World of Warcraft: Current Year

Just put together my first transmog set for my main, not to shabby imo the shades of green were a bitch to try and match. Looking for bulkier boots though

Crone_sl said:

Do you really think that Blizzard can pull it off and not cave to the masses of people that are paying their monthly subs? I feel like the people that would appreciate something like this is far in the minority compared to those that would. Just look at Cata release, and the difficulty of those dungeons as an indicator.

I would love it, but far too many people suck, and those people are far too vocal I think for Blizzard to really do anything about it.

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I think Blizzard COULD pull it off, but I don't think they will. Hopefully pessimistic.

Vilmz_sl said:

Remember that one dungeon in Wrath? Halls of Reflection I think it was. It was one HELL of a ride being a tank. 95% of the time if you queued into it as DPS the tank would leave instantly lol.

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Halls was a fun tank. It shows how the game progressed; the boring ass days as a prot warrior. Fucking spam sunder armor and shield discipline.

All you had to do was stand in a corner and preferably be a paladin. It was the 4 other idiots that always fucked up Halls

82 now tanking with the Monk. I've never NEEDED any addons with my other classes. They made shit nice, but I could live without them unless I was being super anal about cooldowns, wanted to see who was putting down top dps, whatever. Fuck man, this Monk I'm having to rock half a dozen things just to begin to keep me going.

No more sitting in the back spamming, having to flat out say "Never tanked this, give me a minute to read up on it" seems to be an easy way to weed out the assholes from the decent players.

Weak Auras is love. There's some good monk strings out there for putting a # to your guards, stagger, # of Brew stacks/current duration, etc. I've got a little halo of weak auras running around my character All info that's readily available in the base UI, just nicer to have in a graphical, centralized, and larger array.

Just gotta watch out for fake strings trying to steal yo moneys

Well the ones that do quit over not having immediate and easy access to everything, is probably a much smaller group than it seems because they are so loud on the forums.

I wish Blizzard would look the other way and just say deal with it, or apparently add this proving grounds into the game. I have hopes they will do the right thing.

If anyone is going to say "deal with it," it will be furor. Kaplan would probably roll that way, but I guess he's "saving" wow2 right now. (I fully expect a Minecraft type game for that Titan stuff now)

I think Blizzard's track record shows that they will release WoD heroics as being moderately difficult in the beginning but slowly make them easier as more and more people bitch/get access to them.

I skipped Cata so I have no idea what they did for those.

I think they made it a patch before nerfing. They also did an early blanket nerf to regular mobs. They were somewhat more challenging at the start than previous xpacs. Snowflakes cried.

Never really understood the Catacylsm heroics freakout during the opening weeks. Wah, your DPS had to remember where they put their CC button and your awful tank had to remember not to pull with D&D, until your Healer had blue gear on and could afford to actually cast heals without OOMing; then you just went back to plowing through everything.

Yeah I was dumb. Simply marking mobs was more than adequate to rape cata dungeons.

Cata heroics were great - tough without being unfair. Stonecore without a ranged dps was a bit broken, though. That said, pugging them early on was nearly impossible as DPS. Because you know my well documented luck with pugs.

What is this proving grounds thing? Some kind of solo instance you have to run before you can do heroics? I never did it in MOP because I thought it was just a breadcrumb to the brawler's guild "standing in line because people demand community!" crap that I've never done. But I guess this quest I've ignored for months is actually something else.

Kuro_sl said:

Never really understood the Catacylsm heroics freakout during the opening weeks. Wah, your DPS had to remember where they put their CC button and your awful tank had to remember not to pull with D&D, until your Healer had blue gear on and could afford to actually cast heals without OOMing; then you just went back to plowing through everything.

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There were several factors. But mainly the freakout was surrounding "triage healing" and the idea that you would have to leave people at 25%-50% health for some time because healing them to full quickly made you go OOM. Chain-pulling and AOE in Wrath was so ingrained that tanks and DPS didn't want to adjust. Add in tons of avoidable (but who avoids?) mechanics which drop you 75% health.

Guild groups were almost tolerable because I could let people die if they did something stupid and not have them rage. PUGs were impossible majority of the time.

I've never rage-quit anything in this game, excepting healing PUGs in early Cata. I was very close to completely quitting healing over how stupid it was. A few good healers I know either quit healing, or quit the game entirely, and I'm sure the meta-data jockeys at Blizzard noticed. It was changed fairly quickly, but a lot of healers (including me) are still butt-hurt about it. Just start a thread titled "Triage Healing" in the forums to get a sample.

Doesn't help that Street (or whoever that was) still defends the stupidity and imbalance of "triage".

I just remember being on my pally in mostly JP and heroic gear and watching a tank slowly die while I chain cast holy light or whatever the spam heal was because the dps was too terrible to kill those 2 ogre things before the first boss in heroic DM. What a nightmare those dungeons could be with 3 bad dps

Kreugen_sl said:

What is this proving grounds thing? Some kind of solo instance you have to run before you can do heroics? I never did it in MOP because I thought it was just a breadcrumb to the brawler's guild "standing in line because people demand community!" crap that I've never done. But I guess this quest I've ignored for months is actually something else.

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I have no idea what it is currently like in MOP, but I believe it's being expanded for WoD. This is the thing I saw that caught my attention:

Proving Grounds will be updated for Warlords of Draenor and Blizzard wants to expand its functionality. It will be used as a prerequirement for raids. For example, players will need at least a silver medal in the Proving Grounds to queue in a dungeon. If you want to play in an instance with your friends or your guild, no problem, but if you want to join a random group you will have to prove that you know how to handle some mechanics of the game. This should be ready for Warlords of Draenor. Blizzard hopes it will improve the experience of players in LFD and LFR, and each player in the group should have the minimum knowledge required to fight the bosses.

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Ah, neat. Given how well tuned and awesome Gatekeeper was in TSW I have some hope for it, but they always seem to cave in to casual tears so I don't see them throwing up a roadblock that takes anything approaching passable skill to get through. As long as they normalize gear and tailor it by class they should be able to tune it to be a pretty good measure of competence. The damn thing could even have a paper clip that pops up and tells you things like "I see you aren't using xyz! Your damage output is suffering, you should work on that!" or "see this? that's your health bar! It's going down because you are standing in red stuff on the ground. You should move!"

And if people cry it's unfair, well, it was unfair that I had wait until I was 50 inches tall to ride the big roller coaster too. Your ineptness affects other people's fun. And people don't seem to get the hint when they get vote kicked.

Another thing they should look into is a proper gear score. Because gating by ilevel is a fucking joke. A 550 ring and a 450 weapon does not equal a 500 ilevel. I was doing SoO LFR with a blue quest weapon ffs. Granted, I was putting out 70-80k dps which put me into the top 5, but that's just a reflection of how fucking sad and pathetically low the bar has been set for LFR.

A real gearscore, combined with a proving grounds that is comprehensive enough to actually teach people how to play better could vastly improve the quality of pugs. They could then tune content appropriately, without having to worry so much about the idiots and the under-geared. But I'm sure they'll give in to the casual majority of shit-awful gamers and not take it nearly far enough. Because the MMORPG crowd for the most part is made up of people who flat out suck at playing video games.