Karamoon

In other words, it's false to say "that greens would replace the hard earned epics in a matter of hours after the expansion hit." A few mid-level epic items with non-optimal item point allocation (like resists on T2) could be replaced with a marginally better blue (piece for piece the blue is better, but you'd lose enchantment and potentially a set bonus so it's not even that clear in practice), but no one replaced (or virtually all) of non-starter epics in a few hours of play, and it's wasn't with green drops in any case.

 

Drunkmunky

I kept all of my T1 until around lvl 66, my T2 lasted until I was 70 and my HWL spellblade was still useful for weeks after I hit 70. My alts in blues however got lots of upgrades very fast
I can't see T4 lasting until 70 myself, T5 & T6 sure will though. I do foresee another last minute honor grabbing rush, perhaps this time I will be smart and not spend the honor on 70 gear but save it for lvl80 pvp gear.

 

Lavode

I am not going to grind honour like that, ever again. It really turned me off bg pvp in a fairly big way. Heck, at the time I would rather have raided. (hard to do without a full raid!) Really, the way to go if you want an edge in starting arena 80 pvp is to do a spot of pvp once in a while when so inclined from now on and just not spend any honour - no grinding should be nessesary to cap out your honour bank over that time horison

 

Anedris

As a healer I my raid gear was obviously pretty useless (and I was only halfway through BWL anyways) but that heal gear such as it was didn't get replaced until about level 65.

Really though I don't mind the gear reset. Gear is there to let me see new raid content. I'm quite happy to regear myself in level 80 5-person instances before going back into the raid game. (Indeed, it'll be more interesting if I do actually have to regear than if my tier 5/6/whatever I end up with gear is still the best option at that point.)

 

Tanoh

I still use [Neltharion's Tear] also, it's really quite sad that Blizzard seems to have forgot how to make good trinkets. In TBC almost all trinkets are yet another version of [Talisman of Ephemeral Power], or some really weird equip proc (eg [Eye of Magtheridon]). How hard can it be to give us a trinket with damage and spell hit? Or damage and spell crit?

Trinkets - Items - World of Warcraft

Pretty sad reading to see how few good trinkets there are. I'm gonna hang on to Neltharion's Tear until at least Illidan, and I'm in a guild that's faaaaaar away from killing him (killed Hydross and Lurker in SSC).

 

Infenwe

Now I've seen it all... A *mage* that complains about trinket choice. I have two words for you: Rejuvenating Gem.

But seriously. Clickable trinkets are awesome for dps since you can pair them with other effects like Combustion, Arcane Power or *gasp* Heroism/Lust.

Constrast that with Essence of the Martyr which most of the time is just +100 (or more) overhealing (unless you're rolling lifebloom of course) becuase you quite simply can't heal more damage than a boss is outputting.

 

Plankel

Tanoh, I decided to trow your stats in the Lhivera's theorycrafting script (Lhivera's Theorycraft Script). One thing I noticed directly from the armory is that you are 18 hit rating over the cap already, which decreases the value of trinkets with + hit on it by a lot. With the gear from the armory NT is only the the 13th best trinket in the game for you

Since you can easily swap out hit for crit I also did the calculations with 148 hit (so NT would bring you to the cap):

dps trinket
62.48 The Skull of Gul'dan
47.81 Darkmoon Card: Crusade (10-minute restack)
43.05 Icon of the Silver Crescent
42.49 Darkmoon Card: Crusade (3-minute restack)
41.76 Neltharion's Tear
41.28 Eye of Magtheridon

NT is still an awesome trinket, but crusade and the icon are both easily aquirable trinkets which are even better (not to mention the icon syncs nice with combustion and BL)

 

◊ Quigon

Kinda misses the point that its comparable to an item that dropped over two years ago.

 

Tanoh

I know I'm over the cap at the moment, I need to resocket some but haven't got around to doing it yet, and also waiting on a few more drops. Hopefully 2.2 will come out next week which makes [Quagmirran's Eye] decent again.

I don't like click trinkets, and all the maths around them are based on that you can use them in a perfect sittuation. Which is far from true in the "real" world, even hit capped you can get a streak of bad luck due to the randomness of random, or you can't DPS during those seconds for some reason or the other. I prefer to have non-click-to-use-me trinkets, which of course is a matter of personal preference.

Just because there are worse examples doesn't mean mine is not valid. I feel for you healers. :>

That was my whole point. It's really weird that it's still so viable, and it's even from BWL (albeit last boss), so it's not even bleeding edge of old WoW raiding either. I mean, I can sort of understand Naxxramas loot still being viable, but BWL?

 

phonogen

hmm im sure Blizzard realize that if they announce the expansion pack to early they will kill the raiding/pvp in the game. So to keep more ppl farming and farming they will hold the info of the expansions’ release so long they can.

 

Zure

Given that Blizzard decided to change the nature of the trinket slot with the Xpac, I don't think it's unreasonable that some items from WoW classic are still viable. Blizzard's development team had the choices to either: allow a few "overpowered" legacy items to remain in the trinket pool; not make the change; alter the old items; or dramatically increase the power of new trinkets above what they felt was properly balanced.

It isn't as if there is nothing comparable to Rejuvenating Gem or Tear, so there is no need to farm the old and cold instances in which they drop. For instance, the blue rep reward Lower City Prayer Book is 70 healing, 9.17 mp5 if you cast 5 spells during its 15 second duration. It's still worse than the Gem in practice, but nothing to crucify the itemization team over.

 

Tanoh

I don't really see how they are overpowered though. They give us what we want, with no gimmick Use effect. Are your average pants that gives hit and dmg also overpowered?

I don't get it why trinkets must almost always have a Use effect.

 

Nurru

Judging by the PTR, it seems like the haste buff on PTR isn't that helpful for Mages. Unless I'm mistaken, on live passive haste is based off the untalented casting time of a spell while on the PTR it's based off the talented casting time. Because of this it came out to roughly the same casting time when I was playing on the PTR with my Mage, but I could be mistaken.

< Aislinana> Why would it be my job to sleep with vontre? Don't I have standards?

 

gunsmithx

If I had to venture a guess, I'd guess it's cause it's more involving to have an on use ablity then just passive stats, plus you can in theory add new and different effects that are more exciting then just boring old stats... but thats just a guess.

 

Coriolis

Because on-use trinket give the player another button to click, another thing to optimize (click during bloodlust/AP/mob vulnerable/etc), and ultimately make it require that little bit of extra skill to play optimally - which is at least in my book a good thing. For DPS classes in particular I think it works out well. For healers, it's pretty meh unfortunately, because there just aren't that many times when you can know that you'll need that extra 280 +healing. Still it has it's good points like refreshing earthshield/healing stream totem as a shaman and of course starting a rolling lifebloom as a druid.

 

Viv

But the "use" effect on a healer's trinket isn't necessarily more +heal.

Which is why [Earring of Soulful Meditation] is much loved by priests - you get passive +heal and an excellent situational spirit boost (which also conveniently happens to be well over 100 +heal for an appropriately specced/buffed priest).

 

Clandestine

You're mistaken. Haste works off the talented cast time of spells on live already.

 

Forar

You struck a chord with me. I completely agree about at least maintaining the 'illusion' of following in the footsteps of greatness, if not perhaps being on the verge of greatness yourself.

While I speak as one of the more hardcore players in one of the more hardcore guilds on my server, that's not saying bloody much. We raid 25 man content 4 nights a week for 4 hours (though often at least one night will fall through for a variety of reasons). There are 2 guilds on my faction ahead of us, and several behind. At 4/6 and 1/4, we are likely the perfect definition of an "average T5 guild". We don't intentionally stack for specific bosses, and mid-instance swaps are often done on the fly as people have to go and / or become available. We've gone weeks without a new kill, and due to personnel issues, even had weeks where we didn't get all the 'farmed' content down.

Being effectively at "Garr" while some (~2% according to WoWJutsu) are revelling in the Ebonroc -> Nefarion range is somewhat disheartening. Not because of sour grapes, I applaud every guild in BT and Hyjal, and aspire to be there myself one day. However, it just feels so far away. Every step forward feels like it's met with two steps back, as we fight to get 25 consistant people on, maintain morale, and choke down yet another night on Gruul and Mags and maybe a little SSC, while we were sick of clearing that trash a few months ago, and we're sick of it now, and oh god why won't these bosses just die?

It's easy to say that we should just get good people, but as a PVE ruleset server and an RP server at that, even as one of the most populous servers of all in the NA clusters (according to WoWRealms.com), we struggle even to find cross-server apps that have anything resembling a notable level of skill and gear. And we're barely even at the half way mark to T5 content, so that must be saying something.

I too feel that the retuning of the raid content to smaller raids with more personal responsiblity was a good change, but I think they drifted way too far to the extreme end of the specrtum with it. All these enrage timers and mechanics that punish guilds that don't do X dps in Y minutes while maintaining X healing and however many tanks, etc, etc, it just all feels overwhelming to say "It's okay guys, pick yourselves up, we'll go fight it again, and it'll be great!" when you're a full tier behind the head of the pack, and feasibly yet another tier is being worked on by Blizzard. As much as I understand that there are seperate teams working on patches and the expansion and on new content, I very much feel that the 2.2 development cycle (as well as a swift, merciless nerfing of at least T5 content) is well overdue, and if they don't have the people necessary working on these changes, they damned well better get some.

Every week, I see more and more people who've learned MC and BWL and more instances (from release) leaving the game or taking breaks or deciding that playing arenas and spending time on alts is more fun than gritting their teeth and getting raped for 4 hours a night. In a perfect world, I'd have 25 competant people that never missed raids, always gave it their all, and never had technical difficulties or made mistakes. This isn't a perfect world, I'm not a perfect player, and while the game might not expect perfection in group composition or execution of strategy, being this far behind makes it feel like even catching up is insurmountable.

TL;DR version: Forar QQ's that raiding requires more than his people (and even his server) are capable of giving, and that 8 months since release is far too long for the vast majority to be stagnating.

 

Nurru

Then I'm entirely confused as to why on the PTR I was having nearly identical cast times with the same amount of haste. I'll have to give it another try.

< Aislinana> Why would it be my job to sleep with vontre? Don't I have standards?

 

Inkm

I think you'd be suprised at the amount of people willing to back that statement.

Probably not on these boards due to the nature of things, but in the general rading population.

Content is just too hard and requires too much effort compared to what's available in both available skill and available eagerness to a huge percentage of the population (ref. wowjutsu).

Back in wow 1.x a smaller core of dedicated players would be enough to 'boost' the remaining 25-30 people trough as long as they at least had some sort of grasp on raiding. In TBC, we need at least 20 focused, skilled, well geared players with specific knowledge about how to handle the encounter.

 

Vohbo

While this is true, a lot of people seem overwhelmed by the raids ahead of them for no reason. We have taken passengers along on all encounters except Archimonde so far and there have been no issues at all having 3-4 people along that are first timers or in general not so good.
I have also seen a lot of problems with leadership, and it's mostly the failure of the leaders that leads to guilds getting stuck.
On the other hand I also see groups slowly getting there. Many people are even now still recovering from the dramatic events of the raid size change and the new class introduction, but slowly guilds are trickling into SSC on my server and things are getting back on their feet.
I also have to say that Black Temple up to and Gurtogg and Hyjal up to Azgalor are definitely not harder to learn than Emperors. That's 9 / 14 bosses in the final raid zone that are going to be available to almost everyone as soon as they beat Vashj/Kael.

 

◊ Quigon

To the previous few posters:
Well it was nice showing up to raids, playing music over vent, and basically screwing around for 2-3 hours and still getting things done. Now adays it is all about focus, no mistakes or you wipe and lose 30 minutes, etc etc. But I'm not sure those experiences require that things be easier - plus the raiding game really is vastly superior today (although I still feel strongly Naxxramas was a much better experience). Most of the oldschool screwing around was because bosses were more forgivable when you made a mistake.

In fact, I think the content in Hyjal/BT is far more pleasant to farm than that in Naxxramas. However, farming SSC and TK25 drives me up a wall - but perhaps that is because we put a few months into it pre-2.1 and I'm bitter.

Maybe the bottom line is more content, and less cockblocks. It is a shame that the hardest or 2nd hardest boss is only midway through progression. And that it leaves most guilds stuck in the worst raid zones. TK25 and SSC are just disasters really.

 

songster

I think you're soured by the pre-2.1 experience. I'm just now getting into SSC and TK25 and loving them, both in aesthetic terms and in terms of encounter design. However that (as everyone else has said) has come at a very high price in terms of lost friendships and less joking around during raids.

 

tedv

My guild also raids only 4 nights a week, although we do 7 hours on one of those days (Sunday), and we're working on Archimonde and Shahraz. I remember a post in another thread that roughly said:

While that could be true, it's best to focus on the things you can solve, not the things you can't. If everyone in your guild does these three things, your raids really will go better:

1) Don't take PvP talents over core PvE talents
2) Use rare gems and high quality enchantments even if they cost more
3) Use consumables, especially flasks and weapon oils

I mean, I'm looking at your guild leader's armory right now (The Armory) and he doesn't even have Malediction as an affliction warlock! He took Improved Curse of Agony over it. One of your tanks, Kamelyna (The Armory), doesn't have gloves enchanted, is using a green quality gem, and has an unholy love of gem set bonuses, taking gems like 8 dodge and 8 hit over 12 stamina. There's a 0/5/56 Resto shaman with the +3% hit talent, and these are just the first three people I inspected.

Is putting three point in malediction really more than your guild master is "capable of giving"? Progressing doesn't require massive amounts of time spent. You just need a greater focus on making choices that benefit the raid.

 

Fellwraith

Consumable use isn't just about flasks and elixirs. Those should be a given if you really are serious about progression.

Chain-chugging mana pots (on every serious attempt past the first "let's just see how this works"), using drums of restoration, weapon oils, etc. are frequently the difference between an "OK" healer and the guy pumping out 1k HPS. The same is true of DPS classes. Some of our really, really good rogues (the guys doing 1.2-1.3k DPS in T4ish gear) are using haste potions, drums of battle and other consumables to boost their output. Is your tank using ironshield pots, nightmare seeds, and other consumables to buy his healers time? The usage of these exceeds any gains from tier 4 to tier 5.

Farming all of that DOES take time, however, with the new daily quests it shouldn't cost you more than maybe 5-6 hours outside your normally scheduled raiding time to sustain it.