Initial Thoughts on Pandaria

[cmlancas]

Hopefully the progressive nerfs will have started going in by then. I'm pretty much pure casual now and so is my guild, which I figured would be raiding normals by now. Nope; they just groupqueue for LFR and that's good enough because fuck organizing this crap anymore after 7+ years.

We've pretty much headed that direction and I've switched guilds since my old one moved to RIFT for some ridiculous reason. Also, nobody wants to roll a healer this expansion.

Speaking of that; did Blizzard pull a Cata again and make healing suck shit?

Healing isn't the thoroughput spamfest it used to be, but it doesn't suck shit.

Also, I have a 10-man raid group on Grizzly Hills that raids Fri/Sun at 730p EST that has space for one.  Would prefer heals or DPS, but we might be able to swing a tank, if you're unhappy with your current raid situation.  We're 1/6 because people are gearing molasses-speed,. but 8/8 HM last expac

[Miasma]

I wouldn't say healing is as bad as it was at the start of cata but you definitely feel the sudden reset in terms of lower mana regen.  Or at least I do as a priest.  I guess monk healers are doing amazing, so they'll probably be nerfed.  Druid and shaman are both strong.  No class seems "broken" but disc priests are very unhappy and seem to be struggling.

[Sjofn]

I notice you don't even MENTION paladins, so I'm going to go ahead and assume they are exactly the same as they were last expansion (which is good, imo  ).

[Paelos]

The healers I know don't play healers anymore. I think Cata burned them and they never went back.

That being said, I think the changes to mana pool didn't help. Priests are having major issues dealing with it, and a lot of people played those that were healers. Gear solves that problem with regen some, but you have to put up with the ramp up factor right now. Once you have the gear, I think it's similar to warrior tanking in terms of effectiveness to gear standard.

Pallys seem to like ret and prot right now; I see almost zero paladin healers anymore.

Druids seem pretty pleased. They have a lot of tools to make them work, and they don't suffer the mana hit as much.

I don't know about shamans. The ones I know all ragequit when they changed totems.

Monks are new. Who knows?

[cmlancas]

I wouldn't say healing is as bad as it was at the start of cata but you definitely feel the sudden reset in terms of lower mana regen.  Or at least I do as a priest.  I guess monk healers are doing amazing, so they'll probably be nerfed.  Druid and shaman are both strong.  No class seems "broken" but disc priests are very unhappy and seem to be struggling.

Our regen is kinda borked, but the way the mechanics are going, I think we'll need nerfing by the end of the expac.  If I could get about 20% more regen (I'm at 10k spirit raid buffed right now), I'd feel better.  Currently I'm on fumes on LFR fights with bosses at about 20% hp and I outgear the content.

The atonement mechanic makes us hard to balance, I think.  Anything that heals from DPS is sketchy when gearscores strat going up.

[Merusk]

I wouldn't say healing is as bad as it was at the start of cata but you definitely feel the sudden reset in terms of lower mana regen.  Or at least I do as a priest.  I guess monk healers are doing amazing, so they'll probably be nerfed.  Druid and shaman are both strong.  No class seems "broken" but disc priests are very unhappy and seem to be struggling.

Priests have sucked since WOTLK.  It's just so much easier to heal on the other classes that I only do it on my priest if I want short queue times.   In the team's fervor to appease the "wahh I'm bored" crowd they didn't look at the non-priest classes for provision of tools.  "Because that would cause too much homogeneity between classes! And look, you have "THE BIGGEST HEAL" "   

Yeah, I know a lot of shamen who've ragequit, too, Paelos.   They and Death Knights have been the rare classes in my experience.  Also; despite all the bitching about 4 trees here, Druids have seen a big uptick.

Found this site, which apepars to be about current L90 characters. http://www.worldofwargraphs.com/statsglobal-classesrepartition-0-0.html

[Paelos]

That data matches pretty much what we have in the guild and what i've seen in my heroic randoms.

I seem to always draw a hunter, a ret pally, myself as a tank, a druid healer in most cases, and one of my DK buddies from the guild (we have 4 actively playing).

If I'm drawing an extra 2 spots to a group of guild three, and it's going to be dps? The odds I'm getting a pally or hunter are gigantic. I've yet to see a single rogue or lock.

Right now we have 13 90s in the guild, with about 6 more who are actively leveling up toons from 85+:  4 DKs, 3 warriors, 3 pallys, 2 druids, 2 hunters, 2 monks, 1 shaman, 1 rogue, zero mages, zero priests, zero locks.

[Sjofn]

I've been screwing around as a mage and a paladin (I can't shake the paladin habit) but I seriously cannot decide what I want to actually play to level up. One of the classes I was eyeing, I sort of never got around to hitting 85 with, so I'd have to slog through Cataclysm again first.  


EDIT: Clearly it should be my ~rogue~, so I can be a special snowflake (apparently).

[Zetor]

My resto shaman feels very strong, and I actually really like the totem changes. Dropping totems every x minutes (and back in BC you were expected to do totem twisting too) was tedious busywork, and the new toys they added are pretty nifty. In my mostly blue gear I can push up to 75k (!) HPS in burst situations, though this was with the dungeon buff - it also ran me dry pretty quick*. Usually I'm #1 or #2 in LFR, though that is probably because of all the stacking (again). About the only issues that I can see is that shaman really suck at doing damage compared to other healers, and telluric currents (used to be a talent, now is a glyph - get some mana back if you cast lightning bolt) is pretty bad now -- though with a 3-min cooldown mana tide I was able to keep chugging along even in the worst "tank stands in every single combo" WOTE boss fight that went on for 10+ minutes. Very good PVP healer too, though doesn't approach the OP that is resto druids (insane cc, almost BC resto druid levels of unkillableness AND very good burst damage? sign me up!).

Main changes from cata:
- healing stream is a short-cooldown smart heal, still very strong.
- healing tide is an insanely powerful oh crap heal, and the 3min cooldown is good. It is not uncommon for this spell to be #2 or even #1 on a LFR 'healing done' meter for shaman.
- ascendancy gives you the green buff from ultraxion - obviously pretty great, especially in clumped up pvp situations.
- capacitor totem is a great aoe stun (much better than the old ele fire nova), the delay allows for some strategizing. Really good in pvp too, as people haven't yet learned to nuke the totem (the 'drop dummy totems' minor glyph helps here too), but if you have the totemic repositioning talent, they wouldn't be able to do so before it was too late, anyway.
- shorter-cooldown fire elemental and the new stormlash totem are decent burst DPS boosts for the group (stormlash is especially good and underestimated in a 25-man environment)
- unleash weapon now combos with healing rain, I'm not sure if this was possible before - it's more beefy aoe healing (as if shamans need any more of that, har)
- earth shield improves ALL shaman ST healing on the target, I think it used to only improve the caster's. On the flipside, it doesn't have the pushback resistance anymore (I haven't seen more than 2 resto shamans in LFR at a time, yet... but if there were, I'd put the third ES on the dps prone to standing in fire as a dubious badge of honor)
- riptide isn't consumed by chainheal anymore, so chainhealing off the tank (or myself) is preferred in most cases.

FWIW I've seen a lot of DKs in my random heroics at 90, mostly blood though (which is really strong). I haven't seen too many rogues. Hunters are kind of on the weak side now, but I still see a good number of them.


* context: in Siege of Niuzao Temple, the first boss' room hits everyone really hard unless both slime groups are killed... but the tank didn't know that. Let me just say it was a "challenge mode" fight.  

[craan]

I cried earlier about my priest and decided that maybe I should try another toon.  I also got sick of being expected to grind dailies.  I did dailies for one day and got annoyed with the GL stuff.

So I leveled my mage as frost.  I had a lot of fun as frost leveling up and doing dungeons.  I was doing decent DPS as frost.  With no heroic gear at all and only a smattering of dungeon gear I was doing 30-35k in non heroics.  And when leveling I could kill any Pandaren rare that I happened across.  It really felt fun.  Then I hit 90 and refused to do the dailies and got bored.

So I decided let me try my druid!  During Cata I was feral/balance.  I did a level or two as Balance and realized I hate the Eclipse mechanic and stopped.  I might switch and make him a bear tank.  But, some of the boomkin changes I really appreciated.  I love being able to cast a few heals without breaking moonkin form and I really loved the glyph that lets you NOT look like a far owlbear.

So then I look at my pally.  My first character in the game and I left him in a sorry, sorry gear shape.  A mix of PVP dps gear and tank gear in ret spec when I didn't know a thing.  All I did was disenchant and JC on him.  But with the way the beginning quests work I found it really easy to fix that gear.  I started off as ret but I remember I really hated it.  Just...all the buttons and holy power and melee dancing.  So I decided to give holy pally a try and leveled/dungeoned as holy.  I do a lot better as a healer as a holy pally.  I have occasional OOM issues but much, much less that my priest.  A group last night pulled the entire library/bored student room with the boss because the shadow priest used that expanding blue circle spell and it just seemed to expand and expand and expand.  I was OOM at the end with the tank, myself, and 2 DPS at 20% health with one dead dps.  But I couldn't have done it on my priest.  Maybe I have just shaken off the rust.  Anyways, holy pally healing is pretty fun.  But I have been so unlucky with heroic drops so I am still only about 440 ilvl.  I can't bring myself to do the dailies.

Reading back on that I don't mean to say its all roses with my pally.  People still die.  Almost always a DPS because I won't spam them with heals when they stand in stuff.  And its a lot easier for me to tell now.  If someone stands in something for a tick, fine.  Finish your cast or just were a little slow to react, no big deal.  I have the mana for that.  But if you take a massive amount of damage and your health bar is dropping fast and YOU ARENT MOVING then I have to let you go.  Either you fucked up by drawing aggro and couldn't dump it or you stood in something that was avoidable.  Nobody has said a word about it.

And one last thing about healing.  It seems like all the rage now in Mogu Palace, on the second boss, to jump down from the balcony instead of going down one side of the staircase.  It happens so often I've made a 'Please don't jump' macro.  I'm not proud of it but I leave group if the tank jumps down.

So, frustrated with poor luck at heroic drops I decided to give healing a break and try DK tanking.  He was about 399 iLvl in Cata and I did tank some of the DS fights.  I think I want to tank because I go into a rage when the tank does something dumb in a dungeon and I'm all 'I am better'.  or, even more petty, when the tank inexplicable pauses for random lengths of time.  Just...stands there.  We'll be moving to the next trash group and...stop.  I know they aren't watching my mana or waiting for a cooldown because they've never used the cooldown and they'll charge right at a boss when I'm at half mana.  But then the pause.  Well, obviously my pet peeve.

I just don't know what class I like so I'm kinda trying all of them.  I'm far, far behind gearing for raids in the guild I joined.  None of my toons can even do LFR yet.  I just seem to like trying out the new mechanics of the toons I leveled more than concentrating on one (my priest) and grinding my enjoyment to death.

[Rasix]

Found this site, which apepars to be about current L90 characters. http://www.worldofwargraphs.com/statsglobal-classesrepartition-0-0.html

Nice, my most played 80s (never did 80-85 in cata) were the 3 sitting down by the monk. 

[Setanta]

Leveled my youngest toon (Rogue) first as combat. That was fun and quick as I went from BE to panda and did it entirely on rested XP. I then went to level my hunter and pally but found that I have lost the hunter love again (the first time was in TBC when I'd played it throughout vanilla) and that ret is just too busy. Given that I hate queueing for dungeons I started dungeon-grinding and was more than happy to see a tanking sword drop resulting in my finally being able to use the Facelifter as a transmog - happy days. But dungeon running bored me so at 86 I switched to my Blood/Unholy DK which hit 90 in no time flat running dungeons and questing with ease as blood (god I wish prot pally could do the damage of a Blood DK). In fact I never left the second zone as DK until I hit 90 and was 89 when I ran out of rested.

In the process of levelling these two, I 600 capped:
Herb/Inscription (90 Rogue)
Mining/Engineering (90 DK)
Enchanting/580Tailoring (85 Warlock using green drops and cloth drops )
Elixir Mastery (85 Priest using left over herbs that the Rogue found)

On top of that my Pally hit 585 Blacksmithing with leftovers from the DK's mining.

The speed of levelling these rocked and Inscription/Engineering/Enchanting/Elixir were all worthwhile although I guess I need to rep grind enchanting/elixir/tailoring/blacksmithing to get the good stuff?

Cooking and First aid were awesome to level too, you can hit cap in no time.

DK tanking is still fun but now I need to work out what is next - 'lock, Shadow Priest, or my Druid/Pally/Warrior tanks - or do I push my monk past 46 (I've only ever dungeon crawled with it)?

With 8 85s to go plus the monk, I need to make sure I don't burn myself out capping them - maybe I need to just go play pokemon :D

[Lakov_Sanite]

I feel like my shadow priest is in a very good place this expac, healing is a terrible oom mess right now but dps seems good.

[luckton]

My Far East DK Gnome

The coloring is better if the Klaxi tabard showed on the model viewer, but still 

[Hawkbit]

I've meant to ask you who runs Tamarack now.  I was part of it back in Vanilla and early BC, when Thoron and Kelkasha ran it.  I didn't realize you played Renwin until I saw you logging into him in my friends list. 

Earthen Ring is a very small world.

[luckton]

Oh wow, small world indeed 

Let's see...Thoron went to work for White Wolf, and passed the torch onto Ynari and her hubby.  She left about a year ago and passed it onto a co-leadership between Dawne and Abratane.  Abra's recently left and passed on the mantle to Magnus, who's still trying to get situated in the role, but we're still truckin' along as one of the last vanilla guilds on ER.

[Rokal]

I'm having problems motivating myself to play alts in MoP. It's a combination of a few causes, as best as I can tell.

-Professions in Cata were a good motivation to level other characters, but in MoP you can level professions for 200-400 gold just sitting in Stormwind.

-85-90 questing feels like a huge undertaking. This was great on my main character when the quests and zones were all fresh, but it is unappealing for alts.

-The 90 "end-game" is primarily reputation factions. I'm almost done reps on my Monk but there is absolutely no way I would want to repeat that process on other characters, even at 2x the rep.

-Gearing up in heroic dungeons isn't fun enough that I would want to repeat it on additional characters.

Unrelated note: Challenge modes are pretty fun. You can get bronze in any dungeon as long as you aren't wiping 6+ times. Silver feels like it would be easy to reach with normal play and 0 wipes. Since there are no repair bills, wipes don't feel too punishing on anything except your time and the VP rate when you do the daily CM seems generous regardless of what medal you get. My server's leaderboard (a medium pop server) only has 1-8 scores for any given dungeon, so they do not seem especially popular. Similarly, I've only been able to run 1-2 a week because there are only ~7-8 people in my guild with any interest in them and there are rarely 5 of them on at once. If anyone on here is interested in CMs, on US servers/Alliance, feel free to add me Rokal#1479. We're usually looking for dps slots to fill. Patience would be required, as we are only consistently getting bronzes and still have a long way to go.

[Hawkbit]

I was Loreck (hunter, my RL brother was Randir (warrior).  We came in maybe 6 months after launch and stayed till the Seraphim schism.  Pissed everyone off when we left, friends were lost.  I likely would have made different decisions about that in hindsight.  It was fun and a new experience building a guild from the ground-up, but it cost a lot in goodwill to make that happen.  

Really good to see TO still around.  Ynari and Dawne were always good peoples.  I'm pretty sure TO turned on the lights for ER, and it would be very fitting to see them turn them off one day.

----
Regarding Pandaria, I'm torn.  

It's the most beautiful expansion and zones they've built so far.  In many ways I really like the layout and progression of the zones.  However, I can't shake the 'sameness' of it all.  I thought the first zone was very competent in getting the player interested in Pandaria, but then it dumped me in the Valley and I was mostly doing farming quests.  It just feels kinda silly, and it's just not sticking for me.  I can't quite put my finger on what I don't like, because it's all so damn pretty.  But something isn't quite right.

[SurfD]

Regarding Pandaria, I'm torn.  

It's the most beautiful expansion and zones they've built so far.  In many ways I really like the layout and progression of the zones.  However, I can't shake the 'sameness' of it all.  I thought the first zone was very competent in getting the player interested in Pandaria, but then it dumped me in the Valley and I was mostly doing farming quests.  It just feels kinda silly, and it's just not sticking for me.  I can't quite put my finger on what I don't like, because it's all so damn pretty.  But something isn't quite right.

I would probably put it down to a lack of a sense of urgency after you get out of Jade Forest.  Jade Forest has this great buildup into the horde vs alliance conflict which is starting out on pandaria, ending with the neat cutscene / sha fight, and then you get dumped in the Valley, where all that buildup goes poof and you spend the rest of the zone helping farmers with virmen problems.  It isnt really untill you get into Towlong / Dreadwastes that any sense of "important" things happening really comes back.  Even the Yaungol raids in Kun Lai really seem generally more like a distraction then a serious issue.

Hopefully, with the next content patch rolling out the increased Alliance vs Horde tensions, things will heat up a bit.

[Rokal]

I would probably put it down to a lack of a sense of urgency after you get out of Jade Forest.  Jade Forest has this great buildup into the horde vs alliance conflict which is starting out on pandaria, ending with the neat cutscene / sha fight, and then you get dumped in the Valley, where all that buildup goes poof and you spend the rest of the zone helping farmers with virmen problems.

I had the opposite reaction. Jade Forest was nice to look at, but the alliance vs horde and Old God Sha corruption stories just felt like the same boring "storyline" we've been following for 7 years. Valley of the Four winds quests had a lot more humor and felt like a real change of pace: laid back, slice-of-life quests. If Valley seems boring you can head to Krasarang which has a story with more urgency.

[Simond]

http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/2987-Patch-5-1-PTR-Build-16208


Nobody tell Lantyssa. 

[Miasma]

Well, okay.  I'm not huge into pets but I NEED THAT.

[Lantyssa]

Nice, but not sufficient to bring me back.

[Simond]

Did I mention you can play not-pokemon with it?

[Lantyssa]

I guessed as much.

Red pandas are one of the cutest critters around.  They're not going to cause me to lose my mind and purchase an expansion for a game I lost interest in long ago.  Especially when there's so much more out there that I do find interesting, and is more to my tastes.  For those that are playing, I hope you have a stable full of the little buggers.

[Ironwood]

If it wasn't for Pokepets, I'd be seriously, seriously fucked off with this expansion.

It's utterly boring and pedestrian with very very little in the way of fun, until you hit the crack cocaine that is collecting and battling with small imaginary animals.

[Zetor]

I like levelling my new monk (gnome, obviously). Coming from GW2, the dodge roll ability is amazing.

That said, most of the level 90 stuff (dailies and rep grinds) is dead to me. I do LFR every week on my resto shaman and occasionally pvp (which is... broken, but I don't think anyone is surprised). Playing alts is fun, and I have just now stared into the abyss that is pet battles. I have 6 level 12-ish pets now, and I think I'm getting more sucked in with every new pet I catch. Close to the 150-pet achievement now!  

[Fabricated]

I would probably put it down to a lack of a sense of urgency after you get out of Jade Forest.  Jade Forest has this great buildup into the horde vs alliance conflict which is starting out on pandaria, ending with the neat cutscene / sha fight, and then you get dumped in the Valley, where all that buildup goes poof and you spend the rest of the zone helping farmers with virmen problems.

I had the opposite reaction. Jade Forest was nice to look at, but the alliance vs horde and Old God Sha corruption stories just felt like the same boring "storyline" we've been following for 7 years. Valley of the Four winds quests had a lot more humor and felt like a real change of pace: laid back, slice-of-life quests. If Valley seems boring you can head to Krasarang which has a story with more urgency.

I kinda agree with this but the jankiness of how you go from the Jade Forest to the Valley of the Four Winds is pretty noticeable.

I mean, my side and the horde show up, militarize the respective two races you idiots kicked out of your government, then destroy a gigantic jade dragon statue you guys needed for your benevolent serpent god to be reborn properly as well as unleashing cuthulu-sha...and because I guess I ran some errands for a few villages and beat up some Mogu you thank me and give me a gentle kick in the ass to the valley to go follow Chen and his terrifyingly bigheaded niece around. Did I mention the pandaren children are scary looking?

Oh, and at least on the alliance side, my critically wounded named allies are wisked away somewhere and I'm not really supposed to care I guess.

[Ironwood]

It's not so much all that, it's the fact that I have this story (with only a couple of instances) to grind through with 10 chars.

With cataclysm, I at least had differing zones I could alternate with.  With this, I'm just levelling my Panda Monk slowly and gathering PETS OF DOOM.

I suspect this will be the last gasp for me.

(Bear in mind also I have XCOM and Torchlight 2 currently ringing my bell)

[Miasma]

I'm a little burned out already.  I'm hoping it's just from playing too much all at once to get to 90 and then some factions up.  I like raiding but we aren't ready yet so that isn't hooking me in right now.

[Paelos]

They really could have done without all the faction bullshit. It was their biggest design flaw in the whole thing.

[Rendakor]

It's not so much all that, it's the fact that I have this story (with only a couple of instances) to grind through with 10 chars.

With cataclysm, I at least had differing zones I could alternate with.  With this, I'm just levelling my Panda Monk slowly and gathering PETS OF DOOM.

I suspect this will be the last gasp for me.

(Bear in mind also I have XCOM and Torchlight 2 currently ringing my bell)

Um, what? In Cataclysm at launch to go from 80-85 you had to do 4 of the 5 zones if you weren't excessively grinding instances/PVP. In MoP Jade Forest is going to be mandatory (at least some of it) but you can skip half of the other zones because (even with no rest or Heirlooms and only a guild XP buff) there is way more questing content than you need to get from 85-90.

[Ingmar]

On the first character maybe. My 2nd 85 dinged in the desert zone, so less than 3 zones totally done from 80-85. I wasn't running dungeons, no XP heirlooms, just guild bonus and a lot of rest xp.

[Lakov_Sanite]

I did every quest because I'm a loremaster fanatic but with only a few dungeons here and there I was 90 before hitting either townlong or dread wastes. I could have skipped any given zone about halfway through had I wanted.

It's true there there are no alternate progression paths but you aren't locked into zone completion the way you were with cataclysm.

[Merusk]

You aren't even locked in to a true fixed path once you enter the zones, either.  Most of the nodes will let you pick-up quests even if you didn't do the feeders.  Just find the starter mob and run the nodes you liked.  I'll skip all the Jinyu on my next alt.  Fuck those fish people.