:smack: They should know better times twenty-billion more. Eesh.
I do almost all of my SDMB posting from work, on my work laptop. I do all of my WoWing from home, on a completely different (and much, much, much better) machine.
Part of the reason I keep it at the 50-post default is that IE sucks so hard. (No other option, and I had to jump through hoops to even get an upgrade to IE7: most of the company is stuck with IE6 still.) E.g., if I try to search for something on a page before it’s completely loaded, IE will CLOSE THE SEARCH BOX AS I’M TYPING IN IT as the page loads more.
Our biggest problems tend to come when we need certain members of our DPS to do anything other than stand there and hit things (especially target switching, e.g. Emalon or Freya), so since we can down Emalon, I’m hoping new guy won’t be too hard.
Sometimes I’m reminded that the Warcraft 'verse can be…insane at times. I got to the Winterfin Refuge last night, as I wanted the kickass Tidebreaker Trident. It’s meant for Hunters and Feral Druids, but it’s not a bad weapon at all for Ret Pallies either. So I’m doing the quests for the murlocs, and I get to talking with my roomie about what I’m doing. She knows WoW well enough to follow along, but my description still came off as completely psychotic:
“So there’s this tribe of actual friendly murlocs. They were living in a cave at the foot of this giant mesa on top of which this horrific secret magic war is being fought. The magic seeped down into the cave and turned half the murlocs crazy. The other half escaped across the water, where a night elf Druid For the Ethical Treatment of Animals is dressed up in a fake murloc suit. He’d been studying them, and when they lost their leader he stepped in, so now he’s their king. So now I’m going over to the village where the crazy murlocs have locked up all the babies so I can free them so they can follow me around and cheer while I slaughter former friends and tribesmen by the dozens. Oh, and they use clams for currency, so I’m collecting them to get this bitchin’ polearm.”
… I love da widdle baby murlocs. Why can’t that be a daily?!
My second place nomination for “should be a daily” is the quest out of K3 where a goblin gets you to blow up mammoths and bring back the resulting meat shrapnel. Just because blowing up mammoths is cool.
There was a point after I finished collecting all 20 babies where we were in the water, heading back to the refuge, and I had to stop to kill a crazy murloc. I turned around, and like 6 of the babies (and my little silver tabby) were all treading water and looking at me with big, adorable, buck-toothed smiles. I’m not the kind of person who takes a lot of candid screenshots, so it didn’t occur to me at the time to take one, but now I’m kicking myself for not. It was just too cute.
Sadly, those particular babies wouldn’t dance with me the way the vanity pet babies do.
Well, like winterhawk11 said that could be a significant problem if they can’t move out of the fire - it hits quite hard and there’s plenty of other AoE damage. Clothies pretty much have one tick before they die (and if the AoE goes off at the same time they might die anyways). And if you lose too much DPS (or God-forbid a healer) you might be screwed since he has a soft enrage.
People have said he’s easier than Emalon, and at this point in the gearing progression he probably is. That said we still wipe to Koralon and haven’t wiped to Emalon in ages.
Yes. Please get out of the fire. One tick is fine, I can get a heal on you pretty quickly, but if you take that second tick and die when I’ve started to heal you that’s your dps we’ve lost, plus the extra mana I have to use to catch up on the tank. Even better, bring raid heals that need less help from the bleedin’ pally, I don’t mind helping a bit with spot heals, but someone shouldn’t die every time I need to refresh beacon (three pulls before the priest went shadow to give the shammy mana, one more pull to convince the shammy he needed to be bouncing chains off the raid).
Agreed. When I was knocking out Nothing Boring and got to that quest, my friend had to put up with me squealing on vent approximately every five seconds as I ran around and collected yet another baby Murloc.
Have you done the Northrend orphan quests yet? I don’t know about the Wolvar orphan, but if you take an Oracle, he and a Murloc baby dance for each other.
We’ve got most of them trained not to stand in the fire, fortunately. It’s not too often that we have to shout things like “move your ass out of that void zone” or “stop standing on the fucking poke-ball.” When we did our Mimiron attempts last week, not one person got hit with the insta-gib rockets.
If they can dodge the Mimiron rockets then they’re definitely on the right track. Another thing to point out is that you can actually see the fire coming if you have your camera angled the right way. It is possible to move out of the way as it flies toward you and not get hit at all. It is very important to minimize avoidable raid damage because (a) there’s a lot of unavoidable raid damage and (b) the tanks will need massive heals during Meteor Fists (especially towards the end when the stacking damage buff is higher).
Speaking of Mimiron we finally got him down again last night on 10-man (did it months ago but haven’t got a good consistent Ulduar group since then). Also got General Vezax down for the first time after three attempts (fun fight!) and threw ourselves at Yogg Phase 1 just for shits and giggles. Gonna have to extend our lockout for awhile to get some practice on Yogg while gearing up through the Coliseum.
Which class, in your opinion, takes the most work to really shine? I’m not talking about grinding fifty thousand rep to get the right belt and then a dungeon 80 times to get the best weapon. I mean, which one takes the most work and active interest but pays off for it? I’ve played lowbies of almost all classes but haven’t gone very far.
Given how long this thread is, you might want to quote or specify you’re responding to me.
I guess I’m not sure entirely what your getting at by “most work and active interest”. If you mean which class has the most things to keep track of while tanking/healing/dpsing then opinions will vary. For DPS it is generally considered that the hardest “rotations” to get good damage is feral druids (cat), warlock, and shadow priest. Easiest is probably elemental shaman.
For healing it seems that paladins are pretty straightforward (but have a decent number of cooldowns to manage) while discipline priests might be the most “difficult”. Druid healing can be really simple (just keep your HoTs rolling) or difficult (not a lot of big hitters). I’m not very familiar with Shaman healing, but most of the time it seems they’re on raid heals spamming Chain Heal.
As far as tanking I can’t really give much of an opinion - they all seem to have the same general abilities, although a few are better at AoE tanking while others really shine in single-target threat generation.
If you’re looking for a good variety of playstyles I don’t think you can go wrong with a druid - right now they are very solid in all 4 playstyles and have pretty complicated/interesting rotations to manage in all of them. And if you get bored with energy-based melee DPS (cat) or rage-based tanking (bear) you can switch to HoT healing (tree) or ranged caster (boomkin). Hard to get bored with so many options.
ETA: I should probably give a shout-out to my main as well. If you want raw damage dealing with a relatively interesting rotation Survival Hunters are in a pretty good place right now. And they are stupidly easy to level. And the “huntard” label seems to have melted away now that they are a little harder to play well and the bad ones have either quit or re-rolled as a DK.
Really? Interesting, as I’ve found running my shadow priest in instances pretty easy - target primary target, dot dot dot mind blast and flay until dead; acquire new target, if new target is still at 4/5 life repeat; if down to about half then just drop a shadow word pain and flay away. The only challenge is keeping half an eye on the tank’s life in case he needs a quick shield.
For soloing, I’ve found either shadow or disc priest to be much more fun than my DK (stupidly easy) or my old Prot warrior, who just didn’t have the tactical options the priest has.
It’s my understanding that tanking on a Warrior is harder than tanking with a Paladin, Druid, or DK. We have a wide rande of abilities, both in terms of building/maintaining threat and “ohshit” buttons for survivability, and learning how and when to best use them can take some time. Generating AOE threat from Prot Wars isn’t as difficult as it used to be, but there’s still some target rotation that generally needs to be done. Our threat tends to work differently from other classes: instead of being based on damage, a lot of our abilities have separate threat stats or modifiers on the damage threat, so we have to have a little mental threat table that isn’t actually listed anywhere in tooltips. One of our biggest threat generators, Heroic Strike, is something that has to be constantly spammed (to the extent that many Prot Wars, myself included, will bind it to the mousewheel and then just scroll it continuously during a fight). Then, there’s the whole Rage issue: we start with 0 “ability currency” to spend on things that can keep the nasties pounding on us and not the healers or DPS, and prior to the latest change to Shield Spec, increasing our avoidance actually decreased our threat output because of Rage starvation.
It depends. Classes and game balance change all the time, and someone who’s a master of thier class will always shine compared to someone who isn’t. Most of what makes a class shine is someone using all the tools of the class when they’re needed.
Take a pally healer, for example. It’s fairly easy to manage the basics of pally healing (focus on the tank, manage your mana and CDs), whereas the highend, wipe saving, bubble tanking, boss killing, every CD burned, every GCD maximized dance requires a fair amount of experince and patience to master. But does it take more or less work to master than it does to master a priest or a druid healer? I don’t know, I’ve seen the difference a good versus a master player for most of those, and the difference is massive, but which takes more effort to learn? No idea.
I think, at the end of the day, that what’s easy for one person to learn is difficult for another. I heard a tank and a healer arguing which was more stressful, each claiming that the other’s role was unplayable because of the responsibility it entailed. As I was on my lock at the time, I just laughed.
Well, I don’t have an 80 priest so I can’t say definitively - more passing along the consensus in my guild. We have one SPriest that does pretty good damage in raids, but you will rarely see one topping the meters. And this is by design - priest are primarily healers, they really shouldn’t be out-DPSing a geared and competent hunter or rogue.
Generally IMO the difficulty for DPS classes comes from managing attack priorities, keeping up DoT effects, managing combo points (rogues and feral druids), and handling proc effects.
Hunters, for example (since that’s the class I know the most about), have a pretty clear shot priority, two DoTs (for Survival) one of which lasts for less than it’s CD so there’s really nothing to manage - just fire when it’s off CD, no combo points, and only one significant proc (for Survival). So while I use maybe 10 different abilities on a given boss fight it’s not a particularly difficult thing to manage.
Feral druids, by comparison, have multiple bleed effects, an armor sunder, combo points and energy to manage, and at least one proc to respond to. Shadow priests have a number of DoTs that have cast times (so to not clip your DoT or have it drop you need either a really good sense of timing or an add-on). Same thing for Warlocks.
In short with any non-bad spec and a decent rotation you can do respectable DPS with any DPS or hybrid class. But if you want top-notch DPS (for your gear level) some classes have to work harder at it than others - and I think feral druids, warlocks, and shadow priests currently have to work the most to maximize their potential.
Problem is, I don’t have much confidence that the SDMB can handle SDMB at 200 posts/page
I don’t know why everybody hates on the human female legs. They look fine to me, at least when they’re bare or in mail or plate. They look bad in cloth and leather, but I think that’s more of a graphics skinning issue than an issue with the legs themselves.
Is my memory faulty, or did the female undead used to have a partially-exposed ribcage under their boobs? That seems to be gone now.
Tauren aren’t cows!
I used it on my ret pally until I was able to replace it with the polearm you can get at Revered (I think) with the Kalu’ak.
Yeah, my first attempt at that I completely failed to notice the bit about the explosives being “unstable”, and dicked around doing some cooking after I’d picked up the bomb. I was … surprised … to suddenly find myself exploding. Somebody set us up the bomb!
I prefer the way the draenei female misunderstands the question: “Yes they’re real. And they can cut glass!”
Today I would like to bitch about a quest in Loch Modan: one of the “Hunter’s Challenge” quests handed out by Daryl the Youngling at the Farstrider Lodge. I was doing this with my new prot warrior on a RP server. Let me just say that, if a quest requires you to kill a certain number of a particular kind of mob, and especially if there’s a time limit involved, it would be nice if that number of mobs would actually spawn. I had 12 minutes to kill 5 Elder Mountain Boars. I killed the first 4 fairly quickly, then ended up wasting hella time tracking down a fifth, which I finally located an absolutely asinine distance from the Lodge. I hauled ass back to the Lodge, only to have the time expire when I was literally two steps away from young Daryl. Arrrrrrrrg! Fail!
So I spent a good half hour doing other things, allowing plenty of time for these piggies to respawn. For good measure I activated QuestHelper (which I haven’t been using lately) to take advantage of the new feature where QH outlines and shades the entire area in which the quest mobs can be found. This verified for me that these particular mobs spawn over a ridiculously large area that stretches from the Farstrider Lodge all the way to the Loch itself. On my second attempt at the quest I found and dispatched three pigs fairly quickly (within 3-4 minutes), and then spent the next 7 minutes running all over the indicated spawn area (and yes, I covered the entire area) and could not locate even one more pig. Bears, yes. There were bears out the ass. And giant spiders. But no pigs. At that point I simply abandoned the quest and logged out. I’ll try it again later. Maybe the pigs will spawn in sufficient quantities if I give them a couple days :mad:
