Best End of Expansion, Ever

I've had a great time in the weeks leading up to the expansion. It's not because Mists of Pandaria is ending. Maybe a bit... But actually, I think this is due to a few things added during MoP that only recently have I taken advantage of.

Soon before the patch I finished the legendary cloak on my paladin. It was a profoundly anti-climactic moment. I effectively got a legendary for running LFR a lot, and for putting up with the utterly ridiculous need to win two specific BGs for a PvE chain. If it had merely been two generic BGs, or even to win two Pandaria BGs (including the same one twice), that might have been okay. I was glad to get it, but I think I've gotten bigger thrills from finding khorium nodes.

Then I heard that the Brawler's Guild was closing. I misinterpreted this as being permanently gone, or that the entire thing would be scrapped and return in some vaguely familiar, yet wrong form, as happened with Naxxramas, or Azeroth. This led to me spending pretty much my entire weekend before the patch trying to get to rank 10. I managed to do it, beating the paladin the morning of the Monday before the patch. Hexos, the first boss in rank 8, was probably the hardest thing I'd ever done in WoW.

My warlock had tried to get green fire, which meant flying to Black Temple and dying a lot. I'd not expected this to be a skill check. Gear helps, but it's like Hexos: it can reduce the length of time that you need to play well, but you still have to play well for a solid 5-6 minutes (Hexos was only two minutes, but was also even more unforgiving during that time). The result was that she died a lot. And then more. I looked it up and found that this wasn't typically people did with an ilevel of 490.

She had puttered around for a while, never even gone to SoO, barely done any LFR at all. That had to change, and that was the first part of the fun. All this time I could have gotten better gear, but for what purpose? Higher numbers for their own sake aren't that appealing to me. But, when they have a purpose, then I very much enjoy the collecting of near gear. Some time on the Timeless Isle (no idea how long) got her a couple timeless items, one of which replaced a blue. (did I mention that her gear was awful?) Some LFR brought in a necklace, Ordos donated a very nice belt, and a Celestial gave her her first tier piece. I gemmed, enchanted, upgraded as much as I could given my lack of lesser charms of good fortune (she was so neglected that she barely even had the currency they gave out for sneezing).

I flew to Black Temple and proceeded to die a lot. I was doing this fight, not perfectly, but I think pretty darn well, except for my one inexplicably stupid habit of running away from cover and getting killed by a chaos bolt. It was as if I'd were being possessed by a Spirit of Stupid. I yelled at that spirit. Then I ignored it. I focused on my pretty red and purple flags on the ground. "Stay near those flags and everything will be okay", I told myself. I didn't and I died. I explain the fight again, "stay alive and stay near those flags. It's not a DPS race until late in; just survive until then." And finally I listened and I downed the boss.

Now I have green fire. This has the unexpected downside of making all of my spell icons look different than I remember, and all the same. But by golly, I have green fire, a weird title, and an Feat of Strength.

In other news, the price of arcane crystals has skrocketed on Blackhand, for no apparent reason. I knew my odd habit of farming thorium would pay off someday.

It's not a pet, I just have a very long arm

I've been having a blast with my frost mage. It reminds me a lot of when I used to play a warlock.

I'm so getting in trouble for that.

No really! What really defined the feeling for me on my warlock was the sense of control from multiple angles. I had fear and death coil. I also had curse of exhaustion, the nerfing of which caused me great sadness. I ran around in PvP with a Nifty Stopwatch and a Heart of Noxxion.

One moment please. I've been reading the comments on wowhead. I need some time to cry. First they nerfed it. Now the quest for it is gone. Anti-fun police, you win this round. And probably the next one too. Dicks. Oh what's that? The other trinket got buffed? OH YEA! WOOOOOOOOOOOO! But seriously, why did you have the destroy the stopwatch? Dicks.

Being able to remove crippling poison and sprint was uh, pretty damn awesome. Then snare the rogue right back and DoT him up! Well, I guess it was just corruption since my curse was taken up by exhaustion. But I had a DoT on him! Glorious days before cloak of might as well be divine shield for how much it wrecks casters. Oh yea, so my warlock always felt in control. Fear, deathcoil, snare, seduce or spell lock or voidwalker bubble, and worst cast scenario, drop an infernal on their head for another stun.

My mage has a similar feeling. I have lots of AoE roots. My main attack is a snare. My secondary attack is instant. My random proc attack is a snare. I even have divine shield. And meanwhile there is my water elemental firing off bolts. But the control part is its frost nova. It's that long arm all over again. I don't have to let enemies get dangerously close as with frost nova and cone of cold. Anywhere: stay there.

I have the keybindings set up so the elemental plays like part of my character, not a separate being. Placing the nova, telling it where to stand, what to attack, these are things that might be viewed as add complexities, pet management. To me, they're just part of my character. It's not a pet, I just have a very long arm.mag

Warlocks: What's the Big Deal?

No really, why do people whine about them so much?

Fear has been steadily nerfed for what, two years? It lasts less time in PvP and has a higher and higher chance to break on damage. The distant changes to PvP trinkets meant that everyone could break fear. Priests all got some fear ward love. Deathwish was moved to fit better into the warrior PvP tree.

Fear didn't used to share DRs with seduce. On the subject of seduce, what happened to the old seduce-nuking? Resilience made the crit reliance much less reliable. Succubi are incredibly easy to kill and have been for a while.

Soul link got nerfed. Oh sure it used to be able to be purged, so I guess it did get that buff. But the damage transfer was nerfed.

DoTs are affected by resilience.

Sure it sucks to get feared to death, but how often does that even happen? I'm far more likely to get stunlocked. And look at the other side, when fear fails, what does the warlock have? They wear cloth. Sure they could have SL, but that got nerfed and the damage is only redirected, not actually reduced. Fine, an instant voidwalker can be trouble. Try again before 15 minutes have passed. They do have unusually high stam for being clothies, but that's partially because health is their mana. Imagine a mage without blink or frost nova. Also take away the ability to get the water elemental for another frost nova, or deep arcane for slow (does anyone ever get that?), or even fire for dragon's breath. Imagine having no way to avoid damage except for death coil. That's what happens when a warlock can't use fear, which is surprisingly often.

It's all a game of rock-paper-scissors and we tend to remember the losing end. But every time you die to a warlock, a warlock dies to arogue or warrior or hunter. It's not all flowers and bunnies, or ever felweed and helboars.

I wonder what would happen if we said nothing

It's pretty obvious that Blizzard has someone like me: he has a lot of great ideas, but also a whole lot of really, really awful ideas and isn't very good at filtering them. Apparently those around him aren't either.

I can't see how the lifetap change ever got to the PTR. I'm not going to argue about whether or not warlocks needed a nerf. I care more about the method of nerfing. Adding stats should never decrease efficiency. Ever. But that's exactly what the change did. It made stamina essentially act as a -healing stat, requiring greater mana from healers for the same mana regen for the warlock. But what is even more strange is the brief change they attempted, changing it to 5% health for 15% mana. That's a gigantic buff. Who thought up that change?

Ideas like this, really awful ideas, are not new. We've seen them before. Unfortunately I don't remember exactly what the change was, but for a short time there was going to be a damage reduction on forbearance. This got shouted down. Everyone from paladins to the mages that they BoP was mad about it.

What if we had said nothing? If really bad ideas can get onto the PTRs in the first place, how do they come down? It's not as if these are changes that look good on paper but get screwed up in game. They are pretty obviously screwed up on paper. If we had said nothing would Blizzard have pulled the changes?

It's not as if this is limited to nerfs even. Just look at the MS flametounge change. It does not address any shaman issues at all. We're not gimped vs. healers. DW is really nice for pushback, purge is amazing against priests and druids, and an interrupt on a 5-6 second cooldown is something other classes drool over. The totem isn't needed either. We already have an incredible melee totem; it's called windfury. But this buff, despite being really huge, doesn't help with our weaknesses like being the only class with absolutely no form of CC.

But maybe we're misreading the buff. Perhaps it wasn't a badly thought out fix for shamans overall. Maybe Blizzard just wanted to make fire totems not the bastard children. It wasn't a retarded PvP fix-all. Notice how I've turned back on myself? I do that a lot. I leave in all my self-contradicting because I think it's important to see the process, not just the end result. Maybe I've taken too many math classes and lost too many points for not showing my work.

I am sincerely afraid that change requires people to be loud and immature. It requires mass warlock cancellations and shamans spamming their own forum. It requires dozens of threads about 40% of 0 = 0 and "omg bliz r u retard!?" Oh sure, maybe Blizzard isn't responding to them. But they sure act as if they do, with changes coming soon after that shit and Blues coming by for damage control. I want them to bring Tseric back and the next time a class spams, just start throwing around bans and add a simple sticky: "STFU." And then do nothing. Of course they wouldn't need to do that if they simply showed us their internal processes a bit more so we could see changes were coming before the spam. I wish Blizzard had a blog where they posted whatever they were thinking about that day.

90%

I'm almost out of level 68. I expect my Succubus to learn a new rank of seduction soon.

Warlocks are Overpowered

I've barely played my paladin for the last week because my warlock suddenly became fun to play again. It took me about 12 months to get from 60 to 62. In about a week I got to over halfway to 68.

I'm affliction right now and it has some elements similar to protection. Grinding is very efficient; DoT up a mob, fear, DoT the next one, fear, first mob is dead, use drain soul and dark pact for regen. In comparison a prot paladin is more like this: pull everything, kill individual mobs fairly slowly (like DoTs) but have a steady stream of mobs getting attacked to create a high overall damage output. Use SoW for regen and figurine of the colossus for health, resulting in no downtime. In instances I often find myself in a similar role of keeping clothies from getting squished. Fear, seduce, deathcoil, and howl of terror make for a lot of control.

The Alliance does seem to be different than the Horde. I hate to start factional bashing, but more often than not they are noobs and are terrible at listening to directions. Having no Barrens results in Barrens Chat everywhere.

Being back on a PvP server was a huge change for me. It's not a constant gank-fest, but you definitely have to stay alert. I've learned to always have a healthstone and to not use deathcoil on a mob unless it is life or death. When I was destruction I ran with a succubus almost always, an invisible seducer is a valuable thing to have; but I don't use her against mobs to prevent her getting killed first. She's turned around ganks several time, pinning my new enemy in place long enough for a soulfire to deliver a lot of pain.

My biggest adjustment so far has been not tanking. It's so slow! People are taking half their time marking, CCing, I can't believe people consider such a tedious process to be normal. I ran into one paladin tank, but he told me to not tell him how to play his class when I pointed out that it would be faster to AoE pull. He was afraid to lose aggro on extra mobs and got offended when I said that's what holy shield and consecration are for. It just seemed silly to make a paladin and then tank like a warrior.

That leads me to my next rant; what is it with people not wanting to be told how to play? I'd love to have a warlock explain a better spec or cast sequence. So why would someone get offended by advice? Many people are so busy making themselves feel better that they never get around to actually being better.