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Warlords of Draenor: Understanding Draenor Perks
What's the point of a Draenor Perk? It's a question that seems to be fairly common among players, ever since the bonuses were mentioned in the patch notes for patch 6.0. As players level from 90 to 100, each level will bring with it a perk. Each class and spec has nine perks, and by the time you hit level 100, you'll have them all. However, the order that you receive these perks is completely random. You can't choose the perk, the perk chooses you. Wowhead dug up the full list of Draenor Perks for each spec and class, and the perks themselves seem to be pretty much the same -- bonus damage or a boost to specific player abilities. In many cases, it's just a flat percent damage boost. This seems all well and good, but players seem to be confused about the point of the perk system, since it looks a lot like something that was deliberately culled from the game a few years ago.
No new class, no new race, no problem
This is one of those title says it all posts, but I'll elaborate: the fact that there is neither a new class nor a new race in Warlords of Draenor isn't a problem. First up, there's the obvious fact that we're getting redesigns for the eight original races plus draenei and blood elves. In terms of art design, that's an incredible amount of work, far more than designing one or even two new races. Racial abilities for each race are also being redesigned, meaning each will play differently. Moreover, by not introducing a new race or class, we don't need to have a starter zone designed for them, meaning that content design can focus on content for the 90 to 100 player, especially since thanks to the level 90 boost, it can be assumed that anyone who picks up Warlords and wants to play it can. As has been said elsewhere, new races and classes are not content in and of themselves. They consume time and development resources to create them, and often they have content associated with them, and that content is usually only playable when you create one of them (although the monk did not actually get that treatment - save for one location in Pandaria that offered monk only quests, as a kind of home base, monks didn't see the death knight starter zone style experience) but by themselves a new race or class is just a different way to experience content. This is not to say they are not important. New classes offer new gameplay options, new abilities and spells, and sometimes new roles for players who did not enjoy, say, tanking or healing on previous classes. But I think it's fair to say that World of Warcraft doesn't need the added complexity of three new specializations to balance right now. There's going to be a lot of work needed to balance out new spells and abilities, adjust item levels, change the way healing works while ensuring it does still work, implement entirely new gameplay like garrisons without also figuring out how to keep another class in the mix with the other 34 specializations we already have. Similarly, while I mourn for my alliance ogre paladin and horde arakkoa druid, do we need two more groups of racials to balance out?
World of Warcraft's new Warlords of Draenor trailer wishes you were here
So your friends in World of Warcraft have finally convinced you to come back to the game. Great, but they're all Level 90 and you're Level Seriously Who Even Cares. They're decked out in epic garments while you're apparently dressed like some sort of drifter with plate armor. What are you going to do? How could you ever take part in their adventures? Well, you could buy Warlords of Draenor and just hit 90 immediately on the character of your choice. A dramatization of exactly that is available in the trailer just past the cut, with a Gnome taking the plunge and bypassing a whole lot of leveling content in the interim. Click on past the break to see it in action, and perhaps you'll be inspired to also vault past a whole bunch of leveling to get right to the top. [Thanks to Schippie for the tip!]
8 quests you might have skipped, but shouldn't
Right now in WoW is a time many of us know all too well: the pre-expansion lull. The last major content patch of Mists of Pandaria is out, and we're not going to see much new stuff until whenever 6.0 shows up on the horizon. Many of us are casting about looking for things to keep us occupied in the game until then--things such as finishing up old rep grinds, working on achievements, collecting mounts, and putting together the perfect transmog set. Something else you might consider doing is going back and finishing up some old, low-level quests, even if you're not working on your Loremaster title. And why might you want to do this? Because some low-level quests are pretty dang fun, good for a laugh, and offer some interesting perspectives in terms of fleshing-out Azeroth's world. I've picked out eight low-level quests (or quest chains) that are a particular delight. I've tried to focus on those in some of the world's more overlooked areas, so as to highlight a few fun adventures you might have missed. Unless otherwise marked, all listed quests are available to both factions.
How to keep leveling when you're just tired of the same old quests
By now, most of us have leveled alts, and probably a lot of them. And while the leveling game was probably fun the first time and even the second, by the third, fourth, fifth and beyond, you're probably painfully bored of doing the same quests again. And again. And again. Sure, there are all sorts of tricks you can use to speed up your leveling, but what do you do when you just can't stand to quest through the same zone again? That's when you turn to alternative leveling methods. These aren't the fastest or the most efficient ways to get to max level, but they do all have the advantage of not being the same old quest grind. So whether you're leveling a character up for the first time or the hundredth, here are our 6 favorite alternative ways to get the XP you need.
The Soapbox: Old content should stay relevant
The archetypal themepark MMO model, as popularised by World of Warcraft, is a race to the level cap in order to unlock the best content on offer. New content is tacked onto the endgame regularly, accompanied by improved gear and perhaps a higher level cap. It's a system that's designed to keep people playing by keeping them on a progression climb that's constantly getting steeper. As a consequence, endgame activities render older content obsolete since these outdated activities carry little real benefit for fully leveled characters. Exploring old content for the sake of experiencing it is not enough of a motivator for many players since this content simply cannot present the same challenge as it once did. Although you can technically go back and play through old dungeons, they will never be as fulfilling when tactics become optional and you can solo once-formidable opponents. In this week's Soapbox, I will mourn the loss of fantastic older content that was rendered obsolete through vertical progression, using WoW as a key example. I'll go on to suggest a solution that I think might allow for both old and new content to exist together in relevancy without significantly compromising the themepark MMO's existing progression mechanics.
MMO Mechanics: Comparing vertical and horizontal progression
MMO players strive to obtain some kind of tangible progression each play session, but the method by which that progression is delivered varies greatly across the genre. Archetypal themepark titles frequently rely on level-based progression that culminates in climbing through gear tiers at endgame, but the freeform nature of sandbox MMOs lends itself to a more open progression system that focuses on the holistic development of characters. These two progression systems are described as vertical and horizontal progression: Traditional gearing or leveling is commonly described as a vertical climb, while wider choice-based progression is more often expressed as a non-linear journey. The relative merits of these two diverging approaches to progression are commonly debated by modern MMO players. Many players wish to see a blended hybrid approach to progression that emphasises the horizontal, multi-faceted growth of their characters over rattling through yet another gear tier. Despite this, players still favour a goal-oriented attainment system and perhaps progressive gear that doesn't require a long run on the grinding treadmill. This balance can be very hard to achieve, so titles such as Guild Wars 2 have taken some knocks on the path towards perfect horizontal and vertical progression balance. In this week's MMO Mechanics, I will look at what is meant by both vertical and horizontal progression, how they are mechanically implemented in MMOs, and what each type of progression means for the playerbase.
The case against heirlooms
So I've been leveling my lowbie hunter through the fifties, in part because I'm such a fan of Happy Days (note - that's not at all true) and mostly because I got the bow off of Garrosh so it's time to get my hunter to max level. Ironically, it was the fact that I got this heirloom that has me realizing that I hate heirlooms. Why? Why do I hate these bringers of bonus XP, these delightfully powerful pieces that free you from the tyranny of gear upgrades for up to 85 levels? How could I have anything but praise for them? Well, here's how. The first, and most often cited reason, is that they make dungeon loot unimportant. You end up chaining dungeons, and almost any and all gear that you get is sharded or vendored. When boots or gloves drop it's a party, but helms, shoulders, chests, legs, cloaks and weapons are at best saved for future transmog. (Being a mog addict, that's what I'm doing anyway.) You can't even reasonably forgo heirlooms - I've actually tried to do so, and switching to the various quest greens and blue drops over my heirlooms means doing markedly less DPS (I'm a hunter, DPS is all I do) and getting crap in my dungeon runs from the heirloom clad tank and even, in some cases, the heirloom clad healer over it. Heirlooms are the expected norm nowadays - if you don't have them it's noticeable. Doing PvP on an heirloom clad hunter? Trivial. No one can stop me. I've actually stopped going. I tried going heirloomless for a while - all the people I'd annoyed seemed to come out of the woodwork for revenge. Ultimately, for myself at least, there's two issues with heirlooms - I like and want to preserve the bonus XP they grant, while disliking and wanting to remove the way they grant power and remove the fun of gear acquisition. So what am I suggesting?
Breakfast Topic: Do you chit-chat in random groups?
Good morning! Are you just sneaking in the Breakfast Topic daily, or are you lucky enough to be able to run the whole front page before lunchtime? Yeah, I don't normally play in the morning, either. It stinks. Sometimes the boss will catch me online during work hours, yeah -- but it's just to grab a quick screenshot for a new Breakfast Topic, know what I mean? It's not like I'm trying to slip through all my dailies or anything ... Chit-chat. We love it in the WoW Insider comments, we love in game, and we especially love and recommend it among groupmates, where it helps foster a spirit of cooperation and camaraderie. A friendly greeting at the outset of random groups or raids sets the stage for a more relaxed, personal experience and paves the way for questions, suggestions and comments about the content ahead. Once you've greeted your groupmates, though, do you keep up the friendly chatter? As a healer, I'm frequently too absorbed by the breakneck pace of most experienced tanks to type much once we've begun. I don't mind others who do, though, especially if they weave in a workmanlike mix of suggestions and gentle joking about our performance. I'll admit to tuning out when the talk turns to sports scores, though. That's when you'll notice players randomly making a Confession or Levitating gently through the instance on puffy little clouds. Oh yeah, sports talk. I'm bored. So do you chit-chat during random groups? Do you feel awkward when you get matched with an SBD (Silent But Deadly) group? Do you have a patented icebreaker for new groups?
Breakfast Topic: Your favorite leveling spot(s)
Chances are, you've spent a lot of time in World of Warcraft leveling, because for most of us having just a single main character isn't enough. Once you've leveled your main, maybe you want to see what it's like to play a different class or race. Maybe you want to see what the horde experience is like after playing alliance, or maybe you want to check out Kalimdor after leveling in the Eastern Kingdoms. Whatever the reason, most of us have alts for a change of pace -- and some die-hard alt-a-holics even aim to hit max level with every class or faction. All this adds up to an awful lot of leveling... and it probably leaves you with a really good grasp of the game's leveling zones. So today we're asking: what's your favorite leveling spot? Is there a zone or quest hub you just can't miss? A dungeon run you just can't get enough of? Tell us all about it!
Breakfast Topic: Where did you hit level 90?
Getting to level 90 may seem like old hat this late in the expansion cycle, but I bet you all remember just when and where you first (or last) hit the level cap. For my part, after skipping out of WoW for all of Cataclysm, I decided to play all the way through each Cataclysm zone with my monk before moving on to Pandaria. The result? I hit level 90 pretty early in Valley of the Four Winds, before even getting around to doing any of Hemet Nessingwary's grind-tastic -- and experience-tastic -- quests. Though after that, I wound up jumping over the wall into the Vale in order to train flying because I'd not yet done the gate opening quests... so it's probably not a leveling experience I'll repeat. Now that I've shared my level 90 story, how about yours? When and where did you hit level 90?
Tamriel Infinium: What to do in The Elder Scrolls Online besides PvP
As a part of my series of articles that explain some of the core features of The Elder Scrolls Online, I want to talk about what most people would consider obvious activities in the MMOs, but because of the way ZeniMax has advertised the game up to this point, many casual followers have come to believe that ESO will not have much in the way of PvE activities. Of course, players will level up via PvE, but beyond that, is there anything to do? What about group activities while you're leveling up? Are there endgame group activities? Is there raiding? Although I like PvP, much of my focus in MMOs is PvE-related. I enjoy story, exploration, and group activities. Save for the group activities, that's what The Elder Scrolls is to me. Exploring every ruin and cave or finding a hidden cult or hearing the NPCs talk about how they each took arrows to their knees defines the series for me. I don't think I could call a game Elder Scrolls without attaching defining PvE moments. I believe the developers at ZeniMax understand this, which is why they have hired some amazing voice actors to the game and why much of the website advertising revolves around the lore of the game. But is it enough to tell us what the game is about, and will ZeniMax finally show us?
The Daily Grind: Do you track your progress?
For most of my time in MMOs, I have had a spreadsheet. It tracks my levels in various game-relevant categories, it tracks my income over the past several days, it tracks my assets, and so forth. At a glance, it tells me everything I know about where I am in a given game... even if I know that it's largely irrelevant and I should really just be having fun and not worrying so much about transcribing every relevant bit of financial data. In a game like EVE Online, of course, there's a lot of benefit to keeping close track of your money and making sure that you know exactly how your assets are allocated. This is slightly less important in, say, Wizard101. But there's still a sense of fun to be found from tracking your progress in the game as a whole. So do you track your progress? Do you have a spreadsheet? Do you keep a list? Or do you just play the game without worrying too much about that sort of thing? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
MMO Mechanics: Kill 10 rats can be fun!
Quests are increasingly an MMO enthusiast's bread and butter, often becoming the staple component of a game's typical serving of progressive content. Over the years, developers have tried to serve up this familiar progression mechanic in many different ways: The modern themepark MMO makes us fetch, carry, explore, and investigate our way to the endgame through countless quest types and story arcs. Among the varieties of quest on offer, kill quests seem to cause the most tears and tantrums amongst picky players. No matter what developers do, there just isn't much love for missions that send characters off with a shopping list of mundane creatures to crush. Kill quests have become so common that plenty of MMOs have cheekily referenced the "10 rats" trope by literally making us smash in some rodent skulls, but killing cute, twitchy-nosed creatures is not the real problem. It's the uninspired kill list mechanic that often incites complaints of developer laziness, an argument that I don't think is justified. Kill quests exist to hone your skills through repetition, but they don't have to feel like an arduous grinding task and are actually a very useful mechanic for game designers. In this week's MMO Mechanics, I stand up for the unloved stepchild of questing; I'll show you that killing a list of creatures can be both contextually engaging and mechanistically interesting, depending on how it's presented.
Hyperspace Beacon: Leveling to max in SWTOR in less than a day
Periodically, the producers at BioWare will throw players a gift of double XP for a weekend in Star Wars: The Old Republic, or in the case of last July, three weekends. Over the American Thanksgiving holiday, SWTOR did it again, and I decided that I was going to take full advantage of it. Laura Williams, Lee Snyder, and I leveled five characters to level 50 in about 18 hours over that weekend, and today, I'm going to tell you how we did it. Laura mentioned reading a post on the official forums about two guys who leveled their characters over the July double-XP weekend in 23 hours of gameplay. Being the competitive player that she is, Laura had to beat that record. When I heard this, I knew I had to jump on board. There were some Republic classes that I had not played through yet, and I needed my fourth class buff. When I agreed to run with her over Thanksgiving, Lee joined in, too.
The Elder Scrolls Online shows off the process of building a character in a new video
One of the key features of The Elder Scrolls Online is building a character the way you want to play. It's been stated time and again that the game will allow you to build the sort of character you want rather than force you into a predefined setup. But what does the process look like in action? Well, why don't you just jump past the break and watch a new video showing off exactly how characters develop over time? When you choose a race and class at character creation, you gain access to one racial skill line and three class-based skill lines, but you also have access to a plethora of other skill lines so that neither race nor class forces you into a certain role. As you level, you gain skill points and attribute points, allowing you to customize your abilities as well as your individual distribution among survivability, magical skill, and weapon-based resources. Not to mention all of the other skill lines you can find over the course of play. For a more detailed look, jump on past the break to take a look at the full video.
Speed up level and reputation gains today by stacking holiday buffs
If you're working on picking up levels or reputations on any characters, today there's a confluence of holidays that will help you along the way. But you'll have to act fast, since Pilgrim's Bounty and the 9th Anniversary event end today. Here's what you need to do to get the most out of your grinding: The Pilgrim's Bounty Spirit of Sharing buff grants +10% reputation for an hour. Get it by going to any Pilgrim's Bounty table and chowing down on each type of food 5 times. The Darkmoon Faire WHEE! buff grants +10% experience and reputation for up to an hour. Just visit the Faire and ride the carousel until the buff stacks up to an hour. Alternatively, you could use the Darkmoon Top Hat to get the same buff -- but bear in mind the two buffs won't stack. Use your 9th Anniversary Celebration Package for +9% experience and reputation for an hour. The downside, as you may have already guessed, is that these buffs are limited duration, and the Pilgrim's Bounty buff and Darkmoon buff (unless you use the top hat) both require you to visit places to get them. Still, an hour of bonuses isn't bad. Plus, these can stack with other excellent leveling buffs like the monk's Enlightenment daily buff, heirloom buffs, and the Guild Battle Standard buff. So hurry up and get leveling!
Free for All: The other side of MMO leveling
As I pointed out in last week's column, I am more fond of spending money to obtain a high-level character than I am grinding out levels to gain one. As usual, I put out my opinion without considering how many people might take it the wrong way. To set the record straight and to give some evidence to the pro-leveling side of the argument, I would like to list off some of the reasons leveling is important. (Also in my opinion, of course.) While I did refer to leveling as drudgery, my opinion does not automatically set some universal definition. What can be drudgery to me can be bliss to someone else, and so -- because it is gaming -- the impact of leveling can be felt differently by different people. It's not science; it's opinion. Besides, it's not all drudgery anyway.
The Tattered Notebook: Forging your own leveling path in EverQuest II
Who needs the straight and narrow? Not I -- when referring to EverQuest II progression, that is. Those who catch my antics on Massively TV can certainly attest to the fact that I am more of a twist-and-turn-loving meanderer than a straight-line kinda gal. And that's even without the inevitable distraction of shinies! Luckily for me, EQII is made for just such a soul as mine with serious emphasis on the wander part of wanderlust. Folks who watch EverQuest Two-sday have seen me lope along the Golden Path, EQII's version of an in-game guide to where to level. But in EQII, the path is not a rigid set-up directing player steps as in many other themeparks. No, the Golden Path here is more of an occasional checkpoint along your journey that offers you just a nudge in the next general direction. Even then, you don't have to follow those implied suggestions. Maybe you'd prefer to forge your own path. That's where today's guide comes in! But unlike the recent guide for the new level 85s, this guide is for any and every level range, so no matter where you are now, you can see all the possibilities for where to go next.
The Elder Scrolls Online opens a grab bag of questions
Sometimes questions don't fit together in a nice theme. The Elder Scrolls Online often bunches questions together with an overarching element, but the most recent round of questions is a real grab bag. It covers everything from resurrection and PvP environments to mixing and matching armor, from weapon styles to disguises. So there's plenty to unpack, in other words. The discussion of Veteran Points and the corresponding Veteran Ranks is probably the most meaty part, shedding light on a system that's only been discussed in brief elsewhere. In essence, Veteran Points serve as a new form of leveling after a character has reached max level, awarded for tasks completed rather than simply slaying enemies. While players still gain stat increases for improving Veteran Rank, the major benefit is the continued acquisition of skill points, allowing players to broaden their abilities even after reaching the apex of power. You can read the full set of answers on the official site.
