Horizon Zero

This Day Of May

Happy May 1st, comrades!

April proved to be a rather hectic month. There are some big structural changes at work about to happen that I'm not entirely happy with and we're still dealing with the implications.

Also, I took a little trip out to San Diego to attend a wedding and catch up with the family unit. Was fun, if busy. (The only flight back from San Diego was a redeye flight to Atlanta that left at 10:30 local time and arrived in ATL at 5:30AM the next day. Not a very enjoyable experience.) Beyond the wedding festivities, we managed to sneak away to Seaport Village where I ate the greasiest slice of pizza ever, took a few photos (that I will upload at some point) and bought an amazingly overpriced T-Shirt. So, typical tourist stuff.

I've been playing a lot of Mass Effect 3 multiplayer, killing time until Diablo III releases later this month. I prefer the biotic character types over the techie and soldier roles - right now I'm rocking a level 16 Asari Vanguard, specializing in Stasis bubbles and headshots with my trusty Carnifex IV pistol.

I haven't exactly given up all hope of getting the World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria beta working on my PC, but let's just say that confidence at this point is low.I don't know if it's the age of my system, the inner workings of my ISP, or just some magical confluence of events, but I've been able to get the bloody thing to work exactly once, and that one time the connection was sucking down data at a non-blistering 110k per second or some godawful number like that. (I had similar trouble trying to download and apply SWTOR fixes back when I was playing that. I wonder if there is a connection?)

In contrast, the Diablo III beta worked fine. I'm definitely going Demon Hunter as my first character when the full game goes live.

I probably will need to start preparing for a new PC, though. I've managed to hold out against The Urge to Build for nearly five years, now. Time and technology are starting to overtake me.

Cataclysm Averted

So, I guess we beat WoW. Again.

At least we beat it as much as we're going to beat it this time around, which for Cataclysm meant a romp through the Looking for Raid version of Madness of Deathwing. Not exactly the most glorious of ends, to be sure, but by this point I think we were all ready for Cata to be over.

I for one am looking forward to literally greener pastures. If I never see another red, orange and brown palleted zone again I will be extremely grateful.

Just for kicks, after we shuffled through Deathwing's demise, we elected to pay a trip to Icecrown Citadel and romped through Heroic 10 man ICC to score a Bane of the Fallen King title for a guildie that had put in lots of time but never been there for an actual kill. (Congrats, Ghlan!)

It's funny - I can dimly recall being so ready to call ICC quits back when it was current content. I even recognize the mental principle in action here, the tendency of the brain to forget the moment ot moment annoyances of past events that leads us to be such a nostalgic species. Will the same thing happen with Firelands or Dragon Soul when we're knee deep in Mists of Pandaria's Tier 16?

It's possible, but thinking back to things like Thrall and the Skittle or the never-ending drake fest atop Wyrmrest Tower makes it seem... unlikely.

PS - It's been more than a month since I've bothered logging in to The Old Republic. I think it's safe to say my interest has waned. Too busy with single-player stuff at the moment.

7 days to Mass Effect 3...

Epic Tinfoil Hats

As I understand it, today is the quarterly Activision-Blizzard conference call where various things like WoW subscriber numbers will be disclosed.

This has become something of a Big Deal, as people love to use this figure as proof that WoW is either D0med! or has Never Been Better.

What I can't help noticing, however, is that the Battle.net sites seem to be down for maintenance today, which is normally something that happens on Tuesdays.

Did someone decide that it would be a good idea for the infamously troll-tastic WoW community forums to be unavoidably unavailable when the call figures came out?

UPDATE: Well, the forums are back up. Also, the conference call isn't until tomorrow.

Pesky facts. They always get in the way.

Mists of Pandaria Report - Part Four

Did I mention that Talents got nuked to the ground?

Talents have been reorganized into Class Talents, Spec Talents, and just plain old Talents.

Class Talents are things everyone gets. Spec Talents are things anyone of a particular Spec gets, ala all Holy Paladins getting Holy Shock.

The last group of talents are awarded one every fifteen levels, and you can only ever pick one of each tier. They're grouped together based on a theme, so you'll have maybe three healing based talents at level 60 and then three crowd control based talents at level 75. 

The goal is to have some actual differentiation between players of the same class and spec without one player's choices being considered gimped and detrimental to progression.

This is a difficult thing to juggle, but it will be great if they can pull it off.

Several sites have full photo albums of the still in development Talent trees as they stand now.

Mists of Pandaria Report - Part Three

Let us talk now of the Pet Battle System. They tried so hard not to compare this with Pokemon.

Collect, level and fight with pets. Accessible to all levels, works with almost every pet in the game. Pets can be customized. 

There will be Wild Pets, rare spawns that can be battled and acquired. May have seasonal or other conditional availability. 

The revamped Pet interface will contain a list of all your pets, their levels and acquired abilities and a Pet Journal entry that will detail lore and where to locate the pet. You are encouraged to go catch them all, although they did not use those words.

Pets are tradable, and auctionable. So if you have the time and the inclination to max out awesome pets you can make it an in-game business.

There will be Pet Masters throughout the world that you can challenge to unlock Master abilites.

Pets are account wide.

Once acquired and leveled, pets are placed into teams and can battle other pet teams in PVE or PVP. I don't know about you all, but I'm expecting at least one sly reference to a Rocket Team in there somewhere.

Pet battle is turn based. 

Some wag asked whether the basic attributes of some pets, say, the Summer Scorchling would make it "Super Effective" against a Winterveil Snowman. The devs did not fall for the bait.

Those are the facts. What do I think of it? 

Well, frankly, it gets my OCD addled heart going pitter-pat. I can't help it. It's not explainable to people that aren't afflicted - it's why I don't bother trying to explain why I care about Achievements. One either gets it or one doesn't

Now, I'm not a big PVP person, but fortunately Blizzard realizes that a lot of their target audience is the same as I am and have allowed for a PVE progression with this.

I really do see this as a good thing for the game - it gives people that aren't interested in raiding something they can accomplish on their own terms since it's available to all levels. It's a good entry point for younger players.

And as a time waster it sounds much better than how Archaeology turned out.

 

Mists of Pandaria Report - Part Two

There will be six new dungeons in Pandaria, and two revamped classic dungeons. Heroic Scholomance is being streamlined and condensed into "just the fun parts" while Scarlet Monastery is being divided into two Heroic dungeons, one containing the graveyard and cathedral and the other the library and armory. No word on how these Heroics will fit in with current lore yet - since we killed most of Scholomance's more interesting denizens while questing around Western Plaguelands in Cataclysm.

The devs are happy with the pattern set by Cataclysm as far as raids go, so we will again see three starter raids for Tier 14. While many of the dungeons in MoP are far along in the development process there wasn't as much hard info on the raids just yet, although we did see concept art for Mogu'shan Palace, a 6 boss raid.

 The goals for MoP dungeons and raids were stated thusly:

1. Keep the experience short and focused. Get players wanting to do more than one heroic, or a heroic plus additional content, rather than seeing heroics as something they HAVE to do for daily VP.
2. Make encounters understandable, so players know why they died (or why they roflstomped something) without having to go out of game to get the data.
3. Don't set up groups to fail. As above.
4. Give dungeons a place in the world. 

PVP is getting two new battlegrounds. The first is set in Stranglethorn Vale. The Goblin Diamondmines is described as resource based, with players trying to get mine cars escorted from the mines to their respective bases. The second, called The Valley of Power, uses the Murderball format. One side or the other takes possession of an artifact - holding the artifact grants points based on its position in the battleground, but also inflicts damage on the holder. 

Also, a new Arena is planned, the Tol'vir Proving Grounds, which will be in Uldum.

There will be some Account-wide Achievements.

Ranged weapons are Hunter only. Hunter melee slot = gone. Hunter min range = gone. Relic slot = gone. Rogues and warriors will throw weapons for ranged attack. 

Wands are now main hand weapons.

Warlocks are getting new energy systems for Demon and Destruction specs.

Druids will have 4 specs, Feral, Guardian, Resto, Balance.

Shaman will no longer have buff totems.

 

 

 

Mists of Pandaria Report - Part One

Still with me?

Ok, here we go.

• New playable race - Pandaren. Playable as BOTH Alliance and Horde, mind you.
• New class - Monk. Playable by all races EXCEPT Goblin and Worgen.
• Level cap to 90, as expected
• Challenge Dungeons - timed runs using normalized ilevel equipment for a level playing field
• PVE scenarios - quest style world events that don't fall into the usual tank/healer/dps mold
• Pet Battle System 
• Talent System 2.0 - A complete rework of talent trees, specs, abilities, etc

 The following is taken from my pages of hand written notes. My hands cramped in agony for you, people. All for information already professionally formatted and presented to you on the internets.

The least you can do is say thank you.

The developers want to get people out of Stormwind/Orgrimmar and back into the world, so look for outdoor world raids and world bosses like the 4 dragons or Doom Lord Kazzak.

The continent of Pandaria is made up of 5 new zones, one unified land mass unlike the scattered zones in Cata. There will be a single hub with Auction House, bank and quests.

No flying in Pandaria until you cap 90. They felt that the instant flying in Cata - while it made sense logically - took away from the questing experience and added to some of the dissatisfaction with the 80 - 85 process.

While there are only 5 zones each one is roughly twice the size of the Twilight Highlands in Cata, so plenty of content space, and when you consider that you won't be able to fly at first that's a lot of new land to traverse.

Zones mentioned today:

• Jade Forest - entry level zone for both Alliance and Horde
• Valley of the Four Winds
• Kun-Lai Summit

 The Pandaren starting area is called the Wandering Isle, and it is literally that. The entire zone rests on the back of a giant sea turtle.

Pandaren will be neutral for their first ten levels, then choose to align with the Alliance or Horde. No changing your mind, either.

There are many new sentient races in Pandaria

• Jinyu - fish people. Will be courted by the Horde
• Hazu - monkey men. Will be courted by the Alliance
• Verming - best described as demented, rabid bunny rabbits armed with utensils.
• Mantid - Insect people. Will feature in dungeon/raid content. Different from the Silithid in that they are not a hive mind and will have clothing, armor, weapons and a culture.
• Mogu - the original inhabitants of the continent. Coming back and pissed off. Will be dungeon/raid enemies

 Then there's The Sha, which is literally a manifestation of bad energy caused by conflict. Which is in high supply due to the Ally/Horde war spilling over onto Pandaria. The Pandarans are naturally annoyed by this.

Pandaran racials:

• Epicurean - Food bonuses doubled
• Gourmand - +15 to cooking, plus some other undecided features
• Inner Peace - Rested XP lasts twice as long
• Bouncy - take 50% less falling dmg
• Quaking Palm - strike puts enemies to sleep for 3 secs

 Monk specs

• Brewmaster - Tank
• Mistweaver - Healer
• Windwalker - Melee DPS

NOT a hero class.

Monks use Chi for energy system, build Light and Dark energy for combos. There's no auto attack, they want a more Street Fighter feel to the class. Having played it, I can say it works as a damage dealing approach. I'll have to see more to grok how it will play for healing.

Challenge Dungeons will have Bronze, Silver, Gold medals. Gear levels are normalized, rewards include Valor Points and "sweet gear with no stats" intended for use with transmog. Challenge dungeons will have leaderboards for "competitive PVE"

BlizzCon 2011 - The Warm Up

I have arrived here in Anaheim in good condition. The flight was straightforward and trouble-free. This is the first time in a long time my flight path hasn't taken me to Dallas. Instead, I connected in Salt Lake City, which was nice because I finally got to do a flyover of the Rockies instead of skirting around south of them. We also flew over Las Vegas on the way in to Anaheim and it was interesting to compare the actual geography to my mental map from playing Fallout: New Vegas.

Yes, I am weird. I thought you might have figured that out by now.

My only complaint is a malfunctioning SD card for my camera that is limiting my picture taking to 4 shots at a time.

Con wise, I've already been through registration and have my pass and goodie bag. This is a much better way to do things than trying to get that done the first morning like I did in '09. I took a few quick pics before I was herded back outside, then decided to grab something for dinner.

I briefly considered trying to get over to the WoW Insider Meet Up, but by the time I was out of the line the party was already half over.

So now I'm back in my room, and ready to go over the contents of the 2011 Goodie Bag.

Let's see...

• 1 Diablo III Mini-Tyrael collectible statue - easily the biggest item in the bag
• 1 World of Warcraft MegaBloks Thrall figure - because we were really hurting for Thrall merch. (That's sarcasm, btw)
• 1 Battle.Net Authenticator, with BlizzCon 2011 artwork (meaning a big Diablo III head)
• 1 pack of cards from the WoW CCG
• 1 fold out event guide with panel tracks, pvp brackets and convention center map
• Several adverts from companies giving out prizes, including Antec, Razer, nvidia, Brady and Cryptozoic

Not a bad haul. The Tyrael statue is miles ahead of the Jim Raynor Noobz figure from '09. It's a shame they couldn't have done a faction based handout instead of the NotLego Thrall, like a Garrosh and Varian deal, but everyone loves the World Shaman, right?

Blizzard Short Fiction Contest - Entered!

To quote the great explorer James Tiberius Kirk, "Why do we always cut these things so damn close?"

I could say that it's the thrill of the deadline, but in truth I'm just a notoriously bad procrastinator.

But by George, I really did it, I did it, I did it.

I said that I would finish and indeed I did.

I knew that I could do it, I knew it, I knew it.

I said I'd write a story and indeed I did.

Blizzard, you're magnificent.

The Man Who Bought The World... of Warcraft

Starting October 17th, Blizzard is auctioning off blade servers that were used to house many of the various WoW realms to benefit St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.

My own home realm, Exodar, is among the batch of blades being auctioned on the 24th - right after BlizzCon.

Was out sick yesterday - hopefully I'm getting this all out of my system before next week rolls around.