For someone that was talking about epeen stroking, you sure do alot of it for raiders.
PvE and PvP = not hard. They both pretty much boil down to time invested. People who are worse spend more time, better spend less. The one advantage PvE has over PvP is the balance aspect. All specs can do well in a PvE environment. You may not want alot of moonkin or ret paladins, but one of either can improve a raid. There is no wrong class/spec.

Hell, most guilds get the strats to bosses handed to them from other more successful guilds, so you're taking a test with all of the answers.

They even supply PvE's stepping stones to raiding gear. Heroics = easy epic gear and badges = more free epic gear. Hell they even put the pvp healing cloak on the badge vendors instead of the honor vendor.

I love when people whine that someone who constantly gets 1300s in the arena system waits like two months and gets a single piece of epic gear. That team will also not have enough points to complete a full set + weapons anyway.

Yawhateva, I like the idea of arenas. They provide a small scale pvp environment that shouldfocus on individual skill rather than a zerg mentality most BGs have. However they fail in practice because the people who decide what "balance" is are completely inept and selfish.


I hate having every post I make sound like I absolutely hate the game, but I just have this addiction to calling stupid shit when I see it. You'd think they would get some people on their dev team that can actually make good changes while keeping it fair and balanced. I reactivated two weeks ago and they're already making me regret giving them another 15 bucks.

I agree with basically everything you've said, Apokx. I have never bothered to learn to arena on my hunter, because when I do pvp (which is seldom) I like to do it with my fiancee and my RL friends and none of us are willing to respec and reroll to the cookie-cutter "pro" arena teams.

I think blizzard has totally missed the point of an "e-sport" with regards to WoW. It's not designed for truly balanced competitive play, and it never will be, but they're going to try to force it down our throats either way. Awesome job guys!

New PVP rules coming season 4!!


When Season 4 begins, Season 3 items will be reduced in personal and team arena rating requirement to:
Shoulders: 1950
Weapon: 1800

The new Season 4 items will have the below personal and team arena rating requirements:
Shoulders: 2200
Weapon: 2050
Head: 1700
Chest: 1600
Legs: 1550
Gloves: none
Off-hand: none

In addition, some of the Season 4 quality items that will be purchasable with honor will also carry a personal and team arena rating requirement:
Boots: 1700
Ring: 1650
Bracers: 1575
Belt: none
Necklace: none
Trinket: none

another solution to arenas, at least to me, would just to completely get rid of resillience....and make every piece of gear legendary, haha.

I like the rating change, it means people will finally stop making throwaway arena teams for free welfare epics.

thank god.

It really hurts you so much that someone spends 5+ weeks on a single piece of gear, huh? That's a major blow to your ability to effectively play the game?

Elitism is stupid. Calling arena gear "welfare" is stupid. Get off your high horse about a video game. Putting ratings on everything doesn't do anything but reward min-maxing instead of rewarding, gasp, having fun in a game. While I understand their shoulder and weapon rating policy, since weapons are very viable for pve use as well as pvp and the shoulders are very signature, everything else is just a way to pretend that they're making the whole system more legit. It doesn't make it more legit and it doesn't introduce any more real competition to the system.

The best measure of "skill" in WoW pvp is going to be the arena tournament realms where everyone has the same gear. Trying to force that onto the normal realms so it's harder for people to catch up and compete is silly, especially the ratings on the honor bought gear.

If you ever feel like stepping up and being part of the big boy discussion, feel free. This isn't the wow forums, so that "QQ arena is welfare epics" elitist bullshit isn't going to fly. I actually took you off my ignored posters list thinking you were going to provide examples of why you think PvE is so much harder and impressive than PvP.

From someone that has little to no interest in PvE, I don't understand what infuriates you so much about seeing me standing around in a major city in my epic PvP gear waiting for a BG queue to pop.

I just wanted to point out how ironic their tournament server is. You pay a fee to have the same class selection/gear as anyone else.

The first time someone pointed it out to me, and all I could think of was "So I have to pay more money for fair PvP?"

I really could care less about this thread, this game, if you have me on ignore, or if you agree with me.

This is all bullshit, it's all too little, too late, and for fucks sake, I haven't played this game at level 70 since the middle of last year. I exited the TBC shitstain just prior to the end of season 1 because I knew it wasn't going to get any better. The only reason I even play is to sell accounts since I get paid to play at work. I'll let someone else suffer the endless hamster wheel grindfest that is TBC, the carrot isn't real, and the only real sense of accomplishment is PvE progression, PvP was an afterthought.

You SERIOUSLY think it's "cool" for the concept of a "competitive arena" to just hand out gear to people who dont make the grade when it comes to competition? Is it not the purpose of the "reward" for your skill and effort to get this gear? :rolleyes: What IS your grand vision for arenas? free gear?
I'm kind of a purist when it comes to gaming anyway, I don't use cheat codes, I don't expect free gear, My highest arena team only broke 1800 5v5's Shouldn't I bitch about entitlement in a competitive bracket now? Nope, My team didn't deserve it, we lost games that we could have won, why give us the "goodies" for underperforming? min-maxing is what this game is about, why don't you understand this?

the game was better before Arenas even existed to begin with. There is nothing preventing you from "having fun" There is no requirement for TOP TIER pvp epics in order to "have fun"

your comment about "big boys" and "this isn't the wow forums" are laughable, fucking hell, I don't post there :rolleyes: I'd say to go outside and stop mouth breathing all over this subject, and I'm going to follow my own advice, I'm done.

Excellent news.

Quite possibly the dumbest thing Blizzard is doing. I guess I'm pretty much fucked since I can only play on the weekends and I play with RL friends and we're not one of those leet class comps for 3v3. Sigh.

Whether you read or respond to this, I'm going to respond. What I value most in games is the ability for people to set and realistically achieve goals and to feel like they're progressing. What TBC has done best is allow people to continue to do that at all levels of play through increasingly high ilvl badge loot and the arena system. It's not perfect game design, but it's worlds ahead of the idiocy of the old rank-based pvp system and the loot gap between 5 mans and 20 mans and Naxx.

Of course you don't need the best gear so you can compete, but it's fun to upgrade. It's a sense of accomplishment, of time spent having a return. You can LOLACCOMPLISHMENTINAVIDEOGAMEWAT all you want, but no one does anything if they don't feel like they're getting something back. In WoW, the only thing to "get back" is gear and gold, which people use to get new gear anyway. There's nothing free about spending two hours every week for at least a month to get one piece of gear. And certainly there's nothing free amount the absolutely stupid amounts of time required to acquire any of the honor-bought gear. For most people, I expect arena to be exactly that-an alternate method of getting gear and getting upgrades. For people who are serious about pvp, I expect that arena will be a place where they can compete with each other to be the best. For the former, doing the work in whatever bracket they compete in, the gear is the reward. For the latter, the gear is means by which the goal of being the best team on the battlegroup can be achieved.

I see no reason why both of those systems cannot coexist without conflict, and I don't know why you or blizzard or anyone else would be so dead set on making sure they can't.

I understand the prestige of the shoulders and the raw power of the weapons, but putting rating requirements on everything else accomplishes nothing positive. It's only function is to dress up the system like it's actually competitive and fair and "e-sport" ready. It isn't, it's not and it never will be. The game simply isn't designed to work in that way.

WoW blew it for me when they forgot the last W was for war.

Sadly their netcode wasn't up to the task though anyways, someone needs to find out how they managed in planetside and use it for MMO's.

Some new Death Knight abilities:

* Death Coil -- Depletes all Runic Power, dealing 600 damage to a non-Undead target, or healing 900 damage on a friendly target.
* Death Grip -- This is the Death Knight's "taunt" ability. It also pulls the target to the Death Knight, forcing them to attack the Death Knight for a short amount of time. Yes, I said pulls the target; Blizzard is going to allow players to move mobs in the expansion both with Death Grip, and other knockback/pull abilities. This works on players too, so PvP balance ahoy!
* Chains of Ice -- Roots the target in place. When the spell fades, it places a snare on the target that reduces in potency as the duration runs out.
* Raise Dead -- Raises a nearby corpse to fight for the Death Knight for 2 minutes. If used on a player corpse, the player has the option to play as the ghoul for the duration -- gaining access to the ghoul's abilities.
o The ghoul has the ability to do the following:
+ Leap to the target
+ Rend for decent damage-over-time
+ Stun target, and of course more
* Death Pact -- Sacrifices the raised ghouls to heal the Death Knight.
* Death and Decay -- Targeted, AoE Damage-over-time which pulses similar to the Paladin spell Consecration. Anyone affected by Death and Decay has a chance to be feared.
* Frost Presence -- Increases Armor by 45% and allows the Death Knight to generate 25% more threat. Only one presence can be active at any time.
* Unholy Presence -- Increases Attack Speed and Movement speed by 15%. Only one presence can be active at any time. This was described by Tom Chilton as the "PvP" presence.
* Anti-magic Shield -- Reduces the damage of the next magical spell cast on the Death Knight by 75%. It also converts the damage reduced into Runic Power.
* Strangulate -- Depletes all Runic Power, dealing minor damage and silencing the target for up to 5 seconds.
* Summon Deathcharger -- Allows the Death Knight to summon a Deathcharger mount. This mount is acquired through quests, similar to the Paladin and Warlock land mounts.

There are some differences in the abilities between different interviews, but some other abilities are being discussed, like the Blood presence, that increases DPS and heals the DK when hit.

Oh the death knight is going to be to much fun.

I wonder what they have planned for the other classes 70-80 to appeal to would-be rerollers to keep their current class.

Yeah. I'm not sure if this is a sign that more classes will have several control abilities (like the DK has a counter for almost every archtype) or if the DK is just going to be so badass.


I've been waiting since release for this class to come out, and it doesent look like I will be dissapointed. They have my money for the collector's edition already.

dunno if anyone posted this here yet but there's a very good interview about the expansion on gamespot: http://www.gamespot.com/video/942519...e;videos;img;2

http://www.mmo-champion.com/ is pretty much the end-all be all of WoW source information these days (and they link to all the sources which is nice)

I forget when I quit playing WoW, but whatever the expansion is, it will work like the last.

Day 1 - all of the previous epics are now obsolete.
Week 1 - non-thinking casual players think they are 'even' with the hard core players.
Month 1 - Hard core players now have epics you can't get with a life.
Month 6 - New expansion is announced.

Rinse/Repeat

And yet the WoW population is still growing.

--jaded

according to a source that wont verify it's source.


lol

damn blizzard.

We just downed Illidari Council. One of the funnest and definitely one of the longest fights in the game. There's just so much that can go wrong.

http://wotlk.wikidot.com/

So, the client goes out for download and a few hours later it's up on torrent sites, being mined for new MPQ data like models and talents.

If you (or someone you know) are in the Alpha, for god's sake (and theirs) just keep it to yourself. People can and will get fired over stuff like this.

That said, here's the most recent compendium of stuff: Talents, new models, some crazy shit if it's all true.

What? You work at blizzard? lol

--jaded

friend of a guild mate actually. not anyone involved in development or anything, just a service rep

That's pretty cool anyway :)

--jaded

http://img395.imageshack.us/img395/3...updatedvl6.jpg

new port in stormwind eh?

looks more like a shipyard to me. probably both tho. From what i read on a previous post up there ships will be leaving from theramore and menethil for the alliance (thus the new mage teleport to theramore). Its hard to tell if the part between the docks and the ship in the water there is shoreline or where the deep water kicks in from this angle.

Dunno what that white thing is directly to the west of the dwarven district is either.

Im still waiting to see what that portal in SW is behind that gate.

iirc that goes to old stormwind which was never released. i think it was in early beta o before that. there's a similar area in ironforge behind one fo the doors in the king's chamber, tho that one isnt a portal. still plenty of unreleased areas in the old world.

Ya heard about people getting into old IF and selling a summon for like 100g...morons

I have been to old IF, pretty cool stuff in there, no NPCs, but meh, I have also been to hyjal. The real hyjal, in dark whisper gorge... ran around all over the place in there when I was 60.

Speaking of places that weren't meant to be accessed...

I'll use links instead of messing up the forums this time.
Climbing Karazhan.
http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y5/.../karahigh2.jpg

Above Ironforge, who HASN'T been here..
http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y5/.../ironforge.jpg

Hopping over the blasted Lands wall beside the Dark Portal.. leads to Zul Gurub..
http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y5/...69/WaytoZG.jpg

This is in Tristfal Glades, in the open inaccessible area west of Undercity.
http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y5/...9/flatwall.jpg

This one is inside the Karazhan instance.
http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y5/.../underkara.jpg


There's still a few places you can get too, the empty area in tristfal glades is still accessible, You can climb one of the walls and get passed the invisible wall in Hyjal Past allowing you to see the rest of the instance, gotta be an engineer, paladin or lucky with the noggenfoggers though. You can still get above Ironforge and under Stormwind too. Seriously I have nothing better to do so I just go out looking for hills to climb. :)

Edit: Too many smiley faces and not enough capitalization.

that last one is in Kara? looks more like ZA

Yup it's under kara. They copy and pasted ZG landscaping and built Kara on top of it. To get there you need to be at the guys that do that stacking str/agi debuff. In the back of the room there's an area you can climb up to, The grey wall there is just for looks if you walk through it you fall a few hundred feet and probably die if you dont have any kind of slowfall.

The original design plan for Karazhan included an inverse mirror of the tower beneath it.

It also called for being such a big instance that you were supposed to take a flight path to the top at one point.

they didn't do a lot of what they wanted to do with it. *shrug*

To bad they nurfed wall jumping or I would try that.

So, It's been a while, What's everyone playing nowadays? I've been raiding on my Orc Hunter for a while now. We've been working on Illidan. I don't know if it's the hardest fight so far but having to clear all the way up to him and only getting in 1 day of attempts per week is annoying.

Illidan really isn't that bad of a fight, you guys will get it eventually. The biggest problems you'll probably have are with the tanks in phase 2 and people controlling their agro during transitions for the next step.

I think the most drastic thing we do for him is to make all the mages (myself included) respec to frost just for this fight. No matter how much they bitch and complain about it (and they will) you *really* need improved blizzard and lots of it for the squids that come out when Illidan is in demon form.

I still just pvp and do dailys

been getting into BT and Hyjal lots now, but none of the mage gear wants to drop...oh well

The Eyeball squids were our problem tonight. They just absolutely weren't going down fast enough at all. We managed to get them all killed only once.

We rarely, if ever, have a problem with them these days. Improved blizzard goes a LONG way with stopping them. Permafrost, Frostbite and Arctic Reach are good talents to pick up for the mages as well as improved blizzard. It really is a massive change in the ease of the encounter if you make your mages respec just for this.

My guild pays the cost of repsecs when they're required so its not such a big deal.

So AoE Fire spec will not work? because I know people who have downed him and there mages never changed spec and most are Arcane/Fire, like myself.

Well i'm not saying that. I'm sure you can get a lot of stuff to work. But improved blizzard slows down the squids so much that they're basically stuck in the opening salvo of AoE and die within a few seconds. you never have to worry about chasing them down cuz they never get more than a few feet away from Illidan. Without some kind of slows on them they jet out so fast from the aoe that you have to switch off to single target dd and that can open up a can of worms that doesn't need to even be in the tacklebox to begin with.

As a side note, I'm also arcane/fire and hate to respec for anything. But the change to this fight is just so huge that its well worth it.

Humm I will keep that in mind for when my guild get to him

i stopped playing WoW after 10 months...

We (SO and I) took a break for quite a while, but now that it's summer and we're a lot less busy with work/school/etc we're playing again. We need an outlet for all the stress of moving, and playing a couple hours a day seems to be helping. We rerolled on an entirely new server for us--does anyone play on Daggerspine?

I love warlocks, and I finally got a cool voidwalker name--Phantaz.

This dropped for me last night in Karazhan:

A Clue

I have now officially won the game. :thumbsup:

LMAO

I'm downloading the trial right now. I've never played it.

Tips?
Hints?
Talk me out of it?

Sorry, I won't talk you out of it, Baraka. I enjoy it too much. Just be aware of the limitations of the trial account; they can be incredibly frustrating. Right now the Midsummer Festival is going on--check it out.

Oh, and fishing is fun!

It's 10 days; I'm not expecting much. I'm a longtime player of online fantasy RP, just not in an MMORPG format. I'm going to be eying up the RP servers. What's the Midsummer Festival?

It's the current holiday event, and it's centered around fires/bonfires for obvious reasons. In capital cities you can learn to throw fire at a target, then learn to toss torches, and outside smaller settlements you can honor the bonfire for XP and a reward. Mostly, though, it's about the buffs--if the bonfire is burning in the zone you're in, you get Bonfire's Blessing, which gives you a chance to inflict some major fire damage on your target. You can also go dance around the ribbon pole near the bonfire (which will be located outside whatever the settlement is in your starting zone) to get a buff that gives you 10% extra XP.

As for the RP servers--good luck. They're kind of a mixed bag--you never know what you're going to get.

That sounds pretty cool. I like the sound of the WoW complexity; much more than NWN, which is bound by D&D rules.

Meh, as long as I can avoid as many Timmys* as possible.



* "timmy": Term used by older gamers to describe immature or younger gamers. Usually this is in reference to their attitude during gameplay or in lobbies. This attitude is usually include Racial slurs Unprovoked profanity or general poor behavior. Other activities by a Timmy may include playing music over communicators or just yelling nonsense. In game play a Timmy may team kill or glitch and exploit game bugs. This term is in reference to the South Park character.
Timmy: "You guys Suck you are a bunch of N^&*%$ J^*^!" ****MUSIC BLARES THROUGH HEADSET**** (Source: urbandictionary.com)

biggest tip is if you aren't picking a server to play with friends/family select a server that shares your schedule for peak hours. otherwise, you may find yourself really frustrated later when the things you want to do require you to stay up really late or get up really early.

biggest hint is a double, 1) learn about addons and 2) learn about resources. the ui kinda sucks straight out of the box but you can improve it a thousand times over with addons. i like wowinterface and wowace. there are a lot of great out of game resources available depending on what you are interested in, but for general game stuff, wowwiki.com and wowhead.com have the answers.

i really enjoy the game so i'm not gonna talk you out of it either :) it's a time suck, but there are great communities to be found as well if the social aspect holds anything for you. there are guilds (clans) centered around every facet of game play but more interestingly, there are a lot of guilds that have created communities that go beyond wow. i know a number of people who've transfered servers or rerolled just to join specific guilds because of the community they created.

Hmmm talk you out of it...

http://www.andrewgonsalves.com/artic...rcraft_4_times

hehe hmm....

http://www.wowwiki.com/Timmy_the_Cruel :wave:

here's something to be released over the weekend.

I hate this game, I'm playing it again.

ahhhhh! why!?

Thanks for the tips and cautionary tales.

I'm nearing the halfway point in my trial account. I'm a level 13 troll hunter with a pet boar. I've been through Durotar (and Orgrimmar) and some of The Barrens.

Pros:

• The world is huge and varied enough to pique my sense of adventure, and you don't need to spend your whole night getting through it.
• The areas look nice despite the somewhat dated graphics.
• There is character skill and item complexity enough to keep me interested.
• There are many players.
• There are many quests.
• It's cool to be able to play tauren, orc, troll, and undead characters.
• It runs fairly smoothly.
• Blue-skinned troll chicks are hawt.

Cons:

• Seems to lack character diversity (partly due to the class limitations).
• The combat/encounter system is something to be desired.
• It's difficult to get a real sense of fellowship when you're in a party with all that running around.
• Characters seem to float and flit about the screen with no real attachment to the world. Maybe it's all the running around.
• Not much roleplaying going on in the roleplaying server. (I've been spoiled by NWN online.)
• It costs $15/month, which is $15 more than the NWN server I currently play.
• Generally, it hasn't whisked me away to a world of magic. There's something missing. I'm a big roleplaying geek; maybe this isn't the game for me.

Mind you, I haven't had much beyond a noob's experience. But this is a trial, after all. What do you guys have to say about this?

A trial account on a horde character is a sure way to not be interested, probably one of the larger complaints from the horde community is that there isn't really a great story to suck people in on the horde side. But if you play alliance up to the early 20's. EVERYONE knows van cleef.

...van who? :confused:

Thanks for the tip. Maybe I'll spend the second half of my trial on an Alliance character? Any tips in that respect? I tend to fall into the dwarf paladin type in other games. Anything of particular interest in character types other than that?

Depends on what play style you're into. We could discuss what you might like, or what classes are actually like. I like Paladins, but leveling one sucked compared to say a Hunter (which I would say is the easiest class to play in any situation). The Paladin however, has 3 specializations. Holy, Retribution and Protection.

Holy is built for healing yourself and other players. They have the lowest damage output of the 3 (with one exception).

Protection is the "tanking" spec (they take damage and keep the attention of monsters while other players deal damage or heal).

Retribution specializes in single target damage (some of their attacks deal holy damage, which isnt mitigated by armor and players do not have a "Holy Resistance" statistic).

That's a very basic outline of what each "spec" does. There is more to each skill tree, and even hybrid builds but it helps to have a better grasp of the game before worrying about those.

Besides all of that, if you were someone with game experience or a person I personally knew, I would tell you to pick another class. Paladins are pretty terrible right now, and arent likely improve until the expansion is released(if at all, Kalgan is a dbag).

Paladins are still heads and tails better than they used to be, thats for sure. 5 minute single buffs in 40 man raids anyone?

ugh.

Better than making mage water for the entire 40 man. I swear to god, one night, I was the only mage there, and I made so much water, the rest of the raid was literly 2 bosses in before I was done.

I liked the hunter class so far. Night elf hunter good?

Night elf hunter is probably one of the most common race/class combos because of shadowmeld. But if you plan on going "Hardcore" at any point in pvp, you'll want the dwarven racial "Stoneform" so you can basically laugh at rogue poisons. (since a rogue can tear up a hunter at close range)

overall though, play what feels right to you. Not everyone has to min/max to the extreme for the best case scenario (otherwise alliance would have zero warlocks)

Just please tell me you didn't name your hunter Legolas

Or even worse, one of the many perversions of Legolas: Legeles, Legelas, Legilas, on and on and on...

Wow = ƒ41£
 

I made a girl elf. Her name is Tyrithiel.

But, alas, my WoW days are done, and, aye, they were short lived.

WoW has failed me. I've been spoiled by quality and rewarding roleplaying on NWN online, and with NWN2 going online with my community in the coming months, I have something better to look forward to. [Imagine an open-ended fantasy-based stage play, where you can make up your own character and develop it in a richly character-based world, and the world's the stage. This is what I play. It's like D&D in the Internet age--Web 2.0, to be exact.]

It's just that the NWN community is pretty much open source. User-built communities rock if you find the right one, and I've really been enjoying this one for more than a year. And it being free, I can't see myself spending much time in something like WoW unless I got something else out of it. I'd probably play it if it were free, as an alternative to roleplaying. I just don't see the $0.50/day value.

Ah, well, I gave it a try. Thanks again, guys.

Mages can summon water for 40 people with a single spell now. Ritual of Refreshment. It counts as both food and drink. Mages can't complain about being water boys now.
(Not sure if you still played and knew that or not, if you did just ignore it)

Baraka, you should probably just skip the MMO genre. You sound like you want less gameplay and more storyline. Pretty much impossible with WoW, especially by yourself.

On the other hand, I've heard of people roleplaying Paladins and leveling them up just to "fall" and become a Death Knight when the expansion comes out. Stuff like that on the RP servers.

Agreed. I guess instead of being an MMORPG player, I'm a "CMORPG" player: communal multiplayer online role-playing game. I like the community aspect of knowing most of the players and DMs, and knowing they have full control over the gaming experience.

In this case, the community takes role-playing seriously, but ensures it's about having fun. The difference being that the fallen paladin who becomes the blackguard can be your fault as a lawful evil cleric looking for servants in the name of the goddess Loviatar, The Maiden of the Pain, only to have this paladin regain his honour due to another player's quest to restore him. (All of this happening over the course of a few month's real-world time.)

I don't see this kind of thing happening in WoW in the same rich detail (if at all). I've spent entire game sessions with not a weapon drawn...only talk and non-combat actions. It's about role-playing above all else. Some of those sessions are the most rewarding even if a DM doesn't catch what you're doing and reward you with an "RP" XP bonus.

unfortunately, the game doesn't really have a community or an immersive story until you step foot in to the raiding content.

Quote of some stuff from the new expansion

Shaman changes were definately needed. I'm wondering if making Windfury a buff means it will be dispellable.

I hear Hex does not break on damage...

Hunter's getting some love!

Battle Shout affecting raid = AP to Pet
Stength of earth and Grace of Air combined means AGI+STR to pet and AGI to me.
Windfury affecting pet...
Steady shot doesn't interrupted Auto shots means no more haste cap, less dependence on specific weapon speed. Latency becomes less of an issue for maintaining highest possible DPS..

Plus we're finally getting an Attack/Defend BG! Woot.

Congrats Hunters on being even easier to play. One of the Hunter abilities currently being tested in the alpha is a vanish type ability. Removes physical/spell debuffs and gives them improved invis. :rolleyes:

While playing BM (and BM alone, really) is relatively easy in raids, hunters are without a doubt one of the hardest to play well and worst classes in Arena PVP, and you're just silly if you want to argue with that. That said, there's no reason to rant and rave and complain about ANY changes to ANY classes until they're in final release phase and we know everyone's talent trees and such.

There's still a lot out there to figure out but I'm thinking it looks good at the moment.

Hunter's used to be hard to play well before Burning Crusade (and without raid gear, a Hunter crit my 60 Rogue for 2800 damage in full Nax gear) as they were vulnerable to CC, couldn't trap in combat(without a bugged macro) and had a deadzone.

Since BC, they have recieved:

Immunity to CC through BM line.
Silence through Marks line.
Dispel via Arcane shot.
Removed deadzone.
Welfare twohanders via arena. <- Not really a class thing, but still. Yay handouts.
Mortal Strike via Marks.
Pet heal is no longer channeled.
Traps in combat.

With the exception of LoS in arenas, a Hunter can basically go "Big Red" and stand in one place dishing out damage, removing buffs, and cutting healing by 50%. Not to mention that a Hunter can easily break 2k crits with Raptor Strike in melee on leather/clothies. Most classes have to at least make an attempt at positioning. Any Hunter can be "Dur dur shoot arrow" and be successful.

Not that Hunters are OP, but I really dont think they needed all of those improvements.
Deadzone? Sure. Pet heal improvement? No problem. When it started being stupid was stacking a bunch of other stuff they didnt need. Instead of the Mortal Strike/Arcane Shot dispell give em' a shot that goes around corners called "Miracle Shot" or something. That way you change the mechanic instead of "Aww pillars make you bad in arena? Here, have abilities from 4 other classes."

Apokx, I think you have a few misconceptions about Hunters. BM is the worst Arena tree. You're giving 30% of your damage to a zero Resilience 6k HP pet and all you're getting is 18 seconds of CC immunity every 2 minutes. BM hunters rely heavily on Steady shot to DPS which requires them to stand still and shoot uninterrupted which is impossible to do in arena. With No Pushback protection, even attempting a steady shot is going to get you killed.

The only way my hunter is critting anything for 2800 is full raid buffed and target debuffed is a trinketted Aimed shot which is impossible to do on a rogue because he's either invisible or behind me shivving me with crippling poison. I'm BM with only 2piece T6 though, I guess it could be possible for a buffed MM hunter. I'd have to check my friend's MM hunter's WWS report to see what he's critting for raid buffed.

LOS in arena actually helps good Hunters. Only bad hunters are complaining about LOS issues because they want to do what they do in PVE and that is stand still, use their highest DPS shot rotation to burn the other guy down. They PVP as BM and complain on the forums the first time a rogue vanishes the entire duration of their Bestial wrath.

Arcane Dispel was a band-aid fix. It wasn't well thought out and now mages and Locks are getting their shields turned into physical buffs to counteract it. Can't explain that buff..

Mortal Strike was kind of needed because we just don't have the burst damage to bring down a healer. It's very hard to use. It's vulnerable to spell pushback and has a 3.5 second cast which means it's use is very limited. I'd definitely prefer is it was an Instant cast, no damage 50% healing reduction shot.

As for Traps in combat, You do know that every class can see traps now right? They used to be invisible and have quite a large range. Now you can see then and be nearly on top of them before they'll trigger. Not to mention there's a hidden 2 second cast timer. I was playing my warrior today and this hunter placed a trap and I ran around it without triggering it for over 30 seconds before some other warrior charged in and hit it. I had a good chuckle :)

Welfare 2hander, It's no more of an upgrade from Legacy than the PVP throwing axe/wand was compared to whatever wand/throwing axe people used. Being that it's only 3.0 speed you're not even getting good raptor strike crits from it. Heck, for serious Arena Two 1handers with 30int each are better anyways. Well, We get those "free" in Season 4 too.. Combined stats aren't as good as S3 Axe though, Just get 2x 30int buffs.

The difference between a good hunter and a great hunter is hundreds of DPS. You'll consistently see the best hunter on top of the DMG charts in raids and you'll see the not so great hunters pushing around 6-8th even through gear is roughly equal. I don't think removing the the interrupt from steady is going to make hunters easier. We already spam 1 button for our DPS. It's is increasing out damage done which sounds good but considering this is Alpha in WOTLK it means nothing because everything is due to be rebalanced. It removes the haste cap and it removes latency as a variable.

In PVE everyone has 1 button they spam. Raiding isn't about maximizing or working in complex damage dealing rotations anymore. It's about not standing in fire, and doing whatever gimmick that you're supposed to do in a fight. There are few DPS races in TBC.

In PVP, Hunters are one of the hardest to learn classes simply because our role is not the same are our PVE role. In PVP we must play defensively and we MUST play with a healer if we're expected to make it high in the arena. Like I said before, We cannot burn classes down especially in an arena environment. We win by outlasting. We have a bunch of cool tricks like Scatter shot and silencing shot but after you use them, you just can't burn anything down before they're broken and they get a heal off. We almost have to rely on our sub-par mana drain if we wanna get past 1600 rating.

I didn't play a hunter much pre-bc but it really didn't seem that much harder, just keeping shots on cooldown and actually being able to weave an aimed shot between auto shots.. lol.. Now Aimed resets the autoshot timer so shooting in a shot rotation is BAD.

Wow.. That's alot of text. Please keep in mind none of this was flaming your opinions about hunters or anything like that, I was just trying to explain hunters to you from my point of view. This isn't the WOW forums ya know :)

To be fair, neither dispel nor aimed having an MS effect nor deadzone removal were things any hunters asked for, and none of them really have anything to do with our arena problems. Cybermike outlined it pretty well above, and you're absolutely insane if you think BM is a good arena pvp spec. It works pretty well in BGs, certainly, but it's a death wish in anything above 1600 arena.

The problem with hunters is we have to play with healers and we have to drain to be successful, which leads to long, unfun fights with lots of running around like an idiot and micromanaging drinking and your pet. We're poorly represented above 1800 in all sizes of arena and, given how much attention blizzard is giving arenas, it'd be nice to have a shot at them without dealing with that garbage.

Deadzone removal was possibly our most useful and deserved PVP buff.

and.. Frostbyte you mean you don't like those 25+ minute 2v2s? Takes hours just to get 10 games in...

heh, and to think you gave me shit for complaining.

turns out you're agreeing with me :p

Uh, I'm pretty sure the Deadzone issue has been argued since...well, release. Not in this thread necessarily but on the WoW forums, definately. Dispel and MS I have personally never seen even suggested before they were given to Hunters, which was kind of my point. Instead of slightly tweaking what you had, and making sense, they just grabbed a handful of abilities and threw it to you. However I'd take the "handful of legos" approach instead of being stagnant for the entire expansion (Hello Holy Paladins).
As far as being under-represented, you can easily say that about several classes, like Paladins, Enhancement Shaman/Ele Shaman and Balance/Feral Druids just depending on the bracket and spec I suppose.

(Mike, the 2800 crit was before Burning Crusade. It was an aimed shot crit for 2800 followed by an auto-shot for 1800. I think my Rogue had maybe 4k hp back then with the Warlord PVP stuff. Hunter was using all Nax stuff I believe. The number is accurate though because it was a real "What the fucking fuck" moment for me.)

Like I said before, Hunters aren't OP, but they shouldnt have so many varied class mechanics. They should have kept the same theme of ranged damage without the secondary effects.

Side note:

Things in Alpha are subject to change, true, but just because its an Alpha doesent mean they wont make it to live. I really hope

# Sudden Death (new) - Your melee critical hits have a 10%/20/30% chance of allowing the use of Execute regardless of the target's health state.

...never sees the light of day.

That would be really overpowered I think. :|

I'm waiting to see what they do for Paladins and Priests DPS wise before I roll a Death Knight as my main. I've quit for now, and I got tired of healing. So if I come back for WotLK I want to play DPS. Hopefully Blizz gives Retribution and Shadow some love once this is finally released.

Oh, I didn't doubt your numbers. I was just stating that Hunter's Burst damage is no where near what it was pre-bc especially considering we're 10 levels higher.

Hunters are under-represented in EVERY bracket. Paladins are only under-represented in 2v2. Druids and Shamans do have talent specs that not only make them really good for PVP, but also makes them desired as team mates. You won't see any serious team spamming LF hunter.

I love the concept of a druid, but both races that can be druids just irritate me to no end. Though if I had to pick, Tauren beat the shit out of N. Elves any day.

Paladins are rare in 2v2 and 3v3 above 17-1800. They find a spot in 5s simply because resto druids dont hold up so well there. Holy spec obviously, Ret would likely never find a 5s group and they enjoy the smaller brackets more anyway.

For Druids and Shaman, they each have two specs that dont show up that often, and even resto Shaman can be gibbed by a couple dps pretty easily.

Hunters and Paladins have yet to receieve their talent tree layouts for wotlk, so I guess
we will see where they end up.

well I thought I'd share my l33tness

this is pre-tbc, :)



before i got my bwl/aq40 gear too :\

http://www.nightelfcollective.com/fo...hp?pic_id=1453



and v2.0

http://www.nightelfcollective.com/fo...hp?pic_id=1996


sold the account for 650$ and moved to seattle, still sitting on 2 accounts, one with a 69 lock and another with a 65 shaman.

I'm just bored with leveling

Private servers own in WoW

Beta signups for Lich King are open if you haven't heard. It's on the WoW main page.

Good luck guys. :thumbsup:

Betas make my cry so many damn glitches. I will wait this time around.

On a side note it has been said the last patch before FOTLK they will open the portal in SW and it will be to the SW Port, at least thats the rumor mill on Windrunner.

I opted in for the beta on both of my accounts. those donkey punchers didn't even invite any of my active accounts last time around. however, they invited my roommate at the time who's account was cancelled.

clever ploy to suck him back in? fuck yes.
proper treatment of a paying customer? meh, I guess I'm not entitled, but fucking aye, at least i was paying for it.

they sent him 3 beta keys, and he sold them all. I don't know how in the hell, but he basically went "yeah thanks for the free 900$"

Lmfao, he sold the keys for $300 each? Jesus fucking Christ some people are pathetic. Why would anyone buy a beta key? This boggles my mind.

I opted in, but I doubt I'll get in. My account has been closed for about a month now, but WotLK is looking pretty good so it may bring me back.

My SO and I both opted in; it'd be interesting if one of us got in but the other didn't.

Well, if either of you get in be sure to give us some impressions.

Well, I'm done. Cya guys in WOTLK. :)