<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\nIt’s very hard to take a picture of this guy and even harder to give it the proper context, but what you’re seeing is me riding a gryphon up the almost sheer vertical face of a mountain. I don’t know of any way you could reach this spot on foot, and even if you could the ground would be too steep for you to hold on. You’d slide right off the mountain.<\/p>\n
Yet there’s this dwarven guard always milling around up here. I still chuckle when I see him. What must he have done to get assigned guard duty on the barren backside of the mountain where no other creature can tread? <\/p>\n
I’ll be very disappointed if I manage to click on him someday and see he’s just named “Ironforge Guard”. I like to think he’s a named NPC with some scandalous mistake in his past. Perhaps his name is Brawler Ironliver. Six years ago the king returned from a difficult military campaign to find a vat of Kingly Ale had gone missing, his ceremonial mount was wedged in the door of his majesty’s bedchamber, his teenage daughters were both pregnant, his scepter had been affixed to the front of a statue in a profane manner, and Brawler Ironliver was passed out on his throne wearing nothing but the royal crown, which was not<\/em> on his head.<\/p>\n I’m on a horse.<\/p>\n A horse is the mount for humans. Normally you can only buy your race-specific mount. (Which means an elephantine Elykk for a Draenei like my character.) The exception is if you can raise your reputation with another race to exalted, they will sell you one of their mounts. In the past I’ve read stories about the mind-shattering tedium involved in such a task. It was reportedly some of the slowest, most painful grinding in the game. Days or weeks of extremely repetitive and dull questing for no loot or XP just to slowly improve the relationship with the desired faction. <\/p>\n So imagine my surprise when I hit exalted with the humans more or less on accident. I assume this is one of the parts of the game where they sped things up. <\/p>\n I prefer the horse simply because being lower to the ground makes it feel faster. Kind of like how tiny gnomes feel like they move so quickly compared to (say) a male Draenei, even though they have exactly the same running speed.<\/p>\n The random dungeon finder is indeed a great feature. You click the button, it puts you in the queue, and once it assembles a group for you you’re whisked away to the dungeon. Being in a group is really the only time you get to use your big powerful area-damage abilities. Any other time, and you’ll just piss off more foes than you can handle at once. But in a group one player will act as a tank and gather up all the foes into one spot and hold their attention while you call down ludicrous punishment and see delightful clouds of yellow damage numbers tick away. <\/p>\n The group needs 1 person to tank, 1 person to heal, and 3 people to deal damage. On my server, we are always, always, always starved for tanks. When I jump in the queue we’ll have 3 damage-dealers in under two minutes. A healer in five. But it will usually take twenty minutes for the server to find us a tank. <\/p>\n I rolled a tank (a warrior) myself to alleviate this problem, but then realized just how much of a challenge the role is. You need to be at the front of the group, which means you need to know the layout of any random dungeon you might land in. And some of these places are incomprehensibly huge. The city of the Dark Iron Dwarves has so many routes, so many branches, so many bosses, so many doors that require quest items to enter, and so much vertical travel that even after running through it a dozen times I still don’t feel like I could lead a group through there without getting stuck or lost.<\/p>\n On top of this, the tank is the one character who absolutely must<\/strong> know his or her job. If your healer performs poorly, you might have to take a potion now and again and it will get dangerous when things go wrong. If your DPS people are lacking in skill or under-equipped then progress will be slow and you’ll probably need to rest more often. But if your tank can’t do the job right your group is screwed<\/em>. The role of the tank is to attract and command the attention of enemies. (Called “holding aggro”.) If enemies don’t stay on the tank they’ll run off and start pounding on the DPS or the healers, and those folks have to stop doing their jobs. The entire group dynamic unravels and if the tank can’t recover aggro the party will be wiped out.<\/p>\n I’ve been in groups with inept tanks, and it’s always a painful experience. You’ve just waited 20 minutes to get a dungeon, and you find yourself with some tank who can’t hold any aggro, or who can only hold aggro on one foe at a time. No matter how gently I attack, any damage dealt to an enemy will cause them to forsake the tank and make a beeline for me. It’s obvious this player simply does not have any idea how to play their class, which is sort of alarming when everyone is in their mid-50’s. <\/p>\n Sadly, I don’t know how the tank classes work so I can’t even offer advice. And not all players are open to teaching. <\/p>\n Once you realize you’re with a bad tank there’s nothing you can do. If you leave the group the game will penalize you for abandoning the group and you won’t be able to use the dungeon finder for half an hour. Or you can stick with the tank until the party gets wiped out, the group disbands, and then you can wait out your ten minutes of resurrection sickness and another twenty minutes in the dungeon finder queue. But no matter what you do, the moment you’re thrown into a dungeon with a bad tank your forward progress is going to stop for the better part of an hour.<\/p>\n And speaking of death, this is where the random dungeon really falls apart. The way death works in a random dungeon is beyond stupid. If you have to make a corpse run, you will appear outside<\/em> of the dungeon and must do a long walk just to reach the front door. Note that if you’re new to the game at all this means you’ll be marching for several minutes through unfamiliar territory where everything looks the same because in death the world is rendered in back and white with thick fog. And then when you reach the map arker to enter the dungeon you’ll be in the open. The dungeon entrance is somewhere directly under your feet, but you have no way of knowing which way to go to find the cave that leads underground. <\/p>\n And if you do<\/em> reach the dungeon, you still have to make it back to your body, somewhere inside of this sprawling three dimensional maze. Have fun!<\/p>\n This generally means that a party wipe will result in the group disbanding. You’ll spend twenty minutes waiting in the queue, followed by ten minutes of bad grouping, followed by ten more minutes of resurrection sickness and a trip to the smith for a hefty repair bill. This is a really frustrating way to waste forty minutes. About one in eight trips seem to end this way, which really degrades the value of the dungeon finder for me.<\/p>\n These dungeons were designed for groups of friends who know the quests and who are working together specifically to overcome these challenges. But now they’re being used by groups of random strangers for leveling. You can get into groups where nobody knows where to go or where the bosses are. <\/p>\n If I were designing the game today, I would make the dungeons for random players into linear places with a boss fight every ten minutes. So groups could decide if they wanted to stop at the ten, twenty, or thirty minute mark and call the place done. I would have the corpse run begin at the front door or (if you really, really feel that a timesink punishment is a required aspect of death) make it a straightforward route to get back to the action. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My favorite NPC in World of Warcraft is this guy: It’s very hard to take a picture of this guy and even harder to give it the proper context, but what you’re seeing is me riding a gryphon up the almost sheer vertical face of a mountain. I don’t know of any way you could […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9052","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pictures"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9052","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9052"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9052\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9052"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9052"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9052"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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