A-hunting we will go: Me and World of Warcraft on the brink of Cataclysm
I'm playing WoW again, and enjoying it. It took at least two false starts to get there, though, and I feel like writing about what I've learned about how I'm doing at the moment when it comes to game play, and what I'm doing about it. This is really long, so it's behind a cut tag.
Part I: Problems and Limitations
#1. Focus
I get easily distracted. In the wake of friends' being diagnosed with ADHD in recent years, I've read up on it, and I don't have it, I don't think. But some of the learning disabilities and other problems arising from autoimmune mucking around in my head do produce similar manifestations. Throughout my years with WoW, I've played many, many, many alts, and there's a lot I never got done with any of them because of it. I wanted to get out of that rut, really badly.
#2. Raiding
I can't raid. More precisely, I can't reliably perform up to snuff in any of the raid roles. And I've been stressing pretty badly about it whenever I thought of it. In the original game and in both expansions so far, I started off pretty well with good raid groups I liked being with, and crashed and burned.
What I found this summer is that being around raiders and raid talk was making me increasingly stressed and unhappy. And it's not because any of them are bad people. To the contrary, I'm talking here about people who've been serious help and encouragement to me in times of need, whom I like. The problem is not them doing anything wrong, or that I feel they should cut out. The problem is purely and entirely in my head. But it's real nonetheless, and something I have to deal with so as not to undercut the ongoing work of recovery.
#3. Alliance
I like civilized cities and towns, right at the moment. Also, the general arc of story development for the Horde annoys me a great deal, with the compassion, wisdom, and creativity of early Horde leaders being displaced by what we in the biz technically call shitheadedness. Varian Wrynn is not my idea of a great hero but he didn't displace anyone of note and he's getting better lately, and the Alliance doesn't seem to be diving so rapidly into sheer stupidity at the top. So it's happier for me. Real-life politics depress me deeply, and I need escape from that in my gaming.
Part II: Productive Response
#1. The Character
So I wanted one (1) Alliance character to play with friends who don't raid regularly. That's just what I have. Meet Lariko (pronounced la-ree-ko), night elf hunter:
For starters, I want to say something about her name. It looks Japanese-ish, which I think is fine for night elves, but it's actually Esperanto, thanks to a suggestion from Frances. She and her husband are long-time Esperanto fans, and many of their characters. I commented that I'd like some sort of arboreal-related name, and after a little rummaging she came back with "Lariko". It's Esperanto for the larch. The larch.
Look, if there's anyone out there actually surprised to learn that I'm enough of a geek to go for Monty Python jokes in synthetic languages, you should probably just stop reading now.
Anyway, back at my character.
I find the pet classes, warlock and hunter, most enjoyable, because having the pet for support allows my quality of play to degrade gracefully rather than rudely and abruptly when I'm impaired. And I favor hunters at the moment because they're more rugged, and also for having more instant-cast spells. It turns out that cast times annoy me a lot more than cooldown times, when I'm prone to annoyance. In addition, I just plain love night elf looks, and many of their moves, apart from the dance and the idle bounce.
Furthermore, of all the classes where I've paid any real attention to developments in the beta tests for the upcoming expansion, Cataclysm, it's the changes to hunters that make me most think "Wanna play like that!"
#2. The Role
Frances plays with her family and some friends, and it's lightyears away from what I've been doing in most of my WoW time...in ways that are just right for me right now. They don't raid; they don't push at high-end content. They work along at a much less demanding kind of pace. So I can be doing okay-but-not-great by my standards and still be very useful, as dps provider and info source.
I can also tank for them. :)
I linked recently to a WoW blogger commenting on the dourness that prevails among many veteran WoW players and bloggers. I agree with her a lot. One of the bright spots in that dark landscape is the community of hunters poking at extreme soloing and pet tanking. Let me explain.
WoW uses the "holy trinity" of character roles: tank, dps, and healer. The tank may do a lot of damage or may not, but its role is to generate lots of threat and keep monsters attacking it rather than other PCs. The healer heals. The dpser deals damage (measured in Damage Per Second, hence the acronym). Hunters are by design one of the pure dps classes. They don't any convenient options to let them be the aggro/threat magnets that tanks must be, and they have only a single spell to heal their pets.
But they do have pets, and some of those pets are mini-tanks: tough, with lots of armor, and with threat-generating abilities. Hunters also have some pretty good armor, and pets get the benefit of a fraction of their owners' stamina and various other ratings, so the better geared a hunter is, the stronger the pet is, automatically. And some hunter armor has interesting special abilities, like the set where having enough pieces of it automatically heals the pet for a percentage of all damage the hunter does.
(People interested in the technicalities, see the above links to Warcraft Hunters Union articles.)
What this all means is that a hunter whose player is prepared to work at it some can in fact tank, for solo efforts and for groups.
Meet Arcturus:
Arcturus comes from Dun Murogh, just outside Ironforge - Lyndon pointed out to me that one doesn't see many black bears with level 20 hunters, since there are no high-level ones. By now she's a very well-traveled bear, with adventures on many continents and multiple worlds. So far she's gone with me solo through a bunch of the Outland heroic instances, and also acted as main tank for a raid on Zul'Gurub. I'm hoping to do more with her, filling in achievements I've never gotten, or have only gotten long ago on other characters.
In future posts, more about what I'm doing in particular. :)
Part I: Problems and Limitations
#1. Focus
I get easily distracted. In the wake of friends' being diagnosed with ADHD in recent years, I've read up on it, and I don't have it, I don't think. But some of the learning disabilities and other problems arising from autoimmune mucking around in my head do produce similar manifestations. Throughout my years with WoW, I've played many, many, many alts, and there's a lot I never got done with any of them because of it. I wanted to get out of that rut, really badly.
#2. Raiding
I can't raid. More precisely, I can't reliably perform up to snuff in any of the raid roles. And I've been stressing pretty badly about it whenever I thought of it. In the original game and in both expansions so far, I started off pretty well with good raid groups I liked being with, and crashed and burned.
What I found this summer is that being around raiders and raid talk was making me increasingly stressed and unhappy. And it's not because any of them are bad people. To the contrary, I'm talking here about people who've been serious help and encouragement to me in times of need, whom I like. The problem is not them doing anything wrong, or that I feel they should cut out. The problem is purely and entirely in my head. But it's real nonetheless, and something I have to deal with so as not to undercut the ongoing work of recovery.
#3. Alliance
I like civilized cities and towns, right at the moment. Also, the general arc of story development for the Horde annoys me a great deal, with the compassion, wisdom, and creativity of early Horde leaders being displaced by what we in the biz technically call shitheadedness. Varian Wrynn is not my idea of a great hero but he didn't displace anyone of note and he's getting better lately, and the Alliance doesn't seem to be diving so rapidly into sheer stupidity at the top. So it's happier for me. Real-life politics depress me deeply, and I need escape from that in my gaming.
Part II: Productive Response
#1. The Character
So I wanted one (1) Alliance character to play with friends who don't raid regularly. That's just what I have. Meet Lariko (pronounced la-ree-ko), night elf hunter:
For starters, I want to say something about her name. It looks Japanese-ish, which I think is fine for night elves, but it's actually Esperanto, thanks to a suggestion from Frances. She and her husband are long-time Esperanto fans, and many of their characters. I commented that I'd like some sort of arboreal-related name, and after a little rummaging she came back with "Lariko". It's Esperanto for the larch. The larch.
Look, if there's anyone out there actually surprised to learn that I'm enough of a geek to go for Monty Python jokes in synthetic languages, you should probably just stop reading now.
Anyway, back at my character.
I find the pet classes, warlock and hunter, most enjoyable, because having the pet for support allows my quality of play to degrade gracefully rather than rudely and abruptly when I'm impaired. And I favor hunters at the moment because they're more rugged, and also for having more instant-cast spells. It turns out that cast times annoy me a lot more than cooldown times, when I'm prone to annoyance. In addition, I just plain love night elf looks, and many of their moves, apart from the dance and the idle bounce.
Furthermore, of all the classes where I've paid any real attention to developments in the beta tests for the upcoming expansion, Cataclysm, it's the changes to hunters that make me most think "Wanna play like that!"
#2. The Role
Frances plays with her family and some friends, and it's lightyears away from what I've been doing in most of my WoW time...in ways that are just right for me right now. They don't raid; they don't push at high-end content. They work along at a much less demanding kind of pace. So I can be doing okay-but-not-great by my standards and still be very useful, as dps provider and info source.
I can also tank for them. :)
I linked recently to a WoW blogger commenting on the dourness that prevails among many veteran WoW players and bloggers. I agree with her a lot. One of the bright spots in that dark landscape is the community of hunters poking at extreme soloing and pet tanking. Let me explain.
WoW uses the "holy trinity" of character roles: tank, dps, and healer. The tank may do a lot of damage or may not, but its role is to generate lots of threat and keep monsters attacking it rather than other PCs. The healer heals. The dpser deals damage (measured in Damage Per Second, hence the acronym). Hunters are by design one of the pure dps classes. They don't any convenient options to let them be the aggro/threat magnets that tanks must be, and they have only a single spell to heal their pets.
But they do have pets, and some of those pets are mini-tanks: tough, with lots of armor, and with threat-generating abilities. Hunters also have some pretty good armor, and pets get the benefit of a fraction of their owners' stamina and various other ratings, so the better geared a hunter is, the stronger the pet is, automatically. And some hunter armor has interesting special abilities, like the set where having enough pieces of it automatically heals the pet for a percentage of all damage the hunter does.
(People interested in the technicalities, see the above links to Warcraft Hunters Union articles.)
What this all means is that a hunter whose player is prepared to work at it some can in fact tank, for solo efforts and for groups.
Meet Arcturus:
Arcturus comes from Dun Murogh, just outside Ironforge - Lyndon pointed out to me that one doesn't see many black bears with level 20 hunters, since there are no high-level ones. By now she's a very well-traveled bear, with adventures on many continents and multiple worlds. So far she's gone with me solo through a bunch of the Outland heroic instances, and also acted as main tank for a raid on Zul'Gurub. I'm hoping to do more with her, filling in achievements I've never gotten, or have only gotten long ago on other characters.
In future posts, more about what I'm doing in particular. :)