Shadow Covenant

Hey all!

Today I’d like to talk about the new mechanics on World of Warcraft, so if you’ve never played the game on Wrath of the Lich King, you might want to skip to the end of this post…

As the players already know, yesterday came out the new patch for the game (4.0.1), which implements the game mechanics that will be present in the next expansion “Cataclysm”.

First of all, I don’t know if I should praise or curse Blizzard for the update… On one hand, they show some courage changing most game systems… it shows that someone at Blizzard doesn’t want to follow the “just add more content/areas/monsters/spells/etc” mentality, which I think is great; Blizzard’s not sitting still at their laurels and apparentely are striving to give players something new to do besides the same thing they’ve done the last five years to different monsters.
On the other hand, I feel there’s a lack of new content on the new expansion… It seems to me that I’m just revisiting old areas with new skins… of course, I’ll eat it up and be thankfull, but I wish there was something more to it than this… I like exploring and seeing new stuff! I also feel a bit cheated by the new game systems; I’ve spent the last five years becoming good at playing the game, understanding the core mechanisms and using them in my favour, and with just one patch, Blizzard changed the whole game system, making it not simpler, nor more complicated, but just different. So now, I’m back to being a noob!

Not that all is bad… After all, I’m a fire mage (surprisingly called Covenant, on EU-Hellscream), and from where I’m standing, I’ve been boosted like hell; I can move and shoot at the same time, while still having circa 8k dps self-buffed on the practice dummy, and without spending mana; or I can sit still and shoot the target dummy with my standard rotation for about 5 minutes doing 12k dps, geared only with 10-man ICC gear. I’m guessing mages will be nerfed on the next patch, considering most people are complaining about nerfs, while mages and warlocks are shouting out loud “huzzah!”.

The idea transmitted by Blizzard on this expansion is that they’re simplifying mechanics and removing the fluff, but I don’t feel that’s the correct way to go… on one side, players that reach level 85 will be players that should know their class and will appreciate more complex stuff… On the other side, removing the fluff for Blizzard apparentely means removing choice, and this is my main complaint about the game now. It seems to me (at least at high-end level 80, might be different in high-end level 85) that all mages use the same playstyle, use the same gear, have the same talents, gems and enchants. It means that instead of you “roleplaying” a character, you’re just one in between the huge masses… and with this expansion, it seems that it will become worse…

I always disliked the concept of “precedence” on the talent trees… A player should be free to put talents at will (just unlocking some talents with level, and that’s it), to create new and novels specs which combined some of the characteristics of all the talent trees, in which spell rotations could include arcane blast and then switch to fireballs just for the DOT effect (which of course would be magnified by the arcane blast, etc). The idea would be choice, and when Blizzard announced the talent rewrite I thought something like this might be included with the game, but that didn’t come to pass… if anything, the “use these talents” became more evident, because you can’t go into another tree without spending 31 points on your “primary” tree.

Anyway, now for some individual points on the specifics:

• New talent trees: They reduce choice, although it’s good to see they’ve removed lots of silly talents and added some useful ones. Level 85 won’t solve this, since you won’t be able to go deep into the secundary trees, so it’s more of a flavor thing, and I feel most people in one spec will choose the same talents from the others.
• Removal of spellpower stat: This seems to be a cosmetic choice above all… In my case, for example, it’s a win, since spellpower got converted to intellect, and I get a larger mana pool (not that I need it as a fire mage), and I get all the benefit from spellpower anyway (I even went up a bit on that)
• Mastery: The mastery system is one of the big additions to the game… still get mixed feeling about it, but it seems like an overall win… you get a more “general” stat that applies to all classes that gives a good measure of the item’s quality, even if you don’t know the other class. I like stuff that scales with gear in a smooth way, and it seems that Mastery is the way to go.
• New character page: Cleaner design, more informative (with the tooltips and such), so it’s better.
• New glyph system: I like the new glyph system, but it makes scribes almost usefull at a high level. What I mean is that while they’ll make a bucketload of money at the start of Cataclysm, they’ll not be able to do any money from their profession at end game level (since glyphs don’t change and only need to be bought once, so not even respecs can make the scribe profit). Maybe there will be a source of money in some other way besides glyphs, but nothing seems to indicate that. I also like the fact that I can see what glyphs I’m still missing on my characters, although it seems to me that not all existing glyphs are visible yet (only two prime glyphs usefull for arcane, for example).
• The new spell notification system: Seems nice, although a bit more customization control would be useful (on mage it’s simple, I only have one notification to look at (hot streak), but on a Moonkin druid, it’s three or four notifications, which becomes a bit more complicated).
• Social stuff: Where the hell is the new social button?! I have to press the hotkey “o” to access it now!
• Guild screen: The improved guild screen is nice, with the achievement ranking and profession screens
• Guild reputation: Have no idea on what this means, and I haven’t got a definitve answer either in-game on in the internet… but it seems like it can be a nice idea.
• Reforging: Reforging is an awesome idea… The only way it could be better is if you could really define how much you take from a stat to give another, instead of those predefined values, but even so it is incredibly versatile system, which I believe will make a world of diffence at end-game content.

The changes also made different character classes behave different… I only have a fire mage and a resto/boomkin druid, so I can mostly speak about those and what I learned from comments on the guild and general chat:

• Mages and Warlocks: Got boosted a lot, it seems to me. Rotations got a bit wonked, but it’s easy enough to adapt.
• Druids: Only got remarks about Moonkin, and it seems to me that the class became even more difficult to play (previously I already though it was one of the most difficult to play ranged classes, because of all the different DOTs, procs and such). The new Lunar and Solar energy concept is very neat, but it’s still not clear to me how to work that in the advantage of the druid.
• Priests: They’re complaining a lot about useless talents in the holy tree, but that gets compensated by the infinite mana on shadow form. Still they seem satisfied, although it seems to me that they’ll need to relearn how to play their class again.
• Paladins: They seem overall happy with them.
• Warriors: Only heard from the dps ones, and they’re definately unhappy, reporting loss of 40% dps and up, which sucks big time…

I know, pretty incomplete, but I was busy with my own character, so I couldn’t pay that much attention to the other characters…

Unfortunately, since all life can’t be fun and games, on the work front, I’ve been working on the new core routines for the new company I’m at… Redoing classes I’m used to working for ages (threads, sockets, mutexes, database, etc) sucks a lot (although I can improve some of the interfaces in the process). But the worse part is that we’ve decided on this new company to actually document the code properly, using Doxygen… and while the tool really helps and it will make the integration of other people much easier in the future, I spend more time documenting code than actually writting it… Hopefully, this will soon normalize, when I start doing more complex code that doesn’t require so much documentation as the core libraries…

So that’s it for now, please comment on this, specially if you spot something wrong with my overviews and specially if you’re a class on WoW different from mage! 🙂

Just finished playing “Halo: Reach”, and although I don’t think it measures up to any of the Halo FPSs, it’s a very competent shooter, and I enjoyed playing it very much…

First, the good part: As usual, Bungie has done a great job in the playability and in the level design… this becomes more apparent if you consider that the game doesn’t add absolutely nothing to the genre, except for the space fighting and Hornet sections, which are quite fun, albeit too easy. The characters are not annoying (in this day and age, I call that positive), although a bit stereotypical (i.e. “psycho”, “hacker girl”, “righteous commander”, “rookie”, “lovable giant”).

The bad part is that the game feels like it has taken some steps back from the Halo franchise; The lack of duel wield kind of bothers me, since it was one of the selling point of the original Halo, besides being fun…

The game doesn’t add anything to the FPS genre, it’s just a well done FPS, with some technical flaws (lots of frame-rate stalls, for example). The story and storytelling are simple and predictable, the characters are too simple for me to actually care about them (which is important considering the objective of making the player feel sad because of the situation on Reach and in Noble team). To be honest, from a story perspective, the whole situation in Reach is kind of silly, and it only becomes vaguely interesting closer to the end of the game…

By the way, developers of the world: having a subtitle option that is only useful for cutscenes and not the in-game dialog is stupid… specially when most of your game’s storytelling relies on communications between team members during the fights where stuff is exploding and shots are being fired… For non-native speakers, it’s very hard to understand what’s being said…

Finally, note that my opinion is based only on the single-player experience, since I don’t play multiplayer FPSs, so the game might be actually much better with the multiplayer taken in consideration…

End of the day, “Halo: Reach” is a competent shooter, with some neat elements, but nothing to write home about…

Numbers:

• Gameplay: 9/10
• Story: 6/10
• Graphics: 7/10
• Sound: 8/10 (with 10/10 if we consider only the soundtrack!)
• Sad Platoon-like feelings: 10/10
• Overall: 8/10