I wasn't sure at the time as to why but I really wanted to complete Uncharted 2 in a single sitting. It didn't take too long for me to figure out the answer to that, though I sadly never got to achieve my goal due to a two hour gym session and the game crashing thirty minutes before the end with my eyes bleeding. People will always hark back to the Metal Gear Solid franchises as the example of games trying to be movies but Uncharted 2 absolutely trumps the entire franchise. Flaws 'n' all, I'm a big fan of all MGS games but Hideo Kojima could learn a lot from playing this game and discovering what can be achieved without a convoluted mess of a script. I assume most people's pound of flesh with Uncharted 2 would be it's length at around twelve hours but is that really unreasonable in this day and age? I don't even know anymore. Irrespective of that though, the story never felt like it was being artificially extended nor that it died half way through because an exec decided he wanted his healthy dividends this fiscal year.
My first experience with the entire Uncharted series was downloading the multi player beta and seeing Rahla kicking ass at my house. Even vicariously it seemed the shit, though my sole attempt at playing it a few weeks later were laughable as I had no idea what I was doing and promptly got rolled. I doubt I'll get too stuck into the multi player side of it too much. I guess it'd be fun now I know how to even play the game but death match type play isn't my type of thing. Now co-op? Fuck year! I asked one of my friends I met playing Rock Band: Beatles if she'd like to try it out to which she was happy to. After I FINALLY figured out how to get my fucking mic to work over PSN, we tried the Sanctuary level and it was great fun. There's my longevity with the game if I felt it needed justification.
One reviewer was noted as saying Uncharted 2 was the best single player experience he ever had. I'm not sure I'd go quite that far but it's certainly up there and worth your money.
I first heard of this game when GameCentral, the only gaming journalists I trust unequivocally, started harping on about how amazing it was. I soon found out that specific Asian versions have a full English language suite and decided to order it only to find out it wasn't in stock and I wasn't willing to pay the eBay price. I somewhat let my enthusiasm die down a little only for it to flare right back up when the game was released in America and a new thread was created on /v/ to discuss it every five minutes. I realize only a fool would take anything posted there as fact but when someone said it's the first game in the longest time that makes you want to get out of bed in the morning, I knew I had to have it. After canceling what would've been a much delayed order from DVDBO, I manned up and paid £52 for it on eBay from someone in my own country.
People had said Demon's Souls was hard and they weren't fucking joking. Though I was pretty sure it was intended, I was amused to be one shot by the boss at the end of the tutorial stage. Every enemy in the game needs to be treated with respect. Sure, you've got the odd enemy that take one hit to kill but if you get several at the same time through carelessness they can put a dent in your HP. I remember the first time I saw the Red Eyed Knight in 1-1 and got promptly one shot, I decided there was no way he could be killed. In the other direction though was a Blue Eyed Knight who did massive damage and healed himself if given the chance. He killed me once or twice before I killed him, and know that if you die in Demon's Souls, you lose all your gained souls (the games collective currency for buying anything and leveling up) and have one chance to get them back. It was pretty satisfying when I killed that guy. You can die and die in Demon's Souls and the game will keep taking your souls away but it can't take your experience away. Which leads in to the next stage.
1-2 is a pretty straight forward level. It's a long bridge with a few stop offs and a few different directions. If you're careful and time your runs, you can just sprint route one and get to the end of the level in a few minutes with relatively little trouble. The problem comes right at the end. After the final sprint from the Dragon breathing fire up your ass, you're confronted by three archers firing at you, two more up the top, little cover and a Blue Eyed Knight right behind them. It's impossible to take the three archers out as melee without aggroing the knight (whose hits still do half my life bar), if you back up too far the Dragon's breath and roof archers will get you, if you go too far ahead, a second knight will activate and this is all in a confined area. I'm not kidding, I must've wiped on this pull about thirty times in my pursuit of getting to the boss just ahead. It was infuriating. Every time I died, I'd scream in a way that only Megaman 9 can evoke... then go straight back in and try again.
The boss was a different matter. Of the countless times I'd wiped on the level, I'd only made it to him about four times. I knew how to kill him, I just couldn't pull it off. I'd go up, clear out the archers, come down and get raped trying to get behind him. I'm ashamed to admit it but in the four or five attempts I initially made, I hit him ONCE. It was at this time I was questioning if I was just too terrible to be playing this game. I knew I could create a caster and have the game be a lot easier but I didn't want to do that as I was enjoying the playstyle of Temple Knight. I decided to stop running at the brick wall and try 2-1 which helped more than I could ever have guessed. I didn't finish the level but I opened the first shortcut, found a new weapon and felt buoyed by the fact I'd actually made progress.
I went back to 1-2 the next day and everything clicked. I got through the hell pull first time and was so close to killing Tower Knight. The second attempt at the level, I destroyed the knights again which left me wondering why I was having so much trouble for so long. And then I raped Tower Knights face (well, ankles). Let me tell you, I cannot think of any game in the past few years where I have felt so relieved and happy at making some particular progress in a video game. Even including WoW, no boss kill has ever felt as satisfying as this.
And that's the point of Demon's Souls.
(4 lost | Enter the storm)
So Aion has been out a few weeks now and I'm not even sure how I feel about it at this point. I'm currently 36 and have hit so many tedious road blocks along the way that even at this juncture I've questioned whether or not I want to carry on playing numerous times. The first time came half way through 24 when I completely ran out of quests and had to grind over a million exp to hit the fabled 25 for Abyss access. I was totally dismayed by this. I felt I must've done something really wrong to end up in this position. I understood that there would be some grinding involved but over a million?
Fast forward a week and it's hilarious to think I held that mentality. To put this in perspective, when I hit 36, I used Aion Armory to tell me all the quests that open at that level. After filtering out all the follow ups and phantom quests, the grand total? Six. Yes, six. After doing all of them and their follow ups, I was left four bubbles into 36 with slightly under 16 million to grind. I wondered to myself there and then whether this was a game that I really wanted to be devoting my time to. Even with their mantra of wishing to bring an eastern style MMO rife with concessions to an accepting western audience, it was inevitable there would be a degree of grinding. 16 million exp worth of mindless killing just isn't an acceptable figure to me. Perhaps it would be if I only had to do it once or twice but it's already happened more than that and, given what Luni tells me and seeing NCSoft boosting exp from quests by 300% in a distant patch, I fully expect more of it to come in the future.
The problem with making a lot of these arguments lies in the perceived sense of self entitlement many WoW players supposedly harbor. It isn't that I'm not willing to put the time in to level at all, I just don't want to kill mob x hundreds of times to level up. I want to pick up a quest, go to an area, kill some shit, go back and get rewarded for it. I would imagine in most cases doing that would be slower than constant grinding but that's missing the point. Players need that psychological fragmentation, or at least I do. I suppose we'll see in a few months if others do depending on how well the game is doing because Aion in itself is actually pretty damn fun and that's the great tragedy. It really feels like there's a fantastic game buried underneath all this bullshit that's fighting you every step of the way to keep you from loving it.
As I said to BTB, even if we do keep plugging away, I can't see Aion being a game we're still playing in a years time. Depending on where our lives are at the time, I'd be extremely surprised at this juncture if we don't end up scrubbing along in FFXIV. Our roots are buried in it's predecessor and as long as they learn from their previous mistakes and don't try to be the previous generations generic conventions dying successor again, it should be a fine game.
(17 lost | Enter the storm)
Monday, September 14th, 2009 - 12:05 am - Aion
I make a point of never allowing myself to get swept up in the hype surrounding forthcoming MMO's. I've seen so many of them come and go during World of Warcraft's lifespan that it's only setting yourself up for disappointment. The majority of them are architects of their own downfall as publishers rush them out before their time with no clear vision, sating themselves for a sliver of WoW's gargantuan market share instead. WoW might be dreadfully stale right now but MMO's are cyclical so whether something actually needs to come along and beat it is a matter of debate. I can't deny that any company worth their salt thrives on competition and pushes themselves to edge ahead when they're forced to though. Anyone with an interest in wrestling need only look at the embarrassing state of it now when compared to the great Monday night wars of 1995-2001 for a perfect example of this.
Aion just evoked the "oh look, another MMO, cool" reaction from me whenever I saw it. I had no interest in reading about it until it collapsed at which point I'd be curious to find out why. Penelo spoke about it a lot and seemed to enjoy the weekends of beta they had on offer. Lunitun the same. Then Chris started talking about it's virtues, though I suspect more out of a desire to have anything other than WoW in his gaming life. I knew there was an open beta in the near future and downloaded the client on the Friday it was released. When we were raiding, I saw someone mention needing a beta key in a conversation I wasn't really paying attention to. Penelo confirmed this which irked me. An open beta that needs a beta key is a bizarre choice of wording. It was ridiculous to me that the only guaranteed way to get in it was to buy the game in the first place for a key. So I'd have to buy the game to discover if I wanted to buy the game? Yeah... Saturday morning, Shovel came on and announced that he'd managed to get three beta keys and asked if anyone would like one, an invitation I lept upon.
Sunday, I went to my future niece-in-law's (?) third birthday party and got pretty drunk. It ended a lot earlier than I anticipated so I was able to get back in time to raid which, in hindsight, would've been a hilariously bad idea, but it was canceled due to lack of people. I logged out, made myself an Aion account and got going. It didn't take long at all for me to feel like the game had some pretty good potential so I grabbed a sheet of paper, drew a fantastically wonky line down the center and put a Thaddius charge on either side. This entry will be an attempt to take the bones from either side of the line and adhere some flesh to them.
For clarity sake, I played as an Elyos Templar on Spatalos.
++
- Really great information is made available for people new to the game. I'm a seasoned MMO player and even I was thoroughly impressed by the little videos you get at the beginning to show you how everything works as the world and your abilities open up. This is the sort of thing that prevents new players feeling overwhelmed and encourages them to stick with the game. FFXI had absolutely none of this and, though I have no doubt it's going to change in Cataclysm, even WoW doesn't touch this degree of accessibility.
- Aion has a really good sense of empowerment. My abilities felt strong, they looked cool and I could see the mob dying as a result of my actions. It's sort of hard to explain and requires first hand experience.
- The character customization is mind blowing. As I tend to do these days, I tried to create an androgynous, camp male but what I felt like I ended up with was an Elvan from FFXI. I really don't want that! I joked that I was going to create my live character tiny with a giant head just to annoy everyone who was bitching about them but then I actually saw one in Sanctum and realized how stupid they look. Not even stupid in a funny way, just stupid.
- The game looks great and seems to be really well optimized. A PC game can always look better but I was impressed with what I was getting without tweaking while maintaining a very smooth frame rate. It dropped a little when I stuck it in windowed mode and entered insanely crowded areas, but that's to be expected.
- The music is great. This is an aspect of any MMO that's crucial to me. I still to this day listen to FFXI's soundtrack and WoW has some beautiful music in places. Phantasy Star Online's score is still with me. So yeah, it's crucial this is right, and it is. Akarios Village reminded me of a mix between The Sims' "Building Mode 4" and a piece from Final Fantasy X that I'd have to break the bet that I can write this whole entry with The Beatles' "Something" on to find out the name of.
- Little things I noticed of no major importance; zooming in and out is fast, items needed for quests respawn fast, using an ability on a mob autoruns you to where it is.
- The level curve and progression through zones is excellent. There were a few times where I'd go to one place, run back, then have to go back for the follow up but it wasn't particularly grating. Having a built in quest tracker is standard these days I guess and Aion's works well. It wouldn't have hurt having an option to automatically track any quest you get instead of having to manually tick every box as you pick them up but that's a minor nit pick. The only time where I felt like I'd run out of quests to do was around 17 in Miraju and that went away when I sucked it up and did the Krall quests with Yuna, Luni and two pugs.
- The short cutscenes you occasionally get around quests are nice and help break up the action. Sure, some are hilariously bad - the romance scene in Dukaki Mines was particularly cringe inducing - but they give quests flavor even for people like me that rapidly click through everything.
- I thought the combat system was primitive when I first begun. That quickly changed as new abilities opened up and you get the chain system. Then you have to make decisions on what to use, how to use it, etc. It would've been nice to see how combat unfolds at later levels but there's not much you can expect from a week beta. I was mighty impressed with what I saw though and it took more skill than a 969 rotation.
--
- My absolute, biggest problem with Aion is the front end. If you get disconnected or AFK out too long, the game boots you out and completely closes. If you fail to log in the game boots you and completely closes. There was a day where I couldn't connect to the authentication servers until about four or five attempts had been made and, let me tell you, having to open the game every single time was infuriating.
- If you so much as twitch while talking to an NPC, it cancels talking to them. I really don't understand this. Technical limitation? I just... I don't know, it perplexes me, though you get used to it and it doesn't annoy nearly as much later on when you're over it.
- There's a button to put on your bars you have to push to loot everything on a mob. Couldn't there just be a box to tick in the options that looted everything when you right click?
- "Tax". There's a cost for everything in Aion. Want to set home point? Kinah. Want to teleport from one end of the ridiculously large Sanctum to the other? Kinah. Want your exp back after dying? Kinah. Every game needs it's method of getting gold out the economy so it's sorta like WoW's repairing spread out but it still seems a weird way of doing it.
- You have to press escape to clear your target.
- Crafting in general goes both ways for me. This is something I only briefly touched on beta but the two bars for the success and fail system take ages to go up. It is cool you get exp but it doesn't seem like a well thought out system when I can go to an anvil, press "create all" and have nothing to do but tab out for ten minutes. Gathering takes it's sweet time too. I also had someone run up and spam click a plant I was hoovering and took the second extract as soon as I was done.
- The beautiful oil paintings they use for loading screens are ruined by the copyright text at the bottom.
- The airship in Sanctum took a disgracefully long time. It was a hark back to FFXI days, which is not a good thing.
- The beta community was dumb as rocks for the most part. I swear, if I saw anyone ask where Tutty or that fucking fossil was one more time... I'm just ranting really. The advent of quest helper on WoW lowered the patience of the lowest common denominator further and it transferred here. Aion pretty much tells you where to go and what to do and when it doesn't, general gets flooded.
- As a Templar (tank), I found it hard at times to gage threat. It's probably because we were spoiled with Omen in WoW but, really, there's no way. A few times I lost threat to people and was only able to tell with target of target, which updates REALLY slow.
- Fuck that fucking crab outside Veteron Citadel.
In summary, the game is fun as fuck and does a lot right. If I was asked whether it was closer to WoW or FFXI I'd say neither and that it felt like PSO if it was done properly as an MMO. I'm already sold on the merits of playing the game to the end game in itself and if it sucks there, I've had fun. The real test is obviously going to be at that point but there's cause to be optimistic. I've read a lot of high profile WoW players post on EJ about the admiration they had for Guild Wars end game which was heavily PvP orientated as Aion will be. I played Guild Wars for a week or so and enjoyed it at least.
(24 lost | Enter the storm)
Anub'arak was damn hard in heroic. We burned the majority of our attempts trying to iron out our strategy and ended up killing him with eleven UNSUCCESSFUL ATTEMPTS left on the counter, scoring us two trophies. We hit phase three on about our forth attempt and immediately agreed that there was no way two healers could maintain such absurd amounts of damage and flipped Silinde over to Holy. The problem we then faced was with DPS. I don't know if it's possible to do this fight in more than one burrow phase with extreme skill mixed in with a little luck to spread out the permafrost from the very limited frost spheres but it didn't seem feasible to us. Many of our attempts were wasted in this way as we made a little change each attempt to achieve a ridiculously tight DPS requirement before just going back to two healers on the insistence of Corlic. It worked very soon afterwards.
Twins we one shot, Faction Champions were difficult due to the composition we got and wasted many of our attempts, Jaraxxus was a joke but gave us a humorous wipe with the goatse portals now needing to be killed and Northrend Beasts, while easy for us, is still overtuned if they don't intend it to be a gateway boss.
Overall I quite liked the place and really enjoyed the subtle changes they made to Anub'arak to ramp up his difficulty. I still hate the Faction Champions and don't believe that shit belongs in a PvE raid but to each their own. Hopefully we'll get a friendlier composition next week and with a stronger strategy for Anub in place, we'll get an absolute minimum of three trophies.
Very favourable entry soon. For now, Russta on Spatalos EU.
(1 lost | Enter the storm)
Due to the disappointment Lunitun and Penelo had with our Glory of the Raider the first time around, I promised that next time we'd get our drakes sorted out before alts got involved. Such a promise didn't even need to be made with how vastly different the Ulduar system is to the antiquated Naxxramas method. I believe that even now we still won't really think of substituting our mains for alts in favour of farming the place for legitimately useful gear. The drake acquisition was significantly more fulfilling this time around as every single one of us got it on the same kill, one that should've come about weeks ago. We've all been busy in the real world these past few weeks, one particular sunny day involving a full real life meet up! Well, not full, but most of us; Ally, Chris, Silinde, Rahla, Kasha and myself met up in London, played some vidya at the Trocadero, went to the aquarium in Westminster and got bent over and violently sodomized at the flicks as a substitute for the gay parade the other five refused to acquiesce to. Much to Penelo's chagrin, not one of us thought to bring a camera so you don't get to see us in our fetching 3D glasses, yo.
Yogg+1 was a pile of horseshit. Either we were doing something chronically wrong or our set up was sub-optimal but the entirety of phase two felt like a random number generator that we kept losing. I think the best moment was Ally clicking a portal at the same second as she got constricted only to go insane when the Induce Madness timer ticked over despite never once actually being inside. We worked hard at optimizing what we had and figuring out ways to minimize the luck factor and killed it the first time we ever got to phase three, as anyone in there with a double digit IQ could've predicted. As much as we would've showered more 226 spell leather with roses, a wonderful Soul-Devouring Cinch was our reward.
Mimiron was pretty damn hard and we haven't even attempted to repeat our kill since so we had as much time to work on One Light in the Darkness as possible. A lot of people thought we were fucking weird when we told them we only used a single tank for the entire fight which I can't really understand. Sure, it's rough for him, but it's far from impossible and we can't afford to drop a DPS, especially a ranged one. Aura Mastery, Divine Sacrifice and a wings JoL really help to trivialize phase two healing too. I think we wiped 57 times to it before we got the kill due to making one very small change; when we used Heroism. We had been trying to do it when Mimiron was ghostbuster trapped down during phase three but it just wasn't efficient. As we were barely losing to the enrage timer, we figured we just needed to shave time off the fight anywhere and reverted to doing it during phase two and it made a significant difference. I know on the kill I died and I'm sure one or two of the DPS did and we still had ten seconds on the enrage timer when he was pushed down. I don't know what other guilds usually do with regards to the Emergency Fire Bots but we completely ignored them and basked in their watery goodness. When they weren't using it to wipe us. Which happened. Many times.
Algalon we've spent one single hour on which was basically fucking around after Firefighter was done. As much as we all want the kill, it was back seated to getting Yogg+1 down for our drakes and requires some wild respecing. I have no doubt that when we learn the fight it'll be just as simple as any other hard mode in there it's just getting to that point. The fight is a real treat for the senses.
Finally, Redemption (and I guess Chefs Knife) got it's first Val'anyr. Grats Ally.
Yes, of course I'm interested. I played FFXI for nearly four years and I still think about all the memories, I still talk about them with BTB and Penelo over Vent during raids. I still recall how awful parts of the game were and laugh about them. I raid with the entire FFXI soundtrack on shuffle down low in the background more that I'd care to admit. It's been a long time since I quit and a lot has changed since them. As much as I love to hear from all the great people I once crossed paths with, they need to keep in mind that I don't live the hours I once did. If I wasn't living the stupid way I was back then, it's a near certainty that my entire experience would've been completely different. I won't be going to bed at 10:00 and waking at 16:00 again and, with the exception of Klisk, I don't expect anybody to be doing the same to hook back up with me should I move on.
Square has a lot to change if I was ever to go back. The vast majority of end-game would have to be instanced so the meticulous planning I can put in place now that allows me to go to the gym, walk my dog, work, play Fallout 3, Rock Band, whatever, is possible. Only when I know that they're doing that will I start to get excited. Otherwise, for now, I'm more interested in whatever Blizzard is cooking up with Tigole at the helm and cycling through the patch phases we get in Warcraft.
(20 lost | Enter the storm)
About the only thing I disliked about this fight was that dropping down to five healers made a massive difference. I've never really enjoyed the concept of arbitrarily shifting uncomfortable numbers of specific roles around to meet specific demands of a specific fight that drastically changed from what came before and after it. At least dual spec has made life infinity easier in that regard.
Yogg-Saron himself was a very entertaining and worthy end to Ulduar. I remember when we first starting poke around in phase one and thinking it was just a formality to blaze through to get to the real fight. Boy, was that wrong. It wasn't exactly the hardest aspect of a fight I've ever done but when I think back to the precedents they set with Illidan, Lady Vashj and Kael'thas having a first phase where you'd only really lose people if they were dribbling into their keyboard, it's a few levels over that. It's possible there are better tactics than the one we were using but everyone needed to be composed and in control to get through it in a timely manner without taking too many guardians with us. My biggest gripe about this phase was people getting released from their mind control in the middle of a cloud and spawning extras. That sucked. I also got mind controlled once and put Hand of Protection on a guardian but that was just straight up funny. There seems to be a small degree of luck in how well you do in phase one though discrepancies were easier to clean up as we dropped healer after healer.
I wish I was able to experience the visions in phase two but alas the life of a tank. I was surprised the roleplayers in my community didn't seem more excited about them to be honest. To each their own. My role was simply to mark the Crusher Tentacles and direct people into them while smacking them in the face when they started casting diminish power. Pretty simple job but one Protection Paladin is pretty amazing at due to being able to spam cleanse on people while giving the wrath deprived casters 3% extra crit and mana returns. Carrying the really shitty aspect theme into phase two, we had one or two times where the melee sent out of the portal went careering into an untanked Crusher at 99 stacks. Oh, and the time where BTB got hit with Death Coil just as he entered a portal and got feared through the brain room door causing Yogg-Saron to regen to full health. Penelo also got feared through the world once but was flinged back up top somehow.
The final phase was excellent. It was so tense as a tank knowing that stuff could spawn where I couldn't immediately spot it, that the three of us couldn't mix up who was grabbing what, that we likely never had time to renew our sanity. I remember on our kill looking at the main tank list and seeing Yogg-Saron still at 11% and feeling like it was going to be forever until he dropped only for him to just die. The bizarre actions of time for me were inexplicable. We weren't really sure whether we wanted melee or casters on Yogg or the Immortal Guardians and were discussing the pros and cons for both. In the end we went for melee on adds, casters on Yogg and it obviously worked pretty well.
I enjoyed Ulduar and I'll enjoy working on the hard modes (even if I do have my doubts) but best of all was how much our raiding community evolved over the period. We've managed to get rid of some pretty poor players under fortunate circumstances and replace them with very good ones. We got a new Holy Priest and Adarinkin this week, threw them in at the deep end and they floated spectacularly. With how awful our first week of raiding turned out compounded with the absolute shit luck our ten man faced, I'd be lying if I said it didn't cross my mind to make a hard decision and uproot myself to a poopsock guild. Then I remembered who I am.
And the day after the ten man version died.
When I say our group has had shit luck, I wasn't joking. We should've had this kill weeks ago but due to a combination of real life commitments, graphics cards blowing up, connection issues between continents, patching a US client the day before EU gets it, power going out, someone preferring arena, a tree falling on power lines and fuck knows what else, it had to wait till today.
There's not a whole lot more to say about Yogg-Saron that I didn't already cover above. The fight is embarrassingly easy in ten man. In fact, I'd go as far as saying that phase one was the hardest of all three by some distance. When we first started, the Guardian's HP was going down in blocks of 10% and we couldn't adapt the strategy we use in twenty-five to fit it. We ended up evolving it to spawning an extra one, killing that and having me run in with it then I simply taunt them off Calira and drag them into my camp in the center. I had a fantastically awesome idea of everyone just camping on top of Sara and healing through the explosions but no one was too hyped for that. Phase two we stood around doing nothing constantly and phase three I was able to solo tank while our disconnected tank ran around trying to kill our healers.
I think it's going to be a while before we start rampaging our alts through the place. I'm still paranoid our ten man group isn't 100% stable and have had to instill a planning and confirmation system for them, something that leaves a disappointed bitter taste in my mouth. We've already began working on hard modes and achievements with the greatest being Thorim thus far. I'm planning to have us do Hodir and Deconstructor this week which I know will be a formality for us if someone doesn't spontaneously combust before Friday.
(Enter the storm)
Mimiron appears to have this all-encompassing aura of sheen to him that perhaps the other bosses in Ulduar don't. Calling his trash creative would be a disservice to the rest of the zones finely crafted equally interesting yet non-epic dropping non-bosses™ but hey, it has a little battle tank you can ride! This all comes before a huge tram that drives you down to a preposterously oversized room encircled with a less lethal version of frogger. Giving the impression that a disproportionate amount of the time developing Ulduar was spent on Mimiron and his surroundings supported by his almost complete lack of nerfs, he very much comes across as the baby of the dev team.
The first phase exists if only to see a return of tank damage so high that it's tricky for a single one to deal with it. Chris and Yuna bounced the MKII between each Last Stand and Shield Wall cooldown as he fired off his Plasma Blast. I suppose it would be possible for one tank to deal with all of that but it would be pretty risky. While thumbing my ass, I took it upon myself to do a little mine sweeping so the melee always had a clear path out while running from Shock Blast. That is, of course, assuming they did. On more than one occasion, we had people stand in and die to it, more than once our Warriors. I swear both of them are devolving back to their Neanderthal state. Still, I shouldn't be surprised given how long we took to kill Thorim this week while the gibbons in the gauntlet figured out their left from their right. Oh well, despair not; faint heart ne'er won fair maid!
The damage taken in phase two just feels insane when you first start learning it. I do think a large part of that had to do with our handling of the rockets though. A lot of us were struggling to see the subtle graphic and turned the strategy into just running and making sure the graphic wasn't where you were running to. Again, having a fairly uninteractive role in this, it was pretty easy to identify that this caused a deficit in healing that was difficult to climb out of when all was safe. People eventually became comfortable in spotting where they were going to land and only those that needed to move moved. Damage was further controlled by staggering people into six groups. I think the key in getting through this phase is just accepting that a fuck load of damage is going to happen and streamlining it as efficiently as possible. I would think that one of the inevitable nerfs this fight gets will be the travel time of the rocket and it's less-than-obvious graphic coming with an epilepsy warning.
I'm not really sure what the purpose of the third phase is now. Perhaps for spirit users to regenerate some mana? Since the Assault Bots no longer need to be kited and the Bomb Bots and Aerial Command Unit's damage can be perfectly controlled by a Protection Warrior, it's become a formality. The week previous, I was tanking the head and the bots were hitting for 40k so the difference was laughable.
Until we got used to the final phase, it was a little chaotic. The times where his abilities all line up together can be brutal but, really, it's just knowing what he did, expecting what he can do and adjusting to the patterns. If they wanted to make this phase really hard, all they had to do was up the damage of the mines. Now that would've been interesting! Though he fires off two rockets now, at this point everyone was so comfortable with them that it was irrelevant. They might want to look into it's being ridiculously hard to see under his ram when it lands on the main tank though, that's retarded. Again, forecasting the tragic nerfbat, I'd guess the self repair time will get extended but the one time we got to it we killed it just fine.
Fantastic fight overall. Not only was it about as fresh as a fight seems like it can get at this stage of WoW's life but Mimiron himself was rather comical. The first one to really give the deep satisfaction when it goes down even if it wasn't quite the GOD TIER fight it had been made out to me. A pure execution fight that took us 2-3 hours to get down from first pull, incredible for how bad I tell myself that we are.
For his placement in Ulduar, Dr. John Vezax is an extremely basic fight. Learning and killing him took even less time than Mimiron, less than two hours according to trash. And lets talk about that for a moment! This is one set of trash I don't feel so enamored with. Shadowstep and Fan of Knives is funny the first time around as is discovering that one of those things does indeed fear you into everything else but by the fifth and sixth pack is a tiring chore. Faceless Horrors are really something too. Trash with PHASES? Holy fuck, where is my badge? Seriously, where, because I'm pretty sure those three big trees in Freya's room took less time to kill and dropped some.
Our kill had a Searing Flames let through, far too many people getting hit by crashes, a Holy Paladin dead early, a Mage dead a little bit after that and bugged vapors. I suppose it was thanks to Yuna miraculously resisting the armour debuff that we got the kill on the attempt we did. Considering how easy it was when so much went wrong, I can't imagine how it'd be with everything going right and it stuns me that some of the guilds on Argent Dawn that had leapfrogged us after our horrendous first week haven't killed it yet. We got server third kill, which is nice.
(5 lost | Enter the storm)
The Iron Council was an unbelievably easy fight. It's hard to know exactly what to write about a fight that was less complex than some of Sunwell's trash. So um, yeah, here goes! I tanked Steelbreaker for an instantaneous cleanse after falcon punch, someone tanked the other one who died then the last one flew around the room raping lolis with electricity, or something. I don't know a whole lot about the hard mode with Steelbreaker last but the description of Meltdown and reading a method of cheesing it involve a Hearthstone and a Flask of Petrification is enough to worry me. I don't know what we'll gain from it but I will be pushing for the medium difficulty mode next week if time is on our side.
I really enjoyed Freya. When I was watching a video before the raid, it just looked like six add zergs to deal with before finally moving onto her. I suppose at it's core it's really not much more than that but I loved the combination of having to be considered with how you deal damage yet constricted by having only a minute with which to do it in. It's probably a testament to the hard modes of Ulduar that I can't really comprehend how to deal with it at this junction. Or rather how many damn tanks you'd need for it to keep it comfortable while retaining some sort of DPS standard.
We didn't have long left after Freya so I requested that we go poke Mimiron's infamous trash with some pointy sticks. When we decided enough was enough, Luni and I bolted for the train in the hope of at least making it to him. We made it comfortably but just as Rahla was about to step on, Luni triggered it and he got left behind and squished as we cackled manically. Now that was funny. I'm not sure if it was because we activated the tram or pushed the DO NOT PUSH button or something else entirely but we're able to teleport past all the trash now. Depending on how long Hodir takes us, we may get a chance to utilize that this week but I doubt it. Still good to know for next week.
After a great many hours of raiding in Blue Garter days, my brain would feel like mush at the end of the night. It was a bizarre feeling but a satisfying one. Very few fights have been as trying in that regard but last night we found one in Thorim. To grant that a prelude, the first few hours of attempts were spent with about ten people in the gauntlet while the rest dealt with the onslaught the arena brings. This pushed each attempt up to around the 9-11 minute mark. Tanking that much stuff at that level was extremely stressful. Yuna was convinced we were overcomplicating it somehow but we couldn't see how. Of the fourteen attempts that came before the kill, we actually managed to get to a point where everyone was alive when he jumped down only for him to chain lightning a glob of people and effectively end it.
On the attempt that was to be the kill, we decided to just overload the gauntlet with as many people as we felt comfortable with and have just enough in the arena to hold out and stop the champions from stacking up. Instead of the gauntlet team getting to Thorim when he had 20 seconds until he supercharged us to waste, they got there and had to wait five seconds for Sif to do one. The arena team had everything under control, there was more margin for error and we had to tank for a lot less time. Looking at our WWS report, the times we wiped with him about 20% or so were 8:29 and 9:31; the time we actually killed him was 6:52.
The above is actually a video. Really!
Why the fuck does each person need so many eggs? What does it achieve? How would scaling back the amount each individual requires achieve anything but make it less of a time sink and more fun? They're supposed to be fun and, to a lesser extent, encouraging co-operation so they build a world event around needing, what, 305 eggs if RNG decides to take a shit in your general direction. That's standing still, looking at a wall, not being able to tab out to read something to pass the time, for hours while calling people shitcocks for camping your spawns. Once you've done that you have to run around finding female races to stick bunny ears on with an item that inexplicably has a five minute cooldown and occasionally just doesn't work. To quote James Rolfe, WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?? This even makes an annual activity in FFXI seem fun but at least you didn't feel obligated to do those because they weren't a small piece of a large puzzle that rewarded something useful upon completion.
Once upon a time I viewed the Violet Proto Drake as LOLCASUAL and while it'll never reach the difficulty tier of Glory of the Raider, I certainly won't look down at someone riding one. Unless I'm literally above them of course.
(3 lost | Enter the storm)
Of the nerfs to be done in last weeks easy modes blitz, Ignis got it pretty hard. I know that whining about content nerfs is a solid way of showing supremacy but I don't think anyone can deny that for his position in the instance, Ignis was way too overtuned. He and Razorscale should be harder than Flame Leviathan but easier than XT-002 Deconstructor which is pretty much how it is now.
Ignoring the Slag Pot bug, the biggest change Ignis needed all revolved around dealing with the constructs. When we were learning the fight the previous week, we had our Feral Druid tank running around and rooting the adds in Scorch. I didn't feel completely comfortable with this as so many aspects felt out of my control. Was the add molten and rooted? Tough. Has the scorch disappeared but it's still rooted? Tough. Got two up at the same time? Hahaha, fuck you. Whatever happened, we had to jump in the fire so much of the time that it felt pointless to even complicate it with a Druid yet the scorch did so much damage that it felt like an unnecessary tax on the healers. With the 20% decrease in damage, we could just stand in them and get healed through it. We tried successfully to just be clipping the edge so that the add would continue to stack heat until molten but we would be out of it. The problem with this came back to the good ol' problem every tank faces at some point in his WoW career; shifty mob! Every time Ignis would cast Flame Jets, we'd get launched into the atmosphere and the mob would edge out of scorch to be right inside us upon landing. It became so annoying that there wasn't any point in risking slowing down the death rate of the Iron Constructs just to lower a healing requirement we were coping with.
I'm not sure I'd say that this was my favourite fight in Ulduar thus far but, damn, is the offtank role fun. It can royally suck having to look for distant adds through his fat ass and the Grandia style pillars of fire but it felt deeply satisfying watching Calira and I excel at the job and getting the adds dealt with as efficiently as possible.
TO THE GROUND! Not only did they take a massive chunk off his HP but they appear to have added a minute or two on top of his enrage timer. We were just horrible on this fight last night. The main tank died and I had to take over, a quarter of the raid was dead, we had two terribads with no vocal chords in the north west corner yet again causing four scrapbots to get through and heal him and we went over the old enrage timer by about 30 seconds and it was STILL enough to get the kill on our first pull. I'm not sure I was comfortable with how tight the DPS requirement was for last weeks iteration but it feels like they overdid it. I'm not sure who the DPS check is for Ulduar at this point. I'm also not sure exactly what they tried to do to make skipping Tympanic Tantrums harder as it seemed just as easy to brute force through the phases as before
Oh boy, and how can we forget the freshly re-added trash. On our first and second pull, the left pack linked. Yeah, you know, that bug they got rid of before they put them back in though, to be fair, I was convinced that a bug had nothing to do with the other pack linking. I noticed that the razorblades one of the mobs spawns is, for all intents and purposes, a generated mob itself and wondered if maybe it's erratic spawning and pathing patterns were causing it to fly off into the other pack. We tested it by having a long range Misdirect pull back into the corridor where not only did we avoid all links but the annoying gnomes stood in the back chain failing at casting defense matrix.
After Kologarn was dead, we had about 15 minutes of raid time left. As there's only one or two trash pulls before Auriaya and we'd perfected at least one pull a few days earlier, we figured we'd give it a try. It was pretty obvious from the video we passed around that the fight is insanely easy after the pull so we knew one clean pull was basically a kill. We even simplified the strategy further by having a Death Knight Death Grip the Feral Defender out of the raid as it was about to die so that we never had to move. I can't help but wonder if they adjusted the behavior of Pounce somehow as the guardians actually did exactly what we wanted them to do this time instead of randomly thrusting into the asshole of someone not even on their threat table.
Tonight should be the Iron Council and Freya.
(2 lost | Enter the storm)
I'd be fibbing if I said the first week of Ulduar went precisely the way I had hoped.
Heroic
The first hiccup came in the obligatory server instability every patch I've ever played this game is plagued with. That, marred with some poor decision making made our first day a complete washout. It may not seem like much but losing that day of raiding on our schedule is about 30% of the week gone. We made the foolish decision to go to Emalon first expecting him to rollover and give us free T8.25, which, after Archavon, isn't exactly hard to understand. Well, with server instability and finding out that he requires some effort now, we lost over a quarter of that raid night. We went over to Ulduar upon finding out it was up and one shot Flame Leviathan once the servers had stopped playing up. We then wasted the rest of the night on an overtuned, bugged Ignis.
On the next night we decided to pass on Ignis and push down Razorscale. A suggestion was made that we put our Mages into each add team and sheep the Watcher. I thought this was a retarded idea and made my point clear that it would be far better to have a Rogue on each one to kick as many as they could. Once the adds were dealt with, it was handling people getting out of Devouring Flame the second it dropped. This is one of the few occasions in WotLK where I actually hoped for a mod to track something. While I was waiting for Sentinals to pop, I called out as many as I could so people could move ahead of time but it's pretty damn difficult as she targets the person for a split second before choosing somebody else for fireball. Once THAT was done, it was down to figuring out how to deal with fuse armor. This wasn't actually an aspect of the fight we were aware of so we were caught off guard by it. Calira attempted to taunt it but couldn't get it so either he got stiffed with resists or she was already enraged. Either way, once we had her back down in the ground phase ready to taunt off each other while moving her in a circle, the kill was easily in the bag.
Next up was Deconstructor who ate up the last hour of our raid. The first round of attempts was mostly people failing at moving out with the bombs. Our strategy at the time consisted of everyone clumping up, Light Bombs going left, Gravity Bombs going right. When we went back the next day, we kept wiping and wiping as the adds continued to sneak through and heal him, causing us to hit the enrage timer while he'd be at 2-3%. The strategy was (and I can't emphasize this word enough) slowly refined as we realized that just hoping the adds would somehow fall over on their way in wasn't the best way to do it. It didn't help that one of our Mages on add duty was trying desperately hard to redefine the word inept. I still think that we overcompensated for the adds as our kill was a zerg through a final 2% during his enrage. Even if that repeats again next week, we have a strategy formulated that works for us and shouldn't take nearly as long to kill.
Next day we moved to Kologarn. My ten man group had already killed him and was able to add a few caveats to the strategy Yunaris was outlining. I'd said that he was simple but not easy, though I didn't truly mean that. Even so, we killed him on the third pull in pretty epic circumstances which my poor ticker can't take anymore of. Screaming "KILL THE FUCKING LEFT ARM IT'S AT 2%" as attrition caught up to us was a nice prelude to a lot of laughter and glee on Ventrilo. It's something I'd hoped to instill into the community but we don't really get that often so I relished it. Our first fragment too, coupled with one of the new enchants which I promptly had put on my weapon. Cool ass glow effect, looks like your weapon is on fire, though I'll probably switch it over to Blade Ward as soon as it becomes readily available to me or when I get Titanguard.
In the next chapter of our success/failure leapfrogging chronicles, we spent the next two hours trying to pull Auriaya. We did manage a completely flawless pull once but we were so focused on just getting the pull right and had changed the area we initially went over the tactic in that it went to shit. From the video I watched, the fight is ridiculously easy and it's all about getting the pull right so if we assume that the fight isn't about the pull then maybe we didn't do as awful as I feel we did...?
Normal
For all intents and purposes, our ten man group went as well as I expected it to. We're great players who already out-gear the instance for all our specs and can pretty much put together any composition that works. On our first Friday of the place, we got down Flame Leviathan, Razorscale, Deconstructor and Kologarn. I was pretty damn pleased but it was already known that Silinde and Rahla were coming to my house on Saturday through Sunday to play Rock Band all day and go see the Dragonball movie which meant our Saturday run of the place wasn't possible. The Tuesday raid, tonight, isn't going to happen either as Penelo has to work and BTB is having someone stick long pointy things in his mouth. So that's that for the week.
Assuming we get all three raids in, I'm aiming to be on Mimiron in ten man this week. Flame Leviathan isn't even a boss, Razorscale will pretty much be a one shot with the nerfs, Deconstructor is a joke in ten man and Kologarn was killed on the second attempt once I'd switched to Holy. I'd expect us to be at Iron Council and Auriaya by Friday if we start on time.
And on some non-Ulduar news, fishing was good to me this week. Damn good. Weather-Beaten Fishing Hat and Jeweled Fishing Pole two days apart on the new dailies, and, for 41 minutes of relentless school fishing...
(3 lost | Enter the storm)
|
