Pros and Cons of Soloing In WoW

And now for the final installment in my year-end survey of my solo MMORPG's, this time taking on WoW. As with Monday's rundown of LOTRO and yesterday's summary of EQ2, this entry will cover three things I like, one thing that detracts from the experience, and a bottom line.

Three Things that WoW Does Best

Group Accessibility

It may seem strange for a solo player rundown to discuss group content so prominently, but the fact is that WoW's accessible group game is a huge asset to the time-crunched player who might want to fit in a dungeon on occasion. Between dungeons that are no longer tuned for a single digit percentage of the population and the game's new highly touted random cross-server group-finder, it has never been easier to sneak in a dungeon run.

Content Variety

WoW's massive revenue has brought massive production values, and Blizzard has put those numbers to good use. Between two factions and neutral content, you can probably get three separate characters to the level cap without repeating quests, excepting perhaps a dead zone around the late 40's and early 50's that's probably going to be fixed in the expansion.

Meanwhile, while all three games offer the standard kill and loot quests, Blizzard's more recent content includes some more impressive technology that provides a welcome change of pace. Players can drive vehicles and ride dragons into battle. They can take part in military campaigns that unfold before them as they complete quests. And, perhaps most importantly, next year's expansion promises to bring all of these advances down to the game's oft-neglected early levels.

Throw in PVP (a neglected, endgame-only activity in LOTRO, and completely unavailable on most EQ2 servers) and the previously mentioned random dungeons and players can always find a change of pace in WoW if they're getting tired of doing the same types of quests over and over again.

Convenience

Would you like your cosmetic pets, your mounts, and your currencies to be filed away in special tabs where they won't take up space? How about one-click dual specs anywhere in the world, accompanied by an outfit manager that comes with the default UI? How about an instant teleport to that dungeon if/when the group finally assembles, so you can actually do something with your time while awaiting a healer? How about player-controlled flying mounts so you can skip over any or all terrain and enemies you don't feel like dealing with?

Speaking of travel, the Argent Tournament rewards allow players to teleport to the grounds and summon remote bank access anywhere in the world. Even your alts can live their lives in luxury with scaling account-bound heirlooms and earlier access to flight.

For better or worse - personally, I don't think that all of the above are necessarily for the best, and some would vote down all of them - Blizzard has been doing as much as they can to make your stay in the World (of Warcraft) more convenient.

One Thing That Detracts From the WoW Solo Experience: Trivialization of the Non-Raid Endgame

When Wrath launched, there was a legitimate space for solo daily quests in the endgame progression. They may not have been supremely challenging, but they offered good rewards; the player who did dailies would advance faster than the player who only played when they had a dungeon group. Today you can buy the minimal blue gear needed to join the random dungeon zerg and skip over three tiers of itemization in a fraction of the time it takes to reach exalted with a single faction. Daily quests are only worth the time if you want to fly around Northrend while waiting for your random dungeon group to form.

Speaking of the random dungeon group, the bribe of daily frost emblems has been enough to draw massively overgeared raiders into 5-man content that's multiple tiers below their current accomplishments. Even on the day the patch arrived, my random dungeon group was overgeared and familiar with the strategies for all of the fights. You won't be waiting long to get a group, and you won't be waiting much longer to breeze through the content without much in the way of challenge.

The random dungeon finder is a great addition to the genre for players who want to complete group content while leveling, and for players who want to gear up for future raid content. Unlike Wrath's launch, however, the current tier raid content that actually requires the new gear is not tuned to be puggable - if I wanted to raid, my schedule and lack of experience would be much greater barriers than my current gear. With no challenge in running the content, no need to obtain the rewards, and the company of random strangers who probably won't say anything unless it's to complain about someone's gearscore, I just don't see the point in playing a level 80 character in WoW that you don't intend to raid with.

The Bottom Line

Perhaps it's no coincidence that the game which brought solo play to the genre has the greatest variety and diversity of solo experiences. Even where other games come close - I'd be torn over whether to recommend WoW or LOTRO to someone who wanted to play a single character solo from one to the cap - WoW delivers comparable quality AND significantly more quantity AND support for PVP and group content.

WoW may or may not be the best at any one thing, but it's above average in just about everything. That ability to appeal to multiple playstyles may be an under-rated part of the game's lasting appeal and popularity. With all of that money, Blizzard actually is able to make a little something for everyone.

Pros and Cons of Soloing In EQ2

Today's installment of my year-end survey of my solo MMORPG's will cover EQ2. As with yesterday's rundown of LOTRO, this entry will cover three things I like, one thing that detracts from the experience, and a bottom line. (I'll edit in the link to the WoW installment.)

Three Things That EQ2 Does Best

Best Crafting and Housing

EQ2's crafting makes the WoW and LOTRO versions look like afterthoughts. Unlike either system, EQ2's crafting actually requires player interaction during the crafting process (instead of pushing "craft all" and walking away from the keyboard for a few minutes), and permits crafters to advance without also going out into the world to slaughter things.

As to housing, WoW doesn't even offer the feature, and the LOTRO version is very limited in both functionality and appearance compared to EQ2. If you like these features, EQ2 is far and away the best option.

World Events

WoW's world events have the game's trademark production values, but Blizzard insists on introducing random number generator elements to strictly time-limited events. By contrast, SOE's recurring holidays and one-time world events are designed to tell a story, perhaps hand out some unique cosmetic reward, and wrap up. They don't necessarily keep you occupied for weeks on end, but they're always worth doing, and even worth looking forward to.

Character Options

EQ2 has a total of nineteen playable races. Even if you dock them three for having not one (LOTRO), not two (WoW), but FOUR playable elf-races, the game has more racial options than WoW will have after its next expansion. EQ2 has two dozen character sub-classes covering such unusual roles as evasion tank, melee healer, mind-controlling caster, and singer of sad songs that make your party members hit harder. Characters can even betray their cities and switch to the other alignment version of their class. Overall, it's a ton of very unique options.

One Thing That Detracts From the EQ2 Experience: Unreasonably Low Character Limit

The downside of having all those options is that the game makes it unreasonably difficult to actually try all of them. WoW offers ten character slots per server with which to try its ten classes. LOTRO's monthly fee includes seven slots per server, with only nine classes to try, and you can permanently obtain two more slots per server for a ONE-TIME $20 purchase.

By contrast, EQ2's character slot limit with 24 classes (12 pairs of subclasses if you're willing to betray later) is seven slots SHARED across ALL retail servers. The only option to obtain more slots on the same account is to nearly double the monthly fee by purchasing the all-inclusive Station Pass. Or you could also start a second account, paying a second full monthly fee for additional characters who will not have access to your account's shared bank (a crucial feature which can be used to transfer just about every bind-on-pickup currency or loot drop in the game). Players are also entitled to seven slots on the game's persistent test server, but those characters are stuck on that server.

In short, unless you're able to rule out classes with perfect accuracy, your choices are to pay SOE more money or spend time leveling characters that you will have to delete (or possibly re-create, if you use the test server to audition characters). I realize that EQ2 character records probably take up a large amount of data space compared to other games due to insanely large storage inventories (and potentially hundreds of items per character in player housing), but this limit is inexcusably low.

The Bottom Line:

EQ2 offers probably the most specialized game amongst the games I play. If you want to be a Wood Elf Ranger/Woodworker who fletches his own bows and arrows, you can. If you'd like to be a pacifist giant lizard who shapeshifts into animals and makes furniture in his spare time, that's on the table. Winged fairies come in cheerful, homicidal, and sometimes both at once. Somewhere in all those options, there's a character that's right for you.

Pros and Cons of Soloing In LOTRO

I'd originally been planning to do an awards-show style post at the end of the year, contrasting the solo experiences in my three solo games. Unfortunately, Syp beat me to that concept, complete with clever title and even an award graphic. After thinking about it for a few days, I decided that what I was planning would work better in the form of individual posts about each game.

Today's installment tackles LOTRO, and I'll be taking on EQ2 and WoW in the same format (three things I like, one thing that detracts from the experience, and a bottom line) over the limited remainder of the year. (I'll edit in the links to the companion posts here.)

Three Things That LOTRO Does Best

Best Solo Instant Action

LOTRO's new skirmish system offers the best instant action for solo players in the genre. Sign on, click a few times to pick your skirmish and level, and away you go for a 20-30 minute battle. The rewards are creative, and some of the skirmishes (the ones where you attack objectives, rather than defend) even allow for AFK breaks. In terms of time spent actually fighting the enemy, it's a major improvement over the daily quest grind in LOTRO or WoW, which is more parts traveling than killing.

Most Attention to Leveling Content

WoW's latest expansion and its patches included a five-level intro to Death Knights, a new profession, and no content whatsoever for existing characters below level 70. EQ2 did devote a part of an update earlier this year to a zone revamp, and has some content that scales downwards for leveling characters, but, again, focuses heavily on the endgame. By contrast, LOTRO has been systematically devoting a chunk of each patch to projects like revamping old zones and making the core epic book storyline more accessible.

Best of all, they're pulling this off with basically a one-man army (a dev named Orion), so the attention hasn't been translating into a major decrease in content for level-capped characters (as it appears that WoW soloers can expect in Cataclysm).

Best Kill Ten Rats Quests

Every game has the standard "kill ten rats" and "loot ten objects" quests. That said, if I got to add one new quest to one of the three games I play, I'd choose LOTRO.

With the deep lore of Middle Earth, those rats are probably servants of Mordor, or perhaps Isengard. Meanwhile, LOTRO's combat difficulty is the just-right medium between the trivial ease of WoW's solo content and the sometimes extreme difficulty of the recent solo content in EQ2. Where the other two games tend to jump straight from "easily soloed" to "requires a full group", LOTRO's quests include "small fellowship" content that may, with sufficient skill and care, be soloable. Having the option of that kind of attainable challenge adds a lot to the solo experience, and usually does not detract from your ability to complete quests and gain levels (though I'd certainly quibble with a few of the ratings ;)).

One Thing That Detracts From the LOTRO Experience: Quest Travel Times
There's no other game on my list where I will log in just to hit my hearthstone equivalent so its cooldown will be available again when I actually want to play, or where I sign on so that I can send Allarond on an AFK-travel route while I finish writing a blogpost. Travel in LOTRO is a pain, but it's a symptom rather than the disease.

Far too often, especially in the crowded, tight, stair-filled halls of Moria, questgivers dispatch players into different zones - think 5-7 minutes of travel times - to carry out some errand that will take 2-3 minutes to complete. Then, to add insult to insult (remember, LOTRO characters don't get injured, they just suffer hits to their morale ;)), you return to the quest giver and they send you right back to the spot you just left. Even within the same zone, travel can be a lengthy (but trivial in terms of difficulty, provided you stop and fight the mobs instead of waiting til you have a dozen chasing you) ordeal. If you think swimming across the entire length of Foundations of Stone takes forever, try walking.

In fairness, part of this may have been specific to the setting of Moria, where the narrow corridors often force your trusty invincible auto-goat to take some lengthy detours - the non-swift travel routes of Mirkwood seem to be much more reasonable in length. I even like the concept of having swift travel to previous quest hubs as a reward for deeds and reputations. In the end, the problem is not the difficulty of travel so much as its frequency. If you're going to have players raid the orc camp on the opposite side of the zone, have a friendly scout lurking nearby to give the players the followup quest.

The Bottom Line:
LOTRO offers the solo player two things - the world of Middle Earth, and a strong, almost-exclusive focus on bread and butter, kill and loot solo PVE content. Perhaps the latter would get stale more quickly without the former, but the two combine for an impressive experience. Though the game's repeatable solo and group endgame options are IMO the least interesting amongst my trio of games, LOTRO delivers very well on the core gameplay that is ultimately my reason for visiting the game in the first place.

How Do You Kill That Which Has No Life Thrice Over?

If having a character at the level cap in an MMORPG is reserved for people who don't have a life, then my lack of life now transcends worlds. Allarond just hit level 65 in LOTRO, marking the first time in my gaming career that I have simultaneously had characters at the level cap in three separate games (WoW, EQ2, LOTRO).

Of course, all such feats are temporary - this edition will last until mid-February, when the latest EQ2 expansion will kick Lyriana from atop that game's throne. I have no idea how common it is for players to pull off this type of feat. For now, though, the deed is done, and that is accomplishment enough.

A Preview of an "Upcoming" Game

I was attempting to dog-proof my old room at my parents' house, when something on the cover of an old issue of PC Gamer caught my eye. And now, straight from June 2002, here are details from the "world premiere of the sequel to the hottest online RPG ever" - none other than EQ2!

Fun Facts

• EQ1, with its 420,000 subscriptions and $12.95 monthly fee, was the king of the genre.
  
• The game was slated for an October 2003 launch (it eventually shipped in November 2004, just before WoW).
  
• Initial character creation was to be purely cosmetic (race and appearance). You'd get your archetype role at level 6 and your sub-class (the game's modern classes) at level 30. The game actually launched with a version of this system, and has since scrapped it.
  
• "Tradesman" was to be a separate archetype, rather than a parallel path for all characters.
  
• The game was slated to launch with 100 levels, and Sony claimed to be considering support for up to level 200 via expansions. (The current cap, five expansions post launch, is 80, with an increase to 90 in February's expansion.)
  
• The very next page after the EQ2 preview is an ad from EB Games to pre-order the collector's edition of Warcraft III. Blizzard itself also has an ad later in the issue. I guess Blizzard was stealing the spotlight from other MMORPG's even back then.

A very different accessibility experience
I'm also struck by how hardcore the game sounds. A few more fun facts:

• "One early quest scores you a compass, ending the Sense Heading tedium, but there's still no map."
  
• All gear was to be "transient", with an unavoidable chance of permanently breaking. The rationale was to allow more impressive quest rewards, provide a constant market for crafters, and even defeat twinking - you'd be allowed to twink gear to lowbies, but the characters' lack of skill would cause the gear to break sooner.
  
• On camping while waiting for respawns: "Sitting on that cold, stony dungeon floor may be tedious at times, but it's also understood to be critical to the socializing experience for groups."
  The people who made this plan look on WoW's automated instanced group finder and weep.
  
• Banks would not be global. You'd need to buy a personal cart or boat to haul stuff from city to city, and hire other players to guard you en route.
  
• Player housing would be non-instanced, with the potential to slowly build into a city as more of your friends move in. Of course, there'd also be limited numbers of plots, so late-comers would probably be out of luck.

There's no mention of soloing, because the thought that someone could solo to the level cap in the sequel to Everquest was completely unthinkable. Overall, it sounds like a game that I would have approximately zero chance of wanting to play. Which, one supposes, is why the game didn't actually turn out that way.

Happy Holidays from PVD!

Here's hoping that your holidays are more like the happy holiday fairy than the grumpy holiday lizard (unless you really like lizards)!

The Melee DPS Learning Curve

After hitting EQ2's level cap, I happened to run into Stargrace (yes, on her actual Dirge named Stargrace), hanging out sporting the Dirge Fabled Epic Weapon. This reminded me that she had posted how the Dirge Epic is "one of those fast easy painless epics" (she would know, she's at or approaching a dozen of them).



I had actually done the solo pre-requisites for this quest (you have to learn a couple of languages, and get access to an old dungeon) while leveling, just in case the opportunity to work on this ever came up. Lo and behold, I opened up the server chat channel that evening and there was a group AT THAT VERY MOMENT looking for another warm body or two for Sebilis, where the item that starts the quest drops. Apparently having picked up the "Luck of the Dirge" AA had paid off, and Lyriana was off to her very first EQ2 PUG.

Point and stab is harder than it sounds
I've been in group content in EQ2 a few times with guildies (shout-out to Sev, Ely, and Ria if you all are reading this), but the pressure is somewhat different with strangers.

The good news was that this particular PUG was not a situation where the group in question was depending on me to survive the content (which was a few levels below many of us). Also, as a buff-heavy class, my Dirge makes a non-zero contribution to the group just by being alive and present to buff everyone else. That said, my performance on the DPS "parse" (which a group member linked repeatedly in party chat) was predictably underwhelming. (In fairness, that group member also did offer me some reasonable advice on improvement.)

I've spent a fair amount of time in WoW groups as ranged DPS, and the basics are pretty straight-forward. Stand somewhere (changes by fight), face the mob (it's pretty hard to miss this unless you're in really close) and cast spells (which spells you cast matter, but you're usually better off casting the wrong spell than no spell at all). I've also, from time to time, attempted to purposefully hold aggro on a mob (generally to keep it from beating on the healers). There have even been a few situations where I have attempted light healing/decursing duties. None of these things gave me nearly as much trouble as the simple-sounding task of walking up to the enemy and stabbing them.

Part of the problem is that Sebilis has some tight, cramped, poorly lit hallways. Throw in six players and typically 3+ mobs in a pull, and that's a lot of bodies piled up on top of one another. One tip I learned reasonably quickly was that I can target the tank, rather than the enemy, and my attacks will proceed to hit his target, rather than some unrelated target that he doesn't have much aggro on. What really screwed with me was that several of my attacks require being behind (or at least on the flank of) the mob, rather than in front of him. I had a lot of trouble even seeing which mob I was fighting, and spent a fair chunk of time ineffectually doing nothing as a result.

There are probably various other tips that I haven't even begun to consider. Still, I was surprised at how hard it was to melee compared to anything else I've tried. Being solo means never having to ask someone else which mob you would like to stab first. If it's attacking you, you want it dead, and it's almost certainly going to be facing you unless you do something to prevent it from doing so.

In the end, I got my Quill, an extra AA from named mob kills, and even a shiny piece of loot. And, perhaps, a new insight into class roles in MMORPG's, if I can figure out what it means.


Lyriana's ill-gotten gains