Mage Tier 7.5, new iMac

I am now the proud owner of a new iMac (2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 GB RAM).  It makes everything run beautifully!  I have all of the settings on ultra (except for shadows) and it only lags a little bit in Dalaran…  Suddenly, I feel the urge to screenshot every part of WoW.  Tonight was the first time that I ran 25-man Naxxramas on this computer and it was a completely different experience (I didn’t even need to pull away from the group for Patchwerk!).  I also was able to get my 7.5 shoulders finally using the emblems, since I can never roll anything more than a 25 on them.  Now I am wearing the full set!  Woo!  I was also pulling around 3.5k dps today in Naxx (including all my AoE damage), and hitting 3.0k somewhat reliably on bosses.

In other news, I transfered my paladin from Eonar to Burning Blade, since I wanted to do something other than dps for a little bit.  Because the name Acalarra was already taken, I named her Jour (to keep with the Frenchie names, heh).

Wrath of the Bitch King… Or How I Came to Hate World of Warcraft’s Second Expansion

I should have known something was wrong when I first saw the cinematic trailer for Wrath of the Lich King.  My first response: “Where the hell is the catch phrase?”  My second response: “There was not enough epic dragon roaring.”  It’s not that I hate how much talking the Lich King’s dad (the narrator) does, but damn!  Where is my “YOU ARE NOT PREPARED!“?

But it was okay, I let it go.  I let myself get excited for the expansion.  I went to the local mall for the midnight opening and even had a funny moment singing numetal in the car on the way back around 1am.  Installed the expansion.  Played a little that night.  Wasn’t really impressed with Howling Fjord, but I just accepted that as stemming from my dislike of forest-y zones in WoW.

It’s been a few months now and I still don’t like this expansion, especially when I compare it with The Burning Crusade.  First let me say a couple things that I like about the playing now, so I don’t sound like a complete psycho bitch:

1. Reputation grinding is less painful now with the Tabard system.

2. Heroics are easily pug-able and they are the correct difficulty.  There was nothing more irritating in TBC than the fact that you needed Karazhan+ gear in order to run heroics.  The rewards in WotLK heroics adequately prepare players for the first tier of raiding.

3. The phasing stuff allows for more interesting questing and more inclusion of lore.

Okay now that I sound fair and balanced (haha), let me complain about what sucks:

1. There are not enough aliens.  I love aliens and demons and I remember being totally amazed by new models in TBC like those weird ravagers.  A slightly reworked model of a wolf I saw in Silverpine Forest?  Not so impressive.

2. The zones all look the same.  In WotLK you can choose between a snowy zone (Dragonblight and Storm Peaks), a foresty zone (Howling Fjord and Grizzly Hills), or an lichy zone (Zul’Drak or Icecrown).  I know a lot of people hated the transitions between zones in Outland, and I admit that it seemed a little implausible that you could go from Hellfire Peninsula to Zangarmarsh in a few short steps, but at least I wasn’t bored to death!  And just an aside: I don’t play with game music on very often, and I blame the viking soundtrack in Northrend.

3. Dalaran sucks unless you have an awesome computer.  If you have an awesome computer, Dalaran still sucks, just a little less.  Making Dalaran such a clusterfuck (for lack of a better term) was a really bad move on Blizzard’s part.  I’m not even going to complain about feeling like I’m in a more glowy Stormwind when I’m there, because I can deal with that.  But why couldn’t the game designers make the city just 1.5 or 2 times its size right now so that I’m not having to load 100 characters every time I go over there?  When I first heard about this city, I was excited because people told me that Alliance and Horde would have their own separated areas.  This could have been much more present, I feel like we are barely separated at all, which just adds to my lag.

4. The gear is ugly and repetitive.  I’ve made posts about this in the past.  It’s enough to say that there are not enough unique models for gear, especially when you’re leveling.

5. The gear reset was too soft.  I will preface this point by acknowledging that 90% of people will disagree with me on this.  I loved when I stepped into Outland and suddenly the quest greens were better than the blues and purples I had been working so hard on before.  It was fun to replace all of your stuff, even if it was very colorful and admitedly a little ugly.  The feeling of being in a new world was totally awesome.  Arco (my hunter) came into Northrend wearing a mixture of gear from Zul’Aman, Hyjal, Black Temple, and some crafted items.  I did not get to replace one piece of gear on her until level 77, if I remember correctly (I might have replaced a trinket at 75, not sure).  Even Eau (my mage), who was wearing mostly crafted and Karazhan gear, didn’t really get to replace items until 73 or 74.  I know that some people are very attached to their tier gear that they worked so hard towards, blah blah blah.  I can only agree with those sentiments if I’m staying the same area.  If I got a whole new expansion, I want gear that looks good and new and fun in the first few levels!

6. The expansion was released with too few raids.  Let’s be honest: Blizzard didn’t even make a raid for the release of WotLK, they retooled a raid (Naxxramas) they had already made for vanilla WoW.  The other raids currently in the game are only encounters (Malygos, Vault, and Sartherion).  People had Naxx on farm within the first week of the expansion.  Within a month, less hardcore players were pugging both 10 and 25-man Naxx.  I was in a 25-man Naxx pug last night that had no trouble downing any of the bosses, even though many of the players were there for the first time.  I am not complaining about Naxx being too easy – Kara was frustrating and broke up a lot of the more casual guilds in early TBC that couldn’t get past Moroes or Curator – I’m just saying that, if Naxx is going to be this easy, there needs to be something else to move on to.  I know that Ulduar is coming out soon, and it’ll be interesting to see how well they tool the difficulty and gear jump.  A lot of people that aren’t in raiding guilds have been pugging Naxx 25-man and will (in theory) be geared for Ulduar.  Are we expecting to see a lot of Ulduar pugs too?  If so, is Blizzard coming out with new content soon after Ulduar?  I feel like they could have delayed the release of this expansion a few months and included a more fleshed out raiding environment.  In TBC, we started off the expansion with Karazhan, Gruul’s Lair, Magtheridon’s Lair, Serpentshrine Cavern, and Tempest Keep –  and people weren’t even progressing past Kara and Gruul’s that quickly!  Blizzard needed to realize that by making the entry-level raiding easier, they would need more content.

7. The achievement system is an excuse to make less raiding content.  This point also requires a preface: I like individual player-based achievements.  I like doing Loremaster because it shows me quests and zones that I had skipped.  What I don’t like is that people seem to think that Blizzard’s lack of content is excusable by the large amount of achievements associated with heroics and raids.  First of all, achievements are predictable.  I was joking around today with Nick that if there had been achievements for Kara, there would have been one to kill Curator without killing any sparks, or to kill Moroes and all of this guests within 5 seconds of each other.  This doesn’t bother me that much, but it is kind of annoying.  What bothers me more is that Blizzard is trying to just recycle content and make it seem newer and more challenging by just adding some small reward, like achievement points that get you nothing but bragging rights.  They are encouraging people to do content in the most stupidly difficult way for the same gear rewards (the exception to this is Sartherion with 1, 2, or 3 drakes up).  A solution to this would be to maybe make certain raid encounters “unlock” once people have done certain achievements, but even then I wouldn’t like it because it’s just giving a new name to attunements.

8. There are too many dailies.  Again, I am not interested in doing the same unchallenging and boring content over and over again.  There were too many dailies in TBC too, so this is just a general gripe with all of WoW.  Dailies are unecessary!  There I said it!  Once you have your flight skill, you don’t really need that much gold anymore.  Blizzard added so many money sinks into this game (like super expensive mounts, pets, spells) that people are focusing more on doing some rotation of the same 50 quests in order to get a toy train set.  I already do that in real life – I save money to buy things that are actually real.  Do I need to spend hours earning and saving virtual money so that I can have a mammoth in a game?  I don’t think so.  You’d be better off not doing dailies and working a part time job in real life.  Then you can buy your own real life mammoth and pile your low level friends on it.

9. Arena rewards are too good.  I don’t know that much about Arena or PvP, but why the hell would you ever give PvPers the first frost wyrm?!  Enough said.

Dragonfest 2009

Tonight was a night no different than others.  Except, instead of sitting around in Dalaran staring at a mailbox, we spent it with other dragon lovers on the ledge of Krasus’ Landing.

We also had a hard time finding a group for an instance tonight…I am 5 more coins awa from getting the title “the Elder” so I really need to get that done soon.  The valentines day holiday is less than a week long, so this needs to get finished and then those achievements done before the holiday ends.  Aye yie yie (is that how it’s spelt?)

I hope your holiday achievements are going smoothly!  Be sure to check the in game calendar for when holidays end and start, that way you can get your achievements done and not get surprised when the holiday ends.  It sure has helped me!

Also, me and Mariana are back at school, along with most people in our guild on Burning Blade, which means raiding has slowed down a lot.  This is our last semester of undergraduate college, so wish us luck!!  Also, our guild <MAN THE HARPOONS> is setting up an Obsidian Sanctium run for tomorrow (Thursday) night for some quick lewts and some good guild times.

Hope the rest of your week is gushing with Lunar Festival awesome-ness!

~Nick