Cataclysm

[pants]

Have a look at the links Sheepherder put in above.  It appears that all gear from lv65 or so and up has had a buff to its values - hes linked a ilvl94 Underbog drop that has had its  sta doubled and int increased by 50%.

If that holds true, I'd say Blizzard are retuning from 65 and up to 'match' the new levels in Cata, since they don't want a huge jump from TBC/Wotlk to Cata.  They want it to be a smoother progression, as distinct from Vanilla/TBC, where you were mad to quest in the old world once you hit 58, since green drops in TBC were far superior.

So to not make 65-80 a complete walkover - they've had to up mob hp and damage to make it challenging.

Have I managed to explain this ok?  It makes sense to me - but I'm feeling really disjointed right now...

[Sheepherder]

As far as I can tell they've buffed the armour and stamina on every single piece of non-plate gear in the game.

[WindupAtheist]

I have a friend who is recovering from a severe case of amnesia. One of the random things she eventually managed to remember was the WoW server we played on. So every now and then, when she feels like it, I run around the game with her and watch her recall odd little fragments of memories sparked by the visuals.

Other than that, they can pretty much blow this game out their ass for the time being. It feels like they're just randomly changing shit for the hell of it.

[kaid]

Was playing around a bit last night and holy crap they are so going to have to nerf moonfire spam. God I was chuckling evily at my regained ability to moonspam while moving. Basically balance druids get a power that stacks up to 3 times when moving when you cast moonfire. It increases the damage and decreases mana cost. So i was hitting 3-4k crits every time I cast it on the initial hit and all for a cost of 62 mana. Yes thats right SIXTY TWO mana. When I was not refreshing insect swarm and using starsurge procs I pretty much was gaining mana spamming moonfire.

In pvp its so hilariously broken its not even funny. You can just run around doing just non stop moon spam plinking melting people left and right without ever having mana issues.

Rogue popped out on me and then I popped barkskin and threw on thorns. Thorns alone blew the rogue up. It costs a LOT of mana now and has a good sized cooldown but rogues are NOT going to like attacking druids when thorns is up they will incinerate themselves if they try.

All in all I was enjoying the hilarity of it but I have to guess some of that is going to get nerfed as the tears of crying paladins is going to be torrential.  Speaking of paladins its very funny when a ret paladin moves up into melee range and I hit them with solar beam and silence half their powers and I just cower in the beam of light moonspamming them till they croak.

[dd0029]

WTF?  New Tree of Life graphic incoming.

[NiX]

WTF?  New Tree of Life graphic incoming.

Looks cool. What's the issue?

[Lantyssa]

I find this all hilarious.  Cataclysm indeed.

[kildorn]

WTF?  New Tree of Life graphic incoming.

Looks cool. What's the issue?

Looks like it should have a high damage melee attack, imo.

[Paelos]

I'm getting bad ToA type vibes from this expansion already.

[Rasix]

I'm getting bad ToA type vibes from this expansion already.

I thought ToA was just bad from a game direction perspective and the style of game play it required.  

Cataclysm just feels nowhere near done.  Seems like a pretty bad idea to go live with this in 2 months.  Poor Blizzard code monkeys won't see their families for a while.  Divorce lawyers are probably handing out cards outside their office.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Doomsaying already? Oh, granted this patch is horribly buggy but the actual changes? I like.

[Rasix]

Not really.  It'll do fine and WoW will be fine.

Just haven't heard a lot of positive feedback for this xpac.  I don't remember this amount of unease over WoLK or BC.  Could just be my selective/faulty memory, however.

[Chimpy]

TBC was buggy as hell and they had to delay it 2 months and release in January. WotLK was pretty stable all around. The difference was how it was tested. Pretty much anyone could go into the WotLK beta and test it, for TBC the only people who got beta keys were Blizzcon attendees and a small subset of the top tier raiding guilds until very very late.

[WindupAtheist]

The forum monkeys have been repeatedly invoking the SWG NGE in comparison, but that's obviously way too drastic. It reminds me more of the UO:AOS expansion. Lots of seemingly arbitrary changes, unbalanced and unfinished, and enough to send me packing from the game for a good long time. But the game itself as a whole will survive just fine.

Nobody is really deluded enough to start doomcasting WoW, but Rasix is right and I've noticed the same thing. The prevailing feeling seems to be a sort of foreboding rather than anticipation.

[lesion]

PLAYABLE GOBLINS GOD DAMMIT

[Rendakor]

The prevailing feeling seems to be a sort of foreboding rather than anticipation.

Well said. Azeroth Flying and Goblins are the only things I'm actually excited about coming in Cata. Everything else varies from 'Oh, nifty' to 'that's gonna be annoying'. Most of these class changes fall into the latter.

[Paelos]

I'm getting bad ToA type vibes from this expansion already.

I thought ToA was just bad from a game direction perspective and the style of game play it required.  

Cataclysm just feels nowhere near done.  Seems like a pretty bad idea to go live with this in 2 months.  Poor Blizzard code monkeys won't see their families for a while.  Divorce lawyers are probably handing out cards outside their office.

It's just similar leadup thoughts that have bad indicators on the speed/direction/timing of the actual product. Most of the changes being made seem to be from an "it ain't broke but we're fixing it anyway" perspective, and the shift is definitely away from the core mechanics of previous expansions to a large world overhaul on the leveling experience. AFAIK we haven't seen anything that leads me to believe there will be more raiding content (than previous expansion if not equal to the same amount), or that any of it will be worth a damn.

[Lakov_Sanite]

The reality is their core mechanics were not sustainable due to mudflation and had to be changed at some point. my spriest is almost top of the line gear having 29% haste is close to having mindflays(3sec channel) be capped by the GCD alone which is insane.  Blizzard knows they are going to be making expansions for my grandkids so they are trying to implement better scalability now rather than having a gigantic mess in a couple years.

A couple of things I personally like.

~Getting a tree defining ability at level 10. This helps a lot at making the lower levels more fun.
~Condensed trees. As much as people want to say there is variety, that's bullshit, there was only ever one 'true' spec in each tree, varying only slightly if you wanted pve or pvp.
~Glyphs.  Glyphs as they are now is how they should have been when they created glyphs, it's a really, really good system as is.
~Spellbooks.  I like seeing what abilities I will get later on, also removing ranks altogether is nice as I never liked downranking.
~Masteries.  While I'm not too happy about the shadow tree mastery for priests, I really like the idea of this stat.
~Reforging.  It's just plain fun and really nice to get rid of things like too much +hit on gear

[kildorn]

The forum monkeys have been repeatedly invoking the SWG NGE in comparison, but that's obviously way too drastic. It reminds me more of the UO:AOS expansion. Lots of seemingly arbitrary changes, unbalanced and unfinished, and enough to send me packing from the game for a good long time. But the game itself as a whole will survive just fine.

Nobody is really deluded enough to start doomcasting WoW, but Rasix is right and I've noticed the same thing. The prevailing feeling seems to be a sort of foreboding rather than anticipation.

To be fair, we get massive class/system design revamps every expansion. It's always like this. Hell, Paladins are so shell shocked they jump when you even mention a spell might be altered a little. The poor things expect to have to relearn their class every tuesday.

That said, I'm not that hyped about the expansion yet. The gameplay changes may be fun, but I haven't had a chance to see them properly yet (right now? Everything is overpowered. And I haven't seen anything about Atonement's current hilarious "heals everyone, not just the lowest health target" state). The selling point for me will be "are the new zones as compelling as the Wrath zones"

Because let's face it: TBC was a huge let down zone wise after you got past the front of hellfire and saw the invasion just.. stop and become a totally peaceful countryside we'd already settled down in. Wrath just kept giving for the most part.

[WindupAtheist]

Speaking of paladins, can someone tell me where this "Paladins are going to take skill now!" meme is coming from? I was expecting something complicated. As far as I can tell though, pushing whatever is lit up got replaced with pushing CS until the combo points are lit up and then hitting TV. Oh and a bunch of passive "this and that adds a combo point" shit that I don't even need to know about. Three points = push butan.

This doesn't feel complicated, it feels stripped down and newbified with half as many buttons.

[kildorn]

Speaking of paladins, can someone tell me where this "Paladins are going to take skill now!" meme is coming from? I was expecting something complicated. As far as I can tell though, pushing whatever is lit up got replaced with pushing CS until the combo points are lit up and then hitting TV. Oh and a bunch of passive "this and that adds a combo point" shit that I don't even need to know about. Three points = push butan.

This doesn't feel complicated, it feels stripped down and newbified with half as many buttons.

Haven't tried mine yet, but was hearing that healy-paladins aren't eye gougingly boring to play anymore.

[Ingmar]

Seemed like roughly the same amount of buttons (CS, judge, exorcism, TV, instead of CS, judge, exorcism, DS) to me, didn't mess with the retnub that much though. The main difference seemed to be that the 'pauses' in the rotation were less predictable and there was an extra proc to pay attention to. Really the big thing that kind of sucks for ret is cleanse.

I am pretty firmly on the 'anticipation' side rather than the 'foreboding' side personally, although I am braced for Metzen to take the story full retard.

I've always (in general) liked these mechanical resets every expansion personally. It keeps things a bit fresher than they would be if I was still tab-sundering every pack of mobs like release, etc.

[Simond]

Hint for the 'pointless' changes: Blizzard is basically redesigning how the game works so that it doesn't collapse under its own weight in the next expansion. This is, if not WoW2, at least WoW1.5

[caladein]

A few of the Wrath issues could be fixed if they didn't have an inept itemization team, but the talent system definitely needed an overhaul before we got to the point of 75 points of filler before getting your three cool abilities at the bottom.

[Ratman_tf]

I have a friend who is recovering from a severe case of amnesia. One of the random things she eventually managed to remember was the WoW server we played on. So every now and then, when she feels like it, I run around the game with her and watch her recall odd little fragments of memories sparked by the visuals.

Wow. That must be some strange shit to see.

[Ratman_tf]

mudflation

Since TBC, Blizzard has been scratching at the mudflation itch. Mechanics are always going to get shuffled around and revamped, sometimes more, sometimes less, but it will never, ever go away unless they gut the entire game like a fish and start over, and it's far too late for that.

[Lantyssa]

Hint for the 'pointless' changes: Blizzard is basically redesigning how the game works so that it doesn't collapse under its own weight in the next expansion. This is, if not WoW2, at least WoW1.5

Ten bucks says they redesign everything again for the next expansion.

[Sjofn]

Mark me down as one of the "most of these so-called pointless changes actually had to happen" true believers. I never played ret for real so I can't say much about that, but the other specs/classes I've played, any issues I have are more "this is sort of buggy" rather than "my class is different." Hell, for some of them (holy paladin cough cough) I'm more "Woo hoo! My class is different!"

[ezrast]

I played around on the PTR some last week (you can do that without an active account) and while I found the experience wholly unfulfilling, I will say I'm surprised nobody's mentioned the new raid frames yet. Incoming heals, minimalistic graphics, and rudimentary buff filtering are in the stock UI now. You can even replace the default party frames with them for dungeons. They won't be rendering any raid frame mods obsolete, but they will be relegating them to the "really nice to have" category instead of "absolutely not worth trying to play without". I think the only things that still fall into the latter for me now are click-casting and a barmod. Which will be nice if I resub since ShadowedUF isn't going to be updated for 4.x, sigh.

On that note, Scrolls of Resurrection don't work on accounts with Wrath, correct? Are there any promotions that I can use to score me and/or a friend game time and/or lewtz for resubbing?

[Paelos]

Mark me down as one of the "most of these so-called pointless changes actually had to happen" true believers. I never played ret for real so I can't say much about that, but the other specs/classes I've played, any issues I have are more "this is sort of buggy" rather than "my class is different." Hell, for some of them (holy paladin cough cough) I'm more "Woo hoo! My class is different!"

Which changes had to happen to items that were slowly sinking the ship? To me it seems like they are trying to revert the game away from more options to less because it was getting unweildy, and the old world was too boring for leveling.

[Ingmar]

As Merusk said earlier, you only had the illusion of choice before, with maybe DK specs being the only real exception. For example I have about as much flexibility now as I did pre-3.0 as a protection warrior. I can still make a PVP spec that differs from a PVE spec, I am still making the choice between threat and utility with my last few optional points, etc. That seems to be the same on all the classes I have at 80 for the most part, although I haven't really gone into most of them in detail yet.

[WindupAtheist]

Wow. That must be some strange shit to see.

At first it was like watching someone from ancient Greece log into WoW and try to figure things out. She remembered the server name, but she was never a "gamer" and remembered nothing about the game itself or even the concept of an MMO. She'd follow an NPC around and watch them go through their script and be like "So this isn't a person?" Stuff like that.

Eventually she got the hang of things and we started running around. She would tell me images she could recall that had to do with the game, images she wasn't even sure were real, and I'd try to figure out what location they applied to and take her there. She remembered the road leading out of Menethil Harbor for some reason. She remembered Scarlet Monastery in a vague sort of way, but thought it was at the end of that road. Other times she'll just swerve off the road while we're riding somewhere and be like "I remember this!" over some seemingly unimportant location.

It's weird, but it's nice. She doesn't really remember much about me either, and it's nice to have something to do together. It's enough to keep me subbed for as long as she remains interested, no matter how badly they screw things up.

[Bzalthek]

It feels like, some day, Keanu Reeves will play you in a movie.  That's only a little snarky, and no ill intent. 

That's actually pretty cool.  I've had experiences with mild and limited amnesia and it's so damn depressing looking into someone's eye that you know well but there is no spark of recognition in return.  You have my sympathies there, chief.

Look on the bright side, though.  At least it's not FFXIV!  She'd remember the same damn hill or tree 11 times in a row!  (yeah, I went there)

[kildorn]

Looool. Atonement was hotfixed out of the game in the last hour or so <3

[K9]

Any reason why?