although we should kill it this week since people have apparently finally figured out how to do parasites properly
Hah, funny you mention parasites, cause we had trouble with that for about the first 5 pulls or so. I learned that 1) Parasites spawn upon Injection expiration, not application and 2) Shuffle alone does not prevent stacks. Has to be Guard or Elusive Brew. Fortunately I figured it out pretty quickly. They still end up running around all over the place munching on people, so I wonder if there's a better way to handle that or what. Hmm.
We have a DK mass grip them and then chain a few aoe stuns. They are easier for people to eat that way as well.
Our biggest problem on hc Paragons was to soak the Aim lines but thats alot easier now its hotfixed so all hunters/priests/rogues/mages can just cancel it.
My guild finally started reaching p4 on Garrosh hc last night and we ended up on 15% on our best try. Hopefully he goes down next reset. We pretty much just have to survive the 4th malice.
I gotta say that I'm not really a fan of the fight. Its way too long and the only hard part with our current level of gear is to handle the whirl adds.
Paragons on the other hand is my favorite fight this tier. So much stuff can happen and the fight constantly changes. Every minute is a different set of events.
I've now had both the Thunderfury bindings and the Warglaives drop the half that I already had.
FFFFFUUUUUU
Are you soloing that content? I'm very interested in doing so as a Warrior. MC should be super easy but seeing as I've never done Black Temple before, i don't know how that will work.
"Look out here comes"..."Susan"..."Suuuuuuuuuuuuusan".
"Woah, I just scared myself!"
Hey, so is there a recommended level order? I did the panda starting zone, Westfall, Red Ridge, Duskwood, and I'm finishing upper stranglethorn now. I'll probably do lower strangle thorn and then head to the plaguelands, but any recommendation where to go after that?
I've spent most of my time on Kalimdor (never done it before to be honest) as a Worgen and pretty much did what @Mill suggested. Queue for dungeons all the time and keep doing quests. The gear/quests/xp from dungeons will give you a substantial boost in levels. I've always been slightly overleved for the quests ive done which has made them super easy and fast.
Question for all - Should hit 60 today, how do I get to Outlands from Kalimdor? Do i go through Menethil Harbor to Wetlands and walk? Is there a faster way? I guess i get flying mounts at 60, so that could ease my burden.
- 2nd question - Are there still attunements for raids? Do i need to do the MC attunement to start soloing that content?
Finally, this is more of a general thing I've seen on lvl 90 gear. Why did Blizzard scale so ridiculously on stats? When I quit playing at lvl 70...having 20k HP on a tank was a LOT. Now you get upwards of 400k? I just don't get it. Couldn't they have continued the level cap without scaling things so ridiculously? 1400 stamina on a chest piece? What's the point? What am i missing here in game design?
"Look out here comes"..."Susan"..."Suuuuuuuuuuuuusan".
"Woah, I just scared myself!"
Question for all - Should hit 60 today, how do I get to Outlands from Kalimdor? Do i go through Menethil Harbor to Wetlands and walk? Is there a faster way? I guess i get flying mounts at 60, so that could ease my burden.
- 2nd question - Are there still attunements for raids? Do i need to do the MC attunement to start soloing that content?
There are portals in all the major cities (and also in the quest hub in Silithus) that will take you right outside the Dark Portal in the Blasted lands. So once you hit 58 you can just hop in a portal to get there and then step through the big one to begin questing in Outland. In Darnassus the portal is in the Temple of the Moon right next to a portal that takes you to Exodar. In Stormwind, you'll pass the portal near the entrance to the Mage Tower.
Alternatively, ships from Darnassus go directly to Stormwind now (there's also the option of taking a boat from Ratchet to Booty Bay) if you want to take more scenic routes but not have to deal with the distance from Menethil Harbor.
As for attunements, I think almost all of them are gone except for Molten Core and Blackwing Lair. However, those attunements are really just shortcuts so you can get straight to the raid without having to run through part of Blackrock Depths or Upper Blackrock Spire respectively. You also no longer need to be in a raid group to enter any old raid, which makes soloing them much easier.
Of course, I think the first boss in Blackwing Lair still isn't soloable without some pet tricks as a hunter or something.
Oh, and in Molten Core you no longer need that magic water from Azshara in order to fight Ragnaros. The runes now activate automatically without it, so just kill all the other bosses and his lieutenant guy will spawn, then defeat him and he'll go summon Ragnaros for you.
Hey, so is there a recommended level order? I did the panda starting zone, Westfall, Red Ridge, Duskwood, and I'm finishing upper stranglethorn now. I'll probably do lower strangle thorn and then head to the plaguelands, but any recommendation where to go after that?
I've spent most of my time on Kalimdor (never done it before to be honest) as a Worgen and pretty much did what @Mill suggested. Queue for dungeons all the time and keep doing quests. The gear/quests/xp from dungeons will give you a substantial boost in levels. I've always been slightly overleved for the quests ive done which has made them super easy and fast.
Question for all - Should hit 60 today, how do I get to Outlands from Kalimdor? Do i go through Menethil Harbor to Wetlands and walk? Is there a faster way? I guess i get flying mounts at 60, so that could ease my burden.
- 2nd question - Are there still attunements for raids? Do i need to do the MC attunement to start soloing that content?
Finally, this is more of a general thing I've seen on lvl 90 gear. Why did Blizzard scale so ridiculously on stats? When I quit playing at lvl 70...having 20k HP on a tank was a LOT. Now you get upwards of 400k? I just don't get it. Couldn't they have continued the level cap without scaling things so ridiculously? 1400 stamina on a chest piece? What's the point? What am i missing here in game design?
There should be a portal to the Blasted Lands in one of your main cities, at least the Horde has one in Orgrimmar. Also no more attunements that I know of, so go crazy.
You can easily hit one million HP as a tank these days, it's ridiculous. I hit it towards the end of ToT around the 535ish Ivls, I imagine it's the norm at least for high HP tanks like Druids and DKs.
Hey, so is there a recommended level order? I did the panda starting zone, Westfall, Red Ridge, Duskwood, and I'm finishing upper stranglethorn now. I'll probably do lower strangle thorn and then head to the plaguelands, but any recommendation where to go after that?
I've spent most of my time on Kalimdor (never done it before to be honest) as a Worgen and pretty much did what @Mill suggested. Queue for dungeons all the time and keep doing quests. The gear/quests/xp from dungeons will give you a substantial boost in levels. I've always been slightly overleved for the quests ive done which has made them super easy and fast.
Question for all - Should hit 60 today, how do I get to Outlands from Kalimdor? Do i go through Menethil Harbor to Wetlands and walk? Is there a faster way? I guess i get flying mounts at 60, so that could ease my burden.
- 2nd question - Are there still attunements for raids? Do i need to do the MC attunement to start soloing that content?
Finally, this is more of a general thing I've seen on lvl 90 gear. Why did Blizzard scale so ridiculously on stats? When I quit playing at lvl 70...having 20k HP on a tank was a LOT. Now you get upwards of 400k? I just don't get it. Couldn't they have continued the level cap without scaling things so ridiculously? 1400 stamina on a chest piece? What's the point? What am i missing here in game design?
Do you have access to Stormwind? There's a portal in the Mage Tower that should take you to The Blasted Lands. Otherwise you will need to find a way to get to Eastern Kingdoms and make your way to the Blasted Lands.
Check your flight points when you arrive. I am not 100% certain but I believe that captial city flight points may be automatically known by fresh characters? If you can get to Stormwind that's your closest route to the Blasted Lands. Either by the Mage Tower's portal or by riding there through Deadwind Pass.
As for the extreme scaling I presume it is to allow people to solo previous content as a side activity and because bigger = better and cooler for most of the population. The numbers are getting shrunk next expansion (all of them) so we'll see what the reaction is.
First boss in bwl is soloable if you have some kind of hot or area heal you can stand in. When I was going through there on my pally I'd pick up the eternal flame talent, toss on rf, then hot myself between mind controls. Everything stuck to me like glue instead of going after the dragon
It is an exercise in humility and dedication, having to raid from a hotel business center for a month; because, "Oh we're converting to 100% wifi" FFUUUUUUUU
Got to 68 with my Monk, and I think I'm going to spend a week or two accumulating those stackable 1 hour buffs. I've got 25% from heirlooms + guild XP, but I think I'm going to need a few hours of 50% to survive the run through WOTLK content again.
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AssuranIs swinging on the SpiralRegistered Userregular
Of course, I think the first boss in Blackwing Lair still isn't soloable without some pet tricks as a hunter or something.
You can solo the first boss of BWL as any class now, but it is much much easier with 2 players. The only one I really have issues with soloing is Thorim and if I was an engineer, I could even manage that one.
Last time I did WotLK content, it went something like this: BT -> Sholazar -> DB -> Storm
As soon as you hit ~76 (w/e min level is for the quests), go to K3 and start the quests for the Crazy Barbarian Women(tm); which eventually lead to Thorim. By the time you are hopping on the backs of proto drakes and killing riders, you'll be 80.
It is an exercise in humility and dedication, having to raid from a hotel business center for a month; because, "Oh we're converting to 100% wifi" FFUUUUUUUU
A guy in my guild raided outside when we were trying to push the starter heroics, because his new apartment hadn't been wired for broadband yet, but the public wifi in a nearby park did work.
Regarding old content: I run that stuff a ton, and it's pretty trivial for everything up to WotLK, and even then a lot is solo-able (I can do all of Naxx, for example). Razorgore from BWL? Just worry about using him to destroy eggs. Every single mob will miss you, and that's true all the way through even Sunwell. I farmed up the Ashes of A'lar with minimal effort on a clothy.
This is assuming you're 90 and have at least the "free" Timeless Isle 496 stuff.
I haven't tried Razorgore in...two years probably? But I thought the problem was him getting killed before you could smash all the eggs if you didn't have something to snap up all the aggro?
As for WotLK, I know as a Rogue I can easily solo everything in ICC (including getting most achievements) up until the dragon that you have to heal, in which case I can't do jack. ICC has that zone-wide buff though, I haven't tried TotC or Ruby Sanctum to see how those would go.
I haven't tried Razorgore in...two years probably? But I thought the problem was him getting killed before you could smash all the eggs if you didn't have something to snap up all the aggro?
As for WotLK, I know as a Rogue I can easily solo everything in ICC (including getting most achievements) up until the dragon that you have to heal, in which case I can't do jack. ICC has that zone-wide buff though, I haven't tried TotC or Ruby Sanctum to see how those would go.
Most of the adds seem to run straight to me. Though I used to have to break the MC and pick them off.
Hmm... What are the chances we see all of the old buildings replaced by these new ones? Have they commented on that?
Zero. When they introduced the new frog model for the Throne of Thunder patch, they explicitly stated the weren't going to remove all the old frog models because they were part of the history of the game.
I think it's an equal part nostalgia and man-power thing, after the Cataclysm blow-back, it'll be a looong, looong time before Blizzard devotes any serious resources to retrofitting the "old world" ever again.
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
Okay so it looks like the way Blizzard is giving each race some identity in the garrisons is through props and doodads. They mentioned that at the tradeskill hut in your garrison, some tradeskills will look different for a race than it will for others. I.E. a dwarf with blacksmithing will have a different setup than humans, gnomes, etc, or a draenei with jewelcrafting will be different. What isn't clear though is whether or not all races will be different from each other for all tradeskills, or if Blizzard is just assigning each race a "thing" they're known for.
I would think that if they were planning on replacing the old world stuff they would want to make it as easy as possible, which would limit the buildings to fitting in the dimensions already occupied by the old ones. Not replacing them allows them to have more design freedom.
e: Actually Henroid, what I took from that is that profession buildings will be where the most non-human/orc architecture is.
We also thought it would be fun to throw in small hints of different races that might be associated with certain professions, such as draenei for Jewelcrafting or dwarves for Blacksmithing, to tie in the many races that give the World of Warcraft its depth and history.
It sounds like they're saying a Jewelcrafting building would have draenei accents, whereas a Blacksmithing building would feel like it has a dwarven influence, not that a Dwarf Blacksmith has a different forge.
It sounds like they're saying a Jewelcrafting building would have draenei accents, whereas a Blacksmithing building would feel like it has a dwarven influence, not that a Dwarf Blacksmith has a different forge.
I'm sure Horde garrisons will have Blood Elf influence on the mage tower and some-kind of Goblin foundry. Maybe the herbalism building will be Tauren flavored.
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SmasherStarting to get dizzyRegistered Userregular
I've now had both the Thunderfury bindings and the Warglaives drop the half that I already had.
FFFFFUUUUUU
Are you soloing that content? I'm very interested in doing so as a Warrior. MC should be super easy but seeing as I've never done Black Temple before, i don't know how that will work.
With a decent health pool Second Wind should be able to outheal incoming damage from anything through Wrath that doesn't either have a stacking debuff or do percent based damage.
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AegisFear My DanceOvershot Toronto, Landed in OttawaRegistered Userregular
I just realized that Weakened Armor and Weakened Blows are separate debuffs.
I have been a bad Boomkin in my raid, as I have not been providing them with Weakened Armor
I think their decision to keep certain older assets and models around whenever they update to newer ones is mostly a selfish one in their part. In that, I don't think they worry about backlash, but they'd like to keep it around for their own reasons, rather than those of the players
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SmasherStarting to get dizzyRegistered Userregular
Finally, this is more of a general thing I've seen on lvl 90 gear. Why did Blizzard scale so ridiculously on stats? When I quit playing at lvl 70...having 20k HP on a tank was a LOT. Now you get upwards of 400k? I just don't get it. Couldn't they have continued the level cap without scaling things so ridiculously? 1400 stamina on a chest piece? What's the point? What am i missing here in game design?
There are several factors that contributed to that. Before I go into them I should probably mention the Item Squish coming with Warlords of Draenor, which will have the effect of significantly reducing the stats on players' gear and help alleviate the problem of item inflation for several more expansions. Now for the factors.
Exponential stat budgets: In order for upgrades of X item levels to feel like meaningful boosts to player power they need to multiply your current power rather than just add to it. The increase from 5k to 10k health is a 100% increase and feels great, 20k to 25k is good but only a 25% boost, and 400k to 405k is barely noticeable at all. If X item levels always gave linear boosts then new tiers of gear would give increasingly small benefits relative to the previous tier and the gear/power incentive for raiding and whatnot would gradually fade away.
Given the above, either item levels or the stat budget granted for a certain item level needs to work on an exponential function to always provide that multiplicative boost. Either way would work, but Blizzard's gone the route of (somewhat) linear item levels granting exponential stat budgets.
Assume that the gear from each expansion covered an equal number of item levels (that's not true but let's roll with it). In Vanilla a Tier 2 geared tank (which was the highest one was likely to see since so few people raided Naxx 40) had about 8k health raid buffed. I didn't really play BC, but going with your figure of 20k for a tank that's a ratio of 2.5 increase over one expansion. If we extrapolate that we'd get 50k for Wrath, 125k for Cata, and 312.5k for MoP. A well-geared Wrath tank probably had health in the 50k range, maybe the 60k range if we're talking BiS 25 heroic, so at least through that point in time exponential stat budgets explain most of the inflation.
Brackets within tiers: In Vanilla and BC there was only one version of each raid. That changed with Wrath, in which you had 10 and 25 man raids in the same tier that dropped gear with different ilevels and (starting with Ulduar) also had normal and heroic versions of the same 10 or 25 man raid. They dropped the 10/25 item level distinction in Cata, but added Looking for Raid in Cata and Flex Raids in MoP which had a similar effect of increasing the number of item levels occupied by a given tier.
The extra inflation of item levels created by brackets can be countered within an expansion by having the higher brackets of one tier overlap the lower brackets of the next tier, which allows for players in each bracket to get a boost each tier without things getting too crazy. Unfortunately that doesn't work from one expansion to the next, as Blizzard wants the starting gear (at the level cap) in each new expansion to make even heroic geared players more powerful than they were before. Thus lower bracket players get a huge boost in item level each expansion, which means the higher brackets also need a significant boost to remain at higher levels than the new lower bracket gear.
Cata HP normalization: Up through Wrath heavier levels of armor (cloth, plate, etc.) had more base stamina on them than the lighter levels did, and tank gear had even more HP than plate dps gear did. This changed in Cata such that all armor types and roles have the same base stamina on them at a given item level, which had the effect of taking clothies from the 30k HP range at the end of Wrath to over 100k HP in Cata blues.
They could have brought everyone to, say, 70k at the beginning of Cata, but IIRC at the end of Wrath people were dying too quickly in PvP so the huge boost in health without as large a boost in damage was their way of mitigating that problem.
Blizzard's solution: the Item Squish
There are various subjective problems with having HP/stat/damage values get as large as they are, but the bigger problem is that they've started causing issues with the combat engine. Mob HP is apparently coded as a 32 bit signed integer, which has a maximum value of 2,147,483,647. Boss HP has already started brushing up against that value in MoP, causing things like Garrosh having a smaller health pool but healing to full during the fight, and having every raid boss do something like that in future expansions would just get silly. A real solution would change combat values to a 64 bit number, but apparently there are unknown difficulties that prevent them from doing so.
Blizzard's solution to that problem is the Item Squish, which will occur when MoP is released (specifically with the pre-expansion patch that's always released). It will take the stat budgets of all items through a certain point (either Wrath or Cata I believe; I don't know if they've officially announced the cutoff) and give them a stat budget that's linear with respect to their item level rather than exponential. Items beyond the cutoff will continue to have exponential stat bonuses, but will start their exponential curve from the much lower baseline provided by items right before the cutoff. In theory everything (mobs/buffs/etc.) will be rebalanced so that it's about as difficult/effective (or not) for high level players as it is now. They are also prepared to do further Squishes in the future once several expansions have passed and they get to a similar situation as we have now.
The squish will have the effect of making gear progression much slower before the cutoff, but since leveling is the primary progression mechanic before the level cap that's not a big deal (the direct effects of level on the combat system mean that even with identical stats a level 30 player would have a much easier time against a level 25 mob than a level 20 player would). Items from old raids will also be much closer together across tiers and expansions than they were before, but since nobody cares about the stats on them that's not a problem either. Items near and at the level cap will still have the exponential stat bonus increases that drive progression at level cap, but the side effects of brackets in tiers before the cutoff along with the Cata HP renormalization will be eliminated.
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AegisFear My DanceOvershot Toronto, Landed in OttawaRegistered Userregular
Well done internet. Decide to start fucking off 20 minutes before raid start, and then fix yourself 1 hour after we started? Yea, fuck you too.
Woooo killed Heroic Malkorok. Decided to extend because of presidents day fuckery limiting us to only 1 raid day this week so finally got our first good day of attempts. Killed him with 3 seconds on the enrage because we're the best.
First boss in bwl is soloable if you have some kind of hot or area heal you can stand in. When I was going through there on my pally I'd pick up the eternal flame talent, toss on rf, then hot myself between mind controls. Everything stuck to me like glue instead of going after the dragon
I could solo what's his face as a rogue at least as far back as mop release if not earlier. Just have to remember to manually release the orb every once in a while.
Success with soloing Razorgore is all up to hoping that enough mobs aggro onto you and not Razorgore. Because if too many are assholes and stick to him, there's fuck all you can do.
"The sausage of Green Earth explodes with flavor like the cannon of culinary delight."
Razorgore has two foolproof methods based on what skills your class has:
1) Heal Razorgore: if you have any sort of instant heal, you can cancel your channel by popping it on him which will definitely be enough to keep him alive.
2) Heal yourself: if you have any sort of hot that you can pop on yourself before starting the channel, then do so as the aggro from the heals will hopefully pull enough mobs onto you rather than Razorgore.
If you don't have either of those then you'll need to pop the eggs as fast as possible, starting from the far side coming closer to your side.
On Item Squish:
The item squish per the version at Blizzcon is going to flatten things at max level by about 90% such that if you have 500k max health now you'll end up with 50k afterwards. The items in Draenor will follow the same-old inflation style. Some assorted reasons why Blizz likes squish over continuing to grow:
-Squish means the differences between levels is less, which helps bring back the Vanilla feeling of being able to survive against someone 20 levels higher than you.
-Expanding to 64bit integers means a ton of extra bandwidth is required to run the game as every damage event will now need twice as much data to work.
-Numbers get really meaningless when they get gigantic such that it'd be likely that Blizz would set it up so everything is shown as kilo-damage or mega-damage. Visually this is basically the same as doing a squish, just everything would be a thousand/million times larger.
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SmasherStarting to get dizzyRegistered Userregular
Individual attacks still do way less than 2 billion damage so you wouldn't need to increase the size of the variable for that. If they send health updates instead, even if you had 50 player/mob attacks per second that's only an additional 200 bytes per second, and realistically it would typically be a lot less than that.
With all of the shit that goes on in the first frenzied few seconds of a given boss encounter, my comp lags down to about 10 fps. And then once Hero is over (or people calm the fuck down and run out of cooldowns to use), it stabilizes for me and I go back up to my normal 55+ fps for fights. It's not that the numbers are getting close to the variable's cap, it's that there's a shitton of fairly large numbers getting pushed out, and having to get mathed, and get pushed back to the players. Per second, you probably have about 100 attacks landing on just the boss, plus any damage the boss is doing either through AoEs or just fight mechanics, and god forbid there's adds to split off to kill. And then you have direct heals (AoE and single target) on top of the HoTs (also AoE and single target). Plus anything from pets, like Water Ele's Frostbolt and the Imp's Firebolt. And that's just for a 10 person raid. So already you're talking about a massive number of fairly large numbers that need to all be calculated and then sent back. I can see it getting pretty taxing for 25 man stuff when you start having the mages that can do 400k dps single target by spamming one ability, and then having a whole group doing similar dps and such.
I like how they are leaning towards props for highlighting the non-orc and non-human races of WoW in Garrison. It's a real good way to show they exist without running into the issue of having a town where none of the building mesh. I'm hoping they'll be able to incorporate some of the other races in a few things that aren't props, for some of the buildings, when doing so will work well with the overall theme.
Still praying that at some point going through garrisons, they'll decide this would be a great way to let people access all the professions (since they apparently don't like profession alts) and we'll just make the perk of picking two professions being convenience, rather than character power. In addition to some of the conveniences we already have, one of them could be that it's easier to use professions one chosses up (aka if you pick mining and jewel crafting, you won't have to go to your garrison to make use of them, but you'll have to do so for every thing else).
With all of the shit that goes on in the first frenzied few seconds of a given boss encounter, my comp lags down to about 10 fps. And then once Hero is over (or people calm the fuck down and run out of cooldowns to use), it stabilizes for me and I go back up to my normal 55+ fps for fights. It's not that the numbers are getting close to the variable's cap, it's that there's a shitton of fairly large numbers getting pushed out, and having to get mathed, and get pushed back to the players. Per second, you probably have about 100 attacks landing on just the boss, plus any damage the boss is doing either through AoEs or just fight mechanics, and god forbid there's adds to split off to kill. And then you have direct heals (AoE and single target) on top of the HoTs (also AoE and single target). Plus anything from pets, like Water Ele's Frostbolt and the Imp's Firebolt. And that's just for a 10 person raid. So already you're talking about a massive number of fairly large numbers that need to all be calculated and then sent back. I can see it getting pretty taxing for 25 man stuff when you start having the mages that can do 400k dps single target by spamming one ability, and then having a whole group doing similar dps and such.
CPUs are capable of performing billions of calculations per second. Memory latency issues bring that down lower, but we're still talking about hundreds or at worst tens of millions per second as long as you're not waiting for the hard drive. For a 32 bit (or higher) computer 1,203,238,013+324,193,284 takes the same amount of time as 1+1, so that's not an issue either.
Offhand I'd guess the lag you're experiencing is either due to RAM (paging to disk can kill performance) or your GPU is having trouble with all the spell effects on the pull. Either way, having a few hundred numbers per second be 4 bytes larger isn't going to cause any new performance issues.
Awesome to hear about the item squish. I like what they did between Vanilla and BC by adding stats beyond stam,int,str,agil to items. They added crit, haste, hit, etc....and then had jewel slots. So the numbers didn't get gaudy but you could see clear progression.
Speaking of which - I hit 58 and shot myself into Outlands immediately (thanks for the tips on the portal in Darnassus!). Beyond dealing with Horde killing everyone in Honor Hold...I hit 61 in about an hour. Running instances and doing quests I upgraded almost every slot of my gear in that time as well going from item lvl 58 to 85. It's hilarious how fast you can jump in leveling now compared to BC days. Back then you could have your MC/AQ epics, come into Outland and replace items pretty quickly too just without such a steep curve. Now I'm praying for those curves!
I'm not sure I'll go back to BWL necessarily as I'm not all about achievements, but who knows. I definitely will be in MC and BT though for them legendaries! Then again, could be fun to collect different warrior tier sets?
"Look out here comes"..."Susan"..."Suuuuuuuuuuuuusan".
"Woah, I just scared myself!"
They're trimming some of the stats (Hit, Expertise, Dodge, and Parry) out in WoD, but adding a few more (Readiness, Amplify, and Multi-strike) to replace them. Least that's the last I saw.
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We have a DK mass grip them and then chain a few aoe stuns. They are easier for people to eat that way as well.
Our biggest problem on hc Paragons was to soak the Aim lines but thats alot easier now its hotfixed so all hunters/priests/rogues/mages can just cancel it.
My guild finally started reaching p4 on Garrosh hc last night and we ended up on 15% on our best try. Hopefully he goes down next reset. We pretty much just have to survive the 4th malice.
I gotta say that I'm not really a fan of the fight. Its way too long and the only hard part with our current level of gear is to handle the whirl adds.
Paragons on the other hand is my favorite fight this tier. So much stuff can happen and the fight constantly changes. Every minute is a different set of events.
Are you soloing that content? I'm very interested in doing so as a Warrior. MC should be super easy but seeing as I've never done Black Temple before, i don't know how that will work.
"Woah, I just scared myself!"
I've spent most of my time on Kalimdor (never done it before to be honest) as a Worgen and pretty much did what @Mill suggested. Queue for dungeons all the time and keep doing quests. The gear/quests/xp from dungeons will give you a substantial boost in levels. I've always been slightly overleved for the quests ive done which has made them super easy and fast.
Question for all - Should hit 60 today, how do I get to Outlands from Kalimdor? Do i go through Menethil Harbor to Wetlands and walk? Is there a faster way? I guess i get flying mounts at 60, so that could ease my burden.
- 2nd question - Are there still attunements for raids? Do i need to do the MC attunement to start soloing that content?
Finally, this is more of a general thing I've seen on lvl 90 gear. Why did Blizzard scale so ridiculously on stats? When I quit playing at lvl 70...having 20k HP on a tank was a LOT. Now you get upwards of 400k? I just don't get it. Couldn't they have continued the level cap without scaling things so ridiculously? 1400 stamina on a chest piece? What's the point? What am i missing here in game design?
"Woah, I just scared myself!"
I think blackfuse was my favorite fight this tier
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
There are portals in all the major cities (and also in the quest hub in Silithus) that will take you right outside the Dark Portal in the Blasted lands. So once you hit 58 you can just hop in a portal to get there and then step through the big one to begin questing in Outland. In Darnassus the portal is in the Temple of the Moon right next to a portal that takes you to Exodar. In Stormwind, you'll pass the portal near the entrance to the Mage Tower.
Alternatively, ships from Darnassus go directly to Stormwind now (there's also the option of taking a boat from Ratchet to Booty Bay) if you want to take more scenic routes but not have to deal with the distance from Menethil Harbor.
As for attunements, I think almost all of them are gone except for Molten Core and Blackwing Lair. However, those attunements are really just shortcuts so you can get straight to the raid without having to run through part of Blackrock Depths or Upper Blackrock Spire respectively. You also no longer need to be in a raid group to enter any old raid, which makes soloing them much easier.
Of course, I think the first boss in Blackwing Lair still isn't soloable without some pet tricks as a hunter or something.
Oh, and in Molten Core you no longer need that magic water from Azshara in order to fight Ragnaros. The runes now activate automatically without it, so just kill all the other bosses and his lieutenant guy will spawn, then defeat him and he'll go summon Ragnaros for you.
There should be a portal to the Blasted Lands in one of your main cities, at least the Horde has one in Orgrimmar. Also no more attunements that I know of, so go crazy.
You can easily hit one million HP as a tank these days, it's ridiculous. I hit it towards the end of ToT around the 535ish Ivls, I imagine it's the norm at least for high HP tanks like Druids and DKs.
Do you have access to Stormwind? There's a portal in the Mage Tower that should take you to The Blasted Lands. Otherwise you will need to find a way to get to Eastern Kingdoms and make your way to the Blasted Lands.
Check your flight points when you arrive. I am not 100% certain but I believe that captial city flight points may be automatically known by fresh characters? If you can get to Stormwind that's your closest route to the Blasted Lands. Either by the Mage Tower's portal or by riding there through Deadwind Pass.
As for the extreme scaling I presume it is to allow people to solo previous content as a side activity and because bigger = better and cooler for most of the population. The numbers are getting shrunk next expansion (all of them) so we'll see what the reaction is.
It can be annoying to get it right though.
You can solo the first boss of BWL as any class now, but it is much much easier with 2 players. The only one I really have issues with soloing is Thorim and if I was an engineer, I could even manage that one.
As soon as you hit ~76 (w/e min level is for the quests), go to K3 and start the quests for the Crazy Barbarian Women(tm); which eventually lead to Thorim. By the time you are hopping on the backs of proto drakes and killing riders, you'll be 80.
A guy in my guild raided outside when we were trying to push the starter heroics, because his new apartment hadn't been wired for broadband yet, but the public wifi in a nearby park did work.
We had to call a raid because of rain once.
This is assuming you're 90 and have at least the "free" Timeless Isle 496 stuff.
As for WotLK, I know as a Rogue I can easily solo everything in ICC (including getting most achievements) up until the dragon that you have to heal, in which case I can't do jack. ICC has that zone-wide buff though, I haven't tried TotC or Ruby Sanctum to see how those would go.
Talks about philosophy and design, with a heavy focus on Alliance buildings. They all look incredibly nice.
For comparison, old Vanilla WoW lumber mill and level 3 Alliance Garrison lumber mill
Most of the adds seem to run straight to me. Though I used to have to break the MC and pick them off.
Zero. When they introduced the new frog model for the Throne of Thunder patch, they explicitly stated the weren't going to remove all the old frog models because they were part of the history of the game.
I think it's an equal part nostalgia and man-power thing, after the Cataclysm blow-back, it'll be a looong, looong time before Blizzard devotes any serious resources to retrofitting the "old world" ever again.
e: Actually Henroid, what I took from that is that profession buildings will be where the most non-human/orc architecture is.
It sounds like they're saying a Jewelcrafting building would have draenei accents, whereas a Blacksmithing building would feel like it has a dwarven influence, not that a Dwarf Blacksmith has a different forge.
I'm sure Horde garrisons will have Blood Elf influence on the mage tower and some-kind of Goblin foundry. Maybe the herbalism building will be Tauren flavored.
I have been a bad Boomkin in my raid, as I have not been providing them with Weakened Armor
Currently DMing: None
Characters
[5e] Dural Melairkyn - AC 18 | HP 40 | Melee +5/1d8+3 | Spell +4/DC 12
Exponential stat budgets: In order for upgrades of X item levels to feel like meaningful boosts to player power they need to multiply your current power rather than just add to it. The increase from 5k to 10k health is a 100% increase and feels great, 20k to 25k is good but only a 25% boost, and 400k to 405k is barely noticeable at all. If X item levels always gave linear boosts then new tiers of gear would give increasingly small benefits relative to the previous tier and the gear/power incentive for raiding and whatnot would gradually fade away.
Given the above, either item levels or the stat budget granted for a certain item level needs to work on an exponential function to always provide that multiplicative boost. Either way would work, but Blizzard's gone the route of (somewhat) linear item levels granting exponential stat budgets.
Assume that the gear from each expansion covered an equal number of item levels (that's not true but let's roll with it). In Vanilla a Tier 2 geared tank (which was the highest one was likely to see since so few people raided Naxx 40) had about 8k health raid buffed. I didn't really play BC, but going with your figure of 20k for a tank that's a ratio of 2.5 increase over one expansion. If we extrapolate that we'd get 50k for Wrath, 125k for Cata, and 312.5k for MoP. A well-geared Wrath tank probably had health in the 50k range, maybe the 60k range if we're talking BiS 25 heroic, so at least through that point in time exponential stat budgets explain most of the inflation.
Brackets within tiers: In Vanilla and BC there was only one version of each raid. That changed with Wrath, in which you had 10 and 25 man raids in the same tier that dropped gear with different ilevels and (starting with Ulduar) also had normal and heroic versions of the same 10 or 25 man raid. They dropped the 10/25 item level distinction in Cata, but added Looking for Raid in Cata and Flex Raids in MoP which had a similar effect of increasing the number of item levels occupied by a given tier.
The extra inflation of item levels created by brackets can be countered within an expansion by having the higher brackets of one tier overlap the lower brackets of the next tier, which allows for players in each bracket to get a boost each tier without things getting too crazy. Unfortunately that doesn't work from one expansion to the next, as Blizzard wants the starting gear (at the level cap) in each new expansion to make even heroic geared players more powerful than they were before. Thus lower bracket players get a huge boost in item level each expansion, which means the higher brackets also need a significant boost to remain at higher levels than the new lower bracket gear.
Cata HP normalization: Up through Wrath heavier levels of armor (cloth, plate, etc.) had more base stamina on them than the lighter levels did, and tank gear had even more HP than plate dps gear did. This changed in Cata such that all armor types and roles have the same base stamina on them at a given item level, which had the effect of taking clothies from the 30k HP range at the end of Wrath to over 100k HP in Cata blues.
They could have brought everyone to, say, 70k at the beginning of Cata, but IIRC at the end of Wrath people were dying too quickly in PvP so the huge boost in health without as large a boost in damage was their way of mitigating that problem.
Blizzard's solution: the Item Squish
There are various subjective problems with having HP/stat/damage values get as large as they are, but the bigger problem is that they've started causing issues with the combat engine. Mob HP is apparently coded as a 32 bit signed integer, which has a maximum value of 2,147,483,647. Boss HP has already started brushing up against that value in MoP, causing things like Garrosh having a smaller health pool but healing to full during the fight, and having every raid boss do something like that in future expansions would just get silly. A real solution would change combat values to a 64 bit number, but apparently there are unknown difficulties that prevent them from doing so.
Blizzard's solution to that problem is the Item Squish, which will occur when MoP is released (specifically with the pre-expansion patch that's always released). It will take the stat budgets of all items through a certain point (either Wrath or Cata I believe; I don't know if they've officially announced the cutoff) and give them a stat budget that's linear with respect to their item level rather than exponential. Items beyond the cutoff will continue to have exponential stat bonuses, but will start their exponential curve from the much lower baseline provided by items right before the cutoff. In theory everything (mobs/buffs/etc.) will be rebalanced so that it's about as difficult/effective (or not) for high level players as it is now. They are also prepared to do further Squishes in the future once several expansions have passed and they get to a similar situation as we have now.
The squish will have the effect of making gear progression much slower before the cutoff, but since leveling is the primary progression mechanic before the level cap that's not a big deal (the direct effects of level on the combat system mean that even with identical stats a level 30 player would have a much easier time against a level 25 mob than a level 20 player would). Items from old raids will also be much closer together across tiers and expansions than they were before, but since nobody cares about the stats on them that's not a problem either. Items near and at the level cap will still have the exponential stat bonus increases that drive progression at level cap, but the side effects of brackets in tiers before the cutoff along with the Cata HP renormalization will be eliminated.
Currently DMing: None
Characters
[5e] Dural Melairkyn - AC 18 | HP 40 | Melee +5/1d8+3 | Spell +4/DC 12
I could solo what's his face as a rogue at least as far back as mop release if not earlier. Just have to remember to manually release the orb every once in a while.
1) Heal Razorgore: if you have any sort of instant heal, you can cancel your channel by popping it on him which will definitely be enough to keep him alive.
2) Heal yourself: if you have any sort of hot that you can pop on yourself before starting the channel, then do so as the aggro from the heals will hopefully pull enough mobs onto you rather than Razorgore.
If you don't have either of those then you'll need to pop the eggs as fast as possible, starting from the far side coming closer to your side.
On Item Squish:
The item squish per the version at Blizzcon is going to flatten things at max level by about 90% such that if you have 500k max health now you'll end up with 50k afterwards. The items in Draenor will follow the same-old inflation style. Some assorted reasons why Blizz likes squish over continuing to grow:
-Squish means the differences between levels is less, which helps bring back the Vanilla feeling of being able to survive against someone 20 levels higher than you.
-Expanding to 64bit integers means a ton of extra bandwidth is required to run the game as every damage event will now need twice as much data to work.
-Numbers get really meaningless when they get gigantic such that it'd be likely that Blizz would set it up so everything is shown as kilo-damage or mega-damage. Visually this is basically the same as doing a squish, just everything would be a thousand/million times larger.
R*SC: BladeCruiser
Check out my GTAV-PC custom race tracks inspired by real life racing circuits!
Still praying that at some point going through garrisons, they'll decide this would be a great way to let people access all the professions (since they apparently don't like profession alts) and we'll just make the perk of picking two professions being convenience, rather than character power. In addition to some of the conveniences we already have, one of them could be that it's easier to use professions one chosses up (aka if you pick mining and jewel crafting, you won't have to go to your garrison to make use of them, but you'll have to do so for every thing else).
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
Offhand I'd guess the lag you're experiencing is either due to RAM (paging to disk can kill performance) or your GPU is having trouble with all the spell effects on the pull. Either way, having a few hundred numbers per second be 4 bytes larger isn't going to cause any new performance issues.
Speaking of which - I hit 58 and shot myself into Outlands immediately (thanks for the tips on the portal in Darnassus!). Beyond dealing with Horde killing everyone in Honor Hold...I hit 61 in about an hour. Running instances and doing quests I upgraded almost every slot of my gear in that time as well going from item lvl 58 to 85. It's hilarious how fast you can jump in leveling now compared to BC days. Back then you could have your MC/AQ epics, come into Outland and replace items pretty quickly too just without such a steep curve. Now I'm praying for those curves!
I'm not sure I'll go back to BWL necessarily as I'm not all about achievements, but who knows. I definitely will be in MC and BT though for them legendaries! Then again, could be fun to collect different warrior tier sets?
"Woah, I just scared myself!"