Wednesday, August 1, 2007

The Art of Paper Folding

Way back in my days of playing on Llane server, I made a druid named Origami. When I switched to Altar of Storms and decided to roll a new druid, I re-used the name because I liked it so much. The inspiration for the name came when I first played WoW during the Beta Stress Test. Of all the class descriptions I read, the druid sounded the most fun to me. When I was actually playing the game though, the animation when a druid shapeshifted looked more to me like the character was "bending" himself into a new shape, rather than "shifting". I thought then that "Origami" was a most appropriate name.
The beta, however, left me with a distaste for playing Night Elves. I didn't like Teldrassil - it was too sparse and everything required a lot of boring running to get to. I detested Darkshore even more with it's elongated zone and Auberdine being at the NW side of the zone and most of the quest locations making you travel farther and farther south. Subsequently, when the game went live, I rolled a dwarven Hunter instead.
The druid class can be a hard class to play to high levels, simply because at low levels, it can be rather dry. It's not until after getting cat form and then getting all the nice cat abilities that the class gets really fun. This isn't until mid-30's though. I thought I would never get a druid to end game simply because the ones I had played in the past I got bored of pretty quickly. However, when I rolled Origami on Altar of Storms, it was to join Ferth and his guild. Ferth is a guy I've been gaming with for years starting back in the 'old' Counter-Strike days. Levelling up with a guild and people you are comfortable with tends to take some of boredom away. Besides, as soon as I hit L6, I took the boat from Auberdine to Menethil and ran my Nelf behind to Westfall. A lot of people do not like Westfall but I find it a lot less annoying than Teldrassil and Darkshore.

Jumping ahead to today, Origami is L70 and is much more geared comparitively than any other "end game" characters I've played (I had a couple of L60's back before TBC came out). Blizzard did some things right with TBC as I've yet to get bored of the end game. With the good number of 5 mans, the option of running them in Heroic mode, 10-man Karazhan, and reputation quest chains to do, there is a lot to keep from being bored. Add in PvP with Arenas and BGs and your week fills up pretty quickly. Of course, it really helps to be in a guild with good guys and gals as that is really what keeps me playing this game.

Origami is Feral spec. That is my preference and I wouldn't have it any other way. He was Feral spec back before the "Druid Review" that really beefed them up. I like having the options of tanking or dpsing and being able to throw out an emergency heal or brezz or innervate. Mostly, I like to be able to be self-sufficient all in one character that can still stealth around and pick his fights. There is a lot to love about the druid class even if their relative ability in PvP is lower than most other classes.
Origami has a slightly weird spec. Rather than going with the traditional 1/46/14 spec, I am using a 2/45/14 spec. I don't have Thick Hide, which most ferals will take if they do any tanking. As well, I ended up taking 2/3 Primal Tenacity and 1/4 Improved Nature's Grasp. These are little personal flavour decisions. At the time I hit 70, there was still doubt as to whether Primal Tenacity worked. I can say for certain that it works as I have witnessed many times where a mob throws out a pbaoe Fear and everyone else is running away while I have the nice little "Resisted" combat text floating above my head. I've also seen this in action in BGs. In fact, the other night, in Arenas, I jumped an opposing warlock and with my initial stun and burst attacks with some lucky crits in there, he came out of the stun pretty badly hurt. As warlocks are want to do, this warlock Howl of Terror'd me and I trinketed out of it quickly when I was sure it wasn't a Deathcoil, but I saw he had anticipated I would do this as he was already casting Fear. There was nothing I could do as I was still out of range to hit him with a Maim but as his Fear cast, I resisted it and I was able to finish off the hapless lock in two quick attacks.
So, I've been meaning to respec and drop the 1 point in Improved Nature's Grasp and put it in Primal Tenacity. However, I've been procrastinating. This is one of those silly little decisions that takes forever to make. The whole point of having more than the base Nature's Grasp was that 35% chance to proc is a poor rate. Why have a talent that gives you a defensive ability when it has such a low chance of proc'ing? Roots itself is a so-so CC and only useable outdoors. At least with the 1 point in Imp. Nature's Grasp, I get a 50-50 chance of it helping me. Also, as it stands, the 10% improved fear and stun (never seen it resist a stun) resistance has helped me and I'm not sure that another 5% is really that big of an improvement.
As such, a respec is still undecided. I also don't look forward to spending 5 minutes clickety-clicking through all my talent trees, hoping I don't accidentally click something wrong and have to pay to redo them. Why can't Blizzard make a better interface for this?

4 comments:

Jon said...

Hey Origami... great to see you're blogging now too. I think I'm going to have to join you misfits here pretty soon...

Lou

Origami said...

Hey Lou,
Yeah you should probably do one too - it'd be good to get a rogue perspective going. Soon we'll have representation from every class! :)

Ellevis said...

Welcome to the wonderful world of venting your frustrations :)

Origami said...

Thanks! It feels good to get some of this stuff off my chest. :P