World of Warcraft: Current Year

A rodent of unusual size.

Itzena_sl said:

A rodent of unusual size.

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Rodents of Unusual Size? I don't believe they exist.

Up to 9/13 Mythic now. The grind on Xhul begins next week.

Dungeon or raid?

For what I've read so far, I don't have my hopes up for Legion. I'm sure I'll find an enjoyable class if the monk will suck gigantic cocks by release time, but holy shit, it's like they are trying hard to remove fun and introduce blandness. Mistweaver becoming a boring healer just like everyone else, Brewmaster losing another ton of shit from the spellbook, including fucking Touch of Death for what I read, which will be WW only (a shit, boring, fucking useless spec that maybe 4 people play world wide) and that will also trigger 8 seconds after application.
According to their most recent blog entry, once again they are taking away stuff from tanks, so that they have to rely more on healers (like healers don't get enough shit already) and making so that if tanks don't use active mitigation (or what will be left of it), the difference won't be so pronounced, like this would help the other players find competent tanks.

My second beloved class, the priest, is being twisted in random directions: I get the theme of shadow being, well... shadow, holy being light, discipline being halfway, but disc is changing its playingstyle and so far it seems it's a lot of work for little returns: after coping with Renewing Mist going on random players so I could use Uplift and pad the meters, I can't say I find buffing someone before I can heal him an enticing and exciting mechanic, quite the opposite, it's pretty much a crock of dry shit. It will also require a large amount of macros to work decently
Shadow as usual will have to use 25 globals to do a fraction the AE damage warriors and rogues do with one keypress and still lag behind in single target (which on par with shadow history, except maybe during Cataclysm), plus this uncontrollable voidform is a stupid idea and should be tossed in the toilet before it's too late.
Holy looks quite good, I give them that, considering it's going to get Complete Healing (well, yeah, almost) and for the rest remain a standard healer.

I'd also follow druid and hunter changes, but I fear what I may read. Before WoD I disliked class changes and ability pruning, release confirmed my opinions, now I'm thinking that, even considering the current as alpha state, they are not going in a direction I like, except (in some cases) thematically.

On another point, I want to understand how the artifact catch up mechanism is going to work, because I can't imagine myself levelling as a healer, but having to do a week of artifact catching up before being dungeon or raid ready would piss me off.

I love this game, but some things *are* getting worse over time, class design for once. Just to mention one, I remember fucking around at the end of MoP with my arms warrior, it was quite fun, then WoD came and I was watching Rend tick... so beautiful!

They've said but not elaborated on the fact that healers are going to do more damage and be able to level strictly as heals. I'm excited about that, but I'm still curious how the catch up is going to work if I decide to go prot at max level after leveling hpal.

I do like that the classes are feeling a little more refined and personal to some extent instead of like.. the end of MoP where everything could do everything. But they might be overshooting it with how many abilities they're ditching. I guess only time will tell, it is only Alpha after all. They've changed bigger things between alpha and release so who knows.

Also yeah the tank+heals post is sort of concerning when they said they want tanks to have to take consistent damage so healers are always on them.. the problem is now the rest of the retards. If after 10+ years DPS still decides to stand in AoE and I'm now going to focus even more on tank healing.. oh boy. The first few months of heroics are going to be a fucking mess, let alone the raids, but I expect raiders to be slightly less retarded by then. I understand it's not at the fault of Blizzard but I hope they have something in place for heals being able to also keep the party up.

They tried it already and it failed spectacularly, at the end of the day locks don't use drain life, rogues don't use recuperate, etc. because they are dps losses, so it's up to healers filling the gaps, this with amazing tank survivability. Before my guild collapsed, I tanked everything in BRF and the difference between me and the other tank was marginal, we both were able to sustain ourselves for a while if healers had to fill up the raid hp bars.
Now I'm considering going back to healing, but I doubt I'll level as Mistweaver. It's not that they can't kill, because they can, but as a Brewmaster I can kill any number of mobs that agro me without breaking a sweat, because of mitigation, self healing and especially massive AoE damage, something healers never had and I doubt they ever will.
If I could have the equivalent of the EQ2 Fury druid with good AE and ST damage, oh god, I don't think I'd ever look elsewhere, but this 40% the damage of a dps or some bullshit like that, never gave me hope.

I don't know what's wrong with tanks nowadays, imo nothing. I don't get how having less cooldowns makes for more engaging gameplay. "they have to matter" is a fucking bullshit, if I have to juggle my CDs and my healers ones, then yeah, they matter, if I have a 5 min cd, I'll likely use it once and be done with it until the next boss (or try). I fail to see any engagement here, just a rising level of stupid design.
I get that some Brewmasters don't like Guard much, especially when it scales so retardedly well with Resolve, but I loved having a moment to catch my breath and assess the situation with a 500k shield on my back (usually it's not that high for the level of content I do, but I heard of mythic tanks that got guards well over 1 milion, nonetheless it's still 3 or 4 hits top).

I certainly don't want healers to be tasked with even more responsability than they already have regarding both tank healing and group/raid healing, it's fine as it is, tanks can still die, healers and dps can still die, heals are powerful, but not ridicolous and mana can still finish if the raid takes too much damage: everything is well.

Miele_sl said:

For what I've read so far,

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It is pretty worrying. I've gotten addicted to the monk in the last couple months, brewmaster is by far the funnest tank in the game and WW is actually amazingly interesting to play in pvp. It sounded like they're changing monks the most in every spec, that's never good.

Rogue is scaling ridiculously well late expansion like always. Mage is very strong. Really, very few classes are weak at the moment.

Springbok_sl said:

Between Rogue, DK, Mage, and Ret Pally - which class is in the best shape atm? Thinking about resubbing to get the ring quest done on a character but having trouble deciding which one.

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Rogue and Mage are top dps by a fairly wide margin (~20%) at extreme gear levels. All the rest of the dps are pretty similar, except windwalkers, who still haven't recovered from the last round of capricious nerfbatting. If you aren't going to be mythic raiding it doesn't matter at all IMO though.

Miele_sl said:

My second beloved class, the priest, is being twisted in random directions: I get the theme of shadow being, well... shadow, holy being light, discipline being halfway, but disc is changing its playingstyle and so far it seems it's a lot of work for little returns: after coping with Renewing Mist going on random players so I could use Uplift and pad the meters, I can't say I find buffing someone before I can heal him an enticing and exciting mechanic, quite the opposite, it's pretty much a crock of dry shit. It will also require a large amount of macros to work decently
Shadow as usual will have to use 25 globals to do a fraction the AE damage warriors and rogues do with one keypress and still lag behind in single target (which on par with shadow history, except maybe during Cataclysm), plus this uncontrollable voidform is a stupid idea and should be tossed in the toilet before it's too late.
Holy looks quite good, I give them that, considering it's going to get Complete Healing (well, yeah, almost) and for the rest remain a standard healer.

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I'm more optimistic on that front - rift choloromancer and vanguard blood mage both played similar to how they are aiming discipline, and it was a great, fun, playstyle. I think the biggest danger there though is the right in your face obvious one - if discipline is equal to other healers in healing, then they are mandatory for stacking for tight dps races, and if they aren't, they have no raid spot. Hell, even if they are 40% of a 'real' healer and 40% of a real dps they'll have an overwhelming advantage for small group content - it's pretty rare that a decent healer gets anywhere near 40% output capacity in dungeons etc.

I just came back after a long brake and have been enjoying my Resto shaman. I played the hell out of the time walking events last weekend not realizing it's not an everyday thing. Most of my gear is 675 now from the timeworn badges. Currently working on my legendary ring, is there anyway to make more than the 800 apexis crystals a day? I noticed some mobs drop a couple times, but not enough for me to want to grind them.

Are garrisons going away? I pretty much ignore mine at this point, haven't even done the naval quest.