World of Warcraft: Current Year

Mahes said:

So are Enhance Shamans good or bad this time? They always go through cycles with most of the time being shit. Also, which class is a good universal tank?

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Enh are meta in m plus. Big pumper, still squishy. Many tanks spec are getting buffed next reset. So far its war by a mile.

Warrior damage is out of control, which will keep them meta.

Foggy said:

Warrior damage is out of control, which will keep them meta.

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Ive done mplus up to 20s and I dont see warrior doing massive dmg. Main diff
i see as a healer is that prot hp does not move, esp compared to monk and druid. Blood dk and vdh seems ok.

Razzes said:

Ive done mplus up to 20s and I dont see warrior doing massive dmg. Main diff
i see as a healer is that prot hp does not move, esp compared to monk and druid. Blood dk and vdh seems ok.

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Yea its kinda been like that for a while that while warrior has rage they cannot be killed and DF just gave them more ways to get rage. Not to mention with the healing/hp nerfs mitigation tanks became standard except DK because they never needed healing anyway and it was always based on percentages so health/healing changes going in that direction just make them more powerful (and to a lesser extent DH but DH really need to know how to pull around their CDs).

does anyone raid during the daytime EST? I've been playing this some during the days and getting super sick of random pugs non stop, just hard to get any real progression when the raid composition turns over every 5 pulls

Tried healing a mythic+ with my shaman …and I won’t be doing that again. Blizzard can shove grievous all the way up their fucking asshole. What a miserable experience for a healer.

Chersk said:

Tried healing a mythic+ with my shaman …and I won’t be doing that again. Blizzard can shove grievous all the way up their fucking asshole. What a miserable experience for a healer.

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heh, the more you play m+, the more you ll like grievous as a healer. At least you have something to heal, instead of mindlessly spamming some filler dmg spells. Idk how rshaman fares tho.

It was just non stop big heal spam. My hots weren’t nearly enough to top people off. Super frustrating. Probably had a lot to do with my group being pretty shit and eating mechanics but usually I’m able to heal through that anyway. Not this week.

Yeah, for a group of people who know what they’re doing grevious is a non-affix. For every other group it’s a miserable healer only affix next to bursting in shitassery “Fuck healers” affixes that dps ignore managing.

At least they removed necrotic from the pool, whatever small consolation that is.

WoW is making gay Irish people cringe.

Chersk said:

It was just non stop big heal spam. My hots weren’t nearly enough to top people off. Super frustrating. Probably had a lot to do with my group being pretty shit and eating mechanics but usually I’m able to heal through that anyway. Not this week.

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Hot are naturally bad at healing grievous since they take time to heal, time during which dmg accumulates. However, some of your spells can clear a stack of grievous on application. For disc pw shield would do that. As a rdruid, my healing is so insane I dont even intentionally clear stacks of grievous with specific spells, I just heal through it.

Started up again xmas weekend. Warlock was first to 70 just pointing at things and dotting while doing the drain life and send it to pet routine. I barely got to touch SL before I was 60 and into Dragon Isles. Fucked around a lot and am just now figuring a lot of this shit out.

Hunter is where I will probably spend most of my time. I went ahead and continued all the way through BFA before moving on to DF and am still working on nazjatar rep for flying.

New crafting is all right. Not much different from old crafting, so not sure why they bothered, but we'll see if that changes as I unlock all this specialization shit.

gremlinz273 said:

They gave crafting and gathering the AA treatment, so there is another set of xp bars to raise that have limited mechanisms to raise and eventually get breaked by daily quests. There are some mechanics that get added from these AAs such as the ability to gather while mounted and alternative ways to gather like growing herbs and getting increased element resources from nodes. Not sure what it adds for crafting, haven't done any yet.

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For LW it opens new recipes for post 50. Went mail spec for now to get my 384 stuff opened up. Not sure what all the new crafting stats mean, but we'll see. The weeklies for extra knowledge are sweet. Make an alt to feed yourself personal orders.

Yeah, while every recipe is craftable at 50 (some recipes are locked behind tradeskill talent purchases), the results have 5 quality (ilevel) levels, and you will not hit the highest ilevel on endgame crafts without maxing out those tradeskill talent trees, burning consumables, and possibly getting lucky on the combination (the inspiration stat gives you a chance to craft at a higher skill level).

From my limited experience with the system, most of the crafting tradeskills massively slow down by 70 base skill (out of 100), as you will either need Sparks of Ingenuity or Artisan's Mettle, neither of which is _individually_ farmable, to skillup beyond that point.

The overall impression I get is that it has devolved into a rich get richer scenario - the major guilds decided who their tradeskillers were at the start and fed their guild's Sparks to them, which meant that those tradeskillers are better skilled than the population at large (because you can only get ~one skill up per week with your own Sparks), which means that they get the general public work orders, which means those crafters are even more skilled than the baseline, repeat.

And yes, having all your characters do their crafting weeklies, and having an alt / guildie feeding your crafters personal orders, appears to be the only way to not lose even more ground vs the high end.

The crafters that have been crafting rank 5 pieces were not fed sparks lol. You would never waste sparks to level and you need to be maxed to make R5. There are ways to max without sparks, they were just extremely expensive. Some guilds made investments and some individuals made their own investment.

I have half of the trades (LW, BS, JC x 2, & Alchemy) at 100, with the others all over 50 and Foggy is correct. Crafted items are BiS for most classes for at least 2 slots, so no one is burning sparks just for skill ups.

In the first weeks, it was easier to catch people needing stuff made using their sparks, for their BiS crafted items. There were less crafters that could make things, and more people needing things made, so if you wanted to max professions, you had to sit in town, advertising or looking for people asking in trade.

Also, as Foggy said, some trades have items, while expensive to make, can be unlocked through the tree and made all the way to 100. For example:

• I used repair hammers to max Blacksmithing at ~7k a skill point.
• On my first JC to 100, I needed some rep with artisans and to get lucky with catching public work orders to skill up to 100 making a rare quality crafting tool recipe. I got that recipe a week or two before anyone else on my server.
• Alchemy can just experiment from 50 to 100 with the basic recipe you get at the start

I used spark recipes on my Leatherworker and second JC to 100. For JC, I put points into rings and necks, then checked public WOs a couple times a day to catch people wanting them made. It took a while to get to max. LW was catching WOs when not many people could make items, in the first 2 weeks.

As far as getting 5 star on the end game ilevels, for the most part, you need to recraft items until inspiration procs, and max the talent that increases inspiration. I don't think people have enough points (if it's even possible) to 100% max rank anything when the item is fully decked out.

Leatherworking is definitely the worst one I've seen yet, avoid that one until sparks are plentiful (also get primordial leatherworking).

It's a shit show, you are only able to specialize in a couple things so far, so you better be organized and know that you are only capable of making certain pieces at max at first, like I can make really nice maces and tools but it's far better to have someone else make my pants or if I splash on the recipe they can at least recraft them for example. Any crafting profession needs to be planned out how to level, because some are much easier to level with specialization tree recipe unlocks (blacksmithing) and it also depends on the recipes you get, so don't go spending all your points right away.

If you fucked up your points you gotta wait for more but at least they are patching category unlocks at lower levels so they will unlock at 60/75 instead of 75/100 in case you fucked that up too.

Burns said:

I have half of the trades (LW, BS, JC x 2, & Alchemy) at 100, with the others all over 50 and Foggy is correct. Crafted items are BiS for most classes for at least 2 slots, so no one is burning sparks just for skill ups.

In the first weeks, it was easier to catch people needing stuff made using their sparks, for their BiS crafted items. There were less crafters that could make things, and more people needing things made, so if you wanted to max professions, you had to sit in town, advertising or looking for people asking in trade.

Also, as Foggy said, some trades have items, while expensive to make, can be unlocked through the tree and made all the way to 100. For example:

• I used repair hammers to max Blacksmithing at ~7k a skill point.
• On my first JC to 100, I needed some rep with artisans and to get lucky with catching public work orders to skill up to 100 making a rare quality crafting tool recipe. I got that recipe a week or two before anyone else on my server.
• Alchemy can just experiment from 50 to 100 with the basic recipe you get at the start

I used spark recipes on my Leatherworker and second JC to 100. For JC, I put points into rings and necks, then checked public WOs a couple times a day to catch people wanting them made. It took a while to get to max. LW was catching WOs when not many people could make items, in the first 2 weeks.

As far as getting 5 star on the end game ilevels, for the most part, you need to recraft items until inspiration procs, and max the talent that increases inspiration. I don't think people have enough points (if it's even possible) to 100% max rank anything when the item is fully decked out.

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For a second I thought Bubbles wrote a concise well informed post. Had to do a double take.

I did mail first because hunter, and the main one next. Haven't put any points into that yet. Planning to do whichever one of the others has the bow for next one.I haven't done much yet on my warlock, but he has mining and smithing. Planning to level my pure gatherers and tailoring/enc next. The new WQ cycle makes for a lot of dead time to keep caught up on shit which is nice.

My hunter is also doing rep farming for BFA flying unlock. Going at a decent clip. Just 4k or so left on nazjatar. After that I will start SL and see how long it takes to do all that shit. Just 1-2 more upgrades until I can start hitting LFR.

New weeklies are pretty fun.