Carrot, Meet Stick

Last night I finally managed to get Laenshield's enchanting up to maximum - 525 skill. Boo-yah! He's still only level 82, so he's got a while to go before he can start shelling out Heavenly Shards for the max-level enchanting recipes.

While having a maxed-out enchanter is a nice convenience - especially since you can now put any enchantment on a scroll and mail it to an alt - that's not why I pushed him to 525. Since Aeth hit 525 in JC, with Laen at 525 in Enchanting, that means that I've contributed twice to our guild's "Working as a Team" achieve...

Wait.

Where's the green? The achievement? Here I am, I just hit 525 skill! Does it take a minute to... oh, crud.

Requires that I be honored with the guild?!?

Augh!

Hence, the title of this post.

I knew that I was eventually going to have to level Laenshield to 85, just to get access to the enchanting vendor in the Twilight Highlands. There'd be some questing along the way, sure - got to get that experience somewhere, after all - but no real need to do more than the minimum to get to level 85, right?

Now I'm thinking maybe not.

Aeth is pushing towards revered with the guild, but it's taken a almost two weeks of dailies to get to that point. I can't recall where she was at the end of questing, but the fact that doing 25 dailies gives around 1000+ guild rep kind of indicates that she was somewhat short of revered, even after doing all the new zones.

Laen is currently still only neutral with the guild. He's halfway to 83, and he's still not even friendly yet. For all the adventure he has ahead of him - Deepholm, Uldum, Twilight Highlands - I'm starting to wonder if he'll actually be able to scrape up enough guild rep to get to revered. There's always Vash'jir, of course - but really, I'm skipping it this time around for a reason, y'know? I don't like the idea of being forced back into questing there just to grind out some rep.

All in all, though, it's a pretty moot point. I'm sure someone else in the guild will contribute the enchanting portion of the guild achievement, and I would have leveled his enchanting skill anyways - so no loss, right? So no, I'm not bitter about it.

What I am, though, is dismayed.

When I first leveled Laen, I did so to have a priest so I could see what healing was like. It was a lot of fun, and for a while there at 80, Laen was effectively my main. I did a few things on Aeth, but swapping over to another level 80 for a couple of weeks wasn't that big of a deal.

Now, though... well, I've already seen one example of the fact that Laen, no matter what his level of skills may be, really doesn't count the same as Aeth, at least in some areas. Whenever I work on something that might be related to a guild achievement, at least, I'm going to have to stop and make sure that I'm doing it on the correct character... at least until time and tides bring Laen up to par with Aeth in terms of guild reputation.

After that, too, there's Aeven and Aeristal and Aretae...

Oh boy.

I have to admit, I'm incredibly impressed with Blizzard right now. I mean... think about it. Anybody can deliver a beating. Just pick up a stick and start flailing away with it. Really not much too it, is there?

Now... consider what guild rep means for folks with multiple alts in Cataclysm.

Anyone can just deliver a beating. It takes a special sort of diabolical mindset to generate a situation where 12 million people pick up a stick and start beating themselves.

Tol Barad

Last night, I finally had the chance to participate in a Tol Barad battle on Aeth. It was a tremendous amount of fun - I particularly liked using Ring of Frost and Flame Orb - and I managed to pick up the Tol Barad All-Star achievement. Personally, playing as an arcane mage, it was a blast. I enjoyed my new abilities, as noted. I was very, very, very happy that folks had to work to take me down instead of one- or two-shotting me. I actually had the option to blink or ice block or frost nova and escape instead of just standing in one spot, stunned and dying. Much more fun.

Despite a pretty good effort by the Alliance, though, we failed to win. At the high point, we managed to control 2 buildings, and were contesting a third, but we weren't able to pull it out.

Simply put, taking Tol Barad is just too hard. Defenders don't even need to take a hold a building - so long as they can deny one point, they can keep control. All other things being equal, in a 30-man battle, the attackers are always going to be facing a superior defensive force, because the defenders can - without risk - abandon one or even two points of defense, and mass at the third. In WoW, as in real life, defending a point already has advantages over attacking. Tol Barad's win criteria just magnifies this difference.

There's been any number of articles and blog posts written about the balance problems in Tol Barad. From my point of view, there's two real problems: the difficulty of gaining control, and the lack of incentives to gain control.

Let's look at the last one first. Lack of incentives? Why, yes. In Wrath, the big PvP area was Wintergrasp. Gaining control of Wintergrasp meant that you got access to daily (then weekly) quests in the zone. On top of that, you could collect Stone Keeper's Shards from dungeon bosses. It also meant that you got access to a special raid instance with high-end loot. Everyone - meaning both PvP and PvE players - benefited from their faction taking and holding Wintergrasp.

Compare and contrast with Tol Barad, where the winning side gets... access to a half-dozen daily quests, which reward Tol Barad Commendations.

Which you can get, just as easily (if at a slower rate) by doing the non-PvP related daily quests on the island.

Woo-hoo.

Why, as a casual PvP player, I should beat my head against the wall of Tol Barad?

I still have to give Blizzard kudos for trying to make Tol Barad interesting to the casual PvP and PvE player. Aeth has her eye on the Stump of Time - dripping huge gobs of hit rating, this is obviously PvE gear, obtainable through doing PvP content. I haven't looked, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that there's PvP gear that's primarily obtainable through PvE content as well. After all, that's how Aeth got into PvP in the first place - she won a set of PvP legs from Torvalon in Wintergrasp.

I don't have to participate in the Tol Barad battle to get it, though. Nor does my faction even need to control Tol Barad. Those things are nice, and would make getting my new shiny happen faster, but they're not essential. Consider how many people in Wrath were interested in Wintergrasp... asking who controlled it, when the battle was starting, forming up raids as the start time approached. Now consider how much effort and involvement you've seen for Tol Barad battles in Cataclysm. Really, nobody cares, because there's no reason to care.

So there's no real incentive there. For the amount of effort required, the reward just isn't there... at least for me, and other casual PvP players. If I just want the thrill of PvP, there are any number of other battlegrounds where I can get that, and still have more than a ghost of a chance of being on the winning side.

So, option one: Blizzard can up the incentives, making winning Tol Barad as it exists today much more attractive to each faction. Which brings us to option two: decrease the difficulty of winning Tol Barad to bring it into line with the current incentives.

I really don't have a problem with defending being easier than attacking - as I mentioned, that's the way things are. The problem is that the victory conditions for attacking side aren't just slightly more difficult than the victory conditions for the defending side, they're much more difficult. So Blizzard can either change the victory conditions, or make obtaining the current set of victory conditions less onerous than they currently are.

Some options for changing victory conditions. Reduce the number of buildings the attackers must capture to 2 instead of 3. Or require that the defenders actually defend all the buildings in order to keep control of the zone. If the attackers control all three buildings at the end of the battle, they gain control; if the defenders control all three buildings at the end of the battle, they retain control; otherwise, the zone is contested... and instead of the current crop of daily quests, players get a different set of PvP related dailies.

If we keep the current victory conditions - attackers must take and hold all three buildings - then we can still level the playing field a little bit by giving the attacking players some NPC help. Consider adding the following mechanic: if the attacking players are able to capture two buildings during the battle, then they gain the ability to "raise the vengeful dead". An artifact appears somewhere between the two buildings that requires 3 attacking players to do a 15-second channel. If they can manage to pull off the cast, one of the buildings they control is garrisoned by the vengeful dead: 20 elites friendly to the attacking forces, hostile to the defenders. This gives the attacking side a non-trivial bit of assistance, but only if they're able to (a) capture two buildings, (b) keep those two buildings, and (c) keep the defenders from interrupting a long-running channeling effort that takes away 3 players from their forces.

Something like this would force the defending forces to defend. If they hunker down in one spot and keep control of a single building, then the attacking force will win, period. Instead of being passive defenders, waiting for the attackers to come to them, they would have to make an effort to disrupt the attacker's forces.

Take it all with a grain of salt - I'm a casual PvP player at best, after all, and I'm sure that there's a hundred problems with changing incentives or changing victory conditions that smarter folks than I can point out. Even as it stands right now, Tol Barad is a fun battleground to play in. Long term, though, part of the fun of playing is winning once in a while. Taking that element of fun out of Tol Barad makes it an interesting diversion, and keeps it from becoming a core part of Cataclysm game play.

5-Man Raids

As I mentioned yesterday, I had the chance to attempt a couple of heroics over the weekend with Aeth doing dps. The experience was both mildly frustrating and a whole lot more fun that I thought it would be.

I was part of a guild group, which obviously changed the level and character of interaction. We were all on vent, which helped significantly with communication. Since we knew each other, there was a level of civility, discussion and co-operation that you only rarely experience in a dungeon finder PuG. The trash was tough, use of CC was liberal - I actually had to be told it was OK to do a sheep pull! - and we wiped more than once. We actually started with the Stonecore, wiped several times on the first boss, and eventually re-queued and completed the Halls of Origination.

Overall, it didn't feel like we were running dungeons, even heroic dungeons. I'm essentially a Wrath player, having barely hit Outland on my first character when Wrath was released. So my experience with heroics is limited to what few I ran at level in BC content, and what I saw in Wrath. Even in those limited instances, 5-man content felt like 5-man content. Tough, definitely, but not horribly impossible.

Stonecore and Halls of Origination were... roughly about the same level of difficulty, I'd say. Less trash than the BC instances, but what trash there was, was tougher. More like a collection of mini-bosses than elites. The bosses themselves were more active than Wrath bosses. To me, it felt like there was less tank-and-spank, more special abilities, more decisions to make and more opportunities to react instead of following a pre-planned script.

So, yeah. It felt less like a heroic, and more like a 5-man raid.

I like it.

Leveling through the new Cataclysm content, there are a bunch of quests that are obviously designed to help teach people how to react to, and deal with, the kinds of special abilities you find in heroic and raid bosses. Fire to move out of, positioning requirements, stop dps and shield... that sort of thing. All good.

Heroics feel like the next step in the chain, where you start having to do additional work. Things like crowd-control. A lot of the HoO fights seemed to involve managing adds as well. Quite a few had me switching targets based on the flow of the fight, or from single-target dps to aoe and back based on what was happening.

I won't lie - it was rough in spots. I died a lot. My dps wasn't near what it could have been or should have been, and I let my sheep expire a couple of times when I shouldn't have. But you know what?

Next time, I'll be a bit better than I was this last run.

Next time, I'll have learned a bit, and be ready to switch targets when the fight demands it.

Next time, I'll know when to ice block through that aoe effect to save the healer a bit o' mana.

It's not just re-learning skills I already had, though. It's learning how to adapt, how to make the right decision to use the skills and abilities I have to their best effect.

Sure, at some point, even Cata heroics will be trivialized by folks running them in top-tier gear. I have a suspicion, though, that that time is far in the future... and that even then, competent players with good coordination will still do better than the overgeared "gogogo" crowd.

As 5-man heroics, Cata dungeons are hard. As raid trainers, though... they're excellent.

Mighty Laenshield At Bat

I Started working on leveling Laenshield, my shadow/disc priest, this weekend, and frankly, the experience was very different from leveling Aetherna, my arcane mage (who got to run a couple of dungeons with some guildies... more on that in a later post).

Obviously, the Great Crush of folks experiencing the new Cataclysm content has died doen significantly. Taking Laenshield through Mount Hyjal, there were one or two places where I ran into someone else killing the same mobs I was after... but that's just what it was, someone else, not somemobofotherplayers. That was a definite plus.

Also, things seemed to go much faster this time around. Starting in Mount Hyjal, it took Laen about 4 hours or so to get to level 82 (well, 4-5 bubbles in to level 83, but who's counting?) I think you can attribute this two a couple of reasons. One, guild perks and rested XP - that's a decent bonus right there. Two, I had upgraded Laenshield's gear with a bunch of crafted Deathsilk and some random cheap crafted green. I'm sure that sporting a couple of ilvl 290+ pieces instead of the 230+ pieces that Aeth had helped make a difference.

Three... shadow priests are just OP, man. I thought Aeth was a leveling monster with her glyphed evocation allowing for a simultaneous heal/mana restore every two minutes. Woohoo!

Yeah. Compare that with "I heal myself every time I do damage, and I'm constantly doing damage. Mana restoration? Can you say 'replenishment'? How about 'shadow fiend' and 'dispersion'? I knew you could!"

When facing more than a couple of mobs, it could get dicey, of course. And while Laen was burning down mobs consistently, there was an obvious bit of "get the DoTs up" ramp-up time before they really started to suffer. Still... while Aeth has the "massive damage in short time" spot in my heart all sewn up, Laen is definitely holding strong in the "massive damage over long time" slot. Especially with those shadowy images, which are just way, way, way cool. There were times I'd DoT up a target and just run around to watch my apparitions chew the face off of a poor mob.

On the minus side, embersilk cloth is still rarer then hen's teeth. Running through Mount Hyjal in it's entirety got Laen enough cloth to... um. Make a set of shoulders? Almost? Yeah, the whole "cloth is hard to come by" meme is being ruthlessly exploited. On the plus side, though, the crafted cloth gear really is kind of awesome. So we'll call it a draw for now.

Oh, and for music Monday - here's what really has to be the PuG anthem in Cataclysm. "Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right; here I am, stuck in the middle with you..."

Professions in Cataclysm

Not a first impression, really. Not even a second, or a third... more like "Holy cow, it took you this long to get around to looking at professions?"

Meh. What can I say? Dailies, man. Dailies. There's reputation to be earned!

Cooking: Amazingly easy to level just as part of the "on my way to 85" experience. The cooking daily is wonderful, fun, and easy, and I'll be doing them for the next 3 months in order to get all the recipes on Aeth. After that? Not so much, unless Blizzard adds new recipes or items you can purchase with the cooking awards.

Fishing: More painful to level, but (obviously) not impossible. The extra skill up from the fishing daily was awesome - do a daily, avoid 5 minutes of fishing? Definitely worth it. Now that I've hit 525 fishing, though, I doubt I'll bother to do the fishing daily at all, unless I find myself needing to squeeze out a little extra guild rep.

Archaeology: Haven't really worked on this yet. There's too much other stuff to do! It looks like it will be a time sink, though, primarily from all the traveling that it will involve. Being a mage should be a slight help there, though.

Mining: Barely even noticed that I was leveling. Just by hitting available mining nodes in the new zones, I was able to hit 525 mining on Aeth about halfway through Uldum. Which I did before Deepholm, by the way... yes, Aeth went from Hyjal to Vash'jir to Uldum to Twilight Highlands, then back to cover Deepholm. She's weird that way. In any case, mining - and, I expect, herbing and skinning - falls into the "Wow, I leveled that already?" category.

Jewlcrafting: Ah, here the pain begins. Dailies to earn JC tokens? Check. Dailies that require you to consume 150-200G worth of gems to turn them in? Ouch. Recipes that seemingly stop giving skill-ups as soon as they turn yellow? Ah-yep. So, really, this is the Wrath version of Jewlcrafting, but taken to the next level. Expensive, annoying, and under-appreciated.

Enchanting: About as painful as jewlcrafting, though the flood of crafted 81-83 items on the AH listed for cheap has made it a bit easier. Well, it would have made it easier if I was foolish enough to buy and DE items to level enchanting. Instead, for the last 4 weeks, I've been buying cheap (under 30g) level 81+ greens off of the AH, disenchanting them, and then turning around to resell the resulting dusts and essences for a 3x-4x profit. I've managed to make about 20k gold in a couple of weeks, just doing this once a day or so.

Now that the prices of dusts and essences has dropped, I've started using some of my mats to level enchanting on Laenshield, and it's going about as well as you would expect - slow, but not painfully slow. I've created a mess of scrolls that sell for far less than their materials cost, so instead of dumping them on the AH, I'm stockpiling them for use on other characters. Laenshield is still at 80, too - so once I start leveling, he should end up with a nice cache of materials from DE'ing quest rewards that he can use to finish leveling his profession.

One annoying thing about enchanting is that the high-level recipes require (a) unlocking the vendor in the Twilight Highlands, and (b) heavenly shards. Yeah, thanks. I thought 200G every other day or so for the JC dailies was bad. I'm afraid to see what the price of heavenly shards will be. Looks like Laen will either have to become a dungeon-running DE junkie, or shell out gobs of cash to buy shards of the AH, if he wants to learn any of the high-level enchants.

Tailoring: Let's see. You can learn new tailoring patterns directly from the tailoring trainer? Yay! No dailies to run! You find the materials as you quest, right? Awesome! How hard could this be? Really?

Hard enough to make you want to drive sewing needles directly into your brain.

Seriously.

One of the things I did with Aeth was gather and stockpile embersilk cloth for Laen, so it would be easier to level tailoring later on. The problem here is that the drop rate on cloth for non-tailors is painfully low. So low that, after leveling through every new zone, and doing every quest, and running dailies for 2 weeks, Aeth barely had enough cloth to allow Laen to get to 480 tailoring skill.

You heard me right. Four. Eight. Oh. 480.

No, wait, that's not true. I had to shell out a couple of hundred gold on the AH to buy the extra cloth I needed to get him that far. Leveling tailoring to 525 is going to be... slow, I think. Vera, vera slow.

On the plus side, once I start leveling Laen, he'll be pulling in additional cloth. Still, will he manage to get the... holy cow, 1700+ pieces of embersilk cloth to level tailoring to 525? That's insane! That's about 9000G worth of cloth!

Yeah. I'm thinking that maybe leveling tailoring can wait a bit.

Edit: Right after posting this, I notice that Larisa slips a little cloth-gathering suggestion into her latest post. Tresure-finding potion and AoE farming? Yes, please! I plan on starting to level Laen soon, so once he hits 85, I'll definitely be giving this a try.

Enumerating the Innumerable

Over at Disciplinary Action, there's an interesting post up on Shameless Self-Promotion.

In the interests of full disclosure (and getting back into the habit of posting daily during the week!), here's the A20S statistics from the past year, courtesy of Blogger and Google Analytics. Rest assured, I will be poring over this data, and use it to craft my eventual plan for WoW-blogging domination.

Well, I mean, once I get my Cataclysm reps to exalted. I mean, you've got to have priorities, you know.

Visitors!

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How in the world did that happen?

Here I am, a month of so after Cataclysm came out. I've pushed Aeth to 85, and started her reputation grinds with Therazane, Wildhammer and Tol Barad Wardens. She's geared enough - barely - to qualify for running heroics, though I've not yet stepped foot in any regular dungeons.

Laenshield has been hanging out in Ironforge, buying uncommon greens for cheap, and turning them into massive stacks of cash. Well, dusts and essences, really - but when a 30g weapon can DE into 3-4 essences worth 30g each, well, that's just a money-making opportunity that can't be passed up. In between times, he's been buying cheap netherweave cloth and making bags. Both the DE and bag business seem to be winding down, though, so I may be taking him out into the wilds of Mount Hyjal soon.

Poor Aeven will have to wait her turn until after Laenshield levels up. I expect that she and Aretae will be the laggards, at least until Aeth has managed to snag all the achievements she can squeeze out of Cata... and Northrend, and Azeroth, for that matter. Lots of new quests in the old world to do, lots of new achievements in the Old World, as well! And not just the ones that have been added in the expansion, either... I'm thinking that wandering through Karazhan solo might actually be possible, now. Maybe not the boss fights, but 100k health and 20-30k dps should make the trash wonderfully grindable!

Oh, and Music Monday. Enjoy! Today it's Clannad, with a live version of "In A Lifetime".