Unbearably HoT

During the past week I’ve frequently asked myself what my time is worth;[i] specifically, whether the time it’s taking me to level a new druid (Smirkfang[ii]) is worth the $55 it would cost to realm and faction transfer Runyarusco.[iii] I’m inclined to say, “Hell yes!” but the reality is that it currently costs over $40 to fill my tiny Civic’s gas tank. Priorities, right?

Thus I’ve resigned myself to the drudgery of questing through levels one through eighty-five all over again. Low-level content is greatly improved, so much so that I found myself constantly out-leveling each zone I visited. If you’re someone willing to move on as soon as quests turn green, this allows you to plow through a multitude of new environments before getting bored. However, if you’re the type who hungers for completion and dislikes leaving a wake of pale exclamation points behind you, you’ll probably only slog through five different zones[iv] before hitting the Dark Portal. (Sadly, I haven’t found an efficient way to skip Outland entirely.)

Now, as I’m on the cusp of reaching Northrend and am familiar with the new mechanics of ability acquisition[v], I feel that I can provide a helpful feral leveling guide.

1. At level 10, choose the “Feral Combat” specialization.
2. Mangle.
3. If your target still hasn’t died and you have five combo points, use Ferocious Bite.
4. Continue to follow steps two and three.
5. At level 25, purchase Glyph of Mangle and Glyph of Maul. This is for more fight!
6. In the event you pull 20394845 mans, shift into bear. Push every button when it’s not on cooldown for great success.
7. In the event that someone else pulls 20394845 mans, apply Swipe liberally.

I don’t have a lot more to provide you with at this juncture; until I hit eighty-five and get back to raiding, I can’t accurately test anything. Stick around though—you never know what you’ll find here. Oh, and have this nice picture of Nagrand. Ignore the sneering Chihuahua in it.

New content arrives. You, dutiful raider that you are, want to find out as much information as you can. Unless you’re particularly averse to spoilers and have somehow managed to shield yourself from the barrage of datamined information out there, information is a beautiful thing. Bringing early knowledge to your raid group allows you to troubleshoot your composition, reduce the number of easily avoidable errors, and make the best use of your time. So why are people flipping their metaphorical shit about the dungeon journal?

If you haven’t heard, the dungeon journal is a new UI feature that Blizzard plans to release in patch 4.2. According to Community Manager Kaivax, the journal will provide instantaneous information about a variety of dungeons: high-quality loot dropped from trash or bosses, boss locations, and a description of bosses’ (and associated adds’) abilities. Kaivax is very careful to mention that although ability descriptions will be “verbose and complete,” they (Blizzard) “will not be giving any strategy tips in the Dungeon Journal.” Great! Instead of alt-tabbing and opening up a third-party site such Wowhead or WoWWiki, all you need to do is press M, select the appropriate dungeon from your map interface, and navigate to the boss you’re interested in learning about.

I initially viewed the addition of the Dungeon Journal feature as an acknowledgment of player expectations. Some third-party mods were (and are) so commonly used that players were more or less expected to have them: Outfitter, Omen, oRA, SCT, Deadly Boss Mods, PowerAuras, QuestHelper[i], and many more that I’m sure I’m forgetting. Over time, Blizzard decided to incorporate elements of these mods as standard game components. Now, as players are expected to scour the depths of the Internet for (at the very least) basic dungeon information, Blizzard has decided to bring that information straight to us. I thought hey, if you’re interested in something beyond the game that provides you with cool videos, fancy diagrams, and maybe even some advanced calculus, you always have the option of searching for it; the Dungeon Journal can easily be ignored.

Still, some raiders seemed to believe that the Dungeon Journal would eliminate the intrigue and challenge of tackling a new dungeon for those who do use it. It seemed that somehow, the very inclusion of the Dungeon Journal would rocket every casual guild to the top of the progression chart. Please, I thought. It’s not a goddamn miracle. By the time any new content hits the live servers, dedicated progression guilds have already played through most of it on the Public Test Realm (PTR), rudimentary how-to videos are making the rounds on TankSpot, and MMO-Champion has datamined the loot tables, boss abilities, and audio files. Soon after, enterprising raid leaders are posting modified strategies in their guild forums, and, if your head’s still buried in the sand, one of your guildies will, in all likelihood, explain things to you before you make a fool of yourself.

So what’s the deal? Well kids, Blizzard lies.[ii] Remember Kaivax’s quote about not providing any strategy tips? The Dungeon Journal does, in fact, provide brief strategy tips about both normal and heroic encounters as soon as the content releases. Phailia, from Inner Sanctum, provides a few examples on the EU forums.

Take a look at the underlined sections. The Spark of Rhyolith section seems reasonably straight forward at first: “Sparks of Rhyolith deal 8,671 Fire damage to all players within 12 yards.” Then, Blizzard makes a point of adding, “Sparks should be pulled away from the raid as long as possible, then quickly destroyed.” Ignoring the poor sentence structure, that last bit goes beyond a basic description of the boss abilities and further provides strategy advice. The description for Magma Geyser (for the Ragnaros encounter) is similar. Instead of simply including the spell description (which I think is fully described by the second, non-underlined sentence), Blizzard specifically tells players how the Magma Geyser mechanic works.

Though I’m not certain I like that the Dungeon Journal will provide strategic content information straight from source, I still can’t imagine that it will meaningfully alter the raiding community—progression guilds will simply destroy raid content faster. I would, however, suggest the removal of strategic advice from the heroic boss descriptions; even if the “tips” for normal dungeons remain, there will still be an element of discovery, trial, and error for the more difficult content. (For a little while, anyway.) Just remember: you can force a veritable dissertation upon your raid group, but some moron will always manage to stand in the fire.[iii]

When we last met, I had forsaken my subscription and had moved on to other things. Of course, I don’t really remember what those particular things were, but the point is that life suddenly developed a new busyness. Seemingly overnight, I metamorphosed into the kind of person whose crankiness knew no bounds if she didn’t get to sleep sometime before midnight. How lame!  Thus for a time, I resigned myself to the drone of corporate life punctuated by brief sprees of gaming and occasional weekend badassery:

• playing D&D and painting miniatures;
• flirting with AION;
• attending PAX East and Prime;
• trashing a novel I’d been working on;
• boating;
• taking copy editing classes;
• purchasing large quantities of Mackinac Island fudge;
• adopting another cat; and, most recently,
• building a house.

But let’s be real—you don’t spend an inordinate amount of time playing a game, involving yourself in that community, and then writing about it without eventually being sucked back in. At some point I caved and spent the last gasps of Wrath raiding on Mal’ganis, waiting for Cataclysm. As tradition in our apartment dictates, Mortality and I immediately power-leveled to eighty-five when the expansion released. Even after taking a cramped nap on the loveseat, the entire leveling process took less than eighteen hours. Eighteen hours! Chagrined, my husband and I flopped around Orgrimmar for a while, brought our professions to max, tried to get into heroic dungeon groups as two melee DPS[i], and then started the endless process of completing daily quests for reputation gains. Perhaps some of you are familiar with this cycle.

But though Blizzard’s pre-60 leveling experience in Cataclysm drastically improved, the end game suddenly alienated me: I was stymied by familiar content, uninterested in raiding, and wholeheartedly dismayed by the seeming return of melee as a liability. I was completely un-enamored with both the expansion and—for the first time—my class. Faced with the prospect of turning into the type of casual, cranky player I’d always despised, I simply unsubscribed. Again.[ii] I washed my electronic hands of the game, cleaned out my RSS feed, scornfully derided the sad state of feral druids, and sneered at the resurrection of Zul’Gurub and Zul’Aman[iii]—two dungeons I had been more than happy to leave behind.

What then? I started playing Rift. It’s a fantastic game with a development team quick to respond to feedback generated by the player base, and while it’s certainly not without its flaws, the game has incorporated and improved upon some of the most successful elements from other MMOs. The community, however, needs time to grow. As Mortality tried and discarded Rift and my fellow gamer-friends dispersed to different shards, my journeys in Telara became largely solitary ones. One afternoon, while hunched over my keyboard obliterating Guardians,[iv] Mortality casually sidled up to my chair. “I’m going to reactivate my WoW subscription,” he said benignly.

Kids, this is a trap. When a super-hot dude drops the “Hey I’m going to play—” line on you, he casts some voodoo nerd spell and somehow you’ve entered your credit card information and fished out your authenticator before you even register what happened. “Oh god,” you say, “why am I in Stormwind again?”

Stormwind indeed. Mortality and I have reconnected with some old players and real-life friends from (the now defunct) Dread Lobster. This change of play locates us back on Doomhammer, Alliance-side, effectively stranding us from our mains. My old roster boasts an array of characters stuck at level seventy—my ancient warrior, a neglected death knight, a sad looking frost mage—and a holy paladin that miraculously made it past eighty. In the interests of new beginnings[v] I’m leveling another druid.[vi] In the meantime, I’m healing heroics on my paladin.[vii]

Although it will take a little while to grind my way back up to eighty-five (I’m halfway there) and gather the necessary druidly accoutrements, I’m back. Expect more content to follow.