Travel, good...

In addition to the new boats which have been added, there are many very fun modes of travel that have been embedded in quests.

Travel, bad...

My first few days in the Beta were scarred by travel woes. Over a two day period, I spent seven hours waiting for the boat to Northrend, riding the boat, getting dumped in the ocean, suspended in the ether, screaming, crying...finally stepping on the shore, only to have the server go down, and find myself back in Stormwind or Menethil.

Shamefaced

OK, I admit it, instead of blogging, I have been running around Northrend. Now, nothing counts in the Beta, but it would be nice if I saw some content beyond the two 'entry' zones. Not yet. Why? Because, I have a slew of alts running around there. I am running three hunters and a druid.

You see, I love farming, gathering, thus all three of my hunters must be played, the skinner, the miner and the herbalist. I also love...just gawking at great scenery. Have I mentioned the fabulous scenery? Hellfire Peninsula is just hideous, so when I started BC, all I wanted to do was get the heck out of there as fast as possible!!

Anyway...I will try to figure out how to add more than one screenshot per post and get a few of my thoughts written up by tomorrow...

Case of the Humdrums

I find myself feeling.. listless.. when it comes to the gaming world, lately.

I have access to WotLK Beta and actually have my own toons there to play with now. As I said last time... the Death Knight area was so creative and fun that I found myself saying "wow!" a lot of the time. Blue mentioned that everything seems to come so easy...

I almost agree, and yet... at the same time it doesn't bother me. We are given the 5-minute cooldown blue Medallion of the Alliance/Horde within our first few quests. We also did, in fact, hit 56 within less than an hour's worth of questing. However, one thing to keep in mind is that Blizzard originally lowered the requirements for leveling from 20-60 by nearly 30%!

And they seem to have done it again slightly, with the advent of Wrath. From 60-70 the experience needed per level will be lessened again, and the experience gained per quest and mob-kill will be increased. This is to make it easier for people who are picking up the game from scratch with Wrath to get to 80 in a world where finding questing partners is next to impossible (re: Azeroth).

But anyway... as I said. Listless. I'm having a hard time drumming up the interest and ability to log into either Live WoW, WotLK Beta, or even Warhammer Beta. I'm not quite sure why. No, I know why.

It's the general antipathy that comes over players when an expansion draws near. We saw it with release of The Burning Crusade a year and a half ago - guilds fell apart, friends server-transferred, and people stopped logging into the game because they felt everything they worked toward on their character would swiftly become useless.

And.. it will.

I think that's my biggest beef with the MMO expansion industry today. The fact that most 'expansions' aren't really expansions at all! It's an entire reset of the game. Every hour we spent pressing keys to down Illidan, and every drop of sweat poured out downing Kil'Jaeden will be absolutely useless in about 2 months.

Well... maybe not entirely useless. Those players who did progress past Black Temple and into Sunwell are likely to see their epics last until the first forays into Naxxramas, much as their tier 3 Naxx gear lasted them to Karazhan in TBC. (Nice kind of symmetry there, don't you think?)

But those players who got through SSC or TK... were making their first tentative steps into Black Temple and Mount Hyjal will likely replace every piece of their hard-won tier 5 set in the first level or two. Or at least they assume they will. And so... people don't want to try anymore.

I can't really blame them. Can you?

Bums me out a bit, though. On the bright side, however...

That comic still makes me giggle every time I see it!

Entering the Beta

Thursday afternoon, Syri and I made a couple of death knights and played them for the first several quests. As many others have said, the quests are fun, teach you about the class, and have great rewards. In fact, my one complaint is that you get SO much for so little work, including XP. We leveled 56 in less than an hour. I know, this is a starting zone, but still!!

Anyway, then I went on to Northrend with Blue. The first thing she did was tame a rhino. Of all the pets I have seen BRK running around with, rhinos looked the most awesome. I was not disappointed! Not only is the stomping very cool, and the knockback fun as hell, but they just look cuddly to me.

It took me an hour to figure out where the pet talents are. Of course, they are on the same window as my talents. /sigh Sometimes I can be a noob. Another thing I did noobishly was to use the knockback in congested areas, thus bringing more mobs aggroing on to us. We survived quite nicely, even before I had found the pet talents!!

Blue and Rhino ran around both the entry-to-Northrend zones, opening them up, finding all the flightpoints and quests, and killing skinnable stuff. And that brings me to another complaint. When I went to the skinning and leatherworking trainers, I found NO mail patterns, just leather. That made me a sad hunter. I hope there are mail patterns soon!

Next post...second day in Northrend!

Beta!

I got in!!!

I is the excited. Client is 40% downloaded, I should be playing tomorrow afternoon, there will be screenies!

I considered calling in sick tomorrow, but I maintain a tiny shred of sanity which says "No!"

One beta, two beta, three beta, more!

Well... I have been given access to the Wrath of the Lich King beta... but at this time, I'm afraid I can't bring myself to use it much.

There's not much detail I can go into at this point, other than that the brief hour or so I did play yesterday still has me somewhat in 'awe' of the whole deathknight area. It brought back the "wow-factor" of the game for me. The art is improved. The quest lines are obviously well thought-out and creative. It's just plain FUN. The area is incredible, the gear looks fantastic, and the dk's themselves seem to function really, really well. I had a lot of fun playing last night.


I am also currently playing in the Warhammer Online open beta, as you all know. That is going fantastically, and I now have 4 toons created. A bright wizard, a swordmaster, a white lion, and a shaman. All of them are a blast, though thus far my favorite remains the Bright Wizard. Next I will be tackling both a shadow warrior and an engineer.

As of yet, I have not managed to create a guild for the open beta. Unfortunately, it's a little tougher than in World of Warcraft... I actually have to convince 6 (instead of 10) people to come WITH me to the guild registrar in the main city, instead of being able to come to them to sign a charter.

So I've (of yet) still been unable to convince 5 others to come with me. I am going to keep trying, however! After I've tested out a few more classes, I will be working up a few more posts on how the separate career paths work etc. Should be an interresting time to be had!

Waaagh!

The future of multi-boxing

I moved my priest to my new account! She is my enchanter, and this means that when my main gets a new piece of BOP gear, I don't have to bug someone for the enchant. Well, once I get my new computer that is. Hrih is 65 now, and she stands to benefit greatly from the whole multi-boxing thing. I leveled her to sixty as a holy priest, but that was when I was regularly grouping and instancing. I just don't have much incentive to play Hrih anymore. So, my plan is to have Hrih follow my druid, or one of my hunters around as they quest and farm, thus she will painlessly level. Because she HAS to level, so that she can keep up with her enchanting and tailoring! And, who knows, someday I may start healing instances again!

I am also planning to move one of my hunters to the new account. OMG, I will be able to play two hunters together!!!! With the new pet love coming out in Wrath, imagine one hunter with a tankin' pet, and my raiding hunter (who of course has the best gear) with a dps pet. What bloody fun!! Of course most folks get this thrill grouping with a friend, but...

The person I do group with the most is my son. We tried having our hunters group together a couple of times, and got into fights about proper hunter etiquette. /sigh We are both pretty pig-headed, and as happily as we usually run around together, there are some fights we don't dare approach again. That one was a killer, we did not group for months.

So, this lets me group with myself; no fear of disagreement. Woot!! I am starting to get pretty darn excited about this multi-boxing stuff!

Blue

Meet the hunters: Sugarmaple

Sugar was my first 60, and my first engineer. She was my second main, after I realized that huntering was even more fun than druiding. Sugar trained a Winter Wolf as her first pet, and still has him. Since this was the era before pet families were standardized, I released the original Sarge and tamed a Ghostpaw Alpha, for the fast run speed and 1.3 attack speed, at level 27. The change took less than two minutes, therefore I feel I can still claim him as my 'first' pet. Sarge was named after my beloved dog that had died several months before I started huntering, so he is very dear to me.

As my first hunter, I admit to incredible amounts of noobishness in Sugar's leveling and first attempts at instancing. I do not think I had EVER dropped a trap, before I was 50. In my first instances, I sent my pet off after mobs in random directions more times than I like to admit. Only the fact that our GM's first main was a hunter kept my pets from getting banned entirely, I am sure.

In fact, Galthran (the GM) was amazingly kind to me, and over the course of several weeks after Sugar hit 60, he took me on runs to several instances where there were good hunter blue drops. Galthran gave me much good advice. "Feign, feign, FEIGN!!!" "Dismiss your pet before we jump!", and, most forbearing, when I was trying out an owl, he did not mention the flapping or 'whistling' (he is a warrior), but simply said, "Nice debuff."

I still mostly soloed though, and found every mining node in vanilla WoW, with Sarge and later also with Teddy, a Plagued Swine.

Blue

An Introduction to WAR

So, last weekend I got to try out Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning.


To sum it all up as quickly as possible.... I was fuggin' impressed.

And now to the longer version....! I've played several games over the last 10 years from Myst and Zork to Diablo, Maplestory, EVE, WoW and more. And last weekend was the first time I was reduced to giddy bouncing and bright-eyed wonder at a game since I first picked up World of Warcraft three years ago.

I've decided to write a bit about the game as I have seen it thus far; first I will cover a few of the surface things I noticed, as well as a surface-breakdown of the playable characters... so, here goes!

The game itself plays very similarly to World of Warcraft; enough to the point that anyone who's played the one will recognize bits of MMO glory from the other. They do have a few noticable differences however.

Whereas WoW has a 1.5 global cooldown, WAR has 1.4 so the combat timing is nearly identical. However, to my eyes the biggest difference combat-wise is that WAR provides Collision Detection during RvR combat. Basically what this means is, you cannot run through your opponant... OR your allies! You must actively move around them as opposed to through them as you would on a real battlefield.

This lends a realism to the game that immersive players like myself will enjoy. It also adds to the skill level required, because unlike other MMO's you can't simply step through your opponant to complete attacks that require you to be behind or to the side.

Another basic difference I have noticed is that the way you obtain gear in WAR is much less important than in WoW. If you complete PvE objectives, participate in public quests, or recieve gear off of looted corpses, that gear will serve you in all aspects of the game, not just the PvE areas. And of course, the reverse is true - the gear sets are comparative, allowing you to use the same set for pve AND pvp.

The final immediate difference I noticed was the difference in focus. WoW has always seemed to me to be more of a Player vs Environment type of game. Until recently (with the advent of arenas), World of Warcraft was more about the end-game dungeons and boss encounters than fighting other players. In Warhammer Online, the opposite holds true. The end-game desire is in fact PvP contact; your entire goal is to take over the opposite faction's city! I was able to participate in RvR/PvP at the ripe-old level of 2. I had access to scenarios and RvR areas from nearly the moment I stepped into the game. And for me, that was one of the best parts.

Anyway... on to the breakdown I promised!

WAR has 2 realms and 6 factions, and each faction has it's own career paths. There are a total of 20 careere paths in the game, with each career containing three separate trees in which to build your career, as well as what are called Morale skills and Tactical bonuses. I will go into more about both of those in a later post.

Here are is the most basic breakdown of realm, faction, and career.



Order

• Dwarf

Ironbreaker (Tank)
Engineer (Ranged DPS)
Runepriest (Healer)

• Empire

Warrior-Priest (Melee Healer)
Witch Hunter (Ranged DPS)
Bright Wizard (Fire Caster DPS)

• High Elf

Swordmaster (Tank)
White Lion (Melee DPS)
Shadow Warrior (Ranged DPS)
Archmage (Healer)

Destruction

• Greenskin

Black Orc (Melee DPS)
Squig Herder (Ranged DPS)
Shaman (Healer)

• Chaos

Chosen (Tank)
Marauder (Melee DPS)
Magus (Arcane Caster DPS)
Zealot (Healer)

• Dark Elf

Witch Elf (Melee DPS)
Sorceress (Frost Caster DPS)
Disciple of Khaine (Melee Healer)

So. 2 realms, 6 factions, and 20 careers. As you can see, this is a massive amount of variety. If I tried to go into it all in one post, my ass would fall asleep. So I think I'll cut it off here. Next post I will go into a bit more detail about the careers. Until then!

Need more content!

I have to admit that I have not been logging on much lately; I am hoping for an invite to Beta. I am not currently raiding at all. I recently got a new account and started a few alts, got several of them up to ten, and eventually mean to level them with the lowbies I have on my original account...but that is contigent on getting another computer, and the wait for that will be at least two months.

It is not as if I have nothing I could do. I have a sixty-five priest who needs to level to seventy before Wrath drops. I have several seventies who need to get their professions maxed, and/or need their epic flyer, certainly there are faction farming and material farming that could be done. It just does not interest me. Like so many others, I am trapped in pre-expansion malaise.

So, what am I doing? I am haunting sites that have Wrath Beta stuff to read, such as BRK and Wowinsider, hanging out on the WotLK forum, and refreshing my email every few minutes. Just wasting my time. Luckily, I am a news junkie, and between the election season and hurricanes, there is plenty to watch on TV, still...seriously, I want Wrath Beta, or at least the public test realms with the new content (pets!!!) to go up. Need more content!!!!!

Bluespruce