Class idea: Chronomancer

It's what it sounds like, a caster that works primarily through the manipulation of time.

Spells would be mostly arcane or shadow tree, but talents would be Past, Present, and Future.

Past would focus mostly on altering the past or moving enemies back to the past. Moving enemies back would result in stat losses since they are going back to a lesser-geared, less powerful existence. This wouldn't actually reverse gearing, just a % change to stats. The ultimate Past ability would be Save-Undo, allowing the player to save a situation and then revert all allies back to that state if desired. A common PvE use would be rather boring, saving your place before a phase change in order to not have to redo it after each learning wipe in the next.

Future would mostly be self-buffs or damage boosts, moving ahead in time for either predictive value or to hasten a desired outcome. A simple spell would be a future bubble, moving the caster into a later time and allowing them to avoid any attacks. They could also attack future enemies, allowing for an interesting source of burst damage by attacking in the future, then unloading a second burst when that time is reached in the present. The ultimate ability would be Fast Forward. It would take the average events of the past 10 seconds and then move ahead 60 seconds, acting as if the past 10 seconds were repeated over that 60. This would be a huge raid DPS boost, allowing players to pop all trinkets and cooldowns for the 10 seconds in order to get a vastly magnified effect. There is great risk though. If the tank does not get enough healing during the ten seconds, he may die during the minute forward. DPS may pull aggro at the end. Mana, rage, and energy would not be changed except maybe in the positive due to regen over the ten seconds.

Present would manipulate the current time and unfortunately I cannot think of anything cool to do right now. Haste is the future, slow is the past. The present seems more like the realm of everyone else. Maybe there could be an alternate timeline, allowing one to duplicate oneself or allies.

Is this it?

Is this it, nothing but a gear grind to get more gear to get the next set of gear? Are we nothing more than the steady increase of our combined ilevel values?

It suddenly sounds pitiful, doesn’t it? Oh sure, people can bash virtual accomplishments as being that: virtual. Still, it does take coordination, planning, dedication, some amount of knowledge or skill, and time, to down a raid boss or be on a very highly ranked arena team. There are no cheat codes, even if you recognize the class imbalance.

I remember complaints by hardcore raiders when BC PvP gear was added and it was equal in ilevel to raiding gear. That was as actual complaint. It wasn’t better for raiding; it was equal in some magical rating system that most people probably don’t know exists. Apparently it cheapened their accomplishments. A little number was enough to entirely ruin their raiding accomplishments.

I complained about the badge gear, as did many others. It was a trick, a false nod to casuals. It was nothing more than high ilevels thrown at us with no accomplishment, no inner feeling of reward. Last time you made up gear for casuals you created dungeon two and an associated quest chain. It was very expensive and took a long time, but it was a lot of fun. The story was a little strange, not directly related to the lore we normally see, but it was told so well and brought with a powerful experience. It showed the world to us, a less heroic world without the great figures we know today, but it was our world. The gear was neat, but the stories were better.

What happened to the world in world of warcraft? It’s all just gear grinds and e-peen flexing now. There is no exploration. The stories are badly told, if at all. The actual world even feels smaller. Oh sure, portals from everywhere to everywhere and flying mounts make playing more convenient. The tightly-packed quest areas with demons 300 yards away from the Illidari they are supposed to be at war with are convenient, but they make no sense. It’s not believable.

There must be something more Blizzard can do. They made Azeroth, they told amazing stories, why can’t they do it again? I realize it is a lot more work to make a world filled with stories rather than efficient, convenient gear grinds, but what do we pay them for?

Blizzard, throw away the e-peen lovers. Throw away the grinds and ilevels and anything else that is not fun and does not tell a story. Get a million writers and a million zone designers, pair them up. If that is too expensive, get a million monkeys, throw out the Shakespeare, and pair them with kids with MS Paint.

Remember the stories you wrote and how you told them? That’s what zones should do. Have story zones. When I go to the Plaguelands, I know that it is corrupted, that something terrible has clearly happened, and I want to discover more and do something. Where are the story zones in BC? Netherstorm is pretty good, makes you wonder why it is blasted to pieces. SMV is a little better, especially once you get Spectrecles. But then there are the blasted lands, scorched, barren, subject to constant lightning, inhabited by invincible servants of evil being, and all pointing towards that ominous portal. Oh yea, and there’s the orc ghost who warns you on your way in and eventually sends you all over the world on inconvenient quest chain. That is one of the most amazing chains ever.

Holy finally fixed?

The healing isn't wonderful, but that's fine, paladins shouldn't ever be healbots. Instead it looks like they're turning into offensive caster hybrids. At the worst they'll be judging and shocking from 20 yards back. At best, they might be in melee and still able to throw out heals.

Who knows, I might give holy another try in the expansion.

[edit] Here's a post I made on the paladin forums. I liked it but it kept falling down, so I'm putting it here so I don't lose it.


Healing talents not in holy? Here's why.

Paladins are a healing class, or more accurately, healing is one of their roles.

Currently healing gear is designed for holy paladins. It has a lot of crit and less mana/5 (or the spirit equivalent) than other classes would have. This is terrible for non-holy paladins since currently they get very little benefit from spell crit. Adding spell crit benefits to the other specs helps to make the gear more useful.

There are times when fewer tanks are needed. In that situation, should all the prot paladins be kicked out and replaced with priests? I'd rather the paladins be able to heal reasonably well and stay in the raid. Is it fair that they should miss encounters which may drop the gear they need while others get to jump in for 15 minutes for a single fight?

Ret is less likely to be switching to healing in raids. In 5-mans though, it can come in handy. The real benefit is in PvP. But in neither of these situations is the paladin likely to switch into holy gear with high spell crit. They are in ret gear though, and that has a lot of melee crit, which will be spell crit too once it is merged. I predict we'll see a lot of ret paladins throw a holy light now and then to keep the HoT going. It lets them put out some healing without seriously reducing their DPS or burning through their mana.

Epics and Blues, also ZA

For some reason epics no longer feel epic. They seem perfectly normal, the standard, meaningless. Blues now feel more meaningful, maybe because they are not the rare thing. Epics are cheap; handed out in PvP just for showing up, Kara is filled with them, badges give high quality gear, but possibly for something as easy as heroic mechanar. Blues seem less common and more connected to the stories, they're quest rewards fairly often.

I hope WotLK doesn't jump on the epic train so quickly.

Tonight I was persuaded to do a 3-chest ZA run. We got one. I didn't like the run very much. For no apparent reason I was put on the back of the gauntlet, resultiung in birds all over the place and a bunch of dead DPS. It felt silly, like the warrior needed to be superior. I suppose he didn't like only having a couple hundred more health even while flasked. We wiped a few times, which annoyed me greatly.

I did come out with 5 badges and the Amani Punisher. That was nice.

Welcome home, to Hell

There's something about taking my paladin to Stratholme that just feels right. I suppose it is perfectly designed for us: huge groups of undead and plenty of corners to LoS casters. There's a high from pulling 6 groups at once and killing them all.

The force reactive disks help. Yea, that was plural. I carry three of them plus a sporeggar shield and my normal tanking shield. A single pull can wipe out half a disk. But hey, they cost almost nothing to repair (I forgot exactly, but it's less than 2g at zero durability). Bag space is an issue. I can easily [make 30 slots no longer empty by picking up drops off mobs. Learn to read in context].

Engineering: Better crusading through advanced technology.

Blizzard listens, and reads minds!

A while back I suggested that judgements return mana. BAM!
I also thought of seals and judgements interacting. BAM! Actually I thought of it a bit too recently, it's not likely that I said it before it was already being considered, maybe even already in the alpha.
And I didn't say it, but I was thinking it, ret paladins are weak in 5-mans not because of no CC, but because they have terrible AoE. Now there's divine storm.

I wonder what is next...
*passive regen passive regen passive regen*

A brief description of every spec

Sometimes people ask, "what should I spec?" or "what class should I make?" I tended to say something like "make whichever is the most fun." That wasn't much help though, how do they know what is most fun? I've decided to fill that gap by giving simple explanations for every single spec and class.

Warrior:
Arms: My PvP gear makes me good at DPS.
Fury: Please stop breaking my whirlwind with your sheep.
Protection: Follow the damn kill order before I kick you.

Paladin:
Holy: If I wave my hands, sparkles appear and you don't die.
Protection: I'm glue and you're rubber, whatever aggros you sticks to me.
Retribution: I get it, I have a small damage meter, but I use it well and it makes everyone else's bigger.

Druid:
Balance: Stop with the chicken jokes.
Feral: Turning into a bear does not make me a furry, it just makes it easier to cyber with them.
Restoration: I could either be a slow tree or I could run really fast and heal everyone and there's not a damn thing anyone can do to stop me.

Rogue:
Assassination: I used to be good at PvP!
Combat: I'm going to stand here in the open and pretend to be a fury warrior.
Subtlety: Please don't see me, please don't see me, please don't see me.

Shaman:
Elemental: Sometimes people ask me, Shatner, how do I hurl bolts of lightning?
Enhancement: I'm going to pretend to be a fury warrior, but I'll ruin the disguise by dropping these sticks everywhere.
Restoration: If I didn't have chain heal I'd be selling sex to the holy paladins sitting outside the raid.

Priest:
Discipline: No one knows we have a third tree beside shadow and holy, so I just tell people I am holy.
Holy: I make people less dead and complain that my stamina buff is weaker than blessing of kings.
Shadow: Melts faces.

Hunter:
Beast Mastery: Loyalty level 6.
Markmanship: legolas would have approved.
Survival: Of course I'm supposed to melee, why else would Raptor Strike crit more?

Warlock:
Affliction: On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Demonology: And you thought Loyalty Level 6 was disturbing.
Destruction: Explode.

Mage:
Arcane: I would kick your ass if I could afford the spell costs.
Fire: I'd tell MC to burn in hell if it wasn't already hell.
Frost: Catch me if you can!

Suneater

It drops ALL THE TIME! When I play my paladin.
It still has not dropped when I go on my warrior that could actually use it. On the plus side the parry/stam gem finally dropped. Even more importantly, the hunter was only joking when he asked if he could roll on it. I got very scared when I asked why he wanted a parry gem and he said that hunters can parry. Now I need sockets.

In unrelated news, I've now had two people hire me to make Titanic Leggings. It seems people want to get gear ready for their death knights and they're looking to old-school epics for it. Perhaps I should change the focus of my advertising a bit, show off more of my old stuff. Arcanite Reaper HOOOOOO!

It's a shame there are no BoE T1 drops for them in MC, it would make it much easier to get raids going if I could appeal to greed.

Why I hate prot paladins

They are a constant disappointment in groups. They have low health, no single-target aggro, they take too much damage. They pull slowly and somehow cannot hold aggro on more than a single mob.

Oh what did I say? I should have said Why I hate bad prot paladins.

When I join a group and see a prot paladin, I think "oh good, no CC, this won't take long at all." Then they start marking CC, waiting around for sap, standing around before pulls for no apparent reason. It's clearly not the AS cooldown since they never use it.

Why do so many prot paladins fail to be the absolute badasses that they are designed to be?

Forums

The paladin forums used to be constant spec bashing. In the distant past it was holy bashing ret (back then prot didn't even count as a spec). Then they both got buffed through the roof and holy got nerfed. It responded by being even more elitist, but with whining mixed in. Now holy just cries a lot while prot and ret take turns telling each other how great they are.

The warlock forums seemed to be great. People were constantly theorycrafting, especially working out incinerate vs. shadowbolt. There was a consant stream of trolls, but people worked together against them. It seemed like they understood that they were all warlocks and they were all in it together. Also they are funny.

The warrior forums are either various forms of crying over there being other useful tanks, arms warriors bashing fury, or warglaive chatter. Almost everyone seems to be a stuck up asshole. Specs and gear are flamed, but no alternatives are given. I think their problem comes from being the only tanks, and therefore the most important class around, for about two years. Now they have to deal with being like everyone else. Very few adapated. The rest either turned into bitter douchebags "Blizzard, we are warriors, no one should be allowed to tank like us because we are a pure class! We should have DPS like rogues too though" or lost all touch with reality "without an interrupt paladins and druids cannot tank, ever. Non-warrior tanks will cause the raid to wipe and all gear to be deleted."

[edit] I don't know why, but all the spaces after periods aren't showing up. That makes this a pain to try to read.

New talents, summarized

I posted this on the paladin forums, liked the sound of it, decided I want to keep it forever and ever and ever.

Ret:
1) I am going to make everyone near me kick ass.
2) I am going to hit people really, really hard.

Prot:
1) Hit me back, bitch, HIT ME!

Holy:
1) Pew pew. Pew. PEW PEW PEW!
2) We take the Light and make it Bright. We've got lights. We've got flashes. We've got power and focus and shocks. We even have a beacon. There will be no darkness when we come through, shining like a lighthouse, a lighthouse with the SUN IN IT!

Everyone:
1) Let's all stack crit!

Real tanks at last?

The changes to prot make me happy. Very happy.

Proactive aggro generation: It's about time. This will make our off-tanking far better. It will make single-target tanking much better. It won't do much for AoE, but we didn't have any problems there anyway.

Shield of the Righteous will probably get nerfed, currently it looks overpowered. But even then, it will still be amazing. We finally have an aggro generating ability that scales with a tanking stat.
Hammer of the Righteous confuses me a bit. With our current tanking weapons (caster with 41 DPS) it seems worthless. Using melee weapons would make it much stronger, but would we then be gimped on spell damage? Perhaps the stam->SP will be enough. I'm worried that this talent may turn out to be useless, even with a decent weapon. While the weapon will help with this one spell, white damage is not a significant source of aggro for us, so gearing for this talent may be a false benefit, that we'd still be better off with a caster sword. Maybe this is intended to add options when picking gear and weapons, but options sounds a like like contradictions.

The switching of divine strength into prot is interesting. It would have make perfect sense to me if precision was still in there, but that is gone. Does this mean strength will mean something to prot paladins now? With new spells giving aggro from block value and weapon damage, perhaps it is so. On the totally unsupported rumor that may have even just been my imagination front (no seriously, eat a box of salt with this), I think the strength->block value ratio is getting buffed.

Guarded by the Light: More mana efficiency as our gear improves? Hell yea! This might actually fix my complaint with tanking, that aggro and mitigation work against each other. Now as we avoid more we spend less mana, so it might even this out. Combined with getting aggro from BV and tanking might actually make sense!

Judgements of the Just: We really did need some sort of tanking debuff. Now we seem to have our own version of imp TC. Previously we either needed a prot warrior to TC for us (and why not just have him tank?) or end up taking 20% more auto-attack damage from bosses. That's one of those weaknesses that once you notice it you go "wow, how did that remain for so long?"


Divine Guardian and the healing effect on Touched by the Light seem like they could be useful in PvP or when switching to fights that need fewer tanks. Or... Pop DS, throw sacrifice, get a priest to use pain suppression, and mages might be able to more safely AoE without having to wait for aggro. It should be interesting.

My current mood is non-cautious optimism.

Hybrids again?

The new talent trees are surprisingly hybridy.
Ret gained a new heal, linked to what looks like a holy whirlwind. Healing crits trigger a HoT. With crit being merged together, ret will be critting a lot. It also got some more group utility, which will work well with raid-wide auras.
Prot gained more healing on crits and the damage redirection under DS could be useful in PvP. It looks like we're gaining some active damage, that helps in all sorts of ways: PvP, single tanking, off-tanking.
Holy got that judgement thing. That will be interesting, 28 yard judgements with a melee/spell haste attached. This does mean that a ret paladin isn't needed to keep up their judgement, maybe. I hope that doesn't reduce the desire for ret paladins.

Combine this with the merging of many stats and paladins might break out of the specialist mold.

Doom and gloom and terrible things too!

From what I can tell, beta patch notes are out. As usual, people are getting emo about them. Why overreact to what will not be finalized for months? We don't even know that this is everything, I'm certain it isn't.

I do think we should look at new talents and spells, compare them to other classes, as see where we seem to end up. This is, after all, the time to look at balance. But we should realize that this is also the time of change, probably rapid change. I predict new patch notes (with significant changes, I don't mean a handful of bug fixes), within two weeks.

Perhaps I have rose-colored goggles. Perhaps many people have smeared brown goggles. We are accepted, even desired in raids. Holy is diminishing, but in its current healbot form, it should be diminished. Holy warrior and healbot do not mix. Until holy is reworked to be more active than hiding in the back casting two heals, it should be bad enough that no one is ever pressured to spec in it. Protection is far better than is was. It actually tanks. Our greatest strength may be trash and 'gimmicks', but what is a gimmick? Why is a dozen murlocs a gimmick but a slow-hitting mob not? It's all just a matter of what we are used to, what we've been told is normal. I look forward to the day when single-mob bosses are a gimmick and in their place are ten thousand NPCs running amok. Ret isn't shitty DPS anymore and it brings some nice buffs. JoW is definitely underrated.

We've been buffed, massively. Why would it not happen again? Prot definitely needs reworking. I don't consider it a real tanking tree/class anymore, just a massive bandaid. It works, but it's sure not pretty. From the sound of it, Blizzard plans to make it more interactive. Who knows, maybe someday holy tree spells will stop being our bread and butter for aggro.

Be happy, God dammit!

Where does the magic go?

I never realized the limitations of my paladin until I played a warrior. Still, I don't plan to ditch my paladin like I did my shaman. Why did I make a paladin in the first place?

I was a shaman. I wanted to learn more about my opponent, my enemy. I never got past 42 due to account problems. My second paladin did much better.

I was inspired by Zalgradis. He released a video soon after 1.9, but with pre-1.9 footage. It was an amazing video. It is because of that video that my paladin exists, is protection, and is an engineer.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8486800906039126244&q=zalgradis+3&ei=385-SKeQGpTk4ALI_4GlCw&hl=en
He was protection, before the tree underwent massive changes. It used to be a strong PvP tree. Then it turned into, I'm not sure what. It certainly wasn't much of a tanking tree.

Paladins seem to have, or used to have, the most interesting videos. They weren't just "hit the other guy harder than he hits me." They weren't the POM-pyro videos of mages. They weren't the perfect setup stunlock videos of rogues, with the bad music. They were so much more about team work, switching roles, adapting to the situation. I fear a lot of that is gone. Relative healing power in DPS gear has diminished greatly, widespread stun resistance has made HoJ less significant. With arenas, PvP has gone the way of raids: min-maxing and e-peen flexing to the extreme. It is leeched of the true fun of winning or losing not mattering except as much as you care. It's just another gear grind and gear check. Ugh, I want to go burn Stormwind, except I'd get mobbed by 100000 guards, take durability, and who would join me, or even bother to fight me? It's not worth the bother to run all the way over there for fun when people can go to a goblin in Shattrath and get epics.

Irony

...is a shaman dying from aggro because he was attacking the wrong mob. Guild name? Follow Kill Order.
...is a moonkin calling my gear noobish. He was in full healing gear.

And now for something completely different.

KALGAN IS A NAZI.
There, it's done. Whining about him has now been Godwinned and we can all move on to something else.

My Annoyance for Today

My warrior is running around questing and starts a group for an instance. I invite some people, and then someone freaks out about my health. Most recently someone drops the group without saying anything. He joins, asks my spec, I say prot, he leaves. I ask why and he says I only have 8k health.

Public Service Announcement: Most people solo in DPS gear, not tanking gear. Don't judge a tank by his soloing gear. Even my paladin uses a modified set with slightly less health for AoE grinding.

Don't read my other blog

It's bad. It will be filled with the half-baked ideas I get when I'm bored. You might get offended. You might get stupider. You might start believing me and get your ass kicked by God.

Speaking of kicking ass, I wish I could be the anti-Christ. Then I'd piss off everyone by (1) Not being on Satan's side and (2) Not doing all the horrible stuff I"m supposed to do, so then God;s followers aren't sure if they are supposed to hate me because I am breaking prophesy or love me because I am going against Satan's plans.

Right, kicking ass. I want to beat up Satan. I'm imaging something like the Neo-Smith fight in the last Matrix, but with more brimstone and him having horns and a pitchfork. Try to honestly say that would not be fun.

Reality in Fantasy

Every now and then someone will argue that armor should affect spell damage, that plate would deflect or absorb some amount of damage. They say it only makes sense, it's realistic. Is it realistic? Does realism play any role in this clearly fantasy world?

Reality does play a part. This is not a purely chaotic world with no natural laws, subject entirely to the whims of magic-users. I believe that the basis of the world is much like the real world. There are all the natural forces and laws that we are familiar with. There is gravity and magnetism, objects have inertia, the conservation laws hold for the physical world. These rules are not entirely broken by magic.

What is magic anyway? When a mage throws a fireball, is it a normal ball of fire, aside from the source, or does it actually have magical properties? If it is simply fire, then it would be subject to natural laws as we know them. It would be absorbed by the armor, spread out, the heat would be dissipated. Frost damage could be treated in a similar manner. Nature seems to be a grouped category of electricity and chemical attacks from either poisons or the toxins released by diseases. Electricity would at least be spread out and would hopefully not need to take a path through anything important like the heart. The resistance of the armor would cause heating and therefore burning though.

But what about holy, arcane, or shadow damage? Those might be something beyond normal physics, so I have no idea how they might react with armor. Perhaps they are actually electromagnetic radiation (it's not as fancy as it sounds, these are all just flavors of light, though most that we cannot see).

I completely failed at getting to my point here. :(

Magical damage may actually follow normal physical laws, so armor would influence the effects of magical attacks. Reality can and should play a role in fantasy. We only need to discover the rules.

Naxx pug

It was a blast. The raid leader was a bit of a jerk and tended to ramble, making it hard to follow descriptions, but whatever. We got through the fights, most were one-shotted. Some were tough, but all in all it was smooth running.

I won rolls for the legplates of carnage and the T3 chest token. The guild that ran the raid was generous enough to provide the scraps for tokens. Now I have the T3 chest. It's really not that far below the healing chest from Terestian. If I had the set bonuses, it would be impressive.

The fights were clearly changed a lot due to our gear level, so I didn't get the full experience. Still, even with the easier strats, it was impressive. As usual, the trash was excessive, though thankfully very easy with 20 level 70s.

We did Patchwerk first, I was one of the tanks, it was a little dull to be honest. The next few bosses were cool, the dog was confusing to me. I was assigned to kite the adds, but pretty much failed and ended up taking the full hits, getting stacked to the point of several mobs (I wasn't paying enough attention, I was busy running) with damage increased by a few thousand. It was fun times. Thaddius was a bunch of wipes at first because we had no melee DPS and I'm no good at tanking a mob that mana burns. We killed him at the end. At that point I was pretending to be DPS, wearing ret gear, but still prot spec. It worked well enough, I was third on damage for the fight, though the balancing of the charges does play a role in that.

Spider was a bit dull. The gear inflation meant that Grand Widow Faerlina was just plain tanked and I held a couple adds. Anub'Rekhan was easy too, though the first time there was some trouble with an add, leading to a dead tank and a 2% wipe. Maexxna was easy. The trash was almost the most interesting, until I realized that I had no aggro because the other tankadin (who left before the end) had much better gear and spell damage.

I didn't like the plague wing much. We had barely any decurses for Noth, so that wiped out about half the raid very early on. Heigan killed me because I didn't know about dancing. He did give me pants though. Loatheb was pretty badass, and just to contradict myself, he made it into an awesome wing. Prot can do some nice damage when every single swing is a crit (I was at 80%, 2.2k+ AP, and a totem twisting shaman, which I lost by the time of Thaddius).

The death knight wing was fun except for me being completely sick of trash by that point. I tanked the adds on Razuvious, except for one that a warrior took for no apparent reason. It was pretty boring, just hiding from the shout while waiting for him to die. Gothik sucked. The adds were on the line between hitting hard enough to need a tank and hitting hard enough that I have mana to tank them. My tanking was pretty much fail, but he died fast enough.

The four horsemen was amazing. It took us a while, first because I didn't know when to rotate, then because the healers weren't moving. I think it was 4 tries (yea, I know, this took guilds weeks or months, but this is BC now and taunt doesn't use spell hit anymore). I liked the mobility, but without the "if you are a half-second too slow everyone dies." It really was a cool concept for an encounter, but I can see how it was absolutely bullshit ridiculous pre-BC to require 8 prot warriors for a single fight, even with raids being 40 people. Thankfully we only needed 5 tanks and one was a prot paladin (me, duh). We were very low on healing, so any mistake was an eventual wipe. When we finally got it down I ended the fight having had my mob taken away. I was just about ready to jump back in (my marks fell off) when the final horseman died. It was good times.

Overall Naxxramas looks like an amazing place. The size could definitely be prohibitive though. The winged setup helps though, so you don't have to spend forever going through farmed bosses to get tot he ones you need. I'm ignoring the whole issue of Kel'thuzad needing the rest to be dead, I'm not going to let facts get in the way of my point. :P Winged, but linked instances are great. DM is an example. West and North are really the same, but because of the setup they can be done as separate instances, allowing people to play in smaller pieces.

Where was I? Oh yea, Naxx is awesome, please don't take it away from us, Blizzard. Don't pretend that taking it away and charging $50 to get it back isn't taking it away. I realize they are your servers and you can do whatever you feel like since we only charge for access, but what standard does this set? Do you decide that not enough people did Uldaman, so you take it out, enlarge it to give space for 10-mans, and call it Uldum?

Epic boots!

I finally hit 375 blacksmithing and have a lot of extra pairs of felsteel gloves. But it was worth it, because I was able to learn the plans for red havoc boots.
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=30031
These put me over 450 block value and 11k health. I think I'm ready for more heroics now, or at least can do mech with less pain for my healer. They have boar's speed. Even with intervene, charge, intercept, and hamstring, I don't like running slowly. I'm too used to a paladin with 3/3 PoJ.

Leveling BS made me annoyed with arenas (and BGs with S1 and S2 on honor) and the gear they give. Getting easy epic weapons for no gold cost really hurts us. I got absolutely no customers, and can I blame them? Early in BC I remember a BS with epic plans could get rich fairly quickly. There was demand for their products. Even with Karazhan not being too hard, people still liked crafted weapons as a way to get a head start. Now they'd rather just do some PvP and save their gold. That's not good for the economy. It hurts crafters, lower demand for mats hurts farmers, lower trading through the AH means a larger gold supply which means inflation, which makes crafted weapons look even more expensive...

Crafting needs something untouchable. Something unique, beyond stats. I don't mean great BoP gear and weapons, those again are just stats. They need something flashy, something that looks cool. Engineering has known this all along. It had almost nothing to sell, low personal benefit aside from grenades which got nerfed, it was not about min/maxing stats. People took it because it was badass. We have gyrocoptors and rocket launchers (which admittedly has 45 stam); gigantic, impractical bombs and mote extactors. None of those really make you better and tanking or DPS or healing or PvP or anything except just being a badass. The goggles are a very strange exception, especially because they don't even have a chance to explode.

Blacksmiths should be able to reshape weapons. Tailors should make shirts with their own designs. Leatherworkers... no comment... Jewelcrafters should be able to make actual flashy jewelry that can be seen without inspecting. Also they should make glass eyes. Enchanters should make wands which can shoot fireworks and make people into frogs (with no loss of ability or control, purely appearance).

Finally engineers should be able to collaborate to make gigantic rockets and launch them at enemy cities. 10% chance to explode on the launch, 20% chance to hit the wrong city, 25% chance that the city it hits will be the same faction, 25% chance it will be goblin, 25% it will be enemy but not Horde or Alliance.