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Posts with tag easy

Breakfast Topic: Why is this hard?


I should be more specific: why is this hard for me? Because for lots of people, leveling a hunter is the easiest thing in the world, to hear them tell it. It's a super easy class that has high DPS and a tanking pet to keep it alive. I should be blowing through the levels.

Instead, I've just recently managed to get my draenei hunter, who I created back when TBC launched, to level twenty eight. In the time since I've created this character I leveled my original warrior to 70, created a new draenei warrior and leveled him to 70, and leveled a draenei shaman to 70, plus went back and leveled two horde (warrior and shaman) to 70 and created a BE paladin and got him to 65. I leveled a paladin to 65 faster than I could level a hunter to 28! What is this, bizarro world? My orc and night elf warriors both hit 70 and I created them more or less as alts to play with RL friends on different servers, which means they get played once a month at most, and yet, here is my hunter, a year into the expansion (over a year, in fact) and I am just now heading into the 30's. And to be honest the only reason I even cared enough to level him this much was because I wanted to get him a mount.

Continue reading Breakfast Topic: Why is this hard?

Breakfast Topic: Easy Mode

Roadkillowns of Aerie Peak posed the question on the official forums, what is the easiest class to level? Hunter came up most frequently as an easy class to level followed by Warlocks. They usually have very little downtime. Protection Warriors and Holy Priests were often quoted as the most difficult to level.

Having leveled a Shaman, Paladin, Hunter, Priest, and Druid to level seventy myself I have to say that as a solo character, the Hunter was hands-down the easiest for me. Between my pet carrying agro for me and the glorious Feign Death ability, I was always good to go.

Continue reading Breakfast Topic: Easy Mode

Hardcore Casual finds himself "stuck in easy mode"

Hardcore Casual has a post up about how easy he says World of Warcraft really is -- just by learning your class, getting the right gear, and theorycrafting a bit, you can roll right through, and get to the point where even yellow or sometimes even red monsters don't give you trouble.

There is one viewpoint here (and it's not one that I necessarily espouse) that HC is just falling into the old "hardcore/casual" trap that Penny Arcade put so well this week -- he thinks that he's casual, when actually, if you're running higher-level-than-you're-meant-to five man instances with your friends (and theorycrafting a bit), you're actually what Blizzard would consider a hardcore player, and thus of course the game is easy for you. But while I think there's a little bit of that going on here, I don't think we need to go that far: the fact is that WoW is an easy game. That's how it's garnered such a big audience. And anyone who has ever beaten Diablo is going to find that yes, if you read a guide or two, run the right instances at the right times, and put some thought into your specs, you'll have an easy time.

So what HC asks for is the difficulty to scale -- instead of just Normal and Heroic, have three or four modes that players can choose to set their own experience. A few games have done this already, and indeed, Blizzard may decide that that's called for in future instances (though it seems unlikely that they'll do this on older content, considering how they've abandoned it so far). But for now, WoW is an easy game, and that's the way Blizzard wants it. After all, you don't get a 10 million subscriber base by beating players up.

Onyxia: Bugged at 70


I don't get it. I'm 70, have lots of nice purples, know the game well enough, and have even done Onyxia dozens upon dozens upon dozens of times back in the pre-BC days. But why then does she inevitably present a problem for me and my friends?

It's probably because she is bugged. And not just bugged, REALLY bugged.

Two groups have now gone in and tried to defeat her. Each time the first attempt was a failure as people relearned not to stand too close to each other (Forsythe run to the center!), run to the side when the rains fire down (<-- 2N, 2N - 1 -->), and all those other small tidbits that make the fight what it is. However when it reached the second attempt, she started acting strange. First, she wouldn't target anyone or let anyone tank her – she just walked around her lair and jerked around a bit. We could still damage her, but that was it. And really it was only the ranged and my crossbow that were able to do any damage (more dots!).

Continue reading Onyxia: Bugged at 70

What if WoW had Easy Mode and Hard Mode?

I was just casually wandering about the Internet yesterday, when I stumbled upon one of those random new MMORPG advertisements that you see popping up on a number of the WoW-related websites nowadays. It's for a game called Shaiya, which (like all the others), I'll probably never play, but a quick glance through it's game features revealed an interesting design choice. Without splitting up the playerbase, they've nonetheless created different "modes" to the game, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. There's an "Easy Mode," which lets you advance more quickly, but also limits you a great deal. There's also a "Normal Mode," a "Hard Mode," and even an "Ultimate Mode" for the most hardcore of players. It got me thinking about how such a system might work if transplanted into WoW:

Easy Mode: This is basically just a tutorial. Not many experience points are needed to advance from level to level, but you can only reach a maximum of level 30. You cannot create or join a guild, and you get no access to any Talent points. You also are limited to Common and Uncommon items -- you cannot use any Rare, Epic, or Legendary items.

Normal Mode: This is where most players will start off. You need an average amount of experience points to advance (something like what we have today). You can create and join guilds normally, and you also get Talent points. In addition, you also get access to Rare items.

Continue reading What if WoW had Easy Mode and Hard Mode?

Easy macro for getting your coordinates

Here's an awesome tip from amib over on WoW LJ. Sometimes, we all could use a little location check from time to time. While I usually am OK with finding quest coordinates, every once in a while, I'd just kind of like to know where I am. So here's amib's tip-- a macro that will easily and simply tell you (no addons required) where you are in game.

/script px,py=GetPlayerMapPosition("player")
/script DEFAULT_CHAT_FRAME:
AddMessage(format("( %s ) %i,%i",
GetZoneText(),px *100,py *100));

(As commenters have noted, the formatting is weird here on the blog-- it's meant to be two lines, both starting with script. The other line breaks will need to be taken out.)

Just put that on a button, call it "Where am I?" or something like that, and then click it to get your current ingame coordinates in the chat channel. Considering how poor my addon-updating abilities are, that's perfect.

Of course, there are lots and lots of addons floating around that will do this even better-- showing your coordinates and cursor coordinates in the window, and all kinds of other ways. But if you only use coordinates every once in a while, and never remember to update your addons, this little macro could be pretty useful to have.

Finally, no more loot click hunting

There's one little mostly unseen note in the 2.1 patch notes that has quietly been making players' lives easier for the past few weeks. Hidden way down inside the "User Interface" section, we find this: "Active corpses or objects (ones with loot on them) now can be selected and looted, even if they are underneath another corpse that does not have loot on it."

We've all been in that situation before 2.1, where we were fighting, and had to deal with adds that died in almost exactly the same place, and then had to slowly move your looting cursor over the whole area, looking for that tiny little section in which it went from black and white to color, just so you could look that few silver and bit of trash from it. Nowadays, in these enlightened 2.1 times, we can simply loot at will, and life is good.

Of course, it's not perfect-- I still can't target anything through walls, and that's a known bug. But it is very nice to see that one simple sentence in the patch notes, and know that I never again have to hunt around for a tiny point of contact just to loot a piece of junk.


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