So we got ourselves some more shiny loot on Tuesday, as we cleared our way through Bastion of Twilight after a week of many kills and clearing everything up to Nefarian in Blackwing Descent. And I gotta say the raid loot in Cataclysm is a little funny all around..
Almost since week one, we’re sharding 25-30% of the drops. I don’t know if we’re just majorly unlucky (maybe my bad standing with Lady RNG is taking over the guild?) on repetitive drops, but it hurts to already be sharding gear this early into fresh content. Extra shards or not, it’s wrong!
Then, there are the oddly unbalanced loot tables and itemization. It seems Blizzard’s armor department had jolly good fun creating belts of all shapes and colors and headpieces for the expansion and totally forgot about creating more and better choices for other item slots maybe! As a priest healer, stuff like bracers, wands and main hand weapons for example, seem very hard to come by. Jewelry isn’t exactly being sold out on the streets of Stormwind either.
The current BiS staff for probably priests and druids alike (and I fear some DPS too) is a trash drop (!) in Bastion of Twilight. The alternative to that is….a staff from archeology! Riiiiight, do you see me getting that one?
And it’s not just that – have you noticed the names of some of these items? We had a laughing fit last raidnight in the healers channel, reading some of the names our supposedly epic drops of heroic awesomeness are carrying:
Scorched Wormling Vest
Ew! I don’t even wanna imagine how that looks like! Were they at least really shiny, epic wormlings that went into that chestpiece or are we talking gooey sewer dwellers?
Sky Strider Belt of the Faultline
Soul Breath Belt of the Feverflame
Belt of Absolute Zero
Absolute zero? Wait.. as in zero zero?? Really absolutely absolute zero???
And what’s with these clunky long-winded names: Sould Breath Belt of the Feverflame? Whoa, my tiny mind is boggling under the exercise!
And what on earth is Faultline? AM I PLAYING FOOTBALL AGAINST MY WILL NOW?
Gale Rouser Belt of the Undertow
Erm….help me out here English people: Undertow? Now, I know what this word means, in theory, but what exactly is this belt doing? Anyone?
Anyway, we ended up deciding that Bogus Belt of the Silly Nonsense really was as good a name as any for the items currently dropping in Bastion of Twilight and Co. Would you notice much if that belt dropped among Sky Strider Belt of the Faultline and Gale Rouser Belt of the Undertow? And can you say this last sentence 10 times in a row real fast?
Whose MMO am I playing here?
There are innumerable examples of such failed nomenclature to be found on current WoW loot tables. It makes me wonder whether the “naming department” over at Blizzard has been sent off to work out item names for Diablo and Starcraft, along with their music composers. Clumsy, far fetched name-giving like this is one reason why I chose to play the original version of WoW 6 years ago. Right now, it sounds as if English WoW has actually been translated, very badly, from somewhere else. Is the “real World of Warcraft” secretly in Chinese these days and we’re all just playing a bad translation?
Or maybe they’re just running out of ideas in a fantasy MMO. Now that’s not very comforting, is it? “BUT Syl! WoW has been there for 6 years, that’s thousands of ingame items, one can only come up with so many fantastic names!”
Really? I don’t think so. I can’t obviously prove it very well and send you a list of a couple of thousand item names, but I’ll just claim that if it was my job to design things such as these, I would still try and do a little better than some random fantasy-name generator on the internet!
Some of the loot really is absurdly named, though I do like the ‘unique’ flavor of Incineratus from Magmaw. An item having an actual name and not just a description is always awesome in my eyes.
What makes these item names even worse is that Cataclysm brought with it so many greatly-named quest reward items! Quite often now instead of getting “Hunter’s Axe” or something mindlessly generic, you get something named specifically in relation to the preceding quest, or something punny or witty. It’s too bad the raid items are so…bizarre, so far.
So true and yet so meaningless 🙂
The back of our guild has just made a goodbye post. He transfered his 750k gold into the guildbank and said goodbye.
This is his first goodbye post and nobody doubts that it is his last.
Very cool, no bad feelings. Things he likes to remembers: Grinding stuff in classic to make sure we could raid fully buffed.
Best raids in his opinion: MC, Zul Gurub and Ulduar.
Generally, he doesn’t like how the community feels and considers starting to play STtoR, but isn’t certain yet. This is easily the worst thing that could have happened to our guild – even though he rarely actively organised anything. He was our éminence grise. Those who organised, mostly worked for him – even though some didn’t always understand that 😉
WoW may not be dieing, but it is changing. As far as I can tell the community is finally reacting to the fact that raiding is the only fun thing left to do. And that’s just not worth 13€ a month for many people.
Fault lines are where tectonic plates meet, or where an earthquake would most likely originate from. Not the same as “foul” line.
fault[fawlt]–noun – a break in the continuity of a body of rock or of a vein, with dislocation along the plane of the fracture (fault line).
@Rades
Indeed, many of these new items do have descriptions rather than ‘names’ – and those don’t make much sense on top of it. I don’t necessarily expect every common drop to have a fancy name, but 25man epics? puhleeeze!
@Nils
That sounds horribly sad. the game is changing yes, but then it always has been. i’m not sure it helps that longterm and core players leave like that, but nobody should play the game if he doesn’t enjoy it anymore of course.
personally, I still enjoy our (good) 25man runs and I would really like to keep going, as long as we have enough good players around. I do like some of the new encounters and would love to see them on 25man heroic.
(p.s. let me know if you ever look for a 25man guild 😛 /hint)
😉
@Anonymous
Hmm I see, thanks. and yet, that doesn’t add an awful lot of more sense to that item name, does it? 😀
(p.s. let me know if you ever look for a 25man guild 😛 /hint)
I am honoured by the offer, but I’d never do that 😉
It’s not just you with the loot; I think we have yet to have a boss kill where we didn’t disenchant at least half the drops. How stupid is that? Here we are, in blues and desperate for upgrades, and yet every other boss drop is a crappy belt – the one slot where everyone already has a rep or crafted epic. -_-
That’s so annoying! And really, what’s with all the belts?? indeed, there are also the crafted and rep ones, who needs all of that?? -.-
on the other hand, I’ve been wearing blue resilience bracers until very recently when I finally replaced them with epic ones…and I’m probably going to sit on my blue staff until kingdom come.
Absolute zero, as in zero degrees Kelvin, refers to the coldest temperature theoretically possible.
Wikipedia entry for Abolute zero
Nearly all of the items you mention are from Throne of the Four Winds, and all of those items have random enchants on them. Therefor, they all have a random “of the whatever” added to them. That’s why they seem long winded. In short, the premise of the names of items in Cataclysm being mostly silly is a bit threadbare.
I do agree that the itemization is frustrating, though.
Some of the items really aren’t as bad as you’re making them out to be. The “Belt of Absolute Zero” actually makes sense. Absolute zero isn’t really the number zero…it’s basically the ultimate cold. As in, the coldest something can possibly be.
I would say that’s actually an awesome name, especially if you’re a frost mage.
Don’t forget the “Fool for Love” holiday drop, the “Winking Eye of Love”. Blizzard innuendo is priceless.
Faultline makes sense because it is associated with earthquakes, and therefore it has a lot to do with Deathwing, elementals, and the cataclysm.
Absolute zero is another science word, meaning: as cold as it is theoretically possible. Absolute Zero is 0 K, or about −273°C.
Cheers guys! I stand corrected (ten times, in fact!). some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don’t help.
and I still think these item names suck =D