World of Warcraft: Current Year

I think ToS is what swung it heavily in favor of Horde because of Goblin rocket jump on KJ

Khane said:

I think ToS is what swung it heavily in favor of Horde because of Goblin rocket jump on KJ

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That could very well be the case, we weren't bleeding edge when we killed mKJ (got him like 2-3 weeks before ABT) and still had people that were race changing to goblins even when it wasn't required because it allowed people to be fucking lazy.

Sumdain x said:

Is it just me or is something missing from this expac? prior to legion launch i was looking forward to Lego's (before we saw how shitty they are), Artifact weapons, World quests, Scaling dungeons (M+). with this expansion it feels like they just reskinned Legion and didn't add a lot of new content, I haven't done warfronts yet so i may be missing something? world pvp is crazy bad atm since fury war's and rogues can global you and if you turn on war mode you will generally always be getting ganked (it puts you on a shard with 50/50 horde/alli). its just weird for there not to be something crazy to look forward to in the expac. maybe preview a legendary like the ring or the cloaks thatll take all expac to get?.

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Seems to me that they felt like Legion got out of control, so they decided to haul everything back in. Do a stat squish, get rid of legendaries, artifact weapons & tier and start fresh. It probably leaves them more options for future tiers & expansions, but it definitely removes a lot of the excitement in regards to the launch of BFA. I think going from Legion to BFA is going to feel really bad for most players.

That said, it'll still be a new expansion, so players will come back and current players will give it a try for a month or 2. Since it will likely feel bad to start, it won't be hard to add in a few things that'll make players happy in the 8.1 patch and that might be enough to retain a good portion of the playerbase, and make BFA a big success. Who knows.

I am looking forward to the island expeditions. I'm sure I will only like them for like 3 weeks but whatever. Other then that yes, it looks like a reskinned Legion.

Burns said:

They probably just changed 100 to 110 in the code for the boosts, and since DHs start at 100, they were never in the code.

If you just log on to catch the invasions over the corse of a week or two, you can do 100 - 110 with heirlooms in something like 1.5 hours /played. The DH intro, unfortunately, will take the same amount of time, though.

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They start invasions already?

Sumdain x said:

Is it just me or is something missing from this expac?

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Not just you, it adds nothing of interest. Island expeditions are supposed to be a new thing, but they are slow, tedious and worthless. If a quest designer came up with an idea for a world quest where you killed 500 mobs for 300 azerite they would get slapped upside the head for being a dumbass. I am not sure what they were going for here honestly.

world pvp is crazy bad atm since fury war's and rogues can global you and if you turn on war mode you will generally always be getting ganked (it puts you on a shard with 50/50 horde/alli)

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Did you actually try it ? I levelled 3 chars in war mode to check it out and ran into a grand total of two hostile players across all of them. One of them, of course, was a stealthed overgeared rogue sapping people moving through a mob infested area in a quest hub, and the other one was a hopelessly incompetent fury warrior, who I assume was just desperately happy to see any enemy player. No-one can get even remotely close to 'globalling' you either, particularly not a fury warrior.

Korillo said:

Seems to me that they felt like Legion got out of control, so they decided to haul everything back in. Do a stat squish, get rid of legendaries, artifact weapons & tier and start fresh. It probably leaves them more options for future tiers & expansions, but it definitely removes a lot of the excitement in regards to the launch of BFA. I think going from Legion to BFA is going to feel really bad for most players.

That said, it'll still be a new expansion, so players will come back and current players will give it a try for a month or 2. Since it will likely feel bad to start, it won't be hard to add in a few things that'll make players happy in the 8.1 patch and that might be enough to retain a good portion of the playerbase, and make BFA a big success. Who knows.

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Depending on the class some classes will notice the effects of their artifact being gone less than others. Some the one bit you would notice is now a talent so you can take it if you want it but with the stat squish overall the numbers of everything are so much smaller a lot of the passive stuff is just not going to be that noticable. Taking one of my two main characters on the PTR I can still do the content I was doing before with just some slight rotational changes for the boomkin and the new demo warlock rotation. Even after taking a huge nerf bat demo warlock still seems really enjoyable on PTR and I was still punching through silver elites on argus solo no problem. The lowered life drain auto healing is noticeable but it just means you need to throw a health siphon at the pet once in a while now. The level of self healing warlocks had previously was pretty crazy and its more in line with them now no longer needing to lifetap for mana.

Overall it pretty much feels the same as most expansion starts on ptr. Honestly the legendaries are probably more noticeable once they deactivate or like one of my demo warlock ones simply is no longer applicable due to lack of doomguard/felguard summoning. People keep their legendaries till 115 though so a bit more of a smooth power curve on that so its not immediate cut off.

Ukerric said:

If you are leveling, and there's an invasion going on, you can do the WQ, despite not being 110. Those WQ yield something like 3 or 4 times the XP of a normal quest, and the ones who would give you gear give you +XP instead. With flying, you get a level per invasion in 15mn...

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Ah, those invasions. Forgot about them, thank you. I still have a few toons I never bothered to level in legion. And with the xmog races was hoping they had put in precursor invasion like they had just before legion. Levelled 1 of everything to 100 off of those.

It really feels like in going from 110 to 120 you gain... nothing . There's no Talent at 120, no new ability / spell, just a 'ding' now go farm some Azerite so you can get a 0.03% increase in your +better. Literally every time I got a piece of armor that was effected by the Azerite I would be momentarily excited and then look at the abilities on it and sigh outwardly. They are incredibly dull and do absolutely nothing for me, especially since everything scales.

velk said:

Not just you, it adds nothing of interest. Island expeditions are supposed to be a new thing, but they are slow, tedious and worthless. If a quest designer came up with an idea for a world quest where you killed 500 mobs for 300 azerite they would get slapped upside the head for being a dumbass. I am not sure what they were going for here honestly.

Did you actually try it ? I levelled 3 chars in war mode to check it out and ran into a grand total of two hostile players across all of them. One of them, of course, was a stealthed overgeared rogue sapping people moving through a mob infested area in a quest hub, and the other one was a hopelessly incompetent fury warrior, who I assume was just desperately happy to see any enemy player. No-one can get even remotely close to 'globalling' you either, particularly not a fury warrior.

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Hm not sure how long ago you tried it, but i was getting destroyed by fury warriors on the warlock, if i could fear i had a chance but getting it off was dicey. i was playing a clothy at the time so maybe that had something to do with it, or the pvp talents they were using? i haven't been jumped by a rogue but a guildy DK said they were stunned and destroyed in about 5 seconds with no time to do anything where they weren't stunned/sapped. it wasn't common, and most people left each other alone just because they wanted to level to 120 faster.

I haven't seen the 50/50 split they are looking for yet, but that could just be the pop on beta, i know the general idea is to have people flagged for pvp be in areas where other people flagged for pvp are. there was a blue post about it a few weeks back. It makes sense that if you want to pvp you would be sharded to an area with other pvpers. otherwise you would just leave war mode engaged and go to a high pop horde server like Illidan (or sargeras for alli) where we are 90%+ horde and get the 10% faster leveling experience.

you also have to remember the first 2 zones are faction specific so you really won't start seeing pvp open world until 115-116.

Not sure if I want to do Havoc DH or BM Hunter for BFA. I feel losing the extra pet on the hunter is gonna suck bad for damage and class "fantasy".

Though honestly this expac is giving me the WoD play-for-a-month and quit vibe...

velk said:

Did you actually try it ? I levelled 3 chars in war mode to check it out and ran into a grand total of two hostile players across all of them. One of them, of course, was a stealthed overgeared rogue sapping people moving through a mob infested area in a quest hub, and the other one was a hopelessly incompetent fury warrior, who I assume was just desperately happy to see any enemy player. No-one can get even remotely close to 'globalling' you either, particularly not a fury warrior.

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I concur. I leveled a premade Ally rogue and a copied Horde Blood DK to 120 in Warmode. On the rogue I was attacked twice. I got gibed once, by a 120 rogue, at 110, when I just started the first zone and was at half health. The second time, a 120 Vengeance DH jumped in, when I was at half health in combat, and was able to get me down to 25% before I got away. Other than that, I only saw horde when traveling, and would have had to dismount, if I wanted to pvp. On the horde DK, I saw maybe 3 ally while leveling, but none decided to attack. As a fresh 120 rogue, with super shit ilevel, it felt like I would have lost to a 111 copied toon.

The only thing that looks scary on a rogue is the lego cloak stacks with the 110 talent and the pvp talent that combines to buffs FOK by 5000% or some such. Only, in pvp, they already nerfed FoK cloak in legion, my tooltip (on copied 110) said 60,000 dmg, while it only hit 118 -120s for 8,000 - 11,000. I did get to one round every Demo pet that was near a warlock I tested the cloak on, before I vanished and ran away!

I did some WQs at 120, with warmode on, and started to run into more pvpers; where they would try to engage the rogue, but I was always able to get away. No one cared to mess with a blood DK. I doubt I will keep warmode on at 120, as 10% more resources seems meh, when the cost is adding more time to grinding shit dailies.

Sumdain x said:

They also said that Horde had an easier time leveling in the expac and that there were *things* that made it advantageous to be horde side early on...not sure of the specifics. currently Troll/Orcs racials equate to a decently large dps increase but there is probably something else.

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I would love to know what bonuses the horde have on the leveling front.

From my experience, the horde have slightly better designed zone in Zuldazar, in that it is a more condensed leveling experience than what I found in the Ally zones. It also helps that you can hearth to the pyramid (horde main city) and glider off the top to get most anywhere, in the zone, faster than the FP. I didn't see anything else that stood out with horde vs ally leveling, but then again, it seems like there is always some exploit in leveling for the first day, in every xpac that I'm never privy to.

As an aside, with warmode on, to get to 120, you will only need to do 2 of the 3 zones, so I may have ended up skipping the best ally zone for questing (Tiragarde Sound). I will be doing it on live though, since Stormsong Valley was lackluster.

moonarchia said:

They start invasions already?

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They introduced level 100+ legion invasions in the Broken Isles as part of Tomb of Sargaras patch. It happens in one zone, once every 18.5 hours. Wowhead has a tracker on its front page for it. It is the fastest way to level in /played.

yea i think it has to do with the leveling paths, but then again what does getting a few hours head start actually give you with almost nothing unlocked at 120 till a few weeks later. Maybe since the guild in question requires you to have 3-4 characters max level in the first week for eventual split runs?

During legion there was an exploit in Suramar and you could get maxed rep on day 2, there were groups in arcway/cos the day after release which should have set off red flags at blizzard but nobody cared, they just hot fixed the npc.

Ukerric said:

If you are leveling, and there's an invasion going on, you can do the WQ, despite not being 110. Those WQ yield something like 3 or 4 times the XP of a normal quest, and the ones who would give you gear give you +XP instead. With flying, you get a level per invasion in 15mn...

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If you are leveling an alt do any invasion that is up. They are good order hall resources and hella fast for leveling. I leveled my demon hunter to level 110 doing nothing but demonic invasions haha.

Brikker said:

Not sure if I want to do Havoc DH or BM Hunter for BFA. I feel losing the extra pet on the hunter is gonna suck bad for damage and class "fantasy".

Though honestly this expac is giving me the WoD play-for-a-month and quit vibe...

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If you want the extra pet it is available in the talent animal companion. Basically pick one of your stabled pets and you can get a version that works basically just like hati. Beastmastery felt a lot better and looks animation wise way better in BfA. Instead of dire beast being your main resource gainer you get something called barbed shot. Hitting with it basically boosts your talent like dire frenzy used to do. Overall less random yipping/roaring and less derpy animations due to that.

Sumdain x said:

Yea in vanilla it was Alliance or burst and horde had the short end of the stick. it'll swing back around eventually.

We had a guy who is a top 10 US player stay in our guild for a bit before moving to his new Alliance guild (he was RL friends with our GM). well about a week ago the guild spent its vault and paid for character swap from alli to horde for 3 characters per player. they swapped because of recruitment, they said it was too difficult to get good horde players to transfer sides. they also said that Horde had an easier time leveling in the expac and that there were *things* that made it advantageous to be horde side early on...not sure of the specifics. currently Troll/Orcs racials equate to a decently large dps increase but there is probably something else.

Is it just me or is something missing from this expac? prior to legion launch i was looking forward to Lego's (before we saw how shitty they are), Artifact weapons, World quests, Scaling dungeons (M+). with this expansion it feels like they just reskinned Legion and didn't add a lot of new content, I haven't done warfronts yet so i may be missing something? world pvp is crazy bad atm since fury war's and rogues can global you and if you turn on war mode you will generally always be getting ganked (it puts you on a shard with 50/50 horde/alli). its just weird for there not to be something crazy to look forward to in the expac. maybe preview a legendary like the ring or the cloaks thatll take all expac to get?

i would like to also see previews of raid tier azerite traits, the ones we've seen so far have ranged to meh to busted. the destro one that gave you a permanent 20% haste buff if the mob was over 80% hp was pretty god damn strong, even for leveling.

quick update on my warlock, made him 3 weeks ago and my legos are norgannons, portal pants, affli bracers, demo helm (bis for demo, but does nothing with expac), argus ring, class ring. i'm up to 962 and 5/11m. just need to grab another 1-2 legos, get my norgannons to 1000, and grab an acrid injector and should be good to go for my level-a-thon.

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You talking about Vision(z.. lol) who moved to Thrall Horde? If not that makes 2 top 10 US guilds who had to empty their vault to xfer their entire guild.

Burns said:

I would love to know what bonuses the horde have on the leveling front.

From my experience, the horde have slightly better designed zone in Zuldazar, in that it is a more condensed leveling experience than what I found in the Ally zones. It also helps that you can hearth to the pyramid (horde main city) and glider off the top to get most anywhere, in the zone, faster than the FP. I didn't see anything else that stood out with horde vs ally leveling, but then again, it seems like there is always some exploit in leveling for the first day, in every xpac that I'm never privy to.

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I'd be interested as well, nothing really stood out for me as a mechanical or speed advantage. Overall Horde levelling quests were considerably more interesting though at least. On alliance side, drustvar is pretty good, stormsong is eh, and tiragarde is a boring pile of collect bear asses. All of the horde zones have a reasonably coherent storyline.