I'll have to get back to you on that. I've got the client downloaded but the instructions for setting it up are evidently in their forum, which has been down all afternoon.
Okay! I figured out how to get it working, and I've got a Troll mage named Xoldi ready to melt/freeze face. It's getting a bit late here but I reckon I'll do some of the "learn to press buttons" quests this evening at least.
Yep. Emulated realms that charge money tend to get the everloving shit smacked out of them by Blizzard in short order. Right now it's a little bit of a pain in the butt to figure out how to connect since all the info's in their forums and the forums have been down for over a week, but Elysium's instructions plus the Light's Hope realmlist worked for me.
I think professions such as blacksmithing, leather working, and tailoring being viable again is awesome. Could never get past the fact that they turned useless after Wrath. Though I was engineer/jewel crafting for my main. The engineer items saved my butt quite a few times. They also failed spectacularly in a few raids that caused some wipes. Particularly the boots..
one of the greatest failures of the World of Warcraft was their inability to balance raid/crafting/PVP gear, the PVP and raid gear would alternately be better than the other, or simply easier to get for minimal loss, and the crafted gear would almost never be worth the effort of crafting them. Post vanilla. Vanilla had it's own imbalances, but that was more due to an imperfect understanding of how the stat relationship would impact overall gameplay.
It didn't help that they kept adding weird stats and modifiers that make there be no BiS. When I started it was easy to figure out if something was an upgrade since there were well-documented crit/haste breakpoints to shoot for and it was otherwise just a question of if the item has more of the stat your guy needs. Now I have to sim everything and I'm still not confident the sims are right.
My problem with the higher level crafting for gear is that by the time you could craft the piece you already had something better or a equivalent. Nice for people that want to boost a new alt or something. Which is why the Engineer helm was one of the better items for starting expansion as it was much easier to get compared to others because of it being a engineer only item. I remember getting them by the 2nd week each expak. I wonder if the 2nd time around they will balance things better. One of the more fun things in late wrath was to do alterac valley in full 25m heroic gear as a elemental shaman. They took the cooldown away from chain lightning at that point. I would normally go to a choke area that was having problems and just let it rip, just watching the double and triple cast lightning arc through 15 to 20+ people was the best thing ever as they would all just die in about 20 seconds. A fire shock and lava burst was instant death for most. could get anywhere from 50 to 100 kills a game. the reason for no more BiS is because of how dumb down the game is now. No more hit or expertise to juggle. Now it is just haste, crit, and mastery? I'm told main stats on gear change based on your spec now? is this correct. It is to the point of anyone can use anything so nothing is particularly special to any one class or spec. When everyone is special no one is special. with that being said when transmog came out I instantly changed all my stuff to tier 2 shaman.
The theory is if you can't for whatever reason do progression raiding you can still get good gear from other sources, albeit more randomly and grindy. In practice though it means raiders have to do unfun things they massively outgear because there's a chance they'll get some crazy i955 titanforged thing that blows the stuff they actually had to work for out of the water. I don't really miss hit or expertise since they were the ones the game never really told you you needed, and were the number one reason I'd see people struggling who could otherwise play perfectly fine. Plus who wants to get hit you'll never really use just so you don't miss a taunt or an interrupt? Main stats do change by spec, but that's not really a problem. Items give you whichever one you need so if you want for example to offspec Enhancement you don't need a whole separate set agility gear. The actual problem is your secondary stats priorities are different, and it can make such a significant difference that something that looks like a big upgrade to your primary stats is actually worse because of the secondary stats. This is exacerbated by all the items having random secondary stats, so that crazy i955 that you lucked out and got can still wind up being complete shit. I find the whole system pretty confusing and I ended up just gearing for healing and not giving a crap that I do garbage DPS. I know some people have a lot of fun making spreadsheets of their gear but I'd greatly prefer to spend the time smashing things with Doomhammer.
Probably not but the timing's a bit interesting since 8.0.1 just landed today and they're teasing vanilla instead.
sounds like wrath just minus hit and expertise still. Is spirit still a thing for healers? secondary stats only matter at the start of a expak as they add the most initial benefit then. As time goes on the main secondary stat hits a soft cap, this is when the number crunching begins for which secondary stats take over when a cap is met. for elemental in wrath it was hit, haste, mastery, crit. while enhance was hit, crit, mastery, haste. haste was priority being a caster as the two main sources of damage require casting and fireshock dot is affected by haste. More dots more chances of instant cast lava burst and auto crit as fireshock was on target. Since you should be auto criting with lava burst, crit normally was last in line after haste and mastery soft caps are met and somewhat dependent on trinket procs. For enhance crit was priority because more damage was physical based and you got haste bonus for criting with windfury. I think mastery turned priority in cata as they changed some attacks from physical to nature. When that happened I think it was mastery, haste, crit. Are you saying that secondary stats on items are now randomized when dropped and are no longer a set amount to a item?
They're random in the sense that every item has a stat budget that's based on its item level. So that i955 tchotchke will have the same primary stats as every other one, and the secondary stats will add up to the same amount, but you'll get two selected at random and the one you get the most of will also be selected at random. Softcaps are gone, and there are no breakpoints. If you benefit from haste you'll always benefit from more haste, which I think is good since those are things the game didn't teach you--you had to just somehow find out about them. The trouble is, since items have random secondary stats, if your next best stat is mastery and an item has enough mastery, you can't just google and find out whether it's an upgrade, you have to either guess, or have an addon, or do the numbers yourself to figure it out. Spirit's also gone, as is mp5. If you dd you'll only ever oom if you go balls out for too long, which seems fine to me since that's kinda always been how it was and they just got rid of the stat. For healers you'll only ever oom if somebody fucks up really badly which seems less good. I basically just stand around refreshing Healing Stream Totem and a couple AoE heals that they've added since Wrath and then just spot healing anybody who isn't immediately topped off by one of those. There's no reason to ever not have those passive heals up, which is a little boring. That said, BfA just landed and I haven't tried it yet so things may have changed in the last 24 hours. All in all this stuff doesn't break the game, it just makes it less fun than it could be, and a little frustrating sometimes. It's one of the reasons that classic realms have me jazzed, since no doubt ten years ago some other nerd was writing up a rant like this about whatever changed in Wrath that was way better in BC. I'm looking forward to playing all the old expansions, warts and all.
So item drops are almost like diablo. I guess they wanted more replay value so they have you trying for the same items over and over till you get the right one for maximum dps. It just seems so much more streamlined for casual play and no matter what you do will get stuff thrown at you.
