I managed to hit 90 on my warrior last night. Overall, I would say that the entire process probably took roughly 4-5 nights altogether. Ultimately, my path consisted of doing the Jade Forest in its entirety (85-87), half of Valley of the Four Winds (87-88), Kun-Lai Summit (88-89) and finishing off with probably around a quarter complete in Townlonge Steppes (89-90). Along the way, I leveled mining from 525-600, which probably contributed to a reasonable amount of experience and found occasional treasures and rares for a few extra experience. All things considered, if I didn’t have mining, I’d probably still complete about a little more than half of Townlonge Steppes and get to level 90 with the experience reduction.
Right after that, I immediately tried to craft and buy as much gear for my warrior as possible. As of now, she uses the fury spec but I’ve been considered switching her to arms since it can be pretty difficult locating a second two handed weapon. I managed to get her enough gear to put her into Mogu’shan Vaults but sadly even with the coin re-rolls, I ended up getting nothing. I considered re-doing both sections but I might just wait for another week.
It did feel pretty odd to get nothing, especially after the drop increase and unlucky streak bonus. For that aspect, I really wish that Blizzard incorporates some sort of visual cue similar to the Determination buff just to indicate that the system recognizes your unlucky streak.
In the meantime, I might try to get into a Sha of Anger and Galleon raid. I did give Oondasta a try, but my server is extremely lame after Monday/Tuesday when it comes to that boss. So hopefully, at the very minimal, I’ll get into those two groups and a Nalak group.
I did give the Scenario for entering the Isle of Thunder a try. It’s definitely rough as an undergeared fury warrior and I ended up dying to the colossus troll, who just had way too many hit points. I think my warrior needs quite a bit more gear before tackling that section but it makes me realize that the Isle is pretty nasty and should probably set some sort of gear prerequisite, at least to do the scenarios. I’ll return to ranting on the Isle of Thunder in a bit but I will say that the single person scenarios in general suck shit except for the treasure room.
At any rate, outside of finally getting Engineering to max level, I was somewhat disappointed for the first week as a fury warrior. I might just hold off on doing more with her until I can get her better gear. Instead, I plan to turn my attention to my mage. The nice thing about my mage is that I had been crafting quite a bit of blues beforehand. So she had a fair amount of hand-me-downs from my Shaman. Then when I discovered I had an excess of Windwool Cloth, I sent it to her to raise her tailoring skill. It didn’t take long to max that out, especially in crafting more blues.
So now, I feel she’s more or less ready to be leveled. In general, after focusing on working on my warrior for the past two weeks, I feel that it’s just a great time to level to 90. This patch really doesn’t offer a lot overall in terms of new content so it’s a good time (especially if you’re an alt-a-holic) to play catch up before the next patch.
Going back to my mage, I started exploring specs to try out. I was using arcane but don’t know if that’s going to be the best leveling spec. It seems frost is near the top of the DPS meters right now and traditionally, it had been the best leveling spec. However, as I started examining the rotation, one thing caught me offguard: why isn’t Blizzard in the AoE rotation anymore?
Ever since I started playing a Destruction warlock, I kept in the back of my mind how AoE had changed somewhat for warlocks as well and the types of things Blizzard attempted to incorporate into the play style. But this change got me really wondering where the hell the developers in Blizzard are taking this game. I mean, a lot of classes are experiencing changes in their fundamental design and not all are really created equal. But this just goes to show how far off the game is going from the original ideas set within. It feels as if the developers are overcomplicating a lot of the game unnecessarily and just tossing shit against the wall to see if it sticks rather than looking at how traditional RPGs setup a lot of things like AoE.
So in some ways, I’m looking forward to playing my mage and in other cases, I really am not all that happy. I like playing different classes to experience the different styles. But slowly it doesn’t feel that way. Although I started that each class is not created equal, what I mean by that is that they are not created equal in a good way. In fact, the differences really aren’t fun differences but more like just figuring out how one class/ability translates into another. It doesn’t really make classes feel special, more like a key re-mapping.
But I think the thing that’s bothering me more and more is the general direction of the game. I really hated patch 5.2. I felt that the content shifted in the wrong direction and the intent especially felt malicious. Certain fights are okay in the end once you get used to them as in the case of raids, but the patch overall felt constrained in some way. For instance, the tunnel vision funneling experience in the Isle of Thunder where they really made the zone a pain in the ass with high density mobs, more dailies, tons of useless elites (I’m not talking about rares) and slow as molasses being shit from your asshole movement around the island without flying. I’m not saying everything was bad but it’s just drudgery. Maybe the developers want you to feel miserable from an atmospheric point of view but it’s just not fun.
Then there’s just more and more emphasis on mechanics for everything. I think the problem is that once you do it once or twice, it’s fine. But after a while, it’s just a horribly painful experience you have to endure over and over again. And once again this goes into my complaint about how classes are not created equal. Some excel quite well for certain situations. Like hey there’s an AoE encounter, great so my DK or Balance druid is going to slaughter things mindlessly. Put an enhancement shaman on it, and oh look you already killed that mob with the flame shock, so you can’t use lava lash to ignite everything else and can’t really hit your AoE spell. I mean, do the developers really test these things out with every single spec and gear type just to make sure you can do it? Yes, I know you have these little healing potions all over the place, but what if you didn’t know that? Also, why scenarios to unlock aspects? Worse yet, why single player scenarios? What’s the point? It’s just more isolated encounters that really don’t make a lot of sense (again the treasure room one is the only place I currently enjoy)
Specifically, when it comes to these scenarios, I know it’s a gear issue because I’ve done them on 5 of my other toons just fine. But again I just don’t understand why there isn’t something to at least alert you or prevent you from entering if you don’t meet a certain level of expectation. I mean they already impose such restrictions on heroic scenarios, heroics and LFR. I have heard other people handling these things just fine with undergeared toons but it just feels really sloppy and you can tell that it really becomes conditional. Take the air battle fight for instance. If you’re a beastmaster hunter, you’re fucked because you pretty much depend on your pet to be out to do anything. So why put a stupid encounter like that up in the first place?
Ultimately, I think my real point in this rant is the whole notion of “bringing the player not the class” idea. I’m fine with this notion but in RPGs you have classes that can handle different situations and are designed for that purpose. The “bring the player not the class” idea feels as though they’re essentially trying to eliminate class mechanics to equalize everything to a level playing field. Yet they’re failing miserably because these ideas really aren’t well tested on each class/spec. There’s too much of an underlying assumption that the player will intuitively just be able to switch specs right in the middle of a situation just to handle a single encounter. I really hate this idea for a variety of reasons. One is that you may be too tied to your gear in your spec. In that troll situation, I wanted to go protection spec but couldn’t because I lacked the gear. In another case, what if you were forced to switch to a spec you weren’t familiar with on the spot because you really didn’t have a choice.
But that’s why I feel the game is becoming a big mess. I think a while back specs actually had a purpose. Take as an example, the hunter class. Traditionally, you had BM as the leveling/solo spec, survival for raiding then marksman for PVP (and sometimes the two swapped). While you could switch them a bit, there generally was a pretty clear distinction in purpose when you employed a spec. Right now, it’s just flavor of the month and people choose whichever spec gets buffed for a particular patch.
At any rate, this wasn’t encouraging at all. Very frustrating but we’ll see.
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