Patch 3.2, dubbed Call of the Crusade, came out for wow a couple of weeks ago (Release Notes). From a holy paladin's point of view, it changed three things: reduced bonus intelligence by 5% dropping all of our int based stats, it halved our mana return critical heals, and it made our Beacon of Light misleadingly more effective. I am not going into details about any of these, I only brought them up because they changed some of the numbers I used for my WoW: Math Nerd post, but not really enough to invalidate the point of the post. Small updates to it would be MP5 isn't as much of a throwaway stat as it was, and while crit is important, don't bother gemming for it. What this patch has done, is made us better burst healers for areas where the party/raid takes a lot of damage, and hampered our staying power some. Not sure if the burst healing is worth losing the staying power when it comes to raids (where we still fill a single/dual target healing role), but for 5-mans the changes are very impressive.
I am not going to go into all the changes. The above was mentioned because it directly involves a post still on the front page, otherwise, I wouldn't have bothered. And I wouldn't have bothered because I am not playing WoW any more. I have been meaning to bow out for awhile now...still unemployed, money is tight, etc, etc. But this patch helped kill my desire to play in a big way. And that big way is what they did with emblems and the rewards you get from them. Or more appropriately, how you get emblems. First, lets loot at wow currency, how you get it, and how it has changed. Then we will get to my problems with it.
WoW has tons of different kinds of currency. Gold is the main have to have it that buys repairs, food, and is trade able between players. There are tokens, honor, and points you get from doing pvp things that you can spend on other pvp things. Half the holiday events have a currency tied to them that can only be used for holiday stuff during the holiday. There is basically an entire tab on the character window devoted to these differing currencies.
Heroic dungeons and raids have their own currencies. Before the patch, heroic dungeons and the older 10-man raids all dropped Emblems of Heroism, older 25-man raids and Ulduar 10-mans dropped Emblems of Valor, and Ulduar 25-man dropped Emblems of Conquest (older is still implying level 80 stuff). These emblems could be traded for gear that matched the stats of areas the emblems came from. If I rand heroic dungeons (the easiest in the above list) and got a bunch of emblems, the stuff I bought wouldn't make me more powerful than stuff in the next tier of dungeons/raids. It is called balance, and it worked fairly well. With 3.2 that system has been eradicated and it all drops Emblems of Conquest. So now, you can run heroics non-stop and get gear as if you were running Ulduar skipping all the steps in between.
My feelings on this are totally mixed when it comes to the game mechanics. On the one side, I like to improve my character, and since I already have the skills to run my character, better gear can only make me better. On the other, it is not going to feel like I earned it since it is so damn easy. Another big problem for that matter, it is no longer easy to rate other players by looking at them. People in high level raid gear may have never run a raid before and have no concept of the differences between 5-mans and 25-mans (aside from the obvious difference in number). I kind of eliminate the latter due to my general anti-social behavior of not raiding with people outside of my guild. I will do heroics (5-mans), but not raids.
Now, game mechanics aside, from a personal level, this sucks. I play a holy paladin, healer, and I am fairly good at my job. I have run tons of heroics, probably averaging 3 a day for the past 1.5-2 months, all in an effort to get better gear for both my healing and tanking sets. But I like prefer to do other stuff. Heroics, in my opinion, are nice to break the monotony, but I would rather be grinding rep, farming materials for trade skills, or running around doing quests. The problem, is now everyone sees how easy it is to simply run heroics and get better gear that is all they want to do. And having run about 3 heroics a day for 2 months and being good at it, lots of people know me.
Just being a healer would have been bad enough, but being good at it, I get flooded with requests for groups. Some are polite, but most will sit and try and convince me to go. I have worked retail so long, that I tend to view things in those terms still. Healing is my job...these people are my customers...I get paid to help my customers...customers take priority over other work. Eventually, real life will set it, and I remember I am the customer, I pay for this service, I should be able to do whatever I want, so I would decline. Some where fine with it, most were not, and a few of those turned into arguments...until I remembered I could add people to my ignore list.
After the first day, I stopped the honest I don't want to routine that wasn't working because people are too focused on themselves to worry about other peoples desires (I am a customer, so there is no irony that my desire out weighs there desire even though they are a customer as well...they are not MY customer) and I started to tell everyone I'm saved. You can only run the heroic version of a dungeon once a day. That worked until these same people would start asking about other heroics. There are only so many hours in the day, so depending on when you ask, you can pretty much guess on how many even the hard core players can plow through.
There are only so many lies you can tell before you are totally transparent, and I hate lying anyways, so by day three, I put up an afk message reading "I don't respond to unsolicited tells." Now anytime someone send a request for a group, they would see that message. One person thought it was clever. One. Everyone else was pretty much insulted by it, ignored it, and started whining at me. Hello ignore list, I love you so. So, I changed it to something like "I don't respond to tells. Whine and you will be ignored." There is a character limit, so I couldn't go on at length, but I thought that was enough. I got a lot of apologies, but most just responded with "Asshole!".
Day 4, I decided that I was just going to put up my afk flag and ignore people. I didn't care how many times they sent me a message or how obvious it was that I really wasn't afk, if they were not in my guild or on my friends list, they got ignored. But the tells got more annoying, more hostile, more pleading, more more more. So my afk message went to something like "I won't heal your crappy little group welcome to my ignore list." This was a bad idea. Now whoever got that message would tell all their friends to harass me.
Day 5, I just went back to ignoring everyone, but it never really got better. By this point, my annoyance with everyone else was flooding over into the guild and I started ignoring them as well. I tried playing other characters, but I was really focused on getting stuff done on my paly, so I would go back.
As it stands, my account runs out at the end of the week, but I have already uninstalled the game, deleted my addons, and links. Pretty much everything related to wow aside from screenshots are gone from my computer right now. I know things will get better in wow, and I am sure I will return to wow. But I am done for now...they chased me away.
It amuses me that it tends to be the people that chase me away from games like this. I almost wish I didn't like the genre so I could avoid this type of game altogether, but they just don't make single players games with this kind of staying power. Oh well, maybe now I can get some writing done.
