World of Warcraft: Current Year

Sabbat_sl said:

I can't find any info about the season 13 change over, specifically if S12 Malevolent gear will become purchasable with honor, instead of conquest. Sitting on 4k honor on the character I'd like to play next season who has zero PvP gear at the moment.

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you will be able to buy all malevolent gear with honor in patch 5.2 (it may be a week or two before the season starts and usually cant buy until then). I assume, but don't know for certain, if you will also be able to buy weapons. You may also need to accrue a certain amount of honor before weps or whatever can be bought too, I remember in cata you needed like 7k honor (?) to buy the previous seasons weapons, and it was honor that you got in the current season not the past.

malev gear is dropping from ilevel 483 to 476 though, and I assume the upgrade vendor for them is going away as well. The devs have posted mysterious hints that the gear upgrader going away is not a big deal and something else is coming in place for PVPers, whether thats a full set of premade gear or something probably bizarre and unwanted is anyones guess.

Merrith_sl said:

Sad to hear, although not surprising. Part of what made dungeons like Scholo and BRD great in Vanilla was how they were not tunnels. Sure there was a lot of trash, but it was an epic experience then. Another reason to never come back. As soon as they went the direction that everyone could expect to see everything in a dungeon through a tunnel and succeed with ease, the game lost something.

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Yeah I find that every time I come back to play WoW I am looking for something that it can't offer any more, which is the experience of being new to MMOs. There will never be another MMO that hooks me, because even if it's a new game I will still know the basics of everything there is to know about MMOs. It will be all the same stuff, just with a different appearance.

So 5.2 has some healing buffs. Druid mushroom is getting changed to absorb rejuve healing, which looks kind of neat, although honestly it should probably bloom on it's own instead of requiring us to activate.

Meanwhile, disc priests get ridic buffs. I'm not saying they don't need them; PW:S is expensive and they're getting a reduction on the mana cost, but man. Resto dru and shm being sat for heroic modes again this xpac is really eating at me. Druids are getting a straight 10% increase healing, but druids aren't weak because of thoroughput, they're weak because of their abilities. Lifebloom being restricted to one target was one of the biggest killers.

I play three different healers now and it's really interesting to see the discrepancies. All the charts and testing show that druids and resto shaman do very well early on, but as you receive better gear they start sinking...and sinking. Same thing that happened in Cataclysm.

I love my druid, but I'm so sad that this keeps happening. The only fight I feel particularly awesome for is Blade Lord; otherwise most other fights if I were a disc priest we'd be rocking it much more.

LadyVex_sl said:

So 5.2 has some healing buffs. Druid mushroom is getting changed to absorb rejuve healing, which looks kind of neat, although honestly it should probably bloom on it's own instead of requiring us to activate.

Meanwhile, disc priests get ridic buffs. I'm not saying they don't need them; PW:S is expensive and they're getting a reduction on the mana cost, but man. Resto dru and shm being sat for heroic modes again this xpac is really eating at me. Druids are getting a straight 10% increase healing, but druids aren't weak because of thoroughput, they're weak because of their abilities. Lifebloom being restricted to one target was one of the biggest killers.

I play three different healers now and it's really interesting to see the discrepancies. All the charts and testing show that druids and resto shaman do very well early on, but as you receive better gear they start sinking...and sinking. Same thing that happened in Cataclysm.

I love my druid, but I'm so sad that this keeps happening. The only fight I feel particularly awesome for is Blade Lord; otherwise most other fights if I were a disc priest we'd be rocking it much more.

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Umm Disc is getting gutted hard. Mastery no longer effecting spirit shell, spirit buffs no longer effecting rapture, and prayer of healing no longer adding divine aegis to the healed targets are all huge nerfs, but not on those notes which why it seems liek they are just being buffed.

Not sure what she means by Shaman getting sat either. They're most definitely heroic viable.

Yea resto shaman are amazing healers at the moment *shrug*

Ukerric_sl said:

Why waste time on max-level dungeons that are probably going to be even less used than levelling dungeons?

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Why not just release them as normal dungeons 85-89 then so there's some variety when you're leveling? It's stupid.

5.2 ptr notes mention that heroic bosses now drop 100 JP per. That should smooth out gearing for people who are trying to meet the ilvl requirementd for LFR or just get really bad RNG while in lfr.

I'm doing some reading here, and I poked through the openraid.us site. How in the fuck do you go about getting into a rated bg team if you don't already know people running them? Spam trade? Yeah like that works .

Ever check the server forum? Seems like our server's forum is almost pure guild and pvp recruitment now.

Are you on a dead server? On illidan, KT, tich, and other top pvp servers - usehttp://www.guildox.com/go/g.asp?a=17&w=USto see how the servers stack up rBG wise - there are tons of pickup low MMR rBG groups all the time that spam trade for more. A healer has the easiest time getting in. You still will need some honor PVP gear, preferably upgraded. I join a pug rBG a few times a month, mon/tue is the best day to play since it has the most teams. Its pretty random how you will do, I've gone 5-0 sometimes and 0-4 sometimes, and in the latter you have rage quitters every loss which slows it all down. I'm mixed on how fun it is, obviously winning is fun but I have more fun just playing with a friend in 2v2.

oh, also get the mod oQueue from curse, its like openraid but in game and more PVP focused.

Will hafta take a look. We'd be on Mannoroth.

Edit: boy are they hurtin' for some Horde teams. Ew.

As for disc, I actually didn't see the nerfs, just the buffs. The only nerf I saw was that divine aegis is not guaranteed from prayer of healing. That blows if so. Disc I thought was right where other classes needed to be.

And I'm sure any class will get taken to heroics. There is a difference between "viable" and "awesome". I'd argue that unless you're doing pvp, shaman are not awesome. Their mastery is lacking, earth living tends to be a waste...if you don't need heroism you're better off taking priests/paladins over druids and shaman. All testing (and actual attempts at bosses) show that druids and shaman are once again having toolkit issues. The two more iconic spells (and ones that would be absolutely insanely good in this content) are either not efficient (chain heal needs a glyph to be viable in 10 mans and lifebloom has long since been one target) or don't work like they used to. Still awesome with TOL and for one or two rolling targets but man.

They're doing a bandaid with druids by granting a passive 10% heal and changing mushrooms, but once again, it's not thoroughput druids are lacking. It's definitive toolkit abilities and burst AE healing. I would have thought that shamans with totems would be amazing in this xpac, but the fights require too much movement, so totems like spirit link (which only work within 10 yds) are getting trounced.

It's an issue both classes have had since Cataclysm, and one that isn't getting addressed. And honestly, I care less about shaman because at least when grouped up they can do intense healing, but druids man.

As for normal mode dungeons, you can't just ding and go to heroics if, like me, you followed the progression path and hit 90 in kun-lai. My ilvl was nowhere near where it should have been. Your option at that point was to either get crafted items, buy JP items (granted, with what fucking JP?), or finish off the other zones for added ilvl.

It would have taken zero extra effort to just scale those dungeons back, so that someone who did hit 90 early, could just random normals - especially those two, to get into heroics.

Like I said, lots of little things they could have done that they never did.

Edit: Oh, and new cute panda pets with 5.2 are awesome, except they are pet battles. I haven't gone back to pet battles since I finished Aki, not even to do the pandaren spirit tamers, though I want them badly. Just so angered by RNG woes with them. Must have more pets though.

Thanks for all the gearing tips in the last couple pages. Not sure I'll have the patience to do all that but at least now I have a plan.

Some questions about druid feral/tank:

1)Is it me or is a tank spe much better than a feral spe for leveling? Not even counting dungeon Q time, just questing. Recount does not show a huge DPS increase when I use my feral/cat spe and I have to stop every other pull to eat/heal. And it's mostly single pulls. I think I can pull off a huge number when I burn all the CDs in the right order but that's once every 3-4 minutes. As a tank/bear I can pull same level mobs 6 at a time without breaking a sweat and I never have to eat/heal. My single target DPS in tank/bear without CDs is roughly at 13k (non elite short-ish fights). I get roughly 14-15k in cat. And it's a lot more work. Maybe I'm just doing it wrong.

2)Did they nerf feral charge? I feel like the range is not what it used to be (a year ago). Also I clearly remember being able to use charge when bosses had a "punt you straight up in the air" ability. I can't seem to do that anymore (might be range related?).

3)Is Disorienting Roar any good as an added AoE aggro skill? I'm having a tough time holding aggro on packs in dungeons sometimes. Any other talent or glyph that would help?

Tmac47_sl said:

None of us will get what we want until a niche game comes out with the same polish that WoW had...available on the same platform as WoW (anyone with a PC, no matter how old). Understand this, when WoW released, it wasn't the King-Slayer it is today. It was just your average, incredibly polished, Blizzard creation. That's what revolutionized MMO gaming; it's both simple and sad.

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The "polish" at release wasn't near the paragon people make it out to be. They've really polished it up over the last 8-9 years. The problem with all the new MMO's isn't just that they are basically clones (although this is a big part of the problem), it's that almost everyone has played WoW some, so they expect any new game to be as completely polished as it is now, with all the Quality of Life that entails (although some of the QoL complaints that arise from the genre being far more casual frankly make games worse).

It feels good to be able to complain about video games not being amazing!

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