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Wumpus's World of Warcraft (PC)
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| [January 11, 2007 02:30:38 PM]
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Alright, well after more naxx raids and continued playtime perhaps it is best to address how World of Warcraft handles its economy. Generally I think this is one of the largest downfalls in MMO design. On a broad view WoW does a fairly good job of building and regulating an economy. However on a more from a more microeconomic view, there were some seriously stupid decisions made. Ill go into more detail on at least one of those decisions later. Another important aspect of any MMO economy is how the developer addresses the issue of third party companies attempting to turn an REAL LIFE profit via farming gold, items, and resources and selling them on the web for in-game delivery. WoW does a pretty poor job, as to most of the MMO's at this. However, the Bind on equip/ pickup system is one of Blizzards best decsions on helping to regulate the economy and the strongest tool against the third parties. This makes the third party unable to sell very many useful ITEMS, not to be confused with their ability to sell gold. The farmers / gold sellers occasionally find loops in the system and find a way to dominate the economy, but generally its pretty short lived due the fact that blizzard will close the loophole with the next patch. But enough about that.
One of the huge flaws in game design can be found in profession known for being good at making money . . . Herbalism. Why is Herbalism good? because it can farm dreamfoil. Dreamfoil is a endgame herb that is pretty much used in every single potion a caster in WoW will want to use, not to mention its used in all of the Greater "blank" Protection potions. So when I go out to pick my herbs, I don't ever go to a zone where I can't find dreamfoil. As a druid, the rate at which I will go through the stuff is crazy. Here is a list of some of the most popular consumables a healer would want to use on a hard raid.
Major Mana Potions*
Greater Dreamless sleep potions*
Mageblood potions*
Flask of Distilled Wisdom*
Major Healing potion*
Greater (fire,frost,poison) Protection potion*
Dark rune
Greater mana oil
Some food that will give you a buff
Alright, consumables marked with a * are made by alchemists, who are the people that use 95% of the herbs in the game. Of those marked, here is the ones that need dreamfoil to me made
Major Mana pots
Greater Dreamless Sleep
Mageblood
Flask of Distilled Wisdom
So as you can see dreamfoil is nearly everything that I would make for personal use on a raid. That is unnecessary, and has lead to nothing more than an increase in the prince in G it takes to raid. I hope there is not an equivalent to dreamfoil or mistakes in other professions in the upcoming expansion. Fixing these issues would really help the overall economy of WoW.
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| [January 10, 2007 12:43:49 PM]
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Well, to open this up ill preface by saying I play this game a lot, to much really, but whatever. On my primary WoW account, (we won't go into the others, because it just makes me look even more devoid of a real life), I have three level 60 Toons, which until Jan 16th, is the max attainable level.
Undead mage ~ 74 days played
Undead priest ~ 19 days played
Night Elf Druid (current toon) ~ 52 days played
Totaling 146 days x 24 hrs/day for = 3504 hours logged on three toons.
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Our first naxx boss kill, roughly a 4 hour raid before the boss died.
My alliance druid is part of a reroll guild, so we just this week began to venture into Naxxramus, which for those who don't know is the hardest raiding content in currently in WoW. Contempt (my guild's name) looked to kill Anub'rekan.
Anub, is an pretty easy boss by naxx standards, there is also, as of now that is, pretty much only one viable overall strat on how to do his encounter. Basically, from my experience in the encounter, and the research we did beforehand there are several critical elements. During the encounter the raid has to deal with Anub'rekan who is basically a huge beetle/spider thing, 1-2 of his minion spiders, 100's of little tiny scarabs which come of dead bodies, a conical AOE (area of effect) impale from anub, and a giant poisonous cloud of insects and Anub spits out.
They way we killed him was by killings his adds (minions), which can only sorta be tanked. THen using our mages to frost nova the scarabs, kill them, and finally with any remaining time before anub spit out his his insect swarm DPS him before the tank has to move him around to avoid the poison. You basically rinse, wash and repeat this cycle as many times as you need to DPS the boss down. All told it took us 13 attempts to get him dead, so in the end the raid was a success.
Problems we had, and how we solved them:
Initially, I had assigned (I and the 3-4 other officers, who make our strats) our better healers, druids, priests, and paladins, to watching the MT who was tanking anub'rekan. However we kept having the DPS'ers covering the add groups and scarabs dying. You can't have that, because the more bodies on the ground the more scarabs you have to deal with each cycle. To solve this problem we changed the healing scheme around a bit. I moved our lesser healers to cover the MT, who really wasn't taking very much damage. Then put a pally + a okayish priest on each add group, and finally had our three best power healers, 2 druids (myself being one) and a priest, to cover the four dps groups. This healing scheme made mana last longer, and resulted in few deaths.
The rest of this fight is basically getting the pattern down, eventually it clicked and we killed him.
My Job on Anub'rekan:
Being a 51 pt resto druid, my job is always healing. On this encounter myself and two other good healers watched 20 people, and make sure they didn't die. I also made sure I had a HoT (heal over time) on our MT as he moved across the room with Anub'rekan chasing him. Basically my job was pretty easy, because save some random spike dmg from a crit cleave on a leather armor, or a impale, I could pretty well Keep everyone I needed to keep alive with low ranks of healing touch, or my HoT, which ticks for 535 unbuffed atm.
My thoughts:
Off all the content I've played in WoW, I think Anub'rekan is one of the more fun encounters. Why? Several reasons. Firstly it teaches, and forces everyone to work on the move due to the nature of the poison cloud. Working on the go really helps to keep things interesting. Also, the element of the 100's of scarabs really adds a sort of chaotic presence throughout the encounter, the trick to anub is really taking all the elements and controlling (if thats the right word) them into a form of organized chaos. It way more enjoyable than a tank and spank encounter like most of MC/BWL, and its a nice break from the huge amount of LoS (line of sight) encounters that blizz loved so much in BWL. I also detest AQ 40, so its nice to be raiding Naxx instead of AQ.
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| [January 10, 2007 12:22:52 PM]
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Well, to open this up ill preface by saying I play this game a lot, to much really, but whatever. On my primary WoW account, (we won't go into the others, because it just makes me look even more devoid of a real life), I have three level 60 Toons, which until Jan 16th, is the max attainable level.
Undead mage ~ 74 days played
Undead priest ~ 19 days played
Night Elf Druid (current toon) ~ 52 days played
Totaling 146 days x 24 hrs/day for = 3504 hours logged on three toons.
-----------------------------
Our first naxx boss kill, roughly a 4 hour raid before the boss died.
My alliance druid is part of a reroll guild, so we just this week began to venture into Naxxramus, which for those who don't know is the hardest raiding content in currently in WoW. Contempt (my guild's name) looked to kill Anub'rekan.
Anub, is an pretty easy boss by naxx standards, there is also, as of now that is, pretty much only one viable overall strat on how to do his encounter. Basically, from my experience in the encounter, and the research we did beforehand there are several critical elements. During the encounter the raid has to deal with Anub'rekan who is basically a huge beetle/spider thing, 1-2 of his minion spiders, 100's of little tiny scarabs which come of dead bodies, and a giant poisonous
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Wumpus's World of Warcraft (PC)
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Current Status: Playing
GameLog started on: Tuesday 1 March, 2005
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