World Of Warcraft

I've been leveling with my brother, and because of our different schedules I've been spending a lot of time on pet battles. I'm up to around level 19 fighting Outland trainers, and I hate it more the higher level I get. Maybe I'm just spoiled by the actual Pokemon games. I feel like most of the changes or simplifications were for the worse. For example, weaknesses and strengths are much less effective in World Of Warcraft, which makes level much more important. The smaller team also makes it harder to have a variety of types. It's just... bad.

A first impressions blog, from yours truly.

I wonder... you get knocked out during the airship battle in Horde intro. Would you have been a dead dragon on the deck if you were a tauren/troll druid?

I have to agree, leveling pets is a pain already and I'm only about level 7. I'll grind rep and gear in this game and won't complain without a good reason. I hope they might tweek something in the pet battle system to make it less grindy, XP, weaknesses, whatever. I just don't want to grab random higher level pets. I want my Mini-Diablo.

I'll probably focus on leveling, save pets for my LFR queues.

The basic problem is that levels overcome almost every other consideration. Weaknesses are all well and good, but their effect is so minimal that this merely puts you on par with a higher level enemy. To add insult to injury, they decided to give pet battles a hit system similar to the main game, where low level pets will find it hard to even hit the enemy while they can routinely hit you with multi-hit attacks. Overall, they made it hard to level up while at the same time making it so you need to level up.

The most important change would be some number tweaking to make strategy more powerful than levels. Increasing the damage bonus/penalty for proper type usage would be a step in the right direction. As it is right now, I often ignore the fact that the enemy is strong against my spider since he's just the highest level and has a nice healing combo that lets him outlast most enemies. I should care that Flying takes less damage from Beast, but I don't.

Also, it's incredibly stupid that you lose all the experience for the entire battle if you happen to die on the third opponent. My guy solos two in row? No XP for you, slacker. Even though you died from poison while in the back row. In fact, you get nothing for losing. Just a waste of time and even more time from the healing. Honestly, pet battles are currently the most hardcore game system in the game right now. It's got all the "quality of life" problems that Blizzard has systematically removed from the rest of the game. It has the biggest death penalties, the most grind, etc etc. People often say this was a way of attracting younger or more casual players, but I really can't see them sticking with it when it's so punishing.

edited 28th Sep '12 2:26:46 PM by Clarste

the levels imbalance is the easiest to fix, just don't Pv P battle till your team is at 25, it's what I'm doing.

I don't Pv P battle ever. I'm talking about fighting the master trainers for the quests. Although it's true that reaching max level should help a lot. The final Outland trainer is level 24, so Northrend, Cataclysm and Pandaria should all have trainers at the same level. Maybe the game opens up around then.

actaully, it seems that if you complete all the trainers, not sure if it's in a zone or all of them, they open up to be battled once per day.

also, loving the quests as epic, funny, random and WTF as ever.

after rolling a depressed Pandaren home as he tried to talk vultures into eating him, I then helpped a monkey brew up some laxatives to feed to panda's.

and it makes just as much sense in context.

The pet battle dailies are bugged right now. They just don't work. Probably has something to do with account-wide quests, which is a mechanic that's not used anywhere else.

Oh hey, Mo P came out. I didn't notice and apparently most people didn't.

So how is it?

Two Words: Digital Distribution.

I think its best to wait for Acti Blizz's Quarterly call to see how many people actually bought the game.

They might embellish it, but they are really the only ones who have the numbers on the digital distribution.

I should also note, there are a lot of returning players and many of the high population servers which weren't full before now have que times. Which is kinda standard for beginning of expansion.

On another note, has anyone done any challenge modes?

edited 1st Oct '12 12:31:01 AM by tclittle

I'll also note that they released a bunch of the new stuff for people who haven't bought the expansion, which they've not done much in the past. The new race and a few other features, such as Pet Battles, are available to all.

This says to me that Blizzard's priority with this expansion is not to extract $40 from every subscriber. It's shifting, for its North American base at least, to at least somewhat of a maintenance mode. What matters to them, most critically, is keeping people playing who aren't as heavily invested in the game.

I wonder how much longer Blizzard's ability to double-dip from the pockets of its players will last; I'm not sure subscription payments AND $40 upgrades is a sustainable model.

Anecdotally, the people I know who bought the physical upgrade are those who bought the collector's edition with all the extras. People just wanting to play the game clicked the upgrade button, bought it online, and played it.

Another anecdotal bit of evidence; my guild's online numbers are approximately double what they were earlier in 2012. That says a lot of people have been interested enough to be playing again.

edited 1st Oct '12 4:57:16 AM by Morven

The massive number of realms with queues argues against this release being unsuccessful. Strongly argues, I might add.

I'm level 89 as of about 12:30 AM this morning. I've done all four of the starting dungeons and made it through Jade Forest, Valley of the Four Winds, and a good chunk of the way into Kun-Lai Summit. I've maxed Herbalism, I'm at 588/600 Alchemy, and I've maxed First Aid (although that's almost absurdly easy — I maxed it on three characters so far with the cloth I've looted).

I'm still wielding Dragonwrath because of the sheer awesome, although I found a 465 offhand through Archaeology that I'm waiting to pair up with a decent 450-ish mainhand. My average item level is up to 420 or so through various quest rewards. I'm farming carrots, and my primary battle pet team is up to level 15. I've got about 12 unique pets to go to get the 250 achievement, but to get there I'm going to have to start battling in the 50+ zones where the wild pets start getting really tough.

Green Tea Leaves are goddamn everywhere. It's to the point where I am not bothering to pick them. We've got something like 600 in our guild bank. I'm going to have to start farming Golden Lotus when I get through raising carrots to level Cooking.

The quest design is amazingly good so far, although I've run into a few annoying phasing bugs — that one quest where you have to bust the yeti out of the cage wouldn't work the first time I tried it in a 3-man group; we kept getting stuck in different phases. We did all manage to get it done eventually but it took some fiddling.

The most humorous moments so far have been kicking a monkey in the butt to knock him into an evil altar which disintegrated him, and riding the belly of a rampaging yeti.

Stormstout Brewery is my favorite dungeon so far - battling a giant Alemental just doesn't get old.

It must be pointed out that there is absolutely no point in buying a physical copy of World Of Warcraft unless you want the collector's edition toys. When I bought Cata, the only thing I ever used out of the box was the licence code. The DVD is worthless; that stuff is already downloaded.

Thus, I'd say that judging the success on physical sales — and, note, not even official numbers, but someone's presumably slightly educated guess — is crazy. Physical sales for several expansions have been mostly just a historical artifact, but people are increasingly used to buying online digital content now.

But yeah — it's way too busy in there for the expansion to have been a failure by any measure.

Well, I suspect CRZ has a hand in making some realms have queues, since they are now hosting characters from outside their realm. (This is an observation, not an accusation.)

It makes more sense when the fact is that I haven't seen all that many people leveling. I've typically run into 3-4 people in the same area as me at most (and often less) while questing. If this is true for most servers, it tells me more people are doing pet battles or mucking about with pandas or monks than trying to reach 90. (Which would inflate the CRZ usage.)

YMMV on if this is good or bad.

I don't know the details of Blizzard's architecture but it would seem very odd for CRZ to affect login queues.

Yeah, that doesn't make a lot of sense, the tool designed to average out populations across multiple realms is over-populating realms to queue levels?

Still 86 on my main. I go slowly. Still in the Jade Forest, place is beautiful, loving finding little quest hubs around and it will make leveling alts a lot less tedious.

I also love my farm. Takes maybe two minutes to get it prepped and ready for the day. Hell, the only thing that takes my time with farming is deciding on what I want to plant.

And holy shit! Engineers can sell our dragonling trinket and cogwheels!

edited 1st Oct '12 7:55:53 AM by Rotpar

I'm level 90. I maxed enchanting and alchemy a few days ago, and archaeology yesterday. Actually, I got all the Mo P archaeology rares before I maxed it... I've run all the heroic dungeons a few times and I'm already getting bored of them. I have a max level spider, but I recently realized that he's probably uncommon-power instead of rare so that might have been a waste of time. The most compelling thing to me right now is the Tillers rep and the farm.

They'd have to have sold 2.5 million units digitally for it to be on the same level as cata. Considering companies trumpet sales figures from the mountains it's not a stretch to assume they haven't met that figure. Still, it's not like wow is in danger of dying. It still makes money on a level not seen since cocaine use in the 80's.

But to my other question: I was thinking of booting up a free account just to check out the changes. IS it worth my time without mop installed?

With a free account, you can access everything up to level 20. As far as I know, that includes Pandaren characters, although I don't know if it unlocks Monks or Pet Battles.

You can see pandas and the panda starting zone. You can see the class changes. You can't get high enough in the free edition to see Pandaria anyway, so the only difference is that you won't be able to try the monk out.

I think also, the change in time of year for the upgrade is going to affect rapid sales. Students are in school, at the start of term / semester. Summer entertainment budgets are already blown. At the same time, we're still in the bright time of year in the northern hemisphere; dark nights aren't yet pointing people toward indoor pursuits like gaming yet, and they're not getting the benefit of Christmas pre-orders or advanced presents, either.

edited 1st Oct '12 10:18:51 AM by Morven

You can't access Monks without Mists, and there is a gold cap which prevents you from even getting the training for Pet Battles.

edited 1st Oct '12 9:22:10 AM by tclittle

Right. Back to an earlier topic, I bought the digital upgrade as well. No point in getting a physical box for something that I already downloaded. I did consider getting the Collector's Edition, but apparently you can upgrade it online at any time, so all I'm missing from the box are the feelies. Considering that I have all three previous expansions' CE boxes sitting on a shelf gathering dust...

edited 1st Oct '12 9:56:04 AM by Fighteer

Pet Battles available without Mists?

I'm somehow amazingly keen on this...

@Morven

Physical copies aren't entirely useless, I for one need them because I can't download the files online (internet is too crap).

I'm surprised you can play the game if your internet is that crap, frankly. Or is it more to do with data caps? I can see that making a difference.