Retail Bullet Points

I haven't written about it in more than two months, but I thought it might be worth noting that I'm still playing retail on the side. Let's summarise the sorts of things I've been up to under different headers.

Playing the table game

The thing that actually keeps me logging into the Shadowlands client on a daily basis is, funnily enough, the adventure table. Ever since WoW introduced these tables reminiscent of mobile games back in Warlords of Draenor, I've heard people express nothing but scorn for them (at best they've seemingly been a feature players can just about tolerate), and to be fair, I didn't exactly love the first iteration of the system that I myself encountered in BfA content either. The table in the Legion class order hall was a bit better, but I've got to admit, I really like the Shadowlands version. I'd never played an auto battler before and only really knew about the concept from Wilhelm's posts about them, but I honestly quite enjoy it!

I do still have the casual long-term goal of maxing out my main's covenant sanctum features (something that I'm sure more regular players finished months ago) and I like the slow and steady trickle of anima that some of the table missions provide. I enjoy choosing which ones I want to do on a given day and then sorting my companions into optimised teams for each one. I love the collectible aspect of recruiting new companions and I love making their numbers go up, even if it doesn't serve any greater purpose.

I even tried to install the WoW companion app on my phone to manage my table through that, but it crashed every time I tried to log in so I eventually gave up. The only result of these login attempts was that according to my launcher I now apparently also have a US trial account for retail...

Korthia & Zereth Mortis

For a while, the husband and I kept going to Korthia once a week even after we'd unlocked the last bit of story, but our interest didn't last very long. Initially it was nice to be able to upgrade our gear by doing dailies, but the pace soon slowed to an absolute crawl, to the point where we weren't able to buy even a single upgrade per week, and that kind of made us lose interest. Why spend this much time grinding for gear that'll surely be replaced by the most basic rewards in 9.2?

Speaking of the latter, I'm sure we'll check it out and it will be fine, but the 9.2 developer video really was quite embarrassing. I got the feeling Blizzard was genuinely trying to do something different with it; e.g. I don't think they were featuring female devs "just for show" or anything like that, but it was just. So. Bad. Seriously, who signed off on lines about water "unlike any water that we've seen before", or extended talks about how unique everything about this new zone is, coupled with shots of a snail and a chicken? They really deserved all the memeing that people did about that.

Torghast

Back in July, I wrote that the changes to Torghast didn't really impress me but that I could see the husband and me playing around with them a bit. For quite some time, we didn't. However, one of the changes introduced with patch 9.1.5 was that the weekly quest to rescue souls could now also be done in Torghast... and as that aligned with my desire to work on my covenant sanctum, I decided to give it a go again.

Since then the husband and I have been running a couple of Torghasts a week, with me swapping between my monk and my demon hunter, and it's actually been decent fun. Once we got a bit more comfortable with not worrying about deaths anymore and going faster, we eventually managed to achieve some flawless runs - though I do think it's annoying how heavily the score is weighted towards beating the timer - if you do so by a large enough margin, little else seems to matter.

At some point it struck me that I should use some of all this currency that I'd been gathering to upgrade my monk's legendary... and got supremely annoyed by both the gold cost involved in the process and the utter unintuitiveness of the user interface, which actually resulted in me buying the wrong materials at first. After that I quickly discarded any thought of getting a legendary for my demon hunter too because it just seemed like too much of a hassle.

I will say though that it's funny to me how my relationship with Torghast illustrates the many ways in which I'm seemingly the total opposite of the current retail player base. From everything I've read, they just wanted their legendaries and were annoyed at having to deal with "Chore-ghast" to get them... while I find the gameplay decent fun and then basically toss the gear-related rewards because they are uninteresting to me.

Guildies & Levelling

In September I mentioned that we'd formed a levelling group with some guildies from SWTOR. One of them dropped out after a while, but with the two that remained we did pretty well, completing all the original dungeons, all the Cataclysm ones and most of the Wrath ones, which has taken our alts close to fifty.

Our experience with the last Wrath dungeons was really odd though... we went into Forge of Souls manually with a group of four, something we'd done before with other instances, and got absolutely destroyed on the first boss. Being one person down means lower dps and all that, but we didn't even get close to having to worry about that because his constant AoE damage would just delete us. Somewhat bewildered, we exited and went to try Trial of the Champion instead, where we made it through the jousting event, but then wiped over and over on Argent Confessor Paletress, whose spammable main attack would shave off 70% of a person's health with each hit. I tried to research this online but couldn't find anything about scaling problems with these dungeons, only confirmation that the damage we were seeing was definitely off and we weren't just being bad. We haven't really decided how to proceed after that.

Timewalking

Another thing we've been doing whenever it's been on has been timewalking, something that hadn't yet been added to the game the last time I played retail before our current stint with it. It's certainly been odd for me whenever Burning Crusade timewalking is up, to see the contrast between doing e.g. heroic Shattered Halls in Classic and then the timewalking version in retail. It's no comparison of course, the retail version is still ridiculously easy when you look at them side by side, but the attempt at scaling the dungeons to current power levels is at least something. As an evergreen feature that provides almost nothing but cosmetic rewards, it's also quite at odds with the modern WoW team's usual priorities. I wonder how popular it is with players? It certainly strikes me as one of the modern game's better additions, and to be honest I don't know why they don't do more with this scaling tech.

Wrapping Up Wrath

After we burned through the entirety of Burning Crusade's level range in about two days, I should have known that Wrath wouldn't take very long either. I couldn't quite believe it though, because somehow I still remembered seventy to eighty as this massive slog, and I figured that Wrath of the Lich King wouldn't have quite as many dungeons to keep us busy either.

In truth, it only took us another two days or so to get through that stretch of content as well, and the only thing that felt slow was moving across Northrend. It's still huge, and neither of us were able to afford fast flying yet, which meant that transportation was a bit of a drag. Still, when we weren't trying to get from Howling Fjord to Boring Borean Tundra and back, we were making swift progress. Quest-wise we only did Howling Fjord and about two thirds of Sholazar Basin; the rest of our XP came from gathering experience and two-manning dungeons - and while there were fewer of them, there were still enough for us not to need to repeat anything.

Initially I was a bit disappointed that we still didn't seem to have any trouble two-manning things. Wrath instances were never particularly hard, but I recalled the normal ones being at least a little bit of a challenge initially, especially when you were coming into them with sub-par gear. But no, even with mid-level Outlands gear, the two of us cleared everything up to Drak'tharon Keep with no problems.

Old Kingdom was the biggest disappointment to me personally, though not because of the difficulty. First off, they redesigned the quests to guide you straight past the optional boss, à la Gnomeregan. Not just that though, they also removed the little bonus quest you used to be able to get in the cave with the mushrooms. Mustn't reward people for straying off the main path, oh no! It was a funny quest too: if I recall correctly, you gathered all these "interesting" looking samples from the elementals and then the Nerubian you handed them to gave you a bit of an odd look because they were essentially elemental poop and worthless. The worst thing was the final boss though, as they changed the insanity mobs into generic red blobs that didn't seem to have any abilities whatsoever! Was that mechanic really that confusing as it was? Killing lookalikes of your party members was what made that fight fun! Le sigh.

When we hit seventy-five halfway through Drak'tharon Keep, I put a Glyph of the Treant into my third minor glyph slot and spent the rest of the instance bouncing around like a loony. It was so nice to be an ugly little tree again! I still remember the "save the trees" parade I observed at the end of Wrath. And I have to admit that making it a minor glyph is actually a great solution, as you can keep the look if you want it, or drop out whenever you feel like it, without incurring any practical penalties either way.

Gundrak was the first dungeon where we ran into a genuine challenge, as we couldn't kill the first boss and his adds fast enough before they cocooned both of us and we got hopelessly overwhelmed. Eventually we succeeded by having me switch to my feral spec and going for a quick burn before he even had a chance to summon any adds.

In Halls of Stone we had a funny moment when I DCed and died during the Brann fight, and thanks to talents and self-healing, pet tank managed to stay alive long enough for me to not only come back online but also run all the way back into the room where he was fighting. During the NPC conversation afterwards I also had the embarrassing realisation that I've been spelling vrykul wrong for a whole five years - for some reason I always thought that the r and y were the other way round ("vyrkul").

The Oculus was the next instance that turned out to be a major challenge, as our gear was crappy and the drakes only had the absolute minimum amount of health. After a couple of failed attempts on Eregos we eventually managed to get him down by having pet tank circle-kite him on a red drake, spamming his main ability to do damage and get rid of the whelps, and occasionally using his dodge (especially whenever the boss enraged). Meanwhile I sat on top of the boss on a green drake and alternated between focusing on dpsing him and casting heals on the red drake as needed. With the kiting the damage on the drakes was manageable, though it was a very long and slow fight with no bronze drakes to do proper dps.

Trial of the Champion was also pretty tough, and not just because the jousting was quite a drag with only two people. Argent Confessor Paletress did absolutely nasty damage, especially to me, since she does a lot of non-aggro-based attacks and I was the only target that wasn't the tank. I'm not sure I would have been able to survive being feared around and smited as much had I been playing any other healing class, without the druid's heals over time ticking away whenever I was incapacitated.

The ICC five-mans were interesting as well. Again, the bosses in there had a lot more mechanics than previous ones, and I basically had to deal with everything at once since there was nobody else to do so. I always had to kill my soul fragment on my own on Bronjahm; I always had mirrored soul on the Devourer of Souls. On the last boss of Pit of Saron, I was almost constantly incapacitated or transferring damage and healing to the boss, which made for a very long and touch-and-go encounter. Halls of Reflection actually defeated us initially, as we didn't quite have the dps to make the fourth wall, but we came back once we had upgraded our gear a little and made it without problems after that.

We were level eighty-one by the time we moved on into Cata content.

Voices of Wrath

Back when I reviewed the Cataclysm cinematic, one of the negative points I mentioned was the fact that I didn't really care for Deathwing's voice. This then made me think about what I thought about WOTLK's voice acting in general, what I thought was good and what was... less good.

The latter doesn't take that long to sum up, as it only consists of two points really. The first one is simply Arthas himself. I didn't have a problem with his voice acting per se, but I swear that the pitch of his voice changed every single time he made an appearance. People joked about how sitting on the Frozen Throne all this time had given the guy a cold, but what it came down to in the end was that the voice of the major villain of the expansion changing all the time hurt immersion and generally gave the impression of Blizzard doing unusually shoddy work with him, as if the sound editor randomly came up with a new mix of settings every time they had to record more voice work for Arthas.

The second thing that I didn't like was that all the NPCs just talked too damn much. I know that certain upcoming MMOs are really priding themselves in the fact that they include a lot of voice work, but personally I don't think that this is a good thing. An MMO is not an audio book, is not a film, is not a single player game... it's not a medium where you should have to spend extended amounts of time just sitting back to listen. If a boss wants my attention they have to be snappy; otherwise I'm just going to tune their yapping out eventually, in order to focus on, you know, actually playing. (Gruul's "Come... and die" is one of my favourite lines to this day, simply for being short and to the point.)

For all the time that I've spent in ICC in the past year, I'd have trouble quoting most of the bosses from there, with the exception of Sindy's terribad "BETRAAAY you" line. I mean, I know that they talk a lot and I have a vague idea of what it's about, but what I really hear in my head is something like "Arthas blah blah Tirion blah blah Bolvar blah blah". Not really memorable to me at least.

That said, when they don't go into endless monologues, a lot of WOTLK's NPCs had some pretty good lines coupled with solid voice acting. My personal favourites from Wrath's five-man instances are:

1. Keristrasza: Finish it! Finish it! Kill me, or I swear by the Dragonqueen you'll never see daylight again!

I have a suspicion that her voice work was done by the same woman that did Sindragosa, only without the annoying screechiness, and she does a pretty good job at conveying emotion with her voice (maybe overacting just a little bit, but that's okay). Whatever you thought of Keristrasza's story in general, her last lines in the Nexus are a heart-wrenching mix of aggressive insanity (threatening to kill the players) and what's left of her original personality (swearing by the Dragonqueen and wanting her torment to end). I like all of her lines really, including the "Preserve? Why?" upon pulling her and her last words asking for the Life-Binder to preserve her after all.

2. Scourgelord Tyrannus: Rimefang! Trap them within the tunnel! Bury them alive!

Scourgelord Tyrannus is actually one of those characters that talk way too much, even if he has a very nice voice, but the above line shows that he can get to the point when he thinks it's urgent. I've been known to randomly call this one out whenever we're fighting Rimefang in ICC.

3. Skarvald the Constructor: Pagh! What sort of necromancer lets death stop him? I knew you were worthless!

I love this line for the simple reason that I've always felt that the Scourge's necromancers have a tendency to look a bit sissy, and Skarvald not only shares these feelings, he expresses them better than I ever could.

4. Ionar: Master... you have guests.

Ionar must be British or something, because that's quite the understatement when talking about people storming your castle and slaughtering everything in sight. Even in death he retains the elemental equivalent of a stiff upper lip, and I can dig that.

5. The Black Knight: No! I must not fail... again...

I always thought that the Black Knight was a bit of a weird character, because on the one hand he's supposed to be this really powerful Scourge lieutenant, but on the other hand he's very obviously a Monty Python joke. How do you reconcile these two images? Well, I thought his last words do a decent job at it, by showing that his constant getting up again is not a sign of overconfidence, but rather the last desperate attempt of someone who knows that he messed up before and can't afford to do so again. The way that last line is delivered is enough to actually make me feel sorry for him a little every time.

The "So bad it's good" award: Devourer of Souls: You dare look upon the host of souls?! I SHALL DEVOUR YOU WHOLE!

If you've ever done Forge of Souls, this needs no explanation. You just want to tell this guy to chill the hell out.

And my five favourite voices from WOTLK raids...

1. Sara/Yogg-Saron: I am the lucid dream. The monster in your nightmares. The fiend of a thousand faces. Cower before my true form. BOW DOWN BEFORE THE GOD OF DEATH!

This phase-transitioning line is probably the single most amazing piece of voice acting I've ever heard in WoW. Even just playing it back in my head gives me the shivers. The transition from Sara's almost sensual voice to Yogg's fury is just so incredibly well done; it completely blew me away the first time I heard it.

2. Thorim: I remember you... In the mountains...

I never actually got what the fuss was about with this line. I remember our main tank and raid leader repeating it ad nauseam and I just didn't see the appeal, but the longer they went on, the more ingrained it became into my own brain. Then I found out that it had even become an internet meme and... well, now I can't help it anymore either. (Seriously, search YouTube for this phrase and you'll find loads more.)

3. XT-002 Deconstructor: New toys? For me? I promise I won't break them this time!

While having to hear XT's voice over and over again whenever I run past someone with the mini pet has demoted his voice from amusing to annoying for me, I still have to give credit where credit is due: I still remember pulling him for the first time and vent erupting into laughter upon hearing his squeaky voice - and I know we weren't the only guild that had this kind of reaction.

4. Lord Jaraxxus: You face Jaraxxus, eredar lord of the Burning Legion!

I suppose I have a bit of a thing for eredar lords, considering how many times I abused Malchezaar's lines to announce to people at large that they weren't facing our raid alone, but the legions we command! Jaraxxus has a similar kind of thing going on, and like Thorim he's made it to YouTube as well. Hard to get that out of your head again after a while.

5. Anub'Rekhan: I hear little hearts beating. Yesss... beating faster now. Soon the beating will stop.

Being a product recycled from Vanilla, Naxxramas wasn't exactly innovative and new in terms of voice acting, but bloody hell, Anub'Rekhan's voice is still amazing. Especially the line quoted above is just so creepy, delivered in a way that makes it very clear that the big bug won't just eat you, he's also perv enough to enjoy it in a very naughty way. /shudder

The "So bad it's good" award: Sindragosa: Suffer, mortals, as your pathetic magic betrays you!

There couldn't really have been any other choice for this. There's just something about Sindy's voice that makes it grate so very, very badly, and you'll hate her for that alone - not to mention the many wipes that most of us will have gone through on this fight at some point. However, making a boss hated by the players is not entirely a bad thing, and if nothing else that BETRAAAY is very memorable. Though personally I almost prefer her intro line of: "You are fools to have come to this place! The icy winds of Northrend will consume your souls!" I now find myself wanting to continue any sentence that starts with "You are fools" with this line.

Scary statistics

After following a link somewhere else and then browsing another blog's archives I stumbled upon this post at Bubblespec today, in which the writer talks about how she thinks that she ran way too many dungeons this expansion. To illustrate her point, she included a screenshot of an armoury statistics page that shows that two of her characters combined killed Cyanigosa an impressive sixty-nine times.

"Oh, that's neat," I thought, "I never thought of looking at all of my level eighties like that. I wonder how many instances I've run in WOTLK." So I looked at my statistics page. And, um. I almost wish I hadn't, because it was slightly scary.

Now, I know for a fact that a lot of the numbers on the statistics page are wonky at best. For example it claims that my paladin never killed the Black Knight on normal mode, even though she wore the Black Heart for a long time, or that my night elf priest has acquired less emblems of triumph than she already spent on gear. I still think that they have at least some basis in reality though; I guess at worst some of them need a little rounding up. Which is not really good thing when you have huge numbers to begin with, but there you go.

So, according to my armoury statistics page, I've entered 1456 WOTLK five-mans across my seven level eighties (yikes), but only completed 885 of them. Now, this is another number that I have a lot of trouble believing, because no way did I abandon 571 instance runs halfway through. Maybe it counts twice if you leave and re-enter an instance in progress while alive. I don't know. Still, close to nine hundred full dungeon runs is still a pretty damn impressive number. A lot of them were pugs too.

Curious as I was, I wasn't satisfied with those numbers however, and wanted to know which instances I did the most often. Somewhat to my surprise, the clear winner turned out to be Drak'tharon Keep, with a whopping 197 Prophet Tharon'ja kills (151 of them on heroic). To be fair, it does seem to come up as a random dungeon fairly often for me, and I also remember intentionally running it every day for a while early in the expansion, because it was considered one of the easiest heroics; and coming fresh from the Burning Crusade, we didn't dare to jump into something as scary as, say, heroic Utgarde Pinnacle right away.

In second place but already very far behind is Azjol-Nerub with 106 Anub'arak kills (seventy-three on heroic). Again I was slightly surprised at first, but then realised that this matched my habit of running this instance on multiple characters a day if it came up as the daily heroic pre dungeon finder.

My third most-visited dungeon of this expansion turned out to be the Violet Hold with one hundred Cyanigosa kills (eighty on heroic). I don't remember ever making a point of running this one more frequently, but it does seem to come up as my random reasonabily often.

Fourth place goes to the Culling of Stratholme and Mal'Ganis, whose butt I helped kick eighty-five times (seventy-five on heroic). I remember running this instance a lot early in the expansion while we were trying to make it to the Infinite Curroptor in time. (Yes, kids, once upon a time that was actually a difficult feat to achieve.) I never really got tired of it either, and stubbornly stuck it out even when pug members dropped group right at the start because they couldn't stand all the talking (before you could skip the dialogue, obviously).

Fifth place goes to the Black Knight, which, again, I found somewhat surprising considering that Trial of the Champion was released fairly late in the expansion. I didn't assist that many people with Black Heart farming either. I did run the instance on normal mode a lot with those of my characters that hit eighty after its release though, as it's a great way of getting geared up quickly. My paladin spent a lot of time in heroic mode as well, farming for the Peacekeeper Blade for a fairly long time.

Now, I'm not going to continue listing the numbers for every single boss. Let it just be said that the average for most of them seems to be around seventy.

The ones that I visited the least often are also interesting, however. For example I only escaped the Lich King in Halls of Reflection thirty-nine times (thirty-one on heroic). I suppose this is in part because the instance is one of the newest ones, in part because it has a high gear requirement on the dungeon finder, and in part because the few times that I went there intentionally for a gear drop, I got it almost immediately.

The other Icecrown five-mans are well within the normal average, presumably because even though they were released late, I ran them a stupid amount of times for gear drops for my alts.

My second least-visited dungeon is, not entirely unsurprisingly, the Oculus with forty-two completions (thirty-seven on heroic). I may have overcome my dislike for it now, but the fact that I avoided it like the plague for the first half of the expansion left a visible mark on the numbers.

Slightly above it with fifty-four kills is Sjonnir the Ironshaper from Halls of Stone (forty on heroic). Just goes to show that even though it feels like I get that instance all the time on some days, I really don't.

That's a crazy number of dungeon runs either way. Unlike Enlynn from Bubblespec I don't really regret them though. I mean, there is of course a vague sense of having wasted a lot of time on WoW, but as far as activities within WoW go, instance-running is still one of my favourites so there aren't many things that I'd prefer to have done instead anyway.

The things we wish we'd said

Sometimes I wish I wasn't so damn nice and always avoiding confrontation. When I end up in a group with someone who acts like a jerk I tend to just try to ignore it and get on with the instance instead of saying "screw you, jerk, I'm out of here". I always think that I can stand it for just one more boss, that it would be mean to deprive the other people in the party of their tank/healer etc. At the same time it kind of bugs me that I act like that, because I'm sure I could save myself a lot of frustration if I didn't just put up with so much crap.

Today I had a bad pug for heroic Trial of the Champion for example, which was particularly jarring because on average most people on my server are quite skilled and nice, and even the unskilled ones are usually friendly at least. But today I somehow ended up with a resto druid who was nothing but a complete and utter toerag.

I should have known that something was off with him the moment we entered the instance and Mr Tree felt the need to tell the warlock that "your pet's name sucks". I don't even remember what it was, just one of those randomly generated names for imps, nothing special about it. Not to mention that it's not as if warlocks have any kind of say when it comes to their minion's names. So, you know... yay for random rudeness?

Anyway, I was tanking on my druid. I've tanked TotC many times by now, both on normal and heroic. Most of the time that was on my paladin however, and I find paladin tanking incredibly easy compared to druid tanking. Bears just have so few tools... try something like moving a caster just by two inches for example: on my paladin I have avenger's shield and arcane torrent to silence the mobs and force them to move, on my bear I can use my charge to stun and interrupt, but then they'll just stand there for two seconds being stunned and then go back to casting. I also notice that I generally seem to have a much harder time holding aggro on my bear, especially against multiple targets.

With things being as they were, I didn't disagree when the healing druid told us to run out after the jousting even though I'd never done it that way and am used to picking up the mobs after we dismount. When we attacked them again after resetting I made the mistake of charging right in, which caused the other two mobs to run behind me, screwing up my positioning right from the start, and before I could get things under control again, the arms warrior had run off and mauled the healer.

"Great tanking there," Mr Tree commented, sarcasm dripping from every letter.

I had wanted to apologise properly and to explain what went wrong, but feeling both slightly flustered and annoyed I just said "sorry" and we moved on. On the next attempt we got them down, though dps was constantly dying and running back in again. I resisted the urge to say something along the lines of "great healing there".

Next we got the Confessor, and as I pulled the first trash pack, someone else somehow aggroed a second one as well. I hit challenging roar to try and pick them all up, and at first I thought that I had succeeded... though with my bear's big butt and half a dozen aoe abilities filling up my screen it was hard to see anything really. The healer continued to yell at me in caps lock until I noticed that one of the casters had hung back and was flinging spells at him. So I ran over, got aggro on that last mob... and died, resulting in a wipe.

"Have you ever tanked before?" the healer accused me immediately.

I should have said: "No, because clearly nobody who has ever tanked before could ever hit the wrong key or make any kind of mistake ever again after their first tanking experience." In reality I just told him that yes, I had tanked this before.

"Are you tanking with your eyes closed?"

No, but as I said above... but well, it had already become clear that he had no actual interest in figuring things out, only in abusing people. Not much point in arguing, right?

In a feeble attempt to defend myself I said: "Well, someone aggroing an extra pack didn't help." To which he responded with: "Quit the blaming!" Huh. Because I'm the one throwing blame around like a monkey flings poo, right?

I offered to just leave at this point if I was aggravating him so much, to which he didn't respond but one of the dps offered a "lol". I was probably too polite about it. Again, what I should have said would have been something along the lines of: "I think I'll leave, I'm sure you'll have no trouble finding another tank. After all, who doesn't love getting yelled at in all caps every time they hit the wrong key? That's why LFG is always full of tanks!" But once again I bit my tongue (or sat on my fingers I guess, considering that this is about typing).

We then wiped some on the Confessor herself. Dps was dying constantly and running back in, resulting in the memory's health going down really, really slowly and the healer eventually running out of mana. This is where the dps started to get cranky as well, seeing how some of them had died something like five times already. "How about some heals?" - "I'll give you heals when you give me dps!" retorted the druid, spamming damage meters to show his disapproval of everyone else's performance. The funny thing was that he had a point, the dps was quite low, and usually I'd defend the healer under such circumstances... but as it was I just rolled my eyes.

We eventually managed to down the Confessor as the druid somehow succeeded in keeping everyone alive. Then we proceeded to wipe some on the Black Knight. This is where the warlock got fed up and left, after the umpteenth time the druid whined about the dps being made of fail. I couldn't help but admire him, and in hindsight I probably should have followed his lead. As it was though, we replaced him with a retribution paladin and then finally managed to finish the run, at which point the druid proudly declared "that proves that the warlock did retarded dps".

One last time I didn't type out what I thought, which was "better to have retarded dps than to be an idiot in every other way". I just left the group and put the druid on my ignore list, an honour which he only shares with a bunch of spam bots so far.

I'm playing this game to have fun. Being successful is certainly a part of that, but it's also quite possible to have some fun while wiping, messing up and learning. However I simply cannot enjoy myself when someone has to act like a jerk to everyone in the party, no matter how well we're doing. Now if I could only learn to apply that knowledge more consistently in practice, and to stop letting others ruin my fun! Where's that ignore button again?

Trial of the Champion: The Grand Champions

A lot has been said about the lack of a consistent and logical story for Trial of the Champion, but the actual fights in the instance haven't been talked about that much from what I've seen. This is something I'd like to do today, at least about the first boss. I think the fight has got some interesting things going for it, even if there are also aspects of it that are quite annoying.

The intro definitely falls on the "annoying" side. You can shorten it ever so slightly by running in, starting it and then running out again, but in the end it's still too long. Having a bit of NPC chatter in places to make things seem more lively is alright, but endless lines of scrolling text alone don't make for a good story, even less so when it's preventing us from doing what we really want to do: getting in on the action to progress the story ourselves.

A lot of people were originally put off by the idea of having yet another boss fight involving vehicles, but I have to say that Trial really isn't that bad in that regard. The jousting kind of works - unlike in the Oculus, which requires people to learn how to handle one of three different vehicles on the fly, without necessarily knowing what the others do, everybody knows how to joust these days. The other day I took a friend to the coliseum whom I hadn't seen online on WoW in months, and even he knew how to joust. It's a phenomenon, and it's difficult to have completely missed out on it. But even if you have it's not a big deal, as one individual's jousting performance doesn't really matter in this fight. There is no real strategy to it, everybody just runs around, charging mobs and throwing shield breakers as they come off cooldown and whenever the mobs end up at the right distance. You could even say that Blizzard has gone too far into the other direction here and made a vehicle fight that's too easy, but in all honesty I prefer that over endless Oculus wipes caused by people not understanding the role of their drake.

And still it's not as if I never see people die during the jousting segment. Few people seem to be aware that if you dismount voluntarily, the NPCs will actually drop aggro and leave you alone, so you can go and grab a fresh mount at your leasure. Instead most people seem to cling to their mount until the bitter end even if it's already very low on health, and will then often get mauled after they get dismounted, as the champions continue to attack you mercilessly in that case.

But fear not, even if you die you can simply run back in as the encounter's in progress - and not just this one, it applies to the whole instance. I guess that it makes sense in a way, as I can think of few five-mans where you'll be blocked from running back and re-joining a fight. Most of the time it's just not feasible since the boss is a fairly long way into the instance. However, Trial's layout and the very short corpse-run pretty much encourage zerg tactics, and in all honesty that's not something I like as it encourages sloppy play and discourages teamwork. To use myself as an example, if losing players on the jousting phase was actually a problem, I would probably have made a point of educating more people about the benefits of grabbing a new mount before your current one dies. As it is, why bother? It's not as if someone dying and running back poses a problem for the party in any way, it's only the hapless victim that gets to rack up extra repair bills. Unfortunately my time is better spent just continuing my charges and shield breakers instead of typing out advice.

The transition from the jousting phase to the tank-and-spank ground phase is probably the most interesting bit of the encounter. A smart party will try to down the three champions relatively close together to make it easier for the tank to pick them up, and the tank's ability to quickly produce sufficient amounts of threat on all three of them is a harsh skill check that really seems to separate the mediocre tanks from the excellent ones.

Unfortunately, as soon as the game faces people with a challenge, they'll always find ways to overcome circumvent it. In this case that means that most pugs I've run with insist on running out and resetting as soon as the mounted phase ends, as this will make the champions line up and wait for you on the ground for your convenience. I always hate it when a group does that as it just feels like cheating (and means that the tank is admitting that they fail at picking up loose mobs).

The one thing I can say in those tanks' defense is that as it is, the threat mechanics of the transition seem a bit wonky. The theory I've seen proposed for this is that you keep your threat from phase one, during which everyone - including the healer - does crazy amounts of damage with their lances. This certainly would explain my observation that it's very hard to get aggro off whoever gets it initially without taunting. I've seen misdirections and other big threat moves be ignored completely - obviously they wouldn't make up for a difference of many thousands of damage done during jousting. This poses a problem in so far as it means that the only way to get aggro reliably at the start of the ground phase is to taunt, and if say, one mob is just out of range of your aoe taunt as you cast it or whatever, you can basically wipe up and try again. I would very much like it if Blizzard implemented a proper aggro reset at this point and in turn made it impossible to run out and reset. Seems like a fair trade-off to me.

Once on the ground the fight becomes a "simple" tank-and-spank, though the NPC's group composition makes a big difference in terms of difficulty. There is only one type of mob that can heal, the shaman, and you can be glad if you get him because the alternative consists of three hard-hitting pure damage dealers. The other night I was in a pug where we wiped on this part about a dozen times before giving up because the tank would always die before we could burn down the first opponent. At first we thought that we had just ended up with a bad healer and we went through several different ones, but it just didn't work, even though the tank was sensibly and well-geared and claimed to have tanked the instance with no problems before. In hindsight I think it had very much to do with the fact that the three champions we were facing were the warrior, the rogue and the mage, all of whom hit very hard, plus the mage has the ability to sheep any non-druid healer, which will quickly result in a wipe if it happens during the first phase of the fight while you have all three enemies pounding on your tank at once.

To give a simple run-down of the NPCs' different abilities:

The hunter is relatively harmless in terms of damage as long as the tank keeps aggro at all times. This can be tricky though since she likes to disengage, and the other mobs' abilities may force you to run around a lot, not always making it possible to immediately get into melee range with her again. If she starts shooting other party members you're in trouble, otherwise it's pretty safe to kill her last.

The mage does a fair amount of damage and can also be somewhat tricky to keep in melee range of the tank. If you want to move him you need to be able to interrupt or silence him somehow or need another smart group member to do it for you. As a clothie he's relatively easy to burn down and should be high on your kill order, if not necessarily first. The most dangerous thing he can do is sheep your healer early into the fight, unless they are a tree and immune to polymorph. If someone else in the party can dispel magic they have to be quick at it, paladins can bubble out of it once, an off-healer might throw a few life-saving heals on the tank in the meantime etc. Quick thinking is required and people mustn't be afraid of burning their cooldowns.

The rogue is a medium-sized nuisance most of the time, though she can become a real issue if you don't have anybody in your party who can cleanse poisons. They can stack up to tick for several thousands of damage per second on the tank, which doesn't make life easy for the healer, let me assure you. In addition she throws poison bottles on the ground which damage everyone who stands in them. Even if your party is reasonably skilled at moving out of the green goo they'll usually get a tick of damage or two and thus distract the healer's attention from keeping the tank alive. I would rate the rogue as a medium-priority target.

The shaman is the only one who can heal and the golden rule of "kill the healer first" generally works reasonably well, though it's also possible to focus on someone else first and leave him up until later, as he doesn't have many other annoying abilities beside the occasional heal.

The warrior is a scary killing machine and getting him down should be a fairly high priority. He does all the annoying things you'd expect from an arms warrior in PvP, like mortal strike and bladestorm, as well as an annoying knockback which can make it harder to keep aggro on the mage and hunter.

If you get them all down you'll be cheered at, fireworks will be set off, and you'll be rewarded with an epic item of high quality. If you're unlucky the fight will also bug out, which means that one of the champions goes back to full health and keeps fighting, resetting whenever you get them down yet again. This is one case where you pretty much have to walk out and reset.

In summary I think that this is actually one of the more interesting five-man boss fights currently in the game, though various bugs and the fact that graveyard zerging is encouraged detract somewhat from the fun.

Instance Review: Trial of the Champion

To start off, let me say that I wasn't looking forward to the release of this instance at all. Some people were getting excited as if we were going to see a new Magister's Terrace, but I already knew that this wasn't going to be the case. From all the information we had been given it was clear from the start that it was basically going to be an instanced version of Ring of Blood. And the fun thing about Ring of Blood was always that it was fairly unique; you did it once while levelling to get some great rewards for your level and then moved on. You didn't repeat it three times a day.

Unsurprisingly I felt quite unsatisfied when I finished Trial of the Champion for the first time. This was it? This was Blizzard's excuse for an instance these days? However, I have to admit that the more often I've run it since then, the more I've come to appreciate its good points. Only today I joined a pug for the heroic version with my hunter, and while we managed to wipe at least once on every boss, we still had fun. I think the key here is to be open to experiences different from what we're used to.

Let's go into greater detail:

1. Accessability

This an area where the new instance shines. The Argent Tournament grounds are only a two-minute flight away from Dalaran, if you've never been there before a friendly NPC will send you off for free so you don't even have to search for the local flight path, and if you're already a veteran crusader you can even teleport straight to the tournament. There's also a summoning stone. The only way to make it more convenient for people to get there would be to place an NPC in the Dalaran inn that teleports you straight into the instance. Seriously.

As far as I'm aware there are also no prerequisites for being allowed to enter. For a while I thought that being champion of at least one faction would be a requirement, what with the name of the instance and all, but as it turned out that's not the case. Trial of any old guy who just happens to come by, anyone?

2. Atmosphere

I said in my previous post that I like dungeons to live up to their name by being... dungeon-like. Dark caves, abandoned ruins, lairs of evil masterminds, that kind of thing. Trial of the Crusader on the other hand throws you into an arena where you're actually pitted against (mostly) friendly opponents by the "good" guys. That could hardly be any more different from my usual expectations, but let's run with it.

To be fair, Blizzard did make an effort to evoke some tournament atmosphere in the instance, but I find it a bit lackluster. I have some friends who never seem to get tired of Jaeren Sunsworn's speeches about their greatness, but personally I find the whole introduction too long and tedious. Other instances, like Culling of Stratholme, have long intros too, but at least something's actually happening there. In the Trial you just wait for lots of red text to scroll past, which is really not that interesting. Blizzard can do better than that.

3. Story & Quests

There are no quests connected to this instance. Woe. Story-wise... well. There is a story to the Argent Tournament as a whole, namely that the Argent Crusade is trying to select the most capable fighters for their final assault on Icecrown, to ensure that said fighters don't die too easily and end up returning as ghouls that are fighting for the enemy. The basic idea makes sense, but the logic of the actual implementation is debatable. 2fps summed it up much better than I ever could. Personally I cringe every time the Black Knight shows up to force-choke poor Jaeren Sunsworn, and all those important leader figures just stand there and do nothing.

4. Length

Trial of the Champion is hands down the shortest instance Blizzard has made to date. In a way that's both a blessing and a curse. As I said, initially it felt like quite a letdown, like the instance didn't provide me with enough sense of adventure. But once you get past that stage of wanting to explore and mostly come back to farm for certain drops it becomes a blessing. When your main concern is to find out whether boss X will refuse to drop that one item you want yet again, not having to fight your way through endless tunnels and tons of trash packs is something to be grateful for. It's a lot less immersive than it could be, but also more practical.

5. Layout

I'd like to see anyone get lost in this instance. It's a single, circular room! Unfortunately that also means that you're literally not going anywhere. The first couple of times I ran the instance, I had the instinctive urge to run onwards towards the next boss... except there was nowhere to go.

6. Trash

There is little trash in this instance: nine weakling opponents during the mass jousting event at the start and three packs of three before the second boss. I've said before that ideally the amount of trash in an instance should be a happy medium, not too much but not too little either. Considering that, I guess I should be glad that there are any trash mobs at all, yet at the same time... they make no sense. It makes sense for underground caverns to contain miscellaneous wildlife, it makes sense for the lair of some kind of big bad guy to contain some lackeys, but it does not make sense that if we're meant to face off against some powerful but benevolent boss to test our skills, we first have to beat up a couple of his assistants who don't even stand a chance. They are supposed to be our friends as well! And yet they don't get to walk out after being defeated like the bosses, we clearly kill them and then take their stuff. How wrong is that?

It very much feels like these mobs were inserted as an afterthought so people would get a bit more rep from the instance and actually have a chance at some green drops as well.

7. Bosses

As far as the boss encounters themselves go, I have little to complain about. They strike me as pretty well-tuned, easy if you overgear the place, but challenging if you don't. They are also reasonably unique: Whether you like jousting or not, it's not something that you get to do in any other dungeon. The Argent Confessor has a wide variety of memories to summon. Eadric the Pure is a bit of a pushover, but he introduces a mechanic that was only used during the Yogg-Saron encounter before (having to look away from the boss at certain times) into a five-man and the gimmick with the hammer sounds like fun, though I have yet to see it in action. The Black Knight has a whole story of his own as well as providing an interesting multi-phase fight. About the worst I can say about the bosses is that they all seem to challenge the healer more than anyone else, the tank has some things to watch out for, but if you're dps all you do is stand in one place and nuke a single target all the time. But that's really only a very minor complaint.

8. Loot

Ah loot, the Trial's big selling point. Finally the term "epic quality" has lost even the last of its splendour. In this instance every single boss drops nothing but epics, and the saying that "if everyone is special, no one is" applies to loot as well. The more loot with purple letters we get, the less people care about it. I've been in pugs without disenchanters where people simply left any items that nobody could use to rot, as they couldn't even be bothered to pick them up for vendoring. Epics, the new Shiny Fish Scales? I can't help being a bit saddened by that development.

Sad philosophical ponderings about loot colours aside, Trial of the Champion is simply the place to be these days if you're not a raider that's already kitted out in full best-in-slot gear. Normal and heroic mode combined drop a plethora of amazing items for pretty much any class and spec. If you care about making your character better at all, this is an opportunity you shouldn't miss out on.

In summary, Trial of the Champion is very different from the instances we're used to. It has very little going for it in terms of story and immersion, instead it's all about being able to farm for epic loot all day long. I say, enjoy it while it lasts. Loot aside, you can still go in there with some friends or even a good pug and have a blast. Do it while you can, because once everyone got all the drops they want, the instance's popularity will decrease drastically, and after the next gear reset I can't really see anyone going back to it, ever, simply because it's got little else going for it. I sure hope that's not the direction Blizzard intends to take with all or even most future instances, but for now I'm willing to look on the bright side and make the most of it.