Firstly, I would like to say that I'm 100% with the Darkspears in their campaign against Garrosh. Blizzard had said prior that they would make Garrosh more - err, likeable - in Cata but I think they pretty much failed on all fronts in doing so. If anything, they made him even worse. If Vol'jin can /end Garrosh, I wouldn't be the least bit upset. It would free up the title of "Warchief" for someone more deserving, such as Saurfang or even Vol'jin himself. Even the young Bloodhoof would be a better choice, though he lacks in experience compared to others.
With that said, moving on to new adventures as players begin assisting the Darkspears with their rebellion. Just like with Landfall, I'm not particularly happy about being forced to complete several scenarios before being able to get the actual quests. I'd be fine if they allowed us to do these solo, like with the Isle of Thunder ones. I dislike scenarios because they throw three players in there, group makeup be damned, and expect everything to go smoothly. It almost never does. The groups always rush in there and just start killing crap without even bothering to think, "Hmm, we're all dps - no one to tank and no one to heal. We should pull carefully." Thankfully, the Blood in the Snow and Dark Heart of Pandaria scenarios were fairly easy and, once each of my groups wiped once to stupid shit, they became more cautious with pulls.
I just started on the quests themselves so I'll write more later on those since I'm still not sure how I really feel about them. But the ones I'm doing are all in Durotar and when I arrived there yesterday, it was jam-packed with players, of course. It made it a little difficult to kill the mobs I needed and to loot the overturned caravans before anyone else got to them. However, it did make it easy to kill Commanders, since it's faction-tag and more horde seem to be around than alliance.
I'm happy with some of the class changes, and very unhappy with others. Mage aoe's were buffed, which is great because I could feel how weak they were before and they needed a little boost. Now I don't feel quite so useless when Frozen Orb is on cooldown. With the changes to Living Bomb, I swapped out Nether Tempest for that talent instead and it seems to do better for single-target than NT. I noticed a 1-2k dps increase. But for mass aoe, Frost Bomb still looks to be king.
More crying from the populace led to even more paladin nerfs. I should be used to this, really, since nerfs have been making paladins their bitches since the dawn of WoW. Oh no, how terrible that the pally tank in your raid is doing more healing than you because of Battle Healer. That shouldn't really be happening if you are actually healing and not whispering your friend while simultaneously chatting with your guild about how cute it is when your cat chases your mouse as you move it around. NERF. Non-bubble healers (and even rival disc priests) crying over how much holy pallies can absorb with Illuminated Healing. Sure, that's always #1 in my top 3 heals on the meters. But I have to actually cast heals to make that shield happen. Do you see how much mana I have to use to even cast that many spells for that many shields? Give me the heal-over-time capabilities of a druid or the mana regen of a priest, then you can nerf one of the few things that actually make my job easier. It's like taking crit/Illumination away from me all over again. And I'm still waiting (though not holding my breath) for Blizzard to give me back my 1-minute Divine Plea. At least the small change to Daybreak will make the T15 2-piece bonus a little more appealing. Yay for small blessings?
I'm not really sure but I might try main-healing on my priest, instead. Just a bit burnt out from playing the paladin for so many years and Blizzard completely gutting the class every time they feel like it. I don't think I will retire Rhu - she'll always be my favorite - but I think I just need a break. I got my druid to 90 but find healing on her to be kinda meh; same with my shaman. But I haven't touched my priest in a while and have always liked healing on her before so I might give that a shot now that the xp needed to level was been reduced by 33%. It gets a little tedious after the first 2-3 alts. And! I'm ecstatic that there is no GL bottleneck for rep with the other factions anymore. Time to get that Royal Satchel pattern!
Honestly, I can't say that the Battle Healer nerf wasn't expected. Certain tanks (read: warriors) have aggro issues alone from the healing generated by the glyph/Seal of Insight during taunt swaps and let's not even mention the fact that Haste continues to be one of the best stats for a Protadin until you reach the 30% haste cap (or basically, when your Sacred Shield is up for each boss swing). The best part about the nerf? Ghostcrawler gets on Twitter and claims the glyph was really only meant for Retribution to do spot-offhealing. Sometimes I wonder if he even plays the same game as we do... no Ret Paladin ever would swap to SoI and lose damage from Seal of Truth just to "help offheal". And, if that were really the case, all he had to do was put a RETRIBUTION ONLY flag on the damn glyph.
ReplyDeleteTl;dr: a 10% healing nerf from Battle Healer doesn't mean jack when the majority of Protadin healing comes from Sacred Shield absorbs and spamming Holy Prism if you took that talent. Vengeance more than makes up for it currently, and will continue to do so even after they cap Vengeance to 30% (in 10-mans) and 50% (in 25s) of a tank's maximum health when 5.4 drops. When most tanks are rocking around 700k hp buffed currently, do the math.
Priest mana regen is a joke if you're holy, and only marginally better for a disc IF you time your Raptures correctly and aren't sitting there spamming the wrong spells at the wrong time. I agree with you on the shaman healing--too many cooldowns on a class that had literally NONE pre-Mists in order to do acceptable healing when there isn't a "stack and burn" phase. Blizzard is never going to give back short-duration mana cooldowns, either. 3 minutes or more because they feel "mana should be a precious resource" even though ilvls still increase at a ridiculous rate and really is only an issue during the initial tier of raiding.
Scenarios - you know my thoughts on those already. Blizzard should have just spent a little more time making them full 5-man dungeons instead. Honestly I think the scenarios concept in WoW as a whole is just fail. I get it was mostly done to appease DPS who were tired of waiting for 45+ minute dungeon queues, but honestly there's literally no point even doing them if you don't have a DPS spec. Heroic Scenarios are ridiculous and wasn't what this game needed. IMO, Blizzard should have done scenarios the same way Trion does what they call "Instant Adventures" in Rift -- basically group questing that doesn't suck and has a queue for itself. You get rewards after doing so many of them, and there's daily quests involving IAs in certain zones as well.
I come off as such a negative nancy, but there's my $0.02 on the subject.
Ghostcrawler just needs to pull his head out of his own ass because he's about as clueless as an old man at a rap concert. I agree, it seems like he's not even playing the same game. I haven't been playing ret for very long but I would NEVER use SoL, so that glyph would be useless for me as ret. It sounds like he's just trying to justify his ridiculous decisions.
DeleteAs a vanilla player, I actually get irked how easy they've made a lot of things as far as actual game play. I feel there's no real challenge anymore. It's bad when the best "challenge" they can come up with is making us spend months on dailies just to get rep... Get rid of LFR and LFG; people can go back to using the designated CHAT CHANNEL to look for people to do stuff with. Smaller servers might have problems with this, especially during non-peak hours, but they could make the LFG channel CRZ and all that shit to make it easier to find groups. Bring back the instances that give specific reps, like in BC. And how about you give players more than 4 freaking dungeons to level in? Oh, they added Gate to that list of non-heroics, big freaking deal...
It's too late to pull out the rugs called LFR and LFD out from under the WoW population. They're too integrated with the playerbase now, especially considering how badly Blizzard has screwed up with this expansion. Valor gear tied behind reputation grinds make VP gear absolutely worthless and pointless, not to mention the enforced 1k weekly and 4k overall caps. Once you get to ilvl 460, there's absolutely no point in continuing to grind heroic dungeons for gear -- and you can even hit full 476 by just converting JP to Honor and buying the 476 PvP epics since they made the gear somewhat viable for PvE as long as you aren't tanking. It's ridiculous when there's certain weekly quests giving out more damn VP per turn-in (the Barrens weekly and Champions of the Thunder King for example) than you would get doing even a partial ToT normal clear.
DeleteWhat does this lead to? Players getting frustrated with trying to gear so they stop playing. The few people who manage to get enough gear together try to go into ToT normal and get STOMPED if they aren't at ilvl 500 or so and doing everything PERFECT past Jin'Rokh (the early "loot pinata" of the tier). This after the wonderful Tier 14 introduction encounters we had with Stone Guards and Feng on normal modes turned a LOT of people off to normal mode raiding. Guilds like AL breaking apart because people were just tired of wiping to the same boss for months on end due to BS RNG and getting nowhere, so people just end up staying in the cesspool called LFR to try to get upgrades/gear if they just don't flat out quit.
The people who can afford it and don't have serious connections to their servers jump ship to whichever server is most progressed with a good realm population. This in turn makes already not-so-terribly progressed servers even worse and farther behind in progression because there's NO ONE TO RECRUIT for the spots your raid team needs. Just look on WoWProgress and see the difference between Tier 14 and Tier 15 for Silver Hand alone. That should say something. Blizzard should just shut down the lowest population servers and offer people FCMs to designated medium-low pop servers, and from there allow us to cross-realm at least normal modes while they are the current tier. No one gives a damn in the race for realm firsts about normal modes, just make it so that for a realm to get Realm First! Heroic: Lei Shen/Ra-den is has to be a full group from THE SAME REALM.
Their reasoning for only giving us 5 leveling dungeons is because people cried about how the WORLD WAS SO DEAD and how people were just idling in Stormwind/Orgrimmar waiting for queues (or HGWT to get to raid dungeons) during Cataclysm, so that was their "solution" to force us out into the world. This was also their reasoning behind all those stupid daily quest hubs all over Pandaria for the various factions. I imagine most of this QQ came from derps on PvP realms upset that "world PvP wasn't happening" (read: they couldn't run around ganking level 10s on their 85s).
I agree the game has gotten really simple, and this is coming from someone who started before Cataclysm. The only "challenge" it seems is finding enough cats to herd through overtuned normal modes or subjecting yourself to Looking for Retards if you want to raid and can't afford to spend $25-55+ to move each of your toons off a dead server/faction (be it all at once or one at a time). Inb4 "lol you can reroll for free" -- Yeah, tell me how I'm supposed to get geared up on my fresh 90 reroll toon when LFR RNG is still crap and people want a minimum ilvl of 489+ for TIER 14 NORMAL MODES and 500+ for ToT normals.
/rant. I should just copypasta this to my own blog and call it a new entry, lol.