A Word: On Tanking

Lok’tar friends.

I’ve been tanking for most of the Wrath expansion in one form or another. I started out as a Protection Paladin tanking Sarth and Naxx back before Ulduar. I was in a mix of blues and epics, which were sufficient to do raids at the time, provided the blues were from heroics not Borean Tundra quest rewards.

Of course nowadays with the Dungeon Finder, T9 gear on vendors and the general ease of gearing up to that level, no one is acceptable anymore until they have i245 gear or better. Sorry, that was a side rant, short but sweet, right?

Anyways, after my warrior hit 80, I created a prot spec for him with his dual-spec and spent a week that I had off from work gearing him up. It was a lot of heroics, but it was worth it. Since then, he’s managed to tank at the ICC level, VoA level, and he even got his ‘of the Nightfall’ title for doing Sarth 3D a few months back. I have successfully tanked every Dungeon and Heroic in the expansion; I’ve cleared ToC-10 and done parts of Ulduar. Now, I’m not saying I’m uber or imba or anything, as I didn’t do all of the progression raiding when it was hard or relevant, but I’ve seen a lot of these fights and haven’t had any problems with them from a tanking mechanics perspective.

All of that being said, I like to think that I know what I’m doing, and I think I’ve gotten fairly good at warrior tanking. Now, a warrior tank is a bit of work to do, especially when AoE tanking is involved, but it’s not impossible and I think I can safely say I’ve gotten good at it. Despite what Jong may think, I don’t think it’s a snoozefest, although he’s right that the priority of abilities becomes second nature.

However, even I run characters as dps through dungeons, dealing with other people tanking. A while back, while I was running as my mage through Nexus, I had quite the experience. What follows is based on actual events…

So we get into the instance and the tank up and left after getting everyone’s buffs. Thanks, arse. Have fun failing at life, it seems like you have a head start. So we re-q and we all know we’re in for a wait since tanks while levelling are even more rare than tanks at endgame. We did, however, have a DK with us, so we had him throw up Frost presence and go to town. The resto shaman did a great jorb keeping him up and my leet level 76 frost skillz were brought to bear, despite no druids being present. Just after we killed the mob, another DK joined the group, and said hello. Wow, off to a decent start. We have a warm body for a tank and he said hello when he joined the group, demonstrating some form of manners, which can be rare.

While we were waiting for the tank to get caught up, we ran up to the next tunnel, where the mage hunter and two demon dogs pat and we sat and waited.

Now, when I sit and wait I tend to try to do stuff to keep busy, like telling /silly or dancing with non-combat pets. Murkimus is a usual suspect for dancing, and since he has the single greatest sound effect in the game, he’s one of my favourite pets. So anyways, at this particular moment, I had swivelled my camera angle and was looking at my toon and what he looked like with the cloth heirloom gear on. (He’s a BElf, it comes with the racials). While I was standing there, admiring BElf virility in a dress, the pat found me and tried to get my mojo. Of course, magepanic means frost nova and blink, turn and burn, which is exactly what I did. Now the rogue in the group, he didn’t fare so well. See, for those of you that don’t know what happens to a mob when it gets rooted, by say the Blizzard spell or the Frost Nova spell, read on. Because mobs know that while they’re rooted they absolutely can’t reach the Badass beauty that they find irresistible, they turn to whoever is within range. It’s kinda the ‘Love the one you’re with’ mentality. So of course, after I rooted them, they ate the rogue for breakfast and burped him out before brunch.

I continued to AoE them down, looking fantastic with my hands in the air the whole time, and eventually our Forsaken DK caught up just as the other DK jumped into the mix. So from there it was business as usual. After the pull I gave the ole — hey my bad, I was busy trying to see my own reflections in the eyes of others, I didn’t realize they were the eyes of the bad guys — apology. Thinking that was the end of it, I planned to never speak of it again. Of course, that’s when it all started going sour. The DK tank assumed that because the rogue got chewed on and died, he must’ve been the one who aggro’d the pat. So he starts shouting at him, which didn’t get too out of hand, but was enough to give me that suspicion that this wasn’t going to be all sunshine and roses. Then we got into the room with the icecapades, and sure enough, the Berserker mobs did their whole knockback thing, something about needing their personal space to swing their big… ahem… Nevermind. Anyways, the rogue brought back some friends who decided to say hello. After the pull, the tank again began to berate the rogue, as we tried to explain the reason the rogue was standing behind the mobs and what ‘mechanics’ are. Of course, the tank started the whole ‘no u’ thing with all of us, and then he even had the cohones to try and kick the rogue, as if his arguing with us and saying ‘u shut ure fase’ to us had won us over to his incredibly horrible spelling and grammar.

After his vote to kick failed, he decided he was going to leave the group, so we continued with our Troll dps DK in frost presence, and it was actually easier for us to four-man it. So we cleared along and even fought all the way up to the second boss without a tank, having absolutely no issues. Then our group got filled out with a tank. So he gets in the group and says ‘hello’… I took one look at his name and one look at my recount and saw that it was the exact same tank that had left group. So, of course, the other four of us all lawl at him, but what the hell, we’re obviously not going to get rid of him and the chances of actually getting another tank are astronomically small. So we go on, and while it was once again harder to get through stuff with the crappy tank, we managed and made it all the way to Keristrasza.

We did the boss fight and a blue caster ring dropped, Band of Glitttering Permafrost, I believe. Now, this ring has on it for stats the following: 25 stamina, 33 intellect, 26 spell power and 10 mana per 5 seconds. Obviously, this is a caster ring. Not only that, but it’s a healer ring. So we all roll greed on it and the healer rolls need, an upgrade I’m sure, but who cares, it’s for the healer. And then the tank says ‘Can I have that’. Now, I’ve been typing since I was a kid and while I’m no courtroom transcript writer, I can type fast. I instantly say, ‘you’re an idiot, it’s a caster ring’. Of course he replies with ‘no, I need it for the stamina’. Of course, at this point, loot has been distributed. I saw three lawls, followed by three people leaving party. The tank is still trying to justify why he deserves this ring with Int, SP and Mp5 on it and I just told him no, and left.

I’m not usually one to be rude to other people, but this was one of the worst players I had ever seen, in more ways than one. If the person had just been new to tanking and learning the game or the playstyle, I’d have been more than happy to offer advice or support and give them the benefit of the doubt. But it wasn’t about that. He was not only bad, but he had a bad attitude, horrible spelling and grammar and was an all around douche. That was what sent my GAFF plummeting.

You know, cliché’s are clichés for a reason, and its people like this that make them so true. So I end today with a advice of sorts. It is better to allow people to think you an idiot than to open your mouth and prove them right.

Stay Hordecore,

– Fikkle

Beta Review: Spoiler Free Edition

Lok’tar friends.

I will admit that I received an invite to the Cataclysm beta about a month ago. At the time, I was on vacation with my family and while we were out sightseeing, I was using the wi-fi at the resort to download the client. Eventually, I got into the beta and got to test things out. My first impressions?

Let me start by saying that this post is going to be spoiler free (as in, no lore or story spoilers). So if you’ve been clamouring for impressions about the next expansion without wanting to ruin anything for yourself, this post is for you. I will probably do a post where I don’t avoid spoilers in the near future so that I can talk about some specifics in more detail.

For the record, I’ve only tried the Goblin and Worgen starter zones. I completed the entire Worgen zone twice, while only completing parts of the Goblin zone and not much past level 6. In addition to that, I played the Troll starter area on a Druid up until I ran into a bugged quest. I played through the entire Dwarf starting zone. And I logged in game at the Tauren starting zone but never did any quests there. On my level 80 warrior, I respec’d with the new talent trees into Arms and went to Mount Hyjal, getting about 10 minutes of gameplay in, which allowed me to complete a handful of quests. That’s about it for now.

For my impressions, Blizzard has put the full force of their company into the development of the Goblin and Worgen starter zones. At least it feels that way. They have outdone themselves and topped everything I’ve experienced before. The two zones have different feels, but they are each great in their own way. The Worgen zone has one of the best written stories of anywhere in the game, and the atmosphere and character interactions only make it better. The Goblin zone doesn’t have the same force, so their zone has been done, re-done, over-done, over-re-done, and re-over-re-done again until it just topped everything you could possibly imagine. The Goblin zone makes up for story depth with humor, fun and wacky-crazy events. As I said above, they were both amazing.

Going from there (I did those first in the beta), I went on to the Dwarf starter zone. Now, don’t get me wrong, the Dwarf starter zone has changed to be updated with the ‘current’ events that have happened. That being said, while the zone’s quests and objectives have mostly been updated, there are still some horrendously obvious vanilla quests that weren’t changed at all, or if they were, only the reason for doing them has changed, the mechanics have all stayed the same. As a comparison, of all the quests and mechanics in both the Goblin and Worgen starter zones combined, none of them really feels like it’s a vanilla mechanic. What does that feel like to me then? There are two possibilities. Possibility the first: The zones aren’t completely done yet. This doesn’t seem very likely to me. The flow of quests, the amount of experience they give you and the overall progression of the story feels complete to me. That leaves me with the second possibility. Possibility the second: Blizz decided that the old quests were fine ‘as is’. They may have decided that based on priority. For instance, they have a priority list done of which quests still fit, lore-wise, despite old mechanics and only need to get changed ‘if’ they have extra time. They may have decided that the mechanics were still valid, acceptable or fun. This bothers me the most of all of them. If this is the case, we’ll likely see this trend continue through the old world, which means that the game won’t be ‘as’ different as Blizz claims. Something I saw in a blue post was that they lose over 90% of their players before level 10. I’m not sure of the accuracy of that, to be honest, but it suggests that in order to keep newer players, the starter zones can’t have any of the vanilla-flavoured crap on a stick shovel fed to us as just fine.

The Troll area was completely new and to be honest I only saw a few levels of it, so I can’t really speak to the overall flow, story progression or feel of it. I can say that the artwork looks amazing and the zone seems pretty cool. I’m looking forward to getting back there and seeing if that quest I need has been fixed. The same thing goes for the Tauren zone. It looks good and there is a definite update to the overall story, but I haven’t played through to see it all.

Finally, Mount Hyjal. I flew out to Mount Hyjal, which is cool and crazy. I did a little sightseeing a few days before this and things looked weird. Anyways, Hyjal is a place that just oozes lore and history, coolness and epicness, wonder and amazement, shock and awe. You get the idea. I did the first couple quests there and found that it was really, really hard to level the way I normally do on my warrior (as arms). My normal way of doing things: Charge, rend, mortal strike, overpower, execute. From there, the mob would be dead and I’d go on to the next, rinse and repeat, throwing in Victory Rush when it was available. The problem is that the mobs in the new zone hit hard. Now, I’m not talking like, you were jogging on a cold day and a car couldn’t quite stop in time and it bumped your buttocks causing a bruise hard. I’m talking, there is a snake on a mofo’ing plane that just fell out of the sky and landed on a puppy that was giving a hug to a kitten hard.

What I didn’t realize at first is that Victory Rush has become an absolute must for a levelling warrior, as it now restores 20% of your health, which allows you to keep going. The problem then becomes ‘what happens when you’re questing with others and the mobs still beat on you, but you don’t get the killing blow and so you can’t victory rush?’ Are we going to go back to a time when warriors have to sit and eat after every pull or get use to sighing on the corpse run every other pull?

As I said, I only got a few minutes of play time there, and it may get much better after more time. The thing to remember is that I’m wearing non-cataclysm gear, so there is no mastery on the gear and the stamina boost hasn’t affected me yet. Perhaps with Cataclysm gear on, the huge jump in stamina coupled with the damage bonus to mastery will mean that things die much faster, before they have a chance to do much damage. We’ll see. I will probably try out Prot and Fury soon as well. I don’t know if I have any plans to try out all the classes in the Beta itself, but so far, I’ve tried Druids and Warriors up to level 12, and they both play much better there than on live, so I’m happy with that (at least so far).

Anyways, those are my initial impressions so far. Perhaps in the future I’ll do another post where I discuss lore events that I’ve seen in game. If there are spoilers, I’ll be sure to make it clear for those who want to stay away from them. For now,

Stay Hordecore,

– Fikkle

A Word: On Lore

Lok’tar friends.

I’ve been reading wow.com for quite some time now, and while I don’t read every article they publish, there are some columns that I follow with great interest. One of those columns is the Know Your Lore column, written by both Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney. I’m not sure when the column started, but over the last few months I’ve read every single one of them. They’ve covered lots of stuff, from the current politics of the races of both factions and the upcoming changes in the next expansion; they’ve looked at some of the Old Gods, the Titans and some of the new race/class combos coming in Cataclysm. They’ve even done a few Tin Foil Hat editions of the column where they speculate on specific lore topics and conceive massive conspiracy theories surrounding them.

The Lore of the game is one of the main draws for keeping me interested in the game. The phat loots and internet dragons are cool and all, but without the Lore behind them, they are really just ones and zeros. The Lore isn’t just the reason why of the game however, its intricate stories that can be completely unrelated to each other (aside from being part of the Warcraft universe) or they can be intricately interwoven stories. These stories bring the game world to life, make them more than just pixels. As someone who’s levelled countless alts through the game, roleplaying my characters as part of the story is what keeps it fresh and interesting to me. While that in and of itself doesn’t actually change whether or not I have to kill 10 boars, it gives meaning to the mindless grind. Some of my characters may take pleasure from causing the boars pain while they are cooking them alive or chopping them to bits, while other characters may realize that the sacrifice of these animals is necessary to feed their people and may kill no more than is absolutely required.

This type of roleplay isn’t the renfair kind, and it doesn’t even have to include other people, its just my way of weaving my own characters into the greater stories that make up the Lore. Some of my characters have spent most of their careers as soldiers on the frontlines battling the other faction, while other characters have never raised arms against them, focusing instead on ridding the world of the evils that plague it, or plotting their own supreme domination of that same world. It’s this kind of living story that keeps me so interested in the game and makes me want to roll alts so that I can approach the stories from new and unique directions.

If you’re not interested in the Lore of the game, I’m sure there is something equally as compelling that keeps you playing or coming back, but I would recommend looking a bit closer at the Lore as it can open up a completely new aspect of the game. One of my fondest memories of the game was exploring the Plaguelands shortly after having read the book about Tirion Fordring, and then finding him in game. There are so many ‘cool’ moments like that out there just waiting for you to discover them, and I’m guessing there are going to be a metric crapton more come Cataclysm.

Stay Hordecore,

Fikkle

PS. If you didn’t get the hint, go and read the Know Your Lore columns at wow.com, they’re well written, interesting and provide so much more meaning to the game.

PPS. I’ve been blogging from my iPhone lately, which is great and all, but linking is harder than from my laptop so I apologize for the lack of links.

Wrath Retrospective from an Altaholic

Lok’tar friends.

Despite my absence from the blogging world, I’ve still been around the world (of Warcraft) for most of Wrath. I took two breaks from the game for a few months when I’d gotten burned out or bored, but I’m back for now, for the foreseeable future and I’ve missed blogging.

When Wrath hit I had planned on making my shaman my new main. He had just hit 80 prior to the Scourge invasion event and I was having a lot of fun as enhancement. After the expansion was released, he levelled quickly to 80 and then he was all alone. Most of my guildmates were taking their time or at least weren’t able to level as quickly to 80, so I had nothing to do. I tried to get into a few heroics and do some Naxx raids, but I didn’t have great gear, couldn’t craft myself any and all in all felt bored. Since the dungeon finder didn’t exist at the time, I had nothing really to keep me occupied and so I went and did something I hadn’t done before, levelled Alliance.

At the time I had some recruit a friend time left, so I rolled Dwarf and Human paladins and started dual boxing on the Alliance side to experience their levelling. That lasted for a while and then I just got bored. That was when the first break from the game came for me. When I got back, everyone else had finally hit 80 and our guild had done some recruiting. I finished levelling my Horde Paladin to 80 so that I had a second 80, and he became a tank. The guild had become quite vibrant and wanted to start raiding, so we scheduled some Naxxramas runs and downed the first wing up to the big spider thing. As we could never really kill her and due to the RL commitments of most of our guild, our raids eventually died out and people slowly left the guild for other activities.

After that, I went back to some alts. I levelled a Death Knight to 80 and had a lot of fun pvp’ing with him as unholy, back before the great DK nerf and the circumcising of Unholy Blight. My mage, Druid and Rogue got played on and off, all ending up around 74. I also took some time and levelled my hunter to 80, after which I never played him again. I have come to find the hunter class doesn’t interest me at all anymore, and while I know there are avid hunters out there, it just isn’t for me anymore. At this point, I had four separate 80s, the DK, Shaman, Paladin and Hunter.

From there, I started a warrior. I had been spending all of my badges at the time to purchase heirloom gear (instead of epics) and I had a full set of the plate gear and the 2-handed axe. I started doing battlegrounds with WSG and found that I was pretty powerful as a warrior. I took to defending the flag some games, running the flag in others and just fighting in mid in others. All in all, I got quite good at it and found that I really enjoyed it. From there, I continued to level almost exclusively through pvp, hitting 80 just in time to pick up the Brewmaster title last year. After that, I did some character shuffling. My BElfadin became a Draenei so that I would have an 80 on the Alliance side and I made my human paladin a Belf so that I would still have a Horde paladin if the mood struck me. I finished levelling him to 80 next, while running the Argent Tournament dailies every day on several characters and I burned out again.

Thus came about my second break from the game during Wrath. I was out of the game for four or five months with that break, but when I came back, the dungeon finder had been implemented and things were getting easier to gear up characters at 80. I started back up with my new BElfadin, figuring I was going to make him my new main, but quickly found that I gravitated back to the warrior. Over the last five months, I’ve gotten my warrior’s prot gear up to 5k GS and his pvp gear up to 5.4k GS. I joined a raiding guild for a while (back when I had time) and got to do a bit of ICC and TOC (10 mans). I made it up to Rotface / Festergut and took down one of them (not the slimes one) and then had one attempt at Putricide before I had to leave the guild due to time constraints and RL commitments.

Since then, I went back and finished levelling my poor Dwarf Paladin that got left in the lurch for most of the expansion and he hit 80 about a month ago, which brings the total count up to seven level 80s, three of which are Paladins. Lately, I’ve been doing a number of things to keep busy, including a 2v2 arena team with the only other regular member of my guild (at the moment), Karag. I also started some new characters, a Dwarf Warrior, who hit 30 the other day and a Tauren Warrior, who is about level 22 right now. I have a Human DK at level 60, who’s only being levelled to 65 so she can be used as a Tailoring and Enchanting bot for my alliance-side server. So the current list of characters that I have on the go is:

1. Kor, level 80 Orc Warrior, Prot/Arms. He is my best geared character, most progressed and for all intents and purposes my main at the moment.
2. Jurithas, level 80 Blood Elf Paladin, Ret. He is my next best geared character and while I have some Holy and Prot gear for him, I really only play him as Ret.
3. Brak, level 80 Orc Shaman, Resto/Enh. Brak’s enhance gear is very, very near to what he has had since he hit 80, meaning its crap nowadays. I don’t have the patience to gear him out, and I find the dual-wield mechanics annoying. He’s got some T9 level Resto gear, but its still a work in progress when he does get played.
4. Martog, level 80 Orc Death Knight, UH(dps)/Blood(tank). My DK is wearing mostly Deadly Gladiator gear as he hasn’t really been played in a long time. He’s a miner/herbalist so I use him as a farming toon mostly. I enjoyed playing him as unholy, but I find what Blizz has done to that tree just doesn’t make it fun anymore, so he almost never gets played aside from farming.
5. Antos, level 80 Draenei Paladin, Prot. This was my first (Blood Elf) Paladin to 80 who has tanked some of Naxx and Sarth. Once he moved over to the Alliance he basically stopped getting played, and he’s still sitting idle with no plans for the near future.
6. Grimshot, level 80 Orc Hunter. This was my main for the second half of BC, but as I mentioned above, he isn’t getting played, nor is there any plan to play him in the future. He’s currently on an inactive account and will stay there for now.
7. Bannock, level 80 Dwarf Paladin, Ret/Prot. This is my newest 80 and he’s not on the same server as my other 80 alliance. He’s running dungeons as ret at the moment but I’m purchasing prot gear for him as I intend to make him a tank when he can put together enough of a set to start.
8. Fikkle, level 75 Blood Elf Mage, Frost. This is my first character I ever truly levelled, and my first toon to 70 back in BC. I haven’t seriously played him since the SSO came out, but he might get bumped up to 80 so I can see if any of the changes to the class interest me. So far, I’m enjoying what Frost has to offer, and I might check out the other specs after I hit 80 to see if they interest me.
9. Dwos, level 74 Forsaken Rogue. This is my rogue. I have no idea what I want to do with this character. I don’t really like the playstyle of the Rogue, but I don’t want to up-and-delete him. If I get really bored before Cataclysm, I might hurry him to 80, but even then, I don’t know that I’ll ever play him again.
10. Zaels, level 74 Tauren Druid, Resto/Feral. This is my druid, who was a pvp server toon while levelling. I don’t really know what to do with him as I put him aside for long periods and then come back to him, each time deciding I want to play as a different spec. As a result, his gear is a hodgepodge of greens that make his dps horrible and his heals mediocre. I have wanted to try tanking as a Bear, but I can’t seem to get the hang of feral.
11. Achran, level 30 Dwarf Warrior, Arms. This is my new baby Dwarf Warrior who’s up and coming. As I currently enjoy the warrior class the most, he’s getting levelled to be my de facto main on the Alliance side.
12. Caugruk, level 22 Tauren Warrior, Arms. This is my baby Tauren who I have no need of and am only levelling because its fun to play lower level warriors and own stuff. I log him in when I get bored with higher level content and I just want to feel overpowered and kill things.

All in all, I’ve experience much more of the classes in Wrath than I ever did in Burning Crusade, although I found that some of the changes Blizz has made haven’t been that interesting to me. I like playing as a BM hunter, but I don’t find anything about hunters compelling in Wrath. The same thing goes for Death Knights. I liked the playstyle that I had back when I first started playing him, and now I’ve found that it isn’t fun anymore. On the other hand, I really enjoy playing Ret Paladins and Arms Warriors. Ret is probably one of the few specs I enjoy that is really strong. Arms is great for pvp, which is what I use it for, however its weak for pve, which bothers me. Come to think about it, I think I like playing all of the ‘weak’ specs of every class I play, except for Paladins. Arms Warrior (weak PvE), Subtlety Rogue (weak PvE), Frost Mage (weak PvE), Enh Shaman (not necessarily weak, but has issues), BM Hunter (weak for everything except levelling), UH Death Knight (not necessarily weak, but not as strong as the other trees). I wonder why that is. Am I that much of a masochist or have all those specs just been scaled back because they were really popular at one time? I don’t know, but I’m guessing it’s the self-destructive explanation.

As far as the future of what I plan to do for the rest of the expansion, I’m not really sure. I may decide to level characters, get achievements or simply take another break. The problem with being Fikkle is that what I chose to do today, may change tomorrow.

Stay Hordecore,

Fikkle

Fikkle found being dps by moths for his balls?

Lok’tar friends. Well I doubt anyone still has us in their feed readers at this point, after months of defunct blog status, but I think I might make a reappearance to the blogosphere soon. For a while I didn’t think I had much to say. Now, I still don’t think I do, but I miss writing, so there it is. Today I’m going to talk about my mage. I’ll probably do a post about what I’ve been up to over the wrath expansion soon.

So I got back to playing my mage last night for the first time in I don’t know how long. The toon, Fikkle, hasn’t been my main since mid-BC and hasn’t received any kind of serious playtime since the Shattered Sun Offensive began.

I levelled him a bit sometime since Wrath was released, as he’s level 74 (now 75), but the only reason he got any playtime at all was so that he could learn to port to Dal, which is useless for my other 9 characters on that server / account, but was done for my friends.

Lately, however, I’ve grown nostalgic a bit about him. He has just under 10k lifetime honor kills and is a bag making and gear chanting machine. But I’ve never had any desire to play him after I started to seriously level alts and discover the other classes. For whatever reason, last night I decided to pull him out of mothballs (Merciless Gladiator mothballs, no less) get him into some heirloom gear and go start levelling. I did a bunch of quests and some Arathi Basin pvp, as well as a random DTK run.

When I logged him in, I realized he was Fire spec’d, which is odd, since I haven’t played him as fire since he was level 50. I decided to go back to Frost for pvp and survivability and oh man was it ever a great choice.

During the DTK run the tank and the other two dps died to black bad on the ground and the three mobs turned toward me. Blizzard and the other roots in frost saved me and allowed me to survive and kill the mobs. The healer tossed a few heals, but that was about it. The same thing happened again later and once again I solo’d them, with a few heals.

Now I’m not saying that Gnomer said was wrong about the whole fire/frost/arcane arguement, but I do know for a fact that if I had tried that as fire I would have been the proverbial bug on the proverbial windshield. Frost’s survivability and control is wickedly powerful and so I think I’ll stick with it, at least for now.

That being said, there was that one Rogue in AB that really wanted roasted steak on a stick for dinner, but was forced to settle for tenderized mage on two daggers instead. I still contend that rogues are far too powerful. Nerf rogues. Make them dps with chopsticks… Toothpicks… Dental floss! Yep, we have a winner. Rogues dual wielding dental floss in the next patch. Blizz make it happen, and don’t worry, you can claim the idea was yours, I totally don’t mind.

Stay Hordecore,

– Fikkle

What Gnomer Said…

Lok’tar friends,

First, what Gnomer said.

Second, I haven’t posted here in quite some time. Actually, none of the bloggers who have posting rights have done so. Some of us are still playing the game, very regularly. I have taken some breaks from the game, but I’ve been back now for a while. And I have been having so much fun. At least I was.

I have never been chicken little. Throughout the course of my wow career I have seen game changes come and go, and I’ve heard the nay-sayers proclaim that the end is here or near or around the corner. The introduction of Badges of Justice, Blizzard selling vanity items (to name a few) are some of the issues that people have cried havoc about and let slip the dogs of account cancellation. This happened again with the announcment of Real ID not too long ago and I’ll admit, I once again thought that it wasn’t too bad a system. Even once implemented, I actually enjoyed most of the functionality. It did take away my ability to go bounce around on a lowbie without logging into vent and having that sense of anonymity to it, but it was okay since it wasn’t the end of the world, even though as one of the more knowledgeable members in my group of friends (about the game), some of the newer folks are constantly asking me questions about what this means, or how’d they do that, or which piece of gear is better. Those things get tiresome after a while, and now I have no way to hide from that, but, not the end of the world.

But now the sky is falling. The WoW sky. In order to play this game that we all enjoy, we have to sign the Terms of Service and as such, we declare that we have no right to the in-game stuff and all that techno-babble that most people don’t bother to read. But that does not give you the right to publish my personal information. Period. And this isn’t even some paranoia rant or ‘dual-life’ argument that I’ve read about. I’m not a chick, so I’m not at much risk of being stalked, and I don’t have a really unique name or anything IRL. People that I work with already know about my pastimes and I’m not disadvantaged because of it.

I can understand the need to give Blizzard my information to play their game. That is reasonable to me because when I give them that info I trust that they aren’t going to do anything stupid with it. I trust that they are going to respect my privacy. And this is the part where all the people who disagree with me will say “Oh Noes, but failID is optional, you don’t have to use it.” And yes, that may be true. But if they are willing to let my personal information that I gave to them in trust be published WITHOUT PROVIDING ANY OTHER ALTERNATIVE THAN TO NOT USE IT, than I’m not going to use it.

One more quick little side bar. I only play one MMO at the moment, this one. In fact, I rarely play any other video games at all. Why? Because WoW is where all my friends are, it is fun and interesting and its all I really need as a hobby. But this is going to far for my personal likes. There are plenty of other games out there I can play. I did play Assassin’s Creed II over the Christmas holidays and had a blast with it, despite the fact that its really short, in comparison to something like, say, wow. I stopped playing Oblivion mid-way through completing that game when I started playing wow, and never went back. I have only played Civ III, my all time favorite game ever, a handful of times since I started playing wow, and that game was old faithful for me for so, so many years. There are other options for my gaming time.

As one individual I don’t have very many options to protest Blizzard’s actions. I can’t tell them that in order to get my subscription fees (and numerous server transfers, race/faction changes, character re-customization fees), they need to sign a terms of service with me that says they are not allowed to publish my personal information anywhere without my direct permission. They don’t allow petitions on their forums, so we can’t show our support that way. They didn’t ask us in a poll. They just decided that they needed to make their game more like failbook. And I use failbook, but I use failbook with people who I already know, who already have my information and could get nothing else from it no matter how hard they tried.

So to Blizzard, I say this: My identity has value. It has value to me and you have no right to devalue my personal information by making it available to anyone, anywhere, anytime, in direct violation to the trust I placed in you when I gave you that information. I suppose I could go on paying you each month and then some, but that would just be tacit approval that what you are doing isn’t wrong. And it is wrong. It violates the trust I placed in you and the faith that I’ve had in you ever since I played Diablo 1 oh so many years ago. The only recourse that I have open to me is to tell you that I will stop supporting your company with my hard earned money. That goes for this game and every other game you make. I don’t care how amazing they are, you will not see another penny from me ever again.

That, and what Gnomer said:

FUCK YOU BLIZZARD!

Fikkle and out.

I’m just sayin…