[Enhancement Shaman Semi-Spoiler]

Since my last statement that enhancement shaman wouldn't make the exceptional list, I've played a bit on the beta with mine. He hasn't suddenly become über-awesome, but I think I missed a couple things, or they have been added.

There's a huge synergy between melee and spell damage now. Maelstrom Weapons encourages the use of heals when needed and offensive spells otherwise by making them instant. The new Flametongue Weapon gives bonus spell damage in addition to the on hit effect of fire damage each swing, and using Flametongue on your offhand weapon is hugely encouraged by a new spell (Lava Burst? I can't recall at the moment, and the realm is down) that deals instant offhand weapon damage as fire, and deals 25% more if the weapon is enchanted with Flametongue.

Couple this with the new Stormstrike that is only useable by the shaman who put it there, but also increases frost and fire damage in addition to nature, and suddenly my want to not be able to afk through a fight is fulfilled. I have totems every 5 minutes to place, and Stormstirke, Lava offhand, and Shocks every 8, 15?, and 6 seconds respectively.

A side benefit (or maybe hugely intentional) is that if you're using Flametongue on your offhand and Windfury on your mainhand, then you can follow the fury warrior/rogue model of having as slow of mainhand as you can get and as fast of offhand as you can get, which in turn reduces the number of weapon sets that have to drop, so everyone can get their gear faster.

As a side note, I think that having fewer pieces of gear drop, while hugely beneficial to raid progression, is a bad thing. No, I don't like waiting in Kara 8 months to get my last two enchants. But I think that it takes the uniqueness away from your character. There's no way to differentiate between Paladin and Warrior tanks just by seeing them from across the field, except if they have tier sets on. Rogues and feral Druids are the same, as well as enhancement Shaman and Hunters; Mages and Warlocks. Of course, resto and balance Druids get leather, resto Shaman and holy Paladins get mail and plate respectively, and holy Priests get cloth. So at least the healing classes will have different armor models. Maybe.

The collapsing of damage and healing to spellpower means that resto and balance Druids get basically the same stats. This goes for holy and shadow Priests, and elemental and resto Shaman. So now you won't be able to tell what spec someone is, either. I know that it's a small thing, but I liked being recognizable by what I was wearing. I like having [The Sun Eater] on my Warrior. I like having antlers and a [Squid Stick] on my Druid. (I have the [Wildlife Royalty Staff] now, but I'm trying to make a point ;))

Anyway, I think the change is good (for now). We'll see how it plays out on the live servers, and with raids and WotLK endgame.

The State of the Game Address

Hmmm. . . where to begin? The beta is shiny. And I mean very shiny. I think the graphics have been souped up a ton. But the really exciting thing to me is that the patch is coming! I want to share the shiny with my friends. 

The new talents are promised to make content super easy, and I think that ZA won't be challenging at all, except to learn the dance of the new fights. We still have some time to get a bear mount or two if we hurry, but honestly, I'm not too wound up about them. Might and Aeon (as well as a couple other guilds) have been selling bear mounts forever, so every dumbass who can scrape together 10k gold can get one. I much prefer my Raven Lord.

This isn't to say that I won't enjoy ZA. I want to get in there and just destroy Zul'jin. The fight seems interesting, Hex Lord's fight is complicated (which means fun!), and if I can get another potential "achievement" before the patch comes, I love it. I think the guild is plenty geared, and we just need practice at taking down the trash before the dragonhawk and lynx bosses. The bosses themselves we one-shot on their respective first attempts.

Without going into any detail about the new talents or abilities or anything, I think that feral is weak, and resto is strong. Balance is strong like a bodybuilder at Venice Beach. I love the conversion of damage/healing to a single stat, and have long thought that it should be that way. It means that healers can actually solo without taking a year to kill something, and that the caster specs (elemental, balance, shadow) of those classes can toss around heals in need without being at half-power.

Sadly, I don't see my shaman making the list of exceptional specs. He's enhancement, and I really have no desire to play as elemental (since balance is so good) or resto (since resto druids are so good). Fury is making awesome headway due to their 51-point talent, so melee dps will probably be my warrior. Rogues are reported to be zomgsupergood with assassination, while combat is decent and subtlety is still PvP only. So I might try to level my rogue (currently 12, lol) and see what happens there. And it's not that enhancement will be bad, it just won't be good, either. Just sort of hanging out until a future patch.

But here's to new content, new abilities, and sharing them with friends!

Beta Key! Northrend Ho!

So I found a nice surprise when I opened my e-mail this afternoon: A WotLK beta Key. I debated hocking it for an hour or so, but then decided that running around and taking screenshots would be more fun than trying to undercut people on eBay and getting a couple bucks.

I'm probably not the typical case of what people are like when they get a beta key in that I don't really want to spoil the content for myself. I know, I know - why even get the key in the first place, then? Well, I want to see how the new UI changes are going, and I want to play around with macros and a couple of new talents. I very specifically DO NOT want to level through Northrend just to have to do it all again in a couple months. Repeating content exactly makes me a sad panda. In fact, repeating content similarly makes me a sad panda. I like new. I like different. Probably just like everyone else.

I'll try not to post any "spoiler-ish" things here, so that everyone else can enjoy the content fresh and new when they can get the game for themselves. If, for some reason, I do feel the need to post spoilers, I'll be sure to warn everyone before they come up.

I'm hoping that the beta won't take me away from the other things I'm doing in-game. I just want to explore a little and see what the buzz is all about.

[Off Topic Rant] Incompetence at Its Best

Today is the day I was supposed to have shiny, new internet service. I say "supposed to" because I don't actually have it yet. 

I talked to the DSL people downtown on Monday about getting set up with a modem and service and was told that it would take until the 15th before my service was ready, but I could have the modem now and he would call if my service could be turned on any sooner. I received a call that evening saying that my internet would be ready and waiting for me on the 11th instead of the 15th. This was great! I could have even less time being overcharged by the cable company for spotty (at best) service. 

So today around 1 p.m. I set out to connect my new toys and get BLAZING ZOMG FAST internet. I kept getting errors telling me that the "far end" was not responding. Bad. I double-checked every setting on the modem and my router. Same error. I bypassed the router and jacked directly into my laptop. Same error. I call my brother (who knows way more about networking than I do) and he comes over to look at it. Same error. I finally call up the DSL help line from the card the salesman gave me. The non-native English speaker on the other end told me that I didn't have service because I wasn't scheduled to have it activated until the 15th. *sigh*

This wouldn't have been a problem for me at all if I had been told the correct date from the start. But when some underpaid salesman tells me a fictional figure to make him look better to me, and then can't deliver on that figure, it makes me irritated. I even tried to call the salesman on his "direct line" to try to get some information from him, and was forwarded to voice mail.

So now I have to wait until the original date (which I'm fine with) even after having been promised a connection in half the time (which I'm not fine with). Oh, well. Maybe I need to upgrade cities a little further before I can expect actual service.

Hopeful UI Changes

Blizzard is promising a lot with the coming expansion, and it seems to be the big thing everyone wants to know about. What kind of raids, what kind of zomg purplez, what kind of monsters. . .

The thing that I don't hear anything about (possibly with good reason) is the UI. I've heard about a built-in threat meter, but no other real changes to the interface. Is it because they don't want to increase the requirements on the system any more than they have to with the new content? I'm not sure, but from what I understand unless you have hundreds of addons, or a really old computer, the load on the system isn't that big.

If they're trying to keep the UI open for 3rd party developing, what's stopping that if additional functionality is incorporated in the base UI? I would love to see some kind of action bar flexibility and more mobile frames. (In addition to the promised threat meter) Other than these, what kind of UI mods are there? Sure, some mail things and specialized things for inventory and auctions, but all-in-all I think the most pervasive ones are covered under frames and bars.

At any rate, I'm really hoping they imbed some of these. I would also like to see a default "DKP" system that could be overridden if your guild chose to. I just don't think that many guilds I've been in have been "fair" with loot, instead favoring the guild master/officers/friends. It sounds (from what I've heard) like Warhammer is instituting something like this with their public quests, so that whoever contributes the most gets the most out of the reward.

We'll see how it all shakes out, but here's hoping!

Struck Down Before They Had a Chance

I just read that the Feat of Strength titles associated with reaching level 80 first on a realm have been removed. I love it! I think that this change demonstrates Blizzard's willingness to listen to its customers about what they want from the game.

I also read some changes that are planned for warriors (specifically protection) and I'm very excited to see the end results. The only problem I see so far is that it might come close to equalizing damage done for tanks compared to some dps. Now I personally don't have a problem with this, but I don't want to listen to all the dps people whine and complain about how "sum n00bz0rz warr tnak just did 2x damg then me! NERF WARR NAOW!!!!" or similar for druids/paladins/. . .death knights (I guess. . . . .bleh).

I fully expect that if a tank is well-geared and can play his character decently, a lot of dps will find themselves out of a job. Or just relegated to PvP where they'd rather play, anyway. 

This change won't bother the actual good dps (all 4 of them on our server), since they know how to play their classes and will just scale up with the changes. It will just serve to weed out the people we always seem to PuG. . . full S2 and 300 dps. >.<

Hooray for good news day!

Holding Pattern

In talking with my brother about the coming expansion and what we want from WoW, it came up that once we get to see end-game (with the new 10-man raids) there really isn't a reason to keep playing. Sure, we could join a larger guild and do the same raids for better gear, but it loses it's charm after a while. I know that doing Kara for the last year solid has sort of burned me out, but I still enjoy going in with friends.

I think that this ties in with my dislike for PuGs. I just came out of a Kara PuG tonight that took 6! hours. . . and we didn't even kill Prince or Netherspite. I don't like grouping up with people who really don't care about doing well themselves, as long as the group is good enough to get them their l33t 3p1x that they can show off.

I like the trend that Blizzard is heading toward with the 10-man raids. It means that every person's contribution matters four times as much as when Molten Core and Onyxia (and the old, er, current Naxx!) were the big things to be doing. But while my contribution is more than it used to be in a raid, that also means that the guy who's in full S3 but can still only put out 400 dps also has his contribution amplified by 4 times what it used to be.

I would very much like to play a game with my friends and family that is like World of Warcraft, without having to deal with all the idiots who populate its servers. The appeal of "private" servers is becoming greater every time I have to deal with some moron who either can't communicate in my language, or can't communicate well enough to assure me that they understand what I want them to do in a particular fight.

I know that this is supposed to be a Massively Multiplayer RPG, but sometimes more just isn't better. What I would like to see from a game is something where individual ability is appreciated more than the ability to wrangle a mass of people together and have them sit through something for 20-40 hours per week. My view of raiding might be severely skewed, but the only "raiding" guild I was in required 4 hours a night, 4 nights a week of raiding, and that you bring all your buff items with you (food, flasks, elixirs, potions, etc.). This meant that if I wanted to see endgame content, I had to first go out and farm for things that I wouldn't otherwise use and then I had to endure hours of what passed for progression that mostly consisted of everyone complaining about how so-and-so took too long, or was afk for something, or whatever. I only got about 3 or 4 hours of actual boss-killing and raiding out of the 16 that were required, and spend another 3 or 4 preparing myself for those. So 20 hours a week spent just to boast(?) that I had seen MH and BT.

In a sense, I like the approach that Blizzard had when World of Warcraft was first released and only 5% (or whatever) of the population of the server saw the inside of Naxxramas. Make the encounters difficult. Make the skill of the player count. Make it even more worth it to hone your tradeskills to max level, and get the rare plans/schematics/recipes/formulas/designs/patterns. That way, when someone says "I have full T9" it actually means that they're good, not that they got into a good guild.

Unfortunately, this is a two-edged sword. It means that to get these awesome items that I want, I have to be good at what I do. Not only do I have to be good, but the friends and family that I play with (who range from the equivalent of a 10-year-old girl gamer to the really cool father of a friend who really doesn't know that much about gaming) also have to be good. And for them, being that good at a game just isn't fun; it's work.

Anyway, maybe I'll put down the keyboard (for gaming! I still need it to publish my inner secrets about life, the universe, and everything) and take up cribbage instead. At the very least it'll help me build tighter relationships with people that I currently forsake to kill demons and alien orcs.