Know your role, and shut your mouth?

As those familiar with my recent ranting will know, I’ve been hugely critical of the Blizzard developers for a while now. My belief that they’re not qualified for the job they’re supposed to be doing can be quantified across numerous instances where they’ve shown a complete inability to address issues or, amazingly, made things worse. The problem comes into sharp focus when dealing with Greg Street, the Lead Systems Designer, who simply wasn’t qualified when he got the job, and doesn’t seem to have learned much since.

With that preamble out the way, I think my biggest problem is one that even talented developers would struggle to work around and it’s something I’ve been deliberately wrestling with for the past few weeks.

Guild Wars 2 beta.

No promises, of course, but if you're interested in Guild Wars 2 and want to be part of the testing programme, now's your chance. Go do it:

Sign up for the beta.

It's remarkably easy to sign up for, and there's nothing onerous involved. The only snag is that you have 48 hours to get your ass signed up, so don't wait; get cracking!

The Protection warrior of Pandaria.

We’ve had the best part of a week now, so an overall review of the MoP talent calculator’s most recent iteration for warriors would be fair. This post deals entirely with Protection PvE (though there may be some crossover), as I’m not really experienced enough to comment on PvE DPS or PvP with realistic lucidity.

First of all, it’s taken as read that this isn’t even a beta build and that numbers are subject to change; yadda, yadda, yadda. I know. Don’t tell me. But the current view for the Protection warrior of the future is being put up for feedback, so feedback is what it’s going to get.

I’m going to start with a premise, albeit an anecdotal one. If you were to ask every career Protection warrior what their most favourite aspect of the spec is, the top three would our mobility, our control and the interactive elegance of our priority-based rotation.

Why, then, is Blizzard removing all three?

Too soon, BioWare.

As many will have seen on the official site, BioWare have released a video talking about the launch of The Old Republic and how successful it’s been so far. Some pretty grandiose claims are being made with regards to how great the game is, how many boxes have sold and how players love the innovation they’re finding.

For me, playing the game is enjoyable and a lot of good work has been done. But I can’t shake the feeling that a public back-patting session is wholly premature considering the game was released while incomplete, and still suffers from some pretty significant problems.

The Role of Ravage for Vengeance PvE

I’m not necessarily basing this discussion on factual evidence, but I am coming from a position of relative security with regard to my own results and I’d like to see if others have tried this, if it’s accepted “canon” already or if, in fact, I’m really doing something wrong.

This post is about the value of prioritizing Sundering Assault and Ravage while playing PvE DPS as a Vengeance Juggernaut.

I’ve gone through a lot of posts, including some of the talk over at Sith Warrior, and I enjoyed reading Morsexy’s Juggernaut posts. With regard to the Vengeance “rotation” (a loose term at best), it appears that conventional wisdom is prioritizing certain abilities over others, but largely basing this prioritization off the average damage certain abilities do rather than any thought to their “role”.

The many roles of DPS... Ish.

Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street released a blog today, speaking specifically about how DPS roles can be constructed and designed within the confines of a game. He’s the Lead Systems Designer for World of Warcraft, but as TOR follows suit in its basic combat model (the GCD along with tanks, healers and damage dealers) the commentary is just as important for those of us running around the Vaiken Spacedock.

First of all, let’s get this straight; I hold Mr. Street personally responsible for the Azerothian malaise that has essentially killed off the game. That said, a lot of his blogs cover topics that are emotive, difficult to handle and hard to discuss. When it comes to DPS and how your specializations should be designed, he’s messing about with the vast majority of his player base.

He gets kudos just for taking it on.

16-man Operations (25-man raids)... The end?

Having now reached the point where I’ve killed some raid bosses, I’m relatively happy to say that endgame PvE is good fun in Star Wars: The Old Republic. To date, I’ve completed the Eternity Vault on normal mode and will hopefully clear out Karagga’s Palace this week. I’ve gone over the videos for the encounters and can’t see much to get in the way of completion – all relatively simple, just as the Eternity Vault was. Naturally, the guild has already done Karagga’s Palace and has (I think) taken down three of the hard mode bosses on Belsavis.

Not a bad start for a relatively casual guild.

I’d like to go on record as saying that Operations are good fun and that I’ve enjoyed them. We did a 16-man kill of the Annihilator Droid a couple of weeks back when I played as a DPS toon with tanking gear and spec in tow, but it was a good ol’ fashioned “progress” fight. With one exception, each pull got progressively better than the last until he finally went down after about four wipes. We ended up with only enough time to pull the next boss once, but we haven’t been back since, choosing instead to concentrate on 8-man clearing. Given the relative amount of success we’ve had so far, including the nuisance factor of 16-man raiding, I daresay the guild will continue in the smaller setting.

Unfortunately, I’d rather do the 16-man raiding because I think it’s close to the ideal number of people.

Locking out the weekly lockout.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this statement, and I’m now comfortable saying it. Recently, many debates regarding raid design, instance design and general game design have seen me feverishly participate and reform opinions that might have been coalescing in other directions. Thanks for that have to go to the brave and the bold that populate the hotbed of frustration and angst that form public Internet forums. That said, sometimes the wails of the serial malcontent resonate with me in ways I never thought possible.

With the preamble out of the way, here’s the statement:

I never enjoyed gaming more than when I played level 70 content during World of Warcraft’s first expansion set, The Burning Crusade.

It’s not an easy conclusion to draw when most of the time since then has seen me believing that the game should be hard, it should be exclusive, it should be teaching people to play and it should be a learning experience. I still hold true to some of that and shall ever remain so, but it wasn’t those things that made my Outland exploits so enjoyable.