Is Survival Becoming a Melee Spec?

There was a lot mentioned at the expansion announcement I would love to talk about but one thing more than anything ran out to me.  With the new artifact weapons, why exactly is the spear something the survival hunter would seek out?

Did they misspeak or is survival becoming a melee spec, like it should have been since vanilla?

Feel free to speculate, I know I will until this weekend when they have the question and answer phase and I can ask, why the hell does a hunter need a spear?

Edit:  It was a spear, not a staff.  Still, same question applies.

Now We Need A Personal Toy Box

Who here does not love the toy box addition to the game?  If you just said you don't I have to ask, "What the hell, are you crazy?"

The toy box was a great addition to the game.  It freed up countless spaces in my bags and allowed me to throw away countless more items I had kept on alts but now only one character needs to have things to add them and the other can throw them away.

Sure there are some changes I would like to see made to the toy box we already have. 

First of which would be that things that should be considered toys be labeled as toys from the get go.  How many new things were added in T2 that were not labeled as toys to begin with that completely fit the toy design?  A lot.  So I would like them to be a little better at assigning the toy label to items. 

The other thing I would like to see is them give all toys a sell price.  I know it is no big deal but if I got a toy on my hunter and then do the same quest on my druid and pick up the toy I really do hate having to throw it out of my bag and type delete.  The least they can do is give it a 1 copper sell price.  I know, first world problems, but it would be a nice quality of life change to the toys either way.

But that is not what this post is about.  This post is about the toys that are toys but they do not fix in the toy box design because they are "power" items.  Things like the feather.  It gives power to a character so they do not want it shared.  I can understand that.  They do not want my main to run around getting all the things that grant power and my alts taking advantage of it.  As nice as that would be, I can get on board with that and understand their reasoning.

But that is where my personal toy box desire comes in.

I want a second toy box for the toys they do not want us to share like the feather.  That toy box would not be account wide, it would only be for your character and your character alone.

I was looking through my bags the other day crying silently to myself how I have no space.  Then when I thought about it, I have space, lots of it actually, but it is just taken up by this items I carry around "just in case" I might want to use them.  Yes, I know it is a personal problem but quiet down, you will ruin the flow of my idea here.

Things like the dalaran ring, the timeless island trinket, the previously mentioned feather, the master hunter piece from T2, my hearthstone, the garrison hearthstone, the admirals compass, and many items like those that could be considered power items that I can not put in a toy box but could basically be called toys.

I would love a personal toy box for these things, one that is not shared, because they do not want it shared, but one that still takes the stuff out of my bags and frees up space.  I think I counted all these non-toy type toy things and came up with 25 in my bags.  My engineer would have had even more with all the different wormhole generators, jeeves, my mailbox, the two blings and other such power toys.

So you see how much possible bag space they could give us by allowing us to put personal toys in a personal toy box.  Don't get me wrong, I love the shared toy box, it is one of the best additions of warlords, but having a personal toy box to go along with it would be absolute heaven for the bag space situation.

And while we are at the wishful thinking stage, maybe a tabard collection too.  Even if it is not shared, so I could put all my tabards in there including the ones that have uses like the argent tournament one and the stormwind one.  Yeah, that would be pretty cool even if they tied it to the personal toy box.

They have been thinking so much of shared quality of life changes like shared mounts, shared pets and shared toys lately that they forgot that sometimes we still want personal quality of life changes as well and boy oh boy would having a place to stash my hearthstone and other personal goodies fit the bill as an awesome quality of life change.

Should Specs Need Tier Sets to Feel Complete?

In my last post I mentioned how I was never a fan of the survival spec for hunters until I got the T16 four piece set back in SoO.  It really made survival finally feel like a true hunter spec, like it belonged, something it had never felt like it did to me before that.

This tier I am anxiously awaiting my four piece tier set so I can play marksman with an instant cast aimed shot.  The way marksman should have been from the beginning when they redesigned things.  The one major fault of marksman, in my opinion, was the lack of instants.  We had chimera with its cooldown and whatever level 90 talent we decided on which comes with its own cooldown, both of which are not really all that ideal for just throwing one quick shot out on demand because it might be on cooldown.

While dabbling with marksman all I keep saying is, we need an instant.  The four piece set will give that to marksman just the way the four piece set in T16 gave survival an identity for the first time, at least to me.

It is not only hunters that have tier sets that seem like they complete the class, that they fix something that is broken, or offer something that felt missing, it just feels more pronounced to me as I main a hunter.  There are many classes who have their tier sets basically make the spec.

I am sure this is "by design" but I wonder if it is the right design.

Wouldn't you rather have your spec feel natural and flowing all the time and have a tier set that makes you stronger instead of a tier set that makes you only make you feel stronger by turning your spec into something that feels natural and flowing like it should have been from the beginning?

I am not liking that you "need" to have a tier set to play the way the character should play naturally.  Sure my main hunter will end up with his four piece sooner or later, as everyone else gets gear and no longer needs it so I get it as a hand me down, because I am not going to count on my luck winning it, but what of my other hunters?  What of the ones I do not raid with?

Do I really need to go pug and hope for a 4 piece set so I can play marksman on my alts and it feel like it should feel to begin with?  Sorry, I am not down with that.  Tier sets should give you a power boost, it should not be a band aid to "fix" a spec.

I know some tier sets people shun off, like the druid healers in guild last tier.  They let everyone else get their tier sets first because they did not want the four piece and there were better off set pieces with better stats for them.  But that is the exception, not the rule.  For most classes the four piece is something you will want and for some specs the four piece is something you "need" to fix the class.

Do you think they should keep using tier sets to "fix" what people complain about with a class, such as marksman not having an instant, or should they actually fix the specs?

My vote is for actually fixing the spec and making tier sets for power only, not to change how the class is played.  But you probably knew that already from the tone of my post.

What is your opinion. do you think the tier sets should fix the specs or do you think the specs should be fixed naturally and the tier set just make them more powerful?

I Never Liked Survival Until...

I must admit that I was never a fan of survival for hunters.  I never even dabbled in it much.  Maybe for a tiny bit here and there on an alt hunter, but never seriously.  I am a hunter, and that, to me, meant one of two things.  I am either a killer with a beast at my side or a sharp shooter taking my enemies down from a distance.

Needless to say I was a beast mastery hunter and a marksman hunter.  They felt like what I believed to be what hunter specs should be.  Survival never made sense to me.  It seemed like a spec that was still in development.  Like it should be melee but it was not, like it should be more tank like, but it was not, like it should be more stealthy, but it was not.  It never felt right to me.

That was all until I got the four piece set in SoO.  Sure I had changed to survival earlier, because at some points it was the best spec to be.  At the beginning of cataclysm for instance.  I played it because it was better. Not because I liked it and most definitely not because I wanted to.  I played it because it was the best spec to be.

However with that four piece set I fell in love with survival.  Admittedly not as much as I loved the end of wrath armor penetration marksman spec, which still remains my favorite ever, but I really did start to feel as if survival had an identity.  It felt like it belonged, for the first time to me, as part of the hunter repertoire.

So that is when I gave survival an identity in my mind.  It was the fast paced rapid fire spec of firing off shots in rapid succession as fast as possible ripping apart my enemies with machine gun like efficiency.  I grew to really enjoy that play style in that long long long span of time we spent raiding SoO.

So now, as my mind envisions it beast mastery is the hunter and pet as a team killing machine, marksman is the sniper spec that kills from a distance with ruthless efficiency, and now survival is the fast paced never let up spec.

Sure they all change over the years, marksman now is merely a shadow of the spec I fell in love with many years ago and what made me enjoy being a hunter more so than anything before it.  But those basic break downs will forever be how I see each spec should be.

Was there ever a spec you disliked but you played anyway because it was the best spec to be?

Did you ever begin to like a spec you had never previously disliked?

I know for me, some specs just do not click with me as a player and I am sure it is the same for others.  But the survival 4 piece from SoO finally broke my dislike for the survival spec.  Maybe your opinions about some specs have changed over the years too.

This is part 1 of a 2 part post:  Next up, Should Specs Need Tier Sets to Feel Complete?

Warcraft Down to 5.6M Subs

For the longest time I have been saying that the only thing that could ever really kill warcraft was blizzard itself.  It sure seems like they are doing a bang up job of doing just that lately.  With a 44% decrease in subscribers since the beginning of the expansion this is the largest loss the game has ever seen over an expansion cycle and the expansion cycle is not even half over yet, with no new content to come.

Blizzard is trying to pass this off as the standard cycle that happens during the end of an expansion but that a rather hard pill to swallow.  Perhaps the stock holders could buy that but as a player of the game I am just not taking the bait.  I know that statement is a bold face falsehood.  While it is true at the end of an expansion cycle they do see a downturn, this quarterly report was not for the end of the expansion.  It saw a lot of additions to the game that should have added players, not decreased them.

The quarter in question which saw an additional 1.5M subscribers lost happened to be when the wow token was released which basically allowed players to play for free.  This alone should have been something that gave a considerable boost to the subscriber numbers as people came back to the game being they no longer needed to pay for it with cash and instead could use the copious amounts of gold they had saved up and no use for to pay for their monthly subscriptions.

Not only that, this quarter in question saw the reversal of what was the extremely unpopular decision to remove flight.  You would think reversing their stance on flight and saying that it would, in fact, be coming back to the game would have appeased some of the people that were upset about that decision.

But you also need to consider that the quarter we are talking about saw the release of a major content patch (our only one) that included a new zone, new rares, new reputations, new quests, a new raid, mythic dungeons as well as some other little stuff here and there.  That major content patch was released at the end of the quarter too so it is not like it was released and time had passed for it to die down and people to finish the content that was added because it was only added the last week of the quarter.  So people coming back for that should have been a huge boost for the game.

So I absolutely do not but the statement that was uttered to the stockholders.  This is not the standard downturn at the end of an expansion cycle.  Not even close because this was not the end of the expansion, not when the only major content patch of the entire expansion was released in that quarter.  If they said that 12 months from now when we have been sitting in the same raid for over a year then yes, it would be the standard end of expansion downturn.  But not now.

With all those above mentioned things even the most hardened warcraft hater would have to admit that there would be an uptick in subscribers.  Even the haters know allowing people to play for free would bring people back, adding flight back to the game would bring people back and most importantly, adding new content would bring people back.  So even haters would have expected an uptick in subs, or at least accepted it.  Never before has a content patch been accompanied by a loss in subscribers.  Never before has an expansion saw this large of a loss this early in the expansion cycle.  This is unprecedented.  This could be one of the single biggest declines of any game of this sort in the history of the genre and coming from the leader in the genre that is saying a lot.

There could be a lot of reasons why people are leaving and seemingly not coming back.  We could blame it on the flying debacle, the removal of valor (my personal favorite), the facebook game feeling some people mention with garrisons, the lack of non raid content at level 100, etc.  There are probably a dozen very good reasons why they are losing customers, even after the release of a major content patch, but there is one thing for sure, people are not liking warlords.  For whatever reason it might be they just do not find it worth playing, not even for free with the wow token.

So it seems my statement was right from the get go.  The only thing that could ever kill warcraft is blizzard and it seems they are trying their hardest to do just that.  At this rate warcraft will never finish out the warlords cycle as the top subscriber based MMO.  Some game will pass it.  Because if it can lose 1.5M subscribers when a content patch was released, what do you think it will do in the next 3 or 4 quarterly reports that will come between now and the next expansion when nothing at all is added?  Those are the quarters that would have an expected end of expansion loss.  If they lose 1.5M when they add content, it is not looking good for the next years worth or reports when they will be adding nothing.

The question is no longer will warcraft retain their spot as the #1 subscriber based MMO.  The question now is, how far down will they fall before warlords is over?

I am very sad to see they lost 1.5M subscribers.  I kept complaining thinking maybe they would listen, maybe they would correct their errors, right the ship, but like everyone else, I am just sitting here baffled by how they could let this happen to the game.

The once mighty warcraft is dying, even the fan boys need to start to realize that.  Games are not supposed to lose subscribers when new content comes out.  That is not how business works.

Do you think there is still time for blizzard to fix this or is it all downhill from this point on?

What Do You Hope to See in the Next Expansion?

With all the guesses going around on what the new expansion will bring, be it more legion, azshara, or what have you, I have found myself being much less interested in where the story will lead us than I am on what we are going to do when we get there.

I've always liked to quest, I've always liked to follow the story, and one of the reasons I believe that wrath was the best expansion was because of the extremely well done story telling and how they tied everything together from the questing experience into the raids as one fluid story.  Even when we did a side step into Ulduar, story wise it made sense. Sure there was that argent tournament blip in the story line that made little to no sense, but otherwise wrath was well told and the story is a big part of why I remember it fondly.

So it would be easy to say that the story of the next expansion is going to be important to me but when I think about it, surprisingly, it is not.  I really do not care where we are going next expansion.  Back to azeroth, to take the fight to the legion, to argus, to the south seas, I really do not care.  I've lost all faith in blizzard to present a fantastic story, so I will settle for a decent one no matter were we go.

So with all that said, even if I would like a well written expansion, it is the game play I am placing over the story and as such my list of things I want to see have nothing to do with new story, new races new classes, new anything.  What I want from the next expansion is to fix the game.  To make it more playable.  So here is my list, in no particular order, of what I would like to see next expansion.

Flying:

Lets start at the beginning.  When you hit max level you should be able to fly.  Tie lore master and explorer to it if you must, that is no big deal.  But as soon as I hit max level I should be able to fly.  I should never have to wait for months and months to do something that is a staple part of the game, no thank you.

Oh, and if they are going to tie an achievement to it, it must be account wide.  I am not doing all the quests on all my alts, no thank you.  And this is coming from someone that loves to quest and I am not going to do it, so I am sure most others wouldn't want to either.

Valor:

This is going to be long, hold on to your hats.  Valor gear needs to return.  Call it valor points, valor badges or even valor jellybeans for all I care, but some sort of currency for gear that helps make content repeatable is required.

How many of you did the dungeons for your legendary and / or achievements and basically never went back to do them again unless you were helping someone else out?  ~raises hand~ 

Dungeons have always been a far bit of content, except for this expansion.  The reason for that is that before there was a reason to keep running them, valor and the badges that came before them.  Now there is no reason to keep running them.  Make no mistake about it, if it were not for some sort of points you received from them, dungeons wear out their welcome within a couple of weeks, at best, after hitting max level.  Points you can collect to buy better gear is what kept them so popular and kept people doing them.  Valor helped keep people busy, lack of valor helps keep people bored.

I suggest using some sort of PvP type system when it comes to what you can buy where you need to do X to buy Y.  Something along the lines of if you kill 20 raid finder bosses you unlock the normal mode raid gear for sale, if you kill 20 normal raid bosses you unlock heroic raid gear and if you kill 20 heroic raid bosses you unlock mythic raid gear.

A system like this works on the simple basis of people can always see a substantial reward at the end of the journey.  If I am raiding heroic normally, having me kill heroic bosses to unlock buying heroic gear does not seem like a bonus, "woohoo I opened up the ability to buy something I can get for free from what I am already doing every week", not really a compelling reward.  You will get the heroic gear eventually, in theory, if you are raiding heroic.  Yet offering that person mythic keeps them playing, keeps them collecting points, keeps them seeing that substantial reward at the end of the line.  And if they use the old pricing system that means someone can only get one new piece every 2 or 3 weeks anyway, so it is not like someone is going to gear up super quickly this way, it keeps them active, it keeps them logging in, and it keeps them playing.  If you only offer rewards equal to what you are currently doing the motivation, while it might still be there, is not as much as offering you something better would.

In the end, valor is a great motivator.  It keeps people logging in, it keeps people capping, it keeps people playing and most importantly for blizzard, it keeps people subscribed.  They stay subscribed longer because it takes them longer to get everything they want, and offering people gear in a higher difficulty means that most definitely the only way people will get it is by logging in each week and capping, which means more weeks they are paid subscribers.

Removing valor gear, and by process removing the desire to keep logging in, was a huge mistake in my opinion.  I am not sure why they did it and I really wish to see it return, in this better system I just outlined, for the next expansion.

Options:

Having many options to do things is a good thing.  Blizzard seems to have forgotten that with warlords.  They need to add scenarios back into the game.  They need to add daily hubs back into the game.  They need to make them rewarding, like offering above mentioned valor, and they need to keep those options there.

Having options works to benefit everyone.  If people do not feel like "I have to raid" they will enjoy raiding a lot more.  Once people feel as if they have to do something it starts to lose its fun as it begin to feel more like a job.  It is the number one reason for the dislike we hear often for garrisons from people, it felt like a job.

With options, and valor as their rewards, they take away the feeling of "I have to raid" to get gear and it lets people do what they want to do instead of feeling they are pigeonholed into doing one thing and one thing only.

If people like doing one thing, they can feel they are moving forward doing the one thing they like.  If they are a regular raider they can cap their valor from raiding, if they like small groups, they can cap their valor from dungeons, if they do not like group content they can cap their valor from questing, if they like tight groups they can cap their valor from scenarios.  You get the idea, everyone can play the way they want to play because they would have the option to do so.  Now this my friends, is good design.

And it is not just valor that needs options when it comes back, it is everything.  Like reputations.  Have dungeons offer reputation, dailies that offer reputation, mob kills that offer reputation, etc.  They do not need to make the reputation grind faster, they can keep it at whatever pace they wish to do, but by giving people various options to gain reputation people will not feel like "I have to grind a million mobs for this" like I have heard so many times this expansion.

Options are good, in every aspect of the game.  I'd like to see more options in the game, but with that comes the need for more content end game, which leads us too...

Content:

Can someone explain why daily hubs were remove?  Can someone explain why scenarios were removed?  Now, even if you can come up with the text book blizzard response I will say you are wrong.  There was no actual justification for removing content from the game.

Did everyone do them?  Of course not.  Did everyone like them?  Of course not.  But some people did and those things need to be in the game.  I like to raid, always have, it is the focus of the game for me, but from the company standpoint, it should not be the entire focus of the game.  The game can not be a one trick pony because, Does everyone like to raid?  Of course not.

There needs to be more content end game that does not require a raid to do it.  Sure I like T2 as much as the next guy but that is just a little bit of what should be a much bigger picture.

The original rares in the world that were one and done when you kill them should be like the T2 rares, once per day, not once ever.  The pop up quests in different zones should be weekly, and also offer reputation like they do fitting in with the desire I mentioned in the above header.  The items you find in the world that once you found them they were gone did not all need to stay gone, there could have been a few that were weekly treasures with a chance at something decent in them to make it worth going around and collecting them each week.  The garrison, and then tanaan, weeklies were nice, but once you do them they are done, they could have easily just randomized them that once you did them all you still had another each week even if at that point it was now a repeat.  Why does everything this expansion need to be one and done?

So much this expansion was either missing (like scenarios) or one and done content (like treasures) that you, if you were an active person, could find yourself with nothing to do really fast.  They need to assure that there is content to do at max level.

Would someone go collect treasures every week?  Would they continue to do the weekly quests after they finished the quest line?  Would they keep killing rares they already killed?  Would they do these things?  Maybe, maybe not, but having them there would give people more content to do, even if they did not do it.

They could add baggies to the rares like they did with the warbringers and scouts, to be added motivation, the reputation from the pop up quests might be motivation enough, if we had some sort of resource like garrison resources again, finding those treasures each week could be motivation.

We just need more content at the end game level that isn't inside a raid.  I love to raid, but I do not raid every waking second I am in game and having lots of other content would be a nice thing, at least I think so.

RNG:

I would like to see the random number generator shot, multiple times, have its skin ripped from its bones and then dip it in lemon juice.  Then just for fun I would set it of fire and watch it scream as it was burned alive.  Then just for fun I would cast revive on it just so I could do it again.  And again.  And again.

Seriously, I wish more than any other wish I could wish that the reliance on RNG was reduced to a minimum next expansion.  With that being done there would need to be a new, smarter system, put in place that notices when people are not lucky to try and smooth it out.

Doing a run and winning on early every bonus roll you do it just as bad as doing a dozen and winning none.  Both show there is something not right here.  They need to smooth out the RNG for things so they are not as randomized, or controlled randomized if you will.

I am just about as sick and tired of RNG as any person can be about any thing and I would like to see it removed if at all possible, but I know that isn't possible, so I would like to see it smoothed out.

Oh hell, I get so frustrated about RNG lately I do not even know what to say about it.  I just want it gone, or at least fixed to not be so hot and cold streaky.

What do you hope to see in the next expansion?

Monday Random Thoughts

- I decided to add a second day to trying to get further into the raid this week.

- Worked well the first week, not sure how long it will last however.

- But with a large raid, there is no way we are going to get anywhere 2 hours a week starting over each week.

- Was nice to see us get three bosses further and kill two new bosses.

- I am loving having 2 days.

- The second day we only raided an hour and a half and downed two new bosses.

- I would say week one was a success.

- I think, in time, if we can keep people showing up, we can clear in 4 hours.

- Nice to finally feel like we are moving forward again.

- Am I asking too much for a minimum of 35K for normal?

- There are people that sign up that are a higher item level than I, 700 and over, and they still can not break 25K single target.

- I think maybe I am setting the bar too high.

- But boy oh boy is everything easier with more DPS.

- I think my biggest problem is I try to judge others by what I can do and sometimes I ask too much of casual raiders.

- Hey, casual does not need to mean bad.

- I am a firm believer of that.

- Ran mythic dungeons all weekend.

- Wanted to make sure all my raiders got their heroic cache.

- It can't hurt right?

- And did not also do the everbloom thing for all of them, did many full clears.

- Because for most people a 705 would be an upgrade, and for some people even a 685 might.

- I got boots in my hunters bag, I did not need them.

- Got a trinket in my druids bag, the worst tanking trinket for it.

- So for my characters my weekend was a waste, but we got a lot of raiders upgrades.

- So it was time well spent.

- We did do the everbloom skip more than a few time, just because it is faster.

- When time started to run short and we wanted to get everyone the cache we just wanted to get it done.

- Not to mention it is human nature to take the easiest path of least resistance.

- It is the same reason the world first race stayed 25 man when they standardized the raids.

- It was the easy raid, the path of least resistance.

- It is human nature.

- Do you think skipping all the bosses is an exploit?

- Some do, I don't.

- In my opinion an exploit is something you do that was not intended by using some sort of bug or item to do things that you can not naturally do.

- While this was not intended, no tricks were done to do it.

- You can simply walk to the last boss.

- No wall climbing cheats, just a well timed jump.

- So not an exploit, even if not intended.

- Just my opinion of course.

- Making this a fast MRT for today.

- Hope you had a fun weekend like I did.

- Have a great day.