A big ‘F’ all in Firelands?

Is there anything in the new content patch for us casuals?

With the much awaited release of the 4.2 patch today, Firelands has opened up a whole host of new content to the raiding level 85s amongst us, but is there anything in there for the casual gamer?  On the face of it, not much, the Firelands is seemingly a raid area aimed at the harder core WOW players with no additions on the 5-man heroic front; whilst the prospect of once again being able to smash Ragnaros in the face is an alluring one, I simply don’t have the time (even less than I used to have) to get my act together and start raiding again.  Pretty short post this then… the F in Firelands does seem to be a big F-all for the casual! Not so at all!

If you skip through the content of the Firelands information pages on the Blizzard website you’ll see a section titled Content for the Casual 85, this links to one of the Dev Blogs where ‘Fargo’ talks about what's in store for the casual at 85.  Clearly there’s a whole host of trade skills, and a good few heroics, but they get a bit stale after a while, there’s only so much trade-skilling one can take in a given session, and with the rise of the, errr, Rise of Zanzilar instances the ‘old’ heroics have very little draw as there’s very little reward in it.

Quest, for me, have never had that much draw, even (especially?) the dailies, they’ve been a functional means to an end over the years, you chop your way through them, either to level up or to grind rep.  Occasionally doing a quest chain to get an item, more so on the latter since the iLvl requirement.  Occasionally there were some particularly enjoyable chains, like the various 5 man crucible type fights, that I’d go back to and do even if I had no reason to, but on the main I don’t quest purely for enjoyment, i don’t know why, it just seems a bit pointless, and repetitive if you breed alts; I suppose there just doesn’t seem to be much ‘questyness’ to it – the fact that every other player on the server is, has, or could do the exact same chain, in the exact same order doesn’t set my world on fire – how many of you went to the cinema and watched some short arsed hobbit wait patiently for three other short arsed hobbits in roughly the same clothes stab a few orcs before handing a ring in to get their reward?  It just doesn’t happen like that outside of (I almost said fantasy) MMOs.

Now once again I’ve wandered off into ramblings, and you might ask what the hell I’m on about, well here it is.  Well here it is, the developers seem to have realised the same thing, and gone some way to try and introduce a little bit of randomness in there so tat there's more of a feel that you’re embarking on your own adventure, which comprise of your own quests, with their own challengers.  And not that you’re just re-treading the footsteps of a thousand people before you the same day:

There's also a story here, a chronicle of a vicious, knock-down, drag-out fight that begins in Hyjal and progresses -- over the course of weeks -- across the mountaintop and then into the Firelands themselves. Along the way, major characters are going to get rocked, you'll meet (and destroy) a few new villains, and you'll earn yourself a small heap of nice rewards. The druids are establishing a beachhead in a hostile world, starting with little more than a pile of rocks and ultimately erecting an enormous otherworldly base.

The progression is personal: you won’t see it happen until you make it happen.

The whole post is linked here, and I’ve got to say I like the sound of it, I suppose at the end of the day, it’s just dailies, but the fact that people will be doing stuff along different ‘routes’ will mean that there’s less contention for particular quest items or mobs, there’s some better differentiation (at least in the early days) between characters and the gear they can achieve, and you’ll have less of a feeling that you’re just slogging through the same linier story in the same way as everyone else on the server.  I’m keen to see how the party dynamic is maintained in this, hopefully it wont be a simple case of you go do your quests and I’ll help, then we’ll do mine.

I’d like to see these principles extended to the daily quests, Jewelcrafting in particular is a  particular bugbear of mine, you have a selection of a handful of quests which may crop up as he daily, everyone else on the server gets the same daily, which simply means either the price of nightstone rockets for a day at a time, or the elementals in Mount Hyjal get beaten up and their dinner money stolen again.  I’m currently on the train home and might get an hour or so this evening to try them out, that is as long as the patch downloader doesn’t take its usual half day to sort its shit out.

Pulling it out of the fire

Last night something strange happened to me! I started looking, and feeling, like a proper tank for extended periods of time in a heroic. I was milling around waiting for the footy to start (disgraceful refereeing btw) with nothing to do, a couple of guildies wanted a heroic so I asked what classes they wanted. The answer came back "a tank would be nice" the poor, unsuspecting, fools… Out comes the Death Knight and into the queue we go, only 4 of us so we needed to PUG the healer. Blackrock Caverns, brilliant. For some reason I've not randomly been in the place many times before, to the extent that I only just completed it on mystic for the first time over the weekend, I reckon 4 or 5 times in total on all my characters, I've always skipped Beauty and I've certainly never tanked it.

I explained to the healer and the rest of the group that this was my first time tanking the place, and that they'd have to bear with me, whipped wow wiki up on the laptop and had a quick scan of strategies, fortunately one of the guys there has an alt tank and has done it several times before. My admission also prompted the healer (I think) to say it was his first time too… great… on closer inspection it was his first time healing, he'd got a million alts so knew the instance inside out. We had a load of crowd control with two mages, so the trash was relatively straight forward, a couple of cockups here and there but nothing major. That was until we got to Karsh Steelbender, the basic strategy is to kite him in and out of the flame in the middle of the room, he can't be killed without the having debuff it gives him, but too many stacks of the debuff and the part gets overwhelmed with adds, the trick is to try and get his toe in the fire so he gets one debuff at a time, if he gets to 8 then the tank stands him out until the stack drops and it starts over. You get the picture. It's a pretty daunting task for a tank, or possibly just me as a tank, the onus is on you and only you, if you balls it up, everyone dies. More so than normal. Anyway, I checked up on the strategy and began the pull, all way going smoothly, whilst I wasn't managing one debuff at a time, I was keeping it to two, so not all too bad. We got him down to just below 30% when the healer didn't notice he was stood in crap and died. Now normally a dead healer on a boss fight means wipe, but, amazingly, not this time. The damage is pretty low and smooth in this fight, and I was at about 100% health at the time, with all my cooldowns. Blood DK's have 6 damage mitigation cooldowns (if you include Army of the Dead), or at least 6 that I've found… plus I have a click to increase dodge trinket. So I set off slowly popping cooldowns and healing myself as much as possible with Death Strike and Rune Tap. The DPS was pretty high so it wasn't long before we had him down to sub 5%, I was near death with only Army of the Dead left so out it came. Now this was nearly fatal in itself; as I mentioned earlier the boss needs a debuff from the flames to take damage, the whole point of popping Army of the Dead was to take aggro from me to allow me to heal, but unfortunately I popped it just slightly outside the flames so the boss became immune to damage on 1% health. Bugger. Put fear not, I have taunts! On a massive 20% health myself I utilised the DKs two taunt abilities to move the boss just enough to be in the flames before the ghouls took agro again.

Steelbenders death was greeted with calls for DK's to be nerfed and general mocking of my ability and amazement that I managed to pull it off (don't worry, I gave as much as I got…) Now I've been in situations before as a healer, or shadow priest swapping to heals, which have saved raid or party wipes, it's a great feeling to know something you, and only you, did saved the group. More so with a tank I suppose, as a healer you're expected to heal, as a tank you're expected to tank WITH healing. All in all a great confidence booster, and the satisfaction of actually, for the first time, feeling like I'm a reasonable tank, I've still got a long way to go, but I'm getting there on the tanking front. The run also gave me an appreciation for previous tanks bemoaning the aggro magnet mage, with two of the idiots (one extremely well geared) blasting away controlling aggro was a nightmare, still at least they both knew where the sheep button was.