I had a bad weekend in World of Warcraft, so bad that by Sunday afternoon I decided that ironing my shirts in front of the TV would be more fun. But the funny thing is that nothing special happened, just the usual series of wipes in raids, 5-man groups that never start because one class is missing, people leaving groups in the middle of an instance, and being ganked in PvP. Me not being able to stand that any more tells you more about my advancing symptoms of WoW burnout than about the game itself.
Well, at least I got to see Karazhan, and we even killed the first boss, the stable master. Then we spent two days wiping on the second boss, Moroes. Don't bother explaining me how easy he is to beat with the right strategy, it was the raid group not being very focused that caused the wipes. I was unable to convince the other healers that we would need healing assignments, because with the priests being on shackle duty nobody wanted to be solely responsible for MT healing duty. We had several wipes caused by the other priest in the raid having a bad internet connection and getting disconnected. We even wiped on trash mobs, when the raid leader marked mobs as target for shackle which turned out to be immune to that. But most annoyingly the wipes caused people to lose focus and interest, some people left, we stood around waiting for replacements to arrive, and then got wiped by respawns. With a little more training and organization, and with everybody on top of his game and his internet connection, we certainly could have done it. But Karazhan is very unforgiving to even the slightest mistakes or problems. I never thought I would say that, but I'm kind of missing Molten Core, where a single person losing connection, going afk, or being drunk (don't laugh, happens often enough), isn't instantly destroying the whole raid for everyone else.
But as I said, I'm suffering from burnout. A year ago I would have shrugged off that sort of problems and not let it bother me. Now it makes count the days until LotRO comes out. I could play the beta, but I'd rather explore Middle-Earth with a real character that doesn't get wiped. Well, one more month until that.
Meanwhile I'm trying to make the most out of World of Warcraft and especially the Burning Crusade expansion by doing the quests I haven't done yet. With my priest I had systematically done all quests in Hellfire Peninsula, Zangarmarsh, and Terrokar Forest, and hit 70 by doing the first Nagrand quests. With my warrior I skipped a lot of those quests. And now that I hit level 65, I'm starting where my priest left off, doing the level 65+ quests in Nagrand. I do like Nagrand, it is so pretty. But I sure do hope that the other quests there are a bit more exciting than the ones I was starting with for Nessingwary's expedition: kill 30 rocs, 30 clefthoofs, and 30 talbuks, to get a new series of quests that has you kill 30 bigger rocs, 30 bigger clefthoofs, and 30 bigger talbuks. Once I'll have finished that I'll be able to kill one boss roc, one boss clefthoof, and one boss talbuk, to finally get some item rewards. Can this be the pinnacle of modern quest design?
I did some PvP too, in Nagrand. Horde had captured Halaa, which doesn't happen often, because on my server there is a 2:1 Alliance:Horde player ratio. So Alliance turns up quite quickly to take it back, but they get struck by a bug I had already experienced in the beta: one of the guards disappears, and the score is stuck at 1 out of 15 guards. In that situation it is impossible to capture Halaa (until the next server reset). But of course lots of people see the 1/15 score and flock to Halaa to capture it, giving rise to some PvP action. That was fun for a while, netting me 21 Halaa battle tokens. But then the numerical superiority of the Alliance slowly came to bear, and we had 20 Alliance ganking 10 Horde. Horde couldn't do anything, you just got killed the moment you rezzed. And Alliance couldn't do anything either, because of the bugged guard preventing them from doing the actual capture. Not very satisfying for anyone. I could have bought a plate belt for the 1 research token (gained by handing in 20 powders from random kills in Nagrand) and 20 Halaa battle tokens. But the belt was obviously designed with PvP in mind, not for PvE tanking. The "resilience" stat it gives, which lowers the chance of enemies landing a critical hit on me, and also lowers their crit damage on me, isn't of much use in PvE soloing. For PvE I'd rather have defence.
No comments:
Post a Comment