Honestly there are so many variables these days that if you want to do Heroic it's basically required, and a large portion of the playerbase is in Heroic, so it's pretty much expected. It also takes, as Dhal said, less than a minute. There's an addon to pull a text box and a website that does everything for you and has a ridiculously intuitive UI (the aforementioned RaidBots).
It's just another thing you have to think about along with DBM and probably WeakAuras for any difficulty above Normal.
I have never called anything "easymode," much less Heroic raids.
The general feeling I got here was if you weren't running M+ dungeons and Mythic raids, are you even really playing wow? And everything else was barely harder than LFR/LFD.
Which hasn't been my experience, even most of the people I've played with struggle with heroic dungeons constantly (and normal raids).
"Get a better group" is what I got told constantly when I said I avoided doing heroics in general and hated the whole "you gotta do heroics to unlock shit" mechanic for KT. (aside from coco who is a cool dude)
bowen on
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
Pet Battling only really requires a few leveled pets for most things. If you want to do the harder core stuff like the pet battle bosses you need a much deeper bench for specific teams, but there were (I’m not sure how hard it is now, it’s a late game activity for me and I quit before the Dazar’alor raid) ways to get tons of pet charms to buy level 25 stones and ones that upgraded pets to rare quality.
If you want to do pet achievement stuff without having to do a ton of pet leveling just go to the boat and do the missions. They come up pretty often and if you have an alt or two high enough to run the missions you can buy enough instant level 25 stones to get about as many pets to max level as you could care to. Given there are only like 10 or so pets you need to cover most possible fights maxed out it really is painless. I did not do any real pet battling for the last two expansions but this one I figure I was going to give it a shot. It really did not take long to get setup to do them all easily. Get ikky to 25 get one or two of the zandalari baby raptors up if possible get the unborn valkyr and that will do 90% of the fights for you.
Isn’t the Valkyrie pet the super rare one you have to scour the ice crown zone for?
Actually she is not that rare. There are a lot of spawn sites for her now there is a pet tracker mod and using that I flew over the areas it can spawn and it took me about 10 minutes to pick one up.
I have never called anything "easymode," much less Heroic raids.
The general feeling I got here was if you weren't running M+ dungeons and Mythic raids, are you even really playing wow? And everything else was barely harder than LFR/LFD.
Which hasn't been my experience, even most of the people I've played with struggle with heroic dungeons constantly (and normal raids).
"Get a better group" is what I got told constantly when I said I avoided doing heroics in general and hated the whole "you gotta do heroics to unlock shit" mechanic for KT. (aside from coco who is a cool dude)
I must admit that M10 seems more of a fake boogieman now that I've done a few. It requires players know how to play, which I think everyone here probably meets or exceeds. They don't take 40k dps, or even 30k, or even 25k but they do require that you learn the routes, the mob packs, and adjust for the traits - use purges, cleanses, kiting sometimes, etc.
And man, once you get that sweet 17k titan in a chest, you want that hit every week.
I can't really imagine pugging them 100%, but I've come across some good folks there when we have a hole to fill. We make a note of those folks and reach out if possible.
I do wish it was easier to run a key up to 10. The rewards from 10 vs like everything lower is pretty damn wide too.
There is always an Unborn Val'kyr pet up, but only one at a time. Once defeated/captured, another immediately spawns at one of the known spawn sites as mentioned. Each Wrath zone has 2-3 spawn spots, so about 25 locations all total.
There is always an Unborn Val'kyr pet up, but only one at a time. Once defeated/captured, another immediately spawns at one of the known spawn sites as mentioned. Each Wrath zone has 2-3 spawn spots, so about 25 locations all total.
Yup if you get a pet tracker it will show you the possible spawn areas and then its a pretty easy thing to just fly past them and stop when you see her.
On a positive note, I've been impressed by how blizzard has implemented the Azurite Essences.
They combine all the good points of legion legendaries and azurite traits without their downsides. They're not distributed by RNG like the legion legendaries, they don't take up equipment slots and they're not minor passive effects that you can hardly notice like the azurite traits. They're even designed so that it's not easy to determine which one is the "best" for each fight let alone best overall. I play a healer and I've had real arguments with other good healers on what configuration to run with Well of Existence, Seeds of Eonar, Vision of Perfection and Ever-Rising tide all having legitimate arguments for the major essence slot (and even Crucible of Flame for when we needed to push healer DPS). The standard for holy paladins seems to be vision of perfection for straight throughput but I've definitely gotten good results out of Seeds when we needed additional raid CDs.
They also give a clear path on what I should be doing to get them instead of being randomly handed out like legion legendaries. My only problem with the essences is that there are some that require PvP which I refuse to endure for the sake of just completing my essences. I probably would grit my teeth and endure it if those essences were any good but thankfully those essences are no where near the top of the list for raiding.
Battlenet ID: NullPointer
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
I get the feeling the Azerite traits and essences are tests for future talent design.
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3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
mythic raids are very hard but the real challenge is getting exactly 25 people with the right balance of classes to show up every raid night forever
Yeah, it sucks. My guild has the best team we've had in years and absolutely blew through Heroic Eternal Palace but because it's a guild for working adults that only raids 3 nights a week, we have trouble getting a roster of reasonable players above 16/17 people online consistently. Folks have to go, folks are busy, recruiting good players for that is hard because they tend to want guilds that are pushing 4-5 nights a week...so we end up completing Heroic and definitely being good enough for at least some Mythic if we just had a few warm bodies and we rarely get there because it's a hard limit.
And like, I get the technical reasons why that is, but it sucks!
the only technical reason at this point is that "balancing flex raids is haaaard, I don't waaaaaannaaaaa, people are all shouty about the mythic raaaace, stop yelling at meeeeee"
the only technical reason at this point is that "balancing flex raids is haaaard, I don't waaaaaannaaaaa, people are all shouty about the mythic raaaace, stop yelling at meeeeee"
Blizzard couldn't balance 10 and 25 man raiding and they tried for years. Pick your choice between just not being possible or Blizzard lacking the developer chops to do it, but point is that it ain't happening.
the only technical reason at this point is that "balancing flex raids is haaaard, I don't waaaaaannaaaaa, people are all shouty about the mythic raaaace, stop yelling at meeeeee"
Blizzard couldn't balance 10 and 25 man raiding and they tried for years. Pick your choice between just not being possible or Blizzard lacking the developer chops to do it, but point is that it ain't happening.
It's blizzard not willing to do it. They managed to balance flex well with SoO when it was introduced, and then they never actually tried again.
they can do it fine as long as they're not worried about an even playing field for the world first race, that's the only reason mythic's locked to 20 people and no-cross-server groups
they can do it fine as long as they're not worried about an even playing field for the world first race, that's the only reason mythic's locked to 20 people and no-cross-server groups
I still don't see why that even matters. All the guilds will still be competing on the same playing field. Let them suss out the specific optimal number of players for each fight or whatever. I've never seen how limiting cross realm helps balance even a little at all.
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Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
Flex raids also don't allow them to design fights to require specific classes. In a 20man raid it's reasonable to design a mechanic that can only really be done with one spec, like mind control or something like that. It's not reasonable if you're flexing and allow 10 people in there.
requiring mechanics that only exist on one class is dumb anyway unless you can guarantee that class will be there through the game design naturally, which they can't, so they shouldn't do it
if they're gonna include mind control mechanics they better give more classes a mind control or provide some sort of backup way to do the mechanic like the mind control orbs in the 10 man version of the instructor fight in wrath's version of naxx
Flex raids also don't allow them to design fights to require specific classes. In a 20man raid it's reasonable to design a mechanic that can only really be done with one spec, like mind control or something like that. It's not reasonable if you're flexing and allow 10 people in there.
The less number of players the greater the need of homogenization to give all classes (not specs, but CLASSES) a chance to be a meta choice at the higher end. People say that they don't want homogenization....but looking at all the complaints about M+ turns out that it happened for a reason (Remember getting flak on a class Discord because I said that people would get bored of the stale M+ meta and would drop it like arena). There's multiple solutions though:
Make account-wide as much stuff as possible.
FFXIV "you can just change classes at whim".
Drop Mythic and the entire e-sports angle entirely.
The last two are not going to happen, so players are mostly pushing for the first one.
I suspect the bigger issue with M+ is how it further divides the player base and the games setup has a metric fuckton of rewards & lockouts that pretty much discourage players from wanting to do lower difficulty content. After all why do the lower content when you could use that time either doing an M+ that you can still breeze through, but gives better rewards or attempting harder content; especially, if you already did it once and can't get any more gear. The real irony, is that as much as M+ is suppose to be something that gives people more do because of how it divides the player base and how rewards work, it's probably accelerating the rate at which people unsub. Eventually someone will fall far enough behind that it becomes a pain in the ass to get caught back up with their friends because their friends don't really want to run the content that would help them catch up and it leaves them with no other option, but to PUG and that can be a real crap shoot.
Hell, I'd argue greater rifts don't work that great in D3, a game that doesn't have the lockouts that WoW has and has an actual single player component for end game gear.
I know there has been talk from the devs on bringing back some of the class identity and that's probably in response to the current issues with the game. Some classes were far more interesting, when some of the skill for certain specs was being able to weave in the class utility to either have a strategy to get through a specific boss mechanic or use those abilities to either allow the raid to recover from a misstep or eek a kill instead of wiping. When it's just achieve bigger numbers, it gets less interesting, becomes harder to spot the really talented players and probably helps to contribute to the toxicity.
Problem is Blizz is going to have to make a decision between e-sports or non-e-sports and I don't trust activision-blizzard to not make the shitty choice. If they keep pushing the e-sports angle that's going to make it much harder to go a route to keep things interesting; especially, if that entails having small groups. I'm not a fan of what Mythic Raiding is going for in modern wow. no raid should be boned because they don't have a class present, they should only get boned if their comp is really unbalanced (like in addition to having no hunters, half the range dps are mages, I'd be fine with that not being viable in mythic when everyone in the raid has the appropriate gear level for the raid to be a challenge). There should be multiple ways to deal with each mechanic. Sure you'll get setups where mages have the best took kit to deal with a mechanic and then a paladin's Hand of Protection ends up being the go to for another mechanic, but that's why you mix things up so that no one class or spec is always the right choice to have in a raid. Plus, you want different ways to get by a mechanic because sometimes the person with the ideal class/spec to deal with the mechanic really fucking sucks at using the tools to get by said mechanic (maybe the your raids sole mage sucks at using the frost mage tool kit to slow and root adds or the your raids paladin is really about tunnel visioning and doesn't get hand of protection up at the right time). 5man mythics are even worse because unlike mythic raids, you are guaranteed to not have most of the classes present, which means for the sake of balance you either make it most things don't matter or just about everyone has the few things that matter. Honestly, I'm not a fan of e-sports because it seems like it forces everything towards being a bland mediocrity because that's the only way you can really ensure that there is a reasonable level of fairness without people finding the experience too unpleasant.
I'd love to see things go back to where they were in TBC and WotLK, where part of skill wasn't just having the biggest numbers for DPS, but being able to hit a good balance of providing good dps, while using their utility to help the raid secure a kill. Be that because they have an ability that lets the raid get through a boss mechanic, recover from a screwup or eek out a kill that would have been a wipe. I have really mixed feelings about both Legion and BfA ret, neither have completely departed from what ret was in TBC and WotLK. The key difference is that both Legion and BfA ret have a good dps setup with a rotation, but I completely disagree with how much of the class fantasy and skill cap was traded in to do that. TBC ret was pretty shitty, but if you knew what you were doing you had tools that could fix things that went wrong. WotLK ret probably had the best overall setup with it's real sin being that it was pretty button mashing. Neither Legion or BfA ret has much to offer in the way of tools to get things back on track. At best modern ret builds can help buy healers some breathing room, but run the risk of having jackasses completely shit over them for not just pushing dps when the healer runs into issues. If the tank dies, they can no longer be a solid hill to slow down an untanked boss from being able to decimate the raid (we'll assume progression content), at best they are a speed bump. If the healer goes down, they can't really do much outside of a Word of Glory and Lay on Hands, maybe they get two WoGs because they had a lucky divine purpose proc. Hell, the trimming has probably made heroic queues and holiday bosses actively worse because it's really not possible for really well geared dps hybrids to pop in as adequate tanks and sometimes healers for content they out gear without having to respect (in WotLK, after some Naxx gear I was able to tank all the holiday bosses as ret paladin or a feral druid). Yeah, some of is the players fault, but a good chunk of it is Blizz's fault both in that they got overzealous with the ability pruning, but because they bullshit hybrid tax (it was BS because it never applied to warriors) made many hybrid players not want to keep the their utility for fear that they would then get arbitrarily taxed and possible lose their raid spot because of that tax.
where part of skill wasn't just having the biggest numbers for DPS, but being able to hit a good balance of providing good dps, while using their utility to help the raid secure a kill.
This is absolutely still a huge part of the game and I'm not sure why you wrote a wall of text suggesting it isn't.
The only thing that's different now is that great players have become good enough to provide the utility required while still pushing out the maximum possible DPS. Once upon a time it was acceptable to trade DPS for utility, however it's now no longer good enough to say "I was doing mechanics instead of DPS, that's why my parse is grey.", because good raiders can and should be doing both at the same time.
For a relevant example, when our mage solo soaks a Frenetic Charge with iceblock on Mythic Queen's Court, to prevent us having to share the soak, he doesn't just walk out of the raid and sit in the iceblock for the duration like one would back in the day - he moves out and continues his DPS rotation. A fraction of a second before it hits him, he flicks into iceblock then cancels the block a fraction of a second after he's been hit to get straight back to DPSing. Probably spends maybe two tenths of a second inside an iceblock at maximum.
For another, on Mythic Orgozoa, an add in phase 2 needs to be regularly interrupted. That doesn't mean you stick melee DPS on it, because it doesn't need to die. Instead, everyone has the add on /focus, with a macro to kick their focus target, and while continuing their regular DPS rotation on the main boss they watch the castbars to kick that target.
And finally, a really good example, on the last boss of Tol Dagor, the Deadshot (the giant arrow that points to a random player and will oneshot you if you get hit twice in a row) can be dodged. This means Demon Hunters, with their 100%, 1 second dodge buff from Blade Dance, can soak every single one, essentially removing the mechanic from the fight. An average demon hunter can't afford to just casually hit it on cooldown like you normally would, so they'll often hold it unused to ensure they get the soak off. This costs them significant DPS. A great DH will simply pay close attention to the fight timers and weave in blade dances at the exact right time to ensure they can still use the ability on cooldown while lining it up with the mechanic.
the reason for all of this is basically just that information tools are better now, and lower-level players better understand how to use them. Like, there were logs in the BC era but they weren't as advanced or easily sortable; if you wanted to know what the best players of your class were doing on a particular fight you basically just had to hope they were posting on EJ or something. These days if you're inclined you can dig into logs and get a pretty clear picture of all the little tricks people have figured out. Weakauras exist now and deliver much more and better information about fights than whatever primitive boss mod you'd have back then
and also yeah individual classes still do tons of useful utility things from fight to fight
Eat it You Nasty Pig. on
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
There is always an Unborn Val'kyr pet up, but only one at a time. Once defeated/captured, another immediately spawns at one of the known spawn sites as mentioned. Each Wrath zone has 2-3 spawn spots, so about 25 locations all total.
Yup if you get a pet tracker it will show you the possible spawn areas and then its a pretty easy thing to just fly past them and stop when you see her.
It took me years to get it
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Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
the reason for all of this is basically just that information tools are better now, and lower-level players better understand how to use them. Like, there were logs in the BC era but they weren't as advanced or easily sortable; if you wanted to know what the best players of your class were doing on a particular fight you basically just had to hope they were posting on EJ or something. These days if you're inclined you can dig into logs and get a pretty clear picture of all the little tricks people have figured out. Weakauras exist now and deliver much more and better information about fights than whatever primitive boss mod you'd have back then
and also yeah individual classes still do tons of useful utility things from fight to fight
the increase in information also makes mechanical ability and actual in-game play level more important
you could be above average in the past just by putting in effort outside the game to research and learn how to play, even if you weren't exceptionally good at actually doing it ingame
nowadays it takes so little effort to know what the optimal thing to do that everyone more or less knows, and thus it becomes far less important to know what to do and far more important to be good at doing it
Funny, I don't recall saying they no longer have utility, but rather that said utility has been greatly diminished. I also subtly hinted at how there has been fair bit of conscious design on the devs part to not have to rely on said utility outside of very specific situations that have a mechanic to force inclusion of a class. Hell, the current approach to making use of class utility is pretty piss poor. I think outside of islands & pvp, a fair bit of class and spec utility doesn't see any use until people start pushing progression. I doubt some of the normal & heroic would become insurmountable if players felt like they were being rewards for using those utility abilities, but currently they often might as well not exist in the spell book, which makes it rather hard for new and returning players to learn to play outside of finding someone willing to give them time to learn or coming back when their gear puts them at about the same level as everyone else.
I'm pretty sure I'm not looking through rose tinted classes when I point out, that there was much less shit talking of dps players in TBC and WotLK that properly took a dps hint to ensure that the group managed to get things dead if something went away. These days if a player realizes they need to drop dps in order to ensure that the group doesn't get wiped out and are successful, they often aren't met with praise for "good job on salvaging things," it's usually "fucking stupid dps, that took longer than it should because you didn't do your fucking drop," by people that don't grasp had said dps gone balls to the wall, the whole group would have had to do a corpse run and likely repeated the whole pull again. Also back then it was far, far easier for hybrid builds and to a less extend some of the pure dps builds to pop utility to prevent a wipe at the expense dps. Just about every hybrid melee dps that had a tanking spec during WotLK, had the tools to play tank for 20-30 seconds every few minutes and could be a damage sponge to get a tank up with rebirth. Now they go splat pretty quickly if the tank goes down. I'm less versed with healers, but I know rets ability to provide emergency off heals is not what it used to be. Don't get me wrong WoG + LoH is amazing, WoG + WoG + LoH is amazing (only issue is you need to have a divine purpose proc, on top having the holy power for the WoG, while having both charges of WoG and have that all line up when you only or last healer bites the dust). Just if the healer dies and you don't have the dps to land a kill in the few seconds it takes for the boss to burn through whatever you healed. Utility goes well beyond just CCing mobs.
The thing was even back then, the skillful playing of classes wasn't knowing the right gear to get or rotations. Hell, I wouldn't even say that was skill, that was both knowing where to look for information and being lucky enough to know where the good theorycrafters were posting their information. It often was going into an encounter where a kill was far from guaranteed and not successfully using utility to beat the expected fight gimmick, but being able to pop that utility when something goes horribly fucking wrong and turning what was likely going to be a wipe into a kill. If you're doing progression, you're bound to get those situations where things do go wrong and it's actually better to have an attempt to salvage things before just wiping out (PS I really do miss divine intervention because that was a god send when you needed to quickly wipe things out to maximize total number of attempts) I'd argue that is fundamentally different from Deadshot, where someone intentionally holds off blade dance to soak something they expect. Hell, the whole reason blizz loves RNG is because it is something to force players on their toes, so they don't just pull a spread sheet and figure out what stats are need to kill the boss before the enraged timer and having the most competent people on interrupt/cc/soak duty. Sure it's not completely gone, but again Blizz has pretty much neutered a fair bit of it.
Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
IDK, I've used my blessings of sacrifice, protection, and freedom a lot to save tricky situations, as well as my offhealing. I've had my demon hunter snap taunt Mythic Ashvane at a clutch moment to ensure he got the last Briny Bubble instead of me when I was the last tank alive, and turned a wipe into a kill because I didn't die inside a bubble. I've had an engineer monk double chi torpedo across half a room to clutch out an engineering brez on someone when he realized all the real brezzers were dead already. It happens plenty.
IDK, I've used my blessings of sacrifice, protection, and freedom a lot to save tricky situations, as well as my offhealing. I've had my demon hunter snap taunt Mythic Ashvane at a clutch moment to ensure he got the last Briny Bubble instead of me when I was the last tank alive, and turned a wipe into a kill because I didn't die inside a bubble. I've had an engineer monk double chi torpedo across half a room to clutch out an engineering brez on someone when he realized all the real brezzers were dead already. It happens plenty.
Dhalpir, I get what you are saying, but thing is, a)What you said isn't true outside Mythic raiding/high end M+ thanks to vast gear inflation at the lower end b)Most players simply cannot get there and c)Weakauras itself vastly increased the skill gap since Blizz designs bosses around "ok, the guys all have a Weak Aura running, so what do we do?". Blizzard giving all of this free gear on the lower end means that all the utility that is there....just isn't needed, since most players outgear the content they run. Blizzard tried to protect players from failure states and from getting excluded for ilvl and this is the result. Same as all the obscure RNG procs/gear systems, they also increased the skill gap since the only way to make sense of them is using Raidbots. Which is vastly easier to use these days, but still.
resistances to elemental types gave groups of classes an area to shine. blizz never balanced it well and it got kind of stupid and complex but nature, magic, shadow, water, fire, etc. were good ideas. You have a boss that takes extra damage from fire, then give your group/raid a boost by bringing more characters that do fire damage...oh no but that means the rogues won't have a chance to shine, well next boss takes extra damage from stabbing...things have to be looked at on a whole, not on a single encounter.
3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
I actually hated that so much. Feeling like I was so strong or so weak on an encounter (or, in the case of, say, Hydross, literally unable to do damage for entire portions of the encounter) not through any of my own decisions or ability to spec the character but just because of a quirk of the boss always felt crappy.
resistances to elemental types gave groups of classes an area to shine. blizz never balanced it well and it got kind of stupid and complex but nature, magic, shadow, water, fire, etc. were good ideas. You have a boss that takes extra damage from fire, then give your group/raid a boost by bringing more characters that do fire damage...oh no but that means the rogues won't have a chance to shine, well next boss takes extra damage from stabbing...things have to be looked at on a whole, not on a single encounter.
There is still examples like this in modern WoW, like the big difference between who can soak and who can't. Also, I have to heavily disagree on "things have to be looked at on a whole, not on a single encounter". High end guilds have multiple characters as a requirement. That's one of the biggest differences between playstyles. So, what ends up happening is people bringing different characters to each boss, since as said before, gear isn't an obstacle. Making that more of a requirement actually does the opposite since it's also an increase on the skill gap.
there never were that many situations where "utility" saved the raid from a wipe; basically just fortuitous immunities buying another few seconds, which is still something that happens. There's never been a time when you wanted your dps to spend a significant amount of time off-healing,* aside from a few encounters with intermissions or whatever when there was nothing else to do. There have also been historically few fights where a dps could taunt and act as a tank for any significant amount of time.
also ret's off healing continues to be hugely useful in m+ when the affixes stress the healer, so
*the exception to this was the few classes that had significant off-healing CDs during MoP
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
IDK, I've used my blessings of sacrifice, protection, and freedom a lot to save tricky situations, as well as my offhealing. I've had my demon hunter snap taunt Mythic Ashvane at a clutch moment to ensure he got the last Briny Bubble instead of me when I was the last tank alive, and turned a wipe into a kill because I didn't die inside a bubble. I've had an engineer monk double chi torpedo across half a room to clutch out an engineering brez on someone when he realized all the real brezzers were dead already. It happens plenty.
Dhalpir, I get what you are saying, but thing is, a)What you said isn't true outside Mythic raiding/high end M+ thanks to vast gear inflation at the lower end b)Most players simply cannot get there and c)Weakauras itself vastly increased the skill gap since Blizz designs bosses around "ok, the guys all have a Weak Aura running, so what do we do?". Blizzard giving all of this free gear on the lower end means that all the utility that is there....just isn't needed, since most players outgear the content they run. Blizzard tried to protect players from failure states and from getting excluded for ilvl and this is the result. Same as all the obscure RNG procs/gear systems, they also increased the skill gap since the only way to make sense of them is using Raidbots. Which is vastly easier to use these days, but still.
run more challenging stuff then? Like if the content you're running is easy and you want harder stuff that pushes you to do more than just push your cleave buttons, it's out there
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
They really sped up leveling, my druid has been in Legion content for just a few hours but is already 105 with only one zone cleared. Not even making use of rested experience to any great extent.
Coming up on the Ysera death though and I'm already sad just thinking about it. I bash the writing of the game a lot but that moment is pretty legit.
I can't read 17 pages of things I have no context for so I'm just gonna ask.
What UI mods are "essential" these days? I usually play solo paladin or priest
I haven't played in 2 years (or at least 2 expansions) what should I know?
I like to play solo but the occasional 5 man is fine so what should I look out for?
I played for a decade in a top guild and I'm totally done with "wow as a job" type raids / endgame so what are some casual & fun "anyone can do it for reasonable rewards" dungeons/raids?
Are any crafting things fun or useful? I seem to remember some entertaining first aid and cooking quests...
I like to watch TV / movies and WOW so where should I head to earn some gold & drops while I am just chilling out?
Thank you in advance
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
edited August 2019
1. My RolePlay or Total RolePlay
2. Leveling up to the current expansion is fast, there's plenty of not-raid stuff to do to get stronger.
3. See the above. World Quests are a thing you can do (they replaced dailies) for pretty substantial rewards.
4. See the above!
5. Crafting is not fun. Usefulness I dunno, I'm an enhancement shaman with blacksmithing but I can't craft weapons for my spec because Blizzard is dumb.
6. World Quests. Sometimes the reward for doing a few of them for a specific faction kick out a 2k gold reward.
Edit - (I'm joking about question 1 by the way, I'm an RP nerd)
Henroid on
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Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
"standard"ish addons would include BigWigs, WeakAuras, ElvUI, and Details!.
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It's insanely easy and takes no time whatsoever.
Very good for figuring out things like which trinkets are your best ones.
I used it the other day specifically to figure out if an easy trinket of mine was comparable to a "good" one that was also obtuse as all hell.
Honestly there are so many variables these days that if you want to do Heroic it's basically required, and a large portion of the playerbase is in Heroic, so it's pretty much expected. It also takes, as Dhal said, less than a minute. There's an addon to pull a text box and a website that does everything for you and has a ridiculously intuitive UI (the aforementioned RaidBots).
It's just another thing you have to think about along with DBM and probably WeakAuras for any difficulty above Normal.
y'all send some really mixed messages sometimes
The general feeling I got here was if you weren't running M+ dungeons and Mythic raids, are you even really playing wow? And everything else was barely harder than LFR/LFD.
Which hasn't been my experience, even most of the people I've played with struggle with heroic dungeons constantly (and normal raids).
"Get a better group" is what I got told constantly when I said I avoided doing heroics in general and hated the whole "you gotta do heroics to unlock shit" mechanic for KT. (aside from coco who is a cool dude)
Actually she is not that rare. There are a lot of spawn sites for her now there is a pet tracker mod and using that I flew over the areas it can spawn and it took me about 10 minutes to pick one up.
I must admit that M10 seems more of a fake boogieman now that I've done a few. It requires players know how to play, which I think everyone here probably meets or exceeds. They don't take 40k dps, or even 30k, or even 25k but they do require that you learn the routes, the mob packs, and adjust for the traits - use purges, cleanses, kiting sometimes, etc.
And man, once you get that sweet 17k titan in a chest, you want that hit every week.
I can't really imagine pugging them 100%, but I've come across some good folks there when we have a hole to fill. We make a note of those folks and reach out if possible.
I do wish it was easier to run a key up to 10. The rewards from 10 vs like everything lower is pretty damn wide too.
And/or keeping up with whatever limitations/qualifications blizzard has set for a particular raid tier at a particular time of day.
Yup if you get a pet tracker it will show you the possible spawn areas and then its a pretty easy thing to just fly past them and stop when you see her.
They combine all the good points of legion legendaries and azurite traits without their downsides. They're not distributed by RNG like the legion legendaries, they don't take up equipment slots and they're not minor passive effects that you can hardly notice like the azurite traits. They're even designed so that it's not easy to determine which one is the "best" for each fight let alone best overall. I play a healer and I've had real arguments with other good healers on what configuration to run with Well of Existence, Seeds of Eonar, Vision of Perfection and Ever-Rising tide all having legitimate arguments for the major essence slot (and even Crucible of Flame for when we needed to push healer DPS). The standard for holy paladins seems to be vision of perfection for straight throughput but I've definitely gotten good results out of Seeds when we needed additional raid CDs.
They also give a clear path on what I should be doing to get them instead of being randomly handed out like legion legendaries. My only problem with the essences is that there are some that require PvP which I refuse to endure for the sake of just completing my essences. I probably would grit my teeth and endure it if those essences were any good but thankfully those essences are no where near the top of the list for raiding.
Yeah, it sucks. My guild has the best team we've had in years and absolutely blew through Heroic Eternal Palace but because it's a guild for working adults that only raids 3 nights a week, we have trouble getting a roster of reasonable players above 16/17 people online consistently. Folks have to go, folks are busy, recruiting good players for that is hard because they tend to want guilds that are pushing 4-5 nights a week...so we end up completing Heroic and definitely being good enough for at least some Mythic if we just had a few warm bodies and we rarely get there because it's a hard limit.
And like, I get the technical reasons why that is, but it sucks!
Blizzard couldn't balance 10 and 25 man raiding and they tried for years. Pick your choice between just not being possible or Blizzard lacking the developer chops to do it, but point is that it ain't happening.
It's blizzard not willing to do it. They managed to balance flex well with SoO when it was introduced, and then they never actually tried again.
I still don't see why that even matters. All the guilds will still be competing on the same playing field. Let them suss out the specific optimal number of players for each fight or whatever. I've never seen how limiting cross realm helps balance even a little at all.
if they're gonna include mind control mechanics they better give more classes a mind control or provide some sort of backup way to do the mechanic like the mind control orbs in the 10 man version of the instructor fight in wrath's version of naxx
The less number of players the greater the need of homogenization to give all classes (not specs, but CLASSES) a chance to be a meta choice at the higher end. People say that they don't want homogenization....but looking at all the complaints about M+ turns out that it happened for a reason (Remember getting flak on a class Discord because I said that people would get bored of the stale M+ meta and would drop it like arena). There's multiple solutions though:
The last two are not going to happen, so players are mostly pushing for the first one.
Hell, I'd argue greater rifts don't work that great in D3, a game that doesn't have the lockouts that WoW has and has an actual single player component for end game gear.
I know there has been talk from the devs on bringing back some of the class identity and that's probably in response to the current issues with the game. Some classes were far more interesting, when some of the skill for certain specs was being able to weave in the class utility to either have a strategy to get through a specific boss mechanic or use those abilities to either allow the raid to recover from a misstep or eek a kill instead of wiping. When it's just achieve bigger numbers, it gets less interesting, becomes harder to spot the really talented players and probably helps to contribute to the toxicity.
Problem is Blizz is going to have to make a decision between e-sports or non-e-sports and I don't trust activision-blizzard to not make the shitty choice. If they keep pushing the e-sports angle that's going to make it much harder to go a route to keep things interesting; especially, if that entails having small groups. I'm not a fan of what Mythic Raiding is going for in modern wow. no raid should be boned because they don't have a class present, they should only get boned if their comp is really unbalanced (like in addition to having no hunters, half the range dps are mages, I'd be fine with that not being viable in mythic when everyone in the raid has the appropriate gear level for the raid to be a challenge). There should be multiple ways to deal with each mechanic. Sure you'll get setups where mages have the best took kit to deal with a mechanic and then a paladin's Hand of Protection ends up being the go to for another mechanic, but that's why you mix things up so that no one class or spec is always the right choice to have in a raid. Plus, you want different ways to get by a mechanic because sometimes the person with the ideal class/spec to deal with the mechanic really fucking sucks at using the tools to get by said mechanic (maybe the your raids sole mage sucks at using the frost mage tool kit to slow and root adds or the your raids paladin is really about tunnel visioning and doesn't get hand of protection up at the right time). 5man mythics are even worse because unlike mythic raids, you are guaranteed to not have most of the classes present, which means for the sake of balance you either make it most things don't matter or just about everyone has the few things that matter. Honestly, I'm not a fan of e-sports because it seems like it forces everything towards being a bland mediocrity because that's the only way you can really ensure that there is a reasonable level of fairness without people finding the experience too unpleasant.
I'd love to see things go back to where they were in TBC and WotLK, where part of skill wasn't just having the biggest numbers for DPS, but being able to hit a good balance of providing good dps, while using their utility to help the raid secure a kill. Be that because they have an ability that lets the raid get through a boss mechanic, recover from a screwup or eek out a kill that would have been a wipe. I have really mixed feelings about both Legion and BfA ret, neither have completely departed from what ret was in TBC and WotLK. The key difference is that both Legion and BfA ret have a good dps setup with a rotation, but I completely disagree with how much of the class fantasy and skill cap was traded in to do that. TBC ret was pretty shitty, but if you knew what you were doing you had tools that could fix things that went wrong. WotLK ret probably had the best overall setup with it's real sin being that it was pretty button mashing. Neither Legion or BfA ret has much to offer in the way of tools to get things back on track. At best modern ret builds can help buy healers some breathing room, but run the risk of having jackasses completely shit over them for not just pushing dps when the healer runs into issues. If the tank dies, they can no longer be a solid hill to slow down an untanked boss from being able to decimate the raid (we'll assume progression content), at best they are a speed bump. If the healer goes down, they can't really do much outside of a Word of Glory and Lay on Hands, maybe they get two WoGs because they had a lucky divine purpose proc. Hell, the trimming has probably made heroic queues and holiday bosses actively worse because it's really not possible for really well geared dps hybrids to pop in as adequate tanks and sometimes healers for content they out gear without having to respect (in WotLK, after some Naxx gear I was able to tank all the holiday bosses as ret paladin or a feral druid). Yeah, some of is the players fault, but a good chunk of it is Blizz's fault both in that they got overzealous with the ability pruning, but because they bullshit hybrid tax (it was BS because it never applied to warriors) made many hybrid players not want to keep the their utility for fear that they would then get arbitrarily taxed and possible lose their raid spot because of that tax.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
This is absolutely still a huge part of the game and I'm not sure why you wrote a wall of text suggesting it isn't.
The only thing that's different now is that great players have become good enough to provide the utility required while still pushing out the maximum possible DPS. Once upon a time it was acceptable to trade DPS for utility, however it's now no longer good enough to say "I was doing mechanics instead of DPS, that's why my parse is grey.", because good raiders can and should be doing both at the same time.
For a relevant example, when our mage solo soaks a Frenetic Charge with iceblock on Mythic Queen's Court, to prevent us having to share the soak, he doesn't just walk out of the raid and sit in the iceblock for the duration like one would back in the day - he moves out and continues his DPS rotation. A fraction of a second before it hits him, he flicks into iceblock then cancels the block a fraction of a second after he's been hit to get straight back to DPSing. Probably spends maybe two tenths of a second inside an iceblock at maximum.
For another, on Mythic Orgozoa, an add in phase 2 needs to be regularly interrupted. That doesn't mean you stick melee DPS on it, because it doesn't need to die. Instead, everyone has the add on /focus, with a macro to kick their focus target, and while continuing their regular DPS rotation on the main boss they watch the castbars to kick that target.
And finally, a really good example, on the last boss of Tol Dagor, the Deadshot (the giant arrow that points to a random player and will oneshot you if you get hit twice in a row) can be dodged. This means Demon Hunters, with their 100%, 1 second dodge buff from Blade Dance, can soak every single one, essentially removing the mechanic from the fight. An average demon hunter can't afford to just casually hit it on cooldown like you normally would, so they'll often hold it unused to ensure they get the soak off. This costs them significant DPS. A great DH will simply pay close attention to the fight timers and weave in blade dances at the exact right time to ensure they can still use the ability on cooldown while lining it up with the mechanic.
and also yeah individual classes still do tons of useful utility things from fight to fight
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
It took me years to get it
the increase in information also makes mechanical ability and actual in-game play level more important
you could be above average in the past just by putting in effort outside the game to research and learn how to play, even if you weren't exceptionally good at actually doing it ingame
nowadays it takes so little effort to know what the optimal thing to do that everyone more or less knows, and thus it becomes far less important to know what to do and far more important to be good at doing it
I'm pretty sure I'm not looking through rose tinted classes when I point out, that there was much less shit talking of dps players in TBC and WotLK that properly took a dps hint to ensure that the group managed to get things dead if something went away. These days if a player realizes they need to drop dps in order to ensure that the group doesn't get wiped out and are successful, they often aren't met with praise for "good job on salvaging things," it's usually "fucking stupid dps, that took longer than it should because you didn't do your fucking drop," by people that don't grasp had said dps gone balls to the wall, the whole group would have had to do a corpse run and likely repeated the whole pull again. Also back then it was far, far easier for hybrid builds and to a less extend some of the pure dps builds to pop utility to prevent a wipe at the expense dps. Just about every hybrid melee dps that had a tanking spec during WotLK, had the tools to play tank for 20-30 seconds every few minutes and could be a damage sponge to get a tank up with rebirth. Now they go splat pretty quickly if the tank goes down. I'm less versed with healers, but I know rets ability to provide emergency off heals is not what it used to be. Don't get me wrong WoG + LoH is amazing, WoG + WoG + LoH is amazing (only issue is you need to have a divine purpose proc, on top having the holy power for the WoG, while having both charges of WoG and have that all line up when you only or last healer bites the dust). Just if the healer dies and you don't have the dps to land a kill in the few seconds it takes for the boss to burn through whatever you healed. Utility goes well beyond just CCing mobs.
The thing was even back then, the skillful playing of classes wasn't knowing the right gear to get or rotations. Hell, I wouldn't even say that was skill, that was both knowing where to look for information and being lucky enough to know where the good theorycrafters were posting their information. It often was going into an encounter where a kill was far from guaranteed and not successfully using utility to beat the expected fight gimmick, but being able to pop that utility when something goes horribly fucking wrong and turning what was likely going to be a wipe into a kill. If you're doing progression, you're bound to get those situations where things do go wrong and it's actually better to have an attempt to salvage things before just wiping out (PS I really do miss divine intervention because that was a god send when you needed to quickly wipe things out to maximize total number of attempts) I'd argue that is fundamentally different from Deadshot, where someone intentionally holds off blade dance to soak something they expect. Hell, the whole reason blizz loves RNG is because it is something to force players on their toes, so they don't just pull a spread sheet and figure out what stats are need to kill the boss before the enraged timer and having the most competent people on interrupt/cc/soak duty. Sure it's not completely gone, but again Blizz has pretty much neutered a fair bit of it.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
Dhalpir, I get what you are saying, but thing is, a)What you said isn't true outside Mythic raiding/high end M+ thanks to vast gear inflation at the lower end b)Most players simply cannot get there and c)Weakauras itself vastly increased the skill gap since Blizz designs bosses around "ok, the guys all have a Weak Aura running, so what do we do?". Blizzard giving all of this free gear on the lower end means that all the utility that is there....just isn't needed, since most players outgear the content they run. Blizzard tried to protect players from failure states and from getting excluded for ilvl and this is the result. Same as all the obscure RNG procs/gear systems, they also increased the skill gap since the only way to make sense of them is using Raidbots. Which is vastly easier to use these days, but still.
Blizzard: Pailryder#1101
GoG: https://www.gog.com/u/pailryder
There is still examples like this in modern WoW, like the big difference between who can soak and who can't. Also, I have to heavily disagree on "things have to be looked at on a whole, not on a single encounter". High end guilds have multiple characters as a requirement. That's one of the biggest differences between playstyles. So, what ends up happening is people bringing different characters to each boss, since as said before, gear isn't an obstacle. Making that more of a requirement actually does the opposite since it's also an increase on the skill gap.
also ret's off healing continues to be hugely useful in m+ when the affixes stress the healer, so
*the exception to this was the few classes that had significant off-healing CDs during MoP
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
run more challenging stuff then? Like if the content you're running is easy and you want harder stuff that pushes you to do more than just push your cleave buttons, it's out there
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Coming up on the Ysera death though and I'm already sad just thinking about it. I bash the writing of the game a lot but that moment is pretty legit.
Thank you in advance
2. Leveling up to the current expansion is fast, there's plenty of not-raid stuff to do to get stronger.
3. See the above. World Quests are a thing you can do (they replaced dailies) for pretty substantial rewards.
4. See the above!
5. Crafting is not fun. Usefulness I dunno, I'm an enhancement shaman with blacksmithing but I can't craft weapons for my spec because Blizzard is dumb.
6. World Quests. Sometimes the reward for doing a few of them for a specific faction kick out a 2k gold reward.
Edit - (I'm joking about question 1 by the way, I'm an RP nerd)