I did not do any dungeons this week. Even if I have two characters that need gear and they do seem to be pretty easy even for pug people for the most part because there are fewer instant wipe mechanics I just do not have the desire to do them.
Perhaps it is not so much the desire to do them that is keeping me from doing them, it is the feel that I need to do them that is keeping me from doing them.
My main is still working up his reputations and is capping valor easily in three or four days without ever even stepping into a dungeon, raid, scenario or challenge mode. When I am done with my reputations I might decide to do some dungeons. But as of now, it seems like a waste to run them. Sure I can get gear but if I am valor capped I am not getting valor, so I feel as if I am losing out. They need to remove the valor cap, weekly and total. There is no need to restrict people from playing the game.
Because of my lack of desire to do dungeons, for whatever reason, it has given me the option to level up now. While the first few days of the week I go daily crazy on my main once I cap I only do shadow-pan and august celestials because they are the only two factions I am not yet revered on.
Once capped, I start to do play the other characters. I only have one other 90 right now but that one I go on and do my farm and fishing dailies. That is it. I have absolutely zero intention of working on reputation with that character until they fix it. There is no reason I should need to do a grind for gear on that character when I have already done it. If I opened valor gear on my main it should be open for all my characters. So it sits around doing nothing but farming and fishing and occasionally tanking when someone needs a tank for a quick queue.
So basically my refusal to run dungeons because I am already capped on my main and refusal to run dailies on my other 90 because I refuse to do that reputation grind again to open stuff I already opened means I have one thing to do. Level.
This is not a bad thing at all. Do not think I am complaining. It has actually started to work out well. I have many characters I wish to level and this actually makes me have the time to do that without feeling I need to sacrifice from my 90s to do so.
In the time it takes me to level all those other characters perhaps they will notice they need to make a few changes and they will have time to implement those changes. They need to remove the valor cap, they need to add more items you can get with valor, and they need to make reputations either easier to get up on alts or account bound. Simple as that, until then I keep as I have been and when I cap my main I level my alts.
I've even already mastered my leveling process. Usually only takes one run through and then a second one to fine tune it before I have it all set up and that is exactly how it worked this time as well.
When leveling I start off on the starting quest of course. I work the quests as they lead me which gets me to exalted with my new sister faction in the new world and usually leads me to my training basically. At that point I hit 86.
Once I hit 86 I waste no time. I might finish off any quests I have that are super easy and fast and go turn in any of the quests that send me to speak to someone and then I abandon everything else and head over to the valley.
Once at the valley I do the quest line as it comes to me. Every quest along the way, even if there are a few you can skip. I open my farm, which is important for all my characters and it is the only thing I make sure to log in every single day to tend to on all my characters. I follow the storyline to stoneplow and up to take my training further by breaking some boards.
By the time I am done with that quest I am now 87. When I return to stoneplow from my training there will be someone there that gives me a quest to head up the stairs and speak to two people. Well isn't that special? Even if it were not for that quest being given to me that was exactly where I was heading once I hit 87. If he did not give me that quest there is a guy at the bottom of the pass that would have given it to me anyway.
I grab the fight point to the stairs, which I made sure to pick up as I passed it while questing there, and run up the stairs. I do those two side quests there, because it will be required most likely if I want to keep my timing up unless I have a gathering profession that will get me a little extra experience as I go. Trust me, take them.
I then continue up and when I take the boat across I grab the fight point first and foremost. Then I grab all the quests right there and turn in the two ones that had lead me there. I finish up those quests and then head to open up our little camp there. Once I open the camp after a little quick quest and all the people appear there I make sure to grab the flight point. This is important as I will be coming back here to continue questing after I go off on a side quest right now.
After I get the flight point I head to the white tiger and do the quest there. I open the gates, turn in the quest at the golden pagoda, and head to the main city to get the flight point there and set my hearth there.
Now I have my new home and I fly back to the camp I helped open. I do those quests there, up to and including helping with the yak wash, doesn't everyone love the yak wash? I know I do.
After doing those sets of quests there I had over to the wall in the nook to start on shado-pan stuff. Once in the wall I head to the top and grab the flight path, don't you always do that first or is that just an old school thing? I do all those quests and basically play follow the bouncing panda from that point on going northward and doing all the panda related quests as many of them will give you shado-pan reputation.
Notice that I did not go to the wilds ever. Even if at three points in the valley I was given quests to head in that direction. There is no need to ever go to the wilds while leveling. It offers nothing worthwhile. There is no reputation to be gained there, the quests just end up sending you back to the valley anyway and quite honestly if I followed it all the way through I would be in the steeps before I would be returning to the valley and basically wasted all of the summit yet would have still be forced to do it and thus increased wasting my time. I am not a big fan of wasting time. No reputation and lower quest rewards in the wilds means you are better off ignoring it and moving on to the summit from stoneplow. If by chance you are not 87 yet when you return to stoneplow do the messingwary quest line and that should get you to 87. Do not go to the wilds and waste your time.
Back to questing for the shado-pan. If all goes well you will follow them up the mountain doing quests, getting reputation, and better quest rewards than wilds as well as more experience per quest than wilds and by the time you are done with that big battle at the wall you will hit 88 and continue your quest through the opening in the wall into the steeps.
Once in the steeps stay with our rotund friends and keep getting what little shado-pan reputation you can. You will finish up their quest line and some other side stuff and hit 89 in seemingly short time. The pandas will then send you to the bugs and you will enter the wastes and meet the klaxxi.
While I have heard horror stories about the 89-90 from some people I am left to wonder what drug in the world they are on. Yes, that first time there without knowing where to go it was hard because you got lost and it seems there are fights to be had everywhere and in huge packs. Second time through should be a breeze and the second time through you should have rested unless you made the stupid mistake of running dungeons and wasting all your rested there.
I open up as many of the bugs as I can, doing all the quests and I make sure to let myself get side tracked to do some searching for chen which will net me with a couple of 450 items, so while they do not offer reputation they do offer something of real value.
Before you even open all of your klaxxi's you will see some dailies and if they are close you can do them, if not you can leave them, either way you are now 90, or pretty damn close to it, shortly after hitting 89 and basically just one long quest line in the wastes and one side track quest line to do it. Like I said, if you were on rested it should be super fast, nice and easy.
So I only get to level for a few hours on weekends, instead of grinding dungeons or something, even if I should be, but at this rate, with a pattern now set out fully, getting all 10 classes, and soon 11 when I start a monk, to level 90 should be nice and easy and mostly painless.
The biggest stress to leveling are those first two levels. 85-87 seems to take forever even with rested and seems like you get nothing worthwhile from it, not gear wise and not reputation wise. Once you hit 87 and go to the summit they should just let you press a button that says instant 90, because if you really worked on it 87-90 goes really fast and smooth and thanks to some streamlined questing that seems worth it based on rewards and reputation gained, 87-90 is mostly easy.
For me, what makes questing so enjoyable this expansion compared to last is that I have options, like skipping quests and choosing my own path as I laid out. It is like back in wrath where I used to always joke that once you hit 76 they should just award you 80 because it was so perfect while others always said it took forever. They just never knew how to maximized your time and effort to reward like I did then and I do now. Cataclysm never gave us that option, their on rails questing was do this or do nothing and that was horrible design.
I could stay in the forest longer, I could go down to the wilds, I could complete all the valley quests or even anything in the center of the summit but I choose not to. The only zone I will get the zone achievement on when leveling is the steppes. As much as I like it, that area does not seem to have enough quests. Even with rested I barely make 89 before finishing it. But you know what, I do make 89, and that is all that counts. It works out perfectly. Just like good quest design should. It gives me the option to do it the way I do it or to spend a little extra time in other places.
Thank god for the return to intelligent quest design instead of the lead you by the hand on rails questing of cataclysm that never let you feel as if you were deciding to do things but that you were required to do things.
Just like I am capping valor doing quests now which is keeping me from running dungeons for now, I have options now to everything I do, even leveling, and I like that. I still worry how the characters I am not very good on will do going through them, but at least if I have problems I have options, I can always go back and do easier quests and take my sweet time with it. If the steppes or wastes is too hard on my warlock for example I will still have the forest mostly undone, wilds completely undone and lots left to do in the valley and summit which would be easy enough to get me to 90 without doing the zones that might appear harder for people that are not very good, like me on my lock. Options, we have them, and I love it.
I'll get back to dungeons later, I'll level now. It is just too much fun to ignore.
People keep talking about the choices in the game we have now at max level but they seem to forget a huge part of the game is getting to that max level and we now have choices to get there too. That rocks.
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
Monday, October 15, 2012
Monday Random Thoughts
- This weekend was a Glorious weekend.
- Finished that achievement without ever actually looking for any rares at all.
- Until I got the having only four left that is, then I started to look.
- When I had four left I looked up their spawn locations and made sure to fly by once in a while.
- When I was down to one, I camped it.
- I did all the others without ever looking for them, just came across them as I quested.
- I think that makes it more of an achievement than anything else.
- To get them all, or most of them, without trying.
- And I can say something most others can't.
- I did most of them, at level, and solo.
- I remember getting one group of four level 90 elites and the rare mob when I was 89, that was brutal and took a good 30-35 minutes, but I did it.
- I remember getting one in the golden lotus questing area back that first day when I was the only person there and those dragons were flying all over the place dropping stuff on me.
- With no one questing, many of those dragons up, lots of pats and adds, it was a constant effort in moving and took a long time.
- I remember running into one of those monkeys in a cave and others noticing it as well but instead of them helping they all stood around waiting for me to die so they could steal the kill.
- I remember watching six of them die when he went bananas and stomped them.
- I don't think they realized them being there helped me kill him.
- So they watched hoping I would fail and instead I have to thank them for my success.
- I remember a guild mate finding one and I said invite me but he had already tagged it.
- So I killed it with him anyway and still got credit for it.
- So if you are going for the achievement, even if a mob is already tagged, as long as you are grouped with the person that tagged it you will get credit.
- Even if the mob seems grey tagged to you.
- Just thought that hint might help some a bit.
- Sad part is how insane the gear increase is.
- Those mobs that took me a good 10-15 minutes or more at level I now can walk up to, take one shot, and let my pet kill it by itself, never even needing to mend pet.
- From 85-90 the gear increase should not have been that insane.
- When I go digging and get a site in jade forest I can act like I am in westfall, just let my pet kill anything that attacks me.
- I finally found something game wise I think they really screwed up with in mists.
- Gear.
- There is no way we should be that much over powered over this expansions leveling content so soon.
- And I am not even geared out yet.
- Can you imagine when I am geared out?
- Can you image three raids from now when geared out?
- Will I be one shotting those 85 mobs with one arcane shot?
- They need to bring these stats down to earth, it ruins the game to out gear stuff that easily.
- There is no reason I should be able to go through this expansions content and letting my pet kill things without a care in the world.
- Even more so when it can kill rares all by itself now.
- Just shows you how horrible the increase of the stats on gear is.
- It does seem to be zone to zone type however.
- The forest, wild and valley all seem to be meant for people in lesser gear.
- Makes sense, gives the people that level later a little boost.
- Not everyone that levels will be in all DS gear when leveling.
- So it makes sense things should be easier to handle in those starter areas.
- Except for those virmen.
- Four characters through valley now and not one of them can say those were easy.
- When they gang up on you and start running they can be trouble for any class that over pulls.
- The summit and steeps seem to be a step up in gear requirements and then the wastes and vale seem to be another step up.
- It is the step up from the end of questing to heroic gear that stats go insane.
- When I get +200 main stats or more from quest gear to starter dungeon gear that is why things get too easy to quick.
- That step was the mistake they made in my opinion.
- A +200 main stat increase should be what we are getting by the time the second or third raid tier is out when talking from quest gear too that, not the first dungeon gear.
- Oh well, it couldn't all be good in mists, they had to fall back on old mistakes again.
- At least they fixed a lot of the things they did wrong in cataclysm.
- Just wish they would eventually get a clue about inflated stats.
- They do not grasp the concept that people will upgrade if something is 10 of a main stat better, it doesn't need to be 200 better.
- Ghostcrawler said he wants things to feel like an upgrade.
- Hey, 10 more of a stat feels like an upgrade because it is an upgrade, no need to make it 200.
- Sure, 200 feels like a better upgrade and I like it more, it just is not needed.
- Maybe in another three or four expansions they will get a clue that an upgrade is an upgrade and people do not need 200 more of a stat to upgrade, they will upgrade even if it is 10 more.
- Do you know when they will notice that?
- When ghostcrawler or whomever it might be that made the horrible stat decision is fired and the new person comes in and tells them an upgrade is an upgrade, it doesn't always need to be huge.
- Perhaps I should apply for a job there so I can explain it to them.
- But I would not want to get the partial lobotomy that would be required to get the job.
- I do understand their point, they want to make upgrades exciting, so they make them big.
- Raid to raid upgrades should be exciting, not quest zone to quest zone, not questing to dungeon and not dungeon to that first raid.
- And it should be exciting by offering smaller, but still better, stats and set bonuses from the raid gear, not just flat our huge stat gains.
- If you are like me and currently leveling your third and forth characters through content you will see what I mean about the zones and their challenges/gear.
- Both my rogue and priest are now 87 and in the summit and it is only now that I can say I am not just destroying everything I come in contact with.
- That gives the people that did not come straight from DS raid gear a chance to catch up gear wise from quests because that is also about when you start changing your raid gear.
- If you are geared in normal DS gear that is, some heroic pieces lasted me to 89.
- My rogue is still a mystery to me.
- I've got it up to 87 but I swear I feel like I am back to the bad old days.
- I need to heal after every single fight it seems, recuperate is not enough to keep me up.
- Yet when I see a rare, even the ones that are brutal on melee, I can smoke them on my rogue.
- How come I can defeat hard opponents and end with near full life yet one on one with some BS quest mobs I near death every single fight?
- Like I said, my rogue still baffles me.
- I think it is more because I pay attention and take the rares as a challenge and I love that stuff and quest mobs I don't pay attention to and that is what gets me in trouble over and over.
- My priest is also 87 now and she needed to change herself up some.
- After doing the first few quests as disc it occurred to me that my days of leveling as disc were over.
- Mobs just had way to much life.
- Not that I could not kill anything, I could, but it took forever.
- I could pull 20 mobs and never die as disc, but it would take me three years to beat them.
- So if I wanted to level to 90 I would need to switch to shadow.
- I looked online for some info, asked a few questions I had to the excellent shadow priests we have in guild, and went right out with it.
- Five minutes reading and 30 minutes setting up keybinds and my shadow UI later and I was ready to roll.
- Single target big end quest type guy that I could get some time on and I was doing 30K+ DPS in my shadow spec.
- Not bad for someone that never played shadow for more than a few seconds before.
- Leveling as shadow seems to be no problem.
- I have even noticed certain quests that gave my hunter, druid and rogue some issues that my priest had no issues with at all.
- Goes to show you that every class has their strengths and their weaknesses.
- I have not figured out how to do most of the rares solo on my shadow priest.
- Did them all on my hunter no problem.
- My druid only ran into a few that gave it problems.
- My rogue seems to be able to handle every rare it runs into.
- My priest can mow through packs of mobs like they are going out of style but I get destroyed by rares of all types.
- I guess that would come with experience, like everything else.
- I really enjoy rare hunting.
- Even if my main has now killed them all and I have most of the goodies they have to offer I will still stop and kill every rare I see.
- Except for the high level pandas.
- I think they added a hotfix to them or something.
- I used to be able to blow through them, the worst they would do is try a back to back heal and sometimes get it off which made the fight longer.
- But my pet takes no damage from them and I take no damage from them, so they are not anything to worry about.
- However, they now cast the healing mists more often and I do not have enough interrupts for it.
- Tried one the other day and this is how it went.
- Started and notice it was double healing.
- Used readiness when I noticed it was triple healing.
- Just beat on it until everything was off cooldown so I could line it all up.
- Healing mists, interrupted with silence shot. Healing mists, interrupted with scatter shot. Healing mists, interrupted with intimidation. Readiness. Healing mists, interrupted with silence shot. Healing mists, interrupted with scatter shot. Healing mists, interrupted with intimidation. Healing mists, goes off, back to full life.
- How the F am I supposed to get 7 interrupts off in such a short time frame?
- Step back, dismiss pet, feign death.
- Call pet, mount up, fly away, I give up.
- I could have got another pet with another interrupt but I do not think it would have helped.
- 7 heals in a row, that was insane. Either they hot fixed it so they could not be soloed or it was a bug.
- I can still over power lower panda rares and I do, but the 90 rare pandas I avoid now, not even worth trying solo.
- When I get more gear and can over power them like I do the lower ones I will start killing them again.
- There is no single class that could interrupt 7 spells in a row and still be putting out solid high DPS.
- Even if I switched pets I could do 7, but the panda would just do an 8th.
- Glad I got them all before that change.
- At least I can say I soloed every single one of them, most at level, even the pandas.
- I guess it is the other way around now. I beat the nerfed version and now they are unnerfed.
- If that is a change and not a bug, there is no class that will ever solo that one with just quest gear on as soon as they hit 90. Impossible. Not with the interrupt requirement or DPS requirement to out DPS a heal that can bring them from 30% to full.
- So those are my thoughts, all about rares and leveling.
- Now to think which class will be the next to leave for pandaland.
- Plan to get everyone at least to 87.
- Enough to get to open the farm and then head to the summit so I can go to the white tiger and open the gate to the vale.
- Once I get everyone there, and with easy access on their own to the new city, I will be happy.
- I thought pandas were supposed to have rested last twice as long.
- I have a level 5 panda I left to get rested.
- Used all its rested on one quest.
- Now it is sitting gaining rested again.
- At low levels you burn through rested fast.
- So I am leveling my panda monk, one quest a week, at least until I am done with my other 10 classes.
- I wonder what level I will get out of the starting area if I do it all on rested.
- I am guessing 15 or 16.
- Have a great day all.
- Finished that achievement without ever actually looking for any rares at all.
- Until I got the having only four left that is, then I started to look.
- When I had four left I looked up their spawn locations and made sure to fly by once in a while.
- When I was down to one, I camped it.
- I did all the others without ever looking for them, just came across them as I quested.
- I think that makes it more of an achievement than anything else.
- To get them all, or most of them, without trying.
- And I can say something most others can't.
- I did most of them, at level, and solo.
- I remember getting one group of four level 90 elites and the rare mob when I was 89, that was brutal and took a good 30-35 minutes, but I did it.
- I remember getting one in the golden lotus questing area back that first day when I was the only person there and those dragons were flying all over the place dropping stuff on me.
- With no one questing, many of those dragons up, lots of pats and adds, it was a constant effort in moving and took a long time.
- I remember running into one of those monkeys in a cave and others noticing it as well but instead of them helping they all stood around waiting for me to die so they could steal the kill.
- I remember watching six of them die when he went bananas and stomped them.
- I don't think they realized them being there helped me kill him.
- So they watched hoping I would fail and instead I have to thank them for my success.
- I remember a guild mate finding one and I said invite me but he had already tagged it.
- So I killed it with him anyway and still got credit for it.
- So if you are going for the achievement, even if a mob is already tagged, as long as you are grouped with the person that tagged it you will get credit.
- Even if the mob seems grey tagged to you.
- Just thought that hint might help some a bit.
- Sad part is how insane the gear increase is.
- Those mobs that took me a good 10-15 minutes or more at level I now can walk up to, take one shot, and let my pet kill it by itself, never even needing to mend pet.
- From 85-90 the gear increase should not have been that insane.
- When I go digging and get a site in jade forest I can act like I am in westfall, just let my pet kill anything that attacks me.
- I finally found something game wise I think they really screwed up with in mists.
- Gear.
- There is no way we should be that much over powered over this expansions leveling content so soon.
- And I am not even geared out yet.
- Can you imagine when I am geared out?
- Can you image three raids from now when geared out?
- Will I be one shotting those 85 mobs with one arcane shot?
- They need to bring these stats down to earth, it ruins the game to out gear stuff that easily.
- There is no reason I should be able to go through this expansions content and letting my pet kill things without a care in the world.
- Even more so when it can kill rares all by itself now.
- Just shows you how horrible the increase of the stats on gear is.
- It does seem to be zone to zone type however.
- The forest, wild and valley all seem to be meant for people in lesser gear.
- Makes sense, gives the people that level later a little boost.
- Not everyone that levels will be in all DS gear when leveling.
- So it makes sense things should be easier to handle in those starter areas.
- Except for those virmen.
- Four characters through valley now and not one of them can say those were easy.
- When they gang up on you and start running they can be trouble for any class that over pulls.
- The summit and steeps seem to be a step up in gear requirements and then the wastes and vale seem to be another step up.
- It is the step up from the end of questing to heroic gear that stats go insane.
- When I get +200 main stats or more from quest gear to starter dungeon gear that is why things get too easy to quick.
- That step was the mistake they made in my opinion.
- A +200 main stat increase should be what we are getting by the time the second or third raid tier is out when talking from quest gear too that, not the first dungeon gear.
- Oh well, it couldn't all be good in mists, they had to fall back on old mistakes again.
- At least they fixed a lot of the things they did wrong in cataclysm.
- Just wish they would eventually get a clue about inflated stats.
- They do not grasp the concept that people will upgrade if something is 10 of a main stat better, it doesn't need to be 200 better.
- Ghostcrawler said he wants things to feel like an upgrade.
- Hey, 10 more of a stat feels like an upgrade because it is an upgrade, no need to make it 200.
- Sure, 200 feels like a better upgrade and I like it more, it just is not needed.
- Maybe in another three or four expansions they will get a clue that an upgrade is an upgrade and people do not need 200 more of a stat to upgrade, they will upgrade even if it is 10 more.
- Do you know when they will notice that?
- When ghostcrawler or whomever it might be that made the horrible stat decision is fired and the new person comes in and tells them an upgrade is an upgrade, it doesn't always need to be huge.
- Perhaps I should apply for a job there so I can explain it to them.
- But I would not want to get the partial lobotomy that would be required to get the job.
- I do understand their point, they want to make upgrades exciting, so they make them big.
- Raid to raid upgrades should be exciting, not quest zone to quest zone, not questing to dungeon and not dungeon to that first raid.
- And it should be exciting by offering smaller, but still better, stats and set bonuses from the raid gear, not just flat our huge stat gains.
- If you are like me and currently leveling your third and forth characters through content you will see what I mean about the zones and their challenges/gear.
- Both my rogue and priest are now 87 and in the summit and it is only now that I can say I am not just destroying everything I come in contact with.
- That gives the people that did not come straight from DS raid gear a chance to catch up gear wise from quests because that is also about when you start changing your raid gear.
- If you are geared in normal DS gear that is, some heroic pieces lasted me to 89.
- My rogue is still a mystery to me.
- I've got it up to 87 but I swear I feel like I am back to the bad old days.
- I need to heal after every single fight it seems, recuperate is not enough to keep me up.
- Yet when I see a rare, even the ones that are brutal on melee, I can smoke them on my rogue.
- How come I can defeat hard opponents and end with near full life yet one on one with some BS quest mobs I near death every single fight?
- Like I said, my rogue still baffles me.
- I think it is more because I pay attention and take the rares as a challenge and I love that stuff and quest mobs I don't pay attention to and that is what gets me in trouble over and over.
- My priest is also 87 now and she needed to change herself up some.
- After doing the first few quests as disc it occurred to me that my days of leveling as disc were over.
- Mobs just had way to much life.
- Not that I could not kill anything, I could, but it took forever.
- I could pull 20 mobs and never die as disc, but it would take me three years to beat them.
- So if I wanted to level to 90 I would need to switch to shadow.
- I looked online for some info, asked a few questions I had to the excellent shadow priests we have in guild, and went right out with it.
- Five minutes reading and 30 minutes setting up keybinds and my shadow UI later and I was ready to roll.
- Single target big end quest type guy that I could get some time on and I was doing 30K+ DPS in my shadow spec.
- Not bad for someone that never played shadow for more than a few seconds before.
- Leveling as shadow seems to be no problem.
- I have even noticed certain quests that gave my hunter, druid and rogue some issues that my priest had no issues with at all.
- Goes to show you that every class has their strengths and their weaknesses.
- I have not figured out how to do most of the rares solo on my shadow priest.
- Did them all on my hunter no problem.
- My druid only ran into a few that gave it problems.
- My rogue seems to be able to handle every rare it runs into.
- My priest can mow through packs of mobs like they are going out of style but I get destroyed by rares of all types.
- I guess that would come with experience, like everything else.
- I really enjoy rare hunting.
- Even if my main has now killed them all and I have most of the goodies they have to offer I will still stop and kill every rare I see.
- Except for the high level pandas.
- I think they added a hotfix to them or something.
- I used to be able to blow through them, the worst they would do is try a back to back heal and sometimes get it off which made the fight longer.
- But my pet takes no damage from them and I take no damage from them, so they are not anything to worry about.
- However, they now cast the healing mists more often and I do not have enough interrupts for it.
- Tried one the other day and this is how it went.
- Started and notice it was double healing.
- Used readiness when I noticed it was triple healing.
- Just beat on it until everything was off cooldown so I could line it all up.
- Healing mists, interrupted with silence shot. Healing mists, interrupted with scatter shot. Healing mists, interrupted with intimidation. Readiness. Healing mists, interrupted with silence shot. Healing mists, interrupted with scatter shot. Healing mists, interrupted with intimidation. Healing mists, goes off, back to full life.
- How the F am I supposed to get 7 interrupts off in such a short time frame?
- Step back, dismiss pet, feign death.
- Call pet, mount up, fly away, I give up.
- I could have got another pet with another interrupt but I do not think it would have helped.
- 7 heals in a row, that was insane. Either they hot fixed it so they could not be soloed or it was a bug.
- I can still over power lower panda rares and I do, but the 90 rare pandas I avoid now, not even worth trying solo.
- When I get more gear and can over power them like I do the lower ones I will start killing them again.
- There is no single class that could interrupt 7 spells in a row and still be putting out solid high DPS.
- Even if I switched pets I could do 7, but the panda would just do an 8th.
- Glad I got them all before that change.
- At least I can say I soloed every single one of them, most at level, even the pandas.
- I guess it is the other way around now. I beat the nerfed version and now they are unnerfed.
- If that is a change and not a bug, there is no class that will ever solo that one with just quest gear on as soon as they hit 90. Impossible. Not with the interrupt requirement or DPS requirement to out DPS a heal that can bring them from 30% to full.
- So those are my thoughts, all about rares and leveling.
- Now to think which class will be the next to leave for pandaland.
- Plan to get everyone at least to 87.
- Enough to get to open the farm and then head to the summit so I can go to the white tiger and open the gate to the vale.
- Once I get everyone there, and with easy access on their own to the new city, I will be happy.
- I thought pandas were supposed to have rested last twice as long.
- I have a level 5 panda I left to get rested.
- Used all its rested on one quest.
- Now it is sitting gaining rested again.
- At low levels you burn through rested fast.
- So I am leveling my panda monk, one quest a week, at least until I am done with my other 10 classes.
- I wonder what level I will get out of the starting area if I do it all on rested.
- I am guessing 15 or 16.
- Have a great day all.
Friday, October 12, 2012
Mists Rolls to the Next Level
If you have been listening to sound files from the upcoming 5.1 patch you would be as interested in what is happening as I am. Even if you are someone that never reads the quests and doesn't care about the lore there are a lot of things going on that seem to really throw a lot of lore out there. Something we have not seen since wrath.
Not only are the sound clips datamined, which can be found on places like mmo-champion and many other fan sites, exciting to listen to but the fact we are even talking about 5.1 this close to the expansion launch when a vast majority of players have not even stepped into a raid yet and not all of the mists content has been released is proof that mists might be really committed to making the game exciting again.
While 5.1 will not include more raid content, as we really do not need it anyway yet as we have not even seen all the raid content we already have released, it will have some new scenarios, a new quest hub and lots of lore to sink our teeth into. And not just little lore bits here and there but huge lore changes. Character development on a scale I do not recall ever seeing in this game before. Perhaps someone from vanilla time might have seen it because it was all new then, but basically the only major event I can remember in recent history was the death of Carine. All other lore changes I've witnessed have been what I could call fluff. No real oh crap moment like we have coming in 5.1.
So what is in store for us really? Will this quick release schedule keep up or is it just a nice push at the start and it will end up falling off? Will they continue to bring the story to the game instead of having the game just mimic a story told elsewhere? Will they keep pushing out scenarios as a method to help tell the story and keep the main characters updated to what they are currently doing?
Is blizzard really taking the game to the next level and trying to breath life into it. The game has felt like it had no heart after the lich king died and all we had was godzilla running around. It felt more like you were watching some old 50s black and white horror movie on an early sunday morning monster of the week event. It was okay but you never felt like there was anything to worry about because the baddie was a joke and there was no story to make it seem otherwise.
Now they are making sure a story is there and spending some serious time in getting that story out there for everyone to see. The things the audio clips have talked about range from the death of a main character whom you would have figured was being groomed for much more, the storming of two different cities, one for war and one for retrieval, the rebirth of some lore neglected character from both lines of elves, a major new old ally for the alliance once again backing them, and so much more. All in one little patch, all for filler.
Now this is how filler content should be done, not giving us the two zuls like cataclysm did. Blizzard is really making sure that mists takes warcraft to the next level. Old game be damned, it feels new again, new with excitement. Lets hope these quicker patches keep coming and the story keeps rolling out with the intensity that 5.1 seems to be bringing with it.
If they can manage that I can really see warcraft showing all those new kids on the block why they are still the number 1 MMORPG out there and that they do not intend to just let their cash cow die. They are taking it to the next level and we are the lucky ones to be playing it right now and getting to experience it as it happens.
Not only are the sound clips datamined, which can be found on places like mmo-champion and many other fan sites, exciting to listen to but the fact we are even talking about 5.1 this close to the expansion launch when a vast majority of players have not even stepped into a raid yet and not all of the mists content has been released is proof that mists might be really committed to making the game exciting again.
While 5.1 will not include more raid content, as we really do not need it anyway yet as we have not even seen all the raid content we already have released, it will have some new scenarios, a new quest hub and lots of lore to sink our teeth into. And not just little lore bits here and there but huge lore changes. Character development on a scale I do not recall ever seeing in this game before. Perhaps someone from vanilla time might have seen it because it was all new then, but basically the only major event I can remember in recent history was the death of Carine. All other lore changes I've witnessed have been what I could call fluff. No real oh crap moment like we have coming in 5.1.
So what is in store for us really? Will this quick release schedule keep up or is it just a nice push at the start and it will end up falling off? Will they continue to bring the story to the game instead of having the game just mimic a story told elsewhere? Will they keep pushing out scenarios as a method to help tell the story and keep the main characters updated to what they are currently doing?
Is blizzard really taking the game to the next level and trying to breath life into it. The game has felt like it had no heart after the lich king died and all we had was godzilla running around. It felt more like you were watching some old 50s black and white horror movie on an early sunday morning monster of the week event. It was okay but you never felt like there was anything to worry about because the baddie was a joke and there was no story to make it seem otherwise.
Now they are making sure a story is there and spending some serious time in getting that story out there for everyone to see. The things the audio clips have talked about range from the death of a main character whom you would have figured was being groomed for much more, the storming of two different cities, one for war and one for retrieval, the rebirth of some lore neglected character from both lines of elves, a major new old ally for the alliance once again backing them, and so much more. All in one little patch, all for filler.
Now this is how filler content should be done, not giving us the two zuls like cataclysm did. Blizzard is really making sure that mists takes warcraft to the next level. Old game be damned, it feels new again, new with excitement. Lets hope these quicker patches keep coming and the story keeps rolling out with the intensity that 5.1 seems to be bringing with it.
If they can manage that I can really see warcraft showing all those new kids on the block why they are still the number 1 MMORPG out there and that they do not intend to just let their cash cow die. They are taking it to the next level and we are the lucky ones to be playing it right now and getting to experience it as it happens.
Thursday, October 11, 2012
I Hate the Shado-Pan, Death Threats and A Toy
I've only been doing shado-pan dailies for four days but I have already grown to hate them with a passion. It has nothing to do with the quest themselves, they are simple enough, it is the helpers they offer you. Needless to say I can do the quests without the helpers but I want to get the Shado-Master achievement which means I have to do all the quest related achievements, but even without the meta, I would want to do all the quest related achievements anyway.
It is the one achievement that is part of the meta that is going to kill me, figuratively speaking. Getting around with the Shado-Pan. After my four days of quests and trying to run around with various helpers I have come to the conclusion that blizzard followed the profile of the worst players in the game and made NPCs act like them, but worse.
The helpers are horrible. My first helper was Protector Yi and if there were ever someone I wanted to push off a cliff this is him. I've never even run into a pug with a player as bad as Protector Yi. I pull two mobs and Yi sees that there are another 16 in the area that I seem to be neglecting so he is not content just easily blowing away the two mobs I pulled and moves on to the others. He has to make sure to go round up the other 16 and bring them to me, perhaps because he thinks I would not get around to them on my own. Gee, thanks.
Every single pull I made, no matter what efforts I made to not turn each fight into a mosh pit of dozens of people he found a way to pull extra mobs. Neutral mobs? No problem, I'll drag them into the battle for you. Flying mobs that just pass over head? No problem, I'll drag them into the battle for you. Mobs you were not even going to go after at all because they are not part of your quest? No problem, I'll drag them into the battle for you. Protector Yi should be called Caretaker Yi because he just wants to fill plot holes in a cemetery and he doesn't care if you go into one of those plots.
On a few occasions he even figured out how to pull mobs that were no where to be found. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the mobs he pulled were from the dread wastes or kun-lai, he pulls anything from anywhere it seems.
I use the tidy plates addon so I can see anything that in within range and some. Even if they are in a building or behind a mountain their plates will show for me. There would be no one, not a single mob, outside of the ones I was fighting on the screen and off goes Protector Yi, excuse me, Caretaker Yi, to somehow find more mobs to pull. If I were not sure he couldn't, as he is not a warlock or anything, I would think he was conjuring up more mobs to fight himself. The guy is a freaking aggro magnet.
On more than one occasion I had to say screw it and just leave him to die and run off to a safe place to regroup because he would not stop pulling mobs. Even when I was handling them and getting them down it seemed that he would look at it and say, down to only 5 mobs, need more mobs, and run off to get more. It was one constant massive pack of mobs.
I had to kill 16 of something I believe it was, I landed where 2 were standing and engaged them, by the time the fight was done with those 2 mobs I had all 16 I needed for the quest, which is a good thing, but I also had another dozen as well and some. I finally gave up when I was still fighting and the original 2 mobs I landed to kill respawned. I had a pile of 30+ mobs there. If you ever want to farm gold or something Caretaker Yi is your man because he will pull the whole zone for you but if you want to complete quests in a timely manner, no freaking way.
As bad as he is he can not claim the spot as the most annoying helper I've run across yet. He was a warrior and I guess that fits him, pulling mobs. He also did play the role of the tank, so that is good for those cloth type people I guess. He was bad, even annoying with over pulling for no reason but he was not the worst, close, but not.
The most annoying helper is a huntard in every sense of the word. Hawkmaster Nurong is every thing you heard bad about hunters and 10 times worse. I am surprised that they did not code something in the game that if a green melee weapon dropped he would roll need on it. That is about the only stereotype of a huntard that Hawkmaster did not emulate. Every single fight he runs up to melee and stands there looking at the mob and occasionally dropped traps.
He should be called Trapmaster Wrong because that is all he does, lay traps and do everything wrong. He has no pet, he puts traps all over the freaking place and on the rare occasion when he does attack he does so in melee. I do not care if hunters do not have minimum range any more, you do not attack in melee range, even more so when all the mobs do AoE damage in melee range. Maybe it is a good thing he did not try to get at range, he might have found a way to pull even more mobs.
The worst part is he puts the traps in the middle of freaking nowhere. If I am fighting a mob in one place he will litter the area around the mob with traps. Will he put them under the feet of the mob? Nope, but he will put them all around him.
That is not all either, he pulls more mobs while he runs around placing traps in areas they are not needed. And if someone comes near one of his oddly placed traps it pulls them. Add to that, his timing is horrible for everything he does.
I made this one pull with one elite mob and 5 normal mobs, lets forget for a moment that these bugs hit like a jackhammer to begin with, but I can handle it. Multi to keep them all on my pet and take out the non elites one at a time while keeping mend pet rolling and even the brutal beating my pet is taking I can handle it.
That is until Trapmaster Wrong decides to put two frost traps to the left and right of the battle, I guess to slow down anyone that might come close that is not even involved in the battle, which I really question, and ends up pulling two more roving packs with it. Each of those two packs had 1 elite and two normal mobs, not to mention one of those two packs was close enough to another pack when it aggroed because of his traps that it pulled another pack of four normal mobs. So my nice controlled pull of one elite and 5 normal mobs was now a pull of 3 elites and 13 normal mobs.
My poor pet had its fate decided instantly. Sorry scruffy but you have to die. I started to do my little retreat with a multi misdirect to make sure none tried to follow me while I made a calculated retreat. Trapmaster Wrong kept laying down frost traps and snake traps and explosive traps like crazy, the guy apparently is not limited by the cooldowns I am and can have multiple traps of the same type out at the same time. My pet died a noble death and I feigned death just far enough away that I knew I could pop up safely after battle and the pat walked away.
One problem, after they killed the greatest huntard in the history of huntards he reappears a few seconds later. Right on top of where I was hiding in my feigned death state.
I was laying there in my feign death waiting for the pat to walk away when battle ended but no, he would have none of that, he reappeared standing next to my body laying there and the pats came flying at him. He couldn't wait 5 seconds for them to walk away before reappearing? He couldn't wait until I got up before coming to rejoin me? Freaking jerk. They started beating on him and doing their AoE stuff, hitting my hiding body in the process and I was yelling at the screen, die already you idiot. But he just kept taking the hit and laying trap after trap after trap moving backwards.
At least that moved them away from me some so when they were just out of range enough I hit camo causing me to pop up and took off like a bat out of hell to a safer place so when the wrongly named hawkmaster joined me again he would not pull mobs again.
He ended up doing that to me a total of three times. Huntard is a perfect way to describe him.
The last of the dailies was of course one of those ones to kill some bigger boss at the end of them and I landed and started to lay the smackdown on him. Hawkmaster did not cause any problems this time because there were no adds for him to pull but when the fight was over there had to be a dozen traps all over the place around the mob I was fighting. My pet was tanking him so he was in one place and never moved. What was the reasoning of placing all these traps all around him? He could have placed even one under the mobs feet, but no, that would make way to much sense. Lets place them everywhere in the area he is not. Yes, that makes sense.
I said to my screen, talking to him of course, I am a hunter, if I wanted traps I would lay them. Just attack the freaking target that I am attacking you moron.
All their helpers are like Yi and Nurong, they are all completely useless and are all more trouble then they are worth. If I did not know better I think their secret agenda was to try and get me killed. The pandas do not really want outsiders around so they make me travel with these people so they can kill me. I swear that is it. I swear they are there to kill me and not help me.
If it is not their secret agenda to kill me off and these really are the elite strike force for the pandaren people then I really question how they survived, how they evolved. Survival of the fittest and all, they should have been wiped out a long time ago, their own ineptitude and stupidity should have done them in.
If these are the best of the best I wonder how the hell they escaped being slaves of the Mogu. These are the worst fighters I have ever seen in game, worse than the worst pug I was ever in. If anything it made me wish I were in a looking for dungeon pug instead of doing these quests. These helpers made me understand how good even the bad players in randoms are because I don't think any player could ever be as bad as the shado-pan helpers.
Speaking off odd occurrences while doing dailies I have to make mention of one of the dailies I did a few days ago for the august celestials where I had to kill Ellia Ravenmane, the end quest of the quest line. Nothing special, challenge a person to a battle at the end of a daily quest line. We have all done it a dozen times right? But have you ever received death threats in the mail after you did one? I don't recall ever getting a death threat from a quest mob, nevertheless I got a few of them from her. She did not take losing to me very well it seems. Ellia likes to tell me it isn't over and I will meet her again and she will get her revenge.
I must say, between death threats in the mail and NPC helpers that make me think of bad pugs as good ones, the game sure has developed a real sense of life to it. Like a real RPG should have. Nice touch blizzard. But damn you, I have to do 15 dailies with each of those NPCs? You bastards.
As for toys, I found a new toy the other day too, thanks to my tidy plates showing me things that hide behind walls. When doing one of the quest I saw an NPC named scotty, being a star trek fan I said to myself, self, I need to find him and kill him, a named mob that doesn't have a quest marker on it has to have something cool right? After some stumbling around I found a way to get to him and he dropped a coin that turns you into him but it only has three charges. Either way, it is another nice little toy in game and don't let his elite tag fool you, he is a push over.
If it were not for my plate addon I would have never noticed he was there. Love tidy plates. If you need a plate addon take a look at it.
I wonder what hell the shado-pan will subject me to today or if I will come home to another mail from Ellia telling me she is going to get me some day. Either way, the game sure has a life to it now, even if it is a funny one.
It is the one achievement that is part of the meta that is going to kill me, figuratively speaking. Getting around with the Shado-Pan. After my four days of quests and trying to run around with various helpers I have come to the conclusion that blizzard followed the profile of the worst players in the game and made NPCs act like them, but worse.
The helpers are horrible. My first helper was Protector Yi and if there were ever someone I wanted to push off a cliff this is him. I've never even run into a pug with a player as bad as Protector Yi. I pull two mobs and Yi sees that there are another 16 in the area that I seem to be neglecting so he is not content just easily blowing away the two mobs I pulled and moves on to the others. He has to make sure to go round up the other 16 and bring them to me, perhaps because he thinks I would not get around to them on my own. Gee, thanks.
Every single pull I made, no matter what efforts I made to not turn each fight into a mosh pit of dozens of people he found a way to pull extra mobs. Neutral mobs? No problem, I'll drag them into the battle for you. Flying mobs that just pass over head? No problem, I'll drag them into the battle for you. Mobs you were not even going to go after at all because they are not part of your quest? No problem, I'll drag them into the battle for you. Protector Yi should be called Caretaker Yi because he just wants to fill plot holes in a cemetery and he doesn't care if you go into one of those plots.
On a few occasions he even figured out how to pull mobs that were no where to be found. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the mobs he pulled were from the dread wastes or kun-lai, he pulls anything from anywhere it seems.
I use the tidy plates addon so I can see anything that in within range and some. Even if they are in a building or behind a mountain their plates will show for me. There would be no one, not a single mob, outside of the ones I was fighting on the screen and off goes Protector Yi, excuse me, Caretaker Yi, to somehow find more mobs to pull. If I were not sure he couldn't, as he is not a warlock or anything, I would think he was conjuring up more mobs to fight himself. The guy is a freaking aggro magnet.
On more than one occasion I had to say screw it and just leave him to die and run off to a safe place to regroup because he would not stop pulling mobs. Even when I was handling them and getting them down it seemed that he would look at it and say, down to only 5 mobs, need more mobs, and run off to get more. It was one constant massive pack of mobs.
I had to kill 16 of something I believe it was, I landed where 2 were standing and engaged them, by the time the fight was done with those 2 mobs I had all 16 I needed for the quest, which is a good thing, but I also had another dozen as well and some. I finally gave up when I was still fighting and the original 2 mobs I landed to kill respawned. I had a pile of 30+ mobs there. If you ever want to farm gold or something Caretaker Yi is your man because he will pull the whole zone for you but if you want to complete quests in a timely manner, no freaking way.
As bad as he is he can not claim the spot as the most annoying helper I've run across yet. He was a warrior and I guess that fits him, pulling mobs. He also did play the role of the tank, so that is good for those cloth type people I guess. He was bad, even annoying with over pulling for no reason but he was not the worst, close, but not.
The most annoying helper is a huntard in every sense of the word. Hawkmaster Nurong is every thing you heard bad about hunters and 10 times worse. I am surprised that they did not code something in the game that if a green melee weapon dropped he would roll need on it. That is about the only stereotype of a huntard that Hawkmaster did not emulate. Every single fight he runs up to melee and stands there looking at the mob and occasionally dropped traps.
He should be called Trapmaster Wrong because that is all he does, lay traps and do everything wrong. He has no pet, he puts traps all over the freaking place and on the rare occasion when he does attack he does so in melee. I do not care if hunters do not have minimum range any more, you do not attack in melee range, even more so when all the mobs do AoE damage in melee range. Maybe it is a good thing he did not try to get at range, he might have found a way to pull even more mobs.
The worst part is he puts the traps in the middle of freaking nowhere. If I am fighting a mob in one place he will litter the area around the mob with traps. Will he put them under the feet of the mob? Nope, but he will put them all around him.
That is not all either, he pulls more mobs while he runs around placing traps in areas they are not needed. And if someone comes near one of his oddly placed traps it pulls them. Add to that, his timing is horrible for everything he does.
I made this one pull with one elite mob and 5 normal mobs, lets forget for a moment that these bugs hit like a jackhammer to begin with, but I can handle it. Multi to keep them all on my pet and take out the non elites one at a time while keeping mend pet rolling and even the brutal beating my pet is taking I can handle it.
That is until Trapmaster Wrong decides to put two frost traps to the left and right of the battle, I guess to slow down anyone that might come close that is not even involved in the battle, which I really question, and ends up pulling two more roving packs with it. Each of those two packs had 1 elite and two normal mobs, not to mention one of those two packs was close enough to another pack when it aggroed because of his traps that it pulled another pack of four normal mobs. So my nice controlled pull of one elite and 5 normal mobs was now a pull of 3 elites and 13 normal mobs.
My poor pet had its fate decided instantly. Sorry scruffy but you have to die. I started to do my little retreat with a multi misdirect to make sure none tried to follow me while I made a calculated retreat. Trapmaster Wrong kept laying down frost traps and snake traps and explosive traps like crazy, the guy apparently is not limited by the cooldowns I am and can have multiple traps of the same type out at the same time. My pet died a noble death and I feigned death just far enough away that I knew I could pop up safely after battle and the pat walked away.
One problem, after they killed the greatest huntard in the history of huntards he reappears a few seconds later. Right on top of where I was hiding in my feigned death state.
I was laying there in my feign death waiting for the pat to walk away when battle ended but no, he would have none of that, he reappeared standing next to my body laying there and the pats came flying at him. He couldn't wait 5 seconds for them to walk away before reappearing? He couldn't wait until I got up before coming to rejoin me? Freaking jerk. They started beating on him and doing their AoE stuff, hitting my hiding body in the process and I was yelling at the screen, die already you idiot. But he just kept taking the hit and laying trap after trap after trap moving backwards.
At least that moved them away from me some so when they were just out of range enough I hit camo causing me to pop up and took off like a bat out of hell to a safer place so when the wrongly named hawkmaster joined me again he would not pull mobs again.
He ended up doing that to me a total of three times. Huntard is a perfect way to describe him.
The last of the dailies was of course one of those ones to kill some bigger boss at the end of them and I landed and started to lay the smackdown on him. Hawkmaster did not cause any problems this time because there were no adds for him to pull but when the fight was over there had to be a dozen traps all over the place around the mob I was fighting. My pet was tanking him so he was in one place and never moved. What was the reasoning of placing all these traps all around him? He could have placed even one under the mobs feet, but no, that would make way to much sense. Lets place them everywhere in the area he is not. Yes, that makes sense.
I said to my screen, talking to him of course, I am a hunter, if I wanted traps I would lay them. Just attack the freaking target that I am attacking you moron.
All their helpers are like Yi and Nurong, they are all completely useless and are all more trouble then they are worth. If I did not know better I think their secret agenda was to try and get me killed. The pandas do not really want outsiders around so they make me travel with these people so they can kill me. I swear that is it. I swear they are there to kill me and not help me.
If it is not their secret agenda to kill me off and these really are the elite strike force for the pandaren people then I really question how they survived, how they evolved. Survival of the fittest and all, they should have been wiped out a long time ago, their own ineptitude and stupidity should have done them in.
If these are the best of the best I wonder how the hell they escaped being slaves of the Mogu. These are the worst fighters I have ever seen in game, worse than the worst pug I was ever in. If anything it made me wish I were in a looking for dungeon pug instead of doing these quests. These helpers made me understand how good even the bad players in randoms are because I don't think any player could ever be as bad as the shado-pan helpers.
Speaking off odd occurrences while doing dailies I have to make mention of one of the dailies I did a few days ago for the august celestials where I had to kill Ellia Ravenmane, the end quest of the quest line. Nothing special, challenge a person to a battle at the end of a daily quest line. We have all done it a dozen times right? But have you ever received death threats in the mail after you did one? I don't recall ever getting a death threat from a quest mob, nevertheless I got a few of them from her. She did not take losing to me very well it seems. Ellia likes to tell me it isn't over and I will meet her again and she will get her revenge.
I must say, between death threats in the mail and NPC helpers that make me think of bad pugs as good ones, the game sure has developed a real sense of life to it. Like a real RPG should have. Nice touch blizzard. But damn you, I have to do 15 dailies with each of those NPCs? You bastards.
As for toys, I found a new toy the other day too, thanks to my tidy plates showing me things that hide behind walls. When doing one of the quest I saw an NPC named scotty, being a star trek fan I said to myself, self, I need to find him and kill him, a named mob that doesn't have a quest marker on it has to have something cool right? After some stumbling around I found a way to get to him and he dropped a coin that turns you into him but it only has three charges. Either way, it is another nice little toy in game and don't let his elite tag fool you, he is a push over.
If it were not for my plate addon I would have never noticed he was there. Love tidy plates. If you need a plate addon take a look at it.
I wonder what hell the shado-pan will subject me to today or if I will come home to another mail from Ellia telling me she is going to get me some day. Either way, the game sure has a life to it now, even if it is a funny one.
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
Pet Tricks: Stampede
I might be off to a bad start getting gear and getting into the swing of being a cooldown based whack a mole cluttered class but when it comes to playing around with the little things I think I still have my hunter grove going. It comes with loving being a hunter and also playing other roles as well.
My experience as a tank has lead me to look at certain abilities differently than most and I thought I would share one of them with you because looking around I have not seen anyone mention anything like what I use stampede for. It can really help you when soloing.
Stampede as a Defensive Cooldown:
It is not just a DPS cooldown, it is one of the most powerful defensive cooldowns a hunter has and it seems, at least from all I have read around, that no one has noticed that yet. One thing to remember is that our pets are pretty tough and can take a small beating for at least a few seconds. Now think of having a few of them out at the same time, that can buy you a lot of time to regroup if the time comes that you need to.
How to set up stampede as a defensive cooldown:
Call all pets out one at a time and...
1) turn on their growl.
2) spec them to tenacity.
3) make sure thunderstomp is on autocast.
Now you are ready to use one hell of a defensive cooldown. When you are out in the world soloing, be it a rare, an elite or massive packs of mobs if your pet tank goes down you call stampede instantly and feign death. You now have two options, one would be you wait for them to die or go away or you can pop back up after they pick up the rare, elite or pack of mobs and revive your normal tank pet unmolested.
The moment I got stampede on beta when I first tested it I was not overwhelmed with the theory of it being a DPS cooldown. Sure, it can contribute some, but I knew there had to be other uses for it. When I was leveling and running into a lot of rares it occurred to me that stampede is so much more. While a pet can tank many of the rares no problem at all there are occasional issues with adds and one time when my pet died I came up with this as an oh shit option and have been using it ever since.
If you do not use your stampede as a DPS cooldown and keep it set up as a defensive one it can serve many purposes in random five mans and lets face it, do you really need that extra burst in a five man or do you need to cover up for when things go wrong. So far, from my experience only, I've noticed that stampede is a serviceable defensive cooldown for five mans, and not only for me, for the whole group.
In at least 5 different situations I have used stampede to save a wipe in a five man so far.
1) Tank goes down, call them and hopefully you can finish off the boss in that short time, been there and done that thanks to stampede.
2) Tank goes down, call them until a battle resurrection can go out for the tank to save the group, been there and done that thanks to stampede.
3) Everyone goes down and so does your pet, call them to try and finish off that last 3% with whatever you have left to give, been there and done that three times thanks to stampede.
4) Everyone goes down and there is no way you can beat the boss, call them and get the hell out of there as far as you can to feign death so you can mass resurrect everyone, been there and done that thanks to stampede.
5) Adds getting out of the control and the tank is having problems picking them up and the healer is having problems keeping people up, call them to get those unruly mobs in a nice pile to AoE them down, been there and done that thanks to stampede as a defensive cooldown.
Stampede is not all about DPS. Learn to love the power of a huge defensive cooldown for solo play, group play and even raid play. If you have enough hunters and rotate stampedes, you might even be able to offtank a boss for the last few seconds of a fight or to let the healers catch up on the tank or let a debuff fall off. I can't wait to try that one, three or four hunters stringing stampede defensively is more than enough to let any debuff fall off a tank.
Note: One note about thunderstomp. On your main pet it is usually a good idea to keep it off and only turn in on in a controlled situation. The last thing you want is added attention by things in the area.
Note: If you plan to set up using stampede as a defensive cooldown in a group setting at least make sure your main pet is ferocity. The stable pets should be the only ones that are tenacity.
Note: If your set up for a defensive usage of stampede never call it as an offensive cooldown as it could actually cause problems with the thunderstomp and growl going off.
Stampede as an Offensive Cooldown:
Hit it. That is is. Just kidding of course. There is a way to make it a better offensive cooldown and part one of that is doing the reverse of what I said in the defensive version.
How to set up stampede as an offensive cooldown.
Call all pets out one at a time and...
1) turn off growl.
2) spec them ferocity.
3) make sure rabid is on autocast.
That is really all you need when talking group content but you can take it further if you want for when you are soloing and want to use it for offense. If you plan your pets out you can basically become a one man raid. Each pet called out will act as its own pet and do its own abilties and that includes the buffs they offer. So a smart choice of 5 different pets will apply 5 (or more) different buffs.
Note: You can even use the offensive version as a defensive version when soloing by hitting feign death after you call them and letting them take aggro on a single mob while you revive your pet. It will not be as effective on packs however.
Stampede as a Battle Resurrection:
Note: Must be BM to do this and have a Quillen in your stable
/cast [target=focus,dead] Eternal Guardian; Eternal Guardian
This will cast a battle resurrection on your focus if your focus is dead, which if you are the type that has the tank as your focus makes it perfect for reviving the tank without the need to target it, and if your focus is not dead it will cast it on your current selected target.
Note: I have not used this macro myself yet but I told a guild mate how to make it two weeks ago as soon as he tamed one and he said it works like a charm.
Note: The dead person needs to be within 20 yards of the quillen for this to work.
Stampede as a Full Heal:*
Note: Must be BM to do this and have all spirit beasts in your stable.
Note: Do not use glyph of stampede because it will copy the one spirit beast, you need to have five different spirit beasts to do this, not a copy of one.
/cast [harm] Stampede
/cast [target=mouseover, help] Spirit Mend; [target=player] Spirit Mend
This will cast all 5 spirit mends on yourself or on the target you are moused over effectively acting like a lay on hands for whomever it is used on.
*Posted by Jappse on MMO-Champion.
Stampede is more than just some five minute cooldown mini version of army of the dead, our pets have style in huge amounts, so much so, we can do almost anything with them. Oh, the joys of being a hunter. So many pets, so few stable slots, that would be my only pet gripe.
My experience as a tank has lead me to look at certain abilities differently than most and I thought I would share one of them with you because looking around I have not seen anyone mention anything like what I use stampede for. It can really help you when soloing.
Stampede as a Defensive Cooldown:
It is not just a DPS cooldown, it is one of the most powerful defensive cooldowns a hunter has and it seems, at least from all I have read around, that no one has noticed that yet. One thing to remember is that our pets are pretty tough and can take a small beating for at least a few seconds. Now think of having a few of them out at the same time, that can buy you a lot of time to regroup if the time comes that you need to.
How to set up stampede as a defensive cooldown:
Call all pets out one at a time and...
1) turn on their growl.
2) spec them to tenacity.
3) make sure thunderstomp is on autocast.
Now you are ready to use one hell of a defensive cooldown. When you are out in the world soloing, be it a rare, an elite or massive packs of mobs if your pet tank goes down you call stampede instantly and feign death. You now have two options, one would be you wait for them to die or go away or you can pop back up after they pick up the rare, elite or pack of mobs and revive your normal tank pet unmolested.
The moment I got stampede on beta when I first tested it I was not overwhelmed with the theory of it being a DPS cooldown. Sure, it can contribute some, but I knew there had to be other uses for it. When I was leveling and running into a lot of rares it occurred to me that stampede is so much more. While a pet can tank many of the rares no problem at all there are occasional issues with adds and one time when my pet died I came up with this as an oh shit option and have been using it ever since.
If you do not use your stampede as a DPS cooldown and keep it set up as a defensive one it can serve many purposes in random five mans and lets face it, do you really need that extra burst in a five man or do you need to cover up for when things go wrong. So far, from my experience only, I've noticed that stampede is a serviceable defensive cooldown for five mans, and not only for me, for the whole group.
In at least 5 different situations I have used stampede to save a wipe in a five man so far.
1) Tank goes down, call them and hopefully you can finish off the boss in that short time, been there and done that thanks to stampede.
2) Tank goes down, call them until a battle resurrection can go out for the tank to save the group, been there and done that thanks to stampede.
3) Everyone goes down and so does your pet, call them to try and finish off that last 3% with whatever you have left to give, been there and done that three times thanks to stampede.
4) Everyone goes down and there is no way you can beat the boss, call them and get the hell out of there as far as you can to feign death so you can mass resurrect everyone, been there and done that thanks to stampede.
5) Adds getting out of the control and the tank is having problems picking them up and the healer is having problems keeping people up, call them to get those unruly mobs in a nice pile to AoE them down, been there and done that thanks to stampede as a defensive cooldown.
Stampede is not all about DPS. Learn to love the power of a huge defensive cooldown for solo play, group play and even raid play. If you have enough hunters and rotate stampedes, you might even be able to offtank a boss for the last few seconds of a fight or to let the healers catch up on the tank or let a debuff fall off. I can't wait to try that one, three or four hunters stringing stampede defensively is more than enough to let any debuff fall off a tank.
Note: One note about thunderstomp. On your main pet it is usually a good idea to keep it off and only turn in on in a controlled situation. The last thing you want is added attention by things in the area.
Note: If you plan to set up using stampede as a defensive cooldown in a group setting at least make sure your main pet is ferocity. The stable pets should be the only ones that are tenacity.
Note: If your set up for a defensive usage of stampede never call it as an offensive cooldown as it could actually cause problems with the thunderstomp and growl going off.
Stampede as an Offensive Cooldown:
Hit it. That is is. Just kidding of course. There is a way to make it a better offensive cooldown and part one of that is doing the reverse of what I said in the defensive version.
How to set up stampede as an offensive cooldown.
Call all pets out one at a time and...
1) turn off growl.
2) spec them ferocity.
3) make sure rabid is on autocast.
That is really all you need when talking group content but you can take it further if you want for when you are soloing and want to use it for offense. If you plan your pets out you can basically become a one man raid. Each pet called out will act as its own pet and do its own abilties and that includes the buffs they offer. So a smart choice of 5 different pets will apply 5 (or more) different buffs.
Note: You can even use the offensive version as a defensive version when soloing by hitting feign death after you call them and letting them take aggro on a single mob while you revive your pet. It will not be as effective on packs however.
Stampede as a Battle Resurrection:
Note: Must be BM to do this and have a Quillen in your stable
/cast [target=focus,dead] Eternal Guardian; Eternal Guardian
This will cast a battle resurrection on your focus if your focus is dead, which if you are the type that has the tank as your focus makes it perfect for reviving the tank without the need to target it, and if your focus is not dead it will cast it on your current selected target.
Note: I have not used this macro myself yet but I told a guild mate how to make it two weeks ago as soon as he tamed one and he said it works like a charm.
Note: The dead person needs to be within 20 yards of the quillen for this to work.
Stampede as a Full Heal:*
Note: Must be BM to do this and have all spirit beasts in your stable.
/cast [harm] Stampede
/cast [target=mouseover, help] Spirit Mend; [target=player] Spirit Mend
This will cast all 5 spirit mends on yourself or on the target you are moused over effectively acting like a lay on hands for whomever it is used on.
*Posted by Jappse on MMO-Champion.
Stampede is more than just some five minute cooldown mini version of army of the dead, our pets have style in huge amounts, so much so, we can do almost anything with them. Oh, the joys of being a hunter. So many pets, so few stable slots, that would be my only pet gripe.
LFR: The First Day of MV
I must say that the second looking for raid release was as great as the first one on the first day. All thanks to the fact that the only people that would have the appropriate item level in most cases are the people that actually know how to raid or at the very least try to appear like they are trying.
Sure, there will be people that slipped in. The people that got lucky in randoms unlike me who had to really work to get the item level. The people that got lucky with world drops. The people who crafted their way in. The people that used the auction house to make their way in and last but not least the ones that bought their way in with real money either buying the items online somewhere or the gold online somewhere to gear themselves in.
Those people however were in the minority. The majority of people in the looking for raid that first day were actually decent players. This is why it was a great run.
While I did horrible over all I still managed top 10, which is really different for me, I have never been lower than #3 in a 25 man in any format, LFR, pug, guild, or even filling in for top guilds in at least 4 years. Being less than perfect is something I am not used to but I will chalk that up more to my lack of gear and my unwillingness to enchant crap pieces of gear I know I will be replacing the second I start raiding. I could have done better, I just refused to. I can take some solace in the fact that I did beat two hunters that already had multiple 489 pieces and everything was gemmed and enchanted. So while I felt I did horrible, when compared to them, I did pretty good.
We wiped twice in the run. Once on the second boss because of a messed up pull when people were still outside of the gate and we were waiting on healers and once on the third boss because it seemed not enough knew to go into the totems and kill the adds. No big deal, at least no big deal for real raiders.
After each wipe we joked a little, explained what went wrong, waited for healers and then downed it the next time. No one called anyone names, no one was saying you people are noobs, no one complained a damage dealer was not pulling their weight, or a healer was not pulling their weight, or a tank was not taunting fast enough.
If something needed to be done someone said it, they did not yell it, they did not spam it and they certainly did not call people idiots for not doing it. This was a group of raiders that are middle of the pack raiders. The ones that have not downed normal yet but are still raiders, the ones that will clear normal in the next 3 or 4 weeks most likely but will not rush it.
People always say that the looking for raid is not for raiders it is for people that do not raid to see the content. After a second first day release and seeing how great the looking for raid can be when "those" other people are not in it I am firmly placed in the camp of they are wrong.
Looking for raid is made for raiders. Not hard core raiders, not heroic type raiders or progression raiders but for raiders none the less. Raiders with some skill but less time. Casual raiders, beginner raiders, weekend raiders, retired raiders, part time raiders, anti-social so they don't have a guild or friends raiders, or basically anyone that has the ability to be raid aware which makes them a raider of sorts. It is made for them to see content and do content it is not made for people that are bad players and bad people to see content.
Looking for raid is not meant to see content for people that would never see the inside of a raid anyway if it were not there. It is not meant for people to come and AFK. It is not meant for people that can still not do more than 12K DPS at level 90. It is not meant for tanks that think just beating on the boss with a stick is enough to fill the role of a tank. It is not meant for healers that can't figure out how to heal more than one person effectively and can't even break 8K HPS.
It is meant for the people that were in it yesterday. People that for the most part at least looked up all the fights and had some sort of a clue even if they didn't understand it. People that did not yell and scream at any mistake someone made. People that explained what needed to be done if someone did something wrong instead of insulting them for doing it wrong.
Looking for raid was made for the people that were capable of getting into it on day one and that amazing run, even with the wipes, is proof that the looking for raid was made for them. It was a minor challenge for random people grouped together and worked as a way for them to get gear, see content and get ready for the real raid should they have the time to do that soon.
I like to use it for my raiders so they can see the basic concept of the fights. It is a lot easier to explain in the real raid if they have a basic concept of the fights from the looking for raid. Those are the people the looking for raid is made for. Seeing how great the run was is proof of it. I even have a sort of unspoken rule. I will not bring someone into the real raid unless they have done it in the looking for raid. Like I said, it makes explaining the fights so much easier if people have a clue what you are talking about and seeing it in the looking for raid makes my job as a raid leader for a casual guild 100 times easier.
Beware however, in a matter of a week or two the masses that should not even be allowed to queue up for it will start working their way into and it and the looking for raid will turn back into the load of crap it was at the end of cataclysm. Gear doesn't make the player but gear is the only way to make a wall to get in, too bad the people that should not be there sooner or later will get the gear.
If looking for raid was like this first day raid all the time I would actually consider quitting raiding and only do looking for raid. It is a nice relaxed way to have some fun and get some gear. Too bad the people that shouldn't be there will ruin what could be a beautiful thing soon. It makes an elf want to cry.
A great tool will soon become one of the worst features of the game, just like it did last time. It will happen even faster this time around because the fights seem to be a little harder than they were in the last LFR. If some groups in the last LFR still turned into wipe fests this time around expect to see lots of wipe fests.
So do the looking for raid now if you can, enjoy it while you can, because soon it will turn into hell, a wipe fest, and you will be subjected to rudeness and language that only the dregs of the community can bring.
I think if blizzard were really honest in their desire to let everyone see content they would make a 5 man version of all the raids for those people to see the content. The fact they try to funnel everyone into a raid that most should not be doing proves it is not about seeing content, it is about forcing content on people that they shouldn't be doing or wouldn't want to do it if they were not given a option to queue up for it.
A fair deal of players that I know in my guild that have never raided with us, or rarely raided with us, did the LFR because they could queue for it. Not because they wanted to, but because the option was there and no offense to them, there was a reason they never raided with us and that reason is, they are not raiders.
Looking for raid should be for the people that want to raid, not for the people that queue up for it just because it is there. The people that do it just because it is there are the ones that turn this great feature into hell. At least I got to enjoy one fun run. Maybe I might even get two weeks of good runs in before "those" people make their way into it.
First day LFR gets an A+ from me. But that is because of the people that were in it.
This is a MMO and the people make the game. Good people make for a good game, bad people make for a bad game. In three months I will bet you that the LFR would get an F from me. It will be the same raid, but different people.
Do it while the good people that are fun to play with are there. You won't regret it.
Sure, there will be people that slipped in. The people that got lucky in randoms unlike me who had to really work to get the item level. The people that got lucky with world drops. The people who crafted their way in. The people that used the auction house to make their way in and last but not least the ones that bought their way in with real money either buying the items online somewhere or the gold online somewhere to gear themselves in.
Those people however were in the minority. The majority of people in the looking for raid that first day were actually decent players. This is why it was a great run.
While I did horrible over all I still managed top 10, which is really different for me, I have never been lower than #3 in a 25 man in any format, LFR, pug, guild, or even filling in for top guilds in at least 4 years. Being less than perfect is something I am not used to but I will chalk that up more to my lack of gear and my unwillingness to enchant crap pieces of gear I know I will be replacing the second I start raiding. I could have done better, I just refused to. I can take some solace in the fact that I did beat two hunters that already had multiple 489 pieces and everything was gemmed and enchanted. So while I felt I did horrible, when compared to them, I did pretty good.
We wiped twice in the run. Once on the second boss because of a messed up pull when people were still outside of the gate and we were waiting on healers and once on the third boss because it seemed not enough knew to go into the totems and kill the adds. No big deal, at least no big deal for real raiders.
After each wipe we joked a little, explained what went wrong, waited for healers and then downed it the next time. No one called anyone names, no one was saying you people are noobs, no one complained a damage dealer was not pulling their weight, or a healer was not pulling their weight, or a tank was not taunting fast enough.
If something needed to be done someone said it, they did not yell it, they did not spam it and they certainly did not call people idiots for not doing it. This was a group of raiders that are middle of the pack raiders. The ones that have not downed normal yet but are still raiders, the ones that will clear normal in the next 3 or 4 weeks most likely but will not rush it.
People always say that the looking for raid is not for raiders it is for people that do not raid to see the content. After a second first day release and seeing how great the looking for raid can be when "those" other people are not in it I am firmly placed in the camp of they are wrong.
Looking for raid is made for raiders. Not hard core raiders, not heroic type raiders or progression raiders but for raiders none the less. Raiders with some skill but less time. Casual raiders, beginner raiders, weekend raiders, retired raiders, part time raiders, anti-social so they don't have a guild or friends raiders, or basically anyone that has the ability to be raid aware which makes them a raider of sorts. It is made for them to see content and do content it is not made for people that are bad players and bad people to see content.
Looking for raid is not meant to see content for people that would never see the inside of a raid anyway if it were not there. It is not meant for people to come and AFK. It is not meant for people that can still not do more than 12K DPS at level 90. It is not meant for tanks that think just beating on the boss with a stick is enough to fill the role of a tank. It is not meant for healers that can't figure out how to heal more than one person effectively and can't even break 8K HPS.
It is meant for the people that were in it yesterday. People that for the most part at least looked up all the fights and had some sort of a clue even if they didn't understand it. People that did not yell and scream at any mistake someone made. People that explained what needed to be done if someone did something wrong instead of insulting them for doing it wrong.
Looking for raid was made for the people that were capable of getting into it on day one and that amazing run, even with the wipes, is proof that the looking for raid was made for them. It was a minor challenge for random people grouped together and worked as a way for them to get gear, see content and get ready for the real raid should they have the time to do that soon.
I like to use it for my raiders so they can see the basic concept of the fights. It is a lot easier to explain in the real raid if they have a basic concept of the fights from the looking for raid. Those are the people the looking for raid is made for. Seeing how great the run was is proof of it. I even have a sort of unspoken rule. I will not bring someone into the real raid unless they have done it in the looking for raid. Like I said, it makes explaining the fights so much easier if people have a clue what you are talking about and seeing it in the looking for raid makes my job as a raid leader for a casual guild 100 times easier.
Beware however, in a matter of a week or two the masses that should not even be allowed to queue up for it will start working their way into and it and the looking for raid will turn back into the load of crap it was at the end of cataclysm. Gear doesn't make the player but gear is the only way to make a wall to get in, too bad the people that should not be there sooner or later will get the gear.
If looking for raid was like this first day raid all the time I would actually consider quitting raiding and only do looking for raid. It is a nice relaxed way to have some fun and get some gear. Too bad the people that shouldn't be there will ruin what could be a beautiful thing soon. It makes an elf want to cry.
A great tool will soon become one of the worst features of the game, just like it did last time. It will happen even faster this time around because the fights seem to be a little harder than they were in the last LFR. If some groups in the last LFR still turned into wipe fests this time around expect to see lots of wipe fests.
So do the looking for raid now if you can, enjoy it while you can, because soon it will turn into hell, a wipe fest, and you will be subjected to rudeness and language that only the dregs of the community can bring.
I think if blizzard were really honest in their desire to let everyone see content they would make a 5 man version of all the raids for those people to see the content. The fact they try to funnel everyone into a raid that most should not be doing proves it is not about seeing content, it is about forcing content on people that they shouldn't be doing or wouldn't want to do it if they were not given a option to queue up for it.
A fair deal of players that I know in my guild that have never raided with us, or rarely raided with us, did the LFR because they could queue for it. Not because they wanted to, but because the option was there and no offense to them, there was a reason they never raided with us and that reason is, they are not raiders.
Looking for raid should be for the people that want to raid, not for the people that queue up for it just because it is there. The people that do it just because it is there are the ones that turn this great feature into hell. At least I got to enjoy one fun run. Maybe I might even get two weeks of good runs in before "those" people make their way into it.
First day LFR gets an A+ from me. But that is because of the people that were in it.
This is a MMO and the people make the game. Good people make for a good game, bad people make for a bad game. In three months I will bet you that the LFR would get an F from me. It will be the same raid, but different people.
Do it while the good people that are fun to play with are there. You won't regret it.
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
Class Balance, Clueless Blues, Alts and More
I did not post a random thoughts yesterday so figured I would touch on a few topics today in my standard long winded way instead of bullet points. As usually, don't mind my rambling, sometimes it is more just thinking to myself out loud so to speak.
Class Balance:
I am not talking about the DK tanks that can beat me on AoE or the warlock that did almost 250K burst damage and I can't figure out how. I am talking about hunter to hunter class balance. Heck, I am not even talking about hunter to hunter class balance I am talking about my very own hunter vs my very own hunter.
I noticed something odd while doing my dailies, all 257 million of them, and I decided to take to the dummies to check out if what I was seeing was true. My abilities all seem a little off. Not off as if they seem too low or too high, just off.
After roughly an hour of testing yesterday I notice the high and low range for abilities showed no rhyme or reason. I made sure to take off my agility proc trinket so I would not skew results as I wanted a base to work on. While all abilities seem to have what I call extreme ranges there are two that stood out more than the others. Kill command and glaive toss.
Usually all abilities have a high and a low mark. Like something would hit for between 10K-12K and when it was a critical hit it would be between 20K and 24K, just as an example. If you pound a target for a 5 minute chunk the low will always be around the same and the high will always be around the same. Anyone that has ever done testing will tell you this. There is a bit of luck on hitting the high end but hitting the low end all that often might lower your DPS but not insanely so. There was always a small range between high and low.
Enter mists and now class balance means a whole new thing. After testing I've noticed there is no such thing as a high and low any more and if there is one I have no clue what it would be. During my test I saw the following highs and lows for kill command and glaive toss respectively.
Kill Command Low Critical: 22K
Kill Command High Critical: 109K
Glaive Toss Low Critical: 12K
Glaive Toss High Critical: 138K
I am not kidding about those numbers. They are 100% accurate and actual numbers I saw. So unless my recount was broken this is what we are seeing, a huge range of high and low and now it seems that playing a damage dealer is all about luck. Remember, I did this with no proc items so nothing could have influenced the damage done by these abilities and even if they did there should not be that much of a difference.
So, all you hunters out there that sometimes are wondering how you did 68K on a fight one day and only 23K the next day I have the answer for you. You got lucky and were getting 130K+ glaive tosses one day and got unlucky and were getting 10K glaive tosses the next.
This needs to be fixed ASAP because luck should never play that much of a factor in how well you play your role. I am known for being amazingly unlucky and if this is not fixed I am going to be forced to retire my hunter. Not because I don't like it or can't play it, but because with my luck I will never get the most out of my class if DPS is all about being lucky. I would better serve the community as a tank or a healer.
It is not something that is just tied to a hunter either. While asking around if anyone else noticed that the numbered seemed weird I had a feral druid, a holy priest, a fury warrior and a protection paladin all say they noticed the same weird spikes in damage, or healing, all over the place.
Even leveling my guardian druid I noticed it as well. Mind you, all these other cases were out in the world while questing or in dungeons, but that does not change the fact that the numbers are off, extremely off. There is no reason a holy priest should be getting a wide range from heal, the small healing spell, that goes from 25K to 260K. Even with buffs and procs and everything you can imagine there is no way in hell the smallest heal a priest has should spike up to 260K. It makes it all based on luck.
If something is supposed to hit it should hit between a range. If something is supposed to crit, it should crit between a range. The range should not be so big that is it 12K to 138K or 25K to 260K or the game becomes all about luck and that game is not for me.
Clueless Blues:
Day after day I read more of the dribble that comes out of the mouths of the blues and wonder if they even play this game. They all seem to be living in another world and have no clue what they are talking about. Nothing shows this more clearly than this weekend when there was an extra 3 hours down time after rolling restarts.
The general forums had no less that half of the posts on the first page about people not being able to get in. The technical support section had 9 of the first 10 topics about not being able to log in and the customer support section had 8 out of the first 10 devoted to it. No word at all from any blues what so ever until we finally see one speak up in a thread where someone posted they can not connect and this is what they had to offer. Source
So you are saying that the countless amount of threads, many over 20 pages long and a massive amount even in the section you answered this in and you had not noticed it? Even if you just showed up for work there was no known issues bulletin for you to read? The game had rolling restarts and has been down since then and you noticed nothing? Did you just log in to get to work and go to the first post without even looking at anything else and come up with this amazing answer?
Clueless is actually too nice of a term for this person. But clueless sure does it them. For whatever reason they did not notice all the posts or did not read some office memo which I am sure a company that big had sent to all mods and they made a bonehead statement.
We have all been guilty of that from time to time but I think the fact that they went on that day and answered other posts asking people to reboot or recycle the modem moves from the bonehead statement category into the absolutely clueless one. And this folks, was the first blue response we saw to the problem. Nice work blizzard.
It does not stop there with their bonehead statements. Like the blue that said people would rather walk through mists content instead of adding flying earlier for alts like they did later on it wrath. Have you ever played the game? First time it is awesome, second it is okay, third it is a breeze because you know where everything is, by the forth time it is frustratingly annoying to have to run all over the place.
I've been there and done that, I do not need to do it again. There is an achievement for getting three characters to max level just make the heirloom flying book require three maxed characters to buy and there you go, problem solved. Saying people would rather walk on alts is a clear case if being completely clueless and makes me believe that the blues do not even play this game.
They are also all hung up on this daily grind thing. Mind you I love them but sometimes too much is too much. There is no way in hell I can do my dailies and raid if I want to try to get them all in. If I want to unlock things to buy with valor it becomes a choice of raiding to earn valor or doing dailies to unlock things to buy with valor. I play casual but I play a lot casual and if I can not keep up how are others that play less supposed to if I can not keep up on a 7 day play schedule?
Yet reading the blues they think it is completely fine to cap valor to three thousands when someone that only logs in for a few hours a few days a week at most will easily have 10K valor by the time they unlock anything they can spend it on. They say the cap is fine, it is not, and it is proof once again that no one that posts in blue has a clue or even plays this game.
If you do quests to unlock stuff and other things you will cap valor quickly. The cap needs to be removed or the requirements for those that do not play often needs to be removed. It does not effect me as I have everything open but for a vast majority of players this is becoming a huge problem and blizzard chooses to ignore it just like they do with everything else in the game.
Alts:
I got my second character to 90 now and started gearing them up. I've tanked a bunch of heroics and my luck on my druid is roughly the same as on my hunter. I've got none. At least my druid hit 90 heroic ready with a 441 item level. Kind of hard to believe that my main needed to try to get to 440 and an alt was 441 without even trying. I wonder if it is true that some classes just get better quest rewards. I did everything on my hunter and only barely got to 440 from just quest rewards and I did only enough to hit 90 on my druid and had 441. Makes no sense to me. Glad it was lowered to 435 however, because that seems to be a bit more inclusive.
Not to mention tanking heroics was a breeze. It was a hell of a lot easier than DPSing them. I got to be #1 on DPS often, use my cool new tanking cooldowns often, and did not have to deal with all the problems I did on my hunter where I could not stand still long enough to get even one cobra shot off.
If I have to take a break from damage dealing until they fix the luck factor, see class balance above, then tanking might be the way to go. It was definitely more fun tanking the dungeons than it was DPSing them and it was easier. Perhaps that could be chalked up to the fact I already knew the dungeons which made it easier. I am almost tempted to actually queue as a tank alone this expansion. There is only one dungeon I fear with a passion. Niuzao Temple seems to be one of those dungeons that people will avoid because of the active mechanics that can actually wipe people.
I now have to consider doing dailies on this character but being I do not have enough time to do them all on my main this character will have to wait. It makes me think that reputation should be account bound as well like mounts and pets and achievements. I do not mind being locked by reputation on my main but on my alts it sucks. Big time sucks. I do not want to have to do this all over for many different characters. There is a thin line between fun and annoying. Fun is doing it once, annoying is having to do it on every character as a requirement.
I now need to get all my other characters reputation too for patterns, so even if I said screw it and would gear up only with dungeons and raids I can not get the new enchanting recipes or leatherworking patterns or blacksmith patterns unless I get reputation first. I call bull shit. Let them be BoA once you hit exalted if you are not going to share reputation so I can at least buy them with the person that made exalted and send it to the crafter.
I love the reputation grind, I think it is the best addition to the game in a while. I just do not like doing it a second or third time and I doubt many do. Yet blizzard thinks it is fine, see clueless blues above.
So my druid will not be buying any valor gear thanks to horrible design until I am completely maxed on my main on everything so I might actually have the time to do some dailies on my druid. I don't think that is right. There is so much to do and so little time to do it. Do I really need to quit my job if I want to keep more than one character geared?
I guess in time this will be a moot point anyway. Because once you cap out reputation needed at least you do not need to get it back up every single patch. So it is a one time road block. Once some time has passed and you have done it on all your characters it will be forgotten about. So we can take some relief from that if we wanted to. It is just making having multiple characters ready at the start harder if you do not have a lot of free time.
6 Hours of Dailies:
That is exactly how long it took me to do all my dailies yesterday. I had the day off work so I didn't do them with any sense of haste, I took my time and I did get side tracked a time or two but 6 hours per day is just a little bit too much of an investment for a video game don't you think?
I did the big four, Klaxxi, AC, GL and SP as well as the serpents (now exalted), tillers and anglers. For me when I want to do things quick I can just the AC and SP being both the other big four are revered already and unlocked the valor gear. So I can cut it down some. The other three are just for fun ones and if I miss a day I will not feel like I am missing anything.
The fact that when I decided to do them all it took 6 hours makes me think a little about how they thought this out. In two weeks roughly I will be exalted with everyone and will not need to do dailies any more. So they went for the front loaded grind that keeps you busy for a month and then figures you will move to alts and do it all over again. A good idea really, but will we want to do it all again is the real question.
I am not sure I would want to. I like the daily idea but I am starting to question if it will really serve the purpose long term for the lack of content to do. I do not mind doing dailies on certain characters and I dread doing them on others. Characters like my hunter, druid, warrior, paladin and death knight where I can pull whole zones at a time I love doing them with, it is a fun grind. Characters like my priest and my shaman I would rather just heal with and not quest with and characters like my rogue, warlock and mage I can quest with but I just do not enjoy playing them. At least last expansion I could just run dungeons with them and buy my valor gear that way.
I think it was better to put enchants like head or shoulder enchants behind reputations instead of gear. At least in that case I could still gear up and just be missing an enchant or two and if you wanted to get serious with that character you could grind that one or two reputations. That was perfect optional content. Locking gear behind the wall is not optional content. If you want gear you have to open the wall. Again, not a bad problem on one character but on multiple ones it becomes a hassle.
I would like to level more alts to 90 but I do not want to do the 6 hour daily grind with them as well. I just do not have that time. I did it yesterday because I was off work but I do not have that type of time to play each day. 6 hours worth of dailies is just too much.
They could make us have half the amount of dailies offering us twice the amount of reputation and ditch the dailies with the horrible drop rates or slow spawn timers and turn that 6 hours into 2 hours and suddenly it becomes something you would not mind doing on your alts when you are done with your main.
Blizzard has a habit of doing things in extremes. Either give us nothing to do, the entire expansion of cataclysm basically, or give us too much to do, the start of mists. Do they ever consider doing things average?
Speaking of Extremes:
What the hell is blizzards problem with balancing things out in the game. Lets not even talk about the attacks and quests like I already have but about cloth for one.
When I leveled my main I got enough cloth to max out first aid, get two tailors to max level and still have over 300 bolts left over. That is just from leveling one character. Think the drop rate was a little too high? Hell yes.
So I leveled my druid last week. From 85-90 I looted 83 cloth. 83 pieces of cloth in total leveling a whole five levels. I know they said they were adjusting things but how the hell do you go from one extreme to another like that, it shows they have no clue what they are doing. Lower the drop rate, do not remove it.
Do the designers of this game ever consider doing things right? Don't go from too much to too few. Try something in the middle. Extremes do not work. How can they continuously screw up like that?
What is worse than the fact they can not find a decent balance is the fact that they worked quick to nerf the drop to near nothing but they will make no efforts what so ever to bring it back up to a reasonable level. If it is too much we have to fix it ASAP but if it too little screw the players, we will get around to it later.
As long as the history of this game is you would figure that drop rates should have been something they mastered by the second or third expansion at the latest but they still seem completely clueless about it. I wonder where we heard that word before, clueless. That describes blizzard.
Class Balance:
I am not talking about the DK tanks that can beat me on AoE or the warlock that did almost 250K burst damage and I can't figure out how. I am talking about hunter to hunter class balance. Heck, I am not even talking about hunter to hunter class balance I am talking about my very own hunter vs my very own hunter.
I noticed something odd while doing my dailies, all 257 million of them, and I decided to take to the dummies to check out if what I was seeing was true. My abilities all seem a little off. Not off as if they seem too low or too high, just off.
After roughly an hour of testing yesterday I notice the high and low range for abilities showed no rhyme or reason. I made sure to take off my agility proc trinket so I would not skew results as I wanted a base to work on. While all abilities seem to have what I call extreme ranges there are two that stood out more than the others. Kill command and glaive toss.
Usually all abilities have a high and a low mark. Like something would hit for between 10K-12K and when it was a critical hit it would be between 20K and 24K, just as an example. If you pound a target for a 5 minute chunk the low will always be around the same and the high will always be around the same. Anyone that has ever done testing will tell you this. There is a bit of luck on hitting the high end but hitting the low end all that often might lower your DPS but not insanely so. There was always a small range between high and low.
Enter mists and now class balance means a whole new thing. After testing I've noticed there is no such thing as a high and low any more and if there is one I have no clue what it would be. During my test I saw the following highs and lows for kill command and glaive toss respectively.
Kill Command Low Critical: 22K
Kill Command High Critical: 109K
Glaive Toss Low Critical: 12K
Glaive Toss High Critical: 138K
I am not kidding about those numbers. They are 100% accurate and actual numbers I saw. So unless my recount was broken this is what we are seeing, a huge range of high and low and now it seems that playing a damage dealer is all about luck. Remember, I did this with no proc items so nothing could have influenced the damage done by these abilities and even if they did there should not be that much of a difference.
So, all you hunters out there that sometimes are wondering how you did 68K on a fight one day and only 23K the next day I have the answer for you. You got lucky and were getting 130K+ glaive tosses one day and got unlucky and were getting 10K glaive tosses the next.
This needs to be fixed ASAP because luck should never play that much of a factor in how well you play your role. I am known for being amazingly unlucky and if this is not fixed I am going to be forced to retire my hunter. Not because I don't like it or can't play it, but because with my luck I will never get the most out of my class if DPS is all about being lucky. I would better serve the community as a tank or a healer.
It is not something that is just tied to a hunter either. While asking around if anyone else noticed that the numbered seemed weird I had a feral druid, a holy priest, a fury warrior and a protection paladin all say they noticed the same weird spikes in damage, or healing, all over the place.
Even leveling my guardian druid I noticed it as well. Mind you, all these other cases were out in the world while questing or in dungeons, but that does not change the fact that the numbers are off, extremely off. There is no reason a holy priest should be getting a wide range from heal, the small healing spell, that goes from 25K to 260K. Even with buffs and procs and everything you can imagine there is no way in hell the smallest heal a priest has should spike up to 260K. It makes it all based on luck.
If something is supposed to hit it should hit between a range. If something is supposed to crit, it should crit between a range. The range should not be so big that is it 12K to 138K or 25K to 260K or the game becomes all about luck and that game is not for me.
Clueless Blues:
Day after day I read more of the dribble that comes out of the mouths of the blues and wonder if they even play this game. They all seem to be living in another world and have no clue what they are talking about. Nothing shows this more clearly than this weekend when there was an extra 3 hours down time after rolling restarts.
The general forums had no less that half of the posts on the first page about people not being able to get in. The technical support section had 9 of the first 10 topics about not being able to log in and the customer support section had 8 out of the first 10 devoted to it. No word at all from any blues what so ever until we finally see one speak up in a thread where someone posted they can not connect and this is what they had to offer. Source
This morning? Not seen any other reports here.Note: I did not realize that this was a necro that day and not a fresh blue post after the downtime. It was before the downtime. I will leave this part of it however because while I did not notice it was a necro my gripe about clueless blues still is a real one as they are clueless.
Have you tried rebooting or recycling your modem?
-Orlyia
So you are saying that the countless amount of threads, many over 20 pages long and a massive amount even in the section you answered this in and you had not noticed it? Even if you just showed up for work there was no known issues bulletin for you to read? The game had rolling restarts and has been down since then and you noticed nothing? Did you just log in to get to work and go to the first post without even looking at anything else and come up with this amazing answer?
Clueless is actually too nice of a term for this person. But clueless sure does it them. For whatever reason they did not notice all the posts or did not read some office memo which I am sure a company that big had sent to all mods and they made a bonehead statement.
We have all been guilty of that from time to time but I think the fact that they went on that day and answered other posts asking people to reboot or recycle the modem moves from the bonehead statement category into the absolutely clueless one. And this folks, was the first blue response we saw to the problem. Nice work blizzard.
It does not stop there with their bonehead statements. Like the blue that said people would rather walk through mists content instead of adding flying earlier for alts like they did later on it wrath. Have you ever played the game? First time it is awesome, second it is okay, third it is a breeze because you know where everything is, by the forth time it is frustratingly annoying to have to run all over the place.
I've been there and done that, I do not need to do it again. There is an achievement for getting three characters to max level just make the heirloom flying book require three maxed characters to buy and there you go, problem solved. Saying people would rather walk on alts is a clear case if being completely clueless and makes me believe that the blues do not even play this game.
They are also all hung up on this daily grind thing. Mind you I love them but sometimes too much is too much. There is no way in hell I can do my dailies and raid if I want to try to get them all in. If I want to unlock things to buy with valor it becomes a choice of raiding to earn valor or doing dailies to unlock things to buy with valor. I play casual but I play a lot casual and if I can not keep up how are others that play less supposed to if I can not keep up on a 7 day play schedule?
Yet reading the blues they think it is completely fine to cap valor to three thousands when someone that only logs in for a few hours a few days a week at most will easily have 10K valor by the time they unlock anything they can spend it on. They say the cap is fine, it is not, and it is proof once again that no one that posts in blue has a clue or even plays this game.
If you do quests to unlock stuff and other things you will cap valor quickly. The cap needs to be removed or the requirements for those that do not play often needs to be removed. It does not effect me as I have everything open but for a vast majority of players this is becoming a huge problem and blizzard chooses to ignore it just like they do with everything else in the game.
Alts:
I got my second character to 90 now and started gearing them up. I've tanked a bunch of heroics and my luck on my druid is roughly the same as on my hunter. I've got none. At least my druid hit 90 heroic ready with a 441 item level. Kind of hard to believe that my main needed to try to get to 440 and an alt was 441 without even trying. I wonder if it is true that some classes just get better quest rewards. I did everything on my hunter and only barely got to 440 from just quest rewards and I did only enough to hit 90 on my druid and had 441. Makes no sense to me. Glad it was lowered to 435 however, because that seems to be a bit more inclusive.
Not to mention tanking heroics was a breeze. It was a hell of a lot easier than DPSing them. I got to be #1 on DPS often, use my cool new tanking cooldowns often, and did not have to deal with all the problems I did on my hunter where I could not stand still long enough to get even one cobra shot off.
If I have to take a break from damage dealing until they fix the luck factor, see class balance above, then tanking might be the way to go. It was definitely more fun tanking the dungeons than it was DPSing them and it was easier. Perhaps that could be chalked up to the fact I already knew the dungeons which made it easier. I am almost tempted to actually queue as a tank alone this expansion. There is only one dungeon I fear with a passion. Niuzao Temple seems to be one of those dungeons that people will avoid because of the active mechanics that can actually wipe people.
I now have to consider doing dailies on this character but being I do not have enough time to do them all on my main this character will have to wait. It makes me think that reputation should be account bound as well like mounts and pets and achievements. I do not mind being locked by reputation on my main but on my alts it sucks. Big time sucks. I do not want to have to do this all over for many different characters. There is a thin line between fun and annoying. Fun is doing it once, annoying is having to do it on every character as a requirement.
I now need to get all my other characters reputation too for patterns, so even if I said screw it and would gear up only with dungeons and raids I can not get the new enchanting recipes or leatherworking patterns or blacksmith patterns unless I get reputation first. I call bull shit. Let them be BoA once you hit exalted if you are not going to share reputation so I can at least buy them with the person that made exalted and send it to the crafter.
I love the reputation grind, I think it is the best addition to the game in a while. I just do not like doing it a second or third time and I doubt many do. Yet blizzard thinks it is fine, see clueless blues above.
So my druid will not be buying any valor gear thanks to horrible design until I am completely maxed on my main on everything so I might actually have the time to do some dailies on my druid. I don't think that is right. There is so much to do and so little time to do it. Do I really need to quit my job if I want to keep more than one character geared?
I guess in time this will be a moot point anyway. Because once you cap out reputation needed at least you do not need to get it back up every single patch. So it is a one time road block. Once some time has passed and you have done it on all your characters it will be forgotten about. So we can take some relief from that if we wanted to. It is just making having multiple characters ready at the start harder if you do not have a lot of free time.
6 Hours of Dailies:
That is exactly how long it took me to do all my dailies yesterday. I had the day off work so I didn't do them with any sense of haste, I took my time and I did get side tracked a time or two but 6 hours per day is just a little bit too much of an investment for a video game don't you think?
I did the big four, Klaxxi, AC, GL and SP as well as the serpents (now exalted), tillers and anglers. For me when I want to do things quick I can just the AC and SP being both the other big four are revered already and unlocked the valor gear. So I can cut it down some. The other three are just for fun ones and if I miss a day I will not feel like I am missing anything.
The fact that when I decided to do them all it took 6 hours makes me think a little about how they thought this out. In two weeks roughly I will be exalted with everyone and will not need to do dailies any more. So they went for the front loaded grind that keeps you busy for a month and then figures you will move to alts and do it all over again. A good idea really, but will we want to do it all again is the real question.
I am not sure I would want to. I like the daily idea but I am starting to question if it will really serve the purpose long term for the lack of content to do. I do not mind doing dailies on certain characters and I dread doing them on others. Characters like my hunter, druid, warrior, paladin and death knight where I can pull whole zones at a time I love doing them with, it is a fun grind. Characters like my priest and my shaman I would rather just heal with and not quest with and characters like my rogue, warlock and mage I can quest with but I just do not enjoy playing them. At least last expansion I could just run dungeons with them and buy my valor gear that way.
I think it was better to put enchants like head or shoulder enchants behind reputations instead of gear. At least in that case I could still gear up and just be missing an enchant or two and if you wanted to get serious with that character you could grind that one or two reputations. That was perfect optional content. Locking gear behind the wall is not optional content. If you want gear you have to open the wall. Again, not a bad problem on one character but on multiple ones it becomes a hassle.
I would like to level more alts to 90 but I do not want to do the 6 hour daily grind with them as well. I just do not have that time. I did it yesterday because I was off work but I do not have that type of time to play each day. 6 hours worth of dailies is just too much.
They could make us have half the amount of dailies offering us twice the amount of reputation and ditch the dailies with the horrible drop rates or slow spawn timers and turn that 6 hours into 2 hours and suddenly it becomes something you would not mind doing on your alts when you are done with your main.
Blizzard has a habit of doing things in extremes. Either give us nothing to do, the entire expansion of cataclysm basically, or give us too much to do, the start of mists. Do they ever consider doing things average?
Speaking of Extremes:
What the hell is blizzards problem with balancing things out in the game. Lets not even talk about the attacks and quests like I already have but about cloth for one.
When I leveled my main I got enough cloth to max out first aid, get two tailors to max level and still have over 300 bolts left over. That is just from leveling one character. Think the drop rate was a little too high? Hell yes.
So I leveled my druid last week. From 85-90 I looted 83 cloth. 83 pieces of cloth in total leveling a whole five levels. I know they said they were adjusting things but how the hell do you go from one extreme to another like that, it shows they have no clue what they are doing. Lower the drop rate, do not remove it.
Do the designers of this game ever consider doing things right? Don't go from too much to too few. Try something in the middle. Extremes do not work. How can they continuously screw up like that?
What is worse than the fact they can not find a decent balance is the fact that they worked quick to nerf the drop to near nothing but they will make no efforts what so ever to bring it back up to a reasonable level. If it is too much we have to fix it ASAP but if it too little screw the players, we will get around to it later.
As long as the history of this game is you would figure that drop rates should have been something they mastered by the second or third expansion at the latest but they still seem completely clueless about it. I wonder where we heard that word before, clueless. That describes blizzard.
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