Thoughts on “Meta” Specs & General Updates

My Updates

First up, updates. My mage and my warlock and my priest have all hit 70. It really was easy. I didn’t even have to do any of the pre-patch event to ding them. So I have 8 level 70s. And, once my timewalkers come over, I will have 10 level 70s. I feel like that’s probably 7 too many… But I am set to make some serious cash at the outset! I am very excited about this. More excited than the fact that Warband Banks work (although that is awesome), and more excited about it than the pre-patch event that I dipped a toe into today. Meh. I’m not all about cosmetic/transmog rewards, so I’ll probably just do things through once and be done with it. That gives me a bit of time to relax and not level something for a while.

Okay, enough of my updates. I wanted to talk about THE META. This is a good, old-fashioned Kurn rant, complete with examples to illustrate my points, so get yourself a drink of your choice and settle in for the next, uh, 1700 words and change. :)

The Meta

I don’t know if it’s because I started raiding when we were lucky to get 20 people into ZG for a couple of hours to kill Venoxis, or if it’s because we only ever hit up Molten Core with a full 40 people once (and once, we 27-manned Gehennas!), but I’ve never really understood the whole concept of what is the “best spec” at this time.

Okay, let me rephrase that — I’ve never really understood why people seem to care so much about what is “meta” and what isn’t.

When I started raiding, there wasn’t any room for this “optimization” nonsense. Three warlock curses up on a boss? HAH. We didn’t have three warlocks! We were lucky to have two warlocks on any given night in Vanilla and like 6 warriors who could hold aggro on Garr’s adds while the warlocks banished the other two. It was not a fun time, but we (usually) made it work. Because that’s all we had, you know? We didn’t have the luxury of saying “sorry, resto druid, we don’t have a spot for you because we have 8 priests healing”. We needed healers! We needed everything.

So when people talk about “the meta”, I want to acknowledge that yes, there are likely specs and classes that are performing really well right now. Heck, back in Burning Crusade, Beastmaster Hunters were all the rage. There was a single macro you could just hit over and over and over and over again and boom, you topped damage meters. On Gorefiend in Black Temple, I had to actually swap from my holy paladin to my hunter, Kurn, in order to not mess up the whole raid. I raided on a shitty laptop with an integrated graphics card and things did not cooperate with the encounter. I couldn’t function as a Vengeful Spirit quickly enough to take care of the shadowy constructs that would spawn, and if I was the FIRST person killed, then it was going to be a wipe. So I came in as Kurn (swapped to BM, even though my forever-Marks-heart broke at it) and would feign before every Shadow of Death cast, leaving me able to avoid dealing with constructs and death on that fight at all. And, because I think we had four BM hunters in the same group that night, I did quite well, considering all I had was crafted gear and a couple things from Karazhan.

“But Kurn,” you say, “switching to BM for Gorefiend is playing the meta!”

Kind of. The only reason I did it was because I was incredibly undergeared for T6 content on my hunter, having basically a couple pieces of the equivalent of T5 (from my Leatherworking) and some scattered epics from Karazhan. Had I thought I could keep up with my hunters in any other way, shape or form, I guarantee you I would have gone in as Marks. But the whole point of my swapping to my hunter was to not mess up the raid. So I pulled out all the stops and did everything my hunter possibly could do not to mess it up. In this sense, I played the meta to compensate for crap gear.

The way I see it, when we look at all things being even, I don’t particularly care about the meta and, I guess, that’s why I don’t understand why others care so much. Granted, I’ve never been in a guild that has pushed world firsts. I’ve never been much of a PVPer, so I don’t care if the combo of, for example, frost mage, holy pally, sub rogue, would suck in arenas, if I wanted to play with Majik and Fog.

But that’s the thing, right? Everything has to be even. So when we look at my guild’s first kill of Gorefiend, back in the day, my gear was not even, so I had to step it up with the spec to make sure we had enough DPS. (Not going to lie, the stacks of Ferocious Inspiration, my using a flask and food, etc, really helped.)

So what happens when things aren’t even? Let’s take, for example, Magister’s Terrace, again, back in Burning Crusade. At the end of the instance, you’re flying around the room, trying to kill Kael’Thas, but he’s throwing crap at you and you can hardly stand still. You’re dodging arcane spheres, phoenixes, flame strikes, all kinds of shit. How do you think that went for a holy paladin? Answer: badly.

I could reliably heal three of five people on the fight. Myself, my tank, and one DPS. That’s it. If we didn’t have healthstones from a warlock or didn’t have healing potions or didn’t have bubbles/ice blocks/etc, at least two people would die. And I was in full tier five gear. The gear should have been more than equal to the task. I daresay my skill was, too. But the fight was unfair for a holy paladin, because I had one instant-cast spell (holy shock) on a 15s cooldown. This was before beacon.

I had a priest alt at the time and did the instance in scattered blues and a couple of epics from Karazhan. Healed it without any issues. Like EZ MODE. Compared to my T5 paladin. That is ridiculous.

I did not let one challenging fight have me switch my raiding character, though. Were things harder to heal as a holy paladin than a holy priest? HELL YES. Did I care? No! Apart from dreading Shadow Labs (for Grandmaster Vorpil — the teleporting always screwed me up), and hating Magister’s Terrace, I could do anything any other healer did, barring a battle rez. (Okay, and healing while moving was hard even with Divine Favor and Holy Shock.) But my class and spec had so many benefits! Blessings of Might, Wisdom and Kings! Blessings of Sacrifice and Protection and Freedom! Crits returning 100% of mana cost! (I miss you, Illumination.) I loved the utility of my class. Hell, the very first time I killed the Lich King, both tanks had just eaten it, LK was at 11% (so 1% to go), and I bubbled and taunted the mofo and, yes, then died shortly afterwards when my bubble expired, but I bought the team an extra few seconds to DPS the crap out of him. And we won! And it was my Lay on Hands that crit Dayden as we took down Lady Vashj for the first time!

Show me a priest who can tank the Lich King for 10 seconds without dying. (I mean, apart from the priest who tanked Onyxia, who was shadow…)

The thing is, though, that even if all gear is equal and all instances are equally balanced for all specs of everything, the one thing that is never going to be equal is skill.

When doing most things in WoW, having skill that’s about average will still get you pretty far in the game. If your skill is higher than most people’s, it’ll get you further — mythic raids, high mythic key dungeons, that sort of thing. I still maintain that if your skill is high enough, you probably don’t need the added bonus that “the meta” will give you. If you can pull together your ideal group and it fits the meta, great! But if you pull together your friends and your classes and specs aren’t perfect, that’s okay too. Hell, I did the 45m Baron run in Strat UD in Vanilla in 39 minutes with 2 mages (one frost, one fire), a warlock (destro), a holy priest and myself as a Marks hunter. My CAT (that’s right, my CAT) tanked. No bear, no turtle. A cat. And we did it in 39 minutes. We used shacks and traps and then the mages and the warlock would go AOE down the towers while me and the priest drank. That was emphatically not the best group to do the Baron run with, most of us in a hybrid of T0, T0.5, ZG and possibly a tiny bit of AQ20 gear and a couple pieces of MC gear. We weren’t overgeared for the instance, though our gear was probably higher than some attempting the run. But our group composition was ridiculous. And we did it to see if we could. And we could!

I guess what I’m trying to say in all of this is… think outside the box. Use your class and spec skills to their fullest extent. Did you know that you could cast Divine Intervention on a hunter pet? Well, you could. I can’t advise you do so, but you can definitely do it. Similarly, you could mind-control and sheep the same mob (or is it vice-versa?). Weird? Yes, definitely. But play around with your skills.

Dungeons and raids, even outdoor mobs, they’re all just puzzles. Can you brute strength your way through them? Absolutely. But can you sit there and be patient and do something you have absolutely no business doing just because you thought you’d try? Yes, you can.

Challenge Yourself

Coming this new expansion, that’s my challenge to you. Go do something really dumb on your favourite character. Try to solo something that is not typically soloable. Try to make creative use of your abilities to do something neat. Don’t break the game, don’t get caught making “creative use of game mechanics” to exploit anything. But go do something fun and stupid.

Example 1: I would take night elf hunters to Dire Maul East to kill Lethtendris with me as an application. They would need to make great use of feign death, shadowmeld, track demons, and would need great pet control. If we killed Lethtendris without too much trouble, you were in.

Example 2: I would take dwarf hunters (due to the lack of shadowmeld) to Winterspring and get them to kite… I think it was Azurous, to Everlook, whereupon the guards would help you beat him up. If they did it successfully within a certain number of attempts, they were in.

These are fun and stupid things that test your skill and your ability to think outside the box. Yes, this is a game about the holy trinity of tanks, healers and damage-dealers, but it’s also an open world. The world is yours to explore. Do so! :)

11.0 Patch Issues & Stuff

My dudes (and I use that in the gender-neutral way), are things ever borked in the 11.0 patch! It’s actually kind of funny. Even funnier are the chunks of people who are like “eff this, I’m cancelling my sub” and stuff like that. Hi, is this your first patch? 😂

That said, things are kind of broken at the moment. I can’t withdraw more than like 4200 gold out of my bank’s guild bank? And Warband banks are unavailable. They’ve activated an error message that indicates someone else is using your bank and I’m like, “I assure you, that’s not the case, Blizz.”

The bank is being used by another member of your Warband.

As someone who has been playing this game, off and on, since 2005, this all amuses me. As someone who works in tech, I totally get it. Any time you’re working with databases, like “what items does this character own?” or “what transmogs does this character have access to?” and that sort of thing, you have to be super careful. Err on the side of caution. Always. This is why maintenance days are on Tuesdays — to launch things on a Thursday or Friday is just asking for overtime on the weekend.

To read some of the comments in the blue posts on the forums is to lower one’s IQ by a chunk. Someone posited that the warbanks were linked to the beta and that’s why they weren’t working. Like, my dude, no, warbanks are on an entirely different server, that is not accessible by the live servers. That’s why you have to copy your character or make a new, premade one. Never mind the fact that the servers are not likely to be hardcoded. If anything, there’s probably a database entry saying “Kurn has characters on these 18 servers, so make the Warband Bank accessible to all her characters on all those servers” and there’s probably a piece of code saying “if she creates a new character on a new server, please add that to the list”. Or something akin to that.

Then there are people saying that they’re quitting because the game is super broken at the moment. Well, okay, yes, there are bits that are broken. I can’t withdraw a lot of money from my guild bank right now. Some class/spec combos don’t have their new talent trees fully implemented. All of this, though, is going to be temporary.

I have read that some people have lost achievement progress. I guess it’s possible that I have, too? I wasn’t paying much attention to any achievements, to be honest, but I saw someone lost out on their Molten Front achievements by having them reset to 0 or whatever. THAT would suck. I hated the Molten Front dailies. So what do people have to do there? Well, if the devs can retrieve that data (and, presuming they took backups, they can), the decision is will they? Manipulating data is an extreme pain in the ass. Especially if the data’s format has changed from one point to the next point.

Actually, looking at my armory, it looks as though my progress to the loot 200,000 gold achievement has been wiped. I’m at 0/200,000. Now, to be clear, I spend most of my time making money through the auction house, so even though I make a ton of gold, I do not loot a ton, especially since I stopped raiding. But clearly, I should have more than 0 here.

And when I was logging into various toons on Tuesday, when the servers finally came up, I got “Nagrand Slam” on Madrana. So whatever character(s) of mine had different parts of that done, now has been applied to Madrana. Technically, they have to make sure we all have the right achievements applied to the right characters, too. So this becomes incredibly finicky work if something goes awry and you have to move the data from an old backup to the new format. Trust me. It’s not fun and is incredibly time-intensive, especially validating all the data.

That’s another thing, people are complaining about how nothing was tested, blah, blah, blah. Listen. Any time you mess with data, weird shit can happen, okay? I have seen SUCH weirdness occur in the tiniest edge cases possible. Regular use? No problem. 95% of cases? No problem. That last 5% is where the problems are.

I basically do technical support for a living (although not for Blizzard), and this one day, someone was complaining that a product belonging to the company I worked for at the time wasn’t working. Worked fine for me. I asked the customer what time zone they were in. They were in France, which is UTC+1 or +2, depending on the time of year. I, being in Montreal, am in UTC-4 or -5, depending on the time of the year, so I’m 6 hours back. So I messed with my settings and such and made the product think I was in France. And, sure enough, from 6pm to midnight, and only 6pm to midnight, the problem was visible to me. I switched back to my regular timezone, and there were no issues.

So please trust me when I say that this shit is hard. And that they’re working to diagnose what the problem is, then if they can fix it, then should they invest that time and money into fixing it (if they even can), and then how long the fix should take. And they’re weighing all of that. Does it matter to me if I’m at 0/200,000 gold looted? No. Does it matter to me that I can’t withdraw more than about 4200 gold from my guild bank? Yes. Does it matter to me that I can’t use the Warband Bank? Yes. So they’re going to have to do all kinds of thinking and talking about things to see if they can resolve it, and then if they should resolve it. Obviously, the Warband Bank is going to be fixed, so will the guild bank thing. Those are likely to be technical issues that can be resolved. The achievements? I would say probably, but I’m not sure how easy it’s going to be for them to do.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on 11.0.

In the meantime, I had a hilarious time healing on beta as Madrana…

There’s a lot more than just the first couple minutes, you can actually see me starting to heal stuff around the 15-16 minute mark. Watch me lose my tank instantly. Watch me battle-rez! Watch me panic! It’s pretty funny, I promise.

In other news, going back to professions, I think I’m going to keep alchemy on my warrior and drop inscription. I already have inscription on the evoker, and alchemy does have useful cooldowns, such as something called Blasphemite, which is through Thaumatergy and Gleaming… something or another. Coalescence? So I’m mostly (?) okay with having 3-4 alchemists. I’m going to have to be diligent about transmutes and stuff, though, like I was in Pandaland, where I was doing trillium bar transmutes on 3 toons every day.

So, what weirdness have you encountered? What are you up to before the pre-expansion event?

The War Within – Professions

If you’ve been reading my blog for virtually any amount of time, you know that I get a ridiculous amount of pleasure out of making gold. At one point, I was at like 7-8 million gold? Buying WoW tokens for myself (and my brother) can be expensive, though, so I found myself at something like 700k about 6 weeks ago. I am now approaching 1.1 million gold. And every single copper of that gold was hard-earned. With it being the dog days of the expansion, plus with MOP Remix active, it is damn hard to make any money. I’ve gotten my ~400k through quests, mostly the dragon racing world quests on numerous alts, and very little through the Auction House. And that makes me a #sadmoose.

So I am going into The War Within aiming to be super organized with my characters and my professions. How organized? Well, I’m glad you asked! Here’s a public (view-only) spreadsheet of my toons and professions. That links to the spreadsheet, feel free to make a copy and tailor it (hah, get it? Tailor?!) to your own needs. And here’s an image.

A screenshot of my War Within Professions Spreadsheet

It’s not final yet. Like I don’t know that I need 4 herbalists and 3 miners, frankly, much less two scribes and three alchemists. Let’s break it down a bit.

Kurn is, as always, going to stick with skinning and leatherworking. The couple of times I dropped skinning for mining, I eventually picked up skinning again. I am not going to drop skinning again, even though you no longer have to go through allllllll the prior expansions again to get to max level.

We’ll come back to Madrana in a minute, because she’s pretty much the outlier.

My shammy (not the baby shammy, that’s a whole other shammy!), has generally been the farm character for Madrana’s alchemy and jewelcrafting since, uh, 2007? 2008? And, I think it was back in Cataclysm, when you were able to gain experience by herbing or mining, I was like this is the ideal way to level a character I don’t know anything about. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve grown accustomed to my shammy. I spent a lot of time being enhancement/resto and, in more recent years, elemental/resto. But I spend almost all my time on the character just farming herbs and ore. And, because of that, I get experience and I get to level and it’s grand.

Now, because of the experience one gets while gathering, I have decided that I want most of my characters to have at least one gathering profession that doesn’t require killing anything — so herbalism and mining. This explains my evoker (which I still don’t know how to play), my warrior (which I can kind of play but don’t like to play), and my warlock (no idea beyond incinerate and chaos bolt, tbh).

But I sort of know how to play a mage and I know how to play my “grandbaby” paladin (I’ll explain in a minute) and I know how to play my baby shammy and I don’t super know how to play a priest… but I know how to play Madrana.

So because I know how to play Madrana, she can just heal her way to 80 or whatever. I could theoretically do the same with the priest. I just go disc and bubble things, right? hahaha!

And I could do the same with my mage, but DPS queues are still a thing, so I thought, no, I’ll make him a miner, which is currently is. But I also wanted him to be a tailor. So that’s how I started Dragonflight with him.

As to the grandbaby paladin, this is my Dark Iron Dwarf paladin I rolled on Mists of Pandaria Remix. It’s not my “baby” paladin who is, I believe, still sitting on Skywall. I rolled the character with the goal for him to be a miner and a blacksmith, so I could drop blacksmithing on my warlock and pick up mining to feed his engineering. And I could absolutely heal on the grandbaby paladin… but honestly, am I going to? Probably not. So mining to level makes sense.

Then we come to the baby shammy. This is another character I rolled on MOP Remix. She is 65 presently and is destroying things on Timeless Isle (sidenote: DANG, that frog poison still sucks!!!). She is also…

… a goblin.

LET ME BE CLEAR, I STILL HATE THE HORDE. It makes me feel sick to turn in quests to Garrosh and to kill Alliance soldiers. I loathe the Horde with every fibre of my being.

So why did I roll a Horde toon?

I rolled a goblin for the racial. Goblins receive 20% off normal vendor prices when the vendor is associated with a rep. It’s the same discount you’d receive at exalted with the rep in question. And goblins get it as baseline. Note that it doesn’t mean you get exalted automatically or that you get access to exalted goods or other things behind a reputation barrier. It just means you get the 20% discount.

So I rolled a goblin (and would have done so if it was Alliance too) for this discount. Do you know how much a single Draconic Vial costs? FIVE GOLD! Ridiculous!!! A single Primal Flux? FIFTEEN GOLD. HIGHWAY ROBBERY!!! Is it the cost of doing “business”? Yes. But eff that noise. With Warbands coming in about a week (July 23), you will have the ability to share a Warband bank with your other toons — even cross-faction ones. So maybe my warlock needs like 100 Primal Flux. That’s 1500 gold. But with the goblin? 1200 gold. It’s not necessarily worth it for 5-10 reagents, but when you scale it up? Hell yes, it’s worth it. And if I can level a toon easily (and holy COW, is it easy!!!), why not do it? (If I feel like it, I may roll an Alliance druid as well. We’ll see.)

So my goblin will not be doing much apart from buying stuff for my Alliance toons, but if I want to, she’ll be able to level via something. I am not convinced I want her to do herbalism and alchemy, but is it ever bad to have a lot of herbs? Is it ever bad to have “too many” toons who can do transmutes? My thinking is no.

Still, I have beta access, so I’m going to check in on some of the things each profession can do before I finalize everything here. I may ditch inscription on the warrior and keep alchemy and get herbalism instead of the other way around. We’ll see!

And speaking of beta, have you seen my latest YouTube videos? Here’s a link to the playlist of my War Within Beta vids.

So, tell me, what are you planning to do with your professions and characters in TWW?

The War Within – I caved

Like, okay, I was 100% going to buy the expansion. I have bought all the expansions. I did not foresee myself springing for the top-tier pre-order deal, though…

AND YET.

The interesting thing is that I have some PTO planned for the week of launch (unintentionally coinciding, I swear), and so I saw the three days early access and I was like “well, shit” and coughed up the cash. This also included a 70 boost and access to the beta.

So, current state of All The Things for me:

  • Kurn, Madrana, shammy, dragon are all 70, plus now my warrior (who was 41) is 70 as well
  • Priest and mage are 60 and 61, while warlock is 64
  • Dark Iron Dwarf paladin is 70 in MOP Remix
    • I have achieved my original goal, but I don’t think I’m done with remix yet
  • I have created an 80 hunter skinner/lw on beta

As such, I’ve also played around with professions in beta, although just about an hour’s worth so far. The NPC crafting orders are a weeeeee bit fucked. I did report all these things, btw, but:

  • Lua errors when selecting NPC crafting orders (with 0 addons/etc)
  • A request for a rank 4 item … when the item only goes up to rank 3, so it’s literally unable to be completed
  • Issues with taking orders when I didn’t have the ability to add the reagent in that I could take the order and then had to cancel it

Hilariously, I already hate one of the NPCs. He gives me the shittiest mats (if he gives any mats at all!) and then expects a rank 3 (max rank) item! Like get fucked, my bud. hahaha.

Anyway, things I want to play around with on beta include other professions plus delves. I haven’t even left the old world yet, so some exploring would be nice. I’m not planning to do too much testing because when you then do it over and over again on live, it’s SO BORING. Like I am ALREADY not looking forward to dealing with the quest to open the warband thing. (I gave some feedback on the very low drop rates for the items, but it’s ultimately a short-ish quest chain and it’ll be fine even if they don’t buff the drops.)

So it bodes well for the expansion for me so far. I’m hoping to do up a proper spreadsheet this weekend and I’ll share it with you folks, so you can see just how stupidly organized I try to be when I take things seriously!

What are you all up to?

Mists of Pandaria Remix Thoughts

I wasn’t going to take part in the MOP Remix. I really wasn’t. I did not like the pandaland expansion. I think the thing I liked most about it was farming Zandalari Warbringers.

And yet, when I realized levelling characters would be trivially easy and those characters would end up on live after Remix ended… I was intrigued. You see, I have like seven toons. Kurn, Madrana, a shaman, a dracthyr evoker, a mage, a priest and a warlock. Do I know how to play the evoker, the warlock or even the priest properly? Absolutely not. In none of the specs. So why do I have them?

Kurn is a skinner/leatherworker.

Madrana is an alchemist (since her day 1) and a jewelcrafter (since Burning Crusade). (Here’s my second-ever blog post and it’s about jewelcrafting!) I had dropped herbalism to pick up jewelcrafting.

The shaman is a miner/herbalist and started out as a draenei and has always been my farm toon for Madrana. (She is now a male dwarf.)

I had to roll a dragon this expansion because, uh, dragons. My dragon is an herbalist/scribe.

My mage is a miner/tailor. I’ve had this mage since my brother convinced me to create one with him on a PVP server. Once I hit 30 and got WTFPWNED every single time I logged in at the Southshore inn, I transferred. Fog’s warrior transferred later. This mage started life as a human female and is now a dwarf male. I LOVE the dwarf male emotes, okay?

My priest is an alchemist/enchanter. She came to be because my brother “needed” a healer as he levelled his paladin. He tanked. I “healed”. (I literally put him on follow and threw out some heals and read or watched TV while we did this, much of the time.) The most exciting thing the priest has ever done was a full BRD run with my brother tanking after just the BRD prison popped. My brother was like “that’s IT?!” when the instance officially ended and asked if everyone wanted to keep going. We did, so we cleared the instance. And then I read someone’s blog that sounded SUSPICIOUSLY like our instance run! The blog is now offline, but it was sisters, I believe? Who were a shadow priest and resto druid? Hots’n’dots or Dots’n’hots or something like that.

My warlock is the result of having had a free upgrade to level 90. And I also decided to pick up Blacksmithing and Engineering. That was a heck of a weekend, let me tell you. hahaha.

But I hate the warlock. I really do. He’s presently level 64 and has only levelled via profession quests.

So I was like, okay, if I can level easily to 70 and that toon moves to live in a couple months, just before the War Within launches… then I can pick up mining/blacksmithing on the new toon and drop blacksmithing on the warlock and pick up mining and keep engineering.

For those of you keeping track, that means:

Kurn: Skinning/LW
Madrana: Alchemy/Jewelcrafter
Shammy: Mining/Herbalism
Dracthyr: Herbalism/Inscription
Priest: Alchemy/Enchanting (still needs levelling to 70)
Mage: Mining/Tailoring (still needs levelling to 70)
Warlock: Mining/Engineering (still needs levelling to 70)
New toon: Mining/Blacksmithing

So I rolled a male Dark Iron Dwarf paladin. (They have +5 to Blacksmithing.) I’m levelling him ret in the world and holy in instances. Here, have a look at me healing 3 MOP Remix dungeons!

MOP Remix is interesting. I don’t know that I like it for the experience, but another toon to 70 without too much trouble? Doesn’t sound bad, frankly.

So are you in Remix? What have you done? What should I not miss out on?

Oh, and, please note that I am no longer active on Twitter. I have moved to Blue Sky:

https://bsky.app/profile/kurnmogh.bsky.social

Come say hi.