Thursday 12 September 2013

The new Warchief and 5.4

I figured the title of the post would indicate this but I'm going to say it anyway. Before you read any further, be aware:  **Spoiler alert**

For those of you who have seen the WoW Insider video of the world-first Garrosh kill, then you know who the new Warchief is. I've seen some comments from my fellow hordies saying that "now would be a good time to reroll Alliance." But I completely disagree. I was always a fan of Cairne being Warchief (I really miss the big wise lug...) but in his absence, I was rooting for either Vol'jin or Saurfang. I got my wish with Vol'jin, woo!!!

Contrary to aforementioned comments, I believe (and I've seen others who agree with me) that now is actually a really good time to be Horde. I believe that Vol'jin will be a good and honorable leader, who can bring the Horde back to their former glory, back to the way that the original leaders of the Horde intended it to be. And besides, what the Horde lost with Garrosh, the Alliance gained in Jaina. Seeing her reaction in that cinematic and hearing what she said to Varian about "dismantling the Horde" seriously made me say to myself, "Holy shit, Jaina turned from bleeding heart to mega-bitch." Talk about a complete 180. I almost prefer the old Jaina, as irritating as she could be, to this new bigot that used to be the ruler of Theramore. I mean, I get it. Her land was bombed to oblivion and all that. But we finally got some relief from Varian's bigotry and now have to deal with Jaina being almost as bad, if not worse. What the hell...

I'm anxious to get into some of the new stuff that was released this patch but holy hell is the lag ever bad on the Timeless Isle when one plays on a less-than-ideal computer. I'm thinking I'll have to wait a week or two for things to die down, like I did for the Isle of Thunder, before I can do anything in that area. It seems like a much more interesting place to quest, though, than Isle of Thunder, which got old real fast for me. At least it's a lot more aesthetically pleasing.

I'm also curious about how good/bad flex raiding will be. With all of the groups I've seen requiring a minimum 520, I won't be going into one anytime soon since I've really been getting the shaft on LFR loot. But from what I've heard, the raids seem to scale pretty well with however many players are in the group. I only wish that they had done this a little differently. It seems to me that the people who would benefit the most from this model are the guilds who can't get 10 people to fill a raid group. It would have made more sense to me to lower the minimum player requirement to, say, 7 players. It would give the small guilds made up of friends and family a chance to do these places without having to search for pugs, especially if they're on a particular small or even dead server. Even with the connected realms, it might still be hard to field a group of 10 for certain people so a little more, uh, flexibility in the flex raids would have been nice.

Not too many nerfs on the classes that I play, except to warlocks. Warlocks with a certain talent no longer have the ability to cast any spell while moving. Now, depending on their spec, they are only able to cast 1 specific spell while moving. I didn't think that one really needed to be changed but such is the nature of most nerfs since the dawn of Azeroth.

Proving grounds sound rather exciting; I think I will try the healer ones with my paladin and priest, the dps ones with my DK and mage. Once I get my monk to 90, I'll give the tanking one a shot. I just hope that people won't start requiring proving grounds achievements for raids or anything...

I'm looking forward to exploring more of this patch.

Monday 9 September 2013

Baddies can improve, but elitists will always be assholes.

Since I started leveling my new monk alt (currently level 52), I've been hitting the LFG pretty hard, trying to visit each dungeon at least once to complete the quests before they disappear from my list as I level. Of course, as usual, the LFG is populated with either baddies or elitists.

Today, I ran across the latter - two of them. I got pulled into my group and was greeted by the druid. She was our healer, it seemed, and she was perfectly pleasant and good at her role. Our tank was a very inexperienced paladin, who admitted right away that he was new to tanking and had never done the place before. Fine, no worries, the druid and I were more than willing to help. She told him which way to go and gave him briefs on the bosses while I passed down my pally tanking knowledge.The other two were a mage and shadow priest, both of whom immediately griped about how they got stuck with a "nubadin."

Admittedly, the tank was quite terrible - at first. He couldn't hold threat at all (turns out he was not using Righteous Fury) but that was easily fixed when I told him he needed to remember to always have that on. But while he was working out how to play his role, the other two dps were being total dicks - surprise, surprise. The mage kept yelling at him to hurry up and pull more because he had "other things to do." The shadow priest kept running around and pulling stuff for the tank in attempts to make the run go faster. The entire time, they were harping at this poor guy for being a "baddie" and "not knowing shit."

I dislike being that person who says, "well back in MY day..." and all but sometimes it just has to be said. In classic, this never really happened. Why? Because back then, the game was actually hard. No heirlooms for lowbies to wear and blow through dungeons on. Everyone you grouped with was from your own server so there was accountability - if you were an asshole or a really terrible player, the whole server would eventually know about it and no one would invite you to groups or raids. It was unheard of for a tank to take on more than 3 or 4 mobs at a time, depending on the type of mob, so you can forget about tanking 2-3 whole groups of stuff at one time. But now, with LFG especially, it's just a broken record of impatient dolts screaming "GO GO GO" all the freaking time.

Eventually, the poor paladin's confidence had hit rock bottom and he whispered me to say that he was just going to leave. I told him to just sit tight and not to move - literally. I told him to just stand there. I whispered the druid, told her what was going on, and she agreed with my plan. So all three of us just stood there, doing absolutely nothing. As I suspected, a votekick was initiated against the tank. We hit "no" and kept standing there. Then the two dps started to pull loads of mobs but our healer made no effort whatsoever. So another votekick was initiated against her. It was denied. Eventually, the two elitist pricks got fed up and left - first the mage, then the priest. It took about 15-20 minutes before they realized that the three of us weren't going to move and since we had the majority vote, none of us could be voted out. So then they left.

In come two more dps, who were silent the whole time and didn't say anything as we kept trying to teach the new tank. Maybe they figured out he was new and were willing to cut him some slack. Either way, he greatly improved in just the short time it took us to finish the place. He was able to hold solid threat and was using the correct spells for the right situations. Not all bad players will stay that way; usually they just need someone to show them the ropes. Elitists, however, will grow up to be elitists and likely have elitist babies, forever doomed to repeat the cycle and drive the rest of us up the freaking wall.