I realize this screen shot is a cliche. I joked about it with Matticus the other day. It’s as striking as it is matter-of-fact, but definitely over-dramatic. Many have traveled this path already, and their departure is no different than mine. And, hey, I could have included a shot of the sun setting in Stormwind Harbor, or a mock photo of me slashing my wrists, but each would have been in poor taste.

I’m sure by now most of my readers knew this day was coming. I’d already stopped playing the game, and the only reason it remained on my hard drive was so I could get screen shots and video footage for the Cataclysm review.

I’ve already discussed most of my reasons for quitting the game, but I haven’t really talked about one of my reasons. So let’s summarize:

1. I’m generally burnt out on WoW. After seven years, that’s what happens.
2. I think WoW is becoming outdated and hasn’t changed fast enough.
3. I’m not optimistic about the future of MMOs.
4. I want to focus on more than just WoW.

I don’t want to dwell on most of these points, because I’ve already written entries about them. But the second and fourth points deserve some elaboration.

On the Rate of Change in WoW

Recently, Ghostcrawler (Greg Street) posted a blog entry on the World of Warcraft community site talking about how they approach development. In this entry, he was very forthcoming about their philosophies when it comes to making changes to the game. Specifically, he talked about the concepts underlying changes that are implemented in new expansions.

We hear from players who say “My dude hasn’t fundamentally changed in years,” and they want something, anything, that makes them look at their character in a new light. We don’t want to fix things that aren’t broken of course, but we do want to make sure that a new expansion feels all new. Expansions are opportunities to reinvigorate the player base and the gameplay itself. Therefore, you shouldn’t always view a class revamp as meaning your character is horribly broken and adrift on a sea of designer ignorance and apathy. We probably won’t ever reach a point where a particular class has reached perfection and no additional design iteration is necessary. Change, in moderation, is healthy. (Source)

 

That Greg would write this particular entry immediately after I finished my review of Cataclysm is as coincidental as much as it is convenient. It allows me to get in one last comment on the issue before I close up shop.

Over the past couple years, I’ve come to really like Greg. There was a time I didn’t, but I’ve warmed up to him with each intelligent post and each project he’s worked on. He’s proven he best understands what the game needs and what the players want—things like closer oversight of class balance and quality-of-life improvements that come with systems like the dungeon finder. He’s also proven he is aware of some of WoW’s issues, both existing and developmental in nature.

In this case, he leaves a lot unsaid, because he is toeing the company line. He doesn’t want to reveal to us what changes he personally thinks are needed, because that can be perceived as acknowledging explicit weaknesses in the game, which many investors and company men view as “bad PR.” But he is forthcoming about the fact that changes need to be made to keep the game fresh, which is more than what many employees of a company will publicly admit. And I like that sort of honesty.

One thing I do contest, however, is that “Change, in moderation, is healthy.” Personally, I think more than moderation is needed. When TBC was released, the amount of change was enormous. Heroic dungeons were introduced. Raid bosses were more complex and challenging, across the board. Resilience, the arena system and a linear honor system were added for PvP. Off-specs were made much more useful than they’d ever been. Raids were downsized from forty to twenty-five players. And the entry raid dungeon only required ten people. These were all incredible changes, and some were shocking. And what happened? The number of subscriptions increased. In part, due to releasing the game in other countries, but also because the game was improving. But we haven’t seen this degree of change for a long while.

I’d argue the amount of change needed now is very large. The quest system (at least for the end-game) needs to be revamped, with introductions and conclusions playing out using the in-game cut-scene engine (or some variant thereof). Of course, the ability to skip these scenes and to check the quest log must remain for players with short attention spans. The way abilities work could also do with a fundamental overhaul to make them more enjoyable. A nice start would be to either scrap or change abilities that cause players to lose control of their characters. However, I don’t think changes to abilities should be limited to just this. I’d like to see more emphasis put on the abilities you choose to use. Not in the sense that one spell does more damage than another, and then goes on cooldown, forcing you to use other spells. I’m talking about making each spell different in style, like using EMP with a ghost in Starcraft 2 on cloaked units, or against units with energy. I’d like to see some radical changes made to certain abilities, like making (for example) pyroblast work like a targeted projectile, exploding on impact with the ground (maybe even bouncing a few times before it resolves). Things like that. As it stands, most abilities fly at your targeted unit and simply do damage or perform a simple function.

Of course, I realize some of these proposals might not be technically possible with the current server-client architecture. But then that’s why Blizzard needs to be able to change that architecture to meet the demands of desired game design decisions. I also realize Blizzard might disagree with my specific proposals. That’s fine with me. I just want Blizzard to be aware of the fact that I think the degree of change with each expansion needs to increase. And the quality of changes need to be better. Don’t rush things, as it seemed Cataclysm was. Take your time. That’s what you’re known for. Sure, some people might get a little impatient while they wait for the next expansion, but the game is already bleeding subscriptions with the current approach. So take a chance and see how it works out.

On Focusing on More Than WoW

When I say I’d like to focus on more than just WoW, I mean that in two ways. In one sense, it means I’d like to write about more games than just WoW. In another, it means I don’t want WoW to impede some of my goals in life—to possibly go to graduate school or get a second degree; to possibly work on a running vlog where I go around and show people all the trails they haven’t found in the south bay; or to possibly get a full-time job.

In many ways, WoW has always tended to get in the way of my goals and desires. Though, for a while, that was fine with me. I enjoyed playing WoW. And I enjoyed critiquing and writing about it. But when the joy is no longer there, you have to move on.

And so this is where I stand today.

The End of Lume the Mad

This entry marks the end of my time writing for Lume the Mad and my time playing WoW. I don’t want to say I won’t ever return to WoW, because I might buy the next expansion just to play through the leveling zones. But I won’t ever play it to the same extent I did before. Not unless the game changes radically.

Where I go from here is left to be seen. Currently, I am leaning towards launching a general gaming blog. But I could very well end up writing about movies, books, games, running, or some combination of these. Or I could end up doing something completely different, like embarking on a second degree or starting a new job that demands my full attention. I’m still hammering out my plans.

Whatever I end up doing, I will no longer be writing analyses of WoW, guild leading, druids, or anything relating to WoW on this blog.

It had a great run, and I thank you all for everything. And I especially want to thank those of you who have stayed with me until the very end. I really appreciate your support. It means a lot to me.

Signing out,

—Lume

Considering the competition, there are so many things WoW does right. Increased accessibility ensures players can get involved in the most basic parts of the end-game without too much frustration, and without making the game easier (and before you say it is, I will ask you to take off your nostalgia goggles). Whenever I play another game and I’m forced to troll a general or trade channel to find a group, I realize, “Gee! This is something WoW does right!” And with this and other similar comparisons put into consideration, WoW remains one of the best MMOs, if not the best MMO, on the market today.

But that really isn’t saying much, because MMOs are not where they should be. And Catclysm hasn’t done much to fix the systemic problems WoW endures—the UI clutter, the lack of production value, how classes affect play, etc. I’ve already exhausted most of these topics, so I won’t go into more long-winded commentary about them. I will only tire of it, as much as my audience will tire reading about it.

Instead, I will offer a brief conclusion of sorts. And, frankly, I think Cataclysm is the worst expansion to date. The improvements were minimal. RBGs were incredibly rushed, and its ratings system buggy. It was released with fewer raids than I would have liked. The new in-game cut-scene engine wasn’t used as often as it should have been. You still have to read boring quest text boxes. And the fundamentals of the game haven’t changed enough to help the game break free from stagnation. These outweigh any bright spots of this expansion—the dungeon finder, the art design, the music, the fact that RBGs are now actually in the game, the needed changes for older content, etc.

If Cataclysm is an indicator of what future expansions will bring to the table, I think Blizzard should seriously consider starting work on WoW II. But, unfortunately, that prospect is unlikely, because Blizzard has already begun work on its next generation MMO—Titan. So I can only hope Blizzard will consider making some much-needed fundamental changes to WoW in the next expansion or two.

Production Quality

WoW has generally lived a schizophrenic life. By that I mean the quality of the production in various areas of the game is different and seems to contradict itself. For example, the art design and music in the game are incredibly good, but the voice over work—whether as a result of its direction or the conscious decisions made by some of the voice actors—is sometimes extremely poor.

How is it that WoW can endure such a strange dichotomy of production values and flaws? Is it because it’s a massive production, and a lot of MMO producers seem to run them more like cheap blockbusters than finely-crafted Oscar contenders? They are, afterall, expensive to make and maintain, so cutting corners is pretty alluring. But I really do think they could do better in some areas, and I think the payoff would actually be a lot higher if they would just take their time.

Art Design & Direction

The art direction is one of WoW’s best features. The painterly style of WoW has its charms. It’s not until I stop playing WoW for a while and return to it that I appreciate it. This isn’t to say WoW’s graphics are amazing. They aren’t. But that is a result of a conscious decision made by Blizzard to ensure older machines can run the game. I have no problem with that.

Perhaps the only slip-up in Cataclysm’s art design was the decision to leave the “mountains” in most of Azeroth as the molehills they’ve been since release. I still yearn for the mountains of Storm Peaks and Icecrown Glacier. They were pretty spectacular. So why couldn’t similar mountains be fashioned for the updated Dun Morogh? Oddly, even the mountains in Mount Hyjal are rounded, but I think that’s because they wanted to match the terrain style they used in the Hyjal TBC raid zone. Honestly, I think people are willing to suspend belief and understand the changes are cosmetic, and not necessarily a result of the Cataclysm itself. But, hey, that’s an idea, isn’t it? So I’m not sure why they left the mountains the way they were.

Otherwise, the art team did a great job with Cataclysm, and especially on the new Stormwind and Orgrimmar. Each feels enormous (for the scale of Warcraft) and I love the design work put into them.

Oh, and the new water is awesome, as well. But I’m not sure to what extent the art team deserves credit for that, since I don’t know who worked on it.

The Music

As usual, Russell Brower and his team have done a great job on the music used in Cataclysm. And while much of the older music was modified and re-recorded to meet the current standards of WoW, they made a wonderful gesture to Jason Hayes by keeping some his original recordings in the game.

Derek Duke – Protect the Bottom Line

The music in Cataclysm is one of its brightest spots in terms of production quality. And I hope Blizzard keeps Russell Brower around for a long time!

Sound Design & Editing

Sound design in Cataclysm is generally okay. However, there are some moments missing essential sounds, and other moments that recycle old clips and cause the scene to play out awkwardly.

Just take a look at the beginning of Mount Hyjal, when you’re flying into the zone during the introductory quest.

The music is great. But where is the whooshing sound coming from Deathwing’s enormous wings? When I first watched the scene, I thought “something is eerily missing.” Then I realized it was because it was much too quiet for what was going on. Even if it is just a dragon hovering, spitting fire into a pool of lava, and summoning Ragnaros.

What sounds are in the game are usually well done. But not always. Occasionally, they don’t seem to fit the situation or what you’d expect.

Voicework

The voice acting in WoW is all over the place. If you raided during Icecrown Citadel, you know what I’m talking about. You go from the awesome “BOOOOONESTOOOOORM!” To the long, terrible monologue delivered by Lady Over-Dramatizes-and-Never-Shuts-Up. And then you go from Putricide’s amusing “Great news, everyone!” (A reference to Futurama, by the way.) To the atrociously annoying Sindragosa and her infamous “BETRAAAYS YOOOOUU!”

Of course, by referencing those examples, I’m using the greatest extremes of WoW to make a point, and that’s not really fair in criticizing the work done in Cataclysm. Cataclysm isn’t quite as bad, but it still has the same general problems. Some voice work is amazing, some is mediocre (to be expected for minor lines), and some of it is pretty awful (Sinestra, but she is not quite as bad as Sindragosa or Deathwhisper). Let’s take a look at one scene that really exemplifies all of those claims, the introduction to Vashj’ir:

As you can see, lines land in different positions across various spectrums. Some are good. Some are okay. Some are awful. Some are delivered matter-of-factly. Some are delivered earnestly and meet the level of seriousness demanded by the scene. Some are comical. Some are drab. This lack of direction (or poor direction, I’m not sure which) really causes the scene to play out poorly. And I’d say there is no payoff, if not for the fact it’s ended by a giant kraken.

Nitpicking, there are a few lines that really stick out like sore thumbs to me. The over-the-top deliveries of Mack Fearsen and Budd bother me especially, because they interrupt the original tone set by the soldiers. And then there’s Adarrah’s lines, which come off as forced and unnatural. And why the hell would you use the generic female human /cry instead of the voice actress’ own sobs? They did this in Icecrown Citadel, too, and it’s really starting to bug me. Is it laziness? Did they forget to write it in the script? I’d rather there be no sound and just the animation of her crying.

You’ll also notice some very odd timing on the delivery of the lines. That in and of itself is a problem, but it’s not the fault of the voice actors nor their directors, it’s the fault of the person(s) in charge of scripting the event in-game, as much as it is the engine that handles NPC dialog.

Writing

The general writing in WoW is split down the middle. On the one hand, the vocabulary and the technical craftsmanship of an individual line is usually good. But the script for various events is often melodramatic, and sometimes downright weird. Furthermore, the overall story generally feels second rate to me. Whereas Warcraft III had unifying themes of redemption and revenge, WoW’s themes are scattered and often incomplete. And while I don’t expect anything Shakespearean out of the game, I definitely think it could be much better than it is.

The poorer writing work could be a result of the fact that WoW’s creative development team hasn’t really grown at the same rate as the game. It used to be that many of the designers would actually write some of the story, dialog, quest text, etc. So creative development is still trying to find its footing now that it is doing more and more of the writing in the game itself. And, unfortunately, because I don’t really know to what extent they are doing the writing these days, any critique I have will come off as simply uninformed.

But I can stress the importance of having actual writers doing the writing for a game. A lot of companies employ them these days. And their games are (surprise) usually popular in part due to the excellent writing. (And if they also have great game play, that’s a bonus!) I don’t really know where Blizzard is going with WoW in this area, but I really hope their production leads begin to stress the importance and role of quality writing. A good start would be to tone down the popular culture references in some areas, make each scene and sequence more cohesive, and bring writing more to the fore of the PvE game.

In-Game Cut Scenes

Blizzard developed a new in-game cut-scene engine specifically for use in Cataclysm. This was done because the process of making pre-rendered cut-scenes is long and time-consuming.

Unfortunately, the engine wasn’t widely used this expansion. You see very few cut-scenes in zones like Mount Hyjal and Vashj’ir, but an absolutely enormous number in Uldum.

Why this is, I’m not entirely sure. And I’ve already discussed the issue at length in previous sections of this review. But it definitely bears repeating. Why would you develop a system for an expansion, and then make minimal use of it? To meet a deadline? Think about Starcraft II. Starcraft II has an in-game cut-scene engine, as well. The only difference? It makes liberal use of it from beginning-to-end.

I realize Blizzard thinks it’s really important to make deadlines in a game like WoW. If you don’t, people have to play the previous content for an extended period of time, and they might grow bored of it, which has implications in terms of people quitting and upsetting the stability of the game’s guilds. But I really think increasing the production value of the game will attract new players and inspire people who have quit to return. So the extra work (and, hence, the extra wait) seems worth it to me.

Another thing that bothers me about the way Blizzard used this engine was that many of the scenes went unvoiced (especially in Uldum). The dramatic impact of a scene is so much greater if you simply add voices to the characters. Reading is all well and good, but we are in an era of video games where the vast majority of story-driven games are voiced. Why can’t WoW’s major stories, then, be voiced from beginning to end? Cost? Time? Who knows.

And, finally, the system was really buggy. With something so important, you’d think Blizzard would make sure it wasn’t as laden with as many bugs as it was at release. There’s nothing more annoying than being unable to skip a scene you’ve already seen. Or having to watch an entire cut-scene, because it won’t give you credit for your quest otherwise.

Pre-Rendered Cut-Scenes

The pre-rendered cut-scenes in Cataclysm are top notch. But they are few in number, as is usually the case in WoW. The game could really stand to have more of them. Maybe one for each major zone. And maybe one for each raid. I realize they take time to make, but they are a valuable asset to any game.

What’s Missing?

There’s also an issue in the sense that I think the production quality could be much higher than it is in Cataclysm. Why is it that we’re still required to read quest text almost seven years into the game? So many other games’ stories play out entirely voiced and acted. You walk up to someone who gives you a quest (or mission, or objective, or whatever the game wants to call it), and they express their plight clearly and concisely. Then off you go! (Assuming you didn’t decline it.) WoW (and, hence, Cataclysm) misses this. An MMO is not a novel. It shouldn’t be read like one.

I really hoped the in-game cut-scene engine would change some of this. And Blizzard has shown us it is capable of producing quests with high production values. And there is no better example of this than the Thrall quest line added in 4.2. But I don’t think Blizzard goes far enough. I’m fine if a quest asking me to kill some wolves around a poor farmer’s pig farm isn’t voiced or dramatically introduced. But when major quests with important plot development are doled out in the most uninteresting ways, I worry about WoW. Especially because games outside the MMO market have been advancing at a rapid pace. Why would I want to continue playing a game that doesn’t meet my rising expectations in production values? Cost? Guild attachment? These issues are becoming less meaningful, as expansion cycles increase, server transfers seem necessary when changing guilds or playstyles, and increased connectivity between players makes people less reliant on their guild chat and channels.

Overall

Overall, the production quality in Cataclysm is missing some very important pieces. And what does exist is middling. Some of it is great. And some of it is mediocre. Some of us come away from Cataclysm with a feeling of wanting more in this department. And that’s not a position you want to be in when the competition is trying to fill the void in this niche in the MMO market.

The only new systems introduced in Cataclysm, other than those I’ve already discussed, are the guild leveling and guild challenge systems. The other planned system—path of the titans—which was to be tied to the new archaeology profession, was scrapped.

Blizzard did make some changes to other systems. Gear stats are notably different—mastery was introduced as a new stat, some stats were removed, and some stats were made more beneficial across multiple specs. They also tweaked the talent trees, forcing you to choose your primary spec, removing a lot of filler talents, and giving you some necessary bonuses automatically.

Guild Leveling & Achievements

Guild leveling is a simple concept. Just as you would level your character, people can also earn guild experience and level their guilds. With each level comes various rewards and perks. For a list of guild perks, please see Wowhead.

Guild experience is earned through various means. Whenever your complete a quest, complete a dungeon, win a rated battleground, etc., you will earn guild experience. Blizzard is still making tweaks to this feature, since it’s very easy to patch. There is a cap on the amount of experience your guild can earn on a daily basis, though it goes away once you reach the last few levels.

I’m not necessarily opposed to the guild leveling system, but I definitely think it has implications that complicate the diaspora. People are naturally drawn to guilds already at level 25 (the cap). Newer guilds, meanwhile, find it difficult to attract players, since they don’t have the same shiny perks as the guilds at the cap. In reaching a decision to join a freshly created guild, players have to accept the fact that they won’t be earning extra experience or honor, nor will they be able to mass resurrect after recovering from a dungeon wipe.

If you ask me, I think it’s time Blizzard lifted the daily cap on experience. All it does is prevent the newer guilds from being able to catch established guilds in a reasonable amount of time.

Guild Achievements & Reputation

Guild achievements were also added along with the guild leveling system. They work very much like personal achievements, but are earned for the cooperative and cumulative efforts of members in the guild. Some of them offer very meaningful rewards.

Some of the conditions for earning these achievements also involves guild reputation. Just as you can become friendly, honored and exalted with a faction, you can become friendly, honored and exalted with your guild. Raising your reputation works very much like earning guild experience. Various guild-based (and some personal) activities contribute to your guild reputation. The amount of reputation you can earn in a week is capped. This ensures people cannot simply join a guild and have access to all the perks and rewards available to that guild immediately.

Overall

As I stated before, the guild leveling and achievement systems come with interesting implications. It requires newer guilds to have to struggle through the system to meet its full potential for attracting players, but it offers another path of advancement and promotes participation in guild-based activities. I’m rather split on my opinion of them.

Guild Challenges

A new feature added after release is the guild challenge. Each week, you’re allowed to complete a set amount of guild challenges in the following areas: dungeons, raids and rated battlegrounds. Killing a raid boss, completing a dungeon and winning a rated battleground are the conditions for completing these challenges. Successfully completing each one deposits a modest amount of gold in the guild bank.

This system is pretty clear cut. You get gold for completing activities as a guild, and you can either hang onto it for guild funding purposes, or you can distribute it to whomever you like in the guild. It’s a pretty nice feature.

Mastery, Stats & Gear

Mastery is a new stat that augments your character based on your primary spec. To offer some examples, each point of mastery increases the bonus damage of a moonkin’s eclipse state, and increases the holy damage done by a retribution paladin. The masteries for some classes are much more complicated than these, however. For example, a holy paladin’s mastery involves placing absorption shields on targets of their heals.

Furthermore, Blizzard has done away with a lot of the older stats. Armor penetration, attack power, spell power, mp5, defense, and block are no more. Armor penetration is gone completely, which is probably just as well, since it overly complicated class balance and gear scaling. Block is also gone. Attack power was integrated with agility and strength. Spell power was integrated with intellect. mp5 was integrated with spirit (shamans and paladins rejoice). I wouldn’t really say defense was integrated with anything. Instead, you simply have alternatives.

Haste, crit, dodge and parry still exist. So you still have to weigh them against each other, as well as mastery.

Strength, agility, intellect and stamina have been deemed the primary stats. And when Blizzard says this, they actually mean it. They have done this designation justice. This often means items lower in item level are not as useful as those that are higher. And this is really as it should be. It’s not always true, but it generally is.

It’s also important to note that Blizzard has made an effort to make various stats at least beneficial to some degree to every spec and class. However, this is not universally true. Tanks won’t find much value in haste and crit outside of threat. Non-tanks won’t find any value in dodge and parry. And non-healing casters won’t find any value in spirit (mages rejoice).

For the most part, the addition of mastery and the changes in approach to gear design is preferable to Wrath’s gear design. Wrath had so many stats, it felt like you had to have a math degree to make sense of it all. And because so many classes and specs didn’t benefit from various stats, a piece of gear would often go to waste after the one or two people who actually needed it picked it up.

Another major change is the addition of bonuses acquired from wearing your class’s appropriate armor type. If you’re meant to be wearing mail, you will get a bonus for wearing mail armor in all eight slots. This is to prevent people from taking piece of gear below your normal armor type, so cloth wearers don’t feel cheated by having to compete with the most number of people.

With the way the system is now, the item tables don’t have to be as large as they were before, meaning less goes to waste. That’s not to say items don’t go to waste at all, but it’s a lot better than it used to be. And the fact that I can go from restoration to moonkin without feeling completely useless is also a plus.

Archaeology: The New Profession

Another new addition in Cataclysm is the archaeology profession. Originally meant to be tied to the Paths of the Titans system (which would have basically been another talent tree), archaeology still found its way into the expansion.

Archaeology is rather simple in its design. You pick it up from Stormwind or Orgrimmar, and then when you open your map, you’ll see regions of the map marked with a little shovel icon. These are dig sites, where you can go and dig up fragments. You’ll only ever see four dig sites per continent (counting Outland as a continent, once you have enough in archaeology to dig there).

Each dig site has a specific classification and will offer different types of fragments. For example, a dwarven dig site will naturally offer fragments of dwarven artifacts. The types of dig sites available to you also depends on your level of archaeology.

For each type, you are given an artifact to complete. Which artifact you’re given is random (but some also require having a higher level of archaeology). You can be given a common artifact to complete, or something rare that will give you an interesting item to use or wear. These can be flavor items, or they can be armor and weapons, if you’re lucky. The items and weapons obtained through archaeology are account bound. But be careful, because you cannot send them to characters on realms other than the one you’ve completed the artifact on (unless you transfer a character with the artifact in his or her inventory).

The actual act of doing archaeology works somewhat like a gathering profession. However, the nodes do not appear until you’ve discovered their location. This must be done using a survey tool, which will point you in the general direction of the artifact fragment each time you use it. The closer to the fragment you are, the more accurate the reading of the tool is.

This sounds like an interesting concept, but it really isn’t. Basically, once you enter a dig site area, you drop your survey tool, see if it’s red, yellow or green (red means it’s far, green means its close, yellow is in between), and then move in the direction it tells you to. Then you drop it again and repeat this until you find the node. Then you click the node and collect the fragments.

It’s just like any other gathering profession, only slightly more interesting. But that’s like saying the Ford Pinto was a slightly better car than the Reliant Robin. Overall, archaeology is yet another boring time sink, just as most professions are and have been for ages in WoW and other MMOs.

This is particularly disappointing, however, because Blizzard gave us such rosy descriptions of the profession during past Blizzcons. As they described it during the panels, it would be a profession intertwined with the history and lore of WoW. But the only references made to the game’s lore or history is simply a paragraph for the race tied to the each artifact type, and the names of the items you get. And that’s it. That’s like proclaiming “I’m going to dig a hole forty feet deep!” But then giving up after making it only a foot.

Archaeology is yet another professional disappointment.

Talents

Cataclysm changed the way talents work. Instead of just putting points in the talents you want, and working your way down the trees, you now have to choose your primary talent tree. You are then locked into that tree until you’ve put 31 points into it. And while that doesn’t seem like very much, I must point out that the trees were trimmed down, and the points available lowered.

This is because you’re given some essential spells, augmentations and functionality automatically once you choose your primary talent tree. So you no longer need to spend points on them. This isn’t to say the trees are devoid of talents you need to take, but there is less emphasis on such talents.

For the most part, these changes were made to coincide with the addition of mastery. But they were also made to offer other functionality. For example, choosing balance as a druid means you’re given a new power bar that determines whether or not you’re in an eclipse state. Without this new system, that wouldn’t really be possible.

Conclusion

These are the changes and new systems I hadn’t already discussed in great detail. There isn’t much more to say about them other than what I’ve already noted above. A few are good. One has its problems. And one is incredibly boring.

Honor and Conquest Points

Cataclysm’s gear system is still governed by a two-tier point system—honor points for starter gear, and conquest points for the end-game. Arena points were renamed to conquest points because they can be obtained from both arenas and rated battlegrounds.

One major change to the points system is how they are earned. Instead of earning your points at the end of the week, you now earn them on a per-win basis. There is a cap on the number of points you can earn in a week, determined by what your rating was the previous week, assuming you played enough games. The higher your rating, the higher your cap will be.

Ratings requirements on gear were relaxed. Only high-rated weapons have a higher item level than their lower-rated counterparts. Having a higher rating results only in cosmetic changes for your armor.

In 4.2, a soft cap was added for weapons. You must now earn a set amount of honor or conquest points in an individual season to purchase them. All this really does is force people to buy some armor before the weapons. I’m not entirely sure what the intention is with this design. Its impact is extremely minor, and not worth analyzing further.

If you ask me, the current system is preferable. I never liked that a team twenty points above the threshold could have such a huge gear advantage over a team just twenty points below. Their ratings are so similar, gear should not be a huge factor. If you give someone with a high rank a substantial handicap, it simply distorts the correlation between a team’s rating and their skill level.

I hope Blizzard keeps this system for a long time.

A Word on the Honor Grind

At the beginning of Cataclysm, the honor grind was atrocious. It was about twice as long as it needed to be. Blizzard fixed this issue in 4.1, but it could have been fixed earlier. A couple months after release would have been nice.

As it stands, it’s now at a good point. The grind won’t bore you to death, but it’s long enough to make sure people don’t have a free pass.

Arena

Arenaing in Cataclysm is generally the same as it was in Wrath, so I don’t have much to say about it. The class balance is a bit different, but that’s to be expected. The other difference was the temporary absence of the Ring of Valor (often maligned by the community). But it has since made its way back into the rotation, albeit with a couple tweaks.

About the only negative criticism I really have is that Blizzard could do better to pay more attention to how different arenas can affect the balance of classes and specs. For example, the fewer all the maps have adequate ledges, the weaker moonkins become in arena, since they are so dependent on knocking people off ledges with typhoon. I’m perhaps tooting my own horn with that example, but similar issues, regardless of the class or spec, need to be monitored and addressed more than they are currently.

Rated Battlegrounds

In order to fully appreciate where we are today with rated battlegrounds (RBGs), I think it’s important to consider the history of battlegrounds.

A Little Bit of History

Battlegrounds have undergone a strange evolution in WoW. When vanilla first hit the shelves, they didn’t exist at all. If you wanted to PvP, you had to go searching for it out in the world zones. After several months, Blizzard finally implemented Alterac Valley (AV) and Warsong Gulch (WSG). But you didn’t queue for them, and you could only fight people of the opposite faction on your own server. There was no ratings system like there is today. You earned honor, and it wasn’t subject to a weekly cap. The amount of honor earned each week would determine your rise in the ranks. The first several ranks were linear in progression, but the final ranks were competitive. There could only ever be one Grand Marshal (GM) or High Warlord (HWL) at a time on each server. The ranks existed to determine your eligibility to purchase gear (with gold). GM/HWL gave you access to all the weapons. The few tiers below that gave you access to epic armor. And the rest of the tiers gave you access to superior armor. The armor had set bonuses like what you see on any PvE tier set. For example, the druid bonus made you run much faster in travel form, making them the flag runners of WSG.

It’s important to note there was no such thing as resilience in vanilla, meaning PvE gear was incredibly good. It also meant burst and escape tactics were more important than the strategies you see today (though you do technically have to escape from smoke bomb, and short-term burns mimic the way burst tactics worked, in a way).

In TBC, the old honor system was scrapped. Battlegrounds were now cross-server (confined to a battlegroup), and entirely point-based. They no longer offered the best gear you could obtain. Instead, the new arena system served this purpose. However, you could still queue as a group, meaning organized battlegrounds still persisted to some degree. But organized play became increasingly rare as the expansion went on and all of the serious PvPers began to focus on running arenas. As a result, battlegrounds became PUG fests. Furthermore, the introduction of resilience changed the style of play dramatically.

In Wrath, battlegrounds stayed very much the same as they were in TBC. However, the ability to queue as a full team was removed entirely. Organized battlegrounds practically died, only existing by the grace of a small percentage of holdouts using mods to simulate group queuing (it was extremely primitive, and you often had to spend a lot of your time dropping the queue and trying again to get in as many people as possible).

Finally, after six years of the above, Cataclysm has brought us the RBG. RBGs were needed long ago, and I much appreciate the effort to bring them to life. But they are also not without their problems.

The Good

There isn’t too much that needs to be said in praise of RBGs. That they exist at all is what’s good about them, especially because organized and competitive battlegrounds had not really been supported since vanilla. For four years, many of us went without our preferred style of PvP, and reminisced about the good old days of vanilla—about free action potions, about removing PoM before the pyro resolved, about epic two-hour long battles between the top WSG groups on the server, etc. Of course, we also reminisced about the bad things—the long and terrible grind towards Grand Marshal, and the competitive aspects of the old honor system. In some ways, what we have now is better, because the grind isn’t so terrible.

For the most part, the basic premise of the RBG system is good. It’s not like it was in vanilla, when you needed to play something like 80 hours a week to get to the top. Hell, on many servers, you didn’t even need to be particularly good, you just needed to grind out as much honor as you possibly could for as many hours each week as you could handle. There was a druid on Proudmoore who conscripted his own children to complete the task for him. When he was at work during the summer, they’d be toiling away in WSG or AV, earning him honor. While he was cooking dinner for them, one would most likely be running around literally spamming moonfire every game. And when he finally had some free time for himself, he’d step in to play. And this got him to GM, even though he wasn’t exactly the best druid in the world.

With RBGs, there is still some level of a grind to get every piece of gear. But it’s not terribly long. Of course, if you want to be the best of the best, you’re better off practicing as much as possible to stay at the top of your game, but you don’t need to play more than several hours a week to keep pace with the conquest cap.

The Bad

This is where things get a little ugly. RBGs were and are not without their problems. Their initial design was rushed, meaning systemic flaws came with them at release, and these flaws still reverberate today. The way the graveyards work in some of the RBGs have also created more problems than they’ve solved. And I still think the whole idea of clicking nodes to cap is misguided for some battlegrounds.

They Were Rushed

There’s no question the design of the RBG system was rushed. It was opened for testing during beta only a month before Cataclysm’s release. And since Blizzard had to begin prepping for the expansion’s release for part of that month, that meant they only had a couple weeks to make any major changes to the system, regardless of how absolutely necessary they may have been.

As a result, major problems immediately found their way into the system. One of these problems was the way the ratings system worked (particularly the matchmaking ratings, called “MMR”). Initially, you had to try really hard before you’d start losing points as a result of a loss. Because of this, anyone who played in the first few months was treated to having inflated ratings (both their BG rating and MMR). Sure, you still had to at least play reasonably well, but you didn’t have to achieve excellence to do well. Blizzard eventually realized their mistake, and made changes to the MMRs for RBGs. Unfortunately, they decided not to reset people’s ratings when this change was made, meaning the loss and gain of points was seemingly inexplicable and distorted.

Now, I haven’t played since 4.2 came out, so I don’t really know to what extent this issue has been fixed. Reading some threads on the AJ forums lead me to believe the MMR system has been improved in some ways, but it’s still not without its problems. (See this thread for more information.)

Another problem was the initial mistake of alternating 10- and 15-man RBGs each week. At release, you couldn’t play 10-mans every week, nor could you play 15-mans every week. You were forced to either sit people during the 10-man weeks, or skip every other week to focus on one type of RBG. This rotation caused some teams to dilute their skillset, as they’d feel compelled to rotate people in and out to get their conquest points on a weekly basis. The teams that chose to skip every other week often found their players getting bored during the weeks a large portion of the team had to rotate.

After a while, Blizzard chose simply to drop the 15-mans altogether, as the majority of RBG teams were running 10-mans. Any teams attempting to focus on 15-mans had to downsize their roster if they wanted to continue. And anyone who preferred the 15-man RBGs to the 10′s was out of luck. Honestly, I wish Blizzard would have at least tried to separate each into two different brackets. Instead, they didn’t even give that a shot, and immediately dropped the larger bracket. Who knows if the 15-mans would have gained in popularity if people had a chance to run them week-by-week, or if there would have simply been at least enough people doing them to justify leaving them in the game. I really liked rated Strand (despite my distaste for getting it when I random queue), so I was personally disappointed in losing that RBG specifically.

The biggest thing that bothers me is how the initial rush has caused reverberating effects. A lot of people who were initially excited for RBGs simply gave up and quit due to their poor implementation. This left teams on servers with small PvP communities starving to fill spots on their rosters as the available pool of players rapidly shrunk.

Clicking for Node Capture Doesn’t Always Seem to Be the Best Option

Initially, I was pretty warm to node-based RBGs where you had to click and channel a flag to cap each node. This is because the concept was proven to work in Arathi Basin, and still works in the current style of competitive RBGs.

But then the Battle for Gilneas came along. I’ve played games in Gilneas where the teams literally duke it out at the Waterworks for over half the match before someone caps the node. Sometimes my team would be dominating our opponents in terms of kills, only to be foiled by people returning from their resurrection cycle, because it takes so long to clear people out these days. Had the nodes worked more like Eye of the Storm, this wouldn’t have been an issue. We’d slowly push the progress bar towards capturing the node, because we’d have a constant one- or two-man advantage in presence at the node. But because all you need to do is hit someone to keep the team from capping, that means people can stack a small part of the team to be extremely difficult to kill, meaning they can work an advantage in terms of interrupting node capture. This causes the matches in Gilneas to become frustrating and the conditions for winning seem more based on who is better at capping and interrupting than at actually playing their class to the best possible degree. While being able to manage the battlegrounds features should be important, they shouldn’t absolutely dominate the factors that contribute to victory.

The worst part is that Blizzard really hasn’t even considered at least trying other designs for Gilneas. Who knows if the old Eye of the Storm-style capture would work or not. For all we know, it could be so much better in practice at the higher levels of competition. But we’ll never know if it isn’t tried on live servers.

Graveyard Mechanics Are Designed Sloppily

One of the problems with a lot of the RBGs is the sloppy graveyard mechanics and design. Twin Peaks and Gilneas exhibited this problem the most.

In Gilneas, at release, because people would resurrect at the node closest to where they died, it was incredibly easy to take a node and hold it. So comebacks were nearly impossible, no matter how much better you played in the latter ninety percent of a match. In 4.1, the graveyard mechanics were slightly changed, such that if you died at the Waterworks, you wouldn’t resurrect there. This made node defense a tad more difficult. But because it was so difficult to fully clear out people, teams could still rez and ride their way back to the node no problem.

In Twin Peaks, the issue is simply where you respawn. At release, if you died defending your flag carrier (FC) while you were in your base, you’d quickly come back to the aid of your defense, because you’d respawn near your flag room. Likewise, if you were on offense, you’d spawn mid-field, which wasn’t too far to rejoin your offense quickly. Of course, in 4.1, where you resurrected was changed. If you died on defense, you’d spawn midfield. But midfield isn’t much further away than your home graveyard, so the impact of this change is very minimal. Also, if you die on offense, you now spawn all the way back at your base. The negative impact this has is that people who die on offense can quickly come to the aid of their defense. So killing people other than the FC (in either design) often has a very minimal benefit. Sometimes it’s advantageous, if killing them weakens the strength of the defense enough to allow you to kill the FC with much greater ease. But this isn’t always the case, since some teams stack healers up the ass for defense, and killing one out of four does very little to increase your chances of killing the FC before they make their way back into the room from the graveyard. You’re better off waiting for your smoke bomb(s) to come off cooldown, and forcing the FC to use their escapes before combining a smoke bomb with a solar beam or silence/interrupt/CC chain.

Part of the graveyard design issue is caused by the fact that graveyards work on a static rotation. You do not always have to wait a minute or 30 seconds before you’re resurrected. Sometimes, you can get a “good rez,” and you’ll have to wait only a few seconds before you repop. But if you die when the graveyard has a full cycle to complete, you’ll be at a disadvantage. I’m not sure if one exists now, but I would definitely have wanted a mod capable of keeping track of the rez timers for each and every graveyard. This way, you could time your deaths or kills based on what would be most advantageous to you.

Graveyards simply need a comprehensive redesign for the RBGs most susceptible to the problems they create. This means I don’t think AB should be touched, but I definitely think WSG, Twin Peaks and Gilneas need to be reconsidered (even with the tweaks that have already been made to them). Personally, I think resurrections should be based on time of death. When you die, you have to wait X seconds before you’re resurrected. Of course, this would cause graveyard camping issues, since respawns would be scattered, making it easy for the other team to farm fresh repops. To solve this issue, you’d implement immunity at the graveyards, but position them so the resurrecting team couldn’t exploit the immunity. In other words, make it so people spawn in a purgatory room, and force them to take a one-way teleport to re-enter the match after everyone repops (that way everyone can take the port all at once, so they’re not fodder for farm, but can’t exploit the immunity area). This design would make killing people more worthwhile, since they’d have to wait a full cycle before being resurrected. When the team is at a full minute or 30 seconds worth of being a man down, that’s much better than someone resurrecting after three seconds with full mana and a new lease on life (for both them and any teammates they can assist).

Class Balance and Class Abilities in PvP

You’ll notice I didn’t include discussion about class balance as either a positive or negative in RBGs. That’s because, at a competitive level, class balance is never really an issue, since most of the top teams will adopt the best combination of classes and specs to compete and keep the balance of power roughly equal. Of course, that doesn’t mean I don’t think Blizzard should at least try to balance the classes and specs, so the more casual players can at least viably farm some level of conquest points and have a fun without feeling as though they need to play a different class to PvP. But expecting perfection in class balance is simply unreasonable, especially when you have 30 different talent trees, and over 30 possible builds.

The one thing I do want to mention is how I think Blizzard could do better to drop its hesitance in making abilities work differently in various areas of the game. Yes, it’s an admirable design intention to want to have the abilities work as similarly as possible across different playstyles. But sometimes this design concept is impractical given specific cases, and I don’t think Blizzard acknowledges this enough. Sure, they may have changed CC to work differently in PvE and PvP, and made some spells work a tad different between PvP and PvE, but they should really consider making more tweaks than they have. And they should also be open to considering differences in the way abilities work between RBGs and arenas, as well.

For example, I’m not sure if it was changed at all in 4.2, but smoke bomb was so powerful in RBGs that rogues were the must-have class for them. If you didn’t have one, your ability to kill a FC or to decimate a healer or dangerous DPSer at a heavily-contested node was much more difficult than it needed to be. This is because you often had such a large force of DPS in any given area, that smoke bomb would increase the likelihood of killing an individual by probably a thousand percent (and maybe more). That’s an amazing advantage! But its strength in arena is much more moderate. It’s definitely useful, but it doesn’t have the same impact it does in RBGs. Of course, smoke is only one ability. There is a myriad of abilities and ability combinations to consider in RBGs and arena. It is not a simple issue for Blizzard to consider or fix, even if I think they could be doing more to resolve it.

In short, Blizzard should try to balance the classes as much as possible, but we shouldn’t expect perfection. I would like to see them be a little more open to making changes in the way abilities work in different areas of the game, and that includes making abilities work different in RBGs and arena, when applicable.

Other than on these points, I think Ghostcrawler and his team do a decent job of trying to keep the classes balanced.

Tol Barad

Tol Barad is to Cataclysm what Wintergrasp was to Wrath. It is this expansion’s outdoor PvP zone. And it is full of nothing but problems. Unless your faction gets the jump on the defense at the very beginning of a match, it’s almost impossible to win.

The problem is simply that it is way too difficult to take all three nodes when the defense is mobilized. Once two nodes are taken, the defending faction will simply roll into the node with the least defense and steamroll anyone there to keep them from capping. So it becomes an endless cycle of capping and losing a node, until the offense runs out of time. If the offense is organized, it can certainly win, but Tol Barad is almost exclusively a pick-up group, since it randomizes who gets to enter a match.

The scenario just isn’t very well-designed for a match between two sides of mostly random people. And even though it deserves nearly a complete overhaul, Blizzard doesn’t seem to care about it.

How General Game Play Affects PvP

At a basic level, I don’t think PvP is all that bad in Cataclysm. It’s a simple concept putting two groups of people against each other, both with access to practically the same resources. You can’t really go wrong with this formula. The experience is automatically dynamic, because people are facing player-controlled opponents. And it is relatively balanced based on community adoption of the best compositions at the higher levels of competition.

Rather, the biggest issue is the fact that WoW’s engine has become archaic. In an era where a lot of competitive games have some awesome and fun mechanics that don’t rely merely on class or class-like functionality, WoW is missing a lot of these. Sure, we have CTF and capture-the-node style battlegrounds, but these are overly simple. You’re not hopping into a tank to cut a hole your opponent’s defense. You’re not activating your surface-to-air missiles to bring down a chopper. You’re performing simple tasks that add to the experience to (usually) only a minor degree.

Consider Team Fortress 2. If you’re playing a demoman, you can bounce your grenades off the walls and hopefully hit your enemies. This turns the concept of LOS completely on its head. Likewise, if you’re a demoman, you have to worry about killing yourself when using your grenade launcher in close proximity duels. A bad bounce off the ground or a wall can kill you, even if you do end up killing your opponent. As an alternative, you can switch to your shank. But whether or not that’s viable depends on the class trying to get all up in your grill.

WoW doesn’t really have too many scenarios like these, nor ability mechanics that are fun to kill and be killed by. I remember having a throwaway clan in an indie game called Nox where our sole purpose was to suicide as many times as possible in a match, all because it was hilariously fun. WoW is sort of missing that element of play.

I must also talk about crowd control and ability interruption. When these and dispels are the linchpins of PvP, the game ceases to reach its potential for fun. To me, there’s nothing exciting about getting interrupted every other cast when I’m around a shaman. There’s nothing exciting about getting trapped in a CC rotation lasting 15 some-odd seconds. The design should be re-focused on making the abilities used to kill, heal and (possibly) soak or avoid damage truly unique and entertaining.

This isn’t to say WoW doesn’t have such spells at all. They do. Thunderstorm, typhoon, heroic leap and leap of faith are all good examples. But the number of such spells are limited, and the impact of each is often situational. Also, some of the abilities lose their sense of uniqueness in simplicity. Take heroic charge, for example. You select someone and you charge them. You don’t have to aim your charge. You don’t run into a wall and stun or daze yourself if you miss. Your character automatically charges at your target, and you stun them for a short while. That’s really not that exciting to me, both as the person charging, and the person being charged. I don’t have to aim or carefully time my charge. Nor do I have to reactively dodge it, if I’m on the receiving end. You simply stun them, or you eat the stun. That’s it.

To complicate matters even further, what fun spells do exist often have numerous bugs. I can’t count the number of times I’ve fired off a typhoon, watched it pass through someone, and counted off “one one-thousand, two one-thousand” before it actually affects that person with the knockback. (I’m also sure people can’t count the number of times I’ve complained about this.)

While PvP is fun to some degree, it should be better than it is. But WoW’s engine is old. It would be incredibly difficult for Blizzard to fix the mechanical bugs, and expand the library of spells that are truly unique and fun to use. If they really wanted to do this, I imagine an engine re-code would be in order, and the server architecture and latency handling would also have to be revamped. There would also be a heap of balance issues to consider, and you would run the risk of making relatively new encounters obsolete if you want many of the new mechanics to also work in PvE.

I think the best Blizzard could do now is reconsider crowd control and ability interruption. But that would result only in minor improvements.

Conclusion

The addition of rated battlegrounds has been needed for a long time. That Cataclysm includes them at all is a godsend, despite their problems. But the game is coming closer and closer to being archaic in its design. At some point, there won’t be much more Blizzard could do to improve the experience, without redoing major parts of the engine and the game’s server architecture. And while that may prove to be impractical for Blizzard (especially because Blizzard seems intent on putting a lot of the revenue generated by WoW into other projects), there are still some things Blizzard can do. They can make some much-needed tweaks to the crowd control and interruption mechanics in PvP, and they can still increase the enjoyment factor for some spells and abilities. They can also create new spells and abilities (or vehicles or other systems) that would turn PvP on its head, without removing the spells that ensure PvE remains operational. But whether or not Blizzard is willing to make these changes, much less do them extremely well, is left to be seen. One thing’s certain: Cataclysm didn’t add or change enough for PvP to meet my expectations. And I didn’t exactly set them very high.

Cataclysm has reinforced my opinion that WoW’s writing is generally poor. It is a world of missed opportunities: opportunities to explain Deathwing’s history in greater detail, opportunities to bring more major characters from his past back into the narrative fold, opportunities to make better connections between various characters, and opportunities to make sure each zone or dungeon is presented with a higher quality in writing, production and direction.

It’s not as though Blizzard isn’t capable of doing any of these. They proved they’re more than capable with the Thrall questline they added in 4.2.

When I consider that questline particularly, I have to wonder why the stories told in the zones and dungeons of an expansion can’t be written, produced and directed just as well.

I’m not going to try to put my finger on the reasons why. MMOs are so massive in their production, you can only really look at things objectively. And what is clear to me is that the major narratives in Cataclysm are generally unfocused, uninteresting, and poorly produced. This is one of WoW’s biggest downfalls. And it’s especially tragic when Blizzard has shown us it’s capable of doing great things with the story in WoW. Warcraft is a universe rich in lore and characters. So, please, Blizzard… do them justice in more than just a few quests and dungeons that are introduced post-release.

And, please, for the love of god, don’t bring characters back from the dead merely for the sake of bringing them back from the dead!

If I was to nitpick, I could say raiding has changed a lot with Cataclysm. The multi-tiered badge system was converted to a two-tier point system. And 10-mans were made prevalent, dropping loot equivalent to 25-mans. But neither of these changes affects the actual game play on a basic level. Neither changes how the encounters are fundamentally designed. Neither changes the quality of the storytelling found in a raid dungeon. Neither changes the way we traverse the depths of Blackwing Descent or the heights of Throne of the Four Winds. And this is very much where raiding is flawed.

For the most part, improvements are stagnant or inconsistent. And sometimes there is a nauseating amount of content recycling.

Breadcrumb Quality & Inconsistency

Let’s first consider breadcrumbs. Breadcrumbs are quests, movies, events, zones, or anything that would otherwise lead you to a specific raid dungeon. Breadcrumbs are an important part of raid storytelling. They introduce you to an antagonist or set of antagonists and give your character reason to enter raid a dungeon to assault them.

Unfortunately, Blizzard doesn’t always do a good job with their breadcrumbs. Sometimes, they don’t include them in the game at all. At the release of Cataclysm, two of the three major raid instances—Blackwing Descent and Throne of the Four Winds—were missing breadcrumbs. No one tells you to go to Blackwing Descent. No one says, “Hey, there’s a rumor going around that Nefarian is back from the dead! How can that be possible? Who is responsible? Someone should investigate!” There’s nothing. Absolutely nothing. And the same goes for the Throne of the Four Winds. People only go to them because they’re on the map, because they remember Blizzard talking about them outside of the game, because Wowhead lists them, because they remember reading about them on MMOC, or because their guild or raid is headed to one of them and they’re invited to come along.

Even when the breadcrumbs do exist, they often could be done better or more completely. As an example of this, I’ll use the Bastion of Twilight. For the most part, the way you’re introduced to Cho’gall and his ilk towards the end of the Twilight Highlands isn’t half bad. But Blizzard could have done so much more. I remember how awesome it was entering the Black Temple after completing its attunement quests. You fought your way through a bunch of demons alongside Akama to a small breach in the Temple’s foundations. This was an excellent end to the trail of breadcrumbs leading into the Black Temple. The Bastion of Twilight, and many other recent raids, could do with this sort of epic conclusion to their introductory questlines.

Of course, I’m rather happy with the breadcrumbs for the most recent raid—the Firelands. Already you had the quest at the end of Mount Hyjal where you briefly engage Ragnaros. Tack on the Molten Front, and you’re given an adequate introduction to the Firelands. (I could talk about the annoyances of being daily-throttled, but that’s for another section.)

So Blizzard is essentially two-for-four with Cataclysm, which is pretty poor. And since there’s only one more raid instance coming this expansion, the best Blizzard can do is three-for-five. And you don’t want to be batting .600 in a video game.

Plot Development in Raids

I’m going to be blunt in this section. The plot development in WoW’s raid instances is awful. Blizzard has dropped the ball in this area time and time again. And it is no different in Cataclysm.

Blackwing Descent is the worst offender. I’ve already gone over the lack of breadcrumbs, so you already know you’re not introduced to the conflict outside of the instance. That must mean you’re introduced to the conflict inside. Right? Well, there are some things that allude to the overall story, but they by no means paint a complete picture. Nefarian’s back from the dead. His minions have been doing some experiments on various dragons, creatures and constructs. Beyond that, you’re not explicitly told who resurrected him, how, or why. And he’s dead before you find out. Maybe this will be addressed in 4.3, but I doubt it.

For that matter, the quality of the story that does exist in Blackwing Descent is poor. I almost laughed when Blizzard revealed Nefarian was back from the dead. That alone inspires some /palmfacing. Maybe I would find it plausible if it played out in some actual plot development in the game. Maybe this could have been Deathwing’s way of bringing physical proof that he is not the Aspect of Death in name only. But none of this was in the game itself. I seriously hope Nefarian and Onyxia aren’t bosses in the final raid. If they are, I don’t think I will ever have to say another word about how ridiculous the raids’ stories are. I could believe this narrative copout for the undead. But when you extend them beyond that, I start to wonder if Blizzard is struggling to come up with fresh ideas.

All right, well, Blackwing Descent doesn’t have a great story. What about the Throne of the Four Winds? The only thing to criticize is its lack of a story altogether. Al’akir and his lesser lords of wind reside here. He’s allied with Deathwing. I know because I read it on WoWWiki. They don’t really say how or why in the game. It’s merely implied. You don’t see anything about it in the raid instance itself.

What about the Bastion of Twilight? The plot development here consists of you chasing Cho’gall and battling through trash and the other bosses, until he reaches a dead end and is forced to fight. I guess the story here didn’t have to be too complex, but I’d liked there to have been more insight into Cho’gall’s recent past involving C’Thun. But I guess we’ll never find out in-game, now that he’s dead. Oh well!

This is even worse than the story told in Icecrown, which was mostly plagued with pointless filler bosses, cheesy dialog, terrible voice acting (you know what I’m talking about), and dangling threads.

Raid Game Play

Okay, Lume. Writing is one thing. But WoW doesn’t need to have great stories, if it’s a game that plays well.

Obviously, I agree with that sentiment to some degree. People play Mario because of its game play, not because the abduction story is at all compelling (it’s not). The same could be said for Ocarina of Time. The Ocarina of Time actually had a pretty saccharine story. But its artistic themes, whimsical charms, and its game play made it one of the greatest and most memorable games of all time.

Unfortunately, however, the game play in WoW’s raids can’t hold a candle to so many other games these days. And why is that? Well, firstly, it’s because WoW is outdated. But it’s also because it has some major problems in several areas that affect raiding.

Basic Design Is Stagnant

The basic fundamentals of raiding hasn’t really changed since TBC. Sure, raids have been downsized and the loot system has been streamlined. But the way you approach and kill nearly all of the bosses hasn’t changed much at all since TBC. You’re usually required to tank the boss (or a set of mobs that are a part of the encounter), dodge fire, heal through damage, DPS, and maybe deal with some kind of unique mechanic featured in the raid (something like a debuff that does AoE damage, or shatters the tanks armor, or something simple along those lines).

Of course, part of this has to do with the way the game is designed as a whole. When you have very strict roles defined by the holy trinity of tanking, healing and damaging, you feel compelled to force people to use those tools. So there’s only so much basic variety you can include. And while new spells and abilities can give the raid designers more options, most of the new spells are too awkward to make liberal use of, since not every class has a spell available that works equivalently. With this in mind, the raid designers have to tread lightly when considering requiring something like Leap of Faith or Heroic Leap. So most of the encounters operate on the premise that the tanks take damage and do their best to mitigate it, the healers heal through damage (be it raid or tank damage), and the damagers do, well, damage. Along the way, you’ve had a few more major mechanics added, such as healer cooldowns, but those are extremely limited in scope.

Occasionally Blizzard will create a unique encounter to keep things fresh. But it’s rare. But the unique mechanic is often limited to only a small portion of the encounter or to only a few people. Not everyone uses the cannons during the gunship encounter in ICC. Only a set number of healers go into the portal during Valithria. Only a set number of people hop up onto Magmaw’s head to impale him (her?) onto the spike. Etc. Sometimes, the encounter mechanics meant to add a little spice to raiding are poorly done (or they aren’t as interesting as they appeared on paper). So the fun isn’t there or it’s shorter-lived than it should be.

The first tier of content in Cataclysm has done nothing to change my mind about any of this. You always have those slight changes. The puzzle’s picture is different. But the pieces are always shaped the same. This isn’t enough for me anymore. I need a 3-D puzzle, a chess match, a poker game, a tennis match, some Minesweeper, and then a page of Sudoku.

RNG

RNG. The “random number generator.” Code for the randomization you encounter in games. WoW’s raids are full of it: how hard your abilities hit, how hard you get hit, whether you dodge or not, whether your abilities crit or not, what ability a boss uses, etc. There was a time when I was relatively cool with the RNG in raids. I was fine with it during both Archimonde and Kil’jaeden, because the style of RNG presented in each was manageable. For Archimonde, it was about manipulating the doomfire and making sure you kept your distance from it before a fear, and making sure you used your Tears if you got launched into the air. For Kil’jaeden, you just needed to know how to handle his combo of death. (Flame Darts! Fire Bloom! Darkness! ULTRAAAA COMBOOOO!) And for most of the other elements of RNG, they’d average out over the course of your raiding experience.

But the RNG in Cataclysm’s first tier was of the most frustrating kind. The kind where you had to go to the extreme in terms of gimmicks and raid stacking to have the best chances to succeed. If your tanks weren’t dodging a lot during Chimaeron’s final stage, you’d just stack mages and cheese the threat mechanics of the fight with mirror images and invisibility (not to mention a mage’s superior ability to burn). If you were having issues with one or two of your healers running OOM during phase two of Nefarian, due to Shadowflame Barrage, you’d just bring extra sources of mana regen or defensive cooldowns. And then there was RNG that was just completely dumb. For example, heroic Al’akir. I’m sorry, but any fight where you tell a large chunk of your raid to stand there and do nothing to minimize RNG gibbing is just poorly designed.

To me, it seems like the handling of RNG in raids has become sloppier over time. During TBC, it wasn’t all that bad and you could usually do something about it. But in Wrath and Cataclysm, it has often been an absolute bitch. And I really don’t think the first tier of raiding is the best time to throw tons of RNG at people, anyway. RNG keeps people on their toes, but you can’t just throw it around like rice at a wedding. You have to carefully plan it. Otherwise, it’s just annoying.

Class Balance

Class balance is I think one of my biggest pet peeves when it comes to raiding. To be fair, the speed at which classes are balanced is much better than it used to be (whoever remembers how terrible it was during vanilla, raise your hand). But there was some gross oversight in the AoE DPS department early on in Cataclysm. So much so that it got to the point where my raiding compadres and I were bitching about it nearly every single raid until it was finally fixed in 4.1.

But, for the most part, the blame lies in the way the game is fundamentally designed. How can you easily balance a raid encounter when there are so many spec combinations with different mechanics while still making the raids challenging? Realistically, you can’t. You can try. And you can do things like making various stats equally beneficial for two different specs, so gear doesn’t complicate the matter. But, even then, you still have such a wide variety of classes and specs with which to fill a raid that you simply won’t be able to make challenging raids without frustrating guilds that simply don’t have the resources to utilize the most optimal setup for each and every fight. And, if you go in the other direction to accommodate those guilds, you risk making the raids way too easy for the guilds that do have those resources.

So, unfortunately, there’s really nothing Blizzard can do about it at this point. People are accustomed to the classes they have. The system is long-established. The game is spec-oriented. Full stop. Changing class balance to me would require changing the fundamentals of the game altogether. And you’d need to rework the classes from scratch. Maybe even remove some or change how you access them. And that is liable to upset a lot of players.

Overall Quality of Play

WoW’s engine is old. Older than most of the engines for games that also came out in 2004. This is because MMOs like WoW take longer to produce than traditional games. Furthermore, because WoW is persistent and some of its processing is done server-side, it cannot have as many complex processes to handle as its traditional counterparts. As a result, when WoW went live, it almost felt like you were playing a multiplayer version of a single-player platformer from 1998. Like Ocarina of Time online, but with more classes, abilities, specs, items, etc. Of course, things have slightly improved over time. But only slightly.

As one example, they’ve added smart collision with spells like typhoon, but the way it works is extremely primitive. I can’t tell you how often I’ve throw a typhoon right over all of the parasites on Magmaw, only to see half of them knocked back and the other half staying put. Even when two of them were directly on top of each other, one would get knocked back, and the other would just keep on trucking.

With such a dated engine, it’s extremely difficult for Blizzard to improve the game and create some truly unique mechanics. Can you imagine all the problems they’d have trying to make dynamically destructible objects? With WoW’s engine and the server architecture it operates on, I don’t think it’d be possible. And, unfortunately, that contributes to how stale the game feels to a lot of veteran players.

Comparing 10- and 25-Man Raiding

If there’s one thing I think Blizzard did well in considering its raid design for Cataclym, it’s acknowledging that 10-man raiding doesn’t have to be third-rate. Different people like different group sizes. It’s a preferential thing. Me? I enjoyed aspects of both 10- and 25-man raiding. I could spend a whole article writing about the differences between each. The social implications. The styles of delegation and management. What it feels like to be a part of the crowd. Etc.

The problem before Cataclysm was simply that 10-man raiding often had no incentives attached. In TBC, people wanted to run ZA because they wanted a bear mount. Or because they wanted the caster trinket. In Wrath, no one really wanted to run the 10-mans for anything but supplementary gear. So if you desired a more intimate setting, but wanted the same physical rewards, you were out-of-luck.

Of course, I should note the tuning for each version of an encounter and the balance between gear drops is not perfect. 25-mans have a very distinct advantage when it comes to loot. More items drop per person. And you’re more likely to have someone present who can actually use each item that drops. And for early progress, this means 25-mans have the advantage in that regard. But loot isn’t the sole discrepancy. General difficulty is, as well. Some encounters are easier in 25′s, and some are easier in 10′s. So the balance between the two is definitely not perfect, but then I never expected it to be.

At least 10-man raiding is now a viable option, and I think Blizzard made a good decision here.

The Upcoming Raid Finder

In 4.3, a raid finder will be implemented, operating much like the dungeon finder does now, but for raids. This is long overdue. As 4.3 is technically a part of Cataclysm, I’ll include my thoughts about it in this review.

When I was still leading a serious raid during Wrath, I had problems maintaining the raid’s health for pretty much the entire expansion. And this was while leading a guild that was frequently in the top 100 in the U.S. The situation was much more dire for raiding groups ranked even lower.

This is what happens when a game is bleeding players. The number of raiding guilds has to decrease. But guilds are slower to reduce in number than the size of the pool of players, because they have to gauge the size of the recruitment pool and then react to it. But guilds are reluctant to disband, so it’s a slow process. And, because of this, most guilds are generally stressed for numbers.

At the end of the day, some percentage of the raiding guilds will have to go. For the players in the guilds that dissolve, they’ll have to find a new. And, unfortunately, it’s not easy. You either have to find a raid that runs during your free time, or you have to transfer to a server with a successful PUGing operation that meets your standards. In light of this predicament, a lot of players end up quitting, exacerbating the problem.

The raid finder, however, may give players who would otherwise quit a reason to stick around, if they feel like playing raid roulette. Maybe they’ll even find a guild they like using the raid finder. For these people, it’s better than sifting through hundreds of guilds and putting in a bunch of applications.

If you ask me, the raid finder is about two years too late. The game’s already bled a lot of players that a raid finder could have saved. But I guess it’s better late than never.

Amount of Raid Content

With the recent announcement that 4.3 will be the last content patch of the expansion, Cataclysm will finish with five raids (not including BH, which I’ve never considered a proper raid instance). That’s three tiers of content. 25% less than Wrath and TBC. This seems odd to me, because Blizzard will be embarking on this final content patch very soon, and could possibly finish it around Cataclysm’s first birthday, give or take a couple months. I’m not sure that settles well with me. Nor am I sure it’s going to settle well with a lot of people.

Conclusion

I think much of what I’ve stated is a result of the fact that I burnt out on raiding a long time ago. What kept me going was the social interaction that often took place during the course of a raid. Some moments have left me with priceless memories I will cherish.

But the fact I’ve burnt out is very much a problem, especially because I know there are others in my situation. I saw friends burn out when I was still trucking along. And I’ve talked to friends who have since burnt out after my own retirement from raiding. I guess you could say everyone grows tired of a game eventually. But I think MMOs need to adapt to the changing demands of its players. And, if it can’t adapt, maybe an engine re-work is in order.

Raiding in WoW has its problems. Some of them are a result of flawed fundamentals with the game itself. And some exist simply because Blizzard hasn’t done enough to heighten the interest or enjoyment generated by the raids. We at least need more than what we’re getting—more compelling and better written stories told within the instances, and encounters that are better crafted and less of the same. The raid finder will probably be a good addition, if done well, but I’m not sure it will be enough to counteract the other problems I’ve mentioned.

The Dungeon Finder

I should be quick to bring notice to the fact that the dungeon finder is not a product of Cataclysm. It was actually implemented in the last content patch of Wrath of the Lich King. But the system clearly factors into the quality of the five-man experience in Cataclysm. No longer do you have to troll general or trade chat to get a group together. Nor do you have to hope your guildies aren’t sick running five-mans everyday. You just bring up the dungeon finder, select any applicable roles (tank, healer or damage), and queue up. And because the system puts players from different realms together, the likelihood of there being enough people to fill a group for a specific instance is rather high, and the group is usually filled quickly.

The only real issue is role availability. Tanks and healers, even though they each only make up one-fifth of a group, are almost always in high demand. So, if you’ve queued as DPS, you can expect to wait for forty minutes before it’s your turn to be placed in a group with the tanks and healers.

Of course, the dungeon finder also doesn’t guarantee you’ll be given a quality group, though it usually does a good job making sure the group is diverse enough not to fail on composition alone. But trolling general or trade chat didn’t guarantee a solid group, either. There’s always a chance you’ll get a player who doesn’t know what he or she is doing. And if that person is the tank or healer, you’re probably in trouble. In this case, you can always initiate a vote to kick someone if they are under-skilled or poorly geared for any given dungeon.

Overall, the dungeon finder is a godsend. It is what WoW’s five-man dungeon system had needed for years. You no longer have to wait hours to gather a group when a five-man becomes less popular. The rewards given for queuing and completing a random heroic (valor or justice points, equivalent to badges in Wrath) means any five-man will still be run, even after the actual gear it drops is outdated for most end-game players. Gearing up your alts is also less frustrating, because groups are more readily available.

The biggest positive the dungeon finder brings to the game has to be at the beginning of an expansion. You don’t have to queue solo for the system. You can queue with any number of people. So you can grab five guildies, queue for a random heroic, and you’ll be there instantly. And once you’re done with that instance? You can queue for another. So you can chain-run instances, without any travel or instance lockouts eating into your playing time. And if you lose a person and can’t find a guildie to replace them, you can just queue with your remaining four and fill the last slot with a pick-up.

Does this make the world and on-server player interaction less meaningful? In some ways, sure. But so what. WoW is a game. I think people get a good feel for the game world when they level through the outdoor zones. There’s no need to require us to travel every time we want to do an instance. Suspension of belief is enough for me if it means more enjoyable game play and less boring tasks like travel. And when it comes to player interaction, I’ve often found as many negatives as positives. Besides, you’re more likely to find a better group by running with people you know than solo queuing through the dungeon finder. So social interaction is still beneficial.

The Dungeons

Other than the dungeon finder and its implications, basic dungeon design hasn’t changed much since TBC. You have your normal five-mans and your heroics. Heroics are meant for the end-game. They are more difficult than their normal counter-parts and they drop better loot. It’s a rather simple concept Blizzard has employed for a while now.

Encounter Design & Quality

The main difference in Cataclysm is in the quality of the encounter design. The five-man boss fights in Cataclysm have seen an increase in quality over its predecessors. More raid-like mechanics are used than were used in times past. And some of them are rather unique. For example, Altairus in the Vortex Pinnacle has an element of wind direction that plays into its design. When you are facing against the wind, you suffer a haste debuff. When you have your back to the wind, you receive a huge haste buff. And because the wind changes direction periodically, you’re encouraged to continually shift positions. But you have to dodge the whirlwinds floating around the room. If you get knocked off the platform by one, you’re probably going to die. Furthermore, the boss does a frontal breath attack, so, even though the tank probably wants the haste buff to keep up on threat, he or she has to be wary of doing more damage to the group than the healer can handle.

Dungeon Aesthetics

The dungeon aesthetic in Cataclysm is only slightly higher in quality than it was in Wrath. The quality of the voice acting and the music is the same. But the actual art is a step up from what was seen in Wrath’s earlier efforts. And this is mostly because I think the art team has improved their work on the cavernous and open-air parts of dungeons. But if you were to compare them to the Icecrown five-mans added in 3.3, the quality is roughly the same (except for the music being better than the music used in the Forge of Souls).

Story Presentation & Lore

Where the dungeons begin to falter is in the presentation of their story and lore. While a few of the dungeons are pretty well-connected to their parental zones, a lot of them are insular and have no interesting ways to present us with their backstory. For example, while I’m sure a lot of people love the whimsy found in the Blackrock Caverns, with Raz’s battlecry of “RAZ SMASH,” it doesn’t actually offer much else. While its relation to the bigger picture is evident, there’s no interesting character to guide you along or provide you with any insight into its plot or lore. No one like Vaelastrasz in Lower Blackrock Spire. No one like Jaina (as emotional as she is) in the three Icecrown five-mans. The story being told in BRC is superficial, and its overall presentation is uninteresting. Sure, the encounters aren’t bad, so it’s at least enjoyable to play through the first few times (and that’s important). But there’s hardly anything going for it when it comes to its story.

To be fair, I must acknowledge Catacylsm’s dungeons that have at least one point of decent plot development:

• The Throne of the Tides — You finally get to confront Ozumat, that giant cephalopod that sunk your ship, and Lady Naz’jar, who led the naga assault on Neptulon at the Abyssal Breach. Neptulon himself also plays a role.
• The Lost City of the Tol’vir — You get to confront Siamat, that conniving wind lord who granted the Neferset their newfound powers to oppose the Tol’vir of Ramkahen.
• The Deadmines — The shadowy figure who plays a role in many of the new Westfall quests is finally revealed at the end of the Deadmines.

I can’t actually say much about Shadowfang Keep, because I haven’t played through Silverpine Forest with a low-level Horde character. I assume at least one of the bosses from the instance plays a role in the zone, but I could be wrong, so I don’t want to officially list it. I do wish the worgen would have played a more prominent role in introducing the dungeon to players of the Alliance. Maybe I missed it, but I don’t remember any of them telling me, “Hey, you know that guy Arugal? The one who brought this curse upon us? You know that keep he holed himself up in? The one in Silverpine? Maybe we should go back to investigate, and see if we can gain further insight into the creatures who infected us with this curse. Maybe we should see if Arugal left behind something that could lead to a cure.” Maybe it was there, but I don’t remember it.

Replayability

Though the five-mans are a bit higher in quality than their Wrath of the Lich King counterparts, the five-mans still become stale too fast. They do have some replay value, but most of it comes by way of perfecting them. After that, I get this feeling like I never want to see them ever again. Even if I play through them with a different class, I still feel this way. Then I consider something like Zul’Aman. The first time through, you have to learn the encounters. But after that, you can focus on racing the clock and obtaining the mount by killing the first four bosses before all of the NPCs are executed. This gives the dungeon a much higher replay value than most. But that’s ruined by the fact that the dungeon is essentially the same as it was back in TBC, only retooled so five people can do it. And since I did the place a billion times in TBC, I was already sick of it. (Recycling content is an issue in and of itself, one I’ve already beat to death when discussing Naxxramas.)

I suppose achievements are meant to add to the replayability of each dungeon. But many of Cataclysm’s dungeon achievements are so annoying they fail to make the experience enjoyable. If not for the fact that my early dungeon group had completed so many achievements accidentally, we probably wouldn’t have bothered doing them all. There’s an amount of enjoyment I get from racing the clock to get the ZA mount, but there’s nothing terribly exciting about doing something as absolutely frivolous as Acrocalypse Now, Arrested Development, or Rat Pack. If you’re going to include achievements for dungeons, spend your time developing ones like the ZA timed run. I’d rather all of the achievements be enjoyable than tedious. And spending your time on making them interesting would actually add another level of replay value the dungeons desperately need.

Of course, some of the lack of replay value has to do with the way the game is fundamentally designed, as well as developer tendencies. I remember when people first experienced the Malygos encounter (it’s a raid encounter, but it serves as an example that could apply elsewhere). A majority of the people in my raid thought the final phase of the encounter was cool. But a small number of them had the opposite reaction. And it wasn’t the better players complaining about it being boring or anything. Most of the better players reacted by saying things like, “OMG! BIG NUMBERS! I MUST GET HIGHER STACKS! YEEEEHAWWW!” It was the weaker players who complained. Why? Probably because they were afraid of losing their spot in the raid because they sucked at learning something new (blunt, but it’s the truth). And as complaints of such things rose, Blizzard seemed less and less inclined to include content that required people to play outside of the normal confines of their classes.

Part of that has to do with basic class design. For example, if a tanking class has better snap aggro than the rest, and you need to pick up something immediately after the unique part of the encounter, that class is probably going to excel where a tanking class that relies on slow and methodical threat generation suffers. In such cases, making things out-of-the-ordinary can cause class balancing nightmares. So what’s the easiest solution? Don’t make a lot of things out-of-the-ordinary. And, unfortunately, this creates a lack of variety in game play, which reduces the overall replay value of things like dungeons.

Number of Dungeons

Something interesting to me is how the number of five-mans has declined with each expansion’s release. The Burning Crusade contained fifteen five-mans when it hit the shelves. Wrath of the Lich King had twelve. And Cataclsym had only nine. I suppose I’d prefer nine quality dungeons over twelve mediocre ones. Also, TBC added only one five-man during its run, whereas Wrath added four (three of which were very good). 4.3 will apparently add three new five-mans, so the total will be raised to fourteen. So the overall decline in the number of five-mans is actually pretty small (raid dungeons are a different matter).

Overall

The early dungeon experience in Cataclysm is definitely better than it was during its predecessors. The encounters are better designed, and the dungeon finder has made it much easier to run dungeons. These are two large positives.

But the dungeons still suffer from some of the same problems that have existed for quite some time.

The stories are generally presented poorly. There’s not a lot of interesting characters to guide you through or create a narrative balance between protagonist and antagonist. And when these characters do exist, sometimes those characters are uninteresting or do uninteresting things (hello, Brann Bronzebeard). In most cases, there is only an unspoken dichotomy between the players and the bosses. And that’s it. Story is otherwise implied by virtue of what you know about any overarching plots (whether you learned them in the game or not). There are some exceptions to this rule, but they are pretty minimal in scope.

And when story is included in a dungeon, the production quality is usually pretty poor. While repeated viewing of the introduction to the Halls of Reflection in Wrath could be seen as annoying, the first time it was actually pretty damn cool. So why can’t every dungeon have something like this? I’m not asking for full-on cinematics or anything. But why didn’t anyone from Ramkahen play more of a role in the Lost City of the Tol’vir? Why couldn’t at least one of them work like Jaina did in the Halls of Reflection? Instead, they just stand there and give you quests. Booooooring!

Basic design is very much the same as it’s always been. There’s trash and there’s bosses. For the trash, you pull a pack, maybe you crowd control something, and then you take damage, heal through damage or damage something until everything in the pack is dead. After each round of trash, you’ll come to a boss. The boss works like a puzzle you have to solve. But because there’s no expectations of having an optimal group in a five-man, it’s not too difficult (unless you’re Commander-fucking-Springvale). So, if you do have an optimal group, one with something like heroism, it can seem incredibly straightforward. With that in mind, the challenges presented in Cataclysm’s dungeons are usually rooted in avoiding stuff that would otherwise kill you. While that can sometimes be pretty challenging, it means every encounter is generally focused on this same concept.

The ultimate replay value could use some work. Achievements are meant to provide us extra replay value to some degree, but they could be done better. If Blizzard wants to elevate replay value beyond what is typical, they need to spend more time in each dungeon making sure there’s something like the timed run in Zul’Aman. While we’re at it, get rid of the frivolous achievements and focus on making them each something that would greatly contribute to a dungeon’s replayability (like the timed ZA run, or most of Starcraft II’s mission achievements).

If Blizzard could make huge improvements in these areas, I foresee great things in the dungeoning future. I guess we’ll have to see if Blizzard is willing to meet that challenge.

There are five high-level zones in Cataclysm:

• Hyjal — The site of many important events and battles throughout much of Azeroth’s history. Where Deathwing has summoned Ragnaros—the elemental lord of fire—to bring destruction to the world tree.
• Vashj’ir — An underwater zone. Where the naga are aiding Deathwing’s cause to try to manipulate the elements of water, and corrupt Neptulon, who hadn’t expressed loyalty to Deathwing’s cause.
• Deepholm — Deathwing’s refuge after the second war. From where Deathwing reemerged into Azeroth and caused the Shattering. Where the world pillar has been shattered, and must be restored, but the Twilight’s Hammer and the distrust of Therazane may hinder your efforts.
• Uldum — A desert land. Where there was once an ancient Titan city. Where the Tol’vir—a cat-like race that once served to maintain and protect the titan’s artifacts—live. Deathwing does have an active agent in the zone.
• The Twilight Highlands — Your experience here depends on your faction. If you’re a part of the Alliance, you must help unite factions of the Wildhammer Clan. If you’re part of the Horde, you must help the Dragonmaw. From here, there is a lot of plot development. Part involves a servant of the old gods. Another part involves the battle between the red dragons and Deathwing and his twilight dragonflight. The final part of the zone involves Cho’gall and his Twilight Hammer.

Zone Flow & Travel

My first thought when I saw what the new high-level zones of the expansion were going to be was, “How are they going to handle the zone flow? How are we going to travel between each zone?” In vanilla WoW, The Burning Crusade, and Wrath of the Lich King, the zone flow involved physical movement. If you were meant to level in a specific zone, you had to travel there by foot, mount, boat, etc. But this would make for many boring hours of travel in Cataclysm. So how would they solve the issue? With portals, of course. (I tried my best not to say that in a GLaDOS voice.)

When a new zone is available to you, you simply execute an introductory quest line to travel to your destination. And in most cases this travel is expedient. In the case of Hyjal, you teleport to Moonglade with the help of a druid, and then take a flight on the back of a dragon to Hyjal (who also conveniently flies through a portal to speed the process even more). The only zone I found annoying to get to was Vashj’ir, and that’s because you have to wait for the boat to arrive and depart for something like ten or fifteen minutes (I’m not sure if the Horde has the same problem).

Returning to a zone is of no issue, unless you fail to unlock the portal that allows you to travel there. In most cases, the portal unlocks the moment you complete the introductory quest line. In a couple cases, you have to wait only a tad longer. Otherwise, when combined with your hearthstone, astral recall, or mage teleports, you can travel to and from your respective capital and the high-level Cataclysm zones easily.

The Quests & Storytelling

For the most part, WoW has always seen an improvement in zone quality with each expansion. This is no different in Cataclysm. That’s not to say it’s improved as much as I’d hoped, but it’s definitely improved.

Storytelling

In general, the quality of the stories told in the high-level Cataclysm zones is better than in efforts past. Each zone has a focus on a few story arcs and subplots. Unlike in times past, many of the storylines and plots begin and end within their respective zones. However, some stories have to conclude in the dungeons connected to them. That’s to be expected. The dungeons would be uninteresting if none of them tied into the story of their parental zones in some way.

That the zones are more insular in their storytelling is a big improvement over previous creative efforts. However, I will admit there is a lot missing here. Deathwing is fashioned as this expansion’s primary antagonist. His return was heralded by the Twilight cultists in the pre-expansion event. He was the main figure in the expansion’s introductory movie. He is responsible for the “reshaping” of much of Azeroth. And he makes some notable appearances in a few of the zones. But what about Deathwing is missing in these high-level zones? A lot, actually.

I’m not going to nitpick every single Deathwing plot point I think is missing, but I’ll give one example I think is a glaring omission. After being chased off by the other dragon aspects after the second war, Deathwing retreated into Deepholm to regain his strength. This is where you see him at the beginning of the expansion’s cinematic introduction. But as you play through the zone, you’re not offered much insight into this part of the zone’s relatively recent past. I think Blizzard should have briefly touched upon Deathwing’s background here. What happened that would have caused him to retreat to this elemental plane of earth? How did he keep tabs on his minions up in Azeroth and abroad? How much did Therazane really know about Deathwing’s presence when he was here? He was here for a pretty long time, afterall. Instead, the zone focuses mainly on the here and now, leaving players who either don’t have the time or don’t care enough to read the canonical novels in the dark.

Production Quality

The production quality of the high-level zones is inconsistent. For example, Uldum makes heavy use of the new in-game cut-scene engine, but it is a “desert” of voice acting. Meanwhile, the later parts of Deepholm make considerable use of voice acting, but the in-game cut-scenes are extremely limited. These inconsistencies are pervasive throughout the expansion’s high-level zones. And I have to wonder why that is. I suspect the cut-scene engine wasn’t finished before parts of each zone, or some of the developers working on specific zones weren’t comfortable using it. For the voice acting, it could be any number of reasons; perhaps they didn’t have the budget for it, perhaps they didn’t have the time, or perhaps they didn’t think it was necessary.

I’ll elaborate more about this in the production quality section of the review.

Quest Quality

There is some improvement in the quality of the actual quests themselves. I really like that you don’t always have to go back to a quest giver to obtain follow-up quests when it’s warranted. This saves the players some time they would have otherwise spent on needless travel.

There is also a larger number of quests in Cataclysm that have game play different from the usual kill and collect quests. By this, I mean there are more quests like the one at the end of Hyjal where you, Cenarius, Malfurion and Hamuul confront Ragnaros. You don’t just pull Ragnaros and damage him until he dies. You have to avoid fire waves and kill groups of mobs when he submerges. You have to pay attention to who is being attacked and defend them accordingly.

Another example is the now-famous Gnomebliteration quest, which I’ll simply post a video of:

So why can’t there be more of this? Why can’t Blizzard try to be more creative with the quests in this manner? Time constraints? Budgetary restrictions? General developer apathy? I don’t know the reason(s). What I do know is that a lot of us are tired of the same old, same old. We’re tired of pulling mob after mob and hitting our usual spells and abilities to kill each one in a routine of boredom. We’re tired of picking quest objects off the ground over and over again. We want game play that breaks this routine. And while this doesn’t apply to just questing, it’s something we want nonetheless. And something I think the zones need more of.

Overall

The increase in focused storytelling for each high-level zone in Cataclysm is admirable. But the experience is plagued by problems in game play and production quality. Blizzard could have made sure to include more voice acting in a higher number of quests. And Blizzard could have spent more time giving the quests a higher entertainment value. With these problems and the occasional plot holes and dangling threads that still exist in WoW’s narrative, the high-level zone experience is middling.

Both the goblins and worgen are generally loved by fans of the series. Love for the goblins is mainly nostalgic. They were first introduced in Warcraft II, way back in 1995. That’s over fifteen years ago. And yet, through all of those years and through the numerous sequels and expansions, they have managed to retain their trademark personality—defined by greed and a comic destructiveness. Love for the worgen is more difficult to place, though it’s likely caused by the curiosity most people had when they first encountered the worgen back in the earliest days of WoW. Or it could just be because “they’re frikkin’ werewolves, man!”

Blizzard definitely made the right decision choosing these races. Goblins were already well-established and many players have wanted to play one for a long time. They also fit in with the Horde nicely, since they’d already sided with the orcs once before. The inclusion of the worgen allows Blizzard to push the development of their story forward, and it also gives Blizzard an excuse to include a more monstrous race as part of the Alliance. Furthermore, these races are interesting and don’t feel as though they have been included just because they’re “cool,” or because a developer or group of players simply want them in the game. (Which can’t be said for a certain popular race currently running the rumor circuit. Ahem!)

Even better, the backstories given for the introduction of goblins and worgens to each faction are presented well and they both make sense. Forget crystal spaceships. Forget contrived plots about magic starvation and shared heritage. The stories here are both believable and reasonable, but, most of all, interesting. This was a pleasant change from what was done in The Burning Crusade. You can observe each and say, “Hey, that’s pretty believable and not entirely over the top! Good job, Blizzard!”

The Starting Areas

Warning: This section contains some spoilers. If you haven’t played through the starting zones for the goblins or worgen, you should probably skip over the applicable section(s). I do avoid the major spoilers, but inferences can be made, and that might ruin it for people sensitive to learning even the least important details.

Goblins: The Isle of Kezan and the Lost Isles

As a playable goblin, you hail from the isle of Kezan. You are basically an under-executive of the robber baron of Undermine—trade “prince” Gallywix. For roughly the first five levels of play, you’ll be making your way around Kezan getting involved in various cells of corruption, scheming, etc.

I don’t really have anything positive to say about this part of the experience. The writing and the game play are both abysmal. A large chunk of it plays like an homage to Grand Theft Auto (GTA). The only problem? WoW isn’t GTA. The music that plays when you turn on the radio in that horrid car doesn’t elicit a smile from me when I recognize the reference. Running people over isn’t funny at all (they essentially wave their fist and shout legal threats at you). There’s no star system or cops to outrun. The inexplicable roadways resemble the poor freeway planning of the L.A. area, which causes the quests to play out too long. Outside of the GTA-style experience, the story in these first five levels isn’t really compelling. It’s like the Jersey Shore meets a third-rate Godfather knock-off. Only there’s no interesting godfather figure to keep it entertaining (Gallywix is a one-dimensional bore).

There’s nothing wrong with humor or pop culture references, but there’s a little thing called critical mass, and it applies to storytelling as much as it does to nuclear fission. I (and I’m sure others) need to have a certain amount of serious writing underlying the humor to maintain interest. While I’m sure the humor and pop culture junkies will love every minute of it, people like me won’t. Especially because the Warcraft series isn’t all about humor and pop culture references. It’s definitely a big part of it, but in Warcraft III, the humor lies on the surface of a deeper, more mature narrative and it never gets in its way. That’s the style of humor that works best in WoW, as well. Here it essentially becomes the story and it doesn’t work.

Luckily, Deathwing decides the local volcano needs to erupt, leading to the evacuation of Kezan at about level five. This is where the experience improves a thousandfold.

In order to achieve evacuation, you need to pay Gallywix (literally) a bazillion macaroons (goblin slang for money) for a spot on his ship. To do this, you rape the land of its resources (since it’s going to erupt anyway), rob a bank, steal a bunch of priceless artifacts from Gallywix’s compound (why this stuff wasn’t already being loaded onto the ship, I’ll never know), and then burn down your headquarters to collect on the insurance (because, you know, the insurance company still cares about operating its business when the island is about to become Kilauea on a bad day). This also buys some spots on the ship for your friends and a bunch of your associates, who now view you as their savior. This plays into the plot development of the last half of the experience.

While a bazillion macaroons was enough to buy a spot on Gallywix’s ship, it wasn’t enough to buy your freedom post-evacuation. You, your friends, and your associates are Gallywix’s slaves to be sold once you reach your destination. But the ship is fired upon by an Alliance vessel. Shipwrecked, Gallywix is more concerned with goblin preservation than with making sure all his slaves are subjugated, so you are set to various tasks. Though shipwrecked, the goblins are still concerned about making a profit. You’re supposed to create a buffer between you and the wildlife, then solve a problem in a mine they’ve recently opened. While in the mine, you discover a dead orc who was part of a group of orcs also shipwrecked by the Alliance attack. So you pay a visit to the orcs, led by Aggra, who greet you as a friend by virtue of your shared circumstances.

From here, the conflict between the Alliance and the Horde becomes the central focus of the plot. I won’t spoil this part, because there are a lot of good surprises. Besides, you know the ending—the goblins join the Horde. How they join is the interesting part.

Worgen: Gilneas

The introductory experience of the worgen is the most interesting of the two new races.

Isolated behind the Greymane Wall, Gilneas, for a time, enjoyed a peace foreign to the rest of Azeroth. But the Gilneans became victims of their own machinations. Arugal, a magister of the court at Gilneas, had summoned a race of monstrous beasts called worgen outside of the Greymane wall to create a buffer between them and the Forsaken. But this tactic backfired when worgen found their way into Gilneas and began infecting its ordinary citizens. As a result, the worgen curse spread through practically the entire population, creating a new race of hybrid worgen and human. This isn’t exactly explained during the leveling experience, but it doesn’t need to be.

As a playable worgen, you witness the attacks of the worgen and fight alongside your king and prince to fend them off. But during the course of battle, you succumb to the curse and become a worgen yourself. Once your inner nature has been “tamed,” you again fight for your kingdom, but this time against an invasion by the Forsaken. All the while, the world seems to be crumbling apart, witch large chunks of Gilneas falling into the sea after a series of quakes.

These are components of what seems to be a very simple premise. But the details and sub-plots are rather engrossing. The cut-scene you witness after you succumb to the curse sets the stage and the tone for the rest of the zone. And along the way, the story asks many questions. How can you control your savage nature? How can the remaining humans and those infected with the curse live together? Can they live together? Politics accentuate these questions. Some Gilneans support the acceptance of those cursed who have proven they can control their savageness. Others don’t. And the surprises at the end of this subplot makes it all the better.

Furthermore, this experience seems to be higher in production quality. There is a higher concentration of voice acting, the quests are more unique, and terrain phasing is more evident. While some of the story still suffers the same issues the rest of the game does, such as an acute plague of quest text for some parts of the story, there’s enough voice acting to keep it livelier than the starting zones of every other race.

To me, this is what the starting experience for all the races should be like, barring any other changes needed to the game on a more fundamental level. However, the death knight starting experience still takes the cake.

Overall View of the Zones

If there’s one negative I must point out, it’s that the goblin and worgen starting areas do not make use of the new in-game cut-scene engine. They rely solely on basic game play mechanics, voice acting, and pre-rendered movies to bolster them. While they are definitely well-written (except for the first five levels of playing a goblin), they could have been done even better through use of the in-game engine.

Of course, it’s likely it wasn’t used because these zones were designed before the engine was finished. And that’s an issue for another section of this review.

Disregarding this issue, the experiences are good for what they are and for what the game normally has to offer. Their design is better than past efforts, and better even than the changes Cataclysm made to the pre-existing zones (including the starting zones for the races included in the initial release of WoW). I really liked the worgen experience, and only a few quests got on my nerves (which is pretty rare for me, this day and age).

Aesthetics

I don’t take much issue with the aesthetics of either goblins or worgen, though I will say female worgen look far too much like anthropomorphic chihuahuas; this is the reason I race changed my druid to a worgen male instead of female. Otherwise, the way each race looks and feels is pretty solid. I especially love the ferocity exhibited when you /roar as a worgen.

Goblin and worgen architecture is also done very well. I especially love the Gilnean terrain and buildings. I only wish we could have seen more of it used outside of the starting experience, the Battle for Gilneas and Tol Barad.

Racial Abilities

The racial skills for both goblins and worgen are powerful in certain areas. In RBGs, the goblin’s rocket boost is overpowered when it comes to a flag carrier getting out of a rogue’s smoke bomb. In PvE, the worgen racials are incredibly powerful, especially when it comes to DPS. (Crit and an activated sprint?) Though, comparing them to a troll’s berserk, I suppose they aren’t as good comparatively. That said, goblin racials are underwhelming for PvE (trolls still take the cake), and worgen racials feel rather balanced in PvP.

Overall

Again, Blizzard absolutely made the right decision choosing worgen and goblins. There are some flaws with the goblin experience, and some flaws with the female worgen aesthetic, but the overall picture is rosy for both, when you compare them to the rest of the game as a whole.

Good job in this area, Blizzard.