Wrapping things up

Well, gosh.

It's certainly been a while, hasn't it?

I'm not sure when I last logged in to WoW. I did the annual pass thing - mostly for the free Diablo 3 - so I'm still subscribed. But I haven't felt any desire to play, or talk about it, or think about it. RPS linked to an interesting essay on the future of the MMO today. I think Mr. Johnson is struggling with the same questions that many of us struggle with. What was so amazing about our initial connection with WoW, or whatever MMO it was that you connected with?

I also think he comes to all the wrong conclusions, even though the correct one is obvious in his own essay. He talks about boss guides and boss videos getting in the way of formulating your own approach to an encounter, the casual/hardcore distinction, odd gameplay mechanics, all the sorts of standard things we talk about it when we're considering these things.

At the same time, throughout the piece, he's telling stories about memories of his time with Risen. Opening the gates to Ahn'quiraj, raiding Hogger with level 1 gnomes, seeing Ragnaros for the first time (and I encourage you to read the snippet of raid chat in that screenshot), all of that stuff. To be fair, he does talk about those social connections as being the biggest, most important part of why he got into WoW, and that's where I agree with him.

I realize that this isn't a new thing for me to say on this blog, but I do think that that social aspect is the most important one in the game for me, even though I didn't necessarily realize this in the past.

I like a lot of the people in my guild, but it's such a tiny guild on a dead server. Even when if I did log on, would anyone else be online? Probably not. Especially working the hours I do. And if there was someone online, what would we do?

I like raiding, but putting the raids together was an almost-constant headache, we either had too many people or too few. And to be honest, there was never as much chatter as I would have liked, either on vent or in raid chat.

At the same time, while I do like raiding, I have also really liked having those six hours every week freed up. Even if I sometimes still use it on gaming in one way or another, you know, it's nice to not have that obligation.

I remain pretty conflicted. At this point I'm honestly unsure if I'll even get Mists of Pandaria. I think they're going good places with the gameplay mechanics, but also kind of so what? Burning Crusade's gameplay mechanics sucked in a lot of ways but I was raiding three nights a week with a 25-person raid guild full of people I really liked. I logged in during off hours and farmed consumables just to hang out, really. Just to chat.

Now, well, I don't know. I should probably give up the pretense of this blog. I haven't even had the courtesy to respond to comments left here, and it used to be that comments got a response as soon as I knew they were there.

I guess I've never really felt like a part of the WoW blogging community, either. There have been times when it's begun to feel like that, and that was great in the same way that an active guild that I fit with socially was great. It never really gelled, though.

So I suppose I should just go ahead and say that Piercing Shots is taking a nap. I can't say as I think it'll return? It seems pretty unlikely, if not impossible. I do want to really sincerely thank everyone who has commented or emailed at one point or another, it pretty much always made me smile. And I think that the guides I wrote were helpful for a few people in Cataclysm, so that's pretty awesome. Nonetheless, I've reached a point where I just don't have anything to say, and that seems like a good time to close up shop.

(Probably) The Last Major Cataclysm Content Patch Is Out

Which means I Should Probably Make A Post.

Breaks like this are what separate professionals from amateurs, I think. Or at least, they're amongst the things that separate pros from not-pros. This month-long posting drought was brought on by a few different things, including lack of anything to talk about, lack of desire to find new things to talk about, holidays, and Skyrim.

I really think this break in content patches was too long. It was getting increasingly difficult to scrape together 10 people for a raid, and in fact the break from raiding for Thanksgiving conspired with a somewhat surprise-patch-release to keep us from putting together a raid for Dragon Soul. I think a few guildies have done the LFR thing, but I really have no interest in it. This is a little bit naughty of me - I could be getting 390 gear! - but playing with 24 people I don't know or care about and will never meet again is just not something I'm going to bother with.

This is going to be a tough patch for the guild in general. We're losing one of our main tanks to major surgery, and I doubt we'll get her back before mid-January. Our enhancement shaman has officially stepped down from raiding, although we hadn't seen her for a bit. Our students are getting nailed by end-of-semester stress and time crunch. I never succeeded in building a healthy off-night social atmosphere, which makes recruiting even more of a bear than it already was. So on and so forth.

It really doesn't matter how tiny and how casual your guild is, or how flat of a hierarchy you try to have: being in any sort of a leadership position takes time and energy, and if you don't put that time and energy in it begins to wither. Much the same as happens with a blog, in fact! Or well, anything else in life, I suppose.

It's been tough to put that time in, though, not least because I haven't been playing much or any WoW. There aren't going to be any more big mechanical adjustments to the game until Pandaclysm comes out. There was that little cowflop a blue dropped in the forums about how hunters just haven't figured out how to play Survival correctly, which is absolutely untrue. The problem with that spec is the same one it's had since Wrath: Explosive Shot damage doesn't scale with weapon damage. End of story. Even if they hadn't nerfed it, I expect top-tier raiding hunters with heroic Arathars would have been MM by now, and they certainly would have been MM with heroic Dragon Soul weapons. A physical DPS spec that doesn't scale with physical DPS is just not going to compete.

In fact, I hadn't looked at the 4.3 patch notes before now and I see that they buffed Explosive Shot damage by 15%. This is hilarious because the original nerf was 25%, and that was too severe so they nerfed the nerf by 10% (making it a 15% nerf from Cataclysm release). Now they're reverting that 15%. Hah! Guys, we could have (and did) tell you this was going to happen before 4.06 came out. Also before 4.0 came out. Tie ExS to weapon damage, dudes!

But in the grand scheme of things that's no bigs, really. The original "you're doing it wrong" comment was insulting and infuriating for the top-tier survival hunters, raiding in the spec because they do heroic tens and don't have an alternative, but balance stuff ebbs and flows. Frankly, the various specs in the game are the most balanced they've ever been, IMO.

Killing Nozdormu in a five-man dungeon is pretty WTF. Also it makes me kind of sad, considering he's still the hottest thing in the game.

But that's it, you know? What else is there to talk about?

I think that what I really need to do is reach out to some of the other small guilds on the server and - as dramaful as this could be - maybe try to arrange some kind of a merger or something. I dunno. I'd be playing more WoW if I had people to play with. As it is, I think my habitual absence means others are less likely to be playing.

Bonus addendum! If you look at my achievements, you'll note that I got Stood in the Fire. I have to protest that I did not actually stand in the fire. I tried to use disengage to get across the gap between pillars faster. It didn't work - instead, I fell into the Maelstrom. Definitely not fire. It actually confused the client, which decided that I'd died to elementium bolt and advised me to move next time. No, game! I fell into the Maelstrom between platforms. Did not stand in anything.

Entering the Patch Cycle Holding Pattern

Well, I have to say that the nerfs this past week kind of put a few loads of grapeshot through my sails. We even extended our lockout the week before to take a last shot at a pre-nerf kill (however much some may giggle at having to try for a pre-nerf non-heroic kill), but some things happened in the real world that cut our raid time from our usual six hours per week down to probably a little under three. I suppose it wasn't meant to be. Especially with Civilization 5 going on sale for twelve bucks on Steam, I just kind of dropped out of WoW for a bit. I feel a little bad about this - I've clearly neglected the blog, and I've also neglected the guild that I've put so much time into. On the other hand, I think everyone needs a bit of a break from time to time, so perhaps this is just my time for one.

As these things go, it's a pretty decent time. It's not like I need VP for anything, and especially with the nerfs to the content, raid time needn't really be about maximizing our limited window of time to try to Kill New Bosses. We can just kind of come in and casually clear stuff up. We of course killed Rag this week, so maybe next week we can try out some of the also-nerfed heroic modes and step into T13 with some 391 gear. Sure, why not? It'll be nice having some 384 weapons and a bunch of people with some 391 stuff when we step into the Dragon Soul.

Actually looking at some of the information coming out about the new raid is what's done some good to renew my flagged enthusiasm. It does actually look quite exciting and neat and good - it seems to have that hard to capture sense of grandeur that tiers 7, 9, 11, and 12 have lacked. I mean sure they're neat or whatever, but with Firelands for example the main attraction for me was "new challenges". With Ulduar, the attraction was storming Ulduar. Even the vehicle-based opening, for all its flaws, did a great job of making the raid feel like it was kind of a big deal. You know, I don't necessarily want another Flame Lev style encounter, but I always had fun with it, and especially with the opening push through all the dwarves and what have you.

Sorry, I'm wandering off, as I tend to. The point here is that although I was a little bit gut-punched by the nerfs, the expansion's terminal raid seems like it could be good enough to kind of rescue things for me. We'll see.

I responded to the hunter version of the class survey thread posted in the official forum. I sort of feel like anything I might have to say would inevitably be lost in the tsunami of craziness a thread like that will inevitably turn into, but Blizzard is a big company that makes buckets of money. It could very well be that they have a rigorous system for extracting usable information from the wreckage left after the wave ebbs.

The two questions in the survey I found the most interesting were essentially "what is fun about your class?" and "what is not fun about your class?"

This may or may not be surprising to anyone, but I actually had to pause for quite a while to answer those. The fundamental reason I first chose the class is, as I have said before, that I like bows. I want to use a bow to shoot arrows into the mans. So as long as I'm doing that, I'm in a pretty decent spot. Some people (dwarves) like guns, and it has not been a very good expansion for them in terms of having that, so I'm a little worried that the T13 ranged weapon of choice is going to be a gun, but hey! Now we have transmogrification, so that's fine.

It's much harder to articulate a game-mechanical thing that I like or dislike. I guess I don't really like the way Marks plays at the moment - it sort of feels like I'm trying to build something out of a mix of Duplos and Legos. Focus regen, the Chimera Shot cooldown, and the Improved Steady Shot buff duration just don't line up in nice ways if you're not using glyphed Arcane Shot and the 13% haste point. So that doesn't feel great.

I do like using disengage. I like the sparkle from Post Haste, I like being able to pick times when I want to be somewhere Right Now, and I like being able to negate or re-purpose a boss's knockback effects. That's all fun. It's also sort of a strange thing to highlight, since it has nothing to do with shooting arrows into mans or having a pet or anything.

All that said, I haven't really seen any signs that they're planning much in the way of hunter changes for 4.3. There might be a couple minor tweaks, but I'm pretty sure the class is going to remain as-is for the remainder of this expansion.

Resubbed

Hello again.

I haven't played in - hm - a few months. I was actually playing while this blog was on hiatus (it may still be, I haven't really decided), but I was playing on my priest and raiding only ICC10 with a guild of mostly RL friends. The 4.01 patch has hit, and my boyfriend has been excited about wow again, so I resubbed and downloaded and patched tonight. I'm about to load up the game and see what's up.

It's sort of neat that the hunter community is flailing and panicking right now. Spec choice is wide open, there's a new resource to futz with, and tier 11 is shockingly ugly. So. I think I'll log in to the ol' huntress and see if farming 'roix for welfare T10 is any fun.

Reposting a guest post!

Hi everyone!  I've got a couple ideas for posts kicking around in my head, and at the very least I can explain what people mean by "stutter-run," but I couldn't manage to turn any of them into a coherent post yet.  So to buy myself a little time, I'm re-posting a guest post I did for World of Snarkcraft.  It's awkward because, while I raided with them at the time, I moved servers and guilds recently.  But I don't have anything else written, so here goes:

At the end of August I had to move.  I won't go in to any great length about why I had to move, but one of the results was that I had to give up playing WoW until I'd settled some things.  Some things have now settled, so I renewed my sub last night.  I didn't do a whole lot – I said hi to the guildies that were on and did a quick heroic ToC-5.  WoW looked a lot prettier than it used to, but I'm not sure if that's innacurate memory or what.  It was mostly just nice to play a little again.

In a sad confirmation of stereotype, one of the things I've been missing has been upgrading my gear.  We all know and love that warm, internal glow from finally getting a shiny new purple.  It's a little bit like the glow a chronic gambling addict gets from their infrequent payouts, I think.  Especially because the longer you go without it, the warmer it is when you finally get another taste.  And man if it hasn't been a while since I had a taste, you know?  I've replaced two things since before the first time I killed Yogg-Saron in the middle of the Summer, both the rings, neither of which came from a 25-person raid.

I'm not sure exactly when I'm going to be able to return to raiding, but it's going to taste pretty sweet when I do.  Especially since I'm sure the rest of the guild is swimming in 245 gear at this point.  Imagine the situation like this: it's a kid's birthday, and he's in the back yard with all his friends.  There's a pinata full of his favorite candy – maybe some kit-kats – and all of his friends are stuffed full of hotdogs, chips, cake, and soda.  They're lying on the ground in a disordered, groaning semi-circle.  You hear the whoosh sound of him swinging the stick a few times, then a sharp crack followed by an avalanche of crinkling wrappers.  Giggling quietly, he scoops up the candy and runs upstairs to stash it in his room.

That's going to be me in the Coliseum.

Distinctly second in the list of stuff I've been missing is the people.  Ha-ha!  Just kidding!  As an emotionally healthy human adult, of course I value interpersonal relationships far more than I value pixels named with purple text.

Hm.

Has anyone else ever heard a saying that goes something like “if you tell a lie to yourself enough times, you might begin to believe it”?

I'm not sure if that's true.  But, moving on!

I really have missed my guildies, seriously.  Reading Snarkcraft has been the cause of some occasional wistfulness, because it reminds me that I haven't been able to hang out with Seri and Jov, both of whom are pretty excellent ladies.  Axiom is just in general a really fun environment to raid with.  Making fun of the raid leader, making fun of Crutches (can I just say that the Hammer of Ancient Kings is apropos for him), misdirecting bombs onto the druid co-GM, pulling off the tank and wiping the raid in the first 5 seconds of an attempt (my specialty!), imagining the female Orc warrior Kerp speaking with the male Polack voice of her player, just on and on.  It has really been a drag missing out on all of that for a month.

On the other hand, there have been compensations.  This has been a really great way to get out of doing dailies and otherwise farming consumables.  Dragonfin Angelfish, for example, is pretty much never available for sale anywhere ever.  Saving myself the outrage over the prices for alchemy mats has also probably done wonders for my blood pressure.  And can I just say that I could happily live the tortured, immortal existence of an Anne Rice vampire just so long as I never, ever had to encounter the trade channel.  Sadly, that boat has sailed, so no lace and black velvet for me.

For real though, everyone: none of it is funny any more.  None of it.  Any joke you were going to make in trade?  It isn't funny.  Every time you say “anal” and then link an ability or item, it actually creates a hole in the universe.  These holes – and there are, by now, trillions of them – vacuum up and destroy the elementary particle of human joy, known as the “fabulon”*.  Relentlessly and forever.  They don't go away, people.  Now that we've made them, they're going to be here until the heat-death of the Universe.  And while it's true that kittens and puppies generate fabulons at a steady rate, we are rapidly approaching the point at which the holes will be depleting them faster than they can be replaced.  Please, think of the children.

*Entirely different from the god worshipped by the shadowy cult of Naga known only as “The Bravo Demographic”.

Interim Maundering

Well, I'm quite proud of myself. I actually managed to write a post about hunters and schedule it for automatic posting at 12:01 AM on Tuesday. This means I'll actually have a post set to go for downtime.

I'm also experimenting a little with some publicity. I sent in a request to get listed on Twisted Nether and I'm considering making an intro post on Blog Azeroth. I'm a little embarrassed about advertising this thing, even though I'm not normally a particularly shy person. I guess it just seems a little forward. But really, if I didn't care about other people reading this stuff, I'd be writing these things up in Open Office and saving them locally instead of posting them to the 'net.

Unrelated, and since I haven't mentioned it, I was able to renew my WoW subscription on Friday night, which was happy. Well, sort of. It also puts me in a tough spot. I'd like to keep raiding with Axiom, but I've moved from Florida to Minnesota. I really love the state a lot. I grew up here, and I'm treated to scenes like this one from yesterday:

The car on the right is mine.

On the other hand, I also moved from Eastern time to Central time. This means that Axiom's raids start at 6 P.M. for me now, and it's really tough for me to swing that. I'm not sure what I'm going to end up doing about it. But hey, of all the problems you can have in this life, "how can I make a raid time work?" is definitely one of the least troubling ones.

AWOL

Hi there, nonexistent readers. Sadly, real life is going to keep me mostly offline for the next week or two. Not sure when exactly I'll be able to resume posting, which is too bad: I had some ideas for a post (with pictures!) about my ideas for how to do the twins encounter in ToC, as well as a couple amendments to my previous thoughts about gearing in 3.2. Ah well! I'll be back before too long.