So we’ve now had a few days to kick it with 3.2, and hopefully all the weird ass bugs (Deconstructor? wtf?) have been fixed and we can all get on with enjoying the stable patch.
I’ve already gotten my Tier 8.5 chest piece, which basically took a single day to get. Hurray for loot? Oddly enough, that’s basically all I actually need from Conquest badges. Seriously!
The pants and gloves are basically garbage, the hat is an incredibly small upgrade, and even the neck piece is currently useless until I can make the hit up somewhere else.
I thought I’d need to be running heroics for days and days… but nope. I’m done. Any badge from here on out is either going to be used for Runed Orbs or for purchasing BtA gear.
Though it does feel immensely weird to be wearing all 5 pieces of my tier 8. I’ve tried, I really have, to get a replacement for something! But all the pants/gloves/shoulders that I either have, or have seen drop, are merely equal in strength to my tier loot… except for one little flaw.
My tier loot has gem sockets, and none of the other gear does.
So I keep wearing my tier gear, and likely will continue to do so until I can get my greedy mitts on something from Coliseum.
Speaking of Coliseum, we didn’t get far. Downed Gormok the Impaler, and kinda went into Twin Eredar Worms with nobody really knowing what the hell we were doing. It also probably didn’t help that our tanks had been nerfed and our healers still hadn’t figured out how to play in their nerfed forms either.
So we went to Ulduar and smashed our faces into the various bugs there. All bugs aside… jesus christ, non-mages have been hit really freaking hard with the nerfbat this patch.
Discipline priests? You better believe Penance was nerfed. Though this doesn’t seem to matter much, according to our Disc priests it “heals for diddly squat for some reason. Also where did my haste go?!” Oh yeah, and apparently Prayer of Healing got the ever loving snot nerfed out of it.
Hurray for gimping Disc AoE heals and forcing Holy to rely on CoH even more, I guess?
And Death Knights.
Holy crap did Death Knights ever get nerfed.
Health? Nerfed. Our frost DK lost 7k, to be precise.
Mitigation? Nerfed. Threat output? You better believe that was nerfed too.
To put it this way, everything that makes a tank a tank was nerfed this patch.
And hooo boy was it ever immediately apparent. Suffice to say where threat didn’t used to be an issue for me, it really is nowadays. Last week I couldn’t even catch up to him with a lucky streak of crits, and now… well, that same lucky streak of crits will likely result in my death.
Speaking of deaths, was Vezax nerfed or something? It seemed like his health dropped really damn fast this week.
Oh yeah, Vezax down, woop woop! Months behind!
The new 5-man instance is… very interesting.
First off, the jousting style fight. A quick and easy joust fight with some interesting “holy crap don’t let them remount” strategy, followed by a ridiculously intense fight immediately afterwards.
It’s also kinda neat how one’s approach to the fight changes depending what comp you end up facing down. I got the warrior/rogue/mage combo tonight, and it was utter hell.
Nobody in the party could dispel poisons, so we mostly just died horribly when the tank started tanking upwards of 12k damage a second with a MS debuff on him.
Fun, fun.
Related to that, if your party faces a comp they can’t beat, you can reset the instance and get a different group of 3 badguys.
Oh yeah, and a couple other things if you haven’t figured it out yet:
If you get dismounted during the fight, you can simply remount. You can get trampled by the “bad guys”, but of course it’s a stun. Blink away, my magey brethren!
Also, if you die, you can simply run back in and rejoin the fight. Yes, even on heroic.
Nothing really of note for the other three fights. Obviously the Black Knight fight is the most entertaining 5-man boss ever. Well, the first time you fight him anyway. Dear god why doesn’t this instance come with a “skip cutscene” button?
One last thing.
Why is jousting hated so much?
This doesn’t make any sense to me.
The mechanics are simple and the content that requires jousting is face-rollingly easy. Thw only exception is Battle Before the Citadel, but that’s due to mostly to adds and those damn Gargoyles eating your shields.
I mean, really, it’s not even difficult to defeat 4 Champions without using your heal, and the first fight of Trial of the Champion can be done entirely by doing strafe – charge – thrust.
So why is it that jousting is hated so?
I would assume it’s for the same reasons as vehicular combat is hated so much, but I mean… the game goes out of it’s way to teach you to play properly. It throws piles of gold at you for figuring out how to push your 3 key.
There isn’t a quest to teach you how to use a siege engine properly, but there are many, many, many quests that teach you how to joust properly.
Perhaps someone wiser than myself would explain this strange phenomena.
I guess vehicle combat is hated because many ppl use action bar addons, and very few of them work correctly with vehicle UI.
I hate jousting because it is mind numbingly boring and predictable
@Sid
I hate playing my Mage because it is mind numbingly boring and predictable
See what I did there?
Jousting, vehicle combat…it’s all a change in playstyle. People like pressing the same 3 buttons and getting phat lewts from it. What vehicle combat does is it makes you change that. Example: on Flame Leviathan: there are no tank/healer/dps roles. Everyone is going to take damage. All the demo’s and all the siege engines have to kite. Choppers have to figure out how to deliver passengers. It’s a change in playstyle. In the 5 man ToC, you have to keep Defend at 3 the entire time, or you gon die. There is no healer, there is no tank. Everyone is the tank. It changes up that central truth to having a group (you need a tank, a healer, and 3 dps). Hell, people have 2 manned FL. It’s different than all the other fights, and it introduces a new sense of difficulty. Difficulty no longer becomes how quickly you can heal 5000 damage from everyone in the raid; it becomes how well you all can work together.
I dislike vehicles, jousting etc because they are all effectively forms of “skill reset”. All of a sudden, ability to play your class (in terms of rotations, enchants, tactics, glyphs etc) matters for nothing, all that matters is your ability to pick up the (near trivial) skills needed for jousting. This reduces the difference between the more and less skilled players, are there is far less to learn.
I personally love siege vehicles, and the bikes for FL are by far the most fun. Isle of Conquest is basically heaven for me.
Jousting, however, is meh. The ToC fight with it is pretty entertaining, but all of the dailies for jousting at the tournament have made it very boring otherwise.
I ran with a guild group for our first run of ToC on patch day, and the Black Knight was hilarious. He just won’t give up! You fought him alive at the tourney. In ToC you not only kill him while he’s undead, but as a skeleton, and THEN as a ghost. Now that’s what I call perseverance!
My god, I thought the threat issues were just me being sloppy. Whew. I was so ready to just use the response of ‘bad mage is bad.’ ^_^
Am i the only one who DOESN’T hate jousting? (btw ill be honest here, i did NOT know it’s called “jousting”)
To be fair, I hate all mounted combat equally. Dragons? Loathe. Vehicles? Despise. Horses? Detest. Whatever form it takes, it completely negates all knowledge skill and comfort you have developed in your chosen class and function. You could argue that’s why mounted combat is so fun, but at the end of the day it’s just a personal choice. It doesn’t work for me.
I dislike Jousting, in general, since it is much more lag-dependent than normal PvE.
In normal PvE, it normally doesn’t matter exactly when the mob hits the tank. Of course there are exceptions like if the tank health is already low but in general, lag is not a problem in PvE (as long as it’s not too bad).
However my normally large-ish lag really makes itself felt when Jousting, especially vs. Champions or Commanders – which is why I’ve stopped doing the daily vs. the 4 Champions and always group-up for the Commanders. Sometimes I will click my shield-breaker or charge and it will do nothing because the mob is already too close to me, sometimes I will get charged or hit by a shield-breaker without being able to react.
You can’t really separate PvP from player reaction time, which is why I don’t mind lag in PvP – I just don’t PvP much. But to me, having lag be an issue in PvE is just bad design – it means someone got sloppy and didn’t think “what if a player has >400ms lag?” I don’t like being penalized just because my connection is slightly worse.
However specifically for the new 5man, the encounters there are easy enough, including the Jousting part, so I see nothing to complain about(*). After all you’re always 5 vs. 3, even if the last trio are each more than a match for an individual player due to their large health pools.
Also, what’s the worse that can happen? Even if it’s a full wipe, it’s a 5-second flight from the GY to the entrance, at which point the last trio will have reset to their non-mounted forms at which point it becomes a simple tank-n-spank fight.
(*) well I also dislike the long start-up time and also there is some bug with the last trio of mounted champions, sometimes one will not dismount like the other 2, and this mounted mob will make quick work of wiping the party. However as I said due to the short time to get back in and the mobs resetting to their mount-less forms, it’s not a major issue.
The extremely long start up time on the first event isn’t a great start I must confess. I am not a fan of jousting for several reasons – lag is a big one (raiding from Australia for the win) but the mechanics are both clunky and overly simple.
If there is one thing about the new instance(s) that I really don’t like is that the whole single room, bringing in combatants thing doesn’t feel in any way epic. It feels like being on a loot assembly line (insert tab A into slot B and retrieve epics from chest C).
First, let me ask the “meta question” – why does it really matter why a very considerable portion of the customers dislike? If a considerable portion of the customers really dislike a feature, why on earth would a for-profit corporation keep coming out with more of it? Can it really be cheaper to do that vehicle junk than real WoW? Otherwise, it sure seems like a bad business decision.
@ Atreyu my guess from chatting is maybe at most a fifth of players like vehicles, perhaps twice that many do not like them and most of those really, really, really don’t like them.
I loathe vehicles for most of the above reasons.
In particular, I remember trying to get to 80 in November and it was in spite of vehicles; both buggy in general and especially interacting with addons and action bars. A lot of the dislike of vehicles is because they chose to ship WotLK before it was fully debugged. I still cringe whenever i see a vehicle quest and wonder how their UI and BT4, XPerl, HB et al will interect. Life’s too short, I now almost always just move on- on six 80s I’ve done OCC once and zero for EoE, AH, TTS.
Vehicles certainly do exacerbate the lag issues.
For me, vehicles make it seem too trivial, not WoW – too much like a “videogame”. There is a market for console games, FPS, twitchfests, etc. But WoW had been trying to appeal to a much broader customer base. I don’t see PS3 owners are going to see horse and lance as state of the art. And people who chose to not play those sort of games won’t be overly excited with WoW trying to copy them. I was jealous of a guildie who got their 7 year-old son to do their jousting for them; it’s the source of my quip that “WoW vehicles are designed by and for 7 year olds.”
Lag.
I run 300ms or so in WoW, and sometimes I get the shield breaker’d and charged before it ever shows enough distance for me to do the same. So I’m suddenly down to one shield, and the enemy has full and I never got to do anything😦
I understand how to joust, and when it goes well I do fine, but then a bunch of the time I just seem to get screwed over. That is why I hate jousting.
BTW I use Dominos and it has no problems switching to vehicle controls.
@Hagu:
You hate vehicles for the reason that I like (I wouldn’t say love – I enjoy playing my Mage more than I enjoy jousting) them. They’re a ‘back to basics’ system that can be used to make everyone the same, and at that point it comes down purely to player skill. That Ret Paladin your guild’s been carrying? Yeah, you’re going to KNOW he’s a bad player when it comes to Flame Leviathan.
Moving on from vehicles, I’ve really noticed the tank issues; in OS + 3 yesterday there were adds running loose and Tenebron just wouldn’t stick to our OT, and instead kept going to chow on a Warlock. Even outside of raids, I’ve noticed my DK alt becoming far more squishy; after respeccing from Unholy to Blood I’m finding AoE threat to be much more difficult, and the ToC involves a LOT of wiping when I try to tank it.
I doubt Blizzard will change it back, and it’ll be like other patches; the player base will raise a massive hue and cry for a week or two, Blizzard will make a small change (maybe they’ll rebalance dodge again, or give back some of Frost Presence’s health benefit) and people will adapt.
Fun the first time. Boring every time after.
Sorry, but the Jousting isn’t fun. It’s nothing to do with the fact it’s “vehicle based”, it’s to do with the fact that most of us have done the same thing for weeks on end grinding Crusader.
The instance/bosses themselves may be a bit higher on the damage/healing requirements than other Heroics, but once you’ve done it a couple of times you will find this is one of the easiest and fastest badge/gear farms around.
And for the love of god I wish they’d give you a “skip long-assed intro” option. It’s like Stratholme/HoS all over again. It’s okay the first time… it’s boring the 10 millionth.
In regards to T8.5 and the other pieces. T8.5 is better dispite the other options because they were designed to have the same itemization value with blue gems in them.
Now that there are purple gems, pretty much every item in game (prior to 3.2) with a socket is better than an equivalent level item without a socket.
I used to really hate jousting, until I figured out how to do it, now it’s easy, except on laggy days, where the NPC would pop off shield breaker and charge right after another even though you’re right next to it. But, yeah, agree with there should be less whining about jousting.
@Malon – a slight correction – “at that point it comes down purely to *INATE* player skill and does not rely *at all* on your skill at WoW”. Someone who is an above average natural gamer will outperform here. Under 10, IQ under 80, insufficient attention span to read 80 pages at EJ – none are handicaps to doing shield breaker. I just am baffled at why Blizzard would want to penalize people who are good at or at least enjoy WoW. If someone really wanted that sort of gaming experience, then wouldn’t they be playing that sort of game??? I don’t want or expect to in the middle of a WoW session to have to play Halo, CS, Starcraft, or Peggle for that matter. Optional vehicle/joust quest for color in Ashera, no problem. Lots of mounts & vehicles in Arena, great! But saying that I am not going to be progressing unless I grind by jousting means I am not progressing and so why would I pay money every month?
I suppose I could do jousting and vehicle, but I don’t see the incentive. Partly because WotLK means soooo much less to me than TBC. All these class changes and adding so many vehicles that so many don’t like seem like such poor business decisions, it is hard to believe that the WoW brand is being well managed atm, so just how much hassle do I want to do for a franchise that is on the downward slope of its life cycle?
I personally love jousting and vehicles in general. It gives you a change from the usual rotation. I think most people just don’t like it because they can’t figure things out for themselves, and would just look it up online. The fact is, if you need to look up how to joust in WoW or complain because your play is affected by too much lag, you need to find an easier game. Like Mario.