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In my old guild, we had a feast-off at Patchwerk between our two chefs. They posted as many feasts as possible and the ground was littered with more than what you have in the screenshot. =[

~Tsugomaru

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lmfao

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I got a question for you guys.

I have no desire to play on my server (Kilrogg) anymore, mostly due to lack of (skilled) players at my desired raid time (between midnight and 5am EDT). I'm just curious as to what your guys raid times are and if you could give me a semi-accurate description of what late night (real late night, not "I raid a 9pm to midnight, i'm late night!) player base is like. Horde side only please, don't care about alliance. Also, if you could tell me overall what the population of the server is... roughly of course. I don't want to go to an alliance dominated server with like 17% of the player base being horde.

Thanks.

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I can't think of any boss that has more than three phases in all the games I've played.

Give me a break.

~Tsugomaru

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this one

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You should've fought kael.

5 phase bitch of a fight.

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no one knows what their server is like between like 10pm and 1am PST? Come on... :(

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no not really

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I do. Those are the hours my guild raids at.

But I'm alliance, oops.

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In regards to that Paladin passive shield bs:
I assume Shaman's ankh will be reduced to a 2 minute cooldown then? Because that's exactly equivalent, Paladins just don't have to push a button or use a reagent to do it.

In regards to the emblem thing:
/sigh glad I put in the time and effort to get far in Ulduar-25 when I could've just waited and run heroics. I thought the ENTIRE POINT of the tiered emblem system was to avoid the way they did it in BC where BoJ bought everything up to sunwell level gear... and now they're doing exactly that. What makes it worse is that I don't even need anything else with EoC, so I can't even make this change work to my advantage, all it's gonna do for me is make runed orbs really damn cheap. Laaame.

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I completely didn't even understand what the changes were to Ardent Defender since I never raid with Paladins =x

That's BS man. Way too overpowered.

Basically means one-shot moves that are designed to weed out stupid people from people who know how to pay attention won't kill lazy Paladins.

And yeah, it's a reagent-less repair-less reincarnation every 2 minutes. Bull. ****.

As for the emblems, I understand that it seems dumb, but I don't get what's so bad about it. Yes, people who you think don't 'deserve' to have some of your gear will have your gear. It's not like your raiding experience is invalidated. You got weapons, offhands, relics, trinkets, rings, necks, and unsold pieces from Ulduar. You got the other pieces of tier. You got achievements, experience with the raid, and progress through the dungeon. None of that is being taken away from you.

All this is doing is giving fresh 80s a leg up. And it makes perfect sense too. If you invite your friend to your guild and you spend every raiding night in Ulduar and barely have enough people for that, how are you going to have time to run him through Heroics or Naxx? He'll never be able to catch up to your gear level to run with your group, so he gets left behind. Well, he could PUG, but that's not gonna get him anywhere.

This basically says "Hey, if you run some heroics and get all the purpz from those and get experience with not standing in the fire enough, we'll give you enough emblems to let you buy some really nice gear in addition to the stuff you got from those heroics. All you have to do is run 100 or so heroics and you're good to go!"

It's not as if these casuals who were solely in blues and heroic purpz will suddenly be competing with your DPS or stealing your spot in a raid. If a player sucks, no amount of gear will make them not suck. Simple fact of life.

Will people abuse this? Of course they will. You know it, I know it (and I will), and Blizzard knows it. However, the alternative is to tell your friends that they joined the game too late and need to wait until the next expansion and make sure they hit 90 as fast as possible so they can raid with you. What this also means is that you can actually play an alt in the current tier if you dedicate enough time to it rather than just have that 80 sit there rotting, choosing to bring it to a Naxx pug you saw advertised in Dalaran on your off-days.

PS - I don't know if I've mentioned this, but as a Shaman who has played Restoration, I can tell you that all of the changes for Resto Shaman will make them way, way overpowered and that they will be nerfed shortly after 3.2 if they even make it to live. I can't even imagine a situation where a Resto Shaman runs out of mana. Every time you crit a heal, you proc +550-600 mana. The mp5 boost brings our innate mp5 up to about 500-600. Add the 108mp5 totem. Even if the mana proc is once every 5 seconds, that's 1200-1400 mana regenned every 5 seconds. And that's spamming heals non-stop.

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That's all good and fine, but I feel they went a bit too far. Why not move it up one step at a time and have heroics drop emblems of valor for a while?

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Probably because the Valors system is messed up too.

Ulduar 10 should not drop Valors. Either they had to make two new sets of Emblems in 3.1, they had to make Conquest drop from 10 and 25, or they had to let you buy tier 8.0 with Valor. Neither of these happened. It was a huge screwup. The fact that you get ilv219 gear from Uld10 in a new item set makes Valor Emblems completely worthless to Ulduar 10 raiders, even if they had not gotten any from the previous tier of raids. Hooray, you can buy tier 7.5. Too bad the set bonus won't affect your tier 8 loot you're getting from the Watchers.

And I think we can both agree that having four Emblems (eight after this patch) is just flat-out overkill. You'd have to have a set of Emblems for each tier of progression. It would be ridiculous.

But I'll bite. Let's say Heroics give Valor. That means Naxx 10 and 25 give Valor. That means Ulduar 10 and 25 gives Conquest.

So you get Conquest from Uld 10, eh? Ok, so you can buy tier 8.5 with three trips to Ulduar. Sooner if you do hard modes--some of which are a joke. Yes, you have to raid, but you can still get 25-man gear from 10-man dungeons. QQ ensues. People can get a 4pc bonus with minimal effort.

People cry over everything regardless of what you do. This was the most painless way of trying to bridge the gap between fresh 80s and current raiders. It still requires a crap-ton of work, especially if you intend to get all of your gear from the Emblem vendor. It's over 200 Emblems for Conquest stuff alone and another 150 or so for the Valor stuff and maybe another 100 for Heroism stuff. 450 emblems, assuming a 1:1 downtrade ratio (like we have now), divided by an average of 4 emblems per heroic, still means these 'casual' folks need to run 113 Heroics to get decked out. And this isn't even focusing on any kind of offspec. Oh lawd that would be a nightmare. (Actually, it is still a nightmare for me, since all of my heal suit is either random mail mp5 from naxx25 that nobody else wanted or naxx10 tier. No way I can roll offspec on tier pieces when other shaman / hunters / warriors still need tier, right? None of our shaman / warriors / hunters needed naxx10 tier pieces so when we ran that for lowbies I got all the pieces that dropped. Unfortunately not the case in 25, since there are usually an average of 8 people in that tier category. To sum it up: all I have is tier 7.0 pieces for my heal suit and it's not sufficient for Ulduar, especially when Resto Shaman lag so far behind innately.)

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Actually, it's better, because instead of dying, we heal, which means we don't fall off the threat list, or lose all our buffs in the same way you would by dying and resurrecting.

Conversely, as a tank, chances are that I'll end up dying more frequently than a ranged DPS does.

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You would be surprised how quickly the person with the lowest health pool dies.

I'm so glad this is getting fixed in 3.2, because it's been a thorn in my side forever.

For example. So, we're doing XT hard mode for the 2nd week, having done it the week before. Having trouble. Don't know why. I get a light bomb and I get heals / shielded through it. Then it dissipates and I die instantly. What the hell? No Tantrum, no hits, nothing. Just dead.

I looked at Recount:

Life Spark melee Crit Sqek for 19,500 phyical.
Sqek dies.

Without the new HP bonus, I die. With it, I would've lived. Damn Hunters next to me have 23,000 HP and I have 19,000. What the HELL.

It's completely unfair too. There's absolutely nothing a Shaman can do to survive that except hope he doesn't crit. If it were any other class, you could've said something like "well they could've taken the hit if you had them at full health first". Not Shaman. We're boned. The damn thing had literally just come out and it smacked me. Normally we taunt it around because it hits like a damn truck, but it had JUST SPAWNED. It's absolute BS.

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Well, nobody in the character balance teams for the game even could remember -why- shaman had less base health than anyone else, chances are it was accidental. This isn't really an upgrade so much as a bug fix.

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They had lowest base health because in vanilla they were actually DESIGNED to have overpowered abilities. Or at least that was the common consensus 5 years ago. I doubt the devs would admit to actually that now.

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Sqeek, you may actually have convinced me most of the way. It's still just a little hard to swallow for me... you weren't around in BC when everyone just farmed Kara every week and got gear on par with Sunwell raiders. Blizzard admitted almost right away that they liked the emblem system but that that was a terrible implementation. I doubt I'll end up minding it as much as I feel like I will... it won't be so bad after the patch hits and nothing actually changes for me except that I'll start doing the daily heroic again *shudder*

Also, just for the record, I do have the 500 Emblems of Heroism achievement, as well as like 350/500 Valor and almost 100 Conq, so I kick the inflated numbers of your post's ass =p (but admittedly, I've almost bought a full set of pvp gear with emblems of heroism, not to mention several Heirloom items after I was done buying all my resto and balance stuff)

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Ok, well then answer me this:

Even with Sunwell-level gear, were those people clearing Sunwell?

Hell no.

@Grandia: The Devs said Shaman were originally supposed to be offensive hybrids as opposed to defensive hybrids in Paladins. I think we all know how that turned out.

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Well yeah, back in the days when Windfury could prof off of itself it was probably rightful for shamans to have lower health, but since homogenizing everything it's ridiculous.

This does actually explain why it was always harder to get up to 8k hp for Kara on my shaman than on my druid back in the day.