Hole In My Shoe

Yesterday was reset day in Europe. I had hatched a fiendish plan to make a huge dent in my quest for the Legendary Cloak, of course the best laid plans of mice and men came to nought. As soon as I logged on I was whispered with an invite for Flex raiding, not on my Hunter, but on my Shaman for my healing skills. Incidentally I have discovered that my Healing skills maybe a bit rusty and besides my Shaman is geared mostly in Elemental gear, but even that seem to have a sprinkling of spirit on it.

The Flex raid went Ok, a little ragged in parts, but four bosses in about 90 minutes is not too much of a hardship. The rewards were also very good, with upgrade in off-hand from iLevel 476 (barely epic shield from the Timeless Isle) to the very strange Purehearted Cricket Cage, and a ring. A combined upgrade of 108 iLevels which I believe will make a large difference in my performance.

The side effect of running Flex was that I managed to obtain all the Sigils for the Wrathion Questline. The next step in the quest is Fear Itself, for which I can see a little hole in the Blizzard masterplan. Blizzard is trying to encourage the return of absent players, and in the Timeless Isle have provide a catch up mechanism for alts and returnees alike. These people although relatively far down an expansions worth of quests may be tempted to try to obtain the Legendary cloak. Fear Itself is not difficult, but neither is it current content and to make matters worse the early Raids in MoP are sequential. My poor little Shaman who can heal in Flex but cannot queue directly for the Terrace of Endless Spring because I have not yet finished Heart of Fear.

I have done the first part of Heart of Fear only, so to progress to the Terrace of Endless Spring I will need to queue up for two different LFR's that nobody is running at the moment. It might be fair to say that I missed my chance before patch 5.4 dropped.

One solution would be to remove the prerequisites for the early Raids, or an alternative is to gather the guild together for a 10 man normal, but who are currently busy doing current content. Either way this is not a good scenario for me. My major hope is that there are others in my predicament or a guild that can now obtain an easy achievement now that we massively overgear the Raid.

Let's Dance

With an apology to those that PvP to a high standard, WoW is all about Raiding. In terms of developer time this is where most of the energies go in any given expansion and nearly every new patch introduces a new raid. The raid size as gone up and down throughout the history of the game and as now settled on a 10 or 25 man raid size before the flex raid version which scales between the two sizes.

Everybody has there favourite Raid over the ages, but what exactly is it that makes a raid good, bad or indifferent? The following is the full listing of Raids:

Vanilla

• Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj (1.9.0) – 20 player
• Onyxia's Lair - 40-player
• Temple of Ahn'Qiraj (1.9.0) - 40-player
• Lower Blackrock Spire – 10 player
• Upper Blackrock Spire – 10 player
• Molten Core – 40 player
• Blackwing Lair (1.6.0) – 40 player
• Zul'Gurub (1.7.0) – 20 player
• Naxxramas (1.11.0) – 40 player

TBC

• Karazhan – 10 player
• Zul'Aman (2.3.0) – 10 player
• Caverns of Time: Battle for Mount Hyjal – 25 player
• Gruul's Lair - – 25 player
• Magtheridon's Lair – 25 player
• Serpentshrine Cavern – 25 player
• The Eye – 25 player
• Black Temple (2.1.0) – 25 player
• Sunwell Plateau (2.4.0) – 25 player

WotLK

10 and 25-player

• Naxxramas
• Vault of Archavon
• Archavon the Stone Watcher
• Emalon the Storm Watcher (3.1.0)
• Koralon the Flame Watcher (3.2.0)
• Toravon the Ice Watcher (3.3.2)
• Ulduar (3.1.0)
• Trial of the Crusader (3.2.0)
• Trial of the Grand Crusader (3.2.0)
•   Onyxia's Lair (3.2.2)
• Icecrown Citadel (3.3.0)
• Chamber of Aspects
• Obsidian Sanctum
• Ruby Sanctum (3.3.5)
• The Eye of Eternity

Cataclysm

10 and 25-player 

• Blackwing Descent
• Bastion of Twilight
• Dragon Soul (4.3.0) - LFR
• Firelands (4.2.0)
• Throne of the Four Winds

Pandaria

10 and 25-player LFR

• Mogu'shan Vaults
• Heart of Fear
• Terrace of the Endless Spring
• Throne of Thunder (5.2.0)
• Siege of Orgrimmar (5.4.0) Flex

Quite a list when you think about it, and the developers have to try to come up with new and varied ways of making the encounters interesting. Some of the Raids are remembered fondly, and others not so. Was it the people you raided with or was it the encounters that made them memorable?

Personal favourites are Karazhan, Naxramas, Ulduar and Icecrown Citadel. Does this mean that Blizzard have failed to produce a decent Raid in the last two expansion? Maybe it is just the mind playing tricks on me, but I feel that the new Raids are perhaps a little too gimmicky.

Karazhan is my personal favourite, once they removed the worst gating ever seen in form of the attunement from hell. The setting of a spooky mansion was simply awesome and although some of the encounters were run of the mill, (Attunmen, Maiden of Virtue and The Curator), there was enough interesting encounters (Moroes, Illhoof, Shade of Aran, Opera and Chess). The other thing that makes a Raid interesting is the quality of the adds. The Grand Ballroom had loads of spectral dancers, and I remember waiting patiently at the bottom of the stairs for the pull to come. The AoE kings of the time Hunters and Mages would often be greasy smears at the end of the fight. Upstairs from these ghostly delights was the "carpet of death", stand in the wrong place, for when they dropped aggro and a the nearest clothie would be in a world of pain.

Naxxramas had some awesome fights and it was unfortunate that Ulduar came out just when the guild was starting to make good progress. The rehashed version of Naxx kept all the fights from the original Vanilla raid, but it was right to reuse the Raid because so few people ever stepped foot in the place. I liked Grobbulus, Gluth, Noth, Heigan and the Four Horsemen. All very different encounters and for anyone who mastered the Dance, never again would you die facing Heigan.

Ulduar had a lot going for it, the difficulty level was a huge step up from Naxx, and it was only when massively outgearing the place did it become easy. The adds hit like a runaway train and the achievements were almost impossible and needed multiple runs to achieve them all. Oddly enough I have one big bugbear with Ulduar, and that was Flame Leviathon. I dislike not being able to use my abilities, it made no difference if you were a Hunter, Mage or Priest on the Motorcycle and the faffing around to get to the boss fight was a joke. If I could have teleported to the other side of the Flamey, I would have run this Raid a hundred times more than I did.

The Icecrown Citadel had everything, the encounters and adds were difficult the encounters were many and varied, and the last boss was one of the toughest encounters I ever saw. The low point for me was the gunship, which was plain annoying, thankfully when it was over you went straight into Deathbringer Saurfang. This boss was a pain in the backside, but it felt like you had achieved something to finally defeat him. No room for slackers on this fight.

I have had a smile on my face whilst writing this post, remembering the hours spent honing skills and making small gains on a weekly basis. I feel none of that love for the new Raids. They lack the panache of previous encounters. They are gimmicky, and clunky requiring you to stand together, on one leg with one finger in your ear and one on your nose.

It is not that the encounters are not difficult, it is just that you want to see the back of them as soon as possible. Singled out for particular distain are:

• Garalon the Tripod from Heart of Fear,
• the sheer number of mobs in Throne of Thunder,
• Horridon
• Tortos - the pinball wizard
• Durumu -  Maze from hell
• Megaera -  Which is just a poor imitation of the Deathwing fight. Long and very boring

I have not included Siege of Ogrimmar because it is too new to have formed an opinion yet.

I appreciate the difficulty of producing new and exciting things for Boss fights, but after creating over a hundred such encounters it feels like the well is running a little dry.

A Town Called Hypocrisy

WoW Insider has published an article based on the Blue Post by Draztal. The article is reasonably well written although Draztal seems to wander off topic (no Blogger would ever do that). The Blue post is about the dumbing down of WoW (in particular Raiding), Vanilla raiding required a huge numbers of people to partake, apparently the droprates for 40 people were minuscule, whilst not being strict attunements, gear from one raid would be required for the next raid, leaving a huge bottleneck in the process.

Draztal argues that anybody can become an expert these days by taking the time to study the huge quantity of material available on the Internet. It is quite true, and even I often find myself writing an a post on a subject that I have no knowledge of at the time of writing. My aim is to make other people aware of a new aspect of the game which they did not know about. Let's face it WoW is a homogeneously complexed game, and to honest I know the areas of Azeroth better than the town that I live in.

One aspect of the game that Draztal failed to acknowledge is the role of Addons in WoW. If people really want a hardcore experience from WoW, here is my tip. Go in a new raid, do not visit Tankspot, turn off, Recount, DBM or any of the other alternatives that simplify the Boss Skills and attacks. Then come back and tell me how easy this game is.

The State Of The Union

The above graph is from Wowinsider who in turn stole it from GuildOx. The Graph is very interesting and focuses on those people who have obtained an average PvE iLvl of over 400 (heroic Dragon Soul). The runaway class partaking in Heroic is the class with Dual Wield Legendaries, big surprise for all those that dusted off their Rogues.

The middle ground is occupied by Priest, Paladin, Druid , Hunter and Shaman. No real surprise for the 2 true hybrid classes of Paladin and Druid, or for the ever popular Hunter class, however Priest and Shaman is a bit more of a surprise, though I guess there is more need for Healers than Tanking classes.

The ugly ducklings are Warrior, Death Knights, and Mages, bringing up the rear is no surprise Warlock. Cynwise has recently been writing an excellent series of articles on the reasons behind the dearth of the Warlock Class.

The graph above is a census of Level 85 classes pulled from Warcraft Realms.com. The 2 most obvious points are that Rogues are massively over represented in DS Heroics compared to the percentage of Rogues at max level, and that Warlocks really are in a very bad place. Also it is interesting to note the normalising effect on Death Knights during the course of Cata. The number of max level DK's is only 11% compared to their hugely popular status during WotLK, and they are not well represented in the Heroic Dragon Soul category.

The graph on the left shows the breakdown of the class specs and provides a real insight into what is going on in the raiding world at the end of this current expansion.

Warrior

Although difficult to judge it would appear that Protection Warriors are just about holding their own in the Tanking stakes. Arms Warriors are viable, but Fury Warrior is in a very bad place.

Warlocks

Cynwise has suggested that there is not a lot to choose between the 3 specs, with all 3 viable and none of them outstanding. Maybe if one was outstanding people would return to playing the class.

Shaman

Resto Shaman is by far the dominant spec for raiding. Elemental makes a reasonable showing with a poor showing for Enhancement.

Rogues

There appears to be a slight leaning towards Combat Rogues with more than 3x the other 2 specs put together.

Priests

Possibly the most interesting class in this study, is the fact that for a class with 2 healing specs it is the Dps spec that is the dominant Raiding Spec. The once dominant Holy Priest is consigned to minor spec, with Discipline taking over as the healing class of choice.

Paladin

The Healer of choice for the raiding fraternity. Once the creme de la creme of the Tank Healers, Now coupled with a useful toolbox for AoE healing, they are the most popular single spec healers. Retribution is positioned as a middle of road Dps class, and Protection is an average Tanking class.

Mage

Fire Mage is the stand out spec, with a handful playing Arcane and Frost are sat on the sidelines in a bucket of ice.

Hunter

They have been up and down in the popularity stakes for 2 expansions, but Survival is now the top dog. BM has been buffed to be as good as MM, and MM has been nerfed to be as bad as BM. Now they have both been deserted in droves.

Druid

This is one class with equal participation throughout. The one issue is Feral, are they Cat or Bear, and the answer is we don't really know.

Death Knight

Last but not least, the once skeletal masses have moved on to other classes, but it looks like Blood is the number one tanking spec.

Summary

Tanking and Healing looks to be in an alright position, but the Dps specs seem to be all over the place. Combat Rogues, Fire Mages, and Survival Hunters are sitting pretty at the top, one assumes that the Dps charts mirror this picture.

At the other end of spectrum Fury Warriors, Enhancement Shaman, Subtlety Rogues, Assassination Rogues, Frost Mage, Beastmaster Hunters and Marksman Hunters need some tender Blizzard love.

The classes needing some attention as a whole are Warlock and Death Knight. In case anyone needs reminding there is a new class on the way that needs balancing.