bruceb

Hey, it's a WoW post, for the first time in many months. 

So here's the deal. Last year I just plain burned out on the thing. I think their developers have gotten into some very bad habits, and the constant reshuffling meant re-learning a lot of things just to keep playing, and that's a drag. I felt like raid design was getting more and more constricting, in that there's one and only one correct solution to most boss fights, so that what you're really learning is choreography rather than strategy. (Playing City of Heroes only reinforced that sense, since their fights, big and small, are much more amenable to widely diverging approaches.) And to top it off, the Firelands reliably give me a migraine, from the colors and texture combos.

I thought about leveling up some fresh new characters, but never did, mostly out of a feeling of sameness. There'd be no real surprises for me in it, just things I'd done before, whatever track I might choose - regular grouping or soloing, aiming for raiding or not, any race/class pair I'd be at all likely to enjoy playing, whatever axis you want to look at.

Then came a blog post from the WoW folks, and the funny thing is I'm not even sure where I found the link. It told me about the WoW Ironman Challenge. The rest of this will get long, so I'll throw it behind a cut tag.


Here's the gist of the challenge:

Level from 1-85 using the rules below.

1. Only White or Grey gear. No Heirlooms of any kind.
2. No transfer of gear, items, or money from any other character (yours or others).
3. No gear enhancements, including gems, enchanting, and reforging. Class abilities are allowed (eg. Rogue poisons, Shaman imbues).
4. No specialization, talent points, or glyphs. No pet talent points.
5. No professions or secondary skills, except for First Aid.
6. No potions, flasks, or elixirs except for required quest items.
7. No food buffs or other external buffs (including buffs from items and other players).
8. No groups or assistance from other characters, even if not grouped.
9. No dungeons, raids, battlegrounds, or arenas.
10. No guilds, except for level 1 guilds created specifically for the Ironman Challenge.
11. No Refer-A-Friend.
12. No addons which assist in combat and/or leveling (eg. leveling guides, Ovale).
13. THE BIG ONE: No deaths. Character death for any reason disqualifies the character

The following are allowed:

1. All class abilities, racials, and personal buffs.
2. All mounts, bags, and non-combat pets.
3. All quests, including holiday events and dailies (unless prohibited by some other rule, eg. Fishing and Cooking dailies).

"White" and "gray" in the first item, for those of you who don't play WoW, are measures of item quality. The basic level of quality is white - it's not good, but it won't hurt you. New characters start off with some, and early quests give more white-labeled items as rewards, like this neat robe. Gear with a green label, like this shield, is better than that, providing some noticeable benefits. Blue-labeled gear, like this delightfully excessive bow, is a notch better than that, with more armor and bonuses than green or white gear at the same item level. Purple-labeled gear, like this sword, is epic, and rare, often in the possession of a single boss enemy. Gray-labeled gear (like the two-hand mace with one of my favorite weapon names), on the other hand, is also known as "vendor trash". There are no circumstances, in regular play of any kind, in which you'd want to use it rather than take the money a vendor will give you for it as scrap and saving up for something worth while.

Ironman challenge characters, in other words, are restricted to weapons and armor that are one step up from running around in their skivvies. This is a big, big deal in a game like WoW, in which equipment matters. At level 10, which most characters will reach in a couple-three hours of play, the difference in total stats between sticking to white or gray gear and using green and any blue gear that might come along as a random drop or as the reward for completing a particular quest is...I'm not going to go look up numbers, but it's not going to be a 25% gap. Smaller than that, probably more like 10% or so. But the gap gets wider and wider at higher levels. A character at the current maximum level, 85, with a load of blue or purple gear, might well be getting 75% of their total stats in the form of bonuses from their equipment. And the challenges in each zone are set up with at least some gear boost in mind, since the designers have the sensible expectation that players will be taking advantage of opportunities to improve their characters. It will therefore be harder and harder for a character on challenge rules to survive and prevail.

The other rules have the same kind of effect, cutting off usual routes for character power boosting.

And then there's the no-death rule. In WoW, as in many computer games, death is just a setback. The ghost of your character can rune back to their body and revive (usually with some kind of damage or temporary impairment, but still), and there are spells to revive other characters, and so on. In practical terms, it slows down your progress and imposes some inconvenience. If your character is doing something with a timer running, it of course uses up time. But it's not terminal...unless you choose to abide by a rule that says one death is is for that character, it must go out of play, or at least has failed the challenge.

There's a fan site for the project, and you can look at the tally of participating characters living and dead, and also a bunch of stats.

I thought, hey, that sounds like fun, maybe. So I made a draenei hunter, and got her to level 20 before she died. (She survived the Vector Coil quest almost undamaged, and then got killed when too many blood elf agents respawned all at once.) Now I'm working on a blood elf warlock, who got to 11 before I logged up to let the armory update and write this post.

There are two real benefits to this, for me, at the moment.

#1. It shifts focus to all kinds of gear, spell/power usage, quests and areas, and so on, that you generally don't give a second glance to in regular play. With more and more of the usual stuff off-limits thanks to one rule or another, you look more and more at the unusual. It can mean revisiting places that used to be familiar haunts, and it can mean poking around corners I've only ever flown past.

#2. It's surprising. Constantly.

I can't tell you everything about how every talent tree within every character class feels in play, what it does well or poorly. But I've played everything a bit, and stuck with the ones I was enjoying, and can go get info on updates and changes to get a pretty good sense of "okay, if I want to do this, try that, and if I'd like A but not B, consider C". That all goes out the window with this. I have no idea how character types I'm familiar with will do at this.

I really, really like that. I don't know if I'll want to stick with it, or how long its charms will last, or anything like that. But it's fun right now. There are good communities of participants who recognize the absurdity and the fun of it, and who are happy to trade experiences, advice, and random commentary as we go about our various solitary ways. It's made the game feel genuinely fresh to me.