Not everyone is happy with some of the changes made to World of Warcraft in preparation for the upcoming Legion expansion. Aside from some minor annoyances, I’ve been having a blast. Being Squirrel Girl helps.
I’ve been harping on Gnome Hunters since they were announced earlier this year, and now that I’m levelling one I feel that harping was completely warranted. Despite rolling Beast Mastery, which seems to be the least popular choice these days, I am a tiny engine of ranged destruction, mowing down oncoming enemies with casual ease.
I suppose “casual” is the proper term to use here, what with all the streamlining (because dumbing down is offensive to dummies) that’s gone on over the past decade and change. Take that whole Beast Mastery thing. I’m just a non-combat button press away from swapping to Marksmanship or Survival. I can even swap around my talents in any rested XP area (cities, inns), which makes increasingly easy decisions even easier.
I am a little miffed about not being able to remove my helmet without visiting a transmorgifier. That said, the new appearance management system is a source of joy, both for fashion conscious me and ravenous collector me. I must fill all of the appearance slots. And once I am done, I must create different signature outfits for each of my specialisations, so I change close when I change play style.
The game is doing strange things with gold, reducing the amount given for certain dungeons and produced by garrisons, the previous expansion’s big thing that they’re trying to make less appealing now that they’re going to all be more or less abandoned for new content. The economy is getting a little wacky, especially with prices on low-level items with unique appearances skyrocketing due to being in demand for the new wardrobe system.
And while I am not playing on my RP server currently, the introduction of involuntary phasing in cities to cut down on crowding has made maintaining a RP conversation a crapshoot. Maybe the person you’re chatting with disappears, shunted off to another instance. Blizzard’s working on a fix to make sure they don’t alienate one of their most loyal fanbases.
I’ve taken my Gnome Hunter from level 1 to 57 in the past couple of days, and I have to say it’s always a joy to have a reason to return to World of Warcraft. Hopping on just to poke around is fine, but when you’re driven to reach level 100 to tame a mechanical wolf in the depths of Gnomeregan, the easy-breezy nature of modern play and the ageless cartoon graphics serve the game well.
And so Quality the Gnome Hunter (Ysera server) and her brave squirrel pet TippyToe prepare to enter the Dark Portal. For the first time, that is. The regular one, not the cross-time one. Those boring Burning Crusade quests won’t know what hit them.
How’s pre-expansion content treating you folks?
Comments
18 responses to “The World Of Warcraft Legion Pre-Patch Has Been Very Good To Me So Far”
Has been a very extreme opposite of good to me. My Blood DK’s self-sufficiency got utterly gutted. Self-healing all but removed. No more soloing all the things that no-one else could. 🙁 It’s not fun feeling so dramatically weak on my main, and makes it hard to tell what the point of difference is between DKs and other tanks, now.
Really killed my enthusiasm for the expansion, actually.
Might load the game back up when the Demon Hunter is available, but right now I’m too bummed out to even bother. Might just come back in six months when the dust’s settled.
you think thats bad.. ive mained a ret paladin for the last 2 expansions and we are nothing but a free HK in pvp with no mobility at all unless we talent for divine steed which also doesnt break snares nor does it suppress them while active. and currently the lowest dps even at lvl 110 with a maxed out artifact. so low that mythic ret paladins are struggling to keep up with tanks.
Running as prot though, like all tanks now in prepatch i cant last long against the dungeon training dummy due selfing healing being removed and placed onto the artifact which is why blizzard had to nerf not just WoD raids but also mythic and heroic dungeons as well
hand of freedom is still in
that gets purged/dispelled/stolen and hand of hindrance is on a 25sec cooldown(with pvp talent) that get dispelled as well. out of all melee specs Ret is only one that have zero mobility/gap closers. plus its the only spec on the beta forums to have 115 pages of feedback with Havoc at 84 pages, after that no other class has even hit 40 pages
I don’t know DKs very well but possibly they have moved a lot of the self healing to the Artifact weapon. A brief look shows several leach and healing abilities on it.
http://www.wowhead.com/artifact-calc/death-knight/blood/AjERIPA
Balance is gonna be… interesting with the Artifacts I think. Seems like a notable amount of your power will be tied to it.
Apparently a lot of that will be added back in through artifact traits. My boomkin bar is completely empty, my rogue bar has most of its skills missing and my ret pally… i don’t even know what it is anymore.
All tanks have had their self sufficiency reduced. Blood DKs are actually one of the strongest tanks still. Stick with it, you’ll get used to it, but just be aware you can’t solo ridiculous things like you used to. We’re all dependent on healers a lot more than before.
See, that strikes me as the dumbest possible idea they’ve had yet. I mean… Isn’t one of the biggest problems for matchmaking due to the lack of tanks? If so, why the HELL would they go and make tanks less fun to play?
I find them still fun to play, but the changes are significant and it’s always uncomfortable getting used to a completely new way of doing things. As for whether it’ll lead to tank shortages, I guess that remains to be seen. I’m my guild’s main tank so I’ll be sticking with it at the very least.
i was also rather unimpressed with the changes, so much so that i went in search of some information on it. I have a Druid, DK and War as tanking toons and i couldnt figure out why the hell my DK kept dying doing heroics.
Blizzard have come up with the idea that the active mitigation needed to be nerfed because bad tanks making mistakes with it were causing guilds to stop progression where as putting damage in to reactive (healers) hands meant that poor tanks were less likely to blow it for the rest of the raid group.
Problem with this is now its healers feeling most of the pinch rather than it being spit up between healers and tanks. In beta at 110 a good tank will still have no where to turn in some situations where as prior to this pre launch patch on a lot of occasions they could have saved a wipe by self healing and allowing the healers to top up dps etc. Artifact power in beta still did not change the end result of feeling completely dependent on healers.
I’ve been tanking since vanilla, including through Legion alpha and beta. The balance hasn’t been split between tanks and healers for years, responsibility has been primarily on the tank. In MoP and WoD, a good tank could carry a group regardless of the healer’s abilities. In Legion it is actually split now, you need both the tank and healer to be at least semi-competent to succeed. While that does mean tanks feel less survivable, that’s just because we’re coming off a long period where tanks were absolute kings.
The tank/healer relationship in Legion is roughly what it was in vanilla and TBC.
Which is exactly as it should be.
I healed all the way to AQ40 in Vanilla on my druid and I tanked all through TBC as a pally (except sunwell because i needed a break) and druid, if i popped CD’s for mitigation i could survive healers being drunk for 8 seconds, now, even in the lastest beta update if i spam all my CD’s during a high dps mechanic i was feeling very squishy if my healers had to spam quick heals to dps or the off tank. Admittedly blood and guardian specs have been tweaked a lot and a few self heals will help a lot more than it did a few iterations ago in the beta and my pally feels like it wont die immediately if i dont have a hot on me. Im hoping they tweak it more, because no i shouldnt be completely dependent on the healers to survive 8 seconds during an encounter while i have CD’s available.
I agree there is a huge difference in tanking since wotlk really, regarding heals/tanks dependencies. Due to the change to dk’s moving tanking from frost to blood was when self healing became way too strong in raids (blood dk’s soloing 10 man heroic ICC during current content was just wrong). But as usual Blizz take their changes to the extreme. I simply dont feel safe in the middle of a fight with the options im awarded, and ive chatted to enough other tanks recently to confirm its not just me. Im not a great tank but im proficient enough that i can see when a nerf is taken too far and when a buff is going to break aspects that only needed a minor tweak. (im personally one of those people who have no issues with certain specs being ridonc op in pve if it helps everyone else)
What tier of content did you get to in the beta? If you’re comparing with AQ40 you’d want to compare with an equivalent tier of raid progression in beta as well. Tanks under 105 or so are still missing parts of their toolkit so they naturally feel weaker, that’s something that happens every expansion as stat ratings to percentages are converted to the new cap. Granted this time around it feels more intense, because there is a general tank nerf as well, but it’s not reflective of end game.
I haven’t run into the problems you’ve mentioned so far in beta. Survivability with no heals and CDs available is anything from 10-30 seconds (class-dependent) for typical at-level content which is perfectly reasonable to my mind. I’m much more concerned about the reduced maximum skillcap and reduced toolkit on tanks than their survivability, since those two things have a much greater risk – of making the role unfun to play.
I really don’t like what they’ve done to shadow priests. The insanity/void form mechanics are fiddly and require a lot of micromanagement, losing the fort buff is annoying, losing 1 of 2 aoe spells has hurt and the lowered dps has made mount & pet farming in dungeons a pain in the ass.
Shadow spec feels like it’s been turned into a raid spec with a focus on burst dps, instead of a sustained dps all-rounder.
They usually fuck the current level balance up when they redo the classes for the new level cap, so its hard to judge until we hit level 110. The ret pally seems a bit dull and underpowered to me so far. I really disliked Shadow Priest in WoD so I’m not sure it can be any worse than that?
Probably going to play a rogue and warlock this time around, never had them at max level. But I probably should play a healer too, shaman I guess.
Try playing BG’s, The 40 man BG’s are basically broken since they are balanced for 110 so all the AI are at 110 as well, Making them impossible to kill at lvl 100 even with the full group
I was annoyed that a lot of the talents that I’m used to using for my specs and toons have been thrown into that artifact thing that for the first time in about 10 years of playing, I’m not taking my Hunter through the expansion content first. Instead I’m taking my Ret Pally & Warlock through the content first since they seem to have a more complete set of abilities leading into Legion.
Didn’t know this was a thing. Thanks for the heads up. It seems like a lot of interface options have been hidden or removed.
I think this is the one pre patch that has thrown the power lvl out the window the most. I mean when even Blizzard admits that their current raid is too difficult and they needed to provide further nerfs to compensate for the changes… yea that says it all
Don’t get me wrong I think Legion will be great, I’ve been playing since beta started and by the time it rolls around I would have played it several more months then other people. Blizzard continues to polish and fix bugs and it’s great.
A lot of the issue just boils down to the fact that you have the artifact from 100 – 110 and balancing is built for that, Just for kicks I started lvling a mage from lvl 1 on beta realm and it’s sad that you basically have 2 or 3 abilities for 10+ lvls but i can understand why that it’s not that big a problem because let’s face it, lvling is super fast for the low levels and they’ll continue to tweak the XP gain as needed (nvm every Legion xpack purchase will come with a boost)