Classic Westfall: Where Dreams Meet Reality

First Death

I finished Elwynn Forest and moved on to Westfall, where I had my first death. I got attacked by a Coyote and a Coyote Packleader and foolishly decided to fight when my bubble was on cooldown. It's interesting because if it had been three coyotes, I would ran away right at the start and survived.

I also had a second death a bit later, fighting a Defias Trapper, and not realizing that a Defias Smuggler was throwing knives at me from a distance.

Dreams meet Reality

If Elwynn Forest is the zone where you see all the advantages of Classic, Westfall is where you start to see some of the disadvantages. And you realize that there was a reason Blizzard changed things.

Like one of the first quests is to kill 30 Defias, 15 trappers and 15 smugglers. You have to make a circuit of several camps, killing one Defias at a time. You run away if two of them attack you. You sit and drink after killing three or four. The respawn time is long so you have to find multiple camps.

There are some advantages to this playstyle, though. You explore a lot of the map. You usually end up working on several quests at the same time. For example, kill a couple Defias in camp A, then kill some boars for livers on the way to camp B.

Truthfully, it is kind of boring. Another thing which made it worse is that Westfall chat wasn't working in the Beta. There's a saying that MMOs are glorified chat channels, and that's true to an extent. But the chat channels work with the slow pace. The slow pace gives you time to read chat and respond in between killing a mob or two. And the chat channel makes the slow pace bearable.

Another element is that the way paladins interact with a couple of mechanics pushes solo gameplay to be even less interesting. Mana regen in Classic is governed by something called the "5 second rule". Mana only starts regenerating a full 5 seconds after you last used an ability. For most classes, this isn't an issue, because you have to spend mana to deal damage. For paladins, though, the abilities are all front-loaded. If you Seal, Judge, Seal at the start of the fight, mana regen will kick in after 5 seconds. Then if you just auto-attack, you'll get most of your mana back during the fight. The only damage you are missing out on is Judgement, and it isn't that much. Especially if Judgement gets resisted, which is rage-inducing because you realize that you killed your mana regen for nothing.

Fights are slightly longer, but you don't have to sit and drink. But game-play is atrociously boring. Press three buttons at the start, and then auto-attack for 30 seconds.

Now, obviously, playing any other class might be more interesting.

WoW Classic Beta!

I got a WoW Classic Beta invite, and it is hilarious!  I remade my paladin, and here she is at level 10.

Classic Coriel in Goldshire

You can see the Seals, Judgement and (5 minute!) Blessing of Might on the bars. I had forgotten just how few buttons the classic paladin uses. (The question mark is a mouseover macro for Holy Light that seems to have a bug with the tooltip. I have reported the bug.)

It feels very much like the vanilla WoW that I remember. It's pretty slow, level 10 took me maybe four or so hours. Lots of running around. Combat is somewhat dangerous. I haven't died yet, but I've had to use bubble and run away four times. Twice from gnolls, and twice from murlocs. I'm wearing a mix of leather and mail, and I've even been wearing greys!

The major difference so far between Classic and retail is how much interaction there is with other people, and how the mechanics push you to interact. For example, tagging is absolute here, there are no shared tags at all. So I've ended up making impromptu groups for almost every named quest mob with the others who are waiting for the mob.

People seem to make liberal use of buffs, randomly buffing people nearby. Priests and Mages give me Stamina and Intellect, and I give them Blessing of Might. Though, this may just be the beta crowd. If you get in over your head (very easy to do!), and someone is nearby, they'll often help out.

I even traded some linen to someone who was leveling tailoring in exchange for two six-slot bags.

It's a very interesting experience to see exactly what you miss, and what you don't miss from retail, and what you wish was in retail.

So far, things I miss from retail:

• AOE looting. I kill two murlocs and I always forget to loot the second one.
• The bag clean up button. Apparently I use this constantly in retail. I open my bags, and reach for the button before I remember that it doesn't exist.

Things I don't miss from retail:

• Quest markers and sparkles. The map and mini-map in Classic are very basic, and don't do very much. The mini-map doesn't even show new quests. After playing Classic, it's clear that I pay more attention to the map in retail rather than the actual world. In Classic, bringing up the map doesn't really add any information, so you pay more attention to the world. I am beginning to think that the balance between map and world in retail has tilted too far towards the map, and the map simply does too much.

Things I want from Classic back in retail:

• The spinning uppercut animation for Hammer of Justice. It's so much better than the current animation. Every time I use Hammer of Justice in Classic, it annoys me that it got removed from retail.

Overall, WoW Classic has clearly got that vanilla feel, with all the advantages and disadvantages thereof. It's a unique opportunity to compare and contrast the two versions, rather than relying on nostalgia and unreliable memories.

WoW Classic and Layers

When WoW Classic launches (Aug 27!) it will use a new tech for managing server populations called "layers". From BlizzardWatch:

Called “Layering,” the new system will help reduce queue times and improve server stability for the launch of WoW Classic. Layering is tough to explain without a metaphor, and thankfully Blizzard came up with a good one while explaining it to press and content creators recently. 

Imagine a tray with an empty glass. The tray is a single server in WoW Classic. The empty glass is a layer. When you log into the game on launch day, you’ll be with a flood other players: the water that we’re going to pour into the glass. Once the glass is full, we add another empty glass and start filling it up with water, or players, too. Each new glass is a new layer that consists of two to three thousand players — which means any single server could handle tens of thousands of players at the same time but without all of them being crowded into the same place in-game. The only way to see players from another layer is to group up with them —otherwise they don’t interact.

A layer is basically an invisible server. You get assigned to an invisible layer, and you only see other people who are assigned to that same layer. If you join a guild, you get transferred to that guild's layer. So you should see the same guilds and characters over time.

If the population of two layers drops down, the layers are merged, just like a server merge. Only because the original and final layer ids are unknown, and character names are unique across both layers, the merge should be unnoticeable. Other than seeing a bunch of new people running around Stormwind.

The interesting thing will be to see how many traditional "servers" WoW Classic launches with. Perhaps it's theoretically possible that WoW Classic could have a single server (or maybe 3 for PvE, PvP, and RP) and have 1000 layers.

Of course, naming characters would rapidly become very, very hard. And I wonder if there is value in having a named subcommunity, rather than everyone thrown into one giant pot. Is it good to feel like you belong on Lightbringer, while others belong to Skywall?

Cinematic: Safe Haven

Blizzard dropped a new cinematic on us in the lead up to patch 8.2 titled Safe Haven.

It's a pretty good cinematic. It looks like Thrall is coming back to the Horde.

I really wonder what Blizzard is planning for Sylvanas. They said she won't be Garrosh 2.0, but she's sure looking like it. I also don't think they're handling her character very well. She's supposed to be the cool-headed, competent archetype, but she seems to be making rash and foolish decisions all through this expansion.

Ah well, we'll see how this turns out in the patch.

Ahead of the Curve: Uu'nat

Heh, I thought it would take another couple of weeks, but we tweaked our strategy and how we handled the Tears and got a kill!

Defiant-Doomhammer kills Heroic Uu'nat

  Here's a screenshot from our Jaina kill which I never posted:

Defiant-Doomhammer defeats Heroic Jaina

Uu'nat was a pretty decent fight. Using the same three artifacts with the same double-edged powers in both fights of Crucible was an interesting twist. Ultimately, though, I think it was a touch gimmicky. I still think Jaina Proudmoore was the best designed fight this tier (and probably the best from the last several tiers).

Updates

World of Warcraft

We're working on Heroic Uu'nat at the moment. It will probably take a couple more weeks, I think. We're currently working on steadying Phase 2 and figuring out Phase 3.

Otherwise, things are pretty steady in WoW. One thing about the server transfer is now all my other characters are stuck on the old server, and it's a bit of pain to switch servers. So they're basically gathering dust now.

I am very slowly leveling a Shadow Priest. I decided to do questing-only, with no heirlooms. I like upgrading gear and watching my character change appearance as I level. But it's quite slow without heirlooms. I think I would like Blizzard to separate out the XP gain from the heirlooms. Since quest gear now scales with level, you don't really need heirlooms unless you don't want to bother with gearing entirely. Perhaps XP gain while leveling becomes a stat that you could permanently increase through various mechanics, including heirlooms.

Final Fantasy FFXIV

I'm pretty much done with Stormblood, and waiting for the next expansion. I've been leveling Ninja using the AI Squadron in dungeons. It's not bad, but it can be tricky to force the tank to take aggro on everything.

The only thing I have really left undone in Stormblood is Eureka. But I'm at an awkward stage in Pagos where I'm too low level for the bosses, but I find it hard to get a smaller challenge log group going. Content that requires groups is really hard to do if you can't find groups.

Torchlight II

I ended up deleting this. The problem here was that Torchlight is one of those games which doesn't allow you to respec. I was putting all my points into one main ability and a bunch of passives. This worked well, but got boring. I really wanted to try different builds, but that would have required making new characters. The story wasn't really gripping me, so I eventually decided that I wasn't interested in finishing the game.

Anthem

I haven't played much since the patch. I did log in and do some missions and a stronghold for the daily one day. It was actually a pretty good day in terms of loot, with two Legendaries and four or five Masterworks. I haven't tried the new stronghold yet, though.

Mythic Champion of the Light

We had a weird raid last evening. First, we went and did Normal Crucible of Storms. I think we did this mainly to get another look at Uu'nat before we start working on the Heroic version.

Then we killed Heroic Restless Cabal again. Interestingly, this was harder than our previous kill because we were trying to fully use the Promise of Power mechanic, instead of just dispelling it early.

After Cabal, the raid leader noticed that we had exactly 20 people in the raid, so we tried the first boss of Mythic Dazar'Alor: Champion of the Light. She was fairly easy, and we actually one-shot her. I think that because it was Mythic, everyone paid a lot more attention to the mechanics.

Loot-wise, it was pretty lucrative, as I got a warforged i425 shield! I also realised that our raid does not have a single 2H Strength DPS character. No Warriors, Retribution Paladins, or Death Knights. As a result, there's no one for me to leech Retribution weapons from. I was wondering why I haven't replaced my Retribution mace since Uldir.

We then tried Mythic Jadefire Champions, but that was a big step up in difficulty and coordination. We made some decent progress, but then people had to leave. So we finished up the night with the first three bosses in Heroic Dazar'Alor.

Pretty good night, all in all. It's rather unlikely that we'll have exactly 20 people again, so that's probably our only foray into Mythic this tier. To be honest, I don't mind. I do kind of miss the intricacies of Mythic raiding, but that's more than outweighed by not having to worry about roster issues or the bench.

Heroic Jaina, Heroic Restless Cabal

Heroic Jaina Proudmoore

Last week, we killed Heroic Jaina and got the Ahead of the Curve feat for Battle of Daz'alor. The fight took us a fair amount of time overall, as we had a lot of problems with Phase 3.

We ended up switching to having most of the raid get frozen early during Bloodlust, and having a small group break people out. That proved to be the strategy which got us past P3, and Jaina went down shortly after.

I really like the Jaina Proudmoore fight. It feels like fighting a powerful frost mage. It matches the story quite well. There's a solid variety of mechanics, but nothing feels too contrived. Jaina using Iceblock in response to Bloodlust is simply hilarious, an outstanding mechanic.  Once you master each portion of the fight, you generally have it down. Wipes never feel arbitrary, but always because you made an identifiable mistake.

Heroic Restless Cabal

After we got Jaina, we still had an hour or two left in the raid, so we went back to Crucible of Storms, this time on Heroic. The first boss took us about an hour. It's basically the same as Normal, only this time you have to do all the mechanics correctly.

If you did the fight properly on Normal, and didn't try to overpower mechanics, Heroic is just more healing and damage required. It's less difficult than Jaina.

After Restless Cabal, we took a look at Heroic Uu'nat. This one looks a lot harder, and it looks like a fun challenge to finish the rest of the tier. I also think that--unlike Cabal--we didn't do half the mechanics properly in Normal, so we'll have to learn to do them correctly.

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.