World of Warcraft: Dragonflight

The Game Room
21

Yeah, I mean the dps spec of a healer (switching to healer on dungeons), usually the ranged (maybe the cat form has been good on a few expansions, but its a rogue, really, and I have one of those). Both shadow priest and boomkin were hard plays in recent expansions, maybe the gear drifted, I couldn’t get past the first major set of pulls on a shadow priest in Shadowlands with still having mostly Bfa gear on. I came back with heirloom gear on and it was fine, but I did need to flash heal quite a bit on a few serious pulls. I last remember Boomkin being a good spec perhaps as far back as Wotlk but its been a long time since its being an easy spec to do.

Elemental Shammy has been good for a long time, it seems to be the only dps of a healer who seems to not “just die” when you pull 2 mobs (something which a mage pretty much always does). It has a good burst and kill, rest have been disappointing in that way.

It’s pretty much been the same for classes as to which one is easy or hard to level since draenor, the dps classes are mostly hard, and the tank can dps as well as them (far better en mass) when levelling.

22

Yep, I’ve been playing that Shaman as ranged DPS since Classic, yep, 18 years. What a time sink. But I’ve had a lot of fun. Which is the point.

23

I will say that elemental shamans and shadow priests are substantially more robust for soloing in Dragonflight than Shadowlands IMHO, and the talent tree gives you choices that improve soloability a great deal in exchange for not quite so optimal dps.

Right now I’m alternating between my Feral Druid (Heal spec for grouping) and my Demon Hunter. They’re dual gatherers and raking in cash right now, but once the first rush is past will send mats to my crafters, who may or may not end up actively leveling anytime in the near future.

24

Here’s a list of the dps classes from best to worst

Elemental shamen as usual come low in there, with Enhancement high, but I just don’t want to play another stabby one, 3 specs of rogue, cat druid, windwalker monk, it’s just the same thing over and over again, melee with barely any heals and often no armour.

Interestingly it rates the Balance Druid above Elemental Shamen, never felt that, never really got the burst dps than the Shamen had and died a lot when trying it.

My versions at the moment, are:

  1. Beastmaster hunter, which weirdly feels the weakest and has died the most
  2. Affliction warlock, which I love playing, dot dot, tab, dot dot tab, just leaving a trail of corpses. Even got heals if it goes wrong.
  3. Prot warrior. Gotta fight em all. Unkillable. Pull more and with Victory Rush your next attack after one dies, heals you.
  4. Blood DK, another pull em all, just seem to end up with full health mostly.

When I level, I level a few at a time, and leverage rested ,so the early levelling needs to be good. Giving all my alts a kind of flying at the start has immediately made me much happier with this expansion.

Off to try an instance with the tank. Hope they’re not too annoying. Or loooooong.

25

I would also add that the auction house seems utterly fucked now for buying. I am mostly gatherer but the one moneymaker I had was tailoring, and I kept that.

The process of buying cloth which seems to be across multiple servers, and attempts to buy at lowest means it just keeps attempting to buy and failing. Plus a few times the whole interface gets stuck and it breaks my client, and I’m left with having to alt-f4 out and can’t log into that alt again, it’s stuck and says “already logged in”.

I’m amazed how awful they’ve managed to make this. It wasn’t great before, but addons made it bearable, but the default interface here is unusable. Are there addons to fix this now?

26

I haven’t had any of the issues you’ve mentioned regarding the Auction House freezing or crashing, but it has been slow to respond, admittedly.

And yeah, they basically did a multi-realm AH to help balance prices across high and low population servers across multiple realms, which was also supposed to limit individuals from price fixing (buy up everything and resell at higher costs). I believe it’s limited to just trade goods and consumables though.

As for the failed auctions, right now demand for good is so high that stuff will literally sell out from under you. So if you’re trying to buy cloth, but all the cloth at the price point you’re trying to buy has sold, you get that issue, especially if you’re for whatever reason having the AH issues you mention. In the short term (next week or so) probably get around it by picking the cloth 1-2 price levels up.

27

I haven’t had any issues with the auction house either, whether buying or selling, but then I’m not usually on at peak times. That might also have an effect.

28

I can try again at an offpeak time, basically failed every time, then I started doing refresh then buy, and repeated that about 10 times before I managed to buy 400 cloth.

For failed auctions I was asking for 400 cloth and trying about the 10th entry down, so not the idiot selling things for 1 silver, the ones selling 48000 at 34 silver (when the sensible price was about 30), and those failed because it seemed to be attempting to buy the ones for 1 silver etc, I think it was basically buying from about 10 different entries, from different servers, trying to resolve them and then one of those had already sold.

I do wonder if it works better in the US, and perhaps the EU servers are different and underpowered, and even that may only show at peak times buying, but it’s current bloody awful on my server.

29

Definitely sounds like something is abnormal server side. My sympathies.

30

For clarification on this - whatever order you try to buy, Blizzard will always buy from the cheapest order. You CAN’T buy from the 34s order. Probably why it didn’t work for you.

31

Yeah, I suspected this later. The reality is that nothing could be bought. The system did not work. It kept trying to buy things which were sold. And thus failing.

It was still doing something similar about 11pm, so offpeak time, just less consistently.

32

That’s rough. I literally haven’t been to a city since I escaped Orgrimmar on a flying boat. That said, I’m still only 64 and taking my time. Dragonriding is more fun than leveling.

33

I am having some trouble understanding the craft order system, having another go at it this morning.

Leveling is sort of happening in the background for me, as usual. As I’m a skinner/leatherworker I went on an explicit hunting trip on the Ohn’har’an plains (or however you spell that) to pick up materials. I’ve been a crafter all along, the new system is different and intriguing, and I’m hoping to make a little gold with it.

34

And every so often I hit the bits which makes me remember why I hated some of the game. So I stick with tailoring, it has been the only recent crafting which made any money. Find the one with the cooldown, get the specialisation, and Chronocloth it is then.

So they need me to make it at a special loom, but with flight this time, I can make it to that place, and despite it sometimes having some enemies I can’t kill on it, I spend about an hour and a half looking and flying and getting flight points and get there, I make one cloth. Off I go. Come back next day, whoops, I’ve not made one of the components…

Which needs a tailoring table. From wowhead and forums so far, there appears to be only 2 of them on that island, and nowhere near that temporal loom (there are probably loads more but nobody has mentioned where in the forums or the guides).

WHY DO THEY DO THAT? I get why they make it hard to do the cooldown crafted item, but why do they make it so you’ve got to fly another 10 minutes to use the mundane table which builds a missing component.

Sorry, rant over, it’s just so unnecessary…

35

Hey, at least that sort of crap has been an issue since vanilla. I’m looking at the never to be sufficiently hated Black Anvil there. I was actually more pissed off in the last expansion where they required huge amounts of purchased thread to craft even the most basic green items. So you’re flooded with cloth, which was nearly valueless to the vendor and the AH, but need 120-150G of FREAKING THREAD to make a single piece of gear using the valueless cloth?

It’s like everything in the game was made with 20 thread count cotton cloth head together with 24k solid gold sewing thread.

36

Every expansion they say “we’ve made crafting better” and every one of them they have the same crappy variations of travelling around the world like its classic, the same massive gold sink, and same lack of profit in the end.

I only ever tended to make money off of bags from about an expansion back. Sometimes the cooldown cloth, but I think it will take a while for the cloth to actually be profitable rather than doing it for costs + about 2% because it gives you a skillpoint.

I’ve made good money off JC, Inscription and Alchemy in the past, even engineering for the rocket gatherer thing, but only tailoring gave me any money recently and usually off old cheap mats.

I still don’t understand why the likes of inscription is in the game. Glyphs are pretty much long gone, Jewelcrafting barely in the game either, bit for the end game, I assume, I never played much late stage gear last expansion…

37

I don’t think crafting has been an advantage since… Burning Crusade? And certainly has been dead since LFG and especially LFR. Prior to those points, getting a group together to do high level content was much harder, and the drop rates for ‘you’ getting just the right BiS item were often unspeakably low. So being able to craft at least entry level dungeon / raiding gear was a help.

But none of that has applied in a decade now. And the last couple of expansions have been event worse in that to keep people playing, they’ll release a new content patch with bigger and better numbers, while simultaneously improving all the old gear across the board. And again, and again, and again.

The work done at beginning of shadowlands to craft a iLevel 200 Blue was made laughable by Korthia where you could just buy those from vendors, and then the later sub area had 226 gear for sale. From vendors!

I think what they’ve tried to do is interesting in DF, but it will inevitably fail as they keep needing to roll out new shinies to keep the subs going. It will fall behind. And having spread out the consumables over multiple realms, they prevent any sort of scarcity other than for very rare, not commonly found pieces of gear for transmog, enchanting, and the like. Which still doesn’t normally reflect the cost of farming the materials for some of those old items.

38

I’ve made a million or more in gold over the years crafting the panther mounts. Of course, that does require I keep going back to Panderia for materials, but I’ve got it down to a routine now. That’s where Jewelcrafting money has been for a long, long time.

It’s Archeology they’ve basically dropped. You can still play around with it and max it out in prior expansions, but as of Shadowlands there’s no new content in the new expansion.

39

Thoughts after about a week and half of actual play.

The instances are annoying the first few I played. While not long and requiring cc etc, the dragon pools one was ok until the last boss with fire everywhere, getting pulled around by wind etc, tanked that and healed that and a standing healer is a pain in that. The other one where you fly about on dragons was absolutely terribly annoying, across the board, dragonflight really is like a slingshot into place which has potential to drag every other spare bit of trash around on a few bad landings, and the end boss I was involved with, had serial fearing boss (might have been trash) which rates as one of the most horrible encounters I’ve seen for a while. Some of our specs has no interrupt or a 2 minute cooldown on the interrupt, they’ve taken some of the most annoying attacks (fear) and brought it to its conclusion.

Other joys remembered: mobs you kill but don’t get xp for, always a joy, but going back to Shadowlands to level a few more mobs: mobs that jump behind you, making a standing caster who needs to face in the right direction a wonderful experience (sarcasm).

Anyway, on other side of things, I’ve sped a few alts through shadowland, with full heirloom gear and rested, you can ding 53 out of the intro maw bit, and be at 57-58 in a day or so. I’ve quite enjoyed the frost mage, it seems to have a lot more spells, most specs of things have mainly 4 things you hit, most of which are on cooldown, but mage seems to have a lot of spare spells to use. Went to boomkin too, who’s joy is to be able to stealth past stuff avoiding all that trash.

Having some form of flight early on for all alts has charmed a bit for this expansion, I’d got a monthly sub this time around, because I reckoned it would last 2 months max, like Shadowlands, but it’s got me alt playing much more and leaving the others resting. Due to the flight it seems a lot of quests scattered around, which isn’t actually bad, not sure if good either.

Another interesting thing to note is that due to crafting and pricing, there’s a bit of decent level 61 startup gear on AH for most classes. Which helps levelling, and I don’t recall it quite being that so easy and cheap in previous expansions.

40

I definitely think that is deliberate (the costs to craft the 61 armor are pretty minor) - it gets people coming back after a while quickly geared up, to the point where the intro stuff seems to be a breeze.

I’ve heard a LOT of complaints though from my friends who were raiding/doing mythics that all their work didn’t even last a single LEVEL into Dragonflight though, as the 310ish stuff at 61 crushes all but the most l33t grinders out there.

I’ve got about 4 characters that are around 63, just cycling through them to get my basic crafters and gatherers going to support everyone, but have avoided the instances like a plague. At endgame of an expansion, it’s all faceroll all the time, and then people start over with stuff that has to be cc’d or interrupted as you point out, but no one is willing to do it. So wipes, rage quits, and sitting around for next player, who doesn’t want to do a partial clear, and then more waiting.

No thank you.

I’m back to having a 4 man group of IRL people, and we’re leveling from scratch once a week. By the time (2 months or so) we hit 60, we’ll do those together, and all the crap will be sufficiently tweaked and I won’t have to put up with Puggers.

ETA - for those who play the AH / token game, Blizz just opened pre-orders for Diablo 4, which spiked token prices by about 20k on my server. And it’s likely to stay higher for a while at least, so it’s yet another consideration.