World of Warcraft: Current Year

Noahx_sl said:

Almost makes me want to sub - looks very clean. Any huge drawbacks?

Having played WoD for just the story content/few raids - any large drawback coming back without having huge swells of gold?

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The only drawback to that UI is that either you like it the way it's laid out or you don't. Very few things can be moved, other than like your target or focus target. It does scale nicely, regardless of resolution, so what you see is what you get. They are still working on it but it even has the GW2 single bag, tooltips, fonts, etc.
There is also a really nice Diablo3 UI that's not quite as far along, but I think looks amazing (DiabolicUI - Unit Frames - World of Warcraft Addons - Curse), you can check out if it's more your style. Both are being worked on and added to to be (hopefully) complete for Legion.

As for playing with little to no gold, it's not an issue. I had like 15k (yeah thousand) across 11 characters when I logged in a few days ago. You can earn the money for flying by just leveling in WoD and other than that there isn't really any necessary money sinks. When Legion hits you'll get enough gold to buy whatever necessities you need at the time just by playing naturally.

Only downside will be that if you want to buy legion ore/skins/whatever off the AH at the start of the expansion instead of gathering them yourself, they'll prolly be above your paygrade since people will be burning a hole through their stash of WoD gold the first few weeks.

Really love the Disc priest style of like a Blood Mage type, with damage putting out healing. Loved it in the past, where with full heirlooms I was the main healer, and still like #2 on DPS in dungeons. I know things have changed drastically since I last played a Priest, but I tried putting some effort into leveling a Horde Priest, as my other priest is Alliance, but I just couldn't get into it.

They sure went balls to the walls with the dumbing-down of classes. This seems like kind of a big gamble in an expansion where they desperately need to steady the ship and avoid controversies. If Legion is another miss, it could genuinely be the beginning of the end for WoW. Massively simplifying the classes seems like something that a lot of players might not appreciate. My enhancement shaman no longer has totems, shocks, any meaningful ranged attacks, any elementals, buffs, really anything besides my rotation. My character is a walking rotation. Everything else has been stripped away. It doesn't feel anything like a shaman anymore, just generic melee. I don't have a snare aside from Frostbrand, I don't have a DoT, I have to waste a talent to turn Lightning Bolt into more than a mob-pulling tool. Pretty sure you have less abilities at level 110 than your class did in vanilla.

Ao-_sl said:

No, I got 12 out of 13 drops, should be fine.

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Nice, good to know. I got 11 of 13 yesterday and thought I either got extremely lucky or they stealth buffed the drop rate.

Also, everyone's DPS was complete dogshit in all 5 LFRs I ran yesterday. Like my 705 alt was struggling to break 20k DPS where it was easily doing 30-35k pre-patch. Not sure how much of that is a Learn2Play issue and how much is due to us not having artifacts yet. Or they just didn't bother tuning numbers for level 100 since the expansion is out soon.

I'm a big proponent of games with classes that offer far less abilities or key presses but create skill in how those abilities interact with each other.

Dandai_sl said:

I guess I'm the only one that thinks ability pruning is a far better alternative to EQ2 style MOAR BUTTONZ MMO maintenance. Let's keep things in context here - to make ANY activity compelling and interesting enough to continue to do it for more than several hours is a monumental task. There are very few games in which players have an expectation of novel and entertaining experiences for HUNDREDS of hours of gameplay. I think the WoW team's willingness to "reinvent the wheel" with every expansion is the only reason WoW maintains relevance while every other MMO withers up and dies.

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Ability pruning is fine, but they've taken it to such an extreme end of the spectrum that my spec feels downright primitive now. They've stripped away practically everything that doesn't pertain to the actual rotation. It's starting to feel boring. When you start to take away stuff like Grounding Totem and Frost Shock, you're not just removing unnecessary bloat, you're removing core class abilities that used to define the character. That's something I can see a lot of players objecting to.

I'm absolutely in favor of having fewer available buttons during combat. WoW is forced to take away options to prune ability bloat because they don't have any restrictions on active abilities like GW1, GW2, Everquest 1 or even their own Diablo 3, and probably most other games that are less then a decade old. Personally I would prefer if they added such a limitation and gave me a wider choice of utility or cooldowns to pick for the available slots. Introducing a limit on in-combat abilities would be a big change though, probably too big a change for a game that as old as WoW.

The problem is in many cases they removed the wrong buttons.

3 button rotations without any situational abilities (just filler cooldowns ie + dmg) are extremely boring. There certainlywastoo many abilities on some specs, but the reality is that most of them were really close to what they should be - maybe 1-2 extra situational abilities that were necessary for optimal performance but just frustrating things to keep track of and otherwise unnecessary (army of the damned for frost, for instance - flavorful but otherwise just kind of dumb and the dps could have been baked in elsewhere without much loss).

The idea of rotations is a stupid one. They should try to develop situations that don't rely on damage rotation.

Itzena_sl said:

Tomes are pretty much a guaranteed drop from the bosses right now, so as long as you're quick you should be fine.

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Even with having to do all the naval stuff basically from scratch on top of the tomes?

Jesus, some mythic dungeons are completely broken right now. Tanks all had their CDs stripped and healers have basically no longevity. Trash packs are doing 400K+ damage attacks. Meanwhile some bosses just auto attack for pennies.

Ratama_sl said:

Even with having to do all the naval stuff basically from scratch on top of the tomes?

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I mean if you have L3 shipyard thats doable easy. If you just started your garrison, it'll be very tight.

Palum_sl said:

I mean if you have L3 shipyard thats doable easy. If you just started your garrison, it'll be very tight.

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Garrison is L3, but I just started the Shipyard today (so it's still L1) :/

Yea the real problem is going to be the 25 treasure mission one to get L3. It's about 8-10 days on the legendary part after you have a L3 shipyard.