Filed under: Cataclysm

I've already done some Raiding with Leashes vanilla raid posts. The next logical step would be Burning Crusade soloing, but I've tried and failed to make a glorified loot list more interesting to read, since BC content tends to be more "walk in and win" nowadays than an actual soloing contest.

So, while I wrangle out an adventure in tiers four to six, I will talk about killing dragons solo as a warlock in order to grab dragon mounts.

I'm not talking about dragons that require friends by your side to complete: e.g., Deathwing's two dragon mounts, Ultraxion's mount, completing a dragonstick, or Al'Akir's dragon drop. Al'Akir has actually been soloed before by a warlock, but you'll need friends in order to clear his genie council first. I'm talking dragons you can go beat up by yourself.

The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how -- but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft.

One of the interesting things about Garrosh Hellscream's rise to the position of Warchief of the Horde has been his display of leadership. When he was in charge of the Warsong Offensive, he lead the Horde in battle against the forces of the Lich King's Scourge and the Alliance. Upon returning from Northrend covered in glory, he began his tenure as Warchief by unleashing Horde forces to seize control of Azshara, make inroads in Ashenvale and Stonetalon, and encouraged (one could even say strongarmed) the Forsaken under Sylvanas Windrunner into invading Gilneas in order to secure a port for future advances.

Following this, he orchestrated an elaborate plan to lure the Alliance's leadership to defend Theramore, a plan that nearly succeeded in destroying them with a mana bomb, and has since extended the war to Pandaria where he's dedicated a great deal of the Horde's military resources (and those of factions within the Horde like the Blood Elves) towards finding ancient weapons or things that could be made to serve as weapons, all while sending his Kor'kron to occupy the Echo Isles. In short, Garrosh has been a dynamic leader, and it's hard to dispute that he's made more gains for the Horde during his time as Warchief - both the Dragonmaw and the Blackrock have become powerful Horde allies under Garrosh, Gilneas is heavily contested, the Forsaken have spread across northern Lordaeron, Azshara is firmly under Horde control.

This isn't the game I started playing!

This is a paraphrasing, of course, but the mentality is real enough. People lament that the communities have changed, that raiding has changed, that gearing has changed, that dungeons have changed, that how we play has changed, that our classes have changed. And every individual has to answer for him or herself whether or not the game has changed enough that it's not worth playing for you anymore.

Personally, I recommend that if you feel that way, you stop playing. But more importantly, it must be stated that the change we're discussing is an inevitability, especially since it's basically stated that World of Warcraft is more likely to see expansions and additions than a sequel ala Guild Wars 2 or EverQuest 2. WoW is going to keep changing as long as it exists, trying to address player concerns and improve its systems even as it gains new levels and sees new content. This is the nature of the beast - it will never be 2004 again, and I will never be a low level warrior getting Charge for the first time and ramming myself headlong into spiders.

The game cannot, will not, and most importantly should not freeze, not even to stay at the exact combination you found the most fun.

The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how -- but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft.

They claimed to be the true Horde. They may yet prove it.

The Blackrock orcs seem, on the surface, to be a relic of a bygone age. A tribe of orcs holding on to a past swept aside by Turalyon's hand clutching Lothar's broken sword, a defeated remnant of Gul'dan's legacy. Once led by Blackhand the Destroyer, the Blackrock clan rose to prominence when Blackhand became Gul'dan's proxy as Warchief of the newborn Horde. And it remained central when Orgrim Doomhammer, Blackhand's second in command, slew Blackhand and seized power, for Doomhammer too was a member of the Blackrock clan. After the final defeat of the Horde atop Blackrock Spire, it seemed certain that the Blackrocks would trouble Azeroth no more.

Yet Blackhand's sons Rend and Maim, who had served Doomhammer even after he killed their father as leaders of the splinter clan the Black Tooth Grin, led the Blackrocks into the mountain that bore the same name and set about rebuilding them. When Teron Gorefiend came to Blackrock Spire, the brothers Blackhand refused his call to join Ner'zhul's Horde, seeing themselves as the true inheritors of Blackhand's legacy. In time, the Black Dragonflight came to the mountain, attracted by the reds still held in bondage there, and Nefarian brought the Blackrocks into his service. Maim Blackhand died in the war with the Dark Iron Dwarves to determine which force would rule the mountain, while Rend died when Thrall sent members of the Horde to kill him for his claim to the title of Warchief that Doomhammer had bestowed upon the shaman.

And yet, the Blackrocks were not done. Ironically, it may have been one of Thrall's most loyal supporters who brought one of Garrosh Hellscream's most dangerous enforcers into the fold.

The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how -- but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft.

Last week, we covered Deathwing's shortcomings and the non-reappearance of Kul Tiras. This week, we'll talk about my biggest beef with the run up to Mists of Pandaria, and then segue into a general complaint I had about Cataclysm as a whole. Some of this actually predates 2012, but it's easier to see in the hindsight we all get once enough time passed, so it serves us as well to discuss it now as it would at any other time.

So let's get started by saying this: I really disliked the lack of a pre-expansion event. The ones for Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King and even Cataclysm weren't always spectacular, but they did a really good job of giving you the feeling that everything was about to change. The lead-up to Wrath with the zombie plague was controversial at times, but it was memorable, it served as a really clear line of demarcation and set up a lot of elements that would be taken up later. Garrosh Hellscream went from 'whiny dude crying in Nagrand' to 'warrior willing to challenge his warchief to Mak'Gora' in a pre-expansion event. The Cataclysm pre-launch event had some excellent little moments in it, the return of Rexxar, and gave us the first new AQ content in years.

I understand that Pandaria didn't pose the same kind of situation - instead of Pandaria hosting a threat that comes forth to affect the wider world, the Horde and Alliance bring their war to Pandaria and threaten it - but I still lamented this lack. Something as simple as a Horde/Alliance airship battle that ended with us crashing on the new continent could have worked.

While recording the WoW Insider Show this week, my two co-hosts Anne Stickney and Olivia Grace were discussing heroic five man dungeons and made the interesting point that, while Cataclysm used new heroics to help people catch up in gearing as new raid tiers were released, the advent of the Raid Finder might mean that it isn't necessary anymore. If you're running LFR as your primary way to see/experience raid content, then you'd simply run previous LFR's in order to gear up and collect valor points for the various reputation vendors. This would allow you to get geared enough for further LFR as new raid tiers are released, and keeps the previous LFR's relevant. If you're running the current 10 or 25 man raids, you can use the LFR's for those raids to bootstrap yourself appropriately if you're not already geared well enough from the previous tier of raiding.

Either way, you don't need new heroic dungeons for the task - between daily quests, scenarios and LFR, the Cataclysm model which placed new five mans in patch 4.1 and 4.3 might no longer be necessary. Challenge modes keep the heroics that launched with Mists of Pandaria evergreen, since you can't outgear them, but is that enough for fans of five mans? While both Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm introduced post-launch dungeons, Burning Crusade really only introduced Magister's Terrace in its last content patch. This makes me wonder if we really need any new five mans, and if we do, what would/should they be?

Gearing a character for raiding was a predictable and straightforward task. Get a few bits and jump into the latest 5-mans, which were very easy and certainly achievable with PvP gear, as long as you were one of the classes that didn't do too badly from it. Preferably not a plate tank, then!

If you were adamant that cheaty PvP-based gearing wasn't for you, you could just run a few of the normals and earlier heroics, such as the Zul'roics or even the ones before, to get yourself geared to an acceptable level for the 4.3 heroics. What's more, your main could send your alts decent, current gear with their inevitable glut of valor points, and your justice points bought you the previous tier's gear.

Why the Cataclysm retrospective? As a reminder of how easy it was, in Cataclysm's twilight hours, to level and gear alts to a raid-ready level, or, for that matter, to a competitive PvP level. Quite apart from the ease, it was really the only thing left to do, after months upon months of Dragon Soul.

The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how -- but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft.

Okay, not everything is good. As much of a fan as I am of World of Warcraft and the story of the game, there have been times I've been kind of disappointed in something, or felt like we could have seen more than we did. One example I have is the Dragon Soul raid, but not for the reasons I see around the web. I'll go into what I mean in this very article.

What I'm talking about this time isn't necessarily bad stuff, as much as it is things I wish had happened, or had happened more. I'm not numbering them because I don't think of them in a particular best to worst scheme, they're just places where I felt like more could have been done with the story as it was presented to us.

It's not exactly a secret that I'm terrible at keeping my finger on the pulse of the community. I just sort of wander around with my usual private obsessions, doing what I do, and sometimes I blunder into an emergent discussion like a rhinoceros stumbling into a clearing. Such is the case with the discussion of reforging currently going on. The post I have linked to by Mushan basically highlights the discussion, with some folks arguing that World of Warcraft has gone too far in the direction of gear optimization and too far away from the days when you'd get a drop, know it was better, and put it on. As a result of that argument, some are arguing that reforging should be removed from the game.

I can understand this argument, because if we think about it, reforging was never meant to be what it became. The initial purpose of reforging back when it was first announced was to allow players who got a drop that was otherwise significantly better than what they had, but itemized for a different role (so, as an example, a cloth piece itemized for healing over DPS) to make that drop better for the role they intended to use it for. So if your tankadin got a pair of plate lets with crit and expertise on them, he or she could swap some of the crit to a stat more useful for tanking. However, players being what they are, they immediately grasped that reforging also allowed them to trade away stats that were less effective on gear for stats that were more effective. Reforging allowed players to customize their hit and expertise in ways that had never been accessible before, allowed for dump stats to be dumped with even more efficiency than before - it was the absolute biggest change to the game in years, and ended up the largest single legacy of Cataclysm.

Mushan's arguments about removing the process of reforging are good, and I'm not going to belabor them here - instead, what I'm going to do is discuss my own personal feelings on reforging, and how it benefits the game.

Last week we talked about wild speculation. But since then, Anne and I each talked about our characters and the way they view the Warchief of the Horde, Garrosh Hellscream, and that got me thinking about the perspective we as players have versus the perspective the characters in the game have. It's easy for me as a player to be uncomfortable with things that my character would not be, and vice versa, because as a player I have access to sources of information no one in the world of Azeroth does.

Garrosh Hellscream has intelligence reports. Varian Wrynn has spies. But neither of them can go to a bookstore and pick up Tides of War and get to read scenes from inside their opposite number's war councils. Neither of them can go play a character inside the opposite faction. Players of the game have the ability to achieve a much broader perspective than anyone within that setting, and draw parallels to a real world history none of these characters can be aware of. Garrosh Hellscream doesn't know he's fictional. And frankly I wouldn't recommend telling him, dude has a temper.

The lore of the game, the story, is always predicated upon the fact that the people within that story act according to their own motivations, and none of them are omniscient. We know that Garona didn't want to kill Llane Wrynn but that Shadow Council conditioning and torture, combined with what she saw within Karazhan, left her convinced she had no choice. We know that, but Varian Wrynn doesn't know that. He only knows that an orc that his father trusted cut out his father's heart. He knows that because he saw it, and it's easy for us to know that not all orcs are like that. Try and imagine it from his perspective, and you understand why he believes what he believes. The same goes for Jaina, or Arthas, or any of the big names of the Warcraft setting - they're limited to their own perspective. They can't know what we know.

If you're the kind of person who enjoys building set toys, like World of Warcraft Mega Bloks, then this contest is for you. To quote the contest instructions:

Take your Mega Bloks World of Warcraft sets and stack, rearrange, redesign and recombine 'em into never-before-seen creations. We want to see how big, impressive and creative you can be with your sets. Once you're ready, snap some pictures of your masterpiece and submit them through our official "Build Big, Win Big" Facebook Contest.

So if that's you, head over to the Facebook page and see if you want to enter. Time is short - the contest ends in two days. The grand prize winner will get five CE's, one for classic World of Warcraft and one for each of the expansions. There are plenty of other prizes to win as well, check the official rules here for details.

---

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Check out Basil's re-reboot of Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

This expansion is the first one where "perfect" cuts (which are about a 10% proc rate when you're cutting a green quality gem) are blue quality, and even though they have different names, they have identical stats as blue quality gems. People still don't generally know this, and will sometimes skip over the perfect cuts when they're gemming new gear, but over time it will become more commonly known that there's no difference between socketing, for example, a Perfect Delicate Pandarian Garnet or a Delicate Primordial Ruby.

If you're an enchanter, you may have noticed that the price for the common materials has gone way down, and if you're a jewelcrafter, you're probably wondering what to do with all the green quality gems you get from prospecting, as well as potentially looking wistfully at the profit margins on some of the really desirable research blue cuts.

One of the things that Mists of Pandaria has really brought home for me is how time progresses in a persistent world. World of Warcraft is now 8 years old, and certain locations like Stratholme, Molten Core, and Darnassus have existed for the entirety of that eight years. Still other places introduced at the time of the game's launch have changed dramatically, or even been removed entirely. A great deal of the world itself has been remodeled as time has progressed - The Burning Crusade added new islands off the coast of Kalimdor, Wrath of the Lich King changed the plaguelands by adding a whole new coastline to the area, and Cataclysm reshaped both continents. This doesn't even take into account adding whole swaths of explorable content like Outland, Northrend, Deepholm or now Pandaria itself. And Mists of Pandaria has advanced the story of World of Warcraft in ways that changed everything, from the removal of Theramore to the coming war of patch 5.1 between Alliance and Horde.

Interestingly, the persistent world of the setting persists through these changes, or more accurately, it persists because of them. Not only do they provide impetus for our adventures, they also contrast what we've come to know with what is new and unknown to us. Pandaria's secrets draw us deeper into exploring what was, to us, a forgotten land, and in so doing make the world we've already known continue. Anyone who leveled before Cataclysm and then leveled a character after it can attest to the wide variety of changes to the world, and anyone exploring that world on a new pandaren or monk is benefiting from those changes. But those changes work entirely because they're changes to the world we've already come to know. We care about Pandaria because it's a new place, yes, but we also care about it because it's a mirror through which we can see ourselves, our characters, our factions. We bring the World of Warcraft we've known for years to its shores.