Recent Posts

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Theorycrafting and Class Discussion / Re: 8.2.x Stuff

« Last post by Marco on Today at 09:03:10 AM »

Servers are up.  (Maintenance was scheduled to go until 6pm eastern but they're early this time.)  Don't forget to update your UI mods.

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Theorycrafting and Class Discussion / Re: Level squish survey?

« Last post by Piralyn on June 24, 2019, 12:07:01 PM »

Fair. I was thinking primarily on abilities/skills/traits as opposed to items, since gear is constantly replaced throughout the course of an expansion anyway, but you're right that it does make an appreciable difference in early leveling power and I don't think that an immediate dropoff would be a bad thing. That's how it was for BC since they drastically changed itemization budgets with stamina and other things, and it felt fine to me all the way back then. It would sometimes be tough if you had a super important/crucial set bonus, but that's not a problem at least in this expansion.

 I do disagree with the traits/active abilities being mostly folded in, but I think that depends on the class. While many of those didn't change Time To Kill, they did impact survivability/utility/play for the classes I was playing at the time. It wasn't an insignificant interruption to rotation/play for my two classes. Something like the Warlord of Draenor perks getting wiped out wasn't really that noticeable, though.

Something like changing powers/skills/items works great in a circular gameplay loop like Diablo's seasons, but yeah, it's a hard sell in a game that has been consistently built as a linear progression like WoW.

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Theorycrafting and Class Discussion / Re: 8.2.x Stuff

« Last post by Marco on June 24, 2019, 11:44:03 AM »

Still 410 until the raid opens two weeks later.

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Theorycrafting and Class Discussion / Re: 8.2.x Stuff

« Last post by Fernia on June 24, 2019, 11:32:30 AM »

Anyone know if we will land up with 8.2 rewards for the M+ chest tomorrow, or will it still be a 410 chest? 
Better rewards might motivate me to actually run something on Fernia tonight.

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Outside Azeroth - General Chatter / Re: Hearthstone (and battlenet desktop)

« Last post by Snique on June 24, 2019, 10:25:00 AM »

More HS changes coming: two basic cards rotate to Hall of Fame and ten new cards are coming, replacing those two and others that have been rotated out, including two new neutral legendaries.

https://www.hearthstonetopdecks.com/vanish-and-mind-blast-rotate-to-hall-of-fame-10-new-basic-classic-cards-will-be-added-to-the-game/

There's also a bunch of info there about how Blizzard says it sees each class strengths/weaknesses (identity).

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Theorycrafting and Class Discussion / Re: Level squish survey?

« Last post by Marco on June 24, 2019, 10:19:17 AM »

His idea is basically that each expansion would be a self-contained game branching off of the end of classic, with no expectation that you take any power gains with you from one expansion to another.  Top-of-the-line Legion gear would be no more powerful than scrub end-of-classic gear once you step into any other expansion content.  If you earned any class abilities during your time leveling in Mists, they would only work in Mists.

Isn't this more or less what they did with Legion -> BFA and it sucked? The Artifacts gave interesting abilities and traits and progress, but then as soon as BFA rolled around it got wiped out and you got shit-all to replace it?

No.  If you picked up good gear in Legion endgame, in BfA you start out pretty godlike and get less and less powerful (relative to the scaling outdoor or dungeon mobs you interact with) each time you gain a level, with a marked decrease at 116 when you lose your legendary effects.  If you instead exited Legion with scrub 110 gear, you gain a little bit of power from Azerite armor as you level in BfA.  Starting in scrub gear is of course slower overall, but feels more like a traditional RPG leveling experience.

It's true that artifact powers got wiped, but most of their raw power was folded into the class.  The activated ability went away, sometimes still available as a talent pick.  In some cases ancillary powers went away, but they usually didn't contribute much to the speed of killing outdoor mobs.

I think there's merit to that approach as a way of making legacy content interesting for new/returning folks, but as a long-term sustainability thing, it seems like it's just going to exacerbate the existing problem of "Leveling ultimately doesn't matter. Nothing changes. Anything cool we do get will be removed anyway."

It's a different mindset--progress by breadth rather than depth.  In the current model, the best gear in Legion allows you to level faster in BfA for a bit, and then it carries no power advantage anywhere (aside from legendary effects in timewalking dungeons).  In the proposed model, the best gear in Legion gives you no advantage in BfA, but it retains its power advantage when you go back to the broken isles.

To me the problem isn't so much that "I lost all my shit" is a deal-breaker--the same thing happens when I stop playing one RPG and start playing another, after all.  The problem is that we're not used to thinking of expansions as having separate progression, and the players who would appreciate the proposed model aren't the same body of players who are still playing after N expansions of progress by depth.

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Theorycrafting and Class Discussion / Re: Level squish survey?

« Last post by Piralyn on June 24, 2019, 08:56:27 AM »

His idea is basically that each expansion would be a self-contained game branching off of the end of classic, with no expectation that you take any power gains with you from one expansion to another.  Top-of-the-line Legion gear would be no more powerful than scrub end-of-classic gear once you step into any other expansion content.  If you earned any class abilities during your time leveling in Mists, they would only work in Mists.

Isn't this more or less what they did with Legion -> BFA and it sucked? The Artifacts gave interesting abilities and traits and progress, but then as soon as BFA rolled around it got wiped out and you got shit-all to replace it? I think there's merit to that approach as a way of making legacy content interesting for new/returning folks, but as a long-term sustainability thing, it seems like it's just going to exacerbate the existing problem of "Leveling ultimately doesn't matter. Nothing changes. Anything cool we do get will be removed anyway." Might work better if this opens the doors to more significant and frequent power gains within each slice, but I'm not sure that necessarily outweighs the more frequent "I lost all my new cool shit." I feel like I've played some games that had areas where there was a separate progression tree that only affected that zone/area, but those games were substantially less linear than WoW where you hit Raid 1 to be able to clear Raid 2 to be able to clear Raid 3 et cetera. Maybe this would work better if it was immediately replaced by an equivalent system. Would the abrupt loss of all the Legion artifact stuff felt less shitty if we got a new artifact weapon right off the bat in BFA?

I actually think the perk system from Warlords was a potentially good idea for making leveling up matter, minus the random order part. Back in the days of yore, a lot of the "stuff" you got from leveling was just new, more powerful ranks of spells--but at least it felt like something. It does eventually run into the same issue of only being able to layer so many advancements before it becomes unsustainable--You can't have Sinister Strike do damage, cause self-healing, cause a debuff, increase dodge, reduce energy costs, and generate bonus combo points without having tooltips take up an entire screen--but it gives a way to have continued minor progression that rewards leveling without potentially dramatically altering class rotations by introducing ten new buttons.

The past few expansions have seemed to try to reinvent the wheel with a brand new design each time, and it hasn't been a great transition most of the time. I wouldn't trust them to do a more extreme version of that any better.

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Theorycrafting and Class Discussion / Re: 8.2.x Stuff

« Last post by Snique on June 22, 2019, 04:16:57 PM »

I think they're specifically talking about death from old age,

I suppose that's right. But they could easily have said "...immune from age..." Just struck me as weird.

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Outside Azeroth - General Chatter / Re: Finished playing...

« Last post by Snique on June 22, 2019, 10:09:37 AM »

Thanks, that's an idea. I still haven't figured out how to play the DLC that I think I have so maybe I'll try that if I figure out how...

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Theorycrafting and Class Discussion / Re: 8.2.x Stuff

« Last post by Marco on June 22, 2019, 08:47:03 AM »

My attempt at a to-do list for 8.2:

* Flying (aka revered with Waveblade Ankoan and Rustbolt Resistance):
- Run the mainline quest chains to unlock the two reputations
- Explore the new zones, run side quests
- Get a Contract: Ankoan or Contract: Rustbolt Resistance
- Run world quests in Nazjatar
- Kill rares in Nazjatar (one-time 50 rep each, 40 rares but probably only some up each day)
- Do the public event in Nazjatar (150 rep)
- Do the warmode "Battle for Nazjatar" event when it happens every few days (500 rep, win or lose)
- Open treasures in Nazjatar to get Lesser Benthic Arcanocrystal and follow quest chain (500 rep, I think one per week)
- Defeat elite pets in Nazjatar (one-time 250 rep each, total of 3000 rep)
- Level up bodyguards (400 rep for each at level 5, maybe more at higher levels)
- Run the daily world quest in Mechagon (850 rep) and the pet daily world quest (75 rep)
- Run the daily Mechagon quests
- Defeat elite pets in Mechagon (one-time 250 rep each, total of 2000 rep)
- Kill rares in Mechagon (one-time 75 rep each, 36 rares)

* Ramp up new buffs and consumables:
- Gather new herb and ore on gathering alt (gathering will be faster with flying)
- Level enchanting, alchemy, and jewelcrafting to 175 as needed
- Get new recipes (can't find much information on how)

* Essences:
- Await theorycraft on the best essences
- Do weekly islands in case Worldvein Resonance is good