Sunday, February 24, 2008

WoW Journal - 25-February-2008

I played too much World of Warcraft this weekend. :) But that's okay, because I didn't have anything better to do, and next weekend I'm going on holiday for a week, which will prevent me from playing WoW for a while. So this weekend I was having a lot of fun.

The biggest event this weekend was my best Karazhan run ever, with my priest, a complete cleanup run from start to finish, including all optional bosses. 22 badges of justice, got my T4 gloves, and had loads of fun. Took us 6 hours, but that was including a few small and one large half-hour break. We didn't wipe once before the prince, and with the prince wipes are more a question of luck than of ability. We also wiped once at Netherspite after doing the prince, but as we usually don't do Netherspite at all, killing him on the second try with most raid members never having been there was actually quite good. In other raiding news I was at a successful Gruul raid on Thursday, and killed the Lurker and Hydross in SSC on Friday, so lots of raiding lately.

My mage is also developing well. Level 63 now, and +759 in frost spell damage. I went to ramparts with a not bad pickup group and noticed that the extreme frost damage gear isn't optimal for that, after Omor one-shotted me with a single shadow bolt. But I had some reserve gear with less spell damage bonus but more stamina and intellect, which basically doubled my health, as the "of the frozen wrath" gear has no stamina bonus whatsoever. I finished nearly all Hellfire Peninsula quests, and then decided to skip Zangarmarsh. I only got to honored with Cenarion Expedition by handing in lots of unidentified plants, and didn't do any quests there. I just moved directly to Terokkar Forest, where I'm currently questing.

My warrior did some tanking in a BM group, helping a guild mate to get his Karazhan key. In the group was another warrior, with an arms-fury hybrid spec, and I had the Recount damage meter running. The difference in damage output was so depressing, that I took the plunge and respec'd my warrior to 41-20 arms-fury for PvP and soloing. I did my first ever EotS battleground, one loss against a premade, one win against regular opponents for my very first PvP daily quest. I'm still not a big fan, but I should give PvP a chance, and maybe pick up some gear. I decided that having more than one raid char wasn't realistic, and without raids my warrior didn't have much of a future as a tank.

Doing PvP in a random group against a premade is like a little league baseball team playing against a major league team: totally pointless. I don't see why battlegrounds can't be set up in a way to people who join as group only fight against opponents who joined as group themselves. Or limit premades to arenas, where the rating system pairs people against equally strong opponents. Premades "farming" random opponents in battlegrounds is just bad game design, because it is minimal fun for the winners and totally frustrating for the losers. Better game design would give out less rewards if you won too easily, and more rewards if you had to fight hard to win, so people wouldn't be tempted to manipulate the system to only fight against weaker opponents.

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