What missing loot flavor are you referring to exactly, Sly?
Drai
5422
I could be wrong, but I think Sly is referring to some of the more unique effects that earlier weapons had - say the spell that gave everyone in your group a +Int buff when using the original Headmaster’s Charge, or items that could proc a helpful ally.
I do not play anymore, so I can’t speak to how varied items are these days. If it really is that most items just get increasing larger base stats instead of unique properties, I would agree that is a change from older WoW - a change in the direction of boring just for the sake of balancing.
Many ICC weapons tended to have unique procs rather than just more stats (at least on 25-man mode; 10-man raiders were SOL), and I recall at the time Ghostcrawler wrote that this was something Blizzard wanted to do more often in the future. I can see why they didn’t want to add too many proc effects in the first tier of Cata raiding, though, since they tend to be harder to balance properly, and balancing was already a big enough task in 4.0 since every class received major changes. I suspect we’ll see more unique weapon procs (and trinkets and set bonuses) in 4.1.
No, but they broke bards again.
SlyFrog
5425
You got it. When I left the game, I remembered having things like the Barov calling trinket that would summon them to your aid in fights, etc. Now everything just seems to be pluses to stats. Even the activatable trinkets just seem to do stuff like plus X to spell power for 15 seconds.
There are still lots of items like the ones you’re talking about. In fact, there are far more now than there ever has been. Wrath had all sorts of the types of items you’re talking about, even trinkets that transform you into a totally different race when they proc and weapons that spawned tiny attackers. There’s a dagger in Cat heroics that shoots a friggin’ meteor at your target every so often and a few trinkets that are quite a bit more interesting than simple stat boosts. I’m just not sure what specifically you’re looking for. :)
SlyFrog
5427
Can you get any of those things without raiding? I’m now into heroic dungeons in Cata (having run roughly 10 of them), and I can not as of yet think of a single item I’ve run across that does anything like that.
Bear in mind that I skipped BC and Wrath, so my experience was with Vanilla years ago and now restarting with Cata.
Can you get any of those things without raiding?
Yes. The meteor dagger RobotPants mentioned drops in Heroic Shadowfang Keep.
This trinket can be purchased with Tol Barad tokens (there’s also a Horde equivalent). This trinket is crafted by engineers and is used to summon a mechanical whelpling to fight for you.
Those are just a few I can think of quickly, but there are many more. Granted, none of them are optimal raiding weapons, but neither was the Barov Peasant Caller you remember fondly.
In Wrath, 25-man ICC had a staff that would randomly summon a Val’kyr to attack your targets. I’ll bet we see more stuff like that later in Cata.
Sly, I’m not saying those items are all over the place, just that they’re there and that I can’t really think of very many from the olden days of WoW that would make you think there are fewer in current content. There weren’t many back then, either. And if there were, you probably wouldn’t remember them as fondly. :)
maxle
5430
Man. I’ve had pretty good luck with PUGs in Cata and the earlier dungeons were largely trivial, so I was pretty unprepared to wipe three or four times on the final boss of the Occulus because the healer thought we didn’t need healing and took a dps drake. When I put my foot down after the second wipe it was a dps who stepped up and took care of the heals.
Occulus is probably the worst-designed piece of content I’ve ever seen in WoW.
Let’s push the awful vehicle mechanic down players’ throats even more than we have in every other derp piece of content in WOTLK, but not just for trash clearing and movement, let’s do it for the boss.
Occulus was so bad that they actually had to implement bonus rewards – including a chance for a mount that only dropped in LFD Occulus – to prevent people from leaving the second they got the queue. And still, every group I’d ever been in past WOTLK release dropped group the second it popped regardless.
But after the changes they made to it, it was easy and quick. Plus extra rewards. It wasn’t nearly as bad as people made it out to be, though I also hated it quite a lot at first simply because people like James dropped group immediately.
JM1
5433
Yep. People just got into the habit of quitting, despite the fact that they made it much simpler and easier.
What’s frustrating about a mechanic like that is that unlike the normal experience of doing a new boss fight in a dungeon you haven’t seen, it can really be a struggle to understand what to do. I ran that once and only once as a healer on my latest char and I literally couldn’t figure out how to get the healing to work right. We wiped almost instantly. Maybe I’m a moron but I ended up taking a DPS drake and somebody else healed it.
But regardless of the difficulty level it’s just not a fun instance is what it really boils down to.
Yeah, I agree. I got to be really good at Occ, and could talk most groups through it, but you’re right… it just wasn’t fun. The mount, dismount, kill a couple mobs routine got old real quick.
On the other hand, I like that Blizzard tried something new & innovative, and if I had been a dev, there’s a good chance I would have thought Occ was a cool idea. It just doesn’t work too well in practice for some reason.
Oh, I agree completely that it wasn’t fun. However, it was very fast and I don’t suspect anyone ran heroics with fun being their primary goal.
When you’re one of two left in the instance I think it’s fair to leave.
It was the same with Malygos; that was easily the least-killed boss of that tier of raid content, compared to Naxx or Sartharion.
A lot of people really don’t like vehicle fights, especially 3D ones. (It sure didn’t help that both of those fights featured annoying “fly in circles around the boss to avoid something floating toward you” mechanics.)
It’s kind of too bad that Blizzard took that feedback to heart to the extreme, and backed away dramatically from using vehicles in Cataclysm. When used properly, vehicles can add an interesting extra dimension to WoW fights, as seen in Wintergrasp. It’s a tricky thing to get right though, for sure.
sinnick
5439
Trial of the Champion wasn’t bad, as vehicles went. It helped that you could practice using the horses outside of the instance.
When I tried to heal The Occulus, what made it hard was having to suddenly do something I had never done before, with no real chance to learn how to use the abilities in any context outside of a life or death situation. The fact that I do all my healing with an add-on which was suddenly broken didn’t help. I was glad that I had a group willing to talk me through it.
Err… backed away? Really? There are all sorts of vehicles in Cata, including the best use of the vehicle technology I’ve seen yet (the Vash “become a naga” quest line). There’s an integral bombing run in Grim Batol where improved skill in the bombing run directly translates into an easier time in the instance. There are some very basic (and easy) RTS-like segments which I found a pretty decent twisting of the vehicle tech. There’s the Green dragon/Deathwing sequence in TH. There’s the wildhammer sequence in TH. There’s the Joust stuff in Hyjal (which I personally despise, but it’s at least a more creative take on vehicle mechanisms than most stuff in LK…) Thresher fight in Deadmines… etc…
In LK, the vehicle stuff seemed gimmicky; kinda like “We got this cool idea, look what we can do now!” In Cata it seems that they’ve gone to “This tool gives us the ability to do cool stuff when it can be well integrated.” which I far prefer.
