Unless you checked out of the game a while back, you know that we’ve just finished the first week after patch 4.2 Rage of the Firelands made it to the live servers. With the servers down for maintenance, it’s as good a time as any to share my thoughts on the recent game changes and maybe give a couple predictions of what is coming.
Legendary Drama
Just before the patch went live, our raid group decided the first recipient of the new legendary staff. I had hoped to have an open discussion about the staff, but now I see that was a bit naive, even for Zosima’s Utopia I like to live in. Instead I open a private section of the forums that only our raid group could see and put it up for a simple vote.
You can’t really argue that a legendary doesn’t come with OMG face melting DPS potential. However, legendaries are much more than that. They are status symbols for individuals and raids, they usually have some amazing flavor addition (I’ll talk about this one in another post), and they are much a way for a raid group to reward someone who has done more than just show up.
In Wrath we awarded Shadowmourne to one of our founding members who sacrificed his love of DPS to tank to keep progression moving, he was always looking out for the raiders to make sure folks were getting what they wanted out of the game, and was just generally a good guy. Back then it was really an obvious choice. No one else really spoke up wanting it initially as pretty much everyone knew he deserved it.
I was hoping for the same this time. Since it didn’t happen to work out that way, I hoped the voting would simplify things. Private votes, with a public tally should make everyone happy. What I failed to prepare for was some people counting votes and trying to figure out who voted for whom. In the end the second place raider didn’t get all the votes he felt he was promised and all hell broke loose. There were shouting matches in whispers, /ignore being thrown around, and people just disappearing from the game unless it was raid time.
Holy shit! I really thought we were above that. I really hate being wrong. There was talk about the raid group splitting up over it, or maybe 1-2 people should be removed, etc etc. I will admit I thought long and hard about doing just that. Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed and I decided to wait and watch. The drama has settled for now, and if things return to normal, great. Tempering steel makes it stronger. So too does a little heat in a raid group. Just like metals, too much heat will make a raid group brittle. Now is when the leadership gets tested to see if we can strike the balance and end up with both a strong group and one that is still flexible.
New Daily Quests
In addition to a new raid zone, 4.2 brought us a TON of new quests. I’m a raider at heart, I love raids, dungeons, and most anything that resembles a raid (even BGs with the raid group counts). However, my dirty pleasure in the game is lore and questing. I really enjoy questing and I’m one of those guys who actually reads the quest text, listen to podcast sections on lore, read the novels, all that nerdy goodness.
I loved the quest hub that came with the Fury of the Sunwell. The group activity of the Isle of Quel ‘Danas made us feel like we were working together for a common goal and rewarded the server for working together. As much as I enjoyed that, I’m really excited that the Blizz Quest Team has chosen to use the phasing tech and make this a more individual experience. As heroes, we are fighting the beginnings of the invasion and earning the trust and support of a couple sub-factions.
Many who know me know that I’ve not been pleased with the gross linear questing of Cata as a whole. I much preferred the previous questing style of picking and choosing. In fact, so far I’ve only leveled 3 of my toons to 85 because I’m simply tired of the exact same quests in the 80-85 range.
The new quest hub however is much better the quests aren’t exactly the same every day and the achievements keep me anxious and exciting. That’s right. There are achievements and even a bad-ass title for quests. It’s good to see Blizz toss a bone to those folks who play the game for quests. In fact, I like the title from the quests much more than the raid content. “Zosima, the Firebreaker” just seems more awesome than “Firelord Zosima.” While I want the latter, I haven’t seen Aang, Katara, or even ZUko hanging out around here.
In addition to the better title, completing the quest story rewards the Flameward Hippogryph. A little extra icing on the cake!
The FIRELANDS, (is it hard enough)
It’s hard for me to believe I waited until the end to talk about the new raid content. This is especially hard to believe since I am really digging it so far. I’m concerned about the longevity of the tier, but we’ll talk about that another day. For now, I’m in awe over the open air zone and it actually feels like we are pushing to Rag’s man cave to deliver the final beat down.
There have been lots of folks QQing all over the forums about tuning. First and foremost…
ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE IS ANECDOTAL
With that out of the way, I don’t think there are any huge tuning problems. My raid group finished the week at 5/7 and that’s with adding an extra day for opening week. We raided a total of 12 hours, with a lot of break , slow runbacks, etc. People are saying 10 mans doing well is proof that the content is undertuned. I strongly disagree. My raid group well over gears the content, we did our homework, and frankly…we have some really good raiders. I have little patience for those people who try to bring other down because they are inadequate in some way.
I went back to T11 screen shots. After 4 nights of raiding, we had cleared 4 bosses. The average of a boss a night went on until we were 7/12. We lost it the schedule at 8. Oh well. Seems we are on the same pace as before.
People like quoting WoWprogress stats. Like I said it’s all anecdotal, but on Hyjal the only guilds to be 7/7 the first week are 25 man guilds. There are plenty of 10 and 25 guilds sitting some where around 1-3 bosses down. Calm down folks. Don’t claim the content is undertuned for someone else because you can’t clear it. I hate the way this sounds and I don’t like tossing ego around, but just maybe my raid group is performing better than yours right now. If you don’t like it, do better. Don’t try to say we are cake walking.
If there is a race, it is heroics anyway.
The Real Discusssion about Firelands
The previous section didn’t really talk much about the raid. The trash is a bit out of control, but Blizz was actually pretty quick to fix things like the 10 man trash with 16.7M health. That’s right. M as in Million! We lol’d, orded pizza, went to buy beer, and I’m sure more than one person tabbed out to watch Tauren on gnome porn. While it was funny to see mobs that had stupid amounts of health, it was getting old fast.
Some groups were also having a problem in which they would clear the central area for Shannox, wipe a few times on trash, maybe swap some folks out, head over to kill Beth’tilac or Ryolith and then just as Shannox spawned, the trash would come back.
I’ve never been a fan of two hour trash respawns. I think it’s an outdated design and it’s nice to see blizz adjust the Shannox trash to a 4-hour timer. Now if we could only get them to look at adjusting the trash repawn plan overall.
As far as bosses go this tier, there is one prevailing design: Split the raid, control adds, burn phase at the end. I was pleasantly surprised to see that even with this fairly write design outline, the fights are engaging, interesting, and reward raids who have players who can think and act on their own. Raid groups who are carrying a lot of players or have people who wait for a Raid Leader to tell them when/where to move will have a rough row to hoe.
There’s a lot more to talk about, like gear choices (sorry Priests), trash farming, and raid comps (again, sorry Priests), but I am going to wait on those topics.
What does it all mean?
So far, I’m very excited about the new content and most of my raid and guild at large seems to be as well. I’m very impressed and think Blizz has done well this tier overall. I’m still disappointed about losing the Abyssal Maw, but I’m gonna trust Blizz for the time being and see if Firelands has some legs (other than Rag’s).
