Torchlight II

Since I signed up for Origin Access Premium for Anthem, I decided to see if there were any other interesting games on the service that I might like to try. I noticed Torchlight II, and thought that it would be a good light game to play. I did play the original Torchlight back in the day.

Torchlight II is very much like Torchlight. An ARPG like Diablo, but much more light-hearted. There are more pets than just the dog this time around. I also believe that there is multi-player this time, though I am playing it as single-player.

Outlander, Embermage, Berserker, Engineer

There are four classes:

• Outlander - Two pistols, traps
• Embermage - pretty standard elemental mage
• Berserker - Dual-wielding fast melee attacks
• Engineer - 2H melee, cannon, or 1H+Shield, with tech special abilities like bots

I'm playing an Engineer, which feels a lot like a heavy hitting melee class. A Warrior who occasionally pulls out a bot.

In some ways, there are two types of RPGs: ones where you can respec freely (like Diablo III); and ones where character decisions are set in stone. Torchlight II is the latter type. In some ways it's a little restrictive, because it stops you from experimenting. I took a main attack and a healing bot, and have otherwise been putting my points into passives. You also have to put points into your stats.

There are some interesting elements here. Gear has either a level requirement or an ability requirement. So you can use the gear early if it matches the stats you are focusing on. Or you can wait a couple of levels and it will be fully unlocked. It's an interesting way of pushing you to choose specific types of gear without locking the gear to a specific class.

Combat is fairly normal for this genre, with lots of potion-chugging. The story is decent enough, nothing too unique.

So far, Torchlight II has been a pretty fun game. It's not a game you'll play for years, but it's pretty solid. A good bonus for Origin Access, or if you find it on sale somewhere.

Crucible of Storms

Yesterday, the Crucible of Storms raid in WoW opened. It's a small raid with two bosses, with about the same difficulty and item level as the latter half of Battle For Daz'alor.  Similar to the Trial of Valour raid from Legion.

First off, there is a quest line leading to this raid. If you have not done so, do a Naga invasion. There's usually one active at all times. A mob will drop the item which starts the quest chain. It's a pretty neat quest, and actually leads into the mechanics used in the raid.

The items in particular seem to have less stats, but an equip effect which is somewhat double-edged. For example, I got a belt which heals you for 70k if you drop below 35%, but deals 60k damage to you over 6 seconds. I gave the belt to one of our tanks to try out.

We decided to try the new raid on Normal, and extend the Jaina lockout from last week. The raid was fairly easy on Normal difficulty.  The fights revolve around three artifacts. In the first fight you have work around the different artifact powers, and in the second fight you have to use those same powers to your advantage.

One very interesting mechanic introduced is effects that turn you hostile to the other people in the raid, but do not mind control you. So you're still attacking the boss, but you can't be healed, can't heal others, and you take damage from cleaves.

For Holy Paladins, you have to be careful with Holy Shock. It's very easy to accidentally Shock someone else in the raid for damage if you don't realise that they're hostile.

All in all, it was a fun raid, with some very unique mechanics. The loot is particularly interesting, with lots of weird effects.

Star Wars News

Apparently there was some sort of Star Wars celebration over the weekend, as several different announcements were made.

Star Wars IX: The Rise of Skywalker

"The Rise of Skywalker"? Seriously? Is that really the best Disney could come up with?

I hope Rey doesn't turn out to be of the Skywalker bloodline. I really liked VIII's reveal that she had no special heritage. Hopefully "Skywalker" will turn out to be a title or name she assumes. Or maybe it refers to Kylo Ren, who is a Skywalker.

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order

Is it just me, or are the game devs making better Star Wars movies than the movie people?

Apparently, Fallen Order is a pure single-player game, with no micro-transactions. A bold move for EA, we'll see how it pans out.

The trailer feels a little reminiscent of Kyle Katarn and the Jedi Knight games. I liked those games back in the day, so hopefully this one will turn out well.

The Old Republic: Onslaught

No snazzy trailer here, but SWTOR announced that the next expansion will launch in September. The quick feature list is:

• New Storyline
• New Planet - Onderon
• New Planet - Mek-Sha
• New Flashpoint - Corellia
• New Operation - Dxun
• New Species - Nautolan
• New Level Cap - 75

It feels very much like the first two expansions, Hutt Cartel and Shadow of Reven. That Bioware is going back to more normal MMO style rather than extreme story-centric Eternal Empire expansions.

They also announced that they're trying to do some interesting things with gear, including more sets and items which changes your abilities. A little like the old Glyph system in WoW. It should be interesting to see how things turn out.

Random Thoughts on Battle For Azeroth

Just some thoughts about Battle For Azeroth which have been bouncing around in my head over the last little while.

General

A lot of people seem to think BFA is a "bad" expansion. I confess that I don't really see this. To me, BFA seems more or less like Legion. I liked Legion, and I like BFA.

Story

The base zone stories in BFA are quite good. I do think that effectively requiring you to level both a Horde and an Alliance character will be deemed a mistake in hindsight. But as I have max level characters on both sides, it's not much of a barrier.

As for the faction war story, I didn't have very high expectations, thanks to my predictions about the nature of war. I think BFA has shown that the basic logic of those posts were sound and correct. However, Blizzard has managed to exceed my expectations in the handling of the war. So where many other people seem to be disappointed, I'm actually impressed that they did as good a job as they did.

Azerite Armor

Azerite armor was a decent attempt at fixing the issues with both artifact weapons and legendaries in Legion. However, Azerite armor really demonstrated that character power must be monotonically increasing, as mathematicians would put it. Players will not accept a temporary reduction of power now in exchange for future power later.

And as always, it falls victim to people theorycrafting the best options, and everyone ignoring all the others.

Island Expeditions, Warfronts

In my opinion, the last two expansions gave us several solid "evergreen" systems. For example, Warlords gave us the modern LFR/Normal/Heroic/Mythic raiding structure, which is quite good. Legion replaced dailies with World Quests and Emissaries.  Legion also gave use Mythic Keystones, which are excellent small-group content for players in the higher tiers.

I believe that Blizzard is looking for a new system or mechanic for players below that tier, for whom Mythic Keystones are not a good fit. Players who are casual, and primarily use Group Finder to make groups instead of guilds or Party Finder. Basically the type of player who currently tops out in Heroic Dungeons or LFR.

Blizzard basically took two cracks at the problem with Island Expeditions and Warfronts. I'm not sure either was entirely successful. Though here, it's hard to tell. The vocal part of the WoW player base, the people who post on the forums, are not the target audience, they're in the tier above. Overall, Warfronts have probably been better received than Island Expeditions.

I think Blizzard has been looking for something for this group of players for a long while. Their last attempt was Scenarios in Mists of Pandaria, and given that Scenarios never appeared again, we can gather that they weren't successful.

Epic's Digital Storefront

Lately, one problem I've been having with the gaming community is that so many issues go like this:

My foray into outdated memes

Case in point is Epic's new digital storefront. Everyone is complaining about games being exclusive on Epic's store. But this was entirely predictable and expected.

When Epic announced the store, the major point which set them apart from Steam was that Epic's cut would be 12%, compared to Steam's 30%. Developers would get 88 cents of every dollar instead of 70 cents.

But developers are not Epic's customers. Developers are Epic's suppliers!

The only point in giving a supplier a better price is so that they will sell the product to you instead of selling it to your competitors. Or in other words, exclusives. Epic's entire strategy is centred around exclusives, and has been from the very beginning.

It is an interesting strategy, certainly. Steam is so consumer-focused that it is hard to see what Epic could have offered that could compete consumer-side. They could have offered a lower average price. Of every Steam dollar, give the developer 70 cents, take 12 cents, and effectively "give" the consumer 18 cents. But Steam sales are so steep that pretty much all the cost-conscious consumers would probably wait for those rather than buy at the default Epic price.

There is the curation issue, I suppose. People complain that there's a lot of junk on Steam. But is this a real problem for consumers, given that you can search for the specific game you want? I don't think Steam has gotten to the point where search fails, which is where curation becomes really valuable.

Ultimately, I think Epic's exclusives strategy was entirely predictable. It's also possibly the only strategy with a chance of breaking Steam's hold on the market. I expect that while Epic may pay lip service to complaints about exclusives, they're going to ignore the community clamour, and follow this strategy until they get established.

Anthem's Development

Jason Schreier has written an article on Anthem's development: How Bioware's Anthem Went Wrong. It's a very interesting read, and explains a lot about why Anthem is as it is.

In particular, there's a saying, "It's better to make a bad decision than no decision at all" which I think really applies here. It seems like until Mark Darrah came on board, the leadership kept flip-flopping. The whole going back and forth on flight, which is a core game system, is a real indicator of problems.

As the article states, you have to design your entire world very differently if you can fly. Think of the current Anthem world, which is very vertical to take full advantage of the ability to fly.

EA comes off surprisingly well in this. Other than the directive to use Frostbite, which is not unreasonable, they seemed very hands-off until presented with an unacceptable product. They seemed to be the only adults in the room willing to exercise judgement.

One thing that I've seen a lot of people talk about is that Bioware did not like referencing Destiny, preferring Diablo 3. I don't think this is as bad as people are making it out to be. The problem with referencing something too close to your project is that you'll often just end up making a slightly-better version. Of course, if you ignore that game, you might end up making the same mistakes as the first game. It's a hard line to judge. I think the decision to avoid looking at Destiny is defensible.

I do like Anthem, though. I enjoyed levelling through the story, and the basically game play is very fun. It's a good secondary game. I play for about an hour every other day or so. Log in, go through all the dailies, slowly improve my Javelins.

The fact that the team managed to put this together after such a rough development process is actually somewhat heartening. Hopefully they will be given enough resources to improve it further. The fact that they have a clearer identity and vision now should be very helpful.

War of the Spark Trailer

Wizards of the Coast unveiled the trailer today for the latest Magic: the Gathering set, War of the Spark. This is the culmination of the story for the last seven years or so. The trailer quite quickly hit 4 million views, so it's clearly struck a chord in the gaming community.

You know, if someone had described this trailer to me, I would have been skeptical. Time flowing backwards, showing events in reverse. The unironic use of a cover of Linkin Park's In the End. And yet, it works.

Perhaps the aspect that makes it work is that the central character is Lilliana Vess, the necromancer planeswalker who represents the color Black. Black is selfish and ruthless, and Lilliana is all of those things. In the Magic community, Black's tagline is "Greatness, at any cost."

Yet Lilliana is still very popular, and is perhaps the character that WotC has done the best job with.

8.1.5 Horde War Campaign, Heroic Mekkatorque, Heroic Blockade

Horde War Campaign

I finished the Horde War Campaign. It's basically the prequel to Alliance-side. I do like how Blizzard is implementing the choices. It's not a huge change, but my Blood Elf Warrior is a Sylvanas loyalist, so it's fun setting it up as an infiltrator into the rebel's plans, and reporting to Nathanos. In essence, your character is directly responsible for the last cutscene where Zelling is killed and Baine arrested.

The more interesting part of the Horde quests was the continuing Vol'jin story. This was actually very extensive. I'm not really sure where this is going, perhaps Vol'jin will become a loa in Rezan's place. But if you don't have a max level Horde character, I strongly recommend levelling one to see this story.

I've mentioned this before, but you really need both an Alliance character and a Horde character to get the full impact of the BFA story. I'm still not sure that this was the best of ideas on Blizzard's part.

Heroic Mekkatorque

We had multiple sub-5% wipes on Mekkatorque on Tuesday. So last night, we jumped right back into it and killed him within two pulls. It was a very messy kill, with only the two tanks and a healer alive at the end.

I'm not sure why we have so much trouble with that last phase. We go into it with a full raid, and then just start getting picked off. I think part of it might be tank movement. We drag the boss around quite a lot, instead of moving him in a predictable manner. I think adjusting to that is where we lose people at the end.

Heroic Stormwall Blockade

In contrast, Blockade was much easier. We spent an hour and a half, and got a fairly clean kill. Really, the only difference is that you have to know how to do both boats, as the tidesages switch at 50%. Otherwise, it's very similar to normal, just with a bit more damage, and a bit stricter timing.

We even got to spend an hour on Heroic Jaina. That fight is going to take us some time to learn, I think. We got to phase 2 though it all falls apart quite quickly. Haven't made it to the ice wall yet.

FFXIV Tokyo Fanfest

It's been a while since I've checked into FFXIV. SE had the Tokyo Fanfest last weekend, where they revealed most of the details about the next expansion: Shadowbringers.  Here's the full trailer:

SE also revealed details about the new jobs and races in the expansion, and the reveals were surprising controversial.

Other than the previously revealed Gunbreaker, the second new job will be Dancer. Dancer is going to be a ranged DPS class that uses throwing weapons. It's in the same category as Bards and Machinists. FFXIV differentiates between "ranged DPS" and "caster DPS". Ranged DPS are usually more support oriented.

Apparently a lot of people were expecting Dancer to be a healer. The forums are full of salt from disappointed healers.

SE also revealed the new races: Hrothgar (male-only bestial cat people); and Viera (female bunny girls). There's only one of each gender, and that decision is even more controversial than Dancer.

SE's reasoning was pretty logical from their point of view. Apparently they only wanted to make two more rigs because of the amount of work multiple races cause. They wanted to do Hrothgar, but they knew that players would be extremely disappointed if Viera were never made. So they swapped female Hrothgar for female Viera.

Personally, I'm okay with having races with only a single gender represented, especially in a game where race is mostly cosmetic. Gender-locked classes are more annoying.

All in all, Shadowbringers is looking pretty good. The final Main Story Quest installment for Stormblood just came out yesterday. I haven't done it yet, but hopefully I'll be able to get to it soon.

Level Squish and Zones Done

The WoW development team is discussing a potential "level squish", reducing the maximum level to something much lower. With 120 levels, new abilities are spread out, and there are large gaps where nothing much changes when you level up.

One of the problems I have these days with blogging is that it seems I've already written about the topic of the day. This time we have a post from 2009: Time to Max Level. In that post, I propose that the time to max level should be roughly the same, regardless of what the maximum level is.

Rather than looking at time, though, let's take a look at a different angle:

How many zones should a new character complete before you reach the current expansion?

I suggest that this should be a constant. That a new character should do about eight zones before reaching the current expansion. That's enough time to level up, see several different stories and feel that you are ready to take on the latest content.

However, there are far more than 8 zones in the current levelling path. It would be better to construct multiple paths from beginning to the current expansion, then allow a new character to pick her path at the start.  The current options would be something like:

1. Kalimdor
2. Eastern Kingdoms
3. Outlands and Northrend
4. Cataclysm and Pandaria
5. Draenor and The Broken Isles

You start an new character and can choose to go to Outlands or Cataclysm zones or Draenor right away. The first continent gets you about half-way, and the second continent gets you to the current expansion.  That's about enough time that you'll be satisfied with leveling, and the multiple paths means that each alt can have a different experience.

When Battle for Azeroth is done, maybe it becomes a second-half zone, and when the expansion after that is done, the two of them become a sixth path for alts.

Another advantage this would have is that it breaks up the weirdness in timelines that happens with Outlands and Northrend. You don't suddenly go back into the past after doing post-Cataclysm Azeroth.

The biggest problem, though, is that if you're a completely new player, you'll only see a small fraction of the total story on your way to the current expansion. On the other hand, it won't take you forever to get there either. And each zone can be paced appropriately and not go by in a blur.

Other people's posts on level squish:

• The Ancient Gaming Noob - Where would a Level Squish Get Us?
• Gnomecore - Leveling and Azeroth 2.0
• Biobreak - World of Warcraft's level squish is not the solution

Kul Tiran Recruitment, Heroic Rastakhan

Kul Tiran Recruitment

The quest line to unlock the Kul Tiran Allied Race was really well done. It had you revist all the zones in Kul Tiras, and had several callbacks to the levelling experience.

Being able to name the new Alliance flagship was a very nice touch, especially as Blizzard got the location names to match what you picked. I went with Tiffin's Melody.

The only issue I had is that Blizzard tried too hard to "surprise" you with the fact that shipwright was female. In fact, it was really obvious because a lot of the sentence construction and word choices used were unusual, and served no purpose beyond veiling the shipwright's gender. And whenever writers do this, they invariably make the character female.

Whenever authors do this it feels as though they are condescending to the audience. Like the audience is so obviously prejudiced that they cannot possibly conceive of a female shipwright, and so it falls to the enlightened writer to educate the audience.

Heroic Rastakhan

We also killed Heroic Rastakhan. Surprisingly, this was the first night we attempted him, and the previous boss had taken a while. But Heroic Rastakhan isn't that different from Normal. We actually tried a different strategy to start, but then we gave up and went back to our Normal positioning.

The only real difficulty is the phase where the raid is split in two, and once you have that down, the fight is pretty much done.

We then tried Heroic Mekkatorque for an hour or so. I think that fight may take us a few nights. It seems pretty obvious that we aren't executing correctly on Normal, as we had a lot of gigavolt charges blowing up in the middle of the raid. That should have been a mechanic we mastered previously.

8.1.5 Alliance War Campaign

The Alliance War Campaign for 8.1.5 is fairly reactive. Things are happening horde-side, and the Alliance is basically watching the fallout. Shades of this older post of mine:

Now in Pandaria, we see the end result of that. One side had to go evil to make the war "fit" with modern sensibilities. Thus one of Garrosh or Varian had to go bad, and Garrosh was the one chosen. 

That sets up two stories: a civil war within the Horde, and the Alliance attempts to finish Garrosh. Of those two stories, the civil war is always going to be the more interesting story.

There's a nice cutscene, though:

The writers' work with Jaina has been the major standout this expansion. They've done an excellent job with her all around.

I wasn't really on-board with all the "Garrosh 2.0" complaints about the storyline earlier. But it's looking more and more like this expansion will be a re-tread of the Pandaria story line. There's some differences, notably Sylvanas is treating the rest of the Horde much better. But her character and motivations are really mysterious. There's been no attempt to get Horde players to sympathise with her or her aims, even if you disagree. That lack makes it really seem like they're setting her up to be deposed.

Oh well, there's still plenty of time left in the story. Perhaps Blizzard will surprise us.

I think this story illustrates the disadvantages of "going big". If Sylvanas hadn't burned down Darnassus, there's actually a lot more room for the story to manoeuvre. But because she did, the story points in one direction. Though imagine a scenario where Sylvanas sues for a peace or truce that leaves her as Warchief still. Anduin agrees to this truce (as his nature inclines him to), and that causes a schism in the Alliance as the Night Elves, Worgen, and Kul Tirans strongly disagree. That would be an interesting turn of events, and move the "civil war" over to the Alliance side.

Patch 8.1.5, Heroic Conclave, Glimmer Build

Patch 8.1.5

Patch 8.1.5 launched yesterday. As it was raid night, I only did Magni's quest to get 10 ilvls for the Azerite necklace. That quest was pretty short, featuring a return to Uldir and a couple of cutscenes. It felt a bit more like set up for future developments (in 77 cycles, a nod to the 77 day patch cycle of Legion).

I'll probably continue the main campaign line next, though I'm considering making a Kul Tiran druid. Of course, I've never actually finished levelling an Allied race character. So it will probably languish as an alt.

Heroic Conclave

We got Heroic Conclave down tonight. Pretty fun fight, though I think we still aren't positioning the frog quite correctly. In particular, I use Avenging Crusader during the Paku phase, which means I have to be in melee on the edge, and inevitably I get bounced when the frog jumps there.

Also Conclave is a little annoying because you have to look through translucent mobs to marks on the ground beneath them. The translucent mobs don't actually do anything but act as timers (and a marker in the case of Paku), so it is unfortunate that they take up space in the arena.

Avenging Wrath Buff

Paladins got a small buff to Avenging Wrath in this patch:

Avenging Wrath now causes your next Holy Shock, Light of the Protector, Templar’s Verdict, or Divine Storm to critically strike.

A little unusual for a mid-expansion buff. I'm not really sure what prompted this change.

Edit: Apparently a bunch of cooldowns for different classes got a small effect on use. I guess Blizzard just wanted to add some "punch" to these abilities.

Glimmer Build

I tried the Glimmer build in the raid. My Retribution chest had Glimmer so I reforged that to try it out.

My verdict: I disliked the build.

I was performing a little worse than normal, but a lot of that was unfamiliarity with the build, and generally Holy Shocking the wrong target. In particular, the same people often took damage, and I would instinctively Holy Shock someone who already had Glimmer on them.

What I found, though, is I really disliked the number of Crusader Strikes you use. The priority is Holy Shock > Light of Dawn > Crusader Strike, and sometimes it felt like I was spending half my GCDs on Crusader Strikes instead of healing.

As well, it felt like you had to be stricter about staying in melee. The old build, you want to be in melee, but it's not strict about it. If the boss is moving, you can heal and then catch up to melee. I did do a fair bit more DPS with the Glimmer build than normal, though. And mana seemed much more forgiving with the Glimmer build.

In any case, I switched back when we took a break in the raid to the standard Judgment of Light build. Given that we did get Conclave after that, maybe I'll take it as a sign that the JoL build is the one for me.

Anthem Loot Issues

On Friday before the patch, there was a brief window where loot in Anthem dropped like crazy. The patch restored loot rates to normal. Since then the Anthem community has been clamouring for loot rates to return to that pre-patch state.

In my opinion, Anthem loot rates are correct up to Grandmaster 1. Every difficulty should have a purpose:

• Easy - for people who find Normal too hard, or perhaps people soloing
• Normal - go through the initial story
• Hard - finish levelling to max, equip Javelin with epics
• GM1 - replace epics with masterworks
• GM2+ - replace masterworks with better versions

I think that GM1 loot rates are fine for that primary job. It won't take you very long get masterworks for most of your slots. At which point you should move up to the next level.

It's like Torment I in Diablo 3. Torment I doesn't actually drop that many legendaries, probably a bit less than one per rift. You farm Torment I until you have legendaries for most slots, and then you move up.

Anthem, however, does make that last stage, where you are chasing better versions of your masterworks, more difficult than it needs to be. I do think that drop rates in GM2 and especially GM3 could be increased a fair bit.

I also think the community outcry is excessive. It's been two days, over a weekend. I think it's unreasonable to expect a response on an issue like this so soon. 

In some ways, maybe this is Bioware's fault for trying to respond to earlier issues so quickly. Rather than giving them credit for that fast response time, it's just conditioned the audience to expect that, and become upset when responses don't appear that fast.

New Holy Paladin Glimmer Build

A new Holy Paladin healing build has popped up recently, one based around the new Azerite trait introduced in 8.1: Glimmer of Light:

Holy Shock leaves a Glimmer of Light on the target for 30 sec.  When you Holy Shock, all targets with Glimmer of Light are damaged for 1076 or healed for 1587.

The basic idea is that you get 3x Glimmer of Light traits on your Azerite gear, and then use your talents to get as many Holy Shocks as possible. You try to put Glimmer on as many people as possible, and each Holy Shock then acts like a mini-Beacon of Light to all your Glimmered targets. You also have to be in melee and using Crusader Strike to get more Holy Shocks.

Here's a more detailed article: A Glimmer of Hope for Holy Paladins in BFA.

Apparently, the build plays more like a druid putting HoTs on the raid than a traditional paladin build. It's also quite powerful, as many of the top parses are using it.

There's all sorts of interesting nuances to this build. You eschew Judgment of Light, which has been a staple for so long. You go back to a single Beacon. You don't use Avenging Crusader, though you have to be in melee more.

You even want to take one Retribution Azerite trait, Light's Decree. I admit I was very confused when I saw people in the Holy Discord channel asking about that.

I haven't tried the build yet, as I think I only have 2x Glimmers. But maybe I'll try and pick up that third Glimmer and give it a whirl.

Guild Updates, Server Transfers and Names

As you may remember, the guild I was in for Legion and BFA imploded in the beginning of February. The remaining officers and a few others from that guild transferred to a new server and went Horde.

The previous guild leaders came back, and formed a new guild from the remaining players. We've been raiding with another guild on Doomhammer for the past couple of weeks. They're a pretty good group and are around our age, skill level, and preferred schedule. We've picked up Heroic Grong and Heroic Opulence, and are working on Heroic Conclave.

In any case, the Doomhammer guild asked us to server transfer and join up with them. Our guild leaders want to step back from the work of recruitment and building up the new guild to a point where we could raid on our own. So they, and most of the other people in our new guild have decided to transfer.

I'm probably going to join them, but there's one thing holding me back. My main name, Coriel, is taken on Doomhammer. It's taken by a level 90 blood elf paladin, who I think left the game in Mists of Pandaria.

I am rather loathe to change names, since that character has had that name since Vanilla. But I guess I'll have to do so. If it was a low level alt, I'd try and get it released, but it looks like someone's endgame main.

Several of the secondary names I use are free on that server, so it's not a huge deal. It's not like I'll have to resort to alternate characters. Though, amusingly, one person who was trying to invite me to a group recently asked what the code was for the "i" in Coriel, automatically assuming it was something special.

The other thing I'm considering is, since I have to change names anyways, is switching to a male character. I don't talk a lot in Discord, and I think some people have started assuming I'm female. It's kind of unusual, because in the past the default assumption has always been male. But maybe it's the combination of healer + female character + not talking. Either way, it's a little awkward, so I'm thinking of switching.

Server transfers are annoying, though. They're simultaneously too easy and too difficult. They're easy enough so that people don't really bat an eye at transferring a single main to join a specific guild on a different server. But it's also annoying to have characters spread out on multiple servers.

Solution to A Makes B Worse

There's one interesting mistake pattern that Bioware has made a couple of times so far in Anthem.

Basically, Bioware predicted that Situation A would be problematic and devised a solution for A. However, in practice, it turns out that Situation B is more common, and that solution actually makes B worse.

For example, take tethering in missions. If you get too far away from the group, a warning pops up and then the game will automatically port you to the group (unfortunately, this requires a loading screen). It's clearly intended for people who go the wrong way, or get turned around, or just get lost. Porting that player to the group is a great solution for this situation.

However, it turns out that the more common scenario is for one player to be a little bit slower than the group, and she falls behind a little bit. Maybe she's not as good at flight, or took a few seconds to look around before taking off. She's still going in the right direction, and will catch up eventually. However, the tethering mechanic triggers and can port her, which is very annoying.

Bioware made the mechanic more forgiving in the Day One patch. However, the basic issue remains. There are too many false positives with the tethering mechanic.

A similar thing is happening in quick-play. If someone leaves a mission, then the spot is back-filled from the quick-play queue. This is a great solution to handle people who just leave missions for arbitrary reasons. But it turns out that the reason most people don't leave missions arbitrarily. Most of the time they leave missions is because the mission is bugged, which is a really good reason to leave. Then quick-play people get back-filled into the instance and can't do anything, end up leaving as well, and the cycle continues. Even if only a tiny percentage of missions bug out, those are the ones that people will always see in quick-play.

One has to wonder if it would have been better if Anthem just did not back-fill at all. If someone leaves, well, you carry on with three people. Quick-play always starts you with a fresh mission.

The main thing here is that the "effectiveness" of the solution depends on the frequency of the problem. If getting lost was more common than falling behind, there would be minimal complaints about tethering. If people leaving was more common than bugged missions, quick-play back-filling would be a great solution.

Of course, these issues will get fixed by narrowing the solution. Maybe tethering will consider if you are moving in the right direction before triggering. Or back-filling might put a cap on the number of people that fill. Like the queue will fill 2 empty spots, but after that it will mark the mission as unsalvageable, so no more people cycle in.

Community Reaction to Anthem

The gaming community's reaction to Anthem is really harsh. It's getting savaged in press and reviews, and on the internet.

I think the reaction is excessively harsh. Anthem's moment-to-moment game play is superb. It has some issues, that's true. But it's about what you would expect from a game like this. It isn't a "You must play this!!!" game. I wouldn't recommend it to someone who had no interest in looter-shooters. But if the general idea of the game attracts you, you'll probably enjoy it a lot.

The best explanation I've seen for the scale of the reaction is that Anthem is the "last straw" for a lot of gamers. There's been a whole host of AAA games which have disappointed recently, especially with regards to polish, and Anthem is just the point where the crowd decided to make a stand. It's a particularly attractive target as EA is so hated, and thus the community can indulge in the narrative that EA ruined the once-great Bioware.

One thing that concerns me, though, is that there is one game cited as "Anthem should have been more like this": Monster Hunter World.  Now, it might be true that MHW was much more polished on release. But MHW was released on consoles in January 2018, and the PC release was months later, in August 2018.

An awful lot of the "polish" problems are PC problems which only occur on some setups. Differing loading times, that sound cutting out bug people keep complaining about, occasional crashes, etc. Absolutely none of which have happened to me. From my perspective, the game is rock-solid performance-wise. Even the lack of text chat is really a PC problem, and doesn't really apply to consoles.

I'm concerned that the lesson EA and the games industry will take from the contrast between MHW and Anthem is that the simultaneous launch on PC and console was a mistake. That Bioware should have just released a polished console-only game, and launched the PC version months later.  If that console version had played how Anthem plays on my computer, then I think the reviews would be 10 to 20 points higher. But as a PC player, I'd rather not see that future.

In any case, I don't think Anthem is as bad as much of the online reaction is making it appear to be. Even if much of the complaints are rooted in reality, it feels like they are not weighing the sheer fun of the game. If you're interested in the game, I strongly recommend the Origin Access subscription route to try it out.

FreePlay in Anthem

I'm currently level 16, and am "blocked" on the story. You have to do four trials which are basically collections of achievements. Kill 50 enemies with melee, etc. You can complete these achievements in the earlier story missions, but it's likely you'll be missing a few of them, so you have to head into FreePlay for a bit.

The major problem for me is that one achievement (open 15 chests) was bugged, and it only counted if you were the person to open the chest. It has since been fixed so that it counts if anyone opens a chest near you. But I entered FreePlay with zero chests, and have been slowly accumulating more. Most of the other achievements were about 80% complete, except Ultimate Kills. Apparently I wasn't using Ultimates earlier in the game. But since they're Ultimates, you rack up kills with them quite quickly.

FreePlay is a bit lonely. The map is very big, so meeting up with other people already in the map is rather time-consuming. As well, people leave and join often. You meet up with someone, do an event, and then they leave FreePlay and you have to go find someone else. You don't see World Events on the map, so there's no obvious location where people converge.

Once you meet up, wandering with people and doing events is fun. I guess if you played with friends,  or an online community, it would be even better. Note that you don't have to group up. You can do most things solo, even the events. The only thing I was unable to do by myself was kill an Ash Titan. So much fire!

Javelin-wise, I've unlocked the Ranger, Colossus, and Interceptor. I don't care for the Interceptor play-style. It is a fast, fragile, melee type, which is just a bad fit for me personally. However, I really like the Colossus.

The Colossus has a shield, and you can hold up the shield and then charge at people, dealing damage to them. I have a component which increases that shield damage by 300%, so my Colossus just runs around the battlefield stomping mobs. It's pretty hilarious. It doesn't really work with flying enemies though.

In other news, I bought a Logitech g600 mouse for use with Anthem. Somewhat ironic, since it is an MMO mouse. But I found I needed about 4 extra buttons, and they were awkward to use on the keyboard. So far the new mouse is working well.

Anyways, I'm still enjoying Anthem. Hopefully I will get past this stage soon and then back to the story.

Anthem First Impressions

In the end I picked up Origin Access Premium to try out Bioware's Anthem. Origin Access got to play the game starting on Friday, though the full launch is on Feb 22. I'm not very far in, I'm about level 13 and I have unlocked two Javelins: the Ranger and the Colossus. Here are my impressions:

Good

• Javelin game play - this is just superb. It feels great, and is a ton of fun. In particular, flying in a Javelin is outstanding. The javelin heats up in flight, and you have to land if it gets overheated. But you can do things like fly through waterfalls, skim the surfaces of rivers, or dive straight down to reduce heat. So managing heat and flight time is a mini-game in and of itself.
• Combat is fun. You have guns and two "powers", which depend on your Javelin type and equipment. You can equip many different powers, and the guns also play differently.
• Different Javelins play differently. The Ranger is more long-ranged with a shield that regenerates. The Colossus meanwhile charges in with lots of health and armor.
• Gearing is good so far. There looks like a wide variety of gear and options. One interesting thing is that you only see loot at the end of a mission. I kind of like it, as you don't really need to worry about loot during game play.
• "Multiplayer-by-default" - Whenever you start a mission, you are matched with 3 others working on the same mission. Anthem in small groups is a lot of fun, especially seeing all four of you flying towards a destination. You can change the setting to Private, and play by yourself if you wish. Though you might want to dial the difficulty down in that case.
• Performance is pretty good. Some people are reporting lots of trouble, but Anthem has been rock-solid for me. It looks good as well, but I don't have very high standards for graphics.

Uncertain

• Story and Writing - It's decent, but not as good as I would have expected from Bioware. In some respects it's making me wonder if I'm looking back at Mass Effect and SWTOR with rose-colored glasses. Maybe ME and SWTOR writing wasn't as good as I remember. It feels like Bioware focused on improving game play significantly, as that was the weakness of ME, but in the process they let their writing team and practices degrade a bit. Now, it's not terrible or anything, but so far I'd give the story and writing a B, not an A.
• Real Money Transactions - the store is entirely cosmetics at this point, and you can earn Coins to buy stuff on it through gameplay. I generally ignore cosmetics though, so I'm not really someone to give advice here. All I can say is that so far, I've been able to ignore the system entirely.

Bad

• Load times. You absolutely must install Anthem on an SSD. Load times are long even on an SSD, and there are fair amount of load screens. This is especially important because you can start missions as soon as you load in, even before the others have loaded. So if you're on a older HDD, it's very likely you'll miss the beginning of every mission.
• Keep group together mechanic - During missions, if you fall behind too much, you'll get a warning and a countdown timer. If you don't catch up, you'll get ported to the group. Now, this is a good idea in general to help people who get lost, but the mechanic is very aggressive. You look around for five seconds, and the timer pops up. As well, failing the timer triggers a load screen, which hurts given the previous point. More than once I've been two seconds away from catching up to the group, when the timer expired and I got thrown into a 20 second load screen.
• Menus - there are a lot of nested menus. The control scheme is pretty clearly made for consoles, and it is a bit of a pain to navigate.
• Mechanics are opaque. For the most part you can muddle through, but if you're the type who needs to know exactly how stats and mechanics work, you're probably going to get frustrated. Even the basic damage mechanic of how Combos work, with Primers and Detonators, is extremely poorly explained. I found the following chart on Reddit, and the game mechanics and gearing make a lot more sense now:

Overall

Anthem is pretty good. The core game with Javelins is lots of fun so far. The story and writing is a bit disappointing, but really only because we have such high expectations of Bioware.

I have no idea about the longevity of the game, though. I'm still just leveling up. If you're on the fence, consider getting a month of Origin Access and trying out the game first.

Guild Implosion

The first raid night in Battle for Dazalor we had a whopping 29 people in the raid. Three weeks later, we had 11, and the guild leadership decided to swap factions and transfer servers. I am not really certain what exactly happened.

Or, well, I guess I do know. In Legion, we were a Heroic raiding guild. In Battle for Azeroth, it was decided to push for Mythic raiding. We didn't do too badly in Uldir, going 3/8 Mythic.

But before Dazalor, our long-time guild leaders decided that we were getting too hardcore for their tastes, and stepped down. After the first couple of raids, a large chunk of our best raiders decided that we weren't going to be good enough and split off. Then another, newer, group decided our times were not right for them, and they left too.

So then the leadership and core raid team decided to go Horde, since many of them wanted to play on that faction, and transferred to a larger server, hopefully with better recruiting prospects. This happened super-fast. They announced it Saturday afternoon, and people were transferring in the evening.

I have an invitation to join them, but I'm a little unsure what to do. I've raided with several of these guys for two years now. They're good people, and I enjoy playing with them. 

But I really don't want to faction-swap Coriel. I suppose I could transfer or level a Horde character, even another paladin.

The other thing is that, looking back at my tenure in this guild, I preferred it as it existed in Legion. Focused on Heroic raids, 2 nights a week. I didn't mind Mythic raiding at 3 nights a week, especially since many other people in the guild wanted to try it, and I enjoyed raiding with them. But I did like the Heroic version of the guild better.

Hmm, perhaps writing this post has made things clearer to me. I want to find a decent Alliance Heroic guild, but one with zero intention of going to Mythic. Maybe one willing to "graduate" extremely good players, and help them find a spot in a Mythic guild, but able to resist the pressure from those good players to have the guild go Mythic.

Diablo Season 16

I haven't played Diablo III in a while, but I jumped back into Season 16 when it started a week ago.

Normally, I stop playing Diablo after I finish the first four Season chapters and get the full 6-piece set. Usually Torment 6 or Greater Rift 20 or so. This time I've decided to make an attempt at getting into the Diablo III elder game. Primal legendaries, ancient primals, Torment 13 etc.

I'm basically following an online guide to the Hammerdin build, and it's going pretty well. I'm in Season chapter V. I still need to find a proper weapon and shield for the build, but most of my other pieces are decent. Though I cannot roll a socket on my amulet to save my life.

It's interesting because usually I don't "farm" in Diablo. I play on difficulties close to my gear level, pushing to finish the chapter requirements. Enemies seem to take a while to kill, but also take a while to kill me. This time around I'm farming T6.  Everything dies super-fast, and I can finish a rift in five minutes or so. But everything also does a lot of damage, and death can happen very quickly.  It feels very different from the Diablo III I normally play.

Season 16 is the Season of Royal Grandeur. There's a universal buff which mimics the effects of the Ring of Royal Grandeur, allowing you to get set bonuses with one less set piece (minimum of two pieces). It's an interesting twist. I'm currently running five pieces of the Seeker of the Light set (so I get the 6-piece set bonus) and two pieces of the Blackthorne set for the 2- and 3-piece set bonus.

Playing Diablo III this way is an interesting experience. Probably what most serious Diablo players are used to, though.

Origin Access Premier?

Has anyone tried Origin Access Premier?

I saw someone link it in a discussion about Bioware's Anthem. It looks like quite good value for money, especially if you like to buy newer games.  It's $20 CAD/month or $130 CAD/year, but given that Anthem will cost $80 CAD at launch, that's basically 4 months of subscription. Or a full year is 2 new games.

The back catalog also looks pretty decent, with a wide variety of games available. I am particularly interested in Dragon Age 2 and Inquisition, as I never played them.

You can probably do better value for money through Humble Bundles and waiting for Steam sales, but this looks really solid for new games. Of course, I think you're restricted to EA games. And like most subscription services, you probably lose access when you stop paying.

But it seems almost too good to be true for games that you will play and finish. If anyone has tried this service, can you post your impressions in the comments?

Blue Mage

FFXIV released their newest job, the Blue Mage, last week. The Blue Mage is a "limited job". It currently has a level cap of 50, and is not allowed in normal random-matchmaker group content. You can do dungeons and trials with a Blue Mage, but you have to be in a pre-made group.

The central mechanic of Blue Mage is that you don't learn abilities from levelling up, like all the other classes. Instead you learn abilities from monsters. You have to attack a monster, see it use the ability, and then defeat it. You then have a chance of learning the ability. There are currently 50 abilities to learn, of which you can equip 25 at a time.

The big problem, as I see it, is that the game doesn't give you very much information on what abilities you can learn. The spell book starts blank, with 50 slots. The only information given is the zone in which a monster with the ability can be found. It doesn't even tell you the name of the spell!

Now, obviously, all the information was data-mined and there are guides already up on the internet which will direct you to all the monsters you need.

But if you want to try and do it organically, you basically wander around attacking every monster in the zone. And since learning an ability is not guaranteed, you have to kill several of that type to be confident that you can't learn anything.

The saving grace of the system is that most abilities can be learned from several different monsters, not just the ones from the zones noted in the book.

What I'm currently doing is just finishing FATEs to level my Blue Mage, and incidentally learning abilities along the way. I can't target specific abilities, but the spell book doesn't tell me what abilities I can learn in any case. So far it is working pretty decently. I'm level 12 and I've learned 5 abilities or so. Among them an AoE bomb spell from goblins, a cone stun from Quirin, a "Sticky Tongue" pull from giant toads, and a self-destruct spell from bombards. Not really sure what use the last is, since it does kill you, but maybe it will combo with something.

I rather imagine I'll end up at 50 and then look up an online guide to get the abilities that I'm missing.

I do think it would have been better for the spell book to give the names of the abilities, but not the locations. That encourages the player to remember what monsters use the abilities. As well, if you're fighting a new monster, you know if you can't learn the ability, rather than wondering if you are just unlucky. Another option might be some sort of Lore spell which tells you if the monster has a learnable ability.

Still, FFXIV's Blue Mage is an interesting experiment. It's more of side-content, rather than a straightforward combat job, but it is enjoyable so far. It's a bit of a shame that the internet has already obsoleted the exploratory aspect.

FFXIV 4.5 MSQ, Orbonne Monastery, Suzaku

Final Fantasy XIV released the latest patch, 4.5, last week.

Main Scenario Quest

The MSQ continues setting up the next expansion. The Garlemad Empire is moving against Eorzea. The new dungeon, The Grimhylt Dark is pretty neat. It's essentially occurs during a battle, and has lots of cameos from the major named NPCs fighting in the conflict.

The dungeon is a bit easier than The Burn was, especially the last boss.

Orbonne Monastery

The patch also released the latest 24-man raid, the Orbonne Monastery. The third boss is a bit crazy, it took us many attempts. I still don't really understand the Crush Armor mechanic.

This raid took my group a long time to finish, mostly because half of Alliance B left after four or so wipes on the third boss. FFXIV has very generous timers on their instances, something like 180 minutes. We finished with less than 10 minutes.

Aside from the third boss, it felt a little easier than the previous couple of raids. At least the boss mechanics were more straightforward.

All in all, it is a pretty good. Three tank pieces actually dropped for me, but since FFXIV has a 1-item-per-week restriction, I had to watch 2 pieces go unclaimed. Very sad, as I'll now expect to never see the chestpiece again.

Suzaku

I realized that I hadn't actually done the Trial from the last patch, Suzaku, and I had to finish it before I can do the Trial from this patch.

Suzaku was a pretty interesting fight, though not that difficult now. It's interesting, but FFXIV fights are much more "gamist" than WoW, relying on very "unrealistic" visual elements. For example, in Suzaku, the arena is divided into four quadrants, each inscribed with a different colour and Japanese character. Then the four characters appear in the air on the edge of the area, and there's a flying phoenix circling. When the phoenix hits a character, the matching quadrant explodes.

I haven't done the latest trial yet. FFXIV is also staggering a lot of the content in this patch. For example, Blue Mage releases tomorrow. The MSQ also continues in a month or two.

Patch 4.5 is pretty good. I'm looking forward to trying Blue Mage tomorrow, along with everyone else on the server.

Mag'har Orc Scenario

I finally got exalted with the Honorbound on my Horde character, and unlocked the Mag'har Orc allied race.

The scenario itself was really neat. You go back to the alternate Draenor, this time twenty or thirty years after the events in Warlords of Draenor.

In this timeline, the Draenei became fanatical members of the Lightbound under High Exarch Yrel. They seek to convert everyone on Draenor to the Light. You have to rescue the last remnants of the Mag'har from them and bring them to Azeroth.

It's a really interesting set up. The real question is if Blizzard will do anything with this. I could see another expansion based around the Lightbound invading Azeroth. But perhaps a better method might be like how Star Trek used their Mirror Universe. Save it for occasional interaction, but don't focus on it intensely. A bit like how the Infinite Dragonflight was used.

This scenario was excellently done, and it's worth grinding rep with the Honorbound on a Horde character to see it.

Updates

Just a quick round up of what I'm playing lately.

World of Warcraft

Nothing really new. We're just coming out of the holiday lull and waiting for the new raid to open in a couple of weeks.

I guess we're going to end this tier with 3/8 Mythic. That's not bad, but for some reason we stopped putting in attempts on new bosses. Instead there was a push to do Mythic Keystone dungeons. I hope this trend was just because of the holidays, and we return to focusing on raiding.

Final Fantasy XIV

I haven't really played this much lately. I did the seasonal events. The Starlight Celebration this year was pretty neat. It featured an attempt to organize a seasonal choir, complete with a musical rhythm game. It was pretty funny if you failed. Here's a video I found on YouTube:

Lord of the Rings Online

I haven't played it since my dungeon runs. I rather think I'm going to drop it.

Soul Calibur VI

I'm still working my way through Libra mode. I stopped using the highest level weapon that dropped, and just started focusing on learning and mastering one weapon style. The style I chose was Knightmare, a heavy 2H sword. I'm about level 48, though I'm not sure how far I've gotten in the story. My guess, based on the map, is about 70-80%.

8.1 Horde War Campaign

Over the holidays I also finished the 8.1 Horde War Campaign. Like the Alliance version, there were three chapters, and the last chapter waits for the raid to open. There's also a second questline involving Saurfang.

The first chapter is a raid on the Norwington Estate to destroy stockpiled azerite weapons. It featured Rexxar. It was pretty straightforward as these things go.

The second chapter was a goblin escape with Gallywix and a mech. This was okay, if you're a fan of goblins you'd probably like it. I'm not, so I wasn't particularly enthused. There are some funny lines here and there.

The third chapter involved springing Lady Ashvane from Tol Dagor. Your compatriots are Rexxar and Arcanist Valtrois of the Nightbourne. I really like how Blizzard is reusing Allied Race NPCs in this expansion. I like Valtrois, and it's good to see her return. The actual quest is an enjoyable prison-break, featuring disguises and explosions.

The other major quest is the Saurfang quest. This is an excellent quest, as you try to discover what happened to Saurfang as he escaped Stormwind. It's really worth having a Horde character to go through it.

You even get to make a choice at the end to side with Saurfang or Sylvanas. Which is great, except it points up one of the downsides of this thing. I sided with Sylvanas on my blood elf, so to see the other side, I'd need yet another Horde character. I'm debating leveling an Allied Race, or simply using my BfA boost on a Horde character. I don't think the choice will make much difference in the long run, though.

In any case, the Horde War Campaign was a good counterpart to the Alliance one. The story is beginning to heat up, so we'll see what happens when the raid opens in a couple of weeks.

Othrongroth, the Great Barrow

I ended up making several different characters in Lord of the Rings Online. I finally settled on a Captain, even if the NPC ally is a little janky.

I got my Captain up to the level of the first dungeon, the Great Barrow, and gave that a try.

LotRO has an interesting dungeon system. You have to form the group on your own, mostly by advertising the the Looking For Fellowship channel. But once you form the group, you start the dungeon using a menu system where you select the dungeon and a level for the dungeon. Then everyone teleports inside.

Selecting the level is interesting too. I just set it to the level of the lowest person in the party. But I think setting it to a higher level rewards more XP and loot, but is more difficult.

The actual dungeon run was very disappointing though. It was a total zerg. The tank took off at warp speed and blitzed to the end. To make matters worse, the dungeon is a bit of a maze, so you're chasing down corridors and hoping you don't take a wrong turn and end up with more mobs.

It was also very dark, and very hard to tell what you were fighting. The bosses were okay, I'm not sure if they had special mechanics. But it is the first instance, so one really only expects basic fights.

I did try the dungeons (there are three separate wings) twice. I had to do it twice because the first run was so fast I didn't finish some of the quests. If anything, the second run was worse.

All in all, The Great Barrow has really soured me on LotRO. I don't really want to do more dungeons, and I'm not sure if I really want to keep leveling solo. Especially as the Captain feels like a dedicated group character.

Ask Coriel: What's Changed Since 2015?

A reader asked:

I use to read your blog for many years and I have been away from WoW since 2015... How is the game nowadays and what major changes have been made ? I plan on returning next week.

Welcome back!

Since you say 2015, I'm guessing you missed Legion. The most noticeable changes Legion introduced are World Quests/Emissaries and Mythic Keystone dungeons.

World Quests/Emissaries replaced daily quests at max level. Instead of getting a bunch of dailies, when you open your map, there are a variety of quests scattered around the zones. Each day, there's an "Emissary" quest to do 4 World Quests from a specific area or faction.

Mythic Keystone dungeons (also called Mythic+) are extra-difficulty 5-man dungeons. They're timed runs which reward higher item level the more difficult the Keystone used to start them is.  They're basically an alternate to raiding, and higher Keystones award comparable gear to Heroic and Mythic raiding.

Battle for Azeroth introduced Island Expeditions and Warfronts. They're lower difficulty than dungeons, and more optional activities. Their reception has been mixed, but they're worth trying out.

Otherwise the game is pretty much the same as ever. BfA has separate stories for each faction, so it's worth having both an Alliance and a Horde character.

Any other changes in the last couple of years worth talking about?

Edit: I completely forgot, but Legion added Demon Hunters, which are a pretty neat class.

Soul Calibur VI

Over the holidays I picked up Soul Calibur VI.

It's been forever since I've played a fighting game. I'm pretty terrible, the veriest button-masher. But SC is a lot of fun. It's bright and colourful. There are lots of characters and weapons. Each weapon set is a different fighting style.

Soul Calibur VI also has an extensive custom character creator where you can make your own unique fighter. You assign that fighter a weapon which determines what moves your character uses.

The main story mode, Libra of Souls, has you creating a character, then wandering around in a quasi-RPG. Your character gains XP and levels from fighting enemies. You can also find or buy weapons which have levels and powers.

The RPG mechanics are actually a really nice fit for a single-player fighting game. As far as I can tell, levels just reduce the damage you take and increase the damage you deal, while the fighting game aspect is the same. So if you're actually good at fighting games, you can do everything at low levels. If you're bad, you can grind a few levels with the random encounters, and then have an advantage on the fights.

The story is pretty basic. There are a couple of choices you can make which change parts. You can do a Good or Evil play-through, though I'm still working my through it. Sometimes fights will have special conditions, like the area being slippery, making it very easy to fall off the edge.

There's also a second story mode (Soul Chronicle) where you play shorter stories as the specific characters in the game. Soul Chronicle doesn't have RPG elements, basically a series of fights with some story scenes in-between.

As for fighting game mechanics, I have no idea how it compares to other fighting games. It's quasi-2D, you can move towards or away from the camera, but it's mostly to dodge attacks and change direction in the arena. The camera keeps the view like a standard 2D fighter.

The basic moves (horizontal attack, vertical attack, kick, and block) are simple but effective. Then there are throws, break attacks, soul edge, and reversal edge specials. Soul edge are specials you can only use after a meter builds up. Reversal edge is a special break attack that takes you into this rock-paper-scissors mini-game, which I think allows you to "reset the momentum" if your opponent is pushing hard. Then there are combos after that. I'm still learning the basics and next tier though. Trying to learn how to block effectively.

I'm probably going to stick with single-player, rather than fighting other players online. But so far, the single-player component of Soul Calibur VI is surprisingly extensive, and very enjoyable. If you feel like trying a modern fighting game, I recommend giving Soul Calibur VI a whirl.

8.1 Island Expeditions, Part 2

Though Blizzard announced that they had changed the way rewards were determined for Island Expeditions in 8.1, they actually made many other changes.  Many of the changes I wanted in the previous post have been implemented, even if it is still something of a race:

• The location of monster packs has been tightened up. It's a lot easier to move between or around packs without accidentally pulling the entire island.

• The amount of Azerite elementals has been greatly reduced. I don't think I've seen a large elemental yet. This puts the focus back on the varied fauna of the island.

• Invasions of other creatures occur a lot earlier, and I think it's possible for two different types to land. Like you might get Vrykul early and then Mantid later on. 

• I think that the items you need for the various quests to rescue NPCs are now found much closer. So it's much more likely you'll actually be able to do those quests.

All in all, the changes to Island Expeditions have made them a lot smoother and a better experience. It feels like you have more control over your progress, with more focus on special monsters rather than zerging everything in sight.

Island Expeditions are still the same in many ways as in 8.0, just a more refined experience. I think they're more enjoyable, and I rather like doing the four or five Heroic ones you need for the Weekly Treasure map.

8.1 Faction Assaults and War Mode

8.1 introduces Faction Assaults. Like Legion Invasions, one zone comes under attack for a set period of time. New world quests appear, and after you complete four, you do a final quest to finish the assault.

There are some changes from Legion. The Assault World Quests don't replace existing World Quests. They are all clustered in a specific part of the zone. There are different (but similar) quests for each faction.

The assaults are well done. The zone changes, and it really feels like a major battle is taking place. For example, in Drustvar, the city has magic shields fending off Horde bombardments.

These Assaults are excellent in War Mode. I turned on War Mode to do the kill 25 Horde quests, and it was a lot of fun. There are Alliance groups running around clashing with Horde groups. The Assault structure funnels everyone into the same locations, encouraging lots of faction combat while doing the World Quests.

I even joined an Alliance raid group in Zuldazar that got hyped up and decided to sack the city of Dazalor. Not really sure why, but we invaded the bottom of the city, killed everyone at the inn, then charged all the way to the Great Seal and killed everyone there. It was pretty hilarious.

Even though I had a fair amount of fun in raids, I still don't think they're a good match for War Modes. It's just too uneven. I was in a raid of 25, and we encountered a raid of 10, and wiped them out. I strongly believe that War Mode would work better if they were somehow restricted to 5-man groups. Even multiple 5-man groups loosely coordinating would be better. It also might improve performance a bit, having several 5v5 fights scattered around, rather than a single 40v40.

I'm not sure how Blizzard would do that though. Perhaps War Mode is automatically disabled while in a raid. I have a feeling that there would be a huge outcry though.

In any case, Faction Assaults are quite fun. I strongly recommend turning on War Mode for them, and joining a small group.

8.1 Alliance War Campaign

I finished the available parts of the Alliance war campaign. There are three "chapters" available, out of four total. I'm somewhat surprised that Blizzard didn't time-gate each chapter. It would have fit well, and each chapter is a reasonable chunk of content.

The first chapter is working with Jaina to fend off an assault on Anglepoint. This was a pretty good use of a previous location and NPCs. Also, the final cutscene combined with the Achievement name ([Kul Tirans Don't Look At Explosions]) was very amusing.

The second chapter was this very odd blend of comedy and tragedy, where you use a gnomish device to "embiggen" an intelligent gorilla at the cost of his intelligence. The gorilla volunteers for this operation, seeking to strike back at the Horde (goblins, naturally) for hunting his people. So the entire quest line is a bunch of things that are normally funny, but kind of aren't anymore. I'm not certain if this was a good idea or not, but it was an interesting way of presenting the usual light and mindless gnomish shenanigans.

The third chapter was a treasury heist scenario featuring our favourite Alliance rogues, Mathias Shaw and Flynn Fairwind. Even though they're both rogues, they're both very different characters. Lots of fun banter. The scenario itself was pretty interesting, with several traps that you have to navigate.

I believe the second and third chapters are setting up potential bosses in the Dazalor raid.

There's still one more chapter, which I'm guessing unlocks tomorrow.

All in all, the Alliance War Campaign is pretty good. One interesting thing Blizzard is doing this expansion is taking their time with the story. 8.0 was all about setting initial outposts, and trying to avoid the enemy's attention. In 8.1 things are heating up, and there is more direct confrontation. This long view of the story is interesting, especially as we see many complaints that the factions aren't clashing as much as people think they should be.

Edit: One thing I forgot that I wanted to point out was that Blizzard was very good with cutscenes featuring your character in this patch. The aforementioned first chapter cutscene with both your character and Jaina walking away from the explosion was particularly stylish.

Battle for Darkshore

Patch 8.1 was released yesterday. I did the Night Elf quest chain leading to the Battle of Darkshore.

I really enjoyed the quest line. It was good to see the Night Elves go feral and strike back.

The new warfront is interesting. The initial phase before getting a base is longer, which makes it feel more like an invasion or amphibious assault.

The primary resource seems to be wood, where Arathi emphasized iron. In Darkshore it feels like you use iron for recruiting troops or special abilities, and use wood for building. I liked the Night Elf style of the buildings, and the abilities you get.

It did seem to go a bit faster than Arathi, with a shorter building phase, but that might be just because we're learning the new zone.

I'm not really sure about the undead/goblin opposition. Though that's mostly because I don't like goblins and the "tech" that they bring in. They seem out of place in a night elf/worgen/undead fight. It's all shadows and knives in the dark, then the goblins burst in with flashy neon lights.

All in all, the new warfront is pretty good. Warfronts aren't really an activity I focus on, but it's nice to do them once or twice whenever they become active in each cycle.

Island Expeditions in 8.1

Blizzard is changing up how rewards work for Island Expeditions in 8.1:

Currently in Battle for Azeroth, Island Expeditions have a chance to reward cosmetic items based on which type of creatures you and your team defeated. For example, if the island theme of the week was Hozen, there’s a chance to receive one of the Banana toys. If the invaders were Nerubian, you could have a chance to receive the Voru’kar Leecher companion pet (among other things). They way this has worked is by means of a hidden scorecard that counted your group’s efforts against anything on the island that was part of the invaders’ ecology. So if anyone in the group earned some Azerite from killing invaders or mining Azerite near the invaders, everyone in the group had a chance at the cosmetic rewards. That chance grew based on how much invaders’ Azerite was obtained, and was also a higher chance in Heroic and even higher in Mythic difficulty Islands. We set the maximum chance you could earn at a reasonable threshold, in the hopes that players wouldn’t feel that they needed to only kill invaders and not complete the islands in a natural way. 

Of course, that’s not how it worked out. Confusion around the best way to get cosmetics led to a divergence in playstyles, with some players wishing to focus exclusively on hunting specific creatures, while others wished to win the island efficiently to get Azerite. This caused a significant amount of tension between players who had differing goals. 

In Tides of Vengeance, all players on an Expedition will have a chance to receive cosmetic rewards based on the island’s inhabitants, rather than which enemies were specifically defeated. That chance will again be higher on higher difficulties, but there will be no need to strategize around invaders. The most efficient way to receive cosmetic rewards will be whatever tactics cause you to complete the Island quickly, on the highest difficulty that you’re comfortable.

I agree with Blizzard that the two playstyles interacted badly with each other. However, I wish they had chosen the other path to be the default.  Hunting rares and specific enemies is much more fun than speeding to the goal.

What I would have preferred:

• Expeditions are a fixed time, say 20 minutes.
• Most Azerite at the end wins the match.
• Normal creatures do not give Azerite, only named creatures.
• Many normal creatures become non-hostile.
• The "invasion" occurs at the half-way mark.
• No Azerite elementals.

So you can't speed up the expedition, and all you have to do to win is stay ahead of the enemy. Your focus becomes finding named enemies, and doing the mini-events around the island. Then when the invasion occurs, you hunt them down and clear them out.

Updates

Here's what I'm up to in the various games I am playing.

World of Warcraft

We're still working on Mythic. Last week was Thanksgiving in the USA, so we basically lost all our raid days and ended up just doing the first two Mythic bosses and several Heroic bosses on one day.

We also probably need to recruit some more. We pulled in a casual for the Mythics, and he hadn't even done them on LFR!  He did manage to stay alive for both fights, so I think we should recruit him.

Other than Mythic Uldir, I'm pretty much waiting on the next patch. I am levelling a warlock alt, currently in Dustwallow Marsh. But I'm not putting a lot of effort into it. Maybe I should try to get into PvP or Mythic Keystone dungeons.

Lord of the Rings Online

I started the Captain, got to the point where you get a Herald, and decided to shelve the Captain. The Herald is just a bit too janky for me.

I ended up rolling a Ministrel. However, on the weekend, I ran into a bug where a quest item in the main prologue quest would not spawn, and that pretty much blocked me from continuing. So I created an Elf Guardian. It's somewhat ironic that I went with the base tank/healer classes after saying I would play what was fun.

The other part I'm deciding about are deeds. I really like how LotRO has deeds which reward you traits like Valor, Compassion, Charity, etc. and you can "equip" those traits to give your character bonuses. I think that's an excellent mechanic, and really emphasises the "goodness" of your character, which is very appropriate for the game.

But deeds are also a little like achievements in that you have to go out of your way, or grind a bit, to finish them. So they're somewhat optional.

Final Fantasy XIV

I haven't really played this much. I got to elemental level 20 in Eureka Anemos, and went to check out Eureka Pagos. But because you can still level in Anemos, most people are levelling there, and there are no challenge log groups in Pagos.

Destiny 2

I haven't played this in a while. There was a 13 GB patch yesterday. It's probably on the way out for me, but maybe I'll give it another whirl.

Alt-based Design and Battle for Azeroth

Shintar has a post reminiscing about SWTOR's Golden Launch Days. In it, she cites the premise of eight different class stories being a attractive factor:

The promise of being able to level at least eight different alts, have it be a totally different experience, and then receive continued updates for all of those unique class stories sounded absolutely amazing. That those plans ultimately weren't sustainable is another matter, but the amount of content to play through at launch was huge. And yet the game ended up with loads of players who just speed-levelled one class to cap and then complained that there weren't enough raids. I don't even know. Though speaking as someone who did raid once I hit the level cap, the first few months were good times for me too. While there was only one operation at launch, Bioware had added three more by the end of the year. It was a golden age of constant content additions.

To me, the SWTOR's experience leads me to believe that alt-based design--design which expects players to play multiple characters--is a losing strategy. I've mentioned this before in the context of SWTOR:

It really looks like alt-based design is not a good strategy. The Old Republic greatly rewards playing alts, with eight different (excellent, in my opinion) class storylines and the entire Legacy system. And yet, judging by the timeline, I would wager that the largest group of people who quit only had one max level character, and the second largest only had two. 

To me, this strongly looks like encouraging alts is a losing strategy. The better strategy for MMO design might be to assume that most people play a single character all of the time. I mean, don't go out of your way to stop people from playing alts, but just design the game assuming that everyone focuses on one character.

With that in mind, let's look at Battle for Azeroth. BfA is an example of alt-based design, with a lot of changes aimed at encouraging people to play alts. The biggest example, of course, is the separate Horde and Alliance stories, with a full three zones for each side.

But there are more examples. For example, there is no Paragon reputation, which would keep people doing World Quests on their mains. There are no Legendaries, which again encouraged play on mains in order to increase the chances of getting one. Allied Races are a big thing, and are implicitly alt-centric. Professions are much simplified, and it's a lot easier to have a stable of alts with fully-maxed professions compared with Legion.

Now personally, I don't mind a lot of these changes. I quite liked seeing both the Horde story and the Alliance story. But I do notice that I am playing my Paladin, less and less. I pretty much raid with her now. And I am less enthused when on an alt.

I think a lot of problems with BfA can be traced back to the decision encouraging alts instead of expecting people to focus on a single main character. BfA has a ton of content. But maybe it would have been better with six common zones that all characters level through.

The pro-alt crowd is very vocal, and constantly complaining about thing like reputation, and locked content, and difficulty of gearing up. But catering to them seems to make the game less satisfying for the majority of the population.

Kotaku's Blizzard Article

Last week, Kotaku ran an article on Blizzard, The Past, Present, and Future of Diablo.

It has lots of interesting tidbits about Diablo's development. Basically Blizzard opted to work on Diablo IV's development instead of a second expansion of Diablo 3. The article presents that as a "bad decision". But honestly, I remember the chatter around around D3 at the time. A lot of the gaming community didn't like the direction of D3, and Reaper of Souls didn't really change that.

It's a bit of revisionist history to say the community loves Reaper of Souls. Yes, it fixed a lot of problems in the base D3, mostly by closing the auction houses and adding the Crusader. But by and large, the people who liked D3 before Reaper liked it afterwards, and the people who didn't like D3 before Reaper still didn't like it afterwards.

So I think the decision to move on from D3 is defensible. As a fan of Diablo 3, it's not what I would have preferred, but it is reasonable.

There are is some interesting information about Diablo IV's development. The first idea, Project Hades, was a Dark Souls variant. Over-the-shoulder perspective. I think it would have failed miserably as Diablo IV. Blizzard ended up cancelling this one too.

The current project is codenamed Fenris. It's a more traditional Diablo, going back to more D2 aesthetic rather than D3. But it's a few years out, so Blizzard isn't saying anything about it publicly.

The most interesting part of the article, though, is the fact that the push for mobiles games is coming from Blizzard senior developers, not the business side. It seems to be a reaction to the very long development cycles for PC games.

An AAA PC game apparently takes a decade to build, and a mobile game takes 1 to 2 years. I can totally see devs wanting to shepard a project from inception to fruition in two years, rather than spend ten years of your life on single game, with a high possibility of seeing it cancelled halfway through. Make five different games rather than one.

The interesting underlying question is why AAA development is taking so long. Is it the art requirements? Is it the game engine that new properties require? Is it just that content creation for expected amount of playtime takes so long? Does iterative development, which Blizzard is famous for, waste too many resources, even if it produces a better game in the end?

We'll see what answers Blizzard comes up with. To be honest, this makes me more interested in Diablo Immortal, and seeing what Blizzard's new team comes up with, even if it is on mobile.

Zandalar

This post contains spoilers for the Horde stories in Battle For Azeroth.

I finally finished the Zandalar and Horde war stories last week on my Blood Elf Warrior.

The Horde stories are decent. I'm not as attached to the Horde as the Alliance, so I didn't think it was quite as good. Also, I think straight-back trolls look weird. They look more like misshapen humans than trolls. I much prefer the traditional Darkspear look.

I did Nazmir first, followed by Vol'dun, and then Zuldazar. In hindsight, the better order would be in reverse, Zuldazar, Vol'dun, and finally Nazmir. Zuldazar in particular really introduces you to the Zandalari.

I did like the Loa, and all the different interactions with them. The star NPC Horde-side, and probably the most memorable overall, was Bwonsamdi. A very interesting personality for a death god, more reminiscent of trickster gods (Coyote, Loki, etc.) than gods of the underworld. Superb voice acting, as well.

Though, this would be the downside of starting in Zuldazar, as Bwonsamdi is introduced properly in Nazmir.

One odd thing is that there is no story connection to the King's Rest dungeon, even though that dungeon seems like it is an important part of main story.

The war story is also interesting, perhaps more so than the Alliance one. Having Derek Proudmoore become Forsaken seems like a vastly important plot point, and it will be interesting to see where Blizzard goes with this.

Zandalar was a very good country, and between it and Kul Tiras, this expansion had an enormous amount of story content.

Revisiting Lord of the Rings Online

Lord of the Rings Online launched a "Legendary" server last week, with a lower level cap, slowed down levelling, and some of the original quests added back in. It's also a subscriber-only server. I gave it a whirl last night.

First of all, LOTRO has a very long download and install process. It took something like four hours before everything was fully installed. The process of subscribing is also a little janky. You have to log into a non-Legendary server first to get access to the store.

Lately, I keep debating if I should play a healer or tank so that I can join group content in new MMOs. This time around, I just chose the most appealing class, a Human Captain. It's very similar to a paladin with a 2H weapon, buffs, and heals.

Way back in 2007, I wrote a First Impressions post of LOTRO. Pretty much everything I said in that post applies today. The graphics are a bit better, but the colour palette is much the same. Movement and combat feels very similar. It is interesting to see how many elements have been incorporated into other MMOs, especially the quest tracker details.

Somehow, though, I feel a little more charitable to the game this time around. I'm enjoying the slower pace. I haven't got very far, I'm still in the introductory town of Archet. But it's really nice to see all the classic Lord of the Rings elements like Hobbits, the Rangers, and the Nazgul.

Also, there's a lot of world chat going on, which is nice to see. And for once they're not discussing WoW. Instead all the chatter is about Moria.

Blue Mage Controversy

FFXIV's newest class, Blue Mage, is proving to be quite controversial. Here's the basic outline (taken from Reddit):

• Will start at level 1
• Initial level cap will be 50 which will be raised at later dates
• Gear will be from ranged magic DPS
• Initial amount of monster skills will be a count of 49
• 24 monster skills will be equippable at once
• Developed more for solo, including new content "Masked Carnival" for Blue Mages
• Various restrictions including not being able to use Duty Roulettes to enter parties
• You can enter pre-formed party instances, but obviously the level cap is at 50

Basically, the Blue Mage learns skills by fighting monsters with that skill. There is no obvious order in which skills are gained, or what skills a Blue Mage can choose to use. This is apparently very true to the way Blue Mage has been depicted in previous Final Fantasies.

The big controversy is that SE is locking them out of random match-making content like levelling dungeons.  The obvious reason is to keep Blue Mages who don't have the necessary skills equipped or learned from negatively affecting the party.

Blue Mages can do content in pre-made parties, but in FFXIV the vast majority of content is done through automatic matchmaking.

I think it's a very interesting experiment, seeing how far SE can push the current FFXIV class/role structure. I believe they're being conservative for now. FFXIV has had several classes introduced with unique mechanics at the start, but ended up having to be brought in line with the existing classes, and much of their uniqueness removed. Dark Knight suffered from this a lot, I believe.

If Blue Mage works out, I imagine that automatic matchmaking will be opened up to allow them in, perhaps with extra requirements on which skills must be equipped.

I'm a big fan of experimentation, so I'm excited to see how this will work out.

FFXIV Shadowbringers Expansion and Blue Mage

FFXIV is having it's Fanfest this weekend, and it announced the latest expansion, Shadowbringers:

I do like that FFXIV teases things, rather than stating them outright. I'm a little tired of everything in WoW being revealed and data-mined months in advance.

Apparently, Viera (some sort of bunny race) was strongly hinted at. Yoshi-P wore a Bugs Bunny t-shirt, which is as close to gospel as FFXIV gets.

There are multiple classes coming, including Blue Mage:

FFXIV does like flamboyant casters (see Red Mage).

Blue Mage is actually coming out in Patch 4.5, but has a level cap of 50, which will be raised later. It's a little unsure what SE has in mind here. Is it like a preview, do they think they won't meet the 4.5 deadline with a full class, are they dealing with balance concerns? The last class they released in a mid-expansion patch was Rogue/Ninja, and that did have a lot of balance issues at first.

It's also possible that this isn't a regular job, but more something meant for solo play.

All in all, Shadowbringers looks pretty interesting. It sounds like the major story arc with the Ascians that started in 2.0 will come to a close. And it continues FFXIV's focus on story and traditional dungeons.

Mythic Zek'voz

My guild killed Mythic Zek'voz last night! This puts us at 3/8 Mythic.

Been a while since I've posted a killshot

We actually killed the boss with every single person in the raid dead. Zek'voz keeled over just as the last person died. Though this is mostly because Zek'voz has a soft enrage where people are mind-controlled and need to be killed.

Mythic Zek'voz took us about three weeks or so. I think more than anything else, we just needed to put time into the fight, practice the mechanics and slowly get used to the timers.

We did this using a normal strategy, moving from one voidweaver to the next. I had an idea where half the raid attacks the left voidweaver, and the other half takes the right voidweaver. Minimize target-switching and keep people spread out and use most of the room. Sadly, we never tried it out, so I have no idea if it would work or not.

Now to see if we can repeat the kill next week. On to Vectis!

Overhauling Mounts

In theory, WoW has a very large number of mounts which players can ride. In practice, though, everyone seems to use the same three or four mounts: water striders, sky golems, yaks, or mammoths.

This is because these mounts have unique special abilities. Water striders can walk on water, golems can gather materials without dismounting, and yaks and mammoths have vendors so you can sell and repair.

WoW should spread out these special abilities to other mounts. Ideally, every mount should have one, and only one, special ability. That way you would have a variety of mounts to use in different situations.

Potential properties:

• Flying - can fly
• Fast - can move faster than normal
• Gathering - can gather without dismounting
• Vendors - has vendors
• Two-Seats - can carry a passenger
• Swimming - provides water-breathing and faster swim speed
• Steady - cannot be dazed or dismounted

Of course, this is a nerf to Sky Golems and some Two-Seats mounts as they effectively have two special abilities. Personally, I think the Sky Golem is a little too good, and could stand a nerf.

Another possibility is to come up with a few more properties, and then let each mount have two special properties. That would lead to a bunch of combinations.

I think making sure all mounts have access to special abilities would make it more likely that a wide variety of mounts are used, and reduce the importance of getting specific chase mounts. Personally, I'm a little tired of seeing everyone on water striders, and would like to use a different mount every so often.