Upcoming patch notes, test servers going live

[Rasix]

Strath with 7 peeps last night took about 2 hours and no wipes.

It's funny because with 15 people we wipe more often.

Just curious, but is that doing both sides, Crimson and Baron?  I didn't like Strath much, it just felt like an exercise to better equip our warriors (every fucking drop was plate this or that).

[MrHat]

Just the Baron, I haven't actually done that otherside.

[Rasix]

Just the Baron, I haven't actually done that otherside.

Pitty, you missed a more boring version of Scarlet Monastery (why can't more instances be like this one.. heh).

[Sky]

There are instances in WoW?

[Chenghiz]

Pitty, you missed a more boring version of Scarlet Monastery (why can't more instances be like this one.. heh).

If they all were, people would complain about that. There're only so many ways you can make a dungeon cool/fun.

[HaemishM]

I really don't see what the big deal is with seperating into more than 1 group is for say UBRS.  If you have more than 40 members and are complaining about the limits on onyxia...that could be a problem.  I don't like huge guilds however, so luckily, I'll avoid that problem.

This is more likely a problem more specific to my guild and guilds like it.  We have poor class balance (lots of hunters/warlocks)  and we typically have 20-30 people on per night for raids.  Until we grow up a bit, this really won't be possible.   We're not a huge guild, we're just simply large and the only game in town for high end raiding on our podunk server (horde side that is).

My guild in EQ was similar. We were a Casual guild. We didn't force you to play an alt you didn't want to play on raids, we didn't have level limits, we didn't recruit by class, and as a result, all the bigger/more raid-oriented guilds had plenty of the most needed classes (healers, enchanters) and we were stuck with people who either didn't like raids to be like jobs or just didn't care that much about raids. And had there been caps on the size of raids, we'd have had real issues with trying to pick who could go and who couldn't. The worst part would have been those "required" classes would have ALWAYS had to be there.

You really cannot understand the issues this presents until you've had to deal with the problems of a friendly guild.

[Sky]

The worst part would have been those "required" classes would have ALWAYS had to be there.

I think that's the only problem I have with WoW. At some point the game stops being fun and starts being endgame EQ-like. So much done right and then....BAM shitbag city. Maybe it's not as bad as the EQ endgame, I never got past the original batch of Planes because it was so much bullshit for a not-fun raiding experience payoff. But then, EQ at release wasn't nearly so shitty at the endgame than it later became, so WoW has plenty of time to sink further into the suck.

Haemish, I wish I had been in that guild, may have saved my sanity. I play casually and I hate restrictive guilds, but I also like to play with competent players when I actually do have time to sit and group up. My EQ guild actually wasn't too bad...until they decided to reorganize (borged by another guild, too) for "raid content", and the "Inner Circle" of the new guild was a bunch of self-serving jackasses. I now totally hate not only the endgame bullshit, but just about any guild of decent size, because of the petty politics and drama. I won't put up with that kind of juvenile behaviour (high school shit imo) in reality, I'm damn sure not going to do so in my 'relaxing' hobby.

[Fabricated]

I've been playing WoW less and less since the endgame looks like a drag. Like I fucking feel like spending 3-4 hours in a raid with a clusterfuck of other people on the off chance I maybe, just maybe, will get one piece of an armor set I want, or a decent weapon.

That being said though, it's nice to see warriors getting some love. Thunderclap may just be useful outside of burning off excess rage now.

[Luxor]

I dont know if this has been menioned on the US forums but the EU version of the patch is going live on the 18th. I forsee a weekend of pain

[Ironwood]

I dont know if this has been menioned on the US forums but the EU version of the patch is going live on the 18th. I forsee a weekend of pain

That's a shame - do you think you'll have any spare time to play WoW ?

[HaemishM]

Haemish, I wish I had been in that guild, may have saved my sanity. I play casually and I hate restrictive guilds, but I also like to play with competent players when I actually do have time to sit and group up. My EQ guild actually wasn't too bad...until they decided to reorganize (borged by another guild, too) for "raid content", and the "Inner Circle" of the new guild was a bunch of self-serving jackasses. I now totally hate not only the endgame bullshit, but just about any guild of decent size, because of the petty politics and drama. I won't put up with that kind of juvenile behaviour (high school shit imo) in reality, I'm damn sure not going to do so in my 'relaxing' hobby.

That's the funny thing. We were a much more relaxed, fun guild to be around before we started really being eligible for "raid content." Soon as that happened, most of the resources, mine and the officer corps, got absolutely borged by the need to get the guild into a raidable state. And we didn't even "raid" all that often. But in order to do things like the Planes and Dragons, pretty much everything else got put on hold or dropped. We had a decent roleplaying storyline going in the guild (with our allied guilds) that got dropped because I couldn't devote any time to it or get much interest out of it because almost everyone wanted to raid for the phat lewtz. As that progressed, the alliance we were in and many members of the guild got caught up in the "I want to get mine" lewt hunger that led to me doing more forum arguing trying to set "fair" loot policies than anything else, including playing the game.

I hope WoW's endgame requirements are much easier on guild leaders, because that whole mentality can just destroy games for individuals and whole guilds alike. It turns friends into enemies squabbling over table scraps. Limiting the amount of people that can participate is almost akin to a guild size limit for any guild that wants to raid. Because if you have more than 50 people and want to do the instance that caps at 40 people, it's time to set a policy for who gets to go. Making that fair is going to be a fucking nightmare, especially if there are class issues involved, such as priests being mandatory for healing.

[Rasix]

Just did LBRS to Ommok/Voone/Shadowhunter last night.  Took just over 2 hours with 2 wipes: rogue went LD on big pull (he left due to lag) and another where we just unlucky with some heals (the 4 mobs + raider  + 2 wolves pulls are viscious + other shaman wasn't paying attention at time of pull).   Group was 2 hunters, 2 shaman, and a mage.  When we got going, we moved through it pretty fast and didn't have a problem on any of the bosses we faced.  Probably could have done it in about an hour 30 if we didn't have the two hiccups and the laggy rogue that had to be replaced (lag was bad last night, 150 pings in an instance).

You'll like this Sky; I'd now consider hunters (and multiples) to be great to have in these instances.  Freeze traps and the pets, which can be quite durable in some situations (hell, we pet tanked Voone) were a blessing.  Made everything much more manageable and on top of that they made up for the fact that I couldn't really add any DPS being on full time healer mode.   

[Sky]

Woot! Gotta love the hunter love. I'm in a kind of second honeymoon now with my hunter and WoW in general. The eqholic picked the game up last weekend, so I've been playing more (I was off in Battlefield Vietnam for a couple weeks, I loves the Battlefields!). The few weeks prior I was playing my mage and shaman alts...so now my main has like two full levels of rest, which is pretty nifty. Dinged 45 last night doing some leatherworking quests and all of 45 is blue. Also tamed Snarler...just before his nerf. Hope to get him out for some pvp over the weekend, maybe. Even ran into a very cool Shaman...I was out hunting in Feralas with my Longtooth Runner when Snarler spawned (he's rare ifyadintno). I was close to Mojache, so I jumped over the back wall there, stabled Longtooth, ran back...and a Shammy had Snarler almost dead. I asked him if I could tame it, and he went ahead and let me! Too bad Blizz decided to have less unique pets in the world, dammit. We need more cool pets, not less!

[Ironwood]

You can tame the unique beasts ?

Dammit.  Wish I'd known that a while ago.

Is there anywhere you can point me for the full skinny on the hunter class ?  Thot and alaka don't seem to be chocka full of the details.

[Trippy]

You can tame the unique beasts ?

Dammit.  Wish I'd known that a while ago.

Is there anywhere you can point me for the full skinny on the hunter class ?  Thot and alaka don't seem to be chocka full of the details.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-hunter&t=155&p=1&tmp=1#post155

[Ironwood]

Wow.  The Official Boards Hunter Discussion threads.  I should have thought of that.  I'm obviously too f13 orientated.

Cheers mate.


Edited to add :  Wait a minute, I have to tame another pet with bite or claw so that I can learn it and then teach it to Hobbes ?  Eh ?

[pants]

Wow.  The Official Boards Hunter Discussion threads.  I should have thought of that.  I'm obviously too f13 orientated.

Cheers mate.


Edited to add :  Wait a minute, I have to tame another pet with bite or claw so that I can learn it and then teach it to Hobbes ?  Eh ?

Yep.  If you tamed Hobbes as, lets say a Lv10 Cougar from Mulgore, he won't have any skills.  You can learn basic growl from the pet trainer, but to learn any other skills you have to.

*  Put Hobbes into the stables.
*  Go out and tame another pet with the skill you want to learn.
*  Go and fight a few (only 2-3 mobs) with the new pet - you will learn the skill you want (Bite/Claw/Cower) off it.
*  Abandon the pet.
*  Go back and get Hobbes out of the stable.
*  Use Train Pet to teach Hobbes the new skill.

You have to do this not only when learning a brand new skill (ie learning Bite because Hobbes doesn't know Bite), but when upgrading a skill from, say Claw 1 to Claw 2.  So you end up faffing around with pets once every 7-8 levels to get their new skills.

There is a good list of what animals have what skills here -> http://www.goodintentionsguild.info/hunters.html

[Trippy]

Some additional Hunter comments and clarifications:

Edited to add :  Wait a minute, I have to tame another pet with bite or claw so that I can learn it and then teach it to Hobbes ?  Eh ?

Yep.  If you tamed Hobbes as, lets say a Lv10 Cougar from Mulgore, he won't have any skills.  You can learn basic growl from the pet trainer, but to learn any other skills you have to.

You get Growl 1 and 2 automatically when you complete the second part of the beast taming quest. It's already in your Beast Training skill which confusingly is located under the General Spellbook tab (the top right tab) and not the Beast Mastery tab like your other Pet skills are. A lot of low level hunters don't realize this since the quest wording is very vague about all this.

*  Put Hobbes into the stables.
*  Go out and tame another pet with the skill you want to learn.
*  Go and fight a few (only 2-3 mobs) with the new pet - you will learn the skill you want (Bite/Claw/Cower) off it.

It may take more than a couple of mobs to learn the new skill. You'll see some text appear in your General chat window (not the Combat Log) window when this happens. It also helps to put that skill on autocast (right click on it) so you don't have to micromanage it.

Not all pet families can learn all four pet skills (Growl, Bite, Claw, Cower) though all the cats can so you won't run into that issue with Hobbes. When you do teach Hobbes Claw you may want to consider leaving autocast turned off on it if you need Hobbes to do the tanking while solo. Claw does not have a cooldown (just the normal skill refresh time) so he'll burn through his energy very quickly if you leave it on autocast and then he won't have energy for Growl and he'll lose aggro. If you are in a group with sufficient tankage you can turn off Growl autocast and turn on Claw autocast and have Hobbes swipe away at mobs.

Edit: Ugh, *Growl* not *Cower*

[Ironwood]

Cheers for the assists all.  I have growl and cower already, since I think I learned them when I was trundling about with the taming quests (the crab and the boar).  It's just a shame I didn't know about this earlier, or I could have done it before level 15 !  Yeah, Yeah, I know - pwned Noob, etc.

It also clears up another question I had - Hobbes NEVER uses up any of his Focus at all, and I was starting to wonder what the hell it was 'for' and why you would use talents to increase it.  Obviously, if the other skills burn through it quicker, that would make sense.  You just know that if something's too easy, you're doing it wrong...

I still say that it's the most fun class I have played yet - I have a warrior (yuck) a 20th Rogue and my hunter - the wife has a paladin, a priest - neither of which appeal to me.  Though oddly enough, she never has any trouble getting a group....

[Sky]

Well, since you only have growl/cower, and only one of those should be active at any given time, he's using very little focus. When you teach him claw and/or bite, he'll use more. But pets regen focus quick, so it's not really a big deal. I think improving a pet's focus is pretty much a waste of talent points. I did take the hit point boosting talent, but that was to fill out prereqs for the run speed talents in the beastmastery tree (right now I'm 18 beast/18 marksman, but the rest of my talents will be marksman).

Anyone know if the Snarler nerf means that the Burning Roc (fire resists..helloooo mages and warlocks!) is getting a nerf as well? I was hunting in Tanaris last night and thought about taming one while I'm there...and ditching my King B, finally. He has slightly better stats and better dps than my longtooth runner, but the wolf does ok, since he's a speed pet and not a tank pet. Thinking about grabbing a scorpid or a bear to complement Longtooth.

[Calantus]

It wasn't a Snarler nerf. It is a nerf for all pet resistance, so yeah... the rocs will be nerfed.

[Sky]

whaaaaaahhh  As I said previously:

Too bad Blizz decided to have less unique pets in the world, dammit. We need more cool pets, not less!

Guess I'll stick with my wolf, blah. How bland. And get a bear like every other moron. Yay.

[Phred]

whaaaaaahhh  As I said previously:

Too bad Blizz decided to have less unique pets in the world, dammit. We need more cool pets, not less!

Guess I'll stick with my wolf, blah. How bland. And get a bear like every other moron. Yay.

Maybe your server is different, but the 2 I've played on most, the morons tend to gravitate toward cats. King B or lookalikes seem to be the pet of choice of the worst hunters I've encountered,  at least.

Oh ya, another good hunter trick I picked up recently, that's obvious in retrospect but didn't occur to me. Use a freezing trap when taming pets. You don't have to take a beating as long if you can keep the potential pet nicely away from you.

I tamed a black bear in Loch Modan at 10 when I got the skill and have stayed with him pretty well exclusively. I tried a swamp jaguar for a bit but with the pet speed bug, his much higher pursuit speed was pretty well useless most of the time, and he didn't seem to tank as well as the bear. I've tried a turtle but the supposed better armor class wasn't there when I compared him with my bear so I went back to the bear. The main reason I like the bear is they will eat anything, don't make annoying sounds when they attack like apes do and he does a decent job of tanking. It would be nice is pets had a bit more variety though. Other than attack speed and run speed when told to attack, they all seem pretty much the same and Blizzard seems determined to set them all to the lowest common denominator.

[Ironwood]

Maybe your server is different, but the 2 I've played on most, the morons tend to gravitate toward cats.

I take offense, Sir !


As to your other remark, it's another one of the hallmark problems of online games - if you don't make ALL pets bland and the same, then mostly everyone will use the same 'good' pet.  It's that simple.  And once you realise that, all you're left with is a lot of different pets with the 'same' grades.

Come with solutions !!

[Jayce]

As to your other remark, it's another one of the hallmark problems of online games - if you don't make ALL pets bland and the same, then mostly everyone will use the same 'good' pet.  It's that simple.  And once you realise that, all you're left with is a lot of different pets with the 'same' grades.

Come with solutions !!

Various pets for various situations.  This pet has good resists, this one is fast.  That one has a lot of hp or damage mitigation, but the other is a glass cannon (high damage but fragile).  In essence, create a microcosm of the (well-done in WoW) class differentiation but in the pet world.

The hard part might be this dual-vision design: each beast-type mob has to be both an adversary and potential ally.  That could  complicate encounter creation.

[Phred]

What Jayce said. Balance for the pets is tricky, especially with the hunter being one of the last classes added, but having some reason to have a few pets stabled or picking a pet that fits how you want to play the class would be much more interesting, IMO. It's like the talents for hunter. At first look it would seem that having a fast attacking pet would be a good thing if you went beast mastery, what with the talent that heals you every time the pet hits something, but I find with my play style I am so infrequently in melee that the need to be healed by my pet is non-existant. If I'm getting attacked, it's usually from a big crit and I usually take a couple of hits then disengage and back off to gun range. I've gone from dual wielding and caring about melee weapons to picking a 2H weapon with stats, and my skill is usually hovering about 5-10 pts behind my level max.

[Rasix]

Just an FYI, hunters become pretty valid offtanks in later instances in the proper gear.  I'd wager a few of them are using that pet heal ability. 

[pants]

(lag was bad last night, 150 pings in an instance).

Please tell me you're joking.  Please tell me 150 pings are not 'bad'.

Anything under 500 is good for me - regularly play at 500-600.

[Rasix]

I typically ping in the low 60s, especially if I'm in an instance with only 4 other people.  If my ping starts hovering above 150 in an instance, 400+ in org,  or high 200s in zones like STV, I can tell it's a bad day for the server. 

Sorry to those of you on shit connects or overcrowded servers.   

[Jayce]

Sargeras just started having queues and lag problems lately.  I have pung around 120ish on average since forever.  Now sometimes it climbs into the 200s.

[Calantus]

I ping 300-400 from Australia... how the hell do you ping 500-600? Dial-up?

[pants]

I ping 300-400 from Australia... how the hell do you ping 500-600? Dial-up?

Not sure frankly.  I'm coming from Aus too - on tpg's 1.5Meg ADSL plan - maybe coz Proudmoore is one of the basket case servers?  Anyway I regularly see 500-600 pings - which means 95% of my online time the ping bar thingy is red.  Maybe I'll try out a lower pop server and see what the pings are like (altho convincing the rest of my guild to move could be, ah, interesting).

[Margalis]

A large problem with raids is that WoW is not generally a group centric or guild centric game. Then suddenly the endgame is to gather huge swaths of people.

I think they just didn't know what else to do. Fast levelling curve, people get to the end...and what?

[Rasix]

Que?

Edit: Valid and somewhat true observation (to a point), just a tad out of left field at this point in the thread.

[Margalis]

Que?

Edit: Valid and somewhat true observation (to a point), just a tad out of left field at this point in the thread.

I haven't been reading the therad, and that was the interesting part.

Now go back to discussing your ping.