Yeah, it’s part of why I didn’t want to start raiding so late in the cycle. But look at it this way: it’ll give you a leg up on at least the first few levels so you can get to 85 faster, and the initial quest rewards that don’t come close to your current gear will provide excellent cash flow or give you a head start in DE mats for the new tier of Enchanting, if that’s one of your professions.
Plus, of course, having the gear now means you can play the game you want to play now, rather than twiddling your thumbs until Cata releases.
I wonder, the early leaks we saw a few weeks ago included new enchants, one noteworthy thing about those enchants was that they could only be cast on ilvl 300 or greater items, so I suspect we may see a much greater jump in ilvl than we did in TBC and Wrath. shrug We’ll find out eventually.
I hope they change that. I really liked that in Wrath, 200 was the level 80 entry level gear. Easy to remember. I’d be happy if they shifted Cata ilevels so that 250 was the introductory green level, with 300 being the entry level 85 gear.
From BC into WotLK I didn’t replace more than an item or two until Naxx. I wouldn’t expect a T10 Heroic raider to replace much before max level in Cata, keeping in mind that WotLK was a 10 level expansion, and Cata will only be 5. Personally, I thought it was a blow to progression, I didn’t have to step into a 5 man heroic for gear, and it showed when I went back and leveled my pally to 80.
Then again, I’m finding the current idea of progression kind of sad. I’ve played more in the last two or three weeks than I did in the last year, and it’s still a bit odd to see people pugging the current end game raid (I don’t think I ever saw a SwP pug, and even BT pugs were likely to end after a few bosses). Oh well, guess it’s time to see if I can find a semi casual group to do 10 mans with, and get some modernish gear.
Stamina’s going to be extremely important. All classes will need roughly the same amount of HP, though tanks will still be able (and probably need) to gem for it and take talents and armor to reduce damage taken.
Basically, if this philosophy was in play right now, every ICC raider, from clothie to plate, would be expected to have at least 30k health (without the ICC buff) and possibly as high as 35 or 40k, while the tanks have 50k or more.
It may be that 264-277 gear will be just barely acceptable, but unless they heavily revise their stated plans, I’m fairly confident that it will need to be replaced by level 85 gear, whether that be quest greens and blues, crafted blues and purples, or heroics gear, before raiding is possible.
Basically they’re trying to even out damage. While a tank can soak a 20k hit without a problem, that would annihilate a clothie. By increasing HP pools, they can afford to play with raid damage without making it either too easy for the tank or too difficult for the casters to stay alive, as well as allow healers time to perform triage without worrying about the casters being two-shotted.
It’s really just another step in their “homogenize the classes as much as possible” philosophy.
Edit to ramble further: I recall a Classic raider talking about an addon they used to use that would show how much damage each raider was taking at a particular point in time, which would help the healers figure out how much attention to give to each person. In BC and LK, this kind of went out the window, as non-tanks are usually either at 100% health or near death. There’s no time for triage, just AOE heal like mad. The increase in HP is an attempt to bring that older style of play back, where you focus on the people taking heavy damage while the ones taking light damage can afford to be ignored for a few seconds.
The way I understand it the goal is that players (tanks as well as DPS and healers) will find themselves somewhere between 0 and 100% HP much of the time.
Basically, bigger HP pools compared to boss damage, with smaller (relative) heals as well. This makes choosing the right heal for the moment a much bigger decision. Right now the decision is “big heal, big heal, big heal, crap missed one tank’s dead”.
This also has the side effect of making avoidance relevant again for tanks - larger overall HP pools makes the benefits of dodging, say, 25% of attacks relevant. When two hits will kill you, the fact that you would have dodged a third one is a bit moot (and leads to the EH is King motto of today’s tanks).
Finally, it also makes the cost of the heal a decision point again. Right now mana is so rarely an issue that all that matters is healer throughput, not using the appropriate heal at the appropriate time (overheal? who cares?).
I would disagree that it is part of class homogenization - that is better epitomized by the changes to CC, dispells, and some buff availability.
Granted, I’m really enjoying the Holy Pally Holy Light firehose just because of the simplicity and big numbers, but on the whole I think this will be a needed change.
I remember reading (sorry, no links) that Blizzard was unhappy with how quickly people were geared to raid Naxx in WotLK and plan to make the requirements more stringent for Cata. From this I would anticipate that T10 gear will possibly get you most of the way to 85 (83 sounds quite reasonable, although it might even get you into heroic 5-mans), but it won’t be good enough to start raiding with.
As far as that being a reason to not raid now, well, I raid because I enjoy it not just for the gear. That also ties in with their plans for 10- and 25-man raids to drop the same loot. They don’t want people making their in-game choices solely based on what loot drops, but rather based on what people actually like to do.
I’m not. I think it’s great that they’ve made raiding more accessable. The hardmodes are still there to give challenging fights to those that want them; and there are still exclusive titles, mounts, etc. available as marks of the true best performers.
IMO, no one should be allowed to complain about raiding being “too easy” until they’ve beaten 25-man LK on Heroic.
I don’t disagree. I’m just saying it’s not going to get thrown by the wayside immediately: “T10 should get you most–if not all–of the way to the first Cata raid” were my exact words.
I watched a funny machinima about a guy who got Shadowmourne. The axe started talking to him and making him do stupid things, and cost him his in-game girlfriend (a draenei - “Hey, I didn’t know your girlfriend was a GOAT! Baaaaa! Goat! Goat!”) and got him kicked out of his guild. At the end of the video it flashed forward to Cataclysm, and you see the guy looting a mob and saying, “Hey, this green weapon has better stats than you…”
Stole Thunder Bluff’s flame last night and got King of the Fire Festival! Now I just need to do the juggling thing.
Anybody know why the NPCs at some enemy fires are yellow/neutral instead of red/hostile? For example, all the holiday NPCs at Hammerfall were neutral to my human paladin.
And why do they try to apply big patches during holidays/world events, making people lose most of a day when they’re trying for once-a-year achievements? Common sense would say, “Wait until after Midsummer Fire Festival to apply this patch.”
Cut the !@#$ out of my thumb at work today while dicing tomatoes. This finger condom I’m wearing on my thumb is making it awkward to use my spacebar. Grr.
I got the Flame Keeper title on my priest after the second night of poiting hither, thither, and yon.
To the 80 war who tried to gank the two clothies who just happened to be 2/5 of five geared toons traveling as a herd (seriously, none of us were over 5 yards apart!), and did it not once, but THREE times (each time, emerging as pixel paste within seconds) : nuh huh.
Got the juggling achieve after some cursing and experimentation. Basically, I had myself a stack of 20 torches, parked myself on Krasus’s Landing. Bright idea from listening to you fine wars talk about keybinds/macros, and bound the torches to mousewheel down. Left hand on left mouse button, right hand on mouse wheel, go nuts. Eventually I got the achievement, but seriously, Blizzard. 15 seconds? My shoulder would like to have a little talk with you.
Regarding the funky pronounciation: I’ve heard people say achievement, achieve, achie, cheeve, chevo. The last two make my soul weep bitter tears.
It turned out my inability to log in was caused by a bad DLL that apparently didn’t matter until 3.3.5 was installed. Luckily there’s a lot of smart people already figuring these things out before me. Honestly, sometimes using Linux is more trouble than it’s worth.
Found the Divination book upstairs in the Violet Citadel, and /yelled it for everybody’s benefit … and got 10g for my trouble because reading that book got somebody the Higher Learning achievement I was really starting to wonder if that book was ever going to spawn, because I’d never even managed to find a junk book spawned there. Now all I need is the one downstairs in the VC, and the one next to the laundry gnome across the street.
Got the juggling achievement after much frustration - I took the portal up to the Purple Parlor to get away from the Dalaran lag, but after many many attempts I came the to the conclusion that I simply can’t physically bang a button and click my mouse that fast. So I had to “cheat” - I learned of an addon called Juggler, which binds the tossing and catching to your mousewheel. Even with that, it took me several attempts. I ended up having to hold my wireless mouse in my left hand, with the laser pointing at my palm so that my target wouldn’t keep wiggling all over the place, and using my right hand to spin my mousewheel just as fast as I could. I hated to do it that way, but I was getting too frustrated with being unable to complete something in a video game due to physical limitations.
