Monday, December 1, 2008

WOTLK raiding: first impressions

A few random thoughts after two weeks:
  • Hunter damage is out of control: it never drops under 2500 DPS and during one pull in Naxx where we aggroed three groups, the top hunter clocked at 9000+ DPS. WTH? I can't believe this would be working as intended. My first reaction would be that it should be nerfed, but the crazy hunter DPS is probably a big factor in the fact that Naxx seems so easy. I would be curious to see Blizzard's official position on that.

  • Mages and Warlocks are getting very rare. I'm not sure how widespread it is, but our lead Lock told me he didn't like where the class was going and that he was tired to be a one-button raider, so he's leveling a Death Knight. As a matter of fact, we joined up with another guild to do a quick Naxx 25 run and we had zero mages, zero warlocks and one rogue. And five paladins.

  • Naxxramas is easy and varied (at least the first four wings). It's a great entry-level instance which will probably become as popular as Karazhan, although it's simpler and less demanding on gear. Sapphiron and KT will require a bit more work, though.

  • Same remark for the Obsidian Sanctum, which was already a lot of fun to raid in the beta. I really love the fact that not only can you pick the 10 or 25-man version, but you can also decide how hard you want it to be (for people not familiar with this instance: it's very short, features three mini-bosses and one main boss. Each mini-boss you leave alive makes the main boss harder to kill, but he will also drop more loot if you pull it off. Same idea as ZG, although I don't remember if Hakkar dropped more loot depending on how many of the other bosses were still alive).

  • Another interesting idea from Blizzard: Archavon. He's the only boss in an instance that is accessible only to the faction that controls Wintergrasp and he drops some pretty cool stuff for an easy fight (we killed him with a 25-man pug).

  • It's been barely two weeks and I already have 1 T7 and 1 T7.5 piece. I'm honestly not sure how I feel about it, it seems like it should take much longer. As for the rogue class, I find myself back in the top dps meters now that my gear is becoming decent, but the various theorycraft articles I read are scaring me (for example, I'm still sitting at 230 hit but the cap seems to be at least double that... yikes).

  • I'm reading a lot of positive things about Death Knights at 80. I've never leveled one beyond 60, but I'm getting more and more intrigued to push one all the way to 80 now, more so than my existing 70 characters.

  • The dailies are much more scattered than in TBC but fun overall. I'm exalted with one faction already (yay championing) and by now, there is no loot that any of these reputations will get me, so I'm going to focus more on useless stuff, such as another mount+pets (Oracles) and the fishing pole or the penguin (Kalu'ak).

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Cedric,

nice article...I too am going through the 2nd XP, making observations about class changes, raiding, pvp, DK's, leveling and the overall game experience. I have a rogue as my main. To your point about having class diversity in raiding (or lack of), I am finding that Blizzard is has made certain classes *almost obsolete* in raiding such as the rogue.

In our guild for example, DK's, Ret-Pallies top the DPS charts, right in front of druids, shammy's and Locks. I typically range in the middle DPS tier right now despite recently hiting 80. Once I get trick'd out in epics, I'll re-evaluate but to me, the plate classes mentioned above have the complete package.

Blizz makes me think/feel as if the only place for a rogue is in PVP land, which by me is fine since thats where I spend most of my time anyhow.

Anyway I look forward to more writeups on your blog...

Regards,
TJ
>shameless plug sneakyassassin.blogspot.com<