WoW XX: It's Not A Recolor, It's An Original Thread

[Psyren]

BTW, double-post to add:

For those who want to try the level-scaling and stuff without resubbing, hey, free weekend

[Spore]

BTW, double-post to add:

For those who want to try the level-scaling and stuff without resubbing, hey, free weekend

Just tanked one of the more dangerous dungeons and I can say that monsters are pretty dangerous now. The Disc priest was struggling to keep me alive. We wiped thrice (and I sort of know what I am doing as a tank) in Dire Maul.

[Resileaf]

I managed to get all the druid challenge appearances yesterday, leaving only Death knight and Demon hunter to go! Still fifty days to go, although if the tower closes with the pre-patch, that puts a much more severe time limit on my goal, depending on how early it will be.

[Psyren]

Just tanked one of the more dangerous dungeons and I can say that monsters are pretty dangerous now. The Disc priest was struggling to keep me alive. We wiped thrice (and I sort of know what I am doing as a tank) in Dire Maul.

I think I identified the problem

Kidding aside, that's kind of good to hear, I enjoy those older dungeons having a bit of teeth to them. Were you/they in heirlooms?

[sonofzeal]

Few questions....

- When my Wife, Nephew, and I are 3-manning instances, is there a way to do it without being by the instance entrance? I've poked around at the Group Finder, but don't see a way to do it with anything other than Healer-Tank-3xDPS.

- I vividly remember Cat Druids having a "Pounce" attack akin to a Warrior's Charge, but I don't see it anywhere in the list. Has that been removed?

- What's the best way to get a couple heirlooms? I've never actually reached level cap, but I've got one lvl 82 character and an heirloom from the Darkmoon Fair.

- My Nephew presently has his heart set on getting some sort of raptor baby battle pet. I've got a pretty wide assortment but managed never to get any like that even though I know they exist. Any suggestions?

[The Glyphstone]

Take your pick:

https://www.warcraftpets.com/wow-pets/beast/raptors/

The (1 of 1) pets are guaranteed drops from their indicated locations. The Zandalari pets are rarer but you can check the AH.

[The_Jackal]

- My Nephew presently has his heart set on getting some sort of raptor baby battle pet. I've got a pretty wide assortment but managed never to get any like that even though I know they exist. Any suggestions?

Darting Hatchling, from Dustwallow Marsh.

[Mutant Sheep]

There's a particular baby raptor pet you can get from a Stranglethorn Vale questline. It's a pretty great Cata bit, tied to the Zul'Gurub heroic dungeon.

I remember Pounce too, but it's been removed since I think Draenor? The Second talent tier has Wild Charge, which, in cat form, does something similar. It doesn't have a stun and it doesn't break your stealth, but you leap behind the target.

Darkmoon Faire and most holiday week events are the best ways of getting heirlooms. A few days of doing a few daily quests during and you can get an heirloom. Midsummer Festival offers heirlooms, and it's available for the the next week and a half.

Three manning instances sounds hard already, but there's no way to teleport into dungeons like in Groupfinder unless you are using groupfinder. (And yes, groupfinder requires you have the 3 dps tank healer setup.) If you have a tank and a healer, groupfinder should give you fairly quick queues. It's not as much fun having two strangers being quiet, but you'll get extra XP, gear, and much less travel time if you use the groupfinder to fill in the other two slots. (And a wide variation of dungeons.) Most people you'll queue with will be extraordinarily untalkative, but they can do damage, and dungeon's dont get any easier the less people you have in them.

[Spore]

I think I identified the problem

Kidding aside, that's kind of good to hear, I enjoy those older dungeons having a bit of teeth to them. Were you/they in heirlooms?

As a resident Disc priest, you just commited sacrilege! To be honest, Disc is a confusing spec to newcomers, and she (female High Tauren) did a few things wrong: 1) Penance as direct healing. 2) Almost never used PW: Shield. 3) Almost exclusively smited and then spammed Shadowmend. 4) Never used Purify to remove magic debuffs.

(5) DPS was ****. I had addons turned off, but the DPS players piddled in their damage.)

About the only right thing to do here was spam Shadowmend. But then, a Disc priest should not get into the predicament of having a tank drop below 50% life when he pulls in a decent pace.

Were you/they in heirlooms?

I was, and the enhancement shaman was. If the priest was, she transmogged "pretty robes" over it. Maybe not. But the pulls should be doable by a character not in heirlooms. To be fair, we only wiped (and once in the garden area because we managed to pull two groups at once) because of lack of healing at the last boss who was dangerous BEFORE the revamp.

That is a problem in its own though. Beginner's guide don't mention dispelling harmful effects. The healer page on the spec selection shows 6 skills that make the healer work but don't show the dispel spell. There are almost no talents that interact with dispelling that reward correct dispelling (when I saw the demon hunters gained ressources from Consume Magic, I was wondering why no other class got DPS/healing out of it).

[Psyren]

But the pulls should be doable by a character not in heirlooms.

Agreed, but definitely nobody should be wiping in heirlooms.

The issue is that some of the specs are more unforgiving post-Legion (and especially post-scaling) than others. Disc, which was once my favorite healing spec ever, is one of those. As with every other spec, Legion created a large hole in their rotation that the Artifact weapon power was meant to fill. That hole just happened to hit Disc harder than most others. (Brewmaster Monk has a similar problem, or at least it had one last time I tried leveling or Timewalking one.)

That is a problem in its own though. Beginner's guide don't mention dispelling harmful effects. The healer page on the spec selection shows 6 skills that make the healer work but don't show the dispel spell. There are almost no talents that interact with dispelling that reward correct dispelling (when I saw the demon hunters gained ressources from Consume Magic, I was wondering why no other class got DPS/healing out of it).

Yeah, dispelling/decursing should be a mandatory aspect of healer education.

[Spore]

(Brewmaster Monk has a similar problem, or at least it had one last time I tried leveling or Timewalking one.)

Can't say but I assume you are right because I played a Brewmaster in this scenario. :)

[Psyren]

Can't say but I assume you are right because I played a Brewmaster in this scenario. :)

Ouch. Yeah, Brewmaster + Disc is a bad combination even after you get your artifacts. It's perhaps the least reactive tank+healer combination in the whole game. It doesn't surprise me that you'd be feeling the pain even through heirlooms.

[The_Jackal]

Yeah, dispelling/decursing should be a mandatory aspect of healer education.

Wouldn't it be better to remove gameplay that can be boiled down to 'push this button when I tell you to'? I mean, heal whack-a-mole isn't very interesting to me, but at least there's the potential for nuanced decisions. Purify is just 'push button when DBM shouts at me'. The only remotely interesting decision is 'who do I purify'/

[Psyren]

Wouldn't it be better to remove gameplay that can be boiled down to 'push this button when I tell you to'? I mean, heal whack-a-mole isn't very interesting to me, but at least there's the potential for nuanced decisions. Purify is just 'push button when DBM shouts at me'. The only remotely interesting decision is 'who do I purify'/

Putting aside that you can reduce almost all gameplay to "press X button when Y event" if you wanted to, for me it would depend on what we're replacing it with. Yeah "dispel or don't dispel" isn't a particularly interesting decision on its own, but when you have to weigh it against numerous other stimuli demanding the healers attention in a given moment then it can be. The other problem is that stuff like poisons, diseases and curses are pretty iconic to the genre at this point, particularly if you're going for role-based gameplay.

[The_Jackal]

Putting aside that you can reduce almost all gameplay to "press X button when Y event" if you wanted to, for me it would depend on what we're replacing it with. Yeah "dispel or don't dispel" isn't a particularly interesting decision on its own, but when you have to weigh it against numerous other stimuli demanding the healers attention in a given moment then it can be. The other problem is that stuff like poisons, diseases and curses are pretty iconic to the genre at this point, particularly if you're going for role-based gameplay.

That's legit, I just have my stated preference that more of the game is engaged with paying attention to the in-game action, rather than the user-interface or add-ons like WeakAuras. I think the game would be generally more accessible, more fun, and more engrossing if the user-interface were less intrusive, and more of the game's mechanics were intuitive as opposed to 'button lights up, button is pressed'.

[Spore]

Purify is just 'push button when DBM shouts at me'. The only remotely interesting decision is 'who do I purify'/

Low level dungeons often throw out 2-3 different debuffs. Using and saving your dispel for an actually dangerous debuff. On the flipside, using debuffs early enough so you can dispel more debuffs.

Also there are bosses that give a player a timed debuff (dispel at x stacks so the explosion is manageable but the debuff doesn't fly around the raid all the time). And at last, dispelling is a major part of playing healers in PvP, so it should be taught if people want to go there.

[The_Jackal]

Low level dungeons often throw out 2-3 different debuffs. Using and saving your dispel for an actually dangerous debuff. On the flipside, using debuffs early enough so you can dispel more debuffs.

Okay, none of this contends with the issue that you're basically interacting with user-interface prompts, rather than responding to something intuitive.

Also there are bosses that give a player a timed debuff (dispel at x stacks so the explosion is manageable but the debuff doesn't fly around the raid all the time). And at last, dispelling is a major part of playing healers in PvP, so it should be taught if people want to go there.

Yes, I'm not contending that in practice, understanding what debuffs to cleanse, and when, can't be a challenge, it's just a well-designed challenge. It's a problem you only solve with trial and error, or, in the real world case, if you're not the guys from Fatboss or a progression guild, looking up a strat on the internet. ALL of these mechanics are shorthands for, "Consult internet guide to tell you what the game-designers couldn't contrive to supply."

I'm not suggesting that players shouldn't be asked to read their skill tooltips, or learn how their class works, but when it comes to stuff like 'what does this debuff do', and 'why did everyone wipe', the developers are setting the average player up to fail. That's why there's this vast gulf between Heroic (the 'intended' raid difficulty) and LFR in terms of challenge. Because LFR has to assume that nobody showing up is going to bother to put on their pants straight, let alone do research on boss fight mechanics. And I don't think the average player who doesn't want to do 20 minutes of homework on a dungeon encounter is in the wrong here.

The point I'm trying to make here is that the "What killed me?" moment is kind of a design failure. Far too much of WoW's mechanics rely on parsing the really obtuse user-interface, or, more accurately, using a third-party addon to parse the really obtuse use-interface for you, and tell you what to do.

If you can make a system whereby debuffs are intuitive and easy to understand, as opposed to having a WeakAura that gets thrown up saying, "Cleanse Dim-Mak Debuff from Tank!", then I'm all in favor of using them. I just don't think that's possible, in light of the game's engine and design.

[Psyren]

The point I'm trying to make here is that the "What killed me?" moment is kind of a design failure. Far too much of WoW's mechanics rely on parsing the really obtuse user-interface, or, more accurately, using a third-party addon to parse the really obtuse use-interface for you, and tell you what to do.

If you can make a system whereby debuffs are intuitive and easy to understand, as opposed to having a WeakAura that gets thrown up saying, "Cleanse Dim-Mak Debuff from Tank!", then I'm all in favor of using them. I just don't think that's possible, in light of the game's engine and design.

I agree totally, especially with the bold part. I just don't think that "remove dispels entirely" is an appropriate solution. It would make healing even more boring, for starters. And Sporegg is right, recognizing the debuff colors and reacting appropriately is a key learning element for PvP. (I personally have no interest in PvP, but if you're going to have it at all, PvE needs to have ways to teach you how to play.)

[Jera]

Few questions....

- When my Wife, Nephew, and I are 3-manning instances, is there a way to do it without being by the instance entrance? I've poked around at the Group Finder, but don't see a way to do it with anything other than Healer-Tank-3xDPS.

Unfortunately no, you do have the option, of two of you summoning the third using the summoning stone, but that's pretty much it.

- I vividly remember Cat Druids having a "Pounce" attack akin to a Warrior's Charge, but I don't see it anywhere in the list. Has that been removed?

Yes, it got removed a while ago, someone mentioned wild charge, but it's basically blink with a 2 second speed buff at the end.

- What's the best way to get a couple heirlooms? I've never actually reached level cap, but I've got one lvl 82 character and an heirloom from the Darkmoon Fair.

Gold, if you're willing to drop $20 on a token, you can easily buy a full set of maxed out heirloom gear for all three accounts, and have plenty of gold left over.

- My Nephew presently has his heart set on getting some sort of raptor baby battle pet. I've got a pretty wide assortment but managed never to get any like that even though I know they exist. Any suggestions?

Wailing Caverns and Dustwallow March would be your best bet to get one, Deviate Hatchling and Darting Hatchling respectively. Darting Hatchling is probably your best best as that's a guaranteed drop. Or if you went the token route for heirlooms you could probably pick one up at the auction house.

--

I just finished leveling a void elf Monk, doing the Iron Man challenge until lvl 100. And all I can say is I am so disappointed that I didn't play monk throughout Legion. I've mained Paladin through most of my time playing WoW and whilst I think I might stick to pally heals for raiding, DPS and even tanking is so much more involved on the monk, it's so engaging as with hit combo I have to keep track of what skills I've used and actually plan ahead to make sure I don't have down time. Healing Orbs, Ox Totems and Paralysis make me almost as survivable in my DPS spec as I am in my Tank spec, against non-rare elite mobs.

I think with Shadowmeld a Night Elf Windwalker Monk might be the best class for solo pve play.

[Sian]

Solo PvE i’d say NE vengence Demon Hunter or maybe Tauren Blood Death Knight

[The_Jackal]

So, this most recent patch has added a quick little quest-line in Silithus which will:

Spoiler: Quest arc rewards

Show

Max out the artifact power on all your legendary weapons.

Spoiler: My reaction

Show

I'm a bit conflicted as to this turn of events. I'm generally not much of a fan of catch-up mechanics, as I think there's implicit damage to the effort that players who did things the hard way were able to accomplish. On the other hand, I was never a great fan of how artifact power needed to be split between your three specializations, so it was nice to be able to swap specs and toy with some stuff I hadn't been able to grind through yet. Obviously, BFA will take care of the spec issue, but I'm still on the whole vexed by all this, not the least of which because I knew when Legion announced that everyone was going to get a legendary weapon, that they'd have to contrive some way to take them away when the next expansion hit. So it was always going to be a formula for weapons-grade anti-climax.

[Resileaf]

I wish the sentient weapons had a reaction of any kind in Sillithus when you complete the latest questline. This is literally ultimate, infinite power. How are Xal'athah, Aluneth and the Eredar skull whose name escapes me atm not absolutely thrilled by it?

[sonofzeal]

Gold, if you're willing to drop $20 on a token, you can easily buy a full set of maxed out heirloom gear for all three accounts, and have plenty of gold left over.

Pardon the ignorance, but what's a token?

[Psyren]

I'm generally not much of a fan of catch-up mechanics, as I think there's implicit damage to the effort that players who did things the hard way were able to accomplish.

Whereas I find this notion ludicrous. The grinders/early adopters already got their reward - being early. The number of people that hear this and think "oh cool, I'll resub and try it!" is always, always going to outweigh the diehard elitists.

As for taking the weapons away... yeah that is annoying actually, though it'd be nice for my fire mage and shadowpriest to be able to use a staff again (hopefully.)

Pardon the ignorance, but what's a token?

Game Time Tokens, purchasable via the in-game shop. You can then list them on the AH and get a substantial sum of gold.

It's been suggested (though not proven?) that Blizzard themselves buy up tokens when they get too plentiful, keeping their gold value high and making them an attractive way for new or lapsed players to gear up, buy heirlooms etc.

[Jera]

Pardon the ignorance, but what's a token?

A wow Token is an in game item you buy in the blizzard shop that can be sold for gold, I looked a few days ago when they were having the sale and it gets you about 210,000 gold give it take a bit. Also you can buy them with in game gold and get a months subscription with it.

[Resileaf]

Pardon the ignorance, but what's a token?

Blizz has started selling game time tokens, which you can buy with real money. They cost the same thing as normal game time, but you can sell them for in-game gold on the auction house rather than use them.
What this means is that a gold-rich player can buy game time with gold, and money-rich players can sell game time for in-game gold.

Edit: Ninjaed! Twice!

[Kish]

Whereas I find this notion ludicrous. The grinders/early adopters already got their reward - being early. The number of people that hear this and think "oh cool, I'll resub and try it!" is always, always going to outweigh the diehard elitists.

Just out of curiosity, and not attempting to convince anyone of anything about what Blizzard "should" do for any reason, just inspired with curiosity by this argument--did they ever make the old-style titles (Scout, Grunt, High Warlord, Champion of the Naaru, and so on) available again by any means?

[Resileaf]

Just out of curiosity, and not attempting to convince anyone of anything about what Blizzard "should" do for any reason, just inspired with curiosity by this argument--did they ever make the old-style titles (Scout, Grunt, High Warlord, Champion of the Naaru, and so on) available again by any means?

Not that I know of.

[Psyren]

Just out of curiosity, and not attempting to convince anyone of anything about what Blizzard "should" do for any reason, just inspired with curiosity by this argument--did they ever make the old-style titles (Scout, Grunt, High Warlord, Champion of the Naaru, and so on) available again by any means?

To be completely clear, I'm not referring to titles and achievements when I say that. But mechanical things like artifact power should absolutely have catch-up mechanics for later in an expansion (or even at the tail-end.)

[The_Jackal]

To be completely clear, I'm not referring to titles and achievements when I say that. But mechanical things like artifact power should absolutely have catch-up mechanics for later in an expansion (or even at the tail-end.)

I think there may be some argument for truncating some of the slog, but I kind of feel like just picking up a level 110 and immediately getting maximum artifact power through a 7 quest chain is akin to dousing your entire expansion in lighter-fluid. Theoretically, they should have 12 years worth of RPG content that one would consider a value add. Which begs the question: If WoW thinks their game is so fun, why do they keep offering (and indeed charging for) ways to skip it? Would you buy a level boost in Mass Effect to skip to the end of ME3?

In my opinion, one of the main draws of the MMO genre is the sense of investment and accomplishment from having persevered at something. In light of that, I'd much rather they work on making level scaling a thing, and make mentoring a thing, so that these older sections of content can retain their relevance, and no longer be relegated to backfilling cheevos and transmogs.