World of Warcraft XVI: Wibbly Wobbly Timey Wimey Orcy Worcey...Stuff

[The_Jackal]

A thread of all of us Giant ITP'ers to discuss World of Warcraft.

Obligatory Linkages:
www.worldofwarcraft.com (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/) --official site
mmo-champion.com (http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/) --news site
www.wowpedia.org (http://wowpedia.org/Portal:Main) --encylopedia of the Warcraft Universe
www.wowhead.com (http://www.wowhead.com/) --search engine for pretty much anything in the game. Items, quests, achievements, enemies, everything.
www.tankspot.com (http://www.tankspot.com/) --strategy guides, class guides and videos, forums. PST and The Weekly Marmot are posted on this site.

Previous Thread (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=282495)

[Karoht]

Huzzah. New thread is new!
Orcy Worcy new.

[The_Jackal]

Finally finished my Shaohaohaohao rep grind and got the Heavenly Cloud Serpent (http://www.wowhead.com/item=87774/reins-of-the-heavenly-golden-cloud-serpent). Now I'm focused on the cash grind for the maddeningly expensive JC Panther mounts. Oh woe is my bank account.

[Traab]

Im farming up cash on another account to buy that guild account bound stuff. (long story) Speaking of which, just started up a dk for the hell of it. Did they nerf the dk starting area or something? I recall the part where you are in the crypt and the ghouls are attacking the fortified town is mostly stalemate at the gates, but this time, the ghouls slaughtered everything and are rampaging through the front of the town in swarms.

[Karoht]

Im farming up cash on another account to buy that guild account bound stuff. (long story) Speaking of which, just started up a dk for the hell of it. Did they nerf the dk starting area or something? I recall the part where you are in the crypt and the ghouls are attacking the fortified town is mostly stalemate at the gates, but this time, the ghouls slaughtered everything and are rampaging through the front of the town in swarms.I recall it being pretty darned steamroller (as you described) when Wrath launched, but I attributed it at the time to the number of DK's in the area. My second DK (because I enjoyed the starting zone so much) also encountered a steamroll at that point, and this was mid-cata.

[Psyren]

What Karoht said, I've never seen the LK's forces having any difficulty in that whole segment of the game.

I wonder what the odds are of us getting another "hero class" at any point in the future. (A ranged tank would be interesting if they found a way to pull it off.)

[The_Jackal]

I wonder what the odds are of us getting another "hero class" at any point in the future.

I'd certainly hope so, but nothing I've seen has given me much basis for that hope. Most of the 'hero class' features that have been seen in Warcraft III have been baked into the base classes. The Mountain King's Storm Bolt and Avatar abilities? Bestowed on the Warrior. The Sentinel's fan of knives? Rogue. Bladestorm. Demon Hunter's transformation? Warlock.

I feel like the notion of Hero classes needed to be baked into the root design of the game to work properly, with the expectation that you might start out as a warrior, but would eventually graduate to a Blademaster or a Mountain King or Death Knight. But the problem with that plan is that, just like talents, there winds up being a 'correct' choice, making the whole enterprise a nightmare to balance. If you look at how WoW's talent/customization systems have progressed, the developers have basically done everything in their power to simplify player choices. Offering a complex branching advancement mechanic would be a huge reversal of that trend, and probably result in huge imbalances in player power.

Also, as the game ages, there's a trend for the 'sunk cost fallacy' to settle in, making players more resistant to abandoning a character they've dropped tons of hours of playtime into.

[Traab]

What Karoht said, I've never seen the LK's forces having any difficulty in that whole segment of the game.

I wonder what the odds are of us getting another "hero class" at any point in the future. (A ranged tank would be interesting if they found a way to pull it off.)

What exactly would a ranged tank be? Something like a hunter in plate with no pet? A couple of big blasts on incoming then beat him the rest of the way down in melee sort of thing?

[otakuryoga]

ok..so i might try some add-ons

i want one that shows me on map where rares pop up when they spawn to help me locate a pet or two on timeless isle(since the announcements from others with such things mean nothing saying so & so has spawned at 63,34)

a nav one for following a route(for example checking unborn valkyr spawns or the "longest day" achieve)

what others are key(prot/ret pal)? and where can i dl them?
(please do NOT say fileplanet...every time i have tried to get something there i have gotten a non-working copy and a serious case of malware)

[Psyren]

IIRC Curse is the main place to get addons.

As far as which ones I tend to just look at the top downloads (Deadly Boss Mods, Recount and AtlasLoot are always staples.) Someone else will probably know the specific ones you want.

[The_Jackal]

You want NPCScan (http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/npcscan). Though bear in mind the addon doesn't discriminate between live and dead NPCs, which mitigates its utility somewhat.

[Krazzman]

Wohoo new thread!

Addons for a Paladin?

Bartender (always bartender!)
FCLC Helper (or similar name, basically helps you with your routine as a ret paladin, helps until you have the basic priorities maxed out).

Weak Auras or similar. Your 90's talent?`let it shine in your face if you are in combat and could use it.
Inquisitions not up? Shines in your face whilst in combat. Etc.

You can basically program it to show you a visual (like for ret if art of war proccs) for anything buff you can imagine.

And yes curseclient is the way to go.

[ryuplaneswalker]

What Karoht said, I've never seen the LK's forces having any difficulty in that whole segment of the game.

I wonder what the odds are of us getting another "hero class" at any point in the future. (A ranged tank would be interesting if they found a way to pull it off.)

I would guess no. The Death Knight starting zones are awesome and cool, but they are starting to show their age in a bad way come Warlords horde death knights..will leave just after the battle of lights hope and arrive to meet War-chief Vol'jin...nearly 4 years later at this point.

Wibbly Wobbly Orcy Worky indeed.

[Psyren]

I would guess no. The Death Knight starting zones are awesome and cool, but they are starting to show their age in a bad way come Warlords horde death knights..will leave just after the battle of lights hope and arrive to meet War-chief Vol'jin...nearly 4 years later at this point.

Wibbly Wobbly Orcy Worky indeed.

Eh, they just have to slap a filter on the DK starting area and call it a "flashback" that your DK is having. In reality, your DK already went through the Cataclysm and all that other jazz, and all the leveling up you're doing on him to get to cap is just an interactive backstory.

They're actually better off than the other classes - the ones that do start in post-Cata WoW, level to 60 and then go back in time to TBC and Wrath. That one's much harder to justify.

[GungHo]

What exactly would a ranged tank be? Something like a hunter in plate with no pet? A couple of big blasts on incoming then beat him the rest of the way down in melee sort of thing?

Crossbowman/Rifleman with a pavise is the one thing I can think of that would make sense, but it honestly sounds too close to the hunter's schtick. Or maybe a Warmage/Mageknight that casts big bombs while wearing plate, which would be encroaching on Paladin/Death Knight territory. Dragon Knight that has "breath weapons"?

Honestly I'm not sure what adding more classes would give us now, though. Races, too. I'd honestly be more interested in ways to crossover and have a Human work for the Horde, or an Orc in the Alliance.

[Traab]

Crossbowman/Rifleman with a pavise is the one thing I can think of that would make sense, but it honestly sounds too close to the hunter's schtick. Or maybe a Warmage/Mageknight that casts big bombs while wearing plate, which would be encroaching on Paladin/Death Knight territory. Dragon Knight that has "breath weapons"?

Honestly I'm not sure what adding more classes would give us now, though. Races, too. I'd honestly be more interested in ways to crossover and have a Human work for the Horde, or an Orc in the Alliance.

I was having this kind of mental image im having a tough time putting into words. Basically, its a beastmaster similar to rexxar from the rts game. Give him some short duration pets to summon that vary based on spec for what they do, for example, a tanky pet type, a ranged damage dealing quillboar type of thing, and maybe a healer type pet of some sort. These things would be short term boosts instead of perma pets like a hunter or warlock. Each pet type would have its own use. For example, all three add their agro to you, so extra threat generation. The ranged pet would be adding in extra dps, the healer would be keeping you alive, and the tanker would take attention off of you for a time, letting you take a short breather to get healed, bandage, or possibly setup a positional attack move of some sort.

Give him the ability to "throw" his weapon for melee damage. The advantage is it would be a few good shots on incoming, but it would be auto attack levels of dps, so not really all that viable of a method for doing damage at range only. Still handy for scenarios where your character cant be in melee range for whatever reason though. Melee would be the standard stuff, refluffed descriptions for the usual attacks, but make it a mix of warrior and rogue abilities by including things like positional attacks that solo he needs his pets to make use of and have enough of a cooldown timer to not be spammable in groups.

[ryuplaneswalker]

They're actually better off than the other classes - the ones that do start in post-Cata WoW, level to 60 and then go back in time to TBC and Wrath. That one's much harder to justify.

Actually that is not entirely true, without heirlooms or rested XP the DK starting zone gets you to about 55-56ish so it will be entirely possible for a death knight to, so they can easily do the post Cata-Wow Stuff.

Really, the entire leveling experience is derp in terms of timeline and the joke at this point is a dead horse.

And in regards to the new class discussions, there is nothing a new class can bring that a 4th spec for an existing class can't do.

You want a ranged tank, two words.

Illusion Mages.

[The_Jackal]

I guess a fourth spec would be more likely to garner interest than a new class, though that's certainly an immense order for the development team. The inevitable result would no doubt create an uproar from the anti-homogenization crowd. On the other hand, with most gear becoming 'spec agnostic' it does open up the possibility of widening roles for various classes. Tank-mages, healer warlocks? It could be fun.

[ryuplaneswalker]

I guess a fourth spec would be more likely to garner interest than a new class, though that's certainly an immense order for the development team. The inevitable result would no doubt create an uproar from the anti-homogenization crowd. On the other hand, with most gear becoming 'spec agnostic' it does open up the possibility of widening roles for various classes. Tank-mages, healer warlocks? It could be fun.

The anti-homogenization crowd needs to tone down the rhetoric, most specs incredibly different from each other except for Hunters and the finishing moves of Rogues.

[Traab]

Meh, ive gotten over my old rants about homgenization, its not like it matters anymore, its pretty much done. At this point what I want to see are other combos of skills. A roguemage, a hunterlock, basically, classes that can do new variations of the existing skills.

[Karoht]

I often thought about how Hunter (probably Beast Master but maybe not) and Demonology Warlock could be made into a ranged + pet tank.

It wouldn't be about having the pet be uber tough and do all the tanking while the player just did DPS. So before someone says Voidwalker or Turtle pets, just pretend they don't exist. And pretend that a tanking specific pet wouldn't exist either. The main pet could be anything, might vary from fight to fight. There probably just shouldn't be a singular tanking pet.

The concept with either of these specs is treating the pet and the player character as a single unit. Shared health is a maybe, not a for sure. Maybe only with temporary effects rather than perminent ones. The health of the pet/s can and perhaps should be considered a resource.

The other thing we want, is a reason for the master to occasionally go into melee, but not all the time. "Go into melee" is a loose term here which can also mean, "the boss comes to the master."

The final challenge is, how do you set up aggro control without doing things like old school hunter/warlock pet kiting? The idea is that you don't want the boss being incredibly mobile during the fight because it screws your melee and your positioning. But what hunters particularly used to do was bounce a mob back and forth over a long distance by getting aggro above the pet, then as the mob runs back to the hunter, drop that aggro or let the pet get higher aggro. The mob runs back to the pet. Repeat. We don't want that. Kiting isn't really a test of tank skill, it opens up way too much opportunity to cheese mechanics, and it isn't the sort of skill that someone in LFR can pick up easily, so basing any of the tanking on kiting (beyond a few very rare instances) is probably not a good plan.

You want pet control to be part of the skill cap, but you don't want pet management to be the whole spec. So how do we do it?

The easiest idea is to explain the active mitigation (in a very general way) for both specs, and then expand on their nuances individually. For the most part, think of pets as resources, both for aggro and mitigation.
1-The pet takes the hit or sacrificing the pet in some way. Consider that the pet may even in fact die. Could even be a specifically sacrificial pet, such as the free Imps that the Demo spec pumps out randomly. If you can control those, and use them to take the hit instead...
2-The pet takes some of the hit, the master takes the rest. Shared health, in effect, though temporary. Again, if you can build up smaller less important pets, but use them as part of your mitigation, and then "huddle" and share the damage evenly instead of a big chunk...
3-Outright negation of damage, such as a dodge based effect.
4-Not really active mitigation, but aggro shunting to a specific pet so they can take the hits for a while would also be an option, but caution is required for the reasons already stated regarding kiting.
5-An effect which can be 'built up' such as giving the pet higher armor for a while.
6-Pet damage deflected to master, but that would probably be 'baked in' as an aggro management mechanic.

And no, they don't need all 6 of those, but 2-3 at the minimum.

Demo Warlocks-Would probably spend more time in melee, but due to their high mobility (leap, big portal, personal portal, fast run talent) and strong ranged capabilities, could easily be at range to avoid certain effects, and move into melee when necessary to take damage or reestablish aggro. Due to the Demon Form (AKA Illidan form) would likely be in melee more than a hunter.
Beast Master Hunter-Would spend less time in melee, likey only dancing into melee when it's time to take damage. Truthfully, this spec already has lots of pet management and related abilities, so this one might be okay leaning harder on the pets and therefore spending less time in melee.

As far as resource management goes, I see no reason to change the current resources, they just need a reliable outlet for mitigation effects. One that you can build up and 'stockpile' some mitigation, one that is very reactionary.

Also, Masteries would have to change to support these specs. And then they need to adjust Vengence accordingly. Should 'Pet Vengence' be seperate, or should they share it in some way/s? Hard to say, especially if you plan for these guys to have a gaggle of pets with them, particularly complicated if they have a fluctuating number of pets.

A raw ranged tank is quite hard to conceptualize. How do they keep some big mean ol mother hover from charging at them? Snares/Roots? That doesn't seem to make much sense. Without a pet that just doesn't sound like it would work out. If you could root a boss an entire fight, why would you even bring melee and not just bring pure range? How does that work against add packs? A pure range tank without a pet just seems like a logistical and playstyle nightmare.

@Illusion Mage
Could work. Elaborate further maybe? If it is simply a matter of 'spam and endless sea of pets that aren't really there' combined with maybe an illusory wall or two, that sounds rather lacking. It's missing the active mitigation aspect that makes playing a tank what it is. Thoughts?

[Traab]

One class I liked the idea of was called an animist from daoc. I have no clue what they are like now, but the basic gist back in the day was, they would slap down some animated plant life as "turrets" basically, they attacked anything in range. So the goal was to clear out a space you could safely pull to and then get your turrets to help burn down the mob. They also had "bomb" pets. Basically a fancy looking dd spell, though I THINK, I may be wrong, that they could be killed on incoming if you were fast enough. They may have had buff turrets as well, I dont recall, though that may make them too much like shaman with their totems. Any kiting that would be done would be short range to keep the mob in range of the turrets, and the turrets can be killed quite easily, so you cant let the mob lose agro on you.

I would like to see a necromancer class get started too be honest. One that is similar to the rts game. Needs a dead body to raise, skeleton doesnt last forever, (though it will likely last for a few quick pulls before a replacement is needed) and some solid debuffs to slap an enemy with so they die easier like cripple for example. A snare and attack speed debuff all rolled into one. Could be a lot of fun in dungeon or raid scenarios where there are a lot of trash mobs before the boss. Spam skeletal summons as much as you can and drop a swarm on the boss to help do extra damage for awhile, or just leave the bodies there for replacements as needed. Would require some solid strategy for raids to make sure the necro doesnt run out of bodies before the boss dies. Also adds an extra dimension to separate them from hunters and warlocks, with no perma pet, you have to keep track of how long you have left till your pet dies so you dont overpull and get stuck with a few mobs on you while trying to channel through a raise skeleton spell.

You could even give the necro several skeletal summons to choose from, a skeletal warrior, skeletal archer, or skeletal cleric.

[Karoht]

One class I liked the idea of was called an animist from daoc. I have no clue what they are like now, but the basic gist back in the day was, they would slap down some animated plant life as "turrets" basically, they attacked anything in range. So the goal was to clear out a space you could safely pull to and then get your turrets to help burn down the mob. They also had "bomb" pets. Basically a fancy looking dd spell, though I THINK, I may be wrong, that they could be killed on incoming if you were fast enough. They may have had buff turrets as well, I dont recall, though that may make them too much like shaman with their totems. Any kiting that would be done would be short range to keep the mob in range of the turrets, and the turrets can be killed quite easily, so you cant let the mob lose agro on you.Yeah, that is mostly what an Enhance/Ele Shaman does, with the difference that they get 1 'turret' instead of multiple. And any tank in the current system that loses aggro to a totem or a pet is really doing something wrong.


I would like to see a necromancer class get started too be honest. One that is similar to the rts game. Needs a dead body to raise, skeleton doesnt last forever, (though it will likely last for a few quick pulls before a replacement is needed) and some solid debuffs to slap an enemy with so they die easier like cripple for example. A snare and attack speed debuff all rolled into one. Could be a lot of fun in dungeon or raid scenarios where there are a lot of trash mobs before the boss.And incredibly crappy if there are not a lot of trash mobs before the boss and no adds on the boss fight. See below.


Spam skeletal summons as much as you can and drop a swarm on the boss to help do extra damage for awhile, or just leave the bodies there for replacements as needed. Would require some solid strategy for raids to make sure the necro doesnt run out of bodies before the boss dies.Corpse dependancy is very similar to the old soulstone dependancy. Except you can't just farm more corpses unless the boss fight has adds. So what, when you eventually run out of corpses, that character gets benched until you kill that boss and move on? A limited number of attempts while on progression, or one really really big bad attempt (you save all the corpses until the raid leader says 'last attempt'), and then after that you're less effective and therefore literally dead weight? Yeah, somehow I see a corpse dependancy to be extremely negative.


Also adds an extra dimension to separate them from hunters and warlocks, with no perma pet, you have to keep track of how long you have left till your pet dies so you dont overpull and get stuck with a few mobs on you while trying to channel through a raise skeleton spell.If we remove the corpse requirement, this is more or less what I was suggesting with Demo Warlocks and their Imps, but requiring an action VS automatic.


You could even give the necro several skeletal summons to choose from, a skeletal warrior, skeletal archer, or skeletal cleric.A mix of minions, some mostly support/debuff based abilities, some dots, a bit of throughput, you've basically got the loose outline for a class. Truthfully, this was my idea with Unholy DK's with the suggestion that they should use Int Plate, but that is no longer necessary.

[Traab]

Yeah, that is mostly what an Enhance/Ele Shaman does, with the difference that they get 1 'turret' instead of multiple. And any tank in the current system that loses aggro to a totem or a pet is really doing something wrong.

And incredibly crappy if there are not a lot of trash mobs before the boss and no adds on the boss fight. See below.

Corpse dependancy is very similar to the old soulstone dependancy. Except you can't just farm more corpses unless the boss fight has adds. So what, when you eventually run out of corpses, that character gets benched until you kill that boss and move on? A limited number of attempts while on progression, or one really really big bad attempt (you save all the corpses until the raid leader says 'last attempt'), and then after that you're less effective and therefore literally dead weight? Yeah, somehow I see a corpse dependancy to be extremely negative.

If we remove the corpse requirement, this is more or less what I was suggesting with Demo Warlocks and their Imps, but requiring an action VS automatic.

A mix of minions, some mostly support/debuff based abilities, some dots, a bit of throughput, you've basically got the loose outline for a class. Truthfully, this was my idea with Unholy DK's with the suggestion that they should use Int Plate, but that is no longer necessary.

The difference is, the turrets are the main source of damage instead of a fairly minor supplement like a searing totem. That eliminates the kiting factor, because the turrets dont have a large range and cant just be dropped all willy nilly. And with them being a major source of damage, agro is a factor. You cant just run around in circles and let your turrets do it all, or the mob will turn around, whack the turret, then you lost most of your dps. Split the damage done in half more or less between turrets and caster so the caster has the early advantage from the pull, but cant just slack off entirely to add some real strategy to playing it right.

When I say the pets are temporary, im not talking a 30 second single solo fight pet where each fight revolves around summoning a skeleton of what you killed last pull, the length of time they last can be adjusted, increased through talents or glyphs, or otherwise improved for raids where a boss fight might drag on for some time. As for dealing with wipes, allow the necro to summon a skelly from whats left behind from the raiders wipe recovery. There, a solid work around that doesnt leave necros as worthless after the first wipe. And the pet wouldnt be all they can do either. It would just be a part of their dps. Similar to a hunter pets damage. Even if the pet is sent away, the hunter still has his bow/gun.

[Seerow]

There's two things I think holding them back from adding new specs at least to the pures (who need it most because the concept of a "pure" is outdated and results in meaningless balance arguments).

1) Some pures picked a pure class because they didn't want to be pressured into healing or tanking. Anyone out there who plays a non-pure class but only enjoys DPSing knows exactly what this is referring to. Where the guild expects you to be willing to swap over to tank or heal because that's what's needed. A lot of people switch to pures just to avoid that.

Personally I dislike this argument. I rolled my Warrior just to DPS. Does that mean I am entitled to make Warrior Protection specialization no longer exist so I don't get people asking me to tank? Of course not. Similarly, there are a number of pure players who regularly ask for a tanking or healing spec, either for help soloing, or because they actually want access to those roles for dungeons/raids. A lot of people just picked whatever class sounded the coolest when they started the game. So a minority that picks their class based on what people may or may not ask of them is not one I think should be catered to exclusively.

2) The other big thing is they've thus far been pretty good about keeping tank and healer specs balanced numerically. 5 classes can tank (Warrior, DK, Pally, Monk, Druid). 5 classes can heal (Priest, Monk, Druid, Shaman, Pally).

Now the issue we run into is, Tank specs are far easier to pitch conceptually than healer specs. Seriously. Every time this sort of discussion comes up, you see people talking about Rogue tanks, Lock tanks, Hunter tanks. People want Shammy tanks, Mage Tanks. Heck now that I think of it the only class I don't see a tank pitch for regularly is the Priest (and that's probably only because the Paladin exists). Basically any class that has the capability to survive a high level environment has some way to become a tank if that gets cranked up to 11.

By comparison, how many of the classes that don't currently have a heals spec, but conceptually fits being a healer? Personally, I would love a Warlord style Warrior spec. I could also easily imagine a Lock that puts up DoTs to leech health from enemy to his allies, with some active tools like funneling health from pets into a specific target or using more often and on allies. But can you imagine adding those specs? Imagine the outcry from the locks who have wanted a tank spec for years suddenly getting a heals spec out of nowhere instead. Or the cries of "Mah Versimillitude!" as the Warrior starts shouting people back to full health (nevermind that Victory Rush, Second Wind, and Rallying Cry exist).

There's really not a solution that will satisfy everyone without breaking that even distribution.

[Karoht]

The difference is, the turrets are the main source of damage instead of a fairly minor supplement like a searing totem.So a big load of automatic damage that you barely have to push buttons for. Yeah, that will go over great. /sarcasm
The new faceroll class/spec. The QQ will be epic.


Allow the necro to summon a skelly from whats left behind from the raiders wipe recovery. There, a solid work around that doesnt leave necros as worthless after the first wipe.So I'm literally dragging in more corpses as the night goes on, so I'm becoming more effective every time we wipe? Yeah, that sounds balanced.


And the pet wouldnt be all they can do either. It would just be a part of their dps. Similar to a hunter pets damage. Even if the pet is sent away, the hunter still has his bow/gun.Um, I don't know the last time you played a hunter, but a hunter without a pet is doing quite a bit less damage than one with a pet. Especially true of Warlocks. Not to mention the tactical advantages lost if your pet dies (IE-Stuns, disarms, etc). A Beast Master with a dead pet is pretty crippled last time I checked.
And even if the damage loss is minimal, less is still less. That's kind of the opposite of optimization, in a game that operates around optimization.

[Traab]

So a big load of automatic damage that you barely have to push buttons for. Yeah, that will go over great. /sarcasm
The new faceroll class/spec. The QQ will be epic.

So I'm literally dragging in more corpses as the night goes on, so I'm becoming more effective every time we wipe? Yeah, that sounds balanced.

Um, I don't know the last time you played a hunter, but a hunter without a pet is doing quite a bit less damage than one with a pet. Especially true of Warlocks. Not to mention the tactical advantages lost if your pet dies (IE-Stuns, disarms, etc). A Beast Master with a dead pet is pretty crippled last time I checked.
And even if the damage loss is minimal, less is still less. That's kind of the opposite of optimization, in a game that operates around optimization.



Its a big load of damage you have to A) keep the mob near without letting him hit it, and B) avoid getting pasted by the mob at the same time. Far from faceroll, you cant just toss a single nuke at a mob then stand still and let your turrets do all the work. Plus there is the fact the turrets will attack any mobs in range, meaning you cant just leave them somewhere at random, you have to be careful or you could wind up grabbing more than you can handle.

Im not sure where you get this from. Its not like the necro will be able to summon 40 skeletons at the same time. And whats more, the more time you spend summoning skeletons, the less time you spend nuking/dotting/whatevering the boss. So yeah, you may have a conga line of 6 or 7 skeletons in a chain of constant despawning and respawning as timers run out, but that probably wouldnt be the best use of time. It would probably be something like a mage who casts nothing but pyroblast. Sure it does damage, but isnt there a more effective and higher total dps spell cycle he could be using?

*EDIT* Meh, I played my hunter last night. Sure he was marksman, but aside from keeping the mobs off me, I was doing the vast majority of the dps. Sure I would take a hit in total dps if I lost my pet, but its not like I would be dropped by 50% or something.

[Karoht]

Its a big load of damage you have to A) keep the mob near without letting him hit it, and B) avoid getting pasted by the mob at the same time. Far from faceroll, you cant just toss a single nuke at a mob then stand still and let your turrets do all the work.I don't always DPS, but when I do it's in range of the boss.

Seriously, keeping a mob near a Searing Totem isn't a challenge now, why would it be in another class? And you're worried about the mob attacking it? How is the tank doing that crappy of threat that a turret is out-threating it? What strawman tanks are we talking about that 'just toss a single nuke at a mob and then stand still and let your turrets do all the work' exactly? Honestly, you've stopped making any sense at all.


Plus there is the fact the turrets will attack any mobs in range, meaning you cant just leave them somewhere at random, you have to be careful or you could wind up grabbing more than you can handle....so placing them in range of the thing you are trying to kill is too complicated? Ranged pulls to lead the boss to where you want it are too complicated? Have you never heard of Misdirect? Or Taunt? Or Heroic Throw? Or Death Grip? I'm seriously lost trying to figure out what you are on about here.


Im not sure where you get this from. Its not like the necro will be able to summon 40 skeletons at the same time. And whats more, the more time you spend summoning skeletons, the less time you spend nuking/dotting/whatevering the boss.I start the fight with one skeleton. Wipe. Now I have a corpse in the room so corpse management is no longer a concern. At that point, why bother even making it one? Where is the benefit to making corpse management a concern exactly?


So yeah, you may have a conga line of 6 or 7 skeletons in a chain of constant despawning and respawning as timers run out, but that probably wouldnt be the best use of time. It would probably be something like a mage who casts nothing but pyroblast. Sure it does damage, but isnt there a more effective and higher total dps spell cycle he could be using?You're the one who said "Spam skeletal summons as much as you can and drop a swarm on the boss to help do extra damage for awhile," and after that said, "You could even give the necro several skeletal summons to choose from, a skeletal warrior, skeletal archer, or skeletal cleric." So exactly how many skeletons up at a time are you talking about?


*EDIT* Meh, I played my hunter last night. Sure he was marksman, but aside from keeping the mobs off me, I was doing the vast majority of the dps. Sure I would take a hit in total dps if I lost my pet, but its not like I would be dropped by 50% or something.A hit is a hit. People scream about 5% nerfs to a single ability which equate to about a 1% DPS drop over the course of an entire boss fight. If the skeleton's DPS contribution is so low you claim it could be ignored, why have it at all? Why have yet another mechanic to manage? If it is so low as to be ignorable, how is it relevant, or even fun?

And I genuinely intend you no offence here, but I don't take your DPS parse to be all that relevant.

[Traab]

I don't always DPS, but when I do it's in range of the boss.

Seriously, keeping a mob near a Searing Totem isn't a challenge now, why would it be in another class? And you're worried about the mob attacking it? How is the tank doing that crappy of threat that a turret is out-threating it? What strawman tanks are we talking about that 'just toss a single nuke at a mob and then stand still and let your turrets do all the work' exactly? Honestly, you've stopped making any sense at all.

...so placing them in range of the thing you are trying to kill is too complicated? Ranged pulls to lead the boss to where you want it are too complicated? Have you never heard of Misdirect? Or Taunt? Or Heroic Throw? Or Death Grip? I'm seriously lost trying to figure out what you are on about here.

I start the fight with one skeleton. Wipe. Now I have a corpse in the room so corpse management is no longer a concern. At that point, why bother even making it one? Where is the benefit to making corpse management a concern exactly?

You're the one who said "Spam skeletal summons as much as you can and drop a swarm on the boss to help do extra damage for awhile," and after that said, "You could even give the necro several skeletal summons to choose from, a skeletal warrior, skeletal archer, or skeletal cleric." So exactly how many skeletons up at a time are you talking about?

A hit is a hit. People scream about 5% nerfs to a single ability which equate to about a 1% DPS drop over the course of an entire boss fight. If the skeleton's DPS contribution is so low you claim it could be ignored, why have it at all? Why have yet another mechanic to manage? If it is so low as to be ignorable, how is it relevant, or even fun?

And I genuinely intend you no offence here, but I don't take your DPS parse to be all that relevant.

Ok, maybe im not speaking clearly here. Im not talking entirely about raids. When I was talking about setting down turrets I was talking about the problems of doing it while solo more than anything. Take one of the random hozen camps in kung lai as an example. There are roamers everywhere and if you arent careful about where you are pulling mobs, they will grab more than you want. When I talk about losing agro I meant when you, as the animist, pull a mob towards your turrets, you wont be able to just let the turrets do all the work. For one, you will get stabbed to death as a caster class. For another, eventually the turrets will out damage you and draw agro, getting one shot by the mob. Who will then turn back around and continue stabbing you to death.

But as for groups and such, no, you obviously shouldnt take agro from the tank, but even so, the turrets are only about half your potential dps, so you still cant just slap down the turrets and go afk till the trash/miniboss/dungeon boss is dead. So in either case, there is no faceroll here anymore than there is for any other random class. If anything its a bit harder than regular pet classes because all they have to do is face the right way, hit pet attack then go back to doing whatever the hell they do for dps.

As for why make corpse management a thing, because the pets dont last till you die, and you dont want to run out. Sure it would be easier to not run out after a wipe with all those extra bodies lying about, are you complaining that something ISNT that hard to do during a raid? i doubt the guild would sacrifice a wipe at the start of every boss battle just so the 2 necros in the crowd have tons of extra summon material to work with. I didnt exactly picture the skeletal pets of being total dps monsters. Not worthless by far, but hardly some sort of "ok we gotta make sure we have TONS of this!"

Ok, what I meant was there were several ways it could go, you could summon up several skeletons at the start and try to keep those however many up and running. Clearly thats something that would have to be parsed out to find the optimal number of skeletons versus lost dps from not directly attacking the boss instead. Also it would vary depending on how many bodies are available at the time. As a random example, it might turn out that a casting cycle where you keep three skeletal archers up at all times is the best dps option, but if there arent enough corpses to work with at that rate you might have to accept slightly lower dps in order to maintain steady dps throughout the whole fight.

Just like every other class has its rotations depending on spec, so would the necro. As for the various types of skeletons you could summon, I was more offering them up as ways to diversify the necromancer class so it can do more than just the one fighting style. How they could work is obviously something that would need testing and debate to find the right setup.

[otakuryoga]

But as for groups and such, no, you obviously shouldnt take agro from the tank, but even so, the turrets are only about half your potential dps, so you still cant just slap down the turrets and go afk till the trash/miniboss/dungeon boss is dead.

maybe i am confused...but wasnt this your idea for a ranged tank?
therefore you ARE the tank?

[Traab]

maybe i am confused...but wasnt this your idea for a ranged tank?
therefore you ARE the tank?

No, the ranged tank was something else, it had some similar points but these are different class ideas. Not that it couldnt be adjusted to work that way if they wanted. The animist thing was basically talking about a class from another game that I found interesting and me straining my brain trying to remember most of the details from back when dark age of camelot was a fairly new game.

[Karoht]

Ok, maybe im not speaking clearly here. Im not talking entirely about raids. When I was talking about setting down turrets I was talking about the problems of doing it while solo more than anything. Take one of the random hozen camps in kung lai as an example. There are roamers everywhere and if you arent careful about where you are pulling mobs, they will grab more than you want. When I talk about losing agro I meant when you, as the animist, pull a mob towards your turrets, you wont be able to just let the turrets do all the work. For one, you will get stabbed to death as a caster class. For another, eventually the turrets will out damage you and draw agro, getting one shot by the mob. Who will then turn back around and continue stabbing you to death.So don't place them like a derp? And drag the mobs into it rather than placing one in the middle of a massive pack? Learn to ranged pull?

If the mobs live long enough for them to potentially over aggro you, you're doing it wrong to begin with. Moreover, their aggro by the sounds of things is individual. If an individual, non controlled, non aimable object managed to out aggro anyone? That's pretty bad all around. And currently, the way tank threat is set up, it is extremely hard for that to happen. Heck, before Vengence was a thing, DPS threat was Linear, Tank threat was Quadratic. Lets take BC where Searing Totem was also known as Homicidal Maniac Totem which picked random targets and chain pulled as you describe. Any competant tank could hold that threat no sweat. Any competant Shaman could hold that threat, no problem.


But as for groups and such, no, you obviously shouldnt take agro from the tank, but even so, the turrets are only about half your potential dps, so you still cant just slap down the turrets and go afk till the trash/miniboss/dungeon boss is dead. So in either case, there is no faceroll here anymore than there is for any other random class.I can totally AFK that if the tank isn't a drooling idiot.
Deliver 50% of your DPS without requiring any input from the player? I guarantee you that if you AFK and let your hunter auto attack, and let your pet do it's thing, you won't equal probably anywhere near 40% of your overall possible DPS for your gear level. IE-If your potential deeps is 100K, you won't do anywhere near 40K doing that.
Your turret example on the other hand, is. To balance something like that, your abilities would have to hit like limp noodles.


As for why make corpse management a thing, because the pets dont last till you die, and you dont want to run out. Sure it would be easier to not run out after a wipe with all those extra bodies lying about, are you complaining that something ISNT that hard to do during a raid? i doubt the guild would sacrifice a wipe at the start of every boss battle just so the 2 necros in the crowd have tons of extra summon material to work with. I didnt exactly picture the skeletal pets of being total dps monsters. Not worthless by far, but hardly some sort of "ok we gotta make sure we have TONS of this!"If the DPS boost is in any way relevant, and if having more corpses on hand will give them a boost? Yes, they will. Dude, people still use the Sword from Headless Horseman for the Squashling Summon. It does something like 30 DPS for about 20 seconds? Maybe 30?. Over the course of a 3 minute fight that equates to .0001% of the damage dealt at BEST. And that was back in Wrath. They still insist on using it on a pre-pull, or including it in a weapon swap macro during the big burst phases. Ask Kripparian, his Cata guild had it as a requirement for anyone who could use a sword. The previous expansion, when Ensidia was a thing, they all required it too. So did the majority of guilds in the top 200 EU/US during Sunwell. And seriously, it does next to nothing. They still insist on having it.
TL:DR-If it gives people a 1 DPS advantage, people will do it.


Ok, what I meant was there were several ways it could go, you could summon up several skeletons at the start and try to keep those however many up and running. Clearly thats something that would have to be parsed out to find the optimal number of skeletons...So by that logic, I would want a big fat pile of corpses in the room so that I could summon my maximum number of skeletons at the beginning of the fight for a big early boost of DPS (or save the corpses for a later burst section), meanwhile maintaining some set number of them for the rest of the fight. That sounds like a lot of corpses. That sounds an aweful lot like more than one skeleton active at a time. That sounds like a huge swing of DPS.

The optimal number of skeletons would be parsed very quickly. Long before beta ended. It's just math, players have been doing it for years now. Which means that every player worth their salt would know the optimal number of corpses needed for the duration of a given fight. If they don't have access to that number of corpses, then corpse dragging would occur.
If the DPS they do isn't high enough to be relevant, that would be parsed out as well.


Versus lost dps from not directly attacking the boss instead. Also it would vary depending on how many bodies are available at the time. As a random example, it might turn out that a casting cycle where you keep three skeletal archers up at all times is the best dps option, but if there arent enough corpses to work with at that rate you might have to accept slightly lower dps in order to maintain steady dps throughout the whole fight.So again, this is a class entirely dependant on corpses. If the DPS from them is in any way relevant, then corpse dragging can and will occur, to the detriment of the raid. If their regular abilities are so amazing and these skeletons don't do much, then why would anyone go to the headache of even having them on a fight? Ergo, why even have them as a class feature?
Trust me, if Sentry Totem gave a .1% DPS advantage, every Shaman would have used it on every fight, and they would never have got rid of it.


Just like every other class has its rotations depending on spec, so would the necro.If the DPS input isn't relevant, it wouldn't end up as part of the rotation, ergo a wasted class feature. Just like poor poor sentry totem.


As for the various types of skeletons you could summon, I was more offering them up as ways to diversify the necromancer class so it can do more than just the one fighting style. How they could work is obviously something that would need testing and debate to find the right setup.You still haven't answered my question, how many skeletons at a time would be allowed to be active at once at maximum? You seem to flip flop between 1 and more than 1.

[Traab]

The class doesnt exist yet. How the ^%$& should I know what would be balanced, since it hasnt been designed yet it could work either way. As for your really strange comments about the animist idea, I still dont understand why you think any group or raid would accept a player who does half his potential dps at best because he is a total moron who drops a couple turrets then goes afk.

As far as threat goes, yes, any competent player wont lose it to the turret, but once again, its just something you have to look out for. A shaman never has to worry about losing threat to his searing totem, he could probably equip a shield with a freaking spike enchant on it, pull with a single lightning bolt, then go afk and never lose it. The animist doesnt have it quite that easy. Since the turret(s) is fully half of his dps (give or take, the numbers could be fudged to make them work) he has to be taking part in the solo fight to avoid losing agro. He CANT just pull then go afk.

Once again, going back to afk dps. On one hand you talk about how people are so insanely dedicated they are equipping items that are multiple expansions old just for a summon effect in order to get that one extra hit. Then you are talking about how everyone would be dropping their turrets and going afk, despite that being half or so of their potential damage. Which is it? What raid group is going to put up with a class capable of dishing out 100k dps only averaging 50k at best? One that has the content so outgeared that they are only doing the dungeon for giggles in the first place?

Now, the thing with the skeletal pets. You keep trying to pin me down on numbers like im a dev or something. I have no idea what would be ideal. Basically, I know the necro has to be capable of killing stuff without his pet/s, or else he will never be able to go out at the start and get one in the first place. I want the pet to be a valuable part of the class, but not the only thing it can do. Im going back to an earlier comparison I made. Lets take a fire mage. Spamming skeletal summons should be like spamming pyroblast. Yeah you can do it if you want, but its not even close to an optimal dps cycle. And like pyroblast, while its not best to spam it to hell and back, there are times when it IS best to cast it.

As for corpse management, I really dont see where it would be a problem solo group or raid. Especially if you also get to use the dead bodies of your fellow players. No trash should live long enough for you to run out of bodies, on boss fights, there are generally at least a few trash packs that are or were nearby that can be used, and in case of wipe you have everyone elses bodies to work with to try again. Its not like soulstones or arrows requiring bag slots or prep time to setup. Its using the dead bodies on the floor which you should rarely at best ever run out of. But if it really is such a horrifying prospect for you, whatever, easy enough to refluff. Stuff has died everywhere over the existence of the world and a necromancers magic can find the smallest traces and summon a minion to their aid. There, now they can summon skeletons whenever they want, happy?

[Zherog]

Seriously? Traab's not a designer or a coder. He doesn't need to have all the answers to all this stuff. He has what he thinks is a cool idea for a new class, and that's all it is. It's not his "job" to balance it or figure out exactly how much deeps the turret should produce or any of that.

If you don't like his idea, that's great I guess. Different strokes for different folks. But there's no need to crap all over it because it doesn't measure up to the existing classes in your mind.

[Psyren]

I do like the idea of a Necromancer as a pet-using tank. Give them one of those super-ghouls (i.e. the transformed version of the Unholy DK pet) baseline, with the ability to convert it into a full-on Abomination when it flips out. Also, they would have a (passive?) spell that converts holy and life energy into shadow, allowing the other classes to heal the pet.

I don't think we really need corpses around to be a necromancer. This is Azeroth/Draenor we're talking about; there've been countless battles across the centuries/milennia. There's almost as many bones in the ground as dirt. We can just handwave it and let you raise a skelly anywhere.

My only personal problem with necromancy is that almost all of their iconic abilities were chopped up and distributed to the three shadow classes (SPriests, Affliction Warlocks, and DKs of all specs.) You would have to mix and match these to make the new class. It could be a fun exercise though.

I also like a "turret-using class" as a ranged tank.

[Traab]

Thanks Zherog, too be honest I was starting to wonder if I was imagining things or being over sensitive about criticism of my (awesome) idea. :smallbiggrin:

As for the turret using class being a ranged tank, the main problem I see with that is, unless its like shaman totems and easy to slap down in an instant, it might not work well for all those fights where the tank has to move around, and if it IS that easy, it might be seen as a ripoff of vanilla wow enhance shaman. They actually were pretty solid tanks pre raid. Rockbiter and earth shock were pretty huge threat boosts, and the ability to do fast self heals not only helped keep the shaman tank alive but produced even more threat. They werent GREAT tanks, but they could get the job done. Biggest problem was group pulls, but single target? You could lock the boss on yourself easy.

[Jonzac]

Having played an animist in DAOC (the best MMO ever in my opinion), there were several things to watch. First there was a "pet" turret that was more robust for soloing (you could only have one) that you could control just like the pet in WOW, then there were less powerful turrets that you could put out there (finally could only have 4 I believe) that were fire and forget.

The single pet one was mostly used for soloing. You would plop it down and and let it attack. You would assist with healing or DPS on your own....WOW hunter modeled after this (except the shroom you put down didn't move with you). FnF turrets were mostly used in PvP situations...or perhaps if you were in a group that was bringing in Mobs to a central place. PvP was used in castle situations and not in field fights very often.

The biggest difference that kept it from being TOO overpowered was the fact that a caster in DAOC COULD NOT CAST if he was getting hit (unlike WOW).

The difference with Shaman is the totam is a MINOR portion of DPS...the shaman is the tank and it was reversed in the animist...Mage with elemental is closer to the animist that Traab is talking about.

[Karoht]

The class doesnt exist yet. How the ^%$& should I know what would be balancedI didn't ask what would be balanced, I asked how many skeletons active at a time you are talking about.


I still dont understand why you think any group or raid would accept a player who does half his potential dps at best because he is a total moron who drops a couple turrets then goes afk. Clearly you've never been in LFR.


He could probably equip a shield with a freaking spike enchant on itDoesn't exist anymore.


Once again, going back to afk dps. On one hand you talk about how people are so insanely dedicated they are equipping items that are multiple expansions old just for a summon effect in order to get that one extra hit. Then you are talking about how everyone would be dropping their turrets and going afk, despite that being half or so of their potential damage. Which is it?You are connecting two different issues together in your head. Your turret idea and your skeleton idea are two different things. Funny seeing as they are your ideas. You are literally talking about the turrets being 50% of someone's DPS, while the skeletons are supposedly not nearly as much. So why don't you figure out what you are talking about instead please?

@Zherog
"Seriously? Traab's not a designer or a coder. He doesn't need to have all the answers to all this stuff. He has what he thinks is a cool idea for a new class, and that's all it is. It's not his "job" to balance it or figure out exactly how much deeps the turret should produce or any of that.
If you don't like his idea, that's great I guess. Different strokes for different folks. But there's no need to crap all over it because it doesn't measure up to the existing classes in your mind."
See the above. Thanks for trying though. Ever have a 'shifting goalposts' argument with someone? Not fun. Asking him to explain what he means (IE-Describing a rough idea with 1 or more than 1 is not the same as getting him to describe the specifics of an ability) is not unheard of or unreasonable. His hostility towards me in response to a request to clarify is unreasonable. Also, I'm only holding him to the same level of scrutiny my ideas would be subjected to on this very thread/forum in general.


Now, the thing with the skeletal pets. You keep trying to pin me down on numbers like im a dev or something.Because you are discussing it in different contexts, virtually every time you talk about it, and then trying to pin any misunderstanding on me.
It also relates to my argument regarding corpse management. If I need 50 corpses to be optimal in a fight, then I need a means of bringing 50 corpses, which would be a pain in the arse for the rest of the raid. If I only need 1 corpse, that is a different discussion.


Spamming skeletal summons should be like spamming pyroblast.So... lots active at once is an option yes? Then we need lots of corpses on a given boss.
Also, Pyroblast isn't a small amount of damage, meaning these skeletons are not a small amount of damage. A lot of skeletons running around doing not a small amount of damage.
Unless by 'like spamming pyroblast' you are infering something entirely different. Are you suggesting perhaps that the cast time to summon one is lengthy, and that by the time you summoned a second one, the first one is already gone (or shortly thereafter)? Is that what you're on about?


As for corpse management, I really dont see where it would be a problem solo group or raid. Especially if you also get to use the dead bodies of your fellow players. No trash should live long enough for you to run out of bodies, on boss fights, there are generally at least a few trash packs that are or were nearby that can be used, and in case of wipe you have everyone elses bodies to work with to try again. Its not like soulstones or arrows requiring bag slots or prep time to setup. Its using the dead bodies on the floor which you should rarely at best ever run out of. But if it really is such a horrifying prospect for you, whatever, easy enough to refluff. Stuff has died everywhere over the existence of the world and a necromancers magic can find the smallest traces and summon a minion to their aid. There, now they can summon skeletons whenever they want, happy?Once again you speak as though you've never played this game with actual people before. Why intentionally design a feature that intentionally inconveniences the rest of the raid? And how many people are going to wait while a necro decided to corpse drag in LFR?

No corpse requirement would be my vote, as having a corpse requirement brings largely no benefits (or poorly described benefits) and only drawbacks.

[Traab]

I didn't ask what would be balanced, I asked how many skeletons active at a time you are talking about.

Clearly you've never been in LFR.

Doesn't exist anymore.

You are connecting two different issues together in your head. Your turret idea and your skeleton idea are two different things. Funny seeing as they are your ideas. You are literally talking about the turrets being 50% of someone's DPS, while the skeletons are supposedly not nearly as much. So why don't you figure out what you are talking about instead please?

@Zherog
"Seriously? Traab's not a designer or a coder. He doesn't need to have all the answers to all this stuff. He has what he thinks is a cool idea for a new class, and that's all it is. It's not his "job" to balance it or figure out exactly how much deeps the turret should produce or any of that.
If you don't like his idea, that's great I guess. Different strokes for different folks. But there's no need to crap all over it because it doesn't measure up to the existing classes in your mind."
See the above. Thanks for trying though. Ever have a 'shifting goalposts' argument with someone? Not fun. Asking him to explain what he means (IE-Describing a rough idea with 1 or more than 1 is not the same as getting him to describe the specifics of an ability) is not unheard of or unreasonable. His hostility towards me in response to a request to clarify is unreasonable. Also, I'm only holding him to the same level of scrutiny my ideas would be subjected to on this very thread/forum in general.

Because you are discussing it in different contexts, virtually every time you talk about it, and then trying to pin any misunderstanding on me.
It also relates to my argument regarding corpse management. If I need 50 corpses to be optimal in a fight, then I need a means of bringing 50 corpses, which would be a pain in the arse for the rest of the raid. If I only need 1 corpse, that is a different discussion.

So... lots active at once is an option yes? Then we need lots of corpses on a given boss.
Also, Pyroblast isn't a small amount of damage, meaning these skeletons are not a small amount of damage. A lot of skeletons running around doing not a small amount of damage.
Unless by 'like spamming pyroblast' you are infering something entirely different. Are you suggesting perhaps that the cast time to summon one is lengthy, and that by the time you summoned a second one, the first one is already gone (or shortly thereafter)? Is that what you're on about?

Once again you speak as though you've never played this game with actual people before. Why intentionally design a feature that intentionally inconveniences the rest of the raid? And how many people are going to wait while a necro decided to corpse drag in LFR?

No corpse requirement would be my vote, as having a corpse requirement brings largely no benefits (or poorly described benefits) and only drawbacks.

It could be made to work with however many we want. Its honestly not that important. I am more in favor of a specific pet type to correspond with each spec, but it could also work with all three pet types being available to summon. As for how many total skeletons, once again, it could work in any way. It could be like the old rts necros and just cast summon skeleton over and over and over again till you run out of mana or the target dies, it could be more of a warlock/hunter pet class balanced to work with anywhere between 1 and whatever total number of skeletons you like. You could even wind up with what amounts to your own personal faux 5 man dungeon group and call up a healer, two dps and a tank and go to town on older content for all I care. It could honestly be made to work in any of these scenarios or any other one you care to mention. All have their upsides and down sides all have potential issues, but all could be made to work.

I really dont give a rats ass if tank spikes exist anymore, thats not the point and you know it. I was using hyperbole to make the point that a shaman would never ever have to worry about his totem yanking agro unless he flat out refuses to ever attack it while the animist idea involves a turret capable of pushing enough dps to make that an issue if you try to be lazy and let it do all the work.

I have no idea what your problem here is. The animist turrets are meant to be a major source of their damage, not all of it, or even most of it, but very very significant. The necromancer I never even MENTIONED how much dps the pets would do as I quite frankly have no idea what would work as it varies depending on what the necromancer himself could do. And aside from mentioning a few debuffs that would be neat, im honestly not sure what else the necromancer himself should be capable of. Im sorry I dont have a complete spell list to suggest, I just thought a skeleton summoning class could be neat.

As for needing 50 corpses to be optimal I threw out the "spam skeletal pets" thing as a random idea of something they could do. I didnt say it would be the right thing to do. Just as a mage spamming blizzard all the time is something he could do, even if it would be a stupid idea in most scenarios. Remember, this is a vague idea for a possible class, not something already statted out and ready to play. I dont KNOW what the best way to play a class that doesnt exist would be.

God almighty its like you are TRYING to misunderstand me. First off, you are the one who keeps hopping from, "Raiders will do whatever it takes to max out their dps" then hop back to "Oh, so they would chose to do suboptimal dps? Then clearly the raid needs to make it possible for them to do that for some reason." By spamming pyroblast I am saying that just because you can choose to do something, doesnt mean its the best way to go about it. A mage spamming nothing but pyroblast would presumably be doing sub par dps to what a fire mage with a proper spell rotation could do, correct? So the comparison was, "Yes, you COULD choose to summon 50 (or whatever) pets and do nothing else but that during the fight, but it would probably be less effective than some proper spell rotation instead" Thats the point I was getting at.

Ok, first off, I really dont see a reason why a raid necro would have to corpse drag, considering after the first pull he should have plenty of bodies to work with, but whatever, if this is twisting your panties so hard, fine, no corpse requirement, I thought it made for an interesting bit of fluff with no real consequence as it isnt something that requires a bag slot or gear slot like old time quivers and soul stones and ammo and such, just for there to be dead bodies somewhere relatively nearby. But apparently the idea of there being a requirement for a corpse to be nearby is causing you emotional strain so forget about it. A necro can summon skeletons at any time and anywhere so long as he has the mana for it.

[Icewraith]

I'm not sure why people love the concept of "ranged tank".

I know it was a thing back in the day, you had a mob intentionally too dangerous for melee, so a ranged dps or someone wearing resist gear or with a particular class ability or whatever maintained threat on the mob instead of a normal tank.

It doesn't work in wow as a general concept.

First, to be useful generally, the class has to take and deal damage comparable to the other tanks, without the disadvantage of having to stay in melee or caster pushback. PVP issues.

Second, the class still deals with the same set of bosses as the other tanks, so after the pull the boss just rolls up and hits the ranged tank anyways OR the ranged tank has to run within melee range of a fixed-position boss or immediately induce its raid wipe mechanic. A "ranged tank" will usually spend about the same amount of time ranged tanking as a death knight pulling a group with death & decay.

Third, if a ranged tank does have some sort of method of actually staying at range on most bosses to fit with its concept, it has to deal with the aoe ground effects and raid mechanics that Blizzard throws into most fights to keep the healers and ranged dps on their toes. Sometimes the melee has to deal with them, but often melee and tanks do not because of the issues of seeing a void zone on the ground when clustered into a little blob around the boss. This is a recipie for extra tank deaths.

Fourth, and similarly related, is the issue of movement and kiting fights. If you are dependant on a pet/turret, how do you move the boss? If you have to spend time directing your pet to move all over the place what happens to your own dps? What about raid hazards? If your pet can sit in raid hazards and take minimal damage why bother using any of the other tanks? Tank movement is still a big deal in raids- just look at the Shamans (boss 7) in SoO.

Sorry, just a thing I have about the concept.

[Karoht]

Third, if a ranged tank does have some sort of method of actually staying at range on most bosses to fit with its concept, it has to deal with the aoe ground effects and raid mechanics that Blizzard throws into most fights to keep the healers and ranged dps on their toes. Sometimes the melee has to deal with them, but often melee and tanks do not because of the issues of seeing a void zone on the ground when clustered into a little blob around the boss. This is a recipie for extra tank deaths.

Fourth, and similarly related, is the issue of movement and kiting fights. If you are dependant on a pet/turret, how do you move the boss? If you have to spend time directing your pet to move all over the place what happens to your own dps? What about raid hazards? If your pet can sit in raid hazards and take minimal damage why bother using any of the other tanks? Tank movement is still a big deal in raids- just look at the Shamans (boss 7) in SoO.

Sorry, just a thing I have about the concept.Which is why my idea involving hunters and warlocks involves them spending only some of their time at range. Warlocks with their Demon form already have melee abilities, and hunters no longer have dead range so they could stay up in melee for short periods. Would they go to their extremes of range ever? Probably not, unless they needed to move the boss and were leaving the pet to tank for a short time solo while the master positions, then establishes aggro and brings the boss to the master. Short periods at range (hunter would probably longer periods than the warlock but not dramatically so) would be fine, having to 'dance' a bit with the boss and work well with one's pet would be the goal really.

[Mattarias, King.]

While what I REALLY, REALLY WANT is for mages to have a melee spec (FIRE SWORDS, SO MANY FIRE SWORDS), I can see a time-rewinding mage healer being a thing too, since Blizz seems in love with the time concept for us. :P

As a sidenote, woo, got my second 90! :smallbiggrin: Paladin! .... Still wielding a level 414 or so green. :smallannoyed: Despite all the Timeless Isle gear. Uhh... Where do I get a better one? ...Preferably a polearm. >_>

....I want to use my Ranseur again, ok? :smalltongue:

[Krazzman]

....I want to use my Ranseur again, ok? :smalltongue:

Either smith one, go into dungeons and get one or buy one on the isle. Any two handed weapon can now be transmogged into another two-handed.

For example I have the axe from Nazgrim (LFR) on my Paladin and mogged it into Zoid Firelit Greatsword.

[ryuplaneswalker]

Either smith one, go into dungeons and get one or buy one on the isle. Any two handed weapon can now be transmogged into another two-handed.

For example I have the axe from Nazgrim (LFR) on my Paladin and mogged it into Zoid Firelit Greatsword.

I am not sure that is true for polearms though, don't they have different animations?

[Cerlis]

I think the base mechanics of an appropriate "ranged" tank already exist.

you basically mash the 2 pet classes together, namely the demonology/Demon hunter part of the warlock.

Soul bond (0r whatever its called) gives the Warlock and his pet the same health pull (and reduces the pets health). The pet (void walker) has activated abilities (in this version, they would not be automatic but controlled always by the player). You'd have it still treated as a pet/automoton/turrent/whatever for the sake of boss abilities that effect players. Combined with special taunts (that make the boss target the player, not the pet) and certain mechanics that coax the player to stay within 10 to 20 yrds of his pet to use ALL of his abilities (but if he needs to run away for awhile he can).

------------

Its just like how people said that a support class wouldnt work because it would be required, and then people figured out a way it WOULD work (namely by it buffing players with mitgation/dmg increasing abilities/heals comparable to spells being cast by players.

[Psyren]

I'm not sure why people love the concept of "ranged tank".

I know it was a thing back in the day, you had a mob intentionally too dangerous for melee, so a ranged dps or someone wearing resist gear or with a particular class ability or whatever maintained threat on the mob instead of a normal tank.

It doesn't work in wow as a general concept.

"Everything is impossible until it is done." - Heinlein.

People said melee healing wouldn't work either. And then we got fistweaving. They said letting tank specs do decent dps would undermine the dps role, and we got Vengeance.

The fact that this hasn't been done before and would be unique is reason enough to try. Yeah, they may not get the balance right the first time. Yeah, pet AoE avoidance is definitely a problem, and removing it would cause a bigger problem (micromanagement.) These are all challenges to be overcome, but they don't stop the idea itself from being fun to think about.

There's some smart folks at Blizzard, they could figure this out if they tried.

[Krazzman]

I am not sure that is true for polearms though, don't they have different animations?

Why not? I assume the animation and overlying display are taken from the mogged reference and the stats and so on from the actual weapon.

[PrinceOfThieves]

The way they have transmog set up now is 1 hand axes, swords & maces can be changed into one another. Same thing goes for the 2 handed versions. Staffs & polearms can be interchanged as well. Same thing goes for bows, guns & crossbows.

[GungHo]

While what I REALLY, REALLY WANT is for mages to have a melee spec (FIRE SWORDS, SO MANY FIRE SWORDS), I can see a time-rewinding mage healer being a thing too, since Blizz seems in love with the time concept for us. :P
Can the melee mage healer also sneak?

[ryuplaneswalker]

Why not? I assume the animation and overlying display are taken from the mogged reference and the stats and so on from the actual weapon.

I dunno how it works exactly, but I know weapon types with different animations can't mog over to each other.

Like Daggers and Swords/Maces for Rogues.

[Karoht]

Well, it only took me 8 years but I finally got my Hydraxian Waterlords rep maxed out.
I never have to see the inside of Molten Core again. Huzzah.
I'm debating if I want to put forth the effort on Ravenholt (or hold, however you spell it) rep, but I'm probably not going to bother.

I only have a few of the older meta achievements to get done, some stuff on Timeless Isle, and I'm basically done for this expansion.

[Mattarias, King.]

Can the melee mage healer also sneak?

:smalltongue: I was talking about two different ways you could go... But, since Invisibility is a thing, yes. :smallbiggrin:

...Also, dang, I completely forgot Blacksmithing was a thing. :\ My pally is Herbalism/Skinning, both about maxed. Guess I really wanted money and haste/crit back when I picked those up. Hm.

[Karoht]

Jewel Sockets are going to become much less common in WoD. I wouldn't recommend Jewelcrafting to go with Blacksmithing.
Enchanting maybe? You're going to have a lot of junk greens and blues while you level Blacksmithing, and low level mats are still a decent money maker. The money you spend on ore to make stuff to level BS would then be funnelled into leveling Enchanting. It's pretty win win.

[Krazzman]

Also when I leveled Enchanting with my Spriest... I basically went farming 600 Mithril to craft something to disenchant that and even then I had to buy something after that.

[Icewraith]

If sockets are much less common, wouldn't JC be an ideal pairing to go with BS since you have a much better chance of having enough sockets to use all your special snowflake JC gems?

WRT ranged tanking, I'm not saying that something like a demonology lock wouldn't work (I really wish they HAD gone with that in fact-it's a cool concept), but that the mechanics that forced the original ranged tank role aren't there anymore and a truly ranged tank would throw a wrench into the workings of a number of important areas in the game. The Demonology warlock isn't (or wasn't when it existed as a potential viable tank spec) a true ranged tank (or pet tank or turret tank as proposed), he turns into a big shadow demon and makes claw attacks, his pet doesn't do any of the work for him, he stays in melee range of bosses, etc.

For instance, it's not just that a ranged tank that can actually stay at range might get targeted by extra boss effects, but that a ranged tank that can actually stay at range creates an extra moving "stay out of the bad" bubble that no one else can enter without risking dropping a raid hazard on the tank. This technically exists normally, but is confined to the area immediately in front of the boss that no one else usually has business being in. Depending on the fight, not only is it one more thing for the hardcore raiders to keep track of when the fights are tuned harder, there are more raid hazards, new mechanics etc, but it's one more way for a careless pugger or LFR-er to cause a wipe in a raid that probably doesn't need the help.

The closest thing I can think of to a pet/turret tanking class that would actually work is some sort of illusionist/astral projection tanking spec for the mage. Even then, it's less of a pet/turret deal and more of a "vehicle" deal- the mage would drop a circle somewhere that he stands in that makes him immune to damage and then summon an astrally projected something or other that shares his health, and move and control that. The only real advantage to this arrangement is you could heal the astral projection or the mage to the same effect if one or the other isn't in range. Also there could be an interesting interaction between a tank "death" and cauterize, potentially giving the raid a pseudo battle-rez for the tank if the healers are quick enough.

[Karoht]

If sockets are much less common, wouldn't JC be an ideal pairing to go with BS since you have a much better chance of having enough sockets to use all your special snowflake JC gems?Gems are plentiful and cheap, and won't be in high demand. So who is going to buy them? They'll stay cheap, trust me. Enchants on the other hand are supposed to broaden, including possibly releasing more enchant options with each non-raid tier patch. I predict that enchants won't stay cheap for long, or at the very least, not the mats.


WRT ranged tanking, I'm not saying that something like a demonology lock wouldn't work (I really wish they HAD gone with that in fact-it's a cool concept), but that the mechanics that forced the original ranged tank role aren't there anymore and a truly ranged tank would throw a wrench into the workings of a number of important areas in the game. The Demonology warlock isn't (or wasn't when it existed as a potential viable tank spec) a true ranged tank (or pet tank or turret tank as proposed), he turns into a big shadow demon and makes claw attacks, his pet doesn't do any of the work for him, he stays in melee range of bosses, etc.That is kind of why I figured it would be neat if they based the tanking around some pet management, but the pet only takes the load at very specific times, and the pet/s is/are treated like a resource. Knowing when the pet should take a hit and when it shouldn't is supposed to be part of that skill cap.

[Icewraith]

If most of the sockets on gear are going away, you think Blizzard won't make the new gems more expensive to make? I mean, they actually have been giving Engineers new things to make and sell from time to time, so somebody might actually be paying attention to that sort of thing.

Anyways,

Hmm.... maybe like your pet has its own HP and you can have it sort of intervene you at regular intervals?

Alternatively you could use it sort of as a blocking mechanic, where your pet will absorb or split a certain percentage of damage for you, and any healing done to you is duplicated to your pet. You could implement that statement literally and just sort of equip your pet as a shield, but I doubt that would go over well.

Anything that uses a pet to tank instead of tanking with the assistance of a pet probably isn't going to go over well.

Rant on current pet AI and players.
Hunters are bad enough as it is remembering to turn off taunts, never mind the prospect of them getting something that actually works on a raid boss.

It's not as bad as it used to be, but every time a pet taunts off a tank it's still stealing a portion of that tank's resource generation.

With the barrens stuff I'd be tanking one of the boss mobs, and some warlock would come along with their voidwalker, and it will auto taunt on a short cooldown, and it's too dumb to move out of the bad and because it's too dumb to move out of the bad Blizzard had to make it nearly immune to damage from AOE, so it just sits there in a huge damage zone and keeps the boss in the damage zone, and I and any other melee in the area might as well go hide somewhere and afk until the boss dies or the warlock dies- we literally can't get at the bost most of the time.

Even if it's not actively putting the boss in a void zone or some crap it's still taunting off me, stealing my rage generation from critical blocks and my revenge procs (which generate rage) and crit buff from avoidance and my damage boost from vengeance. And my rage generation from critting with devastate, because my crit buff went away since I'm no longer being swung on. The resource drop is noticeable and frustrating- just because someone didn't turn off their pet taunt or popped army suddenly half my stuff doesn't work or I have no reason to use it.



The only time I don't mind it when pets tank (and there's a player tank available) are the elite elementals on the island, because their aoe is so lethal.

[The Glyphstone]

That's an idiot warlock/hunter, not an idiot pet - pets can be manually moved, and if he doesn't want to have to kill the thing all by himself, he'll drag the boss/mob out of the bad.

[Karoht]

If most of the sockets on gear are going away, you think Blizzard won't make the new gems more expensive to make? I mean, they actually have been giving Engineers new things to make and sell from time to time, so somebody might actually be paying attention to that sort of thing.Unlikely. They made transmuting gems to be much harder, which seemed to control the price much better (comparing wrath, cata, and mop), but simply put no matter how may jewelcrafters there are trying to sell their goods and compete, only so many items are going to have gem slots, only so many gems will actually be purchased.


Hmm.... maybe like your pet has its own HP and you can have it sort of intervene you at regular intervals?Pets already have their own hit points, but yes, that's what I'm thinking.


Alternatively you could use it sort of as a blocking mechanic, where your pet will absorb or split a certain percentage of damage for you, and any healing done to you is duplicated to your pet. You could implement that statement literally and just sort of equip your pet as a shield, but I doubt that would go over well.I don't mean for this to sound rude but, did you read my post regarding the idea? Because that is basically what I suggested. Nearly word for word.


Anything that uses a pet to tank instead of tanking with the assistance of a pet probably isn't going to go over well.That is more or less my train of thought. If figure that pet assistance is a better idea than pet dominant. The skill cap comes in managing your own mitigation AND the pet mitigation, not just your own all the time.


Rant on current pet AI and players.
Hunters are bad enough as it is remembering to turn off taunts, never mind the prospect of them getting something that actually works on a raid boss.
It's not as bad as it used to be, but every time a pet taunts off a tank it's still stealing a portion of that tank's resource generation.Agreed. Again why I figure that you would have to build the pet management to be a resource of it's own. You only want to use the pet to take something at certain times. Also, shared Vengence could be a thing for this very specific example, but maybe not. Would totally be dependant on pet scaling.

[Mattarias, King.]

Wooo! My Paladin has a better weapon now! It's terrible, but it's better than what I had! :smallbiggrin:

So glad the Ring of Blood tradition is back. The fact that this one's a Scenario made it SO much quicker to do. And I got to Ret tank. :smallbiggrin:

[The Glyphstone]

Wooo! My Paladin has a better weapon now! It's terrible, but it's better than what I had! :smallbiggrin:

So glad the Ring of Blood tradition is back. The fact that this one's a Scenario made it SO much quicker to do. And I got to Ret tank. :smallbiggrin:

Ring of Blood, Amphitheater of Anguish, Crucible of Carnage, Arena of Annihilation....what will Gurgthock and Wodin be running in WoD? The Stadium of Slaughter?

[Mattarias, King.]

Ring of Blood, Amphitheater of Anguish, Crucible of Carnage, Arena of Annihilation....what will Gurgthock and Wodin be running in WoD? The Stadium of Slaughter?

:smallbiggrin: HAH! I hope so! Oh man, I bet the WoD one is gonna be absolutely BRUTAL.

[The Glyphstone]

An Old Horde gladiator's ring? "Brutal" will be an understatement.

[Icewraith]

Unlikely. They made transmuting gems to be much harder, which seemed to control the price much better (comparing wrath, cata, and mop), but simply put no matter how may jewelcrafters there are trying to sell their goods and compete, only so many items are going to have gem slots, only so many gems will actually be purchased.

Pets already have their own hit points, but yes, that's what I'm thinking.

I don't mean for this to sound rude but, did you read my post regarding the idea? Because that is basically what I suggested. Nearly word for word.

That is more or less my train of thought. If figure that pet assistance is a better idea than pet dominant. The skill cap comes in managing your own mitigation AND the pet mitigation, not just your own all the time.

Agreed. Again why I figure that you would have to build the pet management to be a resource of it's own. You only want to use the pet to take something at certain times. Also, shared Vengence could be a thing for this very specific example, but maybe not. Would totally be dependant on pet scaling.

I went back and found the post on page one I think you are referring to. I was attempting to suggest that instead of gaining the flat damage reduction tanks normally do a "pet tanking" class could split damage off to its pet but duplicate healing taken as an equivalent damage reduction mechanic. It would need a good self healing mechanic to avoid becoming even more healer depandant than the warrior, but eh. I also had the mental image of a hunter "equipping" a tanking pet as an item (like a warrior shield) and then a large wolf or something appearing on his arm that he uses to block damage. I also wanted to make a joke using the phrase "beacon of pet" but nothing came to mind.

Given how the past "Gurgthock and Wodin" events turned out after the first two weeks of the expansion, they will end up calling it "The pit of have your friends who already have gear completely trivialize this quest for you so you can get a halfway decent weapon to use until you get a drop from a heroic 5 man or raid finder."

"Pit of Despair" has always had a nice ring to it, and since the original didn't have the same starting letter thing they can always go back to it. If not, I suppose there's "Hut of Hemorrhaging", "Menhir of Massacre", "Klein Bottle of Effective Character Permadeath (although you could probably just hearth out)", "Dumping Ground for Rejected Raid Bosses", "The Gurgthock and Wodin Home for Displaced Internal Organs", "Semicircle of Spam", "Dodecahedron of Death", etc...

Also

Pentagon of Pain
Hexagon of Hurt

[Seerow]

An Old Horde gladiator's ring? "Brutal" will be an understatement.

It shall be known as the Bowl of Brutality.

[The Glyphstone]

It shall be known as the Bowl of Brutality.

That's a good one too. I couldn't think of a synonym for 'arena' that started with B.

[Seerow]

That's a good one too. I couldn't think of a synonym for 'arena' that started with B.

Well if they were going for Stadium.... it would definitely have to be the Savage Stadium.

Because we all know how savage Draenor is.

[The Glyphstone]

Well if they were going for Stadium.... it would definitely have to be the Savage Stadium.

Because we all know how savage Draenor is.

Gotta be X of Y, so Stadium of Savagery.

[Karoht]

I went back and found the post on page one I think you are referring to. I was attempting to suggest that instead of gaining the flat damage reduction tanks normally do a "pet tanking" class could split damage off to its pet but duplicate healing taken as an equivalent damage reduction mechanic. It would need a good self healing mechanic to avoid becoming even more healer depandant than the warrior, but eh.The split healing/duplicate healing would probably be a quality of life element that they would toss in anyway. As it stands, it is remarkably rare for a healer to actually directly heal a pet anyway, and having to pay attention to who is actually tanking, the pet or the master, would add an extra pain in the butt. So if the healing automatically split/duped, that would make that very healer friendly. Would it replace damage reduction? Depends on the degree to which having the extra large hit point pool makes up for it. Also depends on how Vengence would scale and if Vengence would be shared or not. That's a balancing decision, easily mathed out.

@Pet Equipped
I get your joke, absurd humor is absurd. I had a chuckle. I have a friend who posts every month on the forums, demanding a "Dual Shield" warrior option. He goes a bit further with it to say that the warrior should use the shield to tuck into a ball and other players should roll the warrior around.
He was particularly fond of posting about this idea during the development of Cataclysm. He called it the Kata-Warrior.
Kata-Warrior, as in Katamari Damaci.

Savage Stadium works. But what about Fight Club? Does it get a rename?

[Zherog]

I suspect my free time just went down... *points to sig*

[Psyren]

I know staffs can be mogged into polearms - my monk did that - not sure about axes/swords into polearms though.


I suspect my free time just went down... *points to sig*

Congrats! (One of the reasons I backed the d20Pro Kickstarter was for the promise of FGG content being incorporated.)

[Seerow]

I suspect my free time just went down... *points to sig*

Will we at least get stories about the fun of working under SKR and the like from you? Or are you just gone?

[Zherog]

Will we at least get stories about the fun of working under SKR and the like from you? Or are you just gone?

I don't work under Sean Reynolds. He works for Paizo, not Frog God Games. (That said, I casually know Sean. He's a nice guy and probably smarter than most give him credit for. No idea what he's like to work for, even what he's like to work with since I've never shared a project with him.)

That said, stories in general are a possibility. I'm sure I'll need to rant occassionally, even if I can't give details. ;)

[Seerow]

I don't work under Sean Reynolds. He works for Paizo, not Frog God Games. (That said, I casually know Sean. He's a nice guy and probably smarter than most give him credit for. No idea what he's like to work for, even what he's like to work with since I've never shared a project with him.)

That said, stories in general are a possibility. I'm sure I'll need to rant occassionally, even if I can't give details. ;)

Ah I was under the impression Paizo kept a tight line on their 3rd parties. In the Path of War thread it was mentioned that they had to keep in line with certain Pathfinder design philosophies even if they thought they were stupid and wanted to avoid them. So I assumed there was a little more interacting there at the very least with someone in Paizo, not necessarily SKR.

[Psyren]

Ah I was under the impression Paizo kept a tight line on their 3rd parties. In the Path of War thread it was mentioned that they had to keep in line with certain Pathfinder design philosophies even if they thought they were stupid and wanted to avoid them. So I assumed there was a little more interacting there at the very least with someone in Paizo, not necessarily SKR.

My guess is that has more to do with staying within the expectations of their target market, than it does being mandated to this or that style by Paizo themselves.

Though the fact that Paizo has picked up DSP material for APs before likely helped that decision. If they get too far away from Paizo design philosophy there will be fewer lucrative partnerships like that.

[Zherog]

The license from Paizo to 3pp does have some limitations built into it (mostly "standards" such as no nudity in art, no sex, etc). A publisher could get around that if they really wanted to by not using the Paizo license and making their product a straight OGL product.

Technically speaking, I do believe Paizo's license also gives them "approval" power of a product, but to the best of my knowledge that currently only involves Paizo looking at explicit terms of the license - making sure the OGL has the proper citations, making sure the Pazio license is referenced correctly, the logo is used correctly, no obvious violations, etc.

Beyond that sort of stuff, though, I've never heard of Paizo having any sort of control over 3pp. Doesn't mean it hasn't happened, of course.

Anyway... back to the thread's actual topic... I'm in "learning curve" mode now with FGG, and it's way steeper than I thought. Once that's licked, though, I expect to get myself onto a schedule - because there's no way I'll be able to work my day job for the 50-ish hours I do, and work every night and weekend on FGG stuff without going stir crazy - particularly dealing with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. So I expect I'll have nights set aside for "free time" which will be WoW, or other games, or whatever. And I'm hopeful that when the expansion comes out, I can block out a week or so where my nights and weekend are completely free so I can dig into the cool new stuff.

So, I suspect I've gotten about as far as possible in the current x-pac. I'll almost certainly get through raid-finder SoO by the time the next expansion hits but it'll be a wing or two here and there as I find time. Whether I can also get "Loremaster" on my horde rogue in that time will remain to be seen. (I like having Loremaster on both factions, so I can essentially see everything from both sides of the story.)

I shall continue reading here, of course, so I can enjoy the game vicariously! :smallbiggrin:

[Krazzman]

Congrats! Hopefully you can salvage that little free time you will now have.

As for me I can say I have more freetime now. At least until Sunday.

To sum it up my wife and I were a bit stressed and thus didn't raid last Thursday. On our second Raidnight Sunday we wouldn't be available either and as such declined the invitation on Saturday (around 7pm). On Sunday our Raidleadcouncil thing was a bit... pissed and nearly threw a hissy fit. Like you can't plan with 25 hours and so on. Now Monday was a busy day due to my wife getting sick (flu) and me worrying about her being contagious so we didn't come online for WoW.
For Tuesday we had accepted but were set to out. Also they set us to out for next Thursday and Sunday.
Also we treid yesterday to get a Garrosh only run but that was seriously hard...

I think this behaviour seems childish... but I don't know if it might be justified as we aren't that motivated due to... some other person in the raidgroup...

EDIT:
Ok I had some more freetime for random thought at work and... my current roster of max level chars is: 90 Spriest with full Legendary Quest. 90 Retribution Paladin(I don't even think about gearing up Prot or Holy if even his Ret gear sucks) who needs to farm Rune Stones [legendary quest for cloak]. And a just level 90 Druid (healing/moonkin... not good).
I also have a 85 mage available but are not that fond of playing him.
I am a "quite" passable Spriest with even other spriest asking me how to do stuff but in the last time I think I fell down that "progression" curve.
Comparing myself to others I should do around 350k dps at least on protectors HC... I on the other hand only do around 300k dps.
Should I maybe... switch from Spriest to another class? If yes which one? I really like Krazzman but if it needs to be done to have better chances for other raids/in another raid/guild whatever...? As yesterday I was listed as DD in the raidtool and still people asked me if I could heal ever so often... and I just can't. I'm just not made to heal.

[Icewraith]

If you want to eliminate the chance of being asked to heal, go mage or other dps only class. That's the only way to completely avoid ever being asked if you can tank or heal.... although if you're known to have alts you might get asked anyways.

I don't know about people (certianly people who do heroic raids) being "unable" to heal. I would agree with the argument that healing probably is the least specific raid role and therefore the most stressful and uncertain for a large swath of the playerbase at all levels.

When you're dps, it's usually pretty easy. Focus on the fight mechanics, hit buttons, kill stuff. As long as you stay out of the bad and kill things in the right order (while putting out good numbers ideally) it's usually not your fault if there's a wipe. DPSing in a progression environment is a bit more intense/stressful if there's heavy competition for raid slots.

Tanking is more stressful as there's usually more responsibility in terms of extra pass/fail raid mechanics, boss positioning, you usually end up leading the raid by default, and if you die with active mitigation it's at least partially your fault most of the time. But you've got a very specific role and you probably know what you should be doing even if you don't quite know how to do it. If you don't, there will be a video or six up on the internet from one of the bleeding-edge progression guilds after a couple weeks into a new raid.

Healing is nebulous. As long as the bars stay full and people aren't dying or exploding from raid debuffs, you're good. It's not as intuitive as the other roles because even though you know there will be damage and you know how it will be generally distributed, the specifics of where it lands has a partial random distribution in most fights and if anything goes wrong it's mainly on the healers to stop people from dying from the extra damage. It's also nearly impossible to learn to raid heal in any environment other than a raid. Most of your buttons are situation specific instead of sequence-specific, so there's usually an extra half a GCD between when you realize you need to react to something (someone takes extra damage or gets a debuff or needs an external cooldown or the boss announces the aoe healing phase is about to start or you get a void zone) and when you can start doing something about it without dropping your current cast (which is usually bad).

I may have ruminated on this previously, but we have a new person tanking with us and my usual co-tank is running with us as a resto druid. Her comments about how stressed out she is when healing and how different it is than tanking had me thinking about this subject.

There's also the difficulty issue. If you're not comfortable healing then a heroic raid is not the time to learn. With heroic gear however, you could probably take a spin in lfr/flex and then once you've got the hang of it work up from there.

Personally I find healing both more stressful AND more relaxing than tanking. I find dpsing to be less stressful (there's less riding on me personally) but less relaxing (now I'm sort of racing all the other dps and trying to kill stuff as fast as possible) than healing. That might just be me though.

[Tanuki Tales]

Does anyone happen to know how to connect Wowuction data to the Auctioneer addon? I'm trying to maximize my re-sale efforts on my bank toon and someone suggested using WoWuction.

Nevermind guys, I just went with TSM.

[The Glyphstone]

Is anyone else unable to get into the game? I'm finding all characters are disconnecting me after locking up at 90% on the Loading Screen.

[Krazzman]

Could log in just fine... might be something us specific?

I did it. My wife "Recruit a friend"-ed me and now I will probably go for Destrolocking. We will maybe search a raid or twink tomorrow and then go for the other thing or more twinking on friday.

The thing I am thinking currently is: what would be most beneficial to the raid. We don't have a resto druid anymore but I certainly don't want to raid. Also they won't let me. I did quite a good job in early cataclysm but since then didn't do it, didn't want it and still haven't gotten the hang of it.

Hunter: already there.
Mage: although I am having a 85er I don't like mages that much really (played one through Dragonsoul as a Twink and... well I didn't like it)
Shaman: Ele, Enhancer, one apparently new ??? shaman and my wife as resto shaman? No thanks, passing this up.
Warrior: No interest.
Paladin: Just want him as a Twink.
Monk: Going in with rolling on the same staff as Guildlead/Raidlead and our MT Guardian Druid? No, I am going to pass this.
DK: No interest in leveling yet another one.
Rogue: No interest.
Warlock: Best pick. Still get the facemelting feeling. Also getting some pets... although I will certainly miss Sparky.

My wife will run a Warrior. We're thinking either leveling Bloodelves (with me switching to Troll/Goblin later) or Trolls.

[Traab]

Heh, I cant even imagine how ludicrous the leveling is now with recruit a friend. It was insane even before they did cata. "Ok, we finished the quests in the first hub, time to move on to the next zone." Redridge is done before you even go to lakeshire, duskwood finished before you even have to kill ogres, etc etc etc. There a zone coming up you dont like? Stick around the previous one and finish it off, boom, there ya go.

[Icewraith]

I don't think I even quested unless I felt like it until I hit Cata or parts of LK- do a dungeon, get a large chunk of level, do another dungeon, etc.

Edit: That may go faster if you tank or heal though, which you're explicitly not doing.

[Psyren]

As DPS, I only quested long enough for my dungeon queues to fire, at which point I would end up with gear and levels such that I had to move on to the next quest hub anyway. As healer or tank, I didn't quest at all.

[Traab]

With the recruit a friend thing it might be better if only because triple exp for quests is insane when as it stands you can already outlevel zones before you complete them without rested exp normally. Just as an example, you could probably outlevel westfall enough for redridge quests before you even reach the town itself. Thats after hitting level 10 in goldshire before you even need to visit the jasperlode mine.

[Krazzman]

Our or at least my "normal" process is/was level until 15 then do other stuff while waiting for an invite.

That's how my Shaman got to 33.

In low-level instances I can stand being a healer or a tank. But as soon as Cataclysm hits it get's weird.

Furthermore my wife wants to start running as a Prot Warrior so theres that already decided. Tank/DD combination is not that bad... hopefully our healer does not suck.

[ryuplaneswalker]

But as soon as Cataclysm hits it get's weird.

The idea behind Cata dungeons was that they wanted to make dungeon mechanics and CC matter again, in heroics it meant you had to pay attention to things even against trash. In normal mode it means a lot of really annoying things that don't matter..but are still terribly horrible.

It looks like they are trying this again in WoD with the "you won't be going into heroic dungeons at max level right off the bat" thing, which is going to be lame since at max level there is usually 1 or 2 normal modes that are even with your level.

[Krazzman]

The idea behind Cata dungeons was that they wanted to make dungeon mechanics and CC matter again, in heroics it meant you had to pay attention to things even against trash. In normal mode it means a lot of really annoying things that don't matter..but are still terribly horrible.

It looks like they are trying this again in WoD with the "you won't be going into heroic dungeons at max level right off the bat" thing, which is going to be lame since at max level there is usually 1 or 2 normal modes that are even with your level.

The weirdness isn't the more mana management/CC issue.

Take for example my Druid. Resto/Feral

from 15 to 60 he was a Feral/Guardian. Then I switched to Resto/Feral and went with that, at level 90 I went with Resto/Moonkin.
The issue was that prior BC it was easier to just tank as doing most damage, Nearly nothing can kill you anyway and so on. In BC I started as Guardian/Cat and respecced around 64.
In the first span as a healer you don't have enought healing abilities to mitigate certain things a Tank does. that is around level 15 to 25 (speaking of Resto druids). Through BC and whole Northend everything is so easy that you just give the tank a hot and run around casting wrath. Then comes cataclysm where at exactly level 80 you have sometimes no chance to heal someone before they die. As you are rather weak on HP as a level 80 char. Then it goes on and on and we come to MoP and basically gradually every instance gets more chaotic to heal. There were fights where I had to spam swiftmend and other instanhealing abilities just to keep the tank alive. Feeling like my healing is worthless.
I healed a bit in LFR mogu and it somehow did feel like I was doing nothing and just wasting my mana and leaving all the work for the other healers.

From cata on I found that healing with a resto druid felt weird... most likely because Northend was mind numbingly easy...

WOD: They most likely will build something out of Scenarios. Krazzman visited them around the time of the barrens event for the first time...

[Icewraith]

Generally speaking when you hit a new content zone it's still a good idea to run around and fill up any non-boa slots with the new quest greens before heading into new dungeons, and maybe even replace the BOAs for one level (especially weapons) since their stats won't catch up until 61, 71, 81, 86 etc.

I wouldn't be surprised if they go back to harder 5 mans/heroics since they have scenarios for people who just want a quick and dirty gear run without having to worry too much about class roles.

There are a few things that might have impacted your healing experience on the druid.

1: The MoP 5 mans are supposed to get more chaotic as you go deeper into them.

2: If your gear isn't that good then you will have to heal harder and burn more mana to keep everyone alive. If you have to use survival abilities to keep the tank up, at least you know where they are and the tank stayed up, right? If you didn't use all the tools in your toolbox and people died.... that's bad. If you had to use all the tools in your toolbox maybe you are hurting for gear, but everyone stayed up. If you used all your stuff and people still died, you may need a bit more gear, or you might not be using your stuff at the right time since healing is a bit of an art and takes getting used to, or people may be standing in fire or ignoring mechanics and there's nothing you can do about it.

3: If you end a fight scraping the bottom of your mana pool but everyone's alive, you did it right. Expansions start off with a healer mana conservation mindset that tends to get negated by better gear. Any mana you end the fight with as a healer is mana you never used.

4: If you're healing LFR as resto, IIRC a lot of your heals, especially raid heals, are HOTs. If you're running with priests (and paladins to a lesser extent IIRC, or you have warrior tanks) they have absorb mechanics that will prevent damage, causing hots to overheal quite often unless the damage output is really intense. If someone is in there with gear, either because they're working on the legendary cloak quest backlog or helping out friends on their alts or looking for an xmog piece, they will expect to carry the raid and heal even harder than they normally would to make sure the raid goes smoothly and their time isn't wasted. There are also a couple of gimmick fights where certain healers, especially disc priests and monks, will put out insane numbers without trying if they know the tricks.

5: Gear significantly and dramatically impacts how a healer plays. There's a gear tipping point where you go from spamming your feeble heals and using all your mana regen tricks on cooldown and hoping the dps pick things up to OOMing only if you completely forget about your mana regen tricks or sit on your emergency heal, and being able to see the impacts of your heals even when running with 4-5 other healers. If you still have blue or green gear (full disclosure- my priest is STILL using the blue Archeology umbrella off-hand but it's upgraded as far as it will go and everything else is extremely purple, including 2pc current tier), you are probably still in category 1. Going into lfr with BoAs and dungeon gear is going to be painful, but if you get a full set of island gear or equivalent things will be much better.

[Psyren]

The idea behind Cata dungeons was that they wanted to make dungeon mechanics and CC matter again, in heroics it meant you had to pay attention to things even against trash. In normal mode it means a lot of really annoying things that don't matter..but are still terribly horrible.

It looks like they are trying this again in WoD with the "you won't be going into heroic dungeons at max level right off the bat" thing, which is going to be lame since at max level there is usually 1 or 2 normal modes that are even with your level.

I for one am glad. Heroics should be, well, heroic. I hate the fact that I just run them to get JP and convert that JP to Honor for the really good pre-LFR gear, particularly since the JP gear is useless (even weaker than the gear that actually comes from the heroic.)

Basically with Cata heroics you needed at least two of the following: CC, mana efficient healer, high dps, or overgeared tank. Those last two are a rarity until the expansion has aged, so frequently you would find groups that needed CC and became frustrated because they weren't taught to use the tools in their toolbox up until that point.

But when you had a group that either knew what to do or listened, man! That was so much more fun than just facerolling everything. Plus the few failures definitely made the victories stand out even more, especially when you got that one group that would wipe 3x in Deadmines but stay on to finish it up anyway.


Generally speaking when you hit a new content zone it's still a good idea to run around and fill up any non-boa slots with the new quest greens before heading into new dungeons, and maybe even replace the BOAs for one level (especially weapons) since their stats won't catch up until 61, 71, 81, 86 etc.

Aren't they going to eliminate this issue when they flatten the ilvl curve a bit? So you won't have those massive jumps in defense and offense from 61, 71, 81 etc anymore.

[Icewraith]

Aren't they going to eliminate this issue when they flatten the ilvl curve a bit? So you won't have those massive jumps in defense and offense from 61, 71, 81 etc anymore.

As far as I know, but until they do it's still a good idea not to jump into the next set of dungeons until you've done the first round of quests. They're set up so that you acquire a nearly complete set of gear to replace any old crap you had on your alt for almost exactly this reason.

[Seerow]

The idea behind Cata dungeons was that they wanted to make dungeon mechanics and CC matter again, in heroics it meant you had to pay attention to things even against trash. In normal mode it means a lot of really annoying things that don't matter..but are still terribly horrible.

It looks like they are trying this again in WoD with the "you won't be going into heroic dungeons at max level right off the bat" thing, which is going to be lame since at max level there is usually 1 or 2 normal modes that are even with your level.

I wish I could understand why they insist on keeping "Leveling" and "Normal" as the same thing.

Raids have 4 difficulties (LFR, Normal, Heroic, Mythic), and are available only at max level. Yet for some reason Dungeons which are used for both leveling and endgame get only two (Normal and Heroic) plus Challenge Modes (which nobody cares about because they don't contribute to progression).


We should have 5 categories of both Dungeons and Scenarios. Going:
-Leveling Dungeons/Scenarios: These are accessible below max level, through the random dungeon finder. Every new dungeon added later in the expansion gets added into this mix as well.
-Dungeon Finder/Scenario Finder: These are accessible only at max level, through the random dungeon finder. These are at roughly the difficulty of Pandaria heroics. Easy even for new max level characters to power through, no real tricks or CC needed.
-Normal: These are tuned to about the point of some of the later wrath heroics, or post-nerf cata heroics. You are expected to have a premade group, some degree of coordination is required, but overall still pretty easy.
-Heroic: These are tuned to about the same level as early-cata heroics or BC heroics. You need to be relatively well geared to complete these, and it will occasionally require rare spec abilities and almost always CC
-Mythic: These are tuned harder than any 5 man to date has been. They should be very hard, with groups tending to have very specific synergistic comps. Requires at minimum full Heroic Dungeon gear.


Rewards should be basically:
-Mythic Raid
-Heroic Raid
-Normal Raid = Mythic Dungeon
-LFR = Heroic Dungeon = Mythic Scenario
-Normal Dungeon = Heroic Scenario
-LFD = Normal Scenario = Special Daily Rewards
-LFS = Random Daily Rewards

Ideally I'd like to also see Flex tech implemented for Normal/Heroic dungeons and scenarios (say Scenarios ranging between 2 and 5 people, dungeons ranging between 4 and 8), and a new category of things to bridge the gap between Dungeons and Raids (something more like old school dungeons that are long, twisting, and exploration focused, maybe even randomized Diablo style), with a group size ranging between 6 or 7 and 14 to 15. With the random finder version simply not existing (because exploration is not really compatible with random groups, which is why we've had years of hallway dungeons).

And since I'm not being demanding enough already (yes I'm aware that so much content isn't feasible. Though I suspect tuning extra difficulties is several factors of time faster than producing all new material, it is still time intensive), I want to see these dungeons/scenarios scale upward as new raid tiers release (at the very least scale the gear up. For the upper difficulties, Heroic/Mythic, they should be retuned to new gear levels as well).


Basically what I want is for there to be content of all difficulties available for just about any group size. As you get up in group size, the difficulty can be tuned tighter, because you can be more certain of certain things being there, but small group content can be tuned much tighter than they currently are. Basically no matter what your group size is, you should always be able to pull them together and go do some sort of instanced content that's appropriate to the challenge you want.

[Psyren]

No one cares about Challenge Modes because you have to queue locally for them, which just about nobody does anymore. Even with only cosmetic rewards, I'm positive people would queue for them if there was a Challenge Finder. They'd be a great "endgame" for the non-raiders who want to put their LFR gear to use.

[Seerow]

No one cares about Challenge Modes because you have to queue locally for them, which just about nobody does anymore. Even with only cosmetic rewards, I'm positive people would queue for them if there was a Challenge Finder. They'd be a great "endgame" for the non-raiders who want to put their LFR gear to use.

Nah. The Cosmetic rewards take about a day to grind out for anyone who cares. Nothing new has been added to them since day one, and what was offered was a single set per class that most people wouldn't care about.

Now if the reward was some sort of currency that could be used to get old currently unavailable sets (so as to provide a reward without much extra work) it'd probably be more popular for a few months, but would eventually fade away again.

The only things that really retain long-term relevance are things that people want to run for gear.

Edit: Challenge Modes could have a place in the game. Simply making a Challenge Mode a Heroic dungeon with a standardized gear level and the timer (Mythic Should be tough enough that applying a timer to it would be useless and wouldn't work for that purpose), with cosmetic rewards would be fine. The problem is with the current approach where Challenge Modes are the only challenging end-game content for small groups.

[Psyren]

Nah. The Cosmetic rewards take about a day to grind out for anyone who cares.

That's the problem, finding 5 people on your server who care (and are capable.) There's too many other things (much-easier-to-queue-for things) competing for their attention.



The problem is with the current approach where Challenge Modes are the only challenging end-game content for small groups.

On this much we agree. But the problem is compounded because people don't even get to practice them. Even the hardest heroics got cleared over time. I routinely cleared pre-nerf Stonecore, which at its zenith had people zone in, see what instance it was and drop group; I did so through many wipes on Ozruk and Corborus. And when I got to the point where I was geared and helping other people pass it, it felt good.

That'll never happen in Challenge Modes the way they currently are because even getting to run them once is a rarity, never mind getting to run them routinely enough to actually learn them.

[Mattarias, King.]

Belated grats, O glorious beer dude! :smallbiggrin:

As a bit of an addition to the current conversation, I guess:

I haven't had to sheep anything since I resubbed. :smallconfused: I remember when you HAD to sheep like, every other pull in a heroic, or you were screwed.

It was kinda stressful, but fun. I felt important, instead of just another AoE-er. Where's some good places to polymorph stuff? ...And then yell at the warlocks that DoT it?

[Karoht]

That's the problem, finding 5 people on your server who care (and are capable.) There's too many other things (much-easier-to-queue-for things) competing for their attention.openraid.com
/problem_solved (to those who actually want to take the initiative to solve it themselves instead of demanding Blizzard solve it for them)


On this much we agree. But the problem is compounded because people don't even get to practice them. Even the hardest heroics got cleared over time. I routinely cleared pre-nerf Stonecore, which at its zenith had people zone in, see what instance it was and drop group; I did so through many wipes on Ozruk and Corborus. And when I got to the point where I was geared and helping other people pass it, it felt good.

That'll never happen in Challenge Modes the way they currently are because even getting to run them once is a rarity, never mind getting to run them routinely enough to actually learn them.Daily "Get Gold on Challenge Mode X" is probably one of the best ways to get VP there is. I think if they had incentivized VP a bit better (especially including cosmetic rewards), this problem may have solved itself.

Proving Grounds actually suffers in that few people know of it's existence (even with a quest that points people to it), and few people take the rankings to mean anything other than just random cheevo points. Had they tied some better rewards to it (but with perhaps a daily or weekly cap) chances are it would be more successful as well.

[ryuplaneswalker]

Basically with Cata heroics you needed at least two of the following: CC, mana efficient healer, high dps, or overgeared tank. Those last two are a rarity until the expansion has aged, so frequently you would find groups that needed CC and became frustrated because they weren't taught to use the tools in their toolbox up until that point.

The problem is not all toolboxes are made evenly, none of my toolbox were worth a crap in cata heroics, Dark Sim? did either crap damage or was something you had to interrupt anyways, Necrotic strike? most things in PVE that are worth slowing casting speed on are immune to it and its damage made it mostly a moot point since Scourge Strike/Obliterate did more damage to overcome the heal anyways, all we really brought to a "heroic" dungeon was death grip and a great deal of the time it just wasn't worth the bother.

Also Challenge modes are a great and nifty idea.

Challenge mode gear is horribly ugly and is so not worth the bother, also the best way I have found to max out VP? Heroic Scenarios if you got a good group to chain run them.

[Psyren]

openraid.com
/problem_solved

/domain_not_found


(to those who actually want to take the initiative to solve it themselves instead of demanding Blizzard solve it for them)

Our b*tching is what made LFG and later LFR a thing in the first place. Squeaky wheel, ya know?



The problem is not all toolboxes are made evenly, none of my toolbox were worth a crap in cata heroics, Dark Sim? did either crap damage or was something you had to interrupt anyways, Necrotic strike? most things in PVE that are worth slowing casting speed on are immune to it and its damage made it mostly a moot point since Scourge Strike/Obliterate did more damage to overcome the heal anyways, all we really brought to a "heroic" dungeon was death grip and a great deal of the time it just wasn't worth the bother.

I do agree; And if they weren't going to give all the dps cc of some stripe, I kinda wish the plate dps classes had gotten cc in the form of offtanking one mob and burning it down. I really think plate should be enough to let you handle one elite.

Alas, only the Ret got any CC worth a damn in Cata, and maybe Frost DKs with... Icy Chains, was it?



Challenge mode gear is horribly ugly and is so not worth the bother, also the best way I have found to max out VP? Heroic Scenarios if you got a good group to chain run them.

I've never had a problem maxing Valor. The problem was maxing it on day one and being stuck unable to get any more until next week. It would therefore take 2-3 weeks per piece of gear, which for a casual player leaves plenty of time for reflection on what the earthly hell they're doing with their life.

[Seerow]

Challenge mode gear is horribly ugly and is so not worth the bother, also the best way I have found to max out VP? Heroic Scenarios if you got a good group to chain run them.

When I was worrying about valor capping, I'd log on and hit up 1 Heroic Scenario, 1 Heroic Dungeon, 1 regular scenario. Altogether it would run slightly over half an hour, and doing that 3 days a week would pretty much cap me. So I could do it on an alt on weekends and get a second toon capped as well.

I hate chain-running anything, because the rewards getting cut in half after the first time a day just makes it feel like a slog.


The problem is not all toolboxes are made evenly, none of my toolbox were worth a crap in cata heroics, Dark Sim? did either crap damage or was something you had to interrupt anyways, Necrotic strike? most things in PVE that are worth slowing casting speed on are immune to it and its damage made it mostly a moot point since Scourge Strike/Obliterate did more damage to overcome the heal anyways, all we really brought to a "heroic" dungeon was death grip and a great deal of the time it just wasn't worth the bother.


Plate melee tends to get screwed in the long-duration CC department, which is what you really want in a dungeon where CC is needed.

DKs and warriors get tons of short duration control, which is awesome for PVP, but I don't think either one gets a single CC that lasts over 8 seconds outside of PVP (where all the CCs you care about are 30-60 seconds). Paladins I think are in the same boat but I seem to remember them having a talented long duration CC ability.

As it was, I mained a warrior. I remember spending over half an hour in a dps queue just to get kicked the second I entered the group because of my class. Only reason I got any heroics done back then is because that was when I was actually raiding and had a decent guild to run **** with.

[ryuplaneswalker]

Same crap happened to me with getting kicked because of my class, which is why I am fine with heroic dungeons being..not very heroic, and leaving that crap in challenge modes, especially since challenge modes alter gear levels which means they can't be muscled through no matter how high level you get.

It is also why I liked the Legendary quest in MOP more than I liked Shadowmourne, I have a great deal of Loathing for the WoW playerbase and do not trust any of them to not screw me given half a chance.

[Karoht]

/domain_not_found
Because a google search is too hard for some people, and not that I haven't mentioned this before or anything but...
openraid.us
Try that.


@CC in Dungeons
"How Dare You" was the response to Ghostcrawler suggesting that the existing tools actually be used back in Cata. Personally I enjoy CC'ing stuff and thinking about pulls, but trying to find 4 other people that actually give a damn about it, and give a damn enough not to break it, is a different matter.
Even if Challenge modes had a queue system I doubt the community would trust it. I know I wouldn't. It was too much to ask Mages back then to sheep things and not spray AoE everywhere 10 seconds later, I wouldn't expect a random mage in Challenge Mode not to do it today.



I've never had a problem maxing Valor. The problem was maxing it on day one and being stuck unable to get any more until next week. It would therefore take 2-3 weeks per piece of gear, which for a casual player leaves plenty of time for reflection on what the earthly hell they're doing with their life.Which is an odd position to take towards a piece of content that isn't supposed to be convenient and exists for a challenge. In other words, it wasn't designed for a casual player to reflect on why they are spending their time on it.

[ryuplaneswalker]

"How Dare You" was the response to Ghostcrawler suggesting that the existing tools actually be used back in Cata. Personally I enjoy CC'ing stuff and thinking about pulls

well, it is not just about the CC, I am fine with classes using their non dps mechanics in dungeons...if everyone gets to hop in on the fun once in a while and not just half the classes in the game.

If yall want CC to matter, I want everyone else's nifty crap to be useful more than once a raid tier instead of being told "oh all that stuff is PVP abilities so go screw off"

[Cerlis]

Not really a single class in the game who doesnt have multiple utility tools that aren't very useful in pve.

P.S.

To expand on it, as a priest or a mage i wish i had an aoe stun. as a Warrior i wish i had a major CC. as a warlock i wish i could interrupt and also use a voidwalker.


but the whole point of having different classes is to have them do different things. Ranged characters most often get long ranged long duration CC because they can see the battlefield better and can snipe enemies with CC who arent near aoe. While Melee tend to have better interrupting and gimping power.


As a shadow priest or hell the class that is a representation of Magical Mastery (mage) i can only interrupt a spell every 24 seconds. pah.

[ryuplaneswalker]

well then longterm CCs can be a "tool that is for PVP" as well.

If "we want people to use their abilities in Heroic Dungeons" is a design goal then it should be a goal across all class mechanics and not just 6 abilities.

[Krazzman]

Let's sum it up: 90 days of insane leveling ahead.

Player a Goblin Warrior (she) and Goblin Warlock combination for the past two days and around 5 or 6 hours played we are level 40. Hilariously fast but let me recommend you something: IF you start with RAF never start as goblins... you have to quest through all the quests which around level 10 turn grey...

Used up around 30 minutes of leveling in Bloodelf start area and well... level 9. Which would've been faster if I did prepare better but anyway.

Basically 85 days of leveling multiple chars to 85.

Things I am thinking about leveling up:
Shaman
Warrior (mentioned bloodelf already level 9)
Hunter
Rogue
Monk
maybe DK

Gonna see where this will take us. I do hope that we will have fun in the process.

[ryuplaneswalker]

Player a Goblin Warrior (she) and Goblin Warlock combination for the past two days and around 5 or 6 hours played we are level 40. Hilariously fast but let me recommend you something: IF you start with RAF never start as goblins... you have to quest through all the quests which around level 10 turn grey...

I have only played one Goblin and one Worgen because of those crappy starting zones, the Worgen one is tolerable but after doing the goblin one I never want to touch it again.

[Seerow]

Even with RAF you're going to start slowing down around level 45-50. Then once you break through to 58, you can hit BC content and you'll level quickly again up to 70 at which point it slows down a lot again, and then in cata it gets pretty painful. You'll spend more time going 80 to 81 than you did going 1 to 40.


Also, don't forget about level granting. Every 2 levels your recruited friend gains translates into 1 level they can grant you. Level two toons up to 85, get a third 85 free! If you play a lot, getting 6 85s out of the deal isn't impossible. Getting 3-4 is more reasonable.

[Traab]

I have only played one Goblin and one Worgen because of those crappy starting zones, the Worgen one is tolerable but after doing the goblin one I never want to touch it again.

I didnt mind the goblin zones themselves, what I hated were those VOICES! ARRRGH! The whole raf aspect never occurred to me. Man that sucks. Im actually a pretty big fan of the worgen starting area. Its constantly on the move, there is always a new place to go, and very little backtracking. Plus its a neat story.

[ryuplaneswalker]

A neat story that has no real ending like most everything in the 1-60 experience of cata. :smallannoyed:

[Psyren]

Because a google search is too hard for some people, and not that I haven't mentioned this before or anything but...
openraid.us
Try that.

Actually I did find it right off, I just felt like calling attention to your mistake in a facetious way :smalltongue: no need to take it so seriously.



@CC in Dungeons
"How Dare You" was the response to Ghostcrawler suggesting that the existing tools actually be used back in Cata. Personally I enjoy CC'ing stuff and thinking about pulls, but trying to find 4 other people that actually give a damn about it, and give a damn enough not to break it, is a different matter.
Even if Challenge modes had a queue system I doubt the community would trust it. I know I wouldn't. It was too much to ask Mages back then to sheep things and not spray AoE everywhere 10 seconds later, I wouldn't expect a random mage in Challenge Mode not to do it today.

"The community" is not the homogenous blob you seem to think it is. The possibility of bad players exists for any queue, but that just makes the times you get a good group shine even more. Like even the hardest Cata Heroics, if people run them often enough they'll clear them eventually; and once you get gold on one you never have to try it again.

All I'm saying is, let us queue, let us try. Those who are success-driven and afraid of getting a random bad apple can still manually schedule groups on third-party sites like they're doing now; this wouldn't take that capability away from them. But we don't even have the option to just try jumping in with some randoms. Even if I lost I'd still consider the experience valuable. And to preserve the e-peen of the local organizers, just make it only possible to get the realm-best title if you form a group manually instead of queuing.



Which is an odd position to take towards a piece of content that isn't supposed to be convenient and exists for a challenge. In other words, it wasn't designed for a casual player to reflect on why they are spending their time on it.

Are you talking about Challenge Modes there? The part you quoted was talking about Valor, and the lack of endgame content for those who aren't interested in PvP or raiding.

5-mans are the most enjoyable part of WoW for me; I'd consider Challenge modes and the new scenarios to be a fine "endgame". (I'd queue for 10-mans if they let us, too - LFR is nice, but also too busy/noisy.)

[Krazzman]

Ok we slowed a bit down but... not really. completing an instance gave us 77k exp (meaning just completing 2 instances means a level up at level 54).

But due to not liking Blackrockinstances... we made a break.

[mistformsquirrl]

I'm back yet again! Playing my Warlock again, but I switched her over to Affliction from Demonology - doing a LOT better than I remember doing as Demonology for certain.

Only downside is, just as I was getting into my first few quests... maintenance! <T_T> I'll have to wait to see if I can solo the Durnholde Challenge in Hillsbrad. (So far I've killed 2 of the elementals without problems and nearly had the third.)

[Krazzman]

I don't really have experience in Warlocks other than Destro (and this only upt to 54) but from the comments of my fellow guildmates that play a warlock as twink made me wary of demonology.

According to them the playstyle correlating to demonology is... bad.

I so far really like the Destro way of doing things atm. Chaosbolt stuff, Shadowburn stuff. In instances most of the Cinder generation goes through Shadowburn... it's awesome.

Apparently RAF has it's downsides too... leveling too fast that you have no time to even pick a talent... sort of missed to use my level 45 skillpoint and basically ran two instances without it being picked. And now we are again near the next skill available. Sadly my inscipter can't create some of the glyphs I would like to have... as such I have only the two most important: Corruption/Immolation heals me and Soulstone.

[mistformsquirrl]

Affliction, so far, is very very simple, but the ability to use Soulburn on Health Funnel makes my Voidwalker stupidly tough; and to top it off, if the VW actually dies, I can just summon another one instantly via Soulburn. It makes me feel kinda evil really - constantly sending Voidwalkers to their doom only to summon another one because, why not? They're disposable!

[The_Jackal]

Ring of Blood, Amphitheater of Anguish, Crucible of Carnage, Arena of Annihilation....what will Gurgthock and Wodin be running in WoD? The Stadium of Slaughter?

I'm voting for the Pit of Pain, though you could certainly justify just having the Ring of Blood again, since we're back on Draenor. Just make it less decrepit and ruinous.


I for one am glad. Heroics should be, well, heroic.

I'm fine with that, now that there's scenarios to fill in the gaps and make a step up from the regular punk-level dungeons. The problem with steep dungeon difficulties is that they're fine when you're rocking a 5 player guild premade, but in the pug queue, you're going to wipe over and over because you got paired with derps who can't figure out which direction the wind is blowing.


I have only played one Goblin and one Worgen because of those crappy starting zones, the Worgen one is tolerable but after doing the goblin one I never want to touch it again.

I REALLY hated the Goblin starting zone. The whole thing had a really irritating curated feel, the whole instanced nature of the zone and the way you're whisked from one quest hub to the next really undercuts the whole 'exploring a fun new world' aspect that brought me to MMO's in the first place.


Apparently RAF has it's downsides too

The biggest drawback of recruit-a-friend, in my opinion, is that it undercuts the very sense of investment and accomplishment that gets a player invested in their character. I've done RAF twice, with two different friends, and in both cases, they wound up at the level cap in virtually no time, with little understanding of their class, having seen none of the intervening instanced content, no professions, and suddenly dropped in the deep end of endgame trying to figure out how to play the game. Both dropped out after a relatively short period of befuddlement and frustration. And these people weren't non-gamers, they're veterans of a whole series of other MMO's.

[Mattarias, King.]

I'm voting for the Pit of Pain, though you could certainly justify just having the Ring of Blood again, since we're back on Draenor. Just make it less decrepit and ruinous.


"RING OF BLOOD 2: BLEED HARDER" :smallfurious:

....Yeah, I'm okay with this.

[Krazzman]

Level 62.

I would not say that indepth training with your class is needed after having this fast leveling experience but in most cases reading a guide and then applying that advice is only really feasible at level 85+ anyway.

One of our raiders had a RAF action with a buddy of mine and well at level 70 they stopped. Not because of understanding or other things but just the fact that he had no money to buy WotLK.

So far I only read a Destro guide and still have to train the use of Havoc and Fire and Brimstone more. In those lowlevel instances you would not really learn it even IF you were leveling at a normal pace.

We'll definitly bring them to level 85 but after that we have to see if we either level up something else or bring them to 90 first.

[mistformsquirrl]

As far as the Goblin and Worgen starting areas - I actually really liked them myself. That said, I tend to play MMOs as entirely solo affairs with other people primarily existing as backdrop/to stock the auction house. I also tend not to explore a great deal unless given an incentive of some kind - I just follow the stories basically.

That's actually one reason I'm hesitant with Warlords of Draenor - having the ability to make an instant level 90 is... eh to me; and yet the temptation would always be there. I suppose I may use it someday if I end up getting enough characters to the cap normally though.

[Krazzman]

As far as the Goblin and Worgen starting areas - I actually really liked them myself. That said, I tend to play MMOs as entirely solo affairs with other people primarily existing as backdrop/to stock the auction house. I also tend not to explore a great deal unless given an incentive of some kind - I just follow the stories basically.

That's actually one reason I'm hesitant with Warlords of Draenor - having the ability to make an instant level 90 is... eh to me; and yet the temptation would always be there. I suppose I may use it someday if I end up getting enough characters to the cap normally though.

I have 3 level 90 chars. Priest, Paladin, Druid + a level 85 Mage. Instantly leveling to 90 would be awesome for me as I already played 1 DK to 80, 2 DKs to 85 and another one to around 75.
My wife has Shaman, Priest, Hunter and DK at level 90. a 87 Druid and a 84 Paladin. I think she would be quite happy about an instant level 90 char too.

[mistformsquirrl]

Yeah, I can see that as being a very different situation than my own hehe. I have a 79 DK as my highest character, so I have a lot of stuff I haven't really messed with yet.

[Traab]

Yeah, I can see that as being a very different situation than my own hehe. I have a 79 DK as my highest character, so I have a lot of stuff I haven't really messed with yet.

Yeah ive got a lot of 90s myself, but most of your post was similar to my views. I actually like the lower level stuff. I like the stories, the adventure path, etc etc etc. That said, i have no problem with getting one of my lower level classes up to 90 because there are a couple I just havent been able to push through. My priest and paladin are both in hellfire penninsula for example. But my mage, hunter, dk (x2), rogue, warlock are all at 90, with a monk in pandaria (I havent played in awhile, forget his level)

[Krazzman]

Blasted right through BC. Managed Utgarde Keep so far (twice, once at level 69 without quests and again with quests).

But I think I am in need of training on how to use Chaos Bolt and other stuff. In instances I mostly don't use my embers except for a FIre and Brimstone Immolate/conflagrate here and there. And of course for Shadowburn. But I think Arcane mages are far more easy to play than Destro Warlock atm. COuld be the gear (fast leveling means less chance for useful drops at my iLevel range) but a non Accountbound mage usually has more DPS in thrashfights than me but my burst is higher for bossfights... still most of the time behind the tank in terms of DMG and she only has the XP bonus Heirlooms.

Tonight is raid... maybe. If they take us with them as 13 people accepted the Calendar invite. Going to see what comes of it. Maybe we start twinks on a PvE-PvP server (Dethecus) as 2 guys from our Pathfinder game play there.

[Psyren]

Your DPS will seem sucky until Cata when Mastery comes into play. Through Wrath, even healers will be doing competitive dps, e.g. Disc Priests, and tanks will be at or near the top of the charts thanks to Vengeance, which they got at level 10. So don't worry about your output before then, there's no real point.

[Seerow]

Your DPS will seem sucky until Cata when Mastery comes into play. Through Wrath, even healers will be doing competitive dps, e.g. Disc Priests, and tanks will be at or near the top of the charts thanks to Vengeance, which they got at level 10. So don't worry about your output before then, there's no real point.

Vengeance actually has relatively little effect. Tanks tend to do well because they get their AoE tools early and have their damage balanced around no mastery. Warrior tanks in particular get a double boost because they're also not balanced around Colossus Smash (a level 80 or 85 ability for both DPS warrior specs). Then there's the fact that tank and DPS gear is nearly identical (when it's different at all) until your mid 80s. You're simply not getting enough crit and haste in place of dodge/parry to make a meaningful difference.

Basically around level 20-30 tanks are doing their full DPS, while actual DPS specs are doing about half. It takes a long time before actual dps come into their own. I'm really hoping this is something that gets fixed with the expac.

[Krazzman]

My comparison wasn't really against Tank/Healer... more against other DPS specs.
Until around level 40 I was either short after my wife or above my wife in terms of damage. After that she pulled ahead with sometimes a Hunter/Disc above her.
In one of the late BC instances we got another warlock in our group and he either outdpsed me or I was right next to him. I think this might be because he never used his Curse while I used it on bosses.
Still need a way to learn how to time Havoc and for certain parts Fire and Brimstone as well as when to use Chaos bolt and so on. Mainly the stuff you only really learn while playing and getting the feel for the class.

[Psyren]

Basically around level 20-30 tanks are doing their full DPS, while actual DPS specs are doing about half. It takes a long time before actual dps come into their own. I'm really hoping this is something that gets fixed with the expac.

I don't think it needs to be fixed. Think about it, if tanks are feeling uber-awesome while leveling that just means more instances for everyone because tanks are typically the bottleneck in the queue. If I was leveling a dps class, I would be okay coming in below the tank on meters if it means I can fill those non-heirloom slots with blues and get the instance quests done.

[mistformsquirrl]

Ugh, something's* wrong with my internet and WoW is entirely unplayable at the moment because of it. Was just getting ready to farm some honor for some transmog gear for my Death Knight. I has a sad now. On the upside it shouldn't take too awful long to get said gear once I can get started.

Cannot wait for that sword... < ._.> one of the few in the game that looks like an actual runeblade (http://www.wowhead.com/item=51392/wrathful-gladiators-greatsword#.).

Speaking of DK... I'm tempted to respec to Blood and try to do some instances; I worry less about grouping if I'm firmly in control of it.

That said... how IS Blood as a spec for a DK? I've only played Unholy at present, kind of curious what some of the more experienced folks think of it.

*It cuts out every 5 to 15 minutes. I'm used to it cutting out once every couple hours or so (I have Comcast, they're terrible), but never, ever this frequently.

[Psyren]

Blood is awesome in 5-mans. You have no problems holding aggro and blood shields (your mastery) are great passive mitigation. There's also something just cool about tanking with a 2-hander. They have a lot of self-healing too so feel free to solo old content.

No idea how easy or hard they are in raiding, but then any tank is viable with enough skill these days.

[Ionbound]

Hey, I really want to try WoW, but almost everything I've seen about it seems really competitive, and I'm only really interested in the lore and stories. Any advice?

[The Glyphstone]

Hey, I really want to try WoW, but almost everything I've seen about it seems really competitive, and I'm only really interested in the lore and stories. Any advice?

Unless you're in a max-end raiding guild or looking to do serious PvP arena, WoW is pretty much the anti-thesis of 'competitive'. You can more-or-less play through the entire game up to max level without ever teaming up with or going against another player at this point, exploring everything and doing quests written as if you were the only hero in the world instead of one out of six million.

You'll find a lot of people willing to extend a Recruit-A-Friend invitation to you, because they get a special mount reward if you sign up and enjoy the game enough to keep playing - this comes with a triple-XP bonus whenever you and your Recruiter are grouped, but I'd avoid doing that (the grouping) if you want to experience the lore, since you will gain levels faster than you complete storylines.

[Icewraith]

Hey, I really want to try WoW, but almost everything I've seen about it seems really competitive, and I'm only really interested in the lore and stories. Any advice?

Try it! Just keep in mind that the leveling curve is a tad compressed, so you may out-level a zone before you finish it. There's nothing stopping you from completing the zone, though, if that's what you care about. You might even want to step into the 5-man dungeon queue to see some of that content, remember that some people in there are speed-leveling alts to 90 and are the very definition of "competitive" - they may not appreciate you dawdling.

"Hi I'm a completely new player so please bear with me" usually suffices.

[Psyren]

Everyone should sacrifice months of their life give WoW a try at least once. As Yahtzee said, "I admit somewhat grudgingly that WoW is about as good as MMOs are going to get."

You don't have to stick with it, but it is a very well-designed game that will give you a much better frame of reference for any other MMO you choose to try.

[Traab]

Blood is awesome in 5-mans. You have no problems holding aggro and blood shields (your mastery) are great passive mitigation. There's also something just cool about tanking with a 2-hander. They have a lot of self-healing too so feel free to solo old content.

No idea how easy or hard they are in raiding, but then any tank is viable with enough skill these days.

I triple backup the old content point. It is hilariously easy to solo old content. My dk was able to solo crazy good in old dungeons with basically ah and some scenario blues. It was nice to finally get around to exploring the really old content I never got the chance to see because I stopped raiding before tbc came out.

[Krazzman]

Seems likely that we abandon ship.

Talked to raid/guildlead tonight due to us again being excluded from the raid.

The reason was apparently that we were both not there if the other can't make it (mainly due to being in the same place as the other). And they needed to take randoms with them and are fed up. He doesn't know how to handle it atm but we have been replaced. Mage and Restoshaman are now in the raidpool.

Due to having friends on Dethecus we started chars there. I have all my heirlooms there now and we start with a Warlock/other again.
So far she has a Hunter.
Going to see how we will take this due to the Dethecus being a PvP server and so on...

[Karoht]

Hey, I really want to try WoW, but almost everything I've seen about it seems really competitive, and I'm only really interested in the lore and stories. Any advice?
-Do not play on an RP server until you have a comfortable grasp of the game.
-Do every quest you can find, even if you greatly outlevel it.
-Read all the quest text. All of it. Every time.
-Try PvP a few times. Do every battleground at least once. Some of them are genuinely fun. I'm personaly a fan of Silvershard Mines, Arathi Basin will always have a special place in my heart (I drowned 3 Gnomes there, all Rogues).
-Play whatever class you want to play the way you want to play it. Everything is viable these days. Everything. Even leveling as a healer is viable.
-Do Dungeons only when you get a quest taking you there. Don't worry about level requirements or anything, the minute you have a quest for it, even if you are 20+ levels above it, do it anyway.
-When you hit max level, do Scenarios first, then dungeons. When you are geared (and it is really easy to get geared up enough to enter raids these days) go do LFR, ignore everyone in Raid chat unless they are telling you something useful. Otherwise, focus on all the character interactions and boss talk and other lore points.
-If ever you say to yourself "hey, who is this character they are talking about" go to wowpedia.org and search for her/him right away. Trust me. Same goes for any special weapons they mention (For example, Quel'Delar and Quel'Sanar each have interesting stories behind them) or any story events that sound unfamiliar.
-Don't buy gear off the Auction House. Ever. Trust me, it's all junk. And it is particularly unnecessary to someone who is more focused on the lore, less focused on the raiding/pvp. My caveat to this is, when you can enter LFR, be enchanted and gemmed up They're pretty easy to come by, and next expansion it will actually be a lot less complicated, more choices but a bit less focus on optimal choices. Especially your weapon. They make a huge difference.
-I find that to learn fights prior to entering LFR, just take a bit of time, open up the dungeon journal, and just read a few bosses you are about to take on. LFR is divided up into sections, a section is usually 3-4 bosses at a time. You don't have to memorize things, just get a rough idea of what to look for.
And always assume that if you are standing in something that looks bad, it's probably bad. If you have red numbers coming out of your head, and you are standing in something that looks bad, it is bad, move out of it.
-The road is long, and at the end you realize, the competition is really only as competative as you make it. If you only go into LFR/Flex mode to see the raids once or twice and take in the story, then as long as the boss dies, you all won. Just don't compare yourself against anyone, unless you choose to because you want to do something better. And if things feel too competative, back off for a bit.
-Have you read any of the books? If you haven't and want a recommendation, check under the spoiler tab.

-War of the Ancients Trillogy, for for no other reason than to read about the awesome Broxigar Saurfang. It is the only book by Richard A Knaak I will recommend, ever.
-Rise of the Horde. REALLY recommended given the upcoming expansion.
-The Shattering, to really get the personal impact of the Cataclysm, and to get the story of Garrosh's rise to Warchief, and all the sorrid details related to it.
-Thrall: Twilight of the Aspects is an excellent read, a great adventure. I've heard good things about Dawn of the Aspects but haven't read it yet.
-Tides of Darkness and Shadow's of the Horde really nead to be read back to back.
-Warcraft Archives has 4 stories in it, totally worth reading, one by Chris Metzen all about Tirion Fordring.
-In regards to Richard Knaak, I mentioned Dawn of the Aspects already. He's the author, and thus the reason I haven't read it yet. Most of his work isn't great. I hear tell that Wolfheart is downright aweful, but if you must know the tale of Varian Wrynn/Lo'gosh, read it at your own discression.


This is all coming from a Top 100 US Hardcore Progression Raider. You know, those strawman elitists you hear about from time to time who supposedly make everything so competative and ruin the game from time to time.

[Icewraith]

-Do not play on an RP server until you have a comfortable grasp of the game.

[snip generally useful good advice, although the stuff about LFR seems a tad premature-especially if your advice regarding ALL OF THE QUESTS is taken]

This is all coming from a Top 100 US Hardcore Progression Raider. You know, those strawman elitists you hear about from time to time who supposedly make everything so competative and ruin the game from time to time.

I'm curious as to what's behind that first point.

The last bit made me chuckle. I get what you're saying, but I think you're also trying to open an unlocked door with dynamite. :smalltongue:

[Psyren]

Seems likely that we abandon ship.

Talked to raid/guildlead tonight due to us again being excluded from the raid.

The reason was apparently that we were both not there if the other can't make it (mainly due to being in the same place as the other). And they needed to take randoms with them and are fed up. He doesn't know how to handle it atm but we have been replaced. Mage and Restoshaman are now in the raidpool.

Due to having friends on Dethecus we started chars there. I have all my heirlooms there now and we start with a Warlock/other again.
So far she has a Hunter.
Going to see how we will take this due to the Dethecus being a PvP server and so on...

Ahh guild drama, one of my favorite reasons to cancel

[Karoht]

I'm curious as to what's behind that first point.
RP groups sometimes are itchy about certain class abilities. IE-Warlock Doomguard is restricted in an RP group a friend of mine plays in, for story reasons. The logic is that Warlocks are untrusted, and as such as they rise in power they must prove they can be trusted with certain abilities. It was a big enough deal that when he popped out a Doomguard (might have been another summon, long time since I touched my Warlock) in a city, a few people freaked out on him. He's a pretty calm person, very difficult to rattle, but even he described this as "People flipped their [pool] about it," which is just not fun for someone new to the game to deal with.

It's hard enough to learn to play the game, learn all the RP rules of the server and the RP group you fall in with, learn the chat system and get all your common macros all figured out, without knowing in advance what all of your abilities and buttons do or being familiar with the interface. Therefore in my opinion it is typically easier to learn the game on your own before you try and find an RP group on an RP server.

[Shishnarfne]

I'm curious as to what's behind that first point.


Well, given that I've been on Moon Guard (the largest population US RP server) for a few years now, I have a few guesses as to why you might want to read up on the official lore first:

1) Sometimes, you might see "RP elitists" who will criticize people for "not acting consistent with their character." These people are usually easy enough to ignore.

Edit: It looks like this may have been the reason, looks like my mind-reading abilities are off.

2) I don't know what it is, but Moon Guard draws a lot of trolls into the most popular chat channels. I can't speak for other RP servers.

3) Some people want to write themselves into the lore of Azeroth as major participants. These people congregate to RP servers. These people may be vocal about exactly how important their character is to everything and give a skewed view of the "story" present in World of Warcraft.

I suspect that given the expressed interest in learning the "stories and lore" of the game, that reason 3 is a very solid reason to not roll on an RP server (disregard if you have friends on such a server willing to help walk you through why the guild claiming to be the governing voice of Dalaran is not the best source for Kirin Tor lore).

Unrelated: I'm worried about feeling a hair burned out on WoW at the moment. My guild is 9/14 H, and my Blood DK is one of the two tanks (and number 3 is the alt of one our top DPS), so I don't want to take a step back, because I worry it will slow progression, but I don't spend nearly as much time on it as I frequently have. Maybe pushing my Prot Warrior alt through the battleground stage of the Wrathion quest chain left me a bit worn out, maybe it's other issues. I feel like I either have to talk to my guild about stepping back, or I have to find a way to make the game "fun" again.

It's not been easy for me to push my alts through the Wrathion quest chain, partially because LFR feels like a chore to me (relative to guild groups), but I feel kind of bad for not pushing to get the amazing rewards for my other characters.

[Karoht]

To be clear, I'm not saying one should not roll on an RP server. I'm saying not to do so until one feels ready to.

[Kislath]

I've been out of the game for over 6 months, but every now and then I log in to download the latest patches.

Question: When I'm ready to start playing again, I plan to have someone scroll-of-rez me. My subscription ran out in July, but will my having kept my game patched make me ineligible for a scroll of resurrection?

[Karoht]

I've been out of the game for over 6 months, but every now and then I log in to download the latest patches.

Question: When I'm ready to start playing again, I plan to have someone scroll-of-rez me. My subscription ran out in July, but will my having kept my game patched make me ineligible for a scroll of resurrection?
Nope. It's based on your subscription, not the software downloaded.
Do you have someone lined up to give you the scroll? I'll offer myself if needed.

@Firedaemon33
Speaking of which, would you like a Recruit-a-friend bonus? You get a spiffy mount and I think you get an additional month free or something. PM me if you want a hookup.

[Kislath]

Hey, thanks! It'll still be awhile before I can play again, but when I do, I'll call you for a rez.

[Krazzman]

Ahh guild drama, one of my favorite reasons to cancel

Yeah... except not really.

Hmm let's see if I get a complete telling of my history with avoid together.

WotLK ICC, finding a 25man raid for a friend (Holy Paladin, later Mage) and me(Spriest).
Getting my now wife to leave her Progress Guild to join us as she has more fun with me anyways.
Cata launches. 25man crumbles to an unstable 10 man an we manage to get some Heroic Bosses down. 2/5 BoT, 5/6 BWD and ??/2 To4W.
Firelands launches:Raid reshapes due to raidlead leaving. Rogue becomes Guildlead, Mage (former Holy Paladin) becomes Raidlead.
Near end of Firelands Raidlead is responsible for people leaving. Have no fun and my now wife and I are taking a break.
Fast forward through Dragonsoul and our stay in the Allianceguild Drachengold.
Back to avoid now on Blackhand (former Forscherliga) and leveling. (Mage is still butthurt for us leaving during firelands).
MoP former guildlead is back and roughly after MSV 6/6 nhc and HoF 3/6 nhc we break up and form acute a 25 man guild with former Guildlead, Mage and some others.
Gimping around that whole content. ToT we break after some serious wiped on Tortos and go back to avoid. Mage is vehemently against avoid.guildlead taking us back.
We apologise and Raid with them.
SoO launches and the Mage comes back after being thrown out of acute.
Guildharmony drops significantly. Mage becomes defacto Raidlead again.
We beat some HC's and due to falling outs have to take Randoms with us.
Randoms get's loot that would mean a SIGNIFICANT improvement for our healer (my wife). (ToT HC(could be nhc too) ring against Warforged HC Ring from Immerseus, BIS for shaman afaik)
We have an appointment and can't come in on a Thursday to raid (declined calendar invite)
On a Saturday we can finally log in again and decline(Sat around 6pm to 7pm) the calendar invite for sunday(8pm).
Sunday my wife goes to a Karnevalistic Dance Tournament. Her parents invited her. I am at home but still not feeling well.
Next Thursday we are automatically set to OUT for both Thursday and Sunday and we decline for Tuesday.
This Thursday we were accepted but not confirmed until Thursday itself. Again we are set to OUT (for Sunday too).
We ask our Guidllead about it. He tells us that he doesn't know how to proceed as he doesn't want the progression of our HC kills to stall.
His reasoning is that when one of us can't participate that the other isn't available. And this would force taking randoms which jeopardizes the whole heroic progression.
Because friends of us (Dming our Pathfinder games) felt that we have some problems in their guild they tried to recruit us. I am torn. My wife thinks this is a good idea as the would probably be more motivated if she hasn't to heal with the Mage(who rerolled Holy Priest in our Disc, Shadow setup... yes there were 3 priests in a 10man heroic raid).

I think this is a good summary of our Drama.

Now again leveling a Warlock... we will level to around level 30, gift us each the levels we gained with our Warlock/Warrior combination and then from 62 on she will use her DK and I will advance my warlock and afterwards I level my DK and she will level her whatever she will play with my warlock.

God I hate this stuff...

Any recommendation on how to get Gold on a new server fast? Because I won't be having any Farming professions... until I trans my Druid (Herbalism and Alchemy) or my Paladin (Mining and Blacksmithing).

[Delusion]

RP groups sometimes are itchy about certain class abilities. IE-Warlock Doomguard is restricted in an RP group a friend of mine plays in, for story reasons. The logic is that Warlocks are untrusted, and as such as they rise in power they must prove they can be trusted with certain abilities. It was a big enough deal that when he popped out a Doomguard (might have been another summon, long time since I touched my Warlock) in a city, a few people freaked out on him. He's a pretty calm person, very difficult to rattle, but even he described this as "People flipped their [pool] about it," which is just not fun for someone new to the game to deal with.


Back when I played I played on RP servers. I have only seen people complain about someone having demon out when the warlock had a demon out in middle of Stormwind and was rping at that moment. And the complaints were strictly IC anyway. People who are not actively rping that moment tend to be ignored.

Besides in my experience most rp guilds are very helpful to the newbies. So if someone wants to start on a RP server, I would dissuade them from it.

A good guild is a must though.

Edit: Was thinking about coming back to WoW in WoD because I had heard rumours about mythic dungeons, (I don't really have ability to schedule around proper raids), but then I heard that it was just a suggestion and that while heroic dungeons will be harder than MoP, just I'd propably end up outgearing them after having fun for 2-3 months which means I'd propably not have enough PvE content that interests after that.

[Psyren]

Any recommendation on how to get Gold on a new server fast? Because I won't be having any Farming professions... until I trans my Druid (Herbalism and Alchemy) or my Paladin (Mining and Blacksmithing).

Any particular reason why not? Because farming professions are definitely the best way to make money on a new server.



Edit: Was thinking about coming back to WoW in WoD because I had heard rumours about mythic dungeons, (I don't really have ability to schedule around proper raids), but then I heard that it was just a suggestion and that while heroic dungeons will be harder than MoP, just I'd propably end up outgearing them after having fun for 2-3 months which means I'd propably not have enough PvE content that interests after that.

I'm inclined to agree but I'll wait and see what the new Scenarios have to offer.

[mistformsquirrl]

It's not big money, but I've made reasonable sums just selling the cloth I get from killing humanoid mobs on the AH. It was enough for me to get some useful glyphs on my Warlock and DK. That said, that's just on Wyrmrest Accord, I dunno about other servers.

[Zherog]

Been a while since I've done it, but auctioneer helped me make money on the past. You'll need to get some "seed" money to start, though. For a few days, simply let auctioneer scan the AH to build up some data. Four is probably OK, but if you can go a week that's even better.

Then use auctioneer to find items - any items - that are listed way below what it determines to be the market price on your server. Buy those items, then relist them at market price.

For example, maybe a stack of silk cloth sells for 2.5g on your server. You see a stack out there for 1g. Assuming you can afford it, you buy it then relist it for 2.4g - just a hair under market; auctioneer will give you a suggested price.

Early on, when your funds are a bit low, it's best to stick to crafting mats - I've always found cloth to be especially reliable, but herbs and ores also sell well enough. Be wary of enchants; while you can turn them around for more money, quite a few will require you to list it several times before you get a sale. And that's just money that you've tied up that could be used for other stuff.

If you can take enchantment on the new character, you can also keep an eye on the AH for cheap greens, DE them, then list the mats. Just be sure of your conversion before buying. For example, if spirit dust sells for 1g and the item you're looking it DEs into 1-2 spirit dust and costs 1.5g, that's not a good buy. If that same item costs .5g, it's a good deal - especially if you get lucky and get to dusts out of it.


Plus, with enchantment, you DE all the quest rewards you can't use and the green junk you find out in the wild. Even if you just take enchantment for a while then drop it for something else later, it can be a money-maker just from DE'ing junk.


However, with the amount of money that flows out of quests and such now, I don't know if it's really necesary any longer to play the AH for cash.

[Icewraith]

I think it is- questing money generally gets you to the point you can afford the next tier of flying + one half or less of a piece of current raid tier crafted epics.

If you start ignoring the AH, like I have for most of the last several patches, you start off with a really healthy gold cushion but it slowly depletes due to reforges, enchants, gemming, consumables, legendary cloak quest chain mats, etc.

If you keep up with the AH, you can eventually grab the repair/reforge yak - super handy, but I log on to raid nowadays and that's about it.

[ryuplaneswalker]

Back when I played I played on RP servers. I have only seen people complain about someone having demon out when the warlock had a demon out in middle of Stormwind and was rping at that moment. And the complaints were strictly IC anyway. People who are not actively rping that moment tend to be ignored.


God I hate that on RP servers. "Warlocks are outlawed by the alliance and horde...except they are really not" is one of the dumbest bits of lore in the game, especially when the Gear vendors were in the capital cities.

Gear NPC : "hello stormwind gaurd, how are you today"

Stormwind gaurd "Hello Gear NPC and your 10 sets of armor...hey there are only 9 classes, why do you have 10 different sets of armor."

Gear NPC : "Oh that are just for show"

*warlock walks in* "Give me one warlock tier-11 head"

[Psyren]

God I hate that on RP servers. "Warlocks are outlawed by the alliance and horde...except they are really not" is one of the dumbest bits of lore in the game, especially when the Gear vendors were in the capital cities.

Gear NPC : "hello stormwind gaurd, how are you Stormwind gaurd "Hello Gear NPC and your 10 sets of armor...hey there are only 9 classes, why do you have 10 different sets of armor."

Gear NPC : "Oh that are just for show"

*warlock walks in* "Give me one warlock tier-11 head"

To be fair, the original fluff was that they were indeed taboo - which is why you always found them in basements and the like. Cleft of Shadow in Org, Slaughtered Calf in SW, basement of Goldshire etc. Back in those days it was fun to roleplay a "mage" who would run off to the cellar all the time and never seemed to cast any ice spells.

Now everybody is over it - there are lock trainers standing out in broad daylight e.g. in the human starting area right next to the church, not to mention Ironforge where a whole faction of Warlocks joined the city pretty openly. Locks have proven their value to Azeroth in every expansion and in some societies (e.g. Ironforge) have even risen to prominent status. Both factions seem to have realized that (a) there's worse out there than the Legion, at least for the moment and (b) having individuals who both understand the legion and can throw their forces into disarray is useful.

[The_Jackal]

Any recommendation on how to get Gold on a new server fast? Because I won't be having any Farming professions... until I trans my Druid (Herbalism and Alchemy) or my Paladin (Mining and Blacksmithing).

I've always made the case that you're better off just leveling straight to the cap and then doing quests to get a chunk of seed money for your professions/gold farming scheme. Never has this been more true than in MoP (http://www.wowhead.com/guide=1490/exploration-guide-riches-of-pandaria).

[Ionbound]

Just out of curiosity, is there a GitP guild? And Karoht, the Recruit-a-friend sounds good. I'll send you a PM when I get the free time and hardware to start.

[Krazzman]

The reason why not is: I am unsure wether to go Alchemy/Tailoring or Alchemy/Enchanting with my Warlock.

Krazzman is TransAlch/Enchanter and I really like it. I won't go away from being an Alchemist... double duration for Flasks is just too convenient for me.

I have currently 15 Gold (combined between Warlock and DK) and never really used auctioneer... mostly because I find it boring and didn't really get auctioneer to work like I wanted it to...

[Karoht]

Just out of curiosity, is there a GitP guild? And Karoht, the Recruit-a-friend sounds good. I'll send you a PM when I get the free time and hardware to start.Not really, but most of the content is now available across realms meaning you can be on server X in guild Y and we can still play in raid/dungeon/scenario Z.

[Prince Gimli]

With regards to moneymaking while leveling - a very simple, straightforward and easy way is to take two gathering professions and just cart everything you gather to the Auction House. Sure it might not make you as rich as some endgame moneymaking plans, but it is a steady flow of income, providing plenty of gold for getting your mount trainings and bigger bags and such. 16 slot Netherweave Bags tend to go for fairly cheap - it is so awesome to have so much inventory space early on.

And I have not done this myself because I stopped playing before I got really involved in endgame content, but the idea is to ditch one or both gathering professions when you hit the level cap and then use the gold you earned to powerlevel one or two crafting professions of your choice. Or I suppose you could keep one max-level character to farm materials for your characters who run two crafting professions.

Just some food for thought from my own experience :). I found it superconvenient, especially for my first character on a new server.

[Zherog]

The reason why not is: I am unsure wether to go Alchemy/Tailoring or Alchemy/Enchanting with my Warlock.

Krazzman is TransAlch/Enchanter and I really like it. I won't go away from being an Alchemist... double duration for Flasks is just too convenient for me.

OK, so then for now go alch / enchant. Even if you ditch enchanting for tailing later, you can still use it to make money in the short term; think of all the quest greens and blues you've sold to vendors, for example.


I have currently 15 Gold (combined between Warlock and DK) and never really used auctioneer... mostly because I find it boring and didn't really get auctioneer to work like I wanted it to...

It can be boring, for sure. Back the last time cared about - which is at least going back to WotLK - scanning the AH took about 10-15 minutes each time. (time varies, certainly, by your server and your PC.) Auctioneer will show a column that is the percentage different from the market price. So if something has a market of 1g and it's listed for 50s, that column will have 50% in it. You can also (as I recall) search by that percentage. So you could search for everything that was 0-33% of market. From there, scroll through for the best deals - again, mats are best. Then another few minutes listing them back on the AH and you're done.

The first week is tough, because you want to let auctioneer build up good data to determine market prices. And so that's 10-15 minutes each time that you'd rather be doing something else. After that, I would run a scan when I was in a city and didn't care about 10-15 minutes. For example, I would log on right before getting my kids ready for bed and start a scan, just to keep prices current. I spent my Sunday mornings doing the purchasing while drinking my morning coffee. That would take about a half hour or so.

There's definitely a time investment, but it's not too terrible if you can find scan times where you can walk away and let it work.

[Traab]

Nobody ever bothers me on my rp server,my poor gnome rogue Stabbymcgee is so lonely. I get very few tells, or guild invites. I think its my cologne. Luckily his warlock cousin Scabbymcgeee is there with his priest brother Healymcgee to keep him company. He has an adopted son, a dwarf warrior named Rendalthor, but we dont talk about him.


With regards to moneymaking while leveling - a very simple, straightforward and easy way is to take two gathering professions and just cart everything you gather to the Auction House. Sure it might not make you as rich as some endgame moneymaking plans, but it is a steady flow of income, providing plenty of gold for getting your mount trainings and bigger bags and such. 16 slot Netherweave Bags tend to go for fairly cheap - it is so awesome to have so much inventory space early on.

And I have not done this myself because I stopped playing before I got really involved in endgame content, but the idea is to ditch one or both gathering professions when you hit the level cap and then use the gold you earned to powerlevel one or two crafting professions of your choice. Or I suppose you could keep one max-level character to farm materials for your characters who run two crafting professions.

Just some food for thought from my own experience :). I found it superconvenient, especially for my first character on a new server.


This. So much this. Every time I go to a new server, my first char is a miner/skinner. I usually have full netherweave bags by the time I hit 15. Its mainly the copper bars that go for so much, but the leather is usually worth several gold a stack and its free extra loot. I do check the ah for upgrades, but only because every once in awhile there will be something good for cheap. Takes like an extra 30 seconds after putting up your bars and leather to do a quick scan of each slot.

[Zherog]

Yeah, I do agree skinning is a good money-maker; you're going to be killing all those animals anyway - not to mention all the carcasses other people have left behind.

[Traab]

Yeah, I do agree skinning is a good money-maker; you're going to be killing all those animals anyway - not to mention all the carcasses other people have left behind.

lol I love wandering around places where someone has been killing animals for a quest or whatever and not skinning. Especially if you join a random high level guild and get the gathering bonus. Its scary how fast your bags will fill up just following those guys slaughtering yetis in hillsbrad for example. Hell, in that cave its the mother lode, there are like 6 fairly fast spawning mine nodes on top of all the easy leather.

[Karoht]

Wanna farm a pet worth 5K and a ton of leather at the same time?
There is a spot where a bunch of horses go by as part of a circuit. Work backwards from whereever you find them all the way back to the spawn point. Spam an AoE on that spawn point (magma totem works well, chain lightning to pick off the stragglers), every 3 seconds a new bunch of them just dies. They have a high chance to drop one of the tabby cats (worth 5-10K depending on the market), and you can skin them all. I found that if you killed them on the spawn point for a minute or two, then spent the time looting and skinning, by the time the area was clean they would be back again.
You'll get medium and heavy leather, and by the time you fill your bags with leather (just drop everything that isn't leather, trust me) you'll probably have 3 pets to go along with it. I did this for about a week straight, made about 100K, spent it on a mount. Boring and somewhat tedious, but the results are hard to beat.

There is also quest mob who pats through that area, has a knockback, respawns rapidly. He's rather annoying as that knockback is an aoe and autohits. So here's you channeling Blizzard on the spawn point, boom you are knocked back. And the AoE radius is pretty high.

[The Glyphstone]

Wanna farm a pet worth 5K and a ton of leather at the same time?
There is a spot where a bunch of horses go by as part of a circuit. Work backwards from whereever you find them all the way back to the spawn point. Spam an AoE on that spawn point (magma totem works well, chain lightning to pick off the stragglers), every 3 seconds a new bunch of them just dies. They have a high chance to drop one of the tabby cats (worth 5-10K depending on the market), and you can skin them all. I found that if you killed them on the spawn point for a minute or two, then spent the time looting and skinning, by the time the area was clean they would be back again.
You'll get medium and heavy leather, and by the time you fill your bags with leather (just drop everything that isn't leather, trust me) you'll probably have 3 pets to go along with it. I did this for about a week straight, made about 100K, spent it on a mount. Boring and somewhat tedious, but the results are hard to beat.

There is also quest mob who pats through that area, has a knockback, respawns rapidly. He's rather annoying as that knockback is an aoe and autohits. So here's you channeling Blizzard on the spawn point, boom you are knocked back. And the AoE radius is pretty high.

What zone is that?

[otakuryoga]

What zone is that?

hillsbrad...though i believe they fixed that so the horses no longer drop anything

i saw that discussed while researching how to get black tabby(one of just 3 pets needed for the zookeeper title)

another suggestion for the cat drop was guards at "i cant remember the name" but they dropped nothing at all when i tried them(as in...you dont even get a loot bag icon off of them)

so i just go from one end of beach to the other and repeat til im too bored to do another cycle....still no pet 8(

[Karoht]

They fixed that? Shame.

[The_Jackal]

OK, so then for now go alch / enchant. Even if you ditch enchanting for tailing later, you can still use it to make money in the short term; think of all the quest greens and blues you've sold to vendors, for example.

Let me offer a competing perspective. The most valuable resource when earning gold is YOUR time, which is why I think Alchemy/Tailoring is the move. Even if this toon isn't your main, or if you don't have time to sit down for some real AH trolling today, you can log in, do your combines, and log off. Plus, I like to always think toward the next expansion. When MoP is in the rear view mirror, you'll still be able to farm Sunsong Ranch, and do your Silk combine. 28 slot bags are still going to be in demand in Warlords of Draenor, make no mistake. I'm selling my bags for 2.7 to 3k, and I expect that price to inflate once the new content drops.

Now if this will be your surefire main, then by all means go Enchanting, but it's going to require a lot more micro-mangement in the AH, and the crafting table. The earning cap is higher too, but while you will get SOME dust and essence from quest greens and random drops, it likely won't sustain your skill ups past mid-vanilla. At that point YOU will be the one paying to skill your profession. Tailoring's startup costs aren't nearly as bad, in my experience.

[Delusion]

God I hate that on RP servers. "Warlocks are outlawed by the alliance and horde...except they are really not" is one of the dumbest bits of lore in the game, especially when the Gear vendors were in the capital cities.

Gear NPC : "hello stormwind gaurd, how are you today"

Stormwind gaurd "Hello Gear NPC and your 10 sets of armor...hey there are only 9 classes, why do you have 10 different sets of armor."

Gear NPC : "Oh that are just for show"

*warlock walks in* "Give me one warlock tier-11 head"

The funniest is the NPC just inside the Stormwind Cathedral who calls people by their class names when they enter.

Many lols where he had when in middle of rp he calls a "mage" a warlock :smallbiggrin:

[Krazzman]

I am unsure about enchanting.

On one hand I know that I won't like leveling it... on the other hand most questitems will be Cataclysm/MoP Items. And due to being unable to do stuff with it...
Another possibility would be Engineering (which would double as I can get an achievment out of it).

But I don't have a tailor and really need bigger bags... and I don't want to depend on someone else...

Our "moneyproblems" are more or less done on that server as a friend of us gave us some Netherweave bags.

[Traab]

hillsbrad...though i believe they fixed that so the horses no longer drop anything

i saw that discussed while researching how to get black tabby(one of just 3 pets needed for the zookeeper title)

another suggestion for the cat drop was guards at "i cant remember the name" but they dropped nothing at all when i tried them(as in...you dont even get a loot bag icon off of them)

so i just go from one end of beach to the other and repeat til im too bored to do another cycle....still no pet 8(

I got a cat carrier drop off one of the guards at that palisade area near dalaran crater. But that was back before they revamped the area. I wasnt even farming anything special, I think I had a quest. Or maybe I was just wandering, all I know is bang, cat carrier. Looked it up, saw it was worth 5k, and made an amusing "squee!!!!" noise when it actually did sell for that much. Only equaled by the time back in vanilla when epic ground mounts were hard to get, I was farming cloth in the masters cellar, an area where karazhan stood but wasnt a dungeon yet. Had been farming stack upon stack of cloth and selling it when boom, epic world drop neck item. (Amulet of cyerwyn?) Instantly done with farming and I could finally run really fast. YAY!

[Krazzman]

I still got no clue how to use Auctioneer but at least now I have 200 gold. And we are level 54.

It went pretty fast. Had some funny guys with us.

For example Stratholme with 3 Monks. The Tank played like a ADHS-victim on crack. Missed bosses, pulled double bosses while half of the trashpacks surrounding them still lived and so on.

But at least son my wife will take over tanking and I will just sitting there trying to churn out respectable DPS.

[mistformsquirrl]

Question everyone:

I've switched over to Blood DK, and I'm liking it - unfortunately I'm completely chicken when it comes to going into PVP.* So despite having some PVP gear I really want for transmogrification, I'm having a hard time getting myself to actually expend the effort.

However, I was reminded that there's another really cool sword model in the game that's entirely PVE, one that works for a runeblade quite well and has the added benefit (since this character is a Blood Elf) of being tied to the character's race. That of course being Quel'delar (http://www.wowhead.com/item=50048/queldelar-might-of-the-faithful).

The thing is, I have no idea if I can actually solo the questline at level 90 with reasonable gear. I know people have mentioned soloing old raids previously - and I'm able to knock out elites above my level with laughable ease already*** But I'd hate to get my hopes up if it's impossible/nigh impossible. (As silly as it is, 'looking cool' is one of the chief reasons I play MMOs; hence my rather bizarre single-minded focus in that direction.)

Still need to find some armor I like that isn't PVP-acquired.

*little rambling below*

I seriously wonder what goes through MMO armor designer's heads sometimes, not just in WoW but in other games too. I just did a stint in RIFT and despite being able to purchase a visual copy of almost any armor model in the game, I only found one set that I thought was 'decent' out of the entire lot. (I'm having similar difficulties in WoW shopping for good looking armor; and I had the same problem in SWTOR as well. And GW2. And Neverwinter. From the screenshots I've seen the same will likely be true in Wildstar too. Maybe I'm just too picky.)

*The one time I tried was a disaster, not just in terms of losing, but in terms of being screamed at the entire match by 3 different people for being a noob.**

**I effectively AM a newbie, at least at the level I'm at, this is my highest level WoW character ever, what exactly do they expect?

***In fact it's a twinge *too* easy to be honest. Leveling is so fast and easy that I don't feel like I'm really learning how to play my character beyond some very basic principles. I don't even have time to go through a full rotation on most elites. The only fight where I've felt the slightest concern was against Archbishop Landgren (sp?) during a recent quest against the Scarlet Onslaught; and he's supposed to be a 5-person quest objective.

[Seerow]

You're a blood DK. Quel'dalar is from WotLK content. It's faceroll easy, don't worry about it.

Your biggest issue is going to be getting the Battered Hilt to drop in the first place. It's a pretty rare drop, so it'll take a long while. But the questline itself should be a breeze.

[mistformsquirrl]

Awesome, thank you <o.o>b Sorry if I seem overly nervous, I just hate to set myself up for disappointment.

[Icewraith]

Quel'delar is from WotLK, so should be level 80. You ought to be fine at 90.

Regarding pvp, find someone to queue with who maybe knows what they are doing. You both have someone to watch your back and you learn from someone who hopefully knows what's up.

But in battlegrounds there's usually people calling other people noobs, it's sort of the ground state existence of being in a battleground. Until you know what's what, if you must queue solo to avoid being the person called a noob I'd just find someone with good gear that seems to know what they're doing, stick with them and support them.

Now that would be a lot more straightforward as a healing class, as a tanky class if you stay blood your best bet is probably going to be dpsing their target, interrupting hostile spellcasters/healers, and deathgripping opponents off them unless they're melee or getting swarmed. (Make sure you spread your diseases all over the place too.) If you end up in a flag carrying BG you have better survivability as a flag carrier but that's no good if you don't know where you're supposed to carry the flag to. Your damage output will probably be better as one of the other specs (IIRC frost has stuns and stuff so is probably the way to go for PVP, unless those got farmed out to the talent tree) but you will be squishier to compensate.

However, unless you're a flag carrier, nobody has a super good reason to attack you as a tank spec unless you're the only target, and you should never ever be by yourself in a BG unless you know what you're doing and have a really good reason.

When in doubt, if you see an enemy healer, kill it. Mobility is often life in pvp, your deathgrip is a superb way of controlling your opponents. Just don't deathgrip a squishy away from a warrior after he's charged it (it should be stunned for a bit and you can icy touch while closing the gap), but if you see a healer hanging out dpsing at range do deathgrip him into the melee (the forced movement will interrupt his cast), then when he starts casting again interrupt him before the cast is complete. For mages, hunters and their ilk, close to melee, force a blink/disengage, and THEN deathgrip them back to you.

[mistformsquirrl]

Useful advice Icewraith, thank you <^.^>

[The Glyphstone]

And the bigger the battleground, the less your individual contribution (or lack thereof) will be noticed...in Warsong Gulch, being down 9/10 to their 10/10 can matter. In EotS or Arathi Basin, being 14/15 to their 15/15 might matter, but you're more likely to slip through the cracks and not get yelled at specifically. In Alterac Valley, being 39/40 to their 40/40 is utterly irrelevant, especially since a quarter of both teams is likely to be outright AFK anyways, so you'll be above the average even with your terrible gear.

[otakuryoga]

yeah..PVP pretty much boils down to 2 types
1) the "professional" pvp'rs..those who live for PVP
2) everyone else...who go into PVP when FORCED to for a quest or get a notion that they want to "quickly" pop out the pvp achievements for completeness
and type 1 goes apoplectic when they get type 2 players on their team

[Icewraith]

Useful advice Icewraith, thank you <^.^>

No problem. As someone who had to learn the ins and outs of BGs with no previous gear or experience the hard way, I am happy to spare others at least some of the bottom end of the learning curve.


And the bigger the battleground, the less your individual contribution (or lack thereof) will be noticed...in Warsong Gulch, being down 9/10 to their 10/10 can matter. In EotS or Arathi Basin, being 14/15 to their 15/15 might matter, but you're more likely to slip through the cracks and not get yelled at specifically. In Alterac Valley, being 39/40 to their 40/40 is utterly irrelevant, especially since a quarter of both teams is likely to be outright AFK anyways, so you'll be above the average even with your terrible gear.

Now this here is absolutely not true. One person even in bad gear that knows what they're doing can be the deciding factor in a game if they get the opportunity and can exploit it. It only really comes out in fairly evenly matched games though. That's why I said don't go off by yourself unless you know what you're doing and have a good reason for doing so.

The classic example is one person back-capping in AV or AB, or (from a previous era and personal experience) the only person in the AV group in tank spec and gear making sure he gets to the other base so he can reliably tank and giving his team a huge advantage. (I've been exalted with the AV alliance faction since BC- the others are nowhere near close.)

I can think of a number of matches off hand where I was able to stop a key flag cap with something like a heroic leap-charge defender in range-heroic throw flag capper and stop their cap at the last second, for instance-or came back from a rez just in time to stop the cap and get killed again, but give the rest of the team time to rez at the cap point and not lose it.

The other reason I disagree has to do with why I recommended finding someone to run with, especially if you have vent or similar to coordinate with them.

One year I had finally gotten all the holiday achievements except the "kill 50 people as a father winter's helper", queuing as arms with fairly bad gear. I managed maybe 1-2 kills for eightish games until a disc priest buddy logged on. I think we maybe queued three more times after that - the trick is that you lose the buff you need for the rest of the match the first time you die iirc, so if you die early (and since you are a tiny winter festival gnome you are a target for anyone looking to inflict a little misery on the opposing side) you get next to no kills for the match.

Anyway, the point is that since I was pairing up with someone running a complimentary class who knew what he was doing (kind of), all of a sudden we started absolutely wrecking things. Even if you're fairly bad, teamwork can still be op if the bad people on the other team aren't using it and you are, assuming a roughly even skill distribution on both sides.

[The_Jackal]

I am unsure about enchanting.

On one hand I know that I won't like leveling it... on the other hand most questitems will be Cataclysm/MoP Items. And due to being unable to do stuff with it...
Another possibility would be Engineering (which would double as I can get an achievment out of it).

But I don't have a tailor and really need bigger bags... and I don't want to depend on someone else...

Our "moneyproblems" are more or less done on that server as a friend of us gave us some Netherweave bags.

Really, once you have bags, there's no real need for cash until you're paying for your flight training. Really, the best advice I can offer you is this: At the end of the day, gold is a waste-product from having fun. So treat your professions accordingly.


Anyway, the point is that since I was pairing up with someone running a complimentary class who knew what he was doing (kind of), all of a sudden we started absolutely wrecking things. Even if you're fairly bad, teamwork can still be op if the bad people on the other team aren't using it and you are, assuming a roughly even skill distribution on both sides.

Absolutely true. Even a small, under-geared group of players can make a huge impact on a large BG, if they do the right things and operate as a team. Of course, nothing is stopping the opposing party from doing the same thing, but odds are if they're not brand new, they'll be working on Rated anyway.

[Karoht]

However, I was reminded that there's another really cool sword model in the game that's entirely PVE, one that works for a runeblade quite well and has the added benefit (since this character is a Blood Elf) of being tied to the character's race. That of course being Quel'delar (http://www.wowhead.com/item=50048/queldelar-might-of-the-faithful).

The thing is, I have no idea if I can actually solo the questline at level 90 with reasonable gear.
The questline is a solo quest at 80.
Getting the Battered Hilt is the trickier part, as it is RNG dependant, or you can buy one from the auction house for anywhere from 5K-25K depending on your server. Or you can solo your way through Pits of Saron/Halls of Reflection on Heroic for one. And yes, you can solo your way through there with 90 greens and blues, with only marginal effort. As a DK, Blood Boil is going to murder most of the trash packs, and it is the trash packs that drop the quest item (Battered Hilt) in the first place.

Everything after that is designed to be solo 80 content, which you can verify on the wowhead article as well.

[mistformsquirrl]

Oh nice <o.o>; I guess I got the wrong impression due to where the Battered Hilt is acquired. Excellent.

[Karoht]

Oh nice <o.o>; I guess I got the wrong impression due to where the Battered Hilt is acquired. Excellent.
And even where it is acquired doesn't even require you to kill a boss.

On Heroic-Go in, kill trash until you get to the first boss. Don't kill first boss. Kill trash until you get to second boss. Don't kill second boss. Return to exit. Exit dungeon, hit 'reset all instances' go in again. As long as you don't kill a boss you don't get saved.

On Normal-You can full clear Pit of Saron, then exit the dungeon (via running back, don't take the portal). Exit dungeon, hit 'reset all instances' go in again. You can kill bosses but they don't actually have a better drop chance for the Hilt. As far as trash goes, after the second boss your chances of finding a Hilt will quickly decrease.

WARNING: You can only do this a certain number of times per hour before it will say that you have spawned too many instances, at which point you will be unable to enter ANY instaces, not even LFR. This status will go away in about 20-30 minutes, depending on how fast you moved and how many you made before you got the message. So either make it the last thing you do before logging off, or don't anticipate doing any other instance based content for 30-minutes to an hour.

Also, I think you can get Battered Hilt to drop from Northrend trash mobs as well, particularly around the... I want to say Shadow Forges? Or something like that. But, they may have changed that a while back. Check the wowhead.com entry for Battered Hilt for further details.

[mistformsquirrl]

Thanks Karoht, that's very useful info for me!

[Icewraith]

I'm not sure how nasty any cc or damage the mobs in those instances will do, but you should have something like 20 or 30x the health a tank at the time would have had, and dks have great self healing.

Also, mobs in instances don't reset. Pull everything if you can, find somewhere to hide behind to los the casters, aoe it all down, and loot if possible. Clear out your bags first. If nothing else you should be making quite a bit of gold off of grays, cloth, and green trash drops.

One more thing- it may be faster to just hearth out and fly back instead of running back out, depending on the closest place you can set your hearthstone.

[ryuplaneswalker]

Since it has been brought up, I just want to reminisce that..Quel'delar, Might of the Faithful was my first epic weapon.

[The_Jackal]

That was an awesome weapon, I had one too. Though my FIRST Epic Weapon was The Unstoppable Force. Man, I had some fun rampaging through battlegrounds with that evil pighammer.

[Krazzman]

No time to play yesterday.

About Quel'Delar... I saw the battered hilt drop twice. Both times someone got it that was already on that quest.

We tried to farm it once in a group... went in an killed every thrashpack in Pit of Saron before we would engage the First Boss then go out again.

@Professions:
The Warlock has Alchemy and Tailoring for now. A Guildmate gave me 6 netherweave bags (16slots) being Revered for Orcs and Trolls gives me another two 16slot bags.
I have 200 Gold on the Warlock now.

@Raid:
avoid organizes it's Raid via ingame calendar invites... apparently the invites for next ID are gone for both Krazzman and Yuvati (according to battle.net) and we declined for the ID after that.
The time with them definitly seems over and I'll ask my wife if we transport our chars to Dethecus (a PvP Server) now.

@Goldmaking:
So far the AH brought me around 130 Gold on Dethecus. Solely through selling woolcloth for ~40 gold (and being lucky with a blingtron that gave me a Gemstone I could sell for 70 Gold).

[mistformsquirrl]

Hrm, well - I started doing dailies for the Netherwing today, because until I can get my ideal mount*, a Netherwing Drake would be pretty darn nice. (I'm really tired of my Imperial Quillen. It serves me well, but it just doesn't suit this character at all.)

It's very easy stuff, but I'm too lazy to spend a lot of time hunting the eggs down (If I find them, great, if not, meh), so it'll be a couple weeks before I can get Exalted with them I think. Worth it though, and it doesn't even take long, so that's nice.

Also figured out what armor I want - Conquerer's Dark Runed Battlegear (http://www.wowhead.com/transmog-set=499) Will be awhile before I can even make my attempt; but from what I've read it's definitely possible to get it. The hard part is getting the best bit... the shoulders.

*edit* I'm an idiot and must have gotten sidetracked into a seperate article, they're from Yogg-Saron not Thorim. <. .> I am dumb.

So that armor, + Quel'delar and riding an Onyx Netherdrake < ._.> I will feel stylish.

Also very much looking forward to building a Garrison come WoD. It sounds like it's rolling a lot of my favorite features from several other games into one, which is pretty cool < ._.>

*After much looking on WoWhead, I decided that someday, I'm going to try to get Invincible from the Lich King. I know it won't be anytime soon however - first I have to get enough power to actually beat him, which probably won't be soon, and then it's a very low drop chance... Worth it though. It has to be one of the two coolest looking mounts in the game for a Death Knight imo (Which makes sense given the source heh) <. .>

[The_Jackal]

@Goldmaking:
So far the AH brought me around 130 Gold on Dethecus. Solely through selling woolcloth for ~40 gold (and being lucky with a blingtron that gave me a Gemstone I could sell for 70 Gold).

This is exactly the thing I'm on about when I say that gold is a waste product of having fun.

When you're max level, do Tillers' dailies to unlock all your Sunsong Ranch plots and crops. That's probably your single best source of easy money. Then head out to Timeless Isle and do the intro loop, then Path of the Mistwalker and A Timeless Question every day. The quests are fast and easy, and doing them will also net you a fair chunk of BoA timeless gear in the doing. That's 75 gold, a chunk of Timeless Coins, and a bit of Shaohao rep every day.

I've already posted the link for the Riches of Pandaria guide, but another thing you can do for handy, fun cash is to finish off all the yellow quests in all the leveling zones you didn't get to. The rewards from them will include some greens to disenchant/vendor, and between 19 and 25 gold. It's quite profitable, nets you some cheevo's, and is a heck of a lot more fun than parking in the AH running scripts.

[Seerow]

I dropped 2 battered hilts when they were new, but at the time I was raiding ICC25 and had a better weapon already. I sold them both, because they were going for 25k even then, and back then 25k was a lot more than it is now. I also helped a guildy drop one during early cata because she wanted the achieve.

[Icewraith]

Old raids aren't as profitable as they once were (especially Kara), but you can still get good chunks of gold selling transmog gear from them, and they have built-in 1-2k gold drops depending on how saturated your AH is.

Of course, the transmog gear you want from the old raid quite often is the stuff that would sell the best from it, but still. No way was I going to AH my Exalted chest piece when it finally dropped.

[ryuplaneswalker]

When I was on an RP server, I transferred this month getting ready for WoD I made some good money (in terms of effort vs profit) selling runs for Twilight Drake/Black Drake runs, it is only 3Kish a week but minus the portal bit I soloed them without even thinking.

I think in DPS spec with the Juggernaught crystal from SoO I could solo it outright.

[Zherog]

So I saw this article from Blizz in my Facebook news feed today. (http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/blog/12346804) Two different friends posted it, with totally different views of the article:

Friend 1: Blizz releases some data! Sweet, though I wish they said more.

Friend 2: Blizz confirms 90% of all WoW accounts have lapsed.


Perspective is everything, I guess.

[Psyren]

So I saw this article from Blizz in my Facebook news feed today. (http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/blog/12346804) Two different friends posted it, with totally different views of the article:

Friend 1: Blizz releases some data! Sweet, though I wish they said more.

Friend 2: Blizz confirms 90% of all WoW accounts have lapsed.


Perspective is everything, I guess.

It's a whole lot of nothing, but it's well-illustrated nothing at least

[The Glyphstone]

It's a whole lot of nothing, but it's well-illustrated nothing at least

It's statistics, and interesting ones. Just because it doesn't disclose financial data hardly makes it 'nothing'.

The dungeon/Battleground ratio, for example...sure, it's not useful for anything, but still a nifty thing to learn.

[Karoht]

Friend 2: Blizz confirms 90% of all WoW accounts have lapsed.

Which also includes every free account ever created as well. Perspective really is everything.

Also, the total amount of lore was neat to see quantified. I'm a bit skeptical of that one, but often times we hear of lore in brief notes and tidbits rather than counting every last word of every last book.

And Richard Knaak was certainly a lot of bloat on that one.
While reading Stormrage, I would occasionally turn ahead 30 pages and see if anything different was going on, if it was the same as before, turn ahead another 30. Especially any time Malfurion was doing pretty much anything in the nightmare. I swear, the last 120-200 pages, that man photocopied the same 10 pages.

[Seerow]

I'm surprised that there are more pet battles per day than PVE and PVP instances combined. I had no idea pet battling was anywhere near that popular.

[Mutant Sheep]

I'm surprised that there are more pet battles per day than PVE and PVP instances combined. I had no idea pet battling was anywhere near that popular.

It hink it should be noted how quick pet battles are, especially compared to instances or battlegrounds. In the time it takes for 20 people to finish one game of Warsong Gulch, 20 Pet Battlers could have done half a dozen battles each.

[Seerow]

It hink it should be noted how quick pet battles are, especially compared to instances or battlegrounds. In the time it takes for 20 people to finish one game of Warsong Gulch, 20 Pet Battlers could have done half a dozen battles each.

Even so I would have guessed that there were maybe a couple thousand people who do pet battles every day. This seems to indicate my assumption there was way off.

[Karoht]

Even so I would have guessed that there were maybe a couple thousand people who do pet battles every day. This seems to indicate my assumption there was way off.For all the hate that Poke-WoW got when they announced it, lots of people do it. Heck, there are 5 people in my guild, that is all they do all day before raid, and when they are bench-warming.

[otakuryoga]

I'm surprised that there are more pet battles per day than PVE and PVP instances combined. I had no idea pet battling was anywhere near that popular.


It hink it should be noted how quick pet battles are, especially compared to instances or battlegrounds. In the time it takes for 20 people to finish one game of Warsong Gulch, 20 Pet Battlers could have done half a dozen battles each.

also a dungeon counts as one instance...even though it is created for five people
extend that to raids....

[Karoht]

also a dungeon counts as one instance...even though it is created for five people
extend that to raids....Extend that to PvP, which is for 10-15-20-and 40 people.
And take much longer to run.

[Seerow]

Extend that to PvP, which is for 10-15-20-and 40 people.
And take much longer to run.

Actually double that (you have 10-15-20-40 on each side).

It would have been interesting to see the breakdown of PVE for Dungeons vs Raids.

[Karoht]

Actually double that (you have 10-15-20-40 on each side).

It would have been interesting to see the breakdown of PVE for Dungeons vs Raids.
I would really be interested there, to see Dungeons, Raids (both sizes all difficulties) and Scenarios all broken down for us. Maybe even break down which LFR wings. That would be some really awesome data.

[Krazzman]

Level 62.
My wife will now switch from Healing Druid to DK Tank.

Friday we will probably raid with the guys from Dethecus. They haven't downed Immerseus HC so far and we hope that it will be a good introduction to the raid as we will be raiding in 20man mode with them in WoD. Anyone knows how Crossrealm raiding works now? Do you need to be in the same realmpool or does it work regardless of server now (only difference being the region?)?
This will only be friday and only for about 3,5 hours for now as we are still leveling DK and Warlock (druid was only a filler).

@Pet Battles... I have brought my team up to level 7. It's just not really that interesting for me atm...

EDIT:
Wife went in as Tank. Level 68. I really hate the Durnholde dungeon now. Bossfights are still over too fast to really gauge any reasonable rotation (to learn it...)
But we will probably only bring them up to 85, then level up Druid and DK then Hunter/Shaman or some other weird combination...
Still no reaction from avoid so far. Even from the people in our Battle.net friendlists.

[mistformsquirrl]

Ya know, I thought raising my Netherwing rep was going to be annoying... but honestly? This is pretty darned easy. Far better than raising my Borg reputation in STO for sure <@.@> (I still have dreams about farming for Omega Marks ><)

[Icewraith]

It's a lot easier to farm when there's not a ton of people in the zone for the daily quests, some of whom are solely farming eggs. Also I think they increased the egg spawn rate.

[Psyren]

All the old reps got accelerated IIRC, and yeah it helps when there aren't many people there.

[Icewraith]

Oh right, rep gain used to depend partially on your character level relative to the level you were expected to be when doing the quest.

In BC/Wrath doing old world reps you'd get like one point for killing a mob that granted rep when you would have gotten 7 at 60 or whatever. Really slowed things down.

[mistformsquirrl]

Ah, good good - I'm sure I'll have a lot of other reputations I need to grind eventually too. Right now I'm just trying to get a mount I like a bit more.

Now watch - I'll get this Netherwing Drake and they'll put some perfect-for-a-DK mount in the store or something lol <;_;>

[ryuplaneswalker]

Ah, good good - I'm sure I'll have a lot of other reputations I need to grind eventually too. Right now I'm just trying to get a mount I like a bit more.

Now watch - I'll get this Netherwing Drake and they'll put some perfect-for-a-DK mount in the store or something lol <;_;>

That is what that random mount addon is for.

[mistformsquirrl]

Random Mount addon? <o.o> I'm not entirely sure what you mean

[The_Jackal]

http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/gogomount

Evidently the most popular one.

[mistformsquirrl]

Oh, that's cool <o.o> I may have to use that when I have more mount options.

[The_Jackal]

To unlock the most mounts/reps quickly, you may want to participate in Lunar Festival. For someone who's just starting out in the Horde reputation grind, it's a solid trip up to Honored, IIRC. But as you say, the mount you want is more important than a bunch you don't want.

[Karoht]

Random Mount addon? <o.o> I'm not entirely sure what you mean
When in doubt, google it.
But in this case, I'll explain. There exists an addon that will throw you onto a random mount, rather than specific ones. The cool part is, you can set things like preferences and presets, so it cycles through an assortment of your favorites.
The same addon also manages pets in much the same way, including extending some functionality to pet battles (though this area I have no knowledge as to what that functionality would be).
There are a variety of these addons, a google search should provide you with a variety of them if you are interested.

[Zherog]

Look out, Karoht! There's a ninja behind you! ;)

[Karoht]

Look out, Karoht! There's a ninja behind you! ;)
I lol'd.
My post-fu is weak today.

[Icewraith]

You can already do this with a /castrandom macro but then you have to update it whenever you get a new mount you want to see in the sequence, and you can only fit so many mounts in the space. You can alter probability, but only by entering the same mount multiple times, which takes up even more space.

It's unlikely that blizzard tweaking the ui will break this particular addon, and it doesn't affect your combat performance, so it's probably a fairly safe addon to have. I personally just try to run as few as possible due to the headache of what happens when one goes wrong and starts crashing the client on login.

[mistformsquirrl]

Yeah, right now I'm not running any addons at all, though I'm considering looking for something with additional hotbar space, because right now I have a bunch of cooldowns in awkward positions since I have a hard time using the hotbar stuff further to the right.

The mount one I'll probably snag too - the one linked by The_Jackal even lets you set up mount decisions by zone, which is pretty cool <o.o>

[Icewraith]

Ouch, login servers crash during our raid break.

[The Glyphstone]

Both of my characters are frozen in crashed instance servers.

[ryuplaneswalker]

You can already do this with a /castrandom macro but then you have to update it whenever you get a new mount you want to see in the sequence, and you can only fit so many mounts in the space. You can alter probability, but only by entering the same mount multiple times, which takes up even more space.

It's unlikely that blizzard tweaking the ui will break this particular addon, and it doesn't affect your combat performance, so it's probably a fairly safe addon to have. I personally just try to run as few as possible due to the headache of what happens when one goes wrong and starts crashing the client on login.

Yeah i am the same about addons but using random mounts each time (and only having one button to summon said mounts) doesn't take up a whole lot of memory..and is very awesome, cause Like >.> I got the five JC panthers so I wanna use them"

[Mattarias, King.]

Did Seige LFR part 2 the other day... :smallfrown:

/salute

[Krazzman]

Yeah, right now I'm not running any addons at all, though I'm considering looking for something with additional hotbar space, because right now I have a bunch of cooldowns in awkward positions since I have a hard time using the hotbar stuff further to the right.

The mount one I'll probably snag too - the one linked by The_Jackal even lets you set up mount decisions by zone, which is pretty cool <o.o>

One word: Bartender!

Without bartender I refuse to play. I started playing wow and as soon as I found bartender I said to myself: "Never will I play without you."

It's good, you can pack everything there, keybind the **** out of it and even hide/show bars while combat.
For example you have one bar with mounts/professions or similar stuff that you won't need in combat. You can "program" this bar to be only seen while out of combat.

We managed to get to level 76 with only seeing two instances twice... Nexus and Violet Hold.

And the first time actively questing after getting to level 15 is quite close since it will definitly better to quest a short while in hijal. But tonight we have a raid to go in with (I couldn't talk to the RL for this but hopefully this works out).

[mistformsquirrl]

Just installed that one thanks to your advice - I like it already, gives me the same functionality I have in a few other games I've played that I've sorely missed with WoW. Big big help <o.o>b Now I've got everything lined up nice and neat on the center-left of the screen within easy reach.

[The Succubus]

I resubbed. I'm a terrible person. -.-

I'd like a little companionship on an EU server somewhere....

[mistformsquirrl]

I'm on North American I'm afraid <;_;>

[ryuplaneswalker]

One word: Bartender!

I would love to use bartender, if it were not one of the ugliest things I have ever beheld in a video game UI.

[Karoht]

I would love to use bartender, if it were not one of the ugliest things I have ever beheld in a video game UI.Um, okay, how? All bartender does is let you move around the bars of the default UI (and hide elements of the default UI as well such as the Gryphon artwork on both sides of the main bar). The only reason it would be ugly is if you made it ugly.
It also has a handy keybinding mode which you can toggle on or off. Makes changing abilities around really easy.

If you mean Elvui or any of the addon suites based on Bartender, I will completely agree with you.

Fortunately, Bartender is also compatible with virtually every other UI addon out there, so if you have one in specific that makes everything pretty, Bartender will work with it as well.

[The_Jackal]

I would love to use bartender, if it were not one of the ugliest things I have ever beheld in a video game UI.

Bartender is HIGHLY configurable, and you can further customize your buttons with it. It's a veritable swiss army knife of UI customization. Here's just one of many really awesome custom UI mods (http://wow.joystiq.com/2007/07/30/reader-ui-of-the-week-taeo/) people have made with BT (This one is highly dated, but since then, BT has gotten better, I just did quick Google-fu to find a sample).


Just installed that one thanks to your advice - I like it already, gives me the same functionality I have in a few other games I've played that I've sorely missed with WoW. Big big help <o.o>b Now I've got everything lined up nice and neat on the center-left of the screen within easy reach.

If I may offer, the addons I run are:

Postal (Mail Handler, stupidly useful for managing Auction House traffic)
Bartender4 (Bar/Button mod)
Recount (Damage Meter)
Deadly Boss Mods (Raid/Dungeon event notification: Don't stand in fire!)
Quartz (Very slick custom castbar)

Those are really what are, I feel, the crucial addons everyone should run before playing any amount of WoW at endgame. If you heal in raids, you'll probably also want a raid frame addon, like x-perl, but I'm always DPS or tanking, and I don't care about anyone's health bar except my own and the guy I'm killing.

[ryuplaneswalker]

Um, okay, how? All bartender does is let you move around the bars of the default UI (and hide elements of the default UI as well such as the Gryphon artwork on both sides of the main bar). The only reason it would be ugly is if you made it ugly.
It also has a handy keybinding mode which you can toggle on or off. Makes changing abilities around really easy.

If you mean Elvui or any of the addon suites based on Bartender, I will completely agree with you.

Fortunately, Bartender is also compatible with virtually every other UI addon out there, so if you have one in specific that makes everything pretty, Bartender will work with it as well.

Must not have been bartender then *shrugs* it has been since WOTLK since I used any addons aside from Random Mount, Skada, DK diseases and DBM, and only two of those I feel are absolutely necessary.

[Karoht]

Elvui and Tukui are both based on Bartender. I dislike them both. Greatly.

For healing, I'm still a fan of Healbot. Default Blizz raidframes are getting better and better all the time though. Really all you need now is Clique + those raidframes and you can go a long way these days.

Clique does keybinding directly from your spellbook, not requiring things to be on bars at all. What is neat is how intelligent Clique has become. I can configure Clique to use my middle mouse click to be a heal while hovering over raidframes, but while I have an enemy targeted and I'm not hovering over raidframes, that button can be an attack, or a shapeshift, or whatever.

It can also bind macro's directly in this manner. It's pretty keen. Between Clique and Bartender, my UI has never been tidier.

[mistformsquirrl]

I am starting to seriously question my loyalty to the Horde. There's some good Horde-side characters mind you, but I'm starting to find the faction at large (particularly the orcs) too damn bloodthirsty for me. I'm still questing in Icecrown, and while the Argent Crusade and Ebon Blade are firmly focused on the Lich King (as they ought to be), a lot of the Horde characters are focused on fighting the Alliance.

I mean war is one thing, but this is ridiculous.

Of course I suspect the Alliance isn't any better, which is part of why I've not given a lot of thought to switching sides. It's just annoying. I'd like to be able to feel a little faction pride, but it's sorta hard when they want you to go murder wounded soldiers and are all happy because they just bumrushed an Alliance patrol while they were fighting the Scourge.

And strange as it is, no the Ebon Blade don't bother me nearly so much. They strike me as ruthless and pragmatic, but not bloodthirsty for the sake of it, and most importantly, not stupid, you know?

[Aidan305]

The Alliance are pretty bloodthirsty at that point as well due to the events of the Wrathgate. (Sadly not in the game anymore, but I highly advise looking it up. It was one of the most significant turning points we've had in lore.) from this point on however the Horde will slowly ramp up the bloodthirst, (pretty much entirely due to the orcs) until it culminates in the most recent Mists of Pandaria patch.

[mistformsquirrl]

Ah, I'd seen the Wrathgate cinematic, but there's a part missing after that. Alextrasza keeps whispering you to come talk to her, but she'll only repeat the cinematic. I had to look up the quest beyond that point. (I really wish they wouldn't remove things *sigh*)

I guess at the time I hadn't put together that that's what put the Horde and Alliance against each other in Northrend, given that the Forsaken attack there was pretty universally catastrophic.

Hrm, I suppose we'll see what happens when I get to MoP and if the new expansion changes anything too.

[Traab]

The Alliance are pretty bloodthirsty at that point as well due to the events of the Wrathgate. (Sadly not in the game anymore, but I highly advise looking it up. It was one of the most significant turning points we've had in lore.) from this point on however the Horde will slowly ramp up the bloodthirst, (pretty much entirely due to the orcs) until it culminates in the most recent Mists of Pandaria patch.

Even then, isnt it mostly garrosh and his elite guards? I mean, Im pretty sure the rest of the horde is constantly going, "Uhh garrosh, we probably shouldnt be doing this." Even a lot of the orcs are against it.

[mistformsquirrl]

Ah, that's more acceptable I suppose. < . .>

Also a totally random thing I noticed: Was considering making a second DK and despite the fact that Human females and Blood Elf females are the same height, a weapon wielded by a human female appears twice as large for some reason <@.@> The DK runeblade at the character creation screen is what I used for comparison. My current BE's weapon feels well... dinky comparitively. Not a huge deal, just an oddity I noticed <@.@>

Related: Do we know if Blood Elves will see a revamp anytime soon? WoD only seems to cover the original 4 races for each faction - which is fine, they need it the most, but BE also look a little dated and (more importantly) could really stand some more combat animations. (I can't speak for Draenei, but I'd imagine it's the same.)

[ryuplaneswalker]

Yeah Garrosh is a twit who never should have been put in charge, they were pushing for "LOLZFACTIONWAR" in Cata cause "people were demanding it" so they had Thrall step down so he could become Green Jesus and Garrosh could be in charge so the "horde could be the horde" again.

Not surprisingly this worked out poorly and now they needed to spend 1/2 an expansion to fix it..then another full one to deal with more Garrosh bullcrap that has nothing to do with the proper plot of the game, all while fanboying over characters that have been dead ten years plus and were for the most part Evil.

"Hey guys its Guldan and Grom! they were awesome weren't they?"

This expansion is going to begin and end in stupid. It will be dumb for the bronze dragons to help Garrosh go to the past (FOR SCIENCE!), and inevitably something dumb will happen to make this expansion actually matter.

my bet is "Thrall as jesus shows the Warlords the error of their ways so they can join the real horde, oh what is this a portal is opening..oh no demonic tainted humans are coming through a portal" To be continued! *cue back to the future music*

[mistformsquirrl]

Well on the upside, I just did an *awesome* quest chain in Icecrown.

The ghost of a child essentially showed me Arthas' ascent to being the Lich King after his arrival in Northrend; and I helped Tirion destroy his heart. That was pretty cool < ._.>

Sadly there isn't a whole lot left for me to do in Northrend, so I've moved on to Mount Hyjal; which is *WAY* the heck more busy than every other zone I've been in up to this point. Up till this point, outside of Orgrimmar, running into more than a couple players has been an extreme rarity. now there's tons of folks around <@.@> Just kind of all of the sudden. Does everyone hang out in Hyjal or something? Just seemed like a strange place for things to suddenly get very busy.

[Krazzman]

@Succubus:

If you don't mind reading stuff in german all the time try out Dethecus... just kidding. Just try leveling/questing a bit... enjoy the things you missed plotwise and search for a casual/family-esque guild.


Well the break is now fulfilled. We have broken from avoid and will now fully join exHeres... Wrote a letter to avoids GL telling him why we left. Doubt anything good will come from it but my wife said I should at least notify him why we left.
Wished them the best and luck and so on and yeah yesterday we already raided with the exHeres/Extreme raidgroup. From Immerseus to Thok. Sunday they will just need to kill Thok, Blackfuse, Klaxxi and Garrosh... interesting trivia: in the Malkorok encounter I realized for the first time that I didn't have dbm activated...
Did a good job anyway...
Another interesting Trivia: due to some stupid errors they marked Krazzman with a forced Rename... but after a Ticket this was resolved. Was quite painful to have to rename him to his old name... Krazdoru.

Also @ Alliance vs Horde:
I like the Horde far more than I like the alliance. Played end of BC/WotLK until ICC as a Draenai Paladin then with ICC rerolled for Troll Shadowpriest... and visualistic and from the characterization the horde is just that much more awesome. Even while being a dickish orc like garrosh.

[Seerow]

Sadly there isn't a whole lot left for me to do in Northrend, so I've moved on to Mount Hyjal; which is *WAY* the heck more busy than every other zone I've been in up to this point. Up till this point, outside of Orgrimmar, running into more than a couple players has been an extreme rarity. now there's tons of folks around <@.@> Just kind of all of the sudden. Does everyone hang out in Hyjal or something? Just seemed like a strange place for things to suddenly get very busy.

People don't generally hang out in Hyjal but I figure there are a few factors making it busier than anything you've seen:
1) CRZ. Basically if people are in the zone on any server, you'll see them. This is intended to make zones seem more alive.
2) Cata dungeons suck. Like they're a massive pain, and give far less experience per time invested than questing. A lot of people will dungeon run to 80 then start questing in Cata.
3) There are two level 80 zones available for Cata. The other one is an underwater zone that is very binary either you think the zone is awesome and the best thing ever, or you hate it with every fiber of your being. Most players really hated that other zone. So everyone switching to questing for Cata content is funneled through Hyjal.

[Aidan305]

Well on the upside, I just did an *awesome* quest chain in Icecrown..
Icecrown has many awesome quest chains, certainly a number of my favourites.

Of particular note is the Crusader Bridenbrad chain which always hits right in the feels. That one is probably one of my top three in the game along with pre-cataclysm Darrowshire and the Climax of the Jade Forest.

[ryuplaneswalker]

Sadly there isn't a whole lot left for me to do in Northrend, so I've moved on to Mount Hyjal; which is *WAY* the heck more busy than every other zone I've been in up to this point. Up till this point, outside of Orgrimmar, running into more than a couple players has been an extreme rarity. now there's tons of folks around <@.@> Just kind of all of the sudden. Does everyone hang out in Hyjal or something? Just seemed like a strange place for things to suddenly get very busy.

People usually need to grab a few items before they have high enough gear to do the cataclysm level dungeons.

[Raven777]

either you think the zone is awesome and the best thing ever

That's not a thought, that's a fact.

[ryuplaneswalker]

That's not a thought, that's a fact.

You lie, and blizzard knows you lie since they removed the raid that was going to happen there. then again they removed a great deal from cata, I really think they rushed Dragon Soul out early so they could finish the expansion and move away from it.

[The Glyphstone]

Well on the upside, I just did an *awesome* quest chain in Icecrown.

The ghost of a child essentially showed me Arthas' ascent to being the Lich King after his arrival in Northrend; and I helped Tirion destroy his heart. That was pretty cool < ._.>
.

Trivia tip: Play around with 'Matthias Lehner' - the name of the ghost kid - as an anagram, and see what you can come up with.:smallbiggrin:

[ryuplaneswalker]

Trivia tip: Play around with 'Matthias Lehner' - the name of the ghost kid - as an anagram, and see what you can come up with.:smallbiggrin:

Wait I know this one...

[Insider joke] is it "Lord Nemesis?" [/Insider joke]

[Karoht]

You lie, and blizzard knows you lie since they removed the raid that was going to happen there.The following anecdote is not directed at Ryu or anyone in thread.

I love how Blizzard constantly communicates with it's 'fans' and yet no one ever listens or has a memory that lasts longer than a week.

They decided against the Abyssal Maw raid for 3 reasons, words out of their mouth.
1-The only thing they developed for it was the on-paper artwork. Nothing else. The raid itself was never put into any kind of serious development beyond conceptualization, because the art team already was doing double duty doing Fire themed gear and assets for Molten Front/Firelands, while doing all new art assets for the ZG/ZA revamps. Asking them to split their focus further to make more water themed art (basically none from the zone was going to be re-useable as it wasn't going to fit the darker and more twisted theme of Abyssal Maw), was basically a recipe for disaster and further delay.
2-Firelands was already taking up a lot of development time due to entirely new tech and new coding being implemented on virtually every boss, along with the Firelands Molten Front zone. Abyssal Maw being an underwater fight was going to require new tech for virtually every mechanic, never mind that testing and balancing and bug fixing for 3D mechanics is going to take MUCH longer than 2D fights. Positional mechanics and "don't stand in bad" mechanics would have been absurdly annoying to test out to ensure no one could cheeze/bug them rather than avoid them. Bug testing + new tech = extra long development cycle.
3-It was going to be like ToC only underwater. Most people disliked ToC. Most people disliked the underwater zone and it's mechanics, along with fights like Al'Akir and his flying phase, which basically every fight would have been like. Stands to reason that few people would have liked this raid. Why go to all the effort of the above 2 points for a raid that the community had expressed it probably wouldn't like?

Of course, the week following such announcements, the forums were awash in "Abyssal Maw would have been the best Raid EVAR" commentary, complete with complaints about how much time was wasted on it's development.

Again, not directed at Ryu or anyone in thread, just a related anecdote I thought I'd share.

[Traab]

Well on the upside, I just did an *awesome* quest chain in Icecrown.

The ghost of a child essentially showed me Arthas' ascent to being the Lich King after his arrival in Northrend; and I helped Tirion destroy his heart. That was pretty cool < ._.>

Sadly there isn't a whole lot left for me to do in Northrend, so I've moved on to Mount Hyjal; which is *WAY* the heck more busy than every other zone I've been in up to this point. Up till this point, outside of Orgrimmar, running into more than a couple players has been an extreme rarity. now there's tons of folks around <@.@> Just kind of all of the sudden. Does everyone hang out in Hyjal or something? Just seemed like a strange place for things to suddenly get very busy.

Something to keep in mind. There are only two starting zones for level 80 content. Hyjal and vashjir (im sure I misspelled that). And everyone seems to hates the zone thats underwater. Honestly, Im not sure why, I kinda like it. My only complaint is the very last quest chain sometimes bugs out. But point being, that means everyone in the 80 range is in hyjal.