The loss of the head arcanum.

There’s a pretty big announcement regarding Mists of Pandaria today, and it regards the helmet arcanum:

AAAAAAAAND, IT’S GONE!

Here’s the quote from Blizzard:

Head enchants are gone.

We decided that putting head enchants on the various faction vendors wasn't working well with our design intent for the factions. There is a lot of max-level quest content in MoP, much of it focused around the reputation with the new factions. I think it's really cool stuff -- worlds away from the old Argent Dawn scourge stone days.

In previous expansions, the head enchants on the faction vendors served to force players into that content. You couldn't even choose which reputation to pursue -- you had to pursue the one with your specific head enchant. Our design intent for MoP is to give players options in how to play, and the head enchant design wasn't compatible with that.

Once we decided to no longer offer new head enchants, we made the older ones non-functional or else players would feel like they had to go back to older content or be missing out on power. This way, helmets are just no longer enchantable and you'll have one less required step to get a piece of loot ready to wear.

Shoulder enchants can now be provided by scribes, so those still exist, but they are also not part of the faction reputation system.

The LFD tool... Is a necessity.

This was an extraordinarily difficult post for me to write, and one that I know is going to see me roundly mocked considering what I’ve written and VERY publically said in the past. I’ve had many arguments about it and my stance has always been resolute in the face of the onslaught (also my favourite tier set).

That said, I’m doing myself and those who read my rants a disservice by not writing this and biting the bullet. This post, honestly, is a major climb down for me and something I almost vilify the man in the mirror for. But let’s get it out there.

A dungeon-queue or LFD tool is a necessary part of any modern MMORPG.

There, I’ve said it. And because I know a great many people will view this from completely the opposite side, I think it best I explain myself.

To break or not to break?

Wrapping up Casterclysm (or any expansion) will be seeing a lot of raiding guilds making their preparations for the next expansion so that they can hit the ground running and start raiding as quickly and effectively as they can. I’m not really one for zapping content as quickly as possible because it’s not much fun that way, but I do like playing to a high standard and I confess that I abhor time-wasting while in an instance.

I don’t have an infinite amount of it.

Against this backdrop, my guild forums were recently discussing how we wanted to handle raid breaks throughout the remainder of this expansion (now complete for us) and looking ahead to Pandaria. By raid breaks, the general definition I’m using is a pre-planned ten minutes where everyone can get away from the keyboard and come back refreshed.

But I was wondering how people generally view this topic.

MMONBI: The POWAH (!) of positivity.

One of the things I’ve learned over the course of my blogging history is that, sometimes, I must be an absolute chore to read. My most popular blog, the Dead Good Tanking Guide, saw most of its content written from a happier angle that was more engaging to a wider readership. As a bit of a noob, I could simply relate what I was getting up to, why I was enjoying it, and why it was worth getting involved in for my readers. In short, it was a blog about having a blast playing a Protection warrior. Not much more, and not much that would exclude people.

Unfortunately for my blogging appeal, I did the worst thing I could ever do as a World of Warcraft player. I got good at the game. Not only that, I also started to take a far keener interest in things like class balance, theorycrafting, game design and comparative analysis. And while these topics are fine to speak about once in a while, they’re topics that probably alienate more people than they engage.

Worst of all, and I mean really worst of all, I started to whinge. Complaining about why things were going wrong and pointing out faults is only really acceptable in the smallest of doses. A succession of posts that do nothing but moan?

RSS suicide.

Are we still bloated?

One of the things I’ve been keeping an eye on as the Pandaria beta moves along is whether the stated design intention of removing bloat is being successful. Basically, the developers want to clear up action bars a bit now that we’re hitting level 90, so certain abilities that have lost their lustre over time are being removed entirely from the game.

One way of doing that has been the separation of individual spec abilities, and that’s been largely successful. Another way has been certain talents directly replacing baseline skills (also the case with abilities you get at later levels). That, too, has been successful in the main.

What’s not so great is the fact that there are still a lot of places where things can easily be culled without any real impact on gameplay.

Let me tell you what I mean.

"Gief achi and ilevel or no inv".

I was reading the Grumpy Elf the other day (I do love a grumpy elf) and, yet again, I came across a discussion revolving around the item level requirements to get involved in specific raid content. Basically, we all know what’s being railed against here:

“lfm ds 10 link achi and 395 ilevel”.

There are other versions of this, naturally, but it’s currently the most common one that’s doing the rounds. The argument, of course, is that item levels and achievements don’t tell you whether or not a person has the capability to complete a raid. The flip side of the argument is that there’s a higher chance a person will have the necessary attributes if they do have the better gear or requisite achievement.

So what’s the solution?

Before the Mists lift.

As we move toward the end of Cataclysm and the start of Mists of Pandaria, it’s time to get a few things sorted out prior to launch in a couple of months (guesstimate, of course). There are already umpteen posts out there about how to run down the clock in an old expansion and prepare for the next one, so I won’t repeat that here.

What I will tell you is what I’m going to be up to, as there might be some people out there who want to get involved in similar things and I see no reason why would couldn’t do a bit of spotting for each other. :)

In any event, I’ve pretty much cleaned out all my bags and liquidated everything that I’m not going to be using again. My toons have the professions I’d like them to have maxed out, so I may as well make some gold out of it. To date, I’ve managed to rack up about 11k gold just by selling old junk that was gathering dust; if that doesn’t hit you with the potential of an auction clear out, nothing will.

Protection marches on.

There have been quite a lot of changes recently for warriors, and it’s honestly hard to say exactly what the developers are currently playing with; such is the pace of beta patches right now. As we move along, we’re starting to get a clearer picture of how warriors are going to look come the launch of Mists of Pandaria, and things are shaping up quite nicely for tanks.

Quite a lot of my erstwhile concerns are starting to get addressed and we’re being given quite a few more options in the way of utility and rotation, with even active mitigation starting to look a bit more interesting. Not necessarily because we suddenly have great options for our rage, but more because there truly is enough to be getting on with.

That said much of what’s happening is moving in the right direction, I reckon, so it’s worth having a quick pass before I get on with Diablo 3 for the rest of the week. :)

Does your class hint at your religion?

I’ve put off publishing this post for a while, as it has the potential to be controversial and that’s not always worth it. I’m sure we’ve all heard the adage about the two topics you should never discuss, but this is something I’ve been thinking about for a while and I figure I may as well shove it out there and trust readers to be sensible.

It started from an acquaintance of mine recently getting involved in World of Warcraft and asking me about it via Facebook. What I assume to be the usual chit-chat ensued about what class is best, how you beef up your character and if playing with others really is necessary. The chat then got around to what my first toon was, specifically what race.

“I’ll bet you’re undead being a Satanist; you’re into vampires and all that jazz”.

Now ignoring the reference to vampires and jazz, I was a bit put out that someone would think of projecting my religion onto a game world so haphazardly. It’s not nice to be pigeonholed by someone who obviously doesn’t know any better, and even less nice for it to be used so disparagingly.

But none of that stopped him from being right.

Fury becomes... Fun?!

After finally being able to get back onto the beta last night without crashing as soon as I saw the ground, I thought it was time to spend a bit of time with Fury; the red-headed warrior spec as far as concerns me, and the spec I’ve pretty much always hated. I didn’t like it in either WotLK or Cataclysm, largely because of its reliance on Heroic Strike in the former and reliance on procs in the latter.

I was also anxious to see how the changes to Battle Stance affected the rage generation of my white swings, as that was another big problem I always had with Fury – rage starvation. Now, I’m totally comfortable with the fact that my problems stemmed from my own inability to play the spec well, so whinging about that isn’t a route I’ll go down. But given the fact I was going to mess with a spec that I’d disliked since picking up World of Warcraft, as well as a warrior development team that’s floundered with warriors in general in recent times, I wasn’t expecting much.

I’m happy to admit that I was proven wrong.

The New Blogger Initiative!

While going through my daily blogroll, I came across something hugely interesting multiple times; I figured it was worth reposting so that people can get on board with what I consider to be hugely positive:

The New Blogger Initiative.


A couple of my favourite authors such as Kadomi or Spinks have already waxed lyrical about this project, and at length, so there isn’t much left for me to cover. Suffice it to say that I’ll be involved in this for the duration of May and hope to see many others doing likewise.

See you there. :)