The Battle Of Evermore

The Fall of Theramore, the debate rages on. The Grumpy Elf waded into the fray and actually came out with a totally different conclusion than I was expecting. I was going to reassess my feelings towards Theramore's Fall but first I wanted to examine some of the points raised by Grumpy.

1. Too Long, the Alliance version appears to be longer than the Horde version (no shock there we know Blizzard loves Horde).
2. Queue Times, Why does it take 30 - 60 minutes to find 3 of anything. LFR suffers from Healer shortage, and LFD suffers from Tank shortage. 3 DPS = 60 minutes??? There is obviously something not right with the system and with more scenarios lined up for the new expansion this is something that needs to be fixed pretty damn quick.
3. Easy, Grumpy says not.
4. Prelaunch Event, we all know it is not a prelaunch event, but have we been short changed? All other expansions have had an event, quests, bosses. The players all know that 2-4 weeks for a one-off event is a lot of development work for something that will never be seen again, but somehow 10 months without anything new as made us hungry for anything that does not smell as stale as Dragon Soul.
5. The Reward, there is little to go on to persuade people to invest the time on multiple attempts. Worse than the tabard was the badly phrased Horde gloating of the wanton destruction of innocent lives, which brought back memories of the Twin Towers.

On Tuesday I wrote about my experience of the scenario. On Tuesday night I ran it 3 times and last night just the once. The bugs have now been ironed out, which ultimately was my biggest issue with the scenario. I have also been considerably luckier with loot drops and from 8 runs have seen 3 Weapons and a Helm. Only one of these was actually useful but we all know what is in the loot table and the way the loot is distributed is similar to the LFR Personal Loot.

Now the thing works as intended I can see it the scenario concept for what it really is. It is a nice time filler and should sit underneath LFD in terms of time requirements. It should be a sign up and a couple of minutes later off you go, with a 10 minute maximum time to complete, with a total time requirement of no more than 15 minutes. This is definitely not the case, with long waiting times and some poor groups having to go slowly and carefully.

Ghostcrawler has recently stated, ""this is what scenarios are like", they're a new feature, a way to do content quickly, in a your lunch break, to get some more valor or gear." If this is Blizzards intention then they need to do some serious work on the matching up process, or make more resources available for running concurrent scenarios.

Level 85 mobs with some Elites is not a big issue, they will nibble away at your health. The main problem is the sheer numbers involved in some pulls. A load of nibbles adds up to a big bite.

My main characters have not had any problems, but my lesser known alts who are more in need of any potential loot, and are still way over the iLevel requirement have still encountered problems.

My Warrior and Death Knight both assumed pulling roles and played a small meat shield for some of the feeble cloth wearers, and they have had mixed results. My unholy Death Knight was able to hold aggro in Unholy spec and survive once I changed to Blood Presence. My warrior needed to eat or bandage after the bigger fights. Plate wearers rock scenarios would be my general finding.

I have mentioned that I am the world's worst Rogue, although Grumpy thinks he is worse. I can now state that I have seen a worse Rogue, unless Grumpy also has a European account. In a group comprising of 2 Rogues and Warlock, which would be nice for PvP, it resulted in nobody being able to pseudo tank. The Warlock and myself were doing considerably more damage than the other Rogue so naturally we actually more attention. The other Rogue was skilled in stealth, vanish and sprint. The result was several deaths to the Warlock and Myself. There is no penalty for dying in a scenario, except the usual repair costs, so dying and running back to your body is not a big problem. There are no respawns to worry about and you can just continue where you left off. In some respects it would be better to have a timer on some of the activities just to create a little bit of a challenge.

If I am a bad Rogue, there is one other class that I play far worse, and it happens to have seen some major gameplay changes. My Gnome Destro Warlock was placed in a party with a Warlock and a Mage. In an attempt to provide some tanking abilities, we both ended up popping Voidwalkers. After that it was a nice smooth run.

The scenario concept is not easy and neither is it hard, the objective is always obtainable it is merely a question of how long it takes to complete. It is interesting how they will stack up in the level 90 versions.

Letter From America

There is no doubting what the main topic of the day is going to be. Just in case you have emerged from under a rock, the main topic is going to be the brand new scenario, Theramore's Fall. If you want a detailed walk through then there is one supplied by WoW Insider.

What is the Scenario Theramore's Fall? WoWWiki describes it as:

Theramore's Fall is the first scenario available that presages the Mists of Pandaria expansion and will be available to level 85 characters for one week before the official expansion release (September 25, 2012) around September 18, 2012. On the release of the expansion, the scenario will only be available to level 90 characters.

Horde player will execute Garrosh's plan to sack Theramore while Alliance player will try to drive out the Horde.

If you want to do it in it's current guise, then get your skates on it is here as a level 85 scenario for one week only.

There are 2 scenarios, one for the Alliance and one for the Horde. There is a summary below:

Horde

• To the Waterline! - Rig powder barrels on all six ships.
• The Blastmaster - Inform Blastmaster Sparkfuse of your success.
• Gryphon, Down - Slay Baldruc and his gryphons.
• Tanks for Nothing! - Destroy Big Bessa and sabotage any unmanned tanks.
• Fly, Spy! - Slay Hedric Evencane and free Thalen Songweaver from Foothold Citadel.

Alliance

• Welcome to Theramore - Defeat the Horde in the harbor.
• Cleansing the Filth - Destroy any remaining horde in the ruins of Theramore.
• Find Jaina - Find Jaina Proudmoore in the ruins of Theramore.
• Destroy the Destroyer - Destroy the Horde siege engine at the west gate.
• The Last Stand - Protect Jaina while she attunes to the Focusing Iris. 

The news is that Horde version seems to be reasonably playable, but the Alliance version is very buggy and the slightest issue can cause the scenario to not register the completion of the current phase.

Personally I had a 50% success rate which is not very good. There have been many complaints that the scenario was not tested on Beta or PTR, and the result is a sub standard product from a company that boasts that they only issue when it is ready. The Godmother was not in the best of moods this morning, and described the Scenario as a "Dumper" which is a bad film that tries to make it's money by releasing without being reviewed, in the hope that people will watch it early, before they realise that the film is a steaming pile of dung.

The main criticisms seem to be that Theramore's Fall is:

1. Bad content at the end of a bad expansion
2. Poorly executed with far too many issues
3. A poor substitute for a pre-expansion event
4. The mid part of a story that happens outside of the game in a new book

Blessing Of Kings is very scathing of the move towards Lore happening outside the game, in books, comics, blogs and cartoon strips. I personally have no interest in the Lore, but in this case we are parachuted into a story with no beginning, no build up  and no interest.

This is the first in a string of Scenarios, and should have been so much more. Even a Wrathgate style stand back and watch the action, because we are going to win even if I don't do anything, but isn't it an epic storyline would have been better.

Letter to Blizzard, "World of Warcraft is a computer game, not a media franchise. Take the paying customer on a journey through swords and sorcery. Tell the epic tales that need to be told, and for god's sake stop delivering content with so many bloody bugs in it."