Warlords of Draenor: Vapor-Expansion?

I’ve noticed something, peeps.  Something a little odd and perhaps a bit disheartening about Warlords of Draenor.  Are we actually getting anything new?  You’ll respond “Garrisons, Luvbacon, you absent-minded twit of a goblin!” and I’ll respond “Rascist! Garrisons look like they could be interesting, but is it going to be something that will really and truly hold our collective attention and cause those boxes to fly off shelves?  I don’t see that happening.”   This is the first expansion without several major additions to the game…..EVER!   Maybe this doesn’t bother you, but it bothers me.   Let’s take a walk down memory lane.  I’m going to rate each expansion based on three criteria.  2 possible points for expansion identity and theme,  2 possible points for Quality of life and improvements, and 3 possible points for new features (ignoring anything low impact.  I’m thinking classes, races, etc.), for an ultra-wierd 7 point scale. This is all based on my opinion only.  0 science.

Burning Crusade

Expansion identity and Theme –  Illidan, bro.  Outland’s spooky ether and wacky disjointed zones were wonderfully foreign compared to Vanilla.  Black Temple.  Kharazan.  Is there a better defined bit of “WoW”ness in existence than BC?  I think not. Plus, a clear bullseye on a baddies head is always nice for clarity.  2/2 Points.

Quality of life and Improvements – Smaller raid sizes certainly made raiding easier to organize.  And the low barrier of entry for Khara made it so nearly everyone had a crack at Prince at least.  Raid markers happened at this time too.  Badge loot made gear catch up possible.  Also, this was the first time they put in a late-in-expac catch-up dungeon with purples for everyone.  It was nice!  2/2 points.

New Features – 1 new race per faction, 1 new class per faction.   Admittedly, they got to cheat out a bit here by simply using existing classes.  But still, most players tend to be fairly faction-loyal.  I was alliance at the time and had not played shaman at all.  It was a new class for me.   Still, I’m going to dock a point because they weren’t strictly new.  Flying mounts!! Also, this was the expansion in which they added arenas, which have since remained the pinnacle of organized pvp.  2/3 points.

6/7 points total.  A pretty solid expansion.  We were not prepared.

Wrath

Expansion identity and Theme – Ok, so Arthas and Northrend’s Icy and Ominous zones may be even a bit more “WoW” than even Illidan and Outland.  This expac oozed style.  Quests linked our little heroisms with the schemes of the expansion big-bad in a way that had never been done before.  The bullseye was painted ultra-clearly on Arthas head all the way through the expac and the final confrontation did not disappoint.  2/2 points.

Quality of Life and Improvements –  Tabards for rep grind comes to mind.  That made it pretty nice.  Dungeon Finder made grouping for 5 mans easier than ever.  Catch-up heroics made getting geared for raiding super easy; even more-so than in BC. 2/2 points.

New Features – DKs.  The addition of the first 100% new class with their own unique (and awesome) starting zone.  The cherry on top?  They started at 55.  This alone was a new feature that could define an expac imo.  Everyone had a max level DK at 80, btw.  Also, in Wrath was the first instance of the world pvp zone; Wintergrasp.  3/3 points.

7/7 points for the expansion.  A PERFECT score on the luvbacon scale!!  Frostmourne hungered, and ate us up.

Cata

Expansion Identity and Theme – For me, this one was not great in this department.  Sure, it had Deathwing, but I found him to be pretty uninspiring for my ire.  In the end, we killed the CRAP out of his toes.  The big mark against this expac for me was that there was no new place.  Sure, new zones, but no new land for us to explore.  It was weak-sauce.  0/2 points.

Quality of Life and Improvements – Healer mana pain comes to mind here.  the big quality of life change for me in cata was that I could no longer heal a five-man without going oom.  Sure Blizz, give us challenge but not giving us enough mana to keep our party alive isn’t challenge, it’s cheating.  It felt like playing a game of D&D with the neighborhood bully as the DM.  Challenging?  You betcha.  Are you coming back next week?  Nah, I’m cool.  -2/2 points.

New Features – New Race/Class combos.  New 1-60 leveling.  The race/class combo thing basically meant nothing.  I mean, if you wanted a shaman in wrath, you made one from the available races.  Why would you level another one?  Same for all the other classes.  It’s not like you were holding off on alts in the hopes they would make it available in your prefered race.  I award no points for that, sry.  Now, 1-60 leveling.  Ok, thats worth some points imo.  The whole vanilla world redone with solid questing.  It has made leveling alts much less painfull, for sure.  Lastly, LFR.  Now I know, it’s my obligation as a respectible curmudgeon to poopoo LFR as often as possible.  But I will say this about it, it got me back into the game when I had no intention of raiding.  And I know I’m not alone.   It undoubtadly increased the accessibility of the game and at the very least was Blizzard’s first attempt at having a legit progression path for the pure casual among us.  I call it a success.  3/3 points.

1/7 points for the expansion.  Deathwing released a cloud of his most mild flatulence and ruined our appetite.

MoP

Expansion Identity and Theme – In the big-bad department, I felt like MoP was really lacking.  Sure, Garrosh is a douche, but for most of the expac, horde players were doing his bidding, not chasing him down.  Weak.  Pandaria though was inspired.  It painted a picture of a world unlike any we had visited before with fleshed out cultures and milieu.  I loved the Jade forest, the Vale of Eternal Blossoms, Valley of the Four Winds.  Fantastic!!  I’ll split the difference here. 1/2 points.

Quality of Life and Improvements – The only big change I can think of here was lifting of the limit on dailies.  And in hindsight, it was a terrible one.  Hard to argue against that.  0/2 points.

New Features – New Race, New class, Scenarios, Pet Battles, Brawler’s guild, Challenge Modes, flex mode….and I probably missed some.  Look, you may love or hate Mop, but you simply cannot deny the vast wealth of new features and content they have dumped on us this expac.  This has been, hands down, the best expansion since Vanilla for new features.  I award 2 bonus points for sheer magnitude of features alone.  5/3 points.

A total of 6/7 points.  Pretty fantastic expac over all!!  We all slowed down and savored it (minus a few million subs).

Now Warlords…

WoD

Expansion Identity and Theme – A whole new continent for us to explore.  Yay! Except, it’s not completely new.  In fact largely, the zones are the pre-destruction version of zones we’ve already visited.  Sure, it will be cool to revisit these zones, but it’s not a new land, by any stretch.  In the big-bad department, who do we get?  It looks to be a rehashed version of the weakest big-bad we’ve ever had.  What?  Yes.  Garrosh 2: The Sequel.  Will it end up being someone else?  Probably.  But as of right now, Blizzard has told us about Garrosh and that’s about it.  Uber-weak.  -1/2 points.

Quality of Life Improvements – Item squish, ability prune, new player models, elimination of reforge, elimination of (many) gemslots.  These are solid.  But notice, they’re not really improvements so much as elimination of things we’ve had…mostly.  The one exception, player models.  Which are a good effort, but sadly, we’ll all have them covered up in armor anyway.   Still, these are good changes that will improve the game.  I award full points, in fact, even a bonus point.  3/2 points.

New Features – Garrisons. >.>  ………………………… seriously.  that’s all.  Garrisons.  No new class.  No new race.  No new gameplay mode.  No new nuthin’! I am going to pay $60 for Quality of Life Improvements.  So are you.  Let that sink in.  -2/3 points.

A total score of 0/7.  Losing to Cataclysm.  Did you read that?  Cataclysm looks to be a better expansion than WoD.  For shame Warlords.  For shame!!

Summary

So does this mean we should all jump ship?  The sky is falling?  Etc?  Nah.  Warlords will probably be another good expansion.  But Blizzard is holding their cards extremely close to their vest this time and waiting inexplicably to tell us about their uber-features.  That’s my hope, anyway.  The alternative to this is that they really have no ace in the hole whatsoever and are assuming that they are the only shop in town.  Which up until this year, would’ve been on the money.  Unfortunately for them, Wildstar (and possibly ESO) has changed that.  Whether or not you are as enamored as I am with Wildstar, any reasoning player has to admit that it is at least a competent MMO.  In the past every MMO has had some major flaw that put it on a tier below WoW.  Wildstar does not look to be this way to me.  I think Blizz may have picked a bad year for a “rest-on-our-laurels” expansion.  Time will tell.

But let me implore you, Blizz.  If you have something up your sleeves, SHOW US!!  Please!  Garrisons will not carry an expansion.  I’ve made this point before, but I would personally be all for greatly slowing down the rate of expansion releases in favor of just having  raid tier after raid tier.  I think that would be a ok.  I hate leveling anyway.  But as long as Blizzard is trying to fish a fi’tty out of my wallet every other year, let’s get something substantial, k.  None of this ‘leveling zones + QoL = GG’.  Please/Thanks.

>luvbacon<

 

What WoW can learn from Wildstar

Hey folks! As the cycle goes toward the end of any expac my interest wanes a bit and I more and more succumb to the tempting wiles of; sunshine, or console gaming, or an epic PC RPG, or maybe even the day-gig (not likely).  This time around,  in case you somehow missed the title, the time-vacuum under discussion is Wildstar.  It has thoroughly sucked me into it’s brightly colored world of challenging combat and rewarding gameplay.    I thought it’d be fun to take a look at why this game in particular has caught me in it’s web and what could be learned from it by WoW.

The Guild Wars 2 Killer

Let’s get this bit out of the way.  Every time a new high profile MMO comes along it is proclaimed by the addoring fanbois to be the long prophesied WoW-killer.  Off the top of my head there’s been; LoTRO, GW1, WAR, AoC, SWTOR, GW2, and many others.  Each of these was expected by some to knock Blizzard off it’s lofty perch at the top of the MMO heap but each of them fell far short.  Internet 101 explains the reason for this obsession with WoW’s downfall.  People love to watch folks crash and burn, especially the big guy.  It has never really happened though.  WoW started with too big of a lead on all of these contenders to the throne.  It’s had years to incorporate game-changing features that competitors just can’t match.  There will never be a WoW-killer that’s not a Blizzard MMO!!  There just won’t!  In fact, we haven’t even seen a competitor take a noticeable chunk of subscribers in any permanent way.  They all launch with some serious deficiency.  No end-game.  Questing is unfun.  The world is bland.  The character development is bland.  The most frequent downfall is definitely lack of an endgame though.  But I have always said that a competent MMO with an interesting world that launched with a fleshed out endgame would eat WoW’s lunch.  Especially at the tail end of a long patch.   Well, search no further.  Wildstar is that game.  It has a fully fleshed out endgame, an interesting and colorful world, and fun combat.  Plus, it’s launching in the middle of the longest content lull in WoW history.  Will it be the WoW-killer?  No!   Nothing will kill WoW.  But rest assured, unless the dev team slips on a serious banana peel between now and launch, it will eat a good chunk of WoW subs.  There are a lot of other MMOs out there that folks really love but have a far lower population than WoW.  Those games will probably feel a bigger impact from the launch then WoW will.

So what’s so great about Wildstar then?  I mean, I discussed in a previous entry that I spent some time in the ESO beta but was left decidedly unmoved by ESO’s bland Tolkien-lite fetchquest world and Skyrim style click-clickety-click-click combat.  To be fair, I tapped out rather quickly on the whole thing.  I’m told there are some interesting aspects of endgame.  What makes Wildstar special?  Let’s break it down.

Action Combat

The combat in Wildstar is fun!  But it’s really not far off from the combat in other MMOs like GW2 or Vindictus.  There’s a satisfying sense of control and immediacy to the abilities.  The main componant that sets it apart from other action MMOs out there are the telegraphs.  These are the piece all those other MMOs were missing.  Wildstar’s telegraphs are extremely clear and give detailed information to the player on the fly.  You always know exactly how long you have to get out of the red zone.  This solves a problem many of us may not have even realized we had in WoW.   Raid Bosses in WoW have their own telegraphs.  The dotted lines on the dogs in Mogushan Vaults, or the Wind Circles on Windlord in Heart of Fear, the purple maze on Duruumu, or the Green line on Dark Shaman.  The problem with these things is that they’re not consistent.  If you step inside certain floor circles, you die.  Inside others, you take damage over time.  Others can be walked through without taking any damage at all until they explode (when?  who knows).   Wildstar communicates much clearer information because it’s consistent and readily understandable.  I would love to see WoW add consistency in the way it communicates this kind of information.    There is nothing in the world less satisfying than dying to something unavoidable or unclear.

Challenge

Ok, this is vague.   What I mean is,  I forgot what it felt like to die while questing because I overextended and got swarmed by mobs.  It’s frustrating!!! But it also serves to up the ante on the world.  Some of the most fun I’ve had so far has been when I get swarmed due to carelessness but just barely manage to get away with my skin intact.  This challenge runs through the quests, shiphand missions, adventures, and dungeons (I haven’t run a dungeon myself yet.  Just streams).  In WoW, I honestly can’t remember the last time I died while questing.  Mobs are carefully spread out to avoid pulling unintentional mobs but the lack of danger trivializes the experience for me.  The possibility of death reinvigorates questing.

Storytelling

Don’t get me wrong, Wildstar has it’s fair share of kill-10-boar and fedex quests.  But peppered generously throughout each zone are questlines that play out like little pocket epics.  One fun example was a questline a guildy and I played through where we had to deal with several different rogue AIs in various nearby instances.  Along the way, different kill challenges and sidequests popped up.  We had a blast and got completely lost in the adventure of it.  When all was said and done, my chum and I agreed that it had been some of the most fun we’ve had while questing since way back when.  The ‘why’ of it is hard to put a finger on though.  I honestly can’t adequately describe what makes the storytelling in this game stand out.  What’s funny to me is that while playing through the class quests in SWTOR, I rarely found a feeling of deep immersion, adventure, and fun that I had here.   And SWTOR’s great claim to fame at launch (when I played) was it’s deep questing.  It’s a puzzler that Wildstar, a game that has made no noise at all about it’s questing, has happened upon a truly fun formula.  The only place during MoP that came close to this was in the Jade Forest.  Somehow the Jade Forest created an effective illusion that my actions were truly impacting the world.  It didn’t quite hit my ‘schoolgirl-gigglingly’ fun nerve though.  It was more impressive than fun.

Fun

Which brings me to the last great aspect of the game.  Fun!  This one is hard to describe too, so let me give you a few examples.  When you go to create a new character, before you select a race or faction, the placeholder character is a silly looking goat.  Why?  No reason, but you’ll smile.  The first time you level up and the humerously ultra-masculine announcer exclaims “Oh $#!+”, you’ll smile.  I promise you’ll smile.   The first time you die and the announcer makes a crack about a frequent customer discount, you’ll smile.  These are just a few examples, but understand, these devs had fun making this game!  And you feel it!  These are notes that WoW has certainly hit from time to time.  But for every DK starting questline, Kung Fu questline, or Jade Forest, there’s 20 fatty goat steak quests to eat your fun fairie’s soul.  I would love to see some random fun in Warlords.

Try it

Seriously folks, Wildstar is worth some playtime.  It’s in Open Beta for another week or so.  Do yourself a favor and give it a try.  It may tide you over until Warlords launches or even keep your interest long after WoD launches.  I have no doubt that I’ll be back in full-on progression mode when Warlords hits, but I’ll likely be a bit scarce in Azeroth from June until Warlords.

It’s fun.

Yeah, I’m hoping Blizzard takes a few cues from Wildstar.  They usually get some good fuel from successful competitors and I hope this is one of those times.  I guess we’ll see.

>luvbacon<

WoW’s Secret Sauce

After an extended hiatus from both WoW and my blog, I thought it would be a great way to mark my return with an entry about what makes WoW so special.  If you love something, let it go.  If it’s really yours, you won’t be able to stay unsubscribed for long, after all.  During my break I played a sheeps-head-load of Hearthstone and I also had the chance to try out a few MMOs, some in beta, some long since released.  So let’s take a minute, just sit right there, and I’ll tell ya what I think makes WoW … so special.

We’ve all attempted it.  A new MMO comes along with enticing sparkly gimmicks in tow; be it personal story, action combat, cinematic storytelling, or just a unique setting.  So you take the plunge, slap down your purchase price and start into your free month.   You notice all the nuances that make this new game special.  “Oh man! I love how this dodge feels!”, “The abilities feel REALLY powerful!”, “The depth of the storytelling is really impressive.”.  But there’s a nagging feeling the whole time.  There’s that extra element that’s missing.  Maybe you can’t even put your finger on it right away.  Over the next few days or weeks you feel like logging in less and less.  You don’t quite know why, but the new game doesn’t have the same pull that good ole’ WoW has.  So, probably before your free month ends, you unsubscribe and come on back to momma Blizz’s loving arms.   Why?

Setting

It’s easy to overlook how interesting the setting in WoW really is.  On the surface, it’s standard Orcs and Elves.  That’s how a sitcom episode about a WoW clone would show it.  But it’s not really.  Don’t forget about the large steampunk stylistic touches all over the world.  From Ironforge to the Barrens, to any of the Airships that seem to be issued to the landlord of most raid zones.  Whenever a hunter’s gun fires, and the sound kills a portion of your soul,  that’s not something you would hear in a standard Orcs and Elves mishmash.  How many giant robot bosses have we killed over the years?  “Time to play!!”  Or who can forget the pant-poopingly-panic inducing stomp of the first fel reaver that strolled through your path to pwn your toon flat.

It’s not just the steampunk flourishes though.  There are some places that are just plain weird……in a good way.  Take Outland.  It’s floating continents and wild geometry are not really something you see on the cover art of a DnD source book.   From the foreboding gloom of Shadowmoon Valley, to the steak-knives-in-the-dish-washer peaks of Blade’s Edge Mountain’s, to the etherial enclaves of Netherstorm; there couldn’t be a bigger difference between these zones and the standard Tolkien derived me-too zones of your newest would-be WoW heir.

Another great example is Pandaria.  When first announced at Blizzcon, it was met with a collective gasp from the community with forum posts saying things like “April Fool’s joke becomes the Next Expansion”.  I must admit that even I was skeptical that Blizz could make the Asian inspired world of Pandaria make sense within the world of Azeroth.  But dude, they did it!  We don’t think twice about any of the Kung Fu throwback tropes and color splashed throughout.  Take the Kung Fu training montage questline in Valley of the Four Winds as an example.  It plays out just like you would expect a training montage in a Kung Fu film to play out.  It’s satirical and fun, and it works!  Somehow, it just works!    Another great example is the entire Mogushan Vaults raid.  It has stone warriors and dogs throughout the thing, asian inspired carpet in the four kings room, and it finished up with an endless army and two Giant sword wielding warriors unleashing their devastating combo on us.   Nobody could have made Pandaria work the way Blizz had.  And now it’s an essential part of what makes Azeroth so unique.

The unique blend that makes up Azeroth’s setting is so enticing and special that it has kind of become it’s own thing now apart from the Tolkien inspired fantasy settings that have spawned movies, comics, and books for generations.  Watch a stream of Guild Wars 2 or Wildstar and see if you notice anything familiar.  These games both look and feel fantastic, but it’s crystal clear to me that they are at least partially trying to get in on Blizzard’s fun in creating a mishmash universe of fantasy/scifi/steampunk/whatever-else-they-think-is-cool.  I don’t blame them, either.  Blizzard has essentially created a playground for them to make ANY story they want.  I mean, at this point, what COULDN’T Blizzard do in WoW?  They could go pretty far scifi and still have it make sense, they could go nearly modern day, victorian era, anything is fair game.  This is the ideal setting to keep players interested for say…..15 years or so.  I played SWTOR.  I love Star Wars in an unhealthy way.  But even with my offputting romance with the Star Wars universe, the setting grows stale over time.

Gameplay

So, if you’re in the know on MMOs, you’re aware that the last few years has seen the launch of several MMOs whose prime selling point is action combat.  What this boils down to is that the enemies attacks can be dodged in realtime.  You have access to a dodge button that scoots you out of the way of these attacks and gives combat a feeling of immediacy that WoW does not have.  The other common element is the lack of sticky targetting.  For example, ESO does not allow you to click on an enemy and have your subsequent hotbar abilities cast on that enemy regardless of where your mouse is pointed.  Your mouse has to stay on the enemy to perform the attacks.  Often these games will have no autoattack either.  You will have to manually execute each attack.  This  exponentially increases the visceral feeling of combat, and for a time I was convinced that it was the wave of the future.  But when you add this style of play to a questing system that utilizes your standard kill/fetch/fedex style quests that tend to become quite repetitive, I often would rather just be able to target and click hotkeys.  To me the essence of an RPG is the choices you make; strategic combat choices, character customization choices, story choices.  Not the action. I do not believe this is as large a disadvantage as one may think, if at all.  There are already threads cropping up on the beta forums about how players are tiring of the constant requirement for gymnastics.  Sometimes a dude just wants to vege out and kill boars, ya know?

What WoW does so well in the vein of combat, is the feeling of immediacy on your attacks.  You feel very much in control of your actions.  A good while back I gave LotRo a whirl and found it unplayable by my standards.  The setting was cool, the art was compelling.  But when I clicked a hotkey, there was a few extra milliseconds of delay.  Doesn’t seem like much, but it was enough to make me feel like I wasn’t in total control.  And that was all it took for me to uninstall.  Back in the days of Vanilla WoW, playing a Rogue was a thrilling experience.  Especially PvP.  Stunlocking was the ultimate feeling of control.  Timing the gouge or blind so it just clips the previous stun to keep the player locked up.  This type of play would not even be possible in many games.

The other gameplay element that WoW does extremely well is the interaction within a raid team.  The current raid environment, primarily heroic raids,  requires the right amount of skill from the players of each role.  A tank must control the mobs, maintain threat, manage their personal survivability, do dps, and obey the specific fight mechanics.  A healer must manage his mana, obey fight mechanics, stay out of fire, prioritize the proper targets, choose the appropriate heals.  DPS must dps the appropriate target and switch as neccessary, stay out of fire, obey the fight mechanics, interrupt, kite, etc.  That’s a good bit of gameplay.  Games that have tried to iterate on the tank/healer/dps trinity, perhaps even eliminating one of the three, haven’t seemed to have much success.  I’m looking at you GW2.  You end up with classes that are completely useless and classes that are basically mandatory.  This is because of the lack of depth and interdependence between the roles.  There is just something special about the trinity.  When you get it right, everyone feels vital, and if anyone isn’t carrying their weight, you fail.

Accessibility

This is the big one.  By far, WoW’s most important innovations have been in this area.  Random Battleground Queue, Dungeon Finder, Raid Finder, Flex Mode, Scenarios.  Even things like faster leveling.  All of these serve to provide an easier point of entry for new players.  Likely, when you start out you won’t have a guild of chums to group with and you won’t have a regular raid team.  But with all of these innovations to accessibility, you’ll still have stuff to do to progress your character.  In fact, many folks find their guild through a random LFR or an Oqueue Flex run.  Other games have launched without some of these features and paid dearly for it.  SWTOR launched without a Dungeon Finder and hemorrhaged subs once people started hitting end-game.  This was largely due to the fact that gamers don’t want to go back to painstakingly forming a dungeon group through global chat just to knock out their dungeon quests.  We don’t live in that world anymore!  Why not?  WoW.  That’s why not.   These features require a lot of time and manpower to develop for a new MMO.  They also generally don’t make much of an impact until the player hits end-game.  That makes it pretty enticing to backburner them in favor of things your players will need during their first few weeks of play.  The risk is that if most players hit endgame before you get at least a Dungeon Finder into the game, you are going to lose a ton of subs.  This is all thanks to WoW.

The lack of these features in a new game feels jarringly offputting to me.  I’m used to these things now.  Sure, it took WoW a decade or so to get all of these in the game, but now that we’re used to them, we expect an MMO to have them.  These expectations are setting us up for trouble.  New MMO developers can’t hope to put all of this stuff into their games at launch.  Players expect them, so they don’t stick around after endgame and they come back to WoW.  New MMO fails.  This is why I’m predicting mostly failure or subdued success from all upcoming MMOs until Blizzard puts out a new MMO.  They’re the only ones who could hope to implement enough of the features we now expect, to keep the players through endgame.

WoW’s Secret Sauce

All of these elements come together to make a truly one-of-a-kind experience.  WoW has officially ruined me for other MMOs.  I even find myself comparing the character progression of non-MMOs to the character progression in WoW, usually to the other game’s peril.    WoW isn’t just one-of-a-kind though, it’s special.   Being unique isn’t enough to generate a /played that looks like mine does.  It has to be special.  WoW’s secret sauce is a blend of addictive character progression, both before and after endgame, addictive guild progression through raiding, multiple layers of deep character customization, skill based success/failure, and lots of silliness and fun.  Add to all of this that other x-factor.  The mystery element.  The secret spice.  Heart.

>luvbacon<

Healer Regen, Fun, and You

With the glut of news coming out of Blizzcon came vibrant discussion (read:QQ) about the ramification of these announcements.  One of the most interesting issues I’ve come across so far was discussed here http://wow.joystiq.com/2013/11/20/warlords-of-draenors-gear-system-and-spirit-as-a-secondary-stat/#continued.  This entry is partially a response to the above article.

To summarize the issue; one of the most exciting changes at Blizzcon is spec specific loot.  This means that in the expac when I switch specs from Enhancement to a Resto, for example, the primary stats on my main armor pieces will change from Agility to Intellect.  This change will happen automatically upon spec change but the secondary stats will remain the same.  So than what about Spirit? Spirit is an unusual case.  Sure, it’s technically a secondary stats, but it’s importance to a healer’s mana pool cannot be overstated.  Haste affects the resource pool of a dpser as well, but the difference is that a dpser will never reach the point of being unable to do anything for long stretches of time because they don’t have enough haste.  However, this is a very real possibility for a healer.  A healer without a good amount of spirit and who is using an inefficient playstyle WILL go oom (out of mana).  This puts spirit in a different category of importance from the other secondaries.   The problem here is that spirit is largely worthless for all but healers.  If it appears on gear at all, it’s wasted unless you’re a healer.  In addition, pieces without spirit become extremely unattractive for healers.  This would effectively exclude healers from the spec-specific-loot party.

Blizzard’s answer to this quandary is that spirit will not appear on the main armor pieces at all.  It will only be present on rings, necklaces, trinkets, weapons, offhands, etc.  These items will be more tailored to a given role and will not change with spec.  They assure us that regen will be balanced with these lower spirit values in mind.  The problem I see with this is that I can upgrade my chest, shoulders, pants, gloves, and helm, and see NO improvement in my mana regen.  That seems….well…wrong to me.  This whole issue brings to light some inherent inconsistencies and questions about healer mana regen.

Swimming in Mana!!!

At the end of every expac we’ve experienced this Scrooge-McDuck-Swimming-in-Money euphoria of having more mana than we know what to do with.  It’s like Christmas!  Spam your most inefficient heal willy-nilly and don’t even worry about mana.  Well, that may be a bit of an exaggeration, but the point remains.   In MoP, we experienced this euphoria much earlier than ever before.  Basically from the moment we received our legendary meta gem in 5.2, our mana worries were largely over.  In spite of this surplus of mana, my raid team still had to work to get kills through ToT and SoO. I still had to work to keep the team alive even though I routinely finished fights (or we wiped) with plenty of mana left.  The healing balancing act remains; prioritize to prevent deaths, keep the group out of spike death range, use raid CDs wisely, conserve mana where possible.  Mana is just much less of a concern than other issues though.  I still find my gameplay to be dynamic and engaging.  This begs the question, do we really need mana regen to be a prime concern?  Does it really add anything fun or interesting to our gameplay?

Going oom is fun?

I remember the days of early cata when Telluric Currents and weaving Lightning Bolts was basically a necessity to avoid going oom.  It was certainly taxing and challenging at times, but I can’t say it was more fun.  In fact, the struggle to conserve mana across all healers retired many healer friends of mine from the healing game altogether.  This is no surprise really.  Hop in a pvp battleground.  It won’t be long before you get chain-stunned/feared.  While you’re grinding your teeth, you will perfectly understand this issue; it is UNFUN to be unable to do anything.  A healer who goes oom is affectively stunned until they can regen some mana.  It is incredibly frustrating to watch a player die, to know they need healed, to know which heal needs to be cast to save them, but to be unable to heal them because you have no mana.    The penalty for poor play is to stand around for 10-15 seconds watching your fellow raiders die while you regen mana.  It doesn’t make sense to me.  The only reason we accept it so readily is that it’s just always been that way.

I’m interested in what it would be like for a healer’s resource to be more like a dpsers resource; energy, for example.  Energy regens at a set rate based on your haste.  You know you’ll always be able to do something in the next second or two, even if you burn through your energy completely.  There’s no ‘Oh, you got a little greedy there.  Naughty naughty. Now stand around for 10 seconds‘ for a dpser.   I would like to see Blizzard head in this direction; a lower overall mana pool, but with exponentially faster regen rate.  This would eliminate the enormous penalty for going oom and would create a new incentive for using more mana efficient spells;  you get to cast more frequently.  This could potentially create a situation where one shaman will tend to use GHW and one will tend to use more HW, both will be effective, but the HW dude will cast more often.

Meh, not sure if that would work, but two things I do know;

1. Going oom is UNFUN

2. No other role faces such a steep penalty for non-optimal play

My Crazy Ideas

Here are a few different ideas to alleviate both of these issues.

1. Make spirit a universal stat to increase resource production/regen rate.  Change haste to only increase attack speed and casting speed, not resource production/ regen rate.  Then add spirit to gear liberally as a secondary stat.  This would make spirit useful to everyone, not just healers, and would add another ‘interesting’ secondary to the slim pool of secondaries that are out there.  However, this would also have the downside that healers would likely want to pass on pieces without spirit. This brings me to my second alternative.

or…

2. Make spirit the primary stat for healers.  Have their regen and throughput scale from it.  For this to work, they would also need to eliminate primary stat gems altogether, which I also think would be a good idea.  Otherwise healers would just stack spirit to hilarious extent like we used to with Int. This would allow healer regen to scale from primary armor pieces and would also serve to make mana regen more of a foregone conclusion, like it’s always been toward the end of an expac.

or…

3. Eliminate a mana regen stat altogether.  Keep Int as our primary stat and simply normalize healer regen.  The benefit of doing this is that our playstyle would not have to change over the course of an expac to suit our current regen level.  This would seem to make balancing healers easier, and would make learning a healing spec simpler since gameplay would not change so drastically upon the release of a new raid tier.  Something else that could be interesting is to iterate on active mana regen mechanics like Telluric Currents.  Make this essential to mana regen rather than simply stacking a stat.  Could be cool.

I’m sure there are other, better ideas out there that would solve these problems.  But no matter the solution, I think it is a good time to address the enormous gulf in playstyle between playing a healer early in the expac and late in the expac.  It’s like two totally different games.  We can’t assume that mana regen is so completely vital to the healer playstyle any longer, since the end of each expac shows us what it’s like to operate without it as a real concern.

<luvbacon>

Let’s talk Blizzcon 2013 news!

Woot! So it’s finally here.  We all have read the deluge of news about what we can expect in the World of Warcraft over the coming year.  I think it’s safe to say we were not  disappointed.  Let’s wade through the news.

Big Deal Stat Changes

Item Squish:   The item squish is finally happening.  Relative power is going to remain where it is but the stats on items as well as the power of spells is going to look more like it did in BC.  Int gems will give you 8 instead of 300 like we would expect from the next expac.  Spells will do 5,000 dmg instead of 500,000.  Enemy health pools will be lowered to compensate.  Also, we will still be able to steamroll old content.   This is all good news!  Honestly though, I don’t really see this having a huge impact on our play.  The numbers will look right after a while.  Till then, it will seem a little wierd, but that’s the only way it will effect us.

Elimination of ‘Cap’ Stats: This one is huge! Stats like expertise, hit, parry, and dodge are all going away.  This change makes a lot of sense.  The stats really did nothing.  You had to hit your minimum on each of these anyway or your dps took a huge hit.  It basically served as a stat “tax” because it took away from straight throughput stats like mastery, haste, and crit.  I see this as a positive change that pushes us to more interesting gear choices.  Plus, caps made reforging a pain (more on this in a bit).

New and Interesting Bonus Stats: We are getting new stats like run speed, aoe avoidance, lifesteal, and sturdiness (no durability loss for the item), and cleave (free splash dmg).  It is also likely that these will only appear on one item type.  For example, run speed will probably only be on boots.  This is very cool!  I am pleased that Blizz is finally trying something new with stats rather than what always amounted to just “Do More Dmg”.  Lifesteal could become a real gamechanger for tanks, and cleave could become vital for dpsers.

Gems: Two things; items will now have a maximum of only 1 gem slot, and gems will now make a smaller impact on your stat distribution.   This will help to even out things like proving grounds or challenge modes and make it less possible to cheese the scaling.  Also, Blizzard seems intent on expanding the level scaling down to include old raid content as well.  This would make balancing much easier for this type of content.

Reforging: “Gone!”  That’s right.  Reforging will no longer be a thing.  The ramifications of this cannot really be overstated.  This is going to bring back BIS in a very real way.  In the live game, it really makes very little difference whether I have haste/spirit or crit/spirit.  I can just reforge to whatever I need.  This will no longer be the case.  You will now be at the mercy of rng.  Don’t get me wrong, I am all for this.  Reforging has stolen a good bit of the magic of loot drops away from the game.  If there are two different mail/spirit bracers in-game, I don’t really care which ones I get.  With reforging, it barely matters to all but the top 1% overlords.  To me and the rest of the peons, it is a marginal difference.  This will make a BIS item a great improvement over the second best.  I LOVE THIS!  Thank you Blizz!  Also, as was mentioned at Blizzcon, this will eliminate much of the tedium necessary when you get a new item.  In the live game, when I get a new item, part of me is bummed, because I know how much of a pain it is to gem/reforge/enchant said item.   No longer a problem.  In a related note, enchants are going to cover fewer slots to further reduce this tedium.  <Thumbs up>

New Models

I love this one too.  This is long overdue imo.  WoW is a beautiful looking game now-a-days.  Jade Forest is breathtaking on ultra.  But right in the middle of the screen likely sits a character model that looks like it came out of Warcraft 3 (because it did).  This needed to be done.  However, this change also reminded me of how people will appose any change, no matter how clearly beneficial it is.  The QQ posts on the forum about the new models are really a surprise for me.  I feel that Blizz did a great job of keeping to the spirit of the original model while still making it modern.

Garrisons

WoW’s equivilent of player housing.

building your Garrison gives you benefits including epic gear, access to professions you don’t normally have in a limited fashion, and customize the buildings in the Garrison for specific customizeable benefits. http://wow.joystiq.com/2013/11/08/garrisons-player-housing-in-warlords-of-draenor/

This has the potential to be extremely cool and compelling.  Epic gear is always good.  Access to professions I don’t have is AMAZING!  Sure, “in limited fashion” I would assume means the top tier recipes are reserved for actual practitioners.  But that seems fair to me.  This could become the next ‘pet battle’, and could potentially foster obsession level commitment from players who actually begin to lose interest in other parts of the game in favor of developing their garrison.  Or it could just be farm 2.0.  Time will tell.  But for my 2c, the difference will come from the amount of impact player choices have on the outcome.  If two players garrisons end up being pretty similar even though they made very different choices, then this will become farm 2.0.  If there are vast differences, this could be huge.

Send followers on missions: Sounds similar to SWTOR’s profession system, in that you can send your npc crewmates on missions to gather or craft items.  I really hope this is the direction Blizz chooses to take things.  Much of the busywork associated with professions is not much fun.  I say, allow us to delegate this stuff to an npc so we can go about the fun business.

Spec Specific Loot Drops

This is a pretty huge change.  They only mentioned this once but it is a gamechanger.  Drops will adjust their stats based on the receivers loot spec.  For example; if their loot spec is heals, plate that is awarded to them will be spell plate.  If their loot spec is ret, it will be strength plate.  Yes Please!!!  I am the DEer for my raid team.  This will save me time in video editing, since I like to make compilation videos of me DEing loot my fellow raiders are looking for when it drops on nights they miss.

Major Raid Changes

Flex System: Let’s get this out of the way.  I called this!  Ok, anyway, the flex system (10-25 people scaled raids) is going to be in effect for the flex equivalent difficulty (now called normal), as well as the normal equivalent difficulty (now called heroic).  I love this!  This will make recruiting so much easier.  It will allow you to bring your entire guild without sitting anyone all the way up to Mythic difficulty.  This is a superb change.  In fact, I hope they add this change well before the expansion launches.  I am going to go on record here saying that I expect the prepatch to happen much sooner than usual this time around so we will see much of the 6.0 feature-set implemented much sooner than expected.  This is just my own wild speculation though.  At any rate, this will go a long way to helping guilds maintain a healthy bench for Mythic.

Lockouts:  All difficulties are now on separate lockouts based only on gear.  What this means is you can run all difficulty levels every week.  In fact, you can run them all as many times as you want.  You only get gear from the first time you kill the boss each week and only one coin on each boss.    This is such a great change.  I would love to be able to help out a second team with normal mode.  Or to just pug into another raid to cap VP.

20 man ONLY Heroics (Mythics):  Blizzard has decided to limit the most difficult content to one raid size, 20 man.  This is to make it easier to balance these encounters.  I feel this is a good change.  20 players is much easier to maintain then 25, not sure why, but this has been my experience.    This is also a long overdue change.  I think it possibly would be better to settle a bit lower than 20 players for this, say…15.  But it would decimate 25 man guilds in BC fashion, so I can understand why they wanted to keep it close to 25.

Cross Realm Grouping: Cross realm groups have been very helpful for SoO so far.  But they will become even more useful soon.  You will be able to form a cross realm group for normal mode (now called heroic) as well.  This is great!  This makes the possibility of cross realm guilds quite likely.

oQueue Style Matchmaking in-game:  oQueue is a fantastic addon that makes cross realm groups easy to form.  It’s a no-brainer for Blizz to co-op this for their own.  I also love the fact that Blizzard seems to be taking a step back from LFR style auto-groups.  They lead to braindead gameplay and no accountability.  Whereas in an oQueue group, that type of play will just get booted because there’s a real raid leader keeping tabs.  Solid system.

All in all, it seems Blizzard is trying to maximize the flexibility in raiding, especially with premade groups, while incentivizing forming an actual group rather than relying on LFR style matchmaking. Luv It!

New Content

Ok, so I honestly don’t have much to say here.  It looks good but honestly didn’t make much of an impression on me yet.  Time will tell.  I do love the fact that they specifically said they are backing away from the idea that leveling should be a long process.  This is a great idea.

Free Level 90

This is an absolutely KEY change! 100 levels is a lot of content to wade through for a new player.  Putting myself in their shoes, it could seem a little pointless to even start.  With a free level 90, that leaves a mere 10 levels to slog through.  I could see a friend trying the game out if it meant they could get a free high level character and play with their friends on day one.  This is a monumental step towards accessibility for a game that every expansion becomes less accessible.  Well done Blizz.  I also love that I get a free level 90 alt.

New Talents

Many of the new talents look to be absolute game-changers; ie. a no pet hunter spec.  We Shaman don’t really get anything mind-blowing.  I’m not going to break them down in detail but suffice it to say, my socks were not blown off by any of them.  Here’s hoping they do something cooler with these.  Colour me underwhelmed.

Those are the highpoints folks.   This could well be a turning point for the game as it has been on a downward trajectory for a good while, subscription-wise.  This addresses all player concerns from MoP and iterates on all the advances made.  This is how you do an expac right.

Can’t wait!

<luvbacon>

[WoW screenshots courtesy of http://www.mmo-champion.com ]

World of Warca$h?: Pay-to-Whine

So we’ve all seen the news; cosmetic helmets in the cash shop, $15 a piece.  This addition, along with the upcoming XP boost, makes it pretty clear that Blizzard is taking a serious cue from the many successful free-to-play cash shops out there.  But what place does the free-to-play style cash shop have in a subscription MMO?  Where is the line between subscription content and cash shop content? No clue.  Let’s talk it through.  I’ll be sure to use the terms “slippery slope” and “pay to win” as much as possible.

What’s the precedent?

We’ve been purchasing pets and mounts for years now,  from sparkle ponies, Drakes, Quilen, to Pandaren Monk pets (cuz they’ll never be playable in-game or nuthin).   Plopping down real world cash for in-game stuff is nothing new at all.  And they’ve been pretty popular.  I remember seeing everyone and their brother riding the sparkle pony the week they came out.  You can’t really fault Blizzard for expanding what is a decidedly popular feature.

Free-to-play style stuff

But there’s an invisible line somewhere in the minds of the player where our spider sense tingles and it feels like too much.  For many this was the recent data mining discovery of an XP boost item and the subsequent announcement of the addition of an in-game cash shop.   Traditionally, a pure subscription game has not offered XP boost items on their cash shop.  This was typically the realm of free-to-play games.  Also typically part of the free-to-play cash shop were purely cosmetic items.   Poke your head into the Team Fortress 2 cash shop and see how many hats you can buy.  But what exactly makes these items off limits for a subscription cash shop?  Well….nothing inherently.  It just hasn’t been done.  But let’s look at the potential downsides of heading down this path.

Slippery Slope

You see a lot of this term lately in regard to the cash shop.  The idea is that Blizzard will gradually add more and more items into the cash shop, testing new waters, until eventually you’ll be able to buy a ready made level 90 toon, or buy a full set of starter gear for your 90, or even buy a full set of LFR gear maybe.  This would put a large disadvantage to not paying real-world cash.  Pay-to-win!!! is the buzzword for this type of cash shop.  There are even F2P cash shops out there that sell BIS items and gems.  That would be bad mmkay.  But the hysteria surrounding the “slippery slope” argument is unfounded.  There is one glaring problem.  Blizzard hasn’t announced any of that stuff!!! Until they do, the slippery slopers are arguing against something that doesn’t even exist yet or probably ever.   Historically, (but not always) pay-to-win style cash shops have been an act of desperation by floundering games.  They make the cash shop super troll friendly (“buy player power and 1-shot newbs!1!!!”) and perform an internet community service by attracting all the trolls to their game for a while.   But WoW is no where near that stage.  7 million+ subs is still a ton of subs!!  Not to mention, Blizzard isn’t known for those shady practices.  Love ’em or hate ’em, Blizzard is a pretty stand-up company.  I do not anticipate the purchase of player power items in the cash shop in WoW in the future and I really think that those who are seriously fretting over this prospect are a lot premature and a little paranoid.

Too ‘Spensive

Ok, so this one is hard to argue with.  The helmets are $15 bucks each!!!! That’s the cost of one month of unlimited play-time in WoW.  Let that sink in.  This is a ridiculous price and everyone, including Blizzard knows it.  So why would they price it like this?  Simple.  if they price it too low they could be underestimating what the average player would be willing to pay for such an item and once they’ve set a precedent, the tears that would come from hiking the price would drown the whole world (of warcraft).  If they start high, they can slowly lower the price with each new item until they hit the sweet spot and the funny part is, every time they lower the price they’ll be seen as the hero <cackle>.  Genius.

What does my subscription pay for?

Here’s where it gets problematic for me though.  I pay $15 a month for access to this game.  But in order for Blizzard to plop three head pieces onto the cash shop, they have to pull resources off of development for the game itself in order to create something for the cash shop.  Every item you see on the cash shop is one less thing you will see in game.  As the cash shop grows, we are effectively losing in-game content because the devs who created that item could have been making something for the subscriber to enjoy, but they weren’t. This is largely the realm of speculation, paranoia, and those suffering from the martyr complex.  But there is also some merit to the discussion.  Undoubtedly, more of a focus on creating items for the cash shop WILL cost subscribers some content.  Are you good with that?

I am, I guess.  At the moment, there is no MMO that can really compete with the quality of the content or systems found in World of Warcraft.  And the last few years, each big MMO that has launched has been missing some key elements that ended up bringing many of their early adopters right back to Momma Blizz’s loving arms.  So unless you’re willing to sacrifice feature depth or content depth, they kind of have you over a barrel.  This means Blizzard is free to experiment I guess.  And they are.

Internet Hysteria

But does this merit the amount of hysteria we have seen on the forums and web?  Nah.  Not at all.  This isn’t really much of a change.  Putting the items players have already been purchasing into an in-game store changes nothing in the way of availability.  Adding an XP boost doesn’t change the fact that leveling a toon at present is ludicrously fast.  It only makes it even more ludicrously fast.  Adding three transmog helms changes nothing at all, especially at the current price.  All of this was inevitable anyway.  The rest of the industry is innovating on the free-to-play concept while the last vanguard of the subscription model is missing out on the innovations.  Let’s not forget that Blizzard runs a business.  This makes good business sense because players WILL buy these items in droves.

For those who hate these changes, here’s an easy solution.  Don’t buy the stuff!!! As I said, Blizzard is a business.  They will not pursue something that is unprofitable.  They will only continue down this line if players respond.  So if it bothers you, DON’T BUY THE STUFF!!!  If no one does, Blizzard will get the hint.  The majority will win on this issue.

That’s my perspective anyway.  What’s yours?

>luvbacon<

I can haz legendary?

In Vanilla WoW the hang out spot was Iron Forge, not Stormwind (I have no clue what was going on Horde side.  I’m a care bear through and through).  If you were one of the lucky few in a raiding guild that could scrape together 40 players toclear content, than you were probably spending many of your non-raiding hours parked on the AH bridge /flexing your muscles in your rare epic loot.   Most players didn’t have it, so it made it pretty satisfying to be the object of their envy.  Occasionally you’d see a rogue or warrior tank with Thunderfury or maybe the legendary 2hander.  Maybe you were lucky enough (i say lucky because the drops were a myth for my team) to have a player with the legendary.   Throughout BC, I was between guilds for a good bit, so raiding for me consisted of Kara and buying badge loot.  I would see a rogue in full tier 6 with glaives and become absolutely green with envy!!!   That was a sweet look right there.   The exclusivity and rarity of the item somehow contributed greatly to my level of envy.  I recently had a guildy win the rare Firelands mount.  I’m betting he gets his share of whispered “Where’d you get that?”.   I can’t decide if these objects of envious /inspect and whisper added to the drive of the game for me or not.   I certainly had no prayer of receiving one of the glaives (I was a rogue main at the time) because I wasn’t raiding Black Temple.  So I can’t say it drove me in any way at all.  I pursued character improvement through the avenues available to me and that was it.   I was fine with that.  

Over time though, the development team has changed it’s approach to items like these.  In DS, pretty much any rogue with 10k and a regular raid team could have legendary daggers that were insanely powerful.  There was really no serious envy to be had here because any rogue could get the daggers if they just put the time in.  The only real rarity in Cata were a few rare mounts.  But their rarity was often (Rag mount as the exception) counterbalanced by how outright ugly they were.  Or at least underwhelming.  This trend has continued into MoP and become even more pervasive.  Every single raider can have a legendary cloak.  Everyone!  There is nothing rare or prohibitive in any way about the questline.    But by putting everyone on equal footing, they are gently eroding one of the driving forces that motivates us to play.  I talked about it in my last entry.  The fantasy that I am special!  These rare items and their pursuit is important to an MMO.   Though I guess the real question is, since I had no hope of ever attaining a legendary back in the day, did it really make any difference at all that they existed?  Now that I do have access to the legendary, am I more or less driven to pursue it?  Well, more driven.  But there isn’t really much pursuit to be done.  Just keep chugging down the questline picking up drops and jumping through the gates as they come.  Easy peasy.

Similarly, we used to see the same type of exclusivity in the raid content itself.  I mentioned I never raided Black Temple though I did play through BC.  I was not unusual in this respect.  There was a large gate to entry.  If you were in a Kara guild, you likely saw your guild poached to death by Tier 5 and 6 guilds who didn’t want to have to gear their apps.   Fun!   So it left us stuck mainly in Kara for the bulk of an expansion while the cool kids had all the fun.   No only was their gear exclusive, but the content itself was exclusive.  I didn’t kill Illidan until the next expansion.  Blizzard’s solution to this conundrum is LFR.  Now the criteria for killing the end-of-tier boss is basically a pulse.   I can see where they’re coming from.  Honest.  They created raids like Vanilla Nax, and only a tiny fraction of their playerbase ever even stepped through the door.  They had players quitting the game in droves due to lack of content when there was content in the game that the players had not done yet.  The content was inaccessible to the players, so it may as well not have existed.  Hoping to address this once and for all, they created LFR.  This would allow players to see all the content they have made, with a few exceptions (Ra-den).      But their quest for accessibility has had some side effects.

LFR has made it so that a ultra-casual player can kill all the bosses a raider kills.  They can have all the gear a raider has, albeit at a lower ilvl.  It has fed this innate sense of entitlement in our playerbase.  I see this in new recruits all the time.  When prompted to put forth more effort or go the extra mile, they couldn’t care less.  You see, effort and going the extra mile has not been neccessary for them to progress.  Why should they start now?  The fact that they can be pretty well geared and kill all the bosses destroys the incentive to bother putting forth max effort.  Many of these sub-par players could certainly be a good player.  WoW is not exactly hard.  In previous expansions, they would have either improved or been locked out of seeing all the content.  So they improved!   Now, they just stick with LFR or continue apping to guilds until they find one that will carry them.

Not all is doom and gloom though.  We are starting to see signs that Blizzard is picking up on this culture of the freebie that they have built, or at least fed.  We had an exclusive HC boss in ToT and we’re getting an exclusive world boss that requires the legendary cloak in 5.4.   That means many of the LFR heroes are going to be stuck out in the cold on this boss.  OH NOES!!!  Honestly, it’s good for the game for there to be exclusive content.   But I think the exclusivity shouldn’t start with Heroic mode bosses like ra-den.  It should start with normal mode bosses.  Give us a bonus boss or two available only in normal mode.  That’s the gap that needs closing.  LFR to normals.  Give LFR players an incentive to put forth the effort to be a normal mode player.

To some degree, I think virtual realms, flex mode, and Proving Grounds will help with this sense of entitlement.  It will not be faceroll easy like LFR.  Players will have to try in order to succeed.  Truth be told, I am not completely sure there is a total solution.  Having nothing to do as a casual player stinks!  But having no competent players to recruit stinks too.  Blizzard is at least aware of it.  I look forward to what they may do in the expansion to get us back to a more skilled playerbase.

We’ll see.

>luvbacon<