WoW: Warlords of Draenor

Yeah, I've noticed the Plea/mana thing. So far I've just done 5s, and Plea isn't a huge mana drain (yet). Raid healing will be a different matter, of course.

It's a Timewalking Weekend (Northrend!) so I'll get a pretty good workout on both my HolyPal and Disc healers. HolyPal feels manageable. I'll know by Sunday whether I feel OK enough with Disc to stay with it.

Enix wrote:

A little, but PW:R is slooooooow. It feels quicker to spam Plea and DPS than to stand around and wait for PW:R to complete.

Speaking of, are you using disc in BGs? How is that working out? I haven't tried it yet, mostly because it feels really weak. (I'm probably wrong about that; that's just how it seems right now.)

Managing atonement can be a pain at first, but once you get used to throwing out shield + pleas BEFORE the fight it becomes a lot of fun. Or Radiance when theres a bit of a lull. As Disc you'll never be able save someone from sub 10% health like a resto shaman, but you'll surprise the hell out of people with the amount of DPS you can put out while keeping multiple teammates up. Trade offs, like anything else.

Can't say this enough...in a BG, having two schools of magic to heal from is huge. Arena is a different story, but in a BG with defensive penance, shield, shadow mend + purge the wicked ticking, disc is actually pretty tanky. One school will be insta-kicked while the other school usually has an option off cooldown or available shortly.

edit: just finished a WSG that we won on my Horde priest. Pretty evenly matched with 2 healers and 8 dps on each side (me/resto druid vs holy priest/resto druid). I finished with 6M damage and 10M healing...second in healing to their resto druid by about 1M but with 10 times the damage. The DPS doesn't seem like much but it definitely turns fights in your favor. Also had 10 KBs without really trying for them, with 2 deaths and 40 HKs.

Anyone tried a Mage yet. Trying to decide on Mage vs hunter for my boost. Fire spec looks kinda awesome.

Omnivore wrote:

Anyone tried a Mage yet. Trying to decide on Mage vs hunter for my boost. Fire spec looks kinda awesome.

Fire is relatively unchanged except for one thing, it no longer relies on crit gear to be good in the second half of the expansion. It now naturally has the crit to work itself from passives... and that may just get out of control by the second half of the expansion. Arcane feels... weird. Like, I get what they were going for, but such a long cooldown on Evocation to restart your attacks ends with me being at low mana for a long period of time waiting because I'm not getting enough procs to self maintain at times. Frost is fun, but it's also undertuned or something right now and lagging way behind the other two on damage done right now (hopefully that's fixed soon).

mindset.threat wrote:

edit: just finished a WSG that we won on my Horde priest. Pretty evenly matched with 2 healers and 8 dps on each side (me/resto druid vs holy priest/resto druid). I finished with 6M damage and 10M healing...second in healing to their resto druid by about 1M but with 10 times the damage. The DPS doesn't seem like much but it definitely turns fights in your favor. Also had 10 KBs without really trying for them, with 2 deaths and 40 HKs.

Interesting! (and grats!) what's your Disc build for PvP, if you don't mind my asking?

Also keep in mind that, much like everything else happening right now... your spec in PVP is woefully incomplete... more so, even, with the lack of PVP talents on top of your artifact weapon.

Enix wrote:

Yeah, I've noticed the Plea/mana thing. So far I've just done 5s, and Plea isn't a huge mana drain (yet). Raid healing will be a different matter, of course.

Yeah, with the LFRs I did it felt tricky balancing the number of cooldowns spent getting atonement onto people vs doing dps to actually get benefit from the atonement. Probably just a matter of practice.

Edit: Tank quality in timewalking seems way more erratic than I remember - guess it's a combo of gear and practice with new mechanics. Had some that we cruise through and other where the tank explodes in 2-3 hits.

Enix wrote:
mindset.threat wrote:

edit: just finished a WSG that we won on my Horde priest. Pretty evenly matched with 2 healers and 8 dps on each side (me/resto druid vs holy priest/resto druid). I finished with 6M damage and 10M healing...second in healing to their resto druid by about 1M but with 10 times the damage. The DPS doesn't seem like much but it definitely turns fights in your favor. Also had 10 KBs without really trying for them, with 2 deaths and 40 HKs.

Interesting! (and grats!) what's your Disc build for PvP, if you don't mind my asking?

Penitent for the defensive penance, Body and Soul, Psychic Voice, Mindbender, Contrition or Twist of Fate, Halo, Purge the Wicked. I've tried taking Schism in the first row but found getting locked out of shadow without being able to penance myself too difficult. I prefer the damage from mindbender over solace, especially for 1v1...I've actually had people get the jump on me and then run once mindbender is out and DPS starts to pick up. Clarity of Will kinda sucks but its really a toss up between divine star and halo. Last row is tough but I prefer PtW for the damage increase and dot spread.

Someone on the priest forums pointed out that Shackle Undead is actually arcane...so disc has 3 schools to cast from! Till this morning the spell wasn't even on my bar but now I'll try using it to bait/juke kicks.

Demosthenes wrote:

Also keep in mind that, much like everything else happening right now... your spec in PVP is woefully incomplete... more so, even, with the lack of PVP talents on top of your artifact weapon.

Not really true from what I've seen. Power of the Dark Side is great but it only procs once/minute so it isn't game changing. As for the pvp talents, Strength of Soul, Holy Concentration and Dark Archangel will help but are not as impactful when compared to the talents of other classes.

Sonicator wrote:

Edit: Tank quality in timewalking seems way more erratic than I remember - guess it's a combo of gear and practice with new mechanics. Had some that we cruise through and other where the tank explodes in 2-3 hits.

Remember that the Wrath Timewalking Dungeons are available to anyone 80 or above. Even though gear is scaled equally, I imagine some tanks won't have as many tools as others.

Aristophan wrote:
Sonicator wrote:

Edit: Tank quality in timewalking seems way more erratic than I remember - guess it's a combo of gear and practice with new mechanics. Had some that we cruise through and other where the tank explodes in 2-3 hits.

Remember that the Wrath Timewalking Dungeons are available to anyone 80 or above. Even though gear is scaled equally, I imagine some tanks won't have as many tools as others.

Very true!

Finally through Burning Crusade and into Northrend and OMG it's night and day. The game is actually fun again! Hoping to keep up momentum and get to 100 before the expansion hits. Or I may just boost a new character to 100...

jdzappa wrote:

Finally through Burning Crusade and into Northrend and OMG it's night and day. The game is actually fun again! Hoping to keep up momentum and get to 100 before the expansion hits. Or I may just boost a new character to 100...

Yup. BC is the oldest content in the game now, and it totally shows. BC was that weird in-between phase where they weren't really doing EK/Kalimdor Vanilla where quests just didn't exist in enough quantity to level you to Northrend where quests were not only plentiful, but designed to be done sort of in a specific line to get you from Point A to B to C through the zone and each of them had their quests within the same general region too.

Seriously makes me wonder why people want Vanilla back. Vanilla WoW was easier than any other MMO on the market at the time, but even that was preeeeeeetty bad by modern gaming standards.

It's really surprising that they haven't tried to touch up BC any. Yeah, it is a short sliver of the game, but I've crashed and burned there a couple times because of how disjointed it is going from the fun of the redesigned 1-60 to the soul crushing slog of 60-68 (or whenever you get into Northrend and things start actually being fun again).

I've been leveling my Ally Pally up and I was surprised BC wasn't too bad.
Of course, I had a ton of heirloom items and could heal/tank/dps so dungeon queues were pretty sweet.
I think I got through in 3 short play times.
But yeah, it is rough.
What was funny was my brain kept remembering WoD layouts for some of the zones and I was confused where some things were. Nagrand, especially.

Yeah, TBC is definitely a dungeon area for me now. A few of the quests in the first zone (Hellfire Peninsula, formerly Tanaan Jungle, which is suuuuuuuuuper weird) were bugged last time I tried to quest there a few months back... so since then, I've just LFDed the expansion until Northrend.

It's only taken me an hour or two to get to 64 as dps. Panderin, with mostly heirloom gear still and rest exp, so haven't minded BC so much as the original time when it took me 12+ hours just to get to 61 from 60 when it first came out.

I guess this is the catch all?

I wanted to play a little bit, but as well use the gold I have before I stopped.

Seem I don't have enough. But I wanted to know how much I might have so I know how much I'll need within a the renewal. And before renewing.

Manach wrote:

I guess this is the catch all?

I wanted to play a little bit, but as well use the gold I have before I stopped.

Seem I don't have enough. But I wanted to know how much I might have so I know how much I'll need within a the renewal. And before renewing.

Does the armory include gold on a character?

You may still have to reup for a month for cash before you can buy time tokens, although if you have a ton o gold on a character below 20 that may work.

I really have to read back over some posts, is anyone Horde or are you all alliance? I started a horde character last night as all my old characters are as well. I am on Mal'Ganis as a good RL friend is playing there. I'm curious how the cross server thing works in terms of grouping, giving items to him if I decide on a different server, etc ...

There are a few Hordies here -- I slum as one from time to time -- but the most active GWJ guild is GWJ-Alliance on Blackhand.

You can group cross-server if you're in the same faction. You just need to hook up via Battle Tags, I think. I'm a little unclear on the actual mechanics, but it's probably something to the effect of inviting someone from your friends list, just like you would do to a guild member or some rando standing right in front of you.

You can send account-bound items to your own toons across servers regardless of faction. For instance, I farmed up a bunch of Steamwheedle Rep items in Nagrand on my Alliance toons and shipped them to my Horde priest. Some of the armor and weapon drops in Tanaan Jungle work the same way. BOA items are clearly marked in the tooltip.

Heirlooms, most mounts and battle pets (appearances too, I think) are all shared across accounts these days. That was a huge quality of life improvement, imo.