We are the hollow men

These days, I do not play. And I have not had anything to say. My attachment to this world is slipping away. And I imagine there are others who feel this way.

This is how the world ends.

I still log on, but with no ambition. I watch the people run past, rushing to and fro, slotting their slots so that they can replace them again. Fighting for gear, fighting for progression, fighting for server rank, fighting for world rank. Driven by their social demands for approval, that's been twisted into dominance. Or, in truth, the banishment of all failure. Absolutism will tolerate no other form.

Many times, I have tried to walk away. Each time it took anger, resentment, circumstance, and a declaration. But such passion can only be summoned from attachment. Perhaps of a bitter kind, like shackles on one's psyche. Where one is horrified at themselves for the needle in their arm, or the minipet on their toolbar, with that absurd and disgusting desire for more. The kind of dependence driven by fear, the fear of living any other way.

Now, the shackles are loose, for I must be wasting away. I slip them off from time to time, and back on again, but it's now just a habit. Sometimes I hardly remember their weight on my soul, those terrible and consuming passions, and often I forget to put them back on. No, there's been no cancellations of subscriptions. I don't even think about it. It's become irrelevant to me what happens. I still invent duties and responsibilities. I make bullets, I sell bullets. And then I forget that the game is even running.

This is how the world ends.

I tried to make it impersonal and professional; I tried to shed my soul. That is, I tried a new raiding guild. But the apathy was strong, so strong that I did not feel a thing. I left in the middle of the night without a word to anyone. I doubt they noticed. If they did, then my conviction is that much stronger. I didn't care about them, and I didn't want them to care. I wanted nothing, in its purest form.

I felt the pressure through the headset on their Algalon attempts, orders of magnitude greater than the sound against my eardrums. My imagination amplified the pounding another tenfold, pounding and pounding against the gates of Icecrown, with its limited attempts twisting and heaving and pressuring us more and more. And I knew that I had to escape. I could not fight with them, I would not rise to the expectations of these strangers. And my own expectations were insignificant, invisible to their eyes.

I should have left at the moment when they questioned a red gem vs. purple+set bonus choice. Five DPS. Give me a fucking break.

This is how the world ends.

I am not quitting. I don't think I have the desire to quit.

Somewhere, I still hear whispers calling me to Icecrown, for the head of the Lich King, to finish what I started. But they are so faint, and the shackles are just strands.

These days, I do not play. But I haven't played for years. I have worked. And fought. But I have fought for too long.

Now, I don't think about it. I just sit. And wait.

Not with a bang but a whimper.

Jormundgard vs. Karazhan, Take 1

Whatever worries I had about a lack of challenge have faded. My first serious attempt at a solo Karazhan run have shown me that it's going to take a lot of work. While some fights are borderline trivial, a couple have left me wondering it it's even possible.

I started easy and finished off Attumen and his horse. As Feral, there isn't much to worry about. Leader of the Pack and various mitigation talents keep me healed enough that I could just sit there and hit one button until he was dead. But I had done this many times before, and this was nothing new to me.


It's about as exciting as it looks.

Moroes, however, was a very different story. Arriving unannounced may not have been a good idea.
Unlike the "proper" 10 man fight, which requires lots of CC, interrupts, and multiple roles, the solo version of Moroes just degenerates into a numerical game of Who DPSes faster. It becomes about how many tricks I can pull to mitigate damage and burst enough before I get killed by Moroes' Garotte DoT.

Most of the fight ends up looking like this: Boom Boom Swipe, Boom Boom-Boom Swipe.

Getting the guests down was not difficult, but Moroes usually took me out in the final showdown. It was particularly funny when I would shift out of bear to heal during his Vanishes. I swear he waits for me to come out of bear like a real rogue.
Most attempts ended up like the one above.

I wasn't able to progress until I used as many tricks as I could think of to survive:

• Root the adds for the pull, and subsequently during the fight with Nature's Grasp
• Use Barkskin and Frenzied Regeneration (with Enrage) as early and as frequently as possible.
• Interrupt Lady Catriona's Heals with Bash. Generally, only one interrupt was required.
• Kill the Mortal Striking warrior after the Priest

All of these efforts helped, and finally turned the DPS race in my favour.

In the end, Moroes did stay down, but it was a terribly clumsy kill. I had to use a healthstone from an earlier raid, and I still needed Ulduar-level gear. I still need some practice and thought on this one. But for now, I was happy to get this far.

The Maiden of Virtue was next on my list, but she turned out to be even more boring than Attumen.
It's almost like she wanted to lie down on her own.

Sadly, this was the end of my adventure. I proceeded to the Opera, but Romulo and Julianne just doesn't seem possible. Julianne's heals are very strong (>50%) and druids just don't have a convenient set of interrupts. The cast time is too fast for Feral Charge, and she hits too hard to stay in Cat form to use Maim. Bash does work, but the cooldown is far longer than her heal.

Since I couldn't even find a reliable solution for Julianne alone, I gave up the effort. I doubted that Romulo would be difficult, but I saw no conceivable way to interrupt Julianne's heals while surviving Romulo's attacks. I'm not giving up completely, but I might just have to wait for a Wizard of Oz week.

It seems you win for now, Karazhan.

Magister's Terrace: The Commemorative Edition

After getting linked in a post by the goblin, I decided to re-attempt my previous adventure in Heroic Magister's Terrace. The results were very depressing. When I originally attempted that, it was the first time I had taken feral builds seriously since I was level 60, and the screenshot shows that I was barely cutting it with Naxxramas gear. It took a some serious effort, as well as trial and error, to understand the levels of damage and how to survive long enough to finish.

Now, sitting pretty in lots 245 item level gear, the entire exercise was risk-free. I still had the knowledge of when to tank-and-whittle-down and when to burn-before-you-die, but the risk was gone. Kael'thas shot me into the air before he even summoned a phoenix. It shows how absolutely haywire gear has become in this patch, and how much previous patches relied in sparse upgrades and poor theorycrafting to balance these fights.

On top of that, I've decided to give up raiding. Aside from not getting much pleasure out of following orders in scripted battles, I have no desire to deal with the new changes in Icecrown. Limited attempts is a recipe for stress and blame, and I have no interest in getting in the middle of such fights. So it seems that new challenges won't be as easy to find.

The iLevel and Blizzard's Bungle

One thing about Wrath of the Lich King that no one can deny is the enormous amount of loot inflation. It became so bad that the designers had to produce a raid-wide debuff in Icecrown just to return sanity to tanking. WoD discusses the impact of this, and commenter ZachPruckowski gets it right:

Blizzard has said the issue with itemization was adding the hard-modes later in the process, and it makes sense. Blizzard was always planning on ToC being a raid (or at least they were planning on a 3.2 “mystery raid” since Wrath’s Beta, and it was announced Icecrown would be in 3.3 at Blizzcon’08), but hard modes seem to have come much later in the development cycle (after seeing the community reaction to Sarth-3D). If not for hard modes, they could have stuck with a 13-ilvl-tier system ICC-25 would drop ilvl 252 loot instead of 264/277 loot.

Hard mode loot is a massive monkeywrench in the system, essentially doubling the rate of stat improvements. And it's especially evident to us now that item level is a published and accessible number to the players, and that Blizzard has fulltime theorycrafters like Ghostcrawler to ensure that gear scalability remains accurate.

Except that this is also a major source of the problem. People can quibble about things like spirit or haste vs. crit, but every patch has yielded clear upgrades in almost every slot. When everything was ballpark estimated and based on certain misconceptions (anyone else remember BC raiders hanging on to tier bonuses for a very long time?), there was so much noise that true upgrades were infrequent and the rate of upgrades became slow.By getting the gear scalability so right, it exposed the issue of upgrade frequency.

By fixing one thing (gear scaling), they made another thing (upgrade frequency) more sensitive (using the Fun-O-Meter, of course). And this amplified the problem of the Hard-mode itemization. Well, we don't want to give up on professional theorycrafting and get Ghostcrawler fired. More control is always better than less control.

But I have a good fix, one that ZachPruckowski hinted at and would be easy to implement for Cataclysm, and maybe even Icecrown:

No new loot for hardmodes

The Blizzard team would strongly disagree with this. They would argue that loot is the primary incentive for all players, and needs to be used to control player activity. It's the same logic they've used for PvP.

For the unwashed masses, I have no doubt that they are right. But I've seen these hardmodes get really hard. Firefighter might be the hardest thing I've ever done in this game. If these hardmodes are going to get even worse for Icecrown Citadel, then only a small percentage of players are going to even try them, and at that point I really doubt that anyone is wasting sixteen hours a week dying to Lady Deathwhisper for a 10% chance at some new boots (well, except maybe this guy).

Removing hard mode loot would reduce the upgrade frequency problem, it would improve scalability, and it would even prolong the life of older content, since people could go back to older hardmodes in the next patch's gear (+13 iLevel) and simplify the fights. Right now, people go back to them with effective two patches worth (+26 iLevel) of gear, and just smash them into oblivion.

Doing this would also be an implicit declaration of Competitive PvE (CPE), with hardmodes as the rating system. Serious raiders should be in favour of this, since it would create more balanced fights and put such players on more equal footing, and should have their support.

So why hasn't the Blizzard team done this? For example, I never understood putting item rating on PvP gears, when it's supposed to be about skill and not what you're wearing. Yet the great arena players were always very angry about seeing "scrubs" in the top-end arena gear. And I've heard enough players complain about people marching through Dalaran in gear that "they don't deserve". CPErs would probably react no differently.

But if CPErs are serious about balanced competition, they will support any effort to maintain control over the numbers of this game, and will encourage the Blizzard team to abolish hard-mode loot.

Great News, Everyone!

Finally, we can emote the way we were born to play! From the PTR patch notes:

"The existing /welcome emote now greets/welcomes targets (character says "hello"), while the new /yw is for saying "you're welcome."

A few other changes:

Naxxramas appears to be getting the Tempest Keep treatment:

Players no longer need to kill the final bosses in all four wings of this dungeon in order to teleport to Sapphiron. Teleportation orbs have been added to allow players access back and forth from Sapphiron's lair.

Death of a Legendary Item:

Sceptor (sic) of Celebras: Since this item is no longer needed as a key, Celebras will no longer give one out to a player who loses it. The item can now be sold or disenchanted as normal.

Still no mention in the patch notes, but I confirmed on the latest PTR build that we can still mail heirlooms between Alliance and Horde characters. I'm looking forward to this; leveling an overpowered Horde character might bring some life to the game for me.

PS: /yw

Our Ephemeral Challenges

Posts by Graylo and Tobold have made me realized how accurate Gevlon is about the socials (two recent posts on his beliefs: "Irrationals and socials" and "I did it for fun!"). The reason I was surprised was that I always assumed that both were driven by much more personal pursuits. The first takes raiding seriously, but had I always assumed that he pursued it solely for the challenge. The latter talks so much about the larger impact of MMOs that I assumed he was immune to the presumed accomplishments of their timesinks. But both seem genuinely annoyed at certain changes that are completely within their control to ignore, but don't.

Graylo's post is about the new structure of Icecrown Citadel raiding. While the most controversial part has been about the limited attempts on many of the fights (see the American and European forums), Graylo is particularly bothered by a ramping buff provided to all Icecrown raiders. As time goes on, the buff will be augmented and player statistics will be indirectly improved over time. Why is this a problem? After all, the designers have allowed us to remove the debuff. But that is not enough:

I realize you can click it off, but a gradual built in nerf is not the way Blizzard should be tuning encounters. It just feels cheap to me. This way you never know if you just downed that boss because you improved or if the the fight was finally nerfed enough.

Picking up additional gear from one week to the next is already an indirect nerf to the content, why do [they] need to provide this charity[?] Blizzard should design the encounters to be... as they think they should be. If it's decided that the encounter is [too] hard then nerf it, but I want to kill the boss on the intended difficulty.

But the entire line of reasoning is very contradictory, since the buff can be removed. The server and client software provide the tools to perform at the "unfiltered" level. In fact, with XP turn-off and freedom of gear choice, anyone can do this at any level of the game. The only issue is whether everyone else gets the buff, particularly those nasty players who use it to trivialize the encounters. Therefore these feelings can't be about absolute challenge, it is relative challenge. It is a social comparison.

In a very similar vein, Tobold seems very annoyed that anyone can level cooking up to about 350 through the Pilgrim holiday with very little effort:

Pretty regularly Blizzard nerfs some challenge in World of Warcraft and makes something which was previously hard to get a lot easier. That usually makes the people who couldn't do the hard achievement happy, but those who already did it on hard mode unhappy. And I must admit I'm not quite happy with the way Blizzard nerfed acquiring cooking skill in the current Pilgrim's Bounty holiday event.

[C]ompared to previous methods of leveling cooking to 350, which either involved lots of farming meat, or fishing, or spending a fortune on the AH, the Pilgrim's Bounty event is giving cooking skill away far too easily. Where is the fun in leveling a tradeskill when you can level it for a handful of silver in an hour? Even if the event, and the food, only lasts for a week, the cooking skill lasts forever.

Again, nothing is stopping a person from leveling cooking the "normal" way. It is the availability of an alternative route that previously did not exist that seems to be grating him. His subsequent comments suggest that it is the loss of the challenge and the temporary opportunity for raising the cooking skill. But what is stopping him from doing it the old way?

I single these two out because it's forced me to consider that even the best of us are driven by social forces, even those who I thought were immune to it. Every person (including myself) seems to harbor these feelings. It is as if we really don't value the journey, or the overcoming of the challenge as much as we think we might. Without that public acknowledgement of the challenge, we cannot take any pride in it. We still feel free, almost compelled, to operate within the constraints that the game designers offer us.

So what is it? Do we just value overcoming that which our neighbor cannot? Are we mad at ourselves for putting all that time into something that could have been subverted if we had a little patience? Is it more primitive than that, and basic envy at those who waited? I don't know, but I'm sure the patron saint of Goblinism is closer to the truth than any of us want to admit.

Cross-Faction Mail on the PTR

It was hinted that it might appear in the next patch, and I suppose nothing is ever guaranteed, but on the latest PTR, I've confirmed that we can mail heirlooms across faction. I purchased one on an Alliance character, and successfully mailed it to a new Level 1 Horde character (after running halfway across the starting zone, of course).

I wasn't able to mail gold, and I doubt that I'd be able to mail items. But it looks like we will be able to mail heirlooms across factions to encourage us to level on the flipside.

This is good, but not great. There are two barriers to alt-leveling experience: heirlooms and gold. I don't immediately see the disadvantage of mailing gold cross-faction. It's most useful for training professions. Maybe Profession-training heirloom books are next?

Another change, a very simple one, is to just finally put a mailbox in every starter zone. I'm sure it violates all sorts of notions of immersion. But realistically it just prevents an irritating run to Brill (or your own city of choice).