World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King

[Rahvin]

On the plus side, the Northrend Alchemy Research cooldown is now 3 days instead of 7. That was an intended change, of course.

There are quite a few bugs in this patch. The cooldown on Howling Blast is set to 5 seconds, but the tooltip doesn't say so - it doesn't even show as unavailable unless you try to cast it. Obliterate gives 0 Runic Power. I'm certain there are dozens more.

But I'm very, very happy about the Glyph of Holy Light change. So happy that I think they're likely to nerf it. Loatheb last night was trivially easy (not that it was all THAT hard before), because I could heal one person in each of teh melee and ranged groups and heal the entire raid, with effective healing all reflecting back to the tank with Beacon.

Between that glyph, my crit rate, the strength of Holy Light as a base heal, and the mana longevity of a Healadin, I'm ecstatic.

[CaptainChewbacca]

Yesterday Wintergrasp went bonkers on my server, it was hilarious. As soon as a fight was over, it would IMMEDIATELY reset and start a new fight. This meant that I won 6 wintergrasp fights in about 2 hours, because the Horde was slow on the uptake. Unfortunately, this meant everyone and their mother was pouring into wintergrasp for the 'free' badges, and lagging up a storm. This, in turn, meant every time Wintergrasp reset, the entire Northrend server would crash.

The up side of that, of course, is that everyone who WASN'T in wintergrasp was running through the streets of Dalaran trying to get all the magic books so they could get their achievement and vanity pet. A fun time was had by all.

BTW, I finally got my onyx netherwing drake. Woo.

[Kuja]

Same thing happened on TN, fortunately it got fixed afrer three or four such crashes.

I am loving my new pally taunt.

[Kuja]

By the way, Sriad, thanks for that Thaddius diagram. My guild made it through Construct Quarter last night and after a little oopsie (two of our guildies didn't make the jump onto his platform the first time) we dropped him like a brick. I showed everybody that graphic before we started and halfway through the fight one of my healers was going "This is it? He doesn't, like, mortal strike you or something?"

Of course, that doesn't include the hilarity of our enhancement shaman dc-ing during the fight and popping back on in the middle of a field of anti-charged people. Cue death, self-res, death, and after thad went down our priest rezzed him and he died AGAIN because the charges hadn't run out yet. Poor guy.

[SpacedTeddyBear]

I'm beginning to see why some of you don't pug naxx. I've had pretty good results for the past few weeks regardless of whether or not I made out with a good share of loot, but it all came down like pile of bricks this week.

Here's one highlight:

In my 10-man pug, everything was going ok. The dps seemed low at times, because we ran into a bit of difficulty on the gargoyles, but I didn't really think about till later. While working through the plague-wing, I noticed that the DK that we had was acting a little childish/incredibly stupid. He sat outside the gates before every boss fight and we literally had to yell at him to get his ass inside. He didn't do anything that would warrant a kick, which I doubt would happen since more than half the raid, including the leader, was in the same guild. We finally worked our way to Loatheb, where assuming that if we had decent dps and got our buffs from the spores, it should be a piece of cake right? We wiped 3 times, and finally downed him on the 4th. After we downed him, someone finally posted the DPS meter. Had someone posted it sooner, I would've yelled at the DK for being a bad, and fought tooth and nail with the raid leader to kick him regardless them being guildies. The DK posted 1.2k dps for the boss....... A mage, hunger, and myself topped off at 3.6kdps, 2.9kdps, and 2.6kdps. Mine was a little low, because toward the last quarter of the fight, I had to stop and heal myself (and the hunter if I timed it right) because it got to the point where the healers just couldn't keep up. We called it for the night where afterward, the mage and I had a discussion of what had happened.

Even as undergeared as he was ( was geared mainly in lvl78 gear), you'd actually have to try to produce numbers as low as it was. When asked how many times received the spore buff, he asked " What spores?".

[Lord Revan]

just curious and what class you play?

as for the Death Knight, 1.2k dps , I can do 800ish DPS when in tanking gear (from last saturday's run) and I'm neither geared or specced for DPS and besides I was the off-tank (we did whole of spider wing (10 man) and up to Heigan (wiped on him though) of plague wing (no problems with the gargoyles)).

EDIT:this was a guild run though not a PuG.

[Teleros]

I'm wondering if that DK has heard of proper DPS rotations and such. I can't understand how he could be so low otherwise.

[White Haven]

Just to chime in on the shitty DPS argument...I'm our guild's main tank at the moment, and I can pull anywhere from 1300 to 1900+ dps as a prot pally with full tanking gear. 1200 is inexcusable.

Also: Huzzah, all 3 70s are now all 3 80s. I now have shooty power, heay power, and tanky power!

[Maxentius]

I could probably hit 1000 DPS as a Holy Paladin with autoswing SoRighteousness, Shield of Righteousness and Holy Shock. 1200 DPS as a class as broken and weighted as Death Knights are is nothing short of complete stupidity.

And people wonder why I despise the class as a whole.

[Minischoles]

Thats not really a rare problem though, the vast majority of DKs haven't even read up about their class and what sort of rotation they should be using to achieve high DPS, they've just rolled it and they go around mashing buttons through everything, and because of how broken the class is right now they'll have no problem hitting 80 very fast and owning up PvP.

[Rahvin]

My lvl 75 DK can sustain 1600 DPS against an even-levelled dummy, and that's with Necrosis and the disease dots only hitting for 1 damage (stupid dummy).

His rotations have to be messed up. DKs require real attention to ability rotations - I found it to be more rigid than any spec of Warlock, or playing as a Retadin (okay, so Retadins are disgustingly easy to DPS with as far as rotations). It seems to be a very common feature with DKs - they can be extremely powerful, but only if you know what you're doing, and most of them don't.

I did a semi-PUG of Naxx-25 last night ("semi" because while it's not a guild run, we're trying to establish a regular core of players to run it weekly). Got my T7.5 shoulders. I now have a 45% crit chance with Holy light, unbuffed. Patchwerk went down easily. I utterly destroyed every other healer for healing done and dispels done. My mana returned was obscene (I make sure to be within melee range on melee-friendly bosses for the occasional Seal of Wisdom proc, and I use Divine Plea frequently). I didn't have any healing problems for the entire run, and I would say that as far as healing goes all of the fights we were able to do have become trivial. We cleared Plague, Arachnid, and Construct quarters before quitting for the night (we didn't have the shadow priests for Razuvious and it was getting late anyway).

[Civil War Man]

Definitely sounds like that Death Knight's rotation is all shot to Hell. Maybe even his build and gearing, too. I mean Hell, I haven't even stepped into a 10-man yet and I can come close to doubling his dps.

Do you remember anything about this guy? It'd be interesting to check out his armory to see if his problem lies with his spec or gear (though, for the sake of the guy's privacy, it might be better if you looked it up yourself and reported the results). He could be a dual-wielder that couldn't be arsed to gear for hit for all we know.

In other news, I've been tinkering with my build again. Decided that my Frost dual-wield build worked out so well that I should try my hand at a heavy Frost 2-hander DPS build now that Killing Machine has a proc per minute mechanic in place. My final product this round is a 27/44 Blood/Frost hybrid, which from what I can see is unorthodox enough to not even really register in the list of popular builds. The basics of the build is Blood down to Abomination's Might and Frost down to Frost Strike and Guile of Gorefiend (like so).

So far I've found it to be pretty powerful, if a little demanding. I don't really have a neatly delinated rotation outside of the openers (it has different openers depending on whether it's a single-target or AOE fight). So far the real demand involves juggling Obliterate and Howling Blast during AOE fights (since Obliterate gives the +10% attack power buff with Abomination's Might) while keeping diseases up and dumping runic power (via Frost Strike, which hits like a freight train now that I'm using a 2-hander again) as quickly as possible. Because between Butchery, Chill of the Grave, and Runic Power Mastery, I often end up swimming in Runic Power between all the adds. And since I have Frost Strike glyphed, I've had instances where I've unleashed 4 consecutive Frost Strikes near the end of a boss fight. Which is just beautiful, since near the end of a boss fight Frost Strike is doing 52% more damage, critting half the time, and dealing 245% damage on a crit with the damage that can't be dodged, blocked, parried, or mitigated by armor.

[Maxentius]

Despite having played WoW since around the time Zul'Gurub was released, this week marks my first real foray into the Arena system. I douched around with skirmishes in the twilight days of Classic WoW, but this is the first time I've gone and joined a team, due in no small part to half of my guild lobbying for some hot Holy Paladin action in their 2s/3s/5s/whatevers team.

I found the 5v5 matches to be funnest. There's enough variety going around to make things unpredictable. We won most of our 5v5 matches, pretty much only losing when we came up against a team with a Shaman that popped Heroism. All in all, I enjoyed my 5s experience. Maybe the thing with 5s is that since there were four other people on my team I never had an opportunity to feel like I, personally, doomed the team to defeat with my utter lack of knowledge on common arena tactics and foibles.

3v3 and 2v2 are another matter entirely. I don't think I have ever had as little fun during PvP except maybe, way back in the day, when I was playing my Rogue during that four-month stint of hell when everything about Rogues was utterly, utterly broken. Exactly what about these matches attracts people? I spent twenty minutes in one match, playing against a team that had exactly the same composition as my own team; that is, Warrior/Priest/Paladin. After the first five minutes I started getting bored, and really that match didn't come down to anything resembling skill, but rather simply became "Which team is going to slip-up first"?

What really irks me is how badly Arena throws class imbalance and suitability into the light. I won't go out on a limb and say I'm a fantastic PvPer, but I know my shit, and against someone with equal gear I can reasonably expect a 50/50 chance of victory. My Warrior teammate has gotten Gladiator in two different seasons, and our Priest is his girlfriend and good friend of mine, who is equally skilled and probably better than I am. But the thing is, we utterly destroyed some teams. Skill had absolutely nothing to do with it. Likewise, there were some teams that curbstomped us so effortlessly it was embarassing. In one instance, a Rogue popped out behind our Priest and literally killed her before my BoP went off. In another instance, when facing a team with a Mage and two Death Knights on it, I was literally silenced the entire match.

I'm ranting, I suppose. I never liked the concept of arenas that much but actually playing them has been another matter entirely. What are some other thoughts on this subject?

[Minischoles]

I currently refuse to play arenas at all unless i'm feral or boomkin, as a healer its literally pointless. There are so many rogues/mages/DKs about, i'm either spending an entire match running for my life barely able to get a heal off between silences and nukes, or dying within a GCD or 2.

Burst damage is completely broken right now, especially with rogues. A rogue whose been lucky with some drops from Naxx and with minimal pvp gear can literally kill any clothie class within a GCD, 2 if they're lucky. Resilience makes no difference, i've seen a priest with 900 resilience die within 10 seconds as a train of 2 DKs just chain silenced him and annihilated him.

I will also openly admit ferals are pretty broken as well, i can annihilate most classes in gear i've collected as offspec through Naxx and Sarth, or even as boomkin with the same. Arcane mages will tear most people a new one, and any healer is dead. It seems the dev team wanted to move away from the healer based tactical fights of S3/S4 and just went way too far towards bursty RNG pvp where it all depends on whether you crit or not.

[Slacker]

Arms is absolute dogshit and it irritates me. I was Arms throughout Classic, where it was as viable as any off-spec could be, Arms through most of BC, where it was challenging but worthwhile, and with the new Lich King talents, it was fun and not completely useless in PVE. Fury has gotten so many absolute bullshit buffs recently that it's rendered the marginal benefits of Arms in PVP useless when compared to Fury. The handful of utility Arms used to bring to a raid environment-the physical DPS buff, that sort of thing-are now provided by other classes. It's really immensely frustrating.

And don't get me started on Arenas...I've just given them up, they're rock-paper-scissors on cocaine. Nerf Death Knights.

[Boyish-Tigerlilly]

Warlock is fun, too, in PVP.

1. Immune
2. Can't do that while stunned
3. Can't do that while silenced
4. Resisted
5. Dead.

=D

Well, if you like dying, that is.

[Narkis]

Mage is the same in the old BGs. Unless it's 1vs1 casters and I manage to fling a counterspell first. In Wintergrasp though, I love being a passenger in the medium size catapults and blizzarding the hell out of everything that moves. Especially with Tenacity on, something very common on my server. People drop like flies then.

[Rahvin]

The only time I enjoyed playing a Warlock in PvP was way back int he day with vanilla WoW before even the honor changes, sitting at level 29 as a barely-Destruction 'lock loaded up in "of Shadow Wrath" greens and spamming Shadowbolts from a distance. I was the very definition of a glass cannon, but when I hit things, they died.

Nowadays...I hate PvP.

I had some brief fun before Wrath as a Healadin in AV because I could keep several people alive and kicking far beyond what they could do alone, but because I'm unwilling to respec/regear for PvP because it might take up 5% of my playtime under the best of circumstances, I die too quickly and am too dependent on support from other players to make the experience enjoyable. I'd rather stick to heroics and raiding.

[Crown]

Warlock is fun, too, in PVP.

1. Immune
2. Can't do that while stunned
3. Can't do that while silenced
4. Resisted
5. Dead.

=D

Well, if you like dying, that is.

Patch 3.0.8 was a major buff for Warlocks on a PvP server ... they added over 60 NEW GRAVE YARDS! Isn't that exciting?!

[Ghost Rider]

Warlock is fun, too, in PVP.

1. Immune
2. Can't do that while stunned
3. Can't do that while silenced
4. Resisted
5. Dead.

=D

Well, if you like dying, that is.

Patch 3.0.8 was a major buff for Warlocks on a PvP server ... they added over 60 NEW GRAVE YARDS! Isn't that exciting?!

Course the 60 new graves are exciting. Now I have to hunt down the right one before I corpse camp!

Ah well, at least my DK cannot fear people just because I have DnD down. Doesn't really matter, but it skews from invincible to mostly invincible.

[Ender]

Link, because I hate you all

[Ghost Rider]

Link, because I hate you all

Saddest part is I was expecting one sooner, and I dunno...something more. I mean those chibbers cannot be any worse then the usual RP crowd that proclaim the weirdest shit. Vampires are literally a dime a dozen on a RP server, with so many weird fucking combinations merely being a vampire would seem normal. They get into the most fucked up drama over nothing really. I mean loot drama I can grasp, but RP drama over RPing?

On the side note, that thread is fucking awesome. The amount of nerd rage, hate and general dislike for Twilight mixes wonderfully with WoW's barely literate crowd.

[Teleros]

Well I'm pissed, because Blizz's stupid RNG system for the Valentine's Day achievements means I'm short TWO Bag of Candy sweets . And I even got the Peddlefeet pet .

Oh well. Back to Kul Tiras on the 22nd so at least I'll be raiding again soon .

Also, I agree with GR on that thread: great fun .

[Kuja]

Blueberry tanks 3-drake Sartharion

HOLY FUCK

That warlock is my hero.

[Maxentius]

Man. I despise that fight. As the designated Sartharion-tank healer, the time from Shadron landing to the last drake dying is a terrible strain on the integrity of my sphincter.

But my guild needs to try that. Maybe even with a Doomguard.