Things I learnt in the Scarlet Enclave...

...and (judging from /general) nobody else did.

1. Press 1 for Horse
2. Quest text is your friend.
3. No, we won't group with you to kill 100 defenders.
4. Do all the quests.
5. Yes, really, all of them.
6. There's an elite by the horses, and he doesn't think DK's are OP.
7. Diseases, disease buffed skills, RP dump, repeat.
8. The soulstone buff thingie is on a 10m cd.
9. Turn on your mount bar.
10. You need to be unholy for perma-pets.
11. You get your mount from a quest.
12. Talent points too.
13. The inn is right where you soul drained it an hour ago in quest number 5.
14. No I won't duel you, go duel the npc's like everyone else and let me level.
15. The horses, citizens, peasants, and pretty much everything else is to the south.
16. Try not to kill people you're torturing for info, maybe by laying off the horrendous disease causing attacks.
17. No you can't go to Orgrimmar/SW yet.
18. All three specs can level, pick one and move on with your life. Respecs exist for a reason.
19. They can all tank too.
20. Use the makeshift cover. It's in your bag.

Inevitable Wrath

As expected, I have no where near the willpower to resist another WoW expansion, despite having Fallout 3 and L4D on my plate, with Mirror's Edge and PoP on the horizon. Worse, my new death knight is one of the most fun characters I've played, and also gives me an excuse to finally see horde-side BC.

Undoubtably more will follow.

Recently Played

Work and a lack of reliable internet have killed a lot of my gaming habits recently. But a quick rundown of stuff I've been at recently.

TF2 - Is as stupidly good as ever. EdgeGamers run a pretty nice selection of servers. Pretty strict on the behavior rules (no rudeness, no swearing, no religion, no politics, and a few others), but it seems to lead to a pretty nice climate to relax and frag people in. And going by their size (I believe the largest clan for FPS games, definitely the largest within TF2) they seem to be doing alright (I think they're currently running something silly like 7-8 TF2 servers, 4-5 DoD:S servers, 2 CS:S servers, and a CoD4 server). I've recently found the joy of playing scout and spy in addition to my general love of pyros and demos, so things are good.

CoD4 - I wasn't expecting a lot, but the single player really is very very good. One of the more cinematic and epic gaming experiences I've had recently. I'm also a sucker for unlock systems in FPS games, TF2s class updates, and BF2142 unlocks were both winners for me. It's a shame then that CoD4 is tied down to such utterly terribly multiplayer. If they'd given some sort of BF-like squad system, or really any gametype other than "Kill everyone" (and yes, every CoD4 gametype is "Kill Everyone" because no one understands the other types, i.e. the least intuitively implemented Capture and Hold and CTs/Terrorists modes ever).

Bioshock - Not a fan. Yes, the water looks pretty. And yes, I understand it's a more detailed story than most FPSs try to tell, but it still leaves me cold. Usually I'll dig through to the end of a game's story even if I have to jack the difficulty down to easy or turn on god mode so I can blow through annoying bits, but even then I couldn't be bothered to dig through Bioshock. And this really comes down to two things:

A) The combat sucks. It's a whole host of things from poor weapon accuracy, to spastic enemy movement, to high enemy health and low weapon/spell damage, all on top of ammo conservation concerns. I have the feeling that the developers want me to use combos of weapons and plasmids on every enemy to make things tolerable, which I might have been open-minded about if they hadn't thrown some many random cannon-fodder enemies in, and hadn't omitted a Last Weapon Quickswitch button that's now essentially mandatory for FPS games.

B) I hate everyone. Everyone I felt even mild sympathy for turns out either not to exist, or nailed to a wall. Yes the eventual meeting with Ryan is somewhat impressive, but at the end of the day it doesn't matter when I as a player don't care whether or not all of Rapture sinks into the sea and implodes, taking my character with it. Developers need to learn that simply looking out of a characters PoV for the entirity of a game doesn't buy them empathy, especially when we haven't seen anything from that PoV to induce it (including the, admittedly demanded by the storyline, paper thin protagonist backstory). Slaughtering hordes of faceless flapper beasties just isn't a significant bonding experience.

Mass Effect - Much much better than I expected. This is apparantly where all the talent that I'd expected in NWN2 went, and in the end I'm not unhappy, as I'd rather have one stupidly good space opera RPG than yet another fantasy rpg. Naked space booty is just an added bonus. The combat took me a little getting used to, but I did really enjoy it once I got into it. It's a fairly linear experience, the sidequests are very much sidequests. But frankly non-linear storylines are overrated, especially in RPGs, where I suspect a well written linear experience is much more preferable to a game that lets you explore it's mediocrity in whatever order you prefer (especially since I find most games whose storyline is the draw equally boring to replay regardless of linearity, so non-linear games simply make me feel like I've payed for content I haven't seen because one playthrough doesn't get through all of the story). I'd also like to point out the final assault on the Citadel as a good example of imaginitevely using the setting (lets have the them fight up the side of a building!) to seem like you're doing something different with out actually having to build anything new (other than some textures). Unfortunately now I'm left waiting for the sequel. /pout

Halo 2 - I've finally figured out what it is about the Halo series that does it for me: music, and voice acting. Because really, it's kind of a mediocre shooter, probably a bit better when it first came out, but the fight mechanics don't change drastically in the series. It's still the same old-school unrealistic (read: enemies can require many shots to kill) shooter at the end of the day. The combat is so-so, and most of the levels are very very repetitive. You could probably slice out 50-60% of every map (the copy/pasted bits) and end up with a much tighter experience (which is essentially what CoD4 did, same focus on story but with much shorter walks between epic setpieces).

But the sound gets you over that. The music really is amazingly well done, a good blend of epic stings and action guitar to help move the monotony of space hallway #1241. The wheel that keeps everything, including the player, moving in the end is the Chief/Cortana relationship. The story is nice and epic, but it's only interesting through the lense of those two and their scrambling to move from one precarious position to the next. It moves through the cutscenes, and her in-mission asides, and (I think) is one of the primary reasons the Arbiter missions feel so flat, as Tarturus generates no empathy as an obvious villain from the get go, and the elite with half a face is almost indistinguishable from the redshirts he drops in with, there's no emotional hook.

The problem with all this is that since the cutscenes for the entire series are now on Youtube, you can simply watch them in order there and enjoy 80-90% of the music and voice acting. While it's obviously less that what you'd get playing through the game, I'm not sure if the remaining 10-20% is worth $50 and 25 hours of playtime.

A Note on Nightbane

Before I forget, for anyone who tanks Nightbane:

a) At the start of the fight he lands on the section with the little skull on the ground about 3/4 of the way around clockwise from the door closest to the Kara back door. ALWAYS.

b) After an air phase he can land ANYWHERE. Watch for the shadow and pick him up.

Had a tank in t6 the other day who someone had failed to learn this in however many billion times he'd run Kara before. Embarrassing wasn't really the word for it.

LFG

So, my shaman gquit last night after nine months of on again off again drama with the Officer Who Hates Me (OHWM). It had long been clear that the OWHM was willing to do anything up to and including lie through his teeth to get me out of the guild, but I'd successfully fended him off until now. Our GM, who, it's become clear, has been lying to one or both of us all along about various aspects of the situation, decided he'd rather have OWHM in the guild and deal with my drama than the other way around.

So, to that end, I've been somewhat vindictive in my leaving (sorry, I'm not a saint, and after two years building this guild I'm a touch bitter), which is somewhat out of character. Part of me isn't terribly proud about the way I left. Another part of me though, the part that remembers nine months of drama characterized most by getting screwed because I was reluctant to throw the first punch, is perversely pleased that when push came to shove I wasn't as polite.

Getting rid of officers needs to be handled one of two ways. You either need to euthenize them gently so they don't notice it happening, or shank them so fast they don't see it coming Screwing around with it while they still have access to in and out of game guild resources is dangerous and asking for trouble.

Well That Didn't Take Long

From the Dept. of Shoulda Seen That One Coming, comes the news that the MS Flametongue change has been reverted. Not even sure they managed to fix the reverse MS increased healing bug on it before they did it.

The upshot is most of the last post's analysis is rendered somewhat moot, and that I, Mauro, Push, and most of the rest of the shaman community are now in agreement that we are back to being as boned, if not more boned (thank you 15s SR), than we were previously.

Some people are kicking around other ideas for improvements, mostly centered around root/cc breakers (Danemoth has been pushing both a Windwalk (the short term bastard child of vanish, CloS, and Sprint) and a Spirit Form (the bastard child of BoP and Amp Magic) idea, both of which sound neat and workable (though my choice would be Windwalk), or stun/root-reactive abilities (e.g. armor, root breaking, or damage reflect type abilities that activate, or start stacking when you are rooted and/or stunned).

There's various flavors of all those ideas floating around, many of which would have significant effects on the class. Probably far fewer of which have any hope of implementation.

Most of us are just holding our breath for the next PTR change, or worse, patch release.

/crosses fingers

Shaman 2.4 Changes

I tend not to comment much on upcoming changes either here or the Blizz forums. A combination of time pressure, the technical issues of getting on the PTR, and a fairly competitive raiding schedule mean I tend not to have the time or the opportunity to test changes to the extent required to provide informed feedback.

That said, I'm trying to get back into PvP lately, and I'm stubborn enough to try to do it as enhance (yes, I'm that much of a masochist, but I do really like mage/enhance/pally as a matrix when I can get the team together), so these changes have special relevance for me.

Interestingly two of the most vocal and consistently intelligent (judging from posts) 2k+ Gladiator enhance shams have made posts about their experience on the PTR and their analysis of the changes and have come to almost completely opposite conclusions.

Push gives the glass half full view here: https://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=4976339038&sid=1
Mauro has the glass half empty side here: https://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=4976278881&sid=1

For my part, I'm leaning towards Mauro's view. I don't necessarily disagree with Push, I think all the things he raves about are true and will be positives. But two concerns overwhelm my enthusiasm for those changes.

First, I didn't, and don't, believe that MS was needed for enhance shaman. Setting aside the fact that MS drives us closer to being a poor man's warrior or rogue (something I consider distinctly undesirable), overcoming healing done hasn't been a major issue in my experience. Between Purge, Earth Shock, and high burst simply brute forcing your way past healing has been viable for enhance shams in most situations (occasionally there are priests or shamans that can outheal my dps, but it's a very mana intense process for them). The majority of cases where my dps is easily outhealed revolve not around a healer's ability, but my inability to effectively apply my dps (generally due to rogue stuns or hunter/mage kiting), which leads to the second point.

We still will not have any good options or methods to avoid or escape stunlocks and kiting scenarios. Toughness will have no effect on roots or other control removing CC effects (poly, stuns, fears, etc.). As a result it feels like the anti-kiting equivalent of frost shocks's snare, in that it's only effective against people who didn't need to use it against in the first place.

Of the classes we would want to get away from/get close to, rogues, druids, and hunters, none will be disadvantaged by the current incarnation of Toughness.

• Crippling poison is applied faster than half it's duration, stuns and blinds are unaffected, and CloS/Vanish/Sprint will all still break/overpower EB/FS snares. Deadly Throw will take a small hit, but the frequency that rogues have had to resort to DT against me is vanishingly small
• Root and Cyclone are completely unaffected. Insta-GW may make these fights easier, but not by much.
• Frost trap is unaffected (and still implemented in a far superior way to Earth Bind). Crippling poison from snake traps has similar problems as with the Rogue version (though a smart hunter would prefer the superior and less effective frost trap). Wing Clip will be slightly effected, but not greatly, and Imp Wing Clip will see no detrimental effects. Concussion Shot will take a hit, though good hunters will rarely need to resort to it. Scatter Shot will see no effect and will still have no deadzone.

There is a chance, as Push and others suggest, that the combination of Instant GW and Toughness will be enough in an arena situation. Though, while I'm open (and hopefully) that it will be so as the changes hit live, I'm skeptical of the prospects, and my current expectation is Enhance will continue to require significantly more work/effort/skill to achieve ratings than almost any other non-tank spec in the game.

Addendum: A 2.4 change discussion is probably not complete without mentioning the SR changes. Undispellable feels like a fix that should have gone in at implementation, it's something that really should have been a base component of the ability from the beginning. The duration reduction isn't a huge hit for most things PvP or standard PvE. I do maintain that it's a significant Raiding PvE nerf.

SR has been the shaman answer to CloS/Vanish/Evasion for rogues, DS for retadins, HoTs/Shifting/Barkskin for ferals, and Plate/Intercept/Intervene/Huge Health pools for dps wars. Enhance have consistently been the squishiest of melee with the least health, armor, dodge, and escape buttons. Even SR as it was was somewhat subpar when compared to CloS. It's one saving grace was that it lasted forever. Which gave significant returns on fights like RoS, Bloodboil, and Archimonde. Reducing the duration is a significant hit for raiding survivability, though I don't hold out much hope for a reversion.