Oriental picked the angry face? What does she think Mileena is packing behind the ass mask? Beware, farmers.

forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=106861258&postId=1064925639&sid=1#142

Perfectly said, bravo. They rushed in a hack job fix to counter a specific problem that existed at a specific time in the game’s history. Gruul wasn’t nerfed, the itemization was all sidegrades, and a couple of guilds were attempting things for 6 hours a night every day of the week. Everyone needed to be fully potted and flasked at all times to even try and remove all of Gruul’s HP. Bingo mass complaints about needing to farm for 5-8 elixirs plus flask.

The change is lame and it dumbs down the game. I can understand not making people force for 6 elixirs that all kinda half-stack together, but the limit of one battle and one defensive elixir is asinine. As a Rogue, let’s see I can choose between Major Agility or Major agility, and Major Fortitude or Major Fortitude. That’s fun!

Here is what needs to happen:
1. Remove the “one of each” limit and make it a limit of any two elixirs.
2. Allow flasks to again stack on top of elixirs, but at their current (or slightly buffed) stats and mat requirements.
3. Buff herb collection so that everyone on the server isn’t flying around on epic mounts to snag the single-herb terocone nodes.
4. Put in additional ways/gear to beef up the alchemy specializations so that the yields can continue to improve over time.
5. Leave back in some random/little known items that stack on top of everything else. Rumsey rum was fun to keep and not everyone used it. Now it doesn’t stack so it’s just another useless beer item.

The zone specific flasks are even more of a joke. So now Blizzard, you just want 25 dumb scrubs to zone into your instances, all buy THE SAME FLASK, and just zombie the content. MMOs are about strategy, preparation and hard work. If you balance a big chunk of your game around a tiny slice in time, you look like amateurs.

Show some class and adjust things back the other way in the coming months.

You can find the notes anywhere, and maybe I will add some comments about other parts of the changes, but for now I had to get this up here after reading it again.

“The majority of level 70 epic items have been upgraded to reflect their intended power.”

Smug. How can you phrase it like that? If this power was intended from the beginning then the stats would have been as such. They weren’t, but good game on trying to semantics wiggle out of this one just like the “working as intended” BS of old. You made all the blues and you made all the purples too. You want to change something? Fine. How about being honest instead.

“The majority of level 70 epic items have been upgraded.” or
“The majority of level 70 epic items have been upgraded to provide a more noticeable stat improvement.” or
“The majority of level 70 epic items have been upgraded to provide a rolling start for the grand canyon stat gap we are preparing to Liu Kang arcade drop on your motherfucking ignorant asses.”

Oh and don’t get me started on the hack job consumable situation.

www.thottbot.com/i31331
Ssen, Early February:

Just saw this up on the AH for 1000/1200, thought about it for a few minutes and nabbed it. I like items with interesting procs and effects, and this fits the bill. Procs a lot, I once had a 3 stack going like 3 seconds into a fight. I am liking it a lot so far.

forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=102901976&postId=1053115644&sid=1#22
Ssen, May 22:

WoW’s Achilles’ heels are the horrid/boring itemization, the oversimplified stat system and their outright failure to upkeep/update both of them professionally as the game gets older and evolves in other areas.

Let’s see, I can choose 17 AGI 24 ATP 7 Hit or I can use a 19 AGI 20 ATP 8 Hit item! Such an exciting choice for players! Actually it is digusting, they barely show a pulse capable of breaking this paradigm, and I feel that they will always take the easy balance way out due to many years of RTS patching and the fact that PVP exists in WoW.

They need to start taking some bigger risks, unlink PVP/PVE balance and put in more interesting items/procs/tradeskills/class traits in the style of past console and PC RPGs. The Night Blade was a decent example of such design. No stats, pure proc, an interesting and fun proc that went off a lot, useful, powerful, rare on the AH, talked about, argued about, expensive, impressive to own.

The result? Item is completely trashed three months after the expansion is released. Give a few weeks for many people to hit 70, give a few more weeks for some to start showing up via grinding and instance running, and basically right as people started to use this dagger Blizzard got angry and snatched it away.

Unacceptable. The spammed rhetoric, rumors and mass hysteria that the dagger crushed everything in the game including SSC and beyond daggers was never fully proven. Legions of Malcha/Ripper scrubs came to applaud the nerf, simply because it would make them sleep better at night, not even realizing that identical Blizzard behavior could easily come to beartrap them in the future.

In response to the many TNB posts there has been absolute silence from Blizzard. Casters went nuts after the tailoring stuff was nerfed (and rightly so), and the changes were instantly reverted. There has not been one blue comment related to the nerf of TNB at all. Good game cowards.

To the people who love the nerf of TNB: Stop being so defensive about your current gear and character and be more objective. Realize the broader picture of balance and itemization and take a few moments to think about how many items you actually relish using. Is it many? I doubt it and in fact I think the only thing people do these days is hit C and look to see how many blues they still need to replace with purples. Everyone in the game strolling around like a RE1 zombie.

To Blizzard: It is by your own hand that you are required to fill up massive loot tables, stop tossing out stale bread to the players. It is one thing to blow your load of items by 2007, it is quite another to never put in interesting items in the first place because you are too scared or lazy to balance them properly. If I see another dagger with a random spray of STA/AGI/ATP I think I might burst a vein.

To the theory that a BoE should never be better than a raid item: Arbitrary to the max. This seems to be a popular opinion and it really needs to gtfo. I realize that many of you out there feel very good about yourself and the fact that your guild can kill Kara bosses. Get off your cloud, prags. Not allowing farmers to mass purples by hiding them in instances is good. Not allowing ebay freaks to buy full sets of gear by hiding it in raid instances is good. Not allowing a skilled solo or small guild player to invest in a sweet mainhand to match all his other choice picked BLUES is just flat out sickening to me.

With the servers down my Rogue and her daggers are in server limbo, and once the patch is live this combination of slice will likely never be seen again. I am pouring out some cranberry juice tonight for my friend The Night Blade, because soon he will be retired for good. I care not about the money I spent, I care not about finding a replacement, I am just sad to see him go. The Night Blade meet Barman Shanker, you both will be sharing bank bag 5 for the duration.

www.bvvp.com/wow/images/gruulkill.jpg

I died semi-early so I am not satisfied with my performance.

forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=102780929&sid=1

it appears to be adding the damage as a bonus instead of an actual extra swing.

forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=102910536&sid=1&pageNo=1

Holy cow. All T4 got about +15ilvls

Karazhan loot got about +15 ilvls as well.

Pretty much every epic ever is buffed insanely. Karazhan loot is now an upgrade, chages as I find them.

every gladiator piece I had was buffed. every kara item I had was buffed.

Actually I don’t think I have a bc epic that wasn’t affected by these changes.

QFT. This game’s starting to turn back into its pre-2.0 self, where tier gear was better for PvP than PvP rewards. That’s not right.

So in other words, Blizzard noticed that non-raiders had an opportunity to get some tolerable gear, and that raid gear wasn’t making raiders completely invulnerable. So they corrected this by nerfing all the new crafted gear, and buffing the hell out of all raid gear.

/sigh. I see we can look forward to a return to the days when an incompetent raider could kill any thrill skilled non-raiders just through sheer gear imbalance.

I mean what the fuck, Blizzard. Waited long enough and now it is fine to drop non-raiders back into a smelly pile of crap? Also thanks much for the tiny The Night Blade dps buff. I see that the Kara daggers have been roided up, so now this thing is even more worthless. Incredible.

forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=96160201&sid=1&pageNo=21

Why should a BoE be noticeably less rewarding? Arbitrary logic? WoW is already a silly rat maze where Blizzard makes 99% of the decisions for us and any sort of outside the box thinking is punished instantly. Leaving in a world drop that surpassed other common epics made me smile and it created a neat situation. You cannot pull any sort of “it’s hard to clear Karazhan so all daggers in there should pwn all world drops” BS. This game isn’t hard unless you are doing bleeding edge 25-man content, and even then it’s not the difficulty you are up against but instead rooster blocks.

Yes proc weapons cause balancing confusion, but confusion is good and it creates interesting itemization and discussion about gear choices. Everyone using the same boring +22 AGI +19 STA dagger makes my stomach ache. If the dagger math proved it to completely null out epics that were 2+ tiers ahead, then they should have retooled it. All they did was knee-jerk harpoon the proc rate, which basically makes it useless. The fact it can three stack refresh doesn’t matter if it now rarely two stacks.

I could join a Karazhan or 25-man guild in a second and get brand new purple daggers. I was healing MC in orange Devout with Aquamentas in my offhand. I was doing my guild’s Horde-first MC and BWL kills. I quit WoW twice and the second hiatus lasted almost a year. Now that I am back for BC, Blizzard is pulling a lot of the same BS and restricting player choice, and punishing player innovation.

In general, anyone who applauds the nerf is jealous they never had one and is rubbing salt into the wounds of people who did (in truly juvenile fashion by bragging about lost gold and void crystals). Anyone who is crying about the nerf is largely QQ-ing(this is certainly part of my issue as well), but the nerf complaints are more justified because they speak of a larger problem with WoW. The failure of Blizzard to produce interesting itemization, and the continual onslaught they drop on anyone or anything that performs in a way they didn’t intend the maze to work.

Give players freedom and learn to itemize your own game, Blizzard.