[WOW] Look at me, I'm flying ! Woooo ! (after the servers come up)

Dhalphir

look i don't know what raids you've been doing but i am the best ever and never get hit by any of those things at all

Lorahalo

May as well not get hit if you're a brewmaster.

Aegis

Lorahalo wrote: »

May as well not get hit if you're a brewmaster.

And with the way that T18 currently is for Brewmasters, you only technically have a health bar.

LD50

Dhalphir wrote: »

look i don't know what raids you've been doing but i am the best ever and never get hit by any of those things at all

Must be a mage then.

Madican

crimsoncoyote wrote: »

Delmain wrote: »

crimsoncoyote wrote: »

Delmain wrote: »

Is there still no PA guild? I came back for a bit during Mists and got invited to a random person in here's guild, but he quit playing and it got real awkward for me, so I did to.

Anyone looking a dude? I have no idea what's happened in WoW since Cataclysm (and that includes the fact that I have a kitted out Warlock from SoO, I didn't understand any of it then), but I'm real bored

I believe shambler milk is still about?

I've been playing with Mugsley and Aegis most recently.

Where at? I'll have a 90 boost to use

Kul'Tiras

Shambler Milk is Horde on Cho'gall.

Delmain

I think he meant him. Which makes sense because after he said it I remembered seeing him on that server in B.Netq

crimsoncoyote

Yeah, I wasn't sure. Oh well! Sorry for the confusion

Eat it You Nasty Pig.

man, mythic furnace sucks

Viskod

It does!

We got lucky and got to phase 3 like it was no big deal but then we couldn't do it again.

It was an early fluke just to taunt us.

Lorahalo

Eat it You Nasty Pig. wrote: »

man, mythic furnace sucks

Especially when your only priest is your best healer, and he gets stuck on MC duty!

Eat it You Nasty Pig.

we wasted far too many attempts on people killing engineers too quickly; once we got that fixed we could get into P2 reliably but it always just kinda steadily fell apart

best we did I think was breaking the shield on the third elementalist, but I have no idea where the mana is gonna come from to heal P3. We must be taking too much damage from something, but I kinda struggled to identify what

Viskod

Well if it's not the constant furnace blasts then it's volatile fire or the slags casting at people which does aoe damage around their targets.

Dhalphir

it's probably people not spreading properly for volatile fire and slag eles. that damage is easily healable and isn't going to kill anyone but it drains healer mana like whoaaa

Madican

Ahahaha. Apparently the new raid has tiers of ilevels depending on the boss dropping the loot. Three different tiers, with a 5 ilevel different between them and Archimonde dropping the highest. What makes this so funny? Archimonde only drops three types of weapons. So only those three are the highest ilevel and anyone who doesn't use them can get fucked according to Blizzard.

Javen

Actual tier pieces are also low on the ilevel progression, also making things worse

Lorahalo

Because we all love picking between tier bonuses and better stats. I swear they don't think anything through, it's such a terrible idea.

Aegis

Crafted gear is amusingly higher ilvl than tier by 5.

Which I don't mind, since there's no boomkin cloaks or boots with crit/mastery itemization, so crafted 715s it is!

Viskod

Yeah I have no idea why staggering iLevels within each difficulty was considered. Just makes working out what gear you'd ideally need more of a frustration, because this piece from the first couple fights has better itemization, but this piece from the end of the raid has so much more Intellect. Ugh.

Aegis

The weapons are the worst part, since every 4 bosses means everyone in your raid that needs that Sword/Caster Staff/whatever is now rolling for the same new gear, as 5 ilvls at this point is 100 more spellpower and 5% more primary stats.

Secondary stats are effectively irrelevant, when the primary bonuses for upgrades are so high, outside of really badly itemized gear.

Viskod

So the Arcane 2Piece set bonus, is kind of a DPS loss as it makes your conserve phase mana negative at the moment.

You have a 40% chance of Arcane Blast being an instant cast. Which means you don't get the mana regen you would during your casts as you build to 4 charges.

Which means depending on your "luck" with set bonus procs, you won't be able to reach 4 Charges.

Aegis

Speaking of the item level increase, here's the official blog post:

Item Level Ramp
As this expansion has progressed, it’s become increasingly apparent that there is a mismatch between challenge and reward for guilds that delve deep into large Raid zones. When the Item Level for rewards across a given difficulty of a zone is flat, a caster staff from Heroic Imperator Mar’gok is largely equal in power to one from Heroic Tectus, despite Mar’gok being the far more challenging boss. We often see and hear about guilds killing a late-zone boss like Blast Furnace for the first time, only to disenchant most of the drops because everyone already has loot from earlier bosses in those slots. On top of that, many guilds move on to higher difficulties before they fully complete a difficulty, because Heroic Darmac loot is stronger than Normal Blackhand loot—and you can get it for much less effort.

To address this, we are structuring Hellfire Citadel so that the Item Level of the loot awarded by bosses increases as players proceed deeper into the zone, culminating in Archimonde—providing both the ultimate challenge and the ultimate reward.

... it feels good to get higher-level items as you progress through a zone.

We’re doing this for a few reasons. First, it feels good to get higher-level items as you progress through a zone. One of the more prominent pieces of feedback we got about Blackrock Foundry was that it felt unrewarding for challenging bosses like Iron Maidens to drop loot that was just as good as—or possibly worse than—Gruul’s.

This also breaks up where your best items are in a good way. The power of the items that you can get in a particular slot will differ based on how far through the zone you are. The best boots for you will likely be different if you are on Normal Gorefiend than they would be if you’re on Heroic Mannoroth, which would be different than if you’re on Mythic Iron Reaver, and so on.

Opty

The problem is that they need to bloat the item drops to accomplish what they want to do but so far they're refusing to. Each ilvl "tier" needs to drop the equivalent of a full raid's worth of gear for that to make sense. You need to be able to fully gear yourself within a "tier" so reaching the next tier is a reward rather than the way it is now where not being able to reach the next tier is a punishment since it has the gear you need. This feels more like a way for them to artificially lengthen the raid and their reasoning is just BS they threw together to justify it.

Javen

It's actually not a unique thing for final bosses to drop higher ilevel stuff, Arthas and Deathwing both did this, and they were weapons, too. But they dropped a weapon for each class.

Viskod

The final boss having their specific gear be a higher ilevel is fine and like you said it's been done before but a staggered 15 point difference all throughout the instance?

Tier set pieces included? It's certainly a thing.

Delmain

Hmm

This sucks.

I didn't realize you couldn't level past 90 on the WoD trial. I assumed it would let me level and then just not let me play that character again unless I bought it.

I suppose either one makes sense. But I would have preferred a notification.

Opty

What I'm arguing is that every piece of loot that's dropped in a higher ilvl section of the raid needs to have a corresponding piece of gear in the lower ilvl section of the raid that fills the same slot. Deathwing did this in that every piece of loot he had filled a slot that was also filled by another piece of loot somewhere else in the raid. This is not currently the case with HC, mainly because they've put so many damn tiers in.

Dhalphir

Delmain wrote: »

Hmm

This sucks.

I didn't realize you couldn't level past 90 on the WoD trial. I assumed it would let me level and then just not let me play that character again unless I bought it.

I suppose either one makes sense. But I would have preferred a notification.

it says it somewhere - I think when they advertise the trial it's in the features list

all expac trials have been like that. you can level to 99% of the way towards (previous max level + 1) but not actually ding.

Klineshrike

Yeah the way they describe it makes it sound like there is equal opportunity pieces on each tier of ilvl. But.... thats not the case.

I think every raid in WOTLK and CATA did it with the final boss. They almost always dropped weapons but they dropped ALL the weapons. How hard would that be to do again? Its just downright silly if this is not some unfinished loot tables thing.

It sounds to me actually like you have two different teams going here. One makes decisions on raid balance and has access to ilvl of the gear dropping... and a separate team handles the loot tables. As is in pretty much EVERY MMO WORKPLACE EVER teams have the worst communication in existance.

Delmain

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that if they want to do this 5ilvl "tiers" then each tier needs to be a piece for every spec in a subset of slots. Like, everyone can get a set of boots and shoulders off the first tier of bosses.

It's the only thing that makes mathematical sense.

LD50

It also magnifies the whole 'should I roll on this sub-optimal piece' thing because you might NEED that ilevel boost to get over the current tier.

Aegis

Heroic Blackhand is finally fucking dead.

It wasn't really clean, but he's dead.

And one of our ret pallies hit the lottery and got the Heroic Warforged Socketted The Black Hand to drop.

crimsoncoyote

Feels good man. Another kill on the last pull of the night too!

Abhainn

Based on what they said it sounds they're trying to do what they've done in the past but with the item system they have now they find themselves a gigantic hole so their answer is to make a cluster fuck out of it (a piece of gear at the end of the instance is 16% stronger than gear at the beginning for any given difficulty).

In the past the later bosses could drop better itemized loot without an ilvl difference. It could have stuff like 2-3 sockets and the best stat combination for a spec. Now stuff like sockets are random by design to keep people coming back and there most classes seem to have one secondary which is very good but the rest are around the same (not sure if this is true of all specs, but it's true for the ones I've messed around with). The shared loot also hinders this. In the past they would make sure tank armor had the best or atleast better combinations for the plate tanks in later tiers, the druid leather would have mastery or haste and spirit on and so on. If specs needed a threshold of one stat there was usually enough of it on later tier gear that capping wasn't a problem but other stats where available since they were now worth more (relatively speaking). They can't do this now because every spec sharing an armor type potentially wants different stats so they drop one of every kind. If the item you want drops in an earlier part of the tier it's now it's potentially 5.1% or 10.46% worse than later items and you have to way that against the stat weights of the items that drop later. Chances are people take the straight ilvl upgrade.

They don't even customize tier now since it's all the same and you end up with a bunch of middling secondary stats with one good off piece. Really with stats being so close together and the shared itemization tables the only thing they can do to make better gear is go back to the old sockets design and plunk a few on gear or up the ilvl of gear. They're choosing to blindly increase the item level wing by wing to fix this "progression within a tier" problem.

Since they have feedback that says the later bosses aren't rewarding a better system might be to have later bosses drop upgrade tokens similar to the crystallized firestones. Make them drop a few of them plus loot. Then people can upgrade whatever the hell they want including tier. Save the big ilvl weapon upgrades for archi and make sure he has enough. Hell let people use the tokens on them too.

Eat it You Nasty Pig.

it's something that doesn't seem like that big a problem to me

I mean okay, there's incentive to defer a drop because there might be a better drop later, but so what? That's been the case forever. It might lead to loot being deprecated as the tier goes on, but that's also been the case forever.

there's no reason there needs to be a full raid's worth of gear at each ilvl plateau. Loot over the course of progressing through the raid will work exactly the way it does now, except that some pieces will have marginally higher ilvls.

Wrizzik

It's just them testing out new loot/gearing ideas and seeing what happens. Like they've done forever.

Quite frankly, I'm okay with some of this because it means I won't have to kill Archi for my BiS weaps. I'll be using them to kill him.

Slayer of Dreams

Eat it You Nasty Pig. wrote: »

it's something that doesn't seem like that big a problem to me

I mean okay, there's incentive to defer a drop because there might be a better drop later, but so what? That's been the case forever. It might lead to loot being deprecated as the tier goes on, but that's also been the case forever.

there's no reason there needs to be a full raid's worth of gear at each ilvl plateau. Loot over the course of progressing through the raid will work exactly the way it does now, except that some pieces will have marginally higher ilvls.

For weapons, 5-15 ilvls is all it takes for one to go from "god tier" to "dog shit". Unless they stop making weapon damage and dps values a part of what ilvl something is, the higher DPS weapon will always win out as being better (assuming it has the same primary of course). This means those specs with weapons on the final bosses will have a higher possible DPS than anyone else.

Corp.Shephard

The implementation will be flawed but the way it works now is probably much worse. I look forward to the item level changes.

We're progressing on Heroic Blackhand and I've not needed an upgrade out of this instance for probably over a month.

Slayer of Dreams wrote: »

Eat it You Nasty Pig. wrote: »

it's something that doesn't seem like that big a problem to me

I mean okay, there's incentive to defer a drop because there might be a better drop later, but so what? That's been the case forever. It might lead to loot being deprecated as the tier goes on, but that's also been the case forever.

there's no reason there needs to be a full raid's worth of gear at each ilvl plateau. Loot over the course of progressing through the raid will work exactly the way it does now, except that some pieces will have marginally higher ilvls.

For weapons, 5-15 ilvls is all it takes for one to go from "god tier" to "dog shit". Unless they stop making weapon damage and dps values a part of what ilvl something is, the higher DPS weapon will always win out as being better (assuming it has the same primary of course). This means those specs with weapons on the final bosses will have a higher possible DPS than anyone else.

This is interesting because I see it the other way.

Does highest possible damage really matter that much though? If you've killed Archimonde then you've no where left to go but up to the next level of difficulty. When you step up to that next difficulty suddenly all of the other weapons that drop earlier in the raid outclass your Archimonde weapons. Raid loot under this system is a ladder. Raid wings and raid difficulties combine to create a smooth progression where people and classes get some "time to shine" when their drops are strongest. Yet everyone is getting armor and trinket upgrades. That seems fun.

If you killed Archimonde Mythic then you've beaten the tier. The whole thing is on "farm". Do relative power levels of classes really matter after the content is irrelevant from a progression point of view? I don't really think they matter that much at that point. If this really is the last raid instance then the people who have Archimonde weapons are probably getting a raw deal. Their weapons won't be relevant for progression ever when the new expansion comes everything resets inevitably.

I'm sure this will lead to Mythic guilds stacking whatever classes get weapons on the tier right before Archimonde. Whatever though. Mythic guilds when signed up for class stacking and min-maxing. Comes with the territory.

Eat it You Nasty Pig.

class' dps from fight to fight is dependent on a lot more than 5-10 ilvls on a weapon, and you are overstating the difference it'd make anyway. 15 ilvls is a lot, but 5-10 ilvls basically already exists. The existence of socketed/wfed weapons doesn't turn the stock version into 'dog shit'; the difference obviously exists but it is a marginal one.

In general, there are already 3-4 weapons available to a spec in a given tier. One of them is the best, the rest are Not The Best. In practice this won't create much difference in the way you gear up over the course of a raid compared to the current tier.

Opty

I don't think weapons are as big a deal as the tier gear (assuming no BiS weapons drop from the first four bosses that is). That's 5 slots that you've got to wrestle on comparing against higher ilvl gear to try and figure out if you should go for your full 4 piece (and which piece you should skip) or if going for 2 piece or even no tier is better.

Also note that I believe zone drop items are of the lowest ilvl for that difficulty so you'll have a potential to get bottom level items from higher level bosses.

PMAvers

You know, I don't think I've even grokked until now how much of a clusterf*ck Tanaan is going to get on PvP servers.

Imagine the entire player base pouring into the zone trying to get the new crafting mats for the next levels of upgrades.

...Yeah.

Gladiator's Sanctums on all characters! Probably should start working on a PvP set now.