Cortez The Killer

For a change of pace, I have been levelling alts again. The current status is 8 at max level and a Druid that I expect to level in the next few days. The problem for a blogger of doing repeat content is that I have no new material or new experiences, but I am in a reasonable position to give a status on the classes from the perspective of a casual player.

Please bear in mind that I do not play a Priest on religious grounds, and that I am still rough around the edges on at least two classes, Rogue and Warlock.

Hunter 

First up is my favourite class the Hunter. For the first time since the launch of Wrath of the Lich King, it is safe to play Beast Master and not be called a noob. With the rise of BM we have witnessed the fall of Marksman. MM has traditionally scaled better than any other Hunter spec and was always a popular choice at Raid level. I understand that Survival is making something of a comeback in recent months.

Hunters are possibly the benchmark class at the moment and are sitting fairly middle of the pack in terms of DPS output. The biggest problem is the size of the toolkit and the shear number of options in the rotation. This as resulted in BM being a very difficult spec to play well.

Levelling and general content has been pretty easy for Hunters, although the pets are taking considerably more damage than we have been used to previous patches. Self healing is still an issue for Hunters and with the prospect of cooldowns on Disengage and the removal of Readiness things are going to get worse. There are options for self healing but many involve a loss of DPS to achieve.

The next expansion will definitely see a streamlining of the toolkit as confirmed by Ghostcrawler.

Hunters are still a joy to play.

Shaman

I have not played Enhancement since I levelled from 1-78. I have always chosen a combination of Elemental and Restoration, purely from a gear standpoint it makes more sense. Enhancement is apparently one of the top raid performers in Patch 5.3

Elemental is a streamlined rotation which is very bursty with a Flame Shock/Lava Burst combination, which is made lethal when Ascendance is active. It is a fun class to play without anything difficult to master, but the use of Totems as been a step backwards in my opinion. I am sure all Shaman are missing dropping 4 Totems at once.

Restoration seems to be a poor imitation of it's former self, and whilst it is still my favourite Healer spec it seems to perform badly compared to other classes in Raid content. I am not sure what the problem is exactly, but I have needed to keep a very careful watch on mana consumption.

Mage

Just like Hunter and BM, I have been a diehard Frost Mage, and for the first time ever they have a moment to shine in the sun. The rotation is fairly basic and still revolves heavily around keeping mobs slowed and in blocks of ice instead of standing on your toes.

A heavy hitting class they have been rocking the meters in this expansion, and if we are brutally honest Fire and Arcane have been near the top since Vanilla days.

Death Knight

I have previously played only Unholy Death Knight, and have already discussed my conversion to the Blood side. The DPS appears to be low in the Tanking spec but the survivability is very over powered.

This is a lot of fun to play when the mobs are in big packs.

Levelling was very easy in Unholy spec, but it did suffer with gear deflation 85-87 was nice and smooth, but the 88-90 was not so pleasant. This would indicate a heavy gear dependency, and picks up dramatically at iLevel 468.

Warrior

My very first character was a warrior. I chose it because it should be the simplest to play, hit things over the head very hard. In truth I have never found warriors to be easy or to hit very hard. I have struggled at every level and have switch between Arms and Fury on many occasions, hoping that things will get better. It never as.

Warriors seem to lack a big punch, with the exception of Bladestorm coupled with Bloodbath. Apart from that they appear poor at self healing and ultimately one of the most boring melee classes to play.

Monks

The new kid on the blocks. Having to level up from 1-90 means that you get to spend a lot of time with this class. I have only sampled the delights of Windwalker, and have found it to intuitive in it's design and relatively easy to play. The levelling Blues every 10 levels help and the increased XP for 1 hour a day helps speed things along.

At raid level Windwalker joins a host of melee classes that are capable of doing some large numbers.

Paladin

I have always had a soft spot for Retribution Paladins even in the early days when they were rubbish.

The modern version is a completely different beast and in many respects, I dislike the whack-a-mole game style. Start combat and wait for the toolbar to light up, press corresponding button. The rotation consists in using anything that is not on cooldown, and in many respect resembles the Death Knight faceroll when they were first introduced.

I endure Retribution now so that I can get some Holy gear, so far it is low on my list of priorities.

Rogue

Still in the early of MoP levelling, but Combat Rogue seems to be less difficult than usual. The issue with Rogues and levelling was always the amount of damage taken, ie. Leather wearing Melee class. Both Subtlety and Combat are performing well in raids, but then again Raid allows them to stand behind the boss and lets them go stabby, stabby, stab, stab.

No doubt I will provide a further review in a few weeks, when I am fed up of eating and using bandages.

Warlocks

To be honest I never really got on with the class. There are 3 specs all of which are totally unfamiliar due to the radical overhaul they received. This will definitely be reviewed as a noob guide to Warlocks. I am always surprised how bad a Warlock I have made in the past. Spell casters are much more my thing than melee.

In Raids all 3 specs seem to be very close dPS wise, which suggests that Blizzard actually did a good job with the revamp. The downside is that no single spec is dominating and all are middle of the pack.

Druid

This is where I am currently up to with my level 88 Boomkin. The sad thing is that I feel neither OoM or Boom with the Balance spec. Balance used to be very OP but quite dangerous. Starfall could turn a large angry gathering into a greasy smear, but could attract mobs in a nearby galaxy. Wrath was quick and not a big hitter, Starfire was long and slow and packed a punch. Now it is nothing more chasing eclipses, one way and then the next. The soul of the rotation is gone, and now Starsurge is the big hitter.

Balance Druid is not fun to play any more and used to be, which is very sad indeed.

Summary

In many case rotations/priories are sanitised versions of their former selves. Arcane Shot, Frostbolt, and Lightning Bolt, are all pale imitations of their former glory, and now play the role of fill in spells. Big Damage comes from combinations and not from signature spells.

Some of the classes are now more desirable to play and some are less desirable, and it is nice to see Beastmaster Hunter and Frost Mage be acceptable raiding specs.

Blizzard have still failed to balance all the specs within a tight percentage deviation, and looking at the tables, Mages look like they need reigning in a little

Land Of Confusion

 

2 Posts have struck a chord with me recently. The first was the Godmother with Find Your Smile, which did not go into specifics, but it did mention that "Nothing's changed with the game since yesterday: the problem is me." Now it is not my place to even guess what it going on with the Godmother but sincerely hopes she finds her mojo, or whatever is bothering her.

The second post was from the Grumpy Elf, and yet again Grumpy is bang on the nail with some Blizzard design flaws. Blizzard's design philosophy reminds me of some of the better American TV shows of the last 20 years. They start with a plot for the pilot and the first few shows and then make them up on a weekly basis. If the show extends into several seasons then the plot goes askew because they had a start and no ending, examples of this are the X-Files, Lost and Heroes.

Blizzard have over time, refined, changed and not settled on a philosophy for over 8 years. They call this evolution but undue tinkering maybe the issue. Take for instance the Raid philosophy over the years:

• Very difficult Raids
• Easy Raids
• Huge numbers of participants
• 25 total strangers in a dumbed down version,
• Raiding 4 times a week with different lockouts.
• Fluctuated between 10 and 25 man raids in the same expansion
• They have made end game difficult to obtain
• They have made end game easy to obtain
• They have had expansions where it possible to raid on multiple characters
• They have had expansions where you can only really raid on one character
• Some raids have one boss
• Some raids have 13 bosses

The problem is they fluctuate from one side of the spectrum to the other without ever finding a sensible middle ground. One example of this is WotLK in which Call of the Crusader, (or whatever it was called) had no trash, and 4 tiers of difficulty with different iLevels on the 4 raids. Blizzard decided to introduce lockouts in an attempt to control player behaviour and reduced the gear to 2 sets of iLevel gear. The result was total freedom to choose how many times you could raid in a week to a restrictive once a week By the time Icecrown Citadel was the current raid, the player base had multiple alts to raid with due to the ease of gearing alts to endgame content by bashing out as many 5 man heroics as possible, in very quick instances (5 to 10 minutes was not uncommon ).

Cataclysm was supposed to be Alt friendly but they introduced gated content in several places which slows and deters people from grinding out the same content again, and again and again. The 5 man Heroics went from 5-10 to 2 hour marathons through the Zul's in a war of attrition of find a tank and healer who would stay for the duration.

Mists of Pandaria, was designed with the philosophy of plenty of end game content, which is all supposed to be optional. You simply choose to do what you want to do, when you want to do it. The problem is some of the options are not optional and are totally mandatory, resulting in repeat activities required to be undertaken every day, with no ability to shortcut the exercise.

Reputation is not optional, dailies are not optional, can you afford to not tend to your farm, in terms of resources or money, 1 LFD and 1 scenario a day, weekly LFR and Sha of Anger. The gear drops seem to be poor and psychologically who wants good Blue gear when you can have Purple Epics.
Valor must be capped each week in order to upgrade or purchase new gear.

Honestly I can not see a way of getting gear other than through valor at the moment and the accumulation of an item every fortnight is just too much like hard work.

I like to accumulate lower end gear quickly and when it becomes difficult, or hard work, I tend to move on to my next alt. On an effort versus reward scale I want lots of reward for a small amount of effort, and I can then duplicate the effect 10 or 11 times on all my alts. Being stuck with one character for the whole expansion is not my idea of fun. I want to do my bit for the community too, I have no Tank and my main is a ranged DPSer, but I do have 4 alts that like to heal, and I have not the method or enthusiasm to do it under the current system. 5.2 will not bring any respite and no shortcuts.

When faced with the same inability to gear my alts or raid on my main, my choice in Cataclysm was to PvP. In MoP I have elected unintentionally to tune out and drop out. If dailies have become mandatory, then I have chosen to do something else. At present I am levelling a Panda Monk, after that I have an entire stable of other alts and I have yet to even touch Pet Battles.

The Grumpy Elf also identified that the easiest way to gear for PvE is through PvP. This is a weakness in the design and now that PvP are additional to the iLevel not instead of, they become genuine alternatives to the PvE gear. Honor and Conquest gear is achieved relatively easily and in the past I often done old content to cheat the system. This includes doing the PvP quests in the Grizzly Hills for a whopping 55 Honor a day for killing 10 Orcs. and then moving done to the harbour to complete the other 3 quests. Added to these quests is Wintergrasp and Tol Barad. The bigger Battle Grounds like Alterac Valley and Isle of Conquest,  offer places to hide for those less initiated in the art of PvP. Lets face it crafted PvP blues are going to ensure that you do not get to see much fight time, and it is better to sit and wait on Noob Hill (do not sit or even worse dance, as you will only upset the veterans).

Right now the game is starting to look like early Cataclysm did. Remember the peak numbers of WoW subscribers came at the start of Cataclysm not at the end of Wrath of the Lich King. Mists of Pandaria was given a good honeymoon period before the criticism started, but I seriously think that patch 5.2 needs to be a good one if they are not going to get a big drop in subscriber numbers again.

Having taken several weeks off to level a Monk, I am much less stressed about doing dailies. Dailies are not the problem per se, it is the routine that you get into to complete your To Do List. Everybody eventually rebels against doing the same tasks everyday for a long time, this is one of the reason why we as humans need to take a summer vacation. If School years were made up of 30 weeks straight with no breaks, then kids and Teachers would be hitting each other with sticks by the end of it. Now Blizzard does not make us do the same tasks everyday, but they do provide certain incentives to do so. I am not forced to logon with 4 max level characters, tilling and sowing and harvesting my crop, but the missed opportunity of not harvesting 16x4 plots on my farm of Enigma seeds or Songbell seeds.

Ann Stickney at WoW Insider recently argued that Daily Quests must go, not because they are bad or because she does not like them, but purely because it is not compelling content, and we have enough other things to do. Reputation grinding via daily quests, when we have had it so easy with Tabards and chain running Heroics for 4 years. The result of these two expansions left me personally with green reputation bars, when compared to vanilla and Outlands I have plenty of gaps in my reputation bars. Ann also points to the 5.1 quest hub as being a very good implementation of Dailies interspersed with storyline,  I totally agree with this point and also made the same argument here.

I recently read The Queue on WoW Insider were someone wrote in and asked a question about running Operation:Shieldwall for a second time and the rep gains from the commendation. The writer was very dismissive asking why anyone would want to do this content a second time on another character. I thought this was a strange response, because of all the current Daily Hubs this is the one that I would do on multiple characters because the valor rewards are so much better than the pre 5.1 rep grinds.

World of Warcraft wants to be all inclusive and yet the contradictary behaviour of Blizzard shows they are making the episodes up as the go along, there is no joined up thinking at the moment and we can expect more mood swings from the developers in all aspects of the game.

For now I am going to keep my head down and play the game my way and at my pace. Remember when you are in LFR and waiting for a healer, I have 4 of them but Blizzard does not want me to play them any more.