f13.net

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/20151961/legion-pre-expansion-patch-notes-7-18-2016 (http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/20151961/legion-pre-expansion-patch-notes-7-18-2016)

At a glance:

New Transmogrification Collections System: Appearances
Revamped PvP and Honor System
Raids and Dungeons
Quests and World Events
Items and Itemization
Character Changes
Class Changes
Garrison
Collections
Professions
UI
Account
Graphics Engine

I don't know how to Disc Priest _at all_. I set my talents and bars, joined a quick pvp game, and could not actually heal people unless there was an enemy to attack around. It's so different. I ended up being 3rd in healing but felt lost.

Hopped on Druid (resto), set up, joined pvp game, it seemed much as it was - changes weren't so huge.

Tokens are back - they are account bound, and actual things that can be mailed and take up an inventory slot. Got one for each game (we won each).

Hunter is very different - set up but didn't play.

Checked forums. Full of tears over class changes.

Transmog is very cool - I like the new system.

See the link above for full patch notes - these are things that interest me most -

Equalized PvP Gear
Gear has been normalized in PvP combat. Characters entering a Skirmish Arena, Battleground, Rated Arena, Rated Battleground, or Ashran now receive an aura called Principles of War.
Principles of War removes all stats gained from gear (Strength, Stamina, Haste, etc.), disables gear related bonuses (like trinket effects and set bonuses), and gives the character stats based on their specializations, and increases based on overall item level. The goal is to provide a much more finely tuned and balanced PvP experience.

Hellfire Citadel
Enemies on Normal, Heroic, and Mythic difficulty now deal roughly 30% less damage.

Legendary Ring Quest Line
Players can no longer start the quest line for the legendary ring. Players currently on the legendary quest line have until the launch of Legion to complete it; at which point uncompleted quests will be removed from the quest log. :drill:

Tap Changes
All creatures and NPCs can now be tapped by up to 5 other characters.

Items
Potion of Luck and Greater Potion of Luck no longer have an effect.

Specialization System Changes
Characters can now change between any of their specializations while out of combat. Action bar configurations and talent loadouts are saved for each specialization. As a result, Dual Specialization has been removed.

Talent System Changes
Players may now change talents freely when in any rested XP area. The Inscription profession can craft consumable items that allow for this to be done in the field. In addition, after queuing into an instanced dungeon, raid, or PvP content, players have a grace period during which they may change talents freely.

Glyph System Changes
The Glyph panel has been removed from the game. Some minor glyphs that had a cosmetic effect that does not apply to a specific spell have been converted into cosmetic items that provide the same effects as before.
Some minor glyphs that made cosmetic alterations to a specific spell have been added to the spell itself in the spellbook.

Wow, most of that sounds terrible. Inscription gone, character/spec/talent identity gone, Honor is back to marks that take up inventory space, everyone's the same in PVP, ugh. The transmog changes are the only thing there that sounds good. Glad I read those notes; I was starting to get a WoW-itch.

So they are just giving up on PVP gear? I'm assuming now people are only doing PVP for fun and customization rewards, which is fine, but still that's a serious departure from what they wanted PVP to be way back when.

The PVP changes are - yet again - another attempt to make Arena PVP a viable E-sport. When everyone is on the same playing field skill becomes a bigger contributor. The thing they STILL don't get is nobody gives a fuck about MMO PVP enough to watch it as a sport. Stop trying.

That said, it WILL be nice to not have PVP concerns nerfing useful and unique PVE skills and gear anymore.

Tap changes are very nice. Means I actually bother to help people when completing quests in Beta and there isn't the competition for spawns there once was. It's still there it's just not as intense.

Class changes I'm lukewarm on. Some are OK but i do miss skills on some specs.

Priest:
Haven't touched the Priest at all, trying to heal in Warlords as Holy made me hate life. As Discipline there was a player better than me by about 3% so he was more useful in raids. Two disc healers was never a solved problem, so I stopped caring. Maybe they fixed it but probably not.

Death Knight:
I miss some of the skills on Unholy, like Anti-Magic Barrier (PVP Only now) and Icebound Fortitude, but overall once I learned the new rotation I like it a LOT better than the old method. Adding boils and breaking them is a lot of fun. The QOL change so my runes are shown on my character in addition to my resource bar (like rogue energy) is fantastic. Good job all around.  

The talent to add a second pet is fun, but doesn't seem to do a lot. It's a bit buggy too, because when changing zones or dismounting the 2nd guy never shows up. You have to resummon your pet to get him back. More of a hassle than anything else.

Also, the talent that changes your ghoul into an abomination doesn't seem like it ups the ghouls damage much. I didn't parse and I was low gear level because *beta* so maybe it is bigger than it seemed thrashing level 101 trash mobs.

Frost is still boring-ass "wait for the oblivion/ winds proc, then hit buttan" It may be better DPS but you'll never find me enjoying frost.

Didn't try Blood at all. I don't tank anymore, too much of a PITA to control a rotation, control mob position and strangle cats who step out of line.

Hunter

Marks is fun. I didn't try Lone Wolf but I like some of the mechanics here. The ability to tag and then spray shit with Multishot was great. I just kept losing my pet when trying to level. The pet is very, very squishy now. Then again I don't know if I had him in Tenacity mode.. I should check.

Beast Hunter IS beast mode. I really liked the change to the "call a wild animal" talent. It's a much shorter duration than it was, BUT the beast seems stronger. Also you get a CD proc so you can have 2 or 3 up at a time. (Maybe more, the most I got to spawn has been 3 and I haven't done a dungeon.)  The cosmetic change to pull any beast from the zone is fun. I get spiders, birds, demon-dogs all attacking things alongside my pet.  Kill command procs a lot more often and he does great dps. The trade-off being I can't dps. Oh well.

When combined with the legendary weapon that gives you a second pet, the spec becomes really fun. You feel like a Beast Master instead of just a hunter with a big ass pet now. Very good themeing here.

Survival I haven't touched. I get that there's people who have - for years - wanted a melee hunter. I'm one of those who's always hated the idea.  I do not miss traps at all and these guys are welcome to have them. Outside of the freeze trap they were a pain in the ass to manage and I hated that they were mandatory to throw into my rotation to max DPS. Good riddance to bad mechanics.


The Transmog changes are fucking awesome. If I play again I can throw away nearly 4 characters worth of full banks and void storage because of it. Not only that, but I have access to gear I'd thrown away ages ago when I didn't think Blizzard was ever going to introduce an appearance change system. My favorite is the ONLY Mail eyepatch in the game, from a quest in Bladed Spires in Burning Crusade. It had a gold skull on it and looked great.

I saw so many younger hunters wearing in their transmog sets and I had it at one point, too. Only I'd done the quest back in actual BC days and thrown it away about halfway through WOTLK because there was no transmog and I needed bank space. I was not happy when the system was announced about a month later. Fuck. Now I've got it back. Yay.

I'm convinced it's packrats like me, sending the storage requirements ever-higher, that prompted this system. It's been suggested for years but now they've chosen to implement it. All I can point at is declining revenues and need to consolidate database space. I'd bet it's the same reason they flipped a lot of things that weren't Toys into being toys. I had 7 different "pokemon" helmets because each character had one. It's a toy now, I don't need to worry about it.

Esports are supposed to have a viable skill. MMO PVP doesn't have one even if you try and turn it into stock car racing.

Big change here is that they are account bound, so you can collect them on one character and use them on another.

I got my hunter to 100 yesterday (had been like 96 for probably a year+, DK and pally are 100) and banged off the last few levels as survival.  It was a blast!  Put a dps pet on a mob to hold agro and stuff dies quick.  Reminded me of the White Lion from Warhammer Online.  Transmog is nice but you have to log into each of your characters for it to update to everything you have.  Not being able to hide your helm and the reduced camera range are annoying.  We'll see how everything shakes out after the expac has been out a few months but I'm not hating things at this moment.  Of course, the WoW forums have been lit up by people saying Blizzard ruined their class and how they're cancelling their sub. :oh_i_see:  Same shit you hear every time a new expac is released so I wouldn't worry about any of that yet.

See my comment in the WOW in 2016 thread for my opinion of the camera change. It's fucking terrible. "not that bad" is a bullshit answer from anyone who claims it.

Helmet and Cloak hides are still in there. It's a transmogrify option, though. It only shows up when you're talking to an ethereal. It's the first option on the helm or equipment slot. 0 Cost.

I know about having to use the transmog npc npc to hide your helm, I didn't word it correctly when I wrote it.  It's still annoying having to do it that way but not really a big deal.  The camera change is definitely a head scratcher.  I usually like to be able to zoom the camera out quite a distance away from my character so I can see my surroundings better.   

You can still pan back pretty far I was doing some raiding last night and was able to pull it back to my normal viewing distance in a raid without a problem.

It's still not as far as it was, the viewing angle is much narrower.

(https://db.tt/YItx8voo)

That's from Beta. If they changed it when it went live that's new.

One thing to note though is a lot of the really panned back stuff is not the normal camera range you have to use console commands or add ons to push it back farther. It is mostly those that got blocked so if you did not do that then you won't notice much of a change. I can still pan back far enough in a raid to have a good situational view of everything going on. I have been running LFR's just to test classes in a pretty easy mode.

I don't think I had a view range addin on my account. I could be mistaken, though.

I didn't either and the camera doesn't pan as far back as it did.

Not only can you hide helms and cloaks, you can hide shoulders. Finally!

Haha, so they finally got around to a request from Vanilla on that one.

Realm hop no longer works the same way. Now you only change servers when you join the zone the leader is in. So, you can use it to visit others' garrisons, but you can't use it to find rare spawns and so on. Which makes it difficult to find popular stuff, again, because of the server merges.

On the plus side, farming for mob drops can now be done in groups, such that everyone by default tags each mob. You don't have to hit it to get loot from it, and you get loot from every mob someone in the group tags. (At least, I think that's how it works).

Garrison missions no longer award gold, and garrison armor/weapons are only worth 5c.

Gave it a whirl on my two 'mains' going through a few timewalking dungeons and a leveling alt with some questing / leveling dungeons / pvp, random kvetching:

Resto shaman (100): healing is still good. I miss grounding and tremor totem, though, and not too happy about having to talent into ascendance. I don't understand why flameshock and lava burst cost mana while lightning bolt is mana-free... dudes, spamming a weak attack spell is boring as shit and it's not like being able to cast FS/LVB during healing downtime would blow up the damage meters -- especially since resto shamans get Lava Surge procs now, too. Not spending my precious healing mana on sub-par damage with no other benefits (wru Elemental Blast?!). Oh yeah, chain lightning costs negligible mana (320), but that spell is a bad joke as resto anyway. The new gust of wind thing is pretty cool, though, and I love the built-in totem projection.

Prot warrior (100): pretty good, I dig the new animations. The battlecry sound is hilarious (female gnome), but I'll probably mute it after a few days. Not a fan of the rage dumps: shield block is ok, ignore pain is just glorified shield barrier, and focus rage is some weird-ass burst buildup ability that makes sense for a dps spec but not so much for tanking. What was wrong with Heroic Strike? Build up rage -> spend however much is needed on defensives to stay alive -> spend the rest on putting damage in the enemy's face without interrupting your rotation, simple. I know that Focused Rage is basically the same thing since it's a GCD-free ability, but it lacks the punch and visceral feeling of old HS/Cleave. I don't like losing intimidating shout and hamstring (even though thunderclap is better all around), they were just iconic abilities to me. Increased timers on cooldowns are fine, closer to ohshit buttons than regular mitigation abilities you had to pop even on normal pulls.

Blood DK (90->97): I can see that the class is pretty powerful now with much greater control over self-heals and mitigation than ever before. But the way they rejiggered the abilities rubs me the wrong way -- now the main disease applying skill is AOE + charge-based (needs no runes / generates no RP) + also serves as an aoe attack skill. Heart strike is back, and it's now the snare ability too... but most runes should be spent on the new marrowsomething ability that generates bone shield charges because pretty much everything depends on boneshield having as high uptime as possible. Death Strike is now a RP dump (the RP dump I should say), which is weird as hell and completely turns the previous resource system on its head, now being conspiciously similar to Shield Barrier / Ignore Pain for prot warriors.

I can see prot warrior and resto shaman growing on me, especially with the shiny new artifact things... but man, Blood DK is basically a whole new class now, would have to retrain my muscle memory for it. I'm too old for this shit!

Will  have to see how the artifact weapons affect Blood, but I don't agree on the "more control over self healing" thing.  We literally have one self heal now (deathstrike), no more ghoul sac, and since it requires RP and there is no "burst" RP generator atm, you can pretty easily RP starve yourself if you are trying to desperately get your HP up with DS.  It also heals for shit (at least from what i see running Timewalking), and shields for a lot less now, though that just might be me not DSing at optimal times.   Vamp blood does let us get a good amount of health back while Deathstriking, but it just doesn't seem nearly as effective as it was pre-patch.  Pre patch, I could practically keep myself alive through a huge ass bad pull if the healer went down by rotating cooldowns.  Now, I just prolong the inevitable death by a handful of seconds, since I run out of cooldowns to rotate pretty damn fast.

Oh yeah, overall healing ability is down, but imo blood DKs now have more control over when to use their self-healing / mitigation instead of just dropping death strikes as the main rune consumer / RP generator. Now you can double up on blood plague via DRW (double the healing -- it can get quite significant), deathstrike is an RP ability instead of requiring runes, and the ability to pre-stack bone shield charges depending on incoming damage. DS *is* a lot closer to Ignore Pain and Guard, only it's reactive instead of proactive*... and when it comes to cooldowns, I agree that ghoul sac and old rune tap were way better in general. But in the brave new world of Legion, every class needs to lose their survivability cooldowns (even tanks, apparently) because reasons.

* side note: one of the preferred talents for prot warriors makes Ignore Pain absorb up to 100% more damage depending on how low the health of the warrior is when using the ability. I wonder where THAT mechanic is from!  :awesome_for_real:

sometimes i wonder about abilities they pruned out.

Enhance for example, no only has a single DPS cooldown (wolves), and almost no assist healing at all (unless you spec into the currently utterly garbage gimped version of healing rain).

Also really missing Tranq shot on my BM hunter.  Every bloody time an enrage icon pops up on a boss, or a buff i used to be able to dispell (the goddamned shield from the priests in Blue Dragonshrine timewalking for example) I instinctively reach for the button, but nope, gone.

They get a couple more DPS cooldown options through talents, which seems to be how most specs work. Artifact weapons will also give a couple abilities and CDs per spec once we get them. Looks like the first ability Enhancement gets out of their artifact weapon is a 1min DPS CD for example.


I've messed around with half of my characters over the past week, and most of the changes seem pretty positive. My biggest gripe (other than not liking the massive Brewmaster Monk changes) is that in an effort to differentiate specs, they've made some really iconic class abilities spec-specific. For example, Outlaw rogue doesn't have Evasion. I love the new spec and it's a ton of fun to play, but it's weird that it doesn't have this really important defensive ability that I've relied on when playing my rogue for over 10 years.

Instead of organically building up spec-distinction in Legion with new or more-powerful versions of abilities that define each spec, it seems like they took the existing ability kits for each class to divorce court.

Brief thoughts on what I've played as well at 100:

Rogue (Outlaw) - Outlaw is the replacement for Combat spec. It finally feels like it has its own identity, and I really enjoyed playing it from 90-100 last week. They get a couple ranged abilities which are part of their normal rotation even if you're in melee, and stealth is completely de-emphasized for them. They still have stealth and Ambush but there isn't a big incentive/need to use them. Whether you open combat from stealth or with a small ranged attack seems like a relatively minor distinction in the grand scheme of things, since the pull is such a small fraction of time spent in combat in WoW, but it gives the spec an entirely different feel. Instead of slowly sneaking up to a target, incapacitating them, and then attacking them while they are defenseless, you are just quickly shooting them from the hip with a pistol and then going to town when they get in your face.

Blade Flurry has been redesigned so that instead hitting your target + 1 nearby for an energy regen penalty, you now hit your target + all nearby (for 35% damage to them) for the energy regen penalty. Shores up one of the biggest weaknesses of the spec while still keeping the flavor. Roll-the-bones is the replacement for Slice n Dice (now a talent) which gives you one or more of 6 random buffs. It's pretty fun to get lucky and activate all the buffs, turning into a monster for ~30 seconds, but it's going to be frustrating in competitive settings where your effectiveness will vary wildly based on RNG.

The only thing stopping me from playing a rogue in Legion is knowing how much of a burden melee will probably still be to groups compared to ranged, and knowing that I'll probably have 30+ min dungeon queues without a tank or healer spec option. The melee vs ranged thing was a huge problem in Challenge Mode dungeons in WoD. In some boss fights there were times our dps warrior literally did nothing while ranged continued to attack normally, and given how big of a emphasis this expansion seems to have on dungeons I don't want to be in the same position.

Druid (Balance) - Balance was my least-favorite spec in the game for the past 2 expansions. I hated the Eclipse bar, and how you had to awkwardly focus on and play around that cumbersome mechanic without any payoff relative to other simpler dps specs. They removed it and the spec is finally fun to play again, though it still plays like mage-lite. You still don't really have the breadth of ability options, or the utility of a mage, but at least the spec is fun & easy to play again.

Hunter (Survival, Marks) - I had high hopes for Survival but after playing around with it, it feels very underwhelming. There wasn't enough interaction between abilities at 100 and Mongoose Bite, the core ability of the spec, wasn't very fun or interesting to use. There wasn't a way to extend the damage-increase buff, so you had no reason to do anything besides mash the ability when you capped 3 charges of it. I spent most of my time spamming no-cost filler attacks and waiting for energy or cooldowns. I think this will be fixed at least partially by the Survival Artifact which adds some much-needed ability interaction.

I have mixed feelings about the new Marksman spec. It mostly feels the same as before, and even inherited a few Surv abilities like Explosive Shot. The big new gimmick of the spec, Marking targets and then using Marked Shot, just felt too passive/random at 100. Outside of that mechanic, the spec doesn't seem like it has changed much and there isn't much to write about.

Monk (Brewmaster) - They gutted the spec, removed Chi from it as a resource, and moved the spec to be much more passive. Purifying Brew now has a 21-second cooldown, only removes half your Stagger, and shares a CD with other abilities. The spec plays very differently now and overall feels a lot less effective and interesting. More than any other class/spec in the game in Legion, Brewmaster was hit extremely hard with ability pruning and nerfs, and all (allegedly) in the interest of "better matching the fantasy of the spec". I don't even agree with that logic as the old spec felt like it hit the "evasive drunken master" vibe better than the new one. Even if they were right that the old spec didn't match the "drunken master" gameplay fantasy well, what about everyone who bought into and enjoyed the gameplay fantasy they *did* put in the game for the past 4 years?  I had already decided I didn't want to play a tank in Legion, but I'm still upset that they so dramatically changed a spec that people had invested so much time and energy into. This would be the equivalent of removing Runes and Self-heals from Blood DKs, leaving only Runic Power, and turning the spec into a off-flavor of Protection Warriors.

The reality of the situation is that the spec was too self-sufficient and capable of preventing damage, so they have effectively killed it in the interest of giving tank-survival gameplay back to healers.

Reading this thread, it sounds like basically that happened.

They still have runes. How useful those are is questionable.

As for giving healers Tank Survival gameplay again. Hahahjah.  Yeah on top of the bs raid/ group survival gameplay that is ALSo on top of Keep your ass out of the fire gameplay. 

Healers are going to be rare this expansion if things didn't majorly change from Draenor. I'm not bothering to even look. Holy was fucked and I doubt it's unfucked for priests.  I know discipline has been complaining in beta they don't know if they should heal or DPS or how to do both. 

They already did this once with the talent system back in...Cata? Pandaria? And it was terrible.

Impressions I've heard of Holy have been positive, but Disc sounds like it's going to be very awkward to play if you're the only healer.

They made tanking more simplistic and accessible in Legion, but less interesting/satisfying. Then they went the exact opposite way for Healers. It'll be interesting to see how that impacts populations for both.

Other than Ascendance, nothing else in their talent tree currently is really viable as a dps cooldown, and current sims essentially put Ascendance behind just taking Landslide for the pretty much permanant passive 8% agility increase.

I guess you could spec  ascendance if you needed really great burst on priority targets on a 3 minute cooldown, but on just about every raid fight,  the passive 8% agi is just too difficult to pass up.

The Artifact may help, true, but having one viable dps cooldown is still annoying.

http://www.wowhead.com/guides/classes/shaman/enhancement/rotation

Looks to me like Enhancement is meant to be just that - Enhancing others - rather than self-buffing DPS. If done right it look good on meters individually, but groups with and without Enh. shamans should have a noticeable difference in outputs.  There's no more raid-wide buffs so this seems to be the slot they're pushing Enh. Shamen towards.


The problem they constantly run into with Holy priests are that Druid heals provide better HoT and are generally better for raids because of the "dot and move on" nature. HOTs are also nice because you don't have to wait until someone's "damaged enough" to throw out a heal. 300% spell power for Rejuv., 325% plus another 200% for Lifebloom vs. 425% for Flash Heal, the only saving grace for the priest is the lower mana cost, so it's not as hard on them to overheal. Just sucks to be you if you've got to move.

This generally left Holy Priests as healing the Tanks and bleeding into the Melee group with any group heals. If they deal big group damage to make priests big group-heals a factor, your tanks are now ALSO taking spike damage, meaning the Priest has to focus them more.

Lifebloom/ Tranq has remained a significantly more powerful spell. Sure, the math says that Divine Hymn is great but in practice you only blow Hymn so the Druids heal more. 

That's before the whole mess of priest heals working on groups vs not working on groups that required your raid to be mindful of their own positioning as well as your own knowledge of where people were at.

All of the above is what made Disc. so much better from a gameplay perspective. Your spells were more like the druids "tag and move on" with faster cast times. The proactive vs. reactive healing meant a lower stress threshold AND you could anticipate bigger spikes and counter for them. It made the player feel engaged vs. overwhelmed when things got rough. Holy lacked that and still does from what I can tell.

The biggest 'about time' is they finally abandoned the dumbass Chakra modes. They didn't like Warriors doing stance switching but they made priests do it for two more expansions.  :awesome_for_real:

My BM hunter is severely underpowered and unsatisfactory to play. The change to Aspect of the Cheetah (very brief speed boost on a 3 minute timer) is huge, as is the removal of frost trap, both of which has been mostly unchanged since vanilla. MM is a little better, but I prefer the playstyle of BM. Survival in Wrath was probably my favorite non-BM build but Survival now is nothing like that - I have no interest in a melee hunter.

My priest, druid, monk and mage all have better mobility than my hunter now.

Disc priest is like a completely new class - very little like disc has been for a long time now. I've played shadow only for farming old content, and holy not at all yet.

Resto druid feels similar as pre-patch.

Currently leveling up a monk (69) as WW. DKs are putting out ridiculous damage in the little dungeons. Leveling through dungeons is quick.

Planning on leveling hunter and priest,  regardless, since they're my oldest characters. How much I play them once I hit max level, time will tell.

If you're talking live, then yes BM hunters are totally gimped right now.

The reason for this is they are balanced around having their artifact. All abilities assume you have 2 pets live all the time, which means right now you're gimped.

DKs always do best at low gear levels and drop-off the cliff once the second raid content is seen. So the first month or so people complain when they're unholy killing machines again, then forget about it come the end of the expansion. We've seen this cycle since they were introduced, and it was confirmed by the old devs at one point that this was a balancing strategy they planned for, dumb as it is.  I'd hope the new group abandoned the strat, but it will remain to be seen.

how's enh shaman these days. also can they use swords yet, or sword transmog

I believe they can sword transmog, but they can't actually use swords. Don't quote me. :P

Oh, Merusk, someone found a solution to your camera zoom problem.

https://www.wowace.com/addons/maxcam/

Unfortunately enhance cant do swords.   I find mine a little  bit more boring then  they used to be, as the removal of totems and lack of cool downs makes the game play somewhat boring.  Basically just keep Flametongue / Frostbrand debuffs up, hit Boulderfist on cooldown, and spam Stormstrike / Lavalash / Crash lightning whenever you have enough maelstrom for whichever one is highest on the priority list.

removal of totems, eh

what else remarkable has happened to that class anyway

Havent tried elemental, but enhance is now basicly purely mele.  You do still have lightning bolt, but currently there is no point in even having it on your bars (there is a talent that makes it hit really hard on a 6 or 8 second cooldown or something like that, but sims have it preforming very sub par).  Lavaburst is gone. Totems are gone.  Frostbrand / Flametongue are back as debuffs you maintain on targets for damage / procs.  Everything else is basicly  just spamming Boulderfist / Stormstrike / lavalash / crash lightning as required.  Once you have your artifact, you will have the potential for some pretty crazy burst (one of the artifact abilities gives you the ability to passively generate maelstrom while in ghostwolf).

Enhance has also been tweaked to be a "buff bot" so to speak for the raid, through a passive ability that causes their hits to empower nearby players with a buff that makes them do extra damage for a brief bit,  meaning that every raid is going to want at least 1 enhance shaman in the raid purely for that buff.

Gonna start fresh again with Legion and roll a DH on Tuesday. The changes to DK overall have kinda turned me off, but the time I spent in beta with the DH were much better. The mobility and utility available suits me. Until then I've been playing around with a Demo Warlock. A personal army of demons is pretty  :awesome_for_real:

Today, after patch, the invasion begins. There will be a couple of event-only achievements relating to invasions, a new pet, and a new toy to pick up.

Here is a preview from Blizzard. (https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/news/20175682/legion-demon-invasions-preview)

#hype  :yahoo:

from Wowhead (http://www.wowhead.com/guides/legion/pre-patch-demon-event):

DH seems pretty fun despite not having a full move-set yet. Also falling out of the sky and slamming into the ground wearing a ninja costume is ichiban wowfashion experience.

I can't see shit on the invasion bosses, either because I'm old or the new ability animations are too much when 20+ characters are trying to spam a huge NPC to death. :drill:

Vengeance DH is definitely keeping my interest at this point. Ran around and did all of the invasion points, collected the full leather gear set, and bought all of the ilvl 700 accessory gear from the shop. Even got two of the ilvl 700 warglaives (purchased one, looted the other) and got one maxed out to 725. Shouldn't be too hard to get the other to 725 before Legion launches and still be able to pick up the nethershard pet to boot. Then, I shall be prepa...well, you know.  :awesome_for_real:

Right now, the invasions are timed to your character. You get access to two invasions every four hours, which will ramp up quickly every Tuesday until launch. Word is the last week will basically give you an invasion every hour, if not sooner.

Also, there's more scenario/lorelol quests and stuff being unlocked over the next couple weeks prior to launch as well.

And if you haven't seen the in-game Broken Shores and DH videos yet, here you go: 1 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsk3h-6DSYI) 2 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAOi078QTZg) 3 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HerNdsh_H-g) 4 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HerNdsh_H-g) 5 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vX8BiEI5c6c)

So nice to see Bliz using gnomes for  :drill:

This is so different to play. How.

One of my friends is actually trying to talk me into this, telling me beta does not suck. WHAT IS TRUTH HERE?

True enough, but remember that's only the leveling experience. Only re-up if you only want to level and be done with the game. Endgame is still daily quest grinds so you can get flying and raids.

And after the fuckfest that has been the last year of zero added content, I don't expect them to do any better in Legion*. This game is on life support, lurching from expansion release to release.

** Actually, TWO years if you consider the patch before the last raid was devoid of content at all.

Suck or not, it's still WoW. I don't think I could hop back on this horse if it was objectively the best thing ever. Weariness would start to set in minute 1. That's no slight to the game, I've just re-upped once or twice too many by now.

day one of re-entry

- jump in and see that my hotkey bars are a graveyard of now-dead macros. What used to be 46 actions in sum (including the 4-totem drop sets) can now be pared down to a 7 to 9 ability rotation
- spend one hour cleaning out my hotkeys and looking at icy veins to figure out what is the Correct build, before choosing my talents. chose Correct talents.
- spend one hour going through the transmog changes and figuring out that I can dump out literally hundreds of items from my bank
- spend some additional time realizing I can just dump my maxed out formerly-top-of-the-line PvP set from Season 10. PvP sets aren't a thing anymore.
- my god, i have room on my bars and in my bank, what
- retransmog

- jump to mystic asia china expansion, to the ~mystic exotic jade asian forest~

- on one quest i get a cooldown-free ability that i can spam to make my dancing ghost wolf form look like it is spewing endless dog vomit out in a continuous greasy stream of vom. never turning in quest, sorry besieged peasants

x11 because I have a sickness for alts

The pre-launch event, while somewhat simplified, is getting some pretty rave reviews for all of the "little things" they put into it. They didn't just plop a bunch of demons down into some old zones and let them run amok.

I mean, they DID do that, but they also put a shit ton of scripted events with the NPCs of the zones. Quest vendors and characters from the leveling experience have actually been coded to respond to the invasions, from the peasants and CSI Miami knockoffs in Westfall to Mankrik defending his wife's grave one-shotting demons in the Barrens. A handful of vendors will actually just give you a buff instead of the normal shop interface of low-level junk they sell. Even the treant your supposed to kill near the Ogrimmar Read Gate as part of the goblin leveling area can be saved from the Legion's attack and join the fight.

If you're not using the level 100 boost, the invasion event is a great booster. They recently hotfixed the stages to give a shit ton of XP for each stage completed.

FUN DETECTED! FUN MUST BE NERFED! XP REDUCED!  :uhrr:

They upped the frequency and amount of invasions  so it still works out to be faster xp than before the nerf but you have to do more running around to get it. Still its raining loot up in here. I do love the zone specific voice overs for the invasion call outs they add a lot to it. Of all the pre launch event things this so far is much better than any of the others especially lol WOD omg an invasion came out and then was immediately stopped at the gate way.

Finished the new quest line today involving Dalaran, Karazhan, and Ulduar. Not bad for the story, but since they're handing out ilvl 700+ gear like candy from these invasion, an ilvl 685 set of gloves for finishing is a bit underwhelming. Still, progress.

I started playing again a month ago after being away for years. I still don't like what they did to Hunters which was my main since Vanilla, so I decided to level my DK Unholy to 100. It went pretty fast overall and the DK feels pretty good as Unholy. Frost seems like a wet noodle though.

I logged in today to see everyone in chat bitching about the new quest line today in Kharazan, how short it was. So I went through it and had a really good time. I think they did a good job telling a good, short story that took me back to many places I had visited in the past. I wish they would do more short weekly quests like this in the future. The entire intro event has been fun and I think I'm actually going to get back into WoW at least until the solo stuff wears off. I don't have the time to commit like I did in the past, so raiding is out. But I might make it a few months based on what I've seen so far.

They've had a few many missteps over the past few expansions, but this one seems good. I'm bummed they're going to dump the artifact weapons after this expansion, but it's not really surprising.

They may be dumping them after Legion, but it sounds like Legion's going to be around for a long time.

Stahp guys! I'm getting kind of bored with NMS and at the rate I keep hearing good shit about this I might cave and resub for the first time in years.

(http://i.imgur.com/52i0AtW.gif)

worth price of admission for sure

Very odd.  What level were you when you  did those quests?  I have done the new set of stuff 3 times on 3 level 100 toons, got two pair of ilevel 700 gloves (blue), and one pair of 710 boosted gloves (epic).

You probably got lucky and scored some Warforged/Titanforged rolls. It can happen with any Legion loot going forward. For example, the helm you get for finishing the DH starting experience rerolled to epic (705) for me.

Some of my guildies (including a few who haven't played since WOTLK) have returned to check out the event. While I've been getting some positive impressions from some of them, there's also a lot of frustration about ganking... which seems to be out of control in invasions even more than regular leveling in old expansions (which can get pretty bad, e.g. Hyjal), especially if you're below level 100. The combination of CRZ and pvp server = faceless gankers killing you over and over, sometimes even by accident (thx auto-cleave / AOE abilities). Of course there's the option of just doing the two 'friendly' invasions and ignoring the other 4, but eh.

World pvp in WOW was always somewhat clownshoes, but the last time it was legit enjoyable was somewhere around mid-BC... it's been various shades of terrible / annoying since then, especially after CRZ, and this event is sort of highlighting it again. Honestly, at this point I kinda wish blizz gave a one-time option for people to transfer their characters from a pvp server to a pve server (even if they didn't get to choose which pve server to transfer to), but it's never going to happen obv.

I haven't had a problem with PvP during the invasions. Unless you're on a PvP server and are auto-flagged, when I encounter someone that's PvP flagged, I cannot attack them due to system forbidding me from doing so unless I manually enable myself first. Which is an improvement over the system of old that would just let you attack flagged people if you wanted to. Even my AoE abilities don't hit them when I'm attacking demons.

So yeah, have your friends check their settings. Unless they're on a PvP server, then ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Edit: /grammar  :awesome_for_real:

*they're

Yah, we are all on a pvp server (Crushridge), that's why I had that spiel at the end about moving characters en-masse from pvp to pve servers. Been playing there since 2004 -- it's just that in vanilla/BC world pvp was actually somewhat enjoyable (small-medium pop server, so you didn't have roaming gank squads everywhere, ganking actually carried consequences and put you on KOS lists, etc), but it went to crap with CRZ and whatnot. And yea, abandoning old vanilla characters just to reroll on a new server and go 1-100 is not an option...

They should silently turn off world PvP altogether and bury a "we're looking into it" post deep in the forums somewhere for the three people who notice.

Resubbed to check out invasions and revisit my old characters. Resto Shaman is still Resto Shaman-y. Earth Shield was frankly pointless and I don't miss it. I do miss Wrath-era totems but those have been gone since Mists, apparently.

Bear is still most effectively played by button mashing, given a sufficiently sophisticated mashing technique. I might be able to fix that by crafting a Raven display that tells me which button to press, but what's the point? I'm also not sure about having to pay more attention to my past and future health than to my current health in order to make my cooldowns work - it could get better as I get used to it, but on top of threat, rage, and mangle procs it seems like a lot to keep track of.

Combat Outlaw is a fun style but random effects don't make me feel good. So I switched to Assassination, which plays exactly the same but with worse ranged damage and no active buffs. This is better, I told myself. I was lying though.

Chances I'm going to buy the xpac next week are now high. The last time I tanked was in the beginning of Panda land so I expect this to be a hilarious amount of failure.

EDIT: I looked it up, I have two level 90 toons, one warrior tank with 495 gear, and one melee shaman at 90 with 525 gear.

Since I get a lvl 100 boost is it worth using on one of them? How long does it take to get those last 10 levels roughly since we have a couple of weeks left.

I stand corrected.

I also stand by my original reply: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yesterday I two-manned heroic UBRS on a demon hunter tank with a priest backup (who was mostly DPSing). It just keeps getting easier.

I would save the 100 boost unless you don't have much free time. Two weeks seems doable to hit 100 (maybe twice), especially if you have gold for upgraded heirlooms.

I believe you're given the chance to "try out" any class you want now prior to using your new boost so that you can get a feel for the class at the current max level. Try making a new character while you have a boost credit and look for the trial button.

I'm guessing we'll have tons of demon hunters running about then early on.

Probably.  They've been pretty fun to play so far.

It was like that with DKs and Monks (although not as immediate since both of them didn't start off right at the max level of the previous expansion that they were introduced). They'll level out over time, and I suspect that those who want to play a complex class won't find much joy with DHs. They're pretty basic with their skill set. Unique, but basic.

My experience so far is that is every class - it's dumbed down something rotten.

Not a bad thing, but I could playing a DH or a DK or a Warrior or a rogue and not nitice the difference.

Still fun, but I honestly miss all the signature abilities that made classes different, but I also saw the writing on the wall when they made tanking skills similar.

They've moved tanking back to a mostly passive model, so you might be surprised.


It's a very mixed bag. Basic rotations have gotten much simpler and they've trimmed a lot of the sometimes-used abilities from classes, but talent selection feels like it has gotten much more complex since there are only a few obvious stinkers left. A lot of the stuff you're picking either adds to or modifies your ability rotation instead of just adding a long dps/healing/tanking cooldown. Add that on top of the artifact weapons granting each spec a new important ability and modifying the rest, and it feels like we're only seeing part of the picture.

When I have revisited other classes or specs on all my alts over the last few weeks, it has felt very easy to grasp the basics because all the classes have different combinations of the same resource models at this point, and take similar cues for ability rotation. The longer I spend on them the more different they feel though. I think this expansion will be the first to really make each class and spec feel like it has it's own identity, down to even a (potentially superficial) story-level with artifact weapons & class quests and order halls. I can't speak to the healing and tanking specs yet, since those are hard to feel out without doing dungeons or raids, but I'm enjoying the direction they took the dps specs.

I'll give you an example of what I mean that we are only seeing part of the picture for specs in Legion. I'm having trouble deciding whether to play a Balance Druid or Elemental Shaman for Legion even after playing around with both daily for ~2 weeks.

My impression of Balance in Legion is that, while the awkward eclipse bar is finally gone, the spec currently feels:

-weak relative to other specs at a similar gear level
-slow to build resources (Astral Power) for bigger or more interesting spells, even with the talents that increase resource gen
-that it lacks burst damage

Balance druids that were raiding pre-7.0 reported that after the Legion patch they went from competing at the top of the DPS charts to the very bottom.

The artifact weapon, allegedly, fixes all these problems. The ability it grants is a New Moon, a nuke with 3 charges and a 15 second recharge that transitions from New>Half>Full each time you cast it, getting increasingly powerful until the cycle resets.

New Moon: 1 sec cast, 450% spell damage, generates 10 astral power
Half Moon: 2 sec cast, 900% spell damage, generates 20 astral power
Full moon: 3 sec cast, 1800% spell damage AoE, generates 40 astral power

Compare that to the current nukes in live:

Solar Wrath: 1.5 sec cast, 190% spell damage, 6 astral power.
Lunar Strike: 2.5 sec cast, 270% spell damage and a fraction of that as AoE, generates 10 astral power

You'd have to cast 4 Solar Wraths just to get comparable damage & resource generation of Half Moon, let alone the crazy numbers and AoE damage of Full Moon. As soon as you get the artifact weapon the class will feel dramatically different, which makes trying to evaluate everything in 7.0 difficult.

Elemental isn't in the same boat, but it currently feels like WoD in that most of your damage is coming from Lava Burst crits. The artifact will shift a lot of your biggest damage to lightning spells instead, so it will also be a change as soon as you get it.

Yeah, the bit about artifacts balancing the chars out is what I said earlier. You notice this on Beastmaster hunters as well. You're balanced around always having 2 pets out, so having only one will fill really bad.  If you weren't doing the Legion beta you're not going to have the right feel for your class. You're currently missing key abilities and upgrades that come through the Artifact.

I'm likely installing and loading up for play on Sunday. We'll see how this invasion business goes.

Follow-up from earlier regarding the gloves you get from Khadgar after finishing his pre-launch questline: DO NOT VENDOR/DE/DESTROY THEM!

Apparently, the proc they do does about 1.5M damage. So basically it turns HFC content into a huge /faceroll.  :ye_gods:

So yeah, I got to use Blizzard's item restoration service today. Works like a charm!  :awesome_for_real:

I wouldn't use a 100 boost on a level 90. You can go through the garrison chain to get a garrison, then use 100 garrison resources to buy an xp elixir off your garrison vendor. Combined with rested and with invasion xp, you'll be 100 by the time Legion goes live, easily.

If you want to boost a different class, that would make sense.

EDIT ADDED: Also, the DH intro is really well done, I think, so you might want to make one. I imagine that isn't going anywhere, though, after Legion launches. I do not have the feel down for my DH at all, admittedly. (I'd rather play windwalker monk or feral druid).

You might want to look into both druid and monk - those are likely my favorite classes right now (although I'll stick with my hunter and priest most likely, out of some strange feelings of affection for characters I've been playing forever).

What Xanthippe said. I've played about 4-5 hours across multiple toons since reupping last week. (Travel has limited my time) My level 91 rogue hit level 95.5 last night. I was doing WOD content before saying "fuck it" and chasing invasions. It's grindy but it's SO MUCH faster. I did two and a half levels last night vs. the running around doing quests thing.

I also have heirlooms, so YMMV.

They did cut the exp needed to go from 90-100 by about 30%, IIRC, at some point during WoD. With Heirlooms it was easy to go from 90-100 with a little over 2 zones worth of questing, especially if you're picking up treasures and killing Rares. Without Heirlooms it took 3 for me recently.

Invasions give you ~1 level for doing 2-3 of them, so they are potentially a little faster than quest hubs, but YMMV on whether you'd rather quest or grind invasions.

Given the current situation, which could change any time, the least stressful situation is to fly to the invasion, afk for 30 minutes, and fly to the next.  Right now, participating will only add hp to the mob scaling technology, and you won't get any exp from most mobs unless you solo them.  Of course, I find them kinda fun, but you get pretty much the same rewards whether you die repeatedly to attacks that aren't scaled for your level or just afk on yer flying mount at the edge of the zone.

How depressingly Blizzard.  :why_so_serious: :drill:

It already did change. XP for low level people getting help from 100s was got hotfixed overnight. Go kill some demons already.

Yep, I got home just now and demons are kicking out nice exp.  It's nice seeing people participate again.  Swarms of players tearing into the demons.  I love seeing that.

Now if only they would fix how hard some  of those endbosses hit, everything would be right in the world.   Not terribly fun as a tank when some of those fuckers 3 shot you through your passive defensives.   Even with a healer or two on me, My DK quite literally cant tank some  of them for more then about 6 seconds without splattering.

I don't try tanking them anymore on my Prot Pally. Even if someone actually tries to heal me through it I'll die. It's less headache to just stand around and then maybe go in when the boss is <20% than to get crushed into the ground in 2 hits.

One semi-protip I picked up while powerleveling my warlock yesterday: when fighting the pit lord minibosses (the ones that do the 'searing flesh' attack), only engage them after they've already used the attack once. They'll almost always get to cast it twice, and while surviving one is possible with all self-healing / damage mitigation cooldowns you may have, the second one WILL kill you. Same thing applies to fel reaver's earthquake.

Of course you can always just move out of range, but some classes don't have enough mobility skills to do that...

I went from having one 100 toon I didn't like to having five 100 toons after the past few weeks of legion invasions. Hopefully I can find one of them I enjoy playing?!

The XP is insane from these things - I also have a 43 warrior that I started on Saturday. He hasn't even completed a quest yet, just the invasions. Hoping to have him to 100 by end of event.

Yeah, I leveled-up several of the alts I abandoned because Warlords was only fun the first time through. Thief and Druid have now joined my Hunter, DK, Monk, and Priest. I'm working on the Mage now and considering the Warrior and Shaman.

I just can't find a lot of long-term play in any of them, though. Not sure if it's because I'm still burnt-out on WoW or I just don't like the mechanics of the new classes. They all have their own flavor, but something's missing on each of them so they haven't clicked with me.

It's like none of them feel HEROIC anymore. It's just simple rotations with little actual decision-making. I feel a bot could play all of them and I'd be having the same experience.

I started a Tauren pally (my first ever Horde toon) on Tuesday and he just hit 100 in 26.5 hours /played. I left him sit for likely a few hours by accident so could have done in less than a day. Pretty cool!

This pretty much sums up day 1 for me on my thoughts regarding launch:

(https://i.imgur.com/2VlyYIM.png)

Granted, I know everyone plays at different times and zones, and apparently there was a DDoS attack late last night, but I've logged about 15ish hours since 0300 EST Tuesday, and have been running without a glitch.

Cleared through Azsuna and finished the main story lines in Stormheim, just need to collect the last hidden treasures and side-quests there. Dinged 106 on my DH, and unlocked one of the key points on my artifact. So far, this expansion's hitting all the proper endorphin buttons.  :awesome_for_real:

I'm just not feeling the game anymore. My warrior main feels boring as fury and I wish I'd chosen the tanking weapons to level. Enhance shaman feels ok but TBH, I might as well be playing my warrior. Affliction warlock feels ok but I don't have any sense of variety. In fact I'm bored already because of the changes, it's all generic skills. Class halls seem good but for the first time ever I actually can't be bothered levelling. The game feels slick but lacking in soul.

I think they refined the signature skills too much, there just doesn't seem to be enough depth to the classes anymore.

If you can hold out to 102, you can head back to your class hall and do the quests to pickup your other spec weapons.

Just make sure you have a different weapon with you when you do this. The DK tanking quest, for example, is not able to be completed by DPS. Since your artifact is spec-related it becomes a broken-weapon when you change specs.

One my guildies is already 110. He's nuts.

Not sure if that applies to all classes. I got the warning that doing my DPS artifact was "designed" for my DPS-spec, but I was not forced to change spec. I was able to do the whole Havoc chain with my tanking blades on and running Vengeance the entire time. The only "error" I encountered was at the end when I got the blades; the game tried to auto-equip them, but couldn't due to my tank spec being active. Still finished though.

Edit: Grammar and words are hard while at work after 15 hour gaming session xD

The warning you're talking about is when you take the quest. If you can power through it as that spec, great.

However, if you change specs the artifact goes "broken." and is unusable. THAT is where you run into problems if you can't complete the 2nd quest in your "Default" spec.

i.e. I can't use Apocalypse (the Unholy weapon) in Blood spec.  Since the quest was designed around  a lot of self-heal/ mitigate I couldn't complete it in Unholy Spec. When I switched to Blood I wasn't able to "Tank" the instance without a separate weapon.

Ditto my wife needing to do DPS with the Holy artifact, she lost all of the stat-stick of the weapon slot because it flagged "broken" when she switched to Shadow.

Gotcha. Fortunately your class hall vendor should have a generic weapon(s) available for sale that will suit the artifact quest needs.

If you weren't already decked out in iLvl 745 or whatever mythic gear or didn't take advantage of that sweet, sweet invasion loot, you're in for a rough beginning. You will get some decent starting gear within the first couple of hours but if you have iLvl 650 or less, its going to be a slog.  Even with my mage having slightly over 700 gear, it took a bit to kill mobs.  I wouldn't say they're hard to kill but you're not going to face roll them, either.

Oh crap, I sold them :( Might be able to craft a shield and sword I guess.

On that note, I hate 2H swords for fury as I love my Tauren Chieften axe transmog. I do  wish you could transmog swords and axes together

Some NPC in your class hall should sell weapons for the other specs if you need one to complete the quest. I ended up doing them with heirloom weapons before finding this out, as I too had sold my weapons as soon as I earned my first artifact.

OK, this scene inside the class hall made me want to level my druid next.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIMOx4BD8wg

I finally got a feel for my ret paladin and I think I'm going to main him for this xpac. I didn't really like how the mage or hunter play anymore (my vanilla toons), and my DK feels fiddly as unholy.

I did the class quests for the weapon on all four characters last night and Blizzard did a really good job with those. Engaging, each one of them. Also, the new zones look downright beautiful. We'll see how it plays as the expansion progresses, but so far they've done good. It's doing great on nostalgia.

Rolled back my deleted items on my Warrior. I really want to play around with my feral druid, rogue and prot pally. I've always levelled the latter as prot, it's fun. Enhance shaman is also good and I took the warrior out again and got into a rhythm with it.

I'm having fun, played a lot and hit 110. I'm not sure if I'll stay subbed for more than a couple months since I didn't in WoD but for what it's worth this expansion feels more fun to me. I like the world quests, they offer a lot of variety. All the class quests and profession quests offer even more variety on top of that.

Unholy isn't too fiddly, I'm playing it as one of my main characters. You juggle the same number of resources as other classes, but the gameplay is more methodical than spammy. That gets frustrating at times because I want to just mash keys.  :awesome_for_real:

Keep your two diseases up, manage runic power and don't let pustules stack to max unless you're then going to blow your Artifact proc (which is awesome).

That's for basic kills. Harder mobs you roll-in making sure your pet is hulked-out on CD and you are throwing Gargoyle/ Dark Arbiter out there. IF you didn't take Dark Arbiter then you should have taken Soul Reaper, so you weave that into the first rotation on CD right before a Scourge Strike.

I didn't like the Beastmaster Hunter at all. Marks is pretty decent fun now that I get the rotation. It's a LOT simpler than it was. Spam Aim, Use Sidewinders to mark targets hit your "shoot all my marked targets" button. Win. It's especially fun on big pulls with lots of targets.

Hunters big problem is each spec only has one viable talent tree spec and little flavor outside of that. Using marks for example:

* You MUST take Sidewinders unless doing massive AOEs at all times when Piercing shot overtakes it. The other talent is nigh useless.
* Barrage is superior to Volley because things don't have to be massed and there's too many multi-target fights for Murder of Crows to be worth it except in specific situations.
* Patient Sniper > all.  
* Lock and Load is fantastic and removes a CD instead of adding another to manage.
* Lone Wolf removes pets (which I consider sacrilege) but outperforms the others in any fight with more than one target.

The other specs are very similar in terms of 'choices' that aren't really choices.


People don't level pallies as Prot? What's their problem?  :drill:  Prot pally felt really strong again when I did the Legion Invasions to level mine up. I don't think they're back to the "I rule all" levels of Burning Crusade but I definitely can see them being the #1 or #2 choice for tanks because they're fun and not easy to fuck-up on rotation.

It's not terrible, but I wish there was a version of unholy without pet. If unholy had Lone Wolf, I'd probably play it. I always wanted to play frost, but it plays really weak to me.

I agree. My main complaint about Unholy has always been the perma-ghoul. I like perma-pets for Hunters and Warlocks, but it sucks for melee and seems out of place. Especially an undead plate-wearing juggernaut of plague and decay. Much preferred when it was a DPS cool-down back in early Lich King.

Frost IS really weak play-wise. You're waiting on CDs, rune power and procs. It's nowhere near as engaging as Unholy or even Blood tanking. That's before I start into my bitchfit about Dual-Wielding.

Started my priest first (disc). Got within 3 bars of 110, and got so stuck that I had to put in a ticket. Can't use hearth or /stuck, because it says I'm moving. (I used levitate and ended up in a crystal cluster that I cannot get out of). Response time on ticket estimated at 24 hours.

I started in Highmountain (really liked the questlines), and then did Val'sharah.  Maybe I'm more of a lore nerd than I used to be, but I really enjoyed the story lines.

I am very impressed overall with this expansion. So far, I'd say far better than the last two.

So now, although I wish I was playing my priest, I'm starting my BM MM hunter.

**Edited - I just found out that MM hunter is where my speed went.

Open up help, there's a "character stuck" option that will force the hearth. If that doesn't work then right below it has the kill option that will teleport you to graveyard. Are those not working?

Correct. Those are not working. The game thinks I'm moving.

I did LFG in Assault on Violet Hold with 2 other mages today.  One was fire, one was arcane and I was frost.  I'm not sure if this is going to hold up in raids, but my dps as frost was only slightly lower than fire and a bit better than arcane.  It seems like all 3 specs might be viable when raiding.

Priest? Queue for a dungeon as a healer, use hearthstone after you zone in?

Maybe see if  you  can whisper a warlock  to summon you somewhere?

Oh, I should have tried to queue! Thank you, I didn't think of that. As a healer, I've had insta-queues for dungeons.

Blizz fixed it within a couple of hours.  I was surprised at how fast they got to it.

On the plus side, I got my hunter started.

After doing some more reading at Icy Veins, I might switch to BM for the first part of leveling, and then back to MM. I think I would kind of like to have two viable specs. OTOH, hunter is not grabbing me all that much. I do want to get Loremaster for Legion on my hunter, who has most of my achievements, and whatever fishing and cooking achievements. Druid is beckoning to me for playing.

I am impressed so far with this expansion. The artwork, the stories, the exploring, the lands. The Broken Isles seem larger than Draenor - Northrend sized.

One thing I noticed yesterday when logging in and out of my characters.

None of the characters that I had not logged in on since Tuesday had rested xp, but the ones I did log in on had a little.

So, if you want rested xp to start, log in on a character. Otherwise the little rested xp thing is at 0.

This has been an issue since Wrath at least, no rested XP at the start of an expansion/major overhaul if you don't log in first.

I'm really tempted to resub for this but am not sure... My old friends are playing again.

I'd forgotten that tip, thanks for the reminder. With one of each class rested XP makes a yuge difference.

I agree the hunters don't feel the same anymore. Worst will be when I try and do dungeons as Marks. Half my skills are AOE, I'm going to really have to watch positioning.

Besides saving them to use on a different artifact, is there any reason to not use the items that give artifact xp?

Not since they fixed the exploits, no.

There IS still an argument against picking up all the world drops and dares until later, though. I'm finding its more fun to just pick them up anyway.

ed: To expand now that I'm at the office.

That post I made earlier in the "WOW in 2016" thread about the 'catch-up' and experience bonuses once you complete the 108 quest for Artifact Knowledge still stands. That's still a mechanic and a method to really make those pickups go a long, long way. However, it's not retroactive to anything you've picked-up already. Once you pick up an item its fixed to the AK level you're at. For those of us who haven't done it we're at AK level 1.

If you hold off and wait you can get one measly little 10AP item to give you up to 2490AP at Artifact Knowledge level 25. That lets you do 6 whole nodes from that one little 10AAP item you find in almost all purple chests strewn all over the place.  However it's something like a 50-day grind to get there.

The REAL reason for AK is because the cost of nodes skyrockets after your 13th unlock (which is 5 nodes on most artifacts).
Nodes 1-7 increase at a cost of 25, going from 300 to 450.
Node 8 increases by 75
Node 9 increase by 100
Node 10-12 increase by 125, ending with a 1000AP cost for the 12th node.

Node 13? 6840.
Node 14, 15, 16, 17? 8830, 11280, 14400, 18620.

So you don't do any harm picking-up and using those AP items as you find them while leveling. You're not going to unlock node 13 before you get to the endgame. However, once you hit 9 or 10 unlocks you should slowdown or stop finding those world treasure chests and rares if you're only doing one spec. Each one you use is lost AP later when you've got some Artifact Knowledge.

World quests apparently grant AP and are affected by AK, so that's got you covered for later on down the line when costs get really stupid.

Only level 106 but I love healing on my disc priest.

Only 104, having fun taking it slow with the wife. Me as a DK her as a Priest. We might try tanking/ healing tonight and watching all the DPS rage at the deaths and my refusal to go too fast.

Thanks, Merusk. I think I'm just going to play and have fun with it instead of min/maxing it to death.

Yeah I realize now my TLDR should have been there:

Just use the things until you hit 13 unlocks. It's more fun and you don't lose anything doing so.

Did another marathon today...

- Ding 110
I think as a result of everything scaling to your level, grinding isn't really a concern for Bliz anymore. I did every "Bonus Objective" mission as they popped up along my questing, and got a crap-ton of CH resources and XP as a result. Now that I'm 110? No more Bonus Objective pop-ups in the zones outside of Suramar. I know this because I did a couple zones in beta and saved them for last on live. Regardless, the journey was fun. Fun enough to finish...

- All of the Exploration/Adventure/Loremaster/Treasure Finding stuff for everything but Suramar
"lorelol" and Green Jesus cat-call all you want, but Bliz has gotten a hell of a lot better at telling a story in-game now. And they're not afraid to kill off characters anymore. The world design is top notch, and chock full of rare NPC fights, treasures, and terrain to explore.

- Progressed the Light's Heart chain up to where you can
At any point from 100 to 110, Khadgar offers you a quest to find a thing that fell out of the sky. Not going to spoil anything, but so far this chain is a real treat for long-time devotees of the lore/story of Warcraft. Someone(s) put a lot of time into this one to make it compelling.

- Worked on available profession quests (LW/Skinning)
At the end of the day, professions in WoW are the same as they always have; nice little filler things to help augment your gear, but never a true replacement for raid stuff. That said, the journey to get the recipes and up your skill is a LOT more involved now. Again, good story telling and really good use of exploiting the content they're introducing.

- Started on Suramar before I started making dinner
As I stepped foot into the current "end-game", I was rewarded with an artifact token that gave me 800 AP. That's more than anything I've gotten from questing or treasures, and no artifact research yet. Party on, Wayne.

The Surimar quests give you a ton of AP since they're endgame focused. That was the big hubub about "don't wait to start them, it won't matter"

I two-manned the first boss of an instance on my pally tank with a shadow priest buddy...it was fun! But slow as hell. So we did the rest with guildies. It struck me at one point that I was playing for the fun of it and not to get loot or level up (despite doing both). Video games?!

Just wanted to confirm (being a psycho altoholic who WILL want to eventually work on 6 or so alts to 110):  Artifact Knowledge is Account Wide, right?

Edit: Shit.  A quick search on google turns up the info that AK is only per character,  NOT account wide, however Research times for AK levels will get shorter as time goes on, so reaching high AK levels on alts will  be faster.

Guess that means focus primarily on one or two mains for "active" content like dungeons / raiding etc, and just putz around on sideline alts who are more for Crafting and whatnot.

Prob means I will focus on my Druid and DK as my primary mains, and leave the rest to what i can get around to.

You are better than me. What AK means to me is that I will probably level 1 or 2 to 110 and then unsub because it's just another variation on alt grind=content.

The other 9 alts can get fucked at which point the untidiness of not having all at 110 will annoy me enough to uninstall the game :D

Which is a shame as I liked levelling alts but refuse to level them all and their weapons.

I just realised it's a variation on Diablo 3 (level and hit gear for season then stop playing) or Hearthstone (get cardback and quit for the month). Blizzard are shit at working out what fun is

I'm almost 110 on my ret pally that I'm going to 'main' this xpac. I decided to try my Unholy DK at 100 with his artifact last night - I can't believe how much faster it kills through content. I feel slightly squishier than the pally, but I kill so much faster it's not even comparable.

I think I might try to play a Holy pally at some point soon. I've never healed, so some PUGs are in for some fun 5-mans. :)

I've heard from a few folks that Ret is decidedly fucked this X-pac. Maybe it'll get better with higher gear or tweaked, but most were saying to just level as Prot instead. You kill a lot and you kill at the same speed.

One thing to watch out for is that your DPS/ ability to kill PLUMMETS at 110. I'm getting wrecked by level 101/ 108 players in dungeons. The scaling at 110 must assume a higher ilevel on gear vs. the lower ends so the mobs have more mitigation.

On a "Fucking COOL" note:

The DK class quest has you, as an agent of the Lich King Bolvar, re-form the Four Horsemen. I just hit the 3rd and geeked out because I always liked the character.

The other two were:

FWIW elemental shaman seems to be absolute bottom of the barrel dps too, with mediocre survivability. Switching to enhance with no trinkets and a 0 AP artifact weapon increases dps/mobility/survivability significantly even though I haven't played enhance since levelling back in BC. Hell, switching to RESTO is better for solo questing, since it kills single targets almost as fast as ele (unless ele hits the rng jackpot) and literally never dies + has zero downtime.
As a bonus, ele is probably the worst spec in pvp against melee, which was fun when leveling on a server with a 2:1 horde:alliance ratio. I switched to resto for soloing now and I can at leastsurvive and get away from most ganks unless it's like 1v3.

Performance of ele in dungeons is similarly sad, though some warlock specs and maybe arcane mages have it bad too...

I had the identical experience. Leveled from 100-110 as Elem, got crushed in DPS by lower-level players in dungeons. The only areas I accelerated were very large AoE groups if I stacked some cooldowns. Though as Merusk posted, this seemed like it was partially some scaling weirdness in Normal Dungeons. I also noticed the normal dungeons that had been a total breeze to heal from 100-109 as Resto got way harder to heal as soon as I hit 110. That seems to vary wildly based on the levels of the other people in your group, if you go in with a full group of 110s it'll feel as easy and balanced as it does when your lower levels.

In any case, I could do okay as Elemental at 110 in world content as long as I was stacking, say 2-3 of my best DPS cooldowns for a Rare or Elite mob, but I'd get killed without them and ended every fight needing to hard cast 2-3 heals before the next mob.

I swapped to Enhance at 110 on a whim with 0 Artifact Runes or Artifact power invested and suddenly the game got much easier. Higher DPS, more reliable single target and AoE damage, better utility, more survivability, etc. Once I had a few green-quality Artifact Runes to boost my weapon ilvl I was blowing everything apart with no effort, elites and Rares included.

The most puzzling difference was that Enhance got instant-cast heals for a small amount of Maelstorm Power. Elemental, which uses the same resource system, has to hard cast them. Not only was I taking more damage as elemental, but I had to sit around like an asshole hard casting heals when Enhance just zips along with instant cast heals mid-fight or out of combat. Zero reason for elemental to not get the same option to trade Maelstorm power for instant cast heals, since both specs have a finite amount of healing they can do with their small mana pool anyway.

I've noticed most of the groups I've healed so far have been very Melee heavy, so I'm not the only one finding the ranged specs for most classes lacking in Legion.

I think its partially based on statements by Blizzard just prior to release. The lead dev said something along the lines of, "Melee will do well in Dungeons and Challenge modes and Ranged will struggle. The reverse will wind-up true in Raids and we're ok with that. Not everyone has to be equal."

So since Dungeons are the content for this part of the cycle, you're going to see more melee.

I thought it was strange that my kill speed didn't go up when I tried switching from Resto to Ele. Glad it wasn't just me being bad.

Level 110 tanks are definitely a bit harder to keep alive in dungeons than their lower-level counterparts. I really don't know why they even raised the cap this expansion if everything is just going to scale anyway.

What's up with Demon Hunter tanking, by the way? I always see them drop to ~50% really fast and then self-heal most of it back by the time I get a spell off. It's really unpredictable and leaves me in a constant state of semi-panic as a healer. Is it just me or do they need a little love?

I just dinged 110 on my disc priest and just entering stone/storm mountain whatever its called as my last zone before the other.

Love the healing ability on this class. Real fun.

I think demonhunters play a lot like early Deathknights.  They dont have a proper "full  time" active mitigation skill (i think every other tank can keep at least one of their actives up almost 95% of the time), so they have windows where they have pretty much no mitigation at all going for them, so unless the person playing the tank has a really good grasp of proper cooldown staggering to cover the gaps, they will  be playing a lot of self heal pingpong wit the healthbars.

I hate healing pugs in dungeons as disc. Holy is fine, though, and it's easy to unlock the artifact, and get it up to a reasonable level.

I have decided to shelve hunter until it's enjoyable again. Got up to 105, played both BM and MM, and realized Blizzard managed to take the fun out.

I have a WW monk that I use for skinning. It's ok, but I'm not in love. I think I'll go with druid next.

Legion dev Q&A. (http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/5962-Legion-Developer-Q-A-Ion-Hazzikostas)

Whenever I read one of these things, it seems to boil down to that the players who are complaining aren't playing right.



It doesn't sound to me as though any broken classes will be fixed any time soon.

Been piddling around with this for an hour here and there. Don't like the changes to Blood DK, which was my main in MoP/WoD. It feels like they took away most of my self healing ability, as my DK just doesn't feel nearly as survivable or self sufficient as before. Moreover, they seem to have made all the talents uncool. There's hardly any that make me actively want them. They are all like 'here's 2% more life' or 'here's 5% more energy' or 'here's yet another button to take 20% less damage for 5 seconds' or some other forgettable junk.

Vengence DH has been alright. I like it actually has great self heal, and mobility compared to DK is great. My biggest complaint is the various abilities don't feel very meaty, rather they all feel rather interchangeable. None of them seem to hit particularly harder than any others, and it just feels like I'm slowly whittling every guy down in 5% increments.

Anyone have much experience with other tanks in Legion? Looking for something that feels somewhat self sufficient and has some abilities that actually take chunks off enemy health bars (at least solo). Perhaps that's just not a thing with the new legion tanking dynamics...

As I understand it that's not a thing with the new dynamics. DK self-heal isn't bursty like it was, it's much more even outside of DeathStrike. Tanks are meant to rely on healers now to "give them something to do," except the DH which is the "solo tank."  Rumor is DHs are meant to be able to take on anything outside of raids by themselves by design intent. This also is apparently why they tend to make terrible group tanks and are "only if we have no other choice" for Mythic and Raids because of 'not dying' and 'fucking hell why did you pull that' aspect.

Fuckers aggro so much shit needlessly that I believe it, though it could just be the 'newness' of them. DK tanks had similar problems in WOTLK.

Druid might be more to your liking, though I don't know as I don't play them. No bear tank in what's left of my guild, so no way of knowing from that aspect either. I rely on Youtube for that info anymore.

As for "best" tanks it's Warrior/ Paladin. Pallys are simple and hard to screw up and Warriors have insane Victory Rush and mitigation combos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRdJ-edDMJM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qd0fLDnRQCs

First toon  to 110 here is a druid,  primarily as Tank.

As a group tank, you are quite solid.  Make sure you have mastery on everything that can have mastery on it, and you are golden.   We are basically back to being complete meatshields, but we do it very well.

At around 810 item level currently, and I find my solo self healing is kind of lacking (Frenzied Regen is utterly inferior to Deathstrike for keeping you alive, for example, unless you are taking big hits very slowly, which doesnt happen very often in solo outdoor stuff), so unless you want to spec Resto Affinity and run away / hot self / come back, you have to be careful with what you pull.  Especially as even moderate packs (5 or 6 mobs) that just mele you can still put down some hefty damage to you since you cant block, and no longer have a +Dodge cooldown.

We do get two fairly hefty "burst" healing cooldowns in the form of the Astral Beam heal talent + first major trait granting Leech to our artifact cooldown, but with a 1.5 min cooldown on both, some of the harder world elites can leave me almost dead by time i kill them.   meanwhile, I have watched DKs beat the shit out of the things and their healthbars barely move.

So far, my major complaint is that, outside of popping our artifact cooldown for damage, our solo damage feels lacking, and I find I seem to spend a lot of time spamming my main active defensive abilities.

Um, Blood Death Knights are ridiculous at soloing. I'm fairly sure I heal myself more than the healer does on many bosses as well. There's no cap to how many things you can kill at once whilst soloing, and you can kill grouped quests solo without ever going below 90% health with Blood. Easily one of the best and most powerful levelling specs in the game currently for solo play.

I've been leveling an Enhancement shaman from 1 after six years away from the game. It's 88 now, and I'll probably be hitting 90 before I even finish the first Pandaria zone.

Really enjoying it so far, and I have yet to run into anything short of an Elite that I can't kill in three hits. I imagine it'll change in Draenor and in Legion, but it's nice being OP while it lasts.

Haven't played since Cata, re-upped just before release and leveled a MW monk.  Was home all weekend so I got to power her up and I am sitting at ilvl 840 now.

My impressions:

I really love monk healing (I've played druid, priests and pallies in a former life).  The mobility is absolutely great.  Especially since every fight now is "don;"t stand in the way of this bad stuff/QUICK MOVE OVER HERE OR WE ALL DIE!."

I was an avid casual PvPer/world pvper/battlegrounder.  Even on my worst days in prior expansions I was a good dueler 1v1er.  No more.  Either I have gotten old and slow (likely) or the days of healers being able to take on any DPS spec are totally over.  Also, melees are insane right now, they have tons of interrupts and an infinite number of "jump right to you" abilities.  These seems broken.

PvE is really fun, I like the world quest/crafting system.  The dungeons are interesting (although the Warden one is a giant pain in the ass to heal SO MANY MECHANICS....).

Being a healer is awesome for the insta-dungeon pops and it is super easy to get into groups under LFG.

Running pandaran dailies so I can get that water-strider and the cloud serpent mounts.

I know no one currently playing other than myself, my wife who re-upped and is just playing casually and another friend who is super casual.  Is it possible to PUG raid with any success?

It might be a bit rocky at the start but the raid equivalent of LFG works. There are also custom groups in the LFG menu which probably (maybe, ish) have better quality control.

Eh, ok, I finally got around to doing a bit this weekend (and of course got ganked by asshole level 110s who are sitting around at the first landing in Dalaran.

The rogue HQ is sort of amusing. At this point I can't help but shout back at the NPCs about how stupid they all are. What, there's been a secret society of rogues all this time but I don't even know about it, despite the fact that I've beaten gods, am friends with Khadgar and Thrall, had a huge fucking garrison of my own, have stolen tons of stuff, you name it. They should be joining me, for fuck's sake. Or be hoping I don't kill them for leaving me out. And yes, of course, the super-rogues all get poison in their wine within twenty minutes of me meeting them. And then I fly off to the new continent but all the big NPCs are pretending it was there all the time and there's tons of ancient shit and so on. Goddamn ridiculous game.

But ok. The artifact thing is a cool idea. I decided to switch from being Assassination to Outlaw and Outlaw seems really fun, even if I'm struggling to understand the rotation and the use of the occasional abilities.

The class hall bugs me sometimes the same way the garrisons did: even though I'm "in command", I really just get to occasionally pick one of two options while everyone else waits to give me my next order/quest.  I can't yet recruit some of the paladins in the hall who are clearly more important than I am, yet I'm already supposed to be their leader, because plot or something.

But then, Warcraft won't ever be that sandbox-y, and I remember I'm only playing until the grind gets too repetitive anyway.

Speaking of pallys, I levelled Prot to 110, then switched to Ret.  Took about 10 kills to switch back.  Too squishy, and kill speed went down...?  I'd DPS in prot if they just gave me a way to dial down my threat.

If only there was a buff that you could switch off to remove threat. GG Blizz

I'm going to level my prot pally next as my warrior is almost 110. Tried leveling as prot but fury is just fantastic. Usually I die if I try to take on 6 - 7 mobs but less than that is fine. First I want to finish the warrior line as I have only completed 3 continents - but I've cleared them. Decent xpac so far I must admit.

Fury was just so goddamn boring when I did the Legion invasion. It was just watching 1-2 cooldowns and punching them as they lit-up. Was I doing it wrong?

I wish Assassin rogues killed faster. I love the bleed/ stealth gameplay but it seems like I've got to to Outlaw/ Subtlety if I don't want to be squishy as fuck because things take too long to die.

http://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/20749157269#post-1

Chris Metzen retires.

So what intern did he harass to this point, I wonder.

 :awesome_for_real:

Oh, oh thank god.

Yeah he's retiring at 42. My ass. He got canned.

And thank God. He's been on my shitlist forever. This expansion doesn't suck, and Metzen finally gets the boot. It's a great year in WoW!

I hope he decides to never touch another game in his life. But he'll come out "retirement" into some other shitty thing in less than 3 years tops.

Maybe Star Citizen is hiring!  :grin:

Haha holy shit. Now the shaman order hall story makes sense!

So yeah, Green Jesus went out with a whimper instead of a bang. Can't say I'm too sad about it.

Maybe Pardo is hiring (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/281142/Former_Blizzard_devs_form_Bonfire_Studios_net_25M_in_funding.php)  :why_so_serious:

I'm finding I can chew through everything as fury - bloodthirst means little to no downtime and the artifact skill wrecks the rares along with shout. other than that it's wrecking blow, furious slash (filler), rampage (on proc). Multiple packs it's WW then use the proc to hit multiple targets with bloodthirst or rampage. Furious charge and double time talents to heal up more. With charge and leap you just keep moving and smashing things.

Melee is over-strong by design. I don't understand why, but this is planned. Are they going to boost ranged/healing later? Who knows. If you want to pvp and win now though, roll melee.

I believe the logic is, "Ranged has less shit to deal with in Raids, so to make Melee and Ranged even in DPS we're going to boost melee since they have to run out all the time."

My experience battleground healing mostly consists of casting 1-2 spells and then getting stunned for 6 seconds and 100-0'd by a Paladin. Casters are in a terrible spot.

That's fine.  But that doesn't really work in pvp though.  Especially with the amount of movement/cc abilities they give them.

Welcome to the experience PVE players were bitching about for the last 12 years?

Again it's their failings in trying a "one size fits all" solution. The abilities need separate PVE/ PVP numbers the same way they did with stun and CC duration.

I'll say that DPSing with my arms warrior (both while leveling and instances) is way, way easier than DPSing as an ele shaman -- much more damage that is unaffected by the constant movement requirements in fights while my shaman keeps having to cancel casts, lots of mobility and gap closers compared to the single wind jump ability on the shaman (lol ghost wolf), etc etc. Of course there is the occasional 'fuck you melee' mechanic (I hear something about a trash mob in some mythic dungeon having a 0.5sec cast 360' cleave that basically two-shots everyone in range), but I've seen just as many 'fuck you caster' mechanics as well. It's also easier to avoid those massive breath weapons / cones when I'm in the enemy's face.

The only thing my shaman has that my warrior doesn't is a (hardcast) self heal... and in pve I can easily regen to full with Second Wind, or just keep killing shit for Victory Rush to refill my HP, resulting in zero downtime.

e: while we're on the subject of world pvp, it's pretty much clownshoes, but then, it kinda always has been. My server is 64% horde to 36% alliance (pretty much 2:1), and some class hall companions are utterly ridiculous. I think my favorite at the moment is Taran Zhu with his random AOE 10 second untrinketable stun that also increases damage taken... was 100-0'd with that yesterday by a monk without being able to do anything. Prot pallies have a 15-sec cone stun on one of their companions too, plus it's an active ability instead of random, which is probably even worse!

Also, this is probably a no-brainer, but the passive stat/hp increases you get each level are absolutely massive. Today a 101 DH and 100 warrior tried to double-team my 103 warrior, and I killed them both without taking too much damage... then killed them again since they graveyard-zerged me. And then a third time when they graveyard-zerged me AGAIN because I was at 20% HP... well, at least now they know how Victory Rush works. This was without me having any food or bandages to regenerate outside combat. On the flip side, when a 107 mage decided to pick on my then-104 shaman, I died in 4 casts and was CC'd during most of it... I had maybe 1 GCD that I used on the "jump away" ability, it didn't help much.

Arms Warriors are one of the best specs for DPS at the moment. They hotfixed some of the combat ally abilities in world PvP on Tuesday, I assume the 10-15 sec stuns were changed.

Well, the Taran Zhu 12 sec stun definitely wasn't (I was hit with it twice: once by accident when a horde monk was killing a world quest miniboss, and once during the gank). Maybe it's because it's not directly controllable, but rather (semi)randomly triggered?

So am I right that the AH is basically dead? I can't see much of anything that I might need that another player would have to sell. It looks like glyphs, at least rogue glyphs, don't matter any more. I can't even see how to apply them, really, and there's almost none in the AH anyway. You're not going to be looking to see if the occasional great world drop is there for weapons or armor--you have the artifacts and the armor comes at a frantic pace from questing and I would assume from instances. I pick up everything I need for my own crafting. I'm not clear if you even can enchant your artifacts or if you would want to, and I wouldn't enchant armor until I was pretty close to a final set. Pets are mostly monetized.

I think this is sort of one of the vague things that depresses me about the game: the variance between players is very nearly gone--I kind of liked seeing catasses and RNG-lucky and weird-itemization and theorycrafting people looking different, doing different stuff, arbitraging as much as they could on the AH and elsewhere.

Glyphs were killed, they only do purely cosmetic things now. It's the designers simplifying so they have to worry about less stuff. Just like everyone now has only 2-3 stats to juggle.

AH is good only for mats, bags, and quest items you need. You can't even sell twink armor anymore because Heirlooms replaced that years ago.  You can enchant artifacts, as a DK I do it myself, though, as it's always been better than other enchants.  Gems? If you care don't buy them on the AH buy them from a guild jewelcrafter instead of paying the insane AH price.

Got into the Arcway and Court of Stars yesterday and today. The Arcway reminds of Heroic Shadow Labs, which to me is good. Haven't had good dungeon romps like this in a long time. Court of Stars is nice for all the extra fluff they packed in; every class and tradeskill profession has something in it that lets you tip the scales and buff you up or cause distractions for boss guards.

Cleared up just about all of the 5 and 10-withered chests in the training scenario. Should be able to walk in next time it spawns and clean house for a full clear and max score.

THERE IS NO "S" IN LABORATORY (:grin:)

Regarding the training scenario, what is a quick way of getting 2000 ancient mana (aside from doing all suramar WQs with the ley rift buff active)? I've been hitting up the city for those juicy 50-130 mana items (Lunastre Estate used to be the best since it's only used for a short part of the plot), but it seems others on my server have caught onto that too, so most of the time I just see blips on the radar that disappear before I can get to them. The training scenario looks like a very different experience depending on your class/spec -- tanks seem to be the absolute best at it, and squishier casters tend to struggle, especially at Dro. I expect my warrior will be able to walk all over it in prot spec (basically prevent all of the withered from taking any damage), which is an annoying contrast to trying it as a healer, since each withered mob remembers its own HP and it rapidly decays to that point if they're ever healed, so may as well not bother with healing at all. Elemental shaman is very bad for this too (again, I did better as enhance with 0 AP and missing relics) -- can survive Dro by rotating cooldowns, it just takes forever and probably costs me half of my withered army in the process. e: I should probably just spend my withered on all the chests I can see before Dro, and then just suicide on him... with more damage / better hp on them, it should be eventually much easier to burn him down. Also, maybe the recent hotfix about withered using rock throw at point blank range will help too.

I should probably look into starting Mythics (just unlocked arcway/court of stars), but my ilevel is still way too low. Speaking of dungeon difficulties: it was amusing that a normal mode vault fight (Cordana) had me push 262k HPS, while tougher heroic fights with more mechanics I can get by with 120k or so. But then, in that Cordana fight, basically the only thing the group did was "focus fire Cordana"  :why_so_serious: It seems that just as in WOD, normal dungeons are harder than heroics!

Is there some kind of trick you people have for getting to Revered with the Nightfallen so quickly?   I swear, im not that far behind the first through the gate crowd, but i am still only half way through Revered and am completely out of everything but world quests that give nightfallen rep.

Fastest way I have found  for ancient manna is still to romp around the city.  The south western area (near the Waning Crescent portal), the Lunastre estate and most of the upper area around there, as well as the Vinyard, all spawn the good items that give anywhere from 40 to 130 ancient manna.   The merchant bazzare near the Waning Crescent can often be a goldmine, but dodging the revealers can be a pain in the ass.  Pro tip: Always keep the location of the nearest Inconspicuous Basket in the back of your head, as if you get jumped / exposed, you can make a beeline to it and hop in to completely drop all aggro (you can even re-apply your disguise while inside the basket before popping back out).

I refill my ancient mana by just using the Ley Rift buff and killing things. It ticks up enough as I'm slaughtering folks that I don't have to bother with it much. Plus you get mana as drops from withered and other creatures, so that helps too. Of course I'm a DK, so I just love killing shit. It doesn't get tedious the way it does on my rogue or even the hunter.

Order resources are my current bottleneck. I'm only getting 2-3 World Quests per day that grant resources and I've killed almost all the rares. I'm only at 1400 resources/ 10k needed for the next Stronghold update because I upgraded my class armors.


Speaking of rogues, don't fucking go assassination. It was great at 100 pre-legion still, but as soon as I hit the isles it turned to garbage. I can't kill shit and 2 mobs is a 50/50 shot at death. Wtf, Blizzard. I popped into Outlaw and using non-artifact weapons I'm killing 3-4x faster. That's fucked. Too bad, I hate the spec and the rotation. It bores me so I guess the rogue is getting shelved.

Best tips for Suramar:

- Get all of the leyline feeds unlocked. Go out of your way from the quests and do them. http://www.wowhead.com/achievement=10756/leyline-bling
Doing so increases the amount of ancient mana you collect from sources (i.e. instead of 2-3 mana per shard in the wild, you'll get 10-20)

- Skin/Herb/Mine gives more ancient mana than just straight kills. If you have a gathering profession, do that.

- That said, once you have Leyline Bling achieved, Suramar City proper (i.e. the area where you don your disguise) gives arguably more mana per minute thanks to the various clickable sources as opposed to the shards and chunks in the wild. I can farm up to the 2k cap within about 15-20 minutes just running around the SW corner of Suramar.

- As far as rep goes, progress the story as much as you can, and also explore around the city for non-storyline quests. Doing them allows them to show up as World Quests, which give rep. Do the Withered Army training whenever it pops and try to do your best. Non-humans can get up to 425 rep per run, and if you're getting that you're doing it right. The emissary quest is a no-brainer when it spawns, but when the Kirin Tor emissary spawns, that one gives you a chance to reward you a singular boost to one of the Broken Isles factions. That's been my strategy thus far; stay on top of the world quests and check in daily. You get 150 a day alone just keeping your three NPCs at the rebel base supplied with mana. More details that break down everything I just said can be found here: http://www.wowhead.com/guides/nightfallen-reputation

I should probably worry more about my rep with the Nightfallen. I got to Honored and stopped fucking around with it on a regular basis. (much like I hit 814 iLevel and said "fuck the gear grind.")

What's the big deal with their rep, other than advancing the storyline? I don't feel the rush to get shit done, knowing that I'm only going to LFR this x-pac and Blizzard's 2-3 years away from the next one. Is there anything tangible?

The big one is that 8000/12000 Honored unlocks the final 2 Mythic dungeons. If you don't care about those or the story, there isn't any big reason to care about the rep.

The Mythic dungeons are the biggest thing. More chances at cash and prizes are a good thing. The encounters themselves also also pretty enjoyable.

You also need Exalted for the final piece of your class gear, if that's important.

If you have the portal for it (unlocks at 8000/12000 honored), the Twilight Vineyards have ancient mana everywhere. There's Leypetal Blossoms, Dust, and Twice-Fortified Arcwine and the kicker is that as soon as you loot one another instantly spawns somewhere else in the area, or so it seems to me. Go back and forth from the portal in the east to the west past the moths up until you hit the detection mobs and you'll fill your 2000 in 10 minutes or less. The tricky bit is that everyone else will be farming this spot too, so if the Scenario just reset that's a terrible time to farm for it since you'll be competing against tons of people also trying to get their 2000. It's best to farm it when the scenario hasn't just reset.

I'm regretting picking the assassination daggers first on my rogue alt. I'm dying to level up a couple times so I can go pick the combat (outlaw, whatever) weapons and start actually killing things in a decent amount of time.

YEah, that's what I was saying earlier. Assasination is totally fucked. Just dump the artifacts, buy the weapons off the class hall vendor and go Combat or Subtlety. Sorry "outlaw".  You'll save yourself so many headaches and corpse runs.

Shame, I was planning to level Assassination when I got bored with my Shaman. Guess I'll put that on the back burner.

Any reason I shouldn't blow my level 100 boost on a Blood DK? I can't stand the frantic button-mashy playstyle of Bear Druid and want to try a tank with more careful resource management, a la rogues and healers.

I'm curious what Talents you guys are using for Assassination. I haven't spent a ton of time playing as it on my Rogue alt, since I actually enjoy Outlaw, but I never felt like kills took too long or that I was too fragile when I did play it up to 105.

Marked for Death is the talent that I felt made the biggest impact for the spec, since it lets you set up all your bleeds on a target and then Exsanguinate within a few GCDs of starting a fight. Single targets die fast and taking on 2-3 mobs hasn't been a problem since you can just Mark the next target immediately for a free 5 point combo. Here (http://www.wowhead.com/talent-calc/rogue/assassination/c33M) is what I'm using for reference.

Nothing I can think of, except maybe warriors are more careful about resoures? IDK I don't tank as one. When I do Blood for world quests/ elites it doesn't feel like I'm managing anything, though. Just waiting on Cooldowns to come up.

No one else doing disc priest? I can't die in suramar and I'm only ilvl 802. I'm sure my kill speed is slow.

Yeah, I switched to Outlaw right away, I could see already that Assassination, which I'd been playing for a long time, was fucked. Subtlety seems like it's still for PvP?

People are making way too many assumptions about classes based on just the dungeons.  I think we need a month or 3 of raids to make any real decisions.  The dps my assassination rogue was doing in dungeons seemed low until you took a look at the numbers it was doing on bosses.  It was at least double what everyone else was doing.  It's not a good spec for trash mobs or topping the dps meters but thats only because it has poor aoe skills and the bleeds take too long to ramp up before the mobs die.  General questing and leveling is probably better as an outlaw because it doesn't take long to kill mobs normally and your improved aoe lets you kill more of them than the other 2 specs.  I didn't care for sub at all so I haven't gone back to it since I got the artifact weapon.

Yes, my first character is disc priest. Killing things is slow, but not dying while doing it makes it satisfying. I switch to holy for dungeons because 1) it's cheap to unlock other artifacts until level 12 or 13 or whenever it goes up to 6k+, and 2) it's less hectic and I haven't yet gotten the hang of disc healing for groups of random idiots who like to stand in shit and tanks who don't use mitigation.

Wait until you hit the elites. You will die sometimes.

That suramar city elite zone is super fucking evil.    It needs about half the detector mobs removed.  Practically impossible to get anywhere important in there without aggroing half the city.

Buy items from Jacin (http://www.wowhead.com/npc=107467/jacin) in the Waning Crescent to make it easier.

If you're in the elite zone it's a bitch and a half to get around until you've memorized the best ways to evade the guards but outside of that part of the city it's not so bad. There are Inconspicuous Bags or whatever they're called that you can jump into to immediately deaggro everything. It lets you reapply your disguise before you jump back out also. If you ever break your disguise (especially in the Waning Crescent southern area) there is generally one of those nearby to hide in.

Unless you're a tank, doing the WQs in that elite zone is harsh regardless of your disguise. But then the WQs are designated rare/blue, so they design them with the intent that'd you'd be doing them in a small group or at least a duo.

Tried my hand at Normal Emerald Nightmare. Managed to down the first few bosses, but the last three are just a pain in the ass mechanic-wise for me to care about doing/wasting time on between work and family stuffs. Will probably just wait for LFR to complete the quests I have and concentrate more on Mythic+.

Having to quest to get your profession recipes is one of the worst things they've implemented in crafting in a long time.

Most of the professions seem genuinely awful in Legion.

My Shaman is a JC. Currently I'm wearing 0 pieces of gear with gem sockets. The world quests that give me better recipe ranks involve crafting jewelry items that cost 400-500g worth of materials to make, in order to receive a more efficient version of a leveling gear recipe (both in level req and ilvl) that nobody will buy. You could invest 10s of thousands of gold into Obliterum to get those items up to an ilvl appropriate for a level 110 character and they would still be worse than rewards from a world quest that takes ~2 minutes to complete.

Prospecting stacks of Felslate that sell for ~10k on the AH yields typically 1-3 rare gems. I've funneled everything I've mined into JC instead of selling it, and I'm still at 734 skill because the progress is so slow. There are stories online of people stuck at 790 skill who have spend hundreds of thousands of gold making Green Skill recipes that cost several thousand gold each just to try to get to 800 skill where the best gems are locked at.

The only profession that seems like it makes sense in Legion is Herb/Alch. Everyone still wants or needs flasks and potions for raiding and mythic+, with the cost of them being ~2k/flask and ~1/k potion.

I'm considering power leveling an alt with herb/alch soon, not because I've run out of things to do on my shaman, but because I can't afford to spend 12k gold for a single raid night.

For the expansion that was supposed to have the most effort put into professions ever, they did a pretty shit job.

I think professions peaked on WoD. They got it right as they were useful when you hit 100 and they could continue to be useful throughout the duration of the expansion. You also got to level them as you played as the levelling scale was spot on and allowed completion so that you could sit in your garrison get back to playing. If anything, it's the one thing that didn't need changing. As a completionist, I just don't care about professions.

The professions feel to me as if they're edging towards eliminating them altogether.

Yes. They removed all usefulness from anything not Alchemy or the few old Engineering ports. Everything else is more worthless than it was previously because you can't build it unti much, much later or you'll always have access to better via quests.

In hindsight, I probably should have done Enchant/Tailor on my DH. At least I can make money and keep myself reasonably buffed. Decisions...

Oh, Mythic and LFR Raiding went live today. The LFR chaps are already complaining that they can't do the "raiding" skin unlock for their artifacts in LFR. I wonder why  :oh_i_see:

They've never REALLY liked crafting, except when it was just another cockblock in vanilla (remember grinding factions to be able to craft resistance gear?)  IMO, crafting is on the wrong side of the raider/casual dichotomy.  If filthy casuals can craft epics, then epeens might shrink, or something.
"Now that you can get your purps thru pug raids/LFR, why would anyone want to craft? Oh, except to make buffs for raiding!"

I swear, they need to burn all the artwork in the WoW dev workspace and replace it with WildStar promo materials as a constant reminder to these guys.

WoD professions felt pretty sad since Garrisons meant most of them weren't really relevant on your character. I think Cata or MoP were the peak of profession design, with everything being pretty useful and reforging giving flexibility to gear. But it still felt like boring expensive checkboxes you needed to fill before doing the content you wanted to do.

The Legion design is a total mess, but at this point I'd be fine with Primary Professions going away or being relegated to cosmetic/convenience items that don't matter in the grand scheme of things.

I have engineering on both of my Legion characters, and it's pretty useful. Not because of anything they added in Legion (Reaves would be OK if it didn't take a consumable to summon, that part is just a hassle), but by having all the old stuff. Jeeves / infinite Goblin Gliders / loot-a-rang (this is invaluable on a pvp server where my faction is outnumbered more than 2:1) / Watergliding Jets (on-demand water walking and turbo swimming) / etc etc.

Actual crafting seems 99% useless (it was also pretty bad in WOD, but I could use it to boost my hunter's ilevel to qualify for heroics as soon as she hit 100) simply because WQs exist. I need to grind a blacksmith to 110 and go through a long-ass questline (costing a lot of materials) to craft demonsteel so I can use that and some WQ-gated materials to create... an i805 artifact relic that I'd literally replace the moment I hit 110? Or spend 100k gold on obliterum to increase its ilevel to something slightly worse I'd get in WQs or heroics / LFR? Yeahhhh...

Follow-up: After news about the artifact skin not being unlockable on LFR, and that it will be another 30 days before Xavius can be tackled on LFR for finishing the Nightfallen quest campaign, I bit the bullet and PUGd Il'gynoth, Cenarius, and Xav on Normal. Got three hours of sleep before work today, but the deed is done. Wasn't "as bad" as I expected it to be. Ate a number of deaths as a result of people learning the fight and being semi-undergeared, but we did it.

Since the artifact skin can't be done on LFR, and I find myself enjoying Mythic+ a heck of lot more than raiding, I guess I'm done with LFR. It's still a nice tier to have for casual types to experience the story/lore/content, but dropping stuff that's at least 15 ilvls below what I can get from Mythics? Yeah, we're done here.

Less than 1k rep away from Nightfallen Exalted  :drill:

If they weren't so grindy, I would otherwise say that pets and archaeology are good models for professions going forward--that you get two picks out of X number of skills that let you collect fun/curious/odd objects directly from the environment, none of them directly enhancing to your character's actual power in dungeons and raids. So if you're a tailor, you find some fun outfits every once in a while. If you're a blacksmith, you find some cool weapon appearances/molds that no one else has. Etc.   As soon as crafting is about power enhancement, it's instantly roped into min-max catassing and has to be constantly recalibrated when thinking about balance.

I basically gave up and I've left both my professions along this xpac after going through the smithing one. I've already got better gear than anything they've possibly offered. The only thing I enjoy right now is fishing, which they've finally done something cool with.

What did they do with fishing. I haven't noticed any difference.

Angler artifact.

A couple other nice quality of life changes too:

-you can catch any fish at any skill level
-when you catch a rare fish you can throw it back for 5 skill points
-you can buy inexpensive Oversized Bobbers (http://www.wowhead.com/item=136377/oversized-bobber) from fishing vendors that make your lure way bigger and easier to click or hit pools with
-there are a bunch of easy ways to increase your chance to find rare fish, either to power level fishing or to work on getting the Underlight Angler (http://www.wowhead.com/guide=4505/the-legion-fishing-artifact-underlight-angler) artifact

Yea, the fishing WQs getting you a 20-stack of a specific fish type in 2-3 minutes are pretty good too. My main problem with fishing is that it's just a pure timewasting activity / QTE at its core, and that's not changing no matter how many shinies they implement around it...

Disc priest can also solo those, carefully - past 825 ilvl or so.

Loot-a-rangs don't work outside of WoD zones - at least they don't for my non-eng characters. Nor do the mailboxes.

Why they made this change, I have no idea. Loot-a-rang is such a terrific idea, but useless if I can't use it in any other zones but WoD.

Professions are just awful, except for cooking and alc/herbs.

The engineering-only lootarang works fine, it's the other lootarang that got the stupid WOD restriction... I don't like this decision either, since penalizing nonengies is not going to make the profession any more fun.

I have about 2 weeks left on my sub and while I've had a lot of fun and it probably is the best expac since LK, I don't think I'll be re-subbing.  I've gotten to the point where I can't advance my 110's any further without raiding or joining a guild to do mythic+ and the AW grind has really started to set in.  I think I'm just too old now to do this anymore. :geezer:

Have you tried pugging Mythics? It's really not that bad.

I'm with Ginaz on this. Where in WoD I raised all of my alts to 100 and played around on my warrior main, I'm pretty much done with it with my main at 110 and a couple at 101. Great expansion pack but the AW is too grindy (especially as I needed prot/fury) and Blizzard still haven't quite learned to stop catering to raiding guilds. Followers are netting me very little, professions are dead and grindy and I've done all the quest chains and sidequests (this was fantastic).

Wildstar and GW2 also dropped the ball on this and I'm amazed that Blizzard still haven't learned from it. Eve is the only MMO that benefits from advertising when a big corp does something - the bbread and butter subs come from everyone.

Loved the gaming experience of this expansion.

I'm still playing and having fun, which lasted a bit longer than the last three expansions. I would like to level one of my other toons, but can't really justify taking the time away from my main to attempt to stay competitive.

A couple things would help: artifact power should apply to all weapons on a character so I don't have to choose between specs. Artifact knowledge should be account wide to make me want to play alts.

Also, professions really do need some love, those quests are long and expensive. Fishing is fun though, and might keep me hanging on for a month or two.

It's like Cata all over again. Great leveling experience, shitty endgame.  I've no stamina to run it on an alt at all, which I realized once I hit 106 on my hunter. I just don't want to run it again.

I really thought the latter was going to be implemented. The former would be nice too. AK should have been better thought out.

The Cata analogy isn't too far off for me. WoD I enjoyed until I hit 100. WotLK is still the standout expansion - but I think that was a case of it being better than Vanilla/TBC.

Mythic/Mythic+ dungeons are amazing and may be the only thing keeping me playing. The timer makes everything hectic and awesome. Reminds me of the weird crap we did in vanilla to keep things interesting (like 3-manning dungeons or kite-tanking bosses).

There was more endgame accessible to more people in Lich King--which was why the hardcore types hated it so much.

This expansion seems to be very accessible at several areas. I've enjoyed Mythic dungeons, they are hard enough to make me slow down and actually think about stuff, but not so hard that they wipe us constantly.

I think the World Quest idea is fantastic, and I love the idea of upgrading gear based on dailies. That lets people fill in gaps they need to get where they have to go for dungeons and raids.

Professions are horrific. They completely missed out on the idea of making these interesting. Each profession needs a guaranteed high end epic or there's no point to leveling it fast. They also should be available for the after max level experience to fill out gear. These quests make that impossible unless you're doing them the whole way.

I do like that they level corrected the zones so you're not forced into one area and you can do things with friends of different levels. That's incredibly smart.

The AH seems mostly pointless. I'm making massive money on people trading mats for crafting, but other than that there's no gear drops I've seen that you can really trade.

The worst thing they did was Artifact power not going across all your stuff and toons. It's locking people into one thing, and you feel like you're wasting time if you switch. They should have applied a percentage across everyone, and that's how artifact knowledge should have worked where it increases your percentage while also increasing the percentage to your total alt pool.

The worst thing about professions is that all the armor ones are absolutely pointless now.  By the time you've done the quests to get the patterns you've already outlevelled any gear you'd get from them and levelling is so fast, no one wants to buy the stuff either.

Thank you for this. I didn't realize there was a different one for engineers. (I didn't play Cata for long - I think that's the expansion the eng one came from).

I'm enjoying it. There is so much they got right this time (professions not being one of them - although JC has some good rings and necks, but I have no idea how hard it is to craft them).

Re: alts. It dawned on me finally that in order to level alts, the best thing to do is get to a level where you can research your Artifact, then you can let your alt sit until you have your artifact research up high enough that it will be much quicker to get AP. If I play any of my alts with the same intensity I have played my disc priest (first character to 110), I know I will just hate it. So I level an alts when I feel like doing something different.

I think this is the most accessible WoW expansion for different things to do at max_level since Wrath, and the most fun since Wrath.

The annoying part about parking alts at 110 to boost their artifact knowledge is that you'll run out of Order Hall resources pretty quickly, and the best method to get those is by doing World Quests. Since the World Quests have all the rep requirements, it means you have to essentially finish all the zones expect Suramar on every alt in order for them to research AK past the first 2-3 weeks.

Being addressed in next patch. You only need do to the "friendly with everyone for WQ" thing once, and every alt after that will get WQ access right at 110.

Also, the Suramar dungeons will only need one attunement for account wide access.

Artifacts are starting to get me down. I'm now just logging in to do them as I did with garrisons in WoD. But with my fury artifact at 20 and my prot weapons at 17 the rewards are drying up. I'm on AK 4 and no longer enjoying the game as my time is spent chasing specific WQs to get to the third gold talent in each weapon. I stopped my prot run in favour of fury but it's killing the game for me. God help me if I want to go arms for PvP :(

We're back to the grind, and it's World Quests to level your weapon. It didn't take long, but the downside of their reward structure currently is that WQs are the most effective way to do everything.

Thus my earlier comment about shitty endgame.

Even worse if you have alts, because the "catch-up mechanism" of AK still requires you to have been playing since day one. There are no catch up levels and it's not per account.  Grind resources for ak research on the alts and on your main.  Nope.

It's just no fun after the first month at max level.  Grind grind grind.

I've hit the point where my minions are all ilvl 835. But the game is now only giving me 845-850 missions to run. So I can't even send them out to get ilvl boosts and am dependent on the forge making them for me.

It's like they really don't want me to give them money anymore.

As much as the class storyline and artifact weapon retrieval quests were fun for alts, nothing else at 110 is. I finally unlocked WQs on my 110 alt and it was apparent immediately that neither waiting x weeks/months for your Artifact Knowledge to catch up, or farming small fractions of Artifact Power, were fun activities.

The AP chase on my main is kind of fun, because it does feel like some progress each day and I look forward to each gold tier unlock changing my gameplay a little bit. That activity dovetails into WQ Daily Reward Caches, which are fun for the same reason that slot machines were in Diablo 3 Adventure Mode.

That said, each week the grind does become much more visible. I've given up trying to keep my off-spec weapon up to par and even without that drain I'm still lucky to get 1-2 new artifact levels a week even after playing daily and doing the majority of content sources for AP. You start to notice very quickly that the rate of AP costs for each level dramatically outpace the rates for Artifact Knowledge. I've completed 24/34 artifact weapon levels, but only 8/25 artifact knowledge levels. In only 1-2 more artifact weapon levels it'll require more than a weeks worth of daily quest/dungeon content just for the next level and a measly % bonus to one ability.

Yeah, I stopped a week or so ago doing all the AP WQs. I do enough to finish the Caches and no more. Mythic+ / Emerald Nightmare is the only thing I'm doing on my main. Looking at how crazy high the % modifier gets at AK levels 20+ I feel like I'd rather just wait until then to start chasing AP.

Well,  part of that is due to the lack of any kind of "hard" gate on AP / Weapon Progression.  AP is part of the way your weapon "upgrades" over the course of this expansion (along with Relics), however, unlike previous expansions, there is no "Hard" cap you can hit between tiers that makes you say "whelp, i have the best weapon i can currently get, i'm done for now, time to slow down / do other things".  It's basically a never ending cycle of perpetually accumulating incremental upgrades, and if there is anything that MMO games have taught us, it is that the vast majority of us are just not wired properly to be able to ignore that pavlovian button pushing need as long as there is some kind of upgrade lurking in the background somewhere.

If blizzard had designed the Artifacts so that after hitting a certain amount of AP on a given weapon, you couldn't add any more until the next major update / raid tier released, people would be more then happy to probably just swap over to alts and do other things and let the AK ranks build up until they could start progressing again.  Without that tho, you always feel like you are missing out if you aren't perpetually farming AP for your  weapon.

I have 1 of 2 options, grind out more AP or go play WoWs and grind out the latest ARP ship by playing the game and getting challenged to top the damage dealt and hit T10.

This is the sad bit... right now the grind in a Wargaming game looks like more fun than grinding AP in WoW :(

Not only that, but there are plenty of drivers to log in daily and grind out WQs even if you aren't pursuing AP -- specifically, super-rare drops, the potential for a WQ item to upgrade to i870+ (it happened to me!) and legendary items. Emissary chests are especially insidious due to being one of the 'most reliable' sources for legendaries and those mystic coin things. Cue the architect meme about Blizzard getting really good at this entire skinner box thing. Heck, just making AK a slow progression that requires a subscription (I think you need what, 4 sub months to max it out?) is a minor stroke of genius.

Well, after WQs are auto-unlocked at 100, just doing the 20 WQ weekly event whenever it pops up should be enough. 5k resources = 10 AK work orders = 40 days (I think), and according to wowhead the next WQ event is coming at the end of Nov, so that's just about the right distribution, especially if some of the WQs you do during the week give resources...

I'm basically in it for 2 mythics a week, some hardcore full day WQ 2 days a week, and the rest of it who gives a fuck.

I may do a normal raid in November with a buddy for some people's alts. I'm not worried about maxxing out. It's just that I can see how the WQ thing can become obsessive for no real gain.

From http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/6040-Legion-Developer-Q-A-Ion-Hazzikostas-October-13-Hotfixes (http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/6040-Legion-Developer-Q-A-Ion-Hazzikostas-October-13-Hotfixes)

That's cool.  With their trend of 18 months between the final raid and a new expansion, I can easily unsub for 'a few months' and not really miss anything.

Although the MasterPlan addon has not yet been updated for Class Halls, Garrison Mission Manager has. It seems to be working very well, so I would recommend getting it.

With regard to leveling alts to 110, and then parking them - I've played a lot, and have leveled a few alts to 110. The first, I did all wrong - I stayed in one zone and did all of the quests before moving on.

The next alt, I followed the main questline in each zone, starting in the shorter zones and moving to the longer ones. (Aszuna, Val'sharah, Highmountain, Stormheim). Ending up with a piece of 800 gear is terrific for leveling (the reward from the main questline).

I also only did the dungeons as I got the quest for them, as they don't seem to provide much xp otherwise.  Also, I mostly ignored the crafting profession but did the gathering one as I quested.

Once at 110, I haven't kept up with the daily missions, because I don't want to run out of resources before getting Artifact Research done (500 resources each). I've ignored the class hall upgrades past the first one (those are very expensive).

Benefits to doing it this way - I'm friendly with all factions except Nightfallen and Wardens by 110. I can pick up extra resources by doing the quests I didn't do before, and killing the silverframed mobs. I can also become friendly with Nightfallen by doing their questline, and open up WQs. That's if I feel like playing the alt. Otherwise it can be parked for many levels of artifact knowledge before I have to gather more resources.

I enjoy questing, dailies, WQs. I particularly enjoy that I got to 845 ilvl mostly by WQs. I do the daily heroic for the AP or satchel (if it's available),  but my raiding is pretty much confined to LFR. My healer is disc, and it's not enjoyable for me to try to heal with, past 5mans. I do mythics if I have a quest. Disc isn't great with bad groups who like to gogogo, overpull and stand in shit.

YMMV, but for a hardcore casual like me, I enjoy this expansion much more than any other, since Wrath of the Lich King.

On the other hand, my credit card expired and I haven't felt the need to change my billing and reup.

Everything I had to do felt like busywork, and since LFR is garbage I didn't even want to bother with that. The leveling experience was good enough, but I think I'm done until I want to bother checking-out Kara.

The implosion of my guild nearly two years ago really has underscored that it's the people that keep you comping back. My guild only had 4-8 players on at any time and the two women who took over play even less than I did, only showing up for 2-4 hours on Tuesday and Saturday. No desire to hunt for another group of not-hardcore but not-20-somethings, so I'm out.

Return to Karazhan arrives a week from tomorrow - Patch 7.1 (https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/news/20327354/patch-7-1-return-to-karazhan-arrives-on-october-25)


 Wowhead notes on 7.1 ptr build (http://www.wowhead.com/news=255940/patch-7-1-ptr-now-live-build-22578-mounts-karazhan-bosses-ptr-patch-notes-music-)

As an addendum to my above post regarding alts - I played my lock and hunter last weekend for resources, both being freshly minted 110s. I noticed that almost all of the WQs offered now give either resources or AP as rewards, with many fewer gear rewards. At least, that's how it seems, so I'm not sure that one can hit ilvl 145 as easily on WQs with the hotfixes/patches since launch.

There are much fewer gear rewards that I see now too, and much better rewards from the chests on the emissary. I have a feeling they evened that out on purpose.

Yeah, I was seeing a lot of 835-840 purples on the map last week, I only see one right now. Can't say whether the emissary chests are better though.

Ran a couple of Mythics on Sunday. Harder but not quite as hard as I feel the Draenor ones could be, which is fine by me. The main issue is just guys who want to go through them at top speed and are assholes if anyone says, "Ok, can we get a quick run-down on this fight?" I just don't feel like studying for an hour before signing up for one--it's hard to understand a fight before doing it. I have Azshara and Darkheart down pretty well, at any rate.

Mythics become harder with keystones, which drop when you complete a Mythic within the time allotted.

So there is Mythic, Mythic+1, on up to Mythic+9. Health and damage increase by 8% or 9% each level, and bosses get more affixes.

I really enjoy doing them on my dps but not on my disc healer. Disc is too hectic to be enjoyable, and I haven't leveled my holy artifact yet.

The balance is really wonky still. The difference in playing different classes is just huge. My hunter is relatively effortless compared to shadow priest (which I still don't understand, admittedly, nor have the rhythm down for). Affliction warlock is also relatively effortless. Balance druid is somewhere in between priest and hunter/warlock.

Played disc priest in RBGs yesterday for the weekly quest. I now know why healers are so few in BGs. Stun Stun Sap Fear Stun etc. Didn't we do this already? Melee is ridiculous. Casters are practically nonexistent. World of Stuncraft is back.

I don't know about that. I literally just finished a BG where the enemy Mistweaver had 3 of us beating on him for 30 seconds straight and we didn't even come close to killing him, then all his allies killed us.

I fucking despise the fact that you have to win BGs for it to count for the weekly. I've done about 15 BGs and won 2.

Alliance then?

Mistweavers and Resto druids are always hard to kill in PVP.   With Kalgan gone that may change but not soon.

Yeah, Alliance. To be fair, I have had stretches where we win a lot, but usually it's not because we got any better but because we were up against complete lemmings. I think the better Horde are queueing with the bonus event being underway.

LFRaid member to me as tank in Emerald dream : are you a casual?

Me: I am the filthiest of casuals.  There are none filthier than I.

Raid member: I LOVE YOU

....

Ran through all parts of Emerald Dream in LFR without reading anything.  Crushed it all.  After drinking 5 old fashioneds (an awesome drink, if you haven't tried one.  Go get blotto today!)

It's a nice change from the screaming assholes who want me to go faster in dungeons.  Fuck them.  Why do I do heroics, again?  I dunno.

Off to get the party killed in Mythics.

So on Tuesday, I played my alliance disc priest in rBGs in the evening. Awful. Played 10 or 11 games to get my 4 wins. In the losses, my team ignored the 4 horde focusing me. In the wins, there was more than one healer and the team looked out for the healers.

Yesterday, I played alliance balance druid in the morning. Was great fun, no stress, no getting stunned repeatedly. 4 for 4 wins.

So if you're alliance, play morning bgs if you can.

MW monks are godly this time around. Resto druids a little less so but still excellent. Priests are not, and not much fun either, I'm finding. Huge disappointment after dominating for so long. In fact, I'm not particularly enjoying disc all that much at all. It's adequate but not a whole lot of fun. I'll finish my artifact eventually but will likely focus on another character more, although I haven't landed on one yet that is a great fit for great fun, although leaning more toward druid than priest. Warlock has problems, hunter too. I suspect it will take a year for Blizzard to iron things out with these classes. I don't know why they were changed so radically (warlock in WoD and hunter in Legion).

So, the Blizzard Launcher updated to include an always on voice-chat function.  No, it doesn't have a "Disable" checkbox.  And moving the microphone slider to zero to effectively mute isn't a fix, because that's just a hook to the Windows system microphone volume slider. 

One step forward, two steps back.

Uhhhhhh what? Really?

To be fair, it's a voice chat for the battle.net (or whatever they're changing the name to now) launcher, not a specific game, so it's not like suddenly everyone in Orgrimmar can hear whenever you fart.  You just invite people from your friends list to a channel and you can chat with them.  And there is a push to talk option, as far as I can see (haven't used it yet, maybe it doesn't work or something?)

Seems fine to me.

I dislike that the mic controls affect the system settings eather than the in-app settings.

I'd like an opt-out option for it because I have no use for it.

Other than that, I can see how some wouldn't want to use Vent, Skype etc and that this would be their go-to.

I unsubbed yesterday. I've got another month and I may purchase some months after that with gold, but the endgame is trash, as has been said. They really really need to do a better job of quarterly content updates, but they never will. It's something that the Final Fantasy MMOs excelled at while everyone else in the game can't seem to figure it out.

Tried to get into Mythic dungeons as DPS so that I could learn the 2 unknown dungeons and tank them. After 25 minutes of hitting refresh and not getting into groups I gave up and switched the game off.

Would it really have hurt to make it the auto groupfinder tiered to keys? Particularly as 2-3 questlines require mythics... not to mention some follower rewards.

Just one more endgame fail - I'm starting to think this is WoD all over again, just in a different way. Great leveling experience (but lack of alt-friendliness through AP/AK demands) but nothing there afterwards.

They definitely need a separate category in the Group Finder for Mythic+. They should also add the ability to filter out groups that, for example, are full on DPS. Their Group Finder tool is seeing more use now than it ever has, I think, and they have not caught up in improving the interface for it.

The problem with being a DPS right now and especially a DPS with lower ilevel is that there are going to be higher ilevel DPS applying for the same thing you are and the group is just gonna take the one with the higher number.

Realistically nobody wants to waste time failing on a mythic+ run because you're locked in once you start.

Whenever I do mythic(+) I run as a tank with a healer and dps, and I generally try to take lower-end ilvl because I'm biased against high ilvl people being dicks. I will always, always take anyone with a creative comment in their group application because I like to have fun.

I found out why I couldn't get in.

First comment was DPS warrior... lol
Second comment was fury warrior... lol

I get it, even in 849 I fall behind Shaman and WW monks... in fact almost all classes. Sadly I didn't know that when I started the xpac and it's my go to tank/dps class.

I invested just enough AP into my tanking artifact to make it viable and concentrated on the fury artifact, nothing in the arms one.

I'm not going to grind through another toon, seriously AP and AK are pathetic in their implementation and just another example of blizzard cock-blocking.

The irony? I gave up on enhance shaman last expansion and moved to warrior main.

Yeah they definitely could tweak some specs, Fury Warrior top amongst them. But Blizzard never gets class balance right.

It's kinda telling that my dps went from 150k to 230+k when I switched from elemental to enhance for my first mythic... despite having a level 19 elemental artifact and a level 3 enhancement one (it didn't even have an iron relic). This considering I haven't played enhance since very early BC - have exclusively play ed ele/resto since then - so I was probably fucking up the rotation pretty bad.

The 7.1 QOL changes for ele are nice, but they won't be enough to fill the gap. I can at least, uh, spam chain lightning and earthquake on trash really well? Go team!

And that's the problem with mythics in general. They've fucked up everything by having them on lockouts. If you have them on normal dungeon mechanics, it's all fine. Now I'm playing shadow games with my friend trying to figure out how to get into these things without creating little cliques. It's pissing me off so I don't bother with them.

It also infuriates me that Karazhan is a 5-man now and on the same system. It should be a raid. It should have an option in LFR or group finder. It's fucking nonsense.

A thousand times yes. With the gold-for-sub now it really doesn't make sense to gate dungeons.

If anyone is looking for 5-man spots Alliance side (because my friends are chumps) add itsgoor#1403

I got my first legendary tonight while on my hunter...for my surv off spec. :oh_i_see:  To top it off, it was pretty shit, too.  Boots that give you 15 energy when a trap is triggered. :uhrr:  Note to self, always open emissary chests in my main spec.

It makes no sense to gate dungeons. Yes, you can gate Mythic plus. I get that, and it's fine. But are we really worried about people running dungeons over and over to get 840 items? I get more of those off world quests.

You can set your loot spec without actually changing to the spec by right-clicking your character portrait.

Still having a bad time with legendaries myself. I would like to have the freedom to change my loot specs around to get some DPS trinkets or help out guildies that are trying to get something specific that would be on my loot table, but I can't without fear that I'll end up getting my "bad luck prevention" legendary at that time and will have screwed my main spec for x months.

I have a hard time believing it really matters what spec you're in, or what loot spec you have designated.  My main is a resto druid, finally had a legendary pop in my bags while healing Normal Emerald Nightmare....

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/item/132452

Fuck my luck, I mean, is this Blizzard's way of telling me I should be PVP'ing?  

Argh.

Never got a legendary. I suspect I wouldn't get one even with their BS "catch up" code, which I belive isn't there just a statement made to mollify those who haven't found one yet.

If I can't see the number, it doesn't exist.

I found one pretty early in doing World Quests--one of the purple world bosses dropped it. It's the rogue wrists, not very good.

I don't think many of the legendaries are good. For a prot warrior you have Gloves that increase your damage (meh), a chest that helps you with shields on you and your intercepted ally (fine but you shouldn't be losing threat on raid targets), a belt which reduced demoralizing shout cooldown every thunderclap (good for multitanking, shit for everything else), and then the decent one with wrists that provide self healing per rage spent, and the best one which is a ring that reduces the cooldown on shield wall with every shield slam (which you use constantly).

So yeah, 1 of 5 is great, 1 is ok, and the other 3 I find to be mostly situational at best if not outright disappointing.

The unholy DK ones are pretty nice. Rune refreshes, Additional burst damage chance, empowering more than just our ghoul, AMS gives a heal off of damage absorbed.  All pretty nice stuff.

One of the other rogue ones is just overtly shit, almost incomprehensibly so. This feels like another small thing that they got wrong.

My prot warrior OS felt like a wet noodle last night... the I read about the IP nerf.

Was it not bad enough that getting rage is pure hell?

unsubbed.

I have played WoW an embarrassing amount since Legion launched, and still have no legendary. (Today is the first day I haven't played, in fact.)

I still like this expansion more than any since Wrath, but  I am struggling to understand how it could have gone live with all of the balance problems for the different classes. Some are just wildly OP and others are not only weak but not fun to play. OP and unfun is an ok combination, but weak and unfun is not.

I now have priest, druid, hunter and warlock at 110, although I mostly play priest. I don't really have a favorite, particularly - none seem really really fun, just adequate or inadequate. I am building AR on the inadequate alts in hopes the classes get fixed at some point.

I'm just not really digging healing this time around. Disc is hard to get used to with the changes, and holy has never been my thing. Resto is ok but I'm just not enjoying it a lot.

I experienced the unfun of being rejected for mythics on my hunter for Kara attunement, who had very low ilvl (830ish to start), then my guild took me along so I could get that done. I also don't understand why base Mythics cannot be in LFG. I have not yet done Kara - I prefer to do dungeons after I know what to expect rather than try to figure it out in the now.

Meanwhile, I'm good at leveling alts. Still haven't gotten the fishing artifact, and haven't really spent much time with the auction house, professions are bleh although the 7.1 change of crafted items going up to 855 is nice - but that's 8 obliterums to get there.

Monk is next. Leveling as WW but not fond of it. Maybe I'll switch it over to MW to see if I like healing like that better.

I have WoW ADD.

Mythics that are not keyed should absolutely use the standard LFG setup. If you look in Premades, that's what people *are* doing, only with an extra touch of assholery on the side. There's only a few mechanics in the base Mythics where a clueless DPS can wipe the party through repeated stupidity or cost the group the DPS for most of a fight. If folks are patient enough to just say, "Ok, you have to X", they save themselves the time of a death or a wipe. The Premade tool is essentially churning at fantastically fast rates because it's being used as a substitute LFG, which it is not designed for.

Keys I completely see why people want to be selective about, and the same even for normal raiding, considering that LFR is just a giant zerg fest.

The 7.1 patch is really buggy, with some major issues for many people. Among them, zoning taking either too long or never completing, people not getting credit for killing bosses, and a lot of minor stuff. It's as though they took out their A team, and put in their C team.

The most amusing bug I've found is getting a rbg win item Potato Stew Feast, a group feast that bestows a 10% stamina gain, and is "Only usable in Battlegrounds." Except when I try to use it, it says "cannot be used in a pvp area."

At any rate, balance is really off between the classes, and doesn't seem to be getting better. There seems to be a change in philosophy by the devs. In this thread (http://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/20749846886?page=5) a player wonders if the game is for the devs or the customers.  Orynx, the community manager, responds with this:


As you can imagine, that statement did not go over well. A few other blues jumped in with comments about how people may have "twisted" Orrnyx's words, and when thread was full it was locked and not continued.

Hah.. I imagine Ornyx got a talking-to about messaging later that afternoon. I get what he was trying to say but he did it in almost the worst way imaginable.

Funny that class balance is still fucked. That was pointed out at launch and they said they'd make the first series of passes in 7.1 then evaluate from there. Did that not happen?

Of course it was... they triple nerfed warriors so far.

You know, the weakest DPS. It's like being a shaman or druid all over again.

Fuck their art form - just make it fun.

But it IS Fun! For them. Didn't you see the statement above? It's how they design!

Of course that also means that if you don't find their version of fun as fun you're fucked. Might be nice if they were to release a vision statement of what they consider fun so you could consider purchase before a months-long investment let you decide it wasn't for you. That ain't happening, though.

The more naive/ cynical part would also comment that if the devs suck at their game they'd also be likely to nerf classes who achieved beyond their pet class. I'm old enough I don't see that happening in a multi-million dollar company with so many heads anymore. It's just a lack of greater vision and myopic data evaluation at this point.

"How are warriors performing in this metric at the top 2%? Right there? Awesome. No, I don't care about over-alls. Those players just suck/ have to gear-up/ L2P/ aren't important." Or "Well they can't be THAT bad there's still a billion of them. When they stop being played we'll address it but there's clearly something compelling enough they're good where they're at for now."

That's been the Blizzard flaw in WoW design for a long time.

I mostly quit playing. I saw what was coming in the patch and thought, okay you've already nerfed my warrior to the ground as a tank, now you're putting in bugs to top all this? The mythic lockout thing has ruined endgame for me. I'm not going to go through some fucked up half-LFG workaround just to play the game. It's the exact opposite of what dungeons are supposed to be about. They are supposed to be fast and fun. Raids are supposed to be where you pound your dick with a hammer for weeks putting together rosters and managing lockouts.

Guild Wars 2 Fractals would beg to differ. Yet Fractals did it right - including a LFG that worked and a non-bullshit "key system" (Fractals ranking you up).

For an expansion that had so much promise and no garrisons, they fucked it right up.

I'm losing my desire to play after one week.  I had 3 friends convince me to come back for this expansion.  They were very excited about the more 'casual' nature of gearing.  After a week, I'm finding it to be the same as always.  I'll probably dabble for another week or two, but will definitely not sub for another month.  I'm pretty let down by the whole experience.  Balance issues plague this expansion.

There is no balance. They've made it so that you have one viable thing your class should be doing, and if you're doing anything else you're stupid.

I think I chose well.  I played a priest this expansion.  So far, Holy and Shadow seem viable for all but the most hardcore progression guilds.  I'm wanting to see if I make make discipline work since it is the most fun... and since I don't care about much other than 5 man content.

Disciple e won't work until higher gear levels if at all.  Someone on the design team was seriously pissed at discipline heal sniping with. Uh Lee for the last two expansions. They kicked it hard.  At least you can do dps and heal, it's just not a spec for high end stuff like it was

You can do heroics as a disc priest, and mythics in a group that knows the mechanics, but definitely not as effortless as holy, and you'll want to be overgeared for randoms.

I like soloing as a disc priest, especially when some dumb rogue tries to gank me, because they're pretty ungankable 1x1, and even morex1 if they're bad.

Disc is a lot of fun in pvp unless you're the only healer and then you just spend your time being focused to death.

I think that disc needs a boost, though, for pve - should make it easier to apply atonement and make it last longer, or they should boost dps and healing.

I have hardly played holy or shadow, not enough to get them down pat. I've played shadow the least. Disc is my favorite, but it needs something.

On another note - I got the fishing artifact, the Underlight Angler. Also there is a new hidden faction with a mount, falcosaurs - picked up 2 new pets doing WQs. There is a lot for casuals to do, if you like pet battling, fishing, archaeology, and leveling alts (which I do). It's frustrating though if you want to run mythics and aren't a tank or healer, and don't have a guild/regular group to do it with.

While I appreciate all of that - why should I bother given that they have gated out content again and not addressed the issue of my main class?

Leveling alts just isn't the answer for me and repetition is repetition.

Blizzard need to get its shit together and get the hell over the casual vs hardcore/PvE vs PvP bullshit.

I don't really understand why that's so hard for them to grasp. The hardcores don't have anything *else* to jump to now anyway. Give them one raid that's crazy-shit hard and a couple of special doodads tied to it. Then put the rest of your effort building a very long and enjoyable treadmill for the casuals. I should not be gritting my teeth trying to get into a mythic in order to have anything much to do, or playing just the one or two nights a week when the remaining six or seven people in our guild of busy professionals can all get online at the same time.

I think things would be improved if they just put the Mythic dungeons into the LFG tool with heroics and normals.

Archaeology this expansion blows. Rather than just having rare projects be a thing you randomly get sometimes it's now a quest you get from Dalaran every 2 weeks. It changed the profession to something you could do when you felt like it to something you HAVE to do in the time limit unless you want to wait however many months it would take for that rare project to rotate back around again. Some of the quests are brutal too, 25 finds in Aszuna was terrible even considering the 2 weeks allotted to complete it.

Agree on all points, especially on putting base mythics into LFG - and even normal raids. Given that they are no more difficult than normal heroic in WoD was (at least that's how it seems to me), there is no reason to make it difficult for people to get groups - especially since they have gated professions and artifact appearances in mythics and normal raids.

The number of people unhappy with this is huge. If they don't end up doing this, I think they'll lose a lot of subscriptions.

Archaeology - finally did my first quest for Legion. Spent a few hours finishing it, just to power through. I'm not sure I'll keep up with that. I didn't find it fun. I'd rather fish or rbg.

Did snag a legendary yesterday on disc priest (finally), a drop off the first boss of a mythic.

From what I hear, Karazhan may be that place that I only hear about and don't visit for a very long time. I don't care for learning encounters, dying over and over again, with the attendant costs of repairs/consumables/frustrations. I expect it will either be tuned down or people will learn its tricks, but it will be a while before I go there.

Gonna disagree on regular Mythics being in the queue. I come across waaaaaay too many knuckle-draggers in Mythic as it is. Having to press a couple extra buttons and being able to filter out the bad at least reduces some of the idiocy.

I've been running heroics lately and man, are there some terrible players in this game.  I can understand keeping Mythics a bit more selective.

I will take a bad player who can maybe be told how to do a boss over trying to get a group for an hour and being denied.

Same, that's what votekick is for.

Until you get into that one group that has a duo/trio going, or one of the neutral people are too dumb/don't care to recognize the stupid and /votekick fails.

I'd rather just lead the group myself and run it with an iron fist.  :grin:

Sure and I'd like a legendary, I haven't seen what yet. But you know what?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7leQB_Oe_k

Well, here is the thing about putting base mythics into LFG - nobody _has_ to use it. If you want to continue to only run Mythics using the Premade tool, you can.

But for those of us who try that, and get denied over and over again because we're dps with a 840 ilvl (I never have had trouble getting in on my healer even though she is disc), it allows us to play.

The requirements for running mythics is becoming more absurd as time goes on. Just saw one group with a tank and a dps looking for a keystone as well as 2 dps and healer - only 870+ level.

Nobody's stopping you from hosting your own group and you setting the terms and conditions of who gets in or out. Part of the reason I started the updated Bnet tags thread was so that we here could at least branch out and know that we have like-minded/similar-skilled people here to help each other out if need be.

There is an argument to be had that "ilvl isn't everything"; even I have some 820-830 gear still on because the secondary stats do more than what a 850-860 can do. But it does simplify the process of trying to find "good" players that at least have the gear part of the trifecta taken care of.

The grouping tool is shit. The LFG is amazingly helpful. Not using it is simply hubris on the part of Blizzard with their stupid lockout design on Mythics which SHOULD NOT EXIST.

I was in a Normal raid last night that got stuck on the Eye boss and it was pretty irritating. We'd go in, about six dumbchucklefucks would get stuck inside the eye on Phase 2 and die, then they'd bitch into /raid about what a dumb group it was and /quit. Then we'd load up on another six, explain the fight, and it would happen again. I generally wouldn't have a sense that stuff was going south until I would find myself on a tentacle alone in Phase 2 and see that no one was rounding up the blobs and realize that there were splotches of poo all over the place and dead people in them. I went about six or seven rounds of that before I gave up. But the thing that made it worse was that there was always some loud asshole joining in the next iteration and saying the fight was so EZ and how dumb everyone was and then he'd usually be one of the people who fucked up.

That shit is going to happen whether that level of difficulty is LFR'ed or it's done through Premades. The only way to avoid that being your gaming experience is to join some insane group of hardcores who want you to play six hours a night every night.

Except that's only true in LFR. I've had plenty of LFG dungeons run just fine, and if it's on asshole they get booted. Raids are an entirely different machine with no wheels and bad shocks.

From Blizzcon:

Karazhan will be broken into Upper and Lower sections, queueable random heroics, Mythic+ as well.
Court of Stars and The Arcway will also become queueable.

Flying also confirmed in 7.2.

So those sub dropoffs must be pretty goddamn significant then. Good.

It's amusing to me because they had Heroic versions of Arcway/CoS in beta, but decided to change them to Mythic exclusive because muh neckbeards.  Which may have been OK on its own but gating a big part of their first major patch (Kara) behind Mythics was a really bad idea.  I love that there's Mythic/Mythic+ content available for those that want to do it, just stop making basic fucking story and tradeskill quests require it.

Also we're going to Argus this expansion (7.3?).  It looks like they may live up to their promise of "no more content droughts" this time around.

Yeah I already cancelled so hopefully I'm part of them deciding they fucked up yet again. Fixing the game is really simple for me. Take dungeons off lockouts and open them up to more queue options.

I made the statement about the shitty state of dungeons when I unsubbed too. Sadly, I've now moved on, discovered Warframe and am grinding with friends or strangers and having fun.

so, whats the fastest way to max out an alt these days?  I am seriously  tempted to ditch work on my main and run several of my alts up to 100 for these new class mounts they are throwing in with the next expansion.  Several of them  just look fucking awesome.

- Always run dungeons that are your level at least once to get the quests and complete them. Don't use the random LFG; specifically look for the dungeons that show up in yellow in the specific list. Huge chunks of XP.
- From 1-60, do the regular quest thing until you outlevel the zone. Move on to the next one.
- From 60-70, do Hellfire and weave dungeons in between. You could stay in Hellfire while you run dungeons or move on, but whatever works for you.
- Repeat for 70-80; choose Howling or Borean.
- Repeat for 80-85; choose Hyjal. Always choose Hyjal.
- Repeat for 85-90; Jade Forest with dungeons should do you.
- Repeat for 90-100; It's pretty linear at this point...just keep the quests yellow/orange if available.
- 100-110; Open season on whatever. Do the Bonus Objectives as they pop up while going through the zones, and don't neglect profession quests. Huge chucks with those.

Pandaria might keep me from relevelling anything ever. I found it an utterly hateful experience.

I might be re-leveling a character.  Been playing Holy priest and find that the lack of mobility and general lack of utility is pretty disappointing.  Thinking I may try a druid or paladin as a healer for Mythic + and maybe a few 10-man raids.

Any suggestions?

The  answer to healing questions is almost always "roll a Druid"   Has been for about 10 years.

Holy pally if you want to be maintain heals and sit in mele to build power but everything else.  Druid.

Holy paladins are really strong in Legion, but they're all viable. Disc is the only Legion healing spec that needs to come with a warning label.

I've been Mistweaving with my Monk. It's not the spec I'm dumping all my AP into (capped off at lvl 14, right when you hit "dat AP wall"), but I can keep a Mythic group going. Do not miss Fistweaving.

I've found Disc to be among the better Mythic + classes.  Problem is that they require the group to know what they're doing... so it's impossible to pug with them. 

Not impossible to pug with them. As long as you're overgeared, you're fine.  :awesome_for_real:

I've basically given up. They broke the AH, they broke professions, they broke doing dungeons, and the raids I've done are for the most part fuckawful boring. I'm 857 level and see no point in improvements. Blah.

Seems like they've been doing great on the initial release but have forgotten how to long-term things. Delayed gratification on some items is good but there has to be a payoff rather than, "incremental improvement here."

I blew my wad on it 2 months in and see no reason going back now until the next X-pac. As you said, the long-term stuff like professions, dungeons, AH are crappy and the Raids? Fuck them, they just weren't that interesting.

I was having fun kind of with mythic + premades except when I wasn't. But even the bloom is off that rose. And doing premades for Kara and Valor is a straight-up drag--both of them are significantly harder than mythic + dungeons and Emerald Nightmare, and nobody who is doing a premade wants to take the time to learn them with folks who haven't run them before. That was true on Day 1 of them going live and so it just gets more true over time. I do not want to have to watch endless vids just to not get yelled at by some manchild who wants his cheese pellet rewards dispensed into his mouth more quickly. My little guild of friends is not going to be in a place where they can run them, though.

That's why they are broken. You should be able to pug dungeons. They should be on LFG. Mythic should be cosmetic challenge mode. Yet they have done this instead and it sucks.

So blizzard went back to "listen to forum whiners who want their shiny to be better than everyone else's shiny or else it's meaningless."

Good for them.  Someone should tell them how well WildStar went with that philosophy.

I don't believe that was the intent. I think they ran out of ways to stop people from progressing so fast with all the WQ gear, dungeon gear, and normal raiding. I mean Karazhan is mythic only and has NINE bosses? WTF?

Normal people don't have the time to play a dungeon for 3 hours. That's why you can choose to do that shit if you raid, and they let it infect their 5-mans because they didn't know how to stop people from going too fast.

The problem with the endgame here is they let the raiding mentality affect their 5 mans. Which is fine if you only have 5 mans and no raids. I'd live with that. But to have raids AND these? You're not giving different classes of players something to do.

They need one ultra-hard endgame raid that only the absolute most dedicated poopsockers can even enter, let alone beat. And then a bunch of stuff that is designed to let most people play it.

I've also noticed the rise in designs that block anybody from going back and soloing old raids that had mounts or pets in them--mechanics where you have to kill an improbably large number of adds in a big space all at once, that sort of thing. That's annoying too, because it would give me something else I'd be fine with doing on a weekly basis just for OCD reasons, but where I'm not going to waste the time of trying to round up two or three other people.

Hmm, I had the opposite impression of soloing old raids -- if anything, they made it more possible in recent patches (f'rex, Galakras was impossible to solo due to having to fire two harpoons at it... now it can be done with just 1). I ran through most pandaria raids (not SOO) this week on my ele shaman, and they seemed to be decently soloable. Only exception is Dark Animus in Heroic 25-man mode (the little golems just hit way too hard) and possibly the troll council can be rough if you don't have self-heals.  OTOH in Heroic 10 mode everything just straight up melts before mechanics could become a problem.

That said, I'm not a big fan of the entire mythic+ setup. It really needs a static group unless you want to hang with "no noobs, have speedrun experience, screwup = kick" ragebeasts from LFG, and my friends who still play WOW are pretty much uninterested. I do like the idea of Karazhan as a 5-man pseudo-raid you can do 1/week, but it'll probably work better as two smaller dungeons in an upcoming patch. After getting some lucky titanforge drops, legendaries and a crapload of Kara gear, my character is approaching the point where the only things worth doing would be pugging a nightbane run each week (haha no), or pugging mythic+7 & heroic-mode raids (haha HELL no). Of course there's the possibilty to get a lucky titanforge from a WQ or a lower-level dungeon, but that's just combining a mind-numbing grind with prayers to RNGesus.

e: also, the weekly gates on Suramar storylines is a pretty cynical "keep everyone subbed" mechanic.

When I unsubbed a few months ago the "make the game for the hardcore" rot was already there. Linking quests to mythic only dungeons/no LFG was not an oversight, it was a deliberate philosophy. They didn't learn from Wildstar's mistakes at all. For some reason they see their game as the holy grail of MMOs, but it isn't because anything that splits a user base is just shit.  The artifact system screwed over alts. Every expansion I would cap my alts out for diversity in playstyle. I'd probably be doing it now except for the state of artifacts when I left. This time I didn't bother with a single alt.

I'd love to see their sub numbers as this expansion was good right to a point... but it still doesn't take me back to the fun I had with WotLK.

Sub numbers peaked shortly after Legion hit and then went back to where it started after the first month.  It's an interesting expansion, but gear inflation is out of whack.

It's boring.

It's hugely, hugely boring.  They NEEDED to sort out the Alt Problem and it wasn't addressed at all.

I still think what they really needed to do was somehow amalgamate the previous expansions 'fun bits' and the Alts into something unified.  Like, a Garrison that everyone shares that also has your garden and other grindy fun nonsense in it.

As it is, you're stuck doing the same shite on your alts that you just did.  It's even worse that you pretty much have to do all the zones on your first chap, so it's not like you can have 6 guys doing six different zones for 'something new'.

Also, the raids blow chunks and the Mythic shit is just awfully implemented and stupid.

Anyway.

I'd love to see a radical change like extending the scaling they use in the Legion zones to all zones. Do 100-110 in Duskwood? No problem. Wrath zones more to your liking? Go for it. It would make leveling an alt a lot less boring.

That is a terrific idea.

I think that leveling through dungeons is still much faster than through questing.

I finally got all of my artifact powers on my disc priest. Switched to shadow spec, and leveling that up is super easy, as is leveling up my hunter that I got to 110 a couple of weeks after launch and then left her, other than to keep up with artifact knowledge. I think she's around AK 21 or something. When I do play her, artifact leveling seems very fast.

I also leveled up 3 others who have sat at 110 for the most part, other than to check in for artifact knowledge notes. When I do decide to play them, it's fun. The 5th 110 was pretty boring to level though, because I've seen all the stories/questlines so much, but in that solitaire mindless minecraft-y way, which is how I feel about doing WQs - or how I used to feel about dailies.

I don't think I'm playing WoW right. I prefer the mindless leveling and doing rbgs and fishing to raiding and mythics. It's relaxing, as opposed to frustrating. I'm beginning to like boring in games, I think.

It would actually be kind of hilarious if they applied their scaling tech to PvP.  Would love to see some max level jackoff get his face ripped off by a couple of people 30 or 40 levels lower then him because everything now scales to roughly the same percentage modifiers.

The wailing and gnashing of teeth would, indeed, be delicious.

That said, PvP'ers would probably like that because swelling pvp ranks is a win/win.

I would also love to see this. I wonder if it would be too confusing for new players though? Having ~50 zones to pick from "next" instead of 1 or 2, and how that is communicated in-game, etc.. The idea of doing like, 10-40 in Pandaria and then wandering off to wherever else I wanted sounds awesome though.


Next patch makes BOA artifact level boosts purchasable for alts, which should help them feel a lot less grindy. They only cost Order Hall resources, which you probably have oodles of on your main if your account looks anything like mine.

I don't think that will fix the alt problem, as it's still pretty boring to re-level them through the same areas, and most professions are trash at this point. Still, it should make it easier for your alts to get to the point where they can run Kara or something, which currently feels like the most fun destination for alts if you have friends to make a group with.

I'd LOVE for WOW to go all-in on the world scaling tech. Old quests, old zones, hell even old dungeons could become relevant again, world pvp could become some semblance of 'fair' nevermind, geared 110s would still be 2-shotting everyone and there's no way Blizz would take that away from them. It'd kill solo running of old raids, but I got really fucking lucky (http://i.imgur.com/48G7CU2.png) with that, sooo...  :grin:


Anyway, the artifact knowledge thing will help, but it's not enough... there needs to be a way to skip the entire world quest tedium. Not only are there a ton of items from WQs that are straight up best-in-slot (Devilsaur Shock Baton, titanforges and friends), but doing the same WQs on an alt to get the emissary chest that you need to keep up with resources / AP / legendaries (?) is just mind-numbing. And yea, it doesn't help that professions are total shit, and the obliterum thing is super double shit.

Honestly, WOD was better at having alt catch-up mechanics that didn't force mind-numbing grinding on the player. MOP was kinda bad too with the rep gating, but at least you got a 2x boost once your main got exalted.


... speaking of legendaries, that entire mechanic is just messed up, though not really from an alt perspective. I lucked out and got two legendaries on my shaman that are useful for multiple specs (the ring is good for both damage specs, and the wrist is great for elemental & has very good stats for resto/enh), but what if I got some shitty/niche ones? Or what if I wanted to try healing, only now I wouldn't be getting any legendaries for several months because my 'bad luck protection' is used up already? If you have gear that fundamentally changes how a spec plays, you'd better give a reliable way to get them, and *choose* the one(s) you want. They'll probably put in some mechanics that allow player selection of legendaries in 7.2 / 7.3, but by thaht point most of the playerbase will have quit. Again.

The legendary system is beyond awful. It's so bad I believe they are already on record saying it was a mistake to have DPS increase legendaries and that they all should've been utility. Honestly I preferred the WotLK/Cataclysm approach to legendaries where you collect foozles from a raid and give them to one guy and he gets the legendary. It's not like I ever got one myself but if you're going to have legendaries in the game I think that's how they should be distributed rather than random bullshit or everybody gets one.

I'm still waiting for them to link AP between all specs. It sucks feeling super powerful as Enhancement or whatever and then switching to Resto and you suck because you have no points in your weapon. And it's not like you suck just a little bit, the difference between 15 points and 35 points is night and day.

The artefact level boosts are going to do fuck all, frankly.  It's addressing a symptom, not the main problem.


I mean, for fucks sake, I can't even share gold across my alts without effort.  That's just shite.

It goes for everything. They put attunements back in the game for heaven's sake. Fucking attunements. No, just no. I should be able to play every dungeon and raid you release at launch. Do not make me jump through hoops, we learned that was shit with Onyxia back in fucking vanilla.

And that was heavily underscored during the attunement insanity required for Burning Crusade.


I remember that people were really goddamn annoyed at having to drag crafters through attunement for drops in the final raid dungeon, because (I think) the drops needed for resist gear were non-transferable.
- This was actually Tempest Keep, not Mount Hyjal, and I think it was the point where a lot of the attunement was finally removed.
- I did have the fun of experiencing most of that flow chart.  It was great.   :oh_i_see:

I apparently hit quote instead of modify.

I R GENIUS.

Merry Christmas!

(http://i.imgur.com/agZISAX.gif)

Horde attunement for Ony was the earliest example as was vanilla Naxx (although a lot simpler) and don't even get me started on trying to get resist gear for AQ.

Blizzard just don't learn and sooner or later the golden goose will fly

I had completely forgotten resist gear for AQ, although I went once during BC.  I didn't play vanilla at all.

Tell me more about Flying these days. I haven't played since Pandas.

If they would give us back flying without having to do the stupid Loremaster achievement, I would at least resub for a month.

If you played casually the month after release, you'd have the loremaster already.  It's really nothing more than completing the main storylines in the zones and finishing Suramar.

So, I got into Nighthold today. I was doing ok--middle of the pack on DPS. Then we wiped on something (I was last up, though). Then five people quit. Then five new people joined. Then we tried again and wiped. I was being extra careful on the mechanic, and was lower on DPS. New jackholes said, "kick the low DPS" (five bosses in, mind you). I got kicked.

So I thought, ok, fine. Maybe I should experiment with assassination finally--I have noticed that the top tier raiding rogues are almost all assassination. Outlaw takes such a perfect control over rotation to hit the high marks. So I tried that. I did ok. But then I noticed: fuck, I have two legendaries and they're both for outlaw. I'm not getting *any* of the bonuses for them besides the stat bonuses. I have no idea if I set my loot spec to Assassination if I'll have a chance of getting legendaries for it, or if two legendaries is all it'll let me have. Handcuffed. I hadn't even really noticed this aspect of it until now.

The legendary system is indeed completely ass. The system right now is that each legendary takes on average twice as long to get as the previous one. If they'd just get rid of that nonsense so that they drop way more frequently people would be way happier. It's not like you can equip more than 2 at once anyway.

That being said, my healing pally shoulders were still better, stat wise, than any other prot gear, so they did for both specs...

They removed the soft cap on legendary drops in late November (relevant bit in the last paragraph): https://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/20752276726?page=9#176

Datamining min-max crowds make everything more fun though. :uhrr:

I knew my DPS as feral druid wasn't great, but brawler's guild really showed me how bad.  Fights that took other melee maybe 10 seconds max took me a ridiculous amount of time, if they were doable at all. 

Granted, I'm ilevel 870 with two restoration legendaries and only a feral artifact level of 22, (so probably way undergeared relative to the others) but we're talking first-tier fights here.

Going to learn how to play boomkin, a lot of the later fights I watched looked melee-unfriendly anyways.

I last played in December before Christmas, and haven't thought about it much. I'm sure the raid I was in is dead but it was dying before the holiday anyway because Emerald wasn't fun.

What I do miss is the ability to just knock around for an hour and get things done. That was possibly with world quests, but the grind was pretty steep and eventually it's just an RNG game for the possible loot.

I haven't played in 3 months, but is anybody else?

I'm still playing but I'm in raidlogging mode (only logging on for raids with my guild, and doing a +15 mythic plus) waiting for patch 7.2. I've leveled a few alts to 110 and have them at 35ish Artifact Weapon level but I just have no interest at all in doing the 35-54 grind on another character and I feel so weak compared to my main character because I don't have those artifact levels, so I don't play them. I've definitely played this one a whole lot more than WoD which only lasted a couple months for me.

Since the first raid went live. I got all my followers, got them leveled and purple then my card got compromised and turned off. I could t be bothered to put in the new billing info.

While I really enjoyed the leveling this time around, the endgame progression treadmill meant I was forced to play one character and that's not me. Plus not having an active guild anymore meant no access to non-idiot groups, and PUGs have gotten worse over time instead of better with the focus on using old raid mechanics in Heroics.

I long for single player once more.

I just started to play again, after a few months away.

7.2 will go live next Tuesday, March 28. (https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/news/20602168)

Part II of the Legion Pathfinder achievement (for flying) will be in it, I think.

So this is the loot island patch?

If following the traditions of the last few expansions, yes.

Talk to me about Pet Dungeon.

It's a time-gated loot island. There is barely anything to do right now, and little loot to be had: no chests, no rares, just a couple world quests in a very densely populated zone. They've said they are going to roll out patch features and quests over the next 11 weeks+, so you probably shouldn't bother checking it out now.

Finishing the WQs allows you to contribute towards a server-wide building on the loot island that gives you a few more activities, but the process is so slow that it's going to take 1-2 weeks just to build a single building, which the Legion will destroy and reset after 2-3 days. It currently feels like the AQ war effort, if you remember that, in that you are doing boring tasks to contribute like 0.0001% towards the progress of the server's goal. Only this time instead of permanently unlocking the raid, the reward is unlocking a non-permanent building.

Another intentional stealth-change joy this patch brought: world mobs now scale with your ilvl, meaning enemies you fought pre-7.2 may now have several million more HP, higher damage, and take longer to kill. If you're trying to do WQs in a healing spec or a tank spec, you'll notice it takes forever to kill anything now. When doing the new artifact weapon trait unlock quest on my raid-geared shaman last night, I was taking 30-50 seconds to kill each single mob.

The solution to this, which they've implied they are going to hotfix out, is just to remove a piece of gear to lower your average ilvl. Removing a ring on my shaman dropped mob HP in Broken isle by over 33%, which is roughly what it was before patch.

Great patch guys  :uhrr:

Hah.. morons and fanbois in charge now.

AQ2.0 with temporary crap? Fuck that, I'll keep my $15 or give it to a freemium game. At least they let me win when I pay.

I heard a theory that they rushed the release of this patch to coincide with FF14s recent patch. May or may not be bullshit but this patch with all its bugs and seeming lack of things to do screams rushed to me.

Rokal, that sounds beyond awful.  Particularly the iLevel thing.

I'm just going to continue with SWToR which is at least upfront about when it's fucking you.

Indeed. This is why I never played EQ - because my perception of it was that it was punishing by design.

Now WoW is too.

Here is Game Director Watcher's explanation:


and later in the same thread where players are expressing their dislike of this:



So basically, "we released a tiny bit of content to stretch this expansion but with ilvl scaling the old content will feel stronger, and didn't think we ought to tell you."

I just cancelled. I don't want to struggle through the rest of this with my disc priest, which already kills shit slow enough even at ilvl 867.

That's a lot of fucking words to say essentially fuck all.

Basically, we don't want to release new content, we want you on this hamster wheel forever, so we removed the horizon for it and you went and fucking noticed, you filthy fucking wallets.

Oh Dear.

I wouldn't go that far, but it's still pretty near to it.  This is a fundamental change in the game function and mechanics that stretches back to inception. It's not something you roll-out in a mid-game patch, and certainly not something you change without big announcements so you get enough testing feedback to make good decisions.

While I understand the sentiment; we want content to remain relevant and not have players 1 shot it with a weak ability - you don't make that call without a feedback cycle. You don't get to arbitrarily decide, "you weren't having fun one-shotting things. trust us!"  Hubris and arrogance writ large there.

They sure make it easy not to resub. :why_so_serious:

They've made a couple changes after the patch backlash.

-Enemy damage scaling with ilvl has been removed.
-Enemy HP scaling with ilvl has been reduced by about half of what it was, so stuff is back to dying pretty fast.
-They've increased the resource contribution build speed for the "server shared" Broken Isle buildings, so it should take 4-5 days to build each instead of 1-2 weeks.
-They fixed whatever was causing rare mobs to not spawn or show on maps, so they're pretty prolific now.
-Additional non-daily Quests are very slowly starting to open up.

On the downside, I've done Broken Isle World Quests for 3 days now, ~4 quests a day, and have already seen several repeats. It sounds like the quests are supposed to be diversified as buildings are finished and class-based WQs are unlocked, but for the time being the Island still feels very boring and unsatisfying.

They also released a content schedule:

    Week 2 (next week): Legion Assaults begin, first PvP Brawl becomes available
    Week 3: Chapter 5 of the Class Order Hall campaign unlocks, which activates new followers, new Order Hall upgrades, and class-specific World Quests
    Week 4-11: Ongoing story pieces unlock, leading up to the eventual opening of the Tomb of Sargeras raid, and the ability to earn Class Mounts

I'd definitely hold off on resubbing even if you enjoyed the previous Loot islands, as there just isn't much to it yet. They called this "The largest content patch in WoW history" in interviews and, as it stands, it feels significantly smaller than several older content patches. Some of the major features they hyped up, such as Class Mounts, are seemingly not going to become available for months.

Months should surprise no-one. They haven't even spoken of the next expansion at this point, so it's 12 months minimum before it releases. The usual year between last patch and next expansion at this point.  They know this so dragging it out as much as possible should be their goal.

Except this isn't the last patch, so that argument doesn't really apply (at least not yet). Blizzard have fumbled some things this expansion, like always, but they've actually been releasing content at a fairly decent pace.

I don't care if the content they are releasing is stupid moronic bullshit like mobs scaling to ilvl.

This is so bad that it makes it easy for me to break up with WoW without looking back.

Holy shit, that's not even B-team. That's D minus team.

The mage tower building opened on my server today. 

In fine Blizzard fashion, all of the quests it gives out seem to be tuned to a level of gear they haven't introduced yet  :uhrr:

You guys keep putting me in the weird position of defending Blizzard. I finished the mage tower challenge today on my main spec. I used to be a hardcore server first raider back in vanilla, but at this point pretty much sign in once a week and do the casual/alt heroic raid and that's about it. I'm ilvl 896, so not even close to pushing the limits of even current gear, and I managed it. It was hard, but easily in my top five favorite things I've done in WoW.

With that said, I certainly wouldn't have wanted to do that challenge as some of the other specs that have access to it.

I like the wowhead comment description of the resto druid challenge:  the tank isn't geared for the fight, uses no active mitigation, and can't peel or interrupt mobs.  The rogue spends the whole time standing in shit.  The hunter is always shooting the worst possible targets.

And it's the healer's fault when they fail.

So a pretty regular day for a healer overall  :oh_i_see:

That's pretty much how the healer Proving Grounds always worked, except the tank used aoe stuns overlaid with your own (like shaman capacitor totem), the rogue and mage would try to interrupt things but regularly blow their interrupt at the same time, and the hunter would always ALWAYS stand in fire (to the point that the mage would yell at him ever so often, and then he'd finally move).

Most importantly, the mage always (ALWAYS) talked trash when a wipe happened. "Oh, did you forget to heal yourself?" "When we're taking damage this quickly, you need to use your fast heals!". Well OK, I think the tank would sometimes whine too to the effect of "I can't take this much damage!". So yeah, WOW has had a pretty legit PUG simulator since Pandaria.  :why_so_serious: