Sunday, March 7, 2010

DK screenies





I really like my DK, the gnome playstyle is so fun, and now that she's an engineer, its just a great combo.

Anyway here are some recent screenies.


My Gnome in her roflcopter! Took a while to get that made, not cheap either.



My gnome on a zepplin, how appropriate!




Speaking of gnomes, this is my favorite scene in WOW; its in Trial of Champions raid instance, a gnome summons Lord Jaraxxas, who crushes the gnome "Trifling gnome, your arogance will be your undoing!". Then you have to battle Lord Jarraxas.

And now some non-gnome screenies.




My Aunt Julie running my little priest through deadmines. Thanks Julie!



My guild facing Rotface (Icecrown boss) for the first time.



My guild after a successful gunship encounter (Icecrown Citidal again). This is a very fun and novel fight in which you jump from ship to ship and battle mobs as they come out. Also very easy.




Wednesday, March 3, 2010

State of professions in Wrath

Just a brief overview of what I think of the professions.

Inscription. I love this profession, I have it on 3 toons now, 2 of which are maxed. Yes, getting to max level takes a very very long time (as far as doing the NR inscription research, it will take months to learn everything). However, this is such a huge gold maker you make over a thousand gold an hour on both of my servers. Leveling is good too, you get access to buff scrolls and recall scrolls, so you have 2 hearths every 30 min. Overall very fun profession.

Jewelcrafting. Well, this is pretty horrible to level up. I must say I was surprised as the absolute lack of useful items while leveling. There are a handful of leveling rings/necks that are nice, but usually they are too little too late. However, at end game JC really shines, especially with the epic patterns. The dailies are an absolute pain though, this makes this profession far harder to truly master than others.

Engineering. I just leveled this a few days ago. I love it, i think it would be good for leveling. So many fun options, and great recipes abound. In BC/wrath there are some nice leveling items, including an ilvl200 helm available at level 72.

Tailoring. Easy to level, but you burn through gold. You'll get it back with bags though. Pretty good at endgame, esp BC and wrath have some nice leveling gear. I'd like to see even better gear though.

Leatherworking. Pretty much like tailoring, but more painful! If you dont have skinning or access to a skinner, in some spots its very difficult. A few hidden gems in this prof, and generally pretty hard to make money with (although each prof has nice end game items, the markets are obvious and saturated).

Alchemy. Fun again. So fun, after dropping 450 alchemy on one toon (pre-epic gem xmute), i picked it up again on another toon. The xmutes make this an easy 100g a day gold mine, and everything else is good. There is one spot that is a lose leader, but my 2000g investment I recouped most of it within a few days. I love the discovery aspects of it too, and the specialization is not yet worthless. Woot. This can rival JC or inscription for profit.

Enchanting. Its one of those long slogs. In BC it gets good, but before that, this is a huge gold sink, even w/ leveling. There isn't nearly enough greens while leveling for this to be breakeven. The armor/weapon vellums go a long way though, and due to those this can be profitable, but its a ton of work. Still, there are a handful of enchants that always sell (mongoose, +4 chest, etc). Enchanting in BC was horrible because of all the rep requirements and most of the good recipes were rare random drops from instances. Can you say kill me now? Since the 100% drop rates of BC raid bosses, it makese getting mongoose pretty easy. This issue didn't occur in Wrath, and instead almost everything is bought from a vendor using enchanting materials as currency. I think this is a great move and I finally feel that my max level enchanters are useful, if only for equiping alts. Also this was a major source of profit due to the saronite shuffle, before economies were brought to their knees.

Blacksmith
Actually pretty fun and useful. I haven't gotten this past 150 but already I can see some use out of it with the sharpening stones and rods. However this is significantly more expensive to level than other professions in terms of material and time. From 1-75 you need some 200 copper ore, which is not really realistic given the faster leveling times. This costs are going to have to go way down for cataclysm. For end game, I can see it being a money maker. If i had a nickel for every 'need BS for saronite swordbreakers' i'd be a rich man.

Mining/Herbing/Skinning
As a game with 3 gathering professions, all of these are good money makers and I wouldn't change it. If you start in a new realm with nothing but a level 1 and herb/skin, by the time you are level 10 you should have enough to buy 4 netherweave bags, by level 20 easily enough to afford your mount, and by level 60 easily enough to afford your flying mount. In northrend as of now herbing makes 500-1000g per hour (less now bc of the frost lotus prices decrease). This is in line with the top end professions such as inscription. So it's quite lucrative for these professions as it is, and if you thrown in the inate bonuses (stam/healing, etc), these are very solid and very easy to level professions. The one thing I can see is that in the mid-zones ie level 20-60 keeping up the professions can be hard, since you fly through everything so quickly.

Wrath, my initial global thoughts.

Well, this is an overall review of the expansion.

Professions. Alot of them were reworked to make leveling less challenging/costly. I think the stuff in NR (375-450) was all very good. Engineering finally felt useful, all my professions had great buffs. Now they need to go back and fix 1-300. I also hate the fact that there are basically no recipes, everything is vendor trained. Boring!

Classes. Well, the DK was just awesome, a wonderful, easy to level tank, fun to play with PVP, great for PVE soloing, even replacing the hunter as far as easy. Yet the DK is pretty hard to master, I've played one since it came out and I'm still learning. The other classes feel fine, I only play hunter/dk/druid so far. Hunter changes were definately fun. And the great hunter revamp will probably be as fun.

Druids were just awesome, the preiment raid healer, decent boomkin, challenging cat dps...the bear form just needs a ton of work IMO. Its the hardest yet simpliest to play of all tanks. Aggro generation is just far behind the other three tanks, and you have to massively outgear the dps to avoid getting mobs stripped from you. The other tanks don't really have that issue as much. Either player skill needs to be reinforced, or the other three need AOE threat nerfs, or bears need better AOE threat. Don't get me wrong, its a huge leap forward, but its still far short of what the community expects now.

My expectation is for cat. that the pure role classes like hunters always do more dps than say a druid, and the priest is better than the druid for healing. That doesn't feel like its the case right now, and that's a shame.

Leveling: Really pretty good in wraith, better than BC ,much better than vanilla. I look forward to more.

The LFD thing: Just awesome, its a huge huge boost for blizz to get ppl to do group content easily.

Badge gear: For the most part pretty good, it was nice to get stuff in the beginning to be able to do naxx, and it was nice to not outgear ulduar. Honestly I would like further boosts to trivial content like naxx now. What if the bosses dropped 4-5 badges each, that would make people want to do it again. The weekly raids are a nice step foward, but I like that at the end of BC everyone was still doing kara/ZA then doing their weekly MH/BT raids. That said naxx is way longer than kara, whats up with that?

I'd say much more raids, much shorter. I'd rather have 10 3-4 boss raids than 3 10 boss raids, which is what we have now. The major issue for most players is time. TOC works because its short and if people fail on the first boss, then leave group. But ICC, if you are in the PUG raid you are tempted to go for hours and hours to clear as much as possible. Its just too long to PUG.

Raid releases in general; pretty much everyone agrees that Ulduar was too long in coming and TOC was too soon behind it, which killed it for everyone. I will never see the end of ulduar, i dont have the time right now and only a handful of people are running it for rusted protodrake runs. TOC was nice and short, but the different levels and the long time between that and ICC means that people were sitting on their butts for a long time. ICC is great so far and most people haven't gotten to Arthas. If cat comes in 3 months it would be an appropriate time, but my feeling is that it's not coming until december. How is iCC going to feel in 10 months? Pretty moldy I bet.

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