Friday, October 12, 2012

I started playing WoW (World of Warcraft) in January, 2007.  Here is my current lead character:

      http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/uldum/chronoslycan/advanced

I play mostly in the Uldum realm, secondarily in Antonidas, and not so much in a few other realms.  In Uldum, I run with the guild Dungeon Crusaders.  I play with the Alliance in most realms, though I started with the Horde, and retains some Horde characters.  I play the DPS role almost exclusively these days, but I hope to get into healing and tanking.

A. Things I like about MoP so far:
  1. Tumbleweeds--not realistic, but nicely done.
  2. Lightning storms, clouds, rain--love it.
  3. New shoulder armour buffs in Inscription
  4. New devices in Engineering, notably tinkers and the trinkets with +600 cogwheels.
  5. Kites for transport
  6. One can choose class and specialisation when dealing with some vendors.  This makes the choices the vendor offers much more relevant.
  7. The DPS version of the monk class has been a lot of fun, at least on a human character.
B. A sampling of the changes I don't like about the MoP contraction (it was not an expansion).  Much of this was present in the 5.0.3 wound (it was not a patch).
  1. The castration of the talent trees.  The amount of tuning a player can do is strongly reduced.
  2. The new offerings in the stunted talent trees are remarkably not useful.  For some classes, the eighteen possible choices contain perhaps one or two that I want for that class.
  3. The elimination of prime glyphs, plus turning minor glyphs into meaningless appearance changers means that one has 3 meaningful choices for glyphs, not 9.  Why inhibit configuration choices of the players this much?
  4. The castration of profession trainers.  There is no longer any need to separate them, since they do not have separate offerings.
  5. Automatic installation of new spells on level up.  The game puts the new spell glyph where it wants on your action bars.  This is irritating at best.  I would much rather buy the spells and install them where I want them, when I want to do it.  When this automatic install occurs in a dungeon run, it is a pain.
  6. Pandas are ugly in appearance and have stupid-looking movements.  The males remind me of Kung Fu Panda, which I did not care for in the least, but was commercially successful and quite well-known.  I am continually reminded of a non-WoW property being used in WoW.
  7. Pet battles.  This is strongly derivative of Pokemon, a very long running anime television series and card game--which I do not care for in the least, and hate to see imported to WoW.
  8. Panda newbie area: the cursed pools are a direct ripoff of Ranma 1/2, a Japanese anime series (and manga) which ran for seven years.  This makes at least 3 direct 'borrowings' of popular anime series.  Someone more familiar with anime and manga would probably find even more examples.  Blizzard should do better; this smacks of intellectual property theft.
  9. The elimination of the tie between the size of total Intellect and the size of the mana pool: again, Blizzard decides for you what should be determined by individual planning and effort.  My mana using characters no longer manage mana, since they are no longer able to exhaust it. One would conjecture that mana will be eliminated in all classes, just as it was eliminated in Hunters, in favor of something limiting and not controllable, such as focus.
  10. The dropping of reputation based buffs for head gear.  What was Blizzard thinking?
  11. The elimination of the 'ranged' slot: there is no longer separate slots for wands, bows, guns, and relics.  This continues the 'dumb-down everything' trend noted above.  For hunters in particular, the tactics are changed.  One does not have to separate near and far combat.
  12. Multi-looting.   This seems like a good idea, but the implementation is seriously flawed.  About half the time, my characters get stuck looting.  No, it is not all the time.  Having one's characters freeze in place, while the game may or may not complete the auto-loot is dangerous for the characters' health, especially in dungeons or near high spawn rate areas (hozen and the like).
  13.  Cooking, farming, Tillers---what is this?  Farmville?  Yet another ripoff?
  14. Some of the primary/secondary professions were just too easy.  Getting from 525 skill level to 600 was almost effortless.  Mining, Inscription, and First Aid come to mind.
C.  As I take my level (89, 87, 86, 85) characters to level 90 I'll have more comments.  Also, I will have more to say about what I've outlined in A and B above. As I take my three monk characters (one DPS, one healer, one tank) from level one to as high a level as far as I can stand working with them.  My level 30 DPS character is my favourite so far.  The healer (level 14) might be OK, but the tank (level 13) is really foul so far.  Hopefully the tank will improve.