Cataclysm

[WindupAtheist]

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/cataclysm/features/garrosh.html

"We built our capital city in the desert, and are now outraged to discover that we are in fact living in the desert. The Alliance must pay for this insult. RAWR! FOR METZEN!"

[01101010]

Bah. It's not so bad now. I mean its beachfront property, and now has some nice flora right outside the gate... just pay no mind to the war machines out front.

[Soulflame]

Isn't Metzen one of Santa's reindeer?

[Minvaren]

Today, I discovered that Victory Rush + Spell Reflection = almost no downtime.   

[Ironwood]

Metzen was one of the reindeer, but it got patched out.

I'm confused about Spell Reflection making any difference, but with Victory rush and Prot, you shouldn't have any downtime ever and you should be taking on at least 5 at a time.

[Minvaren]

A successful spell reflect takes you to full (or nearly full) rage.  Less of an issue with packs, but nice when you're doing 1 and 2 at a time.

[El Gallo]

Tol Barad is seriously terrible.  Not just "this has a lot of kinks to work out" terrible, but "seriously, how did any human being think this was a good idea" terrible.  I've played about 8 of them and the offense (no matter the faction) has never come remotely close to winning.

[koro]

Just hit 85 on my Priest. My health went up 20k (to 98.2k unbuffed), my mana went up a paltry 6k (to 76k), and my mana costs doubled. Again. For the third level in a row.

This is fucking stupid.

[Fordel]

Tol Barad is seriously terrible.  Not just "this has a lot of kinks to work out" terrible, but "seriously, how did any human being think this was a good idea" terrible.  I've played about 8 of them and the offense (no matter the faction) has never come remotely close to winning.

Yep, by the time they let us actually you know, test it, on Beta, it was way to late for them to actually change anything since all the art assets were in place and shit.


It's a 3 base EotS without a flag and the defender only has to hold 1 base for the duration.

[Raguel]

I think I'm about to reach my limit with WoW.  There's a lot I like about the game, but it starts to wear thin.

When I first heard about dual-talent I wasn't interested because I thought one had to spread out points between the two. When I found out you could use the max points for each I was  . I like being able to play the same char different ways. I really like the druid and paladin.

I like the quest system, in the sense that every zone has a storyline, but too many of the quests that initiate the storyline are boring, tedious things. I have a handful of alts on both horde and alliance, and even though I'm playing in different zones it's obvious that Blizzard recycles many of the ideas. Redridge was awesome, but across all characters I've probably done at least a dozen "rescue PoWs" and "kill 100 rats with this op'd vehicle" quests. I nearly died laughing at Minx's goblin disguise in (iirc) Stonetalon, but when I saw it again in Burning Steppes I was pretty disappointed.

eta: I'm also feeling the pangs of being a n00b playing a 6 year old game. When I do random dungeons there's almost no chatting within the group, which is alien to me. I feel like I'm the only one who hasn't done the exact same dungeon 100 times. At auction houses, I see level 20 - 30  gear (armor and weapons, mostly)  selling for 40+g a piece. Not that it matters much; most of my gear on all chars is either from quests or drops and I can solo easily on all chars (except the rogue and mage, but that's probably user error)

[apocrypha]

You can random for normals.  Until you hit gear level 239 that's all you CAN queue for.  Only thing is you won't get Justice Points for anything beyond completion of the first random of the day.

However, you'll be more productive in gearing up, since successful completions of heroics are taking 2-3 hours involving multiple wipes.  Everyone wants to try as soon as they hit 239, but it's not advisable.  Blizz wasn't kidding when they said you should have a full blue normal set before trying Heroics in /random.   In that 2-3 hours you could have completed 2-4 normal randoms and gotten gear instead of a huge repair bill.

Cheers, was hoping that'd be the case. As a guild we just want the ability to learn the dungeons and gear up together without the stupid dungeon finder telling us where we can't go today.

My 1st to 85 is going to be my shaman, and he's resto main spec, so there's no way I'm doing randoms for quite some time yet. 

[Azuredream]

It's actually 329, and I just bought a few rep rewards and an item off the AH and I was able to enter heroics within a couple hours of hitting 80. If you have a good group of people you can do the heroics as soon as you're able. Some of the harder heroics we wiped about 10-15 times the first time but when we went back the wipes didn't happen nearly as often, you just have to know what all the bosses and trash do. I have not gone anywhere near doing dungeons with random people, I imagine it would be a nightmare.

As a side note, we have two healers we run with, a disc priest and a resto shaman.. the resto shaman has to drink so much less than the priest it's ridiculous, I'm not sure if our priest is just bad or if shamans are OP.

[Zetor]

Priest healing is in a very bad place atm... pallies are OP, and droods/shammies seem to be ok.

[Rendakor]

Is it just Disc priests, or is Holy fucked too? My gf plays a disc priest and hated it so bad she went shadow; we since were rolling with a Holy Pally who didn't seem to have nearly the mana issues she was having as disc.

[koro]

I think it's just Disc Priests right now. You can somewhat alleviate it by either going the route of Heal spam alongside popping all your cooldowns on a regular basis or by going the route of macroing Greater Heal and Prayer of Healing to Inner Focus and using just GH along with the talent that lowers IF's cooldown by 5 seconds per GH cast.

Or you can just go Holy and spam Renews and Chakra'd Heals and have plenty of mana wriggle room while being bored out of your goddamned skull. I'm going to give my Disc spec a few more days of play before I kill the group healing spec and switch to Holy for the first time since 2007.

Edit: This post, while probably being a bit too blunt and too dismissive of the valid Disc Heal spam playstyle, is actually quite a good resource and building on that advice has helped my Disc out a ton. It's still not great and nowhere near being truly fun, but it's at least doable compared to the horrid mess I was earlier.

[K9]

I've managed all the normals well enough as Disc, but it hasn't been entirely comfortable. The new mechanics they have tried to implement generally do not work so well. Atonement is fun when it works, but has a freakishly small range and a lot of the time only heals a hunter's pet if anything at all. Heal sucks balls but Flash and Gheal are too expensive. I might give holy a spin, I ditched my second healing spec for shadow for questing, but maybe it is time to kiss DIsc goodbye for a while.

[01101010]

I've managed all the normals well enough as Disc, but it hasn't been entirely comfortable. The new mechanics they have tried to implement generally do not work so well. Atonement is fun when it works, but has a freakishly small range and a lot of the time only heals a hunter's pet if anything at all. Heal sucks balls but Flash and Gheal are too expensive. I might give holy a spin, I ditched my second healing spec for shadow for questing, but maybe it is time to kiss DIsc goodbye for a while.

Granted, my goblin is only 36 now, but Holy is pretty ordinary and pedestrian in dungeon crawls. I plop renews and maybe some heal spam on hard mobs with many adds. Flash heals for bigger fights like the houndmaster in SM library. I run out of mana maybe once or twice a run and only when the tank goes WotLK with pulls and only when its a warrior tank. My only gripe is that Surge of Light mocks me every run by procc'ing at the end of the fights, every god damn time. Such a waste.

[koro]

I can actually smite heal normal Cata dungeons using my solo Disc spec up to and including Stonecore and most of Vortex Pinnacle. After that, I have to switch to my raid/heroic healing spec. Smite/Atonement healing in Heroics is not an option.

[Numtini]

As a side note, we have two healers we run with, a disc priest and a resto shaman.. the resto shaman has to drink so much less than the priest it's ridiculous, I'm not sure if our priest is just bad or if shamans are OP.

I'm a resto shaman. I haven't done heroics, but I have no mana issues in normal instances. Kept everyone close to 100% and came out with full mana. I'm stacking int/haste/crit and reforging mastery to haste, which is what Elitist Jerks recommends, but is pretty opposite of what people on the forums are saying.

For me, the key is that I switched to healing wave (the equivilent of priest heal) when 4.01 came out and that's my bread and butter. Combine that with a load of haste and water shield restoring mana on crits and I make out pretty well. I've heard it's next to impossible to keep up with healing on heroics using HW, so we start getting drained out using healing surge and GHW, but we'll see.

There's almost as much whinging on the shaman forum as on any of the other healing forums for what that's worth.

[kildorn]

As a side note, we have two healers we run with, a disc priest and a resto shaman.. the resto shaman has to drink so much less than the priest it's ridiculous, I'm not sure if our priest is just bad or if shamans are OP.

I'm a resto shaman. I haven't done heroics, but I have no mana issues in normal instances. Kept everyone close to 100% and came out with full mana. I'm stacking int/haste/crit and reforging mastery to haste, which is what Elitist Jerks recommends, but is pretty opposite of what people on the forums are saying.

For me, the key is that I switched to healing wave (the equivilent of priest heal) when 4.01 came out and that's my bread and butter. Combine that with a load of haste and water shield restoring mana on crits and I make out pretty well. I've heard it's next to impossible to keep up with healing on heroics using HW, so we start getting drained out using healing surge and GHW, but we'll see.

There's almost as much whinging on the shaman forum as on any of the other healing forums for what that's worth.

I'm in the process of trying to reforge as much of my tanking gear into mastery and avoidance as I can. 150k health is nice and all, and works great with MY heals (which are percent of max health based), but high health pools beyond "I'm going to die in 5 seconds" ranges are just trading your blue bar for my red bar. The problem I'm having is finding good enough tanking plate without finishing heroics.

[Minvaren]

Cataclysm declared "fastest selling PC game of all time"

At this rate, it's likely to be the fastest-completed expansion of all time as well.  Leveling some alts and farming some old content to keep from hitting 85 too fast myself.

[Rasix]

Cataclysm declared "fastest selling PC game of all time"

At this rate, it's likely to be the fastest-completed expansion of all time as well.  Leveling some alts and farming some old content to keep from hitting 85 too fast myself.

All of the feedback saying the leveling is too fast has kept me playing my goblin.  If it's a quick jaunt, I'm not going to be in any hurry to rush through it with everyone else.  

I am a bit saddened, however, that I'm missing out on price gouging people that'll pay ridiculous amounts of money for resources.  Not too saddened, though, as my miner (which is probably where most of the moolah is) is my DK, which I haven't done anything with since before the ICC 5 mans were put in.

The revamped old world is fun enough for me at the moment.  I figure this expansion will at least keep me busy for the forseable future.

[Numtini]

The small amount of content is kind of perplexing. In particular, having two 80-82 zones seems really odd when there's so little quest content in general.

[kaid]

Tol Barad is seriously terrible.  Not just "this has a lot of kinks to work out" terrible, but "seriously, how did any human being think this was a good idea" terrible.  I've played about 8 of them and the offense (no matter the faction) has never come remotely close to winning.

Yup I cannot understand that once you see what you need to do to win that they decided to keep it as is. The offense needs to take all three bases defense needs to just have them not control all three bases. So basically the defense rolls in one big group and holds the hell out of one base. If that base gets threatened respawn goes to a different base.

Added to this the attacker needs to move the full bar to fully own the base. The defender just needs to push it out of the fully controlled part of the bar so they only need to spend a fraction of the time the offense does.

Right now with two teams that understand the bg at all there is no way the offense can win unless the defenders are totally incompetent. Right now there is just no reason to play it you get no tokens for a loss so if your team is on attack don't bother queuing.

[kildorn]

Tol Barad is seriously terrible.  Not just "this has a lot of kinks to work out" terrible, but "seriously, how did any human being think this was a good idea" terrible.  I've played about 8 of them and the offense (no matter the faction) has never come remotely close to winning.

Yup I cannot understand that once you see what you need to do to win that they decided to keep it as is. The offense needs to take all three bases defense needs to just have them not control all three bases. So basically the defense rolls in one big group and holds the hell out of one base. If that base gets threatened respawn goes to a different base.

Added to this the attacker needs to move the full bar to fully own the base. The defender just needs to push it out of the fully controlled part of the bar so they only need to spend a fraction of the time the offense does.

Right now with two teams that understand the bg at all there is no way the offense can win unless the defenders are totally incompetent. Right now there is just no reason to play it you get no tokens for a loss so if your team is on attack don't bother queuing.

I had a long conversation where the alliance just didn't get that. Basically "hold this base." "what if they all come here?" "then our druids and rogues ninja whatever they abandoned to try and overrun us. We can't lose this without being terrible."

[caladein]

Priests are definitely tight on mana from all reports, although Disc is probably a little better off than Holy from what I've read.  As Disc I'm enjoying the challenge a lot although it's hard to say where "dumb group" or "poor play on your part" meets "your class is screwed" so I've resigned myself to some level of frustration when pugging Heroics (see: Heroic Corborus).  Still fun though.

As for Atonement, that's out the window pretty quickly.  I simply couldn't afford a heal not to go towards the tank for how little Heal or Atonment hit for.  The mana restore from Archangel doesn't seem worth the extra GHeals needed to compensate for heals-not-on-the-tank and I haven't run into any significant lulls on boss fights, just "Keep healing." and "OMG we're all going to die.".  Also, you're not taking time off Weakened Soul via Strength of Soul (-4s off WS per Heal) with Smites, and Power Word: Shield is very mana efficient if kept on one target.

Tank healing generally breaks down into: Shield + (Penance if no Grace stacks on tank) + 2x Heal + IF'd (or damage-warranted) GHeal.  (Grace is really important now at +24%!)  Mostly it's about knowing what kinds of damage are one-time spikes that you can safely heal slowly up with Heal or Renew and what require immediate attention with GHeals and/or Power Infusion (which I'm keeping to myself now).  A good example of that is Heroic Ripsnarl.  A tank is always going to be taking a lot of damage right before a phase transition so if I know he's just about to switch, I'll lay off spamming GHeal and just heal it up during the vapor phase.  Sometimes that isn't going to be the case and then your DPS is too low and you're OOM at the end of the fight .

On a related note, not being shy about using Pain Suppression or Power Word: Barrier has helped me as between the two of them, I usually have one up when it's "needed".  Basically, your cooldowns are there to be used... except Hymn of Hope which I'm just using for the initial tick for +15% returns from Shadowfiend and/or a free 15% of my mana bar.  6% mana isn't worth the rest of the cast time when I'm the only one that needs it.

Group healing really comes down to learning how to use all parts of Prayer of Healing well, which I'll admit I haven't done yet.  Between automatic Divine Aegis (30% shield) and the glyph (20% as 6s HoT) what doesn't seem like a great spell that costs a chunk of mana (~GHeal) is actually quite good.

[Hawkbit]

The small amount of content is kind of perplexing. In particular, having two 80-82 zones seems really odd when there's so little quest content in general.

There was a lot (read: A LOT) of development time/effort wasted on the new worgen/goblin zones.  Each were roughly four hour experiences that will never, ever, be usable again.  I know the same could be said for some of the other starting zones, but I'm not sure why they went so far out of their way to create these zones that are already dead.  

If they had pushed the goblin starter experience into Durotar and the Worgen into Elwynn through lore, that would have allowed two full zones that their teams could have added to the top-end of this xpac.  

I haven't seen enough of the top-end to call Cata an outright failure, but I think this is a couple steps in the wrong direction.  Hell, maybe it's just that they're making a game I don't want to play anymore.

[dd0029]

The small amount of content is kind of perplexing. In particular, having two 80-82 zones seems really odd when there's so little quest content in general.

There's not "little quest content".  It just seems that way as they gave away the majority of the new content with the 1-60 revamp.  That's where they spent the past two years, redoing the old world.  And even for the new end content, there's a comparable number per level.  BC had 7 zones for 60-70.  WotLK had 10.  Cataclysm has 5.  Things are somewhat different this time in that they funnel everyone into a comparatively uninteresting single end zone instead of branching out.  Also, the new railroading quest design does not really encourage stopping.  You are always breadcrumbing into something new.  None of the quests seem to hit that "I've done enough" point. I never feel quite like I did after a Nagrand circuit, where you gather up 6-10, travel over the whole zone and then turn them all in.

[kildorn]

Seems to me they just accepted that we only ever used 4-5 zones, so why make more?

It's not like we all hang out in grizzly hills. Right now we have ~5 zones with ~5 factions, with a little bleed over in questing, but the dailies seem split up. About the only "fail" I see is the distribution of mining/herb nodes causing a lot of overcrowding for the lower tier items in the first two zones.

[Rendakor]

I don't have a problem with the 80-85 content, and don't see how anyone could complain about it before their first 80+ alt. The only advantage of having more than 1 path to the cap is that you have multiple options for multiple toons.

[ghost]

The re-hash of the starting zones has been very, very good.  I'm sure they'll find a way to work Worgen and Goblin into some sort of interesting dungeon expansion pretty easily. 

[kaid]

I don't see the worgen/goblin areas any more useless than any other newbie starting zone. Sure you may walk through some of those areas but really once you level past them there never was any reason to go back to those areas. Seriously how many times do you decide to visit northshire.

Both the worgen and goblin zones were fun and I enjoyed them. I think the horde came out the best on the deal though as the goblins and their zones seemed more finished than the worgen side.

[dd0029]

I don't see the worgen/goblin areas any more useless than any other newbie starting zone.

I believe the point about the useless zones is that you can't start a human paladin and then move it to Gilneas to do that leveling content the way you can with the draenei and and blood elf areas.  The only way into either area is to be a worgen or a goblin.  Though with the revamp of all of the starter areas and the assumed rehash on quest rewards, the desire to start elsewhere is probably less.

[ghost]

The whole point of the patch was to add in the two new races.  The other stuff was just the cherry on top.

[Simond]

Remember this?

Woo, Blizzard fucked up guild xp and are taking a chainsaw to in in response: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/1088190414?page=1

We have decided to remove the added bonus of gaining Guild Experience from Guild Achievements earned. This change will realign Guild Achievements with our philosophy held for normal Achievements, which are intended to be predominantly their own reward (barring the rare exception of special achievements that grant an additional reward.) Previously, the experience reward had been seen as an additional side bonus and not something that should have been significantly skewing the advancement of guilds. During the beta, we greatly increased leveling speed across the board and since most characters were copied from templates, guild experience from Achievements didn’t seem imbalanced. It has become clear that an imbalance does exist and should be addressed to ensure that guilds progress at the rates expected within the daily Guild Experience limits.



For guilds that are currently above the normally possible experience limit, we will be readjusting it back to the expected limit once more. This will not affect Guild Reputation gains at this point in time.

Translation: Every non-bank-alt guild will now basically level at exactly the same rate no matter what. Also, the Realm First L25 guild achievement will now boil down to "Who can get the most poopsockers online at 3am, April 11th next year".

Well, apparently Blizzard just gutted guild xp  to the tune of "small-to-medium guilds that were hitting the daily cap in a couple of hours are now only getting to 15%-20% of the daily cap by the server reset" (i.e. it's about a quarter of what it was). So it's now the worse of both worlds - small guilds cannot complete at all, but big guilds will still be marching in lockstep with each other because achievements still don't give guild xp.