WTF? FFS, four rows of raid buffs is my God-given right!
And this stuff about steady and autoshot being just about the only thing that won’t exhaust focus… how many “stand there and shoot” fights are there, really? At least half of the current end-game raid bossfights are “move, move, move”. MM hunters are already penalized by needing autoshots for a lot of their DPS. Now we need to spam SS to keep up focus?
Damn. Another step towards ragequitting this game.
There’s gotta be a rebalance coming, or else the theorycrafting for Enh Shaman is all wrong–I did my first “real” raiding of v4.0.1 last night (25-man OS3D and ICC for Blood/Frost wings) and we couldn’t generate enough DPS in our predominantly melee-heavy group to deal with BQL or generate enough healing to deal with Phase 2 Sindragosa. Even regemmed, my raid DPS is significantly lower than pre-patch, to the tune of 1500 or so.
Meanwhile the Boomkins and Fire Mages are having a field day.
What?!
Woo-hoo!
People tell me all the time I have a talent for pointing out the obvious, so if I’m doing it again in this thread, please overlook it, but all these changes in the game: how many of them are due to strategy and how many affecting revenue for Blizzard?
For example, it benefits me to take my character out of the game and have him spend the night at an inn, right - thereby taking myself out of the game and freeing up that space for another gamer? And the longer I stay in the inn, the more of a blue resting bar I get and thus more XP when I kill?
If I’m “barking up the wrong tree”, please tell me.
Thanks
Q
Well, when you get right to the meat of it, it’s ALL due to Blizzard wanting more revenue. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t also have benefits for the player base, though.
Blizzard is changing things around in the game for several reasons: to fix major imbalances that have cropped up due to minor changes made since the last expansion and major patching, to simplify and streamline some things, to fix long-standing annoyances with the way some class mechanics worked and to introduce new elements (like the two new races, the new zones and the new profession) and rearrange a lot of the old elements (changes to old zones, old world flying). And all of them are due to Blizzard wanting more revenue, by enticing new players to the game, by luring old players who had fallen away back to the game and by increasing the interest of people currently playing.
I’m not entirely sure what you mean here, Quasi. It benefits you, yes, but it really doesn’t benefit Blizzard all that much…they get their $15 a month from people whether those people can get into a full server or not, and if the server’s not full, there’s no issue of “freeing up that space”. They have rested XP in the game so that people who can’t play that often don’t feel like they’ll never get to 80(/85). Rested XP makes play a bit more enjoyable because it takes away from some of the grind to level cap.
As someone else said, Haste it up! Especially for MM, I believe. It’s gonna be very interesting balancing Haste, Mastery, and Crit (AGI). Much more interesting than “gem all AGI, or all ArP”.
The other key, of course, is to always Steady Shot in pairs (I’m assuming your talking about MM) to keep the ISS buff up.
Nah, Cairne (Emberstorm battlegroup). It’s only happened a few times, and every time we won (which makes sense I guess - if they were any good they wouldn’t have to cheat). Normally they are smart enough to just go stand at the flag and cap right after the gates open, so it isn’t blatantly obvious just from the chat logs that they cheated.
Yeah, it does. Which in turn will proc more Wild Quiver. So it’s all about getting the Wild Quiver mastery and haste high enough to get a nice balance of procs and crit. Some people were reporting Wild Quiver as their 2nd or 3rd highest damage, I think.
The consensus right now (backed up by my limited testing) seems to be to gear and gem to hit cap (a bit lower now - 247 I think). Obviously gem for AGI, AGI/Crit, AGI/Hit to get bonuses (most seem to be worth it now, I think). Then reforge any crit (if you’re above, say 55-60%) to mastery and haste.
Do you have a swing timer? It just takes a little practice to get good at stutter stepping. Also, even the “move, move move” bosses you don’t really have to move that much, if you know roughly where you need to be. Also, of course, Aspect of the Fox will help quite a bit by letting us Steady Shot while moving.
There are a couple of things that do disappoint me, though. Readiness is now pretty shit. They need to put a “refills your focus bar” effect or something on it. Because really the only CDs we care about are RF and CS, and CS you can’t really use back-to-back anyways for focus reasons.
The other thing is the trap launcher. It really needs to be macro-able, or just have a separate spell for each trap. Having to hit the launcher, then the trap, then place the target reticle is a bit much to ask, IMO.
It isn’t healthy to play for hours on end. Rested XP ensures that players don’t feel like every hour they spend out of the game is another hour not gaining XP.
Don’t be a cynic about the game. If a move by Blizzard causes demonstrable harm, that’s one thing, but looking at a random feature and going “That’s just them making money” isn’t going to do anything but stress you out.
Thanks, jayjay. I guess what I was getting at is - is the latency due to an overcrowded server, and if so, has it been improved as much as it is possible to do so and if not, then will tweaking the game help that issue?
I can’t help but think that with millions of players world-wide, it must be a hell of a load on their server and to accomodate those millions (and all those joining every day) changes of this type are necessary for them to remain in business.
For example, I understand that in Dal (and sometimes in SW), I’m going to encounter latency (depending on time of day) and the recent patch is responsible for much of that, but (and here I’m speaking as a total computer dumbass) what if that happened all the time? How much longer am I likely to keep paying that 15 bucks?
That, in my usual roundabout way, is what I was asking: are the changes motivated by revenue, or, as you say (and I agree and hope) to help improve and streamline. And you answered the question - I just felt the need to clarify what I meant a bit.
Thanks
Q
I didn’t mean to come across that way, Bosstone, sorry.
Q
Eh, no worries, that came off harsher than I intended.
The thing is, everything that happens in the game is to increase Blizzard’s revenue. New zones, new quests, new stuff is there so people will keep playing (and paying). Streamlining and simplifying is done so more people will play (and pay). They want you to be happy and enjoy the game so that you pay them. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, that’s just capitalism.
Agreed, in general.
That said, there are plenty of examples of actions and decisions that do not enhance player experience but are solely to drag things out and help increase the number of continuing subscribers. Raid wing gating and limited attempts is one of those, I would argue. If Blizzard was concerned that they didn’t have enough content for raiders (which, with almost a full year of ICC I’d say was a valid complaint), the correct answer would be to create more content, not to put arbitrary locks between wings and attempt counts on heroic encounters just to slow folks down.
Regarding the raids, it seems like they are introducing more content to compensate. Throughout Lich King, there was only one big raid per content patch, with a few short dragonslaying raids sprinkled throughout. Cataclysm is launching with three raids, and although I don’t know how large they are, they don’t look like the dragonslaying shorties. Maybe Throne of the Four Winds.
Blizzard’s thought process as I see it is not “let’s force them to slow down,” but, “let’s have them work on different content to avoid burnout.” The way I see things happening is that raiding guilds will have, say, 10-man raids for Throne of the Four Winds and The Bastion of Twilight, with a 25-man raid for Blackwing Descent. That sounds, to me at least, like a lot more fun than constantly running ICC as both 10- and 25-man.
And also has a rez ability. Think it has about a 30 minute cool down on it. I actually used this for the first time last night in a heroic. Healer died, so I rezzed him. He goes WTF? I didn’t know mages could rez. I told him it was part of the new fire tree…
I don’t know a definite answer to that. I do know that they’re doing things with the new expansion to help alleviate Dal lag and spread the server population around to the other capitals (which…may or may not work…they’ve tried it before (creating AHs in all the capitals rather than just in Ironforge and Orgrimmar) and it helped for a while, but when Lich King came out everyone started hanging in Dal since it was the only “open city” in Northrend and had a lot of daily questgivers, AND had portals to all the capitals and battlegrounds. Well, they’re taking out the portals to the capitals in Cataclysm, which I hate the idea of, but they hope will encourage folks to start spending time in other places.
If they don’t put some other portals in, people will end up defaulting to one of the faction capitals (probably Org for the Horde side, I guess probably Stormwind or maybe Ironforge for the Alliance), since they’re going to want to be able to get to people to get gear enchanted or crafted items made.
It’s certainly not going to be an equal distribution. I don’t think Exodar and Silvermoon will ever be heavily populated, and Darnassus is just too remote. Stormwind, Ironforge, Orgrimmar, and Undercity will remain the popular cities just as they are now. There’ll just be more people in them.
Even if everyone stuck to Ironforge and Orgrimmar, the players will still be sufficiently distributed as each city will only have 50% of Dalaran’s current population.
Swiss Army Knife?! Aroo?!
BTW, thank you to all of you folks who show up here to answer the numbers questions.
I play like an enthusiastic idiot; not stupid, just have no desire <and no memory for stats> to study for weeks before making one change in a setup. I tend to go with what works, and change things if it doesn’t. I’m the perfect WoW subscriber, in other words. I’ll take years to get to the point that meta-gamers will be at within weeks, regarding stat perfection and efficient gearing.
So having someone who is willing to answer some of the ‘doh’ questions is really, really nice, and much appreciated.
Thanks 
[QUOTE=Skammer]
Any druids try tanking yet? I’ve never played one, but the guy I ran H HoL with was complaining about Swipe - it has a longer cooldown or something? Anyway he complained about AoE threat being a lot more difficult.
[/QUOTE]
Swipe does have a cooldown now, as before it didn’t so you could basically spam Swipe, watch TV, and hold aggro. Now you just have to work a little more to keep aggro but it isn’t all that bad.
I took all four of my tanks through a random or two to see what tanking was like. Honestly the only trouble I really had was the randomly dissapearing name plates and Ret Paladins with Shadowmourne/Shadow’s Edge. I had no problems on bosses and trash just dies so darn fast it’s hard to really worry about aggro that much. I have more trouble thinking up names for my pets than I do tanking right now.
Speaking of pets, I leveled 5 or 6 pets to 80 yesterday after I switched from Survival to MM just to check it out. I’m still loving BM though MM has it’s perks as well. Now I just need to level up my two tanking pets and start the hunt for all those rare spawns I want.
Well, Gnomish Army Gnife, actually. Useful even for non-engineers.
I took all four of my tanks through a random or two to see what tanking was like. Honestly the only trouble I really had was the randomly dissapearing name plates and Ret Paladins with Shadowmourne/Shadow’s Edge. I had no problems on bosses and trash just dies so darn fast it’s hard to really worry about aggro that much. I have more trouble thinking up names for my pets than I do tanking right now.
[/QUOTE]
Was Prod a blood tank before, or did you have to make the switch from frost to blood?