LFR and raid dungeon linearity, or the lack thereof

I’ve recently been pondering the possible effect of building a raid with an LFR setting in mind on raid dungeon linearity, or the lack thereof.

Tier 15 is completely linear. Normal-mode raiders have to fight through each of the twelve boss encounters of Throne of Thunder in order. BTH’s guild has killed 9 bosses in 10s and 7 bosses in 25s. They started at Durumu tonight, but only because they’d already killed the previous six bosses on Tuesday and Wednesday. LFR allowed me to jump into Throne of Thunder at Durumu on Tuesday night, without having to have already fought through the first six bosses in this raid reset period. I did the last six bosses of Throne of Thunder first, and though I could go into the first two wings of LFR this evening for the chances at loot and collecting more of Wrathion’s thingamabobs, I don’t have to go defeat the first six bosses of Throne of Thunder this week if I decide that I want to do something else instead. In fact, now that I’ve completed Pinnacle of Storms LFR, I can do as many or as few of the wings of Throne of Thunder as I want, in any order that I please.

Tier 14 was only sort-of non-linear. Sure, the bosses were spread over three different instances, but one had to complete Mogu’shan Vaults before proceeding to Heart of Fear and Heart of Fear before going on to Terrace of Endless Spring. Only after one had completed Heart of Fear could one really pick and choose among the three instances. And each instance was linear within itself. The splitting of Mogu’shan Vaults and Heart of Fear into two wings apiece gave the LFR versions a greater degree of non-linearity.

Tier 13, the first raid to have the LFR option, had a little bit of non-linearity: Zon’ozz and Yor’sahj could be done in either order. The rest of it was all linear. The LFR version split the raid in half, offering the option to do just the second half, provided one had done the first half once — which is what I did, given that my normal-mode guild had cleared the first half and I’d gotten all the gear I wanted from it at the time that I decided to stop doing regular raiding and they downsized from 25s to 10s.

It seems to me that the division of raid dungeons into wings for the LFR mode produces an illusion of non-linearity, because the wings can be run in any order after one has completed a first “in order” run-through. A certain degree of true non-linearity is possible within the wings themselves — I think that an LFR wing could accomodate such sprawling non-linearity as the opening plain of Firelands or the Watchers area of Ulduar. It’s easy enough to imagine dividing Ulduar into wings for LFR, based on the breakpoints ordinary raid groups used to use: 1) Flame Leviathan, Ignis, Razorscale, XT-002; 2) Iron Council, Kologarn, Auriaya; 3) Hodir, Thorim, Freya, Mimiron; 4) General Vezax, Yogg-Saron. But what about Karazhan, with all of its optional, skippable bosses — the animal bosses in the servants’ quarters that I never saw because the guild I began my raiding career with was already starting Kara at Attumen when I joined, the Maiden of Virtue, Nightbane, Netherspite, Terestrian Illhoof? Could a raid with such side-spur bosses be made to work in an LFR mode, or does the advent of LFR mean that such diversions in raiding will never come back again?

the Sackville-Bagginses of raiding

After finally completing the 6K Valor Point step of the Legendary questline a week and a half or so ago, the PvP stage that I had been dreading was delightfully easy. It only took two tries at each battleground to get into a victorious Horde warparty. I went in as a healer and attached myself to whomever had one of the orbs (in Kotmogu) or to whichever DPS was closest (in Silvershard), and though I did sometimes suffer from Healers Have To Die syndrome, it wasn’t too bad. Then BTH and I duoed General Twinbraid. That battle must have taken us at least 30 minutes because I used Bloodlust three times! After we missed an interrupt on the call for adds early in the fight and I died and had to ankh, I did most of the fight at less than half mana. Thank the Earthmother for Telluric Currents! The first ten minutes or so of the fight felt pretty epic, but after that, it got pretty boring.

With these tasks accomplished, I was finally ready to venture into Throne of Thunder LFR. I’ve only felt up to doing one wing in any given evening, and I don’t want to do LFR too late in the raiding week, so I only got the first two wings done last week. This week, I started with the third wing, and last night, I did the fourth and final wing.

I’ve gotten one of Wrathion’s T15 MacGuffins from each wing that I’ve run. I’ve also gotten a bracers upgrade that I am using, a chestpiece upgrade that I’m not using (not ready to break my T14 4-pc set bonus quite yet), and three lovely weapons that might get rotated through my Elemental set — between the Breath of the Black Prince and the Eye of the Black Prince, my Sha-touched weapon will be superior for my Resto set for a long time to come.

As much as I agonized over “what am I going to do about raiding in Mists?!” in the waning months of Cataclysm, I have not regretted my decision to not do regular, guild-based, normal-mode raiding in the current expansion. I’ve been grateful that LFR allows me to get a taste of the current raid environments, encounters, and atmospheres, but I haven’t really missed normal-mode raiding.

Until last night, when I did Pinnacle of Storms in LFR.

Defeating Lei Shen only took two attempts. Afterward, the group just dispersed, and seeing Lei Shen lying there, abandoned, made me feel sad, somehow. I found myself missing the whoops and cheers of triumph and the jostling around as the group arranged itself for a kill shot that would inevitably have followed a hard-fought, hard-won normal-mode guild first kill of a boss. The Twin Consorts and Lei Shen fights were crazy and fun — and yes, even somewhat difficult — on LFR-mode… but they didn’t feel epic like my memories of normal-mode penultimate and final boss fights. I found myself missing that normal-mode challenge, the need to wipe and wipe and wipe and wipe and wipe to be able to master the mechanics and the proper timing of raid cooldowns. I already knew that LFR is the “poor relations” of raiding, and I have accepted that — but somehow these two encounters really drove that home for me.

Azeroth Beautician’s Manual of Feminine Style — Appendix3: Racial Height & Build Comparison

Kamalia’s Guide to the Barbershop (bonus edition)

Okay, so, height and build aren’t exactly things that you can change at all, let alone at the barbershop. They are, however, appearance-related. I put together this scale comparison of the various World of Warcraft player-character races for my own reference. Although it’s kind of rough around the edges, I thought others might find it useful, too.
Click on the small picture to see a larger version.

The Alliance races were all compared to a normal-sized NPC human. The Horde races were all compared to a normal-sized NPC blood elf. I used a comparison between a tauren and a normal-sized, neutral night elf (a Moonglade NPC) to make sure that the two factions were correctly scaled relative to each other.

Also, I finally managed to update the rest of the Azeroth Beautician’s Manual of Feminine Style to include pandaren color and style information.

Wrathion’s Kiss

As she handed the last of the re-stolen vegetables to Farmer Yoon, Kamalia felt a sudden burning sensation on her forehead. It flared intensely for a second or two, then faded away.

Puzzled, she rubbed at the spot.
“Are you okay?” Farmer Yoon asked. “Your eyes turned red there for a moment. Come, sit down.”
He prodded her up the stairs, into the house, and onto a chair, then bustled around making up some ginseng tea while Kamalia tried to figure out what had just happened.
As he handed her the steaming mug, Farmer Yoon’s gaze fell on Kamalia’s mace. He frowned at the deep black gem glimmering on the pommel, and, shuddering slightly, hurried back outside.
Then Kamalia remembered. Only a few days after the Black Prince had given her that gem, she had visited him again with the news of the arrival of the Horde and Alliance warfleets on the shores of the Krasarang Wilds. He had received it with a rather childish degree of glee — but then again, she supposed, he was still very much a child, especially as dragons age — and challenged her to prove to him that the Horde was worthy to be the ultimate victor in the ongoing strife with the Alliance. Then he had done something entirely unexpected…

Without warning, Wrathion sliced his thumb and pressed it against her forehead. His blood burned to the touch, but rapidly disappeared into her skin.

“There!”, he said, “My eye is upon you, shaman. I am watching.

The Pandaren, like the Horde, value the concept of “Valor.” There are many ways to prove yourself valorous on this continent, from daily tasks to the defeat of heroic enemies within their lair. I will let you choose your own course.

Prove your bravery to me!”

That had been nearly three months ago. Much had happened in the interim. Blood and oil soaked the sands of once-pristine beaches in Krasarang Wilds. Pressured by Warchief Hellscream, the Sin’dorei had helped him obtain a dangerous ancient mogu artifact — costing the Sunreavers their neutrality — and the Horde’s foothold in Dalaran — in the process. The young Prince of the Alliance, at once wise and brave and very foolish, had destroyed the Divine Bell. It had collapsed on top of him. Kamalia did not know his fate, but she hoped that he had survived, somehow. At this worst of all possible times, the Shado-Pan reported that the ancient mogu hero, the legendary Thunder King, who had been stolen away and resurrected by the Zandalari trolls at about the same time as the Horde and Alliance first arrived on Pandaria, would soon return to his full, terrible strength. While the Warchief continued to press the battle with the Alliance in Krasarang, the displaced and utterly outraged Sunreavers took this matter into their own hands, hoping to show the Shado-Pan that at least some of the Horde were interested in honorably helping. Kamalia had helped them secure an outpost on the island where the Thunder King’s stronghold was located. She’d spent most of the last month there, fighting trolls and mogu and mogu and trolls and occasionally some saurok and more trolls and more mogu, until finally the way to the gates of the palace itself was cleared. She had carefully stayed out of the sniping between the Sunreavers and the Kirin Tor, who were leading the Alliance’s effort to aid the Shado-Pan. She had a handful of keys to the palace treasure room that she hadn’t yet mustered up the… greed to use. And yet.. and yet… after all of that, it was completing a simple task of service, one that Kamalia had done many times before and would probably do many times again, that had apparently been the final “proof of bravery” that Wrathion wanted.

Kamalia carefully placed the empty mug with the rest of Farmer Yoon’s dirty crockery, and, smiling, went out into the garden to tell him that everything was just fine.

Dezco’s Boys

Sunwalker Dezco says that he named one of his twin sons “Kor”, after Kor Bloodtusk, and the other after the adventurer who assisted him at Thunder Cleft. I suspect that, should the twins ever appear in some later expansion as larger children, the other one will actually be named “Kang”, after Kang Bramblestaff.

Edit, 3 May 2013: This picture has now been jossed by the publication of the short story “Bleeding Sun”.

Leza’s Dream

The Dawnchaser tribe are close cousins (on a tribal scale) to the Dawnstrider tribe, so Kamalia and her siblings spent their childhood and adolescence mingling as much with the Dawnchasers as with the Dawnstriders. Like young Dezco, heir to the Dawnchaser chieftainship, Kamalia’s youngest siblings, the twins Kaohana and Karaelia, were drawn to the philosophies of Tahu Sagewind and Aponi Brightmane. In those early days, as the fledgling Seers and Sunwalkers studied ways to effectively draw upon the Light of An’She, they were few enough in number that they all knew one another by name. Although increasing numbers of Shu’halo chose to follow the paths of An’she as the Cataclysm raged, Kaohana and Karaelia remained close to their Dawnchaser friends.

Around the time that the elite warriors of Azeroth were battling the Old Gods at Wymrest Temple, preparing to take on Deathwing himself, Dezco’s wife, Leza, began to have the same strange dream over and over. She described a beautiful valley, rich and fertile, watered with streams that glowed softly golden, giving the grass and trees shades of gold and crimson. When Karaelia and Kaohana told Kamalia about their friend’s dreams, Kamalia asked if perhaps Leza might be thinking of the enchanted lands of the Sin’dorei, where it always seemed to be simultaneously spring and autumn. The girls brought this suggestion to Leza, and she emphatically responded that she had been to the Eversong Woods, and this place in her dream was certainly not the same. Although no-one knew of anywhere on Azeroth like it, the more often Leza had what she began to call “The Golden Dream”, the more strongly she felt that this place did exist on Azeroth, somewhere in the uncharted southern seas.

That winter, Chief Dawnchaser passed into the arms of the Earthmother, and Dezco became Chieftain of his tribe. When, following the final Madness and defeat of Deathwing and the exhaustion of the Dragon Aspects, High Chieftain Baine Bloodhoof began to have strange dreams, he remembered hearing old Chief Dawnchaser tell of his daughter-in-law’s visions, and he requested Sunwalker Dezco and Seer Leza’s counsel. Upon discovering that his dreams were the same as Leza’s persistent visions, the High Chieftain decided that this place of golden peace must be found. He commissioned four ships to carry Sunwalker Dezco, Seer Leza, and any who wished to accompany them on their search. With their Chieftain, Dezco, in charge of the expedition, many of the Dawnchasers chose to brave the unknown seas. A few Seers and Sunwalkers from other tribes, including Kaohana and Karaelia, also joined the pilgrims. The ships departed from Ratchet barely a week before Warchief Hellscream began gathering his forces for the assault on Northwatch Hold that ultimately led to the destruction of Theramore…

Like Akabeko’s Weipon, the actual leveling of my Tauren Priest and Paladin lags severely behind their RP stories. For Kaohana and Karaelia, questing through the Jade Forest and most of the Valley of the Four Winds will be purely ‘out-of-character’ game mechanics. Their ‘in-character’ experience of Pandaria will begin at Thunder Cleft in Krasarang Wilds, because RP-story-wise, they came to Pandaria with the Dawnchaser expedition. Karaelia is among Sunwalker Dezco’s honor guard of Dawnchaser Braves at the Shrine of Two Moons, and Kaohana has stayed at Stoneplow with the greater body of the Dawnchaser settlers.

In the artwork, Karaelia is wearing her Grunt’s/Outrunner’s “Sunwalker Initiate” set, but I didn’t get the other clothes quite right. Leza is wearing Flirtation Robes when she should be wearing Magus Tirth’s Robe, and Dezco is wearing the BC recolor of the Battlegear of Might when he should be wearing the Vengeful Gladiator’s set.

art post: neon Trolls

When lacking inspiration for writing, post artwork!

A year ago, when bright, hot, neon/fluorescent colors began to come back into fashion, I doodled up these neon-accented outfits one afternoon during lab (my students weren’t asking enough questions to keep me from getting bored).

(The pigment colors of my bright markers and pencils did not scan well at all, so I touched them up in Photoshop.)

Then, as I thought about making a WoW-themed drawing incorporating neon/fluorescent colors, I was naturally drawn to the race with the brightest hair colors in the game — the Trolls.

This somewhat older “neon Troll” drawing was made with the same Crayola Color Surge paper & marker system that I used for this Lunar Festival drawing.