4341

Hmm. I honestly think if you just macro’d it up, the improved uptime on the trinkets+lifeblood would cover whatever DPS loss you got from not doing it manually in line with those spells. Worth a try if you ask me! :)

4342

Smug snark isn’t rage.

4343

I thought that too, until I ran the simulations for it. The difference in DPS is small but significant on non-movement fights, and not small at all on fights where I spend time running around spamming Moonfire instead of being able to stand and cast.

I might try it again in-game, but I had a significant DPS increase on Omnotron by changing it up.

4344

Hah, I played a TBC-era affliction lock, but late in that expansion’s cycle. Still, I didn’t even play wrath that much, so it’s not like I’m coming from the expectation of the game being easy, just playing it now, based on my own experience, I’m very sympathetic to people having trouble.

Honestly, Diablo 3 will probably solve all this for me anyway (if I can run it). Though, Diablo was never quite as fun to play with friends for me but it does fill the kill, loot, level up void.

At least so far (I’m leveling a goblin hunter on the side) it seems like hunter is less tolerant of simple mistakes. All those instant damage attacks can lead to a lot of Huntard mistakes.

4345

At least so far (i’m leveling a goblin hunter on the side) it seems like hunter is less tolerant of simple mistakes. All those instant damage attacks can lead to a lot of Huntard mistakes.

arcane mage, you only have to hit 3 button consistently, as your gears get better, and fights get shorter, you can end up only push 1 button…

4346

I trust simulations only so far; they don’t factor in the human cost of increased workload. Having to juggle too many factors gives me a headache and will certainly lead to me paying more attention to timers and buttons than what’s actually going on onscreen. I’m more than happy to take a small DPS loss for that - I view it as ensuring that I can actually do what I’m meant to be doing.

But if you’re capable of playing with all 31 buttons bound and can use them accurately ingame without it affecting your play, more power to you. I certainly wasn’t criticising - I know there’s a big difference in styles between players and whatever someone can become comfortable with is what they should go with.

And now I must sleep. Happy New Year, all.

4347

I’m not changing classes*. I enjoy Warlock abilities and their aesthetics and put too much time into my warlock. Anyway, I doubt this will be any different than the previous expansions. I’ve got another month or two of WoW in me at most.

Thank you for the suggestion though.

*I don’t know why I put paying there, my brain is stupid obviously.

4348

Thanks for the discussion. Happy New Year.

4349

He’s trying to improve his DPS, not reduce it.

4350

arcane mage is good dps and extremely easy to play.

4351

I think the simplest, elephant-in-the-room answer is that tanking is considered to be extremely boring. Some people like it, most people don’t, the vast majority won’t even try it.

There’s more to deal with in Cata, which should add variety. Instead the runs just feel sluggish. As a tank I spend the vast majority of the time waiting for the DPS to CC. Or asking them to CC. Or typing out how to kill bosses.

4352

I don’t know that tanking is considered boring, but it’s (properly) considered hard. (It’s also viewed by some people as not as fun as DPS, because you don’t normally have big numbers; though with the new weird damage scaling of tanks and Vengeance, that’s not presently as accurate.) Tanks and healers can wipe the group very easily, with one little mistake. It’s rare for a DPS in a dungeon to be able to wipe the group that easily, even in the Cataclysm heroics where the DPS have to more than stand there and spam their AoE ability. (This is different from raid fights, where anyone can easily wipe the raid by doing things like not moving out of the Defile quickly enough, etc.)

Most people simply don’t want the pressure of being a tank, and understandably so. You have to be willing to lead to at least a certain degree, and handle positioning the mobs, maintaining aggro on everything, making sure you’re in LoS of the healer, staying out of the stupid, trying to mitigate big damage attacks, and occasionally interrupting or doing some other ability. Even with the increased difficulty of Cataclysm heroics, that’s a lot more to juggle than a DPS class has to handle.

Most WoW players, even at level cap, never seriously raid. These heroics are mini-raids at times, so it’s only natural that many players are out of their element. The heroics are challenging and so naturally end up taking longer than the old steamroll LK ones; but they’re far more rewarding to finish, as well. Taking a LFD group all the way through something like heroic Deadmines and getting that win at the end is a blast, and certainly more memorable than the previous quickie heroics.

4353

I don’t feel that way as a bear tank. But then DK’s still have some aoe threat ability. You just often don’t want to do it otherwise you’ll die. I have a guild buddy who is a great dk tank that still thinks he can take the hits, I dont want to heal him in heroics now that he is 85. Thankfully his girlfriend is a good healer. Tanking in general is harder than Wrath due to CC positioning, weaksauce aoe threat (warriors and druids have it bad with rage issues, druids have crap aoe threat gen), dealing with dps who dont interrupt/CC and constantly popping cooldowns to help out healers.

I mentioned earlier in this thread that Blizz has swapped around mechanics back to the 1.0/BC mentality of tab target tanking, because its more involved than aoe zerg and thus more “skillfull”. The only upside is that while aoe threat has tanked (while some dps aoe got buffed-frost dks) single target threat is a joke. It was not much of a problem in LK till ulduar when dps geared up but now with vengence there is no worry unless I’m rage drained/short. The only reason on single targets I sometimes maintain a rotation is to maximize dps or say mechanics that buff my defensive options (pulverize for crit to proc more bearshields). In 10-30s no dps is catching me on a boss threat wise.

As an aside on tanking, there was a hilarious thread on the old tanking forums where a blue dev (I think Ghostcrawler) posted lamenting that warriors in LK ended up just spamming thunderclap to maintain aoe threat. That was apparently not what they wanted and “too easy”. So of course, they nerf it a bit but also put in a talent (tclap spreads rend on current target to all targets it hits) that pretty much makes it stupid to not spam it if no CC is in danger of being broken. Which any sane tank moves mobs away from anyway to prevent accidents (usually sloppy dps’ers).

Blizzard making healer and tanks lives harder combined with dps needing to use skills again was not a wise idea. I just don’t get the nerfing of aoe threat when all they had to do is what they did with making mobs be CC’d at least until folks get t11 gear in 6-12 months.

/end another long rant- I spend more time reading/debating game mechanics now than playing the game

4354

No need to spam it with the rend talent. Sure, you can go down the route where you have the talent that buffs Shockwave but it really doesn’t seem worth it, so most tanks dont spam thunderclap. There’s better things to do with that GCD.

Blizzard making healer and tanks lives harder combined with dps needing to use skills again was not a wise idea. I just don’t get the nerfing of aoe threat when all they had to do is what they did with making mobs be CC’d at least until folks get t11 gear in 6-12 months.

AOE threat did need to be nerfed because it was part of the problem. If you didn’t, then people wouldn’t CC because “the tank can get them all” and if he dies then he’s a shitty tank (in their eyes) or it’s a shitty healer. With what we have now, everyone understands that a) tanks can no longer have the entire group of mobs stuck to them like glue, b) mobs hurt, and c) healers can’t afford to be bailing people out the entire time.

It’s gone some way to balancing up the level of responsibility in a dungeon.

4355

Paladin AoE threat is still pretty good. Consecrate is pretty much useless, but paladin tanks still have a ton of multi-target abilities they can use almost constantly. Most of the time it doesn’t matter that much, because as you said people should be CCing and focusing targets down, to reduce tank damage.

4356

As a DPS I haven’t seen much trouble with tank threat. Nobody is really trying to AOE packs in heroics, so focus fire is working fine and I rarely see people pull agro.

They really buffed tank DPS, too, which is nice for them. DKs especially can end up near the top of the meters on a good run, which only helps.

4357

Yes, DKs are pretty damn good with AOE threat. Alot of it is a liability too, but that’s really not a huge issue for an above average DK.

The cooldown popping doesn’t get to me in the least. DPS is typically low and it takes forever to set up CC, so I can pop Anti-Magic Shell every pull. If two or three mobs pull due to bad CC/breaks/whatever, I just drop a D&D, Outbreak/Pestilence/Blood Boil, and pop at least half my cooldowns. Again, short of the very long ones (Army of the Dead, Empower Rune Weapon), they’re probably back up by the next pull anyway.

Blizzard making healer and tanks lives harder combined with dps needing to use skills again was not a wise idea. I just don’t get the nerfing of aoe threat when all they had to do is what they did with making mobs be CC’d at least until folks get t11 gear in 6-12 months.

They went from the game being World of Diablo to turning back the clock six years to Everquest 2.0 (not to be confused with the horribly inferior, at the time, Everquest 2). Veterans say they love it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they vast majority singing its praises are DPS that just don’t get enough queues to realize what a sluggish drag it can be. Or are just doing it with friends (who are good at the game), which makes everything seem better.

4358

/end another long rant- I spend more time reading/debating game mechanics now than playing the game

I do my daily heroic to buy BOA gear for alts (the JP rewards are the same as heroic drops, so why would I waste my points?), dailies for Tol Barad and Wildhammer/Dragonmaw, and then PvP.

I never expected that to become my typical WoW session. I had visions of dungeoneering for exciting rewards with my girlfriend and enjoying what seemed to be the new Blizzard mentality of all specs being at least close to viable in PVE so she could play a Warcraft Pokemon master without dragging a group to a halt.

What I got was a bunch of great questing that I totally lost interest in at 85, a completely, tear-inducingly awful world battleground that was the first indication of Blizzard being totally out of touch with its player base, and heroics that made me have to warn my girlfriend away from them, which just made her all the more interested of course.

It’s going to be really, really bad when she steps into Heroics for the first time in all greens with her trusty Beastmaster spec and does 3k DPS. The harassment she’ll get, and the extremely unfocused nature of JP rewards (was it really that hard to make a Dungeon Set that clearly directed newbs as to what they should buy?) may very well mark the end of her WoW career.

Hard heroics were good on paper and turned out to be godawful in practice. If you’re a min-max loner or have a tight-knit experienced guild, I’m sure it’s wonderful. If you have a friend/girlfriend/whatever that doesn’t take the game seriously enough to do the cookiecutter spec and constantly push themselves for more DPS, you get to find some way to tell him/her that he/she just isn’t good enough for the content. And all that results in is resentment and the loss of a hobby you both shared.

Vocal minority beats out silent majority again, I guess. There was nothing wrong with easy heroics and puggable raids. The hardcore raiders cried rivers that they were losing their elite-only grip on content, so Blizzard added Hard mode to appease the catasses who wanted to afk on Invincible above the Dalaran well just to show how floppy their e-cock was.

There didn’t need to be any more fixes beyond that. Wrath heroics were trivial when you had super raid gear that was two years more inflated than the original heroics. What a fucking surprise.

For two expansions the game revolved around the idea that Heroics were level-cap appropriate remixes of that expansion’s dungeons. You got to go back to Utgarde Keep and fight mobs your level. Bosses had some new tricks, but nothing frustrating. You needed to fight smarter, but it rarely came down to the point that most bosses had a MS Paint chart on WoW Wiki illustrating how not to die like it’s suddenly some pro football game.

Cataclysm took the idea of heroics and made them into mini raids instead of just, you know, dungeons for the level cap. Partially this was done so 5-man players could see raid-level stuff, but I think the big reason was to put a massive cockblock in place to create enough of a delay for Blizzard to crank out content.

I will be very surprised if Heroics aren’t nerfed, directly or indirectly, by the first content patch.

4359

For two expansions the game revolved around the idea that Heroics were level-cap appropriate remixes of that expansion’s dungeons. You got to go back to Utgarde Keep and fight mobs your level. Bosses had some new tricks, but nothing frustratin

Spoken like someone who never did Heroic Shattered Halls, Steamvaults, Arcatraz, Mana Tombs, or Shadow Labs in pre-raid gear. :)

Or, for that matter, Heroic Magister’s Terrace when it first came out.

Say rather that for one expansion that was the case, and I’d agree with you.

Also, BM pulls pretty competitive DPS (maybe a bit lower than Survival, but higher than Marks), from what I’ve seen. Have you tried setting her up with some basic DPS macros and such, or does she prefer just autoattacking her way to quest-victory?

4360

First of all, it’s not possible to step into heroics in all greens unless your bags are full of enough high ilvl gear to inflate your average enough to let you in. Second, why pass over the JP gear? You can fill a good chunk of your slots with it and, while it may not all be optimal for your class/spec, it’s still pretty good.

Hard heroics were good on paper and turned out to be godawful in practice. If you’re a min-max loner or have a tight-knit experienced guild, I’m sure it’s wonderful. If you have a friend/girlfriend/whatever that doesn’t take the game seriously enough to do the cookiecutter spec and constantly push themselves for more DPS, you get to find some way to tell him/her that he/she just isn’t good enough for the content. And all that results in is resentment and the loss of a hobby you both shared.

Again, why should someone who isn’t serious about getting the most out of their character be focusing on doing heroics? Just because they’re there? You’re getting angry for dumb reasons.

Vocal minority beats out silent majority again, I guess. There was nothing wrong with easy heroics and puggable raids. The hardcore raiders cried rivers that they were losing their elite-only grip on content, so Blizzard added Hard mode to appease the catasses who wanted to afk on Invincible above the Dalaran well just to show how floppy their e-cock was.

Uh huh. Everyone thinks their opinion is shared by the majority. I can assure you that hardcore raiders weren’t whining about heroics being easy or because they weren’t able to use them for this sad, tired status symbol thing people keep trying to insist all raiders are worried about. The only reason they ran them was to get quick emblems for more raid gear. Hell, that’s true of even non-raiders. Everyone wanted quick, easy access to better and better gear, which ended up making the content more and more trivial and boring.

Cataclysm took the idea of heroics and made them into mini raids instead of just, you know, dungeons for the level cap. Partially this was done so 5-man players could see raid-level stuff, but I think the big reason was to put a massive cockblock in place to create enough of a delay for Blizzard to crank out content.

Sorry, that right there is just plain retarded.