I did whatever WQs were around for gear as soon as I dinged and then went straight to the rares. I'll backfill anything I'm missing, usually rings and trinks.
Going to be interesting next week when they bump up the queuing requirements past 320.
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World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth|OT| War Mode Enabled!
- Thread starter Tachya
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I did whatever WQs were around for gear as soon as I dinged and then went straight to the rares. I'll backfill anything I'm missing, usually rings and trinks.
Going to be interesting next week when they bump up the queuing requirements past 320.
it is a great feeling for sure. I think I'm gonna run mythics this weekend just because it's a 3 day weekend and maybe doing some dungeons could be fun. if I can scrape together a full guild group or something.
Not sure how many are interested here but WoW's esports stuff got confirmed today: https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/news/22862590/wow-esports-in-2019
Good to see. Everything's been sort of up in the air after the HGC was cancelled and the rumors of cost cutting.
Good to see. Everything's been sort of up in the air after the HGC was cancelled and the rumors of cost cutting.
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That's actually a really clever way to do it and basically how Valve supports official Dota 2 tournaments. Though I think a lot of the success will depend on how compelling these toys are. Mounts might be an alternative good way too and would certainly be flashier, but maybe they want to start smaller to test the waters since there's nothing really bigger for them to go to than mounts right now.
Yeah they actually started doing the crowd funding with StarCraft 2 war chests, which have been very successful. In SC2 you buy the chest and some of the money goes towards the pro prize pool, but then you can level up the chest by playing the game to unlock a full set of skins for units or buildings and a few other things. Could see them doing tiers of unlocks eventually if this test goes well. I'm a fan of the way they do it in SC2.
Which server? I wonder how that effects war mode.
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With the way cross-realm and sharding works now, the population balance of the server you're on doesn't really make a difference for war mode so much because that's calculated at a region scale, with pockets of balancing. I don't even think it's beholden to preferred server linkages or battlegroups anymore for any cross-realm stuff (e.g. in previous expacs with cross-realm enabled, it would typically match a high pop horde dominated server to see players from a high pop Alliance dominated server based on server type, so Mal'ganis and Illidan would be crossed with Sargeras or Kel'Thuzad most often, while Stormrage would be crossed with Area 52, Thrall, or Zul'jin).
initially we all thought you would unlock both races with just one side...
...sigh :(
Stormrage. So far no regrets on the transfer. Trade chat is about 30x more active than my old server eredar and potions and flasks cost about half as much so the buying power of gold is a massive difference. Well that's mostly cause I went from a medium pop server to full. But being alliance heavy makes things easier to find a guild though I already had picked one and played with them a few weeks before I decided to make the move.
I don't know the effect on sharding cause you could always end up in a different shard but just based on a few days of WQs, it seems like I do run into more alliance than before.
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Not sure but sounds about right for either ilvl to enter at normal and be able to relatively steamroll it at a somewhat modest Mythic skill level in the first couple of weeks if that's what you're asking. If you're taking about what drops, I think even the lfr for the BfD might be higher than that.
I didn't look it up to confirm though.
370 should be more than fine but pugs are gonna ask for much higher than that and expect to breeze through it.
Putting the first week a raid comes out sounds awful to me.
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But he's such an adorable giant old god slug! Have you SEEN the fanart?
I survived level 112 on my alliance alt. They really need to smooth off that leveling exp requirement spike.
I didn't mind uldir but I didn't go far into mythic either. Ghuun was definitely a bit hard but seemed largely fair, at least on heroic.
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My biggest gripe with G'huun, at all difficulty levels, is that he's largely a gimmick boss, which is not something you should really have for an end boss of a raid. At least, not to such an extent with a more experimental mechanic. (About 70% of the fight time I think is doing the gimmick, with the final 30% being more standard gameplay which is also arguably harder.) So you have to do a bunch of tedious gimmick work before getting to the meat of the fight and while doing boring stuff first before the engaging hard part isn't new, the orb dunking mechanic wasn't exactly difficult with proper coordination beforehand for more competent groups.
If you want to experiment with new mechanic ideas, I think it's best to have them at other points in a longer raid besides the final boss. 1-3 boss raids don't quite have as much weight for this rule.
I think one of the last times there was a similar or potentially worse end boss for a tier of raiding was Malygos capping off Tier 7 in Wrath with uh...a shitty vehicle fight. Cause of course they wanted to shoehorn in their new tech toy! Although that's maybe a bit more bearable with the shitty part being the end of the fight, rather than at the beginning or in the middle. The flying disc part was pretty cool actually, and as a DK, I liked being needed to grip sparks to position them properly (GRIPS STILL OP AS ALL HELL even today.)
Kil'Jaeden introduced the darkness shroud mechanic, which was pretty successful, though the fight in general was hard as balls before it was nerfed, and even after it was. Though that whole tier in Tomb of Sargeras was much harder than many other raids.
Archimonde was pretty great, but long. Garrosh was pretty great, but long. I would say Argus was pretty good. etc. (those happen to be expansion-ending bosses though, rather than tier ending bosses). Nighthold Gul'dan was long, and the Mythic final phase made the boss that much more engaging because the first parts of the fight were still fairly difficult, but you had to execute them consistently to make it to the Illidan shadow demon, which was completely different (only similarity was the encounter arena basically) and required a whole new set of tactics you had to learn or create. One of the best fights in the game, and that's how ALL important end-bosses should be, at least on Mythic. Though not every raid needs to have secret or extra phases like that -- see Helya in Trial of Valor, for example or Lei Shen in Throne of Thunder I think (ignoring Ra-Den as an additional boss).
Also, although G'huun is an old god experiment/minion/whatever, he doesn't quite have the same schtick as the other REAL old gods we've defeated in the past like C'thuun and Yogg-Saron. Maybe you can count Garrosh as an extension of Y'shaarj a bit. The old god fights typically fuck with your mind more with whispers, and porting you into different spaces (whether in your head or into C'thuun's stomach).
So I think it just wasn't a very good fight for an end boss mechanically, and didn't capture the essence of makes most old god-related fights more memorable.
You could probably do a run down analysis of all the final raid bosses in the game and compare what makes them stand out mechanically and thematically, cross referenced with people's opinions about them. Certainly would be easier to limit the scope to just end-of-raid final bosses, rather than including all bosses. A different analysis could be run on introductory bosses, and mid-tier bosses as well.
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Yup, especially as a final boss. I don't have quite as much of a problem when it happens mid-instance though. And I'm not excusing Sub Rogue stacking for Zul or similar transgressions in the past (the 17 or something ridiculous like that feral Druid dps on Blackwing Descent first kills of Nefarian comes to mind — that shit was even more bonkers).
They should always strive to mitigate the extent that class stacking is necessary while not completely invalidating different classes by giving equivalent tools to everyone.
A better example would be having a Mage made the demon within phase on Nighthold Gul'dan wayyyy easier, but it was POSSIBLE with a Warlock, until they (seemingly unintentionally) broke that for some time with a patch or other nerf and pretty much hobbled my guild at the time's chance to defeat him for CE, since we then had to gear up and use people's shitty unpracticed Mage alt or alts to try and compensate after our sole original reliable Mage had to bow out early in progression on that phase.
It wouldn't have likely been left to rot on the fixes list if they even really knew or cared that people were progressing with a Warlock instead of the intended strategy of needing at least one Mage specifically.
YES IM STILL MAD.
But there's plenty of cases where they do more or less get the balance right, so the bad examples stand out. Here's to you Tomb of Soakgeras and immunities.
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Well that's sure fair...
BUT WE WERE OPPRESSED BEFORE, I can already hear the justifications.
It's bloodbath right now. Alliance hunting parties are camping tons of flight points for the fast kills. I may or may not have been one of them :P
Switching to my Horde alt now since I feel dirty.
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Hahaha. Yeah Blizzard's excessive "balancing" in the form of an overpowered affirmative action program for war mode was uh, yeah.
I don't think it will realistically do anything for the actual faction populations cause at least Horde players are gonna be too entrenched on average. Even the famed slayer titles for official leaderboard placement isn't enough of an incentive. I think the ship may have realistically sailed unless they do something even more drastic, but that might be damaging too. Best bet IMO might be to at least temporarily unify with one faction for at least PvE purposes since the total game population is lower now, and then divide again if you need to.
A true free to play option beyond paying with WoW tokens might cause a temporary resurgence, but $15 for everything but the latest expac is pretty damn low for the value proposition as a newer player. Maybe if they had a cheaper sub option where you could only have one or a limited amount of max level characters active, no mobile app access, etc. but you otherwise get access to everything?
Dunno, that's how some MMOs that went F2P did it, and I think FFXIV has a cheaper sub option for only one character slot or something, but that's less restrictive than it would be in WoW since a single character can do much more there (be every class if they want).
I think Blizzard is really hesitant to do anything that would make it seem like they're losing players/revenue more than they are though as a sign of weakness, which is why they've been stubborn about circumventing server merges and the like. They still feel more or less invulnerable and act like it even when they're not. Which is part of how we end up with BfA and WoD.
I would include Cata on the same level of failure, since people didn't like that for other reasons. Even WoD and BfA are different enough problems with the same end result.
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I mean I don't want to sugarcoat it because that's what the war mode changes were -- Blizzard always swings the nerf or buff hammer WAY too far in one direction. It's so iconic that it's been memed about extensively.
You can think of me what you want by my using that term I suppose, but my views in general are much more nuanced and pragmatic than people might expect if they only see a snippet of some more vivid language out of context when I'm trying to make a point.
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Wait, Horde don't get a Call to Arms Quest to kill 25 players each week? Shit, that has been such an easy guaranteed gear source for me for weeks. I assumed everyone got it.
That and the +30% war mode boost got me to finally flip it on with my alliance chars and I'm never switching back again. I've heard a lot of similar comments from alliance guild mates so, mission accomplished I guess.
Always sad to move back to non-warmode content and lose all the PvP talents and abilities. It's a nice bandaid for the overzealous ability pruning and boring spec design in BfA.
That and the +30% war mode boost got me to finally flip it on with my alliance chars and I'm never switching back again. I've heard a lot of similar comments from alliance guild mates so, mission accomplished I guess.
Always sad to move back to non-warmode content and lose all the PvP talents and abilities. It's a nice bandaid for the overzealous ability pruning and boring spec design in BfA.
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Yeah the faction imbalance was so bad as something that more ore less organically developed over the past decade or more due to relatively minor imbalances, usually in favor of the Horde. And I say relatively minor judiciously -- some were certainly fairly egregious in the scheme of things, but racials were never really going to be make or break for most people -- it just snowballed way out of hand, trickling down from the elite PvE players before any corrections were made. And it's indisputable that the primary focus of the game was originally, and continues to be PvE content. No matter how much one might love PvP in WoW.
But yeah the current situation is basically a HUGE bribe to get Alliance to turn warmode on, but there's no real incentive for Alliance players to keep it on at max level beyond the handout high-level piece of gear each week which can be most efficiently completed by essentially griefing the opposite faction in a group for an hour or two tops, so of course people figured that out. Alliance will turn warmode on for this, but usually turn it off after, from what I've read. There's still not too much incentive for Horde to turn warmode off either as the faction with the higher overall population, unless they're getting explicitly camped into not being able to play. Sharding fuckery is a big culprit in all of this since you seemingly can't effectively rally a counterattack of equal or larger size without getting ported away from an opposing raid into a shard full of individual or less organized opponents.
So...yeah. There's a couple ways you could approach the problem to try and fix it, but the technical side certainly isn't helping at all. Which is a big reason why people end up so pissed and toxic towards each other, thinking that being in an oppressed position at one point gives them a right to lord a powerful one over their opposition indefinitely and vice versa. Before we had tyranny of the majority, now we have tyranny of the minority --- neither is particularly right, but there's only two sides here so....
Personally I think it might be better if there were 3 distinct factions for PvP purposes, among other potential changes, in order to avoid having to adjust balance as much all the time with heavy-handed moves, but that's a story for another day...
it started out incremental but its really just escalated into something unstoppable during legion. like in mortal kombat x there was a faction thing but everyone just joined the winning faction already for the bonuses and the horde became that eventually for 90% of even marginally good players
we'll see the split for top 100 guilds for this tier. i'll bet its like 92-8 horde to alliance.
but hey limit went alliance. 91-9 and at least ONE in the top 10 for sure!
we'll see the split for top 100 guilds for this tier. i'll bet its like 92-8 horde to alliance.
but hey limit went alliance. 91-9 and at least ONE in the top 10 for sure!
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Did Limit actually? Thought it was more of a joke, but I could see them doing it just to prove a point, even though the out of pocket cost is ridiculous, especially for a top tier guild that needs to have at the very least 1-2 maintained alts available from most raiders. That's the other big reason why no one wants to switch is that even any marginal gameplay advantage or community/recruiting advantage aside, the actual cost is too damn high, even if you wanted to switch if you weren't guaranteed a long-term stable position. Who's gonna drop $55 PER character to go to an Alliance guild if you're Horde that doesn't have a rock solid foundation and a core spot open in your role/class of choice.
Uldir was a particularly bad time too, further polarizing people to Horde beyond earlier transgressions, combined with the launch dungeon design. Zul straight up was much easier/more flexible for Horde guilds on Mythic especially due to the already powerful Blood Elf racial being changed into an AoE dispel with BfA. Otherwise you have to field at least one, and preferably two priests with Mass Dispel (otherwise unique to priest) to manage the shadow adds easily because the only other option is single target purges. And priests aren't super popular anyway, especially with the state shadow was left in coming out of beta and even now -- the numbers may be acceptable, but a longtime shadow priest friend tells me it's painful to play and I believe him, having more limited experience with the class myself.
Not sure if anything else was quite as bad as Zul in Uldir, but the Blood Elf racial in particular is now arguably better in dungeons because of the design adjustments coming out of Legion for the M+ scene, and especially good in King's Rest which has the same adds as the Zul encounter in a spot or two.
That's just detailing the effect of one racial too - the usefulness of goblin rocket jump for more immobile classes for Mythic Kil'Jaeden in Tomb of Sargeras was particularly bad too, especially as a notoriously difficult endboss in a notoriously difficult raid tier that wasn't even properly killable until after Method got there and struggled getting past even the first couple of insufficiently tested phases for a good while. I think they even hotfixed bugs and tuning adjustments between early pulls with that encounter. Probably worse than the whole vanilla Diablo 3 Inferno difficulty "and then we doubled it!" fiasco. Nothing had been that bad in ages. I'm lucky to say I even got to experience portions of that fight when it was current during progression (as Alliance, funnily enough, but it was significantly nerfed by that point), and even though I never defeated it myself, the guild I was with went on to get CE that tier, about 3-4 weeks after I dropped out for mostly unrelated reasons and getting to that point. Mythic KJ was also interesting in that there was no secret hidden extra phase or anything, but the more slight adjustments to the different phases and the very tight tuning on the DPS/Healing/Damage Taken requirements amped the difficulty up to such a ridiculous degree. This was also coming off the back of a very hard penultimate boss that took a high degree of coordination, even later on, and another high coordination boss right before, even if the damage and healing requirements weren't quite as high for that one. Not to mention some of the other encounters that could be real roadblocks. But Tomb favored more class stacking than anything else (not quite the level of rogues on M Zul or Heroic Nefarian feral druids), however top guilds will always eke out any conceivable advantage they can get, so going with Horde that historically had slightly better PvE racials along with a more notably better racial for immobile classes for the highly difficult last boss had a noticeable effect.
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Yeah I looked it up, kinda funny. I've seen salt about class nerfs in character names before for top players, but never game-wide salt in guild names really. To be fair, you wouldn't get that opportunity very often...
Also I'd say the whole thing goes back to TBC or maybe even Vanilla depending on what you want to consider. Shaman were on average worse than Paladins in Vanilla WoW (nothing new for Shaman tbh #feelsbadman) outside of a few high points. Back when Paladins were exclusive to Alliance. Horde also didn't really have any conventionally attractive races, especially with the older character models in mind. So Alliance had a slight edge because of those two things plus a few other minor cases. Blood Elves being introduced to the Horde in TBC massively tipped the balance, particularly as the only race at the time that could be Paladins/Blood Knights on Horde. Got a TON of people who wanted to play a "pretty" race on Horde and it was/is the closest thing to conventional high elves which people love (with a passionate fringe still demanding them to this day...) And that's not to disparage Draenei at all, but they were more or less new, and the male models were uh...not quite good, at least in my mind compared to the female models. Whereas Blood Elves let people have a Barbie/Ken fantasy with either female or male characters.
Everything else snowballs/compounds from there in one way or another.
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Well, the situation is dire when I'm unironically contemplating rolling up a character on an RP server to have something engaging to do in the game. And WoW isn't even a great platform for RP!
I'd be better off playing something with vastly more character customization options whether in a multiplayer format or not.
I feel like I was at acceptance for awhile, but now I'm back to the bargaining stage. D:
I'd be better off playing something with vastly more character customization options whether in a multiplayer format or not.
I feel like I was at acceptance for awhile, but now I'm back to the bargaining stage. D:
Don't remember what was added in 8.1 other than more quests that aren't time gated now. Just run through the quests until you get to the Dalazar raid.
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The additional war campaign stuff in 8.1 till now was like an hour tops? If you're already exalted I don't see any other hoops taking very long at all.
Opulence is great. I expect an large amount of trash talking to go on between left team and right team every week. Will be entertaining for sure.
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Boss fights where you have to split your raid are always pretty interesting. One of the earlier ones I remember was Thorim in Ulduar. Spoils of Pandaria in SoO was another later on.
The only issue is if the jobs vary significantly then not having the same setup every week can get weird, especially if one side gets to pad more numbers or is otherwise considered more fun. So it's best if the style of fight is used sparingly.
Yeah, both of which I cited when doing the briefing for the fight last night. We didn't manage to down it - it was getting late at that point - but I think both sides were really enjoying it.
We had a great moment of "Wait, why are we *so* far ahead?" followed by "Oh, er, you two DPS? You guys should be the other side".
No. Just a few quests. Supposedly the final raid quest is not required
So an alliance dungeon WQ (Temple of Seth) popped up that rewards a Mythic 370 weapon. Can this WQ be done on heroic or mythic only? I think it's heroic.
Pretty sure any difficulty (usually cannot be done on M+ though). The weapon will say mythic quality though.
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Some of the stuff they're doing now for 8.1.5 and 8.2 is clearly in response to feedback and it's decent enough, but I don't think it's going to convince the people they really pissed off because it's a fool me twice too far. BfA simply should not have launched in the state it did.
I'm Sylvanas Windrunner and I approve this message (actual new line in 8.1.5 lol)
I'm Sylvanas Windrunner and I approve this message (actual new line in 8.1.5 lol)
Player characters confirmed to be old god agents perpetuating the battle for azeroth.
On one hand I'm kind of curious to see how far they go down with the Sylvanas (and/or Player character for the horde) playing out N'zoth's plan....
But on the other hand, the other lines by Sylvanas/Anduin absolutely do not give me any confidence for them handling this narrative even remotely well.
Also...
....We're gonna have another item squish next Xpac. I won't say LFR was a mistake, but if this is the result, the item levels are going to be out of controoooool by the time we hit endgame.
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