In With the Old

Old heroics. Mechanics. Melee unfriendly. Old Cata.

I was happily maxing out the VP of my various toons yesterday, with my hunter being the last one just short 50 VP. Instead of doing a faceroll Twilight Heroic, I decided to queue for a regular heroic for kicks. I knew beforehand that this wouldn't be a walk in the park, and that it most likely wouldn't be completed in 20 minutes.

I got Deadmines.With a rather squishy tank who's gear was slowly breaking throughout the run. Overall this was a normal group, your normal 10k dps and whatnot.

Thinking back to these new Cata mechanics, I now find them really annoying. Is this bad? Have we been programmed even more so to feel entitled to quick loot with little work? Getting through a Deadmines with new players isn't a walk in the park, the adds hit hard, there are a lot of adds and there are things to interrupt and pay attention to which are simply not present in the new heroics. Sure you could interrupt Carrion Swarm, along with the mandatory interrupt on Azshara in WOE but that's about it.

Deadmines is the perfect example, first boss: Wall of Fire. Boss with cleaves and fire adds. Boss with exploding mists. The DM Gauntlet. All these were fresh and new and epic, but now they are not meant for us anymore. They are for our alts. Don't get me wrong it is still FUN, (and Torby had fun tanking a lot of trash) just not in proportion to the potential reward, in our case the raw VP. Am I implying that there should be some sort of correlation between fun vs reward? Maybe? Probably not. It all depends.

Speaking of rewards, let's talk about drops. Oh drops, the amount of rage and drama that's been linked to your dark dark history since the beginning of gaming time. Let's say you defeat Madness and your time hasting staff drops. You roll, and of course you are going to lose. This of course happened to my Warlock. However, due to the intensity and engagement of the encounter, I didn't really care. We brought a pugged group from not being able to stack on Lootship 2, to one shotting the two encounters afterwards, it was a victory! A lootless victory but still a victory! Now say the caster doing 20k dps won. Well, you are welcome for the carry but thanks for staying alive and now you've seen the fight!

Sure it's great that someone in "need" got an upgrade, but I'd also like to add some subtext, and that is a reminder that any given piece of loot will not help anyone press the right buttons. But that's as far as I'm going to talk about LFR drops.

So the old heroics are great training grounds for healers and melee! As a healer, I automatically expect one of the melee to drop to 50% on any given pull for every single pull in every single heroic. One thing I found funny when healing the new heroics was ...that didn't happen! Another thing I've noticed is that everyone is playing their rogues and rogues are doing a trillion DPS now! Coming within 5% of a hunter's damage is totally imbalanced, I shall QQ unecessarily for all hunters out there! Because the more damage someone else does, the less loot and VP and fun we get!!

So we've agreed that the new heroics and LFR are great stepping stones to....to what? To regular raiding? Free handouts up to ilvl 390 all for what? The basis has been very nicely setup, I am excited to run my Paladin through the gearing game once she hits 85 and I bet it will be MUCH smoother than before. Perhaps for when patch 4.4 hits and the three Old God heroics are released, they will be MUCH more difficult and will utilize normal/heroic modes along with the raid that comes with it?

Truny Forgot What He Was Talking About

Vash'jir is Cool...After the Fact

Now that I'm all done the Vash'jir "quest line", I've been hopping back in once in a while to herb or to gather snake eyes for cooking. I've found that without the tunnel vision brought upon me by questing, this zone is actually really nice. It's quite sad.

The zone is highly detailed, with various little critters and the sprinkling of aquatic life, it's a fantastical underwater world. It's sad that after we do the quest line there's really no reason to come back and "explore" or "romp" (yes I like to romp.......) except to hunt rare mobs or to herb.

This zone is so out of the way, the only convenient way to travel to it is via a portal, I mean how often are you out in the world...actually how often are we even "out in the world" to begin with? Anyways...how often do you fly over Vash'jir and go "oh maybe I'll dive down and enjoy this beautiful zone today?". Probably never. There are no daily quests down there, nor are there any "hidden" quests since the entire quest chain is handed to you from beginning to end (then leaves you very abruptly and rudely). There's almost no reason to stray and since all the caves we end up in look the same it becomes slightly frustrating when you are sent yet again to another cave with quests that will probably lead you to ..yup another cave! The quests weren't BAD and when I was in that Submarine running around clueless, clicking anything I could....the build up was great, I thought "this is going to end epically!". But it was more like "kthxbaifck".

The Battlemaiden quest-line was interesting.

When I was still a Cata Noob, I thought that the new "hub" city was going to be in one of the new fantastical zones. I thought the new hub was going to be in Deepholm, where we would then plan our attack on Deathwing. But now Deathwing is just flying all over the place with no focus. When I entered Vash'jir I thought that there would be a hub city underwater, where we would build our forces against the Naga. Nope, nothing. There was a more "mystical" feeling to thinking that the Cata Hub wasn't Org or Stormwind. It's hard to explain, but let's look at BC: Shattrath. A city in a different world. Shattrath = BC. Dalaran = Wrath. Then all of a sudden we're separated. See, from a "regular" realm...I didn't mind the Alliance. Shouldn't we be working with them to down Deathwing?

I guess since Deathwing is all over the place we didn't know where to build our ultimate Sanctuary. It would have been nice to be in Vash'jir for no reason at all just that it was in the middle of the world. Or by the Earth Pillar. Then provide portals to all the main cities?

So yes, Vash'jir. There's a lot of potential down there for future expansions, perhaps we'll see a new 5-man where a strange dungeon has been discovered by eager underwater archaeologists under the silt and sand where a strange demonic force has corrupted a handful of the Naga. This shall be known as what I had named years before: Watery Throne of Friesh'ja. WTF. Come ON we need a WTF dungeon!

So, what do you think? Why am I asking a question? I don't even remember what I typed up there anymore so goodbye!

Truny the Vash'jir Topic