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I am torn on the vehicle stuff. I love doing it solo; in groups it very often comes down to someone not 'getting' it.

Not fun at all.

Vehicle cockblock to start and then no new boss models?

Wow.

This would be different from non-vehicle fights how?


My real concern would be all the custom UI's people use and how they don't work with the vehicle interface. I can already see the "I don't have any buttons omg  :ye_gods:" happening.

It's one fight...at the beginning. I imagine the whole thing might take 10 minutes. It's not like they are making you siege the final boss, which would be continually stupid.

Actually from the pictures linked in the article, there seem to be a host of new models:



edit: This is the same as Volkhan in HoL

This one is a re-use of some of the models found in Scholozar. The other two are all new to me, I think.

The reason it is different is that it takes the normal amount of HURR HURR HOW YOU STAY OUT OF FIRE fight mechanics and adds an entire extra layer of I DON'T KNOW WHAT ANY OF MY BUTTONS DO with a side of OH CRAP THE FAILBOT PICKED THE KING IN KARA CHESS.

They don't know what their buttons do regardless. You make them take a 'pawn' and move on. It's when they couldn't MOVE the pawn because they replaced the 'Mind Control' Pet Bar with an actual Quick-Bar Replacement one patch and moving the eyes a whole centimeter lower to see their new buttons was beyond comprehension.


-edit- Giant Lava Man isn't a new model. You fight him in Halls of Lighting and for one of the Hodir quests.

I thought this also, but I think by now most people have UIs that work with vehicles. What with all the vehicle quests while leveling, the vehicles in SotA and the vehicles in Wintergrasp.

I would say that anyone who didnt know if their UI was going to work with the vehicle UI would have no business being in Ulduar.

I am completely unenthused about vehicle fights.  They're the main reason I actively dislike Oculus.  I started avoiding a daily in Ice Crown until I learned I could do it without the vehicle.  Aces High! was an impossible vehicle daily, until I learned the magic of 'Auto Cast Self'.  Hell, most of the quests that required the use of a vehicle were damned annoying, because I really felt stupid if I had to take more than one try at them.  Malygos phase 3 is also annoying, and that's just Aces High! in a raid setting.

We get it.  You think it's a cute mechanic.  It's not, and I hate it.  Please stop.

I enjoy vehicle based fights because they take your gear out of the equation, and makes it slightly more skill based. I guess on the other hand, you can't ever outgear the boss, since the vehicles will stay the same.

I actually like the mechanic when used sparingly, it removes the gear element from the fight and makes it totally based on player skill and group coordination. If overused, then its a pain, but I think it has its place, and if its the first boss of Ulduar that takes like 10 - 20 minutes I have no problem with it. If it turns out to be a big part of the instance, then I wont be to happy.

I like the in-game mechanisms to escalate raid.  That would go good with PQs as well.

The light in the tunnel as far as design goes is that Ulduar was in development prior to WoTLK launching, and so they hadn't had time to evaluate the reception of vehicle-based fights. This is probably why it was included, and hopefully will mean that future raids won't have enforced vehicle sections.

Just posted.

Ulduar PTR testing information


Thorim isn't surprising as a boss, nor is Hodir really. I haven't done enough quests in Scholozar to know enough about Freya, and the Iron Council sounds somewhat generic, if this isn't a 4-boss fight I'll be amazed.

I think this is definately a step forward in testing. The way some previous raids have been cleared on the PTR somewhat spoilt the interest in them when they were released on live. Although personally I don't care about world-first guilds, nor am I in one, I hope that they keep much of it closed off. While this had led to a couple of failwrecks in the past (Kael and Vasj), there have been equally many fully-functioning encounters that didn't get dissected on the PTRs. I think also from a development POV this process makes more sense.

I also like the idea that different regions will be testing different encounters exclusively.

Stop making fun of me!  :cry2:

People hate vehicle combat for two reasons and both because it takes gear out of the equation.

Either A. you are used to letting your gear compensate for your lack of skill and therefore hate vehicles

Or B. You are used to your gear compensating for your 'groupmates' lack of skill and therefore hate vehicles.

I have fun in oculus and maylgos, well i WOULD except there's other people involved and mouthbreathers don't know what to do when they cant outgear things like being able to stand in whirlwinds because they have enough HP to not care about moving.

All in all though I have to say QQ more? If your guild can't pull together enough people that know how to use vehicles then you shouldn't be raiding. People were bitching left and right for harder raiding well guess what? This is it, a half gear/half skill based fight to seperate the wheat from the chafe.

I should probably clarify - I don't mind the occasional fight using the mechanic, but to keep people from even getting into the raid instance unless they can pass a vehicle check?  Ugh.

And Lakov?  Let me just say, it's not -my- level of skill I'm concerned with.  I absolutely -hate- Oculus because I have to rely on four other people who can, for just this once, all push their buttons in the correct order.  I once watched guild chat where someone who's fully raid capable, and can handle a vehicle, commented on the 30+ wipes they had on the last boss in Oculus.  I did enjoy Oculus the once or twice I've done it with 5 competent people, it was a very fun experience.  This is -not- the usual case for heroics.

Hell, yesterday I managed to clear H Nexus with two DPS below the tank.  The "dps" warrior was under 1k for the entire run.  (I was healing it, whee!)  The only reason it got done was because the tank was competent, and we had one dps that did more than the other two put together.

To reiterate - I hate people.


Aaand to at least veer this somewhat back on topic, I am unenthused because I don't really relish the idea of sitting around while people assemble raids of 10 or 25 people, only to never even get into the damned instance because Charlie Chucklefuck managed to grab the only demolisher or something.

That argument would make sense if vehicles actually scaled with gear, which they don't. Furthermore, as a healer, vehicles generally push me into a role I'm less thrilled about. While you could heal the dragons in the nexus, I don't see how you'll be able to heal siege catapaults.

The thing that annoys me about vehicle fights is that they artificially slow down content in an un-fun way. You will never be able to kill a boss in a vehicle fight faster so long as vehicles don't scale, and part of the point of the whole gear-progression concept is that it makes encounters quicker and less stressful as time goes on.

This guy sums it up well:

I think there would be a lot less  :heartbreak: for vehicles if they were all just a little harder than the Icecrown daily where you need to dance between the three stances for victory instead of 112112112112112112.

You're forgetting about the poor schlubs who's job it is to press 333433343334.

Edit:  Oh christ, those dailies.  Hell, the one daily is broken (the longrange one) because you fly outside of the area where the "see green" effect even works, which breaks the phasing, and disables the vehicle.  I was supremely frustrated when that happened.  The other daily isn't so bad... but still, meh.  I can barely even imagine the hilarity that would result from most people trying that daily, and that's one I actually sort of like.

To clarify, the dailies in question are:
http://www.wowhead.com/?quest=13376
http://www.wowhead.com/?quest=13404

Oh man, while I was looking, I was reminded of the "attack from the air" daily, where you use a vehicle to shoot up the harpoon guns.  That's another daily I completed once, and swore I'd never do again.

OMFG.

1112

1112

112 is for pros that don't let stacks fall off.  Only the weak use 1112!
 :why_so_serious:

Perhaps if you pondered the question for more than about 3 seconds you might realize the people who were asking for harder raiding are NOT NECESSARILY THE SAME PEOPLE that don't really care for vehicle fights. Also this 'shouldn't be raiding' bullshit is exactly what they (Blizzard) don't want.

For soulfame, you fit in the same category as I do which is "vehicles would be nice if not for other people."

As for raiding being hardcore? Personally I'd have been happy if all raids stay at about naxx level and just have more hard mode achievements(which i think is what they are going for in ulduar so im expecting the non hardmode bosses to be naxx difficulty)

I do not think raids should be exclusive to 1% of the playerbase and I do not dislike casual players but there does need to be a difficulty curve otherwise your accomplishments at level 80 will feel as gratifying as ragefire chasm. They could have made the first boss a huge gear check cockblock like so many other raids before but they didn't. It seems from the description that half the fight will be in vehicles while some of it will be on foot or on the bank of the leviathan which still puts gear into the equation to an extent.

My bottom line is that if vehicles were in wow from the beginning no one would care but since they're new there's still a learning curve for a lot of people. Vehicles aren't hard to use and your average player is more than competant as long as they don't turn their brain off.  I like easy raids but if three-four people can afk/not pay attention in a 25man raid then it really diminishes the challenge and then the accomplishment.

Don't cry.  If I ever make it to raiding levels I'll so astonish people with my ineptitude they will forget all about any times you might have stood in a fire.

Small nugget of good news


From Daelo -> http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=15198911238&pageNo=1&sid=1#6

This fixes one of the major flaws with vehicle implementation.

I look forward to see if you can beat any of our current losers. KILD.

I love vehicle fights. My ONLY problem with them is that they startle and confuse some people, and if I have to depend on them, it is not a good time. But I don't blame vehicles for that. My only complaint about the Ulduar section is that we should all clearly be riding storm giants.  :drill:

Lol @ V0-L7R-0N. Blizz comes up with the best pop culture refs.  ;D

That actually fixes pretty much all the flaws with vehicles. Stupid people won't be able to mash buttons any better in regular or vehicle settings, but the overgearing might help mask their retardedness.

Well now you're just making it a challenge.  :drillf:

I don't like the vehicle stuff. It's cute for a solo quest, but I felt like it took away a lot of options for something very simplistic and mostly I want to play my character and instead I'm playing a tank or a dragon or a 12' aardvark or whatever. It's not really make or break or anything else, it's just not all that interesting to me.

I think it's how they implemented it all. I never felt like I was "playing a catapult" in DAOC/War, but it feels that way to me in WoW.

I was not amused myself. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle?

On top of that Vehicle System fights, such as Occulus, Hodir daily, Malygos... frustrating to master, boring once mastered.

Average WoW player has difficulty showing competence with his/her own class, that has familiar abilities and lots of practice&repetition time. Expecting average player to show competence ON THE FIRST TRY with something unfamiliar is not reasonable. You need to make sure that new player will be inevitably dead weight will not drag few "experienced" players down or new players will be locked out of "vehicle" content.

Imagine you are a raid leader couple month down the road. Would you bring new player to raid and then risk WIPING ON FARM CONTENT until your new player learns encounter? Don't think so.

Right now getting new priest in the guild means couple runs of wiping on Instructor fight, imagine if this going to happen every time you have membership turnover.

Aka Malygos

I like what I hear so far about Ulduar. I'm gettin sick and god damn tired of recycled mobs as bosses. Still strikes me as amateur hour, but it's a small complaint should Ulduar really be the super-mega-epic-deep-fried-jesus raid of all time.

I think the true test will be if the train sets will be usable in said massive vehicle encounter. Raid griefing your guildies never gets old.

I would be surprised if they don't offer dailies that offer "practice" for each vehicle in the encounter ala "Aces High!"

That said, I agree that it isn't reasonable to expect a population who, on average, don't know how to do something they've spent 80 levels "practicing", to pick up something off the bat.  The vehicle fights so far have been relatively forgiving:

- Heroic Occulus is only a hassle if you try for the Ruby/Emerald Void achievements.
- 10-man Malygos's Surge of Power hits for jack-crap.
- 25-man Malygos's Surge of Power does kill people that screw up, but losing 1/4-1/2 the raid isn't much of a concern if P1/2 went at a reasonable pace.

Overall, I'm optimistic when it comes to Ulduar.  Naxx has stayed pretty fun for the most part thanks to achievements, and Sarth 3D is a major challenge even this close to the next tier of content.

11 hard mode bosses. Woo, I can look forward to all this awesome loot I'll never see provided they're anything like 2+ drake Sarth!

Honestly, I MUCH prefer the "hard mode" thing to "let's tune this ten man to people who have been raiding the top 25 man raids, ha ha, fuck you Karazhan people." I have a lot easier time putting the loot I'm not getting out of my mind when I can still, you know, kill the bosses.

About that, sjofn. You're tanking 2 drake Sarth next week. <3

Sjofn can't tank, she's a girl!  :why_so_serious:

Err, wait, that's TBC era sjofntank.

Yeah, all the instances just looked like bear butt back then. :(

You will note THAT character has a penis!

Heroic Oculus is possibly my least favorite experience in WoW EVER. So no, no, no to this fucking shit. There are selected vehicular quests in the expansion that I enjoy, that are fun or interesting, that have that spark that makes them stand out. Mostly though it's like watching a kid break into a candy store, eat every fucking candy bar on the shelf, and then shit himself while he howls in pain on the store floor. They came up with a new mechanic and figured it would be fun to do every third quest. Most vehicle quests are basically an exotic delivery system for QTEs: there is nothing free-form or open about them at all, you discover.

Putting them in an instance, as a requirement to do the rest of the content? Fuck off, Blizz.

I like vehicles in wotlk but I am not a fan of the occulus.  Occulus is just a bit to weird for many of my guild if they were fighting using vehicles on the ground it would be one thing but having to keep track of what the hell they are doing in 3 axis on a boss thats very easy to make evade bug if you fly a bit to low is a pain in the ass especially when we were doing the amber and ruby void achivements by going all 5 emerald drakes.

I'm really surprised by all this hate.

We're always bitching about the lack of new mechanics in mmos - well, here's a new mechanic.

Why not wait and see what it's like before crying about it?

It does occur to me that those of us who bitch about lack of new mechanics are not necessarily the same as those of us who raid.

Is it just my perception, or are a lot of people unhappy with WoW lately?  I'm as happy as I ever was, but I'm not a raider, I'm a hardcore casual.  My raider friends seem terribly unhappy though, as do people in this thread.

I'm happy. I just don't like the overuse of the vehicle mechanic, and I don't like it when it's a serious cockblock in an instance. It's best when it's an amusing diversion, when it has a kind of coolness--or when it's fluid and allows for freedom of action, as in Wintergrasp. When the vehicle mechanic is tightly scripted as in a typical boss encounter AND absolutely necessary for progression, it stops being fun.

I think occulus/drake vehicles really sour people on vehicles and I know why.

It's the kedge keep of wow. 3-axis fighting sounds fun in theory but even blizzard can't quite pull it off in a way that's fun.

Vehicle combat outside of drakes is generally well-liked and the only thing I would do to change it would be something minor.  Add a user interface that makes you feel like you're in a vehicle, maybe force 1st person if you're in a turret or something. Right now vehicles just seem like you're in a different mode, where you can still see all your stuff except a new bar pops up. just adding a bit of immersion to the various tanks and such would go a long way.

It's not just your perception, I'm encountering it, too.  The gripes all boil down to that they're out of content to explore and bored.  I'm still enjoying it, but finding less of a desire to login.  It's not that I'm burnt, so much as the general tone of people is so negative I'd rather avoid it.

I love the vehicles with one caviat.  I hate that you can't loot in them, so when you're killing things you either have to dismount and run back to pick up a new vehicle or just forget about the loot.  (Icecrown in particularl is bad about this with the Water Reaver and EB Death Gryphon quests.)

I would say activity in my guild at least is near its all-time high; on top of that, as a server, we filled 4 raids for Wintergrasp last night and I see PUG raids happening all the time. People don't seem to be getting bored or burned out or unhappy, in a sort of overall general sense. Certainly there are always some people having issues - our partner guild that we raid with is struggling to get enough people to even run their own 5 man instances lately, for example.

The content cleaners are somewhat pissy that they're out of shit to do already, but the middle ground casual-ish players seem absolutely thrilled with how Wrath has shaped up.

True, but even the upper edge of the middle ground is basically done with most of the content. In our alliance we have one group that's been farming everything for at least a month, and our "fun run" which I do has killed off everything Except Kel'Thuzad and Malygos in 25. This is with a group of folks who don't really go the mmo-champion "best in class" route and it's still going down hard. We've done everything in 10s. Most consistent people are sitting in 75% or more 213 gear.

I'm feeling a bit of the boredom setting in, and the real problem is that Blizzard is nowhere near ready to put in the new content. I applaud them for putting in easier stuff, but they had to figure that most of the raiders that took it 3 days a week were going to be done in 3-4 months. So, by the time March rolls around, I'm probably not going to be raiding much at all, and just goofing off with achievements. That's fine, but I don't want to be doing that until May because of Blizzard's glacial process. For people that have already been done for a month, it's just compounded.

The gryphon quest in icecrown is so bad I don't even bother using the gryphon anymore. it does such pathetic dmg that I find it way faster to dps down the gryphon riders on my own, rather than having to put up with the horrible cooldown and aiming mechanics of a spell that hits for maybe 1k. This is why I find myself a bit worried about the new fights using vehicles. They just don't seem to be able to make them fun. In the gryphon quest, you have a low dps ice bolt that can only be cast while facing the opponent and a plague strike that only works from melee range. So, really, your only option for this fight is to sit hovering in the air and blast until the enemy dies. The enemies spears can't be dodged or avoided by any mechanism. How creative, what a unique use of innovative vehicle mechanics.

Don't even get me started listing the multiple retardation that is Blizzard's implementation of a shoot em up.

Implementation.

Vehicles are a new mechanic, and they don't fit well into the engine / ui at all.  Healing breaks, mods break, the player is provided 5 buttons they don't know the purpose of but only get to experiment with while the pressure is on.

Kara Chess was like vehicles-light, but it was paced slow and the player had the advantage of 'knowing' the game and function of the vehicles before they started.  Click to select in a flappy dragonball in order to get your heal off isn't something that is easy or intuitive on Malygos, and the vehicles strip out important information like name, making it counterproductive and frustrating to actually try to heal the player who is injured (rather than just find something to target and spam the AoE heal).  Not to mention they remap hot-keys including one to dismount the vehicle which causes you to 'lose' the encounter - why map that function at all?.  I know why they did it, but it is lazy.

So, from their recent push I do expect to see more vehicles that 'break' camera interactions, make it difficult to control your character, and make it difficult to coordinate your actions.  I do expect that the limitations of the User Interface will be glaring and shoved up in my face while I play - because they are in this most recent wave of vehicle quests.  Many vehicle quests are harder in the vehicle than without, unless there is some class-check:vehicle gimmick to the fight that forces you to put up with it.

So, in contrast to the normal run of play in a UI optimized for normal play, yeah it is pretty easy to see why people dread "Cool new game mechanic" in the next 'hard' raid instance.  I've long thought more fights should be like Kara chess, where class and gear requirements don't matter to completion of the event, and was called out by a guildmate for my dislike of the vehicle fights.  It really comes down to implementation.  I'd much rather have anyone able to pick up the critical raid task (witness 10-man Raz vs. 25-man) but this last wave of vehicle quests just don't work right/reliably/at all, which is really worse than not trying that new thing at all (because now we all have the expectation that it will suck working against any future attempt to get it right).

If they made a vehicle that was even close to being as well-developed as an actual character class, they might not totally suck.  But they haven't and they won't.  If you've ever thought "WoW would be great if my character was totally and completely dumbed down to the point where I only have 3 abilities to ever think about using" then vehicles are for you!

Three times more complex than MC frost mages  :oh_i_see:

I didn't even know that you had a vehicle to use for that daily, let alone that you're supposed to use it  :grin:

Doubt I'll change up anytime soon, I can finish the whole thing in ~5mins and that's as a holy priest.

lol. ya the first time I did it I didnt notice he gave me a bone  gryphon either. Not using one makes it slightly more of a pain for melee chars than ranged thanks to the wonderful targetting on flying mobs but not so much that it's worth using that mount. Hell, I just killed 7 now with my melee druid. There's one tower it's impossible to avoid agroing the roaming flyers from so my 1 turned into 7. fast quest finish at least.

The NPC tells you that you don't have to use it, at least.  I figure it's for classes without a reliable ranged attack, or horrible dps.  I enjoy just deathgripping them in and pummeling them.

On the 1-into-7 thing.  Yeah, fuckers spawn so damn fast I always mentally plan on having at least 3 mobs jump in while I'm killing the first guy.

I've been superslam.jpg'ed.

Wait, you get a mount for that?  :ye_gods:

You mean superslam.swf'ed? (http://dagobah.biz/flash/superslam.swf)  :awesome_for_real:

wtf do you think you had to go steal a goddamn griffon for! OMG REED UR TEXT

As far as the higher than normal hate question earlier in the thread:

Our casual guild is now more active than ever and running regular 25-man Naxx runs once a week.  I can see us going to 2 per week soon.  We're running two separate 10-man Naxx groups per week still getting people geared up quickly.  We do 25 and 10 vault and OS.  I'd say in a month's time we'll be moving on to higher raids.

Slow?  Yes.  Happy?  Yes.  No hate here.

Now for something completely random: http://www.wowinsider.com/2009/02/23/the-argent-tournament-in-patch-3-1/

Can the inevitable CIVILIZATION ... DYING... MUST BUILD OBSTACLE COURSE expansion be far behind?

I was thinking more Isle of Quel'Danas Mk. II, which I whole-heartedly approve of if that's the case.

it sounds a LOT like the isle, which was fun but a pain in the ass to try and get quests done on a crowded server, let's hope they learned some lessons.

Patch Notes.


UNDOCUMENTED

Wow, just going through these there's a LOT of interesting changes. As a priest deep holy just got really buffed if I'm reading stuff right, although they have completely destroyed OO5SR mana regen with the removal of clearcast procs on holy concentration.

Oh wow, renew can crit now!

edit: other interesting stuff

# Players at maximum level will now be able to visit their trainer to pay a one-time fee and access the dual talent spec feature.
# A new Gear Manager feature has been added. Players will now be able to save gear sets for easy gear switching.
# Players will now be able to queue for battlegrounds from any location.
# Prospector Khazgorm, found in Bael Modan in southern Barrens, now sells the recipe for Dig Rat Stew to the Alliance.
# Most of the recipes in the 1-300 skill range of blacksmithing have had their stats updated to be more useful.
# Added a new recipe for the Titansteel Spellblade.
# Added a recipe for enchanting staves with spell power.

Summary: Every DPSer except for druids, mages, ele shaman, shadow priests, and rogues got nerfed.  Healers and tanks are marking their doors with blood.

Looks to me like marks hunters were improved, I don't see much change to beast either way, and I can't tell about survival.

My Moonkin enrage talent was totally nerfed  :ye_gods:

I'll need that dual spec feature to quickly spec the fuck out of Ret so I can get into a raid now.



What's funny is that GC was quoted as saying he wanted Ret DPS (already proven to be higher only than feral as far as single target) to remain the same for Ulduar, which meant some buffs since all of our undead powers were going out the window.

They then decided that this would be in the form of replacing exorcism, holy wrath, undead glyph, and crusade with, uh... exorcism.

Now a huge single target DPS nerf?

Oh, thanks. Cocksuckers.

Dual spec costs 1000 gold.

People shouted me down when I said it'd be expensive as hell.

I'm surprised it wasn't more, honestly.

Edit: Actually, I'm not. Even at this price it won't make sense for a lot of people people to do it. People who both PvP and raid seriously, and dedicated guild hybrids. Beyond those people, it only makes sense if you have money to burn.

A website listing the new achievements in 3.1 (http://a.wirebrain.de/wow/wotlk/ach/9614?diff=1)

Noble Garden has evidently been reworked, that's nice.

Fitting name for that achievement. I mean.. Shen'dralar rep? srsly? :why_so_serious:


-- Z.

I'll buy it if I ever decide to PVE again. As it is, PVP spec is plenty for crushing daily quest trash for gem money.

Dear god, the death knight changes.

Frost got it's Ass kicked. Howling Blast's damage is down the tubes. Which is amusing, considering that actual deep frost specs were the lowest damage output.

Blood .. I'm not sure how blood's doing. Blood Strike massive boost, what appears to be a slight nerf to heart strike? I need to actually run numbers on gear to see how blood fared.

Unholy.. appears to have been buffed?

Across the board DW builds got smacked down no matter the spec. Diseaseless spec found dead in it's sleep.

The aura alterations are cute until you hit Unholy, at which point WHAT THE FUCK? You're letting it reduce rune cooldown? WHAT? Inc every deathknight being unholy again.

I like the changes for the most part. Some specs really have gotten ridiculous and the current incarnation of the DK is just too über.

Also 1000 gold ist not that of a big deal anymore, especially for a Level 80 toon. My Level 51 Draenai Priest already owns 1600 gold just from selling ore and herbs that I gathered while leveling. At that pace I will be half way to the epic flyer by the time I hit 70.

Saw this one coming.  Makes me a  :sad_panda:

Edit: after seeing the rest of the DK changes, it seems my DW Frost DK is dead and buried.  And no, mine wasn't one of the cookie cutter split Frost/Unholy specs.

Apparently, Blood was damn uber if you did a diseseless rotation using Heart Strike/ Oblivion and had 3500 unbuffed AP. I haven't tried it myself as I didn't want to buy the fucking 200g oblivion glyph.  :awesome_for_real:

Dual Wield looks pretty buried in terms of dominance. 

Unholy looks to have gotten a boost if you were running the 17/0/54 build using the new plague strike rune. You weren't running diseases too often anyway with only a 25% proc rate.

Raise Ally got fucked.. which sucks because it was a useful PvE talent, you'd wind-up only having a guy down for a minute on long fights.

Plague strike doesn't remove HoTs? wtf?! Yay no ability to kill healers.  Strangulate is also pretty useless now.. 1 min cd, no damage.  :awesome_for_real:

They're working hard trying to make Unholy a viable presence.  Combine it with the new desecration and you're getting a nice buff to damage, indeed.  Too bad they removed Unholy Aura, that was a nice runspeed boost for raiding.

Wat?  Every DK I've ever seen on my server outside of my own is already Unholy.

Presence as in the stance-like deal. 

That being said, it does seem like they're going to make unholy as a spec even more popular.  I know these things are bound to change, but..bleh. 

Yeah, unholy presence had issues, it was only viable in pvp and certain blood rotations that were GCD starved.

The changes to unholy are brutal. Increasing SS's damage, fixing garg again, new glyph extends UB's duration. Glyphed, SS procs diseases enough that I only reapply every third rotation or any time I have to back out of combat (arch jumps, etc), so the new PS glyph is enh.

New Pest glyph appears to still be minor, but now **refreshes disease duration on the primary target**

We all kinda saw the DK nerf coming. They were topping meters in mid-level gear with little effort. One of the guys in my run was putting out 3.5k dps while also working on a paper and raiding.

I'm a little disappointed in the Titan's Grip nerf, but I suspected that was coming as well to bring it more in line with Arms.

I would imagine that Howling blast will get a base line damage buff to compensate for lower burst (which was already... not really that big). This basically kills the 32/39 DW spec though, since not only did they take away their gargoyle, their necrosis and whatnot, but they also moved HB too far for them to get. Ironically, the diseaseless blood rotation (which is already very good dps, especially on fights where perfect rotations for other specs break down) got a buff since they don't even have to press a fucking button for Sudden Doom anymore.

This is pretty much the last blow in the DW coffin. They should simply remove the ability to use the one handers and consolidate the DK into a 2-handed class. 

Also, if it's anything like the other auras, Unholy aura is going to be changed to reduce GCD instead of Rune cooldown. Hopefully that was a typo, since the other auras basically make the presence ability apply to all other presences.

What amuses me the most are the warrior changes. One talent change? Yeah baby, arms is going THROUGH THE ROOF!


EDIT:  They posted the rationale for the plague strike change. It was basically: resto druids already suck in arena, you don't need more tools to curbstomp them harder. Also, you had OP as hell surivivability and self healing, and we didn't like that. But here, have some more damage. Because you couldn't already own a resto druid after a mindfreeze --> strangulate combo.

If it applys the GCD reduction of UhP to other presences, meh.. no biggie. The Rune cooldown is HUUUUUUGE.

No more DK raid buffs, though.  What speccing for one of; a 15% run speed, 4% damage->healing or a magic resistance Aura, was too much?

Diseaseless got murdered by altering the disease damage boosts on strikes to be % based across the board. It's pretty solidly aimed at diseaseless specs which were based around the static damage increase being useless after X AP.

Sudden Doom change is to make blood less GCD starved, and very welcome. Sudden doom was a great talent that could also randomly fuck up your rotations if you weren't in unholy presence.

Improved Unholy Presence though, depending on the rune cooldown amount, is ungodly. Like, what the SHIT.

Depends how much PS got its damage boosted. Diseaseless is currently great damage largely because of the fact that oblit has the best weapon and glyph scaling, far above that of the PS and IT combo.

For blood, you needed to know when to hit DC. It was the closest that DKs had to a priority system as opposed to a pure rotation.  I hit 100RP and sat there sometimes if dumping would have been an overall DPS loss. The issue a lot of people had was that they felt they HAD to dump their RP when they had excess. It made blood interesting, at least for me, because you had to fight the impulse that excess resources = always bad. I can see why they'd change it though, since it doesn't feel as clean if you're getting used to it.

And yeah, 15% raid wide run speed was stupidly op. Sad to see that go :(

I'm still not entirely sure what it is that you do in the game.

Unless you're still leveling?

This post would possibly make sense if I couldn't swear I had heard you disregard the last bunch of nerfs because you've "never stepped foot in arena and don't plan to".

Is a 10% (speculative) rune cooldown going to offset a loss of +15% damage?

The loss of unholy aura is disappointing, but it was likely the most valuable of the auras, and I suppose they just couldn't figure out how to balance the others.

Deep frost nerfs are a little odd. You won't see a frost DK that isn't a tank now.  Not that you ever did before.

I'm not sure what prompted this.


Maybe they're still living in November-08 when DKs were owning fresh 80s with high baseline but poorly scaling HB?

I mean yes, HB bypasses armor and stuff, but even with the double damage to frozen, a lot of people are at the point  where crit HB is about the same damage as a non-crit SS (easily possible with just a Titansteel Destroyer and ilvl200 blues), and HB has a cooldown. I guess they feel that DK AoE damage is a bit high, but really, who cares? When's the last time trash DPS was holding you back?

As far as I can tell, glyphed PS is now the highest weapon modifier strike in the game, at 161% weapon damage. I fully expect these patch notes to be HEAVILY edited for DKs soon, because they're fundamentally stupid.

That's a bit of hyperbole, a crit HB from, say, sjofn is in the 5-6k range. My titansteel destroyer ass lands SS for about 3-4k, 7-8k crit. All in raid situations, of course.

HB's nerf is pretty much angled towards DW, I'm not sure why it ate a damage nerf in addition to moving it.

edit: from a random patch fight, since it was the only one I could find with sjofn and I both DKing it up. Note she's tank specced at the time:

avg hit, avg crit, crit rate btw.
 Howling Blast (r5)   1,990   4,231      41.7%

Scourge Strike (r4)   2,320   5,628      40.5%

edit2: My mistake, that's her howling blasting in Frost Presence, she was tanking that run.  :uhrr:

Hmm, I may be understating HB damage a bit since the only time I ever use it is when tanking, so my AP will obviously be a bit lower. Still, even double crit back to back (say it had no CD), that's what ~10k damage (factoring in resists and whatnot)? Doesn't seem broken unless you can hit 2 people with it (PvPwise).  Either way, HB is always going to fall behind (unless changed to have a higher AP constant), especially with BOH or better weapons (ie. Ulduar loot).

Also, where are you getting the PS numbers from? My DK still hasn't copied.

EDIT: Just saw your numbers. What weapons are you using?

I use a titansteel destroyer, she's using Demise. She's also in full tank gear for that parse.

HB hits relatively hard until very high gear levels.

PS numbers are off EJ. Essentially the glyph breaks it, and won't make it live. It's 50% weapon damage +180ish, but stacking talents and the +60% glyph onto it turns it into a 1U oblit.

 
EH? How much damage does the PS glyph add?  The undocumented notes say Plague Strike is now 50% WD +189.  To go to 161% is a big fucking glyph.


Also: I thought they were giving Discipline Priests an AOE Divine Shield spell.   Now it looks like it's just a decrease in the cooldown plus a mana cost reduction... while increasing CoH again.  :uhrr:

Glyph 60%, a few talents that increase it's base damage by 30-50%, it's all kind of nuts. They upped the base damage and didn't remember that anything that altered PS's damage had HUGE modifiers on it because PS's damage was so horrible.

One of the new mounts is a flying hovercraft/giant robot head.  :drill:

I don't think you can get exalted with Ravenholdt, can you?

Ack, never mind, you can, it only takes 3000 junkboxes or so.

<boggle>

I was planning a spec that had both the Blood and Unholy Auras, 'cause I like to be different.  Yeah I can still do it to give the benefit to myself, but half my motivation was to give some benefit to my group in return for making them play with some spec that makes them scratch their heads.

Ghetto hearthing is dead.  You are now ported to the nearest graveyard.

I say without a drop of hyperbole that this is the worst change ever.

Yeah, I'm not sure what it services except mages who were making money selling portals. It's the kind of change where I'd really like a designer to pop out from behind the curtain and say, "This is why we think we need to change this, because Bad Thing X will happen or is already happening as a result of this practice spreading in some fashion."

I'm guessing it has something to do with BG queuing from anywhere in the world.

Apparently the dual talent option will now open up at 40.  No word if the cost is still 1k gold or if it scales up.  No lexicon needed, just a 5 second cast time.

I doubt I'll be so lucky, but I really, really want to be able to switch between Feral and Moonkin.

Wow two totally and completely different sets of equipment.  You hate your bank space, don't you?  Such a girl.  :drillf:

(And now I have to confess to keeping 3 sets on my pally.)


Yes.  They didn't build the game from the ground-up with this in mind like WAR, so they have to ghetto it in. That means respawns at GYs after BGs.

Damn char copy queue has been full since I heard it was open. I wont get to check the PTR until next month, it seems.

Amateur. My druid is working on 2x20 slotters of PvE gear - 4 sets. I'm eye-ing the Overcast set for PvP >>and<< nice Resto/Boomkin overlap gear.

I'm just doing battlegrounds and dailies until I get bored and quit. Everything else kinda sucks.

My guess is that ghetto hearthing was part of the cause of instance servers getting overloaded and refusing to launch new instances.

I wouldn't say it's the sole cause, but I bet it didn't make it any better.

My 80 priest is now on the PTR, EU-Brill. I'll see if I can check stuff out for people.

If anyone else is there the name is now "Wobble"

Ha ha, that's nothing.

My old 61 feral druid has a full set of casting gear, including rings, in case I was ever needed for healing.  (I was once I think; Iusually solo.)  Along with about six matching outfits plus another couple dozen "Oooh, this looks cool and I'll never be able to replace it.  I wonder if I can find a skirt/shirt/boots/gloves/belt to go with it?" pieces of clothing.

One of my long time requests is for a wardrobe option that lets you save "useless" gear and recall it later.  I think being able to collect full outfits for turn-ins and later retreival would be very well received.  Gotta put an Achiever spin on anything social or exploratory to get it considered unfortunately.

I've been playing around with the gear manager between crashes, it's really well done. It uses an interface similar to the macro design interface where you pick a name and an icon for the set, then this is saved with what you have on at the time. It's got a few bugs (seemed to have problems swapping rings, trinkets and offhands correctly) but otherwise is really neat. Instant-swap, and you have 10 or 12 slots to store configurations.

I also tried dual spec (prior to crashing and loosing the 1K gold I spent on it ...). In combination with the option that lets you preview talents before saving it's really good. The preview talent option has the added benefit that there's no 1s latency between clicks, so you can fill up the talents you know you want much faster. Dual spec has a 5s cast on it and it reduces your mana (and presumably energy, focus, rage, RP, runes etc) to zer when you cast. Currently you can cast it anywhere. You automatically learn any talent based spells you have already trained when you switch. I'm not sure about the action bars since my bars are rather fubared at the moment.

Well, Affliction has been gutted, for the most part.  How do you remove a spell and not give any compensation?  Oh right, Eradication gives 30% more crit to Shadowbolts!  Why not just replace all the talents in Affliction with Improved Shadowbolt?

I will rant about my woe as a tanking DK later, but yeah, I was like, "Oh, that's a nice change to blood's aura. Oh, I like the frost one too, what a nice little ... what the FUCK, unholy?"


What, you never saw me? :(

Actually no, I've yet to see your DK.  You never hang out with us noobs.  :heartbreak:

Not everyone can be as benevolent as myself.

You are totally lying, Nevermore! WHO HELPED YOU GET THOSE ROSES IN UTGARD KEEP, HMMMMM?

It's because I don't have a penis, isn't it. :(

You were there for that?  I think I warned you all I'd been drinking that night.

(http://msp130.photobucket.com/albums/p242/carlapryor/DrinkWineCheersHappy.gif)

The lof of you is comprised of elitist jerks who won't mingle with us powerlevelers  :awesome_for_real:

That emo gnome was cool, tho. Sam or something.

Hey, I've mingled! Like, TWICE!

But I'm totally an elitist jerk.

Sam/Zam... it's all the same to you.

 :heartbreak:

Ok, what the heck is ghetto hearthing ?

Because I've had this 'cannot launch an instance shit' for a while and it's fucking annoying.

Right now, if you are in an instance you're not supposed to be, you'll be ported back to your bindspot. on the PTR, it takes you to the nearest graveyard.

Like I said, emo.

Ghetto hearthing is used by those who have hearthstone on CD and need to hearth. It is exploited by making somebody else leader of a group and joining an instance then dropping group which will force the use of your hearthstone.

Which begs the next question: Why not just reduce the CD on the damn things already.  Shaman get 5 hearths in an hour, why can't the rest of us be as fortunate?

They sorta do already, with the special Dalaran rings.


You want luxury? Pay up fuckers!  :grin:

Not having a special hearth sucks.

The DK hearth being back to bumblefuck is also lame.

Go level up an engineer and hearth to Everlook ( or blow yourself up)!

 :heart: my Moonglade port!  :grin:

Hi Zam!  :heart:

I do, too.  I always miss it on my non-druidically inclined characters.

It's a lot less awesome on my Tauren druid I find.

Yeah it takes forever to fly to anywhere with an AH for a Horde type from Moonglade.

I like that port, you shut up.

It's got to be a short flight to Undercity for Horde.  I can see the Alliance complaining about that 6 min flight to IF, but I just afk or tab-out and read forums. Win-win!

Still, I'd rather have astral recall so I can wind-up where *I* want to, not my class' home base.

Well yes, astral recall is much better, but there are definitely worse places for me to have a port to than Plagueland. I like porting there way better than the stupid Moonglade. :P

And I bet the grapes there are sour, too!  :raspberry:

UC is on the other continent.  The two options for an AH from Moonglade are TB or Org.  Neither of which is terribly far from Moonglade.

I think Merusk was talking about the death knight port, not the druid one.

They were talking about Acherus.

They're far enough to be annoying.  Moonglade to Ashenvale or Stonetalon is far enough to make me bored.

You do know I have a druid too, right.  :grin:

Of course they are. Everything's dead or rotten in Acherus.


Yes.

I do!  But you don't play him nearly as much.


Now we're talking about Moonglade again.  Keep up!

First Base!

Who's on first?

That's right.

I don't know how I missed the switch from Moonglade to Archerus.   :oh_i_see:

Update: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=15416781541&sid=1&pageNo=22#439

Hm, misread that.  For some reason, I thought I had heard blizzard had upped the timer on shaman recalls, and I mixed that up with reducing the cooldown on hearthstones.

Kind of makes me sad in a way, since I spent 8k gold on a ring so I could hearth every half an hour.  Ah well.

I want an engineering transporter to *somewhere* in WOTLK-land.  When I rebind in Booty Bay every sunday to lose the fishing tournament it's a pain to fly all the way back to UC, take the zep to howling fjord, and fly all the way back to Dalaran to rebind.

Also, please to be adding a portal from Shattrath to Dalaran.  Or else move the fishing dailies to Northrend. 

I don't think the tone was meant to be condecending or ironic.  Just a "hey, you guys won, enjoy it!"  I understand with all the bad companies out there it's hard to take any comments from any devs as anything but a cynical mocking of the playerbase.

you didn't wait until you were exalted to buy it?

Oh sure Soul.. edit your post right before I'm done replying to it.

You bastard!

Lakov - I bought it at revered.  Stupid, I know, but I figured why the hell not.  I wanted the second hearth enough to do it.  Plus, you know, the achievement whoring.

Merusk - /victory   :awesome_for_real:

So the other shoe dropped on DKs, this time landing on the DK tanks.  :awesome_for_real:

Edit: Though if I'm reading the notes correctly, it looks like they unnerfed a couple of the nicer DW talents, Blood Caked Blades and Necrosis.

Some odd changes there.  Seems like they want dual wield (for DKs) to make a reappearance in some form.

Good, since I like dual wielding.

Roll a shaman, warrior, hunter, or rogue.

Edit: I really wanted it to die off and eventually just go away. Ohh well.

Or you know, roll a fucking death knight. They have the ability. Blizzard is perfectly happy to let DKs DW if they want. Get over it already.

I'm glad they unnerfed DW to the point where you'll still see it. Having it be THE way to DPS was bad, but nerfing it as hard as they initially did was also bad. On the other hand ... my beautiful, beautiful frost tank spec. I really don't know where I am going to be left at the end of all this.  :sad:

Likewise.  DW was a perfectly acceptable choice when I made my DK and I shouldn't have to delete and reroll another character because the whole idea of dual wielding gets some people all bent out of shape.

I have a bazillion hunters, I mostly solo, and I'm not a raider.  What does it matter?

Do weaponsmasters teach me to use a shield?  'cause I don't see much difference between me dual wielding and using a two-hander since I'm not picking up either weapon-specific talent.

I like the Deathknights to DW. Nobody else wants any of the 1h weapons in Naxx on my run otherwise. Warriors are now exclusively 2h in DPS.

DK's can't use shields.

Really, I don't understand the bitching about letting DKs DW but NOT bitching about how we all fucking have to use maces 98% of the time in the endgame raiding world if we use a 2h. I got Kel'thuzad's axe last night (yay), so at least I have a runeBLADED weapon instead of a runeLUMP weapon. That drives me WAY CRAZIER.

I wish to fucking God they had left the 2h tank swords in, or would at least have the decency to add some nice crafted axes and swords to BS. They could be EXACTLY THE SAME as the 2h mace, even. It's idiotic to give a bunch of races expertise in various weapons and then have so many goddamn maces lying about. It's extra rude to the Horde.

I never understood why they did this.  Didn't they originally give dual wield to DKs to offset the lack of shields?  Well, I guess we look different while tanking.  :awesome_for_real:

Offensive parry tanks.  You've got a defensive shield tank (paladin), defensive parry tank (druid), offensive shield tank (warrior), so an offensive parry tank (death knight) just made sense. 

Yeah, it's pretty annoying seeing almost every DK holding a Titansteel Destroyer along with every ret pallie and in every other hand of a DPS warrior.  It's even more annoying being one of them.  I've seen a two handed weapon drop once (it was the axe) and it went to the DK tank.  I'd pay double the material costs just for a different weapon model.

Or hell, how about adding them to the hero badge vendor (along with a goddamn unholy dps sigil) and some other useful gear. 

I just want an axe. It doesn't even have to be that axe.  Well, it would be nice if it didn't have armor penetration on it.  I DON'T NEED THAT SHIT.

I would guess that having 3 classes that all use plate, 1hers, and shield as tanks would pretty much make one of them overpowered and another completely useless. In that respect, I think it would be warriors who would become obsolete because of their inability to regularly deal with magic damage spikes.

Run heroic Halls of Lightning til you get a http://www.wowhead.com/?item=37852, that is probably the most accessible epic axe.

Or just look at it this way: if you could use shields, odds are good they'd be mandatory.

True.  But I'd feel a lot more like my old Shadow Knight from EQ.  :grin:  Heh, I'll have practical feedback on real DK tanking come 3.1.  Dual speccing is going to have me replacing a lot of the hapless speedbumps in my guild, when all I want to do is DPS.  :oh_i_see:

Ewww, haste. Almost as bad as amor pen.  Still, over the hit cap now by a large margin, so it'd be worth it.  Now I just have to convince people to run heroic HOL.

I got the Heigan mace pretty early on (I used the Tuskar polearm to tank before that  :awesome_for_real: ) and at least my DK is human so I could lie to myself and say it's OK, I have mace expertise. But not using a 2h sword (which is how *I* envisioned myself tanking) annoys the crap out of me!

Armageddon has dropped in my 25-man 3 times so far.

Each time it has gone to a PUG'd character.  I'm getting pissed and remember why I prefer DKP.

Wat?

Shamans can use 2h axes and maces, but you don't see any of them doing so in any serious environment. I wouldn't be surprised if Blizzard squeezes DKs back into using 2h weapons and marginalises DW much like they did (in the opposite direction) with Shamen.

So you're saying that every single 'serious' Shaman is deep Enhance?

He's saying that every single serious enhance shaman is DW. But you kew that.

I suspected that but I wanted clarification, since it's comparing apples to oranges.  Shaman who don't spec Enhance can't even dual wield at all, but somehow we can equate Enhance Shaman (one tree) performing better with DW with forcing *all* DKs to use 2H regardless of spec?  Does not follow.

If you are not enhance, you're either resto or elemental.  In which case, you're better off using 1H+shield/offhand, because no 2H is comparable to the combination of 2 one handed pieces of gear.  At least, not to my knowledge.

Which is why DKs got such big buffs to their stats with Unholy Rune, and their other +str abilities.. which are now getting nerfed.  So yeah, Dual Wield will still be the way to go if you're serious, to get the extra stats.  :oh_i_see:  Evidently Berserking, a normal old enchant, is now better than Runeforging your weapon until you're near fully-equipped in Nax-25 gear.

Stupidity.

What's the deal with old enchants anyway? Back when they released BC I heard a ton of moaning about them nerfing crusader hard but haven't heard anything about berserking or mongoose getting the bat treatment. I've even seen people looking for mongoose enchants. So, did they skip nerfing the hell out of those enchants?

I concur, although it is conceivable that the new staff enchants could make staves a possibly viable choice for PVE resto or elemental shamans. If you could find one without spirit on it.

Mongoose is still pretty good as a tank enchant; you won't see many other people looking for it. The new parry enchant will probably mean that it will just be druids who still want mongoose, and GC stated today that they're looking at adding some more attractive bear enchant(s).

How do those look un-nerfed? BCB now has a 3s delay to go off, and Necrosis can't trigger on the offhand at all. Those look like nerfs to me.

Blood-Caked Blade proc limitation has been removed. (Old - This effect cannot occur more often than once every 3 sec.)

Necrosis now affects all your auto attacks. (Old - Only Main-Hand)

Source: http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?topic=42702.0

It's not a bad comparison really. You have several situations where a class or spec has the option to DW or use a 2H weapon and Blizz has arbitrarily structured the tree to significantly bias one over the other, DW being the only sensible option for Enhance Shamen, 2H being the only sensible option for Arms warriors. Yet in the past 2h enhance and DW arms were not unheard of. The upshot of this is, if Blizz decides that they want to softly kill of DK DW they could without much problem, or constrain it to be only viable with one of the trees.

If anything we need more 2h-users. There's no shortage of demand for 1h swords, axes and maces.

Ahh thanks; I didn't know there were updated patch notes. I had just been using the ones on Blizzard's official PTR site.

Wat?

Death Knight	Death Knight
Hunter	Hunter
Druid	Druid
Rogue	Warrior
Shaman	Paladin

With the DW nerf coming to DKs the only people using one-handed swords/maces/axes will be plate tanks, rogues, and enhancement shaman.

From my Enh Shaman's perspective, the reason DW is necessary is that to be in that tree, you would be wasting too many points in talents that benefit from DW.  The tree is made for it obviously.  You want to have as many weapon swings as possible to get your chance at proccing special talents as much as possible.  It not only helps your shaman but the groups they are with.

The point is though, that back in the glory days of shamans (if you pvp'd at all anyway), they couldn't duel wield at all, it was a big 2h with WF and that's it (except for occasionally swapping to 1h and shield for defensive purposes).  Then came TBC with the revamped enhancement tree and it's pretty much been DW or go home since.  There were and still likely are a lot of shamans who enjoyed using 2h weapons back then and are still miffed that it's been left to the wayside and the whole tree pretty much designed with only DW in mind now.

Dual wielding is pretty much a retard magnet, too.

I hear they make you take an IQ test before you can pick up a two-handed sword.  True story.

Obviously, it's not working, since the deathtard population on Whisperwind is higher than ever. Although, granted, the most clueless of that unhappy lot do tend to dual wield.

Take your two-hander and shove it where the sun don't shine. :-P

That's true, but I find on both my Enh Shaman and my rogue that designing gear with DW'ing is more interesting than my other alts.  I enjoy all of the tailoring of the right weapon to the right enchantment, to the right hand to put it in, etc...

A 2 hander just cuts your choices in half and shields and off-hand (non-melee) items are just....boring.  DW just adds a bit more to the whole design.

DW'ing 2handers on my warrior (when Fury) is the bees knees y'all.  It soothes the inner geek in me.

If you wanted to be a special snowflake, you should've rolled a female dorf.  :-P

It also cuts your weapon enchant costs in half.  :oh_i_see:

Actually for that reason I am pretty strongly considering making arms my pve dps offspec on my main, assuming it gets the buffs that have been promised.

I don't need any help being a special snowflake...  and sometimes it's best I blend in with the crowd.

I could swear that, in another thread, you claimed to be prepared.
Seems that Illidan was right.  :oh_i_see:

Stalker.

And honestly, those shaman that want to use a 2h are right to be miffed. :P


That's why Midgard was the smartest realm!  :awesome_for_real:

So, now that they've been doing testing on Ulduar for a while, have any of yall jumped in there and given it a go?

No, but I should. I'm just skeered of what my poor little DK might have become.

I've really had almost no desire to log into the game these days. Every time I do it's more ppl asking me to run heroics, and I'm sick of those. Also, I basically have everything from Naxx except 213 bracers and the T7 helm, neither of which I really give a shit about enough to keep running the place so I can kill Kel'Thuzad again.

I really wish Blizzard would move away from the "you must kill every single boss in the place before you can get to the last boss" model in their raids. IMO, everything should be winged, with an "endboss" wing you can get to after you get keyed by killing all the wings. It sounds like they are doing something like this with "Alagon the Observer" by having him only accessed by completing a quest line where you have to do 4 bosses on hard mode in Ulduar, but it's hard to say without actually seeing the layout.

Anyway the reason I say that is because my Naxx group got completely frustrated having to kill 13 unneeded bosses every week just to have a slight chance at a drop off the last dude. I don't even mind killing 3-4 bosses to get to a final boss, but 13 bosses and ~4 hours is just entirely too much. It doesn't seem Ulduar is going to alleviate that concern though, as it has like 12 bosses. I'd like to hope maybe all those bosses aren't tied to getting to Yogg-Saron and some of them are optional, but we'll see how that goes.

Naxx will be nerfed down so you can run to Saph and Kel 2-3 months after Uldar is out.  Just like they finally did with Kael and Vashj.. I'll agree, though, its getting damned tedious having to run a whole instance when all the majority of your group needs is on those last 2 guys.

Yes, and while that is fine that they will probably do that, that only really helps people who want to grind alts through the system or for achievements. I really wish they would just learn that on the front end.

I've only logged on the PTR to beat up on dummies. Apparently that's all DKs do on PTR.

Paelos, I'm almost in the exact opposite boat as you.  I just can't find a group that runs Naxx at times that'd work for me, and I want to do more Naxx.  I'm at the point where I'm good at all of the fights, but simply haven't done them enough to even remotely approach burnout.  I can use gear improvements in spots, but since I'm a DK  and not retarded; my DPS exceeds what any fight requires.   So, I'm doing mop up duty during the last hour of my guild's runs.  :awesome_for_real:

Toyed with the idea of starting my own run, but I'm going to be in no position to be relied upon consistently in about 9-10 weeks.

Yeah I'm sure there are a lot more people out there like you Rasix than there are people in my boat. I have always started my own groups, but I always have coleaders to help control the situation on the at least one run a week that I can't make. The problem we ran into was that we killed everything, we had in most cases at least 85% or more of the gear from the place, and people didn't really want to show up anymore, co-leads included.

I feel that if you run something for 4 months, you're done with it. Once everything is dead, the shine wears off really fast for me because I don't get any rush from winning loot. Others can farm things forever and be happy with stacking up epics or chasing that one last piece.

I haven't really raided at all since I got my betrayer a few weeks back.

It was kind of the one big piece of loot I focused on, and WoW was over when I got it. Upgrading my cloak and libram just aren't enough of a reason for me to spend six hours in a raid with people I don't like.

Clearing all of that trash so other people can gear alts and whatnot... I just can't do it anymore.

The only 25-man I've been to is Vaults. I refuse to pug so I've stuck to leading one of my guild's 10-man runs for the last few months. Pretty much everyone who goes is now bedecked in 10-man gear at the very least and most of my guild pugs 25-man Naxx when bored so about half have a lot (some all) 25-man gear. Maly is a tough sell for anyone who doesn't like the fight in my guild since there's not a lot of "must have" loot in the place and people who hate the fight well...hate the fight. 1-2 Drake sarth interests a few people in my guild for the "what the hell, why not" factor but no one really wants any of the loot and we've been bored/done with OS for a month and a half now.

Most of the people in my guild right now would rather just run heroics and bullshit over vent than go into Naxx again.

I'm starting to get pretty tired of Naxx, yeah. I've got most of what I want for my own toon out of there--a bracer and Calamity's Grasp is really all I'm looking for. I suppose the 7.5 helm as well, but I have Hood of the Exodus, so not exactly a burning need.

So far not a lot of enthusiasm for doing Malygos in our guild, even though we have the key.

I've usually done OS-25 and VoA-25 by Wednesday--I find that if you pug them too late in the week, you usually end up with the really bad players. There's a trinket out of OS-25 that I'd still like to get. Otherwise I'm just doing achievements, which is moderately amusing--more interesting than pure farming, at any rate.

I still haven't run into a bad enough to wipe OS 25 yet, no matter when I've run it.  We've got a smaller pop server, so later in the week is when you see a lot of raid guild alts running it.  Last one I ran,  a DK got hit by walls 5 times and ended up winning the 7.5 gloves.  I don't think I've been hit since my first time doing it. Amazed we didn't have a rougher time considering there were about 12 people offering advice/direction in raid chat.  I won't join vent anymore for pug OS or VoA.

Getting my shaman to 80 has been my main task nowadays as I usually blow my reg Naxx ID taking hatefuls on Patch and just about nothing else.  :awesome_for_real:  It's also gotten harder getting a group as a DK and figure I might as well have a resto shaman now that 3.1 will allow me to go elem (likely) or enhance for dailies and quest grinding.  I've actually gotten tells back saying "no DKs" and have seen "looking for DPS, no DKs" in trade as well as just plain crickets.   (My guild is also absurdly melee heavy atm)

Best part of 3.1 is that maybe I'll be able to get a different looking weapon  :oh_i_see:

At this point, I'd just like to get in on a raid that can clear Naxx 25 military wing.  I've never been beyond Raz.  Thanks Blizzard, for forcing us to rely on one specific class to beat an encounter.   :heartbreak:

P.S.:  Please add mind control crystals to the Raz Naxx 25 fight.  Love, the entire rest of the player-base.

I'd still like to do heroics, and naxx 10, but the raiding portion of my guild has imploded, and what's left is pretty goddamn useless.  I'm pretty unenthused about trying to get in a new guild, although I've made some halfhearted efforts in that direction.  The "A" team I was in went from clearing naxx 10 in 2.5 hours to clearing 4 wings in 5 hours.  Pretty sad, imo.

I'm not even sure Ulduar is going to do much for me, as it'll probably take more player skill and healing than my guild can even muster to get into the place.

Raz-25 is easily the dumbest fight in the whole place. It annoys the fuck out of me that they took the time to change the whole place and left that shit in there. We have the priests, so it doesn't block us out, but it's still irritating to have that class-specific a fight.

Boo f'ing hoo? They took out almost all class depency from the raiding game. They leave it in on a couple fights and suddenly everyone is crying they can't do a raids with nothing but druids and dk's. I understand and appreciate them dumbing things down but I dont think it's necessary to get worked up over such a minor detail. Hell the priests don't even need to have anything more than +hit gear at most, just have someone's alt do it if you absolutely can't find two priests which if you're in a guild big enough to do 25mans should not be hard.

Also this was a really fun fight in the 40man and as a priest im glad they kept it because its a fun change of roles.

Yeah I've run into that problem, too.  When I do a /who it's another DK that's been doing the recuiring 9/10 times.  Asshats. I just want badges, keep your damn heroic lewtz.

I'd be a lot more appreciative of Razuvious is priests weren't so fucking horrible at the mechanics of tanking.

What's fun for some is a giant waste of time and PITA for a lot of others in this regard. Priests didn't roll them to tank. As a tank, I would cringe at the idea of having to main heal a fight while mindcontrolling a priest. It's not a terrible fight, but it is the most frustrating for most groups due to that fact. I certainly don't enjoy relying on people who in a lot of cases have never tanking something before that.

You're so wrong. I also rolled my warlock to tank back in the twin emps day  :geezer:

Tanks = control freaks.

Well all I can say is that every priest I know welcomes and enjoys doing this and most are good at it. If anything I'd say this fight was way too simple since it completely takes tanking gear out of the equation and as long as you have two non-retarded priests and a couple healers not sleeping you'll do fine.

As to peopleswitching roles spefically, well there's simply nowhere else to go is there? There's only so many fights where you can either, stand in shit or get out of the way of shit. At some point they need to have people doing different things to make it a challenge. It's no surprise that the whole vehicle system was created because aside from making people take new roles on, the only other thing to do is increase mob stats to ridiculous degrees. Now, I don't like vehicles as a whole, sometimes they can be fun but sometimes just annoying.

What I can respect though is they are making the game more difficult by trying to expand the players skillsets which and lets be honest, a lot of people are unable to do.  This is most frustrating for a lot of guilds but I look at the people complaining and get a chuckle.  All these supposedly uber raiders saying "but i dont wanna heal!" or something similar when they are asked to change their role for the odd fight or two.  I understand people wanting specific playstyles, afterall that's WHY you rolled that class but to be so adverse to changing that role on rare occasion is just silly.

The problem with Raz's encounter, IMO, is that it makes Naxx 25 very difficult to PUG. It's hard enough to find 25 warm bodies in the appropriate ratio of Tank : Healer : Dps; requiring at least 2 priests (ideally 2 shadow priests) pften forces a group to either a) skip Military or b) bring priests in greens just because you NEED the class. In my last Naxx run we literally spent 15 minutes convincing one of our holy priests to even ATTEMPT it. I don't mind forcing players to change roles, but forcing a specific class (and spec) is rather annoying.

Exactly, it's not the uber raiders that are complaining about this for the most part, it's the more casual/family & friends/PUG groups that it really pisses off.  An uber raiding guild will have several priests with high attendance or if not will easily be able to recruit some.  For everyone else it's hard enough just getting 10 or 25 people together on a regular basis that don't all hate each other and cause drama.  Making Y amount of X class required for a fight and requiring that the people playing X class be some of the more competent and with it people who can "switch roles" just makes it an even bigger pain.  I don't see why they couldn't have added MC orbs and then had an achievement or hard mode for using Priests to MC instead.

I don't mind making people try another class role in a fight. I just would rather it was not *only* priests that could do it, e.g., that it was a part of the mechanic of the fight rather than the mechanic of a class. If what you appreciate about it is that people who don't have to tank normally have to tank for this, then the crystals are the solution.

The main problem with the understudies is that they are really utterly crap tanks, mainly due to their slow speed relative to Raz. Also MC is far from rock-solid, and if you get unlucky with jagged knife attacks you loose casting time and the whole tanking rotation can get screwed up. There's a reason that anyone going for Undying/Immortal will do Raz first, because of all the fights in Naxx up to KT, it's the one with the least control and the highest chance of random Gibs.

There's also the other thing that most priests didn't roll with tanking in mind. I played a tank for 2+ years and enjoyed the hell out of it, but MCing the understudy is nothing like playing as a real tank. Hell, it took me to my fourth go to realise that right-clicking on Raz doesn't cause the understudies to autoattack, you have to manually activate it. Once you get the rhythm he's cake. However expecting smooth kills from priests who have never done it before is ridiculous.

The #1 biggest problem with them is they have the old melee range taunt distance.

Equipment manager is being delayed until sometime after 3.1.

Patch is confirmed for tomorrow.

Split body text:

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=26293.0

Oops. Dispite the bug report I filed on test 3 weeks ago this talent is still broken. Piercing shots tics for 1hp dmg with 1-3pts invested in it off a 2k crit.
Waste of points.

For those of you that use WoWMatrix to update addons, it has been blocked by both Curse and WoWInterface today. Also I heard that WUU is partially usable (blocked by Curse).

Typical patch day. It'll be 5PM EDT before we get an update about when the servers might be up. My guess is sometime between 6PM and Friday afternoon.

I have never understood why it takes them so long to apply these patches.  Is it a database issue or something to do with altering the backups as well?

I'm more interested in why they keep sticking with the idea of one big patch every 1/2 year, instead of several smaller patches on a more frequent basis.  Their current publishing cycle is failboat.

Lean/Agile development is HARD.

Yah, it's not like this patch couldn't have been split into separate patches for the Argent Tournament, mana/balance changes, Ulduar, dual speccing, and minor profession changes.  Hell, it would be cool if they actually did small patches for minor things like UI improvements (hello Gear Manager). 

Plus then they'd seem a little less glacial on the content development side.  Not that this is hurting their bottom line in any way that they'd notice.  As long as the money train keeps running, I doubt they'll undergo any shift in development practices.

They actually want to go faster, its just they are blizzard, so it is unpossible.

Just look at it as an excuse to play RoM or Aion instead.  :drill:

My guess now, they are raiding on empty realms.  So as soon as they are able to obtain the realm first achievement on every realm, they will allow people to log in to the servers.

Everyone who truly didn't see this coming, raise your hand.


Nobody? No one? Good, you're jaded enough.

You're missing the one at 4PM PDT that says by 5PM PDT.

Ha, and you are missing the one at 5PM that says 8PM.

Actually it says "Maybe around 8pm."

Gee, large patches don't implement easilyl. Whoda thunk.

JESUS GOD CHRIST AN EVENING WITHOUT WOW!

(http://www.theescapist.com/darkdung06.jpg)

PVP's pretty fucked atm.

Wintergrasp on Stormreaver is bugged, and won't end.  Horde lost on def, the relic is exposed, but no one actually controls the zone.

Every time I try to enter AV/AB, i get stuck at the loading screen and have to alt-f4 to get out.  Sometimes I get hearthed out, and I hear some people are falling through the world when they try entering.

Sounds like patch day to me!

Dual speccing is pretty slick and Dominoes works with it already.   :drill:

xperl is kinda boned at the moment, but usuable with a beta update and a bug squasher.

Aside from the lol worthy world and instance servers, patch seems pretty keen so far. I like most of the changes in solo practice, I need to check on them in raid and pvp situations still. They did well on three trash pulls we managed in the comedy vault attempt!

I logged on late enough that I only had to wait for the patch.  23 minutes this time.  Dual specced my Pally Ret/Prot, so now he can heal, dps, and tank.  We controlled WG and went into the vault.  Took the original boss down no problem and then started to try the second *new* one.  Big fail there, but it was late and everyone was running without a stitch of add-ons.  I can't remember a time where we went after a boss without having some spoilers ahead of time.  We aren't used to getting to new content this quickly!

Dual-spec without outfitter is .... quite hard.  The pally now has 3 entirely different sets for heal/dps/tank.  I'll be working on updating add-ons tonight (hopefully they are patched.)  Dual-spec is going to be my new mini-game from here on out.  I really like how it was done.

Mundocani (Outfitter author) has released a 3.1 version on Curse - didn't see any explanation but there are a lot of "Welcome back!"s.

Dual spec is nice as I now have a PvP spec and a PvE spec.  The ability to rape people even harder than I did before as a DK makes me understand all the whines now as I blew people apart last night in WSG.  Thanks Howling Blast/ Frost Strike/ Oblit!

The new boss in Vault is... interesting.  We hit him a few times to see where we would get.  If we tanked the 4 adds near him, we died.  If we tanked them considerably away from him, we would still die.  He randomly overcharges one and it seems to hit the entire raid for over 17k nature damage.  If you kill one, another on spawns quickly to join the fight.  It was fun trying to figure it out without any spoilers or wiki entries on how to do it.

The new fishing daily sent me to fish at River's Heart in Sholzar. That turned into a big pvp-fest (OMG world pvp) since the area you had to fish in wasn't that big. It was fun (unless you were actually trying to fish). After killing and getting killed for a while, I went off, did the Oracle dailies, came back to find the place had civilized and no one was bothering each other. Got a Bone Fishing Pole (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=45991) in the reward sack. Perfect fishing pole for my Forsaken.

Yeah I'd missed the changes to fishing earlier.  As a DK who has only managed to get up to 200 skill so far, I'd like to say FUCK YES!  I always thought it was stupid you could only fish in certain areas.  (And prior to that, having to fish in certain areas just to get a skill up)  Requiring a certain skill level to catch specific fish types makes a lot more sense and it a lot more fun.  No more "Summon me from IF when raid starts, I'm going to be skilling up fishing."

We downed Flame Lootviathan before the instance server went KABOOM!   :awesome_for_real:  Assuming the instance servers don't melt down again, and Blizzard fixes the other bosses, we'll try some more tonight.  Hooray for new raid content.

It's an interesting fight, but sadly one of those "MUST KNOW INSTANTLY WHAT THE BUFFS DO OR RAID WIPE" fights.


edit: new Armory is keen, but broken. If you want comedy specs, it's got some new tree/old spec points thing going on where you wind up with 5/3 in random talents.

We also downed flame leviathan on our first real attempt (the first was an unintentional start as someone got too close), and got the no-stun achievement because the guys who got up there couldn't figure out how to PUSH BUTTAN to stun the guy.

We went down to razordrake (?) and got two attempts on it before the servers shit themselves for the night. We pretty much fell apart on it, though, people dying left and right because they aren't running fast enough out of those blue clouds.

I was chosen to get the shards as apparently they form into a healing mace, which tethers me pretty tightly to the game. Exciting times! I'm just happy for new content.

The fishing changes were nice.  Skilling up from level 1 was easy and I made more money from junk than I'd get throwing all the fish away.

I can't mess with the dual spec stuff due to a lack of money, though my Druid is the only one who would really benefit from it at this point.  Hopefully all the frogs from Darkmoon will go off the market soon and I can dominate the market for a few weeks while selling herbs to all the returning people.

There should be a very good market for herbs for a while with all the glyphs people are going to need.

Herbs are selling strong.

I made 500 gold overnight, just from scrambling to put up the pittance of glyphs I had in my bank on my druid. I made sure I had a good 80+ glyphs on the AH before I left for work. I'm trying to ensure that my druid will be able to buy her own dual spec, without dipping into my warrior's cash stocks.

Maybe this is a good time to sell the roughly 30-40 stacks of Northrend herbs I have sititng in the bank.

I imagine it'll be a week before my guild gets any solid shots at Ulduar 10m content. Seems like about half the active players didn't bother even logging on yesterday. 

How is Ulduar 10 tuned anyways?  Does it assume you're in mostly Nax 25 gear?

Supposedly not, they claim the intended progression is Nax10->Uld10. I sure hope that is true, since I am going to be tanking it in ilvl 200 gear mostly, and it could make for some long nights if I'm getting gibbed by virtue of not being in 213+ stuff! I have all of two pieces of 213 stuff, the Maly-10 quest necklace and T7.5 gloves.

I went in last night(10man) with my guilds a-team and we were fully 25man geared.  We cleared leviathan,razorscale,xt,iron council, kolgarn, auriya, hodir in about 4 hours. It's definitely not a faceroll since there were many wipes but 25man gear makes it a LOT easier. We were actually able to get a few achievements as well.

I do find the difference in bosses staggering. Razorscale on 25man is a huge dps race and even my guild which is the best on my server(this is not saying much) could not kill him in 25man and yet on 10man we one shotted him.

It's definitely a step up in difficulty and I would put ulduar25 on par with black temple in terms of how hard it is.

Good point.  Looks like Ky is going herbing on Thursday.

Any know which will be in most demand?  About 300 skill, so will Duskwallow, Feralas (can get thick hide as well), or hellfire be most useful?

My hunch would be the herbs that make dusky pigment (Stranglekelp, Swiftthistle, Briarthorn, Bruiseweed and Mageroyal), and golden pigment (Liferoot, Kingsblood, Wild Steelbloom and Grave Moss). These two pigments make up for about half or more of the glyphs in the 1-300 skill range. Outland and Northrend herbs should be good too.

Drama!  Curse and WoW Interface have banded together to stop third party addon updaters from getting addons from their sites.  Apparently their main target was WoW Matrix (which I hadn't heard of), but WUU doesn't work for those sites either.  You are now forced to either use WoW Interface's non-existent updater, or Curse's bloaty updater, or do all your addons manually.

It looks like wow interface forums are broke now, else I'd link the fantastic thread where you get to decide who you like less, the "I demand you give me addons" crowd, or the "I write addons for me, and I don't give a toss about my users" crowd.

I am grateful to anyone willing to spend their time writing an addon I can then use to improve my gameplay experience.

My main is now stuck in hc UK, waiting for some type of GM action, but not holding my breath.

Grid is not working, xperl is reportedly somewhat broken.  DBM will KILL YOUR CLIENT or something similarly dire.

I installed pitbull, and then spent a lot of the rest of the night fiddling with it.  My overall impression of it:  Soon as grid is fixed, I'm ditching pitbull.  Very configurable, but damn, I just want an interface that shows people's health, and allows me to click on it.  Not something that defaults to "swallow your entire screen".  Which then took me probably close to an hour to figure out what needed configuring where in order to reduce the size of the bars to something reasonable.  Mostly because we were fiddling around with FlameLeviathan trash, and then an absolutely comical wipe to "all four towers still up" hardmode attempt.

Along the same line of conversation, but is there anyway to turn off Blizzard's party frames when not in a raid?

I don't believe there is.  I've looked enough times to believe such a thing, anyway.

VoA froze up for my entire raid today, and now no one's able to log into their characters.

Edit: 3 hours later, I finally got out.  I'm hearing that all instances are fucked on my server atm.  Oh, and the AH just died.

Yikes. I think I'm staying the hell out of raids for a week.  Of course, this impacts me less than others. *grumble grumble*

This happened to us last night in Ulduar.  Some were booted to Dalaran, where they fell through Dalaran approximately 10000000000 times before hitting the ground.  Apparently the sheer number of bodies under Dalaran was 100% epic.  Some fell through the world... forever.  Others were stuck in Ulduar without any way to get out, although I'm told if you log out for more than 40 minutes that you'll be booted to the nearest graveyard.  I was one of the lucky ones stuck in Ulduar last night, I'm very excited* to discover where exactly I wind up when I log in tonight.

* actual level of excitement may be very low.

Awesome bug with the dual speccing.  It will randomly not assign all of your points if your server is lagging. I discovered I was missing Scourge Strike and Unholy blight after switching back from my frost spec, and I had 2 unspent talent points in my bucket.  Switching back to Frost I had one unspent point.  Awesome.

My main was unstuck about 20 minutes after a post on the customer support forum, so well done there Blizz.

Did the new fishing daily, got the weather-beaten fishing hat for my troubles. The new fishing system is definitely a vast improvement over the old. Still not perfect, but far more tolerable.

As far as addons go, Grid seems to be working in the sense that I can interact with it, but it's reporting aggro and debuffs wrong. Quartz is working except for the cast-bar. Pitbull seems buggy as hell, but I don't think I updated the right version, so I'll have another go with that. Bartender4 is working perfectly, supporting dual-spec and everything very nicely. I haven't loaded DBM yet, but I'll see when we do Naxx/Ulduar tomorrow.

Ah ha... I was wondering if I had done something wrong, but every time I switch between combat and hat spec I somehow end up having to put ten points back in to hemo, lolstep and hat.

The only bug I've had with grid is with aggro alert; I just disabled the module.  QuestHelper's been extra flaky though, and the waypoint arrow doesn't display correctly.

Aside from the numerous bugs, it feels like the pvp survivability on my disc priest has gone way up.  I bought the wrong gloves today, so I'm not getting the +50 resil bonus (I didn't realized satin and mooncloth items can't be mixed for set bonus'), but at 655 with 20k health and the new changes, I can actually last more than a few seconds when I get focus fired.

I had a poorly geared warrior, dk, and hunter all on me while I was alone at the beach at SotA for a good 2 minutes.  I managed to shake off the hunter/dk, and was about to kill the war when we won the game.  Self penance + stacking grace + inner fire glyph + super cheap shields = win.

I'm holding off on updating my addons until saturday when my guild is "officially" running Ulduar 25. I hope by then most of the kinks with addons and the servers will be worked out.

Made the mistake of trying VoA again.  Same shit happened.

Maybe I'll just stop playing for a week or two.

My Ulduar run isn't starting until the 24th. I figure by then the severs will stop sucking and possible strategies will be out.

Argent Tournament, fun or just more dumb vehicle shit? Not sure yet.

We had Vault lockup fail two nights in a row also. I'm pretty willing to overlook server instability on patch day, but they usually have it pretty well ironed out by the next night.  :|

So far it's locked up every hour, every 10/25man on the server. No change from yesterday. Got one attempt in at that new Arch boss. Getting kind of tired of this...

Sigh, I avoid the forums and miss the memo about VoA being broke as a joke. My main is now stuck there. I've also go a belf alt that's missing 3 talent points, unable to spend the remaining points, and unable to login. All this for a crummy new raidzone and a fistfull of nerfs? Thanks assholes.

</nerdrage>

Dual spec is totally borked. Swapping is an exercise in figuring out which talent points magically vanished. If they don't have this figured out by the weekend with the world server dumps, the VoA nonesense, and the dual spec crap, they are going to actually start losing accounts over this patch. I usually don't say that, but this is the first time I'm really feeling like they've stopped giving a crap about the game. Given the time that went into testing this patch, and given the patches of the past, this is just getting progressively more ridiculous.

Dual Spec did the opposite for me, bonus talent points!


Best patch evar.  :oh_i_see:

They added a resell function in 3.1. If you're buying an item with alternative currencies (armour tokens, arena points, honour etc) you have a two hour window to sell the item back if you feel you made a wrong purchase. One of the features that I missed in the patch notes, but it's kinda cool. The only limitation is that you cannot resell stacked items (gems, badges, orbs).


Post on the customer support forums, I got my main fixed in about 20mins doing this.


I'm not a fan of vehicles, but this is better implemented than most from what I have seen so far.

Other cool new stuff I discovered:
 - Holding down Alt while mousing-over an item in your character screen shows all the alternative items you could equip in that slot which you have in your inventory
 - Pre-designing talents. I don't know why this is set off by default since it's brilliant. You can find the option in the Interface Menu, under.... display I think. It allows you to preconfigure your talents before saving, avoiding those 1-point misclicks you occasionally make.

Posted on the customer service forums; got me a copypasta response and a lock within 2 minutes. Took about 2 hours for instance servers to come back up and I could finally hearth out. No GM reply at all, about either the crashes or my alt's missing talents.

I really can't believe how buggy this patch has been. Ulduar and VoA are both broken, dual specs randomly steal talent points or reset your spec completely, the various world servers crash hourly, vehicles fall through the world, etc. Everything Blizz changed, they broke; and that's with a month of testing. They could easily have split this patch into two (3.1: Dual Specs and Class Changes, 3.2: Ulduar or vice versa) or more patches; but instead they release one huge buggy mess that breaks the game for everyone.

Is the game at least running better? Framerates have suffered a significant drop since wotlk came out, and those frames never returned.

So far I've had barely any issues at all. After getting the addon mess straightened out somewhat, the only thing that's happened while I was on was we had the Northrend world server go down for a few minutes. I play on Chromaggus which is a low-med pop server which may be why were having less issues. My prot warrior now has a 2nd spec in Arms. God its fun, even in my crappy gear. Really GCD limited though.

So people don't have to confirm every talent point as they level up.

Well, they've added a lot of additional spell effect, texture, and other graphic improvements for people with high end machines, and added even more in 3.1, so you may need to do some tweaking with your graphics options to turn all that stuff off or put it on low and get something close to your old framerates back.

In other news, Yogg has been killed by Ensidia already, prepare for some "the game is still too easy" QQ to start flying from hardcore players anytime now.   :oh_i_see:

My server is a release server, and it's a mess with the world dumps in primetime. Also, framerates were so bad in Dalaran I'm running the game on minimum specs just so I can get around there.

Also, Yogg isn't the real raiding boss test for Ulduar. All the bigtime raiding guilds went the pussy route and chased after the fastest kills without any hardmodes. If they kill Alagon during the next reset though, well...  :uhrr:

Ensidia did hard-mode iron council. Also judging from the issues reports it seems that hard-mode leviathan isn't getting extra HP like it should, so it's not as hard as it should be.


Ah, I posted into the sticky thread and it got resolved.


Fair point.

Oh, I'm well aware that they added a lot of bells and whistles. The thing is, given equal resolution, maxed textures, view distance and character details, and having everything else turned off, it's running (and most certainly looking) worse than AoC. I've a bit of trouble coming up with an excuse for that.

But what can they really do with the current mechanics?  All bosses are either gear-checks, or skill-checks.  Skill-checks mostly boil down to "stand here, not there".  The pain is raiding is getting everyone there in the first place, and then getting them to stand in the right spot and hit the right button.  Past that are there really any new mechanics they can challenge us with?

Vehicles maybe?

Well, the point is that nobody got to test Yogg on the PTR and it didn't really slow them down too much, although a US guild had like a 7 hour head start on Yogg and didn't beat them to the kill.

As for hard modes and Alagon (which only has a hard mode and is basically the Sarth 3D of Ulduar), I'm assuming from what Blizzard has been saying that if these are tuned properly they will be pretty heavy gear checks and require most of the raid to be in 25 man Ulduar gear to succeed.  They even mentioned that guilds may want to do Ulduar 10 man hard modes to gear up for 25 man hard modes since 10 man hard mode gear is slightly better than 25 man normal mode gear.

If they are truly tuned to be that much of a gear check it makes sense that top guilds would just race for world firsts right as the patch hit, then worry about hard modes once the raid has some better gear and more experience with the fights.  E-peen bragging rights is always a good reason too  :grin:.

You are also talking about a guild that has, through recruitment and mergers, assembled the most obsessive and dedicated group of raiders possible. These guys are to regular players what Chelsea FC are to your pub footbal team, or the Yankees are to little league. Any content designed to hold these guys is is going to be borderline impossible for the other 99%. These guys are dinosaurs anyway, relics of now-dead design philosophies; what Blizzard have done well is realised that people don't really care how quickly the pros clear content, it's how logn it takes everyone else that matters, and that's why they are doing better than ever.

I'm running it on my brand new (for me) ATI 3870, and I'm getting good performance with settings turned nearly max.

Even in Dalaran?

I've had one lockup when flying into Dal, and the usual chop from having tons of player there, but nothing out of the ordinary.

Yesterday, I had my first lock up since the expansion released. I'm blaming it on QuestHelper.

Dalaran sucks but I don't have problems getting around it. Framerate problems really only come into play during 25 man raids if I forget to turn down spell effects. Even then it can get a little dicey.

Independent of the overall problems of the patch and more due to the new content, I'm getting that feeling that I might be done.  Last 2 times I quit were when BT and Sunwell were released.  New content depresses the hell out of me in my playing situation.

All for mods I use had updates I applied yesterday (including QuestHelper), and I didn't have any problems with them last night.  QH just takes a long time to load.

The servers, on the other hand...   :awesome_for_real:

Drop your draw distance by half. WotLK approximately doubled how far out the client renders, so halving it puts it back to TBC standards. Oh, and turn off vsync if you don't need it.

I'm not having any serious technical issues (so far). We have had guildies who have dropped talent points mysteriously and so on. VoA's second boss is, so far, unpuggable: your average pug breaks down crying in the first few seconds of the fight. We're planning to tackle him soon in-guild. We had an unplanned half-hearted 10-man ad hoc try at Flame Leviathan last night, got to about 10 % two times without reading any strats. Now that we've seen it, I think not much trouble. It's kind of fun.

I'm running the repair utility right now, as I've had to do every couple weeks or so ever since WOTLK hit. Now it's telling me the game is "seriously damaged" and has to be reverted to a previous version and repatched. Blizzard has lost some of their quality control mojo, yes.

But.. but.. but everyone said that merger with Activision won't affect them at all!

For those of us who have been gaming with and buying Blizzard products since 1997 and the original Diablo, this is nothing new or surprising.

You should keep in mind that they tend to forget to update the repair info after a major patch hits.

Well my guild that has had 10-man Naxx on farm for a cuppla months went into 10-man Ulduar armed with little more than a couple of quick reads on Wowwiki.  The result.

Playing with vehicles at start:  'This is fun now, but I can see the novelty wearing off soon'.  :oh_i_see:
Leviathan:  Dropped him first go!  Woo!  :awesome_for_real:
Razorgore?  The flying dragon one: Woah, lots of raid damage.  Lots of raid damage.  Ow.  Lets try Ignis.  :uhrr:
Ignis Trash: Hey, two fire giants.  Just like at the start of MC.  Lets pull this trash, see how much more uber we are these days.....  <raid sitting at GY> Hmm, yep - just as successful as our first run into MC.  :uhrr:
Ignis:  Holy Mary Mother of God, what the fuck just rolled straight over me???  :ye_gods:

So not impossible, but they've definately upped the difficulty.  Lots more having to pay attention and move intelligently, spatial awareness etc - even on trash.

Fuck, time to find a new guild for me, then.  We didn't get farther than the trash before the instance crashed last night but our druid healer is a goddamned flake.   She was laughing in that bubble-headed idiot way as she said "Oooh, this is too complicated, it makes my head hurt." and  "All i want to do is follow people and heal."  I took that as a bad sign to begin with.  :why_so_serious:

Given the crappy server stability isssues, my guild has only gotten in a couple hours tops so far this week (though I don't know how tonight went, was busy), got 2 bosses down so far though.   I'm just getting back into the game after a long break, so I'm not raiding with them at the moment, but we are a decent guild.  From what my mates have been telling me, it definitely is a upgrade in difficulty from Naxx 25, but not so hard that it is some significant sign in a change of design philosophy or anything.  My guess is that even average guilds will be able to complete this content before more is released.

Try making dual-spec macros using this template and drag them to your bars:

#showtooltip [spec:1] Stormstrike; [spec:2] Lava Burst
/usetalents [spec:1] 2; [spec:2] 1

I've used my enhance/elemental dual spec to demonstrate but what it does is change the icon and spell (or talent) based on which spec you are.

Cheers

Why bother doing that since each spec has a unique set of toolbars associated with it?

Whoops, now I'm seeing the spec issue. When I switch to my PvP mutilate second spec, it always takes away a talent point from mutilate because at some point I unequipped 2 daggers in PvE combat spec--and then I can't reallocate that talent point to mutilate because it's greyed out, even with 50 points in Assassination and two daggers equipped.

I'm pretty sure it's just a display issue. My 2nd spec greyed out for the first time today, but I could still use Penance, and I was still getting all the right buffs. YMMV.

Healbot HATES dual specs, and I have to shift click it any time I switch back to disc, or Penance won't work via it's interface. Not that I have any idea what shift clicking healbot's UI DOES (not a player, just open space on it), but it fixes the issue.

Because I use Dominos and not the silly/ugly standard Blizzard setup :)

Does it? I went ahead and dual specced holy/ret, and have the same action bar setups through both specs.

When you buy the second spec it copies the first spec's toolbar layout.  You only notice the difference if you have spec-abilities on the bars, as they go missing.  Swap some buttons around and then switch specs, the buttons on the other spec will swap out to whatever you had them as when you were last in that spec.   It's very nice.

Now, if only my Scourge Strike and Unholy Blight would stop dropping when I switch back from Frost.  :oh_i_see:

Dominos works fine with dual spec without any messing around.  It saves the bars per spec.

As does bartender4.

I tried out 10 man Ulduar last night. The Ignis fight is a real bitch. We think we were getting the hang of it by the end, but we had trash respawns.

Try doing mimirons trash. I kid you not it is the hardest encounter in the game right now. In the 10man the trash is tuned for the 25 man and my guild last night spent an hour just trying to get past one pack. The only way guilds have gotten past it thus far is having paladins bubble and run past onto the tram to leash them then summon people in behind.

We can't manage to down Razorwhatever in 25 man, as people seem to have trouble not standing in blue glowing shit on the ground.   :oh_i_see:

Oh good.

Northrend continent crashed 4 hours ago on my server, and it's still not back up.  And they restarted the servers this morning.

This is turning out to be the worst WoW patch I can remember.


Edit: oh joy, looks like the continent's up, I just can't login to my char.  Again.

It reminds me of when the game was first released, up to and including the fact that they're going to credit everyone a free day because of the outages.

Ahso! Thanks for clearing that up for me.

Sure is a good thing they spent all this fucking time to make sure the patch was polished.  I don't understand why they didn't advertise the random talent-point dump in dual-spec.  With features like that, it's no wonder they are tops!

In still shocks me that after 5 years of this game, and 5 years of every time you are in a boss fight and there are spell effects are you YOU FUCKING MOVE, people still just fucking stand there.

I think they turned some particular effects thing to off by default? I know I read a thread about people having trouble on Ignis because of it.

I've got a problem with spell effects not showing and I can't seem to turn them back on again. The normal effects seem to work 50% of the time but the projected textures aren't working at all.

To me this patch put a crack in Blizzard's facade of invincibility. None of the drooling fecophiliacs who make up the rest of the MMO industry are in any position to do anything about it, but this shit is not up to par. Then there's the fact that the Argent Tournament is just Not Fun.

First night of the 10-man, got Flame Leviathan and Razorscale down before a couple people had to head off to bed. Deconstructor kicked our faces in. 3-healing it doesn't help for beating the tantrum cooldowns, and we weren't handling the adds/heart right. DPS was a bit over-reactive and pretty much stopping DPS when light/gravity bombed.

 :awesome_for_real:

Is all I can say. It's like people were expecting this patch to be jesus or something and forgot all the other patch days that were exactly like this. No, blizzard aren't mmo gods and no this patch is not the best thing ever but really it's not much worse than patches that added single dungeons. 

bugs will be gone within a week but whining, that's eternal.


On a more serious note, can we not turn f13 into the vault boards?

I don't know about other servers but ours sure showed signs of being very crowded right after the patch. I think a lot of ppl wander off/get bored with content and patches like this bring them back. Often with disastrous results.

Seems Blizz didn't like people beating hardmode encounters during the first reset and so have buffed a load of them.

This patch is the worst thing to happen to instance tanking ever. I've gotten two consecutive tanks in Heroic VH that didn't know what "KITE THE FUCKING BOSS" means.  Even after multiple wipes they just stand in one place tanking the goddamn thing.  Unbelievable.  First boss and I had to drop group both times.

Well its not just that Dual Spec made every retnoob or unholydk think they're a tank; tanking (at least as a DK) got a lot harder after the changes.

My threat is poop now.  :heartbreak:

I still need to play around with some stuff that I think will help, but now I gotta work for it and while I don't really MIND that, I feel bad having to essentially practice with other people.

Surely this will be a short-lived phenomenon? Those who have just taken a tanking spec for the first time have a learning curve ahead of them, sure. But hopefully in the medium-to-long term it'll help reduce the tank shortage as those new to it learn how to do it and build up a set of tanking gear.

On a different note, the mana changes are odd. My Enhance Shaman (now level 74) seems to have infinite mana now while my Holy Pally (also 74) seems to run out extremely fast. Also annoyed with the Holy Pally talents - seems that healing talents are spread throughout all 3 talent trees, making it actually quite difficult to come up with a pure healing spec. Will have a longer and more careful play with the talents later on.

Most of the tank shortage problem I see is more due to every fucking plate wearer thinking he's a tank and not understanding that there is more to it than running directly into the closest group of critters. 

Well.. if you're a prot pally that's all that really used to be to it.   It worked ok on my Unholy DK, too.  I haven't tried since the changes, tough.  D&D + Frost Pres + Unholy Blight + Pest/ BB was enough to keep aggro all the time before.

Yeah, when I pugged the new VOA boss earlier, the pally tank was complaining that avenging wrath + glyphed shield / hammer + consecrate weren't enough to keep all mobs glued to him right away... we had to wait 5-6 seconds before casting heals, or the mobs would go for the healers.

A frost DK tank was also complaining in a pug h-vh that his threat wasn't what it used to be; of course the fact that the group had two arcane mages and one elemental shaman (me) didn't help. I've never seen things blow up so quickly... mob and mage alike. :why_so_serious:


-- Z.

WoW has been out for four years and to this day, people STILL stand in the fucking fire.


 :uhrr:

They also most likely still attack mobs full tilt before the tank has hit them more than once.

So did the 3.1.1 bugfix patch create the bug that leaves Wintergrasp essentially unplayable, or just overlook it? Quality control. In the shitter.

Unplayable how? The lag? Still there for the most part at prime time, when we've got 4 full raids on Horde side and at least 3 on the Alliance. Otherwise, I'm not sure what bug you're talking about.

It seems that vehicle counting is utterly messed up.  At least for alliance.  Or maybe it's attackers.  I'm not sure.  I went in yesterday, and the count showed max vehicles for Alliance side throughout the entire game, even though I doubt we had more than 3-4 vehicles on the field at any one moment.  It didn't help at all that the people driving the few vehicles that existed were screwing around and being totally useless, too.

I haven't seen it, but that sounds like a poorly thought through attempt to fix the "one guy ranks up, spams and dismounts tanks, everyone else uses them regardless of rank or max tank number" shit that happened.

When Alliance (or maybe just attacker) vehicles are destroyed, the Alliance vehicle count doesn't go back down. So we'll get 12 or 16 vehicles for the entire battle, and if the Horde can kill those before the keep is blown open, the game is essentially over while we stare at a wall for 20 minutes and wait to lose. And let me tell you, they're pretty motivated to kill the vehicles. It's fucking clownshoes.

But hey, at least I couldn't hit players with Exorcism while I was there. Way to go with that hotfix.  :awesome_for_real:

The change to Exorcism was deliberate.

Ahh that's lame, I heard some people talking about a vehicle bug but didn't notice anything myself.

I know, it was just an (admittedly unfair) observation on priorities.

"Our expansion-headlining flagship PVP system is proper fucked, but hey we found time for nerfs! Durhur!"

You can't use exorcism on players anymore?   :heartbreak:

Not to mention duel specs are still fubar and specs still get randomly reset on occasion even after the supposed fix in 3.1.1 and the rolling realm restarts last night.   :uhrr: 

There was a patch last night and a server reset a bit ago, WUA, how log ago did you play?  I just ran Wintergrasp and it seemed to be fine, so either it's fixed, or I was lucky (in an unlucky way, since I was defending).

I logged in mid-day and the lag was so bad I played Mount and Blade. I'll try again tonight, but all I really want to do is run my dailies and check on my raid signups.

Honestly, I think we use the armory for that half the time.

Sonuvabitch, I had no idea you could access your calendar on the armory!  :drill:

Awesome.

This was in the wee hours of the morning, so maybe it's better now?

Checking raid signups via Armory is awesome, I've signed up for a couple of raids that way.

Ohh dear, my guild must think I'm a bit of an asshole now. I log on my (now) DK alt (still guilded with them) Tuesday after Ulduar finished up and ask "so, how'd Ulduar go?" figuring they'd go back at the start of the week.  I just looked at the calendar and they were doing Naxx 10.   :awesome_for_real:

Of course, I also notice for the last part of their Naxx yesterday all of the new people were out of the lineup and the officers were getting their KT loot.  :roll:

Death's Bite is SRS BZNZ.  Don't you forget it.   :awesome_for_real:

That would truly be annoying to see though.

Hopefully they'll allow people to just wander into Sapph + KT in a month or three, so people don't have to grind their face against 2+ hours of raiding in order to open access to two bosses that drop loot that anyone even cares about anymore.

I finally took my dual-specced and poorly-equipped (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Alleria&n=Sabilene) Holy/ Disc Priest into a BG as Disc to dick around yesterday.  Holy shit it's ungodly.  I wasn't running out of mana and I was doing nothing but chain Bubbling/ AOE-dispelling and keeping a PoM hopping about.  :drill:

Fordel and I started our uber moonkin/prot warrior S6 arena duo last night.  :drill:

We actually did much better than I expected us to (especially with me lacking pvp gear for the most part - I did it mostly in tank stuff), right around a .500 win rate so far. Any team with a well-played healer can pretty much destroy us, but we seem to beat the tar out of other dps/dps teams. As I learn to not suck at pvp we will do better, too. He's much better than me.

Comedy value: I did 12,000 damage to a rogue in one match via thorns + damage shield. Well, maybe I should say, the rogue did that to himself.