OK, I’ve had a day to think about the recent announcements regarding the Dragon Soul raid and the progressive nerfs that will be rolling out at the end of January. My thoughts on it have evolved from my initial confusion and even disbelief. I freely admit, when I first read that Blizzard was introducing an ICC-modeled debuff to the raid, I was incredulous. I didn’t see why it was necessary, and I said as much. Several of you then upbraided me on Twitter, and frankly, you gave me things to think about that I hadn’t considered. This dovetailed with recent statistics posted on MMO-Champion about who’d completed Dragon Soul in the Raid Finder vs. normal mode.

It’s really worth reading the whole thing. I generally agree with him and I think I come from generally the same perspective. I consider myself a middle-of-the-road raider and I pretty much despise elitism in all its forms–I’m all about getting the content to the people. Yet I’ve finished Dragon Soul and heroic Morchok on 10-man. (I say “10-man” for specific reasons, as you’ll see below.)

According to MMO-Champion’s statistics, that makes me one of a very few. And yet, I can’t shake the feeling that Dragon Soul is an easier raid than any of the ones we’ve seen in Cataclysm before.

One of my favorite fallacies in which I partake is to extrapolate and generalize based on my own guild and raid team, but hell, I do it all the time, so here we go again. (Regular readers who have heard this before can feel free to skip ahead.) I’m not a progression raider and we’re not in a progression raiding guild, but we are the only Alliance-side 25-man raiding guild on our server. Much of the initial progression, however, gets done in 10-mans, and I’m lucky enough to be a member of a pretty good ten-man team. Though I wasn’t in on every first kill because of schedule and gear (I skipped over Firelands for the most part), the team in general cleared Dragon Soul within the first three weeks, possibly even the first two, and if I recall correctly, everything but Madness was down in the first week. Again: we are not the world’s best raiders. As evidence, I offer every other raid in Cataclysm. 

For instance, according to my guildmate Tzufit, Ragnaros (who I still haven’t killed thanks to my break) took about 175 pulls and wasn’t down until just before the Firelands nerfs took effect. Nefarian and Cho’gall were similar stories; Cho’gall went down relatively early when we had a weird ten-man comp and some RNG luck and didn’t go down again until 2 months later, and Nef was a long, hard slog with multiple comps over many weeks.

Now, to Rossi’s point, yes, many of us went into DS with heroic Firelands gear, but not that much. I had none, for instance. In fact, when I first cleared it I was barely able to scrape my way into the Raid Finder, which at the very least proves it was possible to carry me. Nevertheless, an order of magnitude of difference between DS and the previous two tiers tells me there’s something fishy.

Maybe we improved substantially while we bashed our heads against Firelands? More likely, perhaps the DS raid had mechanics that we are just plain better at handling. I recently read an insightful post from Boozekin which pointed out that the major mechanics in DS can be called out by one person, while the fights in Firelands are more baroque. Maybe a raid team that thrives on that sort of thing would clear to Rags in a week and still get stuck on Zon’ozz?

And yet…

Thus far I’ve talked about a ten-man team that, with only a few personnel changes, has been tackling tough stuff together since heroic Crusader’s Coliseum. Our 25-man raids, however, are a different story entirely.

If there’s one thing that’s holding our 25 back, it’s the simple DPS check of Ultraxion, which is hellishly frustrating. I don’t worry about the tanking–we have great tanks. I don’t really worry about the healing–we have fantastic healers as long as they show up. But to be held back because of a fight that’s pretty much “deal damage, stand in one place, and click a button once in a while” is infuriating. I do think, providing the schedules line up, we’ll get it done before the nerfs hit. We’ve had people going through the tens and we’ve got 17+ DPSers who have now beaten him.

So we’re in both places–completely shredding the place on tens, and stuck on twenty-fives. Will we kill Madness-25 with a nerf applied? Maybe. I hope so. If nothing else, it would do wonders for guild morale and cohesion. It may surprise some of my guildies, but I prefer the 25s, as long as everyone takes them seriously and does their jobs.

And yet, I can’t help feeling that Dragon Soul was easier than the previous tiers. If it hadn’t been? None of our teams would have killed Madness by now.

Just had an amazing time with 6 guildies in DS LFR. We’d all need on gear that someone could use then trade to that person. DW double 2x now! 

 
My fury seethes so much I had to delay my real work to make this post.  
 
I cannot comprehend why someone would be proud of doing this. Let’s get this straight. You’re essentially taking advantage of your organization to get what amounts to six Need rolls per piece, and to hell with the poor schubs who are there alone (or who, I don’t know, are rolling ethically). No one in the raid deserves gear as much as we do! Because we are… six people and therefore we’re morally superior? How does that work? 
 
Here’s what you’re doing. You are fucking my wife.  
 
No, you’re not making me a cuckold. But my wife doesn’t get a chance to raid. LFR has been a godsend for her. It’s essentially her only way to see the full content and the only way to get upgrades. And her chance is 1 out of 25, just like everyone’s. Oh, excuse me–just like everyone’s except yours.  
 
 
This tweet is far from the only offender, I should point out. One of my guildies last night lost a roll to someone who was already wearing the very piece they won, who then proceeded to trade it to someone who had the same guild tag as them. Hell, for all I know, it was one of this tweeter’s posse.  
 
Please, people, don’t do this. Be a better person than this. Or, if you can’t think of this from someone else’s perspective, remember that you may find yourself screwed someday. It all comes back around.
 
Update: It turns out I misinterpreted the tweeter’s actions and intentions. They were trading the loot to anyone who was under geared, not just their guildies, in order to avoid the possibility of someone who didn’t need the gear actually getting it:
 

@blamesquelchy Open to anyone if they needed it sincerely as an UG [undergeared]. Traded Agi. trinket to a Hunter last night that I won through general roll

 
I apologize for the implication. It is indeed difficult to achieve true clarity in 140 characters. 

I’m reminded of this now because as I draft this, I’m sitting in a gazebo along a bike path, having done a little real-life sandboxing. Cycling is a lot like World of Warcraft in some ways. There are casuals and hardcores; outsiders’ eyes glaze over when you talk about either activity; and the better you get at it the more ridiculous your gear looks.

(There are even boss fights, after a fashion. You don’t want to know how much gold I spent on repairs after I got hit by a car in September.)

And of course, biking allows you to go off the beaten path–or at the very least, if the path is beaten, it’s a lot thinner.

Squelchy the Former Explorer

Without a doubt, the most epic moment in WoW for me was not a boss fight or a come-from-behind Arena win. It was walking into Ironforge for the first time.

What made it so special? I wasn’t trying to find it. I didn’t even have a quest to go there. I just saw a hill and started walking. “What’s up here?” my little gnomish avatar was thinking. Up to that point I had thought the tunnel from Coldridge Valley to Dun Morogh was pretty impressive. Then I noticed the music had changed about when I passed a small cart on my right. I hadn’t yet learned how to move my camera farther back for a wider field of vision, but with my FPS background I knew how to mouse-look, so I looked up–and there it was, the door with that gargantuan dwarf statue.

Dramatization. The role of Squelchy played by a level 2 bank alt on another server.

“Whoa,” I breathed, doing my best Keanu Reeves impression.

No doubt this would have been as visually stunning if I had bothered to pick up the breadcrumb quest to Ironforge (if there even was one in those days), but the fact that it was a spontaneous exploration is absolutely integral to my nostalgia. And I fear, in today’s game, that need to explore may be gone.

Like it or not, we live in a Wowhead world. And the very fact that you’re reading these words indicates you’re a sophisticated World of Warcraft player (it’s true, according to my analytics consultants anyway). But even for a new player, there is very little incentive to just wander around the world. The quests these days are excessively linear, and there are no group quests anymore, at least in the leveling game–which takes out the metaphorical exploration of finding other players on your realm.

Likewise, it’s entirely possible to level from 15 to 85 standing alone in Stormwind. I think on balance the Dungeon Finder is a fantastic addition to the game, but the sad fact is, it may have destroyed realm cohesion. There’s no need to ask on Westfall general chat for people to help you do Deadmines, and there’s relatively little downtime–even if you’re DPS, let’s be realistic–for you to wander aimlessly as you try to find your group.

(I have no nostalgia for this, don’t get me wrong, living and leveling on a low-population server as I did. But there is no doubt that “server pride” has decreased strongly since the DF joined the game.)

Take off the rails and pick up the shovels

What can Blizzard do to incentivize exploration?

Well, first of all, they could stop with the questing-on-rails that has been Cataclysm’s hallmark. Something as simple as placing a remote (but rewarding) quest in some far-off corner of a zone that’s only found if you’re running all over hell’s half acre looking at the scenery. There were tons of those in Vanilla and even Burning Crusade–as recently as patch 4.1 I found a quest in Hellfire Peninsula that, despite leveling three characters through it, I had no idea existed. (It was a poop quest, but the principle stands.)

Interestingly, the answer may have been part of this expansion all along: Archaeology.

I’m on the record as having a love/hate relationship with the new profession, but let’s look at one aspect of it: it absolutely encourages you to explore the world. But you don’t get to start exploring via digging until level 20, and even so Archaeology’s mechanics seem to have been designed with epic flying in mind–digsites all over the continent, giving a lower-level character no way to realistically level it as they make their way through the world.

Why not open it up as early as level 5? Give us digsites in the starting zones–maybe digsites open only to low level characters, smaller digsites for characters without mounts, rather like the lower-level zones themselves are smaller. Get new players into the habit of seeing different places. And of course, as part of this, put the digsites in less-traveled places, with maybe an Easter egg or two.

In short: give people an organic reason to get out there in the world, so they can see things like this:

Murderous critter mesa, Mulgore

Or this:

Anacostia River trail, Washington, D.C.

According to Icy Veins, yes:

Keep in mind that a Rogue currently collecting Elementium Gem Clusters will prevent another Rogue, on an earlier part of the chain (Cluster Clutch), from progressing at all. This appears to be a deliberate choice by Blizzard, meant to keep the number of legendary daggers relatively low.

So: one Rogue collecting the legendary per raid, no matter the quest progression. So, if you’re the second Rogue in line, and you didn’t know this, add about 8 weeks (4 if you’re regularly clearing 25s) to your ETA.

As for me, I have 99 shadowy gems left. Two weeks?

But there’s one thing that Blizzard said was going to be integral to the raiding scene in Cataclysm. Something that worked hand-in-hand with the changing of 10 and 25 man raids into a single lockout–something that would have completely changed at least my experience in patch 4.2 and might well have made it so I didn’t hang up the game in disgust from July to December.

I’m not talking about the extreme difficulty of the content compared to the end of Wrath, a topic I’ve hammered at before. I’m not talking about the inexplicable comparative ease of Dragon Soul, a topic I may hammer at in the future. I’m talking, simply, about a broken promise. Not a cosmetic promise, like, say, Dance Studios, but a promise that reached at the heart of Blizzard’s raid designs in all of Cataclysm.

You can't /rude while swimming. Coincidence?

Ghostcrawler Promised Me a Turtle

Where is the Abyssal Maw raid?

Now, before you say, “Squelchy, you bloody stupid gnome! You have your knickers in a twist because of a raid in Vash’jir?! The Stranglethorn Vale of Cataclysm? You actually wanted to go back there again?“

No, I haven’t gone back since leveling my shaman there (and I sometimes wonder whether if I had taken her to Hyjal she’d be 85). The Abyssal Maw is a stand-in for a much larger promise. I give you The Blues, in an early post explaining the changes coming to raids in patch 4.0:

For the first few raid tiers, our plan is to provide multiple smaller raids. Instead of one raid with eleven bosses, you might have a five-boss raid as well as a six-boss raid. All of these bosses would drop the same item level gear, but the dungeons themselves being different environments will provide some variety in location and visual style, as well as separate raid lockouts. Think of how you could raid Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep separately, but you might still want to hit both every week.

“Our plan is to provide multiple smaller raids.” How did that work out for you? One content patch later, we hear:

Our initial plan for this raid tier was to have fewer bosses in Firelands and a small number of bosses in the Abyssal Maw. As we looked more closely at Firelands, though, we realized that it deserved more bosses. We also got excited about designing item art (and set bonuses!) that were very fiery in nature, and the Molten Front questing area was turning out to be really cool, so we ended up piling more resources into Firelands…. We’ve decided for now that the Vashj’ir quest line along with the Throne of the Tides dungeon does a pretty good job of finishing the Neptulon story.

Why the hell did they drop this ball?

I’ve said before that my guild is a somewhat unusual one, in that our entire raison d’être is to give everyone who wants to raid, at least one raid spot in a given week. Certainly, some people will not come to a progression boss; some (especially DPS) may have to take nights off even if they’d prefer to raid. But as part of that bargain, we’ve always encouraged guild members to enjoy themselves in private 10-mans, where they can run raids as they see fit without loot or inclusion rules, or where they can even bitch about the officers without fear of repercussions (I encourage bitching; it’s the steam valve in the hot water boiler that is a WoW guild). In the first tier of Cataclysm, it all worked beautifully; 10s would go to Bastion of Twilight while the 25 was beating its head against Maloriak. (I’ve heard rumors there was a third raid in that tier as well. Can anyone confirm?)

But when Firelands arrived, with its new gear to wear and, more importantly, new bosses to conquer, regular raiders had to make a choice: stick with the sanctioned 25s that keep the guild together, or go to the 10s that, frankly, have more success, if only because it’s easier to herd 10 cats than 25? Particularly once Ragnaros was down, many people elected to try for heroic modes in a 10 rather than farm the 25. (Heroic 25s are not in our skill set as a guild.)

When in Pandaria

So the Grand Experiment of mutiple smaller raids lasted exactly one tier. I doubt it will be seen again, because of two words: Raid Finder.

Blizzard has now locked itself into doing three difficulty levels for each tier of raiding: LFR, normal, and heroic. One could argue it’s actually five difficulty levels if you add in the 10 and 25 variations. Is this sustainable for a company that will, if they’re rational, put more and more of their best MMO people into Titan as its release date approaches? And couldn’t they argue that 25s are well served by LFR alone, and scrap normal- and heroic-mode 25s altogether?

That’s the solution, I guess. Destroy the village in order to save it.

If that does happen, I at least will be disappointed. But let it not be forgotten (he said hyperdramatically): it all began here, with one broken promise, deep in the waters of Vash’jir.

Likewise, if you’ve looked at the top World of Logs parses, you may have seen something like this:

So what’s going on here? Is Assassination dead? Combat is behind only Fire Mages for top DPS, and Assassination is down in the depths with such shady company as Fury warriors and Beast Mastery hunters. What gives?

Longtime readers know I strongly prefer the Assassination gameplay. Combat, to me, has too many balls in the air at once, what with manual refresh of Slice and Dice, Combat Insight stacks (and the importance of Redirect if you don’t want to lose them), remembering a Revealing Strike, and those mutually-exclusive cooldowns of Adrenaline Rush and Killing Spree. Maybe that’s all well and good to you young rogues, but I have a major birthday coming up soon (hint: it’s not 30) and I’m just too old to remember a complex rotation and not stand in fire at the same time. (It’s why I preferred Arms to Fury on my warrior as well, even before the recent unpleasantness.)

But there are several strikes against Assassination right now. For one thing, our major execute mechanic requires us to be behind the boss. Well, at least two encounters in Dragon Soul (Ultraxion and Spine) make that either situationally impossible or just plain nonexistent. The first, add-based phase for Warmaster Blackhorn, and the single-targeting tentacle phase of Madness, are tailor-made for Blade Flurry. So: is a Mutilator doing his raid a disservice by sticking with his daggers?

The Theory

Let’s look at what the top theorycrafters in the WoW community have to say. Why does Shadowcraft show a switch from stock Assassination to stock Combat to be a significant DPS increase, even without changing reforging or gems? Elitist Jerks, you have the floor:

Good question. I think it’s a combination of modeling glitches and the practical realities of fights (target swaps resetting Insight stacks, etc.) making it harder for Combat to realize its full potential. This is something I’m looking into, but in the meantime I wouldn’t worry about it too much – ShadowCraft’s primary function as a gear and spec optimizer doesn’t require it to be 100% consistent across specs, and I think its stat, talent, glyph, etc. priorities are fairly accurate even if there’s some oddities when comparing across specs.

(Aldriana, in the Cataclysm raiding FAQ)

So Shadowcraft’s modeling may be at least somewhat to blame. But what about the World of Logs parses? Well, beyond the danger of using the best players in the world as a baseline (I don’t know about any of you, but I’m pretty sure it’s not an accurate metric for me), Aldriana has this to say, from the same source:

Ranking sites tend to conflate spec performance with spec representation; that is, the reason Combat may appear to be superior to Assassination on a fight like Baleroc has more to do with the fact that there are three times as many Combat rogues doing the fight as any practical difference between the specs. There are more Combat rogues because it is better – or at least perceived to be better – on a few specific fights. This results in there being more Combat rogues than rogues of the other specs, which in turn results in a skewing of the numbers that make it appear to be better on the other fights as well.

This certainly holds true for Ultraxion in Dragon Soul, at the very least. You can’t attack him from behind–therefore Assassination is at a disadvantage–therefore fewer players will play it, and therefore the sample will be less accurate.

So the top theorycrafters hold that Assassination isn’t as far below Combat as it would seem. What else can we look at?

The (Personal) Practice

As I like to do, I headed to Stormwind’s crash test target dummies to practice each rotation in turn. Target dummy runs are of course inaccurate as well (where are all the raid buffs?) but as a rough simulation of Ultraxion (a fight where Backstab and Murderous Intent never play out), you could do worse than these wooden figures with a Horde flag above them.

For the purpose of these tests, I did use a Flask of the Winds (as it was leftover from the previous night’s raid), and I did reforge (using Shadowcraft’s recommendations) appropriately for each spec. I did not change my Adept Ember Topazes to the agility/haste equivalent–but at the time I only had one of them anyway.

Here’s the Recount for Assassination:

A respectable 19K DPS. (Aside: isn’t it amazing what raid buffs can do? I assure you, my Ultraxion DPS last night was quite a bit higher.) Here’s the next test, where I was running Combat, appropriately reforged:

Virtually identical.

Now, this doesn’t at all prove that Assassination and Combat are the same on a non-Backstabbable fight. As I said, I’m not a good Combat rogue, and even if I were, I’m seriously out of practice and my UI is suboptimal for it–I didn’t even have a Deep Insight trigger in MSBT. However, it does prove one thing–even in a fight where Combat has a clear advantage, I’m absolutely not hurting my raid when I stick to Assassination. If you’re already a Combat rogue, enjoy, and swashbuckle to your heart’s content. But if you prefer Assassination, don’t let the bastards pressure you into anything.

Case closed, right? Well…

The Mammoth in the Room

Mammoths have difficulty being subtle.

You may have noticed that Rogues, in fact, have a third spec, one which doesn’t do at all badly in the World of Logs parses: Subtlety.

To quote Aldriana again, “From a theoretical perspective, all three specs do quite similar damage…. That said: subtlety remains hard to recommend in general, due to the higher complexity of its cycle. This is not to say you shouldn’t play it, but if you do it should be because you’ve done research beyond reading this FAQ and know what you’re getting yourself into.”

Or, as a member of my guild once said, “KIN Raiders has a lot of subtlety rogues, and they’re all octopuses.” If you think Combat is complex, hoo boy, you need to give Subtlety a wide, wide berth, between having to keep both Slice and Dice and Recuperate rolling (for its extra Energy) and the RNG of your Eviscerates maybe refreshing Rupture… There was a random rogue on our server who whispered me the other day, wondering why his gear was decent but he was still below the tanks in Raid Finder. He was Subtlety. I advised him to look at the other specs.

But hey–if you have eight arms, give it a shot!

Legendaries have evolved and grown over the course of WoW’s seven years, and in many ways, they are the most democratic and least mercurial they’ve ever been; anyone can start the legendary quests, but to actually get the final orange pixels requires time, coordination, and help from friends. Compare this to the BC era, where one guild might fruitlessly farm Black Temple for months while another would get a Warglaive from their only Illidan kill, or to Vanilla, where a very small random drop might lead to a legendary many, many months into the future–or it might not.

Our guild has been lucky enough to get a few legendaries since Wrath dropped–one healing mace, one Strength axe, and two caster staves. As I attempt to collect my three hundred thirty-three shadowy gems (sitting at 211 as of this writing, thanks for asking), I thought I’d ask three of my guild members–Milric, wielder of Val’anyr, Lyshra, owner of Shadowmourne, and Turion, our first winner of Dragonwrath, how they enjoyed the process and the weapon.

On the Journey

In my opinion, the process for getting the weapon needs to be just as legendary as the weapon itself, and it seems that, post-Wrath, Blizzard has embraced this notion. I understand that the Warglaives were actually used by Illidan Stormrage, and as such you can’t have a giant quest to “forge” them, but a simple, very rare drop off a boss doesn’t require any more skill than simply clearing Black Temple (a not inconsiderable task, granted). Perhaps a quest to find the key to Illidan’s safe-deposit box would have been better.

My guildies agree. “After my experience with Shadowmourne I can definitively say I’d feel cheated if legendaries ever went back to just being a boss drop,” says Lyshra, and Turion adds that it’s “vastly superior to the original Molten Core roulette. There’s a feeling of acomplishing something towards which a whole guild spent months working, and that beats relying on a lucky dice roll.”

This is not to say Blizzard’s systems are perfect. Milric advises them to take a page from one of the granddaddies of MMOs: “In old [EverQuest], everyone could be on their legendary quest but extremely few ever completed it…. But many of those components could be gotten solo. The process was non-linear (bing, bing, bing). So people worked on their quest for a long time doing whatever parts they could at the time.” In a way, the current Rogue questlines are in this model: nearly every Rogue with access to normal modes has the first stage of their daggers now. But the gathering of gems remains a bottleneck.

This bottleneck is by far the most reviled part of the legendary quests. Milric says, “Blizzard’s current method forces us to go, ‘I CHOOSE YOU, TURION!’ and then he is the one that gets it. Everyone else can pound sand – not fun.” Lyshra says that the collection simply comes down to ”Show up to raids and don’t leave before looting the boss.” And Turion adds that the quest combined with the new raid lock out system actually decreased his personal challenge by locking him out of heroic modes: “[Collection] soon became a grind, especially since we are not a guild that just plows through 25-man content…. I had to stick with the 25-man with its higher Essence drop rate instead of the 10 man that was actively clearing heroic bosses.”

That said, I would add to this that the ability to get legendaries in ten-man–new to Cataclysm–is a good thing, and is probably 90% of the reason we have two Dragonwraths, and only one each of the other post-BC legendaries.

On Guild Investment

I was on hiatus (thanks, Rhyolith!) while we pursued Dragonwrath, but I can definitely say that our guild helped with getting the WotLK legendaries. In the case of Val’anyr (which we didn’t get until ICC had been released) it was if nothing else because we dragged Milric kicking and screaming back to Ulduar to complete his weapon–he’s been our selfless raid leader for a while now and we all wanted to reward him. Shadowmourne we completed while it was still current content–albeit with a 30% Strength of Wrynn buff–and everyone (but especially the healers) was involved in the infusion quests.

Sadly, though I reserve the right to revise my judgment when I actually experience the whole quest line, I think the Fangs process falls down a bit here; the difficult parts–stealthing to a boss and killing him or her solo–happen completely out of line of sight (as it were) of your guild. Even killing Deathwing only involves looting his chin, unless there’s more to the encounter than has been datamined. This may well fit for rogues–we are, after all, thieves and gankers–but in terms of guild investment, it boils down to waiting for a rogue to pickpocket Hagara, and maybe waiting five minutes for her to reset so another rogue can pick her pocket again. Compare this to Dragonwrath, where you get to watch your guildmate turn into a tree-tank! I firmly expect the general congratulations when the first rogues get their orange daggers to be a bit more muted.

On the Weapon Itself

Turion and Lyshra found the DPS weapons successful in terms of their proc, effects, and feel. As Turion says of Dragonwrath, “the proc feels almost natural for Elemental Shaman, because it works so similarly to Elemental Overload (the Elemental mastery)…. it’s definitely fun.”

However, Milric makes a point which I agree with: a DPS proc and a healing proc are two entirely different beasts, in that a DPS proc at an inconvenient time is simply saddening, while not getting a healing proc at the right time can be deadly. “This is a game mechanic issue,” he says. “Blizzard does not understand that healing throughput is more demand driven than DPS throughput.”

Blizzard definitely gets high marks, though, for integrating the lore into the weapons and the process. On Shadowmourne, Lyshra says, “You melt down Arthas’ old hammer, infuse it with a whole bunch dried old god blood and etch it with the blood of the two greatest Abominations ever constructed. And that’s just the blank slate. Then you slaughter your enemies and feed them to it, infuse it with the souls of the Lich King’s greatest lieutenants, and use the shattered shards of the Frozen Throne to hold the whole thing together.” Turion expresses his joy more succinctly: “Did I mention I am bonded with the essence of a dragon?” It remains to be seen whether Fangs, through the various cutscenes, will be as well-integrated as these, but it is interesting to note that the story actually begins with a level 40ish quest way back in the Badlands…

Of course, like any weapon, it will eventually be replaced. Milric: ”‘I have a mace forged by the very god-like beings that made the world and the living things on it!’ Oh, I can buy a better mace from this goblin guy now that Cata has come out – he makes them from ox teeth.” But that’s a job made for Transmogrification, right? Nope–you can’t transform your new weapons so they can look like the legendaries you’ve earned. I can understand why–Blizzard wants them to be unique. But it seems unjust when, as Lyshra said in a separate conversation, someone who stopped at Shadow’s Edge can carry it around until the end of time, while actual legendaries will rot in the bank. I feel this sting; given our guild’s progression speed, chances are our rogues won’t have the Fangs for very long before pandas arrive and change everything.

Clearly, transmogrifying legendaries is a privilege that should be reserved for those who completed them as current content. But short of removing old legendaries entirely when a new expansion drops, I’m not sure what the solution is.

The Future

With the Fangs questline still unfinished, it remains to be seen whether the rogue entry in the legendary sweepstakes will be worthy of its predecessors. I hope to be able to answer my own questions in a subsequent post. After that, who knows? Perhaps someday we will be able to wield Stormsnout’s Bamboo Snack.

Thanks very much to my guildies who took the time to answer my questions. I was so impressed with their responses I decided to include them in full. If you’re interested, you can find them after the break.

Milric – Holy Paladin, on Val’anyr, Hammer of Ancient Kings

Which parts of the quest for getting the legendary were the most and least fun? Most and least challenging (if different)?

None of it was particularly fun. It was waiting for parts to randomly drop and then killing Yogg-Saron on a difficult mode. The killing of Yogg-Saron was certainly the most difficult part.
Did the quest give a good sense of where the weapon came from?

It did. Though it then ran into the fundamental problem that all legendaries run into. “I have a mace forged by the very god-like beings that made the world and the living things on it!” Oh, I can buy a better mace from this goblin guy now that Cata has come out – he makes them from ox teeth.

Did the weapon’s proc or special features make playing your class more fun?

Proc based heal stuff is crap. Whoa! Heal bubbles around everyone … on this trash pull. Can’t get the damn thing to proc at an important time in a boss fight though. This is a game mechanic issue. Blizzard does not understand that healing throughput is more demand driven than DPS throughput. It’s because they are bad to mediocre at game design.

Would you do it again?

Not for a proc based healing weapon, no.

How do you feel about the process for getting legendaries in general? Is a huge quest chain, a la Wrath, better than a very small random drop, a la BC?

I understand that Blizzard wants Legendaries to be quite rare, but I believe they have erred too far. For the Hammer, someone questing it could make no guess as to when they would have the parts – it was a completely random thing. We would clear Ulduar and I would get 4 parts. We would clear Ulduar and I would get 0. I think they learned a bit from that and normalized the drops. That at least allows a player to know that it will be 15 weeks of work to do it. As for the quest, I’ll speak to that in Thoughts (below).

Thoughts

Blizzard should scrap their Legendary process and use a process more like old EQ. In old EQ, everyone could be on their legendary quest but extremely few ever completed it. It was monstrously hard and required a pile of guild effort. As I recall, the Enchanter epic had 14 components. But many of those components could be gotten solo. The process was non-linear (bing, bing, bing). So people worked on their quest for a long time doing whatever parts they could at the time. Blizzard’s current method forces us to go, “I CHOOSE YOU, TURION!” and then he is the one that gets it. Everyone else can pound sand – not fun.

Lyshra – Unholy Death Knight, on Shadowmourne

Which parts of the quest for getting the legendary were the most and least fun? Most and least challenging (if different)?

Most fun I’d make it a toss up between the soloing bit for the initial quest, and gathering souls. Soul gathering was fun to see all of the soul-stuff flying around and the, ahem, mini-game of trying to tag every add in the Valithria fight so I got soul-sucking credit for all of them. That mini-game brought the thing forward at least a couple days – all those wipes were worth tens of souls each time. Good times.

The soloing thing was also cool – you had to retrieve Arthas’ old weapon from the cavern Frostmourne was in. Mostly it involved killing tonnes of ghouls before the boss ghoul at the end, and a good amount of panicking as you got overwhelmed. I’m a sucker for this sort of thing and I definitely agree with it in legendary quests – honestly I’m a bit sad that this was that only bit for Shadowmourne, and the two legendaries since have had much better developed solo storylines to play through.

Most challenging… while tempting to be witty and say “waiting for you guys to kill enough bosses for me to get 50 shards”, I’d probably have to go for the Putricide infusion. I’m going to lump “least fun” on that one too. As a non-tank it complicated the fight for our already slightly ropey 25 man Putricide kill, and I found the mechanics of eating the ooze and having to juggle energy costs for the slow and the infusion – and having to time the infusion correctly – very stressful. I think I would’ve had some kind of failure-seizure without the Druid energy-restoring talent ticking away on the abomination. On the attempt I managed it, I actually very nearly bungled the whole thing.

Additional shout here here to the infusion quests in general. I found them to be a faff, particularly with the time limit on them. Blood Queen was the least annoying, but that isn’t really saying much here.

Least challenging? Collect 50 shadowfrost shards. “Show up to raids and don’t leave before looting the boss”.

Most fufilling stage? Technically post-receiving the legendary, but – The Lich King’s Last Stand. Best quest name ever, best quest rewards ever. Ask Squelchy’s horse.

Did the quest give a good sense of where the weapon came from? Did it feel organic, or just tacked into the game? 

Oh hell yes. Where this thing came from? Well, you melt down Arthas’ old hammer, infuse it with a whole bunch dried old god blood and etch it with the blood of the two greatest Abominations ever constructed. And that’s just the blank slate. Then you slaughter your enemies and feed them to it, infuse it with the souls of the Lich King’s greatest lieutenants, and use the shattered shards of the Frozen Throne to hold the whole thing together.

For bonus points – you do all that to create the sister blade to Frostmourne, which is the magical artifact behind the entire WotLK expansion. No Frostmourne, no Lich King as we knew him to have Wrath. “Tacked on” is not a phrase I would allow anywhere near Shadowmourne.

If anything deserves orange text, it’s a weapon specifically designed to destroy the final boss of an expansion. Particularly when that final boss is the Lich King, who we’d been wanting to fight since the WC3 expansion.

Did the weapon’s proc or special features make playing your class more fun?

I greatly enjoyed the VFX of the proc – swirly swirl of shadowstuff around your character, followed by a large shadow explosion when it stacked enough – and obviously the massive damage was fun too. I definitely felt like all of the effort was worth it when I was using it.

Would you do it again?

Without a shadow of a doubt. The reward – and I mean in terms of sense of accomplishment, and, in the case of Shadowmourne, ability to twink your friends with cool trinkets – lasts longer than the weapon did.

How do you feel about the process for getting legendaries in general? Is a huge quest chain, a la Wrath, better than a very small random drop, a la BC?

There’s sort of been 3 stages of legendaries – in classic, where you needed a random drop raid item, then you had to do a quest to get the actual weapon. Usually involving crafting, too. TBC, where they just dropped from bosses, and WotLK/Cataclysm where you get a quest which involves killing raid bosses along the way. Val’anyr was more like a classic quest, in a some ways.

After my experience with Shadowmourne I can definitively say I’d feel cheated if legendaries ever went back to just being a boss drop. They need to be quests like they are now. I love the idea of the expanded soloing in the Fangs of the Father quest – viewiing it from the outside, of course. If I ever went for another, which seems incredibly unlikely at this stage in WoW’s cycle, it would have to be a quest along the lines of Shadowmourne/Dragonwrath/Fangs questline to get me interested. Orange pixels are nice – particularly for the effect they have on your damage! – but it’s the journey and the sense of accomplishment that’s the real draw of it. [Shadowmourne] is one of very few achievements I am genuinely proud of and will pimp on request.

Turion – Elemental Shaman, on Dragonwrath, Tarecgosa’s Rest

I consider the current Legendary weapon completion system (even with its long, involved questlines, and somewhat numbing collection stage grinds) to be vastly superior to the original Molten Core roulette. There’s a feeling of acomplishing something towards which a whole guild spent months working, and that beats relying on a lucky dice roll.

The Dragonwrath questline in particular was very gratifying. I admittedly don’t pay much attention to the lore beyond the broad brush strokes, but even I felt invested in the process. Once I finished the solo quest – which for me was quite tough – and witnessed Tarecgosa sacrifice herself so I could have a chance to stop Deathwing’s plot, I was hooked. Obtaining a branch of the World tree and participating in the choosing of an Aspect were incredibly rewarding.

It was still exhausting, however. If we were a guild that flew through 25-man content and were attempting Firelands heroics in the first month the grinding stages would have been shorter, but our slower progression pace meant each Tuesday or Wednesday I missed factored into that mental calculation of how many more weeks were left to go.

It was still worth it, though. We completed a major achievement as a guild WHILE IT WAS STILL CURRENT CONTENT, and with raiding being such a collaborative experience, that matters considerably more than the orange pixels.

Which parts of the quest for getting the legendary were the most and least fun? Most and least challenging (if different)?

The most fun I had was probably obtaining the Branch of Nordrassil, because turning into a tree with increased damage and haste was a great visual. From an event standpoint, being a part of the Blue Dragonflight’s choosing the next Aspect of Magic was very satisfying. Then, for sheer silliness, I loved having the Rage of Ragnaros debuff during the last step.

The collecting stages were my least favorite aspect, because they soon became a grind, especially since we are not a guild that just plows through 25-man content. They also doubled for the most part as the least challenging aspect, since due to the “flexible” lockout system I had to stick with the 25-man with its higher Essence drop rate instead of the 10 man that was actively clearing heroic bosses.

The solo stage that takes you into the Nexus really definitely felt the most challenging, because it tested my ability interrupt, dispel, control adds and heal myself when needed. I tried and failed many times, rethought my strategy, experimented with consumables, buffs and glyphs, until it all worked out.

Did the quest give a good sense of where the weapon came from? Did it feel organic, or just tacked into the game?

It definitely helped tie the Firelands into Deathwing’s plan for Azeroth’s destruction more than any of the cinematics. Plus, it’s not every day you meet a dragon who sacrifices herself to protect you and prevent those evil plans from coming to fruition, and then bond with said dragon’s essence. It’s not as much a weapon as it is a reminder of the price the Blue Dragonflight paid, and their remaining link to one of their bravest members.

Did the weapon itself feel unique enough that it merited the orange text?

Did I mention I am bonded with the essence of a dragon? Does it get any grander, more unique than that?

Did the weapon’s proc or special features make playing your class more fun?

Would you do it again?

Definitely. Despite the grind there was a sense of accomplishing something with a guild that just could not be beat.

How do you feel about the process for getting legendaries in general? Is a huge quest chain, a la Wrath, better than a very small random drop, a la BC?

Back in Vanilla days, on another server, I remember going to Molten Core repeatedly trying to complete a Thunderfury for our MT long after we had completed BWL. We ended up with 4 tanks that had one of the bindings but not the other, and never completed one. We did complete a Sulfuras 2 weeks before BC, after, I don’t know, a year and a half of killing Ragnaros almost every week. In the meantime, there was a guild on our server that had one drop on their second kill. The long questline imparts a much more epic feel when properly implemented, as Dragonwrath’s was. It’s not just a case of downing one mob and being lucky on the ensuing dice roll; it’s the culmination of the efforts of a whole guild, rewarding perseverance and some modicum of execution. I can live with that.

Thing is, I don’t quite know who to nominate; my blogroll is quite tiny and the blogs I do read certainly don’t need any help from me to get readers. I should be better at finding new blogs and championing them, but: Time. Time. Time. (See what’s become of me?)

There will be a quiz later on how many ’60s songs are referenced in this post.

However, there are a few blogs that I keep returning to again and again.

• Tree Heals Go Woosh. I tried, I really did, to keep this one off my list–Tzufit is a friend, and nepotism is annoying. But knee-jerk fears of nepotism are also annoying, and the simple fact is that Tzufit is a fantastic writer. Sure, being a non-druid, many of the theory-based posts make me go “whuh?” (in fairness, most Rogue theorycrafting also engenders that reaction in me), but the clarity, insight, and general excellence of her posts never cease to amaze. Examples: Giving Chase Christian the “Care Bear Stare” and its aftermath; 5 Ways to Win at Guild Finder, a post funny enough that I wish I’d written it; and Mists of Pandaria and the Zen of Warcraft.
• Daughter of Ravenholdt Manor was one of the first rogue blogs I came across, and although I haven’t kept up with it as much as I should, Daraia continues to provide whimsically thought-provoking content. My favorite feature of hers is “Know Your Rogue Lore”; as an example, sink your teeth into this entry on the Gnomeregan Covert Ops. Also, if you want to know the Rogue legendary quest line, there is no better way to experience it than through her stories.
• Finally, a blog that certainly doesn’t need any traffic from me (it’s like I’m the Dave Clark Five trying to provide Paul McCartney with a few new songs): Jaded Alt. Windsoar has too many good posts to really select her best, but her most recent as of this writing really moved me, for reasons I won’t go into in this space.

Looking over these choices, I have to admit the one thing that keeps me coming back to a blog is the writing. Content matters, but if you can get that content in a coherent package, you’ve got me hooked. Oh, and knowing the rules of punctuation doesn’t hurt.

Head on over to MMO Melting Pot to view the categories and cast your ballot!