Burnout:

We can all agree World of Warcraft is in a bit of a lull now. Patch 4.3 was very popular, but by now, the new patch smell is long gone. Everyone’s run End Time a zillion times and cleared Dragon Soul at least once, even if only in the Raid Finder. Odds are you’re running out of transmog gear to collect. With nothing new to be excited about, the game begins to stagnate.

Even a hardcore fanboy like me begins to feel burnt out. Truth be known, if I hadn’t signed up for the annual pass, I might have cancelled my subscription to take a few months off. Not that I regret getting the pass — the rewards make it more than worth any extra expense. But at this point, I’m just going through the motions. And I wager a lot of other people are, too.

I don’t blame Blizzard for this. It’s just part of the natural life cycle of an MMO. Although a filler patch would have been nice…

For some, the feeling of burnout may cause them to do new and strange things within the game they wouldn’t normally do. This is certainly the case with me; I always know I’m really burnt out when one or both of two things happen:

The first is that I go back to playing my death knight. I love the lore and style of DKs, but try as I might, I can’t for the life of me bring myself to enjoy the class mechanics. Frost spec is mildly amusing, but it ultimately just feels like a simplified, less squishy combat rogue. I probably would have deleted my DK by now if not for the memories tied up in him. Well, that and the cow dance.

So when I start playing my death knight, you know I’m struggling pretty hard to find something to do. I haven’t done this during the current burnout period (yet), but then there’s my other character of last resort.

I don’t like overlap among my characters. I’ve tried to spread them out among as many races, classes, factions, and genders as possible (a plan that wasn’t entirely successful considering I’m now playing mostly female Blood Elves and humans, but I digress), but I have doubled up one class, rogue, simply because I think Blood Elf females have the best stealth animation of all time. (OF ALL TIME!)

Still, I can’t bring myself to get excited about re-leveling a class I already have, even when leveling in a different spec (subtlety), so she has become another character who I only play when I feel really burnt out on the endgame. To give you an idea, I started playing her in the latter half of Wrath, and she just hit level twenty the other day.

Yes, I’m playing her. That’s how I knew I had become truly burnt out on WoW.

Moving on to greener pastures:

The other option when feeling burnt out on WoW is to switch to playing other games. When I first started gaming again after my years of hiatus, I didn’t have many options in this regard, but now I can waffle between achievement hunting in Starcraft II, leveling Lucas in Dungeon Siege III (horribly underrated game, by the way), or shooting hamstermen in Aion.

At times in the past, I’ve even been known to dig out Warcraft III for some nostalgia, and I also wasted a week playing a cheap copy of Fable: The Lost Chapters a few months back.

My distraction of choice for the moment is Aion, though I’m still not sure exactly what I like about the objectively mediocre game. It just has some indefinable charm I can’t put my finger on.

In a little over a month, Diablo III will provide a new alternative. I’m banking on it not sucking and planning to play it for at least several weeks, maybe even until Mists of DrunkenPandaLand’s release.

Which brings me to my final point.

You can go home again:

In the end, though, this burnout phase is but a fleeting thing. If you’re as invested into a game as most World of Warcraft players are, you’re not going to permanently abandon it over a couple of dull months. Especially not if you’ve spent three quarters of your life obsessing over the Warcraft franchise like I have.

I may now shudder at the thought of PUGing Hour of Twilight again, but a little time off in other games will rekindle my WoW love as surely as the sun rises each day, and I look forward to Mists of Pandaria as much as anyone.

What about you? Are you feeling burnt out on WoW (or whatever your game of choice may be), and if so, how are you coping? Are you trying something new in an old game, or are you moving onto a different game in search of fresh thrills?

The Great Warlock Tank Debate:

You may recall me recently mentioning the revelation that warlocks could tank in the World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria beta via the “glyph of demon hunting.” It caused a bigger stir than almost anything else from MoP, and warlocks everywhere dropped to their knees and thanked their dark gods that their prayers had finally been answered.

Not only did lock tanking work, it also turned out to be freakishly over-powered. Soloing Dragon Soul bosses over-powered. But hey, it’s the beta. Still plenty of time to balance.

But then, tragedy struck. After many days of rejoicing, Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street — WoW’s lead systems designer and the world’s least popular oceanographer — posted on the forums to say that warlocks are not intended to tank, and the glyph’s goal was to give them an “Oh, ****” CD in the event of tank death, similar to an arms warrior throwing on a shield and off-tanking. The fact that this almost never works has been mentioned by a few people pretty much everyone.

The glyph has now been updated to allow for something called threatening presence, a second version of metamorphasis that gives demonology warlocks a tank toolset at the cost of DPS much like the original glyph. However, to switch from metamorphasis to TP requires leaving meta and waiting ten seconds

Threatening presence is, to put it simply, fracked up beyond all belief. Reportedly, it’s still letting people main tank, the CD makes it completely useless for the intended “clutch tank” design, and the ability to swap between DPS and tank is exactly the kind of PvP-breaking shenanigans that made them split feral druids into two specs.

I haven’t followed a beta closely before. Do they always make this little sense?

So this has sparked a massive outcry among the fans. People are arguing, begging, and pleading for the original glyph to be brought back and for warlocks to be recognized as a tanking class, complete with the ability to queue as such in the Dungeon Finder. And I must admit, they make a good case.

Let’s break it down:

-Warlock tanks work. Most of the changes needed to make them viable have already been done. The guy who soloed Morchok proved that pretty well.

-Warlocks have always been the most tank-like caster and have been used as tanks in encounters with unusual mechanics, such as the Blood Council in Icecrown Citadel, for years. They even had a taunt and some other basic tanking tools back in Wrath.

-One of Ghostrawler’s concerns is that he feels tank specs should have to use different gear from a DPS spec of the same class. But aside from the whole “bear druids say hi” argument, this can be easily fixed. Make the glyph convert spirit to dodge, and we’re golden.

-Warlock tanks are based entirely on mitigation, which is over-powered compared to other tanks. A simple solution is to nerf their mitigation and add an avoidance mechanic, like the aforementioned spirit = dodge.

-The current design of threatening presence will likely be extremely over-powered in PvP. The original glyph design would not be, because it forces someone to choose between DPS and tank before battle begins.

-Although exact numbers cannot be proven, it seems like most warlocks want the option to tank.

My take:

I think warlocks should be allowed to tank. But not for the same reasons as most. Tanking is not my favourite thing, and I’m lukewarm on the idea of tanking on my warlock.

But as someone with a passion for game design, I love the idea of a glyph to change roles. Aside from the fact that it’s a hell of a lot more interesting than the dull passive bonuses glyphs usually provide, this could be the ultimate solution to the pure versus hybrid debate.

You see, once upon a time, there was something called the “hybrid tax.” Classes with multiple roles were much less effective in those roles. But this mostly meant that hybrids were just brought along for buffs or gimmick fights and otherwise ignored, so Blizzard eventually made them as viable as pure classes.

But now we have a problem. Hybrids are much more versatile than pures, and lose nothing for being versatile, so what’s the advantage to being a pure? There isn’t one. A warlock is just a shadow priest who can’t heal, and a rogue is just a monk who can’t tank or heal.

Two ideas are usually offered to solve this: fourth specs for all classes to add extra roles, or converting current pure specs to new roles. But the first is an insane design commitment — akin to making several new classes at once — and the second will just piss off people who play those specs now. I know I’d lose it if they went through with the idea of making combat rogues tanks.

The glyph offers a much more elegant solution. Warlocks could tank without losing a current spec or requiring entirely new abilities, flavour, and lore for a fourth spec. And if it works for them, it could work for other classes. The possibilities of glyphs like these are nearly endless: combat tanks, fire healers, shockadins, blood DPS, holy priest DPS, shaman tanks…

That’s why I want the original glyph of demon hunting back. It’s a beautifully elegant design with the potential to revolutionize the game.

I  have a much higher opinion of Ghostcrawler than most, but I think he dropped the ball here. Let the warlock experiment proceed, Greg. There’s so much to gain and so little to lose.

Edit: Oh, and I realize what the date is, but this isn’t an April Fools gag. Zergling Teaches Spelling is an April Fools gag.