I feel like I should mention Abyssal Maw again. As with many cancelled features, it somehow took on a life of its own in the minds of players. Believe me, though — you just don’t cancel things that you think are going to be awesome. It was three bosses inside Nespirah, with no unique art. The reason it was originally appealing to us was because we had so many Vashj’ir assets that we could use. But by the time it was time to do the work, we felt like we (and many players) had Vashj’ir fatigue. Now don’t get me wrong — I loved Vashj’ir. I was an oceanographer, remember? Vashj’ir delivered on the promise of an underwater zone, but we feel like most players were ready to be done with it by the time they had quested through that. (Individuals will feel differently — it’s that diverse player base thing again.) Firelands received a lot of new art, from bosses to environments, and we just didn’t feel like Abyssal Maw was going to compete. Who knows, though! We haven’t totally given up on the idea of cool underwater experiences, so maybe there’s potential we’d visit it again someday. (For my money, the zone I am personally saddest about cancelling is not Abyssal Maw; it was the Azjol-Nerub quest zone in Wrath of the Lich King.)

It’s nice to see some recognition for Azjol-Nerub, but this explanation rings false to me. I can’t fault his reasoning (though as an aside, I felt that the biggest reason for Vashj’ir fatigue was the lack of travel locking you in once you started it, not anything about the aesthetics or the mechanics of being underwater). But I do have to wonder about one sentence in particular.

It was three bosses inside Nespirah, with no unique art. 

Really? The smallest raid ever patched in (excepting “lair” raids like Onyxia and Halion) is Trial of the Crusader, at five bosses. None of them had particularly unique models (being, at best, recolors), and at least within the raid group I ran with at the time, ToC was viewed as the least interesting raid ever. It seemed like nothing more than a test of a trash-free, “boss attack” mode of raiding. We cleared it so fast that we went back to farm Val’anyrs in Ulduar because we had so much time left at the end of our raid nights.

At the opposite end of the trash spectrum, back in The Burning Crusade, Blizzard gave us the Battle for Mount Hyjal (also a five-boss dungeon). With eight waves of trash in between bosses, it was a grueling experience. . . especially because if you wiped at any point, you had to restart the trash from immediately after the previous boss. Even if the final boss had been a cakewalk rather than the most frustrating encounter I’ve ever raided, I can’t imagine that Hyjal would be fondly remembered for that trash alone.

I bring up all this history because it shows that Blizzard is aware of a prominent problem with a small raid. No matter what amount of trash you choose to use, a raid of that size is missing something critical. Too little trash, and the whole thing feels like an afterthought, and you wonder why you commit so much time to raiding. Too much trash, and it’s the bosses that begin to feel like an afterthought and you wonder why your spec is built for bosses and what in the world your character is accomplishing in that dungeon in the first place.

Bigger raids are fine, because they have enough Big Bad Guys that you can progress through them and even weeks later, still not be able to clear the place in one night. That time investment makes it feel “difficult,” even if its just an illusion based on size, and it serves as proof that Blizzard took their time building the place, and gives players the gratification of feeling like a valued customer.

Lair-type raids work out because players tend to view them more like LFD or LFR. It’s a quick dungeon, you can probably get your alt into a PuG for some gear, and your main raid might use them to kill time if you’re waiting for that last healer to log in, or if you finish your “proper” raiding early in the night. Certainly not real raids, these places, they’re basically for casuals to gear up, right? And so they get accepted as quick ‘n’ dirty loot piñatas, a nice way to spend twenty minutes.

(Sartharion is the exception to that. He was popular because hard modes were novel, while the normal mode was still accessible to pick-ups. His cousin Halion wasn’t, because heroics were old news, and coming after Icecrown Citadel, he too felt like an afterthought.)

With all this experience behind them, I cannot believe that Blizzard’s raid designers would ever let a three-boss, content-patch raid off of the drawing board. Maybe, if there were another raid alongside it to give us a fuller tier, such as with the Throne of the Four Winds. But all we ever got in 4.1 were the Zul’Agains, and that’s not enough.

Stick a few more naga in and call it a raid.

I’m not sure Ghostcrawler lied, exactly. But I do think he was twisting the truth.

Three bosses with no unique art? Sure. That’s what they had completed by the time they decided to remove it from Patch 4.1. In fact, those bosses were probably finished before Cataclysm shipped, because in questing through Vashj’ir, we’d already freed Nespirah from the naga inside her. Appealing because they had lots of underwater art assets? Believable. Vashj’ir fatigue? It doesn’t seem to have been the most popular zone, but I doubt that’s what stopped them.

My money is on a technical problem. Nespirah and the antagonist of Throne of the Tides, Ozumat, are both gigantic creatures. Imagine that after a few fights to free Nespirah, we were meant to do battle (perhaps alongside Nespirah) with that giant octopus, or perhaps an Old God, or a naga legion, or Azshara (or hell, why not all of them?). Or perhaps Neptulon, because Rades makes an excellent point about him acting funny. At the scale of these behemoths, I would not be surprised if they encountered issues with view distance (especially under water), or collision (ever try to ride through a doorway on a kodo?), or control (trying to click that chest at the end of Throne of the Tides).

If that’s the case, perhaps they’ve got that problem fixed now. After all, the last few fights in Dragon Soul have some pretty sizable mechanics at work.

So, sure, I’ll buy it, GC. But I’m not eating it without a massive dose of salt water.

And I expect Abyssal Maw to return in the future.

You don’t cancel things you expect to be awesome.

This will be a four-part series, each post increasingly speculative. Today, we’ll be looking at discarded concepts, places where we know Blizzard took another path. I’ll focus on situations where some relic of the idea remains in the post-Cataclysm world. We’ll next explore seemingly incomplete content, where either blatantly unfinished development took place, or where there is at least the hint that, however unlikely, something more might follow. In the penultimate post, I’ll collect some easter eggs that have been sitting in the game since its release in order to demonstrate the incredible scope that this game was always intended to reach. Finally, I’ll home in on the point where that initial master plan got thrown under a bus, and explain both why it happened, and what it means for future expansions.

So. With our itinerary established, let’s begin.

The Stratholme Raid

Stratholme is one of the oldest dungeons in the game, having been around since release. It was also one of the oldest raids, before Patch 1.10 reduced the player cap from 10 to 5 and introduced the famous 45-minute Baron run (precursor to ZA’s Bear runs). Take a close look inside, even in the new version, and we can see one of the first major shifts in raid design.

The first raid was Molten Core, which resides inside Blackrock Depths. Literally, inside; the raid portal is at the back of the instance. In terms of flavor, that choice made sense. BRD today feels like skulking around, butchering the citizens for plunder. Picture instead: raiding through the capital of the Iron Dwarves, swatting their warriors aside like so many gnats, to drive an assault force to the innermost depths of the volcano, to challenge their patron and master, the Firelord Ragnaros. Defying an Elemental Lord, who had enslaved an entire race to grant him entry to Azeroth. Toppling their emperor, and rescuing Princess Bronzebeard?

Seriously though, who ever runs a group that far into the dungeon these days?

Problem was, taking a raid through that would have sucked. Consider the flip side: a raid group would have been forced to clear through an entire instance worth of trash just to reach the raid trash. It would have sucked so bad that Blizzard never let it reach live servers – instead they gave us attunement quests, by which we could access teleports from Blackrock Mountain directly to the raids. But even then, those sucked too! The MC attunement quest was trivially easy and could be soloed with some wits and resourcefulness, and proved to be nothing more than a tedious necessity.

With Blackwing Lair in Patch 1.6, they successfully removed any way to bypass the challenge of attunement. Taken in order, the Blackrock Spire dungeon consists of fighting through the full army of the Black Dragonflight. From the expendable trolls, orcs, and ogres in the lower half, to the dragonkin and elite orcs in the upper, BRS was an exercise in destroying Nefarion’s entire support structure, before you entered his Lair, wherein dwelt the masterminds and the first results of the Black Dragonflight’s experiments into creating artificially enhanced dragons. The attunement there required reaching the very end of that massive grind, and the only shortcut was to bring along one of the tenacious souls who had completed the key from the lower reaches and thus skip that segment.

I suspect that by the time Ahn’Qiraj was in the works, the developers were well aware of how unpopular this approach had proven to be. Nice on paper, but tedious in practice, they set aside the idea of a dungeon-within-a-dungeon. Theyhadn’t yet adopted the idea of letting just anyone into a raid, but they acknowledged the desire for a less irritating way to gain access. Instead of nested dungeons, Ahn’Qiraj was split into two independent raids, and the whole thing sequestered behind a wall that required a single, immense, server-wide dungeon-within-a-quest attunement through the Ahn’Qiraj War Effort.

That was still a pain, but it only had to be done once in order to apply to every character, past and future. And, while the grind it required was universally loathed, the final result was incredible. The Qiraji launched attacks across the continent, offering level appropriate loot in several zones. The sheer scale of the event and the number of people who logged in for it crashed numerous servers. That event, at least, was hugely popular and still fondly remembered (at least, by those who didn’t lose their loot to massive lag).

So when it came time to create the next raid, Blizzard opted to replicate the experience with another all-inclusive event. Naxxramas was heralded by worldwide Scourge attacks, and even low-level characters could obtain gear through tokens rewarded for beating back the hordes of continually-reanimated undead. Likely for technical reasons (including, but not limited to, keeping the realms online), this event was more sedate and remained in-game for quite a while, rather than being over in a single day.

For the raid itself, the attunement was a reputation grind with the Argent Dawn. Though each character was again individually responsible for gaining access, the quest was arguably the easiest attunement since Molten Core’s. Argent Dawn reputation was rewarded from quests in both halves of the Plaguelands, and from Scholomance, and from Stratholme, and through the new world event. And there was no need to reach any particular level, as at any point from Honored onward, you could become attuned for a series of increasingly discounted prices (to be fair, back in Classic, reputations grinds were single-rep-per-trash-kill hard, and sixty gold was far from a trivial sum).

What has this to do with Stratholme itself? In all likelihood, rather than hovering over the Plaguelands as it did prior to Wrath of the Lich King, Naxxramas was planned to be yet another dungeon-within-a-dungeon, housed in Stratholme. Blizzard instead chose the same approach they’d used with Ahn’Qiraj, taking what were planned as nested dungeons and turning them into neighbors. The evidence for the original plan remains within the Slaughterhouse, the final area inside Stratholme. There, dozens of Abominations block access to the building where Baron Rivendare presides over the fallen city, and upon their defeat, a horde of skeletons rushes in from a tunnel at the back of the square.

There’s one other thing in that tunnel.

This one’s on pretty solid ground, considering that the name on Naxxramas’ map file is “StratholmeRaid” . Or if you prefer ingame evidence, just fly over to the Plaguelands and peer through the smoke over the burning city.

A tad untextured, but it definitely looks Naxxramish.

The Karazhan Flightpath

Karazhan is kinda big. As big as twenty Shadowfang Keeps, supposedly, and the fourth-largest raid ever if you’re counting bosses (not bad, for a raid that was exclusively 10-man).

It was big enough that players needed some sort of fast travel to get through it. Part of the solution was the side entrance, which lets you skip to the trash before The Curator (the fifth boss) once you’ve cleared the previous encounter, the Opera Event. That’s great and all, but the biggest run in the instance is just beyond The Curator.

Three floors of trash, with detours for bosses.

Even once Curator and Shade of Aran (the only mandatory fights between the side entrance and the final boss) are down, the distance between that door and Prince Malchezaar is immense. And as a concession to the raids who would spend entire nights wiping against him, Blizzard looks set to have given us a flight path, straight to the top of the tower.

It never came to be...

... but the ledge is still accessible inside, just past the Chess Event.

I believe their plans were stymied by technical limitations, because it appears that they made an honest effort to get it working. Up until nearly a month after TBC released, there was no means of entering Karazhan above the side entrace. At that point, it appears they gave up and granted Berthold, the doorman at the bottom of the tower, the ability to teleport players to the Shade of Aran’s room once that boss was defeated.

If that theory is correct, there are a handful of plausible problems that might have forced that compromise. If the lower end of the flightpath was intended to be outside the instance, they may not have had the technology to allow an NPC’s AI to read your raid progress, so they couldn’t restrict the flight to only those who were at the last boss. That seems especially likely, considering that only recently has raid progress become associated specifically with your character, rather than being saved to the particular instance of the dungeon to which your character is linked.

If, instead, the lower flight master was to be inside the instance, the problem might have been clipping with terrain. Due to internal size of the tower, the instanced version must fill far more space than the tower’s apparent uninstanced size. That fact, combined with the size of Netherpsace, may have simply left them without room to place the flight path without editing the instance map (and they don’t like changing content after the fact).

Note on that link: The route shown became impossible long ago, due to several patches of anti-exploitation measures. And for what it’s worth, exploiting raid instances (especially current ones) is bad, mmkay?

The “Outlands”

I’m honestly not sure this one is accessible any more, but it’s definitely still in the game. A long, long time ago, players could Blink past instance portals, and some clever mage eventually found a bit of developer experimentation hidden behind one of them.

I’ll let the following video demonstrate the peculiar scene (and unusual route) hidden within The Deadmines.

Why it’s here is simple, given knowledge of some of WoW’s earliest history. Way back during Classic Beta, there was a stretch of land in the southwestern corner of the Eastern Kingdoms map, west of Stranglethorn Vale and beyond the ocean. That terrain was removed very early on, but later resurfaced, changed but recognizable, as Hellfire Peninsula.

As for The Deadmines, understand that when Blizzard creates new instances, they frequently start by copy/pasting the local terrain into an independent map file to use as a starting point (so that if you can ever see outside the dungeon, everything looks correct). With a bit of effort, you can frequently escape the dungeon proper to explore these instanced copies of the nearly world, as it existed when the dungeon was first created. In the case of The Deadmines, that process appears to have copied over a bit of the Hellfire Peninsula Experimentation Region… which survived, safe inside the dungeon, when the original copy was removed from the overworld map.

The Old Kingdom

This one is a well-worn complaint for many, and we’ve been left with little more than suggestions and a sort of oblique apology. Azjol-Nerub is the name not only of the 5-man dungeon in the Dragonblight, but of the whole underground kingdom of the Nerubians. Following its appearance in The Frozen Throne, and the lore behind the ancient Nerubian/Qiraji empires, many players hoped to see an exploration of that culture in Wrath of the Lich King.

We ended up getting a couple of dungeons and a merely-a-setback cameo in Trial of the Crusader. Suffice to say that the experience was somewhat underwhelming.

Still, we know they wanted to do more with it (check the second to last question). And the original version of the instance map showed a boss icon in what has always been a dead-end corner of the instance, suggesting that they might have actually planned more. But now, considering their general reluctance to tinker with expansion territories (instanced versions, such as Dragon Soul and Zul’Aman, excluded), our best hope is probably for them to invent some third splinter race of ancient bug people, who have long remained hidden below Pandaria, or who took to the stars to become the zerg escape the Old Gods or some such crap.

Until then, we can only stare longingly at the scenery in the dungeons, pine for the raid that never happened… and maybe #OccupyIrvine.

I think the first leg of our trip ends here. There are a number of other subjects I’d dearly love to touch on, but we’ll get to many of those in the days to come. Until then, read your quests… lest some patch come along and destroy those stories forever.

Reblogged from Root and Branch:

• The weapon used in stick fighting
• Walking stick, a device to facilitate balancing while walking
• Sceptre or scepter, a symbolic ornamental rod borne in the hand by a ruling monarch
• Magic wand, a thin, straight, hand-held ceremonial stick

So what do we get in World of Warcraft? Magic wands? Check. Weapons? Not sure who’d use them for that, but check. Ornamental rods? Check.

Walking sticks? Not so much. (smartasses: I know. Be quiet)

Okay, so apparently we all have perfect balance in WoW. And when we’re not carrying our staves strapped to our back, or hitting things with them, we just hold them. Low. In one hand. On one side of our body. I’m no expert on ergonomics, but that just can’t be comfortable, especially considering the weight of all of the ridiculously oversized staff heads out there.

Anyhow, this struck me as an opening for a new idle animation. And submitting a new idea to Blizzard stuck me as an opening for a little roleplay. Without further ado, a proposal for greater utility in staff use, penned by the hand of the druid Corvster.

The perennial staves question is “when will we get to cast using them?”, or others along those lines. It is a nice idea, but I am a simple druid, and I like simple things. I am as likely to club someone with a staff as I am to cast anything at all, and far more likely to simply borrow the form of a cat and make use of my claws than either of those.

Still, I have collected quite a few staves, and their pointier spear relatives, in my day. I have grown accustomed to their comforting, familiar weight across my back, though the mages who make them seem to prefer decorative heads that poke into my shoulders. There is something to be said for artistry, but please, spare a moment’s thought for your customers!

I was thinking that there might be another role for staves. We know they can be enchanted, yes, and you can always hit someone with them. But as you can see, I am a tauren. We are much bigger people than you smaller races, and I fear that all too often, you underestimate how much effort is requires to sit down to rest! Our hooves may save us from the sore feet you complain of, but our legs still feel strain.

And so it occured to me that we of all races might use our staves to help support our weight! Rather than merely standing idle, we could plant our staves butt-first into the ground beside us, and lean slightly upon them, that our arms might share some of the burden. Perhaps we could also use them as an extra leg to help retain our balance while walking upon uneven terrain (a task with which we tauren have great difficulty, due to our hooves), though I fear that they would only hinder us if we kept them unstrapped while running.

I suppose those mages could also simply hold them out to show off their absurdly enchanted staff-heads. I rarely intend to be rude, but truly, blades? That float, unattached from the staff itself, while emanating an eldritch glow? It is good to see that your years of hard study were so worth while. Such mighty workings shall be recalled by the elders for ages hence.

*ahem* Practicalities first, though. Let us find ways to better use the resources we have at hand. Using our staves to balance and bear our weight need only be the start.

All of it, of course, is due to Looking For Raid (LFR).

This is going to be a very long post. Fair warning.

Dragon Soul is a much different raid, certainly. To borrow a summary from Aldous, Dragon Soul is about group actions. The fights are constructed so that a raid leader can see everything at once, and make a single call for everyone. You see that with the oozes on Yor’sahj, or in deciding when to let the Void of the Unmaking hit Zon’ozz. Even on Madness of Deathwing, most of the fight can be controlled by a single person calling platform changes and target swaps.

That’s the key to understanding the Dragon-Soul-is-easier mindset. In Dragon Soul, a single player could multi-box the whole raid and clear most of the mechanics. To be fair, clearing the mechanics is not the same as clearing the fight; you won’t kill Ultraxion just by dodging Hour of Twilight. But when viewing each fight as a whole, there are few distinct jobs to do.

In that, the new raid is a degree simpler than in Firelands, where you were asked to split your raid’s focus between multiple objectives. Beth’tilac offered the most blatant example of this, where you physically divided the raid between the boss herself and the adds below. Shannox required the tanks to manage kiting while the DPS shifted between targets. Alysrazor again split your raid, sending your finest DPS airborne while the rest handled interrupts and enrage mechanics with the adds on the ground.

The consequence of splitting the raid is that there are necessarily more distinct jobs. You and your buddy might both be healing, but only one of you is raid healing up on Beth’s web. The guy on the ground really only heals his tank until the next Devastation comes. Or maybe you’re DPS on Alysra. Are you flying into fires and possibly learning a new playstyle for extremely high haste and crit, or are you in a more traditional role, dodging fires while interrupting?

So, yes, Dragon Soul is simpler when we look at the number of roles. But what about complexity within a role?

Say that you’re DPS on Rhyolith. Your job is to burn whichever leg the leader has called, possibly break off to AoE adds, and avoid the lines of fire on the ground. Or perhaps you’re fighting Ragnaros. Stay spread out (and not in front of a Molten Trap), dodge fire waves, kill your assigned target during transitions, move with the raid, avoid Engulfing Flames, and don’t knock your meteor into someone else.

Now over to Dragon Soul. On Blackhorn, burn your class/spec-defined target, break off to kill Sappers, avoid the lines of targets and Shockwaves and Twilight Flames on the ground, stand in purple fire if your health allows, and stack with the raid when the big purple fire comes. Or perhaps you’re fighting Madness of Deathwing. Stay spread out (not in a line with the Mutated Corruption and anyone else) then stack after it dies, kill Elementium Bolts before they land, AoE the Regenerative Bloods, move with the raid, single-target Blistering Tentacles after you finish Alexstrasza’s platform, use survival cooldowns and nuke the Bolts after you finish Nozdormu’s platform, use Dream to protect yourself from Shrapnel, and don’t push Deathwing’s last chunk of health until the raid leader/healers say.

Egads, gents. This blasted Dragon Soul business is looking a mite trickier now.

What we see as reduced difficulty in Dragon Soul comes, in part, from understanding the general goals of the raid, because at that macro level, there are fewer goals. They haven’t been trimmed back to the point of making raid leaders obsolete; they are still necessary to make broad choices and split-second calls when the shit hits the fan. What is far more important is that, at the individual level, there is still just as much difficulty because there are just as many details to track – if not a few more, as you would expect from the next tier of raiding.

I don’t mean to imply that multitasking is the sole source of difficulty, though the vast majority of people really are terrible multitaskers, no matter how much they think otherwise. If you have more on your plate, you’re more likely to make a mistake, get yourself killed, and possibly wipe the group.

Although most people find themselves multitasking, we’re remarkably bad at it. Humans actually switch attention rapidly rather than truly multitasking, and tend to lose whatever is in our working memory when doing so… heavy multitaskers tended to be more readily distracted by extraneous information than their more focused peers.

There should be no doubt that this fact is a core consideration in the development of new raids. There are hard caps on the amount of damage, healing, or threat a person can generate in a given amount of time. Fight mechanics can’t rely too heavily on reaction time, due to the limits of latency in an online game. While those routes to difficulty do see some play, fights that center on them are quickly seen as uninteresting. Players and developers alike speak dismissively of “Patchwerk fights” because they test little more than your knowledge of the optimal solution for playing your class in a near-vacuum. We like other fights more because we like complexity in what we’re doing.

Despite this, I argue that the loss of complexity in Dragon Soul is not a bad thing, because that kind of complexity doesn’t fit the design of the game. The game is designed for tanks, healers, and damage-dealers, with sub-roles like tank healing, kiting, and interrupting. The complexity we’ve lost benefited only one class of person, and there is no raid role for “Guy Who Micromanages Every Detail.”

The GWMEDs out there shouldn’t feel bad. Those Guys exist because that’s what every tier of raiding for the past three expansions has trained us for. If you didn’t want to hold back your raid, you learned the strats beforehand. To do so, you read or watched guides that laid out the entire fight with all the fixings. The people who created those guides wrote them for any role, and to learn your role, you learned every role as a matter of course.

So much of that learning was a waste, though. A given raider would only ever perform one role at once, and rarely perform every role during the entire lifetime of that content tier. What that excess learning gave you was the ability to nag and criticize others in the raid group because you clearly knew their role better than they. It gave you the capacity to bring in your alt, if your alt was adequately geared and your guild even let you. In Wrath of the Lich King, that knowledge finally had some small utility, because you might be carrying a secondary spec to play… if you were keeping that gearset up to date as well… but often enough, that secondary spec was poorly geared or PvP-centric or there simply was never a need in your raid group.

Fast forward to Patch 4.3, and LFR enters the picture, but LFR wouldn’t be enough to change matters on its own. The Dungeon Guide, complete with its role-highlighted ability warnings and everything collapsed by default, was critical. Now, you have access to the tools to:

1. Learn the important details for your role on the fly, while ignoring the other roles.
2. Practice the fight without fear of failure, knowing that even if you die,
3. The fight will go on without you, letting you watch how it should be executed.

Problem was, what raid guides gave you was a distraction. You knew everything that was supposed to be happening, so even when your job was relatively simple, you could shift focus to monitor the performance of others. Because human brains aren’t built for that, your performance suffered, and you tended to make more mistakes, and maybe even wiped the raid. This is a large part of why Dragon Soul feels so much easier. We’ve stopped trying to be everyone, and we can devote exclusively to excelling at our own roles.

As Aldous said, LFR is an interactive strategy video. The nature of this new strategy guide has destroyed the need for the mental overhead that was part and parcel of learning every role simultaneously. Beyond that, the fights were designed with LFR in mind. That is the likely cause of the very real reduction in the number of roles, which brings with it yet another reduction in the amount of mental busywork attached to each fight.

The effect is that the each fight now carries a reduced load of unnecessary complexity. This frees the developers to create fights that demand more from each individual, which means that we players can hope for fights that introduce more fancy mental footwork to enjoy. At the same time, we’ll be more involved in playing our class and focusing on what we can personally do to succeed, which will let us rightly feel that we’ve contributed more to each kill. Each of us will still be 10% of the whole, but the whole can grow larger.

In the present day, there are a few problems. Mechanics that are absent or entirely different in LFR can become stumbling blocks in Normal mode, but this should never be more than a momentary setback. It can feel unfair, though, when the fight reacts to our actions in a qualitatively different manner – not simply a matter of scale, but doing something else entirely. That sort of shift is something we’ve come to expect of Heroic modes, not Normal. The decision to include LFR with a tier of content means that the content must have a variant that is clearable with relative ease. So long as a raid leader is necessary, that puts restraints on how much can be demanded of the raid leader, and on this count Blizzard may have overstepped their goal.

I suppose I’ll amend my original argument slightly. Dragon Soul might, in fact, be slightly less difficult than intended, if Blizzard failed to anticipate the degree to which LFR would succeed, and thus failed to introduce enough individual difficulty to compensate. This would be a simple problem to fix, but they are extremely reluctant to make existing fights more difficult, and thus it will have to wait for Mists of Pandaria.

But why fret? The current content seems close to correct in its tuning, one of the Biggest Bads in the Warcraft universe is dead by our hands, difficulty should be trending upwards for the foreseeable future, the story is open-ended, and tomorrow’s weather is misty with a high probability of bloodshed throughout the expansion.

Enjoy the game.

http://www.mediafire.com/?w2x6uubuc7111hw

This version’s primary changes include:

• Not loading for non-mages
• Localization crap
• Detection of specs for which it works:
  • If your current spec has 2/2 Shatter, it uses that
  • If your other spec has 2/2 Shatter, it uses that (and tells you in the tooltip)
  • If neither spec has 2/2 Shatter, it disables itself
  • If either of your specs has 1/2 Shatter, what the fuck. Seriously.
• Re-detects your spec when your talents change… I hope.

That last point is why I’m posting it here before public release on WoWInterface. Please be my guinea pigs. If you break it, or find a calculation that looks wrong, lemme know.

I will reimburse the cost of any respecs initiated for the sake of testing (on US-Drenden-H).

Thanks to Lyonn, I was able to test out a few things with IceCap and fixed a few bugs. You can download the new version from WoWInterface, as usual.

I set up a few Google Code pages for my addons so that I have a more structured bug report/to-do list; links are on the right. Any problems or suggestions should be posted there, ideally (you will need a Google account).

Also, I’m moving to a new apartment today. I should probably go get some sleep.

Pardon the old 3.x screenshot, please.

To-do list for this one includes keeping the ordering of the currencies consistent (right now, they tend to get scrambled at each log-on) and integrating it into the default UI. Probably as a new tab on your character sheet, next to where your current Currencies tab is right now.

In other news, I intend to revive at least one of the addons I wrote back during Wrath: a cross-character currency tracker. Kinda like Altoholic, except without an absurd excess of “features.” And a better GUI. After that, expect some BlizzCon-inspired ideas…

Speaking of which, god damn we Priests won hard.

Sure, there are a few questionable ones in there. For example, I can’t imagine much use for Path of the Devout, what with it breaking on damage, and Inner Will being quite comparable (unless, of course, they change Levitate to not break). Third tier, who even gives a fuck what the ones of the sides are, because we get boomerang-DeathCoil-FlameOrb. Fight permitting, I could see an approach where you split your raid’s ranged players into two groups, then have the priest fire the star through one group and into the melee, while simultaneously running off to the other group so that the star hits them on the way back. That’s just fun. And maybe a set bonus on some tier that makes it bounce off of you for a second pass? Or otherwise change its movement mechanics – like make it spiral outward, instead of drifting in a line. Or just make it go farther. Ultimately, it’s just an incredibly fun spell mechanic, and leaves room for set bonuses that are far more interesting than some boring static bonuses.

I like the Final Prayer talent in the fourth tier, simply because it requires no action from you. Yes, it’s strictly inferior in terms of throughput, compared to Desperate Prayer. Yes, it has an ICD. Finally, yes, it’s probably intended as a PvP talent. But, if I’m taking enough damage that I would jump for Desperate Prayer, I’m probably taking enough damage to trigger Final Prayer. And when it does, it shines: you only get two-thirds of the effective healing, but you don’t lose a GCD, and you get pushback immunity so long as that shield holds – which is a damned good thing, considering that the thing that knocked you down to begin with is probably massive raid damage.

Fifth tier offers the agonizing choice between Serendipity and Power Infusion. If only you could get both… I suppose I can console myself with Berserking, but it’s just not the same. Whichever, though, it’s kind of small change compared to some of the most amazing talents I’ve ever seen. If you haven’t seen them yet, click that thumbnail up there and read the ones in the lower right. Now.

I’m waiting.

Okay.

Vow of Unity is beautiful, plain and simple. You halve the incoming damage on the target of choice, and get the difference on you as an Ignite-style DoT (briefly, you’ll get a “pool” of damage waiting to hit you that empties by half or a third every tick, depending on whether it ticks once every three or two seconds). Oh, and you get a fifth of your heals on that target bounced onto you, meaning that your Binding Heals will heal them for 100%, and yourself for 120%. So long as the fight mechanics won’t snap the link (by hitting the tank for more than 30% of his health in one strike), this is an incredible tool for dramatically increasing tank survival rates. Your “Vow damage pool” will rapidly fill up until it reaches the point that each tick on you is equal to the (average) amount of damage the tank would take during the same period. It’s the same thing as the original Spirit Link, except that it spreads the redirected damage over a few ticks, rather than a few raid members.

Of course, there’s also Void Shift, which is a great tool for a clutch save, and Vampiric Dominance, which is also an obviously good choice for raid healing. But neither of them are nearly so interesting.