Flyv's Warcraft Blog

WoW: 70-80 in 14 days

My priest won WoW! Dinged 80 today at just about 7 days /played, not sure how much of that was AFK. 70-80 was alternately fun and boring. Fun was doing one dungeon a day, usually as a healer. Also fun was doing battlegrounds, particularly Isle of Conquest on the bonus weekend: good XP if you win. Unfun was grinding through quest lines. I made it more interesting by researching the big story arcs and doing those instead of the side "kill 10 rats" quests, but having done this twice before it wasn't very exciting.

So now the real game of WoW opens up to me! The best thing is I can start playing with my guildie friends again. Time to grind out a million Emblems of Triumph to update the gear.

ICC progression statistics

I've long since given up on my Armory achievement data mining. But here's an interesting analysis of ICC raid completion, based on data from WoWProgress.

What the data shows is that Blizzard's model of making ICC easier every month with a stacking buff has allowed more guilds to get through the raid content. That's what you'd expect, and presumably Blizzard's design goal. Players who like a fixed challenge will complain, but I think this model makes a lot of sense; it lets more of Blizzard's customers play the endgame.

Storytelling in WoW

I just started the Wrathgate quests. Everyone remembers that quest, the phasing, the cutscenes. Everyone loved it. Whenever I see a guildie ding the achievement for finishing it I get a big smile and congratulate them.

Why aren't there more quest chains like Wrathgate that in WoW? More stories? I guess it's a lot of work to write them, but still, the payoff is so good. Classic WoW had some nice stories like Legend of Stalvan, I'll be curious to see if Cataclysm refreshes them and adds new ones.

Common wisdom is no one reads the quests in WoW so it's wasted effort. That's definitely not true, all you have to do is play a game with lousy writing like Star Trek Online or Warhammer Online to see what you're missing. On the flip side Lord of the Rings is distinguished by really excellent writing. Would be nice to have more like that in Warcraft.

Levelling has bogged down for me at level 71, it goes slow. The fastest way to level up is questing, by far, but a lot of the quests are annoying. Fortunately with the 20% heirloom buffs you can pick and choose. My new rule: no poop quests, no 20% drop rate quests, and start with the good stories first.

WoW: 59-70 in 8 days

I keep playing Warcraft. It's stayed fun but still feels kind of grindy. The good change is there's multiple things to grind on: quests, random dungeons, battlegrounds. Get bored of one and do another.

One big drag is the levelling curve. Level 61 takes almost twice the XP as level 60, and level 71 takes almost twice the XP as level 70. The quest experience goes up accordingly; Burning Crusade quests give a lot more XP than classic, and Wrath gives more than BC. You can even game it, doing level 70 quests when you're 68 and flying through those two levels. Dungeon and battleground XP doesn't scale as much though. And ultimately you hit a big slowdown. Of course the journey is the reward, but it's hard not to feel a rush.

Economics are really weird in the new fast levelling game. With all the heirloom stuff my priest hit level 65 before he'd gotten the "looted 100g" achievement. Meantime, of course, he'd spent thousands of gold on training, professions, the occasional bit of gear. And there's a few big ticket items: 1000g for dual spec, 1000g for Northrend flying, 5000g for fast flying. It would have been very frustrating if I didn't have the gold and heirloom items lying around from previous characters.

Now I'm looking to level 80 and wondering if there's a way I can play the endgame casually. I wouldn't mind seeing the 3.2 and 3.3 dungeons before Cataclysm drops. I've never seen ICC or the newer 5 mans. But sadly the way to prep for those is to run a bunch of mindless random heroics first, I may get bored before I can get that done.

I started playing WoW because I had some frustrating free time on my hands. No interesting new games, was in limbo with the pilot training, and wanted something simple and mindless fun. But now I've got the pilot license, there's an interesting new game on order, and I've got some other projects warming up on the back burner. WoW works well as a time-filler, but I wouldn't want it for an avocation again.

Warcraft: level 52-59 in 24 hours

I renewed my Warcraft subscription again, just for a month. Had some free time and was bored, why not? I'd hit a big plateau when I hit level 50. I was too low level to enjoy PvP against people 10 levels higher than me, and I was sick of the dungeons on offer. And quests? Huh? Who does quests any more?

But on re-subscribing I stuck my toe in as a healer in Alterac Valley. It's just as degenerate a battleground as ever before; the optimal strategy for both sides is to avoid PvP entirely and just race to the end. But oh how efficient that is. Two wins = one level, so you can get a level in well under an hour if you're lucky. The only problem is not PvPing is boring. So I had fun "playing wrong" defending bunkers, some good 3 on 3 skirmishes made for a nice priest workout.

Now I'm trying to slow down at level 59, enjoy being top of the bracket for a few matches.