Endgame Viable

The Burning Crusade has been out since January 2007, which makes it nearly seven years old. Since that time, there has always been a contingient of people on every new MMO forum who scream, “Where are the flying mounts? I keep getting hit by mobs!” I, like most everyone else, always scoffed and thought, “Just run around the mobs. Jeez. We don’t need no stinkin’ flying mounts.” Flash forward to today, when my Hunter finally bought a flying mount on the Hellfire Penninsula. I’ve been slowly leveling him since I first started playing WoW, which was, coincidentally enough, somewhere around 2007. (Actually I think it was 2008.) Anyway, he’s 64 now and I still occasionally break him out and grind through some quests to inch slowly forward toward where I can enter the second oldest expansion area. One day I found myself standing in front of the flying mount vendor with 225 gold burning a hole in my pocket, so I bought a white griffin. (408 words.)

Just so you know, I have been a veritable pinball of MMO playing lately. First FFXIV leveling an Archer/Bard to level 30. Then WoW leveling a Mage from around 17 to 50, and leveling some other characters. Then GW2 to check out the Tower of Nightmares. Then LoTRO leveling my hobbit Hunter from 38 to 45. Then Rift to check out the Song of Dreams patch. Even a little bit of Neverwinter and TERA and (gasp) Aion thrown in there between. (106 words.)

I was in a dungeon recently with a chain-pulling tank, and it got me thinking. I’ve always associated the chain-pulling tank behavior with a more advanced tanking technique, but is it really harder to chain-pull? Chain-pulling, if you don’t know, is where the tank runs at full speed pulling mob after mob after mob without stopping, until he gathers a big group of them together, and then he takes off again before the group is even dead. So he gets a big train of mobs following him around, and the rest of the party has to run full speed to keep up with him. (224 words.)

I know that the Mithril Coins are just a way to force people to buy from the shop, but I still cheerfully bought a big bagful of them. Being able to zip back to quest givers is an incredible time-saver. Way more worth real money than, say, a fancy cape or horse or whatever. (Actually, I had a trove of Turbine Points sitting around so I didn’t need to spend any (more) real money.) (74 words.)

Lots of talk about achievements. Are they good? Are they bad? MMO Gypsy hates them (http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/RagingMonkeys/~3/UCUa6ra8IUg/achievement-hate-exploration-and-mystery.html), Herding Cats defends them (http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/machiavelliscat/xgUW/~3/EBQ0bOGdQLk/), and CuppyVille relies on them (http://cuppyville.wordpress.com/2013/11/06/in-which-i-defend-achievements-in-mmos/). Me? I tend to ignore them. It’s true that I’m an Explorer on the Bartle test, so you might think I’d be siding with Syp in saying that achievements have destroyed the MMO genre. Well, first of all, I don’t think the genre has been destroyed at all; I think it’s far better now than it’s ever been. Also, I don’t feel like the Bartle Explorer fits me very well. A Bartle Explorer sounds like someone who will divert from a quest line to wander off into the jungle to see what’s there, because he saw a funny-looking knot on a tree, and then he’ll cross the river past the jungle, and then climb the mountain across from the river, and so on. Totally A.D.D. in other words. I do that occasionally, but these days I rarely go out into the jungle unless there is a quest telling me to. (760 words.)

I was reading a post on Why I Game which talked about lackluster enthusiasm for GW2, and I started to feel really bad for him. I cannot imagine what it’s like to feel such a compulsion to obtain achievements that you’re willing to log tons of game time doing things that aren’t fun. I certainly agree about the lack of enthusiasm for GW2. This Tower of Nightmares update is more of the same. Log in, kill lots of stuff, get some achievements, log out. Really nothing to look forward to except watching your achievment progress bar go from zero to full, and that’s not fun for me at all. I mean I guess there’s loot too, but I’m 80 so what do I need loot for? A new “finishing move?” I’m not doing PvP and it’s not like there are any raids to do. (485 words.)

I got an email from Trion saying that the Rift Song of Dreams patch 2.5 was live, so I eagerly patched up and logged in. What I saw was … nothing. Nothing looked different in Tempest Bay, so I checked my mail to get what I was sure would be a nice invitation to participate in the cool new Mini-Saga and … there was no mail. I knew all the action was supposed to happen on Ember Isle so I took the nearest porticulum over there and … nothing was happening. Nothing was coming out of the ocean, nobody was running around in zergs, nothing changed on the map, no new quest indicators, nothing. Okay, well, Rift is f2p now so maybe I have to buy something to get started on all the fun, so I looked in the store and there was … nothing. All this new content would be right on the front page of the store, right? So there’s no way I could have missed it. But there was nothing there but a dinosaur mount. Next I thought maybe a “Mini-Saga” is something like a Chronicle, so I checked my list of Chronicles and found … nothing. (Though I did find a couple I hadn’t done before.) (273 words.)

I saw a lot of negative reactions around the blogosphere to the GW2 Tower of Nightmares update. Surprisingly, the main criticism seems to be that people aren’t interested in the new story. It isn’t engaging enough. This is puzzling to me for a couple of reasons. First, I didn’t even realize there was a story in the new GW2 update, and second, I didn’t realize people judged new MMO content on the new storylines brought into the world. (715 words.)

So my WoW mage has Enchanting as a profession, and he’d leveled way past the point where he could disenchant the magic items he picked up at the measely skill level of 15. I had a couple of other characters in the 25-30 range that I could have used to farm items from dungeons, but I didn’t think those items would be any better. So I got the brilliant idea that I would level another character to 15 and just keep doing dungeon instances and send all the excess low-level magic items that I picked up to my mage. (483 words.)

I had an odd, somewhat amusing experience in WoW recently. I’ve been playing a lot of dungeon instances lately, partly because I’ve never actually done any WoW dungeons before, and partly because I wanted to level a mage without going through the hassle of soloing. Almost every instance has been an enjoyable, workmanlike experience … until this tank decided to be an ass. So the random dungeon selector came up with the Scarlet Monastary. Or maybe it was the Scarlet Halls. I can’t remember. They all run together. It was the one that starts out with those piles of corpses and zombies which most people just run around, but the second we stepped into this instance we were beset by flaming zombies and fighting for our lives. That usually happens when somebody doesn’t circumvent that first area, so I figured somebody was trying to do a quest I didn’t know about, or somebody was panicking, or somebody just didn’t know what was going on. (667 words.)