Changes
Why do my post titles tend to remind me of songs that stick in my head forever?
My brain is still a little fuzzy after all that happened last week, so please forgive my lack of coherency. I made a big change — I left my guild.
It struck me as odd that leaving a guild felt a lot like breaking up with someone. “It’s not you, it’s me” and “let’s just be friends” and other cliche lines filled my head as I struggled to explain my reasons. It even felt like my heart was breaking a little as I typed /gquit.
It was a tough decision to make, but I knew it had to be done if I was to continue to really enjoy the game. I missed the little bit of raiding we used to do — it was like a gnawing ache at the back of my mind, and finally it was too much to ignore. I need that occasional challenge to look forward to, something to strive for. I also really missed my friends, and former guildies who left a few months back and created another social guild called Parallel. Last Thursday I finally made the leap.
It was definitely an exciting week. I ventured into Trial of the Crusader for the first time, and we made our way through Northrend Beasts and Lord Jarraxus before getting stumped on Faction Champions (I fail at PVP).
I also finally got a Malygos kill and received that long awaited title “Champion of the Frozen Wastes”.
I don’t actually know why everyone hates that fight – I love the uniqueness of it. Flying around on little discs as a melee is excellent. The dragon vehicle phase is tough, and a little tedious, but if you have one person who knows what they’re doing you can follow them and all is good (thanks Push!).
After Malygos we wound up killing another dragon, and she even decided to drop a sweet looking rogue hat for me.
I also did a lot of chain heroics on my shaman, trying to gear up both my resto and elemental sets. The sheer amount of emblems needed is a bit overwhelming. The gear is so similar, and yet different (I’m struggling with the hit cap).
My alt projects were on hold as Jardal wasn’t really interested in playing WOW — he finished up playing Assassin’s Creed 2 and then plunged headlong into Mass Effect 2.
So there you have my week in review. Too many thoughts have been spinning around my head, but I couldn’t really nail down the words. I think I’m starting to find my center again.
Random note – if you had removed Need More Rage from your feed reader, you might want to add it back. Ratshag has returned!
The vehicle portion is pretty much entirely the reason people dislike Malygos, I figure. Plus as melee, I think you and I are biased towards liking the disc phase – it’s the closest we’ll get to those hoverboards from Back to the Future II…
I admit I feel sorry for anyone who’s been pugging the weekly when Malygos rolls around. I know from experience it’s nigh impossible to get him down in a pick-up raid.
Haha you’re right, the disc phase might have something to do with it. Hoverboards ftw!
Playing ME2 makes me want to go play Mass Effect 1 again as a different character… then play ME2 again…
Our poor alts!
It’s funny that you compare leaving a guild to breaking with someone because that’s exactly how I felt too when I left my guild of two years. I wanted to keep in touch, stay friends and everything. Then I alternated between feeling relieved and wondering if I had made the right choice- exactly like after a breakup.
Congrats on your Malygos kill! It’s far from my favorite fight, but I still never understand why people hate it as much as they do.
Difficult guild decisions are difficult – but it sounds like you made the right choice for you, which is the most important thing (says, Tam, authoratively, with no knowledge whatsoever
)
I have a secret fondness for Malygos too – the dragon phase is annoying, having all the problems of Oculus all over again, but I love phases 1 and 2, especially when the whole raid hundles under the magic shelters and I get to AoE heal myself to heaven.
What can I say, it makes me feel important.
Agreed, the dragon phase is annoying, but the first two phases cancel it out in my mind. The sparks, magic shelters, and flying discs are very cool mechanics.
I get sea sick on P3 of Malygos… I hate it…
And Faction Champions have nothing to do with PvP. It’s PvE with diminishing returns on CC (like in PvP). But in the end they are mobs with (non standard) aggro tables.
http://maintankadin.failsafedesign.com/forum/index.php?rb_v=viewtopic&f=36&t=26639
It helped me a lot to view them not as PvP (which I hate) but as a stupid PvE gimmick fight (which I dislike).
The three dimensional vehical fights are very difficult to deal with for most people – I think this is why Flame Leviathan was more succesful.
Thanks for the link on Faction Champions – thinking about how the AI works is very fun for my computer science brain
. I think that although it’s not “technically” PVP, the reason it tends to be called a PVP fight is that the skillset needed is more like what you would use in PVP. Especially in the Wrath CC-less world, locking down mobs, interrupts, etc are not instinctive.
And I don’t get sea sick on FL. But I don’t like him neither.
Sure, I know why it’s called a “PvP boss”. It just helped me to not treat it as such. Not feeling to be forced to PvP helped me. As long as I treated it as a “PvP boss”, 50% of my brain was looked down cursing Blizzard for forcing me to PvP.
And there are differences. E.g. you can taunt the champions which makes them stick to the tank for a few seconds.
The thing that always bugged me about the Malygos fight wasn’t a fight mechanic, actually, it was lore related.
Its Malygos, the spellweaver, the aspect of magic, master of everything arcane in all of Azeroth…
How do we beat that guy with 10 people, most likely including someone named Legolazz?
It is always difficult to balance lore with game mechanics. We as heroes are given tremendous powers and are able to bring down incredible foes… and yet when Cataclysm comes out we will wind up getting killed by a moose while leveling. Yes, a moose.
Something to note about the Malygos fight specifically is that it isn’t technically just us who defeat him – the dragons we are riding on are part of the red dragonflight, and I assume that without their powers we would fail. This method of assisting more powerful characters has been used a lot throughout the game, such as how Illidan is really taken down by Maiev Shadowsong, not by just us.
Malygos did regain most of his sanity, but he is still a bit off his rocker, and I think that weakness also helped us to defeat him.
Greyseer over at Lorecrafted has a good post about plot and he specifically calls out the death of Malygos as a good move on Blizzard’s part: http://www.lorecrafted.com/the_stacks/2010/1/28/when-death-is-a-good-thing-plot-stagnation.html
The lore said that either killing an old god or killing an aspect would do severe harm to Azeroth. That’s why the titans did not kill the old god but only imprisoned them.
We killed an aspect and and old god and just moved on.
I think that’s the major problem with Malygos’ death. It should have destroyed the world. It did not and no one explained why it didn’t.
Perhaps the death of the old gods and dragon aspect have caused more harm than we realize…
The comics have mentioned that magic is weakening due to Malygos’ demise.
I have a feeling this sort of stuff will play a huge role in Cataclysm. I hope they explain in more detail how the old gods are really linked to Azeroth.