The first is: where in the World of Warcraft is this?

The second is: when Blizzard poster Hortus wrote this …

Void Reaver intentionally no longer targets or faces players that he casts Arcane Orb on. This was done to fix a bug.

There is a bug in that there is currently no combat log message for him casting Arcane Orb (just the impact message), causing boss mods to not work. This will be fixed in a future patch.

… that’s complete bullshit, right? It’s not just me who thinks a boss flinging out 5k AE damage SECRETLY is crap? I can accept if they want to break boss announcement mods for some reason which only their leetness can understand, and I can accept that raiders have to watch the boss targeting to see who’s going to be the lucky one to take an orb to the face, but they (the royal Developers They) can’t have it both ways.

And why weren’t INTENTIONAL changes to a boss encounter IN THE PATCH NOTES? That’s why I suspect Hortus was given a line of bull to get rid of him and his pesky Void Reaver questions.

Those are all secondhand reports too, by the way. We haven’t been to Tempest Keep since the patch so I don’t know firsthand what’s going on. I only know that much because of the updates on the Deadly Boss Mods page.

And the third question is: Joining and leaving ten guilds in under one year is a lot, isn’t it?

Remember the lastest Love Between Crazies drama in my guild from a few weeks back? Paladin man-whore #1 had left our guild because his (latest) in-game romance had gone sour and the object of his affections had chosen another paladin man-whore in our guild. About a week after I told you about that nonsense, she told us that we “didn’t appreciate her” and left the guild too.

And what does “we don’t appreciate her” mean anyhow? I suspect it means we didn’t shower 150% of our attention on her.

Whatever. See ya. Then she pressured PRESSURED paladin man-whore #2 to leave the guild also and join her new guild so they could game happily ever after. Now that part was a shame because he was a good player and a fine raider, but that’s how these things go.

Because I’m a shit, I did a little research and checked out her guild history on WarcraftRealms.com and discovered that she had joined and left ten guilds in under one year on our server alone — she had transferred here from another server and Lord knows how many guilds she chewed through over there.

Ya ya, I know. I should have checked the guild history BEFORE we let her in the door, but when your paladin man-whore comes to you with his helm in his hand and asks you to guild his PVP honey, you’d say yes too.

Well. Both man-whore and I learned a lesson with that one, because she’s dumped him and is coupled with one of their officers in eternal two-week gaming bliss and man-whore got /gkicked at her behest.

The biggest shame of all: we didn’t get even one naked picture from her.

Hunter: Hey! How come our target macros don’t work on these totems? (The /target corrupted macro from the Halazzi fight)

Raid Leader: Ummm …

Warlock: Because these aren’t corrupted lightning totems?

Hunter: Oh.

I’ll bet he still doesn’t understand why his macro was “broken”.

I love that thread because there’s a handful of hardcores dueling dozens of casuals — and isn’t that what the Hardcore vs Casual argument is really about? A numbers game, ultimately a profit equation, and in that system Casuals > Hardcore. You live, you learn.

So, hardcore player Altyera of the Dalaran realm, self-described as “… better at this game than you. Much, much, much better”, wrote:

Powerful rewards for people incapable of playing this game seriously? Fine.

Give me something for playing this game well. Give me something for investing three and a half years playing my chosen class to the fullest. Give me something for organizing twenty-five people every week into a well-oiled machine capable of flawlessly tackling complex encounters. Give my members something special for beating the game.

Give me a title for killing every boss in the game. Make my name sparkle and the ground glow at my feet.

Give me a 310% mount for killing Illidan. It’s no less an accomplishment than Gladiator.

Give me an entire array of legendary weapons dropping from Illidan, Archimonde and Kil’jaeden. What casual could complain that they’re not well-earned?

Give me and the top 500 guilds a private forum to converse directly with the developers.

Give me early access to private test realms, expedited character copies and a direct line to the developers while I’m testing content.

You’re giving an awful lot to casual players in this patch. Give me back as much as I put into this game. Great, fun stuff for casuals is awesome, and it’s one reason WoW is so popular. Give the top 1% some incentive to continue investing the time and effort necessary to stay at the top of this game.

Gear that is 3% better than a casual player’s and a couple fancy titles for doing things that no longer matter are far, far less than we deserve.

This is what I love about the Hardcore vs Casual debate as the Hardcores frequently argue: it’s not enough that Casuals get less, or later, than the Hardcores, they have to get much less, preferably much later.

Here’s some more:

Reply #60

The people who consider themselves casuals ruin the game for the people that play it with the purpose of trying to accomplish something they consider great. They spoil the rewards earned by people who put the time, effort, and thought into raiding.

HAHAHA. You casuals are RUINING the game for the people who accomplish GREAT things. Oh fercrissakes.

Reply #13

I have seen people with families and careers get to illidan and farm BT….nobody has an excuses anymore except lack of trying and just plain giving up or being a paraplegic, down-syndrome monkey. Why should they be entitled to free stuff for not trying when the people that actually try get exactly the same things? Its beyond silly…

Parapalegics don’t deserve epics either, I guess. Nice attitude, asshole.

Reply #26

Oh wait, I forgot that most casuals are god-awful at this game.

Pssst, so are most hardcores.

Reply #37

You just can’t talk to them Alty, they refuse, can’t, and never will understand anything about risk/reward in the game, or life.

He’s probably one of those gamers who are CEO of their own start-ups pulling down six figures while married to the super-model wife and raising six children. Even on my own WoW server, we have a lot of those. I assume they’re passing out WoW boxes with subscriptions to Fortune and The Wall Street Journal.

Reply #139

Raiders and hard-core pvper’s make-up the core and soul of this game. Kill that and kill the game. All you are doing is catering to make sh1t so damn easy my unborn child could clear every instance in the game within a week. I’m wondering when they will be giving away epics upon creating an account.

Hyperbole can be an effective argument tool. This would not be a good example of such.

Every EverQuest and Ultima Online player remembers a day when there was no choice like we have in WoW now. I didn’t play UO, but I did play EQ and there was no casual play — everything required a guild, and an able guild at that. (Ok, there was roleplaying and cyber, but we’re talking about gear and character advancement here, stud.) That wasn’t good.

Sure it was great killing Nagafen with 60 people, or getting your class epic (thanks to your guild, and possibly the entire server), but it would have been nice to have another option to get stuff. The stuff didn’t have to be the best, just better than the stuff we had. Choice would have been nice.

Today’s raiders do deserve better rewards, yes — they put in more time and deal with headaches that a solo player will never know — but we should not argue for a big gear gap. Never, never, never should we argue for a big gear gap.

One reason: recruitment.

There are two pools for raiding guilds to recruit from (yes, hardcore ones also): other guilds and new(er)-to-raiding players. If you’re a bottom-line type person, think of this as Good Gear and Shit Gear. If you’re delusional, you might think of it as Skilled Players vs Clueless Noobs.

If you’re pulling most of your new guildmates from other guilds, you’re recruiting guild hoppers, loot whiners, the “I have to log after that last wipe for real life stuff but really I’m tired of wiping and will rejoin you when this is on farm” opportunists, plus a few valuable guildmates along the way.

If you’re refreshing your ranks with new(er)-to-raiding characters, you may similarly be plagued. Players slow to learn, prone to log mid-raid, incapable of moving out of dangerous floor bombs, ignorant of class abilities and/or strengths and weaknesses, also guild hoppers and loot whiners, plus … a few valuable guildmates along the way … BUT your guild has to gear and attune them as well.

YAY!!! Back-gearing and back-attuning is fun!!

I assume all the hardcore guilds have the same goal: forward. Probably all guilds, hard and soft, have that same objective, in fact. Back-anything is not forward, by definition, and is to be avoided or mitigated at all costs.

For the TLDR crowd: Many hardcores overestimate their skill, contributions and the value of their game accomplishments.

Many casuals overestimate how interesting their real lives are.

Raid zones should have better rewards than solo content, otherwise why raid?

The gap between raid gear and solo/small group/small raid gear should not be so large as to require a long time commitment to get newer raiders ready for current guild targets.

Rogues should never be nerfed because we have so little in this world (of warcraft).