An Open Letter To Blizzard

Dear Ghostcrawler and Co.,

Why do you hate us? I mean it in a seriously joking, angry manner. I mean if it’s not one thing it’s another. It started out with queues long enough for me to go mow my lawn and take a shower and still be in line way back in the days of vanilla. Then you fixed it by adding more servers. You said you were sorry and gave us free game time as a make up gift. Eventually the queue boss raised its ugly head again. Not quiet as bad, but still very bad. How bad was it you ask GC? Well when I would leave work, I would call Wife to and have her go ahead and sign us in. Now mind you it’s about 45 minutes to an hour drive home for me, and usually there would still be a small queue left when I got home. So you fixed it by opening more server transfers.

Now flash forward to 2009. No longer is the ice stone melting, but we have had even bigger problems.It started with the battle.net account merges. You knew we would start merging our accounts to get the battlebot pet. Before the massive increase in battle.net accounts there was the occasional issue with those accounts being able to log in.Then the first Thursday night after Blizzcon, and the new battle.net announcements, it happened. You brought half of the servers down during prime time for emergency maintenance, and in the process you took out a good amount of battle.net accounts! WTF, soon you are going to want ALL WoW accounts to be battle.net accounts too? You have a hard enough time keeping the accounts that have already merged from crashing all the time.

Then there’s the problem with trying to get into the instances. You have said that you have the issue resolved on over 75% of the servers. Funny thing is I spent almost 10 minutes today trying to get into Mana Tomb. I finally said screw it and went to work on my death knight instead. Seriously guys and gals is this what we’re paying for? Constantly getting kicked, bugs left and right, and server instability? Come on you can, and have, done better than that.

 

Please, I’m begging you, on not only my behalf, but also on behalf on the rest of the 12 million players out there. Please fix the issues that we all are having. I know you have a lot of irons in the fire right now, but shouldn’t you fix what’s broken first?

Sincerely,

Gweninu and Sushi

P. S.

Oh, and Sushi also wants you to make spirit beasts as good if not better than devilsaurs.

Cataclysmic Changes Are Coming… Eventually…

BlizzCon has come and gone again, but this year at least I was able to watch some of it live. Seems until they decide to have a BlizzCon out on the east coast, the best I can do is get the live stream and watch bits and pieces. So the biggest news was of course Cataclysm. Lots and lots of changes are supposed to be coming down the pipeline when it lands.

New Races

They were right at mmo-champion, we will be getting 2 new races the worgen for the Alliance, and the goblins for the Horde. I was excited when the rumors of the Alliance getting the worgen came out, and sort of meh about the goblins. Wow.com has the official race class combo line up here. It looks like I was almost right on all accounts. I was wrong about both priests and druids, the puppies they will get both of them. As for shammies… well I was undecided and looks like Blizz said no to puppy shaman. I am excited about worgen hunters and cant wait to see all new hunters with their wolf pets named jr, or sonny or something along that line lol. Now as far as the goblins go, at first I didn’t care about them one way or the other. Now though I’m intrigued by them. The lore and class combos definitely worth taking a look at. However, it’s their racials that really got me to be excited about them.

Hunter Changes

Wow… That’s all I can say. We have some major changes in store for us when Cataclysm breaks. Everything we knew is going to change. Mana, armor pen, haste, agility, attack power, and talent trees nothing will be the same.

Mana is going away. that’s right no longer will we have to worry about running out on mana, or being killed by mana burn. Now we are going to be getting Focus. That’s right, we lose the blue bar and get the yellow bar. Blizz stated that focus will regenerate at a set 6 per second. Haste is, in theory, going to increase the regen rate for us. They have stated that steady shot is going to increase our focus regen from 6 to 12 per second.

Armor pen is going away. So every marksman armor pen build is going away. Instead every class is getting a new stat called mastery. Mastery is going to be tied into your talent build to give you different passive bonuses based on your build.

Attack power will no longer be a stat on gear. You heard me right. Instead we will be going old school =). Us old farts who were here back when MC was the “hottest” thing around remember stacking agility. Back then, we would stack agility and drop other gear no matter what other stats were on it. Why might you ask? Simple. We would get 2 RAP for every 1 agility. Blizz decided to bring back the old way, and I couldn’t be happier about it.

The talent trees are staying 51 points deep. I’m fine with that. I’ve lost track of the times I wished I had just 5 more talent points to finish up a particular build. They also said that they are going to be reworking all the existing talents. Now all they have to do is make beast mastery a more viable raiding tree and fix exotic pets… We are also going to be getting new passive bonuses based on what talents and how far we go into certain trees.

There are even more changes coming, but I’ll get into those at another time. So it seems that good things are coming our way hunters, even though  the world is about to end. So until next time, don’t forget to reload so you don’t run out of ammo.

Finally

Well, Tuesday was the first time since 3.2 hit that I’ve had a chance to raid, and it was worth the wait. We were a little short on DPS, and had to bring in Wife and a few new people to round us out. Everything went very smoothly once we got started for the rest of the night.

The RNG decided to smile on us last night. Nothing was sharded and many upgrade were had. Most importantly though, both Wife and I received big upgrades, hers was way bigger than mine though ;). The Shoulders of Misfortune dropped from one of the trash packs on the way to Kolo, and she won it with ease. As for me, well after almost 12 weeks of killing Kolo, I finally got Giant’s Bane!! Of course I haven’t been able to use it yet. I had the new scope in my bag, so I was ready there. Ammo, ummm…. yeah I kinda forgot to grab the 3 stacks of mammoth cutter out of the bank before the raid last night….DOH! So until next time, don’t forget to reload (like I did this week) so you don’t run out of ammo.

3.2… Well… So Far…

Patch week!!!! Yippee Skippy!!! Now due to time constraints, deliveries, appointments, and the cosmos conspiring against me, haven’t given me any real time to sit down and test anything seriously.  So without further ado I give you my impressions of 3.2 so far…

Pet Scaling

First off lets look at pet scaling. Yes it has been fixed! Yep for those of you who remember back when 3.2 went up on the PTR, I decided to run some tests on it so see how the scaling was looking. Well, lets just say that not only wasn’t I impressed with the results, I was ticked off. At the time on the live realms my pet wasn’t missing but was getting plenty of dodges and parries, that was expected. The most expertise that your pet could have pre 3.2 was 10 points. My pets weren’t missing any melee attacks, we were both at hit cap. Sushi’s spirit strike was still missing sometimes, since my hit rating didn’t put him at his spell hit cap.
Now on the 3.2 PTR that was supposed to have all changed. IF I was at hit cap, then my pet would be at hit cap, spell hit cap, and expertise cap also. They weren’t.  Oh lord were they ever pooched. Pets were missing far more than they should’ve been, it was as if they weren’t getting any of our hit rating or anything that was supposed to scale with it. The expertise that our pets were getting wasn’t there either, the number of dodges and parries were sky high. It seemed they weren’t getting the expertise from the animal handler talent either. I was afraid very afraid…
Well 3.2 has gone live, and from what I can tell that all of the pet scaling issues I have mentioned so far have been fixed. I have been keeping an eye on recount to see how the scaling is working. All I can say is, I have not seen a sign of the problems I saw on the PTR. I haven’t seen a miss dodge nor parry. Now the resilience change is a different story. I haven’t had a chance to get into any BGs or do any arenas with Wife yet soo…

The Stealth Change

Now every patch has a few undocumented changes. Some big, some not so big. Well hunters had two that I’ve found so. When I was finally able to get logged in on Thursday night, I noticed that half of my action bar was missing… YAY stealth free talent respecs!. You have to love when they do that.Now mind you this happened after the patch went live, so it was on Wednesday or Thursday, so it might have been a late add in after the rolling restarts.
The other stealthy change was a pleasant little boost to our DPS. No, I’m not talking about the  change to cat like reflexes. Its the change to animal handler. Since our pets expertise now scale with out hit rating, the expertise bonus would be kinda useless. So, now with 2 points in Animal handler our pets do 10% more damage with all attacks. That’s a nice chunk of bonus damage, and an excellent way to start bringing our DPS output up to par with marksman and survival. Now all they need to do is make Ferocious Inspiration stack with the buffs that increase attack power….

All in all 3.2 is turning out to be pretty good so far, I want to try running the new instances and There is 1 thing that I need…One thing That I must have….

courtesy of mmo-champion

Thanks again Daniel, You were an inspiration in the game and in the blogosphere. And don’t forget to reload all so you don’t run out of ammo.

WABAC In The Day…

Recently I saw a shared topic on Blog Azeroth that caught my attention. It was about the "old" days of WoW and what you remembered . So its time to break out the WABAC machine and take a trip down memory lane….

PETS

Ah yes the good old days of WoW way back when pet skills were a nightmare. How many of you can remember back when you would have to tame different pets to learn different levels of pet skills?Yep there was a time where that lil kitty you got from Barrens or Dark Shore only had a low level skill such as claw. If you wanted to get kitty a higher level of claw, you had to jump through hoops to get it. First you had to stable the kitty; then find a higher level kitty that has the next level of the claw skill; and tame said kitty. That was the easy part… Next its time to take the new pet out for a spin. That’s right, you must fight with the new pet until it told you that you have learned claw X. Yep no telling how many it will take either. You could’ve gotten luck and learned it in 5 fights, or you could’ve been unlucky and not gotten it after 100 fights. Now lets hope that you learned the right level of claw, if it wasn’t the very next level… well time to find the right kitty and go through it all over again.

Pets were nonexistent in raids back then also. It didn’t matter how big the raid was, from the easy 10 and 15 mans to the full 25 and 40 mans, having your pet out was a no-no and a n00bish thing. The pet pathing was horrible, they wouldn’t stay on passive, and  they were as durable as wet tissue paper. The only times that I can remember being told to bring a pet out were, on certain suicide pulls, phase 2 on Ony, and the adds in phase 1 of Nef.

 

SHOTS STINGS AND ROTATIONS

Oh boy, have our shots, stings and rotations ever changed. Back in the old days Arcane shot wasn’t worth the mana it cost, and our stings were a joke. You didn’t use arcane at all, it wasn’t even good for soloing it was that bad. Serpent sting was only for soloing or phase 2 of Ony so you didn’t torque off the locks, since you could only have have so many debuffs on a mob back then. Viper was only good on a few bosses and mobs. Also there were two distinct ways to play, the afk autoshot and still do tons of damage method and using a shot rotation. The huntards that didn’t know what they were doing would just afkautoshoot through the raids and were the forefathers of those who still give us a bad name. Then there was the shot rotation. It was the delicate balance and skill of knowing how to weave aimed, multi, auto, and rarely arcane into a steady stream of death. See back then aimed and multi didn’t share a cool down, and aimed had a casting time and longer cool down. If memory serves me correct, the rotation went auto, aimed, auto, multi, auto, auto. Now if you needed that little bit more and you needed to add arcane to the mix it was auto, aimed, auto, multi, arcane, auto. You had to be on the ball or you would start clipping your shots and all of your timers would be off and your dps would drop.

Do I miss the old days? Well yes and no. There are things that I will always love and parts that I will never love. I have good memories and bad ones too. I learned a lot back then on how to be a hunter and not a huntard. I saw specs come and go. Well until next time kids don’t forget to reload, so you don’t run out of ammo.