TwentyFifthNovember and Professional Gaming

As of last night(ish) all of the current content is cleared for WotLK. Assuming that all of the members leveled in 36 hours, that's one raid tier cleared fully in less than 8 days of progression attempts. To me, this highlights the cutthroat capitalism that permeates people everywhere. No matter what the activity is, someone will turn it into a business.

Part of me is saddened by this, since it's a game and should be fun. But most of me is just jealous. If I could describe my perfect day, it would be just sitting around gaming. Not just WoW, but all kinds of RTS, RPG, FPS, TCG (and other TLAs), puzzle, and board games. While my education (for the most part) has been in mechanical engineering, my passion (somewhat obviously) is for playing games. Sometimes I even dabble in the underlying mechanincs of what makes great games great. Dabble. Dabble. I'll try not to splash too much.

But even with all this, I'm not being paid for it. The players of TwentyFifthNovember, from what I understand, are. They get equipment and salaries for being the best gamers out there - at least at WoW. I guess the next best thing to simply playing games all day is to design and build them. Maybe once I'm 80 and raiding I can pull back the throttle on the playtime and shift more towards thinktime.

So while I'm entirely too jealous of their ability to do this with their lives, I still have a great amount of respect for their gaming prowess. Grats on the world first clear of content, TwentyFifthNovember!

Northrend! It's here! And it's . . . already populated with 80s?!

I've been working at leveling my druid since the release. I quest with my girlfriend (a hunter), and we've been breezing through zones. Borean Tundra? Check. Dragonblight? Check. Grizzly Hills? Check. . . well, almost. We hit 75 tonight, but I can't help but feel that we're still falling behind. The big horde guild on our server whacked out Naxx this afternoon (the "big" alliance guild is a joke comparitively. . . it makes me a little sad), and I can't help but feel that I'm missing the leveling curve and won't even have the chance at 25 mans. Not that I'll be doing a lot of them, but I would like to have the opportunity there to not take if I choose. I don't want to be locked out of them because I was just too late.

But then again, as I look around at everyone else leveling, I don't see many people over 73 or so. Tons of people in Borean Tundra and Howling Fjord. Not so many in Icecrown and Zul'Drak. So maybe there is hope after all. I see bloggers posting about hitting 71 and 72. I see lots of tips on how to make enough money to afford training - which at 15-20g per spell per level isn't cheap, but not outrageous - and I see gearing guids for leveling. In my mind though, whatever gear you had on you when your soft little feet hit the beaches of Normand. . . I mean Northrend is plenty to carry you through until the quest rewards replace them. Instances drop ludicrously powered gear for how hard they are to do. Quests give 5-10g per, and that's more than enough to cover repairs and training. Hell, I even got myself a genuine [Repair-o-Mount] almost right off the bat and I haven't really missed the cold, hard cash.

I guess the best I can hope for is to just level through Northrend at the pace that I want to, and see what's waiting for me when I hit the level cap (again :) ). I've been getting enough cobalt to fuel a small army, so that's exactly what I'm doing with it. I've hit the point where I need saronite with both engineering and blacksmithing, used the crappy green armor from the blacksmithing to fuel my enchanting, and sent the extra ore off the be prospected into shiny new gems that get sold on the auction house for obscene amounts of gold.

All-in-all, I'm very happy with how things are going. I just don't want to get to the end of leveling and find out that if I had taken my time and leveled all my characters together I would have been just as well off. So here's to you, Blizzard. For another great piece of interactive video entertainment. And if you ever have a job opening, I'm very good at fetching coffee. . . .

A Summary of Suggested Paladin Stat Change

I've been running some numbers to determine how to homogenize the plate armor for paladins - specifically holy paladins - so that spellpower plate is phased out, much like feral attack power is being worked towards. With the conversions I've worked out, the combination of a spellpower 1h and shield will still be superior, but trinkets, rings, and necks will be a toss-up between strength and spellpower. So without further ado, here are the conversions:

1 str -> 2 SP, 1 int
4 stam -> 1 mp5

With these conversions (at 70, at least), a retribution pally with 1800 attack power and ~10k health will have (when specced holy) about 1200 spellpower, ~10k mana, and 175 mp5. I haven't looked at the conversion for prot yet, but without real numbers I think that the current talent can be reduced to 10% of stamina from 30% so that the str -> SP can be baseline. The str -> int and stam -> mp5 can be deep holy - at least 30 points. Sheath of Light could probably be done away with, or simply reduced to the HoT portion.

This opens up a door to new healing styles, since holy will have a significant amount of attack power. Healing spells based on damage done to an enemy, or similar engaging mechanics. Also a big bonus is that ret/arms gear now becomes ret/arms/holy gear. The dependece on spellpower doesn't make me too uncomfortable, since the weapons/shields will still be shared by elemental/locks/mages/priests. The same goes for jewelry and trinkets.

Of course, there's nothing inflexible about these numbers, and I haven't thought of every possible combination of gear that might make either ret or holy completely overpowered. I'd like to get this posted to the healing forums and get some feedback on it, but I think I'll need some more number crunching first.

The Big Ten

In just a few short days, 10-man raids will no longer be the place that "real raiders" get stuck before getting the gear to allow them into the "real raids." This is a huge boost for my guild - a purely 10-man guild who managed 3 timed chests in ZA before 3.0.2 after only about 2 months of raiding. By the end of next week, saying things like this won't get you looked down on by 25-man raiders.

I'm very excited to see how our little guild progresses. In the last month, we've jumped from 134th(ish) to 43rd ranked guild on our server according to WoWjutsu. To me, this change really allows people to show off their skill instead of just seeing who can gather up enough people to tromp around endgame. Homoginization of both gear and roles encourages the acquisition of skill over gear as well, and encourages more small runs in addition to the raids that currently happen.

I'd like to see this trend continue and have more questlines like the ones for the level 60 warlock and paladin mounts, and the druid swift flight form. Epic, single person quests that can rank you on your skill if they get progressively harder - like the racing quests on Netherwing Ledge. If the quests are restricted to a single player, even with some group parts, then you can't "fake" your way through by buying a group of people to carry you.

This is one of my biggest pet peeves in WoW. I hate seeing people who have either eBayed their account and so have no idea how to play, or who have PvPed their way to ZOMG EPIXX0RZ and think that qualifies them to raid endgame. So implementing a system that combats this would be a dream come true.

At any rate, smaller groups put more dependence on the individual raider which in turn shows off skill more than larger groups. Hooray for expansions!

Quick Note About a Pally Change I Came Up With

I had an idea last night about how to keep holy paladins able to solo while allowing ret to have seals and judgments nerfed for whatever reason.

1. Put two talents of however many points into holy. One that has some conversion of strength->spellpower and the other that converts stamina->mana/5. Exact conversion rates can be determined later.

2. Scrap all plate spellpower gear.

3. Profit!

The basic idea here is twofold. First, holy paladins are the only spec in the game now that has a set of gear all their own. Second, it's very flavorful to have a "holy warrior" type character that can heal more the stronger he is, and can last longer healing if he has more stamina.

Using str/stam/crit plate dps gear, the holy pally would have spellpower/mp5/crit which is exactly what they're after. If they stack too much tank gear, then they can heal forever, but they lose spellpower. This may not be a complete fix for the entire class, but I think it's a step in the right direction.