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| World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade (final, READY FOR FRONTPAGE) by Jhoh Cable o_O 03/12/2007, 5:28pm PDT | ||||
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| World of Warcraft: Orange Crusade
This game might as well marry you, BECAUSE IT'LL DRAIN THE LIFE RIGHT OUT OF YOU 8) There's not much burning, and it isn't really a crusade, but you know me, I don't like to complain. The expansion for World of Warcraft adds basically a new smaller planet to have adventures on, along with raising the level cap from 60 to 70, and adds new skills and dungeons and talent bloo bloos and shit. And new bugs, balance issues, and angry angry players. Until Left 4 Dead or the Warhammer 40,000 MMO comes out, WOW will continue to be the best multiplayer coop game available (based on playtime and depth, otherwise something like I dunno Gears of War might be better, mathematically). That would be kind of sad, but the expansion actually does add good positive things to it besides more "gather 20 really rare random drop items off of dead enemies" fetch quests. Although there is still plenty of that, it's an MMO after all. Fetch quests are like the crate of MMOs. It's like the fetch quest designer shows up at work in his stained Trigun shirt, sits down at his little station there, sharpens a pencil, then throws up his hands and says "Well, I can't think of anything!" And then you're killing 10 guys one at a time to get a single quest item to drop, and then keep doing it for 9 more. And the game will still make a fag of you just for playing it (hence our guild name, Team Snowglobe, a reference to the fine quality motion picture Falling Down starring Fredrick Forrest). However, there are things that are actually original in this new expansion, along with many fixes for the old game that were long overdue. Good Things (WHERE HAVE THEY GONE DOO DOO DOODLDOO): Where the previous World of Warcraft left off with just a bunch of gay raid instances being the only way to get cool stuff or even do anything at all period, the expansion not only adds new shit to do in the new planet of Outland (HOW MANY PEOPLE RACKED THEIR BRAIN TO COME UP WITH THAT AMAZING "LORE" NAME?) but basically as soon as you go through the Dark Portal (located in the previously worthless country of Blasted Lands) and go into Hellfire Peninsula, they give you adventures to go on to report to this and this dude and start your run of quests which gives you gear 2 or 3 times better than the shit you're going in with. Some of these rewards are even better than the fuckin shit you'd get from the raids, and the quests aren't even hard and most are better than the actual quest shit they give you at level 55 and up in the normal game. You can go into the portal at level 58 so you don't have to wait for the last 2 gay levels. You even get more experience and sweet sweet monay from the new quests than the ones on the old planet. So all of the raid instances are now obsolete and bilzrad is telling the raiding people that they have wasted their time all along, HAW HAW HAW. A patch released a few weeks before the expansion added tons of shit that the game needed a long time ago, like raising the maximum amount of quests you can take from 20 to 25, reducing the amount of times you say "FUCK quest log is full let me find something to dump" and then spending 10 minutes looking through the quests you promised yourself you were going to do anyway when you feel like it, and trying to pick the ones you'll have to remember to pick up later or just forget about. They also finally added floaty numbers for when you take damage, which used to only show up in the combat log (not visible by default) or on your character's portrait which is the most out of the way place to see them. They also added floaty text with the damage things for when you get a buff or a debuff, making it very helpful for knowing when you just got in range of a totem, or if YOU ARE THE BOMB RUN INTO THE POISON or some shit. Things like the floaty text (damage floaters) and raid warnings (putting a big warning in the middle of the screen to your party or raid) used to be only available in mods, but they were integrated into the game itself, which is great. And the raid warning thing is really fun to abuse in a party of your pals while doing instances and shit. In a party of newbs, mostly people will be like DUHHHHHHHHHHHH? Because most people who play WOW are brain dead and have no souls. There are a few changes to the old game on the old planet, such as a few quests added from new NPCs represented by the new races/factions added to the game, most of them give better gear than you could've gotten from any of the old normal quests. They sort of normalized the reputation gains from quests too, but that's boring; it involves your main race capital town reputations which basically just affects prices of normal goods and things in towns run by Orgigglyamar or Thunder BLURF, such as your Stonards and your Camp Mojaches, and the rep will max out at around lvl 50 from doing the normal quests, as opposed to a year ago where you'd have to cash in about 50,000 runecloth to max it out and no one would care enough to do that. So after slogging through most of the plain original game (which is still pretty plain and now inappropriately hard compared to the beginning of the expansion), you are almost rewarded when you get to Outland. A lot of the quests are easy, give constant gear upgrades, and some are actually fun. Almost immediately you get a quest that lets you ride a special flight path where you can throw provided bombs that fuckin blast the shit out of some enemy zones and you can see sweet giant numbers flying out of them for like 15,000 damage and shit, which should satisfy any previous player's desire to see the biggest numbers flying around their screens. ADVENTURES! 
ALSO YOU CAN LEARN ABOUT BEAR SPIRITS Because most of your dude's power in the game is based on how good your gear is, upgrading your gear is almost like gaining a level, so almost every new quest you complete in the Hellfire country increases your max health (stam) and max mana and spell crit (int) and defense (armor, agl) and crit chance (agl again!) and fuckin melee powwa (str), with your swee new gears. When you actually gain a level, it gives you like +1 to each of your base stats such as your strength and int and bloo bloo (like +2 to bloo bloo). And spirit, which is worthless (it affects your out of combat health and mana regen, and no one CARES, not even blzrzr because they simply added "5 mana every 5 seconds" to almost all of the new caster gear). The shit they give you throughout the Hellfire Peninsula quests is sort of like gaining a full level or two for each piece of armor. Then there's Hellfire Citadel, which is an instance with a bunch of seperate wings you can pick, 2 of them being actually quite easy as soon as you get into the country, and only taking 1 hour straight up, making it easier and faster even than the fuckin level 20 instances and so on. There are a few tricks usually but nothing really complicated as long as you are a competent player. The bosses drop even better gear, and the quests for these instances have rewards which can be shit you'll almost never replace for the rest of the game. Aside from most of the newer basic instances being pretty short and straightforward, with just the occasional challanging boss, the design of these instances is pretty cool too. They added a lvl 65+ instance in the old world in a place that used to be just a placeholder with nothing in it, where the "dungeon" is a time portal that takes you back to the past to a zone that used to be for level 25 questing stuffs. In the instance is the same old level 25 bears that you can kill in one shot, and then you're disguised as a human for the entire run of the instance, and instead of the usual instance tactics of killing trash mobs and a few bosses, you break into an enemy fort, blow up some internment camps holding orcs (ORCS ARE GOOD GUYS IN THIS TOO? AMAZING) and then break into the enemy castle building and go into the basement to rescue Thrall who's the leader of the orcs and basically the whole horde. Then you bust him out and do a big escort where he chops through a bunch of enemies and then mounts up and rides to Tarren Mill (which becomes a horde town in the normal game, IN THE FUTURE!!!!!) and you kill more guys and then a secret deedly deecret bunch of time changing evil dragons (wow......... dragons) and save history. Meanwhile you can just go right to the alliance town of Southshore (which remains basically the same place in the normal game) and watch looooore characters have a cutscene in the inn or buy drinks and junk from the bartender. You don't even need to be in a party to do this stuff, you could just go to this instance alone. If only molten core was this interesting. Then maybe raiding wouldn't be gay fuckin bullshit. 
AAAAAAAAAAAAAA I'M BLACK!!!!!! I'M AFRICAN AMERICAN Bad Things: Right after you leave Hellfire Peninsula, the gear is all sidegrades (+20 stam +15 str vs +15 stam +20 str), so it's just there to vendor. There's an occasional upgrade from lvl 62 to 70 from quests, and it's still cool to be like "oh shit this is better IN EVERY WAY than my current belt, it has more int and staaaaaaaaaaaaaam and damage and healing and spell crit" and if you can find a chance to SHUT UP!!!!!!!! about it for a second you can actually equip it, and then continue slogging through fetch and kill quests. All the cool "bomb enemy forts from the air" quests dry up and it turns into MMO business as usual. Even months after the expansion has been released, many many quests and areas are totally bugged the fuck out. There's a quest in the level 64 area that only works one time once per server reset and is bugged for everyone else afterwards. There were some dudes in one of the lvl 70 areas that would take damage until 50% of their health, then just totally break off combat, run away, and reset their health, making the quest involving them totally impossible. There are bugs throughout the game code itself where if an enemy stands on a seam in the ground in the wrong way, it will stop moving and become invincible. Eventually you learn to stop doing any quests that involve "forge camps" where the eeeeeevil burning legion is creating their machines of evil war and they have some portals and shit set up to teleport in dudes to strike at whatever I don't really know or care, but the problem with all of these forge camps is that the stationary cannons there bug out and sometimes will shoot at you forever until you have actually left the country, sometimes you don't even have to get their attention to do it, and sometimes you can see yourself back at a friendly town getting hit by green fireballs for no damage at all. There's another monster bug where you can just start being hit by enemies without even seeing where they are, so the game considers them to be standing right in front of you hitting you with a stick or whatever, but you'll see them as being behind a tree somewhere, and then they don't show up as taking damage but they do but you can't really know that until they die, and if they die without you being where they are showing up in the game you can't loot them WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And a month after this has been happening throughout the game, druids mention that entangling roots isn't working anymore, and every server comes down that day to apply a hotfix to it. And what race can be a druid? Night elves. The conspiracy theory here I'm implying is that any problem in the game that happens to players aside from night elves is ignored, but one that affects night elves directly must be fixed ASAP, because in one of the pointlessly readable books inside Stratholme it says that night elves are very powerful and mysterious and they can't have the precious looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooore of the game ruined by a technical problem in the game's code. 
If you made the mistake of playing horde (psh what are you a newb?) then you'll never get to do stuff like this. COULD THAT BE THE LEGENDARY RAZGRIZ I'VE HEARD SO MUCH ABOUT LATELY? Story: Just more pointless arbitrary "there's an enemy army" stuff with the ridiculous fantasy names with apostrophes and friendly and enemy factions that may or may not be allied with each other or something. There are like 20 new factions in this game, and you have to gain reputation with them (completing quests for them or killing certain enemies will give you rep, also collecting fetch type items that you can cash in with them for rep), and the rep grinding will let you buy neat items with them or if you max out you can do the high difficulty heroic dungeons and shit. Then in the capital of Outland there are two factions and you have to pick one to become your main town faction, and when you do shit with them it fucks up your rep with the other place so you can't really go back, although they added a way to try to reverse your rep but it would take a year to fix it no matter what. I hope you can imagine a god who would care, BECAUSE I SURE CAN'T. New Gay Races! In the expansion they add two races and I can't imagine anyone giving a shit about them but people were actually speculating about what the alliance race would be. WOULD IT BE CYBORGS? Perhaps they would be draneeidisfd because you see it would fit the lore very fittingly and then bam it did turn out to be the draeni, which are basically blue guys who for some reason have cow legs like the taurens, and also the males are kind of big like the taurens probably because of all the alliance players who whined about it. The one advantage the draeni have is that the chicks are the most ass shakinest hoowars in WOW (beating out night elf and human hookers). The blood elf belf babez just look all twiggy and weird. And they're elves. Might as well have chocobos and lightsabers in your game too if you're not even going to TRY. Blizzard Hates Horde: According to sites that show the population of the various WOW servers, alliance outnumbers horde 2:1 on almost every server, 3:1 on a few, and then is 1:1 on I think one single server. Word around the player base is that the ratio is the same for blzrd (DEMOTED OF CAPS AND SOME OF ITS LETTERS) employees, so when a problem with horde factions, quests, or classes comes up, no one is able to find out about it because blzblz doesn't listen to anything that isn't presented from 50,000 night elves at the same time. After all night elves are such an amazing race, because you see they're like a normal elf, but............. wait for it.......... they have purple skin! It's more original than just a normal elf! We'll wait a couple years to make normal elves anyway and put them in on the horde side, even though those panda guys from Warcraft 3 might actually be a better idea for a new horde race AND YOU DON'T EVEN FUCKIN SEE THEM IN WORLD OF WARCRAFT THIS GAME IS FUCKIN RETARDED so blz gets complaints from an alliance player who has a Little Mermaid poster in his living room and whos fat and psychopathic wife will thrash him to within an inch of his life about what horde shamans hurt their feelings by vaporizing them with a quintuple windfury crit sending them into a screaming fit to nerf shamans they're imba op and they interrupted them while they were watching Ow My Balls AND THAT IS NOT OKAY, and bliard makes it so there's no such thing as windfury proc crit whatevers anymore AND they add a secret (not even mentioned in the tooltip or the patch notes) cooldown on the windfury effect, no matter how unlikely it was in the game, and then on the flipside when the horde shaman asks for something reasonable and necessary like the range of their totems increased from practically nothing to nothing and a half, blzridd stops reading the shaman boards (horde plays shaman, night elves don't). They only just now got around to adding a skill that recycles your totems, unlike the past 2 years where if a shaman threw a totem down for whatever reason in a fight, and then went to fight other guys or just went back to town, the totem would stay there for a couple minutes until it ran out where any enemy can patrol right into it, somehow agor onto the totem, destroy it, and then agor directly onto you because it was your totem, putting you into combat even if you were trying to drink delicious mana drinks or taking a break or whatever, and no one at blz stopped to think to fix this until now because there was no way of knowing because someone there would actually have to play a horde character or even KNOW someone who plays a horde character to ever find out, and they don't because they created a faction that they don't even care about. Except for the one lonely guy at lizzardb who comes up with the ideas for horde quests and town designs, who's constantly at odds with the alliance guy who does the rest of horde quests and the alliance guy just assumes that they should involve poisoning children and animals because they think that's what the horde should be about, not that they would know because they just play a night elf and have a human warrior and gnome rogue as alts. Then the guy who actually plays horde just sighs and designs horde quests that involve good things, as an attempt to balance things out. No one else at blzrdrds knows about this because it would involve playing horde things themselves. 
I'M OUT OF TOTEM RANGE If you really care about what windfury is, it's a shaman skill you cast that gives your weapon a 20% chance to do 2 extra attacks for double the damage of your normal hits. Your normal hits usually don't do that much damage (most shaman weapons are extra weak even though half your damage is melee PSH although that's the point of the shaman's weapon spells) but you can smoke half an enemy's health if windfury goes off, and windfury used to have a chance to go off on a windfury effect (or, psh, "proc" as they call it in the world of things going off GUNS ABOUT GO TO OFF HNNNNNNNNNN). Then thousands of alliance whined about it for months, so bulz first reduced the damage the windfury effect did by a ton, and then they added a secret cooldown so it couldn't double prox, and now apparently they made it a single magic effect hit equal to two hits or that's what the tooltip says and I don't even recognize what the fuck is the point anymore so I just use rockbiter instead (it just adds DPS to your weapon, STRAIGHT UP) and oh WHO THE THE FUCK WAS THE IDIOT WHO FEARED YOU FUCK!!!!!!!ING RETARD IDIOT, IT WAS GOING PERFECT YOU MUDDERFUCKER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! THEN YOU FUCKING FEARED THEM, AND THE WHOLE GOD DAMN, FUCKING......... MAB THAT WAS FOLLOWING ME WENT TO ALL DEEFEREENT PLACES AND FUCKED ME UP!!!!!! These kinds of things in the game are what lead to the Lenny Bruce syndrome where eventually you are yapping for all eternity to anyone you can about windfury or procs or crit chance or rogues not having enough PVE raid viability or warriors not having enough DPS in prot spec bloo bloo mysterious MMO in-speak shit, and you get shamans on the shaman boards posting lengthy experiments BASED ON 10,000 ENEMIES KILLED where they track how often windfury really goes off and they have this mathematical equasion showing that it is BELOW THE STATED 20% BLZ HAS BEEN LYING TO US ALL THIS TIME SHOULD I DUAL WIELD OR SHIELD SPEC?!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! But still, blarzzid should un nerf windfury, because fuck alliance. I didn't even get to the part about shamans either having to take the hunter gear (because it's mail) and just focus on melee attacks, or pick some of the more rare stuff with caster stats (shamans are half melee half spells with heals and 4 kinds of totems you can drop that buff you and party members) but have nothing for your melee shit. It's like there's no one at blizzard who knows what shamans should actually have. Meanwhile the gear of every other class has like +80 attack power and tons of stam and str and agl and blr and flf and ggg on everything (where the pre expansion gear only had that kind of shit for the super duper powerful raid gear). Clearly lizzardb designed most of the new race's areas and quests and shit with the alliance more in mind, and more of the creativity spent there. The draeni blueberry space people have all these cool quests where you chase around ghosts and they give you short buffs that let you float and you use them to jump off cliffs and then a super fast swimming buff that lets you speed through the water to find this other thing, and then one guy gives you a 15 minute buff that gives you an epic mount to ride around warning people of an impending whatever. The blood elf belf opening area doesn't have any of this shit, it just has "kill 10 enemies" over and over and over and over until you go do the barrens quests. Meanwhile, the new races let horde have paladins, previously an alliance only class, and alliance gets the shamans, with all their nerfed windfury and dropping the strength of earth totem then walking 10 feet away to fight more enemies and being out of range of your own totem that's RIGHT OVER THERE not even to mention boss fuckin fights in instances where your totems would cover one corner of the fuckin boss room and everyone's run out of range of them in the first 5 seconds BULLSHIT. But anyway, most of the shaman trainers in the draeni opening zones are from a race called "the broken." Ha ha ha nice little joke about how you refuse to fix one of the classes in your own game that I'm paying you money for but hey instead of making a race that has blue skin (IT'S LIKE PURPLE BUT A DIFFERENT COLOR) how about fixing problems that have been in the game for a couple years now? NO RUSH. Players Threatening to Sue blzrrzd Funayness: 10/10! The nature of a complex game such as this one can easily lead to many players ranting about things that no one cares about (DEATHCOIL IS IMBUHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH OP NERF NOW NOW NOW I'M CANCELING MY ACCOUNT FOREVER) but the funniest and most pointless one would be right before the expansion came out, and buliz changed the whole honor ranking PVP fight battleground whatevers system so that all the swee rewards for doing battlegrounds were a million times easier to get. There used to be a really bizarre system where you got honor points and then they'd be calculated once a week to decide where your rank meter went, either increasing the meter or promoting you a rank or two, but there was a pointless and weird sliding scale where the more honor and rank and shit you were getting at one time the less it would count for in the next week and so on, and then if you stopped playing the battlegrounds eventually your rank would fall and you could get busted back down to having no rank if you stopped playing entirely. The stupid stupid faggots who quit jobs and divorced people just to get the high warlord/grand marshal rank basically wasted all that time to get gear that now only requires a few weeks of battleground grinding to get. The new honor system just has honor points that you get from killing players and capping flags, and the points stay there, and they don't scale or slide or decay. So I heard from a guildie guild guild person who's in the guild (Team Snowglobe, RETURNING TO ROCK THE HOLY LANDS) that people on the WOW boards were planning to all get together and sue blizzard for RUUUUUUUUUUINING their lives by making the whole PVP rewards system better. Then we laughed about it. The end. :( 
(NWS) IF A NIGHT ELF IS STILL ALIVE AFTER YOU FUCKED IT, THEN YOU'RE NOT DONE YET Things blblrdzrdrdzd Should've Added To the Expansion But Did Not Because They Are Incompetent: 10/10! Out of the things they SHOULD be adding in an expansion pack, instead of retarded-looking new races (DID I MENTION THEY HAVE BLUE SKIN), would be some kind of in game radio station like the GTA games, hosted by the Huhuran guy telling us what's beast and what isn't, and the 50 DKP minus guy with strategies for the new raid instances. Perhaps with the Cloudsong kid doing traffic and weather together although if you were in traffic you'd already know what the weather is, making it kind of pointless to have the reports combined. Another thing, they should add smaller mounts or some kind of movement speed increase skill for all classes at level 20. Right now, a few classes (shaman, druid, hunter) get a movement increase skill at 20, and the rest have to keep walking hundreds of virtual miles just to get back to the town where they can exit their game. MUTHAFUCKA WHAT THE FUCK. Here's another thing! There are times when you're right in the middle of an area where you're fighting enemies all randomly planted around, like anywhere in the game, and you are fighting and fighting and suddenly the smoke detector goes off or the oven goes off (OR BOTH IN MY HOUSE YOU KNOW WHAT I'M SAYING HA HA no just kidding I don't burn food that's wrong). What does WOW do to help you deal with this? Absolutely nothing. Because they are incompetent. THEY ARE INCOMPETENT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! As a result of age combined with drink. What would fix this is a town portal, Diablo 2 style. The WOW equivalent, the hearthstone, can only be used once per hour, and takes 10 seconds just to cast it. I consider myself a good judge of things that are beast, and that is decidedly unbeast. For some reason, the new flying mounts (they're like mounts, but they FLY at the same speed as the old old level 40 mounts, which is kind of gay) are only usable in Outland. Probably because when you take a flight path over a zone border in the old planet, you can see seams and abrupt texture changes, probably because most of the flight paths weren't even added until way later in the game. The flying mount is neat when you want to go over some obstacles in the world or float directly over the roads and land yourself right in the middle of a quest area, but you'll probably still use your lvl 60 fast ground mount because it moves faster. I'm sure bgggsdbfdsfd has a reason for that, but it's probably a gay reason. Also, you have to be level 70 to get the epic mount, which means using it for quests is pointless because you no longer need experience. There are a few level 70 quests that might get you a gear upgrade, but there's still a chance it'll be bugged somehow. Game Ending: The end of the game comes when you hit level 70, and then go on wowwiki and read what's required for a bunch of the end game instances, which are going through the high level instances to get key fragments for the 10 man instance and combining them and then you have to do the high difficulty super hard versions of the previous instances to get through the quest chains to attune for the raid instances at the end. You read those things and say "fuck that" and cancel your account. Final Verdict: GUILTY. Also, if you already play this game, it's good for a while. If you don't, this is not a good reason to start playing. If you're really hard up for crusades, play Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War: Dark Crusade. That's a pretty good crusade. And it's dark instead of burning, and everyone knows that dark is way cooler than burning, in my not so humble opinion, HEH. 8) |
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