Here is what bugs me the most about the class changes, from the perspective of an MM Hunter.
I am getting a feel for how to play the class, but experiences in 5-man content confirms my guess about the reduction in my throughput. I’m much less effective in dealing damage and, because of all the “free cleave” in the current favored MM build, I think I’d be a liability in CC situations. (Assuming CC still exists.) Sidewinders is particularly bad because it is so broad and indiscriminate and you have to use it all the time. Along with Barrage, which was always a sketchy proposition. And losing traps means I don’t have any CC contribution. That used to be the mark of a competent hunter: good at kiting, good at trap-based CC. I have neither.
An MM apparently has to be a turret. You can’t Aim Shot on the move, and since that’s your filler and resource generator, moving nerfs your output. Period. Yeah, I guess that means I can join the ranks of all of the other immobilized caster classes. Lucky me. :mad:
The toon I’m talking about is about iLvl 710. Not a raider by any means, but I think I do OK for a filthy slackjawed casual. I mostly amuse myself by soloing old material, and this patch takes away a lot of the certainties I’ve had for doing that. No passive heal with Spirit Bond. No CC, not even slows except for Conc shot. Almost no dots. I haven’t even looked to see if I can chain misdirect to pets like I used to be able to with the glyph of Misdirection, but if not it’ll be pretty interesting hoping my tanky pet will be able to hold threat. I guess my anemic DPS will help in that regard. :dubious:
I just got around last week to trying to solo Pandaria raid content. I finished ToES 10 Normal and did OK. But losing a lot of the things I described, I have no such confidence now. I might try again this week (looking for the garrison music scroll), or I may not until I’ve leveled up in Legion. Assuming I decide to buy the xpac after all.
There isn’t any such a thing as a secondary spec now. You have your spec. You can change it, or the talents in it, at any time at no cost as long as you’re in a “rested” zone. That’s the garrison, and presumably capital cities and inns. But for now, only there. (In a timewalking Mana-Tombs run, I wanted to spec out of Lone Wolf so I could summon a pet and solo Yor after everyone else left, but no soap – I was stuck petless because I couldn’t even change a talent within the instance itself. All that time and efffort to get an Eye of Haramad seems so wasted now.)
I sort of remember reading that after we get into Legion, scribes would be able to create a sellable scroll to briefly allow a respec/retalent anywhere, and also that instances would have a brief interval after teleporting in that would allow respec/retalent, in case your group preferences are different than your solo ones.
I found Marksman Hunter guides on Noxxic and Icy Veins. And they’re identical. Looks like we’re back to the age of cookie cutter builds, thanks to the magic of complexity trimming.
Can’t answer. Haven’t even considered tradeskill changes yet. I’m so discombobulated with the changes in actual game play, I can’t afford the facepalming. :smack:
Oh, yeah, one other thing I noticed we lost on the spec/talent front. Since we don’t get a canned 2nd specification, when you change spec you’ll have to completely re-talent from scratch. I hope you remember your preferred build, because nothing in the game will remember it for you. :mad:
It depends on the class/spec. Some have basically one viable build, other have multiple builds filling different niches. Demo locks, for instance, seem to have several different specs with somewhat different playstyles, and ele shamans appear to have both nature and fire focused builds. Shadow Priests can also choose whether they want to focus on Surrender To Madness or not, though that ends up being a choice between two relatively straightforward build ideas. This is really the same way it was in MoP and from the little I played of WoD it seemed to be that way too, except they changed which classes are cookie-cutter and which have options.
I didn’t like MOP, I didn’t like WoD, so I took a break and am just coming back after getting to 100. I started a baby warrior and I refused to use heirlooms. The quests were actually challenging again, and I found myself using the healing potions I found.
Once I got to level 10, it turns out that I was really an arms warrior for the first 9 levels. So I changed specialization to fury warrior and got blood thirst. I started holding my own after that.
At level 17 I switched to protection and that’s when I noticed the talent tree changes depending on your specialization which I think is nice.
Protection feels a little over powered still at low level, since I went into Deadmines without heirloom gear, just gear I had found while adventuring. I was able to clear to the first boss solo before I ran out of potions. I figured if I needed potions in the fights getting to the boss there was no way I would actually beat the boss.
I have had no issues with crashes, but I am running in windows 10 full screen windowed mode.
All in all, I actually had fun playing WoW for the first time in forever.
That’s all-in-all pretty cool, and I sense that you’re getting good value out of the leveling content Blizzard worked hard to put together. As much as it’s not common or cool to sympathize with their devs, you have to feel sorry for the ones stuck designing, implementing, and maintaining the leveling content, because no one goes there, or lingers to see their hard work.
In my own defense, all of my lowbies are in gank-infested PvP servers, so trying to level by questing is pretty much a study in being camped by psychopaths. My mistake, rolling on evil servers, but a lot of it is about support from higher-level alts that are stuck on those same evil servers. So it’s put me off of that phase of the game pretty completely. Rush through lowbie content and get to max level so I can at least look less like bully bait.
Is it just me or is there something horribly wrong about garrisons? Any time any of my characters go into their garrisons, the framerate becomes like one frame per 30 seconds. It’s not a problem in cities or other crowds, just garrisons.
Oh, so that’s why I saw someone else’s refreshment table even though I can’t find the spell in my spellbook.
I’m getting used to the new fire spec. It seems much more bursty, which I like. I’ve got a little macro for when I want to pop all of my cooldowns (potion/ring/combustion/pyroblast in one keystroke). I want to field test it more, but heroic dungeon bosses die too quickly for me to get through my whole burn rotation.
My main goal now is to get into the groove of running mythic dungeons with guildies to get enough valor to fully upgrade my ring; I only got it like a week and a half ago.
I’m finally breaking out of my routine of using my alts to make item upgrades for me to sell on the AH. I’ve made a huge pile of gold, but making the rounds on all of my alts would get me a little WoWed out and I didn’t do much else in the game most days. So now I’m just gonna sell what I have left, and probably liquidate my base mats.
I did some digging and found this very long forum thread (33 pages now) about this issue; it’s becoming a major point of contention between the paying customers and the people who get paid by the customers, it seems.
What’s happened is that they have removed the ability to use the command line /console CameraDistanceMax 5 to reset max camera zoom distance.
The default zoom range is now about 10 meters. If you go to Interface>Camera there is now a slider that will let you set the range of zoom from 0-10 to 0-30 (maybe 30, maybe 40… I dunno but more than 10) meters.
It’s not as good as it was able to be, but it’s better than the default. I hope this helps y’all as much as it helped me.
ETA: I just saw your post when I posted this, aktep. I wasn’t gonna go into the reasoning the devs have for the change, but it’s stupid. Unbelievably stupid. It boils down to “not everyone reset their max camera distance so we’re not going to let anyone reset their max camera distance”.
Has anyone tried Final Fantasy XIV: ARR, by the way? I’ve heard pretty much nothing but great things about it. I tried the demo and was put off a little by the long GCD, but to be fair I only got to like level 10. WoW doesn’t exactly shine at level 10 either, and I hear FFXIV’s combat system becomes somewhat crazy at higher levels. I’ve heard great things about the crafting and community as well. I’m thinking of just migrating there when I get the MMO itch if Legion doesn’t pan out.
Not to stop the complaining about all the stuff they took out, but I played on my Rogue last night was was delighted to learn that the nameplates have been updated (very tidyplates-ish) and there was a HUD over my character showing health, energy, and combo points.
What second-hand information I have about the game suggests that the game is a lot more interesting throughout the leveling process, has a much deeper profession system, but the raiding scene is nothing to write home about.
Oh, and the community is supposed to orders of magnitude less jaded than the WoW one.
I can see Alliance players nameplates thru walls and hills, even if they are more than 50 meters away. That means they can see my nameplate. This means that I cannot “hide” around a corner or hill or wall. This is problematic in certain PvP situations.
There doesn’t appear to be a way to turn off the health bar under the nameplates. I don’t need to see health bars under nameplates.
Got to experiment a little today. My gear is around ilvl 685 or so, including the legendary ring. Ran a Heroic as fire spec…managed only about 11k dps. Ran another as arcane, did about 20K. Didn’t run a dungeon as frost, but went and did a couple of WoD dailies. My best guess would be I could probably hit about 24K in a heroic as frost, and maybe closer to 30K raid buffed.
Not sure this actually means anything beyond I don’t know how to play fire worth a damn.
Yeah, you do. The devs decided you do, because other people do. Because CONSISTENCY. :mad:
The nameplate implementation, as well as a few other visuals, still leaves some room for improvement, and I think I resent that Blizzard (in typical Blizzard fashion) stole perfectly good ideas from addons (like TidyPlates, mentioned earlier) and implemented it for themselves in the base game. But poorly, and with poor granularity and configurability. Because CONSISTENCY. :smack:
I don’t think the phrase “raid buffed” means anything anymore. Raid buffs don’t exist in 7.x. A mage can’t give themselves higher intelligence, and can’t do that for a group or raid either.
So, what’s advertised is that what you do solo is pretty close to what you do in raid. It’s not a coherent platoon improving each others’ performances, it’s 25 strangers doing 25 different things as good as 25 individuals can do.
That used to be the mark of a competent hunter: good at kiting, good at trap-based CC. I have neither.