Category: All Roads Return to WoW (Page 2 of 2)

      All Roads Return to WoW: I want to slap the guy that invented Gear Score

      July 22, 2010 /

      gear-scoreI finally got my druid to level 80 and I’ve spent the last week or so getting him geared up through heroics and the occasional PUG raid. It’s actually been a lot of fun. I’ve always enjoyed tanking, and despite my relatively little experience doing it, I’d say I’m starting to get fairly skilled at keeping a critter’s attention so my group can kill it.

      The problem now, though, is that there isn’t a ton of loot left for me to pick up, and I’d really like to see some more content before the expansion comes out. I thought that would be fairly easy to do, but dear god was I wrong.

      According to most information out there, I’m ready to start tanking the 10-man version of Trial of the Crusader. It’s a pretty straightforward zone from what I can tell, and my health pool, avoidance, and overall mitigation should be more than enough. I just have to learn the fights. Unfortunately, the people running those raids are looking for a Gear Score over 5000, and I’m somewhere around 4500. What’s worse, the items that will bump me more than 50 of these arbitrary points per slot are typically from 25-man heroic raids that are no longer being run or the normal modes of raids for which I don’t apparently qualify.

      I finally got a guy to ignore the GS issue and let me into a ToC 10 and when our melee pulled the fire from the second boss straight onto me while I was tanking adds and proceeded to follow me around, guess who got kicked? Yeah, it was me.

      All Roads Return to WoW

      All Roads Return to WoW: Tier set models are lame

      July 13, 2010 /

      Tier Blah.

      When I first started playing WoW I was so excited about the style of the game and enjoying the leveling process so much that I really didn’t care too much about tier sets. As I got more and more involved in the game, though, I started to lust after that gear a little bit. The original tier gear had really cool models, which is a big part of my drive for getting a piece of equipment.

      In Burning Crusade it was the same thing – the tier sets looked incredible. The Tier 4 sets remain some of my favorite in the game, and Tier 6 was amazing as well. I wasn’t a fan of most T5, but that might just be me.

      The current sets, though, are appalling. Most of the Tier 9 and Tier 10 sets look like a monochromatic blob of trash. Gone are the cool shoulder animations (remember those sweet priest shoulders with the blind faces of justice on them?) and the nifty details in the chest pieces and leggings. It doesn’t help that everyone is rolling around in the same gear because of the ease of the badge system, so as ugly as the sets are, I get sick of them much more quickly.

      Lucky for me I’m playing a druid, I guess. Bears always look the same…

      All Roads Return to WoW

      All Roads Return to WoW: The first 48 hours

      July 9, 2010 /

      Tauren Druid.When I started my little WoW experiment I knew the first 48 (not playtime, just the first two days after resubbing) hours were likely to be the litmus test of my enjoyment of the game. If I got bored or lost interest or just generally wasn’t enjoying myself, I wasn’t going to spend any more time trying to rekindle the flame. Despite a whole slew of problems, I actually enjoyed the first couple days back.

      When I first resubbed I jumped around my characters just to see what was new. Most of them had reset talents, so I didn’t screw with them too much. Since I was going to be playing with friends on a new server, I fired up a brand new druid, thinking I’d level him for kicks alongside my only 80, my hunter. I had somehow forgotten along the way that leveling a druid prior to level 20 is about the worst thing in the game. Why they still won’t give you cat form at 10, bear form at 20 is totally beyond me.

      I started thinking about other classes, but then I went back and looked at the class previews for Cataclysm and realized my best best for leveling will be then, when the original world has changed and classes like the hunter have received their respective mechanic revamps. Lucky for me I had a 66 druid sitting on my old server and quickly transferred him to my friend’s server.

      By day two I was having fun blowing through some quick quests in Nagrand. The buff to normal flight speed helped a lot. I was 68 in just a couple hours and on my way to Northrend.

      All Roads Return to WoW, MMO

      All Roads Return to WoW: The decision

      July 6, 2010 /

      WotLK loading screen.

      As you all know, I play a ton of League of Legends. The game has a lot of what I’m looking for in my ideal gaming experience – complexity, challenge, variety, frequent updates, and on and on. I still find myself craving something different from time to time, though, and most recently I’ve been wanting to play an MMO.

      The obvious solution was to resub to WoW – I had played Warcraft at the same immersion level as I played LoL between my 600th and 900th win, which is to say every day, a couple hours a day. But I left WoW for a reason, a lot of them actually, so I did a bit of research and decided to give a couple other games a chance.

      A friend from LoL recommended I try Global Agenda, a futuristic dystopian MMO. It’s had some decent reviews and I liked the idea behind a couple of the classes. Unfortunately, the magic wasn’t there. For me to put in the time it takes to learn all the new mechanics and intricacies an MMO brings (I can’t do it casually – moderation just isn’t my strong suit) I need to be hooked and hooked early. Global Agenda couldn’t do that. The first five levels are a scripted intro in which you don’t see any other players. You get dumped into a small city at the end, from which you can queue for battleground-style missions with other players. That’s pretty much it. I know there are a few more options as you level up, but for the most part you end up standing around a city, staring at other characters who, for the most part, look exactly alike. Not worth my $50.

      There wasn’t much else out there. I had tried Dungeons and Dragons Online some time back and never really gotten into it. I picked up Age of Conan and Warhammer back when I was falling out of love with WoW and they both just made me go back to Warcraft. Reading over their current news, patches, and forums, I realized they were probably the same drab graphical and mechanical experiences that turned me away in the first place (seriously, can anyone actually tell what is happening in your typical Warhammer fight? Fix your spell animations, Mythic).

      There was really only one option left, and it was the first one I had thought up. Go back to WoW. Oh, those dreaded words. It felt almost immediately like I was giving in to a habit I had managed to kick. I felt beaten, my resolve trumped by Blizzard’s finely-tuned skinner box. In truth, though, I had a lot of fun with WoW, and I still have faith that WoW can be an enjoyable game for casuals and hardcore players alike.

      With that in mind, I’ll be mixing this column in with the usual League of Legends posts, covering my impressions on a return to WoW after more than a year away from the game (even a year ago I only played for a couple months, returning from a short hiatus). So far it’s been a lot of fun. Stick around to see if that can continue.

      All Roads Return to WoW, Editorial, MMO

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