[WoW] On attunements

I'm having a thought, here.

What if!

You know that Blizzard has removed basically all attunements from the game, forever. They don't want to have the barrier to content, they don't want people to have to keep dragging alts through the process, they don't want to have a gear grind the way the origial raids had, whatever.

Maybe there could be attunements for Heroic content.

First of all, Heroic content should definitely be more than a slider, or an on/off kind of thing. Ulduar did it best. Ulduar was brilliant. But what if, say, Mimiron's button required a key to unlock? What if getting into Yogg's chamber with some of the guardians still active required some kind of ritual -- or what if the guardians each dropped pieces of a runestone, so that you had to have done the fight on "normal" before trying it on Heroic?

That last isn't really a good example, because what I'm really interested in saving are the Onyxia-style quest lines. I want another march through Stormwind. I want another Scepter of the Sands. I want some epic content, some kind of memorable moment, even if I don't personally get to see it until the next expansion launches and I finally get around to doing it.

Making this change would bring back everything that was really awesome about the game (in my opinion, anyway), and it wouldn't really cost anything. The Heroic players are the ones who are willing to put in the grind anyway, and they already have a core, consistent raid group -- so make it so only one person has to do the attunement. And everybody loved the Ulduar mechanisms, much more interesting than the Normal/Heroic mode switch we have now, so those would be back as well. And there'd be awesome quest chains again! It's win-win-win.

Just...please. Make this the kind of thing that a casual can do. Don't require that a normal raid be part of the attunement. Keep it to dungeons, maybe to LFR. Make it accessible, make it awesome, and connect it to the hardest of the hardcore.

It'll be glorious.

[WoW] And now for something completely different...

Dear Blizzard,

As I type this, I'm atop one of the buildings in Stormwind, looking puzzled at the spectre of an enormous blue dragon hovering over the middle of town. It's a very imposing, very impressive looking blue dragon, hanging there ghostly in the night like the revenant of some future holiday. I'm told, by the ever-helpful and informative folks in [2:Trade] that this dragon portends some lucky caster's acquisition of the legendary staff. That's impressive, and certainly happy news for that caster.

Now, I've never had a legendary. I'm not what you'd call a top-end raider. In fact, I haven't raided regularly since Naxxramas, for several reasons. I've never had a bite at that particular cherry, and that's okay. I understand that legendaries are supposed to be special, unique items, and that they're necessarily constrained to a few classes. That's fine.

But, Blizzard: don't you think it's high time we tanks got some love?

The latest recipient of hot sweet orange lovin' are the rogues, with their Fangs of the Father pair. Bless them, they can now be the Batman. I've always liked rogues, since they're the only class that really plays a different game than the rest of us. Sure, druids can stealth, but rogues are all about Stealth. And they can pick pockets. Good times.

In fact, there have been a grand total of nine legendaries (counting the daggers and Warglaives as one legendary each, and ignoring the temporary legendaries in the Kael'thas fight in Tempest Keep). Of these, three have been good for rogues. Two have been good for plate DPS, one was really only for hunters, two have been for caster DPS and one was for healers. One-third of all the legendaries ever released have been Rogue loot. (Yeah, the Warglaives could be used by Warriors and DKs as well, but come on: they have Agility on them. Let's be realistic.)

An analysis of this pattern leads to two conclusions: one, rogues have been given enough love. It's time for someone else. I suggest tanks. Two, tanks have never had a legendary of their very own. The niche that is historically hardest to fill has had the least orange attention.

This will not stand.

I know, Blizzard, that your tanks have different methodologies. I know that some of us use shields, while other tanks prefer to block with their faces. I know that our weapon sets don't have a lot of logical overlap. But surely this isn't a titanic problem -- after all, Quel'Delar's quest line had an end result that could be varied by class.

But it's a legendary, you say. Yes, I know. If it's a legendary, it should just be that weapon. No variances, no shifting things around. It is what it is. And there isn't a single weapon type that is usable by all five tanking classes. (Yeah, we're thinking ahead here.)

Or is there?

I'd like to submit for your consideration: the naginata. The naginata is a Japanese weapon, essentially a katana blade with a five-foot haft. It's a polearm, is what I'm saying. A polearm with a sword blade on the end of it.

See where I'm going with this?

I propose that a legendary blade be introduced in the Mists of Pandaria expansion. This blade will be the result of a long quest line, involving a master blacksmith, rare ingredients, dragon's blood, all the usual tropes. It will require a lot of effort on the part of the tank and his entire raid. And it will be a tanking weapon, oh yes. The tank will collect his items, perform his trials, complete his tasks, and then, at the very end of it, the master smith will present the tank with the finished blade, Hattori Hanzo-style. If the recipient is a Warrior or a Paladin, our Masamune stand-in will have produced a tanking sword, resplendent with Strength and Stamina. If the recipient is a Death Knight, Druid or Monk, the legendary blacksmith will have affixed a big honkin' haft to that sucker and we'll have ourselves a tanking polearm.

See? You can even use the same art asset for the blade, because lore-wise, it's the same blade. The only difference between the two weapons is, essentially, the length of the hilt. Every tanking class gets the love we've so long been lacking, and we all get to rock out like samurai in the new land of Pandaria. It'll be glorious.

Please, Blizzard. From the bottoms of the hearts of every tank everywhere, please. Please give this to us. For all the idiot PUGgers, for all the absurd repair bills, for all the aggro aggravation, for all the dragon crotch, please. We are the front line between the big nasty and the rest of the raid. We deserve some orange love.

Thank you.

On Teamwork

If there's a dark side to the new LFG, it is this: it has strengthened the illusion that World of Warcraft is a single-player game.

I want to make this absolutely clear: no matter how it seems, WoW is not a single-player game. I know it looks that way; soloing for casuals has strengthened, badges and shiny epix are available with (comparatively) minimal effort, the Argent Tournament, all of these things, sure. It's easier than ever to float on through Azeroth like a neutrino, interacting only weakly with the other real people who are sharing your virtual breathing space. It's easy to forget that there are other people at all. It's easy to gear up into full T9 without ever speaking to another player; it's easy to treat PUG runners like hirelings, marching on a grim and silent death march through heroic after badge-geysering heroic, the terse atmosphere broken only by calls for this buff or that without so much as a please. Might as well be pushing a button to make your pally buff-bot give you what you want. You ungrateful son of a bitch.

It makes me sick, the disregard for their fellow human beings some of the PUGgers show. So here I am, saying it loud and clear: the game is not about YOU. From start to finish, from the time you log on to the time you log off, you are part of a team. You are part of a community, and you have just as much responsibility to be a decent human being in Azeroth as you do in the real world. I realize that that doesn't mean much to many of you out there, that a lot of you don't have any idea what that even means. Hey, you pay your fifteen bucks a month and that entitles you to wring as much blood from the game and your fellow players as you can. Take what you can, give nothing back? Go die in a hole.

Let me elaborate on this.

Most importantly, no matter how much it might seem this way, the other people running that PUG dungeon with you are people. They're looking to have fun and gear their toon exactly like you are. Display a little empathy. Sure, they might not be from your guild or even from your server, but they are still a part of your team. They are still a part of your community. Treating them like a buff-bot or rolling on things you don't need (but they do) just because you might never see them again isn't being a team player. It's not just about you. It never was.

There's more than this, though. You know all that stuff you buy from the Auction House? It's there because other players put it there. It didn't magically appear, it isn't being seeded by Blizzard. Sure, you have to spend some of your hard-earned gold to get the stuff, but it's there because they chose to level those trade skills and make their services available. You might think you're a solo player but you're not. Try leveling through the game without visiting the AH. It'll be unpleasant and painful. Try doing decent DPS in heroics without the services of a chanter or scribe or crofter. It'll be difficult. You need these people.

Moreover, you are paying your fifteen dollars a month to play a massively multiplayer online game. There are hundreds, literally hundreds, of lush, enormous single-player RPGs out there where you can God-mode all you like and nobody will ever complain. And you know what? Most of those don't have a monthly fee. Why would you pay your money to interact with other people and then act like a bridge-dwelling troll? You are part of the world, you are paying for the privilege of being a part of the world, a world populated by other human beings. They aren't bots, they are people, and they all paid to play in this rich, densely-populated world too.

I see the way a lot of people act in PUGs. I read comments on forum posts. Many seem to think they're entitled to special consideration, that they have the right to grab two handfuls of loot and skedaddle, and to hell with helping out the team or seeing that they had a good time, and many who don't feel that way naturally have learned the behavior as a defensive, pre-emptive measure. To paraphrase Syndrome, "Once everyone's a ninja ... nobody will be."

This attitude doesn't help; it makes it worse. It creates a vicious cycle of ever-more-selfish behavior. It encourages the little trolls and selfish gits; now they've successfully reduced everyone to their level, their childish, churlish behavior has been validated and normalized. Worse, it causes damage to the community as a whole -- sure, you can find a guild and be treated decently, but woe to the man who steps out into the wild world, lest he have his loots ninjaed from him and his gear mocked with allegations of noobishness.

I've had good PUGs. I've had people who played as a team, who were cordial and competent and generous with the loot. I've also had my share of bad PUGs, full of self-important, selfish twelve-year-olds rampantly and vigorously exhibiting the behavior that inspired this post in the first place. I don't know about the rest of you but I know that I, at least, enjoy the former much more than the latter. I'd guess that the majority of you do as well.

But in order to live in such a world, we all have to do our part to create it. Don't be a loot whore. Be polite and considerate. Remember that not everyone has the ability (or desire) to chain-run heroics for six hours a day (and thus might not yet be in full T9 despite the dungeon finder being out for a whole six weeks). Don't drop group because you don't like the instance and make everyone else in the group have to wait to replace you. Don't kick a DPS because he isn't pulling 3k or has a Gear Score of under 5k. Greed on the Frozen Orbs, don't need on stuff you wouldn't, in principle, equip right away during the run you're on, and consider maybe letting someone else have the [Battered Hilt] once you've won it twice. Part of being a team player, the team that is helping you run through the dungeon, is occasionally taking one for the team.

Azeroth, the World of Warcraft, might be just a game world, but it is a world full of people who have chosen to be there and who have chosen to be part of a community with you. Don't make them regret it.