Hey, I bet you want to read more about my World of Warcraft Adventures!!
So this past week I finally dinged 60. See?
After all this time, I’ve finally achieved something 94% of the planet achieved a year ago. Yay for Earth.
So of course I was immediately taken to Molten Core, because by God, if they’re going to raid Molten Core for the 9,371st time, the least I could do is tag along. My initial impression: uh… gee, this is kind of dull. Pull, pull, pull. Hey, look, I have to help keep dogs in a pile. That seems epic. Hey, a dog wandered away from the pile, I BETTER FETCH THE DOG. I’m a strong Warrior. It’s what I do. DOGFETCHING. Can I kill something yet? Like, a gnome or something? NO. MORE DOGS. And the occasional elemental thingy. Hey, look, a boss! I bet this will be exciting… no, wait, it’s dead. MORE DOGS. After about 3 hours of this I had more doggie excitement than I can stand and some ZOMGLOOT! because I was the only warrior on the raid that wasn’t already geared up past Robojesus levels. The gauntlets looked especially amusing on me amidst my array of level 53-55ish green and blue gear.
Our guild does Molten Core “off night” raids out of pity for alts such as myself (I joke that I’m my wife’s alt, and I suspect they all think I’m serious), since as you might have gathered from this recap they’ve kind of moved beyond that sort of thing. So meanwhile I joined another pickup raid, this one for lower Blackrock Spire. This was my first WOO LEVEL 60 pickup raid, and the folks in this raid actually knew what they were doing. Mainly because they’ve already done it. A lot. One person mentioned that this was his nineteenth “LBRS” run. At any rate I was main tank now for a 10 person raid. I tried to make sure that the monsters hit my gloves at all times. HEY LOOK, I HAVE GLOVES. JUST HIT THE GLOVES. It should work, judging from the female Paladin epic armor, which has about as much metal as my gloves.
Being main tank meant I moved from boredom to confusion. What, I need to pull? Where? Pull what? Wait, hold up, I’m trying to taunt… oh, it’s on cooldown. I’m sundering as fast as I can here! Could someone actually kill this stuff? I’m a mighty warrior and I’m holding a shield, THAT MEANS I CANNOT ACTUALLY KILL ANYTHING. Did I mention the gloves? HIT THE GLOVES, YOU.
I didn’t get any loot in my LBRS run, but I got something more important — I learned about life. No, wait, I didn’t really learn that much. But I learned that 10 person raids where I could screw up and get people killed and not get anything good were more fun than 40 person raids where I played dogfetcher and got Gauntlets of Lordly Egoism.
Then this weekend my lovely wife, whom, you may remember, spending time with is the entire point of this exercise, asks if I want to go raid Zul’Gurub with them. (In case you didn’t notice, the World of Warcraft developers ran out of names after they launched and ever since have just been releasing zones with syllables from the random name generator.) I say… uh… sure, and get ready to go run an errand. When I come back I AM READY TO GO PARKED IN FRONT OF THE DUNGEON LET’S GO GO NOW GO. Well, how can I turn *that* down!
Apparently Zul’Gurub is less of a well-oiled machine than Molten Core, or more likely the guild leader actually noticed I existed, mainly because I kept not backing up and getting blown up by exploding bats (bats explode! Who knew?) and I kept assisting the main tank instead of the main assist (“My CTRaid put my MA bar under my minimap! Honest!”) and I kept misfiring my abilities and turning right when I should have turned left and uh, Cavort, can you give up your slot so someone actually competent can come along? FINE! I’LL TAKE MY TWO ITEMS THAT ARE FAR MORE UBER THAN ANYTHING ELSE I’VE EVER GOTTEN BESIDES MY HOLY GLOVES THAT I RECIEVED JUST FOR BREATHING AND GO! SEE IF I CARE! Humph.
Tune in next week when I loot ANOTHER pair of gloves.
{ 31 comments… read them below or add one }
At least be thankful your in a guild that can do the large instances. What is worse is being as geared as you can possibly get without being in such a guild, and having all such guilds on your server not accepting new members. All I can do is pvp for hours on end. Enjoy your shiney codpiece of vanquishing.. or might or whatever. As for excessive uberness, when you start disenchanting your current gloves because they just arn’t up to par, you’ll know youve made it.
At least you have your wife to remind you that there is fun to be had. I suspect she’s at least as important as the guild itself.
See, if your guild cared about you at all, they’d have kept you until you got it right. Did your wife help out in any way, or did she give up and cast you away like any random nub?
Well to be perfectly honest I wasn’t really complaining at losing my slot – I had already looted 2 ZOMGUBER pieces and someone else really wanted to play, whereas after 3 hours I had about had my fill of staring down trolls.
Wow. I know what you mean. Our ‘work guild’ a bunch of Aspyr denizens have been dinging thier first 60s over the past month. Everyone mentions a feeling of being lost, desperate.
“What do I do know”
Most log off for a few days, or start an ALT. The transition to PUGs, or even guild oreineted 5 man shcolo/strat raids i crazy. And the mantra you must mutter to yourself is ‘loot, must get itam’.
The end game is surprisingly fun, but deep down you end up feeling dirty. You know that the real reason you are doing it is to get statistically superior gear that is unbelievably better than what you have.
The most depressing thing is finishing a lvl 60 dungeon, dropping what you consider a great item, then examining another lvl 60, and noticing that thier item is two times better than your level 60 item. Strictly better!
That’s when the long road of lootwhoring spreads out before you in your mind. The grind has changed, altered. They have rebuilt it, made it stronger, longer.
The next great MMO will be more honest. I smell ‘ItemQuest’ the MMO coming like a dark, itemful cloud of cloudiness on the horizon.
And this is why I don’t raid. Let me sit in my corner and sew hides for plat. At least I know what’s going on.
Indeed, after hitting 60, the game is no longer leveling, it is now “dress up”. The object being to obtain and wear the fanciest attire. By fancy, or course, I mean “powerful” for those of you with male egos.
There is a good deal of satisfaction that can be obtained when you and your guild tackle any of the major raid instances and drop each boss for the first time. Even for the first ten or twenty times. It takes time to learn the strategies and coordination needed, and that is fun and rewarding for a bit.
But MC, in particular, turns into a shopping trip before too long- where the shopkeepers only stock a few items each, which aren’t known until you are standing over said shopkeeper’s corpse. The relaxation and ease of completing MC can be a welcome change for those currently facing frustration in BWL or AQ40, though.
The guild I am in still has some fun to be had, I think. We are consistantly up to Nefarian but have been unable to take him down so far. After BWL, we still have AQ40 to tackle, and by then the expansion will be out…
To be honest, it’s far more fun if you’re in a guild that’s learning it for the first time.
But still, you’ll get up to speed and join them soon enough. As to MC vs. ZG, you can do MC with less than 40. My guild beat like half the bosses for the first time with about 30-35 people. ZG is more unforgiving. It’s more important that each person should be doing the right thing (or at least, not screwing up).
Being dragged through Molten Core by 39 people who can clear BWL in one sitting is sort of like being dragged through Deadmines by 4 level 60s. It’s rendered trivial by their gear and experience, and because it’s trivial it’s not that much fun. You seem to be implying that there’s an inherent defect in the 40-man system that makes raids boring, which is not really the case.
Out of interest, what UI mod are you using to get your details displayed like that? It’s by far the best and most informative I’ve seen.
Not that I’ll use it – I’ve only got to level 40 and have already lost the will to live.
“But I learned that 10 person raids where I could screw up and get people killed and not get anything good were more fun than 40 person raids where I played dogfetcher and got Gauntlets of Lordly Egoism.”
BIIINGO.
Except when you’ve done said 10 person raid (or 5 man group) 30, 40, even 50 times, you’ll drift back to the 40 person raid, because if you’re going to be bored to death, you might as well get some loot out of it.
Expansion, plz~
> What UI mod are you using to get your details displayed like that?
Discord Unit Frames
http://www.discordmods.com/cgi-bin/page.pl?mod=DUF
I spend far more time on my UI then actually playing.
I must be of some strange personallity type compared to the majority… I’ve been lvl 60, on the save server, with the same guild, with no alts, for over a year now. And I have YET to ‘run out of things to do’. Granted, I’m not some gaming wiz that had it all planned out and created a structured, well managed plan to ration content and avoid burnout… but it seems to have worked out that way. Is that a sign of the incredible design of the game?
Or am I just not enough of the min/max gamer type to have blown through to burnout at maximum speed? And what are the demograpgics of the WoW population, anyways? You have cries for expansion, cries for altered content, etc… but what is the ratio of ‘squeaky wheel’ to ‘silent happy/unhappy gamer’? Or the ratio of powergaming min/maxer to someone like me? And how do those two stats overlap and affect each other? I suppose, whoever can figure that out will have the next great game on their hands.
I’m just returning to WoW after a long break, and am lucky enough to still be in a high-end raiding guild. So I see many nights like yours ahead of me, where instead of just sharding all the dragonhunter armor, etc., I’ll actually get it all. Tons of loot, without the waiting in line … yay! =)
That’s the closest the webmaster for “Broken Toys” has come to sounding like a guy named Lum in a long, long time. I particularly applaud the frequent use of capital letters.
Very funny read.
The next time I’m in a group with a crappy warrior that doesn’t know how to hold aggro and wipes the groups multiple times I’ll be comforted by the fact I’m probably just playing with a developer…
You seem to be aware of it already, but Molten Core is a lot more fun when it’s not being run by people who have done it a thousand times. Comments about chasing the carrot aside, the boss fights in WoW are superior to anything I’ve ever gone through in an MMOG. Won’t bother citing my credentials, but I’ve played a lot of ‘em.
AQ40 in specific has some of the most unique battles I’ve seen yet, to the point that “solving” the fight is more fun than getting the trinkets. BWL was like that too, for all the other flaws you can dig up for WoW, they’ve really aced the high end raiding. The attention and teamwork required to win is pretty darn refreshing.
Heehee, funny. I look forward to similar good times when I finally get my first WoW character to 60th — sort of.
And it’s good to see Cavort out and about in a new incarnation.
“Hey, look, I have to help keep dogs in a pile. That seems epic.”
I laughed loud enough that I had to explain this to the non-WoW-players in the house.
Your first couple of raids sound like my entire experience in D&D Online. Every pickup group I joined was doing the dungeon we were in for the Nth time and I was pretty much just along for the ride. It was disorienting. I never knew where we were, where we were going, or what we were doing, and all the while I was a couple of hours into trying to learn the combat system AT ALL. Bleah.
You are also playing one of those classes who has the strangest job on the planet, which involves not killing things but keeping them occupied. Honestly you may see it now as weird, but a warrior’s main job in the big instances is to sit there and make sure that specific mob doesn’t run around killing everyone in the raid. Eventually the raid turns and kills your mob and then you can go “tank” another mob or help with the DPS.
Seriously though, I think warriors might have the funnest time. Most other classes push 2 buttons and stay the hell out of way. Warriors have to set up rotations, select mobs, and manage aggro. In Molten Core its pretty easy because its all mostly slugfests, but in BWL, the AQs, and probably all future dungeons, encounters are far more scripted.
I’d say stay optimistic and get enough gear in MC to go to BWL, and try to learn to be a “Tank”. Once you start hitting those meaner instances you’ll have fun for a while (at least until you’ve cleared it for the 30th time, but every game has that problem).
Warrioring is required and MC is shit, this is not news. I’d be happy to MT for you instead, but PALADINS AREN’T ALLOWED.
AQ20 is a friggin blast times 100. Especially now that Rajaxx isn’t such a whore. Same with Hakkar/ZG for that matter. After the unfucked the fight it really turned the zone into a fun couple hours. Not that “free” epics for zero effort wasn’t good or anything, but we’re there to actually have…you know…fun. Or something.
Guilds make or break WoW as much, if not more, than they did in EQ. And that’s a tough nut to crack. If I didn’t have oen as ridiculously awesome as I do the game would have been uninstalled months ago. Well-scripted, entertaining content is useless if you can’t be part of a group ready to tackle it.
Umm…so how is that supposed to fun. At all.
So far, I’m still glad I ejected at level 30 something. Thanks for the writeup. I tend to feel the temptation to re-up now and again and this is good medicine for that condition.
Funny because it’s true! I geared up mostly in PvP (Warlord Jaera!), but that armor isn’t really good for PvE. Since PvP sucks, you’re stuck with PvE. Fortunately, my guild can do MC (in partnership with another guild), ZG and AQ20, so I’m gearing up quickly.
If you think Warrior is boring, try a healer in PvE. Heal, heal, heal, oops missed a heal, rez, heal. Fortunately ZG has some encounters where I get to do something other than heal, but MC is so boring.
rofl. Classic.
Isn’t it lame that the focus of the dungeons isn’t on having fun fighting, but on the loot that drops afterwards? I don’t understand why tanks don’t have to like… box in the boss so it doesn’t charge after the healers. Or why every boss fight is exactly the same every time.
ZG is exactly the same as every other instance in the game. If you know what to do, it’s a fucking joke. If you don’t, it’s impossible. There’s no skill involved, just following directions.
What happened to boss fights like the ones in Mario 64 or The Legend of Zelda? Sure, they were on patterns, but at least you had to dodge fireballs, instead of just have enough fire resist for it not to matter.
Like bloo, I bailed on wow about level 30. After talking to my friends who still play religiously and reading this, I don’t doubt that decision at all.
Molten Core didn’t used to be a joke. “Dogfetching” was actually pretty difficult. Maybe its easy now but a year ago it was hard, really really fucking hard.
Molten Core didn\’e2\’80\’99t used to be a joke. \’e2\’80\’9cDogfetching\’e2\’80\’9d was actually pretty difficult. Maybe its easy now but a year ago it was hard, really really fucking hard.
Yes, yes it was. Hell – way back in the beginning, just getting across the first bridge and thru the first 2 pulls was next to impossible.
I remember our very first excursion into MC – FINALLY get past the first two giants – get a fire lord, he starts spitting out his helpers – and then THEY split and it’s like WTF was THAT? Anyone get the number of that truck?
Probably our most memorable fight from those days was when we FINALLY got up to Garr – and took him out the first time – granted, it was pretty close, but never having seen that fight before, I was duly impressed at that particular accomplishment. Course – then came our first 4 pack from Shazza’s room and again we are back to – anyone get the number of that truck? WTF – TRIPLE fire blossom?
MC fights are pretty unique – but I swear I’m gonna corner someone with a ballbat if they keep pulling out the fear card, that is one of my few major gripes about WoW. Hey, got a new boss here – let’s see – what abilities should he have. Hmmmm, I know – let’s let him FEAR that seems to keep them dying enough. Just for the record – I HATE not being in control of my character.
It’s ironic that Lum wasn’t there in those days – HE is the one that likes ‘challenges’. I’m perfectly content once a dungeon is on farm status and we all know our jobs and carry them out efficiently. I likes efficient. I likes efficient a lot.
So the endgame is where the “real fun” begins, where you stop doing quests, forget about PvP, and run the same two or three instances over and over again? FOREVAR? Wow. No wonder I can’t find groups for Zul’Farrak and Sunken Temple. Everybody’s in a rush to get to the dog-catching.
I can’t believe people actually do that kind of thing….
I hope you don’t start doing battlegrounds anytime soon… or maybe you should. That would provide some equally painful experiences to write about.
I realized, upon reading this, that the only thing that would get me to actually spend time doing end game raids is if funky items like the “Piccolo of Making People Dance By The Mailbox And Infuriating Those Trying To Pick Up Mail” dropped.
I don’t care about crit percentage. Gimme a ray gun that turns people into miniature Tauren that do nothing but jump. Gimme a contraption that when placed on the ground causes everyone in the vicinity to alternate between crying and laughing emotes. Screw stamina. I want a bomb that’ll reverse all the controls of an opposing faction member for 15 seconds.
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