5161

I made a deal with my guild last night that totally backfired.

My sub is running out Sunday, and being a holy paladin I felt kind of eh, irritated by the nerfs. Note that I am heroically geared now and it turns out in practice that I don’t really even notice said nerfs while I’m actually healing. But I felt that I’d seen enough, the guild doesn’t seem like it’s making much effort towards raiding, we just do lots of heroics. Lots.

The only piece of gear I’ve been having issues getting is bracers (I’m not alone I think). There’s no Twilight quests that issue blue holy bracers, there are none to be found, really, except in GB and the Deadmines and I had never seen one drop. So running around in rep epics and the rest of my gear is basically heroic 346 blues, I got angry about my green bracers.

So I said ‘I will let my sub expire unless I get heroic holy plate bracers tonight.’ Everyone really didn’t want me to quit, so the guild tank and I queue up for GB and get three outrageously good random DPS’ers…for a change…we blast through GB…and Erudax drops the goddamn bracers.

So I just resubbed. I think I made a huge mistake.

5162

Maybe in the next month, you can earn enough valor points to afford the heroic bracers! :)

Edit: wait, are there bracers for sale at the valor quartermaster?

5163

125 over 15 attempts is like 8 per attempt. That’s not nothing, but it’s also not a ton. Also some of those were undoubtedly when we were in the wipe phase when the interrupters were dead & the trons were just cleaning up.

Drilling in though - yeah we do take some damage from it. On attempt 11 (our best shot) we took about 849k from annihilators; a total of 18. That’s quite a bit, or so it seems. I gotta get better at interrupts!

Other than that our damage sources are largely unavoidable: melee, incineration, and electrical discharge are the big ones.

5164

I think they nerfed BRD since I was last their with my dwarf warlock. As a ret pally, I two manned everything past Lord Incendius with a very skilled hunter. He was 90% of it really. It would have been much easier if I was holy since I could easily heal his turtle.

Anyway, that was one of my most fun experiences in WoW in a long time. It was laid back, no time pressure, only wiped on one boss which we came back for after doing the emporer (we both went from 51-53) during the run (including pre-incendius before the group bailed).

I really think they should try designing difficult, two-three man instances. That was a blast.

Anyway, also, Blizzard, if someone DC’s have the dungeon complete message comes up, either let us kick them or if they remained DC’d for more than 10-15 minutes auto-kick them please. TYVM!

Edit: Also, get on that player housing! I have all these nice weapons just sitting in the bank, it’d be nice to be able to display them in a virtual home ala EQ2. Between two back-to-back BRD runs I got 4 two handed weapons, some of which look quite cool. What’s sad is I just spent 250g on Destiny before those runs. Heh.

And an obligatory screenshot:

5165

Nope, no justice ones either…for anyone.

5166

I’ve had a similar experience. My first toons were leveled at the beginning of BC, and I was able to level cooking on them w/out much effort. I had to occasionally put some effort into catching my cooking skill up to my current level, but it was mostly a gimme.

Then I levelled a couple toons in Wrath, and I had to frequently put a lot of effort into keeping my cooking skill leveled appropriately.

I levelled a mage in Cata, and cooking was hopelessly outdated. I simply leveled it during the Thanksgiving holiday. (Although Cata was released Dec. 7, pre-80 Cata content was released a week or two before Thanksgiving.)

All of these toons were leveled w/out heirlooms, so xp bonuses didn’t affect them.

I still like leveling cooking for some unknown reason, but you’re right that it was way more fun when the cooking leveling experience naturally matched your character leveling.

5167

There are Honor ones though. These. That’s what I plan on getting for my healadin.

5168

Well. Turns out one of the reasons I was squishier than other tanks is that, uh, bears who were in bear form (or spec? Not sure) when the shattering hit retained a 12% damage reduction that new bears did not have. For two months. Oh, and 6% attack power buff.

So that the bear damage nerf that just went live and didn’t make any sense to me, well, it probably (blizzard is explicitly withholding comment while they investigate) was based on a bugged buff that I didn’t have. On the plus side, my armor’s DR is now at 61%, up from ~54%.

Hopefully I gets my damage back in a hotfix soon. Whee.

5169

The bear damage nerf was intended, as a PVP nerf. It was pretty easy for feral druids to sit in bear form and wreck people in PVP because of all the Vengeance stacking up. Instead of making Vengeance not work in PVP, they nerfed the hell out of bear damage. It’s rather annoying from a PVE standpoint, and makes tanking heroic dungeons much harder, especially as DPS are climbing up the threat charts again.

5170

My #1 pet peeve of MMO’s everywhere is when they nerf classes/roles/whatever because of PvP, unless it’s a PvP centric game, of course. At this point I’d think WoW is more of a PvE game. But whatever.

5171

WUT45

5172

Yeah, I think “at this point” is a weird way to put that. WoW has always been, first and foremost, a PvE game.

5173

Well you know, Horde vs Alliance, PvP servers, but what do I expect when I post, really.

The point of my comment was not OMGZ IT’S PVE WTF, it was that I hate changes to PvE due to PvP/Arena whines. That’s all, move on now.

5174

A bear damage nerf was intended, absolutely, but the actual nerf we got…well, we don’t know yet. And by we I mean Blizzard. People brought up the armor change, the CR replied that it was just a tooltip update. People pressed him (I think politely), he went away for a day and came back with a long, involved explanation that conspicuously made no mention of the damage portion of the phantom buff and, incidentally, was sprinkled with caveats along the lines of, “We’re not certain this explanation is entirely correct.” People then asked about the damage portion of the buff and he said:

Well that’s a point. I avoided it specifically since it’s off topic for the purpose of my last post but figured I’d have to follow up at some point. Anyway, it’s something we aren’t going to comment on as we haven’t fully investigated the ramifications or even if this whole situation is being accounted for correctly.

5175

The druid community’s just all sort of disheveled after the patch. That sort of reaction seems… constrained would be the word, I guess.

5176

People get disheveled after every change made to their class, regardless of importance or severity.

5177

Importance and severity juice it up.

5178

Yeah, I dunno. I was mildly annoyed by the damage reductions, but the people canceling their accounts…

/shrug

Point wasn’t that the blue’s reply was inappropriate or anything, just that Blizzard doesn’t appear to have a firm grasp on exactly what went on with some of the bear changes.

5179

Yeah, they’re definitely still trying to figure out all the implications of the changes made, between the old Thick Hide talent, and what not.

The irony is, with the large boost in armor to bears and the reduction in damage for their basic abilities, threat while tanking is even more of an issue in dungeons than before. Bears don’t get hit as hard, which means less Vengeance, combined with lower damaging abilities across the board – it’s hurting the threat scaling system they tried to put into place with this expansion, for tanks.

As for PVP vs PVE, that’s long been an issue, that isn’t going away; anyone playing WoW for a while should know that. It’s never fun to be on the receiving end of as many nerfs as ferals got this patch, for both PVE and PVP, but so it goes.

5180

Stop the whining and play the role druids were made for:

;)