Is there upgrades you can get with valor? Get them. If there isn't? Upgrade your best piece you won't replace for a while each time you are about to hit valor cap.
According to Wowhead he hits like a truck and does a bunch of aoe damage so they say you should have two healers, a tank, and as many dps as you can get.
According to Wowhead he hits like a truck and does a bunch of aoe damage so they say you should have two healers, a tank, and as many dps as you can get.
There's no berserk or anything, so you can go with as few or as many as you'd like. Mechanics-wise there's not much too it. If there's anyone standing out at range, he'll charge them, do an aoe knockback, and charge back to the tank. So have everyone just stack up. Occasionally he'll put a dot on everyone and you'll get an Extra Action Button to remove the dot. Only hit it if you're at high health, cause you take a chunk of damage when you do. Don't forget to hit the button, the dot keeps ramping up and will not go away until you do. There's also random aoe damage.
It's pretty simple, and actually kinda monotonous. So yeah if you can get a large group, do it. My group of six which was 1 tank, 1 heal, and 4 dps in 496+ raidgear, took quite a while. Just toss warm bodies at him til he goes splat.
People really need to learn how to troll properly.
Spamming someone with broken engrish about untowards ideas about your mother is the lowest forms of trolling.
Let me tell you about some great moments I had in trolling:
First; I once on my Death Knight, went to Elywnn forest and /followed around a new player. I knew he were new, because he had no heirlooms on and wasn't in a guild. I didn't interfere with his quests, nor make his life uncomfortable in anyway. I just followed him. I was pretending to be a non-combat pet. I also had my ghoul (on passive) and a non-combat pet of my own out. So this new player had me following him for about an hour. Afterwards, I finally talked to him and said hello, which suprised him. He thought I was part of a quest and was trying to figure me out! I explained what I did and gave him some advice on the game, he thanked me and I gave him a couple hundred gold, bid him fairwell, mounted up and flew off.
Another time of epic trolling: My guild leader and I were pretty good friends. I was an engineer with a motorcycle. He would sometimes just sit in my spare seat and go afk for a while. The first time, I drove from Ironforge to the waterfall next to Dun Moroh (forgot the name). I drove right off of it and engaged my parachute. He died and I landed safely on the ground. About 15 minutes later, he starts yelling at me in guild chat about how he was dead at the bottom of a waterfall. He made me promise to never drop him off a cliff again and I promised I wouldn't. The next day, he's riding around AFK in my bike again, so I put on Path of Frost and drove him as deep into the ocean as possible till I just barely hit the fatigue limit. Then I dismounted him in the middle of the ocean and rode back right before I was about to die! He yelled about me killing him again, but I reminded that I didn't promise to not kill him, I just promised to not drop him off a cliff again. I later did the same thing to his girlfriend, but she had a better sense of humor :P
Lastly, I some random level 2 was just begging in trade chat about two gold to buy green equipment. I wasn't really at my keyboard, I was just kind of online while I was helping my wife around the house. I noticed that this dude was still begging for gold and he had been whispering me the whole time while I was AFK. I really don't like to ignore people, but I gave him some friendly advice about how to grind and if he mined and skinned leather, he'd get rich pretty fast. I'm a nice guy and like to help people who ask, but I do get annoyed when people disregard after I take the time to give them assistance. He took my willingness to engage him as a sign of weakness and kept begging me. So I did what I usually do to annoying gold beggers. I opened trade with him, put in 20,000 gold in the trade box, then went AFK for about an hour or so, doing house stuff, playing with my daughter, ect. I came back and my whisper tab is full of variations on, "CLICK TRADE YOU ASSHOLE!" I sat down, told him that if had grinded for the last hour instead of sitting and waiting on a total stranger to take pity on him, he'd not only have two gold, but a higher level and probably some green level equipment. He told me to fuck off, said he reported me (lawl), and then ignored me.
Battlenet ID: MildC#11186 - If I'm in the game, send me an invite at anytime and I'll play.
the best one ever was a husband/wife team I used to play with who were leveling hunter/druid alts. I wish I could remember the hunter's name now, but the point was the druid was in a guild named <Hunter's Pet>. They'd stand around IF and people would ask where she tamed that cat etc, and then after a while the druid would say something in /say and freak them out
hold your head high soldier, it ain't over yet
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Have I mentioned how awesome Dave Kosak is? Cause he's great. Him and Ghostcrawler have been having this hilarious back and forth, which all started with this:
Yeah I'll be taking over class tweets now! RT @Ghostcrawler: GC fairly unplugged for a few days. Expect few updates.
It's like the April Fool's Patch Notes, but better! Have not laughed this hard in a while.
Battle.net Tag: Dibby#1582
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FairchildRabbit used short words that were easy to understand, like "Hello Pooh, how about Lunch ?"Registered Userregular
edited January 2013
Hunters are now allowed to tame Druids as pets.
Hoo boy, some of those people on the RP servers are creepy enough already, let's not give them any more ideas.
According to Wowhead he hits like a truck and does a bunch of aoe damage so they say you should have two healers, a tank, and as many dps as you can get.
Are you guys talking about the guy you need to kill in the 5.1 area? Some guildies and I killed that dude the other night for one of our guys.
There were 4 of us: a shaman, a hunter, and 2 DKs. It took like 20 minutes. And, yes, he hits like a fucking truck.
My guild did it without a healer. He always charges at the person furthest away from his, so I put my water elemental really far away and just healed it with frostbolt whenever it needed it.
Honestly, a good 95% of RPers freak me out. You can only walk into so many elves and zombies having imaginary sex with each other before you write off all RPers as perverts.
I spent a couple of hours today trying to gather a group for the quest and every time I got people someone would realize it wasn't a daily and bail which would trigger other people to bail.
Why is every design decision in MoP designed to make alts take more and more time to play? lvling rep gearing all anti-alt.
In fact, many players made alts at the end of Cat because they were bored. Alts are cool, but shouldn't be mandatory to have fun.
That isn't actually why those decisions were made. They were made so that a player with one character doesn't get bored.
Italics is the question. Underlined is the most mind boggling thing I have heard in a long time. I can not for the life of me even find a reaction image for how bass ackwards that is and what it means for the game.
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Dr_KeenbeanDumb as a buttPlanet Express ShipRegistered Userregular
I spent a couple of hours today trying to gather a group for the quest and every time I got people someone would realize it wasn't a daily and bail which would trigger other people to bail.
Maybe tell them he gives a lot of Black Prince rep?
Why is every design decision in MoP designed to make alts take more and more time to play? lvling rep gearing all anti-alt.
In fact, many players made alts at the end of Cat because they were bored. Alts are cool, but shouldn't be mandatory to have fun.
That isn't actually why those decisions were made. They were made so that a player with one character doesn't get bored.
Italics is the question. Underlined is the most mind boggling thing I have heard in a long time. I can not for the life of me even find a reaction image for how bass ackwards that is and what it means for the game.
It's 100% correct. An alt should NOT be required for a game to be fun. If an alt is required for a game to be fun, it implies that a single character is NOT fun.
I played since early Vanilla. And it wasn't until around late Wrath early Cata that I finally actually made any decent headway into alts. I mean I have the page full of various combinations of new expansion races and classes and whatever struck my fancy. But I could never get any of them past lv20. I'd just lose interest and go back to my max warrior.
Are you saying I'm wrong for not really being interested in alts?
"The sausage of Green Earth explodes with flavor like the cannon of culinary delight."
Why is every design decision in MoP designed to make alts take more and more time to play? lvling rep gearing all anti-alt.
In fact, many players made alts at the end of Cat because they were bored. Alts are cool, but shouldn't be mandatory to have fun.
That isn't actually why those decisions were made. They were made so that a player with one character doesn't get bored.
Italics is the question. Underlined is the most mind boggling thing I have heard in a long time. I can not for the life of me even find a reaction image for how bass ackwards that is and what it means for the game.
It's 100% correct. An alt should NOT be required for a game to be fun. If an alt is required for a game to be fun, it implies that a single character is NOT fun.
Alts aren't required for the game to be fun, nor is it wrong for people not to want them. It is wrong that the game is punishingly anti-alt right now though. If it's so difficult for alts, that shows a problem with the basics of the game.
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HalfmexI mock your value systemYou also appear foolish in the eyes of othersRegistered Userregular
I played since early Vanilla. And it wasn't until around late Wrath early Cata that I finally actually made any decent headway into alts. I mean I have the page full of various combinations of new expansion races and classes and whatever struck my fancy. But I could never get any of them past lv20. I'd just lose interest and go back to my max warrior.
Are you saying I'm wrong for not really being interested in alts?
I don't think that's the assertion Blendtec is making. Rather, I think the point is that the assumption that most players make alts because they are bored/their main is not fun is incorrect. Some players make alts for extra bank space or to level a different profession but mostly it's to try out a different toolset and playstyle. It doesn't imply at all that the main isn't fun, it simply means that, normally, the player has taken their main as far as they can take them at that time, so rather than, say, grind 10,000 dinosaur bones, they figure "hey, I wonder what it'd be like to throw green fire at things?". Thus, alt.
The baffling part about it is that from about the end of TBC up until MoP, alts were not only an acceptable means of gameplay but were actively supported, whereas IN MoP, they're being indirectly penalized because of the lengthy reputation grinds enforced by the developers' overcompensation to Cata's primary criticism: that being that there wasn't much to do once you hit the level cap.
I played since early Vanilla. And it wasn't until around late Wrath early Cata that I finally actually made any decent headway into alts. I mean I have the page full of various combinations of new expansion races and classes and whatever struck my fancy. But I could never get any of them past lv20. I'd just lose interest and go back to my max warrior.
Are you saying I'm wrong for not really being interested in alts?
I don't think that's the assertion Blendtec is making. Rather, I think the point is that the assumption that most players make alts because they are bored/their main is not fun is incorrect. Some players make alts for extra bank space or to level a different profession but mostly it's to try out a different toolset and playstyle. It doesn't imply at all that the main isn't fun, it simply means that, normally, the player has taken their main as far as they can take them at that time, so rather than, say, grind 10,000 dinosaur bones, they figure "hey, I wonder what it'd be like to throw green fire at things?". Thus, alt.
The baffling part about it is that from about the end of TBC up until MoP, alts were not only an acceptable means of gameplay but were actively supported, whereas IN MoP, they're being indirectly penalized because of the lengthy reputation grinds enforced by the developers' overcompensation to Cata's primary criticism: that being that there wasn't much to do once you hit the level cap.
This exactly. GC, much like with a lot of issues people have raised, doesn't seem to understand what people are saying. I don't think the game should require alts to be fun, or make them and the game as a whole facerollingly easy. I do think it shouldn't be so ridiculous to level an alt and get them into content, especially as this expansion goes on, it's only going to get worse.
So I was thinking when I was driving earlier, could WoW go server-less, at this point in its life?
Lack of 'servers' seems to be becoming a selling point in MMO's, and I think moving forward the idea of segregating the playerbase based on entirely distinct servers doesn't solve much and actually causes a lot of problems, particularly when we're at the point of having the general technology to handle a 'central' playspace without the need to have independent servers.
In thinking about how WoW would go about this I came up with some basic needs it would have to meet to do so.
1) Untie characters from specific servers. There would still obviously be 'servers' people played on, but they wouldn't be distinct and with CRZ could manage to have you always in a populated space. You could log in to the game after choosing your character, and just play independent of servers. Players would still go into a server to handle their gameplay but it would just be whichever server was open next; play with whoever; and it'd be completely invisible to the player. You'd still effectively need two 'worlds' to distinguish PvP and PvE players, but that's fine.
2) Untie Guilds from specific servers. In this general sense, though you wouldn't be in, say, Feralas with the entirety of the playerbase of WoW, the game would prioritize putting people in a guild into the same 'server' so they could play together, or allow them to have a function that worked only with guilds to have people who are guilded to see each other no matter what 'server' they're playing on with the general populace. Again, it'd be invisible to the players, more or less; they'd always just be in the same 'world' as their guild mates (or even battle.net friends if you want to take it further).
3) Make chat channels game wide. This would lend to be able to recruit for guilds, to do party quests, raids, etc; once you're in a party or guild you will just automatically move to a 'server' that you will all see each other in.
4) Make AH's game-wide. Pretty much self explanatory. After you remove 'servers' the need to have separate AH's on each 'server' would be gone, you'd just have one central WoW AH (for each faction).
5) Tie names go battle.net id's like Diablo 3. Let anyone have their name and make names independent of who has what reserved. It would be potentially weird to be sitting in IF and have a dozen "Benedictions" hanging out; but most communication in the game would be done via your battletag instead of specific character. This might make some people feel like their character names are unimportant, but I'm sure folks would get used to it.
This isn't completely thought out or fleshed out: I'm just wondering if it's feasible and if it could potentially be the direction the game takes (CRZ seems to be a proto state of it, if it's not simply a testbed for Titan stuff) as its way to handle dealing with low pop servers.
As I was thinking about it, it feels like they're adding in features here and there that are working toward this idea (crz, battletags, account achievements/pets/mounts) of having a 'universal' WoW, instead of dozens of servers. They could still use their current servers to handle processing all of the information needed to make it 'serverless', and effectively you'd be just hiding the fact that people are actually on different servers (what any no-server thing does really anyway, I think). It would alter the nature of the 'community' to be more transient, but with shared chat channels, how peopel communicate in regards to guild recruitment etc would still be there; and in fact be more robust because atm if you meet someone in LFD who you like, who gets on good with your guild group, but is on a different server welp. This way, in that instance, hey, join our guild, no barriers, everyone wins!
I'm sure there's a lot of holes in my thinking, and that's cool. I just was thinking about it and I came to the personal conclusion that I think it'd work out well and be of overall benefit to WoW.
Why is every design decision in MoP designed to make alts take more and more time to play? lvling rep gearing all anti-alt.
In fact, many players made alts at the end of Cat because they were bored. Alts are cool, but shouldn't be mandatory to have fun.
That isn't actually why those decisions were made. They were made so that a player with one character doesn't get bored.
Italics is the question. Underlined is the most mind boggling thing I have heard in a long time. I can not for the life of me even find a reaction image for how bass ackwards that is and what it means for the game.
There's this 'tailor the response to in no way answer the question that was asked' aspect of PR that never fails to irritate me. Alts were never mandatory to have fun. And if they were, discouraging them doesn't address the issue at all.
I don't really think alts are being "penalized." Every expansion had lengthy rep grinds, and didn't have the "2x rep for alts" caveat. I think people don't remember what previous expansions were really like, or don't want to.
The thing that's disincentivized me from playing alts much, at least so far, is valor. It takes a lot longer to cap valor than it did in previous iterations, and item upgrades mean there's continuous pressure to keep doing it after you buy the 5-6 upgrades you want. Lots of times it'll be like, huh maybe I'd put another couple levels on an alt here, but instead I think I'll run a 5 man or an LFR on mains and cap out valor.
I don't dislike it necessarily, though I do need to get some work done on my mistweaver at some point
hold your head high soldier, it ain't over yet
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Hitting the valour cap now is a pain in the ass. It was all fine and dandy when I was grinding out my reps/dailies but now I'm exalted with everything and my gear is definitely good enough that I never need to set foot in LFR. Full clearing everything in raids, which doesn't happen often because we want to progress in heroics, doesn't cap it out. Especially when you sub out on a bunch of fights so we can trial new people. I don't really want to log in every day to do my daily heroic/scenario.
I don't really think alts are being "penalized." Every expansion had lengthy rep grinds, and didn't have the "2x rep for alts" caveat. I think people don't remember what previous expansions were really like, or don't want to.
The thing that's disincentivized me from playing alts much, at least so far, is valor. It takes a lot longer to cap valor than it did in previous iterations, and item upgrades mean there's continuous pressure to keep doing it after you buy the 5-6 upgrades you want. Lots of times it'll be like, huh maybe I'd put another couple levels on an alt here, but instead I think I'll run a 5 man or an LFR on mains and cap out valor.
I don't dislike it necessarily, though I do need to get some work done on my mistweaver at some point
It's the combo of reps and valor. I have to grind reps to be able to spend valor. I have to do that on every single character I want to be able to play at 90. Basically it's either stop when you get to 90, or grind.
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HalfmexI mock your value systemYou also appear foolish in the eyes of othersRegistered Userregular
I don't really think alts are being "penalized." Every expansion had lengthy rep grinds, and didn't have the "2x rep for alts" caveat. I think people don't remember what previous expansions were really like, or don't want to.
The thing that's disincentivized me from playing alts much, at least so far, is valor. It takes a lot longer to cap valor than it did in previous iterations, and item upgrades mean there's continuous pressure to keep doing it after you buy the 5-6 upgrades you want. Lots of times it'll be like, huh maybe I'd put another couple levels on an alt here, but instead I think I'll run a 5 man or an LFR on mains and cap out valor.
I don't dislike it necessarily, though I do need to get some work done on my mistweaver at some point
Every expansion (well, after TBC) also had the tabard rep grind model which made the reputations much less of a chore to obtain. Combine that with the much lower weekly valor cap and yeah, it definitely feels as though playing alts is being penalized/disincentivized/(insert synonym here). It's true that in vanilla alts were much more of a rarity, at least in any 'endgame' sense, and even through Burning Crusade that continued to be true. But by the time Wrath hit, much of the playerbase had time to cap out their main and gear them to an appropriate level, so the choice then became "find things to do" or start an alt.
The question now being raised, and it is an interesting one (and clearly one the devs hadn't taken into consideration pre-MoP), is how much of a role to alts need to play in the game today. That is, who do you decide to frustrate more: the main-focused player who only has time for that one character (thus gearing the game towards long, time-investment-heavy tasks to accomplish goals) or the alt-focused player who typically spends more time in the game (I'm just guessing here, no hard facts for this) checking off accomplishments for each of his/her characters (thus gearing the game more towards a larger list of things to do but making each individual item relatively fast to obtain)? They opted for the former because again the main criticism for Cata was its absolute dearth of content at level cap, thinking (understandably to a degree) "well, they said they wanted more to do, by god we'll GIVE 'em more to do!". And indeed they did. But now people six, seven, eight years invested into the game with an army of alts are left sidelining most of them because of the relatively daunting time investment necessary to make them anywhere near viable for any type of endgame content, even LFR. That's one of the things I love about my alts - the fact that I can say "well, this fight sucks for melee, I'll just swap in my hunter/warlock/etc." Much more difficult to do that in the current expansion (though the double rep token does ease at least the rep. portion to some degree).
GC had a brief exchange with one person on twitter who raised the question posed above - how much of a role should alts play in the endgame, or even in the game in general? With some sections of the game becoming more global (account bound items, achievements and mounts), and some more things potentially trending that way (gold, other currency, professions, possibly even reputations), GC rightly asked 'at what point do we design for the character and not the player'? Not a bad question, really. For those of you who've played FFXI you know kind of what he was getting at - you had one character and many 'jobs' (classes) that that character could master. There were no limitations on what one character could do (that I could recall anyway - it's been quite a while in fairness), no real need for an alt unless you simply wanted to be another race. Should WoW go that route? Are alts a viable path of 'endgame content' for those who don't raid normals/hardcores or PvP? Well, they are (rather, they were) so instead the question is "should they be?"
rep goes really quick if you have a main at exalted already. Kind of hilariously quick, especially for stuff like klaxxi/shieldwall that already went pretty fast. Accountwide stuff also means you spend less time getting an alt 'ready.'
The big one is valor, and it's the reason I kind of hope gear upgrades don't come back in 5.3 (or come back in a more limited way.) If nothing else, clearing raids/LFRs should give you more valor than it currently does.
hold your head high soldier, it ain't over yet
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
I finally got a monk alt to 90 some days ago, and now I'm trying to get access to LFR before wednesday's reset, so I can get geared up fast (monks are fun!)
Getting 460 was relatively easy, but damn is getting to 470 hard without buying epics, with only 2 drops from LFR MSV. At least I've got nice monk tanking experience while farming that JP.. :P
How do monk tanks compare to others in actual raiding anyway? I've heard they're on the weaker side of tanks, but not quite sure if that's true.
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Dr_KeenbeanDumb as a buttPlanet Express ShipRegistered Userregular
As an altoholic, here's my main issue with the current state of alts:
In Cata, you only "needed" 2 reps; Therazane for a shoulder enchant, and [whichever of 4] for your helm enchant. You could get a big chunk of each of those reps, if not all just, by questing in their respective zones. Then you grab a tabard and finish off what you need. Or hey, there's also dailies. Now it's just dailies. Endless dailies. With enough collection quests that penalize you for being in a group.
The 2x rep token is awesome and all, but it's not any different than it was in Cata. Actually, no.... Now that I think about it, it IS worse. You're revered with Hyjal by the end of Hyjal the same way you're revered with Klaxxi on an alt at the end of Dread Wastes. The difference being I was revered with Hyjal on my main the first time I did it, yet I was getting fuckall for Klaxxi rep the first time around. They basically halved rep then doubled it to give us a placebo.
I finally got a monk alt to 90 some days ago, and now I'm trying to get access to LFR before wednesday's reset, so I can get geared up fast (monks are fun!)
Getting 460 was relatively easy, but damn is getting to 470 hard without buying epics, with only 2 drops from LFR MSV. At least I've got nice monk tanking experience while farming that JP.. :P
How do monk tanks compare to others in actual raiding anyway? I've heard they're on the weaker side of tanks, but not quite sure if that's true.
Brewmasters start out fairly weak, but scale incredibly well with stats and gear. Back when my group was starting MSV, I was tanking in ~463 gear. I felt super squishy and was taking lots of damage. Flashforward to now, my avg equipped ilvl is 500. I take hardly any damage at all.
And, that aside, Brewmasters bring ridiculous raid utility in the form of Black Ox Statue. As you do damage, this thing is chucking out 100-200k+ Guards on raidmembers, constantly. It adds up to be a lot of raid healing. On Heroic Will tonight, I did 15 million raid healing from Ox Statue alone. 15 million! I actually just barely beat out our Priest in total healing done.
No other tank has the kind of capabilities Brewmasters have. They're very strong, capable tanks. But they're not without their weaknesses, as well. We don't handle sustained magic damage too well. We only really have one big cooldown (Fort Brew), so cycling cooldowns becomes a bit iffy. We have the lowest armor out of all the tanks. Stuns affect us more than any other tank, since we can't stagger damage during stuns.
But our strengths are great. We do the most damage out of any tank in the game (especially aoe), and tank damage is super important nowadays. We have excellent snap aggro. We handle burst magic damage excellently, with two 90% damage reduction cooldowns, and glyphed Guard. We are extremely mobile, perhaps the most mobile tank. Roll is your friend, learn to love it. We can also straight up remove half (or more) of the damage from a hit, via Purifying Brew.
Brewmasters are a lot of fun. Honestly the most fun I've ever had tanking. There's quite a lot to pay attention to, though. They're very solid tanks though.
As an altoholic, here's my main issue with the current state of alts:
In Cata, you only "needed" 2 reps; Therazane for a shoulder enchant, and [whichever of 4] for your helm enchant. You could get a big chunk of each of those reps, if not all just, by questing in their respective zones. Then you grab a tabard and finish off what you need. Or hey, there's also dailies. Now it's just dailies. Endless dailies. With enough collection quests that penalize you for being in a group.
The 2x rep token is awesome and all, but it's not any different than it was in Cata. Actually, no.... Now that I think about it, it IS worse. You're revered with Hyjal by the end of Hyjal the same way you're revered with Klaxxi on an alt at the end of Dread Wastes. The difference being I was revered with Hyjal on my main the first time I did it, yet I was getting fuckall for Klaxxi rep the first time around. They basically halved rep then doubled it to give us a placebo.
Eh...not so much, on your last point. Sure, Hyjal you got a shitton of rep for, and got to revered by doing the zone...but other reps? Earthen Ring had fuck all rep, even if you did all of Cataclysm zones. Most of the Cataclysm reps barely got you to honored if you did everything without dailies, including ramhaken and the TH factions. That's really no different than reps without tokens these days.
Golden Lotus, IMO, is the abberation in MoP in how shit the rep is. Klaxxi, even without the token, ends you up close to honored, as does Shado-pan. Having the tokens with these gets you a good bit further into the rep than you otherwise would have, even compared to Cata reps (and WotLK too really), and then has you getting double the rep allowing you to get exalted with them much faster than reps in past xpacks if you look at dailies alone.
Again, GL is complete ass, even with the token, but it's the only real rep in MoP that is that bad; it just is all the worse that two major reps are hidden behind it making them all feel that much worse.
Really a lot of the problems (I have anyway) with rep in MoP surround Golden Lotus specifically and the clusterfuck it is and how that prohibits you from getting other reps, and thus gear.
Klaxxi could have taken 3 times as long for all I cared, I would still do them. Those buffs made it fun, and the promise of even more of them at higher rep made me push for them.
GL is just 3 bloody slogs, more often than not asking you to do literally the same exact task every time. I'd rather they coalesce those damn mogu kills into one giant "Kill 30 mogu" that just spans the entire daily circuit over asking me to kill 10 in every hub.
"The sausage of Green Earth explodes with flavor like the cannon of culinary delight."
I finally got a monk alt to 90 some days ago, and now I'm trying to get access to LFR before wednesday's reset, so I can get geared up fast (monks are fun!)
Getting 460 was relatively easy, but damn is getting to 470 hard without buying epics, with only 2 drops from LFR MSV. At least I've got nice monk tanking experience while farming that JP.. :P
How do monk tanks compare to others in actual raiding anyway? I've heard they're on the weaker side of tanks, but not quite sure if that's true.
Brewmasters start out fairly weak, but scale incredibly well with stats and gear. Back when my group was starting MSV, I was tanking in ~463 gear. I felt super squishy and was taking lots of damage. Flashforward to now, my avg equipped ilvl is 500. I take hardly any damage at all.
And, that aside, Brewmasters bring ridiculous raid utility in the form of Black Ox Statue. As you do damage, this thing is chucking out 100-200k+ Guards on raidmembers, constantly. It adds up to be a lot of raid healing. On Heroic Will tonight, I did 15 million raid healing from Ox Statue alone. 15 million! I actually just barely beat out our Priest in total healing done.
No other tank has the kind of capabilities Brewmasters have. They're very strong, capable tanks. But they're not without their weaknesses, as well. We don't handle sustained magic damage too well. We only really have one big cooldown (Fort Brew), so cycling cooldowns becomes a bit iffy. We have the lowest armor out of all the tanks. Stuns affect us more than any other tank, since we can't stagger damage during stuns.
But our strengths are great. We do the most damage out of any tank in the game (especially aoe), and tank damage is super important nowadays. We have excellent snap aggro. We handle burst magic damage excellently, with two 90% damage reduction cooldowns, and glyphed Guard. We are extremely mobile, perhaps the most mobile tank. Roll is your friend, learn to love it. We can also straight up remove half (or more) of the damage from a hit, via Purifying Brew.
Brewmasters are a lot of fun. Honestly the most fun I've ever had tanking. There's quite a lot to pay attention to, though. They're very solid tanks though.
That's good to hear then. I'm probably not going to tank anything relevant on monk anytime soon, but maybe at some point, if I get the gear.
As I main DK and end up tanking rather often I've mostly been comparing monks to that. It feels like monks need much more healing, and have less options for when something goes wrong. DKs can usually survive for a while without heals with their spare cooldowns (when healers forget, die or something), while monks seem much more dependant on getting heals. But yeah, I've not played well geared monk tank anyway.
Black Ox Statue does seem silly good.. really the only DK equivalent is AMZ, which is somewhat hit or miss. I've been wondering though, how does the ap scaling work? Afaik the damage required to create a shield grows with ap, so are you essentially always getting the same amount of shields with the same rotation, regardless of Vengeance?
Posts
but it seems like no one is ever doing the boss.
I'm not even sure it needs that big of a group.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
There's no berserk or anything, so you can go with as few or as many as you'd like. Mechanics-wise there's not much too it. If there's anyone standing out at range, he'll charge them, do an aoe knockback, and charge back to the tank. So have everyone just stack up. Occasionally he'll put a dot on everyone and you'll get an Extra Action Button to remove the dot. Only hit it if you're at high health, cause you take a chunk of damage when you do. Don't forget to hit the button, the dot keeps ramping up and will not go away until you do. There's also random aoe damage.
It's pretty simple, and actually kinda monotonous. So yeah if you can get a large group, do it. My group of six which was 1 tank, 1 heal, and 4 dps in 496+ raidgear, took quite a while. Just toss warm bodies at him til he goes splat.
Battle.net Tag: Dibby#1582
Spamming someone with broken engrish about untowards ideas about your mother is the lowest forms of trolling.
Let me tell you about some great moments I had in trolling:
First; I once on my Death Knight, went to Elywnn forest and /followed around a new player. I knew he were new, because he had no heirlooms on and wasn't in a guild. I didn't interfere with his quests, nor make his life uncomfortable in anyway. I just followed him. I was pretending to be a non-combat pet. I also had my ghoul (on passive) and a non-combat pet of my own out. So this new player had me following him for about an hour. Afterwards, I finally talked to him and said hello, which suprised him. He thought I was part of a quest and was trying to figure me out! I explained what I did and gave him some advice on the game, he thanked me and I gave him a couple hundred gold, bid him fairwell, mounted up and flew off.
Another time of epic trolling: My guild leader and I were pretty good friends. I was an engineer with a motorcycle. He would sometimes just sit in my spare seat and go afk for a while. The first time, I drove from Ironforge to the waterfall next to Dun Moroh (forgot the name). I drove right off of it and engaged my parachute. He died and I landed safely on the ground. About 15 minutes later, he starts yelling at me in guild chat about how he was dead at the bottom of a waterfall. He made me promise to never drop him off a cliff again and I promised I wouldn't. The next day, he's riding around AFK in my bike again, so I put on Path of Frost and drove him as deep into the ocean as possible till I just barely hit the fatigue limit. Then I dismounted him in the middle of the ocean and rode back right before I was about to die! He yelled about me killing him again, but I reminded that I didn't promise to not kill him, I just promised to not drop him off a cliff again. I later did the same thing to his girlfriend, but she had a better sense of humor :P
Lastly, I some random level 2 was just begging in trade chat about two gold to buy green equipment. I wasn't really at my keyboard, I was just kind of online while I was helping my wife around the house. I noticed that this dude was still begging for gold and he had been whispering me the whole time while I was AFK. I really don't like to ignore people, but I gave him some friendly advice about how to grind and if he mined and skinned leather, he'd get rich pretty fast. I'm a nice guy and like to help people who ask, but I do get annoyed when people disregard after I take the time to give them assistance. He took my willingness to engage him as a sign of weakness and kept begging me. So I did what I usually do to annoying gold beggers. I opened trade with him, put in 20,000 gold in the trade box, then went AFK for about an hour or so, doing house stuff, playing with my daughter, ect. I came back and my whisper tab is full of variations on, "CLICK TRADE YOU ASSHOLE!" I sat down, told him that if had grinded for the last hour instead of sitting and waiting on a total stranger to take pity on him, he'd not only have two gold, but a higher level and probably some green level equipment. He told me to fuck off, said he reported me (lawl), and then ignored me.
Battlenet ID: MildC#11186 - If I'm in the game, send me an invite at anytime and I'll play.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Have I mentioned how awesome Dave Kosak is? Cause he's great. Him and Ghostcrawler have been having this hilarious back and forth, which all started with this:
It's like the April Fool's Patch Notes, but better! Have not laughed this hard in a while.
Battle.net Tag: Dibby#1582
Hoo boy, some of those people on the RP servers are creepy enough already, let's not give them any more ideas.
Are you guys talking about the guy you need to kill in the 5.1 area? Some guildies and I killed that dude the other night for one of our guys.
There were 4 of us: a shaman, a hunter, and 2 DKs. It took like 20 minutes. And, yes, he hits like a fucking truck.
Biggest tip? You can graveyard zerg.
3DS: 1650-8480-6786
Switch: SW-0653-8208-4705
Haha you think they don't already have this idea
*numbers completely made p, but i think people get what I want to say
Italics is the question. Underlined is the most mind boggling thing I have heard in a long time. I can not for the life of me even find a reaction image for how bass ackwards that is and what it means for the game.
Maybe tell them he gives a lot of Black Prince rep?
3DS: 1650-8480-6786
Switch: SW-0653-8208-4705
It's 100% correct. An alt should NOT be required for a game to be fun. If an alt is required for a game to be fun, it implies that a single character is NOT fun.
I played since early Vanilla. And it wasn't until around late Wrath early Cata that I finally actually made any decent headway into alts. I mean I have the page full of various combinations of new expansion races and classes and whatever struck my fancy. But I could never get any of them past lv20. I'd just lose interest and go back to my max warrior.
Are you saying I'm wrong for not really being interested in alts?
Alts aren't required for the game to be fun, nor is it wrong for people not to want them. It is wrong that the game is punishingly anti-alt right now though. If it's so difficult for alts, that shows a problem with the basics of the game.
The baffling part about it is that from about the end of TBC up until MoP, alts were not only an acceptable means of gameplay but were actively supported, whereas IN MoP, they're being indirectly penalized because of the lengthy reputation grinds enforced by the developers' overcompensation to Cata's primary criticism: that being that there wasn't much to do once you hit the level cap.
This exactly. GC, much like with a lot of issues people have raised, doesn't seem to understand what people are saying. I don't think the game should require alts to be fun, or make them and the game as a whole facerollingly easy. I do think it shouldn't be so ridiculous to level an alt and get them into content, especially as this expansion goes on, it's only going to get worse.
So I was thinking when I was driving earlier, could WoW go server-less, at this point in its life?
Lack of 'servers' seems to be becoming a selling point in MMO's, and I think moving forward the idea of segregating the playerbase based on entirely distinct servers doesn't solve much and actually causes a lot of problems, particularly when we're at the point of having the general technology to handle a 'central' playspace without the need to have independent servers.
In thinking about how WoW would go about this I came up with some basic needs it would have to meet to do so.
1) Untie characters from specific servers. There would still obviously be 'servers' people played on, but they wouldn't be distinct and with CRZ could manage to have you always in a populated space. You could log in to the game after choosing your character, and just play independent of servers. Players would still go into a server to handle their gameplay but it would just be whichever server was open next; play with whoever; and it'd be completely invisible to the player. You'd still effectively need two 'worlds' to distinguish PvP and PvE players, but that's fine.
2) Untie Guilds from specific servers. In this general sense, though you wouldn't be in, say, Feralas with the entirety of the playerbase of WoW, the game would prioritize putting people in a guild into the same 'server' so they could play together, or allow them to have a function that worked only with guilds to have people who are guilded to see each other no matter what 'server' they're playing on with the general populace. Again, it'd be invisible to the players, more or less; they'd always just be in the same 'world' as their guild mates (or even battle.net friends if you want to take it further).
3) Make chat channels game wide. This would lend to be able to recruit for guilds, to do party quests, raids, etc; once you're in a party or guild you will just automatically move to a 'server' that you will all see each other in.
4) Make AH's game-wide. Pretty much self explanatory. After you remove 'servers' the need to have separate AH's on each 'server' would be gone, you'd just have one central WoW AH (for each faction).
5) Tie names go battle.net id's like Diablo 3. Let anyone have their name and make names independent of who has what reserved. It would be potentially weird to be sitting in IF and have a dozen "Benedictions" hanging out; but most communication in the game would be done via your battletag instead of specific character. This might make some people feel like their character names are unimportant, but I'm sure folks would get used to it.
This isn't completely thought out or fleshed out: I'm just wondering if it's feasible and if it could potentially be the direction the game takes (CRZ seems to be a proto state of it, if it's not simply a testbed for Titan stuff) as its way to handle dealing with low pop servers.
As I was thinking about it, it feels like they're adding in features here and there that are working toward this idea (crz, battletags, account achievements/pets/mounts) of having a 'universal' WoW, instead of dozens of servers. They could still use their current servers to handle processing all of the information needed to make it 'serverless', and effectively you'd be just hiding the fact that people are actually on different servers (what any no-server thing does really anyway, I think). It would alter the nature of the 'community' to be more transient, but with shared chat channels, how peopel communicate in regards to guild recruitment etc would still be there; and in fact be more robust because atm if you meet someone in LFD who you like, who gets on good with your guild group, but is on a different server welp. This way, in that instance, hey, join our guild, no barriers, everyone wins!
I'm sure there's a lot of holes in my thinking, and that's cool. I just was thinking about it and I came to the personal conclusion that I think it'd work out well and be of overall benefit to WoW.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
There's this 'tailor the response to in no way answer the question that was asked' aspect of PR that never fails to irritate me. Alts were never mandatory to have fun. And if they were, discouraging them doesn't address the issue at all.
The thing that's disincentivized me from playing alts much, at least so far, is valor. It takes a lot longer to cap valor than it did in previous iterations, and item upgrades mean there's continuous pressure to keep doing it after you buy the 5-6 upgrades you want. Lots of times it'll be like, huh maybe I'd put another couple levels on an alt here, but instead I think I'll run a 5 man or an LFR on mains and cap out valor.
I don't dislike it necessarily, though I do need to get some work done on my mistweaver at some point
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
It's the combo of reps and valor. I have to grind reps to be able to spend valor. I have to do that on every single character I want to be able to play at 90. Basically it's either stop when you get to 90, or grind.
Every expansion (well, after TBC) also had the tabard rep grind model which made the reputations much less of a chore to obtain. Combine that with the much lower weekly valor cap and yeah, it definitely feels as though playing alts is being penalized/disincentivized/(insert synonym here). It's true that in vanilla alts were much more of a rarity, at least in any 'endgame' sense, and even through Burning Crusade that continued to be true. But by the time Wrath hit, much of the playerbase had time to cap out their main and gear them to an appropriate level, so the choice then became "find things to do" or start an alt.
The question now being raised, and it is an interesting one (and clearly one the devs hadn't taken into consideration pre-MoP), is how much of a role to alts need to play in the game today. That is, who do you decide to frustrate more: the main-focused player who only has time for that one character (thus gearing the game towards long, time-investment-heavy tasks to accomplish goals) or the alt-focused player who typically spends more time in the game (I'm just guessing here, no hard facts for this) checking off accomplishments for each of his/her characters (thus gearing the game more towards a larger list of things to do but making each individual item relatively fast to obtain)? They opted for the former because again the main criticism for Cata was its absolute dearth of content at level cap, thinking (understandably to a degree) "well, they said they wanted more to do, by god we'll GIVE 'em more to do!". And indeed they did. But now people six, seven, eight years invested into the game with an army of alts are left sidelining most of them because of the relatively daunting time investment necessary to make them anywhere near viable for any type of endgame content, even LFR. That's one of the things I love about my alts - the fact that I can say "well, this fight sucks for melee, I'll just swap in my hunter/warlock/etc." Much more difficult to do that in the current expansion (though the double rep token does ease at least the rep. portion to some degree).
GC had a brief exchange with one person on twitter who raised the question posed above - how much of a role should alts play in the endgame, or even in the game in general? With some sections of the game becoming more global (account bound items, achievements and mounts), and some more things potentially trending that way (gold, other currency, professions, possibly even reputations), GC rightly asked 'at what point do we design for the character and not the player'? Not a bad question, really. For those of you who've played FFXI you know kind of what he was getting at - you had one character and many 'jobs' (classes) that that character could master. There were no limitations on what one character could do (that I could recall anyway - it's been quite a while in fairness), no real need for an alt unless you simply wanted to be another race. Should WoW go that route? Are alts a viable path of 'endgame content' for those who don't raid normals/hardcores or PvP? Well, they are (rather, they were) so instead the question is "should they be?"
The big one is valor, and it's the reason I kind of hope gear upgrades don't come back in 5.3 (or come back in a more limited way.) If nothing else, clearing raids/LFRs should give you more valor than it currently does.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Getting 460 was relatively easy, but damn is getting to 470 hard without buying epics, with only 2 drops from LFR MSV. At least I've got nice monk tanking experience while farming that JP.. :P
How do monk tanks compare to others in actual raiding anyway? I've heard they're on the weaker side of tanks, but not quite sure if that's true.
3DS: 1650-8480-6786
Switch: SW-0653-8208-4705
In Cata, you only "needed" 2 reps; Therazane for a shoulder enchant, and [whichever of 4] for your helm enchant. You could get a big chunk of each of those reps, if not all just, by questing in their respective zones. Then you grab a tabard and finish off what you need. Or hey, there's also dailies. Now it's just dailies. Endless dailies. With enough collection quests that penalize you for being in a group.
The 2x rep token is awesome and all, but it's not any different than it was in Cata. Actually, no.... Now that I think about it, it IS worse. You're revered with Hyjal by the end of Hyjal the same way you're revered with Klaxxi on an alt at the end of Dread Wastes. The difference being I was revered with Hyjal on my main the first time I did it, yet I was getting fuckall for Klaxxi rep the first time around. They basically halved rep then doubled it to give us a placebo.
Brewmasters start out fairly weak, but scale incredibly well with stats and gear. Back when my group was starting MSV, I was tanking in ~463 gear. I felt super squishy and was taking lots of damage. Flashforward to now, my avg equipped ilvl is 500. I take hardly any damage at all.
And, that aside, Brewmasters bring ridiculous raid utility in the form of Black Ox Statue. As you do damage, this thing is chucking out 100-200k+ Guards on raidmembers, constantly. It adds up to be a lot of raid healing. On Heroic Will tonight, I did 15 million raid healing from Ox Statue alone. 15 million! I actually just barely beat out our Priest in total healing done.
No other tank has the kind of capabilities Brewmasters have. They're very strong, capable tanks. But they're not without their weaknesses, as well. We don't handle sustained magic damage too well. We only really have one big cooldown (Fort Brew), so cycling cooldowns becomes a bit iffy. We have the lowest armor out of all the tanks. Stuns affect us more than any other tank, since we can't stagger damage during stuns.
But our strengths are great. We do the most damage out of any tank in the game (especially aoe), and tank damage is super important nowadays. We have excellent snap aggro. We handle burst magic damage excellently, with two 90% damage reduction cooldowns, and glyphed Guard. We are extremely mobile, perhaps the most mobile tank. Roll is your friend, learn to love it. We can also straight up remove half (or more) of the damage from a hit, via Purifying Brew.
Brewmasters are a lot of fun. Honestly the most fun I've ever had tanking. There's quite a lot to pay attention to, though. They're very solid tanks though.
Battle.net Tag: Dibby#1582
Eh...not so much, on your last point. Sure, Hyjal you got a shitton of rep for, and got to revered by doing the zone...but other reps? Earthen Ring had fuck all rep, even if you did all of Cataclysm zones. Most of the Cataclysm reps barely got you to honored if you did everything without dailies, including ramhaken and the TH factions. That's really no different than reps without tokens these days.
Golden Lotus, IMO, is the abberation in MoP in how shit the rep is. Klaxxi, even without the token, ends you up close to honored, as does Shado-pan. Having the tokens with these gets you a good bit further into the rep than you otherwise would have, even compared to Cata reps (and WotLK too really), and then has you getting double the rep allowing you to get exalted with them much faster than reps in past xpacks if you look at dailies alone.
Again, GL is complete ass, even with the token, but it's the only real rep in MoP that is that bad; it just is all the worse that two major reps are hidden behind it making them all feel that much worse.
Really a lot of the problems (I have anyway) with rep in MoP surround Golden Lotus specifically and the clusterfuck it is and how that prohibits you from getting other reps, and thus gear.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
GL is just 3 bloody slogs, more often than not asking you to do literally the same exact task every time. I'd rather they coalesce those damn mogu kills into one giant "Kill 30 mogu" that just spans the entire daily circuit over asking me to kill 10 in every hub.
That's good to hear then. I'm probably not going to tank anything relevant on monk anytime soon, but maybe at some point, if I get the gear.
As I main DK and end up tanking rather often I've mostly been comparing monks to that. It feels like monks need much more healing, and have less options for when something goes wrong. DKs can usually survive for a while without heals with their spare cooldowns (when healers forget, die or something), while monks seem much more dependant on getting heals. But yeah, I've not played well geared monk tank anyway.
Black Ox Statue does seem silly good.. really the only DK equivalent is AMZ, which is somewhat hit or miss. I've been wondering though, how does the ap scaling work? Afaik the damage required to create a shield grows with ap, so are you essentially always getting the same amount of shields with the same rotation, regardless of Vengeance?