2001

Desecration is great in the Lich King fight.

2002

Also useful on Saurfang.

2003

I think I may have made a mistake speccing my rogue as combat. I was combat almost exclusively up to 76 because I found I was much better at leveling with it but now something feels off. Mobs seem to take twice as long to go down, my burst damage seems completely gone and I almost never run out of energy. Before the patch similar level mobs would go down before a 1CP SND wore off and now they outlast even a 2CP one.

I probably messed something up but I can’t figure out what. I’m thinking of switching to subtlety even though it’s going to be expensive.

2004

Pre-patch should be muta as soon as you can for leveling.

Now subtlety is laughable, shadowstep, ambush, eviscerate, loot.

2005

Stay with me here.

  1. You’re going to take the best dps-boosting (or healing-boosting, or mitigation, or whatever) talent at every tier along the way to 31 points anyway. I know this, because this is what everyone has always done in the history of WoW.

  2. If you are forced to put 31 points in a tree, and only 28 or 25 or whatever of them can possibly go into a direct dps gain, you have to put 3 or 6 or whatever points into flavor talents. Desecration doesn’t do any more dps, but it’s a cool flavor skill for Unholy DKs. But you’d ditch it in a second for 2% more damage on Scourge Strike.

  3. By restricting your options slightly (i.e. the 31 point requirement), you’re amusingly forced into making choices about where those flavor talents go. Which is the best case scenario under the old system. There were plenty of specs that had all 71 points all but set in stone.

Now, I would agree that some specs are set up better than others (and I actually think Unholy is one of the better ones), and I do think that the numbers are weird (25-29 “required” points, with just a few for actual choices seems off to me). But I absolutely feel that the talent revamp overall is for the best.

2006

I’m not forced into making choices, because there are no meaningful choices to be made other than “unholy, frost or blood?”. There are no “flavor” talents, only things that are mostly not useful to my present mode of operation. I guess I get to pick between slowing down mobs that 99% of the time are not running away from me anyway (apparently it’s useful in the Lich King fight somehow, but I may never get to that one) or getting runes back when the disease is dispelled (which they won’t be, because mobs never do that), yay?

And I don’t necessarily disagree that there were only a couple of optimal specs for any given role in the previous system but a) those specs changed based on other environmental factors and patch changes to talents, and there was theorycrafting required to settle on these optimal setups, and b) like I said earlier, if the issue is that there are only a couple of optimal specs, the solution is not to -guarantee- that there are only a couple of optimal specs.

2007

Why not? What would your solution be? Blizz has pretty much said that they’d rather people’s effectiveness in their role be based on their skill instead of whether or not they got their talents wrong.

And since you’re hung up on the unholy DK tree, what are these monumental decisions you were making that so drastically affected your playstyle pre-4.0? Because I’ve been unholy for quite a while and the only real decisions were whether to sub-spec blood or frost, and even then the differences between the two were passive and didn’t change how I played. Most of the talents they removed are either baked into other talents or given to you for free by choosing that spec.

2008

My ICC10 run last night was an interesting time. My paladin was raid healing, and our shaman was tank healing. The lowest DPS in the group was 7200 for the entire run, and highest was 11000, which is about at 2000 dps bump across the board. Our main tank (paladin) went from ~55k health to 70k. We only sent our shaman through the portals on Dreamwalker while I stayed out & raid healed - hardly necessary since only one blazing skeleton was able to cast Lay Waste before it died. We blew through bosses like they weren’t there. I was 40 minutes late, and they were already 4/12 despite going nine-man.

2009

Eh, for druids there doesnt seem to be much of a difference. I don’t know about boomkin specs but Ferals have some choice in resto talents but its still kitty vs bear talents with maybe 1-2 pvp specific talents. When I did up my resto spec I was laughing with glee simply because as it stands now, I see little reason to put any points into balance as resto. At 85 it would make far more sense to have all the resto talents for pve/pvp so I didn’t have to re-spec.

2010

This bums me out so much. As a feral tank I went from having the most HP but the least utility to having the least HP and still the least utility. :(

2011

Because that’s not a solution to the stated problem at all? I mean, really, if Blizzard wants to lock in a couple of specs, there’s no need to continue to have a talent system at all. One could just as easily have a specialization choice (or even quest chain, that might be fun. I suspect they’re moving away from that sort of thing, though.) at level 10 and then allocate steadily improving abilities on a level basis.

And for the third time, I’m not claiming that there were extensive customizability or monumental earthshattering spec choices to begin with…only that there is none whatsoever now. I use Unholy as my example because that’s what I was specced with before and what I’m specced now, not because it’s especially bad or something.

2012

I have mixed feelings about the patch.

Our regular 25 man raid last night was extremely frustrating. We lost about 10 regulars to the “flexible” raid system. Most of these are people who are in high end 10 man raids who are either working on heroic Lich King or trying to wrap up all the 10 man ICC achievements and get the mount. Some of those folks with multiple 80s brought a second character, but their gear is much worse.

Compounded with that is the fact that (at least for paladin tanks) boss attacks seem to be hitting much harder. So all of a sudden we have tanks taking a lot more spikey damage. On the other side they are doing about 10k DPS as one of their abilities (forget the name) is criting for 75-90K.

Still with the general buffs to DPS we still managed to kill at least half the bosses on heroic that we usually kill. But I’m worried if we’ll be able to take down Lich King before Cataclysm with all the new additions.

On the good side it is pretty fun playing with all the new abilities and powers, and trying to “relearn” a class you’ve been playing for 2 years.

2013

So this patch includes all the old world revamps? I’m hesitating in coming back. I’d prefer to wait until the new races drop (Worgen Hunter most likely), but if I wait until then I feel like the old world will be a lot more empty as people run through that content now. With dungeon finder, I doubt I’ll have a problem finding groups later… but they may be more obnoxious as everyone else has already learned the changes and doesn’t have time for a relative newb.

2014

No, this is only class changes. World changes come in 4.03 (12/7.)

2015

Oh ok. That makes it easy then. Thanks. :)

2016

Technically, 4.0.3 and the world overhaul will drop at least a couple of weeks before the release of the expansion, which is on December 7. The Cataclysm beta is now in furious balance/tweaks/cleanup mode, to get it ready for that.

If you want to start leveling as soon as the extended class combos are available, with the revamped old world, that will start before the expansion itself, when 4.0.3 hits. If you’re looking to start a Worgen or Goblin you’ll have to wait for the expansion itself, since those are only available with the expansion.

2017

The “flexible” raid changes are really the only major thing I hate about the patch. I think I’ve adequately expressed my philosophical differences with the direction Blizzard has chosen to take the talent system, but it makes little day to day difference to me - I spent all my points and now I have a character that is more awesome than my pre-patch character in most ways. But he’s a character that I can take into half as many raids per week. I mean, sure, now I can do the first few bosses of ICC with one group and then do LK with some other group, in theory. But in actual practice people doing the advanced content aren’t recruiting people like me at random from chat channels.

2018

I’m glad I wasn’t the only person who was seeing this. I was healing our pally tank on Blood Prince Council and barely had time to heal anyone else because he was taking such large chunks of damage. At first I thought he may have forgotten to switch into his tanking gear but it was just that so much more damage was making it through to him.

2019

The raid system borked up my guild’s usual raid system. We run a couple 10-man raids during the week, then all get together for 25-man on Sat/Sun nights. Too many people didn’t realize that had changed & the 25-man was impossible. It looks like we will just start taking alts into the 10-mans & save our geared main raid toons for 25.

The heroic mode system is odd, too. If you do an heroic boss, you are locked to that group for any further heroics, just like the old system. You are free to run any remaining normal modes with other people.

2020

I’ve had more crashes this week than i’ve ever had with wow in five years.

#1 on my hate list right now: hard crash every time i enter brd.