World of Warcraft: Current Year

I have a couple hundreds with a 3rd pretty close. I haven't played since early last year though. Is there still time to stack gold and buy game tokens? My goal would to only pay the initial $15 unless there is a way to avoid that as well.

Foggy_sl said:

I would recommend just chilling and saving the urge to play for legion. The prepatch is only a month or two away and it will bring tons of players back.

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...and I fear that after the novelty wears off, these people won't bother playing the xpack or if they do, it'll be a one month trip to watch the content. In terms of gameplay, I've never witnessed before such an abysmal reception of the class changes, considering that a lot of the alpha was done by focus groups of 13/13 M players (but not only), there are very few specs that are quite happy with their changes, if "happy" is not too strong of a word.

I can recap the feedback in a TL;DR format, this is what I gathered from multiple sources of alpha/beta players and theorycrafters. I did not follow the 35 different specs, which are pretty much classes on their own nowadays, but it gives you an idea of where the current feelings are.

- Death Knight: Blood seems playable finally, frost is shit and unholy is meh.

- Druid: resto is good and fundamentally the same as before except a new mastery, balance is better than WoD (worse was probably impossible), feral is boring and still has Savage Roar, aka a retarded buff to keep up that fucks up the whole priority list, Guardian is good, more fun than before and has a fuckton of hitpoints, which is always lovely to see.

- Hunters: you can probably salvage Marksman, maybe and that's a stretch. Beastmastery and Survival should be taken out and put out of their misery. I don't think any serious hunter will every play one of those in their current sorry state: they suck mechanically and they are boring as dry shit. The pruning on this class is also atrocious: depending on spec you may lose Camouflage, traps (all of them) shots of some kind, etc. I would personally pack the shit of this developers team, push it out the door and fire them in a parking lot, because it's frankly ridicolous what they did.

- Mage: Arcane people seemed happy, Frost had a few tweaks to be done and Fire people were quite unhappy, but it seemed there was hope even there.

- Monk: Brewmaster not happy, Mistweavers are split, it's certainly much more boring and lost all its uniqueness, but it may be powerful enough to be considered interesting, except MW has no real utilities. Windwalkers I have no idea, sorry.

- Paladin: pass. No clue.

- Priest: well here things get interesting. Shadow is pretty much a well received revamp, still lacks in the burst AoE department, but the class seem cool, both thematically and for the gameplay, which considering the insane (haha!) amount of haste it can reach, it'll be the most action packed frantic smashing of buttons ever seen in WoW. Surrender to Madness has the potential to be the most fucking broken personal cooldown in the game, reports speak of over 1 million dps on 2 or 3 targets for more than one minute before the tragic ending (horrible death) and this with shit gear. Discipline has changed a lot, it looks fun on paper and effective enough for those who like the concept of an offensive healer, like the Rift Chloromancer. I don't know how hard it's going to be managing atonements, but it can't be terrible. Holy is also gaining a lot of neat tools and really large heals. The class as a whole seems in a great position to enter Legion (and I'll main it again, fuck playing a broken class, I want a fun one).

- Rogue, shaman, warlock: honestly I didn't keep up with the changes, my info are outdated, so I'm not going to comment.

- Warriors: dps warriors say that Arms is better than WoD (anything is better than WoD Arms, *even* watching paint dry) , but still quite boring, fury is slightly better, but not enticing enough, protection ranges from "meh" to "okay-ish" depending on whom you're going to ask.

The general feeling is quite negative, first because nobody likes to lose a shitton of skills they used for years, some for more than a decade (e.g. Aspect of the Cheetah), secondarily because the changes to skills and talents remove the interaction among them, as way too often there is a determined set of skills that is better than everything else and again that set of skills/talents is mindnumbing boring.
I followed all changes from expansion to expansion, but I've never heard so much negativity. Maybe it's because a lot of players today are just whiny cunts, but the difference from gaining new skills (TBC- WOTLK) and losing them to pruning or lol-class-fantasy (MoP-WoD-Legion) is huge.
Underrepresented specs, such as Ferals for example, have been largely neglected, with shitty artifact talents, lazy developing of the class and little to no mechanical changes since... forever, fucking Savage Roar again is there to put this under the spotlights, jeez...

One comment I read made me giggle, the question was "what will you miss in Legion?" and one answer was "People, because Legion will not keep them". It sounds awfully true.

I'll play a priest, I should say a shadow priest, the changes are interesting and the gameplay is improved from the current state, even considering the loss of Devouring Plague and Psychic Horror. I get to keep my PW:shield and gain Shadow Mend to heal myself and others, I gain amazing levels of haste and while there are a couple of things I don't really like a lot, I think I can learn to live with those, as long as the legendaries class specifics are not overly rare to get. I think the difference between a capable shadow priest and a crappy one, won't ever be so large tho, which is good and scaring at the same time: first because there is always someone better than me and I don't like to be less good than someone (!) and second because I fear for future semplifications.

My suggestion is to find a class you're interested in right now, gameplay is pretty much set for the time being and focus on that as a main. I don't like leaving the monk behind, but I really dislike ALL the changes. Tanking mythic dungeons this week made me think of all the skills I won't be able to use anymore, such as Dizzying Haze, Touch of Death, etc. and I was smashed. Back to priest, good old priest.

Gyrochronatom utter pita to find.

I took a beastmastery hunter out for a twirl and frankly I don't get some of the complaints. I pretty much always had something I could be doing damage wise and it seemed pretty competent in dealing damage. The pets do seem a bit squishy at the moment but otherwise it did not seem bad. I played arms for a while in WOD THAT was dull as shit. Lets cut a spec down to 4 abilities and make 3 of them on long cool downs and make an aoe of all things as your main rage dump. Beastmastery may need some love in legion but it is head and shoulders better shape than arms was throughout WOD.

I have been trying out a bunch of classes to get their artifact just to see how they work mechanically in legion

Vengence demon hunters: these guys seem pretty fun. Good self healing ability reasonable tank powers and they look bad ass. Overall I am going to give this a twirl at some point in legion although probably not my main initially.

Beastmastery hunter Other than the insane yipping when a gnome casts ferocious beasts which REALLY needs its volume lowered or the shrillness lowered I found it worked pretty well. Note I did take chimera shot and that apparently helps a great deal smoothing out the rotation so you don't have dead spots. There are some points for improvement such as their main focus spender when kill command is on CD currently is not very satisfying. Mechanically it works fine but the damage is lacking and it does not have a ton of synergy with the rest of the kit. If all its going to do is damage then it needs to do that better than it currently is. Otherwise if you want to play a hunter who has ranged and an awful lot of critters helping you out they seem fine. Buff pet health a bit up their main spenders damage and it would be good place.

Guardian druids okay bear tanks seem to be in a pretty good place now although the galactic guardian talent currently may be skewing things a bit because disco bear while hilarious and strong may be procing more than it should. The galactic guardian talent currently has a 50% proc rate so every time a mob hits you it has a 50/50 chance of taking moonfire proc AND making your next manually casted moonfire give you 15 rage. When tanking groups of mobs it is like a massive strobe light of bearish doom of near infinite rage. I will have to try this again when/if they do a balance pass as I am not sure the OPness they currently are will stick around. The other amazing thing is the artifact bear forms. For to long every bear tank looked like every other bear tank. Now not only do they have a large number of options available once unlocked most of those options look FUCKING AWESOME. This is the first expansion in years that tempts me to go bear druid again.

The druid affinity system is also pretty neat it basically makes an off spec form more overall useful so for bear druids soloing you can pop a feral or more likely boomkin form and put out pretty damn solid dps. Makes solo leveling as a tank if your buddies are not around a LOT nicer. Same goes if you take resto with boomkin or feral affinity you actually have a form you can kill things with when soloing.

Boomkin I was messing around with last night and is my current spec on my druid. The pacing is a lot different now than it is on live and that throws me off a bit but overall boomkin seem is a really damn good place. Good offense good defense the tool kit is mostly the same as what we have been working with. We lost hurricane but given how nerfed it was in WOD I never really used it much anyway. Boomies have plenty of aoe now available standard and more via talents. One slight issue is until you get the artifact and the moon/moon power the initial ramp up time until you start doing max dps is longer than what you currently see on live. There are talents to mitigate that though so if you feel your self struggling to get the initial ramp up time check your talents there are ways to maximize it early that may not be necessary once you get artifact so tweak as needed.

Enhance shaman most classes got pruned my enhance shaman has more damn buttons than I had that are needed in the DPS rotation than I have had in a long time. They feel really good DPS wise and the flow of powers especially if you take boulder fist feels excellent. You are pretty much a true melee mage and does a good job with it. The only real knock against them is they are a bit squishy although they changed one of their defensive powers to now work on all damage not just magic damage and their heal got buffed so overall a bit more fragile than live but seems overall fine. The big question for them would be potentially PVP but that has been a bit of an issue for enhance shaman for a while I am hoping with the more specific knobs they can turn be easier to get them competitive than it has been in WOD.

Demo warlocks. Okay demo warlocks play like I always wanted my demo warlocks to play now. Its pets and imps everywhere and if you spec for it your shadow bolt gets changed to do added damage for every minion in play. Given the massive amount of imps/dreadstalkers/double barreled fel guards I put out I can rock faces. Their artifact also is the most unique one of the expansion their main hand is a dagger but the prime thing is their "off hand" and by off hand I mean floating skull that follows you around. This skull also when you attack things sometimes freak out and jump at your targets and screams at them doing aoe damage. IT IS AWESOME.

I have not played a warlock main ever but the demo warlock and the artifact for it is making me SERIOUSLY consider it this go round.


Still have a number of other specs I want to try to see what I like best. A lot of the specs are playing somewhat to very differently than what they had been so I do highly recommend come the prepatch stuff try a bunch of them see what appeals to you personally.

Glad to hear about the druid changes. Maybe I'll go back to having the druid as my main (which it always was until WoD made all of their specs except resto crap to play)

If you get a chance to see beta check out the guardian bear and talent that galactic guardian. I don't think it is going to last in this state but the strobe of laser bear doom is so damn hilarious its worth seeing while you can.

I'm considering going back druid as well with seeing the changes. Played druid since vanilla up until mid Mists or so, I sort of miss it tbh

Enough time to stack gold.. Not near the maounts others have obviously but enough to get close to 100k if your garrisons are set up well/have a few followers with treasure hunter trait.

Fury is actually fun as hell right now in Legion, and druid Guardian is currently considered the top tank.

They look good they seem to have good options for magic damage mitigation, physical damage mitigation and longer cool downs for all damage. They don't have the insane self heals they used to but self healers are still really good. That and the fact that there are now a ton of cool skins for the bear really I think is going to make this a good expansion for guardians. I have been boomkin main in the last 3 expansions but after playing through their artifact stuff I may change it up this go round.

So I'm not entirely sure of the severity of the nerf, but a while back they nerfed Disc Priests and Attonement right? It was talked about a little bit above, but are they trying to bring back the Offensive healer? That was a hell of a fun time, albeit OP, to actually rank somewhere in the tops for DPS and still put out respectable healing. Would love to see a return of that somehow that was at least fun!

Thanks to both Miele & kaid for those write-ups. Lots to think about. Probably going with Druid and Rogue again in Legion, but the Shaman/Lock/Priest changes look pretty enticing.

Well, I am now going with my dwarf Pally for Legion. Tri-spec was a major reason, along with how bad-ass Ashbringer is. Prot looks strong and fun in PvP. Holy healing has always been fun to me. RIP my warrior but oh well, still will be tanking.

Tried prot warrior last night a few changes but overall plays pretty much like it does now seems a strong tanking option

Felmega_sl said:

Well, I am now going with my dwarf Pally for Legion. Tri-spec was a major reason, along with how bad-ass Ashbringer is. Prot looks strong and fun in PvP. Holy healing has always been fun to me. RIP my warrior but oh well, still will be tanking.

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We get a third spec in legion?

You can switch to any spec out of combat anywhere, at the moment. They just changed it from costing an increasing amount every time you switch away from a chosen 'primary' spec, but the max on that was only like 75g.

On the other hand, you can only change talents in rest zones. Scribes can make a consumable that you can place anywhere and allows changing talents for 5 minutes. It'll be pretty expensive, but it beats not having the option. I'm expecting, though, that this is going to severely increase use of the 'teleport out/into dungeon' button in heroics.