World of Warcraft: Classic

See also: Me going for 8/8 Nemesis for the -20% threat. Sure, Bloodvine and offset pieces are better dps on paper, but if you’re threatcapped it doesn’t mean anything. And not dying every time I AOE or get a crit early in a fight or the tank misses three attacks midfight is so nice.

Paladin advantages were general and thus more obvious for a given generic encounter. However encounters are not generic, they vary widely, and sometimes shaman are better. Their advantages are usually more subtle than something like reduced threat on the whole raid.

BoozeCube said:

They might not like it and it might not be fun game play but that fairy twinkled toed cocksucker can by the holy light spend the next three hours casting 5 min buffs on 40 people.

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If anyone picks a class that has an awful job or mechanic stapled to it than they did it to themselves.

Greater Blessings are a thing in 1.12, so it’s 15 minutes rather than 5.

a_skeleton_03 said:

Everquest Shaman in Classic - Luclin.

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truth - I ALWAYS want to play one and end up talking myself out of it because fuck doing all those buffs non stop

don't forget timing cannibalize between med ticks

sadris said:

4 druids per raid because of battle res.

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We had 7 druids on Grand Widow Faerlina (poison mostly lmao)

Grim1 said:

My memory is foggy on this but wasn't the Horde a huge underdog on most servers during launch and BC? I just recall making Horde toons and loving the fact that BG's had no queues for Horde. But Alliance was always complaining about the queues. Could be wrong about all of that. Purple haze and all.

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I played on a PvE and PvP server in classic era. On the PvE server the Alliance outnumbered us 3:1 or whatever, and pre-BGs it was basically them camping Tarren Mill all day and us Horde basically hiding behind guards and goading them to get too close. I won the tabard contest because I was a fire mage (ranged attacker) and basically tab targeted people all day behind guards. (also organized mage bomb AoE groups. that was amusing)

In PvE server BGs Horde got in fast, but we faced two problems: one, BGs launched with uneven teams (so AVs would end up like 40 alliance and 20 Horde or whatever the lower bound was) and two, the Alliance that got inside were waiting for like 2 hours or whatever, so they were dedicated players while any Horde scrub with 30 minutes of playtime could get in at will. Naturally this resulted in a lot of easy Alliance wins. Generally speaking Horde players were better than Alliance players however.

When I rolled on a PvP server it was different. Horde had the queues and dominated most BGs. I recall the Alliance uber guild joining BGs with their raid gear and getting wins but otherwise we did well. Biggest problem for us was nobody wanted to heal while Alliance had heal bots and tanks everywhere. I made a druid just to see what kind of difference a single skilled healer could do in a 40 man BG that otherwise had no healers but by late classic era, healing was worthless because DPS was so insane that people died before any heals could get off.

When TBC launched a lot of Alliance players switched to Horde for the elves. I recall the Horde faction losing their skill advantage and chat becoming much more obnoxious.

I had a similar experience, but I started on Whisperwind (PvE) as alliance. Horde was outnumbered, but not by a terrible amount. Battles at Crossroads and TM would go back and forth most of the time. Not sure if other servers did this or not, but before people on my server decided TM/SS was better, Crossroads was the place to gain honor in large battles for a few weeks. Later I moved to one of the PvP servers and rolled some horde characters. We definitely outnumbered the alliance as I barely saw any of them in the world and our queue times for BGs were absolute hell. Eventually cross-realm BGs happened and things got significantly better.

From what I've read it seems like more people want to go horde on PvP servers due mainly to racials for the PvP benefit, and of course because horde has undead and orcs instead of fleshies and elves. Most of the top PvP streamers are horde, and most of the people in chat seem to have a hardon for horde. Who knows, maybe the alliance people are just quieter. I played both sides on the stress test, and I will say the horde chat was much more childish yet entertaining in true barren's chat tradition. Anyway, this is all just a guess on my part based on not much. As most of the guild seems to want to roll PvP, you can safely ignore the alliance bonus population that PvE servers are said to have.

When BGs come out we're getting the cross-realm queuing, so population amounts really only matter in the open world. Pre-BG honor grind and wPvP, grouping for content, leveling in the world without being perma-ganked, getting into raids without being counter-raid cockblocked, etc. From what I've seen of world chat, avoiding streamers seems to be a decent idea unless you like seeing endless spam about them for hours and hours. Either way, it's gonna be fun and I can't wait until release.

The realm I picked during the stress test was unplayable due to the sheer amount of people in elwynn forest. I remade as a orc on the same server and there was a night and day difference just in elwynn vs durotar. Dunno how packed Tirisfal was, however.

Tirisfal was the most packed of the Horde starting areas when I was bouncing around checking.

Layering had a lot to do with how populated starting zones were. I logged into the Dwarven starting zone with zero other people that I could see. A streamer I was watching logged into the same zone and server and it was absolutely packed. Durotar was pretty packed for me as well as the Night Elf zone. You might be able to get a friend on another less populated layer to toss you an invite into their layer if you get lucky.

BoozeCube said:

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It's funny, when I'm thinking back on those classics that really, really struck me with awe back in the day, I don't remember playing them on those ancient tiny CRT displays, on their last years before flatscreens became dominant, but that's the only thing we had back then.

Quineloe said:

It's funny, when I'm thinking back on those classics that really, really struck me with awe back in the day, I don't remember playing them on those ancient tiny CRT displays, on their last years before flatscreens became dominant, but that's the only thing we had back then.

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I remember buying my first flatscreen, a 19 inch ACER, and I felt like I came from the future

I think mine was an 18" Dell, that I had to exchange because of 3-4 dead pixels. Felt good not having to lug around 50lbs of 19" CRT back and forth to college.