World of Warcraft: Current Year

Aside from the phasing issues, you're just missing lore. They've embedded a lot of the 'storytelling' into the questing, especially in Pandaria.

Choosing talents for each of your six tiers is more of a situational decision thing now. There are still some 'obvious' choices that people consider mandatory (i.e. the big issue with the old system; not much 'min-maxing' going on when every spec is identical), but there's a bit more flexibility now.

Think of glyphs as modifiers on your abilities. Majors change them in a significant way that might affect how you use those abilities in an encounter and Minors are just flavor.

Many are returning due to lack of alternative. Not me tho!

If you were starting the game from scratch, what class would you pick? I have some time off this week and after playing the 10 day trial I want to give the game a whirl again since I haven't played since WOTLK. Here are the answers to the dumb questions that usually come up with a post like this one (I'm also admitting this post is dumb as well).

Q: What role do you like to play?
A: I don't care, doesn't matter to me. Probably won't play long enough for it to matter.

Q: Just play what you think is fun! (not a question)
A: I don't know what is fun these days even though it's purely opinion based. I'm just looking for various points of view to the original question.

So if you were starting from scratch again, what class would you pick? (Your motivation could be speed leveling, ease of farming, easiest way to find a group or guild; whatever.)

Edit to add:
Do people still do the gathering professions as you level thing to make money these days?

Monk, Paladin, or Druid, based on the fact that they can spec for any role if you get bored of what you're currently doing. Tanking dungeons is also one of the fastest ways to level, and also one of the most fun.

yes go gathering as you level on most servers low level herbs/bars/ore sell for crazy gold. Get an addon like tradeskillmaster or auctionmaster to see if you like playing the auction game. Do pet battles as you level, its a fun little distraction. Suggest addons Battle Pet Binds and Pet Battle Teams. Also get ElvUI fromhttp://tukui.org/dl.phpits a great UI that takes under 1 min to setup and gives pretty much all the addon features you'd want.

I suggest DK, you skip level 1-55 and its a great class to solo elites and stuff with, plus instaQs as tank (blood). Warlocks are also fun. Really the only classes I would avoid are rogue and monk, they are both kinda weak the rest are all good.

Doesn't playing a dps only class suck for dungeon leveling?

Draegan_sl said:

Doesn't playing a dps only class suck for dungeon leveling?

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Rogue = worst, most boring class in the game, hands down. No flexibility. Stuck doing Melee limiting your effectiveness depending on encounter, so even if your dps is stellar, you can be out done by range simply by virtue.

Every other DPS class has some form of range and/or pet.

One thing that helped me decide on a spec to play was process of elimination. I rolled a shaman and wanted to be able to heal for instant queues and DPS so I can actually kill something on my pvp server. Well, if I went enhancement/resto you'd need 2 different sets of gear all the way through leveling, so the ease of gearing with elemental and resto sharing the same shit was a plus. Until you get to higher levels that works, which is most of the 1-85 game.

I would suggest a class that can fill 2 roles if you want to have versatility.

Warrik_sl said:

Rogue = worst, most boring class in the game, hands down. No flexibility. Stuck doing Melee limiting your effectiveness depending on encounter, so even if your dps is stellar, you can be out done by range simply by virtue.

Every other DPS class has some form of range and/or pet.

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Unless the game drastically changed since I stopped in November, then Warriors, Monks, Frost DKs, Ret Paladins, Enhancement Shamans and Feral Druids have no range or true pets to use that would be more effective than meleeing. Rogues were fine and really fun to play as in pvp. And besides, questing will always be faster than just doing dungeons. As long as you hit the dungeons in your level range once for the quests, theres no need to go back really.

Wow so after putting mages on suicide watch, in 5.2 we can look forward to even more nerfs to PVE. No more spreading bombs? Fuck you, seriously. And arcane takes a bullet to the back of the head. Fucking joy.

They needed to not move away from the Cata rogue model - in Cata we had:

Muti was strong single target, strong AoE
Combat was strong single target, strong cleave
Sub was strong single target, weak AoE but strong burst

In MoP, and looking towards 5.2, we have:

Muti is strongest single target, good AoE
Combat is slightly behind in single target, and has excellent cleave that is being nerfed into the ground in 5.2 - effectively trashing any AoE potential of the spec
Sub is behind in single target, and behind in AoE - additionally it's burst is not as strong as it was in Cata.

The class mechanics aren't boring, but it would be nice to get some kind of raid utility outside of Smoke Bomb - that's where we really need some work. I don't think we need AG or VE or Banners or some kind of crazy healing/dmg reduction clone, but maybe some kind of raid DPS boost along the lines of Stormlash or Skull Banner. My vote would be rather than add more skill bloat, make Shroud of Concealment give everyone a 100% crit bonus on their next few attacks or something along those lines.

The cleave nerf is pretty substantial, math is showing on a lot of fights it's almost not even worth turning on unless you're into deeper bandit's guilde phases and are only turning it on when energy pooled and have anticipation charges holding finishers ready. It over complicates the spec for something stupid like an 8% dps gain on a secondary target. Meanwhile it doesn't appear they have touched warrior cleave yet.

Blade Flurry was probably too powerful, but rather than tweaking numbers, they should make it a talent point, so that any spec can use a more balanced version of it rather than having to respec/reforge every time you hit a cleave fight. If they still want cleaving to be an iconic Combat thing, just add in a bonus to it w/ combat.

They really should look at the stupid amount of utility that an enhancement or ele shaman brings right now, compare that to anything but warriors and it's pretty dumb. AG or one of the equivalent healing talents are crazy powerful, especially when you start sitting healers to meet berserk timers - having something like that to fall back on, with a two minute CD, is crazy powerful. Then they get Stormlash, I don't know about other specs but it's a 1500ish dps increase every 5 minutes for rogues alone, not sure how it lines up with other specs, but that's a massive raid dps boost in a 25 man raid, and all it costs is a GCD every 5 minutes. Then Earthgrab is really powerful on any fights with add management like Will, Earth Elemental is great for things like that too, and finally a 5second targetable AoE stun. And they do all of that without saccing any dps outside of a GCD - and I think Enhance get's some free GCDs anyway it can catch up on. They should pull some of that utility, and spread it around to specs that don't bring too much right now.

Kreugen_sl said:

Wow so after putting mages on suicide watch, in 5.2 we can look forward to even more nerfs to PVE. No more spreading bombs? Fuck you, seriously. And arcane takes a bullet to the back of the head. Fucking joy.

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Yep I started leveling my Mage 85 to 90 and I keep seeing new nerfs every few weeks. Thinking of sitting him, at this point and doing my enh shammy. I just love my Mage so much, been a Mage off and on for so many years. Hopefully during testing some of the Mage nerfs get reversed.

Glyph of fire blast removed because of PVP and frost bomb, which was already nerfed by 50% damage. Except the glyph is also what let us spread living bomb and trigger nether tempest nukes, so its YET ANOTHER fuck you PVE nerf because of stupid fucking PVP tuning.

I think I'll never play a MMO that tries to balance PVE and PVP together ever again. In fact I'll be perfectly happy to have no PVP at all because it FUCKS EVERYTHING UP. So fucking infuriating. Fuck they even had a pvp-specific, 20% damage reduction built in to the thing, yet they take it out completely in the next patch? Fuck PVP, seriously.

I do mostly PVP in the game, but what I find ridiculous is the reason they refuse to separate the 2. "Because it will be too confusing for players to learn 2 different rulesets". Yet some abilities already work differently vs players and the gear is separate

It has to be laziness or that they do not think it is a proper use of developer time/game funds.

As a fellow mage, just pushing heroic raids now, the constant nerfs have seen me go from top of the charts, to near top, then middle, and it looks like fire and arcane are going to be garbage entirely. If they push Frost as the new raiding spec, I will just quit entirely.

Frost won't be viable. Even if it is, it'll be subject to massive fucking PVP nerfs at any moment so I'd avoid it.

Rime_sl said:

As a fellow mage, just pushing heroic raids now, the constant nerfs have seen me go from top of the charts, to near top, then middle, and it looks like fire and arcane are going to be garbage entirely. If they push Frost as the new raiding spec, I will just quit entirely.

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Not sure about next tier, but Fire then Arcane have been top specs since we began the tier over 2 months ago. We have 1 heroic boss left and our 3 Mages have consistently wrecked the meters all the way through.

At least in my experience, Fire and/or Arcane have been strong over the past 2-3 years. I doubt Frost will be for reasons mentioned above, but then Blizz made Arms the dominant Warrior spec (also a good PvP spec) for a couple of tiers in Cata so who knows.