MoP-ing up after the Cataclysm: Updated WoW General Discussion 8/22/12

The Game Room
821

True. The worg is just “gravy”, but absolutely not the threat. If you kill the mount, the stupid Caravan Raider just keeps running along after you and continues pew-pewing you and the wagon. Easier to kill, since he’s only moving at foot speed, but burning through 400k of mount health before attacking the actual threat isn’t good policy.

If you kill the rider, the mount runs away (and despawns). So absolutely not a valuable target. (They do loot out to Kor’kron meat, though. If you do kill one, make sure to go back and loot it after the caravan plays out.)

No, I want to chill the mount because all the mobility is there. If you just chill the raider, the mount’s still moving every bit as frustratingly fast as before. So, as I mentioned, I Howling Blast in the direction of the entire caravan-raiding pile o’ badness while having the actual raider targeted so I can start hitting him as soon as I can. Since HB is a cone AoE, it hits both if I’m facing in the right direction, getting me the movement speed reduction I need and infecting the raider with Frost Fever. Saves me a GCD in the normal opening rotation.

It makes a huge difference. I wound up defending 4 caravans with just my DK while grinding out the “150 of each” weekly, with zero losses (in fact, no caravan went below 50% health).

IMHO, slowing the mount is critical to success if you don’t have good ranged attack. This is where my marksman hunter shines: fighting on the run absolutely does not interfere with my DPS.

Or in one of those weird coincidences, a gunman is the best defense to a caravan, as well as the best attacker to it. The fiction works out just like real life.

ETA: Speaking of hunters, I found a weird little tip :smiley: about killing mounted Kor’kron Outriders at the meat farm. If you freeze trap them, the mount is frozen in place but the outrider is still targetable. And they stay mounted. And for some reason doesn’t attack very fast. So you can kill them at leisure, almost; just avoid the infrequent Explosive Shots they do.

822

Man, I am very rapidly reaching the conclusion that I need to move my tauren paladin off of the Cairne server. She’s so far behind gearwise. I never see more than one other person online in the Burning Dog Legion. Either everybody in the BDL has quit the game, or they’ve already reached the same conclusion I have and have moved to other servers.

Cairne’s Horde AH is the absolute worst AH out of the six different servers where I have toons. Plate armor-wise, the AH is awash with crafted iLvl 458 PvP gear, at outrageous prices (and my paladin is already wearing the stuff), and the few-and-far-between people who post higher iLvl BoE epics want to charge 40k gold for everything. Which I don’t understand, because the Horde population is so low on Cairne these days that I don’t see how anybody could afford that. Donoma, my paladin, has about 38k to her name. She’ll post four stacks of herbs, and come back a week later and find that only two of those stacks sold and the other two are back in her mailbox. Meanwhile, my nelf priest herbalist on Lightbringer posts four stacks of herbs and they sell before I finish her play session. My human rogue on Alexstrasza posts a few stacks of ore or bars and they sell within minutes (seriously, today she posted 10 Trillium Bars and two stacks of Ghost Iron bars a the Dalaran AH, and it all sold before she could fly from the AH to the flightmaster). But on Cairne, I can’t afford to buy anything because I can’t sell anything.

823

The next patch is going to bring a virtual realms feature. From the patch notes:

So it has all the advantages of a server merge, but you will get to keep your realm name, character name, and guild names. It might help if you’re stuck on a dying server. I am on a dying server, so this is great news for me. What’s keeping me there is my raid team and all my alts. If I decided to transfer, I’d probably only take one character with me, so I’d lose access to all my alt professions.

824

I’d heard about that. With any luck the “merged” servers will be those in the same battlegroup. Cairne is in the same battlegroup as Lightbringer, which happens to be my main Alliance server. Lightbringer is high-pop and seems to have a healthy population on both sides (though Alliance is still dominant).

825

Nice in principle. But I’m just jaded enough to cynically assume Blizz has merely come up with a new name for “cross-realm zones for all zones”, not just “low-population starter” zones.

In other words, a stealth realm server consolidation. It only looks like you’re still on your own realm server. And you get all the multi-realm ganking and resource competition in current-content zones that lowbies have been experiencing in their starter areas for months. Livin’ the service reduction dream!

826

Ugh, I finally got around to running the “Dark Heart of Pandaria” scenario on my human paladin so that I could open up the Barrens stuff. I somehow assumed I’d get turned into an orc or something. Getting turned into a goblin really messed with my perspective. It took me a while to get used to hitting from that low!

So anyway, I got started on the Barrens stuff, went through the quest chain, and then picked up the weekly quest. Once I saw how the gearing system works, and having found the Latent Kor’kron Pants (twice, and four belts, the gloves, the shoulders, and I think three boots), I decided that I needed to complete the weekly all in one go. I got the 150 Lumber, Meat, and Oil, but decided to take a break before gathering the Stone. I’ve finally gotten the Valor hats for all my Alliance 90s (thank Og — I prefer running with helms showing, but the PvP hats they all had just looked hideous with their PvE gear, so I’ve had to run hats-off until now), so the legs were the next thing on everybody’s list and will be the first Barrens piece my paladin grabs. But my rogue is the only one who is Revered with the Klaxxi, while my paladin has been planting crops for rep and is only a bit past Honored. My priest and hunter haven’t even talked to the Klaxxi yet.

Honestly, I don’t really like the Klaxxi regular/daily quest setup. I haven’t even finished the regular quest chain on my rogue; I just found the whole system confusing. You start getting daily quests before you’ve even finished the regular quests, and new questgivers show up as you rescue each Paragon in turn, and it feels like I’m running all over the entire Dread Wastes map, doing a yellow quest here, then a daily quest there … confusing as hell trying to keep it all straight.

On another note, I finally reinstalled Recount, which I haven’t used in a very long time — I pretty much ditched it during Cata since I wasn’t running dungeons. But I went ahead and installed it, and today I jumped my paladin into a Galleon group. She already has all the gear she can get from him, but she’s an enchanter so I like to hit him up to maybe get some epics to turn into Sha Crystals. Anyway, we downed him, and according to Recount, my paladin did a bit over 50k DPS, 11th overall in a 38-person raid group. Is that any good? Shes at 485 iLvl - you can see how she’s geared here.

827

50K dps isn’t bad for Galleon or Sha, but it is pretty low for LFR on Thunder Isle. Top performers are doing 130K on the runs I’ve done. My mage is falling behind gear-wise. Still about i480ish, and doing about 70K on bosses. Usually rank around 15th or so.

Had a bit of luck with Galleon last week. My tankadin finally got the mount to drop, and all my toons now have access to Son of Galleon.

My mage has a couple of i502 LFR drops, but if I equip them, I lose my 4-piece bonus from the previous tier. Not sure that is worth it.

Finally brought by Hunter to Pandaria. Guess he’ll be my 4th 90…

828

I haven’t finished my Klaxxi stuff yet. I’ve actually rescued all the Paragons, but the dailies are set up so you can complete the entire chain and not have enough rep to make Exalted. Yeah, that’s right, there’s a special title for getting Exalted and wakening all the Paragons, and the requirement I’m missing is Exalted.

My dps is extremely poopy for my ilvl, and I kinda care, but I kinda don’t, since I just raid casually one night a week. I’m usually around 5th in LFR depending on when in the week I’m doing it. Tuesdays with all the raiders? 8th. Sunday with all the lazies? 2nd. I’m having trouble gauging what my dps should be because the online calculators all assume you’re on full raid buffs and set up for raiders.

829

FWIW, the top DPS in that particular Galleon group only did 70k. Though now that I think about it, my Recount numbers may have been off. The group wiped — apparently some smartass rogue pulled, and everybody jumped in not realizing it wasn’t the tanks that did it, and the three tanks were never able to get control of the situation. So I died, and when I ran back the position of my corpse basically forced me to rez directly underneath Galleon and I promptly died again. I may have forgotten to reset Recount for the second (successful) attempt.

And why is Recount including the boss in the damage-done totals? There he was at #1 on the list with 60%+ of the total damage done, and then the actual #1 damage player listed at #2 with like 5% of the total damage. So I was listed at #12, which was actually #11… I don’t remember Recount doing that in the past (that is, during Wrath) and I can’t figure out how to exclude the boss from the list.

I still don’t raid at all, and haven’t tried any MoP dungeons, so as long as I’m doing enough DPS to kill the mobs in the quests I do, in a timely manner, I’m happy. I’ve now run my ret paladin, my spriest, and my BM hunter through the “Blood in the Snow” and “The Dark Heart of Pandaria” scenarios, and in that situation they all did around 30k over the course of each scenario. Best DPS I saw was a well-over-iLvl 500 warlock who was hitting 60k, and he/she was single-handedly killing everything so fast that my and the other guy’s DPS ended up pretty low simply because we weren’t getting a chance to do any damage. And of course, in a scenario the buffs are limited to what three players can give.

When my priest did Blood in the Snow, she was teamed with a hunter and I had to restrain myself from yelling at him about pet control. He kept using Stampede in completely inappropriate/unnecessary situations, and one problem with Stampede (that I learned while playing my own hunter) is that, if the current targets die before Stampede’s duration expires, the pets will go looking for new targets without any command from the hunter. So he kept bringing nearby groups of enemies down on us - the Stampede would run off and engage a nearby group of mobs, and then expire in the middle of what they were doing, and all those mobs would come charging at us from behind just as we were engaging the next group…

830

I finally got something useful out of Archaeology. It’s fun picking up random lore items that do silly things, and I’ve solved a few decent artifacts but none that were actually useful to my Paladin. I’ve been using the same crappy green lvl 429 sword since forever. Then my third mantid artificact solved was this sweet Mantid Sky Reaver. I haven’t got a new piece of gear except slightly better green trinkets since I hit lvl 90.

831

Hey, my paladin just solved that one too! Unfortunately, wrong server. At first glance I thought it would be an upgrade for my same-server warrior, but then I saw that it was a 1-hander. I don’t run Prot spec on either of those toons, and none of my other toons on the server can use it. I do have a lvl 81 Prot pally over on Alexstrasza (the first paladin I’ve leveled entirely in Prot spec), and my hunter there has maxed Archaeology, so maybe he can find it for her.

832

It seems pretty easy to get, just troll the wastes and steppes, the sites are mostly mantid with a few mogu thrown in.

833

OMG I hate that.

I save stampede for the opening sequence of a BOSS or a really big pull. You really don’t need a bunch of free-agent pets looking for trouble. I suspect Blizzard thought they were solving that problem by removing “Aggressive mode” from the pet bar of normal hunter pets.

But the hunter class classically attacts button-mashing chin-droolers*, so maybe “/cast Stampede” was in that loser’s “I win” button macro. :mad:

*and I say this as a WoW player whose main is a hunter and has two hunter alts.

I apologize on behalf of the few non-clueless hunters out here.

834

Duly noted. My hunter is still only 85, so I don’t have Stampede yet, but I’m glad to know this before I do something embarrassing with it…

835

I save Stampede for emergencies, or for really tough mobs after I’ve already cleared out the surrounding mobs. If there are other mobs nearby and I need some extra damage, I’ll use Murder of Crows instead. If they’re still active when the mob dies, they simply dissipate/fly away.

I learned my Stampede lesson while doing the Tillers daily quest to kill that hozen lorekeeper. After about the second time my herd of cats* killed him and then ran off to aggro a nearby crowd of monkeys, I stopped using it in that kind of situation.

*Yup, my nelf hunter has all cats in his active pet list. I’ve always enjoyed the term “it’s like herding cats” :stuck_out_tongue: Though it would be kind of cool if Stampede would summon a herd of cattle …

836

Stampede with all cats is startlingly literally like herding cats… right down the the absolute impossibility of controlling what they want to do.

That said, my hunter carries only 4 pets at a time (save fifth slot for opportune tames) and half of those are beastmaster only, so my Stampedes in Marksman mode are “Fire turtle, fire turtle, lion, fire turtle, fire turtle.” (Assuming I’m questing or something and using the fire turtle as a Tenacity tank.)

837

I dinged 87 tonight on my hunter. My first use of Stampede was to bail out an 85 NE priest who was fighting one of the rares near Galleon’s spawn point. She was almost dead when I came riding by, so I popped Stampede and jumped into the fray. The pets grabbed aggro, so she was able to heal herself back up, and I dropped the frost trap that slows the mob when Stampede ended. Easy-peasy, and I have a new friend.

Been doing some BGs on the hunter as well. I don’t know if Hunters are way over-powered in pvp, or if I’m just better at hunter pvp, but all of a sudden I’m consistently ranking 1st or second in killing blows. I’m liking this a lot.

838

I do the same thing, and I forgot to count tonight. Does Stampede give me 5 pets every time, regardless of how many I’m carrying?

Is there an optimal line-up for Stampede? I really haven’t done much with this hunter, and haven’t played him since MoP launched until recently, so my pet selection isn’t great. I have “Hambone”–my main “tank” pet–he’s the named pig from one of the early quests at that level-20ish town north of Stormwind. I have two white tigers…think the first one came from Stranglethorn, and just got the second one–that elite tiger in the cave near the end of the White Pawn questline. I have a wolf…not sure where he came from, a flying snake, and a gorilla. In BM mode, I also have a devilsaur (doesn’t everyone?) and a couple of rhinos.

Haven’t checked the devilsaur, but of the rest, the cats have the best dps. What else should I look into taming? I have lots of empty slots in the stable…

839

What I’ve seen: It will summon all the pets you’re carrying, and if you have an empty slot it will duplicate your currently-active pet to fill the last slot. I don’t know how many times it will duplicate your active pet, though - I’m carrying a total of 4 pets, 1 active and 3 in the “stable”, leaving one slot open in case I stumble across something I want to tame.

I have all cats in my “stable” - my active cat is Gondria, the ghosty cat from Zul’drak, plus three tigers I’ve tamed in Pandaria: an orange one, a green one, and … another one.

Okay, now I need to cast Stampede to see … hang on, I have a screenshot of my herd of cats somewhere …

Here we go - this was from back in December '12, and I think the black cat was my active pet at the time:

http://mister-rik.com/hosted/wow/catherder.jpeg

(This was before I realized that, as a BM hunter, I got a benefit from using a Spirit Beast as my pet. Gondria (or as I renamed it, Smokeus) is my full-time pet now.)

So yeah, it looks like it summons everything in your stable, and duplicates your active pet to fill empty slots. But it looks like the five includes your active pet, so Stampede only summons four.

That I couldn’t say.

840

It is, indeed, 4 additional pets. Current pet remains; summoned pets are pulled out of the other 4 of your 5 slots, and any slots which are empty OR contain pets you’re not eliglble to summon right now (any exotic pet taming pet when you’re not in Beastmaster spec) is replaced with a clone of your current pet.

So, again in my case: My current slots are Banthalos (spirit beast bird), Nobodysaurus (devilsaur), Sambas (lion), Terrorpene (turtle), empty slot.

For just walkin’ around, I spec Marksman and I have Terrorpene out. (Turtles make good tenacity tanks.)

When I stampede in that spec and loadout, both the spirit beast and the devilsaur are ineligible to be summoned because they’re Beastmaster-only, so they get replaced with copies of my current pet (turtle). And the empty slot is also replace with a copy of my turtle. So, my stampede is current active pet turtle, Stampede-summoned lion, and 3 Stampede-summmoned turtles.

It’s turtles most of the way down. :smiley:

ETA: Oakie asked about optimum Stampede lineups. I don’t really know, except to note that the only thing Stampeded pets do is normal white melee attacks, so stampeding nothing but ferocity pets with good basic attacks would maximize dps output.

And apparently they also growl, which will drag target threat around and around like a teensy tiny Army of the Dead. And anyone who’s been wiped in an instance or raid by an AoD pulling a boss around to face the party (away from the tank) and catching a face full of breath weapon understands how desirable that can be if it’s not what you planned. If you’re gonna Stampede in a threat-sensitive and party-position-sensitive event, I recommend summoning each pet in turn and turning off growl.