5.4 - Needs more kitchen sink

[Ginaz]

Wow, getting geared up is ridiculously easy.  I went from iLvl 440 to to 503 in about a week.  About half the gear I got on the Timeless Island has been replaced using the gear I got from lfr, inc. 2 pieces of lfr T15.

[Paelos]

I started playing again. Spent about an hour getting gear on the island of silliness, and got a ton of epics. Then I realized I really hate doing DPS on my warrior, so I switched over to leveling my shaman, which is 84 now.

It's nice to get back into it again and having fun leveling stuff, getting gear, and generally not worrying about raids.

[Ingmar]

Did I miss the public apology? 

[Paelos]

Did I miss the public apology? 

Heh, no. 

They added flexible raids (something I've clamored about for years) and the Island of silly loot nixes two of my major objections with the direction of this xpac. Dailies aren't really a big deal anymore as a result, and I want to vote with my wallet the same way I voted out. Also, I think the delay of Titan was what really put the focus back on WoW, especially from the comments in the investor packages given the falloff of subs.

[Lakov_Sanite]

They still haven't learned anything, making stuff easier at the end of an expac is what they've always done.  Also....

Why? If i am happy in lfr why do you want to push me out of it?
Because it provides you more content. Compare: Run LFR until finished vs. Run LFR until finished, THEN run Flex

In their minds, running the same dungeon for the same loot at a higher ilvl = content!

[Merusk]

Exactly.  No lessons learned, expect a return to the stupid with the next expansion.

They'd started off so well in 2004 but have regressed so much since wotlk.

[Fabricated]

Yeah, I'm sure all of the small group content will give absolutely trash rewards at the beginning of the next expansion and there'll be "more dynamic" dailies you're expected to do endlessly for soulless faction grinding to get raid/LFR ready. And the normal/flex raids won't be tuned right so it'll end up causing the "cap out, gear LFR ready, gear up in LFR, unsub til next patch" thing rather than encouraging those people to do the "additional content" of normal/flex raiding.

And they'll wonder why subs are down and decide the answer is more dailies and handjobs for like the 20 people still doing heroic raiding.

[Maledict]

Without wanting to sound horrible, this is exactly the model that drove me from the game 4 years ago when they decided that all challenging content was being put into heroics and you'd have to repeat the same dungeon with bugger numbers for higher ilevel loot.

It sucked then, and it sucks now. Repeating content on no higher difficulty is a bloody stupid model that in the long term really pushes people from the game.

[Lakov_Sanite]

I am still in shock that they flat out said running the same dungeon for the SAME loot with slightly bigger numbers was content.

[Paelos]

They still haven't learned anything, making stuff easier at the end of an expac is what they've always done.  Also....

Why? If i am happy in lfr why do you want to push me out of it?
Because it provides you more content. Compare: Run LFR until finished vs. Run LFR until finished, THEN run Flex

In their minds, running the same dungeon for the same loot at a higher ilvl = content!

I didn't say they learned anything. I just said I liked the idea of flex raiding and easy loot. I'll play for 3 months and quit again if I'm bored. However, I think the shot to their sub numbers with no viable replacement on the horizon has made them take WoW more seriously from a development standpoint, simply because they can't afford to have a similar slide in 2014 if they want to maintain investor confidence now that they've saddled up with debt to get rid of Vivendi.

[Maledict]

I am still in shock that they flat out said running the same dungeon for the SAME loot with slightly bigger numbers was content.

Agin, this is the same model that higher end raiders have suffered for the last 4 years. It sucks.

[El Gallo]

Loot Island seemed fun the first couple days when I snagged all the chests.  But now it's basically killed my desire to log in.  To get the cool vanity shit -- I'm very motivated by cool vanity shit -- (or the thingies that upgrade the chest gear) you need to get a ton of timeless coins.  So I found myself standing around with my thumb up my ass waiting for a rare mob to pop on NPCScan so I can hope to get a hit on it before it dies.  Just like EverQuest, the game I and everyone else abandoned when WOW came out.  But at least in EQ I didn't actually need to pay attention.

I'd much rather have timeless coins come from good old-fashioned daily quests.

[Paelos]

They drop from regular stuff too though right? Not just elites.

[Hutch]

Everything on the island can drop coins.

[Rokal]

Best way to play the island IMO is to do the daily/weekly stuff (chest, quests, world bosses) over the course of a couple days and just kill the rare spawns you see while doing them. I do wish the island had more dynamic events like Rift or GW2 because having a set agenda which is the same every day/week gets boring quickly. The closest thing to that at the moment is the pirate ship every hour or whatever. Still, there is a lot to do and there are a few different avenues to different vanity items so you don't need to be farming coins or Shaohao rep if you would rather pursue some of the other items.

[El Gallo]

must....have.....all.....items.

[Paelos]

Leveling alts in pandaland in a duo isn't too bad, but there are times when I face the cutscenes and it sort of ruins the group interaction.

[Mithas]

Leveling alts solo takes forever in Pandaria. I'm pretty sure they already bumped the xp but I think they need to do it again.

[Hutch]

They did bump it once.

The last couple alts that I leveled, I found it easier to put up with, by throwing pet battles in with the questing. So, kill 5 out of 10 rats, hey there's a battle pet, oh there's another one right there, now kill the last 5 of 10.

Winning a pet battle gives you a nice dose of xp. I don't know if it's more efficient than pure questing, but I can put up with it for longer that way.

YMMV of course.

[Rokal]

Leveling alts solo takes forever in Pandaria. I'm pretty sure they already bumped the xp but I think they need to do it again.

They cut the exp requirement by 30%. IMO it flies by pretty fast now, at least with rested xp anyway.

[apocrypha]

So, got suckered back into playing this with a couple of pals. Good timing for 50% MoP sale 

Got my mage to 90 in 3 days, and now haven't got any idea what to do next. We had a quick go on the Timeless Isle and purples rained from the sky, which was nice. Will be doing more of that for sure.

Are there any quest chains or reputations that you'd consider particularly useful/fun/rewarding to do?

[Mithas]

The Order of the Cloud Serpent rep wasn't as grindy as the other ones and you can then get all the cloud serpent mounts. The other ones are/were horrible grinds and I don't think I'd want to do any of them. People seemed to like the Klaxxi chain too, though by the time I got to it I was sick of questing.

*edit - by grindy I mean day after day after day of daily quests. You can't even grind it out in a few days if you wanted to.

[Paelos]

I liked the fishing guys rep too. Not Nat Pagle, the group of fishing guys.

[Rokal]

The Tillers rep is pretty fun/painless, still useful too.

[apocrypha]

Cheers. I've started the Cloud Serpent stuff, which looks like it'll be painless since my realm is very low pop now.

Also started tanking & healing random dungeons on a paladin & druid alt respectively. Nothing like tanking dungeons you've never been in before, in shitty quest greens and previous expansion gear to learn your class and the dungeons fast 

[SurfD]

Tillers is fast and very useful, since most people use their farm for profession mats, you visit the farm at least once every day, and this gives you an exalted Repair vendor to repair at, as well as your own personal inn if you want somewhere safe to log out where you can never be ganked.

Cloud serpent is pretty fast (especially if you have the +rep token thing from a previous main), and as a bonus, you can get eggs for rep from some of the timeless isle mobs.

[Paelos]

I got my Shaman to 90, and now I'm running around on purple pants island. I found one of those 535 upgrade things and put it on my cloak, which is nice since I'm likely never doing that legendary cloak thing.

The rest of this island is just like watching a hilarious version of Benny Hill when a rare pops up.

[Simond]

Possibly the big thing for 5.4 that Blizzard backpeddled on?

http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/3491-Character-Level-Scaling-Feature-Connected-Realm-Updates-and-Feedback-Blue-Tweets

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ESXjRc6dfo

[Paelos]

I'm a little concerned at that idea. Mainly because it seems like a good way to recycle the old content AGAIN for people instead of working on newer stuff.

Other concern would be that it's not optional. No more farming old raids, you get auto-scaled.

[Hawkbit]

It's like they go wildly out of their way to create quality new content anymore.  They need to pull half the QoL team into the content teams.  Or, well, they needed to do that about five years ago, anyways.

[Simond]

Rumour has it that 90% of what was the Titan team got moved back to the WoW live team in the last couple of months, but I'll believe that when I start seeing evidence of it in content.

[Paelos]

Yeah that's the rumor ever since they announced they were retooling Titan. I was shocked they didn't just declare the project dead.

The flex raid thing was a good idea, and something that I've been wanting for a long time. Now they just need to apply the same mentality to dungeons between 2-5 people. That way they would remove the distinction between dungeons and scenarios to just have content.

[SurfD]

Yeah that's the rumor ever since they announced they were retooling Titan. I was shocked they didn't just declare the project dead.

The flex raid thing was a good idea, and something that I've been wanting for a long time. Now they just need to apply the same mentality to dungeons between 2-5 people. That way they would remove the distinction between dungeons and scenarios to just have content.

Well, how would that affect the length of the stuff though?   I thought the entire distinction between scenarios and dungeons was not supposed to be 3 vs 5 man, but rather be that scenarios were intended to be shorter, and dungeons longer.   If you lump it all together under a flex 3-5 scaling, there would have to be some pretty interesting reward scaling hoodoo going on to make people want to do the longer "dungeons" over the shorter "scenarios".

[Paelos]

They would all be the same length in my mind. Blizzard has already sort of ditched adding 5 man content in favor of scenarios. They might as well take the next step which is combine the two ideas, find a middle ground length and flex them.

[Ironwood]

Oh what the fuck.  Started again and I'm utterly, utterly lost.

So much has changed and so much just seems good (Proving grounds ?  Fucking brilliant idea.  Flex Raids ?  Yes Please.)

I'm LOOOOOOSTTTTT.