Bear Tanking in Wrath

Wow Insider has this great post on Bear Tanking in Wrath of the Lich King. If you are a Bear tank you must read it. Lots of good information.

I had kind of guessed that the buff to Survival of the Fittest would make us uncrittable. So there is no need to get Defense or Resilience gear any more. That will be nice.

The big change will be to leather armor. No more leather items with extra armor. When patch 3.0 comes out, this will be a retroactive change. Yep, that's right retroactive. So all the gear you have now, it get its armor value reduced. This means that rings, staffs, trinkets, necklaces, anything with extra armor on it is gonna be much more important.

So if you don't have those items get em now. You have been warned. lol.

The Real Reason Alliance Loses So Much in PVP

After much thought and play, I think I have finally figured out why the Alliance generally loses in battlegrounds other than Alerac Valley. It's the healing.

The last few days on my mage, I've noticed how rarely the alliance has any healers in a battleground while horde teams generally have 2 or 3 good ones. The combo of burst healing and burst damage is unstoppable in Arathi Basin or Eye of the Storm. Over the last week playing against the horde, I've encountered numerous talented resto druids, priests, shamans, and holy paladins. While my alliance teams may have the occasional priest or paladin. Usually no healers at all.

As to why this is the situation? I don't have answer to that.

Feature Overload

Just another quick thought after my last post. I'm beginning to think that World or Warcraft is getting way too complicated. The developers keep adding more and more spells and abilities and I think it is ruining the game. On some classes there are hardly enough button bars to hold all the spells available. Does this really help the game? Does every class need a ranged attack? Every class a root? A stun?

Why not pally bubbles for all? I joke, but we are definitely headed that way. Mages can now frost block. Rogues have cloak of shadows. Will druids get a petrified tree spell?

I think a lot of this stuff came out of the fact that Warlock dots were overpowered in PVP. It would have been easier just to nerf the the dots.

Rogues are melee right?

I should explain. I just got my Mage to level 70 and I have been PVPing to get him some gear upgrades. Now I originally did a lot of twinking on this toon at level 29 and level 39. At that level, rogue and mage fights tend to be pretty even. Even if you were to beat a rogue, usually you would have to spend all your mana and would not have a lot of health left. But it would be a straight ranged vs melee fight. They are trying to close on you. You are trying to stay away from them.

But one abilitiy added to rogues really annoys me: Deadly Throw

As a mage, to win in a duel with melee, keeping distance on them is key. Deadly throw is a ranged ability that does 2 to 3k damage (at least that typically what I get hit for) and reduces my movement speed by 50% for 6 seconds. Plus it has a freaking 30 yard range! I'm sorry this is just ridiculous. I thought rogues are supposed to be a "melee" class? What does this have to do with melee? I understand melee clases need a way to pull mobs. But should warriors be able to use a bow like a hunter?

To add balance back to the game I think mages need an ability I would like to call, "ferocious blow". This ability will be an instant cast available every minute that does the damage of all your +dmg and the damage from your most powerful damage spell.
That way we can close in for the kill!!! ;-)

Between the stuns, poisons, blinds, and sprints, rogues should have no problem closing on clothies. Why do they need some sort of completely overpowered ranged ability? Please leave the melee classes melee and the ranged classes ranged.

As soon as I get Attilla geared up, I'm gonna get on my bear tank and go do some rogue hunting. That way they can feel my pain. :)

Itemization for 20-58 Needs Updating

This is an open post to Blizzard, in case anyone out there is listening. A month or two ago I finished leveling a Mage to 70 and right now I am working on getting a Priest to 70 (he's at 52). Here is the problem, since there are so few players between 20-58 now, it is VERY difficult to get equipment. I'm talking trash greens here, not blue or purple gear.

Back in the day, if you were at 45 and you still had level 25 gloves, you could always buy something. Not anymore. I have been trying to find a green dagger for my priest for 2 weeks. Other than level 40 blue items going for 50G each, there is nothing on the AH. Nothing!!!! I'm having to use a rogue dagger that dropped for me off a mob.

The old world quests need to be more in line with the BC quests. You should always be getting a steady stream of reasonably good green items, with the occasion blue. Since you can't buy gear, this would go a long way to solving the problem.

Too much overlap in PVP?

I have begun to wonder recently if there is too much class overlap in WOW. My Mage alt recently made it to 70, and I have been PVPing in BGs a lot for fun and gear. (Side Note: I twinked on my mage at 29 and 39 for quite a while so I really haven't PVPed on him in about a year or so. Most of my PVP experience with him is pre BC.)

The first thing I noticed at 70, is that all my magical buffs are getting dispelled most of the time. Used to be that only Shamans and Priests would do that. Now you have Locks with their little fel hunters knocking stuff off. Add to that the plethora of Hunters, and it starts to get ridiculous. What's the point of having them if they are so easy to remove? This ability made sense when it was limited to a few classes and builds. But now it seems like its out of hand.

Why do rogues need a ranged attack ability? Deadly throw? Please. Melee only need the ability to pull mobs. Should a warrior have the ability to do real damage like a hunter with a bow or gun? I suppose that will be next. lol.

Why not give my mage frost "plate" armor? I should be able to have 12000 armor right?

Sylvannas Windrunner Backstory

The leader of the Undead, Sylvannas Windrunner has a very sad back story that is detailed in Warcraft III. Someone was kind enough to go back to the old game and record the story threads and post them on YouTube. If you are interested in the story, click on these links:

Sylvannas Windrunner Part I
Sylvannas Windrunner Part II
Sylvannas Windrunner Part III
Sylvannas Windrunner Part IV
Sylvannas Windrunner Part V

After the story that takes place in Warcraft III, Sylvannas was able to recover her body and can be found in the Undercity in World of Warcraft. Blizzard added a quest line to WOW where members of the Horde find a necklace that belonged to her sister. This triggers an in game event where she sings a song, Lament of the Highborne. Check out the video on the official WOW movie page: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/downloads/movies.html

WOW is Down Again

Just tried to log into the game and I can't get in. Here is the typical keystone cop scenario of a typical Blizzard outage.

1. Try to log into game and it won't authenticate me. (Got an "unable to connect" error this time.)
2. Go to the forums to see if there are issues.
   
3. Can't connect to the forums cause they are down too. (See 1 above).
4. Wait 10 or 15 minutes and log in again.
5. Now I authenticate, but I get an error saying "your prepaid time is up". That could be the case, but I think I'm paid up to the summer.
6. So I click on Manage Account to check.
7. I get a "Server Busy" error message from the account management server. Obviously I'm not the only one having this problem. lol.
8. So I try to log into the Forums to post a message about 5 - 7.
9. Can't log into the forums because they won't authenticate me.

Blizzard has to be the worst company ever when it comes to this stuff. You would think they could at least develop systems robust enough so you could contact them to let them know they have an issue. Not Blizzard. Wait until the customers crash the forum server, or account server, or whatever. Then we will take action.

So since I can't contact them through normal channels, I post here. Maybe someone somewhere will hear my plea for help. lol. I doubt it!!! :)

The Trouble with Blizzard Support - Part II

So now that we know Blizzard's customer support is really lame, what should they do? Well I have some ideas.

First off, Blizzard really needs to back up accounts. Weekly at a minimum. Daily would be better. Then when this sort of thing happens, a customer can be up and running in a couple of days instead of a couple of weeks. In addition, just think how much time and money would be saved. It can't be very effective to have game masters essentially restoring everything by hand.

Second, Blizzard needs to log usage patterns. For example, say I log in from the same IP address between 9am and 11pm server time every day. And blizzard tracks that information. Then I suddenly log in from a different IP address at 3AM and start selling all my blue and purple gear. Hmmmm. Maybe something is up? Possibly? This should be a very easy thing to implement. If suspicious things start happening, a Blizzard game master should be notified and the account should be monitored.

Third, Blizzard needs to give game masters a little more power. If four guild members from a guild think an account has been hacked, maybe it would be a good idea if they could act? If you had the usage data described above it would be easy to figure out if someone is getting hacked.

Finally, if Blizzard doesn't do any of the above, they could at least e-mail customers with the status of the investigation every couple of days. Then at least a player with a hacked account would know they are working on fixing things. Leaving people hanging for days is just plain stupid. Just think if your phone went out or your power. Would you be ok with them getting back to you sometime in the next two weeks?

Blizzard needs to address some of these issues. They are the king of the hill right now, but if you don't treat your customers right, you are not gonna build any loyalty. And if you don't do that, as soon as the next good MMORPG comes out, they will wish they had treated folks a little bit better.

The Trouble with Blizzard Support - Part I

This is the first part of a two part post on some stuff that happened with our Guild Master and our Guild back in December. I have broken the discussion into 2 parts. In this part, I will discuss the facts of what happened. In the next, post I'll try to make suggestions about what Blizzard should do and what they should have done.

Our guild master and her family are avid World of Warcraft players. They have two accounts and play regularly. They also have a nephew who lives nearby and plays as well. Our story begins when our GMs son visited his cousins house and played a little WOW. Apparently, hackers got a key logger installed on his machine. Therefore, while playing there, the hackers were able to obtain the passwords to both of my GMs accounts and her nephew's account.

Fast forward a few weeks to just before Christmas. Our GM logs off for the night around 12am server time. Pretty typical for her. And since it was near the holidays, we had several guildees (like about 5 or 6, including a couple of officers) playing most of the night. At like 3am, our GM and then her husband log in. Now being married with kids, this is very unusual. So our guildees said hi to her. No reply. So several of them begin to ask what's up. One of the hackers pleasantly tells them to "F*!# off, you idiots". Since our guild has a strict policy against using profanity, guild members realized almost immediately that our GM's account has been hacked. They all open tickets with Blizz game masters to shut down the account. Now this is 4 or 5 people opening at least 1 ticket. By now the Guild Bank has been emptied. Then the hackers begin to gkick all the guild members above level 30. So the fact that we have been hacked has been confirmed.

So our members finally get a hold of game masters and report that the GMs account has been hacked, they are robbing our guild bank, and gkicking members. Blizzards response "we can't do anything, only the account holder can shut down the account." So Blizzard does nothing. Absolutely nothing until, we are able to reach our GM via e-mail at about 3pm the next day. Then our GM changes her account password and calls Blizzard tech support alerting them to the fact that the account has been hacked.

The end result of Blizzard's lack of response? Our guild bank is emptied completely, probably losing the guild items worth 1000 to 2000 gold. All of our GMs toons are stripped of their gear or deleted. Her husbands account is also stripped and transferred to another server. (I find this particularly interesting as most character transfers take at least a day. They were able to move his primary toon from one server to another in 12 hours. Makes one wonder if the hackers don't have a back door into Blizzard's transfer system.) So their toons are stripped of gear and everything is sold and all their gold is taken.

So how does Blizzard respond? With an immediate call back? With a quick restore from the day before? No they gave each account a 3 day ban. Yep. If you report being hacked, Blizzard will shut you off the game for 72 hrs. Nice huh. And don't expect them to tell you anything. Cause they won't. They will say they are "investigating" and nothing else.

So what happens after the 72 hrs? A quick restore of your account? A detailed e-mail on what they have found out? Nope nothing. You get nothing. They say pretty much nothing other than they will be in touch after they have completed their investigation.

So fast forward 2 weeks, a Blizzard Gamemaster finally contacts our GM and begins to restore some of her stuff. But anything really important like her primary weapon (a bow, she's a hunter) or other gear, you don't get back. We got nothing back for our Guild bank. She get's practically none of her gear back for alts. It takes another couple of weeks before they restore stuff on her husbands toon.

Pretty lousy support if you ask me. What can we deduce from this state of affairs? A few things.

• Blizzard does not back up your toons. The GM had to give our guild master her stuff one at a time. This means they have no backups of accounts and no way to restore them. They must take snap shots of your inventory list, but that must be the extent of their data protection.
• Blizzard gamemasters and tech support have no authority to help you. Bascially, you are screwed if you get hacked. If someone contacts you in time, you can reset your password, but that only kicks the hacker if they log out before stealing all your stuff. You are on your own. Blizard support can't do anything to help you.
• Blizzard does not take hacking or customer support seriously. They are taking in around $150M a month in revenue. There is NO excuse for not backing up players data. NONE!!! Disk arrays and storage are cheap. It would not be that difficult to backup accounts weekly or bi-weekly. Obviously they don't think this is important.
  

So I have described what happened and what the state of affairs are relating to customer support. In part II, I will discuss what Blizzard should do. Apparently they need some advice. :)

AV Issues

WowInsider has posted this article which discusses the ongoing issues with AV. Apparently Horde turtle wins are so pervasive in some battlegroups, the alliance has stopped playing all together, causing 1 to 2 hr queues just to get in a match. I can understand why the alliance players quit, if the Horde forces a turtle and you end up getting 20 honor points from a 30 min game it is a waste of your time.

It is in the best interests of both sides to make the BG into a race. Race games last about 10 minutes. The winner gets 300-400 honor, losers get 200-300. So if you are winning most of the time, 900-1200 honor for 3 race games is better than the 800 honor you would get from one turtle game. Unfortunately, some players are incapable of doing the math or are just jerks and enjoy ruining the game for the other side.

Ultimately Blizzard needs to balance the game so that the losing team always gets a reasonable amount of honor in a reasonable amount of time. That is what made AV so popular in the past, it was the best way to have fun and grind PVP honor.

I just wish Blizzard would test some of these changes before making them. They seem to have a very bad habit of breaking that which is not broken. Then taking months to fix that which is newly broke. Frankly, I think a lot of people are getting tired of this.

More Kudos to the Exiles

Since my last post, Exalted Exiles have downed:

• Illhoof
• Shade of Aran
• And we got the Prince down to 10%

Grats to everyone who was on any of those runs. We just need to work on our Prince strategy and he is down next.