Monday Random Thoughts

- Originally this was supposed to be the last monday post of 5.3 but we get another two weeks to play around.

- It makes me think what do I need to do in these last two weeks.

- My goal was to have a 510 average item level over all 11 classes on my main server and if the patch was due to come out tomorrow I would have missed that.

- I really lost my desire to try two months ago because I need to do the LFR to get to that point and I really do not want to do it.

- So I am sitting at a 503 average item level over my 11 characters.

- Only one is under 460.

- So while shy of my goal it is still not bad over all.

- The new LFR will need a 496 item level to enter it.

- As it stands I only have 3 characters that will not be able to enter it on day one.

- Can you guess which three?

- I give you a hint, all three wear plate.

- I don't like the plate classes all that much this expansion.

- Don't know why.

- I am looking forward to the warrior changes.

- Will be nice to feel a little stronger even if still the worst tanking class when it comes to dealing damage while tanking.

- While my paladin is not heroic scenario ready all other tank characters are and I can tell you from my own experience with it that warriors lack severely in the AoE tanking department.

- Maybe it is just something I am doing wrong.

- With my other tanks I can round up everything, do quality damage, and let the two damage dealers burn stuff down without ever needing to worry about aggro.

- I can even pull competitive damage with people in 530 item level while sitting at 480 on my DK ungemmed and unenchanted if I have enough mobs on me.

- With all tanks except the warrior it is like bringing 3 damage dealers to a heroic scenario, except one takes all the hits.

- Now THAT is how tanking should be in my opinion.

- With my warrior, I am usually 1/5 of the DPS of even people geared only at 500.

- If I go with 530 people I might as well just say screw it, I will never keep aggro off of them.

- With my warrior, I am constantly fighting over mobs because I lost stuff to AoE all the time because my low damage and lack of solid repeatable AoE keeps me from holding aggro easy like I do with all other tank classes.

- So yes, I am looking forward to some extra damage even if they are nerfing the vengeance we get from AoE tanking some.

- I still think when it comes to AoE tanking warriors will still be dead last.

- But nothing beats a warrior in terms of movement in a fight.

- Still have to love that.

- Not really looking foward to hunter changes.

- We lost all our burst with the removal of readiness and were given no compensation for it.

- Okay, not no compensation.

- We got minimal compensation.

- Stampede was returned, partly, to its original power, but without the utility.

- Nice to see the power return being it should have never been removed for PvP reasons in PvE to begin with.

- But really, more power means nothing.

- They could add more power to boosting a shot.

- The real beautiful thing that made stampede a great ability was its utility.

- They still have not returned that.

- So even with a more powerful stampede, it is still a nerf over all by the lack of utility it offers now.

- Sure that utility was mostly for solo stuff, but it is still missed.

- I would rather have the lower damage and all the utility back for stampede and give us the damage boost to out rotational abilities and not some five minute cooldown.

- They are giving us a tiny boost to some abilities but doubling the cost of arcane shot means we end up with a net of nothing.

- So if you ask the blues they will say "hunters are fine".

- But when you ask the players they all say the same thing.

- You removed our burst button with readiness and gave us nothing in return, how is that fine?

- Some would say the arcane boost, which was then switched to the signatures, was our compensation.

- It was not.

- I will respectfully remind those people the arcane boost was to boost our damage because we were so low and it was an attempt to get use closer to the middle of the pack.

- So that boost, which turned into the shift, was a balancing thing.

- We have still not received compensation for the loss of readiness.

- I like to say, lets wait and see what they will do on the PTR.

- I now say, we are not getting any compensation, so we are in a "wait until next expansion" holding pattern now.

- Unless of course they think boosting stampede made up for readiness.

- I really hope they do not think that.

- Letting an ability do the damage it was supposed to do from the start is not compensation for something else, it is fixing an error made nerfing it in the first place.

- I am sure if you ask a blue however they will say that was the compensation.

- Just shows another reason I say these people that make these decisions do not actually play the game.

- Only ghostcrawler seems to play.

- And he seems to play a mage.

- It is the only logical reason why they have been top, or near top, DPS for what, 6 years now?

- Can't say blizzard hates hunters however.

- It is just that they do not know what to do with them.

- They are a ranged class that follows all the melee concepts, and that is a nightmare to balance in PvP and that makes us sometimes take a few hits for PvE.

- Hunters are incredibly hard to balance because of it.

- Heck, hunters are proof that different designers design different encounters and different packs of trash.

- Dark Animus does not spell lock hunters, neither do the bats before tortos interrupt our casting.

- Yet the trash before council can interrupt us and spell lock us.

- Different designers, same raid, handle what hunters do differently.

- I think if hunters ever want to get fixed, we as a community, need to force blizzard to write the book on us.

- Either spell locks work on us, or they don't.

- That would be a start in finding a balance for hunters, when they finally decide on what they want hunters to be.

- Then they can grow from there.

- Personally if you ask me, I like the idea we can not be spell locked.

- Not only because it is nice and easy to not worry about that stuff, but they removed mana because they did not want us to be casters.

- Then do not let us be affected by stuff that is only supposed to affect casters like spell locks.

- I did some alt leveling this weekend.

- Got another lowbie to 80.

- And got yet another lowbie to 20.

- And another one to 30.

- Think that is all the mile stones for the little ones.

- Every time I level a new character I always wonder how I made it 40 levels without a mount, or even 30.

- Now when I get to level 20 it feels like the greatest triumph ever in game to finally be able to mount and move faster.

- It is almost as if I can't even imagine it having been later before.

- My character that hit 20 was a draenei which meant I needed to make the long trek from stormwind to the exodar.

- That take a while when doing it by foot, just to turn in your riding quest.

- I didn't even think to try to buy riding in SW and just abandon the quest.

- I wonder if that would have worked and saved me like, what, 30 minutes of travel for the sake of traveling?

- I think they should lower it to level 10.

- Really, what is the fun of running all over the world taking 5 minutes between everything you do?

- The world of gaming has changed and warcraft should as well.

- Travel time is no longer a viable way to fill gaming time.

- It is a waste of time.

- I am sure everyone that plays the game would be glad to spend more time playing it and less time running somewhere to play it.

- But you know what would happen?

- We would then want it at level 5, then level 1, then faster riding at 30, then 20, you get the idea.

- So they have to draw the line somewhere.

- I think the line should be at speed.

- I hope they never add faster riding of any sort.

- While I hate travel because it is a waste of time, some travel is needed, to give the game scale.

- It lost a lot of scale with flying.

- It is why I like the idea of no flying in new zones until max level.

- The world seems so much bigger on foot.

- But a slow ground mount, giving that one sooner, I can support.

- Checking auction houses on different servers sometimes amazes me.

- Yes, I know the economy is different from server to server, but it never stops amazing me how different it can be.

- There are some pets that go for 200K on my server, and actually sell.

- Yet I was on another server that has 2 on the auction house for 12K.

- I wish I had the gold on that character, I would buy them and send them over to my server to make some quick cash.

- So I listed some things that on my server go for 600, but on that server seem to go for 10K.

- Pets are such an amazing way to transfer money between servers.

- Buy from one server for 600, sell on another for 10K, then buy on that server for 12K and send back to sell for 200K, and effectively turn 1200 gold into 200K gold.

- Not bad for a days work, if they sell that is.

- On my server the spectral kitten sells for around 60K, if and when there is one around.

- On another server I was on there was someone offering 150K for it.

- Sadly there where none on the market or I could have effectively transferred 60K from my main server to another server I am cash strapped on.

- And made 90K in the process.

- Speaking of gold, after I spent all the gold making all the jewel crafting mounts I am back over 500K.

- Not sure how I managed that, I have not sold anything at auction.

- Do you really made that much money raiding and doing every day junk that I could make 100K in a couple of weeks just doing nothing really?

- If so, how can anyone ever say they are broke?

- Do something and you make money.

- Seriously, do something, anything, instead of sitting in a city talking in trade.

- I think that is how I make so much gold without trying.

- I am never, repeat, never in a city for more then the time it takes to pass through it.

- Soloing old content, doing dailies, raiding, farming for something.

- Just do stuff and you make gold.

- Had a tank finally finished ToT, so another character that went through it.

- But oddly enough, it was not the tank that has the first 11 down.

- It was a tank that had only tanked the first few.

- I made a group from guild and downed the last few.

- So now I have three characters that have either killed everything but the last boss (Bear), or killed the last boss but not everything before it(Monk, Hunter).

- I do not have one character that has killed every boss in there.

- Thank goodness I did not need to kill everyone on one character to get the achievement.

- I think for my hunter to actually get the kills I need we need to do them on day one.

- We usually end on day one after Dark animus.

- So day two, I tank the last three.

- If we even get the day 2 in, but the last few weeks it has been good getting that second day in.

- Which is how I got another tank the last kill.

- I thought I was kicking ass on my tank.

- Did better numbers than my druid.

- Then I looked at world of logs and realized, damn I suck damage wise.

- Still I think doing over 100K as a tank with a 518 item level isn't all that bad.

- At least I thought that until I saw that most tanks that are doing well are doing over 200K on most bosses.

- Gee, thanks, great way to make me feel blah about myself.

- And here I was having a bang up time playing my monk and feeling like I was actually doing well.

- I was surviving and not putting pressure on the healers and I was putting out damage numbers that could beat 10 of the people in the 25 man team.

- But I will say one thing, I am getting better at monk tanking.

- Even have a follower now after seeing my tank and now he wants to tank on his monk.

- We did some stuff together and he asked me how I was doubling this DPS as a tank when he has more gear that I do.

- Popped up the numbers and looked at one thing, keg smash.

- I knew exactly where it was coming from before I even looked.

- Over the course of the fight he had 1/4 of the smashes I did.

- I told him, use it on cooldown.

- Funny thing is, since he started asking me about monk tanking a couple of weeks ago I have started taking it a lot more serious.

- Not like I did not take it serious before, but now I need to teach someone, so there is no room for mistakes, when I am teaching myself I sometimes learn from failure.

- If someone is asking me and depending on what I tell them, I can't fail.

- Back to alts.

- Profession leveling is a bitch sometimes.

- I have a couple of those low level alts just sitting and waiting for the next darkmoon faire.

- They are at stages where they need more materials where you need to go back to get them.

- My new 80 is an enchanter / tailor on its own server so it has no support system.

- It's enchanting is fine, just finally made it up to cata stuff, so I'll be okay moving on.

- But its tailoring is about 15 points behind and at 400 a stack for bolts, I am not going to be spending gold there.

- So it is grind my ass off, or let it fall behind.

- I'll probably just leave the character sitting there for 3 months and try to remember to do the faire for three months to get those 15 skill points.

- It is nice for it to be an alt and I have those options, but I feel for the people that don't have those options because it is their main and their only character.

- They need to do something to make sure that professions can keep up with the new speed of leveling.

- It is not fun going back to play catch up.

- I am guessing this is why you see many new 90s with professions that seemed to die somewhere between the 200s and 300s.

- Because all professions start to slow to a crawl in that range and no matter how much you try they will fall behind unless you make a huge effort for them not to.

- And most players that do not have alts and just want to play, want to get to max level, so they will not waste time going back and waiting until their professions catch up.

- Blizzard should take a clue from that.

- They love to say they have all the data.

- I dare them to look at that data and do something about it.

- Look at how many 90s do not have maxed professions.

- Look at the level those professions were left at.

- Take note of patterns you see, like were tailoring, black smithing, leather working, etc, all seems to stop.

- Read that data, and correct those bumps in the road.

- You keep saying you have more data than we do, prove it, use it to do something to make the game better.

- Running a simple search that finds the profession levels of level 90s should not be all that hard.

- At least I don't think it would be.

- The Godmother made a post about poop quests a week or two ago and I think I found one that no one mentioned in their replies.

- Not so much a poop quest but a quest that mentioned poop.

- Actually the quest does not even mention poop, one of the NPC you rescue does.

- It is in redridge and when you rescue this one guy from orcs while running back with him he makes a poop reference that I got a nice chuckle from because even if I had done the quest before I never noticed what he said.

- He said something along the line of, "why do they call themselves orcs, it is such a disgusting word, like something I would use to describe defecating." after I rescue him from the orcs.

- But that was not the funny part.

- Then he continues with "like if I just got out of the bathroom I would say, I just took one really smelly orc."

- That was the line that made me laugh, and it is yet another one for the long line of poop quests, or poop references.

- But the best line in the game involving orcs still remains "me not that kind of orc".

- I just can not help laughing at that one.

- Even typing it now made me laugh.

- That is enough babble for today, have a great day.

- And remember, me not that kind of orc.