Patch 3.0.2 tomorrow

[Merusk]

Tossing a pancake.  Yeah, first time I heard it, too.  Seems a simple concept.. they're flat and round, they throw easy.

[Lantyssa]

You 'flip' the directory to its new location.  Run the game.  You're done.  Now play WoW.

[Montague]

Been home for two hours, tried to login, got error on character retrieval. Now I cant login at all. Did Funcom buy out Vivendi? 

[Merusk]

They broke the char retrevial.. and now the login server and wow site are fuck'd.  It's normal business for a big patch day/ expansion as millions of folks reup to check shit out.

[Azazel]

Dual specs are pure win. Designers made instances that required totally different raid setups, and you either had to zone out and respec, or just deal with a sub-par group composition. This move lets you take whoever you want into runs, which is the whole point of playing together with your friends. You don't have to worry about much about raid setup, and you can start to worry about people actually being fun.

Exactly. In my small group of RL friends who now play we have a Warrior, a Resto Shammy, a Lock and 3 mages (unless I play my rogue, but Mage is more fun). My rogue is Assassination spec, since it seems to work ok as a Hybrid spec for PVE and PVP, but it's not perfectly set up for either. My mage doen't bother me being deep fire, since my wife is deep ice so we have that complimentary thing going on. We all do ok in BGs, except the poor Warrior has to respec every time we want to do an instance run, or we have to search for a "real" tank to either let him be "rogue in plate" while one of the DPSers sits out, or he misses out.

[Modern Angel]

Ludicrous. The BETA is stable and this isn't. Mounts and pets are disappearing on Mal Ganis after people learn them due to zone instability.

Four fucking years, Jesus.

[Koyasha]

Like I figured, the release is rushed, they haven't gotten things working to a standard level of operation.  I mean, there's always bugs and issues, but this sounds worse than usual by a good bit.

[Fordel]

I can't even log in to my server 

[Mazakiel]

Something I discovered after the patch that I hadn't seen talked about anywhere was that gathering professions apparently now give passive buffs as you skill up.  For 375 skinning, I have a 15 crit strike rating bonus. 

[Fabricated]

Did an impromptu Shattered Halls run with my guildmates in 500ms lag and it was a breeze. Charge, thunderclap, back up, shockwave, demo shout, start into rotation, done.

[lesion]

I went with an UBRS group to get Leeeeeeroy, and it was insane. SO SHINY. Then I sat in Ironforge on my mage for about an hour shooting sparkly things.

[Paelos]

We cleared Karazhan in an hour and a half. Moroes got one vanish off. The Maiden was dead in 40s. The Curator didn't get an evocate off at all. We didn't even bother marking shit, I just ran in there and started shockwaving and thunderclapping. The rest was gravy.

[Ingmar]

Downhammer is living up to its old nickname again.

Seriously though this is one of the biggest patch fails I've seen in a long time. Toot toot, all aboard!

[Kitsune]

Whoa boy, life as a druid just got five times better.  Sure, they nerfed our armor and dodge/crit, but oh the things we got in exchange...

Free Barkskin in shapeshifts.
Free Nature's Grasp in shapeshifts.
Free 'oh shit' heal in shapeshifts.
Free 1200 HP heal in all forms. (well, that's an herbalist thing, but more the merrier!)
AT LONG FUCKING LAST, POTIONS IN SHAPESHIFTS.
Charge for cat form.
Entangling Roots working indoors (also at long fucking last).
Uncrittable!

Now if only they hadn't crippled my ability to play the game by screwing up all of my UI mods...

[Fordel]

The Ret Paladin Nerf whines are already in full force. It's pretty epic!

[Lakov_Sanite]

The Ret Paladin Nerf whines are already in full force. It's pretty epic!

Ret pallies are pretty sick. Granted my guild is in T6 but our ret pally was soloing the outland dungeon achievments. Granted blood furnace isn't the hardest thing out there but solo?

[Merusk]

The Ret Paladin Nerf whines are already in full force. It's pretty epic!

Ret pallies are pretty sick. Granted my guild is in T6 but our ret pally was soloing the outland dungeon achievments. Granted blood furnace isn't the hardest thing out there but solo?

Did you miss where my buddy got up to the first boss of Underbog in just Kara and Heroic dungeon gear?  Yeah, no mana problems at all for ret pallies and seal/ judge of light doing insane healing + art of war means things can go pretty smoothly.

[lesion]

They're kind of ridiculous, but it seems like every class got turned up to 11. I think people just need to adjust to having so much awesome running around willy-nilly.

[Fordel]

Ret Paladins will eat a nerf, probably their burst in PvP. I can't see that staying as is, especially at 80 with the 20 second Justice combo.


If you want to solo shit you have no business soloing, Protection Paladins are where it's at. 

[Fabricated]

Ret pallies, as much as they have suffered being a piece of shit spec that was unwelcome on raids...need nerfed. A pally in the blue PVP set with a blue two-hander nearly smoked 3 epic'd-out DPS and nearly kept up with my threat generation. That ain't right.

[K9]

As expected the background downloader torrent shenanigans are preventing me from completing the patching process..... 97%....

[Merusk]

Ret Paladins will eat a nerf, probably their burst in PvP. I can't see that staying as is, especially at 80 with the 20 second Justice combo.


If you want to solo shit you have no business soloing, Protection Paladins are where it's at. 

I expect improved hammer of justice to be moved farther in the prot tree more than I expect a ret nerf.  The 20s cooldown is needed so protadins have a reliable interrupt.   They will probably even-out ret's dps at some point, because it's far too streaky right now but it's probably going to stay where its at in terms of overall damage output.

[Venkman]

Who's got Mage specs in mind for tomorrow?

This is what one guy in my guild posted in our forums. No clue how good they are. My highest mage is 35.

Fire - 10/51/0 - all the x/50/x variants are about the same dps. This favors efficiency over +hit. Rotation is pretty much the same as normal but two crits in a row mean an instant pyro, so you get to watch for that. You can take your time on the pyro, a 3rd crit in a row counts towards the next pyro crit. If you have excess mana, Living Bomb is ~10% dps gain.
Arcane - 53/0/8 The other option is a 53/3/0+5 build. The rotation is Aracane Barrage->Frostbolt/Arcane Blast. When missile barrage procs, cast AM instead of the filler.
Frost - 0/0/55+6 - Frost is self-sufficient. Frostbolt until you get a brain freeze proc and then Fireball. The FoF proc is best spent on Frostbolts.

Thanks. Not sure if my next round in WoW is going to be more PvP or PvE, but 10/51/0 seems like a good PvP build. Seems a bit reliant on crits and other chancy type things I wouldn't want to abuse on dungeon crawls right away.

[El Gallo]

To be fair, there’s some merit to the concern about dual-specs favoring hybrids – at least from PvE or primarily-PvE players.  In WotLK, Blizz is shifting from a more EQ-ish class system of trying to find a niche for each class to a more EQII-ish archetype system where you have 3 real “classes” (tank, dps, heal) and classes (and specs) that add some flavor but are interchangeable as far as roles go (a protection paladin, a bear druid, a protection warrior and a wtf-ever emoknight are supposed to be interchangeable tanks in 5-mans and raids barring perhaps a gimmick fight or two).

For my gimp warrior, being able to transform from the guy who brings the mad pewpew into the guy who tanks like a champ is pretty fucking hot.  For a rogue, being able to transform from the guy who brings the mad pewpew into . . . the guy who beings the mad pewpew with a different weapon type is not so hot.

Now, this might not turn out to be a problem at all (there are loot distribution issues with class stacking, it’s hard to imagine that you won’t need a minimum fixed number of dps for all fights, etc).  But I don’t dismiss the concerns of my friends in “pure” (perhaps more aptly called “one-dimensional”) classes.

As one person put it, Blizzard just added a job system to WoW.  But only for some classes.

[Venkman]

Ok, been out of things for a bit. Is there a synopsus somewhere of this dual-spec thing of which you speak? And can I get my Mage a halberd so I can be a insta-hit precasting Mage?

[Numtini]

Having lived with the system in EQ2, it is primarily of use for characters with multiple roles (not necessarily hybrids--warrior would be a good example), but it doesn't really overpower them in any way. Most characters that will use the option have one group friendly spec that is not solo friendly and one solo spec that is not group friendly. This lets people switch without cost. At least in EQ2, the cost was the only difference because people were switching constantly anyway, they were just coughing out plat to do it.

[Paelos]

Ret pallies, as much as they have suffered being a piece of shit spec that was unwelcome on raids...need nerfed. A pally in the blue PVP set with a blue two-hander nearly smoked 3 epic'd-out DPS and nearly kept up with my threat generation. That ain't right.

Our Ret pally in Karazhan managed to pull Moroes off me after killing all 4 other adds. He's in epics and put out 2,200 dps in that run. I'm fairly sure that wasn't the intent.

[Merusk]

Ok, been out of things for a bit. Is there a synopsus somewhere of this dual-spec thing of which you speak? And can I get my Mage a halberd so I can be a insta-hit precasting Mage?

There's no real synopsis anywhere yet.  There's several multi-page threads circulating the Blizz forums where players are arguing stuff back and forth, with blue piping in once in a while but that's it.

Numtini gave a fairly concice version of why Blizz said they originally wanted to implement it.  That way Healers, Tanks and others could swap back and forth between their raid role and and a gold-farming role without having to pay 50g every time.

The whole idea, however, predates the revisions we've just seen like spelldam instead of +heal/+dam and tanks being able to do actual damage output.  So now there's a countermovement among players saying "hey wait!" because they're worried "There's no reason to take a rogue/ hunter/ <my class choice> if you can just have Hybrid Hannah over there able to swap into that role at-will."

However, this argument ignores that 1) You need the gear to do that role 2) There's nothing other than gold and a soulshard preventing players from doing that RIGHT NOW.  In fact, my guild did it for a few encounters in SSC with our healers and Warlocks. Removing the idea isn't to force players to drag along lame asses just because they are a certain class or spec any more than it does right now.  It DOES, however, make it a lot easier to take along players who are good at multiple roles and not force a swap for someone else or a respec in the middle of a raid, killing momentum.  (My Protadin, for example, can go on a raid and switch to ret for fights we don't need a second tank instead of swapping out for my hunter.)

The most intersting aspect is seeing the people who hate the idea try to convince all the heal-enabled classes what a bad idea it is, to get them to be against it as well.  "Well, with dual specs you'll be FORCED to heal! No more 'I'm only a shadow priest' or 'I'm only a feral druid!' because the response will be 'well your other spec can be healing!1!!'"

[Paelos]

I don't think people are going to mind healing on certain boss fights while dpsing on the majority of the raid. I don't mind doing DPS on some bosses and tanking the rest of the raid. What I think the problem was in the past was that if you needed to heal, you had to do it the whole time even if you hated it.

I think on trash in raids you'll see a lot of dps and minimal healing, while on bosses you'll see rotations of specs to get the optimal level of tanks and healing.

[Jayce]

As I mentioned in some thread buried in these forums, the dual spec idea still doesn't fully sit right with me. At this point it's like they just gave us double talent points, except you can't use them all at the same time.

It seems like there ought to be SOME limiting factor; 24 hours, some potion that costs less than 50g but more than 10s, a debuff you incur if you do it too much, etc.  Can you swap specs at any time? Only out of combat?  In arenas or BGs?  Can a marksman hunter feign to get out of combat and rise again as a beastmaster?

[Paelos]

As I mentioned in some thread buried in these forums, the dual spec idea still doesn't fully sit right with me. At this point it's like they just gave us double talent points, except you can't use them all at the same time.

It seems like there ought to be SOME limiting factor; 24 hours, some potion that costs less than 50g but more than 10s, a debuff you incur if you do it too much, etc.  Can you swap specs at any time? Only out of combat?  In arenas or BGs?  Can a marksman hunter feign to get out of combat and rise again as a beastmaster?

From what I've heard, it would be out of combat, it would most likely be on some form of short timer, and it wouldn't be allowed in arenas at all. The bigger question though is outside of pvp, why should there be a limiting factor? I would like to hear your thought process on that one, because I don't really understand it.

[El Gallo]

In other news (and at the risk of demonstrating my age, noobishness, and overall lack of skillz) is anyone else having a problem with having just too many damn abilities to hotkey conveniently?

With the new talents and the UI reset, I have over 30 skills that I want to have hotkeyed for immediate use (just in one stance).  Even with a fancypants mouse with sidebuttons mapped to shift-alt and contol-shift-alt, and manual use of the alt modifier, it is quite a pain in the ass to keep everything in easy reach of WASD (no, I can't change).  Plus a few more skills coming with WOTLK.  I'm sure I'll eventually get a handle on it, but sheesh.

I wish they would loosen up on the macro restrictions a little.  Goddamn G-keys (to say nothing of the Nostromo) are too far away to make illicit conditional macros worthile (not that I'd engage in such a practice!).  

This may be a warrior-specific issue (or warriors + certain other classes I don't play), as I don't feel nearly so jammed for useable space on my rogue or druid alts.  

[Montague]

Ret pallies, as much as they have suffered being a piece of shit spec that was unwelcome on raids...need nerfed. A pally in the blue PVP set with a blue two-hander nearly smoked 3 epic'd-out DPS and nearly kept up with my threat generation. That ain't right.

Our Ret pally in Karazhan managed to pull Moroes off me after killing all 4 other adds. He's in epics and put out 2,200 dps in that run. I'm fairly sure that wasn't the intent.

Undead mobs. Ret pallies would rip face against undead just with Judgment of the Wise because mana wouldnt be a consideration for Exorcism.

According to a post today by Ghostcrawler Ret PVE DPS is fine. The upfront burst is likely to be nerfed though, I'm guessing the stun component when Command is Judged.

[Merusk]

That SOC stun is from a Glyph, IIRC, not the ability itself.  I haven't looked at ret in a while though.

ElGallo: It's that you're playing a warrior.  Hunters complain of the same problem.  Druids less so because you've got so many abilities that are usable only in one form.  Rogues have stuff (in my experience) that they just plain ignore based on spec.  (For example, backstabbing / Ambush is impossible as a swords rogue.)

[Lantyssa]

In other news (and at the risk of demonstrating my age, noobishness, and overall lack of skillz) is anyone else having a problem with having just too many damn abilities to hotkey conveniently?

I have this problem with a lot of games.  While it does feel limiting at times, the smaller skill bar is one of the things I like about Guild Wars.