Flyv's Warcraft Blog

Questing alone, raiding together

One thing that's always bugged me about Warcraft: there's two different games. There's the questing / levelling game, and then there's the raiding game. Both are great games but play quite differently, requiring different skills, gear, talent specs, and temperaments.

But most importantly they require different size groups. Raids require 25 (or 10, or 40) people, questing is best done alone. I keep trying to do quests with other people but everyone moves at a different pace and everyone's done different quests. Unless you make a firm commitment to quest perfectly in sync it's easier just to go solo.

Except for the healers, who have a hard time questing solo. I feel bad. Every hour or so someone will say in guild chat "Healer LFG" and I selfishly ignore it, too busy in my own solo activities. I should be helping them, goodness knows they help me enough.

Then again I'm hardly questing myself; I'm too busy exploring and levelling professions. I'm only halfway through level 71. Need to buckle down.

Some WotLK early thoughts

Some random thoughts from a day in Northrend:

• The art direction in WotLK is fantastic. The boat trip into Howling Fjord is breathtaking. Textures are great quality. It may be time to upgrade the model engine though.
• Druids are so much fun for solo play. It's so great doing amazing cat DPS, swapping to bear when things go bad (or just to AoE), then healing yourself.
• My levelling spec seems to work OK. What I miss most is Shredding Attacks: without it Shred is just too expensive. Ferocious Bite isn't so great without Rend and Tear, so I'm finding I Maim/Shred to finish off quest mobs more than Ferocious Bite.
• The new instances are lots of fun. Beautiful set design and some of the boss fights are great. My guildies have been kind enough to not spoil the instances for me so most of the fights I've been going in blind: highly recommend it. And I haven't wiped yet!
• T6 gear is very strong. Even though I'm still level 70 I've now tanked all instances through Ahn-Kahet (level 75 bosses) in my non-tank spec. My companions are T6 geared too and the only instance that gave us any trouble was Ahn-Kahet. Survival of the Fittest means you're crit immune even against things 5 levels higher than you, but you can be crushed and you miss a lot.
• N00b death knights will pay anything for glyphs, bless the little traitorous murderers.

Faerie Fire, Maul, and crowd control

There was a weird change in 3.0: Faerie Fire (Feral) now does damage when you're in bear form. Not a lot: 5% of your attack power, or about 130 a hit. It also generates threat about 1400 threat for me, or about 10x damage. The extra threat is a big help for when we ranged pull. Also the damage means we can now use this ability to break crowd control like sheep. Between that and 20 yard Growl there's hardly any reason to move to a mob anymore!

I've been having fun tanking with Glyph of Maul. The second attack on a nearby mob is very powerful, it's a lot of damage and threat. It's also very dangerous around crowd control; it has a surprisingly wide range. It's fine right now as we AoE down all the newly nerfed trash mobs in raids, but in the situations where I shouldn't break a sheep I've had a very hard time controlling it. I'll probably remove it when the game gets challenging again.

Zombie economics

Like it or hate it, the spreading Scourge is altering our world. I think it's having a definite impact on the economy.

The Garona jewelmarket is nearly empty. So is the glyph market. The market's been hot the last ten days, a lot of people buying stuff. So where are the sellers? Well, a lot of the serious traders use level 1 alts to do their auction work and it's basically impossible to keep a banker alt alive in a capital city right now. So the economy is freezing up.

Fortunately my jewelcrafter is a brave level 70 hunter and she's quite happy to fight off the zombie hordes in-between cutting and selling gems. And she's making a lot of money right now, one of the few crafters able to bring goods to market in these troubling times.

Also, rumour has it that Horde zombies can trade with Alliance zombies. That's a significant change, it's normally a real pain to move gold between factions.

Finally, the zombie invasion has one nice advantage: when was the last time you saw a living gold spammer? Thank you, Scourge.

3.0 Shadowmeld and tanking?

I'm still mostly ignoring all the beta news, although I'm now grudgingly starting to pay attention so I know what the hell to do when 3.0.2 comes out. Hopefully they rebalance bears before then because from what I've heard, the current feral setup is going to make it very awkward for us to tank.

But Alliance druids will get a fun new tanking toy: Shadowmeld is usable while in combat. And when you use it, mobs will ignore you. It's not a threat wipe and once you break the Shadowmeld they'll come back to you.

This ability will give Alliance druids a very interesting and unique tanking ability. We can be the main tank, then stop and let the mob go to #2 on the aggro list. There's all sorts of fights in Burning Crusade where the main tank needs to drop aggro to let another tank take over: too many debuffs from Gurtogg Bloodboil, or properly off-tanking Void Reaver or Gruul, etc. Alliance druids alone will have an easy way to do this.

Of course we can also use our new power for Evil rather than Good. No one says you can only Shadowmeld when another tank is #2. Heh, heh, heh.

Bear mount!

I'm very proud to say that my guild has gotten the Zul'aman bear mount speed run down and under control. We've gotten two bear mounts now and think we can comfortably churn out a few more before the 3.0 patch drops. Zul'aman is a very fun instance and the speed run keeps it challenging even for T6 geared raiders. It's a great feral druid run, too; I get to tank, heal, and DPS all in a single raid.

I'd like to give a special shout-out to Cassytha (and Pepped, before) for organizing our weekly ZA runs. Took us about eight weeks of dedicated attempts to get it down to where we could do the 4 bosses in 45 minutes.

Macros for shifting forms

One bit of advice I give new feral druids: hotkey your form shifts. It's very useful to be able to quickly switch to bear or cat in a fight. It's also fun to shift to crow quickly. Before I hotkeyed forms I used to think of my feral form as a big permanent decision, "ok I'll be in bear form this fight". Now that switching forms is like just another spell, I do it a lot more fluidly. I use ZXCV for the shifts.

I'm just now experimenting with using macros to make form shifting more reliable. The problem with the default buttons is they're toggles. Press the bear button and you shift to bear. Unless you are a bear, in which case you shift to caster form. Which can be a real disaster when you're tanking. So for now I'm trying the following simple macros:

/cast !Dire Bear Form
/cast !Cat Form
/cancelform

These macros shift you into bear form, cat form, and caster form. They always put you into that form, they don't toggle. The cat form macro also acts as a powershift macro, if that's your thing. I'll see how this goes; I'm still used to the toggle behaviour, now I have to train myself to press a new button when I want to be an elf. I was surprised how often I do that even with auto-form-shifting on spell casts.

PS: does anyone have an addon that helps them manage macros? The default Blizzard UI is awful. Looking for something that helps pick icons more easily and generally manage a macro library.

Alternatives to WoW

I've gotten a bit bored of WoW lately. Flyv, my feral druid, is having a lot of fun raiding Black Temple but that's only a few hours a week. And I've done pretty much every other quest in the Outlands with him and all the PvP I care to. He's pretty well done. I spent a lot of time on a hunter alt, bringing her up to raiding as well as she can in my other guild (4/6 SSC). The imminent WotLK release has made me stop obsessing about doing all the content with her though. And I'm not about to start another alt.

So I've been seeing other games.

I've played Age of Conan off and on since the launch. Honestly? It's not that good. It's sort of amusing to play a fast melee combat oriented game for a bit. But the quests are tedious, the story isn't that interesting, and my friends tell me the endgame is basically not there. I lost interest once I got to level 20 and finished the starter zone; you're left to grind boring quests until level 30 and I just couldn't be bothered.

I played Lord of the Rings Online some when it first launched, but got bored with the gameplay and quit. (And respecced Flyv from Moonkin to Feral, thereby making WoW a whole new game.) I've recently picked it up again and really appreciate what the game is. The actual gameplay is not great; combat is laggy and slow and there's not a lot of variety, at least on a Hunter. But the art is beautiful, and of course the story is excellent. I'm playing it more like a single player RPG, enjoying the storytelling.

It's hard to imagine how any game will replace the obsessive, detailed fanaticism of the millions of Warcraft players. You don't see Conan lore nerds or LotRO theorycrafters out there, there are no rockstar endgame guilds for any game other than WoW. Warcraft is a uniquely excellent game. The actual gameplay, the button pushing and coordination, is fantastic, unparalleled in MMO development. And while I don't think the art or storytelling of Warcraft are great, they're good enough to keep people interested and having fun. And the game has its own momentum, enough people and things to do to sustain itself. That's not going to change anytime soon; WotLK will be successful. Maybe Warhammer will be serious competition, we'll just have to wait and see.

Other than WoW, the only MMO I've played that I've gotten deep into is Eve Online. That's a whole different thing, a rich and deep PvP game where the players generate their own content. That, and the economics of the game are fabulous; I played the game as a 0.0 trader hauling cargo through dangerous space to take advantage of cross-region market opportunites. Very fun, lots of "escort my slow freighter full of valuable ore through the pirates!" and "slip my fast interceptor through the hostile corporation blockade". But in the end the poor gameplay of Eve made me lose interest.

It turns out the gameplay, the actual button mashing, is an important part of a game for me. And Blizzard is uniquely good at making games with perfect gameplay.

Potions and healthstones while tanking

In an earlier post I lamented not being able to use healthstones while tanking. Several folks were kind enough to point out that since the 2.3 changes to cooldowns and feral forms, you can safely pop out of bear form, drink a potion, eat a healthstone, and go back into bear form all in the blink of a macro. The relevant macro is discussed on elitist jerks and is quite interesting:

/script local gcd=GetSpellCooldown("Dire Bear Form"); if gcd==0 then CancelPlayerBuff("Dire Bear Form") end;
/stopmacro [stance:1]
/use Master Healthstone
/use item:34440
/use item:33934
/use item:32947
/use item:22829
/use item:32578
/cast Dire Bear Form

There's a lot going on in that macro and I like it. The core of it is "use a healthstone, use a potion, then cast bear form". In fact you can just use a simpler macro that does those three things and be happy. But the above macro is a bit more clever.

One thing it does is at the start it runs a bit of script to see if you're currently under global cooldown. If you are under GCD then it aborts the macro. Very clever bit of scripting, it protects you from accidentally popping your macro right after a lacerate and finding yourself standing their dumbly in your undies.

The other cleverness is it's got a list of possible health potions for you to drink. Those are the item IDs; it tries out Mad Alchemist potions, faction potions, etc before the good ol' Super Healing Potion. The last item ID is a Charged Crystal Focus, if you happen to have one of those. (I think they're on the healthstone timer, so this may not be that useful.)

Bottom line is you don't have to think about it, just put this macro on your hotbar, mash it, and you've got about 5000 points of healing in bear form. Nice to have another panic button.

Thanks for the comments, Faerun and Jink!

The Trouble with Blessing of Salvation

Blessing of Salvation is a feral druid's best friend. When we're DPSing it keeps us from pulling aggro. And when we're tanking it makes holding aggro EZ-mode for us. 30% threat reduction for all your smack-happy fire mages and destro locks is great.

Blessing of Salvation on feral druids is also a paladin's nightmare. Sometimes we're going cat DPS and need salvation. Sometimes we're tanking and salvation can mean the raid wipes. Which is it, pull by pull? The poor Paladin has to keep track. Worse, Paladins choose their buffs on a per-class basis. So of course they're giving Salv to all the trees and chickens and it's easy for them to forget to replace Salv with Might or whatever after rebuffing.

My general rule is I only take Blessing of Salvation when I'm DPSing a boss. On trash even if I'm not tanking I always wear a tank set and don't take salvation; it's far more useful to suddenly be able to tank than to do 30% more DPS. (And Cower is remarkably useful at the start of a pull if you are risking pulling aggro.)

I try my best to be sure I don't have Salvation when I'm tanking, but in my UI it's just one more little icon to track. What I need is a BIG RED BOX on my screen when I'm in bear form with salvation on.

Update: thanks to Faerun for pointing me to the Damnation addon. It automatically cancels Salvation when you're in bear form, just the thing I needed.