In 04/07/2008 I’ve filled a webform to request an email change on my account since the current one does not exist. After a long wait, I’ve received an email in 15/07/2008, 11 days after, stating only the required information that I should send in order to change my email, which I did, so, I’m still waiting, today is 23/07/2007, 19 days have gone, no word.

This is driving me crazy, specially considering I did the Opt-In for WotLK Beta, and if I get a key for it before my email is changed, it’s lost, I won’t get another one again, nor I will be able to get the one which was lost.

20 Days to change an email, and counting….

Best regards,

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In my latest rambling about why there is a tank shortage i pointed out that the one of the reasons that dictates how much players of the X class exist on a server is directly related to how much high end raiding guilds desire them to raid, and since I’m seriously convinced that WotLK tank changes (all of them, palas/druids/warriors/dk’s) are going to decrease how much a warrior is required in raiding, i foresee protection warriors a near extinction species, but, let’s analyse this a bit further.

My concern to be very blunt and direct, is, the Protection Warrior need in high end raiding guilds.

OK, it’s true, it’s beta, it’s true that we don’t know how raids will be, although some might think it’s a bit too soon to worry about this, i disagree, if WotLK development doesn’t keep this issue in mind, I’m fairly sure it will be too late to deal with post expansion release, and we will end up in a similar situations like the four horsemen, where all of a sudden due to a boss gimmick the guild is required to either recruit more tanks and/or have internal re-rolls, so, to avoid future ‘problems’ either on the player base or in the high end guilds, i feel this issue should be brought up earlier in the development stage in order to keep a balanced class development.

If we ‘analyse’ the current trend regarding protection warriors by looking at the differences between Mount Hyjal/Black Temple and Sunwell Plateau, i can safely assume that blizzard intends to decrease the amount of protection warriors in raids, and favour other classes also, while i do agree with it to a certain extent (of course, it’s the class i play for 3 years and like other players i would like to defend my raid spot), if we think about it, there’s no fight in SWP that you could say there is a need to have a warrior tanking or participating in boss X fight, when this happens, why should a raid leader want a protection warrior instead of any of it’s tanking counterparts ? Shield wall ? Last Stand ? well, that is really overrated and completely unnecessary in farmed bosses, in learning ? of course, very useful, can seriously increase the chances of a first kill, on farm ? no, not at all.

Now given the information available about the new beta talents and skills, I’d like to know what or which unique ability does a warrior have that will make him wanted in a raid ? With the end of crushing blows (which I welcome yes), with the significant buff on Feral druids and Protection paladins, Rogues and new Death knight, which got most of THE warrior unique abilities that made them wanted in raids, I’m seriously concerned if they will be wanted at all.

Let’s make a quick review:
This review is thought on a single target tanking, aka, Boss

Protection Paladins:
- Judgements of the Just, judges reducing melee attack speed of the target by 10/20%

Hello thunderclap, one of the famous warrior debuffs that would make them wanted in raiding. Granted DPS warriors can do it also, but, would mean they would loose a tiny bit of dps, on min max guilds this would be a reason to have 1 of the tanks a warrior, instead of having a DPS warrior keeping it up.

Protection Paladins also bring raid utility, another blessing, the casual heal when required although a crappy one but can save a player, the BoP, Divine intervention, JoW/JoL

Feral Druids:
- Demoralizing Roar, decreases enemies melee attack power by 408, talented 571 AP

Although warriors Demo shout is 2 AP higher, and talented some measly 4 AP more, this is by any means any valid reason a raid leader would prefer a protection warrior instead of a feral druid, plus, feral druids are already the best melee mitigation tank in the game due to they’re armour, and how easy they can tank multi mobs.

Feral druids bring also to the raid 5% crit aura, bleed damage increase from mangle, combat resurrection, occasional life saving heal, hibernate.

Death Knight:
- Icy Touch deals damage modified by AP, decreases melee and casting speed by 15%

The new and improved thunderclap, granted, TC and Judgement of just are 20%, but, the casting speed decrease > 5% speed anywhere in the world.

- Anti-Magic Shell, absorbs 75% of magic damage for 3 seconds

OK, it’s nice to have a dedicated magic tank, i don’t have problems with that, but, at the moment, warriors are the best magic tank with 10% damage reduction plus 6% talented, making it the preferred magic tank, with the death knight on the scene, 1 less reason to bring a protection warrior to a raid.

Death knights also bring DPS, as all trees can do ALLOT of dps and still tank, coupled with (talented) Crypt Fever, -5% attributes, and Ebon Plaguebringer, 3% magic damage increase, and, although i don’t know yet how viable it can be, Anti-Magic zone, see, several unique skills that would make a death knight wanted in a raid.

Rogues:
- Expose armour/Imp Expose armour reduces the target armour

It’s a common knowledge that Imp Expose armour is mildly better than Sunder armour (mildly as in, not really an importance at the moment) but, if it’s required the armour debuff in a fight, and someone would need to make a choice in either speccing into Imp. EA or bringing a protection warrior what would be the choice ? i think it’s pretty obvious with the above points, why bring a useless protection warrior without any unique useful abilities to a raid when a DPS that does already alot of it can do a almost negligible better sunder armour ?

- Dismantle, Disarm the enemy, removing all weapons, shield or other equipment carried for 10 sec

Warriors improved disarm, hell, same cool down and lasting time, besides, removes all weapons (MH AND OH), shield, and other equipment (I’m guessing ranged here, but it’s a guess) while warriors disarm what ? main hand, plus, it’s a trained ability, not talented, comes along with any rogue u might have in the raid.

OK, after all of the above, let’s try to search any warrior ability that would make him wanted or that someone might think they would be wanted in a raid:

Sunder Armour, Demoralizing shout, Thunderclap, Defensive stance/imp defensive stance are already pointed out above as things that are not longer warrior unique abilities that would make them wanted in raids, so, I’ll skip them.

- Intercept ?

Well, intercept in a Boss is only required for you to reach the boss quickly if you loose agro, you most likely won’t save who stole agro, the boss as soon as he enters melee range (which is usually big for a boss) he’s dead, and even if you are quick enough to press intervene, several latency issues won’t make you reach there in time ever, clearly, not needed at all.

- Vigilance ?

Vigilance was a great talent, at this current state, the 10% threat reduction makes it useless, what’s the purpose of this talent ? 5 man tanking ? i really can’t see the purpose for boss tanking, why does a caster that pulled agro need 5% dodge ? like if that would save him, or any other cloth, only class that can take high advantage of that is rogues, rogues tanking also ? at the moment, this talent is completely useless in raiding in my point of view.

- Shockwave ?

Please, don’t make me laugh, protection paladins ? feral druids ? death knights ?, in fact i would say this ability should be the 41 point talent in the beginning of the burning crusade, not now, yes warriors need a bit of help multi-mob tanking but a small buff on TC would be enough, now a new talent ? although i like it, looks great, why a 51 talent point in a protection tree of a class which for years was THE single target tank, this either should be a less damage trainable skill or a side grade talent, not a 51 point talent… and definitely not a reason to take a warrior to a raid instead of any of they’re fellow counterparts.

- Crushing Blows

Crushing blows are gone.

Conclusion, what was done on WotLK (beta) on the tanks:

Warrior concerns in TBC were addressed, true, we get rage from parries and dodges, we got a 51 point ability (this is ridiculous sorry) to aid on multi mob tanking, a useless new 31 point talent replacing shield slam, sorry i still think it’s useless until someone proves me wrong, safeguard ?, for starters the movement impairing effects removal should have been an intervene component from the start, on the skill not talented, the damage reduction is nice, and yeah that should be a talented component, ok’ish change, Critical block ? well, either were going to see a major boost, and i mean MAJOR in prot warrior gear on block value, or the Block value coefficient earned by other stat (at the moment is strength and ridiculous….) to make it appealing I don’t see it’s usefulness, 30% chance ? another RNG (Random Number Generator) ? furthermore, an RNG that keeps the survivability at stake ?

Now what I see is that the changes in WotLK were mainly the issues that have been brought up by allot of players in each class, which is good, proves that in fact developers read each class concerns, but, instead of fixing those issues while keeping the uniqueness of each class in order to make them all wanted in a way or another in a raid, we see the almost murder of the protection warrior in raids, while the others just got a renamed copy of the warrior unique abilities that coupled with they’re raid buffing abilities makes them more wanted.

It seems warriors were promoted to somewhat decent 5 man tanks, and the others decent raid boss single target tanks, only problem is, the ‘decent’ coupled with raid utility will make protection paladins, feral druids and death knights more wanted in min max guilds than protection warriors.

I’m seriously concerned about my future in raids at the moment, and since my game goals are not standing on the door looking at the raid entrance in standby, they are in fact, the new fights, the progression fights, downing bosses for the first time, and the learning stage, etc, this changes make this goals almost impossible for me to fulfil. I play a protection warrior as it’s in my humble opinion one of the hardest classes to master, I like challenges, but it seems that my next challenge will be the fight for a raid spot.

Will the protection warriors be completely extinguished ? no I don’t think so, but they will suffer heavy losses for sure, I don’t want protection warriors to be the only class/spec stealing places of other tanks in raids, what I do want is all classes to be wanted at the same time in raids, at the moment, I think I would be thankful if I have 1 tiny little spot in raiding when WotLK hits the deck.

I hope things change, i really do.

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After a small revamp on the theme of the site, and, lot’s of time without any posts, mainly due to the huge amount of work I’ve had during this time (which is good to be honest), here’s a personal view of why there’s a big lack of tanks and healers on world of warcraft PuG’s (mainly).

Well, I’m a tank, I’ve been one for more than 2 years, after changing main back in 2006 for several reasons, and i love the role, i find it one of the most challenging roles in WoW, hard to master, and you won’t do brainless boring instances spamming 1 or 2 buttons as a DPS’er (yes am exaggerating a bit on purpose), and although in TBC, blizzard improved a lot Paladin and Druid tanking, in an attempt to increase the pre-tbc almost TBC time, we reach the same kind of problem on TBC, almost WotLK. I also have a healer (which is a priest), and although the top 10 reasons I’m about to post are directed towards the tank shortage, the healer shortage is directly related to the tank shortage, why ? because of the ungrateful task healers have to keep people alive and often not a single word of gratitude is said when something was done good, or a goal defeated, because the quality of the tanks at this stage that accept doing PuG’s are either tremendously badly geared and are almost impossible to keep alive or they’re filled with PvP ‘purples’ that are only good to spam hamstring on NPC’s and throw out some font only big crits, which in turn makes the healers task even more harder, and they obviously desire less to spend 3 or 4 hours in and instance that can be done in 1.

10.
The challenging task of tanking an instance.
Tanking isn’t for everyone, you must be prepared to keep yourself informed about other classes, how threat and combat mechanics work. If you don’t, you will be a mediocre tank, sorry but there’s no other way to be a proper tank, it’s not enough to know that when tanking you need to spam ability X (which you don’t), you need to know how to perform your role the best you can given your gear, class, group composition and above all, how many and what NPC’s you are tanking. Due to this pressure, people just “can’t be arsed” to do such a task, it’s far easier to roll a class that can’t tank, and spam 2 or 3 buttons to dps than to tank.

9.
There is no tank shortage, they just have no interest in doing normal/heroic instances.
I can only speak for myself and those I know, but this, is the general consensus, in my situation for instance, I’m at Sunwell at the moment, farming Mount Hyjal/Black Temple for quite some months already, what does a crappy 5 man instance (be it heroic or not) interest me ? nothing !, helping friends and such, sure, but with friends you are not doing a PuG, you know who your friends are, and you are comfortable to tell them what or what not to do, they’ll hear it without spitting in your face stuff like “I R GLADIATOR” and totally ignore what you say/ask. Since the shortage only happens on PuG’s the ‘friends’ situation doesn’t count towards the statistics, 5 man instances offer nothing of interest to raiders.

8.
The inability to properly gear new tanks.
That’s right, I made a paladin recently, and simply because I love tanking, my intention at 70 was to tank with him, I thought it would be very nice for 2 reasons, first, I have the knowledge, second there is the so called tank shortage, thought it would be easy to PuG and get geared up quickly etc. Unfortunately, I was so wrong. So, here I am, a freshly dinged 70 protection paladin, that can’t run 5 man normal instances simply because no one wants to do them, that’s right, it seems that every new player or alt jumps straight away into heroics, or, they AFK farm 24/7 AV and think they can do heroics properly with 5k mana, 300 spell damage, 1000AP, but really it seems it doesn’t matter in they’re eyes, because, it’s purple and it should be better than blues that normal instances drop right ? NOT!!
So, here we are, a protection paladin, the king of the 5 man tanking, out of commission because he can’t gear up to be able to tank a few heroics, again in order to gear up, so he can have a chance at running a few Karazhan’s and so on. Then, people yell there’s a tank shortage…..

7.
Tanking gear is far more demanding than healing or dps gear.
If we keep in mind reason number. 8, and this one, things get even harder for newly dinged tanks at this stage. It’s fairly easier to do some runs under geared as a DPS or a Healer really, a pot here and a pot there, 1 minute more or 1 minute less in a fight, it gets done in the end really, but, a tank without proper gear instantly dictates if the group is capable of defeating a goal or not, this coupled with how scarce is tanking gear is even worse, I really don’t understand several Blizzard decisions, try to keep up with this thought, Blizzard announces they’re introducing a Deathknight also to fight the lack of tanks in game, but they release a content patch with a new 5 man dungeon where in all loot there isn’t a single proper tanking drop. Granted, the trinket is not bad, BUT, it’s not that great either, hell I have it in my bags getting dust, there’s a nifty blue ring with expertise on it, but hell, has no defense/dodge/block/parry and the stamina it has doesn’t make it preferable versus rings without expertise, thing is, either this bollocks marketing campaign around Deathknight release to also fight the tank shortage was just an opportunity seen by blizzard to use it, or it’s just plain hypocrisy, because nothing of the latest changes or content updates are directed towards fixing or even attempting to fix this tank shortage.

6.
Cost versus Reward.
Many players, specially those without a plate tanking class, do not understand how much money can be spent in a 5 man, and it always gets higher and higher the better gear you get. Many players would see this as a minor issue, but, for the majority it isn’t, specially if we think that the majority does not respec in a daily basis for 50g to farm some dailies, because farming as protection, in either warrior or paladin, I don’t have a druid so I can comment, is lengthy and becomes boring very quickly, and even for some without good gear can be hard, now if we think that a player with a tank main, without alts at a level where money is easy to farm (doing dailies of farming raw mats to sell etc), tanking instances in PuG’s can be a tremendous money sink. This is the major reason several highly geared players don’t tank 5 mans with PuG’s, there’s always that little voice banging your hear reminding you how painful it can be to PuG and instance with new players, or even PvP’ers that have no idea whatsoever of how to do instances.

5.
The Burning Crusade new players.
I have to hand it over to blizzard about the effort put into making this game guide, and i honestly hope that the majority of the new user base that started playing post The Burning Crusade release reads it. It’s very frustrating when in some madness thought of helping some guys almost crying in the LFG for a tank somewhere, and you end up with a bunch of cocky noobs that just because they are wearing a piece of purple gear they think they know the game in and out and could do they’re role with a hand in they’re back, quickly yelling at you when you kindly tell them something they shouldn’t do or something they should. I tend to be polite, except when I blatantly see an ebayer, in that case I just either ditch the guy asap or i go away, and explain why something should be done or shouldn’t, and when i read something refuting what i said without any argument backing it up at all, just stating things resemblant to ‘i know better than you’ (even if he’s wearing a BoE Epic bought in the AH to full Badge/S1(2) gear versus me fully MH/BT/SWP geared) I kinda loose my patience, hell, I think I am allowed to loose my patience, I think any tank doing a favour to a group asking for a tank for 2 hours is allowed to loose his patience in this situations, but the thing is, several rather not get into this situations at all from the start, so, again, they just refuse to tank for PuG’s, and I generally do, giving the current situation on the server I am, with the amount of PvP migrated morons, coupled with new players that started playing due to the recent Arena tournaments lying around, I just step foot into a 5 man instance with 4 people I do know (or my friends know and vouch for them) or I just won’t. And like me, 90% of the tanks in the server.

4.
PvP
Once upon a time, there was a World of Warcraft where the focus of the content and game objectives were those that were planned since the beginning of the game, but in a dark day, probably some frustrated commercial stuck in a dark office without any windows, tired of getting head shots on <insert the lamest FPS game you think of here>, thought about giving more importance on PvP in World of Warcraft than the original concept that was thought of right from the start, PvE. Now, speaking a bit more seriously, and tying up why PvP influences the tank shortage, I like PvP, but I like it as a thing to relax, have a break from your routine in wow, as a social aspect (yes it’s a very social aspect of the game), not as a competitive aspect, the competitive of it will just draw the bad things of each person into the game, which is seen already by many, the constant bashing and lack of respect from players in bg’s, the usage of each player ratings and honour kills as a mean to flame them in the forums, even if it’s not related to PvP at all, this is completely blizzards fault, all the bad things and behaviours of players in pvp is completely blizzard fault, but that’s not the worst of it, what’s more ridiculous, is the gear differences used for PvP and PvE and how they can be acquired. First, if there has to be a gear difference for PvP and PvE (which I do not agree AT ALL, resilience is the most stupid crap ever invented), is the need for the hardcore PvP’er to have to PvE to get some of the best PvP gear, like badges, or even raid!!, it’s absolutely ridiculous, and it gets worse, there is in fact better gear for PvE as PvP rewards, and it’s easier to get than it’s PvE counterpart, this is absurd. Now why does this influences tank shortage, simple, have you ever tried to PvP as a protection paladin ? or protection warrior ?, well I did, and I quit, thing is, for instance, if you keep reason number 8 in mind, it’s obvious that the new player will try to gear up the in the easiest way he can at the time being, and actually this works also for the DPS part of it, so, why should I spend 4 or 5 hours doing instances, or even if I’m unlucky, wiping for 4 or 5 hours in the same instance, where I get 0 rewards for wiping 4 or 5 hours or mediocre ones compared to the ones I can get in a couple of say 4 or 5 hours a day in PvP ?
Now add reason number 6 and 5 to the mix, and you’re going to end up with a tank in full S1 or S2 thinking he is a hell of a tank, trying to run heroics and failing hard, as the experience he got while levelling was 0, because at this stage it’s rare as hell to do an instance below level 70, thus he won’t tank, or he just doesn’t want to for whatever reason, reaches 70 and obviously rather spend all day in a BG working for gear that he can see and aim for, and above all, knows it will be certain to get, and not a random drop from a boss in an instance where you spent 4 or 5 hours trying to finish and the only thing you earned, was the need to press a repair hammer and pay a costly amount of gold.

3.
Number of tanks required for raids.

This is killing allot of tanks, again, speaking for myself, in a guild currently in Sunwell, it’s really hard for tanks to keep playing the role when you spend several nights a week staring at a door (because really, i can’t be bothered to do dailies or any other quest with the tank) while the other 25 guys are downing new bosses or killing previously downed ones. Of course people rotate, if you had 1 or 2 protection warriors in the guild it shouldn’t be so hard, but, what happens if you have 3 ? it’s getting ridiculous, again, instead of fighting the tank shortage, blizzard are in fact cutting off the amount of tanks required to raid, thus, less tanks you will get to a PuG. It’s even worse with paladins, although feral druids have it a bit easier, with the odd boss here or there that they can’t tank, but at least they can tank most of the stuff, paladins are less desired due to the lack of oh shit buttons also, and although I am completely against the fight that require a specific tank to be able to be killed, specially progressing, I also don’t like the fact that a guild is forced to have X number of tanks to clear a Tier X dungeon, and suddenly in the next progressing dungeon, of Tier X+1, less tanks are required. Think about it, no serious raiding guild has the exact number of needed class/roles to raid, there’s always 1 or 2 more than needed in raids to cope with people missing, so in the Tier X+1 dungeon instead of having 4 tanks raiding and 1 or 2 in standby, you get 2 tanks raiding and 3 or 4 in standby, and in the top of this, makes fights where you either need a protection warrior + feral druid or a protection warrior + protection paladin, it’s ridiculous this kind of designs from blizzard, again, I fail to see how blizzard is ‘working on this tank shortage’ when they make this kind of design decisions, several guilds I know (and high ranked in progress guilds) lost they’re tanks due to Sunwell plateau tank requirements, there’s no interest in being on-line for raids any more when you know you won’t raid most likely.
2.
The negative scalability of tanking gear.
This is the holy grail of all blizzard messed up decisions, for those that don’t know, can you imagine you to do your role worse the better the gear you get ? welcome to the tank world!
That’s right, the better the gear a tank gets, the harder it is for him to tank in lesser content, the warriors require rage to use they’re skills, rage is built with damage done by the warrior and damage taken, since damage done of a protection warrior is ridiculously low (almost irrelevant) the only proper way of getting rage is to get hit, now, by getting better gear, means that either you won’t get hit at all, and when you do, you get hit for less, thus, the amount of rage earned is very very low, result ? unable to keep the NPC being killed on the tank (thus doing his role). The same happens with paladins, but for different reasons, paladins use mana, which they get by being healed, so, less hits, less heal required, less mana earned, less skills used to generate threat. Druids have it a bit easier as they actually do a fair amount of damage, thus they are better in this situation but, they do suffer from the same issue, just not that much as they’re fellow tanks. Granted, this is being looked up in Wotlk, mainly due to threat scaling with AP , and a talent to help on rage generation while avoiding, which i think it should be a passive ability to the defensive stance, not a talent, but that would require another post (which I might do) to talk about.

1.
Lack of content for new players and new alts.
I think this is the most important reason why there is a tank shortage, we have to keep in our minds that the wave of new players in an MMORPG doesn’t happen only at it’s launch and/or expansion release, granted the majority happen in the mentioned situations, but, new players keep showing up, and since there is a very well defined progression path in wow, the new players get caught off on the timing, and when they reach the real game (which is at the moment, when they hit level 70), they’re way back in the progression compared to everyone else and they will fall upon any of the other reasons and feed up this vicious cycle of screwed up stuff for new players and thus influencing on how much people will want to tank or heal in PuG’s. There’s nothing much i can say here, it’s very obvious really, there should be more content for new players or event alts when there are content updates, like Magister’s terrace, the only problem with Magister’s terrace, was the fact that it only catered the group of players far from the start of the progression curve, instead of newly fresh players. There would be players willing to run new content at least to see it, thus more people available to PuG, if the drops were well thought, even catch the interest of each particular class/role to keep doing it etc. But there isn’t, only raids, or, in Magister’s terrace example, allot harder for new players instance.

Personally, I can only complaint about the Sunwell Plateau tank related changes, apart from that, I really have no complaints at all, as I started my progress on the expansion release so I never had a problem with my progression, but I completely understand and sympathize with the ones starting up or that started a few months ago, it’s very hard to progress, if not impossible on certain servers, and I think blizzard could do more about it, but, instead, they’re making it worse, and honestly, having 1 more tanking class (Deathknight) will not change this, it’s all going to rinse and repeat, on WotLK start there will be a flood of tanks, where everyone will complaint about how many bad tanks they find (of course, they have no experience whatsoever at it) and along the progress and content updates, the number of tanks willing to endure some of the current PuG pains will decrease, to the point where we will be at the same stage as we are now.

Best regards,

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On my casual daily forum reading, i found a post in EU forum, Raid & Dungeons, with the title ‘Is it me or are PuGs getting worse?‘ and read several opinions around but i think most of the posters forgot about a very important issue that actually influences how much the PuG’s indeed are getting worse; the amount of new players post-TBC.

There are several reasons there are bad players, one can find children, yes, children’s in 10~12 years old (or even younger) that aren’t that wise kid that understands game mechanics (i found some of this young children playing better than 50 years old too, rare though), but instead play 15 minutes a day, in his brother account, and during those 15 minutes spend 5 trying to get a group set-up to go to a dungeon, then 5 minutes to actually start, and watch them leave 5 minutes later because either his parents or his brother wants him to leave the game, and the person forcing him to do so is a <insert an incredible ammount of foul words here> and sorry sorry etc, this happened to me more than once, and guess what, it’s predictable, it happens usually during the day, lunch time, early morning or middle afternoon, we can only choose better the times we PuG really, i found that late night PuG’s tend to have better players, or at least more mature and (although not all) more receptive to hints and tips from others than during the day.

Another reason, and most relevant of all, is the amount of new players after TBC was released, and i mean months after it was released, like last christmas. It’s very easy at the moment for this new players to reach 70, and if you guys notice (specially those that played or play other mmorpg’s besides World of Warcraft) the main goal in other mmorpg’s is to reach level cap, whatever it costs since very few have instancing content while levelling and barely have any quests, the grinding mmorpg, and this new guys playing World of Warcraft resemble this stereotype, they just rush to 70 because they actually aren’t expecting any other content before 70, and of course, it’s worse when they choose servers where they barely find anyone else levelling and just can’t get people to do so. The end result is obvious, you get into outlands, where most players are, enter you first instance like Hellfire Peninsula : Ramparts, and the player fails at all levels while running it, be it the complete unawareness of threat, moving, usage of utility skills to crowd control, fast thinking and reaction, all this things should have been learned through the dungeons in a slow growing learning curve according to level to ease the progression of the character and to prevent frustration.

I’ve tried several mmorpg’s, and personally, there is no mmorpg at the moment that provides what World of Warcraft provides in terms of playing flexibility, it’s all about moving, several skills can be used while moving contrary to several other mmorpgs where you need to stand still for the duration of the fight if you want to heal or output dps through long casting spells and amazingly beautiful and useless animations while doing so. No other mmorpg I found at the moment has the complex threat system World of Warcraft has, some don’t have any at all, it’s just the guy who tags him first is the guy that ‘tanks’ it, or there isn’t even the concept of tanking as any class can actually get hit by it and be healed through either from the use of non stop potting on games without main healing classes or with any kind of healer.

If a player of this games changes to wow, he will think the game acts exactly the same way, he won’t have any sense of threat in a dungeon, he’ll just unload all he has on the pull to see big flashy numbers and expect to be healed or will whine because pots have cool down. He will whine on forums asking for other classes skills that exist in that way since day 1 of the game to be nerfed because he doesn’t know how to circumvent them, he will whine because the dungeons are too hard since he has 14/14 epics (read it, PvP Season 1 epics) and the gear alone should make the difference but then the 4 players with him equally geared can’t fly through it.

I also detected an increased amount of account buyers, either levelling buyers or auction char buyers, it’s normal honestly, due to the amount of success WoW is getting, this things will increase, only thing we can do about it really, is to keep next to us a paper and pen writing down this guys name and promptly run away from them, or even through the usage of add-ons to do so. This kinda reminds me when i was levelling my Mage alt, he was around level 60 or 61, and i went into ramparts to get that quest done, all the other 3 players were alts, and knew what they were doing, OK, they’re not 100% proficient with that class yet since they’re still learning (pretty much like me) but we understood the game and all. And for our misery, we had a tank which was level 60, and main char, i kinda noticed that through the dungeon he never switched stance, but never gave much importance to that until we reach the last boss. Situation: several wipes during the dungeon, but we (the other 4 players) managed to prevent allot more, mostly due to agro loss, crowd control breaking, and lack of space and distance awareness (pulling adds during fight etc), we reach end boss, and well, let’s do this, the warrior managed to be the last one to die. We repeated, but this time, me and some others, very politely, tried to teach him to generate threat and to taunt etc, when we noticed he took a long time writing something back, standing still on the char, we all started asking if he was there and all, suddenly, after 1 sentence, i think everyone reacted the same as me, I stood looking at the screen, reading that sentence 1000 times trying to understand if I was awake or actually dreaming; “I can’t find ‘Taunt’ in the spell book, I’ve been using this ‘Mocking Blow’ skill to make them hit me”. Summary: Although he never admitted (obviously) this char was power levelled, and never quested, only grinded mobs botting, because he had only 1 stance (Battle stance) and trained only those skills, he had no defensive stance nor berserker stance, no sunder armour, he was just spamming HS/Mocking blow (when available) and a few other insignificant skills. Obviously, he left on his own will, we invited a guildie of mine that came on-line a few minutes before this happened, and killed the boss without any hassle.

Personally, I know how hard it can be to prevent this situations on blizzard side, yes they earn allot of money, but man power is not really the issue here, the big issue is evidence, it’s not enough to check a character spell book and not to see there skill X at level 60 to label him a power level buyer, they have a very hard work, even when all evidence point out to be something that breaks the EULA, they need proof. Granted they’re tools are getting better every day, but, this is inevitable, there will always be people trying to exploit the way game works, it’s in they’re blood since they’ve done it so many times in other mmorpg’s they played before.

So, who to blame ?

Personally, I blame the other mmorpg’s, not because they let people do things they’re not supposed to do, but because they were designed in a way that induces the people to do things they’re not supposed to. Using bot’s for example for levelling purposes, there are an immense amount of mmorpg’s, that they rely only on grinding to level (for those that don’t know, grinding is something called to the task of killing game NPC’s over and over in order to get experience to level), leaving no room for lore, history, questing, all this makes them want to use bot’s, it’s TERRIBLY boring to grind 60 levels. The amount of experience to level is absurd in those games as they want to force the ppl to play as much as they can. The end content is scarce, games with armour and weapons without diversity; class X has 1 armour set at level 10, then another at level 20, and so on till level 60, and can only ‘upgrade’ this armour with the risk of destroying it to improve it, games where you LOOSE experience when you die, all this things are the main reason we get so much more bad players in world of Warcraft every day.

Indeed PuG’s are getting worse, if you want better ones, I advise to work mostly with the time when you want to do dungeons, look at guild names, and above all, don’t be an ass also, although many of this guys are bad players from the start, many want to learn and do learn fast, teach them politely, who knows, you actually might end up with a very good player in the end, and most importantly, a very good friend.

Best regards,

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I know on the first post I said I wasn’t going to add to the blog anything worthy of mentioning, well, I did after all, I just installed a gallery plug-in to show some of my random screen shots and or pictures.

I finished installing it just now, and added a bunch of screen shots I had around, allot of random stuff from quite a while ago and current also. I’m going to start to take more screen shots from now on, going to try to get interesting stuff as well as pictures (dunno if I’ll ever put any of me to be honest, depends on the mood).

Since my wife also likes to take her share of screen shots in World of Warcraft, I’ll probably set-up an album for her too, all depends if she’s up for it.

The link for the gallery is in the menu on the header in the site, can’t miss it,

Happy browsing.

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There has to be a first post right, then, I got this huge lack of imagination over what I should write and started checking around some blogs, trying to read they’re first post as curiosity.

It’s interesting to see the similar stuff in first posts and how they are directly related to the blogger work and or interests, for example, most of the IT workers (developers, programmers, sys admins, etc) usually keep it simple, they just stick to the ‘Hey this is the first post’ and move on to say something about how or what kind of software they used in the blog, so, I’m not going to be different and follow this rule.

This is WordPress, plain and simple. I could (in fact I was) write a simple, to my liking blog in Symfony (which is what I use mainly for web developing) but in the end, it gave me more work than I intended. I just want to get a blog running, where I can rant away or just stick some random words as I feel like without much hassle. In the middle of my regular work and the usual gaming, the task of making the blog to my liking ended up in an impossible task, therefore i just installed WordPress, converted the theme I had in mind for my blog to WordPress, installed some useful plug ins and here we are.

After the IT presentation that I did, I should of announce a to-do list for this blog as it seems usual in the IT related bloggers. Well, to be honest, there isn’t much I’m adding or thinking of adding with the exception of some kind of spam prevention on the comments, I saw a nice plug-in without the need of captchas called WP Captcha Free (name says it all), probably I’m going to install it after this post, apart from that, nothing more IT related going to be done at the moment here, apart from displaying some projects I might be involved with, but no really super duper impressive feature is planned.

For all the blogs I found that are not related to IT in any way, be it humour blogs or personal etc, the first post comes down basically to a small presentation of the blogger, could be the exact same thing anyone write in the about page of they’re blog, so, since I don’t have an about page in my blog, I’ll leave you guys with the always present sidebar ‘about’ snippet. It doesn’t tell much about me, but then, it tells what I want you guys to know, if I wanted to make my life an open book for everyone, I would probably be an Hollywood or a rock star :)

Time to wrap it up, there’s nothing else to add, at least that I can remember at the moment, it’s almost 8am, haven’t slept yet (yes, working all night) and I really need a nap.

ta ta

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