World of Warcraft: Current Year

Devlin_sl said:

It's a shame but a lot of the things that make WoW a better game than it was are also the things that are destroying it.

After a week or so on a toon dungeons are largely irrelevant which is a fucking travesty as dungeons should be the core of the game.

Cutting down wait times via the cross realm lfg tool has destroyed server communities, in Vanilla I knew certain other faction players by sight. I knew the servers first Grand Marshalls. I knew fuckloads of people from doing dungeons because being in a group was harder and good players or funny people were people you'd want to meet up with again.

Now I don't know anyone apart from people I'm in a guild with and I barely know them because I don't have to do shit with them cept raid once a week or so and honestly just doing LFR is easier most weeks.

LFR/LFD is a fucking horrible souless experience, there is no comeback for being a ninja, dropping group mid pull or just generally being a cunt in any way possible. In Vanilla there was a reason to behave like a reasonable human being because if you didn't word would get round and you might as well reroll or move server.

Impossible for them to have predicted that I suppose but it's pretty much ruined the game.

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I have some of the worst experiences in groups and raids. The other day I did stormstout on my monk tank - we were clearing and we noticed the warrior had been afk the entire time. The mage was the one annoyed by it, but even then wasn't being a total asshole, just mentioned in group that hey, wtf man? The rest of us were of the opinion, well give him a second; we can't kick him yet anyways. We hit the first boss, kill it, and warrior is still afk. So, we try to attempt a kick. Cannot kick for 14 more minutes...ooookay? Loot roll on boss. Cannot kick during loot rolls. Kill more trash. Cannot kick during combat or immediately following combat. Wait a tick...cannot kick for 11 more minutes. Like, christ.

The warrior comes back and he's a super douche on top of it, starts hardcore insulting the entire group. I know that we had mentioned kicking him, but it wasn't like we were in group saying, OMFG, THIS ASSHOLE, KICK HIM RIGHT IN HIS JIMMIES, WHAT A HERP DERP. So essentially, there was just no need for the insults. We kill the second boss, the warrior links the damage meter - which he topped, because it counts that stupid mace, then proceeds to insult the rest of the dps for being awful. At this point I'm like, ok wtf, and I speak up, saying that I'm more impressed the rest of the dps have been there the entire instance instead of topping an AE heavy fight. He starts insulting me because I'm a level higher than him (But the tank, so even though I'm a monk I don't exactly expect to top the charts with dps who are doing what they are supposed to) and I just ignore him. Super annoying.

We get to the last boss and the warrior blows it, as expected. Isn't running out of the bubbles on the ground, and isn't good at killing the adds and getting in between them and the boss to stop heals. Boss dies, and as a last hoorah tells us we all suck as players.

We cleared the dungeon faster than the timer to kick him, but it was silly. We had to put up with that asshole insulting us the entire way, and making us clear for him, and there was absolutely nothing we could do about it, other than all leaving the group and getting a deserter debuff. Super awesome.

In the prime of my MMO days, I used to be relatively abrasive and mouthy. It was generally to inform people, and I wasn't often wrong, but I definitely could have been nicer about it. Even THEN, I never went out of my way to be a super bitch or ruin someone's day just because I could. You had to earn my ire, so I really don't understand what is with people who seek to make something simple like grouping with others as painful as possible.

Things like CRZs and LFR/LFD have implemented fixes for things that sucked - like finding groups for content, but it exacerbates so much else that I wonder if it's worth it. In the case of LFD I'd have to say yes, but CRZs can really suck it. I just honestly cannot understand people in MMOs these days. Maybe I'm just an older gamer, and I've settled down so now the it's "them" vs "me" and I feel like I'm yelling at them to get off my lawn, but I really just do not think the communities and the people were ever this bad. And I generally don't think people ARE, just that the systems that are in place don't discourage it, so who cares?

TL;DR: They rustle my jimmies, why do people suck? (Jimmies rustled is the best meme ever. EVER. Well, maybe not better than grumpy cat but it makes me giggle quite a lot.)

Thats just generally someone abusing the system. I really dont understand the kick system because for the most part it punishes the group more so than the player that they are attempting to kick. Are they really trying to protect the legitimate Timmy the Retard THAT much? There have always been people going AFK in groups, though. You're just forgetting about it and looking back with fond memories. Think back to Wizards who could only cast once to twice a fight...? Eventually I just lost track of the damage theyre doing because I would be talking to someone or doing something else while I look at feet and spam 1 & 2. Necromancers were even worse. Cast 2 dots, no immediate damage, go back afk. Enchanters, Clerics, Tanks and Pullers were generally the only people that never had the opportunity to go AFK without other people in the group going ape shit. Just saying, it hasnt gotten worse - most communities have always been shit. There are just no repercussions now.

The epic feeling I used to get in a raid has long been lost. I dont know if its just that the size has dropped down so low, or that there is no competition to the mobs or what... I just dont find it fun anymore. So I would have to agree that dungeons should have a big part of the developer time when the game is being designed. Even WoW's route of going through tiers of dungeons is pretty fun. The game just really blows once all Im left with is raiding or dailies. I feel like there should always be several tiers of dungeons that keep progressively getting worse. The top tier being almost to the point of over tuned and having gear that is comparable to raid gear.

Yea I definitely think I'm not remembering correctly, but I also think it's partially that there aren't really many checks to dissuade people from being total dicks - with CRZs/LFD comes added anonymity, and as you mention, the kick system is sort of shit, and generally it's more effort than it's worth to try to kick.

Another group I was doing on my monk when I was in Cata content; we get into stonecore and the healer says, One second, in the middle of something. So I'm thinking, ok, maybe their kid woke up, whatever. So 5 minutes or so go by, and I ask, something wrong? And I get, no just in the middle of this quest and don't want to have to redo. Uh, ok? So the DK in the group is with the healer, and pulls the first pack of mobs, I assume to get us into combat so we can't initiate a kick. We almost wipe; myself and the hunter stay alive, the other two dps run back. We buff up again, and wait. It's been 15 minutes as this point, no healer. DK pulls another group, we survive this time, still no healer. So 15-20 minutes, one near wipe, and two packs and still no healer and no communication either, despite the group members asking when/if she's coming. I initiate the kick, it goes through, healer gets booted, and DK leaves.

Humorously, the healer sends me a message saying, WTF DUDE, I WAS ALMOST DONE! Now I have to wait another 30 minutes! I guess they got the deserter buff, or she was referring to the dungeon queue cooldown? Either way, I told her that it wasn't just me, that the majority of the group has to also hit yes, and that she'd get a new group soon. She proceeded to rant at me in tells while I ignored her and continued on in the dungeon.

Feels bad man.

Edited for paragraphs~ and also, wtf, 10 hr non patch maintenance!

LadyVex_sl said:

Yea I definitely think I'm not remembering correctly, but I also think it's partially that there aren't really many checks to dissuade people from being total dicks - with CRZs/LFD comes added anonymity, and as you mention, the kick system is sort of shit, and generally it's more effort than it's worth to try to kick.

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I usually run with my guild. Sometimes I use the random queues, LFD, LFR, battlegrounds, but I don't expect much from the people in the randoms and I'm usually not surprised. Not that my guildies don't go AFK or ninja stuff, but at least it's in the family.

Yea, the thing is that people I met back in vanilla when I first hit 60 and was doing ubrs/strat etc, I still know to this day - we talk often, are still guilded with each other, are b.net friends...hell, I'm DATING one of them. That's not something that really happens at all anymore. I raid with my guildies, but getting the twitch to play an alt, and do randoms ends up usually in frustration. And the thing is, back in vanilla there was a sort of sense of "family" as you say. Or at the very least, because it was a community there were more checks.

I wouldn't want to get rid of LFD/LFRs, but jesus, they're really terrible for quality of people. I mention these encounters because even though i go in not expecting something amazing, I still can be surprised by how crazy asshole-ish people are.

Occasionally I get a group of polite, funny people and it's a blast, but god that is so rare.

Well, I understand your point and totally agree with the server community being killed off. I don't think there's anything you can do to solve it now, though, because wow is so heavily built around instancing adding content that you specifically do in the open world on your own server is hard, outside of dailies and such.

I'd love to see less incentive overall to do raidfinder. The idea that the progression is heroics -> rf -> normals -> heroic raids (at least until next patch, they promised that we'd not need RF any more) is just annoying. I would rather get less items than everyone looking the same :/

Raid finder is there for people who DONT DO normal/heroic raiding. yes, you need LFR the first 3-4 weeks of raiding to fill out slots, but any decent guild should have stopped running LFR weeks ago on mains. Even now, on my mage (and i have never stepped foot in a single normal/heroic raid in MOP) I am done with MV and the first half of HOF, I just run the last 2 LFRs and will even stop that once I get my sha weapon. I loved raiding Kara, BT, Ulduar, etc years ago but I freaking love LFR now, logging in and raiding whenever I have free time (daytime usually) instead of locking myself away at night like a antisocial dad is fantastic. Yeah, LFR is retardedly easy but fuck it, I still remember all those painful times in early ICC where joining a pug was a crapshoot on whether you were going to get stuck on Saurfang or not, and nobody ever made it past Putricide (early ICC, not later after dmg buffs and shit). Or the good times when some faggot would turn off the ICC buff...

I guess I have totally different LFD experiences from you, chain ran them last week on my DK to gear up for LFR (like 20+ runs over a week) and never had a single problem. Yeah, my tank DK was top dmg dealer almost every single fight but who cares, all you do is piss yourself off for no reason if you stress over things like that. You can 2 man every heroic in mists so DPS are just there to speed it up.

Interview on MMO champ says 5.2 is "coming soon" and will feature a large, ICC/ulduar sized raid. If they can ship it out by February I will be impressed, that will be 2-4 months every patch which is exactly what they need to keep me subbed. Heck, even now I still haven't gotten to a ton of things in 5.1 like Brawlers, the new pets in old raids and want to spend more time in arena/rBG. Finally got around to pokemon this weekend, kids leveled 3 of my pets to 11 over a few hours and they loved it.

Has anyone done ZG/ZA recently? Is it soloable? I didnt sub for most of cata so never got to do those two, would be nice to solo for mounts/pets. BWL is totally soloable, it takes a few tries to "learn" razorgore but once you do, its a cakewalk. Sucks the GY for that place is still at Thorium point, especially as you run past a spirit healer outside UBRS. Also died after killing Vael, I don't think ice block even worked.

They should remove the random dungeon rewards and "luck" buff and apply it to premade groups.

I thought that Blizzard had an ignore system that will prevent players you have on ignore from joining you in groupfinder runs. If you get a douchenozzle you can't kick, get the whole group to ignore him. He will get longer and longer ques till he kills himself in a puddle of his own urine because noone loves him.

Problem solved.

spronk_sl said:

Raid finder is there for people who DONT DO normal/heroic raiding. yes, you need LFR the first 3-4 weeks of raiding to fill out slots, but any decent guild should have stopped running LFR weeks ago on mains. Even now, on my mage (and i have never stepped foot in a single normal/heroic raid in MOP) I am done with MV and the first half of HOF, I just run the last 2 LFRs and will even stop that once I get my sha weapon. I loved raiding Kara, BT, Ulduar, etc years ago but I freaking love LFR now, logging in and raiding whenever I have free time (daytime usually) instead of locking myself away at night like a antisocial dad is fantastic. Yeah, LFR is retardedly easy but fuck it, I still remember all those painful times in early ICC where joining a pug was a crapshoot on whether you were going to get stuck on Saurfang or not, and nobody ever made it past Putricide (early ICC, not later after dmg buffs and shit). Or the good times when some faggot would turn off the ICC buff...

I guess I have totally different LFD experiences from you, chain ran them last week on my DK to gear up for LFR (like 20+ runs over a week) and never had a single problem. Yeah, my tank DK was top dmg dealer almost every single fight but who cares, all you do is piss yourself off for no reason if you stress over things like that. You can 2 man every heroic in mists so DPS are just there to speed it up.

Interview on MMO champ says 5.2 is "coming soon" and will feature a large, ICC/ulduar sized raid. If they can ship it out by February I will be impressed, that will be 2-4 months every patch which is exactly what they need to keep me subbed. Heck, even now I still haven't gotten to a ton of things in 5.1 like Brawlers, the new pets in old raids and want to spend more time in arena/rBG. Finally got around to pokemon this weekend, kids leveled 3 of my pets to 11 over a few hours and they loved it.

Has anyone done ZG/ZA recently? Is it soloable? I didnt sub for most of cata so never got to do those two, would be nice to solo for mounts/pets. BWL is totally soloable, it takes a few tries to "learn" razorgore but once you do, its a cakewalk. Sucks the GY for that place is still at Thorium point, especially as you run past a spirit healer outside UBRS. Also died after killing Vael, I don't think ice block even worked.

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Thing is, I'm not going into LFR and being frustrated with terrible players. I mean, that happens but that's easily dealt with generally and never really a hindrance in LFR anyways since it's so easy. What's awful are the actual, legitimate assholes who just serve to make you miserable, with their attitude, or general playstyle. It just sucks getting a troll, and not being able to do anything about it, since there are so many ways you cannot kick someone.

Yea, ignore works but it is super rare to get the same person twice. It happens generally only at specific times of the day, IE like late at night when only a handful of people are doing dungeons, so if you all queue up at the same time it's entirely possible you hit the group again together. I can probably name on one hand the amount of times I've seen the same person in the group, and I have a pretty good memory for that sort of thing, so I don't think ignore would work in that respect. A "reputation" system, such that xbox live has, or some system where you can downvote people would be exceptional.

I haven't done ZG/ZA, I can't think of anything being too terrible but I want to say the majority of stuff works off of percentages of health, so boss abilities might still be a bit painful.

There's also, afaik, no way to ever avoid burning adrenaline from Vael - if you get it, you're dying and the only thing you can hope is that you've killed him before it kills you. (Which isn't hard on even a shit geared character, but I know my prot pally can't do it in prot spec; I have to switch to ret.)

Done with LFR? Hah. Sadly enough I still have six items I could use from LFR and I'm at 7/16 H. I've only eliminated MSV from the weekly retard reunion. But then I just went through a goddamn four week long applicant period in the middle of "progression is > clearing everything", so my gear is pathetically behind - and not just my own guild, but probably most normal mode raiders as well. I believe I have six items from normal mode + sha, none from heroic (fuck you bonus roll), and the rest is LFR/valor. The most painful is having the craptastic 2H staff from LFR for a weapon. That is flat fucking killing me. But somehow I'm a full member now and 25m is a fucking loot shower so good times are ahead. And all they really needed from me was to do what I can and not die, and I was one of five people alive for our blade lord H kill so, /flex and shit. After the mayan apocalypse mages, rogues and cockroaches will be standing around calling everyone else noobs and bads.

The upside is because of the fire nerf, most of my gear is wrong anyway. So its not like I have to replace anything good to switch from "Crit is the best stat and mastery is worthless!' to "it's mid progression race and whoops now crit is the worst stat and you stack haste/mastery, fuuuck youuuu ahahahah!"

Odds are in about two to four weeks they will pull cock from ass and buff molten armor to try to recoup the 6-8% crit that shit geared fire mages lost and relied on to function. Since the CM nerf was for "future scaling" and as it was COMPLETELY UNTESTED and done in the middle of a fucking week you'd think they'd do this quickly to compensate for the complete assfucking it gave to low to mid gear level fire. (without a certain crit threshhold, fire damage plummets off a cliff. That's why some are like "well its still middle of the pack dps if you play perfectly, quit crying" and others are like "HOLY FUCK I DID MORE DAMAGE IN SUNWELL")

The best part is all the recent tweets from GC regarding pvp "blanket nerfs" and how bad it is to change things untested. Right after they blanked nerfed the fuck out of a spec in the middle the week. I guarantee you he completely misses the irony.

I thought I didn't really like fire spec anyway. But that was before I played arcane and was forced to use rune of power as much as possible.

Oh, another awesome ghostcrawler tweet. "Invocation fine for Arcane" Wat. WAT. Fine as in, WE NEVER USE IT EVER? Can we get a Wildhammer Fact Checker to filter his fucking mouth?

EDIT: All of the above was meant to be amusing and not some ragefaced rant. Honest.

ZG/ZA: They're very-late Cata Heroics, so they were meant to be done in epics by decently-geared players. Shit hitshard. OP solo classes might be able to do it, but it's harder than Wrath heroics were at 85. I've been duo-ing ZG for mounts, which at first was just barely enough in ~450 gear, in ~475 gear it's not difficult to duo, but can't breeze it.

The nerf to fire mages was fucking ridiculous, ok so we were pretty dominant in PvE, so what?

Now arcane/frost mages are the highest dps except nobody wants to fucking play arcane/frost because arcane is fucking boring as shit and frost is whack-a-mole on acid driving at 200 mph.

I'm glad my new guild wants me to play on my DK, that shit at least makes sense.

Hard 2 play

buffylol_sl said:

Hard 2 play

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Nobody gives a fuck about you sucking at PvP go away.

Tampon, apply directly to the vagina.

Devlin_sl said:

It's a shame but a lot of the things that make WoW a better game than it was are also the things that are destroying it.

After a week or so on a toon dungeons are largely irrelevant which is a fucking travesty as dungeons should be the core of the game.

Cutting down wait times via the cross realm lfg tool has destroyed server communities, in Vanilla I knew certain other faction players by sight. I knew the servers first Grand Marshalls. I knew fuckloads of people from doing dungeons because being in a group was harder and good players or funny people were people you'd want to meet up with again.

Now I don't know anyone apart from people I'm in a guild with and I barely know them because I don't have to do shit with them cept raid once a week or so and honestly just doing LFR is easier most weeks.

LFR/LFD is a fucking horrible souless experience, there is no comeback for being a ninja, dropping group mid pull or just generally being a cunt in any way possible. In Vanilla there was a reason to behave like a reasonable human being because if you didn't word would get round and you might as well reroll or move server.

Impossible for them to have predicted that I suppose but it's pretty much ruined the game.

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Soulless is exactly the right word to describe WoW in its current form and the reason why I quit. What's even worse is that WoW has now set the standard for MMO's to conform to. People expect X-server tech from the start because for most, it's all they have ever known. They don't realise the social damage it creates, they just don't want to wait for more than 2 minutes to get into a group. Perish the thought they do anything pro-active to actually try and form a group, they just want to push a button and be instantly transported into their little pocket of free loots.

The thing is, you can't even blame half these people for wanting this because it's the norm to them.

It's an absolutely horrible, horrible fucking mechanic. The only hope is in years to come we should all be able to play on one server, ala EVE with dynamic instancing and load balancing as and when it's needed, like a very advanced version of how EQ2 handled it's zones and public dungeons.

buffylol_sl said:

Hard 2 play

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Post your gear and theirs.

Hideous rapes were not uncommon for people in full season's gladiator gear against the lesser privilaged in the resilience department.

battle chest is back on sale for $5, cat $10 MOP $30. Battlechest for $5 is a great deal, you RAF yourself a second account, put a $15 gametime code on it (your main account then gets a free month), so for basically $5 you have 60 days with a second account. With some multibox software, while you are doing shit on your main account you can park a hunter on your second account in a grind spot and have all the keys bound to a castsequence macro, so over a few weeks you will level a hunter to 80 (moving zone to zone by hand obviously), faster with BOA gear. Then you can grant 40 levels to your main account, rinse and repeat as many times as you want. You can even loot if you figure out how to broadcast mouse clicks and keybind Interact with Target (turn on click to move too). Throw away those second accounts with all those 80s when the time is up, useless trash!

nice thing is with sub wow accounts they all share mounts/pets and can be emailed BOA gear back and forth.