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s first and foremost i wonder what blizzard is going to do about death knight talents with dk s starting somewhere below level 70 but previously stated to be above 55 i can t imagine starting a brand new character and immediately being presented with the choice of how to assign 50 talent points but i can t imagine how they ll be able to differentiate the dk s class roles sufficiently without the full 71 talent points but that is another story posted by green armadillo at 2 05 pm 0 comments labels my characters specs wow friday april 25 2008 my characters let me show you them part 2 greenwiz pre tbc previously i discussed how i wound up with a level 50 pally a guild that was gearing up towards raiding back in early 2005 i was however getting pretty darned bored with the dps and it occurred to me one day that it would help my unfortunate blacksmithing habit a bit if i had a level 35 alt to transmute my very own arcanite bar supply as it happened i had a level 1 gnome mage bank alt named greenwiz because all of my alts were named green something where something was somehow descriptive and i d enjoyed playing the mage in beta so i decided to take him out of ironforge greenhammer did eventually hit level 60 in february of 2008 and they say pallies level slowly the mage died a lot indeed even more than mages do today since spell damage gear wasn t really something that was in the game much in the early days and you need to do more damage when your life depends on killing foes quick before they squash you but in other ways the wow mage was a lot of fun i ve tried just about every character in the game and solo play with a mage takes a certain degree of finesse you don t have a pet a suit of heavy armor self heals or escape into stealth to save you just your own abilities to keep your foes from getting to you for long enough to kill them i leveled as an arcane spec at the time you needed 18 points in arcane to get evocation and to make your arcane explosion instant cast so i figured i might as well keep going to the top i eventually picked up a fire sub spec for impact and pyroblast for pulling purposes both talents are under rated by the mage community for solo play to this day an impact proc means two seconds of uninterrupted casting and the pyroblast pom fireball at the time pyroblast had a cooldown fireball fireblast combo is generally more than enough to snipe down any single non elite mob which you ll get done before they even get to you if impact procs anyways i eventually made it to level 60 announcing to guild that i was tired of blizzard s slow updates and would not be leveling greenwiz anymore in protest until they got off their tail ends and released the expansion i had some misgivings about moving into the raid game partially cause i was no where near ready for it in terms of skill or gear and partially cause i didn t really want to play on a schedule none the less i was in a raiding guild and the level 60 endgame was nothing if not raid or die so a raiding i went phoenix syndicate was a great guild and i m very glad they put up with me in all honesty i had no business being in a raiding guild at all much less one that was attempting top end content i generally didn t do much in the way of farming consumables i did make an effort to enchant good quality gear as i got it cause enchants don t go away every single time you die if you haven t raided know that you die a lot but realistically i was well behind the curve because i had re rolled and landed in molten core nearly directly after leveling since the guild wasn t running many official 5 10 and 15 man zergs anymore i dunno if they kept me around because the were too nice to punt me or if i got some points for showing up for the jobs no one else wanted somehow there always seem to be empty slots available on nights that promised lots of painful death and no loot at least until naxx came along even a woefully undergeared and soon to be dead player was still generally better than an empty slot or what that preface aside i definitely had some good times during my raiding career the company was good which probably played a bit part in it i haven t had anything like it since and that may have something to do with why i ve been more willing to up and leave games as i run out of stuff to do in them i arrived late in the progression through mc the screenshot above of a domo attempt was my very first raid as the guild was working on rag see previous comment about how there was sometimes empty space for the ill prepared on learning nights but i got to be there for our entire journey through bwl and the early portions of aq40 and naxx we cleared before the expansion honestly though i probably had more fun with the 20 man raids raids we were technically speaking overgeared for as a graduate student i put up with a lot of delayed gratification in real life projects failing repeatedly for weeks on end before hopefully finally coughing up the data i needed a night or two of learning how to kite ossirian i was prepared to deal with but literally weeks of trying to figure out anub rekhan were more than i had patience for at the same time though our kills of huhu and instructor put us at one point as high as 8th on the server guild rankings i think ps hit the dedication wall the level of commitment we expected simply wasn t high enough to beat encounters like the twin emps or really most anything in naxx this wasn t our fault and the officers did all they could through some trying circumstances with many of our best jumping ship to faster moving guilds further slowing our progress it s just the direction blizzard chose to take the raiding game in away from content anyone could beat by showing up provided at least the mt and had the requisite resist gear and a good healer or two and towards content that taxed groups to the limits ironically smaller raids in the expansion would mean that even the entry level content would be harder with a 10 man group size blizzard doesn t have to worry as much about you stacking your raid with 10 tanks certain pally incidents notwithstanding there were some good times to be had in wow 60 getting my epic horse as a gnome remember really felt like an accomplishment in a way that even my epic flyer didn t at 70 due to the comparative ease of getting gold and the number of other things to do while earning gold av rolled out with rep rewards that were actually somewhat useful in bridging the gap between crappy leveling items and raids i eventually powered my way to knight status in the old pvp system just so i could say i got into the barracks back when this was still moderately exclusive still i think i would have quit well before the expansion if not for the company one last war story of probably my only moment of shining glory i will always remember the night i got the head of nefarian patch 2 0 had just rolled out breaking all of the major raiding add ons a month before the release of an expansion that would render all raid loot obsolete i had been practicing doing without de cursive in favor of a click casting addon for a while and it wound up paying off i in an ice block was the only player capable of decursing to survive phase 3 of the nefarian fight it had been a long night the boss had that atrocious 15 minute respawn timer and it had been announced that we would have to give up if this last attempt failed as a dps class it isn t often that it s so abundantly clear that the whole fight hinges on you sure if the raid wipes at 1 and you weren t near pulling aggro you could have done more but that s hindsight right then until the end of that fight either i was going to keep the main tank decursed or everyone was going to die and the night would end in failure and this was something i had never done before and wouldn t even have really known how to do if i hadn t been practicing before the patch hit it was probably the most stress i ve ever had in wow and i d never ever want to do it again but i m never getting rid of that master dragonslayer s orb either all that said i don t think i ve ever anticipated any video game book movie or anything the way i anticipated the launch of the burning crusade the expansion that would save me from the day to day life of raiding or so i believed but that is another story posted by green armadillo at 4 02 pm 0 comments labels my characters wow thursday april 24 2008 solo rewards and the cherry picking problem while i ve been off finishing up my real life dissertation there has been breaking news in the world of warcraft in the latest patch now hitting the test realms blizzard has added personal arena rating requirements to both arena and non arena rewards that did not have rating requirements in previous seasons and has removed one of the five sources for shattered sun supplies the daily quest reward that has a mere 10 chance to drop a coveted badge of justice these two stories tie together in that each relates to the problem of players cherry picking rewards in each case the decision makes sense but in each case it also hits the solo player population harder than blizzard may be thinking or caring as the case may be about the solo daily quest in question the multiphase survey in all honesty shouldn t have had even a 10 chance at a badge reward to begin with the quest consists of flying for 2 minutes putting on a hat clicking the hat six times and flying or hearthing teleporting etc back typically without the need to fight anything if you re an engineer you even get to cash in on some free motes of air from clouds en route and cooks have a 25 chance of the daily cooking quest being located right next door for another easy 10g and some meat nerfing this particular quest reward isn t the issue the issue is that if you are a solo player relying solely on daily quests for badges removing one of the five quests means that the real world time you will need to spend per reward is increased by 20 in practical terms the time to obtain a 15 badge item goes from 30 days to 37 5 a 20 badge item goes from 40 days to 50 and a 100 badge item if you were nuts goes from an already crazy 200 days to a whopping 250 there was no need to nerf the rate of badge gain for solo players there was however arguably a need to nerf the rate of badge gain for players clearing karazhan for 22 badges per week and for players clearing the daily 5 man heroic dungeon for 5 6 badges per day blizzard did not want to remove the incentive for players who have progressed past the likes of karazhan and the daily heroic to do those things so instead they nerfed the free standing quest that anyone can do likewise the arena reward system has been problematic since its inception blizzard rolled out a system where losing 10 matches per week awards points that can be spent on decent quality gear and then were shocked shocked when players started losing 10 matches per week quality players started renting out their services to improve the rating of crappy teams so said teams would earn more points win trading scandals emerged etc the new rules won t eliminate all of those abuses but they will require that players artificially boost their arena rating in addition to artificially acquiring points before they can actually purchase items the part of this decision that was extraordinary was the choice to apply personal ratings to the new honor gear by design blizzard has always left a few item slots on the old school honor system where anyone can queue afk or otherwise and slowly obtain enough points to purchase items without the need for organized arena teams requiring an arena rating to unlock a battleground reward item is like requiring a 10 man karazhan raid to unlock a 5 man heroic dungeon you need to already be doing a harder activity in order to be rewarded for doing an easier one now in practical terms this change won t affect much for this arena season the existing s2 arena gear will drop down to the honor system the s4 belt neck and trinkets will be available for honor as always and the only change will be that the s4 boots ring and bracers will not be available to players who do not have an arena team but the real question becomes whether arena ratings will be required for battleground rewards of the future we probably won t have the answer to this question for a year or more the expansion should hit before the end of the next arena season and then there ll be at least one season with level 80 blue items as battleground rewards before we have to start wondering about what happens when arena rewards trickle down to the battleground general public but if the s4 ratings requirements are an indication of what blizzard would like to do in the future the implication is that battleground pvp will no longer award anywhere near as many rewards as it currently does another avenue for a solo player to continue advancing their character at the level cap may be severely hampered as i said at the top these changes aren t actually about whacking solo players these changes are aimed at keeping much more serious players from gaining rewards too easily there is actually a solution to this dilemma lower quality rewards the shattered sun supply box had to be limited to 5 daily quests and a mere 10 drop rate on badges because those badges are good for ilvl 141 epic rewards meanwhile most solo players who haven t spent time in the battlegrounds entered patch 2 4 wearing ilvl 115 rare rewards at best imagine if instead of the badge of justice the box had a chance to drop a shattered sun badge good for purchasing ilvl 120 rare items say you put the shattered supply box on every single shattered sun daily quest instead of forcing players to do the same 5 soon to be 4 daily quests every single day cause those are the only ones that have badges and it had a 100 drop rate for the shattered sun badge even with those favorable conditions the time to obtain a single reward that cost 100 badges would be far greater than the time it would take to get the same reward from a 5 man heroic dungeon run and all the rewards would be safely below the quality of even the lowest end karazhan raid loot at the same time many of the players who pvp now and hate it would have something else to do at endgame removing much of the need for cheating the pvp system for rewards so why doesn t blizzard implement low end rewards for low end players perhaps they re hoping that if they don t give the low end players any alternatives some of them will move on to higher end content or re roll instead of quitting hint i m currently working on plan b and it s fair to say that blizzard needs to have something more compelling than a fourth level 70 character if it expects to keep getting paid after number three is done perhaps they simply don t have the time to design content that won t be done by high end players even though they do have the time to design content that will only be done by high end players and...