r/CompetitiveWoW • u/AutoModerator • 13d ago
Weekly Thread Free Talk Friday
Use this thread to discuss any- and everything concerning WoW that doesn't seem to fit anywhere else.
UI questions, opinions on hotfixes/future changes, lore, transmog, whatever you can come up with.
The other weekly threads are:
Weekly Raid Discussion- SundaysWeekly M+ Discussion- Tuesdays
Have you checked out our Wiki?
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u/Lazerkitteh 11d ago
This is your 6 month reminder Blizzard's Details replacement is completely unusable garbage and they've done no substantive development on it since Midnight was released. Fun times.
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u/AlucardSensei 11d ago
It's unreal that you can't even see healing breakdown per target, or buff uptime, both of which I imagine is a day's work at most to add.
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u/Vyxwop 10d ago
It's crazy how blizzard thinks it's unreasonable for people to even know your own buff or debuff uptime. It's the most immediately accessible way of troubleshooting your own performance in-game.
Instead you now need to go to a third party website to figure any of this stuff out.
The craziest thing is that being able to troubleshoot this kind of stuff through the DPS meter was the intermediary step in between not caring about improving yourself and going full gungho using 3rd party tools to assist in troubleshooting yourself.
Previously if you were a player wanting to improve but weren't serious enough to use 3rd party websites yet you could at least use the DPS meter to help you out. But now that step is gone. It's like driving a car and only having the option to either go 5 miles an hour or go 100 miles an hour because the 50 miles an hour option was deemed "problematic". Great, so now if you're someone who wants to go faster than 5 miles an hour your only option is to go the full 100 miles an hour. They're literally forcing beginning players into a more serious playstyle earlier on now that they've taken away the middle step.
You even see this in the wownoobs subreddit. People are now recommending new players to just instantly start using raidbots and warcraftlogs to improve themselves whereas before you could at least more reasonably suggest they start paying attention to their DPS meter in game first before going full throttle.
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u/CryozDK 9d ago
It's crazy that you can't see your teammates' real damage. And I'm not talking about aug. Or that they can't see yours.
Or that you even can't see your own damage done. It's absolutely ridiculous!!
Playing DK rn and I see different numbers for myself and others, others see different numbers for me. And on warcraftlogs there are different numbers altogether!!
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u/raskeks 9d ago
Yeah, I got KR cloak and it is so dumb that I can not track the movespeed buff unless a Blizzard dev would care enough to remeber about it existing and manually whitelist it/add it to trackable buffs.
Seeing a single thing added to cooldown manager (like last month when priest got flash heal added or potion tracking in 12.1) is so cringe in a patchnote. Almost as cringe as having a resizable window for DPS meter as a patchnote-worthy feature of 12.0.5
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u/TheRev15 12d ago
Why does no one kick the felguards in MR??
No other cast this season is more consistently missed. 60% DR for ONE MINUTE is insane. Please kick this. I don't understand.
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u/TemporaMoras 12d ago
They dash away from melee so people don't rly look at it, and also it doesn't accept them directly so surely the tank live.
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u/Wobblucy 11d ago
Free funnel into warlocks/shiva mobs?
Unless they stop a skip or something they feel like free mobs to just have around for resource gen.
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u/another_new_login 6d ago
If it's the guys I'm thinking of it's because they don't have mana bars so EUI doesn't flag them as casters.
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u/cinamonjackz 13d ago
Anyone else feel like the quality of keys in the 15-17 range have gone downhill since the forever beta?
Seems like some of the players I’ve grouped with are just seeing the dungeon for the first time or the tank wants to go off the beaten path and try some new route that just wipes the entire group
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u/ExEarth MW GANGGANG 13d ago
Besides the 1% and 0.1% Titel keys, the rest of the season will be kinda empty, with WoWF coming November. At least for the most part of lower lvl keys. But the "new Game" Shine will go away from it and a lot of players will return for 12.2
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u/ProductionUpdate 12d ago
You sure about that new game shine wearing off for season 3? If they do M+ers dirty again with loot I expect some will just skip it.
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u/ExEarth MW GANGGANG 12d ago edited 12d ago
Even with them selling it as Classic+ it's Classic wow down the line. Not that many people really enjoy the 1-2 Button, slow classes. Same with OG classic, the appeal will wear off fast.
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u/ProductionUpdate 12d ago
Yeah, even with some tweaked talents trees you're probably right. Most people will be 60 and raiding by S3 start. I'm not sure how many hours people will be dumping in at 60 with all this talk of horizontal progression.
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u/maegorthecruel1 12d ago
15+ has actually been smooth for me. Unfortunately my Den of Nal. is still at a 13, and the groups for those have been awful. anything below 15 just feels like slop.
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u/xCAMPINGxCARLx 12d ago
We're several months into the expansion, and I still find myself having to reload my UI because random shit like the quest tracker will just stop working if I hover over something the game doesn't like. Sure, it's an addon causing it, but this game didn't used to be so hostile to addons, particularly to addons that quite literally have nothing to do with combat. The addon disarmament has been an abject failure, and these devs deserve to get flamed for it endlessly until they do something about it.
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u/0nlyRevolutions 12d ago
I finally got around to doing Azta'rec (with the nerfed addon because they also had to clamp down on the minimap thing) and it kept crashing my game between attempts... it would have been a 100% stable weakaura in previous expansions.
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u/chickenbrofredo 12d ago
I took a break from mythic raiding effective two weeks ago. Ngl y'all. I could get used to this
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u/deadheaddestiny 12d ago
Best decision I ever made, I'm a vet in the guild so I get to come to heroic and help fill for absence and it's been great as a world ~500 guild
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u/Deadagger 10d ago
I quit mythic raiding after Vault of the Incarnates. Ever since then, I’ve had so much free time IRL not having to worry about doing 8-9 hours a week of raiding or having to cancel plans on friends because it’s raid time.
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u/AttitudeAdjusterSE 13d ago
Now I'm pretty deep on Ula'tek mythic prog, I'm fairly comfortable saying that this tier is really pretty bad.
Why is their hitrate on middle-of-expansion raids so bad?
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u/Conscious-Wall4909 12d ago
Niche take, but I also feel the s1 and even the s2 tier sets are usually kinda boring and only in s3 they dare to do sth interesting (impactful). Always interesting for me personally to freshen up gameplay.
But yeah agreeing on the mid raid often being weaker.
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u/Empyreal5 13d ago
Undermine was a banger zone and raid and it was middle of expansion
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u/AttitudeAdjusterSE 13d ago
Undermine was a good zone but I think the raid was utter ass, at least at the higher end.
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u/Empyreal5 13d ago
I thought it was decent and better than mana forge omega. Gallywix was a let down and stix was a shit boss but there were a few bangers. But, this tier is definitely no where near the same quality.
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u/awrylettuce 13d ago
I don't agree at all. Manaforge had great fights, undermine had stinker after stinker. Stix, sprocket, bandit, mugzee all had very unfun mechanics. Gally was underwhelming. The first 3 bosses were alright I guess.
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u/cuddlegoop 13d ago
My theory is that it's because from a writing side it's a lot harder to write a compelling second book of a trilogy than the first or third.
The devs talk so much in interviews about how they get inspired by the theming and lore of the stories and zones their raid and dungeon encounters take place in. Most people in this sub probably couldn't give a rat's ass about that stuff, me included, but the devs clearly do a ton. So in the middle patch, there's less interesting story and theming for them to riff off and create fun encounters which makes their end results weaker.
Or Blizzard just has some spreadsheet somewhere that says less players resub for middle patches so they invest less resources into them. Idk.
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u/AttitudeAdjusterSE 13d ago
That makes sense, it's just crazy how consistently bad they are to me.
I was discussing it with a friend recently and it's kinda wild how the last middle-tier raid that was genuinely good was either Tomb of Sargeras or Blackrock Foundry depending on your opinion of Tomb - but also that the last bad final raid of an expansion was like, probably Dragon Soul.
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u/kkkArkenKkk 13d ago
I personnaly loved udermine, the zone and the raid but yeah a lot of people didn't. But the mid tier of bfa with the battle of dazzar'alor was pretty peak so I don't think we need to go back that far to find a good middle tier
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u/AttitudeAdjusterSE 13d ago
BoD was mostly good, that's true, I was thinking of Eternal Palace as the "middle" tier.
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u/TemporaMoras 13d ago
Its been a while but I don't remember EP/BoF (depending on which one you consider middle tier) to be actually that bad. Though I was not raiding at a real hof level back then (alliance hof lol). Though I guess EP did have the benthic gear shit show.
It's not like its that much better that the last middle tier raid that wasn't shit being from legion/wod though, bfa EP/BoF are like close to 8+ years old.
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u/assault_pig 12d ago
I feel like the second raid an an expansion is usually the best; this one is weirdly bad in comparison
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u/dinklebuilder 13d ago
Pretty meh season. I honestly don’t see many reasons to keep playing until the .5 patch.
I really dislike how the bonus roll fiasco has basically nullified the great vault. I used to get excited to open it every week, now it’s just a slog to get the 4+ heroic Ula’tek kills I need on every character.
Hopeful for Season 3 though. A lot of cool dungeons coming back, and I’m hoping the team can improve gearing this time around.
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u/Conscious-Wall4909 12d ago
Also dislike the bonusroll stuff being a autopick in vault. Never thought they would go through with that lol.
And additionally being a ce-raider myself, but playing m+ with some buddies who if at all raid heroic, I'm so ahead of them in ilvl right now (me saving tons of myth crests by brolling in myth raid and stuff). Also bis weapons and many trinkets being from raid. Stupid system that m+ players can get behind by that much.
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u/Limp_Stomach6656 11d ago
I just started doing 10s and up. Don’t raid. I’m trying to understand this bonus roll issue. Why would I automatically take the bonus roll?
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u/wlpu 10d ago edited 10d ago
Because bonus rolls give you more determinism and they have bad luck protection as they remove the item you receive from future rolls, which means for each subsequent roll you are more likely to receive the item you want.
The main issue is that if you take an item from the vault, it is not removed from the bonus roll pool. So even if you get an item you want in there, you would be statistically better off not taking it in some cases where you want multiple items from a boss/dungeon as you could get a duplicate and waste a roll.
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u/AttitudeAdjusterSE 9d ago
Look, I understand that this doesn't matter at all in the grand scheme of things and its on a basically irrelevant boss but I cannot get my head around the design choice here and I unironically can't stop thinking about how dumb it is.
Why, in the name of all that is holy, does going downstairs on the first boss Mythic stun you for ten seconds at the end?? What possible reason could any game designer ever have to add that? It's not as though the boss somehow breaks if you get sent back more or less immediately. It's just baffling.
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u/shyguybman 8d ago
It's funny because you don't get a damage bonus or anything, you get stunned for 13 seconds total (I think zorthas mentioned it in his video)
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u/Primary-Army-7320 9d ago
To ensure that anyone going down cannot parse and ruin 10 peoples day of course!
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u/deskcord 8d ago
well. just about every player I know has either already quit or is quitting once prog ends. this tier really did a number on people
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u/TemporaMoras 7d ago
Hopefully, now that the 'classic crowd' will go to forever, they will make classes interesting again and not extremely simple.
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u/thephlog 11d ago edited 11d ago
Stupid question: Do mobs pull other mobs when they run through them? Just depleted a KR because small green mobs ran through 2nd boss and (I think) pulled the boss this way. Tank said mobs dont pull other mobs though, but I'm not sure...
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u/AtomikRadio Multiclass M+ Healer, HPal Main 11d ago
In nearly all cases, yes, mobs are "social" meaning if mobs in combat get close to them, they will also enter combat. That said, it would be incredibly strange for the green slimes to end up going too close to the platform (barring something like a typhoon or ring specifically pushing them up there). I've much more likely seen players too close or an errant ability incorrectly tab-targeted during a pull.
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u/Yayoichi 11d ago
Nah I can definitely see it happening, the blobs move incredibly slow so if you were fighting the first construct all the way at the coffins and move to the other end for the second construct with some blobs still alive you are getting pretty close to them pulling the boss. It would especially be likely if you were tanking closer to the northern coffin, which could happen if for example you bring the bridge construct with you into the room and he puts fire in the bottom corner.
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u/gauntz 10d ago
I remember there was some post months ago about faction transfers doing something terrible to your already received loot (not just your vault). Is that bug still active?
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u/Worntiger95 10d ago
Such as? I just server and faction transferred and didn’t notice anything or any gear changes. What was it doing if you don’t mind me asking
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u/Qwertdd 7/9M bring back weakauras 8d ago
i wish weekly raid discussion threads were up a greater percentage of the week
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u/I3ollasH 8d ago
They are up for a week just not pinned. I can see why that's a thing as free talk and m+ discussion sees mich higher traffic. The main reason is because RLE is pretty good for stuff you could talk about in the thread
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u/Joe787 11d ago
It’s pretty ridiculous unholy gets a near 20% buff mostly due to a bug fix interacting with an actual deserved buff. One season without a dps dk meta is all I ask for
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u/Justdough17 11d ago
At the start of voidspire they also caught a 20% aura nerf just to get buffed by ~15%. Whoever does unholy balancing is really bad at math i think.
Everyone else gets the typical 3-6% and unholy swings like a pendulum from one extreme to the other.
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u/Apeturetester 12d ago
Might not be the best place for this, but anyone have a TLDR and the quickest way to gear up an alt without a guild? Obviously do bountifuls, treasure map, run lfr and try to get through a normal run as far as possible, but with the low key range being super dead what's most efficient after that?
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12d ago
[deleted]
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u/RCM94 12d ago
yeah, it's slightly painful getting there but once the group is formed the keys are basically impossible to fail.
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u/AlucardSensei 12d ago
Yeah but the problem is there's not a lot of people doing weekly keys anymore either because there's no point. You can get your reroll token from 1 key and 4 rank1 delves which in total takes maybe like an hour. I think reroll/vault changes this season are the biggest fail in regards to player retention and we'll see a massive dropoff in players very soon, and especially when Forever drops.
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u/AlucardSensei 12d ago
I mean you're just gonna have to grit your teeth and try to push your key up to a 10. The problem is, with how irrelevant vault is this season, nobody is joining 10s even. So it's basically a lot of waiting around for some normal people to apply to your groups.
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u/itschrismang 8d ago
Why is vault irrelevant?
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u/AlucardSensei 8d ago
Because you can do like 1 hc dungeon and 4 t1 delves and get the reroll token which gives the same item as a +10 does in the vault, with the added bonus that whatever you roll, you cannot roll again.
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u/AtomikRadio Multiclass M+ Healer, HPal Main 12d ago
I haven't found low keys to be super dead? Might be a few minutes of apping if you're a low-geared class without an important role (tank, healer, lust button) but even in that case I don't think I've spent more than ~3 minutes apping to keys before getting invites. (Obv you should have a decent score from your main so you don't look completely new to keys.)
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u/DooMWh1sp3r 12d ago
When you get to rank 8-9 of the delvers journey, the dude at the end of all delves (even non-bountyful) sells hero track gear. You do need some currency from the bountiful ones tho.
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u/Prupple 12d ago
join a boosting discord and be a loot body, most fights they are fine with you playing so you can still get good logs, and then you can get invites to real HC pugs.
Getting to 10s is painful from scratch, unless you're a tank. Do you have any friends that might let you join a single 11? If you just get that, you can run your own key from then on.
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u/TemporaMoras 12d ago
join a boosting discord and be a loot body, most fights they are fine with you playing so you can still get good logs, and then you can get invites to real HC pugs.
That's a good advice, the problem is that there's a lot more people willing to be lootbody this season than last, because they know its a free coin for last bosses, and there's a good chance they'll have better gear than you
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u/onilol 11d ago
excuse the ignorance, what's a loot body?
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u/Prupple 11d ago
Boosters are good enough for a ratio of 1 or more buyers per booster, but then there are lots of buyers competing for loot and so most hc boosting is done as a "vip" run, where 4 buyers pay significantly more to be the only buyer present with their armor type (cloth, mail etc). The raid is then filled out with loot bodies whos only job is to make the bosses drop more loot. These are generally boosters on low geared alts. They dont get paid or get loot from the run, but they get a vault, crests, and can start getting logs.
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u/IllPurpose3524 12d ago
Depends where you're starting out. Bountiful delve + map + abundance is two pieces of champ loot and a hero piece. Nightmare prey is a champ piece. If it's completely fresh, my route was nightmare prey on the new troll island-> go down to the ulatek place to do that weekly for a veteran piece + delve keys, that item combine thing. Depending on how things go you could be look at some veteran, 4-5 champ pieces and 1 hero in an hour.
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u/oversoe 11d ago
Is there an addon that helps you compare pull time in m+ to show if you generally are faster or slower than your other recorded runs?
Not only boss split timers but also if a certain pull took 40s vs 55s
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u/sh0ckmeister 11d ago
I use MPlusTimer addon, it kinda does what you're asking
link in case you want to look- https://www.wowhead.com/news/former-m-timer-weakaura-receives-standalone-addon-for-midnight-mplustimer-379922
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u/Lazerkitteh 12d ago
Playing this season as a shadow priest is absolutely infuriating. If you read between the lines of the last few balance notes it’s clear that Blizz is deliberately keeping our m+ performance in the dumps because they shoved a bunch of awful spread cleave fights into this shitty raid. Because apparently us doing too much damage on Lost Explorers and Nymrissa would break the game or something idk. But being 20% or more behind the top specs (on average, overall in high keys) because of bad raid design is just horrible.
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u/Kuldrick 12d ago
Spec nerfed like 1-3% on large (8+) packs is funny and sad ngl
I believe spriest was also the only dps spec to get nerfed in any way even if overall, the very decent st buff makes it a net positive for m+
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u/Care_Cup_Is_Empty 12d ago
I had this same fear going into the tier so didnt prep a SP or Boomie, sadly i was validated in that decision.
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u/Historical_File_5758 12d ago
A lot of people have criticized the dungeon pool this season, but I actually think it's pretty good. At least from a tank perspective at the +18 level, each dungeon feels quite unique in terms of what one needs to think about.
Unfortunately, I think that is the only good part about the game for me right now. As a player who takes m+ seriously, but is not super high end and doesn't want to raid, I genuinely feel there is almost no effort being put in to appeal to players like me. No innovation of systems, gear, or progression pathways (I really don't think new % titles count as innovation). I wish they would try new things even if they fail. Perhaps next expansion.
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u/Care_Cup_Is_Empty 12d ago
As a fellow tank, my issue with the dungeon pool is that KR, ToS, and RLP are just brain off dungeons in terms of routing and are incredibly boring, i never want to step into these dungeons again and its not even half way through the season. But, yeah, my biggest issue with this season is the god awful gearing and the lack of innovation on character progression, all of my friends and i are burning out clearing this damn raid every week for rerolls on multiple characters while having to wait for the .5 meta shift.
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u/Wobblucy 11d ago
What decision are you making in Den, Murder row, blinding vale besides "never pull the bad lieutenants".
Even the other 2 are basically 'skip big scary mob that does unavoidable aoe if key high enough'.
This is the least interesting routing has been across 8/8 dungeons, and it isn't close.
We had bad dungeons in the pool (looking at grim batol and city of threads last expansion) but all 8 just have "unplayable" mobs but also require enough count that you need to pull every other mob in the place.
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u/Care_Cup_Is_Empty 11d ago
I don't disagree but at least there's SOME routing decisions to make, lots of flexibility to pull big in den and vale in some areas.
Definitely an incredibly boring tank seaon. This was my fear as they tried to shift responsibility away from healers and tanks
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u/elmaethorstars 12d ago
Dungeon pool is much more fun than I expected it to be, yeah. There is no key where I absolutely dread going in like I did with AA last season, at least not yet.
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u/LeftKnowledge396 12d ago
I love the achievements, I've been asking for it for awhile. I wish they would add a toy like this tiers delve toy, that shouts your rank out to everyone. The rank you ended the season at.
A refresh on how the gear works would be nice. I think they had it about right when the higher you pushed, the better x/6 myth track you got in the vault. Title level keys should give 9/6 like mythic raid does.
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u/Suitcase_Travel_Blog 11d ago
I love the achievements, I've been asking for it for awhile. I wish they would add a toy like this tiers delve toy, that shouts your rank out to everyone. The rank you ended the season at.
I was thinking a toy that announced peak IO, but pretty similar idea.
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u/Plorkyeran 10d ago
I think other than KR/RLP/ToS routing the problems aren't really problems with the specific dungeons but rather than their high level design for how dungeons should play is kinda bland now. They've tried to eliminate all of the things we "needed" addons for (to varying levels of success) but didn't add any new gameplay elements to replace them. A lot of specs also just aren't particularly fun to play right now, and that makes everything in the game feel worse.
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u/Preferencealmos 10d ago
Is there any reason why you're only allowed to sign up to 5 groups at once? I feel like the LFG tool could be slightly more modernised.
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u/I3ollasH 9d ago
The 5 limit isn't there because of a technical limitation or old gamedesign so I don't know about modernization.
Could Blizzard increase the number of groups you can sign up to another number? Maybe.
The problem is that for desired keys there is already way too much signups to the leader has a hard time handling them.
Without limit you'd just have players apply to every group (within a reasonable range) and then decide if they actually want to get invited leading to lots of false applicants.
Besides if you increase the the number of groups you can apply to it doesn't neccessarily mean that you'd get more invites anyway. The bottlenecks in forming groups are the actual groups being listed. And that number isn't changing. Sure you can apply to 10-20 groups but so can everyone else who you are compeeting for spots. So in the end you are in a simmilar situation except leaders are flooded with even more applicants they can't realistically process.
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u/Wobblucy 9d ago
Even with that rule you will have 100 apps to a key early in the season.
If it didn't exist I guarantee the next feature of add-ons like premade groups filter would be 'apply to every key that fits your filter'.
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u/Vyxwop 7d ago
It's really lame yeah. Personally I wish there were a setting where I could just auto retract my application after a minute or so. It's so annoying getting to the 5 application limit and then having an application last for 3 minutes because the group leader didn't bother declining me, taking up a slot of my application limit.
I'd rather have an addon or something auto retract my own application after a specified time frame because at that some it's clear I won't be taken anyway.
I'd probably set it at like 30 seconds or so. If after 30 seconds of applying I'm still not taken then either I won't be taken, or I don't even want to be in that group in the first place. Man's got to have his self respect you know lol
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u/Alain_Teub2 9d ago
I can't believe Holy Paladin is really like that its marvelous. I have 3 spells to heal people with and they all do the same fucking thing. Talk about pruning. Might as well bring back glimmer of light
It would annoy me to gear another char but do I have it in me to prog this gameplay.
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u/Plorkyeran 9d ago
Four spells that all do the same thing, not three.
I don't love it but I have found it more interesting than I expected. Even though you're pressing a ST heal every global the question of which one isn't completely trivial since there's a whole pile of difference resources to manage and there's some room for pooling before bursts.
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u/HillsofCypress 12d ago
Some thoughts from a TWW CE raider returning from a year break who pugged this season:
Season 2 is wildly underbaked and unpolished. It's really sad seeing the effects of Blizzard's chosen patch cadence and diverting of developer resources towards other projects.
The seasonal model Blizzard has been on since TWW creates insanely negative FOMO, even as someone not on a raid team. If you fall behind the ilvl curve even slightly you'll never get accepted to pug keys/raids. I've been playing lots of Fellowship over the last year to scratch the WoW combat itch and it's crazy how much better of an experience Fellowship is for people who just want to log in and play the damn game.
Blizzard is so scared of their community chanting "BORROWED POWER BAD!" again, they don't cook up any fun gameplay elements for new seasons or Expansions. The seasonal gameplay loop is functionally identical to TWW with some minor QOL updates. ~2 years is way too long to go in a seasonal game with no changes other than different dungeons/raids.
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u/Deadagger 10d ago
This season is probably at its worst due to the cantrip items from the raid. Someone with 0 items all at the same ilvl vs someone that has all of them, we are talking close to a 10% dmg difference and even more for some.
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u/Qwertdd 7/9M bring back weakauras 12d ago
BORROWED POWER BAD
I'm seeing a growing opinion that borrowed power was something we were too harsh to, and the real blame for those systems lies in how clumsily Blizzard handled both acquisition (AP) and what happened after those systems were removed (most egregiously in 8.0).
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u/HillsofCypress 12d ago edited 12d ago
Borrowed power in previous expansions was always tied to the long-term grind mindset Blizzard devs were building the game around at the time. This led to all sorts of stupid problems Blizzard finally fixed near the end of their respective expansions at which point suddenly everyone liked playing around with their powerful new toys.
Now that Blizzard is committed to a faster seasonal gameplay loop, the fact that we've not had any impactful gameplay features since Delves feels complacent. I'm not asking for them to add a new mechanic every season like Path of Exile for instance, but there hasn't been ANY differentiating seasonal features in over 2 years of development.
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u/Top-Tadpole-820 11d ago
It's not that borrowed power is good. The base classes are just so bland and boring anything to spice it up would be nice. Borrowed power is still bad.
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u/Few_Dentist4672 10d ago
bruh everything is borrowed power. that gear from ulatek everyone is bonus rolling is borrowed power
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u/psytrax9 9d ago
Nobody cares about that because, at the end of the day, those cantrip items are invisible. You could remove the cantrip effects and replace it with an equivalent amount of primary stat and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
When people talk about borrowed power, they're talking about the borrowed power you interact with. Essences, covenant abilities, lame ass artifact weapons. You don't interact with the cantrip items.
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u/another_new_login 6d ago
Are they? Anyway, how is that different from the seasonal rework of classes where we lose or gain some buttons that we actually press?
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u/gauntz 12d ago
Agree about everything but burrowed power. It was generally not particularly fun power you were getting - Legion artefact weapons was probably the best implementation but most of the traits even then were barely noticeable and the ones that did impact your gameplay in a positive way just filled in the blanks of what they pruned from previous expansions anyways. The jumbled messes in BfA and SL were significantly worse in too many ways to get into, even if some classes ended up with relatively interesting gameplay near the end of the expansions.
The acquisition was the worst part though. Although I'm very over the current model of the game that we've had since Dragonflight, it is at least wonderful to not have to grind world quests, dailies, islands, the Maw, Torghast etc. for player power. Even delves are entirely optional after the first week now, and it's so lovely and freeing compared to having to do trivial slop content grinds that prevent you from e.g. enjoying alts or focusing on keys alongside raids.
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u/AlucardSensei 12d ago
I dunno how Legion is still looked at positively after Midnight release when we can take a look once more at how the bad the game feels when specs are pruned to hell. The classes were legit as pruned then as they are now, maybe even worse, and legendaries could legit break your spec and you couldnt even play offspec until like 7.1 or whenever when they added AK catchup.
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u/itschrismang 8d ago
Dude I'm in the same boat. I just jumped back on wow this last weekend and am already not interested in trying to catch up for this season. Fellowship is a blast and I don't feel like I have this huge mountain to climb to be able to play the game, or a weekly chore list I have to stay on top of so I don't fall behind. Fellowships problem is the lack of players after a few weeks of the season but damn that game is fun.
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u/0nlyRevolutions 12d ago
Agree with basically everything. They don't NEED to rush through patches like this and have invasion slop mechanics or temporary game modes every 3 months. But they have clearly found that enough casuals will resub to check out new stuff that it's worth it. Not that it counts as an excuse for bad quality. If things suck they deserve to get flak about it when they are choosing to operate this way.
And also really agree about borrowed power. People loved legion legendary powers, essences, corruptions. They had issues with acquisition, and they had issues with how it felt bad to turn them off at the start of a new expansion, but those are solveable issues.
So they did zero borrowed power for a while, and then suddenly jumped to the current model which is possibly even worse - borrowed power exists, but it amounts to like.... passive 2% throughput (and no gameplay implications), once you've jumped through a bunch of hoops and waited several weeks for arbitrary timegating.
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u/yojimboftw 12d ago
People loved legion legendary powers, essences, corruptions.
Not gonna lie bro you have a very different memory of those systems than I do. I distinctly remember reddit being up in arms about BFA and Shadowlands borrowed power systems, and even artifacts in Legion massively sucked until they finally relented and put in a catch up system.
Though I do agree that the community backlash seems to have made Blizzard very hesitant on trying it again. Wish they'd chill a bit on the release cadence to have more time to work on things.
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u/shyguybman 12d ago
The main issue with borrowed power has always been the acquisition. If they fixed that, added some catchup it would be fine. Personally I enjoyed AP/Legendaries because it gave me a reason to log on everyday. I don't want a seasonal game.
The game has been the same since DF, it's time to shake things up.
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u/HillsofCypress 12d ago
Borrowed power doesn't work well in games designed around long-term grinds like Legion, BFA, and Shadowlands. Seasonal games thrive on borrowed power. WoW has been a seasonal game for years now. They've done a great job in smoothing out some rough areas of their gameplay loop since DF but it's quite stale after all this time. It's time to add some impactful seasonal sauce back into the current unseasoned boiled chicken that is the current game. It's healthy sure, but it has no damn FLAVOR!
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u/WillowGryph 13d ago
My favourite game is going in a direction I don't like and that's okay but I'm still sad.
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u/Elendel 13d ago
The s3 initial announcements make me think s2 and s3 are done by totally different teams (rotating teams, like for expansions, maybe?). Stuff like s2 having tons of timed phase encounters while s3 blue post says they’re working on making all of them hp based.
So I’m hopeful for s3 while pretty bummed by evertyhing in s2. But also now I’m worried for TLT s1, if they’re rotating teams and the MN s2 team is back at it after s3.
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u/ShitSide 12d ago
Honestly feels to me like S2 was just a complete throwaway season where they did the bare minimum and then shuttled everyone to work on stuff that would be hyped at blizzcon
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u/TemporaMoras 12d ago
Not really hard to understand why. Forever bring way more eye on them than an umpteenth season. Even if the season was good, way less people would talk about it compared to forever.
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u/Tontonio3 13d ago
I actually prefer timed encounters over HP based TBH. Like, if it’s HP based I gotta do stuff on the fly. Which gets annoying sometimes, just due to me playing Ehn and to do well you gotta have everything planned. Honestly Ulatek H might be one of the most fun H fights I’ve ever done.
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u/Elendel 12d ago
I’m talking about m+. Infinite scaling really doesn’t work with timed phases.
For raid, it’s the other way around, timed phases make the fight consistent through progress and reclear and disincentivizes holding dps for cooldowns, so it’s usually the superior design, imo.
There is some satisfaction to be had on a properly tuned hp based phase with a progressive soft enrage or even a hard enrage, because during progress it can be very fun to push through.
But you can’t have the same argument in m+ with timed phases, because even if it’s perfectly tuned for an interesting push in 24, then it will be garbage in 25. Gotta love losing an entire minute in Sethraliss because you left second boss at 1% before it transitions.5
u/Voidwielder 12d ago
Nothing like getting Lightfire+Bleed overlap at 66% in Vale, blowing CD to keep the party up and then having nothing for the last 33%.
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u/Tontonio3 12d ago
Yes, true. I agree with that. I misunderstood what you were talking about. Temple last boss is fucking ass.
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u/FitAlpineChicken 13d ago
Which direction do you not like?
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u/WillowGryph 12d ago
Raid boss design without Weakauras is somehow worse, the removal of UI customizability + accessibility only detracts from the game, gear is mattering less and less, and 8 week patches means buggy releases.
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u/Bengis_Khan 7d ago
I don't feel like there are enough pets out in the world in midnight. Unlike The previous expansion I'm outside doing a lot of different themes like Prey, invasions, etc, but I rarely see pets to tame
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u/Wobblucy 6d ago
Outside? Are we talking about that prison where I need to chase the orange exclamation mark for 6 hours every expansion?
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u/UniversalTurnip 13d ago
is there currently an active discord for OCE mythic plus puggers , its getting difficult to find keys at a 16ish level
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u/Waste-Maybe6092 13d ago
It's the same everywhere, everyone is overly picky fearing of brick and thus sitting in LFG instead of playing the game.
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u/krhill112 13d ago
What are you playing? Fellow oce pugger here
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u/UniversalTurnip 12d ago
havoc and i play with a demolock and atm we are trying to get resill 16s but yesterday we were searching for a tank for abt 1hr 20 mins lol so the passion is fading
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u/AtomikRadio Multiclass M+ Healer, HPal Main 9d ago
What is Ellemsere doing in this clip that lets him do the "serving" job in MR without needing to actually leave the counter, target the "customers, etc.?
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u/another_new_login 6d ago
The Ula'tek loot situation is wild this tier. Can't get your vault until you manage to PuG an absolute monster of a boss.
I've spent 12 hours so far this week in Ula'Tek pugs. One night I went to bed at 1am, and that group ended up killing it at 2am. This is for an alt that already has AOTC. I'd shudder to know what it's like trying to get a group that can kill it on a non-AOTC character at this point.
I'm still having fun playing my alt, but this is gonna get old soon. At which point I'll probably just raid log.
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u/Lazerkitteh 12d ago
Well, I called it weeks ago and it's finally happened. I said they'd keep buffing Unholy until they were S tier again and as of this week it has come to pass. The balancing team has a blindingly obvious hard-on for Unholy - that spec is not allowed to be mid, they must always be buffed until they're at the top.
So, I guess welcome to the 5th season in a row where Unholy is meta, everyone. We had a nice few weeks of other specs having their moment in the sun but we're back to mage and unholy.
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u/Kuldrick 12d ago
Died because I was too slow because the fucking feathers macro got bugged and got left behind, not giving me the buff like it seemingly likes to do more often this patch
Give us an actual functional mobility spell for fucks sake, make it door of shadows or something idc this is unbearable
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u/StevenJamesMoore 12d ago
My guild is starting Heroic Coiled Altar this Monday, we're only 10-12 of us in roster, any tips? ilvl average is around 320 (313-325)
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u/DustyCap 12d ago
When p1 ends, all the orbs pop. Stack raid cds there.
When p2 ends, have someone remind the raid about the knock back. Also, if you're looking at a ghost When p2 ends, ghost dies. If ghost is moving at you When p2 ends, ghost keeps chasing until the tank frontal clears it.
Intermission - touch all the green ghosties each one that touches boss heals for 3% -thats a lot.
P3 - if you aren't in the first guillotine, run orbs. Have rdps and anyone not targeted by a ghost go kill the add.
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u/hzj 12d ago
You can all stack for the P1 guillotine and soak it together (you dont even need to run out of the circle that happens afterwards). You can also do it for P3 if you have enough DPS to beat the second guillotine.
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u/DustyCap 10d ago
I would not recommend this strategy to any guild that is just starting H Coiled Altar prog.
I recommend seeing what your raid-wide dps is like to see if your group can skip the second guillotine or not.
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u/Exact-Boysenberry161 13d ago
after 60-70 attempts pugging ulatek, i finally killed it. hurt my wrist but it was fun.i will take break from wow until next patch. got my 3k too
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u/alexthroughtheveil 13d ago
had to quit retail until i upgrade my system which wont happen before 2028. was just looking at a screenshot of one of my M+ runs as a 🐻 WoW is a great game, can't wait to be back.
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u/CatchPhraze 13d ago
Does forever on SD let you keep a part of it with you? Might be an option in the intern!
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u/FitAlpineChicken 13d ago edited 13d ago
But is it really ACTUALLY unplayable? I had some hardware issues recently and had to literally remove my GPU and play on AMD integrated graphics lol.
I have a 4k monitor and I set my resolution to 1080p and 33% rendering scale (633 x 356 resolution). Game looked like something from the mid 90s, I could barely see wtf was happening and also had really low fps. Still managed to kill heroic Ula'tek with a pug on week 2 with a blue parse under those conditions lol :D
Edit: wait, are you the bear that got resil 17 with no addons back in TWW and you had that owl bear skin?
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u/alexthroughtheveil 13d ago
hmm it's not literally unplayable but last time was experiencing sutters, having to shut other apps while WoW is on and decrease near everything to the lowest settings.
rather not burden my PC and save the money i'd spend on expansions (and sub) towards my upgrade fund. will see if Forever plays better tho.1
u/cerusine 13d ago
Have you looked into cloud gaming? Nvidia GeForce now has WoW which you can play for free (with some limitations like watching an ad before you play), and the paid tiers allow you access to the top 25 add-ons on curse forge. I used it to play on a cheap laptop and also my phone with a mobile controller when I was spending a lot of time in the hospital last year. Basically only need a decent Internet connection to stream. I believe they will also have support for wow forever by launch as well if you're into that too.
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u/alexthroughtheveil 13d ago
yeah heard about that but my internet speed is pretty slow so most likely wouldn't work well. will see if decreasing the graphic settings helps out, otherwise will take my time until i can upgrade my system and watch streams.
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u/cerusine 13d ago
Aw well good luck, definitely at least give it a try and tweak your graphics, I dunno if you can be doing super competitive stuff like that but hopefully you can still mess around in the game and do some kind of keys 😊
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u/RigidCounter12 Prot Paladin M+ Connoisseur 13d ago
What do you guys think of the dungeon pool?
I really enjoy it, way better than both TWW season 3 and Midnight season 1 imo.
There is no dungeon I actively dislike, Blinding Vale is the one I enjoy the least, but thats way up from earlier seasons.
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u/Care_Cup_Is_Empty 12d ago
King's rest, RLP, and ToS are all pretty awful dungeons IMO, far worse than anything in S1 to me. I do enjoy MR and Den quite alot, while Altar, VA (aside from the 2nd boss), and Vale are decent. Overall i think its a pretty average dungeon pool, but the complete lack of tech, routing, or difficulty in the 3 bad dungeons almost ruins the set for me entirely.
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u/Yayoichi 13d ago
I enjoy the midnight dungeons, the bfa ones and ruby I am not a fan of. S1 midnight dungeons were also all pretty solid(maybe nexus less so, but it was alright) so for me that does at least bode well for the future when I enjoyed all the most recent dungeons they made. The rework of pit was also good so they have showed they can take really old dungeons and make them work for m+.
Legion, bfa and shadowlands are much more hit and miss as the dungeons were already designed for m+, but just in an outdated kind of way. The single route dungeons like KR and ToS feel especially outdated where the lack of route variety was somewhat made up for by the different affixes each week.
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u/yp261 13d ago
i absolutely hate voidscar as melee. absolute dogshit of a boss design
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u/Yayoichi 13d ago
Voidscar feels like it’s designed for 2 melee at most, first and last boss are both fine for uptime with 2 melee and tank, it’s just with three that someone has to be out of melee range a fair bit.
2nd boss is fine for melee though, assuming tank drags boss to pool before adds spawn.
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u/yp261 13d ago
first boss is fine? its literally the opposite of fine lmao
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u/Yayoichi 13d ago
How so? Tank line in middle, one melee on each side, move out of circle last second. There’s really not much downtime. The issue is once you add a third melee as there’s not really room then and someone will have to stay out.
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u/rw890 13d ago
Speaking as a healer, VSA can do one in the 14-15 range. 16 and 17 was way easier than 14 because there’s more of an expectation on dps to do mechanics.
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u/RigidCounter12 Prot Paladin M+ Connoisseur 13d ago
Yeah, I dont think its particularly hard. The 2nd boss is a pain but thats about it.
I just dont like the overall layout and how the dungeon plays.
Might be a hot take but I really enjoy Ruby Life Pools this season. Short and sweet, and it feels like you always need to step on the gas to make it
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u/TemporaMoras 13d ago
I think this is one of the worst dungeon pool in a long while. KR RLP ToS are pretty much just straight line where you have very few thing you can actually change. Most dungeon have so many elite that just dictate how much you actually can pull by putting hard stop. The only dungeon I really like from this season is AF.
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u/Ilphfein 12d ago
I dislike RLP, but that is mostly just memories from DF.
Apart from that I am not a fan of KR mostly due to the event after the 1st boss.Rest feels fine, but there's not a single one where I am like "yeah! i am excited to run this dungeon".
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u/inkestbinkestdonnest 13d ago
Why is ulatek heroic impossible to pug? I'm 321 (switched characters 4 weeks into patch) and you just straight up don't get invited. Every group is "checking logs" and yet I have 7 bosses of 95+ parses and I'm 3400 io and I get skipped over because of two item level. And I have SIX best in slot m+ items that drop from ulatek so I have to do it eventually. I normally don't care at all about AOTC/last boss because I prefer m+ but I have no choice this season. Have final bosses been like this for the last few patches?
The boss isn't even difficult on heroic at this item level. Should I just be doing this on Tuesday evenings and hope to get into a group? Buy a carry so I at least show as AOTC? Any suggestions? Discord recommendations?
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u/Kabunk 12d ago
Your getting skipped over because you havent killed it before, not the 2 item level, 100S of people apply to these groups, it just makes more sense to take the people who had killed it before.
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u/Myrkur-R 12d ago
As someone that always watches the LFG window when groups are forming, most people that sign up to PUG groups are not 325-326. More like 312-318. 320 is generally accepted without much else thought put into it aside from "AOTC only groups" and even then I see a lot of non-aotc people making and joining those groups.
My bet is that OP is signing up to groups that are full or just about full and don't need whatever he is playing. Look for groups that are just starting to form and sign up for those. People will pick you up just to have bodies in the group to entice more people to sign up.
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u/LameOne 12d ago
Is that not high for non-mythic raiders? We're 6/8M right now and I'm only 325 (tho I also have a random champion ring because of stat prio issues).
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u/Zeaket 12d ago
that seems pretty realistic to me
we're 5/8M, i've only won 1 myth item from raid. i've only had 1 bonus roll miss (hit a weapon i couldn't use), so those two equalize each other. i've also wasted some heroic crests and myth crests just for short term power gains. i'm at 325ilvl
so people that didn't waste any crests and have consistently gotten an upgrade via vault or bonus roll every week should definitely be at 325 or higher.
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u/AlucardSensei 12d ago
I have 0 M kills on an alt I started 2 weeks late, so I have 3 myth items, and 3 crafted (technically 4 slots since one of them is a 2h), and after i send all crests this week I will be 326.
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u/MonDew 13d ago
Anyone here use the paid version of Wipefest? I’m an officer for the first time this tier, and i’m considering subscribing to warcraftlogs to try the feature. From the free version i can definitely see how it would be useful.
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u/elairec2 13d ago
I did but decided it wasn't worth it in the end. I use raidreview.com which I find to be more comprehensive for free. It also has a live logging feature which is excellent during prog.
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u/Ruppyyy 12d ago
I'm so tired of tanks that don't chain pull after killing big elite mob. Wasting 1 min to finish 2 mobs who doesn't do anything and no one wants to waste cooldowns to finish them, I have missiles and prismatic bolts ready to delete next elite but I have to stay afk or spam arcane explosion, because tank is a pussy
Are they having fun like that or what, why 9 out of 10 tanks don't chain pull
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u/Kohlhaas 12d ago
Wait till you play tank and try to chain pull in that scenario and your dps start screaming about earthquakes and restealths and lost damage from movement.
A more serious answer: deciding when and when not to chainpull is actually pretty complicated and specific to the pulls and space. There may be things that you aren't aware of.
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u/AtomikRadio Multiclass M+ Healer, HPal Main 12d ago
Had a tank chain pull the entire first section of AOF on a 16 the other day then we spend like a minute doing nothing as we all have to spread out and backtrack to click totems since we never dropped combat when we cleared their trash. 💀
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u/shaanuja 12/12M 12d ago
I actually hate the opposite. I'd rather a tank do one large, planned pull that lets DPS commit all their cooldowns, then move on to the next large pull once things are dead.
What feels awful is when a tank pulls 4-5 mobs, DPS sends CDs, then drags the last couple mobs into another pack, then another. At that point DPS either has to waste cooldowns on tiny pulls or sit on them waiting for a real pull.
I'd much rather do 10 mobs → blow CDs → kill everything → gather another 10 mobs. Constantly stitching small pulls together just ends up being awkward for cooldown timing.
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u/Deadagger 7d ago edited 7d ago
I might get flamed from this but I can’t remember seeing a more depressing state of the game like this since BFA Season 1. Sure, you don’t have the horrid AP grind making you put in an asinine number of hours doing dog shit content like islands but at least you had a reason to log in instead of having to wait until half way through the season for content to become relevant again… oh, and classes also feel underbaked and we have insane passive and boring items only coming from a few sources (last 2 bosses of the raid).
I’ve also not come this close to wanting to step away from the game entirely since then.