WoW: Warlords of Draenor

[TheFeniX]

What's the deal with Glad Stance Prot Warriors? I see DPS lists showing them above any other spec I could or would want to play (I don't enjoy Unholy DK). And since they require tank stats for their damage, they get even beefier as they progress. Is this sustainable? I know Blizz has always had hard-ons for Warriors in late xpac and I like my warrior. I could see myself maining her, if we ever decide to give WoD a shot after the BS dies down.

[Darmalus]

No idea about warriors, I hung up my tanking specs half way through Mists and the changes for Warlords convinced me to put away my healing specs as well.

WoW has hit the 10 million subscriber mark, beating my expectation by about a million. Of course, the real test is if Blizzard can hold those subscribers once they hit level cap.

The 10th anniversary has begun in the EU and starts in a few hours in the US. I've been getting mixed reviews, the worst mostly related to a bug that kicks the whole raid and griefers pulling huge trash packs, but what does concern me is that apparently you have to do the entire MC run in one go because it's LFR (no saving the raid ID) and people are estimating anywhere from 6 to 10 hours for a full clear. Oy vey.

[Gerald Tarrant]

So far I've been having a good experience tanking. The healers that hit 610 this early all seem to be up to the task of a few mispulls that seem to happen as people get the hang of dungeons. Heroic tanking is awesome. Pulls require proper planning and cc's its a challenge again. MoP heroics weren't this tough even a few days after launch.

About Molten Core, I got into a group that had downed 2 bosses and it only took 2 more hours to finish. If you're careless there's some nasty chain pulls with patrolling mobs and such, but it's not horrible. The big thing I'm noticing is everyone says this is just like original MC; 20 people carrying the other 20.

One of the concerns I've got is it looks like garrisons and professions are the new source of "charity" epics. 5-7 days to get a 640, another 5-7 to upgrade it to 655, I'm not sure what to think of that, probably good from an alt stand point. We'll see what it means when the raiding starts I guess.

[Darmalus]

Even faster if you get into a pre-made group and grind out all your apexis crystals. If you are willing you but some serious wear on your mouse, you could get a 655 item a day. Only covers 6 of the slots, however.

The Iron Docks and Grimrail Depot are a hoot, but the dungeons still suffer from just... being there. There doesn't seem to be any story connection to the rest of the world other than "Bad guys with loot! Kill!" which is kinda a let-down after places like the Jade Temple, Stormstout Brewery and Shado Pan Monastery, which flowed naturally from the surrounding quest lines. Disclaimer: I'm not 100% complete on questing yet, and only just hit the ilvl for heroics.

[Lord Revan]

Shadowmoon Burial grounds and Auchindoun are culminations of questlines in Shadowmoon Valley and Talador, though you could excused at forgetting the Shadowmoon one as the questline is a one you finish at about level 91-92 and Shadowmoon Burial grounds doesn't come avaible until level 100, though Auchindoun is avaible once you beat that questline.
Spoiler

The Auchindoun questline ends with you powering up the defenses that Soulbinder Naymi in the instance destroys to allow Teron'gor and the burning legion to enter

[Gerald Tarrant]

There's also the legendary ring quest netting you a 680

Even faster if you get into a pre-made group and grind out all your apexis crystals. If you are willing you but some serious wear on your mouse, you could get a 655 item a day. Only covers 6 of the slots, however.

Also the legendary quest ring for 680. And that only requires 49xx apexis crystals.

[Minischoles]

Molten Core honestly feels like the Dev Team trolling all those people on the forums constantly whining for Vanilla servers - a big, 'well here you go, enjoy' considering all they've done is scale everything up for level 100.

No retuning of abilities - so you still get raid wide curses when only two classes can remove it, both on an 8 second CD - ridiculous annoying trash pulls and boring bosses.

[Sinewmire]

a big, 'well here you go, enjoy'

Yeh, that what my reaction too. "Still say Vanilla was best?" I went with 5 guildies, and they kept saying A) How much they were enjoying it, because they had fond memories of people screwing up on corehounds etc. and B) They should do this kinda thing now and then to highlight how much better the new stuff is.

[Lord Revan]

it would be intresting to see how many of those who say "vanilla was the best and so hard not like now" actually played those raids when they were relevant content.

[Civil War Man]

it would be intresting to see how many of those who say "vanilla was the best and so hard not like now" actually played those raids when they were relevant content.

Not many. I don't know the stats, but I remember hearing something that less than 1% of guilds cleared the original Naxxramas. We're probably talking only tens or hundreds of thousands in a game that had millions of players even back then. Even if, for the sake of argument, we assume that one million players cleared Vanilla Naxx when it was current, every single one of them would have to still be playing for them to make up 1% of the current player base.

There may be a decent percentage of people still playing who cleared the original Molten Core, but every story I've heard of Vanilla was that the gear and logistics requirements caused guild clearing of later tiers to drop sharply, with each successive tier being cleared by fewer people than the one before it. Can't say that from experience though, since I started playing in late BC, so the first expansion I spent any extended period of time at max level was Wrath. Though I did spend enough time at 70 back at BC to be part of my guild's first clear of Kara (it was a super casual real-life friends only guild, and I was the 9th or 10th person to join).

[TheFeniX]

A lot of nostalgia is built around the time investment. Not just attunements, but also gear gates, builds not being what they were today, and that everything wasn't immediately data-mined. None of these are really "skill," but are usually considered so when looking back. But it cuts down the exposure: just being in a raid when it was current tier meant something.

Really though, talking to a few current (or in and around Cata) raiders who pushed the content and reading posts from the devs: it's all nostalgia. They ignore that the game has changed. Content is no longer gated off behind brutal grinds just to step foot into a raid. Said raids (and the game really) are now a lot less about huge long-term time investments and are instead meant to be pushed a little at a time and do not require the insanity of the guild application process. Yes, those guilds still exist: but they give no fucks about any of these arguments. Skilled players (like me) who could not ever had the time to invest to deal with all that shit can down bosses now and that pisses some people off. The people who it pisses off are probably not as good as they think they are and that's now being highlighted that people who don't suck are no longer being driven off because they won't devote their entire lives to the game.

[Civil War Man]

The people who it pisses off are probably not as good as they think they are and that's now being highlighted that people who don't suck are no longer being driven off because they won't devote their entire lives to the game.

This, I think, is the main part. For the most part, the actual top-ranked players don't seem to care how many people see the content, as long as the top tiers of difficulty present them with enough of a challenge (on that note, I haven't heard any of them complain about how Mythic is going to be one fixed size, since now there's no longer going to be a debate over 10 versus 25). It's the pretenders, the ones with dreams of getting a realm or world first but hit a wall at the last few normal bosses or the first few heroic ones, who care about exclusivity. Of course, they want the bar set low enough that they can clear it, but high enough that anyone they deem to be worse than them cannot, which is probably why they are so nostalgic over the time sinks and gear grinds. Difficulty's not an issue, since the average boss has been getting steadily more complex over time, and gating content through actual difficulty carries the risk of being too difficult for the pretenders. Gating through long attunements and gear/rep grinds, however, means the only obstacle is time, which automatically shuts the door in the face of the "casuals".

Hopefully the devs aren't getting nostalgic about that, too. From what I've heard of the Sha'tari Defense/Laughing Skull reps, they may rank up there with the original Wintersaber Trainers rep in terms of the level of grind. Something ridiculous like zero quests, and each mob killed rewards 5 rep to the faction.

[Darmalus]

Ahh, vanilla Molten Bore. Our raid was made of of 2-3 guilds plus any puggers we could scrounge up to round out the numbers. I would sum it up as a long, mostly boring grind occasionally broken up by bursts of spamming either frostbolt or remove curse. I also remember how we dropped that raid like a fresh turd when Zul Grub came out and we only needed 20 people to do a raid, it was like a breath of fresh air.

The anniversary Molten Core run wasn't half bad, trash caused most of the wipes, as expected. The only boss wipe was the salamander that spammed the double damage curse and interrupts. Our solution was to tell everyone to "blow all CDs this time" since with an 8 sec CD on remove curse getting rid of the debuff was effectively impossible. Lot's of vanilla jokes, fun times.

As far as skill gating, requiring Silver Proving Grounds seems to already be filtering out a fair number of people from LFG, judging from some threads I've seen. I like the general idea idea, but the difficulty of PGs is very uneven across different specs.

Heroic dungeons started hard, but the gear ramp up is already being felt with some heroic bosses being cleared faster and more easily than normals a few days ago. I expect those players with short memories to once again start complaining about EZ-mode heroic dungeons in the next few weeks.

[TheFeniX]

It's the pretenders, the ones with dreams of getting a realm or world first but hit a wall at the last few normal bosses or the first few heroic ones, who care about exclusivity.

I think even this is giving these types of people too much credit. It's more likely their time investment bought them a raid spot and they were carried through by the dire need for warm bodies (likely as DPS, but healer is possible and from what I know even tanking wasn't hard because it was mostly on the other guys to NOT rip aggro) because there were so few people with the attunements, specific gear, and time available to run this stuff. Not to mention, the raid progression was brutally linear vs the current model of "this raid is dead, make up some shitty content to get noobs geared enough to walk into the next raid tier."

And since poaching was a huge fucking deal, they were probably snapped up by the first "casual" guild they could find because they were good enough (or just such big assholes) no serious progression group would take them. So yea, they were running MC, Nax, whatever. But they weren't the gods of gaming they thought they were.

That doesn't happen in WoW anymore. There's not a lot of gear-gates if you are good at the game. Sure, there's break-points, but gearing up is also extremely stream-lined and with WoD it seems like you'll be farming BiS more than iLvLs. So, you can no longer rely just on your ability to walk into a raid to buy you a spot. That guy who is just as good (or better) than you can now walk in just as fast if he devotes his time to the right areas. And since gearing up guides are fucking everywhere, all he/she needs is google.

We scored raid slots in SWTOR because we had a 4-man above and beyond a lot of people on our server because we had learned to abuse the PvP bag drops to get us geared enough to blow through heroic dungeons. So, the first 10-man raid group we pugged with basically begged us to join because 1 of their tank and heals got snatched up by a guild pushing nightmare and some others quit because the raid group cratered. Within a couple of weeks, we were a nightmare raiding guild.

[Minischoles]

As someone who did clear all Vanilla content when it was current, including Naxxramas, I can say that anyone who wants a return to that or thinks that the raids were better is a joke.

The raids themselves were almost universally shit - ZG stood out and some bosses in Naxx were okay - the players were bad and worse than all of that was the insane amounts of grinding needed. Not just for gear, like resist gear for raids or bosses, but for consumables. I still remember the damn consumables needed for Loatheb, for every hour i'd spend on the boss i'd probably spent 3-4 hours grinding the consumables needed. And that's not even mentioning how poor class, spec, talents etc balance was.

It was not fun or 'epic' to be spending most of my time playing just grinding consumables and materials - if people want to pressure Blizzard to model their current raids on anything I would honestly suggest T5 for Kael and Vash or Ulduar and ICC.

[Civil War Man]

I think even this is giving these types of people too much credit. It's more likely their time investment bought them a raid spot and they were carried through by the dire need for warm bodies (likely as DPS, but healer is possible and from what I know even tanking wasn't hard because it was mostly on the other guys to NOT rip aggro) because there were so few people with the attunements, specific gear, and time available to run this stuff. Not to mention, the raid progression was brutally linear vs the current model of "this raid is dead, make up some shitty content to get noobs geared enough to walk into the next raid tier."

I was talking more the modern raiding era when talking about getting stuck on certain bosses, since bosses from at least Wrath onward tended to be more a test of coordination than sheer bloody single-minded persistence or endurance. Back in Vanilla they probably would have "earned" their raid spot by being a warm body or having the "skill" to roll the correct class.

It was not fun or 'epic' to be spending most of my time playing just grinding consumables and materials - if people want to pressure Blizzard to model their current raids on anything I would honestly suggest T5 for Kael and Vash or Ulduar and ICC.

Quoted for truth. Though I never got through a full clear of ICC when it was current (the raid group I was in cleared up to Putricide and Sindragosa before it broke up and half the group swapped servers), I had a lot of fun in it. The bosses were varied, required coordination to complete, and I was always a fan of the Scourge aesthetic (they were my second favorite faction when I played WCIII, behind the Night Elves, and most of my interest in the Night Elves was due to Illidan).

[TheFeniX]

I was talking more the modern raiding era when talking about getting stuck on certain bosses, since bosses from at least Wrath onward tended to be more a test of coordination than sheer bloody single-minded persistence or endurance. Back in Vanilla they probably would have "earned" their raid spot by being a warm body or having the "skill" to roll the correct class.

I'd have to agree with you then. I've run into more than my fair share of these types, which is weird considering where WoW is now.

(the raid group I was in cleared up to Putricide and Sindragosa before it broke up and half the group swapped servers), I had a lot of fun in it.

Are you me? Then again, a lot of guilds got hung up on Putricide. At least it's an entertaining fight to wipe on.... 37 times.

[Lord Revan]

well it seems the "pretenders" or as I like to call them wannabe elitists exist, they tend to skulk about in LFR pretending to be so much better but when you check their gear it's mostly LFR with a peice or 2 from normal but no Heroic or Mythic gear (or at least that how it was in MoP) and they tend to be first to die on mechanics that needed you to pay attention at all but obviously it's the fault of everyone else but them when called out about standing in the proverbial fire.

[Kuja]

Occasionally I scan the wow forums to see what's going on. Occasionally it's worth it to see Bashiok continues to roll natural 1s on diplomacy.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic ... 858?page=1

We just want there to be some kind of order to how characters in the game look. Even with the current restrictions you can do some pretty crazy stuff, but that doesn't mean it should necessarily be anything goes. And it's a big new(ish) system with potentially far reaching consequences if we're not careful. At least to start. We've pretty frequently made changes to the rules to allow more transmog options, and that's likely to continue. Over a slightly longer term we think there should be a more defined system around transmog, with more defined paths of gameplay to specific options and looks. It's not news it's something we've been working on, and we're continuing to work on it.

I would love for you to explain in detail this 'order' because to the player base it looks like you guys don't know what the hell you are doing.

You make parts of sets transmogable while the rest isn't. You offer vanity items like the ethereal soul trader set that end up being completely pointless to try and get. You keep some items unmoggable because you don't want alliance looking too much like horde and vice versa while there are already sets that accomplish the exact same thing. You say you don't want everyone running around with legendaries all over the place but we can still equip them for the look, just wasting some inventory slots. White and grey items aren't transmoggable because they don't have stats, but you can create dumb crap like a shovel that has no stats and CAN be transmogged.

So please enlighten me.

Bashiok gets rightly called out for this nonsensical post that doesn't even address the OPs concerns directly, but it's nothing compared to the raking over the coals he gets when he decides to playfully remind everyone of the 'Stormwind didn't pay the masons so now it can't be fixed' meme.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic ... 826?page=1

The refusal to pay Edwin VanCleef and the Stonemasons from when they previously rebuilt Stormwind--and the resulting defiance--doesn't seem to have been quickly forgotten. Tiffin's memory, however, seems to have been.

Who built our level three garrisons then? The level one garrison seems to have been built by workers that ported in from Stormwind so I would assume the same people built the level three. You're gonna tell me they can build a level three garrison and all of those level three buildings just since we've been on Draenor but they can't fix the park in four years.

Total crap. Try harder next time.

It is downright hilarious how absolutely nobody except the occasional "y u so srs" shitposter goes along with it. Blizzard's PR, yo.

[TheFeniX]

The whole transmog thing reeks(ed) of "we already gave you a gold sink, now shut up about it." And worrying about aesthetics is a stupid answer because there's already so much horrendously modeled shit, available to both horde and alliance. Read: any of the tier sets, which are class based, not faction based. The Legendary issue is what really turned me off though. "Everyone would use them," except that not everyone has legendaries even if they are much easier to get these days. Sure, Warglaives are easily farmed once a week (I have a set), but try and tell me the same thing about Thunderfury (which is the only xbobhueg legendary around) or Shadowmourne. These require sizeable time and/or gold investments, so the argument doesn't make any sense.

I think it was Bashiok talking about how they won't add dyes because they don't want crazy shit like neon-pink armors (even though I could probably find some ready to mog ones). Yet, he thinks this means something other than "look, we're lazy here, fuck off" when they could just decide to, you know, not release those dyes.

Basically, all the stuff the developers are crying about is already in the game. They just don't care to add anything else in because the money-sink is already in place. Though FFXIV handled it better anyways, so maybe we'll just need a few more months before Blizzard rips that off.

I miss my characters, but I don't miss WoW. The game just felt incredibly lazy at the end (a lot like SWTOR endgame) and nothing about WoD has convinced me it's changing.

[Highlord Laan]

Kuja:

All that is because Bashiok is little more than a paid troll. Always has been. And it's not like anyone actually pays attention to the BNET forums anymore. It's all down by Twitter now, where everything is in easily ignored soundbytes and the developers can spit out a couple lines to make people think they give a shit.

[Grumman]

I don't play WoW but I enjoy reading what people here say about it, so does anyone want to give their two cents about the new WoW tokens?

If you haven't heard, it is now possible to buy a month's worth of subscription from Blizzard with real money as a concrete thing that isn't just instantly consumed. When you have one of these cheques for 1 month of WoW subscription, you can sell it to somebody for in-game money, at the price Blizzard says it is worth. When you sell it, it becomes soulbound to the buyer - it is impossible for them to sell it on to a third person.

In essence, it's EVE's PLEX. However, I do not believe that CCP forces you to sell at what they consider the market rate to me, and probably does not forbid you from reselling it if there's a boom in the PLEX market before you consume it for yourself.

While it does not appear to be as restrictive as it seemed at first glance (if you wanted to use the system to give someone a free month's subscription you'd have to just give them the gold to buy it instead), being forced to go through the auction house for the price Blizzard sets means Blizzard's going to get their 5%-15% cut.

[Darmalus]

It's about what I expected, really. You pay 1 month + a few bucks for a token, then try your luck on the AH. I wasn't expecting the specific AH set up they went with, but it seems reasonable enough.

Since the AH lords are often gold multi-millionares, I expect they will get "free" subscriptions, since whomever sells the tokens will probably got right to either a gold sink (mounts and whatnot) or the AH and give the AH lord their gold back. Blizzard will make bank off this.

Other than a small amount of inflation I don't expect much from this. I don't interact much with the larger WoW economy, so this is all academic to me.

[bilateralrope]

However, I do not believe that CCP forces you to sell at what they consider the market rate to me

Yes and no. While you are free to set whatever price you like in Eve, you're not likely to get anything other than the market rate unless you're selling for a low price or you scam someone. So if the algorithm to set the market rate is decent, the price won't be much different to players setting the price.

But the WoW system has some obvious problems when I compare it to other systems. Lets compare Eve's Plex, GW2's gold<> gem exchange and WoW's tokens.

Eve works with buy and sell orders. You can choose to sell a PLEX to a buy order and get the ISK instantly. Or you can choose to make a sell order at a higher price and wait. If you set your sell order price too high, or the market takes an unexpected downturn, you have the option to cancel your order and relist at a lower price.

GW2's gem exchange has its own stock of gold and gems. When you sell gems, you sell at the current price chosen by algorithm. You get the gold instantly every time.

WoW tokens are listed at an algorithm set price. You must then wait for someone to buy them before getting the gold. You can not cancel the transaction after listing it. So if the market price crashes after you list, you won't be seeing your gold until the price recovers. However long that takes.

Eve and GW2s systems can fight gold sellers by offering lower prices and instant delivery. WoW tokens don't offer instant delivery, so gold sellers will be able to charge higher prices than the token exchange. So Blizzard have managed to come up with a worse system than games that have done this before

[Sharp-kun]

WoW tokens are listed at an algorithm set price. You must then wait for someone to buy them before getting the gold. You can not cancel the transaction after listing it. So if the market price crashes after you list, you won't be seeing your gold until the price recovers. However long that takes.

Not true. You always get the gold you listed at. When you list it it goes into the queue and they're sold in the order they're listed at. Even if it sells for less you get the gold you listed it at.