Let’s keep it real. Who am I – a regular dude who has a full time job with little time to invest in character development and elite raider networking – to dream of defeating the Lich King? I reckon it would be a lot easier for me to get the S$1,288 life size legendary sword Frostmourne than the one in the game. Fulfilling the fantasy of getting up close and personal with the Lich King in his dungeon aside, the new patch 3.3 has a lot more to offer. Top of my list: the new Dungeon Finder. The 5 icons below from left to right indicate if the roles of the tank (i.e. damage taker), the healer, and the three damage dealers have been filled. In the case below, the game was still finding a tank for us.
I think I can speak on behalf of my brothers and sisters in the World of Warcraft. Two things suck being an Asian player in an American server (or we refer it as ‘realm’). First, servers are down for maintenance on Tuesdays, off-peak hours in America but prime time evening hours in Asia. 8 to 10 hours, often to be. Second, assembling a group of 5 to venture into a dungeon during Asian prime time used to be hard because most of the players are still sleeping (the Americans) or have gone to bed (the Australians). Cynthia and I could spend 1 to 2 hours spamming the looking-for-group channel and we could end up going to bed not visiting any dungeon at all. I reckon most players simply level their characters through questing. But questing day in day out could drive us mad. When we heard that the new Dungeon Finder is out, we were dying to give it a shot.
Seriously, what took Blizzard so long to implement the idea of pulling players from different realms into a group for dungeons? Especially for some of us who have such difficulty in looking for players for dungeon outings, any dungeon outing. It turns out that to make this idea works is a pretty complicated matter not only from the technology point of view. Here are our observations.
- Finding a random group for a random dungeon seems fast. At times within minutes. That is great. As expected, healer and tank remain as the hardest to come by. Everyone wants to be a hero, to kill something. No one seems to enjoy taking a beating or keeping people alive!
- Exiting a cross-realm dungeon brings us back to the exact location of where we were prior to joining the dungeon. Imagine being able to continue questing right after visiting a dungeon. Also, once outside the dungeon, we can teleport back into it at any time. That enables some of us to stock up reagents, poison, and to repair our gears. Very nice!
- There are rewards to be earned. Did I mention a random rare pet Perky Pug that may drop? There is also an extra buff that makes your random pick-up group (PUG) stronger. But hey, if the group sucks, not even those 5% extra of this-and-that can save us.
- Some players do suck. Maybe Cynthia and I too suck. Since now that we cannot ‘interview’ our team members prior to them joining our group like I used to (cross-realm conversations are normally not possible), we have to rely on luck to get the players who know at minimal how to play their class. And more often than not, luck was not on our side.
- OK. That may be due to the fact that everyone are still trying to get used to the new interface that comes with the new patch (that new camera!), trying to cope with the absence of outdated mods (I miss my damage meter).
- And / or because many players who have not had a chance to experience dungeons regularly have no idea what they should do inside a dungeon. Now they can. But skills are not built overnight. I hope in time to come, players do get better.
- Because of that, many players deserted our group and we constantly needed to go back to the queue and look for replacements. Fortunately, the wait was not long, although I can’t say that it was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. Deserting a group should be discouraged or further penalized by the current 15 minutes ban before re-joining the queue. What happens to patience and mentorship, friendship building and peace?
We did complete one dungeon, after numerous change in players and dungeons. We could have finished a higher level dungeon had the server not needed a restart (we nearly completed Azjol-Nerub in 15 minutes!). I think more fine tuning of Dungeon Finder is certainly needed. And I trust Blizzard on that. Below is a trailer for this new patch 3.3.
Update: On the next day, Cynthia and I took our characters to yet another random dungeon after spending an entire morning researching on how to play better (this link is no joke). That random dungeon was tough! But we had a good group. Nobody dropped out (thank God!). It was worth the wait (about 20 minutes to assemble the group).
