f13.net

UO is boring me again lately, and I can feel the WoW bug biting. This is nothing unusual, as my MMO consumption for the last couple years has been about 2 or 3 parts UO to 1 part WoW, a mixture I find most agreeable. Whenever I want post-SNES graphics and clearly-defined goals, I play a little WoW. When I get tired of being on rails, I hop back over to UO.

I haven't been paying attention to shit in WoW since like March. What's going on now? Is there somewhere I can go to get brought up to speed in a hurry? What's a "scroll of resurrection" and how can one of my WoW-playing friends get a free month? When does WOTLK come out? Stuff like that.

I'm pretty sure I deleted my 70 in a fit of boredom, but I have a 43 laying around, and anyway leveling is the fun part of WoW in my experience.

Basically if you give your email to someone who is currently playing WoW they can use the "scroll of resurrection" feature on the website to give you a 10-day activation of your account. If you reactivate after that and pay for a month the person who gave you the scroll gets a free month. Tada. I'll do it if you want (woo, free $15!).

Anyway, Patch 3.0+ is out.

-All classes are hysterically powerful right now since we got the class and talent trees from the upcoming expansion. Ret pallies kick fucking ass right now, as do a lot of other classes. Everything is turned on its head really. Dagger-build rogues rock now where they've been useless forever, as mentioned ret pallies are amazing, protection warriors are actually capable of doing DPS and AOE tanking, etc. Cats living with dogs, etc

-All Burning Crusade RAID bosses have had 30% of their HP chopped off for the sheer hell of it.

-If you used any addons, they're probably broken now. Go check wowinterface.com or something to find stuff that works.

-Inscription is in. It's the new profession with the expansion. You obviously can't level it past the point it needs materials from the expansion content, but you can see most of the goodies. Inscription makes scrolls and more importantly glyphs. Glyphs are like...skill enchants. They last forever until you overwrite or delete them, and they change your skills and abilities. You get "major" and "minor" glyph slots as you level up. At level 80 you'll have 3 major slots and 3 minor. Major slots make big changes to abilities (i.e. one major glyph makes Flash of Light a heal-over-time basically), minors make...well, minor changes (i.e. Minor mage glyphs include one that makes your polymorph turn stuff into penguins, another removes the reagent cost of slow fall, etc).

Raiding is essentially a total open-ending joke now up to the end to T6. If you ever had thoughts of kicking ass in the raids one level above you, you can probably pug them with little to no problems. There are exceptions to this with the most technical fights in T6 like Archimonde and the Sunwell area, but the rest has been pretty pleasant.

Kara is the new UBRS. It's a 2 hour run now for a clear. Almost anyone can MT now if they like anywhere. Almost anyone can AE tank as well. DPS is off the charts, but nobody is pulling aggro. It's crazy.

What the dancing monkey said.  Full clear of Kara in a single night and I didn't enjoy any of it.

I'm not down with hardcore raiding, but I'm not for smacking spastics in wheelchairs either.

Ret pallies are awesome now? Really?

 :drill: :drill: :drill:

Yes. Like broken aweome.

BTW, Blizzard will probably restore your deleted 70 as well. They did that for a smacktard I know who deleted everything from his account.

We crushed ZA in 61 minutes last night.  Which is... like an hour faster than usual.  Kara took longer at 1h35m.  I thought we were all just doing more damage, I didn't know about the 30% chop.

I don't mind kicking over some wheelchairs for achievements.

Paladins are awesome during EVERY beta.

Blizzard will crush your spirits soon and restore Warlocks to their rightful place at the top of the heap.

Count on it.

Also this.

Basically, a few days ago I hopped on my old Warrior for shits and giggles. Full S1. That's about it.

I specced full Fury, equipped a Deep Thunder and  a S2 2h mace, and pretty much trapsed around the fucking battleground killing whoever I looked at.

Let me put it this way. I have multiple 70s. 3 of them are my priest, warlock, and rogue who are geared out the ass in PVP epics. One of them was a holy paladin with a PVP trinket and questing greens. I brought out her oathkeeper and specced her ret and play her because she is the most powerful at the moment. My brother did the same with his paladin he got to level 70 3 days ago over his fully geared shaman and warrior. We team up with 1-3 other ret paladins we know and just rape the BGs so hard. Looking at our stats we haven't lost a single game since the patch and we've been playing a lot. I'm pretty sure that right now you can tell if you're going to win by checking which side has the most paladins and bringing 3-5 means you always win. :ye_gods:

Buddies of mine got from 1500-2000 arena rating running double ret in one night last night.

Several of the wins were 1 versus 2 as one or the other of them got the transfer aborted instance not found message.

Ret Holy lights land for 4k, crit for 8k and when they crit they throw a 2k HoT on the person.

BC is now officially obsolete. They're just letting people spend a month tinkering with the old content before the expansion hits.

That's only true if they healed for the full 8k. Overheal doesn't count last I knew.

No, I get that, but even when the BC 'patch' went live, we weren't kicking shit over as quickly as this.  It worries me a lot.

From what I've read, WOTLK isn't going to be the great gear rest button that BC was - the purples you're kitted out in now will do you until they start getting replaced in the mid-70's. From what I understand the content is balanced against new players coming up in their quest blus and AH greens, not against people in S2-3 and T5-6, or even Kara gear. So if this is true, we'll demolish the initial content and gradually slow down the progression when we hit the power band.

Didn't get to play much, but I took my 43 ret out to beat ogres. Between Judgement making my hits heal me, and not having to chain Seal of Crusader, Judgement, Seal of Command, Judgement, constantly anymore, I'm dropping equal level mobs with my health and mana more or less full. Even stuff 4 levels higher is barely fazing me. I didn't drink once.

Me likey.  :awesome_for_real:

My 62 mage can round up a group of 10 lvl 64 mobs, hit them with the blizzard and just watch them die.

Given that movement speed is reduced by something silly like 85% and they have a chance to be frozen (and thus critted +75%), they simply can't get out.

It's a culling on a massive scale.

The fun comes against demons/undead: I took down 4 demons in Jaedenar the other day (as a lvl 50) in under a minute then realised they were all 2 levels higher than me. Seriously thinking of nipping to Plaguelands and grinding levels for a bit instead of questing.

BTW - has AD rep doubled like Timbermaw rep has?

Shut up! I've successfuly not giving a shit about Wow for nearly 1 and a half years. I don't need to folk banging on about how delightfully OP my Ret Pally would be, especially not now that university is finished (as soon as write another 1000 words in the fuck of an essay) for the year.

I should uninstall WoW from my PC so I have a bigger buffer in contemplation time.

[optomist]
I'm hoping that Wrath sees a move away from numbers, Numbers, NUMBERS! and more towards making raids fun and engaging.
I'm also hoping that the power curve changes in the recent patch are an indicator of that.
[/optimist]

Realistically, yeah. It's probably going to be Blizzard mucking up with the new talents and taking a few years to tweak everything back to gearcheck as normal.

I did a Kara run last night with my guild, and it was definitley EZMode for us. Even got the undead dragon dude down in one try. Now, we've been doing Kara for a while, and are no slouches. I can see it still being difficult for new raiders. (One of our Pallies was new, and took a fair bit more damage than anyone else.)
Tonight we're running SSC. That'll be interesting as I've never been past the first two bosses.

To sum up though, I think BC is not only obsolete, but an anachronism. (Much like vanilla WoW raids are now.) Wrath should hopefully be better balanced for challenge versus gear.

I disagree a little.

We went to ZA and knocked off the first four bosses no bother at all.  We only stopped due to beddy byes.

We'd never been to ZA before.  At all.  We learned the fights by me TYPING shit I was reading from Wowwiki.

I imagined, right then, that I was pretty much pissing in every hardcore raiders mouth at the same time.

It's not right.


I agree wholeheartedly about the fun tho.  Enjoying the fuckery out of my Prot Warrior and icey mage.

The claims about T6 content being massively easy now is pretty accurate. My guild has been clearing BT and MH for a couple months now and never really made a serious push into Sunwell. Played around with Kalecgos a bit but never really got through a full portal rotation. This week:

Cleared BT in 2 hours
Cleared MH in 100 min
Went to sunwell for shits and giggles, killed Kalec on the first try, Brutallus on the 2nd try, and attempted Felmyst 2-3 times with no clue as to the strategy and took her under 50%. I wouldn't be at all surprised if we were able to clear all of Sunwell before the xpac hits.

Oh and 14 manned all of AQ40.. I didn't go to that one but I heard it was insanely fun!

Kara is pretty damn easy.  We killed the Curator before he got his first evocate off without a problem.  But, all these changes give me a chance to get the last badges I need for a weapon that should last me awhile into the expansion, so I'm pretty pleased. 

They also seem to have upped the reputation gains in all the old Heroic instances.  I was getting 16-17 a kill in Ramparts and Shattered Halls last night, which I'm pretty sure is new. 

Ret Pallies in BGs are powerful if you get caught in a stun or Repentance.

I just make sure I trinket/zerker rage out of those, and I usually don't have problems with ret pallies 1 on 1 (on my full Season 3 + S3 weapon warrior).

If a pally catches me between trinket/cooldowns, though, they can just put out the most amazingly retarded amount of damage when I'm stunned/incapped.

They're a little on the strong side against me, but I'm not terribly concerned about them.

What I am concerned about is arcane mages. Fuck a running monkey, they are heathen bastards and should be burned with candle wax in a non-erotic fashion. They are all about chain casting instant cast spells, which just makes my life miserable. To be fair, all mages of all specs give me a fairly rough time, but good lord - Arcane is the full-speed instant-cast champion.

Pallies are easy, mages are hard.

Well, you didn't include your class in that post - but I'd bet $1000 that you're a warrior.




Well. Okay. You could have just posted "Mages are hard".

I joined up with an almost complete guild group for Heroic Setthek to try for the bird mount. I haven't tanked in forever and I was a little worried about holding aggro. My prot warrior is geared in half quest blues, half Kara gear so I used to sometimes have issues holding aggro pre-3.0, especially with multiple mobs.

After the first couple pulls, we just started chain pulling. The amount of aggro I was producing was sick. I'd hit the group with a Thunderclap and Shockwave to get initial group aggro. After that, TCing when the cooldown was up kept everything on me. My damage was actually respectable as well. 2k Shield Slams, 1k Revenge. I was actually having a hard time getting my Devastates in the mix since Shield Slam, Revenge, and TC were always coming off cooldowns.

I'd also like to say that the Glyph of Revenge makes me very happy. Rage-free Heroic Strike after a Revenge? Yes please. HS used to be my rage-dump. Now its coming up free so often that I usually end fights with the rage bar over half full.

Our guild is pretty much just going back and doing 40 man instances for giggles now.  We are having a lot of fun.  Typically we can only get 15 or less people organized.

The rest of the time people are either doing the Hallow's End events and/or doing Achievements like mad.  Oh, and working inscription or farming herbs.

It is amazing how much more powerful all my characters are now.  I did take my Pally prot spec because he's my tank right now.  I tested him out solo against a 72 elite and finished him with no issues.  I might have had 1/2 mana at the end.

If you want to farm purples right now, go kill the Headless Horseman about 20 times in maybe an hour.  Most of your time will be switching around characters since downing him takes all of 3-4 minutes.

Dammit I'm gonna have to stop reading this thread, my pissedoffness at not being able to play is rapidly climbing the GRRFUCKSHIT scale to 12.

Ooh Headless Horseman purples.  Flying broom ftw :-)

I love that there's no cast time for it.

BG is not fun on my hunter.  I can't do a thing vs. pallies.

PvE is more fun, though.  Changes to volley are great.

I haven't played my lock or pally at all since patch (neither are geared).  I played my mostly s2 druid boomkin a little - was ok fun.

Pallies are stupidly overpowered - I don't want to even play mine because I don't want to have something that gets taken away.

You win! To be fair, I almost killed a Frost Mage as the new prot spec - I made a few mistakes because I was new to the spec, otherwise I would have been able to do it.

The current dungeon HP nerf is simply a safeguard to ensure *anyone* is able to do these encounters. The last tiers of raiding were balanced around healers having pretty much infinite mana via regen and pots. Both of those have been nerfed, so they had to make sure the encounters simply didn't last as long or everyone would OOM before the kill.

You can petition a GM and they will restore your 70. I had deleted 2 70's in a nerdrage a year ago and got them both back two months later.

Did they reverse the aoe mob cap? I miss frost aoe kiting

Sweet. I'll give it a shot. But even if they can't fix my 70, I'm cool.

We spent the first day farming HH and I got 3 rings, the helm and the sword. I'd really like his mount, but I'm not one to grind past the novelty factor.

Servers are still iffy. Ours went down just before our SSC raid was supposed to start, and stayed down for a solid hour while we chatted in Vent and played alt invasion on another server.  :grin:

I've been spending the last two days abusing this fact.  It makes picking herbs FAST.

So the My Sack is Gigantique acheivement is bugged....instead of equipping the bag all you have to do is loot one atm.

I'm confused :  What do you mean as I don't get why it matters ?

It's not BOP, so you can get a group of folks to go in on the 1200 gold then pass it around themselves and their alts for the achievement.  Not that it matters beyond E-peen.

Ahhh, I get it.

Silly.

GMs undeleted my 70 from like 9 months ago. My ret has infinite mana now. Pwn.

The mana issue is hilarious. I was healing an instance on my paladin specced ret and wearing my ret gear (read: no int or spell stats) so I could only cast 2-3 HLs before oom... except I just judge wisdom and boom I have mana again. It was goddamn ridiculous.

Stuff like this is why even a level-hating UO partisan like me can get something out of WoW. Woops I deleted my character, in fact I deleted him about nine months ago, so can you bring him back please? Sure, bam. Delay caused by the server asplosion aside, I am muchly pleased with the WoW customer service.

As far as I know, characters are never actually deleted for real, just stored away on some backup server/database thing.

I think this definitely contributes to the uphill struggle every other MMO launched since has experienced. WoW's CS is so good that without enormous outlay on CS at launch anyone else's looks awful. Of course some MMO's see this in advance and don't even bother to try (Hi Funcom!).

I think half the reason Blizzard seems so good is because everyone else is so bad. Horrible crippling bugs aren't left around indefinitely, there are no developers going out onto public boards to ramble about shining their Porsches with player tears, the GM staff is basically competent and helpful. All shit that we SHOULD be able to take for granted. In a lot of ways WoW is nothing special, but it manages to actually function basically the way one of these games is supposed to on paper.

Anyway, I finished the Crusader's Scaled Battlegear set, the blue rep-bought ret pally PVP set. I had dinged 70 and gotten a couple pieces of it when I quit before, and I just had to hammer out a little Sha'tar and Keepers of Time rep to finish it now. They're not doing an honor reset for the expansion now are they? Because I was thinking I'd just go do BGs and pile up points to spend at some point in the future. It's too late for pursuing serious BC gear to have much point, I think.

And yet there are still games out there who delete your characters when your account expires.  I think you're right that Blizzard shines just by being the average of what we should be able to expect.

Jebus, leveling speed is insane now. I quit last in June 07, and just went from 66-70 finishing off some quests I had.

You'd think other games might learn from Blizzard, but I think they're all too busy planning what to do with their money hats once they dethrone them with half-finished games.

I believe the current reset plans are that arena points will reset, but you can carry honor over.

Sweet. Battlegrounds can be fun, but Arenas just sound blah anyway. I like running around in the zerg and critting some priest from behind who didn't see me coming in the furball.

Massive Ret nerfs confirmed for next patch.

I also doubt it'll be the last round of Ret nerfs.



Lesson: If you want to play a Pally, play during beta and shortly before an xpac release.

Then quit.

And people thought it wasn't going to happen. No fucking way they weren't going to nerf the hell out of ret. It was ridiculously broken.

Of course, instead of just tweaking the damage down bit by bit and finding a comfortable balance, they took a sledgehammer to it.

Anyone who thought it wasn't going to happen is a moron, or at least they haven't been playing WoW for very long. I've seen basically the exact same thing happen to Pallies three times now.

Either way, I had a lot of fun playing my Ret Pally over the last few days. PvE viable? I hardly knew her.

Much as I love Judgement of the Wise, it has been completely and utterly impossible for me to run down my mana and it was due a nerf. Since I've been back I have not gone below 50% mana ever. I can go up to one of those training dummies in Ironforge and dump on it with everything I have literally forever and never go below 70% mana.

I think ret will be fine. It was just broken man, sorry.

Maybe. We'll see.

Like I said, experience tells me that the nerfs don't stop here.

I just know it should probably be at least theoretically possible for me to go OOM. Even if I drain it all healing or something, one Judgement and I have enough mana to go back on the offensive and it'll be full again shortly thereafter.

Really, it shouldn't. None of the other melee DPS classes ever go "OOM", Ret should be no different. Ret is already cool down limited, it isn't like there is anything to spam with that mana.

My only real concern is all the Ret nerfs will bleed over onto Prot and Holy Paladins. Holy Paladins apparently solo even slower now. This is the spec that made Holy Priests feel like killing speed-demons to begin with.

Prot will probably weather the storm alright, but who knows!

So like a warrior can totally ignore any rage-building abilites and instead go completely buck wild 100% crazy with his rage-consuming abilities for a literally unlimited amount of time without ever even emptying half his bar? Because if so, then yeah, we're getting the shaft.

Warriors don't really have rage building abilities (just blood ... rage? Jesus, I've been playing a protection warrior for months and I still forget the names of shit. I can see the icon IN MY MIND, though, I swear.), it's from getting hit and from your white damage, I believe. I do know my protection warrior does not run out of rage ever now, even if I go all out while tanking. It's a bit crazy.

I don't know how non-protection warriors do rage-wise, though, which would be the real comparison.

Playing a Fury warrior is a delicate dance between wasting rage because it's "building" when your bar is already full and wasting rage because you have to "dump" it with abilities BEFORE your bar is full.

Titans Grip gives the mad rage. You don't run out with 2 epic two-handers smashing away at things. However you only have 2 damaging abilities to actually spend rage on. Bloodthirst and WW being on 6 and 10 second cool downs and all means you can only spend it so fast.

Arms with endless rage keeps you mostly raged up and MSing, but if your popping a lot of piercing howls, intercepts and pummels trying to keep someone locked down you may not have the rage for WW. Depends on whether the RNG is giving you mad crits or whiffing away.

As said, assuming something is hitting you, in prot you're in endless rage mode.

Yes, yes you are. The entire purpose of JotWise was to give Ret paladins a "blue rage bar", because every other melee DPS class in game is running on infinity already.

If you never, ever use heroic strike, cleave or slam, you are a terrible DPS warrior and I hope I never accidentally group with you.  For bosses, you are also forgetting maintaining demo shout and a sunder stack if there isn't a prot warrior lurking about.  For arms, you will probably also be maintaining Rend on bosses and using sweeping strike on trash.  There is also bladestorm to consider for arms, but since white attacks don't stop, you will probably leave it with a full rage bar no matter what.

Other melee isn't running on infinite power. I haven't played fury in almost two years, so I can't say how they are these days. Back in T2 content, I either had too much or was sucking wind. Just depended. I don't play rogues and hate everything about them, so I can't comment on them. Enhance shaman, though, that I know quite well. We're hurting for mana right now. We NEED replenishment to keep the blue in the blue bar in any kind of long fight. SR barely keeps us going. Barely.

Now, this is at 70. Things probably will be different at 80 with the new itemization. Some reports from test have us at 15k mana at 80. I have about 8k now when raid buffed and I can burn that blue bar in a couple of minutes with just my standard attack priority (and pull aggro--even on protection pallies). Mostly, it's because we've lost some of our clearcasting-like abilities and have new spells to fire off in melee, but nevertheless, we smoke the blue bar and quickly.

My protection pally can burn the blue pretty well, too. It's far and away better than it was before 3.0, but, again, if I have to really stand on the attack sequence, I go out of mana--unless I'm taking huge damange and corresponding heals, which is as it should be.

Bottom line is Blizz is balancing all this stuff for level 80, not level 70 with 80 talents. So what's going on right now isn't really the way things are going to be.

Prot Paladins are not Melee DPS and share the same 'Blue Rage Bar' design ideal, but on a defensive instead of offensive focus.

Warriors are pretty much swimming in rage these days.

Rogues are the same as they were before, energy hasn't changed all that much, if at all. (Ferals fall into either rage or energy)

The new patch changes may have put Shamans in a OOM eventually area, I haven't seen them in action really since the patch. Pre-patch, The only time I saw a enhance shaman go OOM was if he was spamming heals or rezzing  :oh_i_see:

Yeah, before 3.0 rarely went OOM as enhance. It took a really long tank&spank fight with a tank that could really pile up the threat. Healing runs me out in seconds. PvP, too, but that's another matter.

The main reasons we're going OOM right now is lightning bolt spam in combat via MW, reduction of shamanistic focus to 45% mana reduction, a new melee attack to spam, and the fact that a lot of us were in shitty rogue leather (the armor wasn't shitty, just the rogue part...). Also, we can't get to the elemental clearcasting talent at level 70. So we run OOM, possibly before SR can refresh.

On the Kara run last night, I generally found myself hovering around half mana. Normally, the blue bar would hardly budge, except maybe on Prince. On the other hand, stuff was dying so quickly it didn't affect performance. If these fights had gone substantially longer, then I'd have had to use blue pots. I have a fear and loathing of blue pots.

Jesus.

I was playing my 68 Pally in BGs before the patch. My judgements were critting around ~1300.

Today they're doing about 750 or so.

Yea, it's pretty much  :awesome_for_real:

Oh, shit. I thought we were already nerfed.

Apparently we were only hotfixed.

The rest of our nerfs will come soon.


http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=12065287753&sid=1

There are so many things wrong with the above statement that I don't know where to start.

Although random, untested nerfs seem... uh... fucking retarded? I dunno. Especially if you're asking for data from live nerfs after the fact that you'll never act upon.

I'm not sure about the Judgements of the Wise nerf yet.  Of course, I've never planned my paladin to be ret long-term, I just noticed when 3.0 came out that hey, ret is AWESOME right now and I've never been on the front end of the 'overpowered class of the week' curve before.

So about the JotW nerf, I seemed to fluctuate between 'plenty of mana' and 'crap I'm oom again'.  I did notice I felt like judging wisdom a lot more.  In a 5 man group I was running low on mana a good bit.  In a "raid" (just kara) where I had shaman totems and a prot paladin was judging wisdom (I think wisdom stacks, oddly enough, so if two paladins judge wisdom you get double mana onhit, but I can't say for sure cause it was hectic) I didn't really have trouble for the most part, except when I busted out the backup healing.

As for the Seal of Command damage nerf....I can honestly say I didn't really notice it.  Of course, I've never been one to pay really close attention to my numbers, but...they didn't seem that different.  So, we'll see.  JotW nerf might've hit a bit too hard.  18% instead of 15% might be a better balance.  Other than that, seems fine to me.  Besides, even if the damage nerf was bigger than it looks, ret damage did kinda need to be nerfed.  I knew from the beginning - especially when I wandered into AV after hitting 70 to get my gnerd rage achievement, and wound up winning a 3vs1 fight with 3 guys in a smattering of arena gear, with me in my blues and greens, that ret nerf was coming.

It's what they've been doing all of WOTLK's beta cycle.  They're relying VERY heavily on their spread-sheeted damage models that assume perfect timing and perfect latency.  It's fucked over several classes throughout the cycle.  Frankly, reading some of the replies from this Ghostcrawler guy who's in charge of class dev now, I have less confidence in Blizz doing things right through this expansion cycle than ever before.

  The blatant class gaffes and stupid assumptions I've seen from him were enough to make me drop playing a Hunter at all, because I saw where that train was going.  Great PvE damage, as always, but even worse in PvP than they were before.

Now the ret nerfs.. but hey, Dismantle is perfectly fine and balanced, guys!  All the damage models show it to be so!

Oi hunters... of all the classes they're the only one I tried out after the patch and thought they were worse. I wouldn't touch a hunter main with a 10-foot pole at this stage.

Speaking as someone who has leveled his main to 70 as ret, the spec was horribly overpowered for a couple weeks or so there. That shit with the infinite mana bar was fucking ridiculous. Now it feels more or less right. Assuming I'm going reasonably heavy on the DPS, I drink every couple fights. As opposed to after every single mob during the bulk of TBC, or NEVER immediately prior to the nerf.

It's fine. Enough with this WoW-forums-level QQ.

I leveled my ret pally with a shadow priest.  Rarely had to drink unless I was soloing and then I couldn't imagine soloing a pally because of all the downtime.  Or maybe I was doing it wrong and would have had to learn how to do it differently.

Still haven't played my ret pally since the patch.  Waiting to see how it shakes out, I think, before I even try it.

I've avoided pvp on my hunter because either I'm doing it completely wrong, or the class is broken.

Pve is fine, though.  I particularly like the changes to disengage and volley.

The class is broken in PvP, probably permanently given how even more broken the designer's views on it are. To paraphrase: "You've got mail and Disengage/ Wingclip.  You should be fine with the nerf of agi->dodge we gave the class.  We don't intend for you to survive if you ever get into melee."

 :awesome_for_real:

Even the two guys who HAD 2100+ rated hunters in the BC days have quit the class.  They've rolled Death Knights and haven't looked back other than to laugh at the stupidity on the beta boards.  Like.. Freezing Arrow!  A shot that must hit the ground and has an arm time.. so it's a thrown ice trap that breaks on any damage. Glee.

Nothing is ever permanently broken in an mmo.  Until it closes down, anyway.

I still have a lock (broken?), priest, druid and pally to play with.  And a little mage, shaman, warrior, rogue to level up which I probably will at some point, because I enjoy leveling.

Alts ftw!

Well by "Permanently" I meant "so long as Ghostcrawler and the other devs keep this mindset."  We'll see if their tune changes once Arenas start up again and hunters don't make it anywhere on the lists for a 5th time.

But yes, alts ftw.  I've got a Pally, Lock (don't think so, just didn't get the love of all the other classes) and Priest to putter around with.  I might even take my warrior who languished at 60 up to 80 since titan's grip looks super awesome.  :drill:.  I don't give a fuck about it actual functionality.

Hunters are pretty much top or close to it for PVE dps right now. No cooldown volley pretty much removed their last weakness as far as that goes.

Hunter PvP will be redeemed if Wintergrasp doesn't suck.

Having a giant wall to hide behind and shoot people from is always a good time. If DaoC taught me anything, it's that.  :grin:

My hunter is 63 so I was talking from a purely leveling perspective. I don't raid and only 5man to help friends.

I'm hardly out doing uber shit, but I've taken my ret and his little blue rep-bought PVP suit and done some battlegrounds, dailies, and a couple of solo and duo Stratholme runs for shits and giggles. I can't tell you if raid DPS is down 18.33 percent (repeating of course) but I played a ret to 40 at launch, to 70 around the beginning of this year, and except for this recent two weeks of infinite mana overpoweredness, this is by far the best the spec has ever felt.

If you didn't play during that two weeks, you'll probably just log onto your paladin and go "Wow ret is pretty good now!"

Protection looks like it took one in the ass with the so-called ret nerfs. I haven't logged mine in yet to fiddle around, but from what I've seen it doesn't look good. Holy seems unhappy, too, but screw them. I won't play that tree even for real cash.

Elsewhere...eh, shaman seem ok, aside from PvP, but nothing new there. Warriors, though, man, they have to be cruising for nerfs, but prot just looks fun now. Hell, they all look fun. Might have to restart my 62 warrior again. Bring on the dual spec!

Protection paladins on the forums will NEVER be happy until they're warriors that do holy damage and can bubble.  Fuck the forum asshats and their whining.  I'm still killing swaths of level 70-72 mobs in the Netherwing mines without going OOM.  If they're having problems it's because they're trying to kill one or two things at a time, which isn't how the fucking spec works. 2+ mobs on me and I'm always dodging/ blocking/ parrying enough to keep a full blue bar with Blessing of Sanc, never mind running JoW or SoW.   

No wonder you were so bitter about WoW.  Wasn't pally one of the slowest to level?

No, trust me. Protection paladins are ri-damn-diculous right now. They're insulated from those ret changes because of the weird way judgement of light threat works and the new abilities they got that are unaffected (the holy shield slam and holy swipe things.)

As an equally well-geared protection warrior, I can't keep threat off of Fordel's protection paladin if he judges light on the target, period. We're talking 6000 TPS craziness. That will probably get changed or nerfed in some way too, but prot is going to be fine even without that.

I think it's obvious you just need to l2p!  :grin:

The changes to BM make it mediocre now. Marks is insane single target DPS for endgame stuff as you basically go from trying to use 1 special between steadies to trying to figure out how to get steady shots fit into a rotation with 3 instants and the GCD. Also Marks hunters (if they spec into rapid killing) get to use 4 rapid fires in less than 4 minutes because they put readiness in the marks tree for some unfathomable reason.

Once hunters level up, Kill shot will make them more viable in arenas just a bit, as kill shot will be very much open to the nerf cries.

But most hunters don't play the class to PvP anymore anyway. I have a resto shaman alt for pvp now, and even then I dont pvp that much.

This is simply wrong.  BM is still the top DPS spec by a non-trivial margin.  Here's (http://home.hccnet.nl/mortu/Hunter_DPS.xls) a spreadsheet.  Go knock yourself out.

For now.  There's a LOT of haste on WOTLK gear.  Marks will quickly catch-up since the hunter 1.5s GCD rules all.  With no method of speeding-up beyond that hard-cap to your DPS the more powerful Steady and Autoshots of MM will overtake it eventually.  Not to mention pets are weaker than ever @ 80 in terms of survivability.

Ooo! Spreadsheets! 

All we need now are some charts.  :drill:



Seriously though, any spreadsheets out there for 'locks you can link to?

I went out to Winterspring this morning and did one of those Scourge invasion crystals solo, all the way down to when the cultists appear. I ran from mob to mob, blasting them to shit, and never once had to drink. Yeah, I'm pretty happy.

I left Consecration and Holy Wrath out of my rotation, and I did use Judgement of Wisdom instead of Judgement of Light. But on the other hand, I did use Exorcism and Hammer of Wrath as much as possible, while throwing the occasional Flash of Light on myself to keep my health up.

So yes, outside of a couple weeks of infinite mana, this is definitely the best ret has ever been.