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LOL, so finishing up Cata. Now level 84, I know I level slow but I'm busy in real life and want to experience the leveling game. Anyway, Uldum is the most fun I've had since Plague Lands. Very well done and makes up for vashj'ir. The over the top Indiana Jones bit on top of other things like Schnottz landing is just sprinkles on top for me. For fucks sake I'm old enough to remember Knotts Landing, though it bored me to tears as a kid.

Ret Pally seems ok, pretty solid with good tool kit for survival and decent DPS. Still will prob go tank or healer but nice to know DPS is ok.

Broomstick wrote:That's been a complaint about elemental from day one - lack of viability at the top of the end game. BUT - for soloing mixed with a bit of everything else it is in fact viable. If someone is looking more towards PvE but isn't that concerned with top-end raiding there's a lot that's good about it.

My problem isn't even the top, it's that Enhancement just blows Elemental away in anything but the biggest of trash pulls. You feel like you're gimping yourself bothering with it. This problem has become even more an issue now that gear is "all stats" as people actually bitch. I ignore them, but my buddy who mains Shaman gets tired of it. He doesn't mind Enh, but he started a Shammie for Ele.

It's the same way I feel about Frost vs Unholy DK. I'm a Frost DK, but (and there have been some buffs to Frost), I could fail my way through Unholy in the same gear and pickup an extra 20-30% DPS. Oh yea, and I mob people to death with shittons of ghouls in PvP. They got a lot about Unholy right, but they left Frost in the dust. At the least, Elemental continues to be a fun spec to play which is why I won't ditch it but is also why I would never main a Shaman, same for Mage (I enjoy Frost too much).

Knife wrote:LOL, so finishing up Cata. Now level 84, I know I level slow but I'm busy in real life and want to experience the leveling game. Anyway, Uldum is the most fun I've had since Plague Lands. Very well done and makes up for vashj'ir. The over the top Indiana Jones bit on top of other things like Schnottz landing is just sprinkles on top for me. For fucks sake I'm old enough to remember Knotts Landing, though it bored me to tears as a kid.

Vash'Jir... at launch. It's like "Hey, we got this whole ocean to play with. Let's make all the quest areas as small as possible and force players to clump up for no reason."

Ret Pally seems ok, pretty solid with good tool kit for survival and decent DPS. Still will prob go tank or healer but nice to know DPS is ok.

Supposedly Ret is super-good right now. Top-Tier Single-Target DPS, moderate AOE (insane if you get multiple procs), and is a beast in PvP. They are one of the better tanks and heals at the moment as well. The tanking is boring, but it gets the job done. Amazingly, Ret is now the most fun spec to play because, while there are few, you do have choices to make and there's viability among different talents in a tree.

I expect Ret to be nerfed into oblivion soon. Really never allowed to be on top for long after Wrath of the Retadin. And not even top, they aren't allowed to be anything but middle-of-the-road for extended periods of time. Much like DKs, Blizzard seems to react punitively and quickly any time they become the slightest bit overtuned.

But the buffs to Ret didn't come out of a vacuum, so it would be cool if they stuck around.

This is the cutscene from the nighthold raid. Warning. MASSIVE spoilers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJOuFktebfY Spoiler

Hey, what goes around comes around.

After feeling really good in general about this expansion, hitting a ton of roadblocks labeled "Requires Mythic Dungeon" has taken the wind out of my sails. Feels a bit like the expansion is already over.

7.2 seems to dial down the mythic dungeon demands, that said I didn't find pugging mythic that hard, Mythic+ might be, I dunno I've not tried, I've had more relaxed and fun runs on mythic pugs with total strangers then I've had on normal or heroic (also with total strangers), it seems that on heroic and normal there's a lot of people that need to compensate for something that are super hasty and nasty where as on mythic people are more willing to take the time to do things well and eventually are actually fasters as there's less stupid wipes.

I just cant be assed to spam LFG for mythic 0. If we have to do mythic put it as part of the LFD tool.

Zwinmar wrote:I just cant be assed to spam LFG for mythic 0. If we have to do mythic put it as part of the LFD tool.

you can queue for mythics in the LFG tool you don't have to spam chat for that (tbh I like to make my groups but still I've had fun with the groups I've gotten and it didn't take that long to get one)

Darth Yan wrote:This is the cutscene from the nighthold raid. Warning. MASSIVE spoilers.

Why are villians in WoW so replaceable these days? I guess Gul'Dan has already been offed once, but Garrosh was at least a threat and the Lich King taunted us and did things (besides being magic). Gul'Dan laughs like a cartoon villian, then dies to Edgelord Iliidan in some fanfiction *teleports behind you* levels of hilarity. Nice callback to BC, I'll give it that.

I don't like Illidan. That's not true, I actually find a lot about the character "cool" for lack of a better term. But Blizzard's "but thou must" beating (once again) the Kerrigan motif and trying to tell us "really not that bad guys" while showing us that he's an irredeemable monster is Blizzard SOP. It's old and tired and Blizzard continues to wonder (or I assume they do) why people are leaving.

Blizzard thinks they know how to write an anti-hero, but they are complete shit at it and can really only pull off generic fantasy cliches ripped straight from other IPs.

Lord Revan wrote:you can queue for mythics in the LFG tool you don't have to spam chat for that (tbh I like to make my groups but still I've had fun with the groups I've gotten and it didn't take that long to get one)

Try being an undergeared DPS with no friends (not me, I was a moderately geared tank with no friends). Besides, spamming "please God invite me" in LFG only serves to cut spam out of trade-chat. Mythics are just the new Cata Heroics, no reason they shouldn't be in LFD. Leave the Diablo 3 Mythic +2353246456 bullshit to Group Finder, but locking content behind another difficulty treadmill you have to actively find a group for is shitty on their part. The new dev team continues to show they give no shits about casuals.

I'm no casual.... but "whoops" and I am now because at times my kid might decide to get mad. Then I have to leave for a bit. Dropping from a LFD group costs them little. Dropping from a premade LFG group screws them. I don't like screwing people because I'm not an ass, so I don't do mythics. There are thousands of other players in the same boat watching as more story content is gated because the WoW dev team has showed that endgame is only for people who can dedicate uninterrupted hours at a time.

Otherwise, it's "go spam World Quests till you vomit."

my main is a ilevel 850 mage so I am "under leveled" DPS and I've not really that many issues, oh and I got 850 after 7.1 and had done the Arcway and Court of Stars several times before that hell I did the Kara attunement mythics twice (because I forgot I didn't need to do that individually for each character).


edit:this is my main, just to show that I'm not lying when I say I'm pugging these.

If anything, I'm finding PUG's a lot more pleasent than they've been in years, despite my underpowered alts and never having been the best at any of that sort of group activity. This has been the case across three different servers in three different battle-groups. I don't get where some people are having big issues with PUGging.

Broomstick wrote:If anything, I'm finding PUG's a lot more pleasent than they've been in years, despite my underpowered alts and never having been the best at any of that sort of group activity. I don't get where some people are having big issues with PUGging.

I think it's thing that pugs tend to bring on the people who aren't good enough for the content (or are barely good enough) who want for the run to be a cakewalk so they demand things like "900+ ilevel and achiviment from mythic Tomb of Sargeras" for normal 5-mans at level 110. So when raid/group isn't that they whine and ragequit and if they're the leaders they'll accept nothing less even if they had standard leveling greens and no achiviments what so ever.

That kind of attitude sours people to pugs and they kind of bring that attitude with to even good pugs souring the mood and making those seems bad as well.

EDIT:that said I generally make my pugs rather trying to find a group as it's easier to get decent people that way then to try finding the good group for the sea of bad ones.

From what I've been hearing, the concept of "undergeared" or "overgeared" is vague at best this expansion. Secondary stats are apparently so messed up that for some specs a raid drop is a massive downgrade from a quest reward because the raid drop doesn't have the secondary stat they need to function. For some it's so bad that some secondary stats are considered more important than Strength/Agility/Intellect.

Lord Revan wrote:my main is a ilevel 850 mage so I am "under leveled" DPS and I've not really that many issues, oh and I got 850 after 7.1 and had done the Arcway and Court of Stars several times before that hell I did the Kara attunement mythics twice (because I forgot I didn't need to do that individually for each character).

No offense man, but you're a Fire Mage. Literally the top-tier DPS this expansion whose sole weakness is having merely "above-average" AOE DPS (last I checked). I'm leaning more towards Broomstick's post because I know she has at least one Ele shaman, though I don't know what (if anything) she mains.

I'm not saying, in any way, you don't pull your weight or get shit done. But I recall being declined for many Flex 3s in Pandas on a Frost DK (ilvl 565 at the time IIRC) because "melee is cancer in wing 3," even though I murder-rolled DPS in the groups I got into. All because I needed a non-LFR version of Thok's Tailtip and we were past him on Normal in my raid group. I can't think of a single time anyone would decline whatever Mage spec is currently murdering the DPS list for any reason other than "we already have 5 Mages."

The few times I've bothered to try and pug, I got back two messages: "can you go DPS?" when applying to a group as a Demon Hunter Tank. They were willing to take me as my shitty off-spec and wait for a "better" tank. I think I was 845 at the time. The other, which I can't believe they responded at all, was if my Unholy spec was up to par. They wanted me to burn trash as Frost, but wanted Unholy for the bosses. Probably for the best I declined THEM.

Yea, I agree: the attitude of pugs is above and beyond what I'm used to as most people in the past wouldn't have even responded and these people were quite pleasant to talk with, but this might be due to how small the community has become, at least on Naz.

That said, Rob's been rejected (in past expansions, mind you) because he wouldn't switch from Arcane. He doesn't like Fire or Frost and he's been accused of wanting a carry because he won't switch. Multiple people I used to run with, who have now quit but hang around on b.net, have stated that since their guilds have fallen apart, pugging had become tiresome. Also of note: the WoW forums and other forums I troll for info concerning WoW.

I don't care if certain difficulties are gated behind pugs/guilds/groups of friends. But Blizzard set a precedence of not gating content behind these things, only gating higher difficulties. They've gone back on this system they've had since the end of Cata. I dealt with this back in MoP, but I had the time to deal with it. I could take an hour of declines (or put my own group together) and THEN do actual content for 2-3 hours. Hell, this lead to me being sucked into and becoming the go-to-DPS guy in a guild that got me my Garrosh kill. But, I don't have that uninterrupted time to devote anymore and it wouldn't be worth it even if I did.

I'm going to grant that I could just be racked off because my partner in crime for tanking back in Pandas begged me to level my Pally and he'd get me a raid spot but he wouldn't take my DH main because the raid didn't think it could tank EN Normal. I know DHs aren't in the best spot, but are you fucking serious?

tl;dr: Blizzard refusing to put Mythic into LFD (or making heroic versions that count for quest credit) and letting people without the time to devote hours to a game and leave if they have to without dicking the other 4 players over is a piss-poor design decision. Further, giving these people nothing else to do but one LFR meat-grinder run a week and a few more WQs means people are mad. The casual playerbase that made WoW into the monolith it was are being forgotten and it's going to continue to negatively affect the game.

If you aren't having problems, that's good. I am/was. So were/are others I run with except my geared Pally healer buddy. If I leveled and geared my, let's say.... Pally Tank to my DH ilvl: instant invites. I bet money on it. But DH Tank? Frost DK? Hell, DK at all since Blood is in the shitter and Unholy is already falling behind again because Blizzard is like "lol, what's math?"? Not worth it. I'm not maining a spec I don't enjoy just to see more Quality™ Blizzard writing.

Put that shit in LFD, let them see my DH tank shit. They roll their eyes, I don't die, dungeon cleared, all is happy. We wipe too much, people leave, boo hoo, tears all around. It works for FFXIV (and early cata) and that game is a shitton harder than WoW.

TheFeniX wrote:I'm leaning more towards Broomstick's post because I know she has at least one Ele shaman, though I don't know what (if anything) she mains.

The elemental shaman is my main.

I also have a demonology warlock, outlaw rogue (two of them), arcane mage, and a demon hunter I've just barely started using. Can't remember what spec my paladin is - haven't re-tooled her since the expansion came out.

Still get occasional assholes, of course, but like I said, this expansion seems to have better PUGs. At least for now. Sometimes I get asked to go healer spec for my shaman but, frankly, I totally suck at it. I'll pop off an occasional heal in an emergency, but not go in with that as my role.

Despite not having kids I can't devote uninterrupted time to the game, either. Add to that my wildly eccentric work schedule and I can't join a group that meets regularly. It's OK - I'm happy with how I'm playing the game right now. I can see how it might frustrate someone else.

Civil War Man wrote:From what I've been hearing, the concept of "undergeared" or "overgeared" is vague at best this expansion. Secondary stats are apparently so messed up that for some specs a raid drop is a massive downgrade from a quest reward because the raid drop doesn't have the secondary stat they need to function. For some it's so bad that some secondary stats are considered more important than Strength/Agility/Intellect.

While it definitely does apply to pieces with primary stats, your "off" pieces such as necks, rings, etc no longer have primary stats. So, you could possibly (and it will happen) get a piece 20 ilvls above what you have and it be absolute garbage: hope you're an enchanter. And with the changes being thrown around making entire stats/specs "useless" on a given day, you sometimes can't even bet on your gear holding out at all. However, you could just play Frost DK and have every secondary stat be nearly equally as bad so everything is an upgrade!

Really, checking the Artifact iLvL seems to be a decent goto, but even that isn't that great. Certain gold traits in the Artifact tier (which you can't check) add an absurd amount of damage/survivability/healing output that would outshine significant ilvl increases. With all this confusion, a lot of pugs (from my experience) have fallen back on the tried and true Class/Spec > ilvl > everything else.

I learned this when I decided to mess with my Frost Mage in Pandas. Frost was still strong at lower ilvls, even into SoO. I used to fight getting into pugs as Frost DK, even in groups that were just newly formed and even when my ilvl was ready to jump into Heroics. But my 540-548 (been a while) Frost Mage could get into (first two wings, mind you) Normal SoO raids easier than my DK could get into Flex. It was a pretty big eye opener. I thought DPS just had it rough (had always tanked, thanks for the instant invite to group). No, it just turns out certain DPS have a Hell of a time, certain ones (either actually OP or just seen that way by the playerbase) do not.

As a hyuge lurker, I've been following this thread for awhile, and I am thinking: is there an SDN guild? Would anyone be interested in joining/creating one? I have no preference on faction or server, but I will happily roll a new character to make a guild on a server people like, or join with one of my higher level ones on a server I already play on (primarily The Scryers or Azshara.)

No SDN guild that I know but then we're spread between at least 2 regional servers possibly 3 based on the people involved on this thread alone, I mean I'm on the EU servers so play with people from the US only in the PTR.

Yeah, on Bleeding Hollow myself with an ilvl 865 Enh Shaman. As I can't play my former main because they took everything away, I was survival on him from BC on.

Broomstick wrote:Still get occasional assholes, of course, but like I said, this expansion seems to have better PUGs. At least for now. Sometimes I get asked to go healer spec for my shaman but, frankly, I totally suck at it. I'll pop off an occasional heal in an emergency, but not go in with that as my role.

Yea, people seem to be a lot nicer about it. Makes me wish DKs weren't terrible and I was at the point now that I was during MoP because the average guy/gal running a group isn't just a dismissive asshole. During Pandas, had DKs been this bad, the only response I would have expected (if I got one at all) would have been "hahahahahahaha!." Then again, we had just been merged with Mannoroth and those guys weren't happy about it.

Some "Parks and Rec" shit right there.

Despite not having kids I can't devote uninterrupted time to the game, either. Add to that my wildly eccentric work schedule and I can't join a group that meets regularly. It's OK - I'm happy with how I'm playing the game right now. I can see how it might frustrate someone else.

If it were just one thing, I'd probably have put up with it. But it's all these little things that combine with the big things that just make it easier to log off and play Ark, Heroes, Vermintide, etc. It finally culminated when "Everyone else went to bed, let's give Mythic a shot." The people were nice, yes. But it's like both the classes/specs I had at 110 that were either "my" spec (Frost DK) or just fun "Veng DH," the community has decided are shit and won't bother with.

I never leveled/played something I didn't like just to see cutscenes and I'm not about to start now.

Lord Revan wrote:No SDN guild that I know but then we're spread between at least 2 regional servers possibly 3 based on the people involved on this thread alone, I mean I'm on the EU servers so play with people from the US only in the PTR.

Small world though. I'm pretty sure Zwinmar's guild is on my Spy KOS list, for what good it would do. Then again, there's a lot of Cho'Gall/Bleeding Hollow Horde on my KOS list.

TheFeniX wrote:Then again, we had just been merged with Mannoroth and those guys weren't happy about it.

Some "Parks and Rec" shit right there.

Now we're all united in the salt mines about how much of a dick Cho'Gall players are. Also, fuck Laughing Skull.

Feel free to hit me up if you ever need someone approximately priest-shaped, though.

Apparently the new clusterfuck on the WoW forums concerns incoming changes to Fire Mages. They are not only receiving a fairly substantial "nerf," as part of this core class mechanics are being changed, something Blizzard has said they won't do. This is both a good and bad decision: no one should have to relearn their class during a raid tier but it also means classes/specs with broken mechanics will only get minor buffs/nerfs to even them out. This also tends to not fix issues with gear scaling.

Blizzard going back on stated intentions is not new. What seems to be new is that within 24 hours of the patch hitting the PTR, Blizzard was kind enough to make a post defending it. There was also a developer who joined the Mage Discord to discuss the changes as well. Many other classes have been given nothing more than "we hear your feedback, we're looking into it" or "thread cap raised." Jumping in and (stealing another poster's joke) "rubbing Fire Mage feet to get them through this" after also saying you won't buff Frost because Fire Mages might feel bad if Frost overtakes them.... this isn't helping players in their anger against Blizzard as they feel anyone not a Mage isn't worth even a "fuck you."

I think it's very fair to say the spec needed some adjustments - that's something I've heard in Trade and Guild Chat since Legion day one (even the post above me is a player who boosted a mage for this reason).

You can't make this shit up.

White Haven wrote:Now we're all united in the salt mines about how much of a dick Cho'Gall players are. Also, fuck Laughing Skull.

Feel free to hit me up if you ever need someone approximately priest-shaped, though.

It makes me laugh because I nearly always only have Manno/Naz/BloodF Alliance to rely on for support. I pay attention to this: you have to know who can/might back you up in an engage. I see very very few Alliance from other servers, yet am met with a constant wave of Horde from other servers. So, what Blizzard meant when they said they wanted the world to feel more alive was "feel more dead as you walk through a pile of corpses." This isn't even an Ally/Horde deal: the system doesn't care. It just seems to match you at random based on cvars (or whatever) Blizzard has set for a given area/instance.

I think I've said this before, but the only "fix" for players is to either transfer to PvE (which still doesn't fix having an opposite-faction dominant server tag all your mobs) or transfer to a large population and faction dominate server. And people continue to slowly do this over time, making Blizzard tons of money, further destabilizing server balance on large pop servers, and making life even more miserable for those who can't/won't transfer. Oh yea, and run up login times.

At this point, I don't give a shit how tin-foil it is: I assume it's intentional as part of Activision's mantra of "short-term profits at the cost of retention."

The real irony is that Back In The Day, Cho'Gall was the server Blizzard kept opening up free transfers to from Mannoroth to try to relieve some of the huge population pressure on Manno. Now Manno is a quiet server getting mercilessly razed by Cho'Gall Horde.

White Haven wrote:The real irony is that Back In The Day, Cho'Gall was the server Blizzard kept opening up free transfers to from Mannoroth to try to relieve some of the huge population pressure on Manno. Now Manno is a quiet server getting mercilessly razed by Cho'Gall Horde.

Well..... this is the third time I've laughed out loud today (been an active lunch break, watched the Warcraft Cinema Sins, checked the comments "But Warcraft came out before LotR." I also rewatched the Thomas the Tank Engine Mod video.

Anyway, I didn't know that bit of history and it's hilarious. This takes me back to my fruitless arguments when I bothered to argue on the bnet forums: Even a server like the Manno group, which is pretty damn well balanced and should provide a solid PvP and PvE experience is being rolled by faction dominated mega-servers allowed to coexist with it. It ruins the game for everyone else and Blizzard doesn't just allow it, they want it to happen because they continue to support CRZs existence in Legion zones.

If they were working on the problem at all, that might have been enough for me to stay, but they have stated outright CRZ is here to stay and they've said nothing about how, if in any way, they intend to fix it. So, fuck em.

I can't tell you how much more fun this game was when they patched out CRZ after "accidentally" enabling it after every Tuesday reset. Server reset days were awful, but the rest of the week was enjoyable and we'd even have a few WPvP dust-ups that were also enjoyable. And there's no fix to it from the player side: you could blow hundreds of dollars researching then buying a server transfer and still worry about making the right choice. If you play it smart and move to a high-pop/faction dominant server: you've fixed your issue but are now just another part of the problem.

The only small bit of good news, that I think I've stated before but I like the sound of my own voice, is that these players are so used to a curbstomp, they tend to be absolutely horrible when the numbers don't favor them heavily. Soloing a Warrior, Hunter, and Warlock on my Prot Warrior when I only had two levels on them (was 105). My DH teaming up with a Bear to take out a SPriest, Warlock, and Shaman without issue, me having been ganked by those 3 a few minutes earlier.

They don't even know how to run effectively when they start losing badly.

TheFeniX wrote:saying you won't buff Frost because Fire Mages might feel bad if Frost overtakes them....

That post was beyond baffling. It would have been less insulting if he had just said, "We're not going to buff Frost because I play Fire," because then at least no one could claim he was being dishonest.

It's right up there with when he said that they basically felt that GC's "Bring the player, not the class" philosophy was a mistake. Because nothing made organizing a raid more fun for a guild than forcing members to reroll or recruiting mediocre players because they needed exactly X Warlocks, Y Shamans, or Z Warriors to clear a specific boss.