I don’t know what to do with Cataclysm coming, because they’re taking a bunch of stats out of the game. Defense is going by the wayside, as are, likely, Armor Penetration and Spell Power. So now I don’t want to invest in any gear because I’m not sure what will and won’t matter.
Eh, I wouldn’t sweat it. Your gear is likely to be replaced pretty soon anyways (unless it’s really good raid gear), and almost certainly replaced before you start running heroics/raids in Cataclysm.
That said, they are not removing Defense or ArPen as a concept, just removing it from gear. They will re-allocate that budget elsewhere, no doubt - perhaps to the new “mastery” stat.
According to Blizzard, “Defense” is being removed from the game completely. They’re very intent on simplifying the game, a move I personally think is generally an excellent idea; the stats are far too complex, aren’t easy to translate into a coherent explanation of their effects, and make it hard for casual gamers.
Existing items will be converted to the new system, so get whatever.
to whom should i request and invite to the guild? whisper me or message me in game or IM me here, if it is not inconvenient. toon name is Cyral. Thanks, guys
“This is where I’d insert a cheerful “Fuck you!” but I don’t think the mods would get the joke.”
I would, though, my friend and you can tell me that anytime for I wish it so bad my ownself!
Whoops!!! TMI!!!
Your pals,
Quasi, Wolkie, Heather and Silka
Whee! I wanted First Aid for my level 65 Hunter who was at…uh…a big fat 0. Got meself all the way up to Runecloth Bandages tonight I did! Cost a lot though, I didn’t really farm too much for Linen and Wool. Once I farm some Runecloth I’ll be good because I have a crapload of…um…the one that comes after Runecloth.
You can actually check if you have a hunter, infiltrated dragons are flagged as dragonkin for the purpose of tracking. Back in the day it was the first sign that something was screwy with Lady Katrana in Stormwind, things might have gone so much smoother for the Alliance if they had human hunters back then 
I always check wowwiki to tell me how to get places, each zone’s page has a “Getting There” section, Moonglade | WoWWiki | Fandom .
I hate those flying boneguard scouts you encounter doing the tournament dailies. It took me about 6 attempts to kill a commander last night as 3 attempts were ruined by aggro-ing one or two when I was low on health.
I bought the mail bracers and upgraded a few gems so now I’m at 24k mana unbuffed. Maybe ready for HoR or even the Weekly Raid.
No need to be a hunter, the creature type is available to the UI, not sure if it’s actually displayed anywhere with the vanilla UI, but I can see it in both the unit frame and the mouseover tooltip. (They both humanoids by the way.)
Word is that there’s a hack out there targeting old versions of Adobe Flash; I have a guildie who got hacked even (supposedly) with an authenticator. Update your system frequently!
The Dope guild on Cairne? The easiest way is to do “/who Burning Dog” to get a list of guild members online, and then whisper one of them for an invite. If they’re not an officer they can let one know to invite you. Welcome, in advance!
We ran Botantica last night and wow, that is a fun dungeon – I think that’s my favorite one in quite a while. And for some reason we seemed to burn through all the mobs, even the bosses, very quickly. We had four guildies and pugged a 67 rogue – and lucky for him, because tons of leather gear dropped. My only regret was that the shield I was hoping for didn’t materialize.
At the beginning we had our priest MC one of the mobs to get the Holy Fury buff, which gives a +295 spellpower bonus - that helped me hit #2 on the dps chart while tanking.
We never had a complete wipe, but four of us died when I pulled too many mobs without noticing I had no mana. But yay for Shin Kell’s hunter with the Feign Death + jumper cables. We also had one death on that boss when I forgot to turn Righteous Fury back on after being rezzed. :smack:
Only two BC dungeons left! Next week, Arcatraz, then Magister’s Terrace the following week.
Shin was nice enough after the run to hop on her druid, respec to a tank spec, and run my pally through the Black Morass again; I picked up my tenth shard thingy about 10 gates into it but we finished the dungeon anyway. Couldn’t let the strands of time be unwound, after all. A couple quick stops at Thrallmar and Blade’s Edge to pick up some alch recipes and about ten minutes farming Terocones and Azraq is now an Elixir Master.
Prototype Cataclysm talent trees for Druids, Shamans, Rogues and Priests on their site. Their design decisions seem to really be pushing to get some PvP talents even if you only PvE as many of their talents are hybrid in that nature (regardless of class). While filling out my druid/shaman/priest trees (I do not have a rogue… yet), I ended up with 6-10 points left over (focusing purely on PvE) that could only be placed in marginally useful talents and/or PvP talents. Not sure what you all might find, but I’m interested to hear.
Short on people last night, so we started out by running Naxx for the weekly, which was also going to be a theoretical Immortal run. Everything went like butter (of course, with our gear) until Thad, when, of course, some dipshit new person failed to swap on the very first fucking charge, killing himself and our chance at the title. Sigh. (“DBM told me I was negative!” Well, why the fuck weren’t you looking at your actual debuff?)
Did a quick ToGC25 run after that, since there’s still some BIS gear there. I picked up an upgrade to my bracers–the Heroic version of the ones I had been wearing. Then, it was on to ICC, to bust out Dreamweaver on Heroic and Sindri on normal. I was on Archmages for Dreamweaver (and god *damn *now I have that fucking song stuck in my head, like I always do when talking about this boss), which means I got to make lots of use of my new macro. Well, technically, it’s not a new macro, but an addition to an old one: I added another line to the end of my interrupt macro. Now, every time I Shield Bash or Pummel, I /say Sleu smash. 
Both of our regular Rogues have /says macro’d into their kicks, so I figured it was a good idea to put an alert on mine, since there are several fights where it’s important to know who’s interrupting when (like Dreamweaver or LDW).
Oddly, while I got credit for the Heroic Dreamwalker rescue, it didn’t carry over to normal, so I’m still missing my “kill every boss in the raid” ICC25 Acheesement. It’s gotta be a bug, since I have credit for BQL, despite only having killed her on Heroic. Opened a ticket for it, so hopefully a GM can correct things. 'Cause I don’t know how the hell I’d ever manage to get a regular Dreamweaver kill in–we only ever run her on Heroic, and it’s not like I’m going to skip out on raid for a week or more just to try to PUG with people who can do her on regular but not Heroic.
I keep meaning to pick up an addon like that. I’ll try to remember to check this one out!
It’s not like they’re just magically disappear off of gear–they’ll be replaced with other stats.
AFAIK, that’s not correct. It will still exist, but it will come through talents instead of gear (like it currently does for Feral Druids). The mechanic of what Defense does in the game–reduce your chance to be Crit and Hit and increase your chance to Parry, Dodge, and Block–is an important one, and the only way to get rid of it entire would be to make *all *players crit-immune by bosses. Note that things like Armor Penetration and Attack Power are staying in the game as mechanics, too–they’re just not going to be stats you’ll see *on gear *anymore.
:smack:
If you need places to farm, I suggest the Something-or-Other Armory in southern HFP (with all the ghostly human soldiers) or Stratholme.
If you’re having problems soloing that daily, here’s the trick I learned (from someone on this forum, I think):
Get your shields up to full, then run straight up the big staircase that leads to ICC. Keep running until you break combat. Then, restore your shields and your health to full, and start pulling guys from the bottom of the stairs. You should be able to grab them one at a time, and none of the Scouts patrol in that area.
I think I liked that one, too–although IIRC there were some challenging fights (and maybe some PITA CC-related pulls?) that meant it was hard to get a group together back in TBC.
ETA:
Grats on 'Lixer Master, Tom Scud! May your procs be plentiful.
So I was all excited on Tuesday night for picking up all those level 251 pieces, which finally broke me over the 5k gearscore barrier. (…What? It is a useful tool, it’s just not the only tool.) Last night I got a whisper from one of my new guildies asking if I could heal H HOR. Wince, and I was just about to help out with a friend’s Raven Lord mount run, but I wasn’t necessary for that and I want to make a good impression on the guild. So I said sure and popped in.
We wiped, mm…two times? Three? On the first room of the instance. I was mortified. It’s possible others in the group were responsible for the deaths, but all I know is I had trouble keeping everyone alive. I know HOR is really tough for a 5-man, but I’ve gotten through there on my Pally twice before with at most one wipe. To fall down hard like that after powering up in gear level was just embarrassing. :smack: We did get through eventually, and once we finally cleared the first room it was smooth sailing after that. I even picked up a tanking axe; my Prot set grows.
From what I’ve read, I’d say it’s gone(at least for all practical purposes), they’re removing the entire Skills-tab from your character sheet. Which is a good thing in my opinion, since if they remove any way to increase it, and just set it to your level*5, it might as well just be you and your attackers’ level that is used to determine Hit, Crit, Parry, Dodge, and Block. Then they just add whatever talents needed to make the tanks Crit immune.
If a lot of people were taking damage, that was probably either the fault of the DPS or the tank or some combination: the tank wasn’t keeping track of all the adds, or the DPS weren’t watching their threat and peeling off, and people may have been standing in ground AOE.
Given the non-trivial amount of other types of avoidance that tanks pick up on our way to the Def-crit-cap, I can’t imagine that the mechanics wouldn’t stay the same going forward. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it–and the only thing that’s “broke” is having to juggle the stat on your gear. It’s my impression that while Defense is going away as a stat, the way it works in the background will stay the same.
That’s probably what was going on. I tend to pick up threat right away because I have a habit of dropping Beacon on the tank right as combat starts, in order to maximize the time I have on it while not wasting precious GCDs after he starts taking damage. Most of the time it’s not an issue because it’s trivial threat and most tanks will casually pick up the mobs after that. At least once everyone just slammed into me and dropped me like a rock, and the only reason it didn’t happen again was because I started making liberal use of Divine Shield. I commented on one wipe that I didn’t usually suck this badly, and both guildies who were in the team immediately said “I do.”
Yes, I’m betting it will work the same but be simplified and talented like Bears do now. It’ll just be something that needs to be taken in the Prot tree. It also may be a partial reason why they’ve stated Blood is the real tank spec for DKs; primarily mastery will play a part in that, but there’s also likely going to be tank-critical talents deep in the tree.
Ouch, yeah, don’t do that in H-HoR. Like you said–most places, it’s not a big problem. But the packs in HoR are so fucking nasty to start with, you don’t want to do ANYTHING to give you initial threat when the tank hasn’t picked anything up yet. Or you are going to go smooshy-smoosh.
I’d talk to other Holy Pallies about how they do it. In general, as a tank, *my *preference is to NOT be healed/HoTted/whatever in that gap between when I enter combat and when I hit the thing I’ve aggro’d. It can be a real pain in the ass to have to run around picking up mobs that have peeled off onto the healer. The ideal thing, from my perspective, would be to Beacon just before combat or just after the tank has established base aggro (not just proximity placement on the threat table) on the pack. But I’ve never played a Paladin past level 13 or so, so I don’t know how much that will screw with your rotation.
ETA:
Did you see Dan apped to MU? Joe emailed the thread to me. I gotta say, I’ve been really impressed with the kinds of questions the GM is asking. If I ever wanted to go casual, this looks like the kind of guild I’d love to be in. Fingers crossed they stay as awesome as they look!