WoW: Interview with Ensidia’s muqq: “A good player knows when he can take risks”
- March 12th, 2010
- Write comment
The top World of Warcraft guild Ensidia is still working hard on the 25-man world first kill of the heroic Lich King. However, priest class leader muqq aka Havar Ameen took the time to answer a few questions about what it means to be an active member in an elite WoW guild, what the secret behind Ensidia’s success is, and what he thinks about the notion that World of Warcraft is becoming too easy.
buffed: Could you introduce yourself (name, age, class, rl-job?) and your position in Ensidia?
My name is Havar Ameen, I’m 26 years old and I play as shadow priest in the guild Ensidia. Currently I’m back to studying after taking a break from playing WoW for a couple of years. I serve as the class leader for priests in the guild, and have been doing so since the guild was formed.
buffed: You’re one of the most famous shadowpriests in the WoW community. But every hero has a story – tell us about your gaming career before you started playing WoW.
I’ve been playing on all sorts of video consoles and computers beginning at a young age, and since I got my first 486 I’ve favored the PC as my primary source of gaming entertainment. I didn’t get online before I had a 28.8k modem back in the late Nineties, when I was introduced to Quake. I didn’t play that game very much though, and it wasn’t until Unreal Tournament arrived that I really got hooked on online games. I’ve been playing CTF here in Europe for about a year and a half, until I picked up EverQuest, my first MMO. This was some time during 2001, and I played that game for two years, until I made the switch over to another MMO, Final Fantasy 11Online. That was another game that I played for over 1.5 years until World of Warcraft went live in the USA.
buffed: When did you start playing WoW?
I started playing World of Warcraft during the first few days after its release in the US. I had a friend who bought me a a couple of copies and sent me the keys, so I could start playing with her and my brother, who also started playing WoW together with me.
buffed: Tell us about your first hours of WoW. (Things like: Were you well prepared before you did your first quest or did you go by the “learning by doing” principle? Did you level alone or with friends?)
Unfortuantely, my first few hours of WoW weren’t that great. Blizzard hadn’t really antipicated such a big interest for their game, and the servers were unplayable for the first few days, until they had more servers up. I wasn’t prepared in any way, and the only thing I knew about the game was, what my friend had told me. I leveled together with my brother and friend until we reached Level 60, which took a few weeks.
buffed: Why did you choose a priest?
I actually played a rogue when I first started playing World of Warcraft. Sadly though, so did many other players as well. After being Level 60 for a few weeks, I decided to reroll and play a priest, as nearly a quarter of the server population were rogues at that time. Traditionally, I used to play support classes in previous MMO’s, and I figured I might do that as well in World of Warcraft. Back then, shadow priests were non existent, and even holy priests were rare, so I was holy for the whole duration of vanilla WoW.
buffed: Do you remember any funny “fail” moments from the beginning of your WoW career?
Oh dear, I do. My first time in Molten Core was with an alliance of guilds, and as the raid was preparing to pull Lucifron, I stood somewhat to close to the boss when it patrolled close to us. I wiped the raid, some members left and we gave up for the night, after having spent two hours getting there.
buffed: When and why did you decide to join a more hardcore guild? (How did you join Nihilum back then?)
When I made the move from US servers to European ones, I rolled a priest on the server Darksorrow. I searched the best guild on the server, which happened to be RUIN at the time, and decided I’d level fast to join them. A few days later, around lvl 40, I was finally ready to do so, and that’s where my journey began as a more hardcore raider in WoW. After we had killed Ragnaros for the first time, our somewhat aggresive guildleader decided to leave, and I took over as guildleader, after having served as an officer for some time.
We did good until the fall of C’thun and we stary good even until the release of Naxxramas. However, as many other medium hardcore guilds, we suffered from lack of new recruits and issues of having enough members to fill the raid, so amongst the leadership we decided to throw in the towel and call it quits. Me, and my partner in crime Quantz, sent in applications to Nihilum, which sent us invitations a couple of days later. This was during mid-Naxxramas, where we joined just to kill Thaddius and Loatheb the very same day.
buffed: In your recruitment postings you tell the aspirants that “During progress you can expect to raid at any hour of the day.” How is it that you can afford to constantly wait in the wings?
A common misconception about many progress guilds is that we spend a lot of time playing, farming and raiding. This isn’t really true though. When new instances are released by Blizzard, most of us take a couple of days off from work or school, and focus on raiding. That usually last no more than two days or so, and after that we go back to our normal schedule. A better way to interpret that sentence [in the recruitment posting] is, that we ask you to be able to take some time off when neccesary to clear new content. New content however, is few and far in between, so it’s not a big sacrifice to make. As we’re mostly focused on the highest tier of content, we do not need to spend a lot of time doing other content like 5-man or 10-man content for long, as oppossed to many other WoW players.
buffed: Please describe a typical WoW day during progression raids.
I could take Icecrown Citadel as an example. We prepare a few days earlier with consumables, but also sort some of our real-life commitments. People take 1-2 days off from work and school, and fix things they need to fix. On the morning of a new instance, we gather up at around 11:00 and start clearing it. After a few hours, we take a break for lunch, and then continue clearing it until evening, where we have dinner. Every few hours we have small breaks for people to gather their strength, get some snacks or drinks, or just visit the bathroom. We keep playing until night, maybe around 1.00 or 2.00 AM, and then we go to bed. We repeat this for the second day if necessary, and do as much content as we can. By the third or fourth day, we usually start a bit later, as we realize that most people can not take more time off from work or school. Despite popular belief, most of us DO have school, work or real-life commitments that need attention.
buffed: How do you handle fans who keep asking you how to do more dps?
(I’m sure you get such whispers ^^)
Haha, it’s hard responding to a lot of them. I understand that people might think it’s arrogant of many members to not respond to people when they send us whispers, but one thing they must realize is that first and foremost, most of us play this game because we enjoy it. We, like many others, just want to have a good time in World of Warcraft. Anyway, back to the question. Often, we’re also raiding during the time that they talk to us, so we might not have the time or capability to respond to them. We do have a few guides on our website, where we try to explain how to play certain classes and specs. I usually direct them to our website, or a particular guide somewhere else (like on shadowpriest.com), and ask them to research about spell rotations and gear optimization there instead. If i’m not too busy, I do give a tip or two about how they can improve themselves (if they ask politely).
buffed: What was the weirdest question you have ever been asked by a fan?
Hmm, I’ve gotten a lot of weird questions, but one of the stranger ones I got from a random character, that asked to be my in-game wife. Yes, in-game wife. I wasn’t sure if it was serious or not, but she (or he L) tried to speak for his cause for quite some time before giving up.
buffed: What do you think about addons like gearscore?
I never understood why gearscore suddenly became a popular way of judging people’s worth. From my experience, it’s usually not even the more hardcore crowd that keep insisting on people having a certain gearscore, but rather the medium-skilled players. Most hardcore players realize that not everyone can have perfect gear or is in guilds that are able to run 25-man instances, so we do not insist that you must have a certain gearscore to be eligable for some of the raid instances. As long as you do the best you can with the gear you have and put in effort, it’s fine by us (or at least me).
buffed: From your point of view: What makes up a good WoW player?
I think the thing that sets a great player apart from the rest is the ability to judge situations well in World of Warcraft. A good player knows when he can take risks, and when he can’t, but is also ready to use cooldown and abilities to avoid death in any situation. Situational awareness is one of the things that marks a great player. Being able to read the situation and adapting to it in highend raiding is one of the most important traits a player can have. Experience will of course matter, but there’s a reason certain guilds complete content in a much smaller timeframe than other guilds would.
buffed: There are many discussions whether WoW became too easy or not. What’s your opinion? And if you think WoW became too easy, what do you think is responsible for this trend?
People often tend to confuse their argument of WoW becoming too easy for another thing that has changed since its inception, the factor of time. It’s simply a lot less time-consuming in many ways, and it also takes much less time to reach the endgame as opposed to vanilla WoW. Looking at hardmodes in Ulduar and Icecrown Citadel, I’d say they are of a much higher degree of difficulty than the raid dungeons back in TBC and vanilla WoW. Untuned encounters aside, once Blizzard adjusted the bugged or often untuned encounters in the previous expansion or in vanilla WoW, they were a bit easier than what the current hardmodes have been in WotlK. What has changed though is that a lot of the greatest players have bonded together to form progress guilds, and can perform at a much higher level of skill than what was previouslly possible. Character transfers and faction-changing most definetly helped in that regard.
I do agree that a lot of the 10-man and 5-man content has become much too easy for a large part of the World of Warcraft community. It’s quite easy to acquire good gear nowadays with little effort through the badge-system, heroic 5-man dungeons, 10-man dungeons and older raid-instances. It simply took much longer time to get someone geared up and ready for the highest tier of raiding content back in TBC and vanilla WoW than it has in WotlK. Blizzard has intentionally taken this route as a way to introduce a larger part of their content to more of their audience.
buffed: If you could change three things in WoW, what would these be?
Removing artifical blocks on endgame content, add more forms of character-progression (other than just gear-progression) and have some other form of end-game content other than mirrored 25-man/10-man instances. Challenging 5-man content, special small-scale encounters or dungeon-crawling has always been things I’ve missed in World of Warcraft.
buffed: Is there anything you miss from vanilla WoW? Or is there anything that improved significantly?
What I miss is a lot of the diversity between classes and also the whole sense of exploration in the game. The diversity came with a heavy price though, since you were often reliant on x amount of y class to do some of the content. However, despite that, once you had a class at max level, it was quite unique in comparison to other classes, and that’s one of the things that have been lost in WotlK. One of the other bigger drawbacks of vanilla WoW was that the balancing wasn’t always the greatest. Either some classes were undertuned or overtuned , or they simply had no place in some PvE or PvP content. People were generally more focused with just enjoying the game back then, rather than playing the class which did the most DPS or was the best tank.
With the introduction of arenas in TBC and the homogenization of classes, previous class-defining skills overlapping to other classes, many of the individual trademarks were lost. On the good side though, a lot of things have been improved. Many UI elements have been reworked, a lot of useful tools such as LFG tool, equipment manager, combat text, raidframes, quest-tracker and other neat things have been added since vanilla WoW. A lot of the pacing in PvE content has been reworked, and it’s been for the better in most cases. Overall, a lot of gameplay related features have been iterated upon, which has improved the gameplay experience a lot, but somewhere along the line I feel the soul of the game was lost. The whole sense of accomplishment when finnishing a raid-dungeon, acquiring a new item or simply doing a quest is simply does not have the same impact in WotlK than it had in vanilla WoW.
buffed: In your blog you talked about leaving WoW. Is your decision final or is there a chance to see you again when the next content update is released? Or do you just need a break?
I honestly expected us to have killed heroic Lich King by the time my subscription had run out. That was a rather hasty assumption from my side though, and through a nice friend I managed to get my hands on a gamecard to stay online for another 2 months. Regardless of how I feel the PvE meta-game has evolved in WotlK, i’ll be around until my guild is done with the progress-raiding for Icecrown Citadel. I didn’t want to leave the guild hanging, and I’ve told them I’ll stay around until we’re done with progress. I’m fairly certain that WotlK is my last expansion in World of Warcraft, unless the character-progresison is drastically different in Cataclysm or many fun features have been added that I might enjoy.
buffed: And last but not least for all the trolls out there: Why don’t you play a troll? (Berserk!)
It’s true that trolls are much better suited for PvE than undead if you compare the racials, but I’ve used the same undead character for 5 years now, and I’m a rather fickle person, so I decided not to change the race of my priest. Besides, I think trolls just look silly with their refusal of wearing boots!
buffed: Anything else you want to explicitly get off your chest – or maybe some words for your German fans?
I’d just like to thank all the people that gave their support and also all the people who gave their input, even though many didn’t agree with what I said, I’m glad they took the time to express their own thoughts. As for all the germans fans, thank you all, I know a large majority of our fanbase are from Germany, and even though we direct most of them to our German guildmembers when they contact us ingame, feel free to come online and talk to us if you get the chance. Also, stay tuned for some news regarding our progress in Icecrown Citadel. Our guild Ensidia is still working hard at the final heroic encounter, and we wish all the competition the best of luck in defeating the Lich King in heroic mode. Thank you.
P.S: Don’t miss the first part of muqqs awesome icc videos!
Annette Wieden
