World of Warcraft: Current Year

Grimrail Depot's Cinder Seer trash packs are bloody hilarious on LFD.

whats average hp for a tank nowadays (~600ilvl?) played a year ago and i think my 500ilvl war was at like 450k. Did they retune things?

Whidon1_sl said:

Doing those Heroics in early BC was easily the most challenging and fun dungeon content in a mmo since EQ.

Still on the fence about buying the new xpac. ill prob decide in the next few days. Worried ill be overwhelmed and feel lost not playing since 07.

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The total lack of class balance destroyed all the fun of early BC. I still remember TBC heroic mobs being arbitrarily immune to all forms of CC except sheep and sap, and sap still had a 10% chance to fail and unstealth you.

Shattered Halls with two mages was just infinitely easier than SH with any other comp, and doing timed SH basically required two mages early on as you didn't want to risk wiping to a failed sap and failing because of it.

Baek_sl said:

whats average hp for a tank nowadays (~600ilvl?) played a year ago and i think my 500ilvl war was at like 450k. Did they retune things?

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About 215k.

Neranja_sl said:

I second that. Tank classes are supposed to use baseline defensive abilities in their rotation and anticipate damage spikes with short and longer cooldowns. E.g. Shield Block and Shield Barrier for protection warriors, with Demoralizing Shout (1 min cooldown) and Last Stand/Shield Wall as 3 min cooldowns.

Try to see what that tank does and what buffs he gets during the fight. For example if that brewmaster monk actually does a blackout kick in his rotation once in a while to trigger/keep his shuffle buff up (increasing stagger+parry), or if he only does spinning crane kick "because that is for aoe lol".

That is why I hate healing nowadays. Most LFD tanks never bother to learn tanking and just want to have that instant queue time. And everytime they wipe they blame it on the healer when most of the time they just suck and don't use their abilities at all. Sometimes it is so bad that I wanted to force choke the tank through the screen like Darth Vader: "I find your lack of tanking ability disturbing."

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tldr; the game doesn't teach tanking, one must learn it via trial and error (wipes). this could probably be improved upon. meanwhile, dps mash buttons and everyone blames tanks.

I agree completely that most tanks suck. However, from the perspective of a MMO player who has tanked nearly exclusively since vanilla WoW... the game does a piss-poor job of teaching you your tanking rotation until you actually need it.

What I mean is: I spend 100 percent of the time on my warrior in Prot... but I'm 93 and haven't done a WoD dungeon yet and haven't had a reason to use any defensive skill for any reason. I could "practice" by just firing them off against quest mobs/rares but its pointless and I doubt it'd really teach me anything. I feel like I'm guaranteed to have to wipe groups like a retard for a few days once I start running dungeons. I can't comment on healers, but obviously DPS gameplay remains relatively the same between solo and group. Granted, this isn't substantially different than any MMO early on in a launch... but neither is the complaining about tanks sucking =P

Neranja_sl said:

That is why I hate healing nowadays. Most LFD tanks never bother to learn tanking and just want to have that instant queue time. And everytime they wipe they blame it on the healer when most of the time they just suck and don't use their abilities at all. Sometimes it is so bad that I wanted to force choke the tank through the screen like Darth Vader: "I find your lack of tanking ability disturbing."

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I play Hunter, and The TankT refused to pull until Imarkedthe mobs. He then bitched about no traps. On Normal. He couldn't hold aggro at all...usual shit tank stuff. He then bailed on the group. Replacement tank was a wrecking ball.

I swear, I have no idea how people can lose the ability to play their class (if they even developed it at all) in the span of a few weeks between old and new xpacs.

The game not teaching a player how to tank is spot on. There is no mechanic for tank training save for the time you have to really tank. This regretfully ends up occurring when a player starts grouping. They have DPS dolls. It is a shame they never designed a tanking doll. Essentially it would do damage with heavy damage spikes that forces you to use the cool downs. It could use a phantom health bar and it would gauge your success on how long you remained alive. Hell you could use a solo instance that is offered by the class trainer. Really surprised that Blizzard has never implemented a class training system with the solo instance capability.

How bout if they used the proving grounds to teach you to tank? Seems like a decent tool they could use for that.

You mean like.... proving grounds? It's been in for a while.

Mahes_sl said:

The game not teaching a player how to tank is spot on. There is no mechanic for tank training save for the time you have to really tank. This regretfully ends up occurring when a player starts grouping. They have DPS dolls. It is a shame they never designed a tanking doll. Essentially it would do damage with heavy damage spikes that forces you to use the cool downs. It could use a phantom health bar and it would gauge your success on how long you remained alive. Hell you could use a solo instance that is offered by the class trainer. Really surprised that Blizzard has never implemented a class training system with the solo instance capability.

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Gotta disagree here, as a tank the proving grounds silver/gold really do a good job of teaching someone to tank. You have to peel the healer, while controlling multiple waves of mobs. You can argue its not a huge sample to go on, but your skill as a tank is tested. If someone can silver proving grounds they should be a decent tank for heroics at the very least.

I think the issue a lot of people are having is that blizzard really changed how tanking is done. Instead of before were it was just a steady amount of tank damage, with the occasional HUGE HIT which was broadcasted well in advance, now there's constant burst that has to be mitigated with the new super short duration, but extremely powerful cooldowns.

For example, the ogre mobs in the docks dungeon. They hit decently hard normally, but every ~15 seconds or so they charge up flurry with a 0.5 cast time, which then does massive burst on the tank. If the tank properly times their short burst cooldowns, it's fine, no problem. If you instead have a tank who is just dpsing the target and not timing their cooldowns, they're going to get rolled, and the group will probably blame the healer, or the healer may wrongly think their healing is insufficient.

Sinzar_sl said:

I think the issue a lot of people are having is that blizzard really changed how tanking is done. Instead of before were it was just a steady amount of tank damage, with the occasional HUGE HIT which was broadcasted well in advance, now there's constant burst that has to be mitigated with the new super short duration, but extremely powerful cooldowns.

For example, the ogre mobs in the docks dungeon. They hit decently hard normally, but every ~15 seconds or so they charge up flurry with a 0.5 cast time, which then does massive burst on the tank. If the tank properly times their short burst cooldowns, it's fine, no problem. If you instead have a tank who is just dpsing the target and not timing their cooldowns, they're going to get rolled, and the group will probably blame the healer, or the healer may wrongly think their healing is insufficient.

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This. I play a DK and it took a couple of runs to understand what dungeons were looking for. Previously, you only really had to blow cool downs if something truly terrible was happening. Now, nothing truly terrible happens, but multiple somewhat terrible things do. However, once you are accustomed to using your cooldowns more regularly rather than saving them 'just in case' everything is fine.

My gripe with tanking right now is overall mob targeting and confusion. Generally, I am stuck in the middle of 3 - 5 mobs, can't quite see myself, and end up eating a few AOEs that I could have avoided. Thankfully I am a DK so I can just lolbloodboil and keep aggro so I can concentrate more on avoidance. The screen is just so busy it is hard to see the important things.

Soygen_sl said:

Do you have deadly boss mod? Doesn't that have shit for the group stuff. I've only done like two dungeons so far and I'm only 96, so I haven't even noticed.

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DBM has great boss alerts for the dungeons to the point that I went into most with no experience and was able to compensate. Trash, I haven't noticed DBM popping for anything.

Is it really possible to get back into WoW at this point? I haven't played since Frozen Throne, and I'm not even sure if I ever hit max level in that expansion. I would probably reroll a toon on a server where some work colleagues are playing, but I'm a little nervous that I'll be completely overwhelmed even with the option to insta-level a toon to 90.

Looks like no promising mmorpg on the horizon, archeage was a dissapointment. I'm thinking this is really the only option if I want to play something in the genre.

They do a little hand holding trying to explain abilities when you boost. There are also probably several you tube channels you could browse to get a feel for the game. It's a great time to get into the game because it's new and everyone is screwing everything up through ignorance.

It's WoW of course it's possible to return. Every expansion is a reset. No better time than now.