It’s actually a major annoyance for me - the leveling path is getting narrower and narrower each expansion, and while you can hit 85 without doing all the quests the way the rep grinds work you are better off doing them all. It’s especially bad in Deepholm, where you have to do almost all of the quests to get into the good graces of Therazane for the shoulder enchants. I already hated Sons of Hodir in Wrath, but at least there you didn’t have to do every quest in Storm Peaks to get to the dailies.
For example, I first thought I’d level my druid through Vashj and shaman through Hyjal, but then I realized I need to do Hyjal with them both for the rep. So I ended up doing the same quests with 85 druid and 80 shaman - kind of ruined the experience partly for me. At least I could skip the Harrison Jones stuff in Uldum. While they were fun enough, I didn’t want to re-do them right after I just had done them.
Maybe next expansion will be slightly better when the dev team doesn’t have to do the whole 1-60 thing again at the same time, who knows.
I’m kind of disspointed with all the dungeon nerfs. Sure, it will make it easier to get through a heroic with a PUG (I’m 1 for 4 in that respect) but it takes away some of the sense of accomplishment. I looked at the class changes briefly last night (mainly for paladin and priest holy specs) and the buffs are welcome, especially the mana breaks they’re giving to priests. Renew was bleeding me dry. I also like the PW:Shield buff.
That’s what they always do, though. Make the heroics almost impossible-hard for a few months to satisfy the Challenge-Yourself people, then nerf them down to allow the more casual player to at least SEE content. Frankly, I don’t even do dungeons at-level. I’m actually going through and doing the Dungeonmaster achievements on my 85 DK right now. Took down Kael’thas last night. No mount or pet, though.
Fortunately the shoulder enchants are BoA, so if you don’t care about any of the other rewards you only have to grind the rep on one toon, which is what I’m doing. My second toon left Deepholm as soon as he could go to Uldum.
I didn’t really see any in there that were overwhelming nerfs. Most were things that were either hard to see (Corborus, Shatter), lag-dependent (some cast time increases, Shatter), hard to target (that boss that’s bigger now), or group dependent (Baron needing more than one reliable interrupt, Beauty needing at least two reliable CCs).
The only ones that were just made flat easier were the Grim Batol bosses, which were already harder than the rest, IMO.
Depending on how it works out in practice, it certainly sounds like they’ve made Orzuk easier; now there’s only one thing the tank has to dodge or else face certain death and group wipe (though probably not a great idea to stand in for shatter either).
You’re thinking a tank would just eat the shatter? I’m not sure if that’s feasible - it’s reduced by armor but increased by 33%. But yeah, if the tank could just eat the shatter it would make the tank movement part of that fight much easier (not necessarily a bad thing either, TBH).
Current Shatter does about 140k-160k damage, new Shatter will do 186k-213k before armour, with 70% armour reduction it would do about 56k-64k damage to the tank.
Certainly not enough to one-shot the tank, but still something that might be a good idea to avoid.
Today I discovered a small area northwest of Thunder Bluff that was proof that someone was high on something when they designed this game.
Rabbits with axes, prairie dogs with knives and Pickelhauben, and mice wearing skulls and dual wielding shotguns, all of them running around killing each other. :eek:
It sounds like the tank SHOULDN’T eat the shatter, and trying to do so will lead to cooldowns being blown and so on, but hopefully it at least won’t be instant death.
(Otherwise, I just don’t see the point of that change at all).
Frustrating night in BWD. Mix of good and bad PUGs, as usual–including one Holy Pally we recruited away from his guild. Too many people dying to avoidable things on the Omnitron Defense System; we killed it with three out of five of our DPS dead, with that particular attempt taking 14 minutes. Very proud of everybody for sticking with it and getting the bosses down, but TBQH it shouldn’t have ever gotten to that point.
And then… Magmaw. What should have been an easy fight with just a couple of attempts to get used to the mechanics… Except the DPS just couldn’t get the adds down fast enough. And then, on the attempt where we probably would have gotten him down, our best DPS had WoW crash fairly early in the fight. :smack:
IIRC we’re going back into BWD tonight. Hopefully starting on time instead of having to twiddle our thumbs waiting to fill slots and then having them download, install, and set up Mumble will give us a really solid night of attempts and kills. Bonus: Since we poached the Paladin, that should mean that 7/10 of our raid will now be in-guild, so we’ll start getting official credit for everything. Whee!
Yeah, this is also kind of obnoxious in the Goblin/Worgen starter zones. I mean, it’s fun this first time through, but the thought of having to go through it again and again for any new Goblin or Worgen I roll… Yikes.
I’m quite sure that at least the Exalted shoulder enhancements aren’t yet BoA, but they probably will be at some point. (I bought one last night for my DPS set and the name was purple, not gold.)
Almost every Wednesday night for the past three years, I’ve played WoW with one of my IRL friends. I’m a pally tank and he’s a holy priest and we leveled from 1-75 in that time, mostly through instances, playing 1.5-2 hours per week.
After all that time my epiphany is this: I don’t really like tanking. And I don’t think he really likes healing (at least, he’s not that great at it).
So I’m gonna ask him if he wants to put these guys away and re-roll some Worgen. On Cairne, so I can send mine some heirlooms.
How was taking down Kael? That was what I was thinking of doing when I finished the new zones. Right now I’m missing Dire Maul for Classic Dungeonmaster and I’m not sure it’s a good time to attempt nakey run in Org. Outlands Dungeonmaster is next on the list.
Pretty easy, actually. I may farm him occasionally to try for the pet and mount. I haven’t had any kind of dangerous challenge on any of the Outland dungeons I’ve done…the bosses are at the lower end of max for NORMAL mobs in the new zones and they’re so far below level that they don’t do much damage in relation to lvl 85 health pools. I haven’t tried heroics yet, though. I did finish Outland Dungeonmaster tonight with the Caverns of Time 5-mans.
I farmed heroic Zangermarsh dungeons for rep to get my hippogryff and they were completely trivial for my 85 elemental shammy, as long as I killed them fast and didn’t play around. Two packs of the crab-thingies got me down to 30k hp when I tried to ineffectually AE them, other than that I never fell below 80k hp. I do have a bunch of armor though. ETA – also did heroic Magister’s Terrace. Skipped most of the trash by just walking past, only boss who did any real damage to me was Vexalis. Kael himself was very easy. No mount, but got the pet and the bag.
I was thinking about the pug heroics and dps numbers. Ghostcrawler said that the heroic bosses are supposed to die in about 2 minutes, and most of them seem to have 4.4M health. That means the expected group total dps is around 36-37k, which means dps guys should all be doing 10k or so. Seems a bit high expectation, but explains why for example Admiral Ripsnarl and the shadow portal boss in HoO could be so hard since they were clearly dps check bosses. Ditto with Commander Springvale and his adds.
I wouldn’t bother to listen to anything Ghostcrawler says, if his grasp of PvP mechanics and balance is any indication of his (lack of) understanding of the game.
