World of Warcraft

[devonin]

Your main spec is your main spec. Why should it matter if it's the one you happen to be using at the time? Once again, I don't PUG, nobody is going to BS about that, and someone else knows what your main spec is anyway.

[Squeek]

Just tested a theory on granting levels through refer-a-friend.

I thought Blizzard would be smart and place certain limitations on characters, but all of my expectations were wrong.

So while I was grinding up my Shaman with my friend, he rolled a warrior just to level alongside me for 3x. He would leave before I was done for the night (different sleep schedules and all) and so I would usually spend the rest of the night finishing up class quests or going profession-related things or stuff like that. Sometimes I gained a level while he was offline, and so any time I was a level ahead of him one way or another, I granted him a level.

The first thing we realized is that granting a level doesn't reset your current EXP to 0. If you're 90% to level 49 and you get granted a level, you'll be 90% to level 50. No kidding. So every time I was just slightly ahead of him and dinged while turning in quests before him, I'd grant him a level and he'd end up far ahead of me (which is what I spent his time offline catching up on).

The FAQ says you can grant one level for every 2 you gain to the referrer, up to level 60. That means I can grant 30 levels total. So eventually we got to 60 and all of the R-A-F stuff ended. No more 3x, no more summoning, no more granting levels. We grinded a bit together but eventually I got way too far ahead in quest progression overnight and just finished my grind to 80 without him.

Now it's a month later and we're on our fourth set of alts, hoping these two stick (most of the time we get them to 15 in a day and then quit. These have gotten slightly past that mark. Anyway, we start questing again knowing that we won't have a lot of time and I ended up passing him in EXP again by doing some class quests, so when I dinged first despite the fact that he had a tiny sliver left, I granted him a level to "catch him up". That's when he realized that the shaman has 30 total uses and didn't use all 30 to level the warrior every night, so after our questing ended for the evening he switched to his hunter.

Level 24 -> Level 48 in one minute.

Also found out that so long as your character gained levels above the level of the one you're granting levels to, you can still do it. So I switched to my DK to get 4 more. He's at 52 now.

Edit: completely unrelated

I just looked at the PTR notes for Glyphs for the first time. I actually neglected to do so for a long time prior. Almost all of the new glyphs for Shaman suck except for the last one on the list: Glyph of Totem of Wrath. Wrath gives +3% crit on spellcasts and +280 spellpower, making it the most sought-after totem in our list by all spellcasters both healing and dps. The glyph here adds 30% more spellpower onto that, giving it 84 more spellpower. I just hope it's a Minor glyph (though I know it won't be) as any one of my three Majors are going to be difficult to replace.

[Solid Dreams]

At least your class improvements (so far for us) involves two new major glyphs.

Which means if we want to be better we have to give up 2 big damage ones, which gives us a bunch of threat, or we get ko'd a lot more.

[Sir Psycho]

Wait, so you're saying that we need to get a hold of the Last Stand Glyph and the Shield Wall glyph? That's highly unlikely.

[Solid Dreams]

I think that's their way of "fixing" the problem we have with tanking bosses like sarth 3D, that druids and DKs have an easier time doing.

[Sir Psycho]

Oh pfft, then I won't need to bother with that then.

[Solid Dreams]

I guess, it's just a fact that DKs and druids are better at magic than pallies and warriors.

Doesn't really matter, though.

Source: Ghostcrawler
It is too early to have a "stance." We are still looking at the data and finalizing all of our tanking changes. But I can offer you some rambling thoughts.

1) When cooldown tank abilities have too long a cooldown they don't get used because you tend to save them for emergencies. When they are too short, you just blow them whenever because they will be back up. Hitting that sweet spot is tough especially when there are multiple cooldowns that can be chained.

2) The Patchwerk test used in these tests doesn't have the kind of timed, big hits that generally encourage players to save their cooldowns.

3) DKs are probably too good on tanking fights that do have those kind of timed, big hits if they are magical. Unfortunately the one really hard encounter in the game is a dragon that does just that.

4) Avoidance may be too high given what tier we're in.

5) We are trying to make frequent PTR builds. Part of that means it isn't feasible to go office to office and make sure everyone has every change checked in before we make a build. In some cases we change abilities and things like glyphs or set bonuses get left behind.

We greatly appreciate the numbers and the amount of effort players are putting into generating and interpreting those data. Let's please stick to analysis and not jumping to conclusions about who is getting benched in Ulduar.

If I need to say it again, the goal is that you can have any of the four classes as your MT, so long as that player has sufficient skill and appropriate gear and is backed up by a raid that knows what the blank they are doing.

[Izzy]

http://www.wowhead.com/?item=40190
Got this last night in a quick 25 man naxx run. To bad i didn't get a slower mainhand dagger then 1.5. Soon ill have 5/5 savage glad and all the other hateful pvp pieces. Maybe ill be viable in pvp then. Decided to go with a mutilate spec that uses an imp ambush opener. So far it has been fairly good, other then having 0 survivability as a rogue.

I have several other pve epics but that is insignificant to me.
http://www.wowarmory.com/character-s...am&n=%C3%8Ezzy

Oh and here is my old twink.
http://www.wowarmory.com/character-s...oc&n=%C3%8Ezzy
There is a reason i dont have mongoose =/ Not because i'm cheap.

[Tokzic]

So Rogue glyphs happen to completely suck at the moment. My major ones do the following:

1) slightly increase the duration of one of my DoT abilities;
2) slightly increase my maximum energy (mostly useless in PVE);
3) increase my haste spell by a few seconds (it's always on and this makes 0 difference)

Next patch we get:

1) decrease the energy cost of my main attack by 10%;
2) increase all damage by 3%

TOOK THEM DAMN LONG ENOUGH

:>

[Squeek]

All of my glyphs rock.

+4% damage on lightning bolt
+10% crit damage from lava burst (guaranteed crit skill) (It's currently at +190% damage on crit and will go to +200% when I get one more tier piece)
+6s on my 12s dot and the dot is not consumed when the previous skill goes off (as it's supposed to be) which lets me cast the damaging skill twice before needing to update the dot and keeps the dot ticking the entire time for increased damage

[Izzy]

http://www.wowhead.com/?item=40189
Got the best dps mace in the game. Way to easy -_-;

[Squeek]

It's an 8% drop that you can attempt to get once a week. How is it "easy"?

Worse is the caster mace, since it's a 15% drop once a week from Kel. It's the worst because so few naxx runs get to the end due to time constraints. I've been in four now and not a single one has gotten through all four quarters. I still have yet to see Sapph or Kel.

Oh but I have other options for spellcaster stuff, right? I mean, I can use daggers, and daggers have sp.

The dagger is a world drop from 25-naxx and pretty much every spellcaster in the raid is going to roll on it.

If all these items are so easy to get I wonder why nearlyevery spellcaster on my server is using the Kirin Tor rep dagger.

[tsugomaru]

I would never be caught walking around with a dinky spellcaster dagger.

~Tsugomaru

[Kagome]

When we do 25Naxx we clear in in 2 1/2 hours. Then we go do Maly and just barely make it a 3 hour raid.

Sarth 3D is another day and that's a short one too.

[Squeek]

You run with a guild. We have a grand total of six level 80s in my guild. We can't even run 10-mans without pugging other members. It was only a few weeks ago that we even recruited a tank, so we had to pug a tank for every dungeon.

I wish I were in a bigger guild, but I'm happy with the guild I'm in. Besides, we make friends with big guilds that don't quite have 25 every weekend and we fill in the gaps for them. Apparently before I started, we had a sister guild that would run stuff with us, but they switched servers.

[Solid Dreams]

I'm in a really nice, but small guild, so even though I'd like to do 25 man naxx I can't unless I drop a nice guild for a guild that's filled with people I don't like. :P

[Izzy]

It was easy because it was a pug and it took 0 preparation and practice to do the boss encounter. Any random person in the game can get amazing crap.

[devonin]

Any random person in the game can get amazing crap.

If your entire PUG were composed of 'random people' who hadn't already been in there repeatedly with groups that were much better geared than they were to -get- well geared enough that they could bring along random undergeared people without wiping on everything, you'd find an entirely different experience I'm sure.

[Izzy]

No, that pretty much nails it on the head. Noone was doing more then 2k dps. Maybe a third have seen the fights before. Then again anyone can read or watch the encounters on youtube or wowhead.

In classic WoW if you wanted good gear you pretty much already had to have good gear. Then you had to pretty much write up a resume and do an interview with a guild. For a month or so you would be on trial in raids so that you could start getting dkp to save up for a piece of loot. Back then boss encounter strategy were a guilds close secret. Server firsts were something to brag about. You had to farm daily just for repair bills. The guild had to spend 100's of gold on potions just to get that tiny edge to be able to do the boss.

[devonin]

Any guild that tried to institute something as moronic as dkp or a similar system can damn well raid without me. Thinking before you recruit someone completely removes the need for anything that stupid to hand out loot.