World of Warcraft

World of Warcraft – Part 05 – Alliance

Sep 8th, 2012

I need to start doing this more often, I’m starting to get a bit ahead of myself and starting to forget what I wanted to talk about. I am trying to keep SOME level of continuity here. When I last posted, i had mentioned the huge patch for Mists of Pandaria. I managed to get beyond that, mostly, my laptop still hasn’t finished downloading it all. Anyway, the update wasn’t as bad as I had thought since you can still play during the update process. The download for WoW goes through several stages including “Playable” and “Optimal”.

The ultimate issue wasn’t the size up the update but the sweeping changes made to the class mechanics. The whole thing was basically simplified, you no longer get points to buy traits from a tree, you just automatically learn them. Some abilities were changes, some added and, some removed. The removed thing really hurt my Fury Warrior. I don’t recall all of my old move’s names but before the update, I am pretty sure I had moves which would spawn short term regeneration on being hit and on issuing a hit. Basically, I recall seeing a lot more green “healing” numbers flying about and less “I died” moments. My Warrior went from being a bad ass damage dealer to a pokey loser overnight.

Frustrated, I started a new character. I wanted to try the Alliance side of things despite wanting to try Troll and Tauren out, so I made a Gnome Priest. I wanted to try my hand at being a healing class. Then I became traumatized by memories of the few times I played D&D and always got stuck being a cleric and always ending up being the crappy healer class on those old school RPGs where you could name the pre made characters as well as the irritation I had with my Orc Hunter as a support character. So I made another new character in a Dwarf Paladin. A nice respectable fighter that can also heal.

I’m not going to pour through the tedious details of low level Dwarf Quests. The whole experience is comparable to the Orc and Blood Elf experience. Start in an isolated “beginner area”, work your way out into the real war. The Dwarf area is just filled with a lot more snow and technology. Something interesting I found though was fighting Trolls. When I was a Blood Elf I fought Trolls, I forget if I had to face any as an Orc. Basically, everyone seems to hate on the poor Trolls.

Anyway, after playing through as Paladin for a while I decided to go back to my Blood Elf. She is still my favorite character to play and I decided to just explore a but more back on the East continent away from the zone I was having trouble with. This is kind of the real beauty of this game I suppose, you can just explore and do whatever you want if you get stuck. You can always just, go somewhere else.

So I went to visit my Dwarf. Or more accurately, I went to visit his starting zone, deep within Alliance Territory. This was a really interesting experience.

All of those NPC guards that look really tough on the Horde side? The Alliance has them too. They seem friendly enough when I am a Dwarf, not so much as a Blood Elf. They tend to be level 80+ and can pretty much one hit kill enemy players. I did manage to slip by all of the guard (sometimes by dying and reviving myself beyond them) and make it all the way to the starting zone of the Dwarves. It was deserted and I didn’t find any newbies to try to harass or kill but it felt like an accomplishment and was quite a fun trip. It’s something I wanted to try from the first day I entered the world.

Coming up in future posts, Guilds, Socializing, and the Walking Dead!

World of Warcraft – Part 04 – The Patch

Aug 29th, 2012

by Ramen Junkie.

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So, I’m a bad ass Blood Elf Fury Official now. You can tell because I’m wielding a bloody cleaver and killing WoW Lions and Goblins and Dark Elves and shit with it. If wielding a meat cleaver over a sword doesn’t scream BLOOD FURY WARRIOR I don’t know what does.

I have managed to surpass the Level 20 mark, which is the threshold for Free to Play. In fact, there is a magic gate thing that prevents you from going farther in the world. I saw the same gate on my Orc Hunter in Orgimmar. A bit of lead up to that point…

I’ve had to leave a few quests behind. There was one “Epic Quest” involving hunting down a couple of large Ogres (maybe it was just one Ogre, don’t they have two heads in Warcraft?). Anyway, I saw him several times stalking around and even confronted him once despite that his is enormous and was several levels above me. No luck, I barely did any damage before he totally crushed me. I’ll go back and try again later. I also had to skip what seemed to essentially be the Boss of the newbie area. I managed to complete every other quest but this boss is pretty tough and it’s not helped that he is in a room with 4 other normal monsters. If I could lure the other monsters out I MIGHT be able to get him, but I had some difficulty and decided I’d return to the area around level 30 and crush both of these guys.

The idea is of course that by now I’d have recruited some people and have a small war party or Guild I could use to assist in taking out these enemies. Unfortunately my experience has been that the land of Azeroth is pretty sparsely populated. I kind of get the impression that there simply aren’t many low level new players. I’ve seen a few wandering around, but they tend to either be way above or below my level and point in the game.

Anyway, after completing all of the other quests, i was left only with one optional quest on my list. It was several regions away. This was a bit disturbing. Previously, when i was nearing the end of the quest options in a particular region, at least one of the new quests would direct me to the next area to continue my journey. It’s cheesy and convenient but it works for encouraging the player to proceed. This left me with no real direction other than a lone quest that I had only picked up by happening on a special item dropped by a monster. I figured I’d just proceed to follow the road forward.

I found the enemies in the forward area were pretty high level. At least, the ones that didn’t have ???? listed for their level, they were in the 40s range, they were also giant slug looking guys. Maybe I was just being paranoid but, they looked like trouble, so I hopped on my mount and hurried along the road trying to avoid encounters looking for the next guest filled village.

Nothing, nada, zilch. I found a castle, but it was full of unfriendly folks who, while not attacking me, were not really into asking me to fetch crap for them in exchange for money and experience. The village did have a flight stop, which led to several areas that i had not been to yet at all. After consulting some maps online, I took a flight to Undercity, then wandered around until I found the Zeppelin to Ogrimmar. My plan was, at least I could maybe find the quests that I had done previously as an Orc Hunter on my other Avatar.

No luck. These quests are apparently considered too low level for me. This is when I noticed that each region has a level range located next to the name. Makes sense I guess, and after heading to a region of an appropriate range, I found… quests! Something to do. I was starting to worry that I’d reached a complete dead end of activity and somehow the point of the game simply broke down into nothing after Level 20, but no, there was more to do.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to bore you with the details of my exploits helping a bunch of Goblins.

Instead I’ll make a comment on the recent patch, which seems like a huge mess, quite literally. I went to play yesterday on my Laptop only to find the game had to patch, then do some sort of crazy reconfigure. This is mostly in preparation for the upcoming Mists of Pandaria Expansion. The process of getting to the Reconfigure stage took like a half hour or more, and then, it starts downloading a 10GB (13 on my desktop install) Patch. GIGABYTES. At the speed it said it was running I was looking at a 12 hour download. There isn’t a better way to handle this? Really?

I am a pretty big advocate of digital distribution but one of my hugest pet peeves is being all stoked to play a game, and then, HUGE PATCH. Team Fortress 2 is pretty bad about this, though Steam is decent about updating itself.

World of Warcraft – Part 03 – Blood Elves

by Ramen Junkie.

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So yeah, my experiment with MMOs has come to a bit of a culmination of events. In general, I’ve been finding myself kind of frustrated and stuck in a bit of a rut when it comes to games in general. In order to try to spice these things up, I decided to do something I haven’t ever done and have actively preached against for ages. I signed up for an MMORPG. I don’t mean, started playing some watered down Free to Play game, I mean a paid monthly subscription (not that i can’t cancel it later or anything).

I considered trying something newer like Guild Wars 2 or Secret Wars but I’m seeing those as being a bit pricey. World of Warcraft has been the most enjoyable of these titles I’ve tried and it’s the “Big Daddy” of the genre, so why not. It also helps that Blizzard has the base game on sale so i get the game and a month of play for $5.

With this upgrade, I decided to make a new character. I’ve been playing my orc a bit but I’ve been finding his gameplay a bit boring. He’s a Hunter class, so his primary features are ranged attacks and his pet. This means every fight amounts to me standing 50 feet away from the enemies while my little pet Boar runs in to take all the damage and deal a bunch of damage. It’s easy, and safe, but I’m essentially playing a support class for a damn pig, and I’m not real content with that.

So I created a new Warrior class Blood Elf.

I have no idea of Blood Elfs and Warriors are a good combination or not. Some of the things I read online suggested not, but I wanted to play warrior and I liked this character, so I picked it. I really want to play an Alliance class but I think my next character is going to be a Tauren, and I’m going to try my hand at making him a “carefully curated and useful party character”. For this Blood Elf, I’m pretty much just running with “hey this seems like a cool ability/move/weapon/etc, so she is probably totally useless for anything meaningful (which seems to be Tank/Support/DPS).

Also, Blood Elf is not a class Trial players can use.

Anyway, so far, I’m enjoying playing as a Warrior and a Blood Elf much more than playing as an Orc Hunter. I have all sorts of fun useful skills that let me heal and damage enemies at once and I’m not limited on what types of armor I can use like the Hunter is. I also get to explore a whole new part of the world which is considerably less Brown than the Orc lands. Lots of forests and fancy crystals and architecture. The monsters seems more varied as well, I swear 90% of the monsters over on the Orc land are Scorpions or Boars. Though the other day I did kill some Giraffes. Medieval fantasy giraffes, not real ones.

One of the real interesting aspects of playing WoW is getting used to the impermanent aspects of the game play. The closest comparison i can think of is The Elder Scrolls, where I can defeat an enemy or townsperson or whatever, and find their body laying there for ages even if I walk away (in some areas). Meanwhile, in WoW, I’m on a quest to disable some sort of mechanism, which I do, and the little energy bolts disappear for some nice visual feedback, and then, while I’m still in the room battling some enemy, the thing turns back on. My first thought is that I need to do it again, maybe do all three faster. Then i realize, this is an MMO. The system needs to reset itself in case another player is coming along. It’s kind of funny to think that this machine will never be off.

It’s even more hilarious when you consider any quest where you have to slay some specific enemy. Some poor NPC leader gets to die and respawn, for all eternity. In fact, I got to see this first hand when i defeated the boss, but was killed by one of his followers. When I returned, the boss had respawned. I was frustrated a bit because it meant I had to fight the boss again. Then I noticed his body was still laying where I had left it nearby. I just needed to collect the loot and leave.

The loot being his head. Blood Elves are apparently obsessed with collecting heads, I think I’ve collected like 5 or 6 so far.

Anyway, on the subject of dying, I’ve found that warriors seem to die a lot. I guess the idea is that I’d recruit a friend to be a healer to help keep me alive. I’ve found that fighting more than one enemy at a time is almost an instant death sentence. It’s getting better now that I have some abilities that can heal and hurt at once, but I still am finding it easy to get overwhelmed. This wasn’t a problem with the Hunter Orc, since he has a Boar tagging along to absorb damage.

Anyway, I have no idea how long I’ll stick with this, but I’m enjoying it for the most part so far. I’m really looking forward to getting a mount, if only so I can travel faster.

World of Warcraft – Part 02 – Giving it a Chance

Feb 17th, 2012

by Ramen Junkie.

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So, I was trying to hold out just a little longer before writing another one of these for something else… something, better. I will probably get to at least one more of these posts, maybe two if I manage to get to my level 20 cap. If you’re just tuning in, or have not gotten what’s going on here, I’m working on playing through some of these many Free to play MMOs available on the market and giving some thoughts. I’m starting with World of Warcraft since it is “the game”, or at least, it once was and seems to still be what other MMOs are measured against. Part one, where I start my adventure can be found here.

I wanted to go ahead and get a part two out there. At this point in my play, I can not fathom any reason why anyone would pay a monthly subscription to play this game. Ever. I have absolutely no clue how this game is so popular even from a social aspect angle, there are much better experiences out there. There are also way better gameplay aspects out there.

Now, I am still sticking it out to see if things get better, which they might. Firstly, I am currently at level 9, which as near as I can tell in this game, is synonymous with being on the edge of *more*. Or even on the edge of possibly what could be called the “real game”. For example, There are several features, even basic things like achievements, which I currently can’t get which say “Unlocks at level ten”. I’ve encountered several quests and even a phantom ghost wall which said I had to reach level 10 in order to access them. I remembered that I needed to upgrade my hunter skills and while so far I’d unlocked something like one per level, level ten adds at least half a dozen including things like the ability to train more pets.

So once I pass this level 10 mark, I can already see a whole new wealth of possibilities. As i said, there will be at least one more post on this topic, after I’ve done some of this new stuff.

I also have made it to some sort of very large city. So far, I’ve been to three towns, all were mostly deserted of other players and all could be viewed end to end from any point in the town. I have recently arrived at a large city and it was chock full of other players, many riding mounts and all considerably higher level than I.

On the other hand… the combat is boring. Traveling is boring. Here’s the pattern as I travel between towns, I wander through a vast open empty area, eventually I reach an area full of enemies, these enemies all attack one at a time and often only after being provoked. Being an archer, primarily, this means i target the enemy. I walk towards them mashing “2” until i am in range of my special attack, then I stand there mashing 2 while the normal auto attack shoots arrows and my pet runs in to take all of the damage. After killing the enemy, I walk up to the body, i look a few useless trinkets that I’ll later sell, then i find the next enemy.

This is slow and tedious.

The travel itself is also slow. There may be a way to point to point travel that I have not discovered, but as much as I think, say, the fast travel of TES or the point to point TPs in Second Life kind of “break the experience” (when I played oblivion I made a point of NEVER fast traveling), trudging through the land of Warcraft is really really laborious. I’ve left several old quests behind from my current city and I am absolutely dreading the idea of wandering back to complete them.

So, I’m really holding out for more excitement, and I have a feeling that I’ll either find it soon or not at all.

World of Warcraft – Part 01 – Newbie

Feb 14th, 2012

by Ramen Junkie.

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I’m doing something here that may or may not stick, not the WOW thing exactly but something related to it.

Anyway, this morning, I did something I have not done in my many years of being a “gamer”. I opened a World of Warcraft Account. This is supposed to be the end all be all of MMORPGs so I figured that I should probably at least try it. I mean people make a living doing this apparently. Or at least Chinese sweatshop managers do. Also people break up with their families and lives for this game and forget to eat or feed their babies over it.

I generally steer clear of MMORPGs. It’s a pay per month grind trap. The new trend though is limited “Free to Play” style MMOs which either rely on micro transactions for income or limit how far the player can advance. I really am not up to a reoccurring $15 monthly fee. Yeah, I could afford it but frankly, I’d get more enjoyment out of an Audible subscription.

On to WoW.

The first task was to choose a character. I picked an Orc, because Orcs are pretty bad ass and being Evil is “cool”. I then had to choose a class, which I ended up with a Hunter. Hunters use bows and can do sort of some of everything, at least that was the impression I got. In other free form games, The Elder Scrolls as the obvious example, I tend to migrate towards a bow wielding magic using sneaky sort of assassin play style. Hunter seemed like it would work all right. Later research would show this was a good choice as apparently Hunter is a good class for “Soloing”. I really am not interested in befriending a bunch of strangers on my foray into this game right now, so Soloing is good.

After choosing my class, I got a little story about some names which sound vaguely familiar from Warcraft II and Warcraft III. I then get dropped into a small village with a pet to keep my company. Then I get to undergo a series of quests.

So my chief complaint about MMORPGs is the overall shallowness of it all. The joke is that they are nothing more than “a series of fetch quests”. “Go collect XXX of item YYY”. “Go kill ZZZZ of Enemy WWWW”. That was always the joke. I’ve only really played one MMO for any length of time, and it was Final Fantasy XI, which I hated. World of Warcraft, is like playing that joke. Maybe there is more later, I keep hoping there is more somewhere but so far, all I have done for about 3 hours, is wander through an empty desert killing XXX scorpions and YYY boars for various people. I also, made the mistake of picking the “best armor” options as my reward, which means I now own a pretty cool set of Mail armors, which I cannot wear until Level 40. I should probably add that my free account caps out at level 20. I am a GENIUS like that…

Anyway, I eventually got myself sent to another village where I get to kill soldiers instead of scorpions. Also, I died for the first time. The death experience seemed mostly inconsequential other than my pet ALSO died, and now I am lonely.

Anyway, I play to stick it out some more in this game but the overall time may end up being less than I had planned. I am already 1/4th of the way through my level cap and, honestly, I am rather bored by the game.

Stay tuned for more updates on World of Warcraft in the future.