Raid Mechanics

Sep17

Last week I did Uldir normal with my guild, Erratic, as feral.  I complained about feral already but this raid got me thinking about mechanics.

I’ve raided from ICC until ToT, including some heroic progression before mythics were even a thing.  I can only think of a few mechanics I absolutely hated and this raid seems to be full of them.

The first one, which is probably number one with just about everyone, is the vehicle fights.  Amber Shaper for example, one random person gets picked to go in the Amber monster thing and control it to do something so important if  you don’t do it right, you wipe the raid.  And you get something like 10 seconds to figure it out.  Not even remotely pleasant and most of us just crossed our fingers and hoped we wouldn’t have to do it and get a kill and move on.  Haven’t seen it in Uldir yet though.

Watching stacks of a buff or a debuff.  Nevermind how such a thing is actually possible, but fights where you have to watch your stacks and then do something. Baleroc had one where the healers had to watch stacks of something and swap off because building the stacks was the only thing that would let you heal hard enough to keep your tank up.  So do it wrong and you lose.  Or Majordomo, at one point you’re grouped up and if your stacks hit a certain value, you had to run out of the group BEFORE your exploded.  Do it wrong and you kill the group.   I swear at least 2 fights had that junk.

And of course “group up” and “spread apart” or “join up with one specific person” or “run away from that person”.   Blood Queen Lanathel in ICC was one like this, if she bit you, you had X amount of time to bite someone who wasn’t already bitten or you got permanently mind controlled and ran around killing your raid. A few other fights had things like a line connecting you and someone else, and you either had to group up with them to bust it, or run away from them to bust it.  Neither were that much of a problem but when you’re in the thick of things and you can’t stand next to so in so because of whatever, it’s frustrating.

I really don’t think running feral is going to work for me in raid either.  Babysitting a difficult rotation while watching all that other stuff, is more than I can handle.

Feral Problems

Sep8

Feral is pretty weak right now, and has been getting fairly regular buffs or fixes.  Honestly though it seems like it’s going to need quite the rework and I’m not sure why it hasn’t happened before now.  Many classes have gotten more and more simplified as times goes on and feral just hasn’t.  For example in MoP it was so complicated to play, I literally could not do it.  You had skills to use in front of a target, another for behind, another while only in stealth, that kind of thing.  Then in WoD they baked in a few skills together and I could play it much  better (I keybind around 30 skills) and it was frankly OP.  Now I did not play it in Legion, but I’m maining druid with feral/resto in BFA and it feels no different at all.  Nothing was made easier.

Of course I don’t play ALL the classes but I play a number of them.  I played fire and frost mage, I played hunter MM and BM, I played disc, shadow, and holy priest.  I’ve previously played MW monk, holy/ret paladin, resto shaman, and even rogue a bit.

What gets me about feral compared to other classes, is how complicated it is. To start with, your skills all use energy and you have only 100 to work with.  Some build combo points, but many use/require combo points.  Honestly at this point in the game it’s TOO MUCH.

Here’s an example of a regular rotation, ok? You’re in prowl and you open with Rake (35 energy) to apply the rake bleed and stun the target, that gives you 1 combo point (cp).  Then I would Shred (40 energy) for another combo point, and Moonfire (30 energy) for another cp  and we’re at only 3 cp’s right now.  Maybe we get lucky with a proc that gives us a free Shred and we’re at 4 cp but we still need another to do the BEST.  And mind you, this entire time everything we hit is eating up our energy and we’re tracking the Rake and Moonfire dots.  If we want to then apply Rip, we want to be at high energy and 5 cp. That means doing a bit of auto attack to get the energy up or using Tiger’s Fury. Rip does the most damage at 5cp and takes another 30 energy and takes all your CP to use.

Now you’re probably needing to refresh Rake and Moonfire (65 energy) and work your way up to another 5cp to use Ferocious Bite which eats up 5 cp and 25 energy. If you also took the talent, Sabertooth, it would refresh Rip saving you all that energy and cp to apply it again.  Now, let’s say you didn’t take that, but instead used Savage Roar.  Well in addition to having to keep up Rake, Moonfire, Rip (and possibly Thrash for aoe) you’d have to manually keep up Rip AND use energy and cp to apply Savage Roar.  I’m not sure how it’s even possible to juggle ALL OF THAT.

On top of all that, it doesn’t even stop there.  We also have a stun called Maim which  you guessed it, takes energy, 35 of it, and does the best with 5cp.

 

So basically EVERYTHING you do eats at your energy like crazy  and half of the skills eats your CP and  you have to juggle all your bleeds on top of that.

We’re getting a 5% buff coming up but seriously, just redesign some stuff, please?  I mean it would be like when I get a Flurry proc on my mage, it would empty my mana bar or something.  It’s just outdated at this point.

In my opinion, make it one or the other on some skills.  Ok fine Shred, Rake and Moonfire take energy to create CP.  And Bite and Rip and Maim take the CP.  But ffs, make bite, rip, and maim NOT use energy!  Or… give us Savage Roar as baseline like we had in WoD.  Or something!

So much Winning.

Aug29

I’m not quite 120 yet but I’m getting a little frustrated with the Alliance side of things, as well as some of the Horde stuff. So far we had the Horde completely destroy Teldrassil and basically that entire god damn island.  It’s gone, the whole thing, not only the tree but the rest of it as well.  They also took Lor’danel, which was another little town I use to defend from Horde all the time.

In another cut scene several Alliance ships were chasing a horde ship with some damn Loa priestess on it who calls a Loa dinosaur to push their ship along and then 100 or whatever horde ships show up and destroy ALL the alliance ships.  I think all, anyway, maybe one got away.

Then WE head to the Ruins of Lordaeron to get Sylvannas, but she makes us look like an  idiot over and over, once when she dumps the poison all over the place and we get totally fucked, then another time when we DON’T for some reason, blast her immediately in the face with several arrows, she lol’s and nearly kills everyone by destroying the building.  WTF, seriously?  You know she destroyed the WORLD TREE and killed probably 900+ Alliance right?  You don’t talk to crazy, YOU FUCKING SHOOT IT IN THE FUCKING FACE.  Oh there’s Sylvannas, SHOOT HER.

I’m out in Windshorn hills right now where Horde carpet-bombed the town and is running around killing everyone.  So much winning right Alliance?

Strike a Pose

Aug27

Well, new expansion and a lot to get caught up on.

First off, I ran into this expansions “nooooooope” mob, this guy:

 

This picture doesn’t do it justice.  In-game he’s shaking his head back and forth slightly, very very quickly, it’s creepy as hell.  It’s right up there with the mist lurker guys in MoP and the multi draenai headed dog-thing in Legion.  A big old pile of nope the hell out.

Besides that, a lot of extra poses and animations were added in game, from taking notes:

 

to carrying a falcon

 

standing with helm at their side…

 

 

to walking very much drunk (staggering about instead of running normal but a ‘visual haze and zig-zagging’), holding out an amulet, crossing arms and leaning against things, sprawling on stairs, and being tied with arms behind the back, struggling to get free.  Oh  yes way  back in Cata we had prisoners that walked with their hands behind them but now it’s the person randomly struggling as well.  It’s very interesting seem the game come alive in more ways.