Cows Loves Cake

Before I start what is going to end up being yet another rant about how the Devs just have no fucking clue about this game.  And actually seem determined to kill it off, or at least reduce it to a laughable shadow of itself to force people to leave…. I mean sometimes it like there is a secret in-joke at Blizz HQ about ‘how shit can we make our game and still rake in millions of dollars in subscriptions every month’.

Yeah, before that.

I’ve got to say that I’m enjoying the random heroic system, mainly because I play characters who have their main spec as either healing or tanking, or if they are dps then they probably _can_ tank or heal.  (If you’re just a solo dps char like a warlock, hunter or rogue I’m sure you  are loving the 15 min queues).  I’m making good use of it right now, since Blizz has deemed it fit to reduce DK tanks into a laughable subset of tanking only fit for flame wars between guilds.  “Lol that guild is so bad they actually have a DK maintank ROFL” and etc. I basically stopped playing my DK tank, because it’s shit now, and re-geared my dps warrior as a tank, the process of which took about 6 hours from zero tanking gear to full 232 set, 232 wep, 245 bracers and rings and sitting pretty at a reasonably respectable 35k hp unbuffed.  Got some way to go, shit trinkets and a shit ring along with a shit shield – but not far off, and it was pretty funny how at least in heroics my new tonk-warrior was doing way more threat than my DK can ever do, even with a PERFECT cycle, just by pretty much spamming 3 buttons all the time with an initial shockwave per pack.  But that’s another rant for another day. So yeah, from the perspective of alt gearing I do like the random dungeons.  In fact I really like them, there’s not much wrong with the idea and for once I find myself sitting with the Devs – even if they are usually a bunch of useless pricks.

However – as is so often the case in these modern days of increasing obesity in the young generation – there is a big fat BUT(T) that comes crushing down on everyone’s good times.  The “But” in question here is the issue of instant-dungeon porting.  Wait isn’t that a good thing? No longer having to fly all the way to far flung dungeons like The Oculus.  Well, you might be fooled at first into thinking so, however after a few days of it you begin to realise that this feature has pretty massive game-changing consequences.

Once the novelty wears off you realise that with instant porting what exactly is the point of having a game world at all?  People don’t fly to dungeons any more and suddenly you realise the only reasons to actually venture outside a major city of your choice is to do daily quests or fly to a raid (and how long will that remain?).  Just like that world pvp @ dungeon portals is removed, any sense of size in the world is reduced significantly because of not having to take time to travel and we all might as well be playing Guild Wars.  I’d be willing to bet 1/2 the people who’ve completed the trio of new Icecrown 5 mans haven’t even seen what the outside area looks like at all and don’t know how to get there – unless they wiped a few times.

One of the other major issues is with cross-realm players.  Again, at first this is awesome – your healer decides to fuck off or disconnect for ages so you can suddenly automatically find a replacement within minutes rather than the group usually breaking up as happened before.  However, do a few more heroics and you realise that actually this benefit is far outweighed by the fact that people in full-xrealm groups where no one is from their server are FAR more likely to be pricks to everyone.  And by being pricks I mean doing things like leaving a group as soon as the boss they needed loot from has died, rolling need on stuff that they cant even use or whatever and no one having any recourse.  And my most favourite one, /follow someone and /afk for 15 minutes – YOU CANT EVEN KICK THESE FUCKERS.  They literally just run around collecting badges for the bosses you kill and you cant kick them for 15 minutes or some crap it’s total horse shit.

Right now you’re either agreeing with me or thinking that you’ve been pretty lucky and not seen any of the above mentioned issues with the system.  Well there’s one further issue which I can pretty much guarantee you will have seen.  In fact I believe it’s so common that it has allowed me to reverse-engineer the algorithm for how the system finds you a dungeon for your daily 2x frost badges.  This algorithm is shown below in pseudocode:

if (playerName == "Cows" && randomDungeonsCompletedToday < 1) then
  chanceOfOculus = "High";
  numLowGearedXRealmDPS = 3;
  tankGearLevel = "Low";
  tankInteligenceLevel = "Labotomized Gibbon";
fi