Is it me?

For the third time in 6 months, I'm in a new guild.

After being in a guild with friends for three years, this is the most frustrating experience of my WoW career. I actually came close to thinking maybe I should just cancel my account and leave. At some point, you look at the circumstances around you and begin to wonder, is it me? Am I the one common element in these disasters, or am I just unlucky?

It might be egotistical to assume that one person has enough power to provoke such massive reactions among three disparate groups of people; but I'm coming at this from a far more depressive pattern of thought. Maybe I'm the one who creates problems, is a bad player, bossy during raids, needy for gear, arrogant, depressing, condescending, has a bad transmog, smells weird, picks my nose, eats worms - whatever - and that's why the guilds are collapsing around me. Now, objectively and intellectually, I know that's not the case. In also every circumstance (except when I first left my beloved Turtles), I know I had little if anything to do with the collapse.

Yet, I can't control how I feel about this. It's like being the guy who shows up to a party and then it breaks up right afterward - every weekend. Maybe the guy just has shitty timing, but man, it sucks to be that guy.

So, I flirted with the idea of just canceling my sub, and saying goodbye to this chapter of my life. But instead, I decided to give it another shot, interviewed with twenty or so guilds, shortened the list to about 3 offers and now I'm a Trial with one of them to see if I fit them (and if they fit me). 

I didn't have the heart to type "GQuit" again so I just paid the $55 and became a filthy Blood Elf on another server without the heartache. I also didn't realizing that it was PvP but I'm not as concerned about that part of it as I haven't been ganked (yet). I did wind up buying some PvP Honor gear, though.

The other thing I don't like about it, is that it's a Medium Population server while I prefer the busy bustling metropolis feel of High Population or Locked servers, but we'll see how it shakes out.  The guild I joined is 4 bosses ahead of me in Heroic progression and is a 25-mode raid, so that's another big adjustment. I spent last night talking with their lead tank to get an idea of how they do the various fights, and I hope I don't embarrass myself tonight.

At this point, I just want a quiet place to settle down long term and be content with my guild situation. I desperately miss my Turtles right now. I raided and played with my guild for years, but we've really drifted apart in terms of how we raid, and if I stop raiding - well, I might as well just stop playing this game.

So, once more unto the breach, however many times it takes.

Now, if you'll excuse me I need to put on some eyeliner, black lipstick, rip up some fishnets into torn gloves and smoke cloves in a graveyard while gazing sadly at the cloudy sky...

From The Future

The blog-aggregator stie, MMO Melting Pot, had a request for blog posts up a couple of weeks ago, asking for what enties about what future MMOs might be like. I've written for them before, but this was far too interesting a topic for me to pass up, so I wrote something for them.

It went up today - check it out, if you like. It's a bit strange but it's a very interesting topic for me.

August 21, 2020

If you want to get an idea of where games might actually wind up, you should really read a novel called The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi. It's very dense reading, as the author offers little exposition and wants you to figure out the far-far future tech, but it's well worth the time if you're interested in game futures.

You should also give a pen and paper RPG named Free Market a try, by Luke Crane (of Burning Wheel fame) and Jared Sorensen. That game sort of *is* a future MMO in the form of a table-top game.

The article borrows a tiny bit from both those sources, but is more grounded in what I think is both feasible and what I'd like to see from games in the very near future.

Glory of the Dragon Soul Raider

All done with Cataclysm. I still need maybe 8 or 9 raid achievemts of the 60+ that came out with Cataclysm, but all of Dragon Soul is done at least. That should count for something.

I made a similar post nearly 2 years ago, and looking at it now, my circumstances are very different, and I can chuckle at the naieve enthusiasm I had back then.

Things are so different they're unrecognizable. My son is nearly two, and not a newborn. We're about to sell our aparmtent and move into a proper house. My future in the game was certain and now it's in flux. My job is the same, but it's also different. Graduate school might be on the horizon, and maybe even a completely different side-business when back then, being a brand-new father was an all-consuming thought.

Things change. For the better, overall.

This also marks the end of my raiding with Infinite Turtle Theory on my main character. We sat around after raid tonight, in a circle of dragons, talking about our favorite fights till one by one people logged off. Tomorrow, I'll transfer to a new server and become a cog in the great 25-person machine of a new guild. I don't mean for that to sound ominous, I'm genuinely looking forward to it with a good deal of excitment and nervousness.

It's kind of a heart-breaking end to the expansion. Malencholy and excitment blending to become something more than either. I'll stop waxing (bad) poetry now.

Here's to writing another end-of-expansion post in a couple of years as we say farewell to another act in the Warcraft story.

Bonne nuit, Cataclysm!

Changes

The summer in Warcraft has really dragged for me and part of it is because I've known for some time about a change brewing in my head that I didn't want to acknowledge. It churned, and churned, and finally it spilled over during raid about three weeks ago, when I realized, I just didn't want to raid the way we were raiding anymore. The way my guild wants to raid and the way I want to raid have drifted apart till there was a rift between us and it was making me angry and frustrated, trying to get them to jump onto my side of the gap.

Until, during a random comment in raid pointed in my direction - with no ill-intent or anything - made me realize just what the problem was. It was me. When the majority of the raid has moved on to one side of a divide, the person on the other side should shut up and follow suite. Or leave so as to stop being a problem.

And that's what I did. Well, not yet, but I began the process of trying to find a guild that would fit my needs.

It would need to be mostly composed of adults, it would need to be a mature place to play with long-term stability, it would need to be progression oriented, relatively competitive in terms of ranking, and it would need to be no more than 2 nights a week of progression. Beyond that, it didn't matter. Server, faction, 10s, 25s, I didn't care. I was willing to play any spec on my paladin or even my Warlock or Death Knight if necessary. I spoke to several guild masters after seeing their posts on various recruitment forums and finally got an invite to a guild for MoP. Alliance side, but on another server and as Retribution instead of Protection. They've finished raiding for Cataclysm and are waiting for 5.0 to start up again, which left me a bit of time to set my affairs in order.

I broke the news to my guild leader and raid leader but they took it well, even going so far as to encourage me to keep alts in the guild, which I'm grateful for. I still haven't actually moved over yet, as we're finishing up a lot of the left-over raid achievements (in fact, we only have about 11 left out of the 60-odd raid achievements in Cataclysm) but this coming week will be my last raid on Innana with the Turtles as a Turtle, when we'll finish our last achievement to get Glory of the Dragon Soul Raider.

There are some things I'm nervous about naturally, I have been with the Turtles for over two years, I signed the original charter, I've been writing about the Turtles since I started this blog, more or less, and that's a long time. I don't want to just cut ties and run, I think I have a fair amount of loyalty and dedication to a guild, and I like to stick with them once I find my feet. And with the Turtles, we've known each other so long, it's almost like talking in short-hand with amount of in-jokes and such that we have from a long shared history of raiding.

It's a big risk for me both socially and raid-career wise to take this leap. But it's exciting, and it has added a good deal of energy back into the game for me. I recently got my hands on a Level 4 guild for rather cheap, so I'll be moving to the new server with all my gold rather than the silly 50k cap on transfers.

On September 25th, I'll wake up from an early nap, log in as the servers come up, begin the journey to 90 and as soon as I hit cap, I'll be preparing to to raid on October the 2nd. in the mean time, I have nothing but the best wishes for the Turtles and I hope to see them on top of the server rankings in MoP - if that's what they want.

Two Years

Warning!


This post will be a bit sentimental and melodramatic, so you have full rights to skip this - it might even get sappy and mopey in places.

I've been writing this blog for two years as of today.

155 posts, 192 comments, 31k page-views and about half of those from non-US sources, including Brazil, Denmark, the Netherlands, Russia, Sweden...

The bulk of my traffic has come from a very small subset of posts - the story got a lot of attention, another entry picked up WoWInsider got some eyeballs, and my transmog posts seem popular, as do a couple of guides in particular, but the rest of my entries are not particular standouts. Some posts that I put a lot of thought and effort and emotion into just kind of slipped into oblivion and I find that sad, but such is the way of things in the frequent writing market - you produce a bunch of stuff and throw it up on the wall and some of it will stick and most of it will just kind of melt into the plaster becoming the background for the standouts.

It's kind of crazy (and somewhat depressing) when I think about the number of number who've read this blog is bigger than the number of people who've seen my plays or read my fiction. But it's a privilege to have people read and take an interest in anything one writes, and I do appreciate the people who've followed me for this long, or have even taken an occasional gander at a Google-result that plopped them here. I appreciate every one of you who has taken a few minutes to read what I had to say, and if it helped you in any way, I'm twice as glad.

155 posts in 2 years is almost 1.5 posts a week. That's not a terrible average, though I've had more productive months than others. Especially in the end-tier of the expansion, when MoP is bringing so many changes, a lot of what there is to say seems somehow irrelevant or too-late or after-the-fact so I find myself starting topics or looking at old drafts and slowly deleting them one line at a time, as I realize they're well past their best-use date.

I've also been thinking of stopping completely, but I don't think that'll happen. Even if my readership dropped back to the dozen or two views a month I used to get when I started, I think I'd just keep writing to catalog my thoughts.

Often, I find myself wanting to blog about topics that aren't relevant here - my issues with politic and economics, my struggle with atheism while trying to bond with a religious family whose culture is tied into faith, I could write all day about my son who's nearly a year and a half, and I want to write about the last year of depression treatment that I went into... but none of that is relevant here, none of these are things I want to tie into Warcraft, even if all of these are entangled with my Warcraft experience in deep, intractable ways.

My guild that I play with, my friends that I play with, are all carefully chosen people who reflect my political and non-religious ideals. Not only their tolerance, but their acceptance and involvement with me and my family keeps me engaged. My wife doesn't play, but some members of my guild are friends with her on Facebook, they ask me about my son, I share videos with them over YouTube. I bond with some of them about my treatment, and... it's all tied up.

Two years ago was also, more or less, when we started this guild, when the six or so of us decided we would play the game on our terms, and wouldn't be held to crappy standards of play, nor would we be exposed to homophobia or sexism just to be able to progress as raiders or have strong PvP teams. And we've succeeded in almost every way imaginable.

And through it all, I kept writing, about my frustrations, about my triumphs, about my concerns, during that time I went from co-GM and Raid-Lead to Raid-Lad to merely an officer and attended nearly 95% of the raids that happened during this time. I did Arena in three seasons reaching ~1600 rating every time on two classes.

All of that to wind up exactly where I started two years ago. The end of an expansion, goals in hand, hope and excitement for the future, surrounded by friends... but there are two fundamental differences from the way things were two years ago.

1. I'm a dad.
2. I'm not depressed.

The dad thing and its constraints on time is obvious, but the depression thing is a bit more complicated. At some point in 2009/2010 I slipped into a major depression, and it sapped me of all ambition and creativity. I couldn't write or play music, couldn't follow through on projects, or do much of anything really, and the last year of medication and therapy have slowly brought me back to life and a lot of that creative energy that I was missing has started seeping back into my life.

And with it come the constraints on time.

There is the small game-development company I'm working with as a designer and programmer. There are the numerous publishing projects I'm working on with my wife and a friend. There is my own writing to pursue, my first major play that I'm trying to finalize and find a company to read, my book that I want to draft and send to an agent, the songs I want to record...

Do I have time to raid? Do I have time to write about Warcraft?

I don't know. Not yet. I'm trying to do everything, and a lot of it is suffering from a lack of attention - but my philosophy about creative projects has always been to enjoy the process and not worry about the product, and that's what I'm doing right now. After two years of gray, dull depression, just being involved with these collaborative projects is enough to fill my life with color.

As my son gets older, that time squeeze will get tighter and tighter, and at some point I will have to do something to curtail my Warcraft time-slot. But that's still some time away, even though time seems to be accelerating. When I think of my son being a year and a half old, it seems crazy, how could so much time have passed by already?

But it has. And more will be gone soon. The patches keep on coming, the dungeons and raids get cleared, dragons die, gold is collected from sold auctions, we run our dailies, log in and out, make alts, laugh over vent on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, and after enchanting the loots and cuts some gems to fill empty slots, we say good-night and turn off the monitor plunging the room into darkness.

And, as well all know, it doesn't end there, completely, does it? In the secret moment, in the instant of vulnerability when the day's exhaustion catches up, we sometimes experience an out of body moment of connection.

In the darkness, motes of light dance on the screen, illuminating the outline of my avatar, Innana, my identity present in Azeroth, Innana, a stronger, braver version of me with the strength to protect her friends from harm, with all of her issues, her stories, her nightmares and dreams, she looks back at me, waves, wondering who I might be, and I wave back, knowing exactly who she is, before she fades into the matte, shadow shimmer of the black screen and I turn slowly to climb into bed, well past midnight, and close my eyes, caught between her and me for an instant, between dream and reality, before sleep takes over.

I don't know if I'll still be here in 2 more years, but I know I'll be here 2 days, 2 weeks, and 2 months from now, and more than that, I'll just have to wait and see.

Thank you for sticking with me for so long.

Crazy & Radical BlizzCon Predictions for WoW's Future!

Tomorrow, the faithful gather and learn of what the Olympians have in store for us over the next year and a half, and how our world and lives will change. So of course, I'm going to play the Oracular role for a bit and throw somedarts and see if any of them hit.

I'm trying to think of Blizzard really making a reach for transforming WoW in a blue-sky sort of way, so some of this is super CRAZY-RADICAL. I doubt any of this is what they're actually thinking, but this is the kind of thing  I would be pitching if I were a developer on the WoW team.

General

• At least 7 new zones
• Level cap to 100 (or possibly at achieving Level 100 you gain a title level like "Paragon" or something)
• Guild Level cap to 50 (new cauldrons, new food buffs, lowering cool-down of the big abilities further (rez, summon, etc.))
• Either PvP or PvE objectives in every zone related to dailies available to either side. Each type of conflict rewards its particular type of play (Maybe even link head and shoulder enchants to these matches, along with bonus materials (enchanting mats, gems, ore, elementals and herbs))
• Spectator mode - subscribe to any dungeon, raid, BG or Arena and watch as an invisible member, able to move with the raid while tethered to stay within 10' of the raid lead. Raid lead can set their group as private, invite only, or open
• BattleNet allows cross-realm grouping for Arena, Raid and BG

Classes:

• New class related to the expansion. The new class will be a healer/tank/dps hybird using either leather or mail, start at level 68 ALA the DK zone
• Tanking becomes more of a DPS role with a few defensive tricks tied to offensive abilities, talents and active mitigation
• Disc priests Talent Specialization opens up Int Plate for them
• All classes are now Hybrid. Mages are Heals (Absorbs/Cauterize)/DPS, Warlocks are Heals (Affliction drain-style)/DPS, Rogues are Tank (Mitigation)/DPS, Hunters are Tank (Pet)/DPS
• Eventual goal to move beyond the Trinity by slowly opening players to widening the scope of their individual specs and classes

Dungeons & Raids:

• Every dungeons in the game now scales up to Heroic and random dungeon opens up the entire history of WoW in the LFG potluck (with the option to queue specifically for a particular type of dungeon (All, Classic, Outland, Northrend, Cataclysm, Prior Tier(s), Current Tier))
• No more 10/25 seperation - all Raids scaled to 15 people with a standard composition of  2  tanks, 4 healers and 9 DPS. All Raids have 3 difficulty levels - LFR (Easy), Normal, and Heroic. Possible to queue for Easy as a pre-made
• Scaled down "Encounters" built into the game - a solo player can, with the help of NPCs play brief skirmish type maps with clearly defined objectives that scale up with difficulty. These can be scaled up to 3 players of any spec with more enemies and higher health for each person added. Rewards are always less powerful than the current tier of dungeons

Other Systems:

• Archaeology has been rebooted - you can focus on a particular race, you have a chance to unearth horrors, run into competitors and trigger traps requiring some solo play to discover stuff rather than staring at a UI element. Rares aren't just about gathering mats - each Rare has a small quest or two associated with it. Epic Archaeology items have extensive quest lines that take some time to run through and might require grouping up at points to get into dungeons and/or raids
• Path of the Titans is back in - it can be started once you hit Paragon level and finish a class-specific quest line with a lot of material gathering, dungeon and drop farming, and some other stuff - this will take a while, ALA Legendary quest-lines. Once finished, it will be possible to explore particular class-specific abilities and allow for more specs to open up - a Paragon of her class will master all possibilities open to her over time. Character growth and benefit without a time element tied to it, without affecting balance. Further growth possible in this venue...

As for the actual content? It almost doesn't matter, it could be swimming pandas and flying dolphins for all I care, but I would really love an Outland style Burning Legion expansion, though I doubt this is the one. I think the one after this is where the Legion either comes to us regrouped and in force, or we go to one of their worlds and take the offensive for once. That's what I really want in the end - to invade the Legion worlds.

So, that's what I've got! I'll be watching the live-stream tomorrow afternoon from home hanging out in Vent and in game with a couple of guildies. Stop by, or something! And mock my foolish hopes and dreams for this little game of ours as they're dashed one by one.

Keeping Threat Stats Relevant For Tankadins

Can I ever stop talking about threat stats? I mean, seriously, even I'm getting tired of talking about threat stats, and yet Blizzard keeping throwing reasons at me to keep talking about threat stats.

Sorry.

So, last night's post was mostly a "where are we?" wrap up, today I'm going to try to see if we can make sense of what GC said, what he meant, and what it might mean for us as Paladins.

The pitch
We covered why Hit/Expertise are now pointless for threat. We explained that this leaves tanks to do all the other stuff tanks do (all tanks and most healers know we do a lot more than generate threat) and that this is a good thing. However, we're still left with tank gear with Hit and Expertise on it, and I don't imagine that will go away because it would absolutely and completely eliminate all choice for gearing - get what you get, reforge, enchant and gem as necessary for your choice of mitigation or mastery. And that would be horribly boring.

Besides, Blizzard has done well to make gear a bit more generic - Expertise and Mastery on that helm? Sure, it looks like DPS, but that's almost as good for a tank with that chunk of mastery. Overall, I think Blizzard should (and will) continue to make tank gear with hit/expertise on it.

But with threat a non-issue, why do we need these stats?
That's the rub, isn't it? And GC talks about it briefly in his article, and Matt Rossi went into a lot of detail in his article yesterday which you should read, but the big thought right now that I can see floating around is Active Mitigation.

Active Mitigation:
The word "Mitigation" there is a bit of a misnomer, but the phrase has stuck. Active Mitigation is basically the ability to reduce incoming damage somehow through offensive abilities. A very generic way to think of it would be that the more Expertise you have, the less the boss is able to hit you. Or something along those lines. But of course, a lateral translation like that is just more Dodge/Parry with another name.

Death Strike on the other hand is the text-book example of this. Death Knights have a very strong Mastery called Blood Shield which activates when they connect with a Death Strike. Death strike heals up 40% of the damage taken in the last 5 seconds, and then turns 50% of that damage into an absorb shield. That's active mitigation - and DKs are balanced around it. Good DKs know how to store runes, and when to use them so that they stay alive and are stable health wise rather than spiking damage and draining healers dry.

Their resource depletes and replenishes automatically, but connecting with strikes is important for them to self-heal and trigger Blood Shield. Thus, hit/expertise are good for them, in theory. Blood tanks (I don't raid tank on my DK so correct me here if I'm wrong) like Expertise and a bit of Hit, but don't go out of their way to hit caps. This solution seems to work - but only kind of. And it makes their decision easy - hit Death Strike. That's it. Which is kind of boring.

What about Tankadins?
We already have our own version of Death Strike - Word of Glory. It's dependent on Holy Power which we generate from melee hits, and the more we hit, the more HP we get, and the more WoGs we can cast on ourselves.

Except that WoG has a long cool-down and the amount of Crusader strikes you can get in during that cool-down are enough that even with low hit, you can still generate enough HP to cast it by the time it comes off cool-down.

On top of that, we have Divine Protection on a short cool-down that we can turn into either a small overall damage reduction or a big magical damage reduction pre-fight. We have Guardian of Ancient Kings, Lay on Hands on a very long cool-down, Holy Radiance for a bit of healing, and... Holy Shield.

None of the above abilities use Holy Power so we can be lazy about generating it, we can horde it, and always have it when we need it the most as long as WoG is off cooldown. That makes our "active mitigation" pretty much this:

while(BossHealth > 0)
{
    cast Crusader Strike
    if(HolyPower = 3 AND SelfHealth < 50%)
    {
        Word of Glory
    }
}

Word of Glory is Death Strike in reverse - we hit Crusader Strike to gain the resource and deplete it automatically to heal. And thanks to the length of the cool down, we don't really need the Hit/Expertise so we can afford the misses. We have it easy.

But what if Holy Shield consumed Holy Power and shared a cool-down with Word of Glory like Crusader Strike and Hammer of the Righteous?

You have a system where an actually sizable portion of your mitigation or self-heal, both of which you're balanced around, depend on your ability to generate the resource both need. And once you use one you can't use the other for a set period of time so you set out gathering more Holy Power.

And if both abilities had lowered cool-downs and lowered on-use affect so they stayed balanced overall? Now you do need to get those hits in and figure out what you're going to use it for.

You're actively mitigating and/or healing and making decisions on the fly.

You could turn Holy Shield into an aggressive anti-attack which goes off the hit-table.

Which is to say, you're attacking the incoming melee attack with your shield and need to "hit" with it. That would also make hit/expertise attractive, while contributing to active mitigation. Warriors have this, kind of, in Spell Reflect, except it just happens and doesn't depend on anything. With a shorter cool-down and reliable on hit, it could be an aggressive damage mitigation tool.

Do we need this kind of thing? I don't know. Tanking is going through a change, and the more we get towards 5.0 the more things seem to get more and more fluid - Blizzard is not afraid of slaughtering sacred cows.

I'm excited to see where it goes, and I do hope (and think) they will come up with ways to keep Hit/Expertise relevant for tanks. Because I like them and I'll miss my buddies if GC says I don't need them anymore. If you have any ideas for Active Mitigation, please leave comments, it would be fun to discuss them in a future post!

And lastly - because it always sounds so funny, it's not fun to miss. I've talked about it before. But missing is not fun. At the core of the thing, it's a game, I want to hit stuff, and see it take damage, not see miss...miss...dodge...miss...parry... because of some game mechanic. To the kid inside me killing dragons, that's not fun.