New WoW General Discussion Thread 6/8/10

The Game Room
6742

I’ve been loudly grumbling to myself about the dearth of gatherable nodes in the new Cata zones, but then my miner was posting the two stacks of Obsidium she’d managed to collect and spotted one guy with something like 50 full stacks of the stuff* up there. And I just can’t figure how he’s managing that when I spend 30 minutes in Vashj making circuits of the known nodes and maybe scrape up 5 that are active. Guild banker, maybe.

  • And every stack posted with an 80g Bid price and no Buyout :confused:

And Embersilk Cloth … dear Og, where is it? Who drops it? This is ridiculous. I have three toons questing in Vashj’ir, Deepholm, and Uldum, and I don’t think I’ve managed to collect five full stacks between them since Cata dropped. I can kill twenty humanoids and maybe one of them will drop 2 pieces of cloth. I can’t blame a lack of cloth on “lots of people questing in these zones” like I can with ore and herbs.
As for combat … I don’t know if it’s just me, or if it’s the changes to the class, but I’m just not enjoying my ret pally in Cata. My pally is level 83, and my arms warrior is level 82, and the warrior is thoroughly kicking the paladin’s ass with regard to killing speed and survivability. And I think a large factor is that the arms warrior’s abilities remained largely unchanged from Wrath to Cata, while the paladin’s whole paradigm was gutted and revamped. And maybe I’m just not wrapping my head around the changes. It’s become just plain boring:

Crusader Strike -> CS -> CS -> Templar’s Verdict -> Repeat

Toss in an Exorcism when Art of War procs and an extra TV when Hand of Light procs. And it feels like my entire DPS output relies completely on those two things proccing often, so I feel completely at the mercy of the RNG. I can take on one mob and kill it in about 5 seconds because my procs go off several times in rapid succession. Then I can take on another, identical mob and it takes 20 seconds to kill because those procs don’t fire at all. Divine Storm is somewhat superfluous now that it shares a cooldown with CS — I can’t alternate them any more, I have to pick one or the other and DS doesn’t do enough damage to justify itself. :mad:

6743

Cloth? What cloth? I realize Naga aren’t exactly fashion victims, but geez, don’t they use hankies or something? Ribbons?

It’s kind of strange to realize that I think of troggs (those barely-dressed, stinky-rag-semicovered degraded cousins of mine) as a source of cloth :frowning:

main stuck at 224/225 First Aid and I refuse to pay for cloth to level a purely-cosmetic skill, damnit

6744

Cosmetic? Cosmetic!?
While First Aid kind of sucked in Wrath, it is a mandatory skill for anyone who isn’t healing specced(and even then it’s not bad idea to have it) in Cataclysm. Yes, my feral druid can heal more and faster with bandages than he can with his healing spells.

6745

If my hunter is healing, either she’s healing the pet (which can be at a range longer than that of bandages) or she’s got time to eat. Want munchies? Got haste, spirit, crit and “best primary skill of three”…

6746

You can’t eat in combat, max level bandages heal you faster than food, and in instances not all damage is avoidable and using bandages on yourself will save the healer a ton of mana. Please do yourself and anyone you will group with in the future a favor, and level your First Aid.

6747

Blood DK tank. Seems pretty optional from here (though I guess it would help with occasional near-wipe recovery), though I’ll probably level my first aid once my alt has his tailoring to max.

6748

OK, I made a typo, for which I apologize to mogle’s blood pressure: I’m at 524/525, not 224/225, which would not make sense in any case. You still may want to lay off the caffeine a bit, though

6749

I’m finding a decent bit of cloth in instances, particularly heroics (often getting 4-6 pieces on a single mob, but only maybe 1 in 4 or so that I loot even drop cloth). Doing the Twilight Highlands dailies, probably over 50% of the mobs I kill there drop 1-2 pieces, so that may be a steady if grindy option. Everywhere else though, no so much.

Same with ore – farming obsidium in Vash, Hyjal, and Deepholm is incredibly slow and frustrating. I’m swimming in elementium and pyrite though – mostly via Twilight Highlands (huge volume) and Tol Barad (very fast respawn).

I haven’t noticed herbs to be much of a problem at all – but my herbalist is my druid, and staying in travel form + 1.5s gather means he’s far better at grabbing herbs than everyone else (who is not also a druid). He’s also the most hated daily quester in Twilight Highlands (kegs and food can be gathered mid-air while still in flight form, skipping all the annoying combat – though I refrain from gathering things someone is obviously fighting mobs over, though unfortunately I’d be lying if I tried to claim that all druids are as considerate). I hope nobody from Blizzard reads these threads, I dun want them to nerf travel form :slight_smile:

6750

There’s a crucial typo in your earlier post; you said 224/225, not 524/525, which changes the complexion completely.

6751

I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but you do get to train new bandages at 525.

6752

Wow, that was some fast simulposting. In any case, as I say in the correction, 224/225 simply does not make sense, even before you consider that I first mentioned it in the context of using Cata cloth to level it.

I can’t even remember what the flying frogs kind of cloth I was using at 224 skill. Divide by 5… mageweave?

Headrush, you still need cloth in order to make the new bandages. I am not paying for that, period.

6753

I can sorta see it making sense, in the missing-a-few-steps sense: “I leveled my first aid to 224/225 using all the cloth I’d been saving for turn-ins for my alts; but damned if I’m going to go buy 50 stacks of cloth at the AH just so I can use all my cata cloth to level a useless skill”

6754

I was complaining about not finding Cata cloth.

6755

Yeah, Cata is annoyingly stingy with the cloth. Even with the tailor’s “Find extra cloth” skill in Wrath, my tailor never had any Frostweave cloth to spare. With no similar ability for Cata, I have two 85s sending her cloth from their questing, dailies, and instance running, and she’s still just barely keeping up with creating level-appropriate gear to wear.

6756

That makes more sense, 505->525 was horrible, but that does not in any way excuse dismissing the most important secondary skill as cosmetic.
At least you can use all those Heavy Embersilk bandages to craft Dense Embersilk bandages once you hit 525.

6757

I have two mains questing in Cata (well, one is mostly doing dailies and 5-mans now) and sending all the cloth to my tailor, whose tailoring skill is progressing s.l.o.w.l.y. Fortunately they’re both healers so leveling First Aid is not a priority.

6758

Hey, that’s downright stylish!

Did you check Wowhead for drop rates so you can see what zones or areas have clusters of mobs you can grind? It didn’t take me long at all to max my First Aid with just the drops that my pocket healer and I got questing and dungeoning.

Chalk me up as another person who thinks it’s ridiculous to classify FA as a “purely cosmetic” skill in early Cata, where healer mana is still a real concern. If you are not bandaging during boss fights and your party’s healer is coming even close to going OOM, IMO you’re doing it wrong.

Prot Warrior tank, and I feel like I’ve prevented a lot of wipes in the new instances with bandages. Seriously. A lot of the bosses have fight mechanics where there are gaps where you’re taking no damage and can get off at least a couple of ticks of bandage heals, if not the whole thing. (Erudax kicked you back? Bandage up. Kiting the Harbinger in ph2 of that fight in LCTV and have a healthy lead? Bandage up. Kiting Lockmaw away from Augh? Bandage up. Big dude in the Trogg room in HoO casting Alpha Beams? Bandage up.) Any run where your healer isn’t ending fights with a comfortable amount of mana is a run where you should be using bandages every time you can.

6759

At the rate I’m going, I’ll have enough made for the achievement, too…

SFG, I’m a hunter. A lot of the damage that’s unavoidable for melees is stuff I should see coming and avoid: doesn’t mean I always manage to, but there are a lot, lot of ranged boss attacks which give fair warning and are avoidable. I use Aspect of the Fox (lower damage but you can cast the long-cast-time stuff while moving) specifically to be able to sidestep. If my hp get to the point where I need bandaging, I am eating too much avoidable shit - the healer should grab my own stick and beat me up with it.

6760

Unfortunately, the ones made with Field Bandage don’t count. Only the ones made with the actual final recipe do.

What dungeons are you running that you’re never taking any damage? ISTM that at least one fight out of every dungeon has at least some chance of causing unavoidable damage to any DPS member of the party, whether ranged or melee. Bandaging isn’t just about saving yourself from death–it’s about *conserving healer mana *where necessary. So, if your healer is geared and your group is skilled and the healer is ending fights with something other than an empty or almost-empty mana bar, then there’s no need for DPS to bandage. But PUGs don’t always go that way, so bandaging yourself up for whatever you can in the gaps can do a lot to save the healer from going OOM before the end of the fight.

6761

Come to think of it, I sort of recall now that Storm Peaks & Icecrown were a lot better for Frostweave cloth drops than the lower zones as well. Even so, the non-80 NR zones still weren’t this stingy.

Druids in flight form are my new bugaboo. I think there was one AFK in front of/on top of every questgiver/interactive NPC in Uldum yesterday :stuck_out_tongue:

I had a real :smack: moment yesterday. I was on my herbalist (draenei mage) in Uldum, and grumbling to a friend about Blizzard’s “rule” that every gatherable node must have a hostile mob sitting on it, as all this does is pretty much guarantee that somebody else is going to swoop in a grab the node while you’re fighting. He whispered back, “Why not CC the mob, gather the node, and then fight?” Like I said, :smack:

But speaking of CC, I got a good laugh yesterday while doing one of the Harrison Jones quests. I had to kill that pygmy “sultan” to retrieve part of he Staff of Stars (or whatever). I got to where the mob was and saw he was accompanied by a hyena, but having nameplates up combined with the pygmy’s small size, I didn’t notice he was riding the hyena; I thought they were just walking together. So I cast Polymorph: Pig on the sultan, intending to fight the hyena first (similar to what I did with the vry’kul with pets in Jotenheim, Icecrown). Hyena ran to me… and now was close enough for me to see that the hyena now had a pig riding on its back :stuck_out_tongue:

Yup, my mage is my tailor, and I’ve got my 83 paladin and 82 warrior sending her all the cloth they find, and it’s still not nearly enough.

Not yet, but I should. My luck, it all drops in Twilight Highlands, and I’m turning off XP just before hitting 84 so that I can use the LFD tool to run those early dungeons on Normal mode (when I find the energy to do so, anyway).

Bandages are also useful when you’re a mage, and everybody but you and the tank are dead, and the tank mistakes you for the healer and yells, “Dude! You need to heal!” (Yes, this happened to me during a wipe on Garfrost.)
Also, Deacon Andaal in EPL. At first I thought he was a rapper, but then decided “Southern Baptist black preacher” :stuck_out_tongue: