Patch 3.0.2 tomorrow

[DraconianOne]

Hmm...Affliction-specced, I don't really feel much pain. Maybe a -little-...I didn't have much +dmg, though, ~460, so maybe it's the coefficient change that   hit hard. Between the tweaks and Haunt, I know I DO feel like a pally in a dress. I have more health coming in than I need to tap out. It's a little crazy

Demo-specced, why on god's green earth would you ever have the voidwalker out for anything other than a free shield while fooling around in a contested area? Serious question.

I still seem to be hemorrhaging mana more than I used to although tap helps (and Dark Pact seems to have negligible effect which means I'm either using it wrong or it's not great).  VW isn't as bad as I thought it was although does seem to have trouble holding aggro if I stick more than a couple of DoTs on. 

What're your talents? And gear?

[Selby]

Demo-specced, why on god's green earth would you ever have the voidwalker out for anything other than a free shield while fooling around in a contested area? Serious question.

Because I like tossing him into 4-5 mobs at a time and holding aggro on them all while I beat them down one at a time.  Sure, the Felguard is nice, but the VW just seems to have less downtime even if the killing time is slightly slower.

[deadplayer]

Less one month, Wrath is coming. cant wait. 

[K9]

I'm having fun on my priest. Deep disc is a completely new style of healing compared to 20/41 holy, and I'm enjoying a new playstyle. The only thing bugging me is that my PW:S glyph seems to be broken.

I've also made ~1000g off glyphs so far, mostly off the Slowfall Minor I discovered. I doubt this gravy train will last very long, but for now I'm loving it.

[SurfD]

Im a little dissapointed in the feral druid changes for feral tank specced people.

I compared my old stats to my new stats, and even though i was supposed to gain 10% dodge from new talents, AND I gained about 40 pts of Agility due to the stat redistribution from most druid armor losing it's extra Armor, I actually ended up with about .6% LESS dodge then i had before the patch.

So I basicly lost 10% dodge, AND about 10% physical damage mitigation off my armor (though i gain that back from Protector of the Pack as 12% total damage reduction in a 5 man group.

On the plus side however, I get 6% crit immunity from Talents alone, meaning I need like 1 piece of resilience gear to push me over the level 70 Crit immunity cap.

[Xeyi]

On the plus side however, I get 6% crit immunity from Talents alone, meaning I need like 1 piece of resilience gear to push me over the level 70 Crit immunity cap.

Critical hit immunity at level 70 is 5.6% for raid bosses I believe.  Druids are now crit immune out of the box, and daze immune too.

[Chimpy]

Hunter changes are interesting.

New disengage is funny, makes it useful outside of, well, nothing which is what it was useful for post BWL.
Deterrence being a core talent is still a headscratcher, woulda thought scatter was more of a core talent than deterrence.
Change to kill command makes it almost a waste of mana (basically an extra special attack worth of dmg a minute for your pet, snooze).
Steady being affected by ammo is really pretty noticable.
Aspect of the viper is a mixed bag, sure you basically get a full mana bar by auto-shotting for 25 secs, but it has no OOC regen ability which is what made it the great farming/levelling buff, the dmg penalty makes it really annoying to leave on.
EVERYTHING randomly cancelling autoshot is getting on my nerves.
Misdirect having a 30s cooldown is nice, but if you have a focus macro, using it on your pet is annoying because if you mount, your focus gets cleared because your pet disappears.
Best change to pets (outside of the whole Loyalty level talent point shit) is that they took out the 4 auto-use talent cap it looks like. Now if they would only let us make a second pet bar so we can have all the skills visible at once.

I have not had a chance to spec anything but BM (had to get my exotic pets to level them to 70 for when LK hits) but overall the changes are probably not terrible.

[Selby]

Im a little dissapointed in the feral druid changes for feral tank specced people.

My druid lost a little, but still wtfpwns quite a bit compared to other classes solo.  Making faerie fire not require talent points to get was stellar.

[Merusk]

Hunter changes are interesting.

New disengage is funny, makes it useful outside of, well, nothing which is what it was useful for post BWL.
Deterrence being a core talent is still a headscratcher, woulda thought scatter was more of a core talent than deterrence.
Change to kill command makes it almost a waste of mana (basically an extra special attack worth of dmg a minute for your pet, snooze).
Steady being affected by ammo is really pretty noticable.
Aspect of the viper is a mixed bag, sure you basically get a full mana bar by auto-shotting for 25 secs, but it has no OOC regen ability which is what made it the great farming/levelling buff, the dmg penalty makes it really annoying to leave on.
EVERYTHING randomly cancelling autoshot is getting on my nerves.
Misdirect having a 30s cooldown is nice, but if you have a focus macro, using it on your pet is annoying because if you mount, your focus gets cleared because your pet disappears.
Best change to pets (outside of the whole Loyalty level talent point shit) is that they took out the 4 auto-use talent cap it looks like. Now if they would only let us make a second pet bar so we can have all the skills visible at once.

I have not had a chance to spec anything but BM (had to get my exotic pets to level them to 70 for when LK hits) but overall the changes are probably not terrible.

Keep an eye on all of your pets abilities.  They randomly turn themselves off or on. (This is most noticible with pets that have cower, as suddenly it will hold 0 aggro.)

Also, check out your dodge. You have none. Hunters got nerfed hard because "Well you have mail aspect of the monkey and disengage, you should be fine." (from Blizzcon)

They announced 2 days ago that Viper will be changing (again) because they don't like the way its working.  And apparently late yesterday they announced that hunters will get a new aspect at 75 and 80, replacing Aspect of the Hawk and Monkey. It will be called "Aspect of the Dragonhawk" and all the abilities of hawk and monkey will be in it.  All talents that affect monkey or hawk will affect the new aspect.

[slog]

I'm having fun on my priest. Deep disc is a completely new style of healing compared to 20/41 holy, and I'm enjoying a new playstyle. The only thing bugging me is that my PW:S glyph seems to be broken.

I setup my Disc priest for Deep disc as well, but I haven't done anything with him yet.  How are you actually healing?  You useing PW:S a lot, or just when the shield talent procs?  I keep hearing that "it's a new way of healing" but no one ever actually says how it works.

[K9]

Incoming scattered thoughts and impressions:

I'm not sure I've figured an optimal pattern, but generally I toss up PW:S then use the Borrowed Time for either Penance or GHeal (3s GHeals suck so hard). Then either flash heal, renew or PoM. PW:S + hasted Penance is amazing for dealing with spike damage on a tank, and it's a lot of fun to heal with. The biggest problem is that GHeal as a 3s cast is noticeably slower. I ditched the PW:S glyph for the flash heal glyph and now I'm using flash as my main standby heal, only using Gheal when Borrowed time is up. I'm using renew a lot more too. If you don't have Borrowed Time up one or two flash heals is probably a better option.

Grace is too short, it's always dropping off the tank the second I have to heal someone else. This is more of a 5-man problem I guess, since in a raid I could delegate the raid healing to someone else. Still coming from deep holy I do feel far weaker at dealing with group damage, but the single target healing is more engaging. I'm slowly settling down and finding a rhythm; although I'll need to see how ZA goes over the weekend.

One nice thing is that as almost everything is instant now I feel like I have so much more mobility. Even the penance cast feels quick. Divine Aegis is fun, the main problem is that all my existing cloth healing gear has sod all crit. I've swapped in a few good former-dps items, but I need more crit to be getting the most out of the 56/6/0 spec.

Also, I've had zero problems with any tanks and shields. Even with chained DA procs and PW:S none of my tanks ever had problems with rage or mana.

[Merusk]

That's because tanking classes have abilities based on regening mana/ rage from actual tank stuff instead of being healed or taking damage now.  Even soloing my Pally doesn't have mana problems unless I take on a series of 3-4 single mobs that don't proc my defenses enough for the mana output.

[Zetor]

Yah, as a warrior I'm literally swimming in rage when tanking. As long as a mob is hitting me, I get revenge procs [2-rage attack usable after a block/dodge/parry], which in turn can proc free shield slams along with making my next heroic strike costs 0 rage. Add the fact that blocked attacks generate 2 rage each, and it's very hard to dump all that rage. Even if I spam my most powerful abilities, I just don't run out of rage [unless I'm soloing a caster or something].

Not that I'm complaining, mind. :P


-- Z.

[Fabricated]

Yah, as a warrior I'm literally swimming in rage when tanking. As long as a mob is hitting me, I get revenge procs [2-rage attack usable after a block/dodge/parry], which in turn can proc free shield slams along with making my next heroic strike costs 0 rage. Add the fact that blocked attacks generate 2 rage each, and it's very hard to dump all that rage. Even if I spam my most powerful abilities, I just don't run out of rage [unless I'm soloing a caster or something].

Not that I'm complaining, mind. :P


-- Z.

I can't dump rage fast enough on heavy or fast hitting bosses (Lynx for example), I love it. The best part is that my rotation is gone. It's pretty much a prioritization scheme now, where I hit the most valuable skill that's up. That's way more interesting than the crap I was doing before, but you could really just roll your face across your keyboard and tank now.

[Draegan]

Not sure if this is the best place to put it, but I just resubbed to check out the changes since WAR wasn't letting me log in last night and I found that I don't have a guild anymore.  I havn't played this game for any substantial time since before the summer and I gots no one to play with.

So if any guild wants a level 70 A: Shaman or a H: Paladin lemme know I'll transfer so I can play with some decent folks.  I think I'm going to attempt to play WAR with WOW on the side.

[Chimpy]

Also, check out your dodge. You have none. Hunters got nerfed hard because "Well you have mail aspect of the monkey and disengage, you should be fine." (from Blizzcon)

They announced 2 days ago that Viper will be changing (again) because they don't like the way its working.  And apparently late yesterday they announced that hunters will get a new aspect at 75 and 80, replacing Aspect of the Hawk and Monkey. It will be called "Aspect of the Dragonhawk" and all the abilities of hawk and monkey will be in it.  All talents that affect monkey or hawk will affect the new aspect.

Bah, I still have dodge, but christ....only having 14% with 800 agility unbuffed is retarded. 22 with monkey. The amount of expertise on most gear now totally negates most of that.

How about they make it how it was instead,  put deterrence back as a talent (it has already been nerfed to shit over the years anyway) and give us scatter as a core ability if they deem it necessary to give us yet another core talent.

[Morfiend]

Not sure if this is the best place to put it, but I just resubbed to check out the changes since WAR wasn't letting me log in last night and I found that I don't have a guild anymore.  I havn't played this game for any substantial time since before the summer and I gots no one to play with.

So if any guild wants a level 70 A: Shaman or a H: Paladin lemme know I'll transfer so I can play with some decent folks.  I think I'm going to attempt to play WAR with WOW on the side.

My guys are starting our guild back up on Tich, Horde side. Its going to be casual with 10 man raiding. No more 25 man hardcore shit, so if your interested, send me a PM. MrHat and Jayce where both in it before.

[Kitsune]

Im a little dissapointed in the feral druid changes for feral tank specced people.

I compared my old stats to my new stats, and even though i was supposed to gain 10% dodge from new talents, AND I gained about 40 pts of Agility due to the stat redistribution from most druid armor losing it's extra Armor, I actually ended up with about .6% LESS dodge then i had before the patch.

So I basicly lost 10% dodge, AND about 10% physical damage mitigation off my armor (though i gain that back from Protector of the Pack as 12% total damage reduction in a 5 man group.

On the plus side however, I get 6% crit immunity from Talents alone, meaning I need like 1 piece of resilience gear to push me over the level 70 Crit immunity cap.

The Protector of the Pack doesn't stack with armor mitigation, it takes off whatever gets through the armor.  So if you were at 70% armor and are now at 60% armor, PotP takes 12% off of the 40% that gets through, bringing it down to 35.2%.  Which means your effective armor mitigation is still 4.8% lower than before.

However, I think the goods outweigh the bads for bears.

-The Natural Reaction talent, on top of the 6% dodge, makes dodging beneficial to rage generation rather than a detriment.  Back when dodge=no rage, dodging kinda sucked for bears, but now it's wholly positive.
-Brutal Impact cuts the recharge time for Bash in half.  Yay for five-second stuns every thirty seconds.
-+30% Swipe damage from Feral Instinct, plus Swipe hitting limitless targets (plus my Idol of Brutality) makes Swipe a sweet little baby.
-Survival Instincts gives bears a much needed oh shit button for when the healers aren't awake at the wheel.  (And doesn't use global cooldown!)
-Potion use without having to powershift and lose all that built-up rage.
-Barkskin use in bearform for no rage cost, free 20% damage reduction at will that also affects magic damage, which used to be a big problem for bears.  Heavy armor doesn't do a damn thing against spells, but Barkskin does.
-Feral Faerie Fire for free now, and it does damage to help with long-range pulling.
-Nature's Grasp for free, at 100% effectiveness, equivalent to 5 talent points pre-3.0.2.
-The Maul Glyph makes multi-tanking a much easier task.
-Frenzied Regeneration heals more than before.

[AcidCat]

I really like the new pet talents, plus of course the additional stable spots, and the fact that new pets automatically jump up to -5 levels of you, and of course no more loyalty - really these pet changes are all awesome and very welcome. Although I am a bit disappointed so far with the Exotic pets, there just isn't enough of them really. I thought a Devilsaur would be cool, but the constant stomping got annoying quick. Not to mention every time you turn around there's a hunter with a Devilsaur. Eh, I have a wasp now which I really like, and I'm considering getting a moth.

My Shaman specced back to Enhancement and I love the changes there too. More stuff to do, Maelstrom weapon is huge, and those spirit wolves are awesome with a relatively short reuse timer. Shaman just has a lot "oh shit" buttons with the wolves now the icing on the cake. I've only done some Isle dailies so far but I was carving up mobs so quick it was a bit surreal.

Everyone is loving Ret Pallies now but I brought my level 67 out of retirement and he played as boring as ever, dunno about that.

Still haven't checked out the new Balance stuff for my Druid, looking forward to that.

Barbershop is awesome.

[Merusk]

Everyone is loving Ret Pallies now but I brought my level 67 out of retirement and he played as boring as ever, dunno about that.

It's not about a lack of boring, It's about seeing big numbers and (to a lesser extent) being viable.   If these guys were melee fans they'd have rolled a melee class with all the tricks and tools that they are now whining that Paladins don't get a long time ago.   They're Paladin fans who only want to play a class that has the tag "Paladin" (that acts like a rogue, or a warrior or a priest)

[Chimpy]

So the PvE -30% HP thing made stuff that was basically a mechanic fight a loot pinata.

We just did ZA with most of our old bear run group. We used to do pretty well, having like 3-5 minutes to spare on an average bear run. We had 27 minutes left on the timer when we killed the lynx boss. Basically took 25 minutes less than we used to, with a group comp that would not have been viable last week (no pally tank, only one pally, no spriest, no real consumable buffs). Hex lord we just killed all the adds and then burned him down in 2 spirit bolt phases. Zul'Jin died in less than 2 minutes. We were in the zone for a total of 35 minutes. Threat generation is a joke too.....I used to have to watch my threat, esp at the beginning of fights with high threat generating tanks. I CAN'T pull aggro now, and I am doing at least 15% more DPS than I was a week ago.

There are guilds on my server that had never set foot in sunwell 1-shotting brutallus with 1minute left on the enrage timer.

I am not trying to sound like an elitist, but a large part of the fun of the game as far as raids, even 10 mans, was the challenge of it. After that ZA I dont have any desire to set foot in a BC raid instance. I am just going to keep plunking around on various acheivements I can do solo/in small groups and call it good.

WotLK had me somewhat excited, now I am not sure I will be able to stomach it. The leveling dungeons and lvl 80 stuff is either going to be as trivial as the top flite stuff is now, or so hard that unless my friends who tanked all through tier6 content are around it would be suicide to enter.

[Fabricated]

The leveling dungeons will be trivial to you because you'll be massively outgearing them. The level 80 heroics are appropriately tough IMO and balanced with all of the insane goodies we have now.

You do remember that in addition to the power boost from the new talents we got, the bosses also got 30% of their HP hacked off right? The end-game content I've tried so far in the beta is decently balanced. The heroic 5-mans overall are more consistent, so you may find them "too easy" compared to say pre-nerf heroic Shadow Labs which was akin to beating your dick with a hammer. The entry level raids are probably going to seem easy too since they're not going to be horribly broken/cockblocky like Gruul/Mags 1.0 or "sneeze and the flame wreath goes off" Kara 1.0.

We'll see how the difficulty scaling is when we get to Ulduar.

[Jayce]

The leveling dungeons will be trivial to you because you'll be massively outgearing them.

So it's not a loot level reset like BC was?

[K9]

The BC loot reset was in a large part due to the reworking of stamina itemisation on BC gear vis-a-vis vanilla gear.

[Fabricated]

The leveling dungeons will be trivial to you because you'll be massively outgearing them.

So it's not a loot level reset like BC was?

It's a bigger loot reset than BC was in raw power (BT/MH gear starts going away about level 76-77, you'll replace some SW gear before 80), but the leveling dungeons were designed this time to be totally doable with non-healing specced healers and non-tanking specced tanks. They're also designed to be done by people in zone-level greens.

[Selby]

I am not trying to sound like an elitist, but a large part of the fun of the game as far as raids, even 10 mans, was the challenge of it.

It's not elitist, but when all 25 or 10 people have to line up and click buttons in exactly the right order with just the right combination of gear and pray to the luck gods at the same time, that's not fun to most people.  As described earlier, "beating your dick with a hammer" type fun.  You may miss every now and again, but most of the time you hit yourself and eventually wonder "why do I keep beating myself with a hammer in the hopes of missing?"  I'm glad that now I might just get the chance to see some of the raid zones because I specifically stayed out due to the crappy mechanics and insane time commitments to get there.

[Chimpy]

I know the 30% reduction was in there. I had mentioned it specifically but edited it out because I thought I sounded too whiney.

Basically, with the huge leap in power of DPS/Threat/Healing, 30% was overkill. It goes beyond trivializing the content. 30% is just overkill.

I know they want everyone to experience the content. But making everything so easy that you can trade channel pug Illidan just seems a bit meh.

Effectively I am a little bitter about the whole thing. I was in a guild that was farming Hyjal a year ago, we were the first on the realm to kill Brutallus. I will never have the "Burning Crusade Dungeon Master" acheivement while people who were wiping on Gruul's 3 weeks ago will probably have it before the xpac hits. Hell, I am as much annoyed by knowing that if the 15 of the core of our guild's raiding force who are still around wanted to get together and pull in 10-15 more randoms, we could have Kil'Jaeden dead by the end of the second timer. That zone was hard. They needed to do SOMETHING to make killing K'J pre-patch mean something to the people who did it as the whole removing the Bear mounts. I don't know, maybe they did and I missed it. This is not like people whining about removing attunements, this is totally trivializing stuff at the same time as making having done that thing worth "something".

[SurfD]

Hate to say it, but you are not going to be trade pugging Hyjal or BT end bosses any time soon, unless your trade pug pool consists of tier 5 and 6 geared people who want something to do on an off day in instances they no longer care about.

Even with 30% knocked off of them, some of those fights are going to be hard if people are unfamiliar with the encounters. 

Sure, the first 3 bosses in Hyjal will likely be killed by a lot more people now, but Azgalor will still wipe raids quite handily because people will stand in the fire, or not run to the doom tanks, etc.

The change just makes it easier for people slightly below the curve who could already get the bosses to low health kill them more reliably.  Terrible people will still be terrible, and getting a group of them together will not magically allow them to clear Hyjal or BT through numbers alone.

Or in summary:

30% less mob health will not cure bads of their situational awareness issues and poor reaction skills.  And those are the issues that most often wipe raids, not lack of heals, or dps, or a bosses enrage timer.

[tkinnun0]

Are those raids you're whining about going to be PUGgable? If yes, then Blizzard is doing something right. If no, then casual players still won't be able to touch them, so why are you whining?

[Koyasha]

I really wish they would have some content, even entry-level content, without the blasted lockout timers.  Those are the only things that keep 10-man "raids" from being puggable while they're still relevant.  Face it, Kara is the Upper Blackrock Spire of Burning Crusade, Naxx will probably be the UBRS of Lich King, but you won't see pugs going for them like there were in the old days for UBRS, because if you kill an easy boss and then the group sucks when you start to get higher up, you just wasted a week.

In the old days I'd estimate that well over 65% of all UBRS "raids" i got into wiped when it started getting halfway difficult, past Rend (sometimes even at the rookery or just beyond).  But, at least all I wasted was an hour or two and could come back later that day or maybe tomorrow and try again with the next bunch of retarded monkeys.  In BC, it wasn't until relatively recently that I saw serious Kara pugs actually succeeding sometimes, simply because all the -good- players that actually might want something from Kara didn't want to waste their week lockout timer on a group that might be complete nitwits.

These days Kara pugs succeed because there are enough people that outgear them by such a wide margin that they feel like they can make up for the rest of the group's slack (which is true) and are thus willing to give it a shot a little more often with people they don't know.  And because, it's just for badges and all, anyway.

[Fabricated]

30% less mob health will not cure bads of their situational awareness issues and poor reaction skills.  And those are the issues that most often wipe raids, not lack of heals, or dps, or a bosses enrage timer.

Please tell me you used the term "bads" in an ironic fashion. WoWForums vernacular is retarded.

[Merusk]

Tee hee.

Kara is the UBRS of BC.  Oh I remember when that was pointed out 2 years ago and everyone said "Bullshit it'll never be like that."  Ah, memories.

There's plenty of folks that PUG kara on my server, yes, because the overgeared folks drag them along on badge runs.  The same as overgeared folks dragged idiots along to UBRS and the thing keeping people out (and keeping them from getting "Jenkins") was the key.

[SurfD]

30% less mob health will not cure bads of their situational awareness issues and poor reaction skills.  And those are the issues that most often wipe raids, not lack of heals, or dps, or a bosses enrage timer.

Please tell me you used the term "bads" in an ironic fashion. WoWForums vernacular is retarded.

I'm from Tichondrious.  Such forum vernacular is practically engraved in our bones by this point.

And Merusk, I really wish Tich was like your server.  It is pretty much impossible to get into a kara "badge run" unless you are full t5 / badge gear, because the people doing them simply dont want to waste the extra 5 minutes your sub 1k dps will force them to suffer with.  There is just no compassion left any more. They dont care if you have 3 other characters who are all exalted with the Violet Eye, and that you could do kara in your sleep.  If you dont overgear the place, they wont even touch you.

[Soln]

Our server has been incredibly flaky since the patch.  It's obviously thrashing under some load, but we're getting dumped from queues, timing out on attacks.  Needs to end so I can get me candy treats.

[Righ]

I have a level 70 warrior that I foolishly transferred to a server to play with some f13 folks a long time ago. I decided to patch up and play with the new prot talents. Despite that server being a low population one and it not thrashing under any load at all it too is flaky as hell. Seems to start the same way, you can fight, but you can't loot, eventually the client continues to pretend but you're in limbo and the server doesn't respond at all. Sometimes there's a 5 minute period of unresponsiveness and then the server suddenly updates the client. Other times you're dropped. Eventually the server gives up and reboots or somebody restarts it. Usually that is followed by a little bit of rollback. It all takes me back to launch. Ah, nostalgia.