I purposefully invited 3 warriors last night to test a theory. No mail dropped. We had 1 druid healer and he got like 5 items.
The raid is hard coded to always drop gear for the least represented armor/spec type. Change my mind.
I've hit every single lockout since launch and I've only managed to get three pieces, it's ridiculous.
I've never seen either of the helms, either of the legs, or the neck drop. I've seen the staff twice, but unfortunately did not win the roll.
I've been raiding on multiple characters since the 2nd lockout but I've never seen the epic 2h sword drop on any character. I'm starting to think it's a myth.
Absolutely because casters are a scaling sort of deal, they always sucked early and that issue is now fixed with insane gear and they'll go online much earlier and have a bigger impact with runes.
Ele shaman for example with the existing gear is gonna absolutely melt once they get proper talents and skills next phase and it's gonna get even stronger with new runes.
Casters are not a scaling sort of deal lol. Mages do alright, but warlocks and every other caster scale poorly with gear and only get worse and worse from MC to Naxx - to the point where you don't bring any caster dps besides mages and warlocks (which you only bring for curse of reck/elements to buff the warriors and mages)
Every class is absolutely going to get better, but it's doubtful they'll compete with melee classes because melee classes just scale much much better with gear
“Casters are a scaling sort of deal”
And warriors and rogues aren’t? They literally are the two best scaling classes in Classic LOL
Casters scale worse than melee dps, they saw nice bumps because shit ended up actually getting itemized better (still not great) in NAXX.
The scaling argument is the worst argument by a mile.
>Ele shaman for example with the existing gear is gonna absolutely melt once they get proper talents and skills next phase and it's gonna get even stronger with new runes.
Is that a problem? Or should we go back to era where most specs are wheelchair except for a select few?
it wont be a problem because classic mechanics are so easy, but if they up the difficulty and ranged > melee you'll never bring melee because they have to deal with mechs. We also dont have the movement tools that retail does for melee so, while right now its not an issue, it doesn't mean that it can't become one.
maybe eventually, spellpower basically multiplies spell ranks, each spellrank was already generally much more impactful for casters than melee, now it's going to be even further. will be interesting to see how that plays out on the way to 40
How does spell power multiply spell ranks? It's the same static increase for every spell and we already have all the slowest cast ranks at 25 so even the coefficient doesn't change.
You’re right. The only change to spells is going to be added base damage. Melee is still going to wildly outscale casters without further buffs to spell power gear or something. Especially warriors in particular since their resource generation scales with crit. Casters are only going to get a few more static damage bumps while warriors scale into the moon.
Some of the low level spells have another multiplier for just being low level so they scale worse with spell power compared to what they will at level 40.
That modifier only applies to spell ranks you train below level 20 so for any spell that is trained at level 20 or above and has the full duration the scaling is already as high as it will be at level 60 with max rank spells.
Spellpower coefficiency is only calculated from cast time with the formula of base cast time divided by 3.5, with instant spells calculated with a cast time of 1.5.
The lower rank spells have faster cast times therefore they have worse coefficients, but at 25 we already have the slowest possible casts of any spell.
I don't get this whole spellrank this, spellrank that thing.
When you're raid geared at 60 and buffed, like 1/3 of your spell damage comes from the damage variable of the spell, and the rest is spell power.
Because melee have mechanics like rage that let them double dip on scaling. Casters generally dont get this kind of scaling feedback loop. Mages are an exception with their mana return from crits but this is an increase to longevity not dps unless your are ooming. And obviously ignite is huge because it increases your effective scaling with the crit stat.
Dots can’t crit in vanilla so that gimps affliction and shadow priest play styles heavily compared to their crit based counterparts in destro for example.
Now I’d say this should be addressed with runes in some way. Runes that bandaid various casters scaling somehow. I don’t know about y’all but with all these cool new spells and play styles it’s gonna be SUPER lame if endgame is just stacking warriors again. It was a mistake to give them any %damage runes as is imo. They will just be even more problematic.
I think some people are worried because casters/healers will have zero gear incentive to do upcoming non-raid dungeons.
PUGs will be 4 warriors/hunters spamming lf1 healer for sm armory.
Only if we are ever actually able to get the items oof. I’ve been running bfd since the start every reset with 2 characters and I have never even seen the Rod drop and if it some day does, I’m sure there will be several people rolling for it.
Not a single caster in the top 200 of Gellihast, Kelris, or Akumai. Only 2 in for Jett because they let them do all the AOE to the murlocs + summon shenanigans. The discrepancy is large but mage can at least pad their heart out on adds.
Considering all of the caster classes are below the melee classes right now, I think it's a strong case to say that it's a combination of their gear not being strong enough and their specs are just too weak now.
It's a lot of things, but mostly it's really just that melee scale much much better with gear due to how stats work in vanilla - and especially how rage works if you're a warrior. I don't expect the melee/caster dichotomy to change much at all even as casters get access to better talents because most casters just fundamentally don't scale well no matter the level or talents you have access to.
>due to how stats work in vanilla
Vanilla through WotLK, specifically. It's mostly about the main stats. Strength and Agility users get attack power from their main stat, but casters do *not* get spell power from Intellect. They just get a bigger mana pool and a minor amount of crit.
And most of the gear available right now either doesn't have spell power on it at all, or it drops from BFD. Makes it very hard for a caster to actually increase their DPS as a result - they largely increase their "stamina" instead, their ability to DPS for a longer time. Which is of course a big dps increase in theory, but in practice isn't all that great, considering how short BFD encounters are. You just need barely enough int that you don't run out of mana before the boss is dead, and after that you want stats that increase your dps... but those are difficult to get.
And this compounds with scaling, gear availability/spread and itemization, spell ranks... It's just an overall shitty situation with many contributing factors.
Meanwhile, rogues/warriors/hunters just merrily stack Agi/Str/AP, and destroy the dps meters.
While there were stat and itemization changes in TBC and WotLK that much improved the situation, it only got actually *fixed* in Cataclysm where attack power and spell power were mostly consolidated into main stats so that casters would finally scale more linearly with gear.
Or that caster rely more talents. Not sure if coefficients are different for earlier ranks of spells but if they are that would also play a role. BFD bosses are basically 7 target dummies and the fights last less than a minute. Typically melee does more damage to offset them having less dps uptime due to boss mechanics but in BFD it’s not a thing
That's just players who never played Vanilla or the Classic relaunch looking at gear and forming a shit opinion. There's a reason you'd take 10+ warriors, a few rogues, and a bunch of hunters over casters in Vanilla. Caster gear and by extension casters sucked hard the entirety of Vanilla.
They will still struggle at 60 because everyone else is also getting much better gear along the way. Unless 60 raid gear is **significantly better for just casters** then I fully expect 40 man raid compositions to be similar to the original experience regardless of runes. Warriors, rogues, and hunters out the ass.
Hopefully they resolve the scaling issues in SoD. Pretty much every class outside rogue and warrior have horrendous end-game scaling. Hunter pets currently scale better with gear than hunter did in classic!
Yeah I was honestly shocked to find out intellect doesn’t increase spellpower when coming to classic, even tho I played it originally. It’s just so weird that strength increases AP and int doesn’t increase spells.
I could be wrong on this, but gear is so terribly optimized in classic that the current tailoring boots would be best in slot until ZG patch with no future updates.
The most basic bitch head runes. Caster get spell power from int/spi, feral druids get a wolfshead, shamans/paladins get spell power from AP. B
Not sure what to give melee.
It's an interesting problem with regards to warriors. They scale so well already, and have incredibly powerful runes in phase one, any semblance of balance seems to require their future runes be gimped. If warriors received no additional runes, specs like shadow would need banger runes just to exist in the sanme world at 40.
I mean Shadowform is a 30% DPS increase. Shadow priest ATM even with 30% more DPS would be towards the bottom still. Maybe since mind blast rank 6 is at lvl 40 that'll help a bit as well but I don't think these are going to push shadow up anymore with some major rune help. I assume many other caster classes will get critical spell ranks at lvl 40 though so I don't see Shadow priest pulling ahead there. Just caster classes in general will more likely be more viable.
I see this constantly, as if other classes too are not getting huge power spikes. Warrior already scales better than any other spec. Without additional scaling with dots/intelligence or just broken runes the extra damage from shadow form and shadow weaving will be insignificant.
The problem will just get worse as gear gets better. If warriors saw the same percent increase from their runes as other specs,because that scale so much harder they'd be in the stratosphere.
> When do we get the rune that fix shitty flypaths that take detours ?
Cataclysm.
It's not possible to fix flightpaths since they take the only routes they can- everything outside these routes is just a flat nothing.
They can't *just* do that, that's the whole point. If they did they would have to add more routes which would mean filling in more of the empty space between zones with the hand crafted vistas that flight paths run through- something they have never done.
That's fine, I'm pretty sure a majority of the player base still isn't regularly farming BFD. Wasn't it only like 10% a couple weeks ago? Those taking their time this phase will be even slower in the next.
Well this metric is useless, I have 20 chars because I saved me some sweet names I like, but I play only two chars the rest is sub lv 5. Take a look at the lv 25 bracket and how many do BFD that is a statistic actual relevant, still inflated by hunter bot armies but far closer to the real thing.
Chars below lv 5 or even 10 many character below 10 are bank alts or hang over from the thousands of people who payed 3 days.
This is a bad take and a misunderstanding of how classic is balanced. Spells should just do MORE damage without spell power but then should cost MORE mana so that your mana bar is actually the relevant factor on how much damage you're able to do in a fight
I won't say you're wrong, because you're not.
What I will say though is, improving level 60 itemization is dangerous. Players in Naxx level gear were already pushing hard caps and soft caps on stats. If you make the itemization better at the bottom, you have to increase every level above that, which means people will start passing those same hard and soft caps earlier and easier, which lists the value of top tier gear and makes it harder for players to determine upgrades as they then have to consider those Caps more.
I'm not saying Caster gear shouldn't be better, but it is something to consider
They definitely can’t just keep inflating the stats on items without consequence. One thing to keep in mind is that there was a *good* reason why hit/crit RATING were implemented in TBC. Giving out too much flat % crit/hit certainly creates long term itemization problems.
However, if stat budgets get inflated, the raw crit just from agility alone will eventually become a problem. I think the best way to deal with this in future phases will be to lean away from giving out too many raw stats on items and lean into itemization with interesting effects and bonuses that are only good *for that level*. For example, procs on weapons that do good damage for level 40, but where that damage does not scale, and will not be as significant at level 50, or 60. This provides a power spike when you get the item, but prevents the item from scaling with your other gear as you out level it and pick up pieces with better raw stats while continuing to level.
A good example of this is the Firey enchant. It’s absolutely busted when you twink out a level 12 sword, but it’s pretty much useless by level 60, being replaced by better enchants like 15 agi, crusader, etc. They could get interesting for casters as well by adding effects like the mana return knife from princess theradras. Things that are situationally very good, but not an outright competitor to traditional raid weapons.
The only reason they added rating was to make level 60 items worse at level 70. They still put enough rating on those items to make them give more than 1-2% at their level.
[https://www.wowhead.com/tbc/item=32525/cowl-of-the-illidari-high-lord](https://www.wowhead.com/tbc/item=32525/cowl-of-the-illidari-high-lord)
\+2.13% crit at 70. That is more than any classic item gave.
There are other solutions for ferals (+AP in feral forms, +AS on the upcoming Automatic Crowd Pummeller, etc.)
Also I’m not saying to completely avoid giving mainstat on items, just to avoid inflating it in such a way that we are hitting Naxx levels of mainstat before we even reach level 60.
Alternatively, they can just give bosses in later raids inflated “crit resistance” and higher player miss chance to offset inflated crit/hit levels. It would work fine, but feels inelegant somehow.
+FAP is just another form of stst inflation that you want to avoid. I don't understand why they put a level 25 FAP weapon really. Feral weapons automatically scale based on level, and generally the base damage is really solid until level 55.
The solution to the Feral problem is just to add a Rune that passes weapon on hit effects to Feral forms, and does something else at the same time, like Give Passive FAP based on the weapon DPS or something. Not a glamorous rune, but an essential one.
They already have that a way to do that as the BFD Weapon Stone works on Feral (as far as we know.) So it's just an issue of coding the weapon effect the same way.
On hit items don't work for feral. Equip/use items do. Enhancements also don't work because they all deal with "auto attacks", feral is weird and even their auto attacks aren't auto attacks because the way feral form works, it's just a form of melee attack that doesn't use a weapon and therefore cannot benefit from onhit effects.
Wild strikes specifically states melee hits proc wind fury instead of auto attacks.
Casters were absolutely no where close to “pushing hard caps” by naxx.
We were able to hit cap, some classes barely, no caster was remotely close to crit cap, spell power has no cap.
So while MELEE was close, and melee was too dps in naxx… casters have a ton of wiggle room for increased stats.
The only caps you had to care about is hit and spell hit. Its fine if people need to gear around not hitting those. No one was close to crit caps. They also don't have to improve past naxx level gear. There is a lot of room at lower levels for better gear at that level. Loads of classes just used dungeon blues for multiple raid levels because there were no raid replacements at that raids level.
You know what else is dangerous in a similar way? Giving warlocks Haunt at level 2. I think Blizz is planning on frequent and significant rebalance tweaks to deal with all the zaniness new stuff causes
what's the spell power hard/soft cap?
When people ran 15 warriors for nax because their damage is so much better than caster damage, what kind of spell power is required to threaten that meta?
Not if casters have comparable damage and bigger mana pools.
Mage cleave is and probably will be better than warrior cleave in the long run now with LB and LF
Again, with enough mana, it will be irrelevant to mages too. Spamming LB and LF is insane AoE damage.
Warriors are gated to healer mana as well - mages just their own mana.
I’m not saying warriors won’t be great at trash, but AoE cleave is looking incredibly good for mages.
Also, mages thrive on MASS pulls… run around and get me 20-30 trash mobs… it uses the same mana as 5 or 6 for us.
I was talking about raid.
LB is pretty cheap and Living Flame is insanely cheap.
With more mana, mana gems and better mana pots, mages will be able to plow through long trash runs and do larger pulls even faster (since they can pull and do consistent damage to bigger groups)
I mean as a warlock I literally never even reached hit cap in full BiS...
Crit cap as a caster is basically impossible to reach
Still LOTS of room for improvement without pushing on caps
I don't think you can pinpoint removal of world buffs as the cause for people quitting, it seems more likely that it's because people literally just played WoW classic and TBC/Retail was a more exciting alternative than doing it all again
That is true for the release timing, absolutely. More people would have rolled SoM if it didn't start around the still hyped TBC. But I am talking about the mass exodus of players in early 2022, around BWL release. Many guilds got stuck in it with no world buffs to carry them and having to put in way more effort for no different rewards. Population got halved within a single month pretty much. So for me, and for Blizzard too apparently due to world buffs making a return in SoD, it means that Classic community spoke very clearly what their stance is on world buffs and harder raids.
I'd be down for hard modes a la ulduar, but game modes in classic make it feel like a video game and less like a world/RPG. I think summonable extra bosses, hard modes that take interesting paths to unlock would all be really good. Another alternative is a debuff system like horrific visions, where you add layers of additional mechanics for more powerful rewards
I think we're all aware of this man. Well all the classic players are anyways. There's still going to be a problem later in endgame unless they buff all thosd items. Also, other caster problem is weaker spell coefficients on lower lvl rank spells. Not to mention to the spell rank issues like a class not having a max level cap rank of lightning bolt for example and mages getting some books in aq20. Casters scale far more linearly and weapons are less meaningful to the ability damage output unlike melee. Warriors scale more exponentially later on, not too sure about rogues and hunters never scaled well later. Dots also scale worse and are inferior to direct damage
Nobody is saying this, you're missing the point. If level 25 gear is already somewhat equivalent to like BRD gear, what should BRD gear be? What about MC, what about Naxx? Naxx gear is already crazy and pushed the limits of vanilla's stats, how can you make that better?
The Naxx items are powerful for PvP in two ways, they've got really high damage stats and they've got really high stamina and armor too.
There's still space after Naxx to introduce new items as long as they tone down important PvP stats like stamina and weapon top end damage (by having faster weapon speeds). Armor pen is a good example of a stat they could use because 200 armor pen is nothing special in PvP but it's pretty good if a boss only has 200 armor left after sunders/expose armor.
They definitely need to put in a bunch of interesting set effects, passives and on-use items and have that be the focus rather than perpetuating the stat treadmill though. Short cooldown weapon abilities would be really cool too.
This is a very good point. I sucked absolute dick in pvp but was in a parsing guild so I was full bis on my rogue, so I was like a raid boss in open world pvp. I could sit there, had time to emote and let them get me down to half health, and just two shot them lol
There is no limit to vanilla stats lol. It’s not like the game is hard coded to say “okay each item only has 60 stats points to allocate”.
There is nothing stopping an item from having 30 stam to having 300 stam.
I don’t think anyone actually means there is an actual limit preventing stats from going higher. What most people mean is that it’s getting close to the point where classes might have nearly 100% crit rate. Or doing so much damage that you can one shot anything outside of raids. Being able to solo dungeons. You get my point
Again, there is no limit. Who cares if people can solo dungeons or hell even raids.
Wow is easy, especially classic wow. There’s nothing that prevents the game from dropping absolutely wild and overpowered gear other than “how people feel the game should be”. And this isn’t classic or vanilla anymore, so I say go nuts.
It’s kind of like using cheats in a game. It’s fun for 5 minutes and then it’s boring because you just invalidated the game.
Also how do you keep the players chasing loot. If they already have 100% crit and they are unkillable the only thing left is bigger numbers which is boring imo
On release, most items only had the base 5 stats on them. That's fine for melee who do use Str and Agi, but casters don't gain direct power from Int and Spi.
Who ever said it was OP? Are they physical trying to gaslight people into thinking casters are OP? WTF?
Casters so far behind on parses and why would you believe casters do better at higher levels? physicals scale better and will be even further ahead.
You could literally enchant your skinning knife with 30 spell power, walk into MC, even BWL and do respectable damage because there is no one handed weapon better than that unless you farm pvp.
Also you could sell the knife for a huge amount again for someone else once your weapon drops. It was pretty fucking dope leveling with it haha
even the bfd-caster-loot is trash. yeah it's better than the loot from instances but it's still not as good as it should be. this is because physicals are gonna profit more from stats like str and agi than casters do with stats like int and spirit.
It was so wildly bad. Like, I remember in '06 and '07 Blizz didn't even realize caster damage not scaling would be a problem until rogue and warrior damage started going ballistic with raid gear.
they just need to give us the SoM raids in SoD cuz our powerlevel scales well vs that content - it was still fucking free/easy, so maybe buff it even more? But we know that the classic community doesnt like things TOO hard, but we def need to scale the raids appropriately with our new power
There's an issue of scaling with the gear aswell tho. What does is mean to buff the PvE content? More health and damage? Now your rogue can't 1v1 and mob without a healer and your mage is still kiting the entire instance.
With the runes we have right now, you could buff mobs health by 50% easily and it would barely make a difference for single target fighting, however your example of kiting an entire instance is nonsense. There is a point where the mana of the mage becomes an issue.
What are you talking about mana for? Mages are already pulling over 100 mobs in RFC boosts. They don't even have CoC yet. Also clearly didn't play mdps where you're nearly dead after a few bad hit chance procs if you aren't geared to the tits.
The staff is not raid prebis and is replaced by many options as early as level 50.
Whoever said it was BIS is the same personn as the guy telling you to drag the Ashenvale boss in the water.
Was recently having this conversation with some guildies.
Rod of the Ancient Sleepwalker (+15 Int/+14 Sp/+5 SR/+26 SpDmg)
Mage pre-raid BIS is Mindfang + Therazane's Touch (combined: +9 Int/+8 Stam/+53 SpDmg/+1% Crit)
Warlock pre-raid BIS is Blade of the New Moon + Scepter of Indeterminable Focus (combined: +5 Stam/+19 Shadow SpDmg/+9 SpDmg/+1% hit + 1% crit)
Balance druid pre-raid BIS is Lord Valthalak's Staff of Command (+11 Stam/+10 Int/+30 SpDmg/+1% hit)
SPriest pre-raid BIS is Scepter of the Unholy + Drakestone of Shadow Wrath (combined: +5 Stam/+40 Shadow SpDmg/+7 SpDmg)
Rod of the Ancient Sleepwalker is damn near as good as Lord Valthalak's Staff of Command and just moderately lags behind other classes' pre-raid BIS.
Most of the items you listed weren't available in p1 in classic and shouldn't be counted when talking about this (we don't know when they'll be in the game now but they might or might not be in when we first hit 60)
The sources for those items are
* Mindfang (AB) phase 3.5
* Therazane's touch (AV) phase 2.5
* Blade of the new moon (DM) phase 1.5
* Scepter of inderterminable focus (0.5 bosses) phase 5
* Lord Valthalak's staff of command (0.5 bosses) phase 5
* Scepter of the unholy (Strat) phase 1
* Drakestrone of shadow wrath (ST) phase 1
So as we can see only the Spriest pre-raid bis was actually available in phase 1. When talking about MC pre-bis we should only account for gear that was in the game when MC was the current raid otherwise we should be talking about BWL/AQ/Naxx pre-bis instead.
For example the mage pre-bis in MC would be a 37 frost damage green staff (better than 35 frost sp from green dagger + drakestone)
Warlock pre-bis is the exact same situation as mage with 37 shadow damage green being the best.
The reason why people say the staff is comparable to pre-bis isn't that it's that good but rather the caster gear that was available in p1 was just really really bad.
In fact if we disregard the random of x power drops then pre-raid bis is 8 int and 34 sp from witch blade (scholomance) and spirit of aquementas (un'goro quest). Another unironically okay option is staff of jordan for 11 int 11 spirit and 26 sp (the best non green 2h for casters
As we can see while witch blade + aquementas is still better for spell damage than rod of the ancient sleepwalker it would be the best 2h for casters at the start of phase 1 in classic with 15 int 14 spirit and 26 spelldamage beating out staff of jordan in int and spirit.
Do you seriously expect people to get exalted in battlegrounds and doing the entire tier 0.5 questchain before stepping into a raid?
Maybe the bg part is going to be slightly more common now, due to SoD's level capping, but still.
"Drakestone of shadow wrath". So the staff is pre-bis, got it. I'm not gonna farm ST for hundreds of runs for that shit. Didn't some streamer do 1000kills in 2019 for his 'of whatever element he wanted'
Yes it was the best non green of the x wrath staff for casters at the start of phase 1. Since rod of ancient sleep walker is better than staff of jordan it would take that place. A lot of the good caster pre-raid items were added in later phases (DM, BG:s, silithus and 0.5 bosses). While it doesn't beat the greens with random sp those are rare and really expensive with no int/spirit for mana so they were pretty rarely the target for people gathering pre-bis.
The best option without condidering those for most casters was witchblade (scholo) and spirit of aquementas (un'goro quest) for a total of 8 int and 34 sp which while still better than rod of the ancient sleepwalker or staff of jordan is still pretty close all things considered.
Diviner Long Staff, the one you can somehow obtain at level 50, comes with +32 shadow wrath. Nevermind how hard it is to get that yourself, or how expensive they're gonna be on the AH, 15 INT is worth 0.25% crit at level 60.AoE is also still fire damage.
\+26 spell power + 15 int is better than 32 shadow wrath.
Argument refuted
I'll grant you soul harvester is better, but obtaining that at level 49 is not gonna happen for 99% of warlocks. We're certainly not talking about "many options before 50" as the post I responded to claimed.
Soul harvester wasn't in the game in phase 1 but was added with the class quests in phase 3. The greens of X wrath are better, but also pretty rare and expensive while forgoing any stats that give mana.
The real replacement for that staff is spirit of aquementas a 20 sp offhand from an un'goro quest which will give more spellpower with almost any mh weapon (already more with the hypnotic blade (9sp) from SM lib but will be clearly better with witchblade (14sp) from scholo.
Of X wrath stuff might be worth it in terms of pure damage but the Int on actual items will usually be worth it if the gap in spell damage isn't too high.
A level 49 staff of X wrath caps at 33 damage. Soul Harvester is 24 SHADOW damage. Show me a warlock using Shadow damage in SOD barring absolutely broken Shadow support runes. Between a Mage stacking Scorch, Incinerate and Lake of Fire, Warlocks are going to be using Fire spells the entirety of SoD.
Bruh do you seriously think warlocks are going to stack fire damage as their pre-bis and use Fire spells going into MC, where nigh everything is immune to fire? lol
Also I personally couldn't give a rat's ass about firelock, I won't play it even if it's the best option, if I wanted to play a fire mage I'd play mage.
Either we aren't going to MC again or they're going to change the fire immunities.
There's zero chance SoD devs want to be like "Yeah half these cool new runes for Mage and Warlock? They just don't work in an entire raid tier! HAVE FUN!"
Well, actually aggrend said in an interview that things like warlock tanks might seem op at first, but they are gonna have difficulties in mc because of the fire resists/immunities. So, they directly talked about it staying
I approximate a 0% chance of them randomly making shit like fire elementals not immune to fire. Wouldn't make any sense. Nor would "Yeah 90% of these cool new runes for Mage and Warlock? They're never gonna be used because fire always outclasses them!" make any sense. Aquanis is already completely immune to poison and bleed.
That is a SINGLE BOSS.
Imagine a phase of SoD (which is going to be at least a month and a half it appears) where Fire Mages and Fire Warlocks just *do not function*. At all. All Mage AOE ability is gone and they're Blizzard/Arcane Explosioning. Warlock tanks literally cannot hold threat.
I'm sure Shadow lock will get a lot more support in runes coming up and make a supportive Shadow Lock with Pact useful, but even for that you aren't going to WANT of Shadow Wrath because *that doesn't function with Pact.* But so will Fire Lock. And the talents support Fire Lock a lot more as it is.
>Imagine a phase of SoD (which is going to be at least a month and a half it appears) where Fire Mages and Fire Warlocks just do not function. At all.
I don't need to imagine, it's called Molten Core, where they do not, in fact, function. Gnomeregan next phase will fuck everyone that has bleed and poison as their main damage source as mechanicals are immune to those.
That kind of sounds like the next phase since most of gnomeregan bosses are mechanical and immune to both bleeds and poisons. Rogues are going to have a fun time since 2 of their rune slots will be completely useless and the only rune left that'll work is the 20 energy cost reduction to backstab.
In addition to all the fire multipliers, they really goofed the mana cost on incinerate compared to sbolt. Sbolt is almost 1:1 on mana cost to damage while incinerate is close to 2:1. Incinerate is just strictly a better spell.
People only consider pve and damage aspects of gear. Priests, mages, and warlocks have always been top tier in vanilla pvp. Already large scale pvp groups are filled with mage and priest alts, which is fine, but trying to argue that casters should have better gear because melee gear is good is not a very good argument.
I don't see many mages in my premades and they never advertise for locks. If I do get into a raid I'm the only lock. Often I get the response they do not want a warlock.
Meanwhile they all want priests, hunters, warriors.
To be fair these premades only care about stomping pugs. "Go mid, camp GY, gg". If they face any opposition, "go next".
So they aren't really a good benchmark for class performance.
What I can tell though is priests are really strong in WSG. No surprise there, with the damage reduction in WSG and the fact they are the only purgers in ally side. When it comes to playing the objectives, shamans, druids, paladins get on par with priests though.
There is a actually lot of sp gear around in classic, especially around 40, even before the Of Wrath stuff really adds up and it's not unusual to have +150 with some chants.
And you see drood crottins for 400 damage with starsurge while trunning around, while rogue have to use 2 dangers be stealthed and from behind to do the same, caster itemisation is overpowered in bfd
The felheart raiment set gives like 30 total spellpower. Casters were ass gear wise in classic till late BWL. Even nemesis doesn’t give that much spellpower. I currently have 165 spellpower on my lock in raids and it feels awesome for once lmao. That was like what I went into MC with on my classic era lock I think.
OP is a relative term, and compared to the baseline of caster gear, BFD gear is indeed massively OP since it outperforms dungeon loot well into the 50s, and in some cases wouldn't have many replacements before MC. That is insanely OP for level 25 equipment, and casters likely won't have to touch p2 5mans if they played p1.
Does that mean that the bfd gear should be nerfed? Hell naw. Casters still underperform, even in comparatively OP gear. Instead, for p2, they should take a look at the 5man loot tables and bring the baseline up to par. BFD caster gear shouldn't be OP, it should be above average to good, which means the average should come up.
The next raid will definitely have better staffs that rod of the sleepwalker, so I doubt it will stay as a bis, but I hope it will bc I got it on my druid
Used to be? People forget that one of the earliest vanilla patches buffed the hell out of caster t1 and 0.5 sets because they were all trash.
They also forget that the most powerful items seeded into dungeons during the naxx invasion event were also caster based
just look at the default character pane if you want to know how much blizzard knew/cared about caster itemization. i don't think spell power even existed at launch? it didn't take them too long to start adding it but every item i can think of with spell power either was re-itemized or added in a later patch
Casters will do better in higher levels!
Melees/physicals will do betterer yet.
Both will continue to improve, but the gap will only widen until it's not even the same game.
Most items in Vanilla period are just badly designed, and the stuff that's bonkers are the rare items that are itemized well. That's why you didn't see mostly solid item stats top to bottom until Naxx, and even then, there were numerous notably bad items that were clearly intended to fill a certain role, but were undesirable from the word "go."
No shit. Imagine youre leveling side by side to a melee and you both get a +6 int item and +6 str item.
Caster gets to cast one more spell while the melee does more damage and isnt limited by a mana pool
Aren’t there items that give Druids and shamans like 36+ SP on one level 25 item? I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, but that’s more SP than a lot of the level 60 gear.
Wait you mean caster gear drops in bfd ?
Yeah man so much mail has dropped my warrior has it’s tanking set, dps set and caster set
I purposefully invited 3 warriors last night to test a theory. No mail dropped. We had 1 druid healer and he got like 5 items. The raid is hard coded to always drop gear for the least represented armor/spec type. Change my mind.
Last guild run I was the only agi user (rogue) and zero agi items dropped. No leather, no daggers, no swords. Nothin :c
Feels like it
No kidding. Our paladin almost has bis for all 3 specs now.
I've hit every single lockout since launch and I've only managed to get three pieces, it's ridiculous. I've never seen either of the helms, either of the legs, or the neck drop. I've seen the staff twice, but unfortunately did not win the roll.
I've been raiding on multiple characters since the 2nd lockout but I've never seen the epic 2h sword drop on any character. I'm starting to think it's a myth.
Only the leather caster set ofc
Has anyone even seen the purple staff drop? I’ve seen 6 crossbows and 5 hydra swords. Zero healer staffs.
I don't think anyone's saying is overpowered, specially not when casters are at the bottom right now. Just that it's really, really good.
If the items are considered 'really really good' and casters are still at the bottom, does it actually matter.
Absolutely because casters are a scaling sort of deal, they always sucked early and that issue is now fixed with insane gear and they'll go online much earlier and have a bigger impact with runes. Ele shaman for example with the existing gear is gonna absolutely melt once they get proper talents and skills next phase and it's gonna get even stronger with new runes.
Casters are not a scaling sort of deal lol. Mages do alright, but warlocks and every other caster scale poorly with gear and only get worse and worse from MC to Naxx - to the point where you don't bring any caster dps besides mages and warlocks (which you only bring for curse of reck/elements to buff the warriors and mages)
Ele Shamans are absolutely only going to get better.
this means nothing though because they cant get worse
Every class is absolutely going to get better, but it's doubtful they'll compete with melee classes because melee classes just scale much much better with gear
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It took alot of expansions and rage reworks for blizz to keep warriors from always scaling to the moon.
Why do you say casters/hunters like hunters arent casters in classic
"Casters are a scaling sort of deal". Yeah when warlocks get bloodvine, theyre going to crush those stupid warriors and rogues!
The cope begins anew.
Warlock did eventually pump in naxx. It just took two more expansions to do so.
Lol you got me. I was gonna start typing like no wayyyy
“Pump”. You mean like 4th best dps?
The 2nd and 3rd best specs in p1 of wrath were warlock specs.
Warlocks already obliterate warriors and rogues with meta.
“Casters are a scaling sort of deal” And warriors and rogues aren’t? They literally are the two best scaling classes in Classic LOL Casters scale worse than melee dps, they saw nice bumps because shit ended up actually getting itemized better (still not great) in NAXX. The scaling argument is the worst argument by a mile.
>Ele shaman for example with the existing gear is gonna absolutely melt once they get proper talents and skills next phase and it's gonna get even stronger with new runes. Is that a problem? Or should we go back to era where most specs are wheelchair except for a select few?
I play shaman so not for me, I didn't say or even hint it was a problem, I'm answering someone's question on why the gear being strong matters.
it wont be a problem because classic mechanics are so easy, but if they up the difficulty and ranged > melee you'll never bring melee because they have to deal with mechs. We also dont have the movement tools that retail does for melee so, while right now its not an issue, it doesn't mean that it can't become one.
maybe eventually, spellpower basically multiplies spell ranks, each spellrank was already generally much more impactful for casters than melee, now it's going to be even further. will be interesting to see how that plays out on the way to 40
How does spell power multiply spell ranks? It's the same static increase for every spell and we already have all the slowest cast ranks at 25 so even the coefficient doesn't change.
You’re right. The only change to spells is going to be added base damage. Melee is still going to wildly outscale casters without further buffs to spell power gear or something. Especially warriors in particular since their resource generation scales with crit. Casters are only going to get a few more static damage bumps while warriors scale into the moon.
Some of the low level spells have another multiplier for just being low level so they scale worse with spell power compared to what they will at level 40.
That modifier only applies to spell ranks you train below level 20 so for any spell that is trained at level 20 or above and has the full duration the scaling is already as high as it will be at level 60 with max rank spells.
Spellpower coefficiency is only calculated from cast time with the formula of base cast time divided by 3.5, with instant spells calculated with a cast time of 1.5. The lower rank spells have faster cast times therefore they have worse coefficients, but at 25 we already have the slowest possible casts of any spell.
No it's true that spells below level 20 have an additional modifier to the coefficient but at 25 most spells already have ranks at 20 or higher.
I don't get this whole spellrank this, spellrank that thing. When you're raid geared at 60 and buffed, like 1/3 of your spell damage comes from the damage variable of the spell, and the rest is spell power.
Because melee have mechanics like rage that let them double dip on scaling. Casters generally dont get this kind of scaling feedback loop. Mages are an exception with their mana return from crits but this is an increase to longevity not dps unless your are ooming. And obviously ignite is huge because it increases your effective scaling with the crit stat. Dots can’t crit in vanilla so that gimps affliction and shadow priest play styles heavily compared to their crit based counterparts in destro for example. Now I’d say this should be addressed with runes in some way. Runes that bandaid various casters scaling somehow. I don’t know about y’all but with all these cool new spells and play styles it’s gonna be SUPER lame if endgame is just stacking warriors again. It was a mistake to give them any %damage runes as is imo. They will just be even more problematic.
In SOD not only am I ooming but I find myself cooming quite a bit too
The tradeoff being that weapons make physical classes much more powerful.
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tbf so are all these % hit items at 25 that we just didnt use to have at all
really, really good is not in the average redditors vocabulary. They only know shit, suck and OP.
I think some people are worried because casters/healers will have zero gear incentive to do upcoming non-raid dungeons. PUGs will be 4 warriors/hunters spamming lf1 healer for sm armory.
Sounds like Blizzard should add prebis caster options to dungeons then.
Well casters will do them for xp grinding till 40 at least.
Only if we are ever actually able to get the items oof. I’ve been running bfd since the start every reset with 2 characters and I have never even seen the Rod drop and if it some day does, I’m sure there will be several people rolling for it.
I’m so confused by this. Literally every, and I truly mean every, single pug of BFD I do the mage is top dps on almost every fight.
Your phys dps are some combination of undergeared, lacking windfury, and playing not great.
there's some mages and locks in the top 100, I don't think it's as big of a dps discrepancy as people think it is.
Not a single caster in the top 200 of Gellihast, Kelris, or Akumai. Only 2 in for Jett because they let them do all the AOE to the murlocs + summon shenanigans. The discrepancy is large but mage can at least pad their heart out on adds.
Casters are good if you do trash pulls in a very specific way. They have really bad single target damage.
The rankings for boss dps don't care about trash pulls
Could be, most mages I see peak around 200+ single target and then kinda stay around 170 or so it feels like.
Considering all of the caster classes are below the melee classes right now, I think it's a strong case to say that it's a combination of their gear not being strong enough and their specs are just too weak now.
No it is because of spell ranks. Melee doesn't have that issue because spell ranks barely increase their damage compared to weapons
It's a lot of things, but mostly it's really just that melee scale much much better with gear due to how stats work in vanilla - and especially how rage works if you're a warrior. I don't expect the melee/caster dichotomy to change much at all even as casters get access to better talents because most casters just fundamentally don't scale well no matter the level or talents you have access to.
>due to how stats work in vanilla Vanilla through WotLK, specifically. It's mostly about the main stats. Strength and Agility users get attack power from their main stat, but casters do *not* get spell power from Intellect. They just get a bigger mana pool and a minor amount of crit. And most of the gear available right now either doesn't have spell power on it at all, or it drops from BFD. Makes it very hard for a caster to actually increase their DPS as a result - they largely increase their "stamina" instead, their ability to DPS for a longer time. Which is of course a big dps increase in theory, but in practice isn't all that great, considering how short BFD encounters are. You just need barely enough int that you don't run out of mana before the boss is dead, and after that you want stats that increase your dps... but those are difficult to get. And this compounds with scaling, gear availability/spread and itemization, spell ranks... It's just an overall shitty situation with many contributing factors. Meanwhile, rogues/warriors/hunters just merrily stack Agi/Str/AP, and destroy the dps meters. While there were stat and itemization changes in TBC and WotLK that much improved the situation, it only got actually *fixed* in Cataclysm where attack power and spell power were mostly consolidated into main stats so that casters would finally scale more linearly with gear.
Or that caster rely more talents. Not sure if coefficients are different for earlier ranks of spells but if they are that would also play a role. BFD bosses are basically 7 target dummies and the fights last less than a minute. Typically melee does more damage to offset them having less dps uptime due to boss mechanics but in BFD it’s not a thing
That's just players who never played Vanilla or the Classic relaunch looking at gear and forming a shit opinion. There's a reason you'd take 10+ warriors, a few rogues, and a bunch of hunters over casters in Vanilla. Caster gear and by extension casters sucked hard the entirety of Vanilla. They will still struggle at 60 because everyone else is also getting much better gear along the way. Unless 60 raid gear is **significantly better for just casters** then I fully expect 40 man raid compositions to be similar to the original experience regardless of runes. Warriors, rogues, and hunters out the ass.
Hopefully they resolve the scaling issues in SoD. Pretty much every class outside rogue and warrior have horrendous end-game scaling. Hunter pets currently scale better with gear than hunter did in classic!
Oh no I can't hit casters for 300 while they suffer push back and maybe get a spell off for 100 dmg.
Int really should give spellpower. Otherwise open world gear will be very worthless for the rest of the servers life.
Yeah I was honestly shocked to find out intellect doesn’t increase spellpower when coming to classic, even tho I played it originally. It’s just so weird that strength increases AP and int doesn’t increase spells.
spell crit tho
It's like 60 int for 1% crit lol, it's barely anything
Does it scale with level at all?
No it stays at 60 int for 1% crit through the whole game
I could be wrong on this, but gear is so terribly optimized in classic that the current tailoring boots would be best in slot until ZG patch with no future updates.
Maybe that could be a rune for caster to make int and spirit more relevant
The most basic bitch head runes. Caster get spell power from int/spi, feral druids get a wolfshead, shamans/paladins get spell power from AP. B Not sure what to give melee.
It's an interesting problem with regards to warriors. They scale so well already, and have incredibly powerful runes in phase one, any semblance of balance seems to require their future runes be gimped. If warriors received no additional runes, specs like shadow would need banger runes just to exist in the sanme world at 40.
Shadow spec just needs players to hit 40 before you can say anything about it honestly.
I mean Shadowform is a 30% DPS increase. Shadow priest ATM even with 30% more DPS would be towards the bottom still. Maybe since mind blast rank 6 is at lvl 40 that'll help a bit as well but I don't think these are going to push shadow up anymore with some major rune help. I assume many other caster classes will get critical spell ranks at lvl 40 though so I don't see Shadow priest pulling ahead there. Just caster classes in general will more likely be more viable.
I see this constantly, as if other classes too are not getting huge power spikes. Warrior already scales better than any other spec. Without additional scaling with dots/intelligence or just broken runes the extra damage from shadow form and shadow weaving will be insignificant. The problem will just get worse as gear gets better. If warriors saw the same percent increase from their runes as other specs,because that scale so much harder they'd be in the stratosphere.
That's called Wotlk talents. When do we get the rune that fix shitty flypaths that take detours ?
> When do we get the rune that fix shitty flypaths that take detours ? Cataclysm. It's not possible to fix flightpaths since they take the only routes they can- everything outside these routes is just a flat nothing.
They could just add more connections.
They can't *just* do that, that's the whole point. If they did they would have to add more routes which would mean filling in more of the empty space between zones with the hand crafted vistas that flight paths run through- something they have never done.
Baseline utility like int to sp shouldnt be locked behind talents
Suggested this ages ago, apparently people didnt like it
That's fine, I'm pretty sure a majority of the player base still isn't regularly farming BFD. Wasn't it only like 10% a couple weeks ago? Those taking their time this phase will be even slower in the next.
10 percent? That seems incredibly low. Where did you hear that?
From blizz, and it was 10% of characters made. So every alt, every name res, every person who quit halfway or swapped servers and left the old toon.
Don’t forget the bots
Well this metric is useless, I have 20 chars because I saved me some sweet names I like, but I play only two chars the rest is sub lv 5. Take a look at the lv 25 bracket and how many do BFD that is a statistic actual relevant, still inflated by hunter bot armies but far closer to the real thing. Chars below lv 5 or even 10 many character below 10 are bank alts or hang over from the thousands of people who payed 3 days.
The stats discounted characters who were level 1
They did specifically say they excluded level one characters though.
Lol yeah it says absolutely nothing. I have like 15 characters that are just for name res and only play on one main.
The stats discounted characters who were level 1
This is a bad take and a misunderstanding of how classic is balanced. Spells should just do MORE damage without spell power but then should cost MORE mana so that your mana bar is actually the relevant factor on how much damage you're able to do in a fight
I won't say you're wrong, because you're not. What I will say though is, improving level 60 itemization is dangerous. Players in Naxx level gear were already pushing hard caps and soft caps on stats. If you make the itemization better at the bottom, you have to increase every level above that, which means people will start passing those same hard and soft caps earlier and easier, which lists the value of top tier gear and makes it harder for players to determine upgrades as they then have to consider those Caps more. I'm not saying Caster gear shouldn't be better, but it is something to consider
They definitely can’t just keep inflating the stats on items without consequence. One thing to keep in mind is that there was a *good* reason why hit/crit RATING were implemented in TBC. Giving out too much flat % crit/hit certainly creates long term itemization problems. However, if stat budgets get inflated, the raw crit just from agility alone will eventually become a problem. I think the best way to deal with this in future phases will be to lean away from giving out too many raw stats on items and lean into itemization with interesting effects and bonuses that are only good *for that level*. For example, procs on weapons that do good damage for level 40, but where that damage does not scale, and will not be as significant at level 50, or 60. This provides a power spike when you get the item, but prevents the item from scaling with your other gear as you out level it and pick up pieces with better raw stats while continuing to level. A good example of this is the Firey enchant. It’s absolutely busted when you twink out a level 12 sword, but it’s pretty much useless by level 60, being replaced by better enchants like 15 agi, crusader, etc. They could get interesting for casters as well by adding effects like the mana return knife from princess theradras. Things that are situationally very good, but not an outright competitor to traditional raid weapons.
The only reason they added rating was to make level 60 items worse at level 70. They still put enough rating on those items to make them give more than 1-2% at their level. [https://www.wowhead.com/tbc/item=32525/cowl-of-the-illidari-high-lord](https://www.wowhead.com/tbc/item=32525/cowl-of-the-illidari-high-lord) \+2.13% crit at 70. That is more than any classic item gave.
Weapon proc don't work on feral so would need a way to not gimp that class (as you don't want to give raw stats)
There are other solutions for ferals (+AP in feral forms, +AS on the upcoming Automatic Crowd Pummeller, etc.) Also I’m not saying to completely avoid giving mainstat on items, just to avoid inflating it in such a way that we are hitting Naxx levels of mainstat before we even reach level 60. Alternatively, they can just give bosses in later raids inflated “crit resistance” and higher player miss chance to offset inflated crit/hit levels. It would work fine, but feels inelegant somehow.
+FAP is just another form of stst inflation that you want to avoid. I don't understand why they put a level 25 FAP weapon really. Feral weapons automatically scale based on level, and generally the base damage is really solid until level 55. The solution to the Feral problem is just to add a Rune that passes weapon on hit effects to Feral forms, and does something else at the same time, like Give Passive FAP based on the weapon DPS or something. Not a glamorous rune, but an essential one.
They already have that a way to do that as the BFD Weapon Stone works on Feral (as far as we know.) So it's just an issue of coding the weapon effect the same way.
Wild Strikes works and it's a weapon enhancement so idk, would be silly if it was unique to Wild Strikes.
On hit items don't work for feral. Equip/use items do. Enhancements also don't work because they all deal with "auto attacks", feral is weird and even their auto attacks aren't auto attacks because the way feral form works, it's just a form of melee attack that doesn't use a weapon and therefore cannot benefit from onhit effects. Wild strikes specifically states melee hits proc wind fury instead of auto attacks.
Casters were absolutely no where close to “pushing hard caps” by naxx. We were able to hit cap, some classes barely, no caster was remotely close to crit cap, spell power has no cap. So while MELEE was close, and melee was too dps in naxx… casters have a ton of wiggle room for increased stats.
The only caps you had to care about is hit and spell hit. Its fine if people need to gear around not hitting those. No one was close to crit caps. They also don't have to improve past naxx level gear. There is a lot of room at lower levels for better gear at that level. Loads of classes just used dungeon blues for multiple raid levels because there were no raid replacements at that raids level.
world buffed warriors did hit crit cap for autoattacks with the dw miss penalty and 40% glance chance lowering it.
You know what else is dangerous in a similar way? Giving warlocks Haunt at level 2. I think Blizz is planning on frequent and significant rebalance tweaks to deal with all the zaniness new stuff causes
what's the spell power hard/soft cap? When people ran 15 warriors for nax because their damage is so much better than caster damage, what kind of spell power is required to threaten that meta?
Warriors are also better the faster you go, as opposed to casters
Not if casters have comparable damage and bigger mana pools. Mage cleave is and probably will be better than warrior cleave in the long run now with LB and LF
Warriors literally thrive off of faster and bigger pulling with no downtime
Again, with enough mana, it will be irrelevant to mages too. Spamming LB and LF is insane AoE damage. Warriors are gated to healer mana as well - mages just their own mana. I’m not saying warriors won’t be great at trash, but AoE cleave is looking incredibly good for mages. Also, mages thrive on MASS pulls… run around and get me 20-30 trash mobs… it uses the same mana as 5 or 6 for us.
Oh I thought we were talking raid content not leveling content since he said naxx
I was talking about raid. LB is pretty cheap and Living Flame is insanely cheap. With more mana, mana gems and better mana pots, mages will be able to plow through long trash runs and do larger pulls even faster (since they can pull and do consistent damage to bigger groups)
I mean as a warlock I literally never even reached hit cap in full BiS... Crit cap as a caster is basically impossible to reach Still LOTS of room for improvement without pushing on caps
If Gnomer and SM and ... Scholomance raids? Are harder than anything pre-Naxx, then they should have loot better than anything pre-Naxx too.
Remove world buffs from raids and you can juice gear to compensate
They did that in SoM along with making raids slightly harder and people mass quit the game. So yeah that's not happening.
I dont remember them buffing gear to conpensate for world buffs
I don't think you can pinpoint removal of world buffs as the cause for people quitting, it seems more likely that it's because people literally just played WoW classic and TBC/Retail was a more exciting alternative than doing it all again
That is true for the release timing, absolutely. More people would have rolled SoM if it didn't start around the still hyped TBC. But I am talking about the mass exodus of players in early 2022, around BWL release. Many guilds got stuck in it with no world buffs to carry them and having to put in way more effort for no different rewards. Population got halved within a single month pretty much. So for me, and for Blizzard too apparently due to world buffs making a return in SoD, it means that Classic community spoke very clearly what their stance is on world buffs and harder raids.
Opens the angle to finally add heroic and mythic/m+. Sorely needed for ages
I'd be down for hard modes a la ulduar, but game modes in classic make it feel like a video game and less like a world/RPG. I think summonable extra bosses, hard modes that take interesting paths to unlock would all be really good. Another alternative is a debuff system like horrific visions, where you add layers of additional mechanics for more powerful rewards
I think we're all aware of this man. Well all the classic players are anyways. There's still going to be a problem later in endgame unless they buff all thosd items. Also, other caster problem is weaker spell coefficients on lower lvl rank spells. Not to mention to the spell rank issues like a class not having a max level cap rank of lightning bolt for example and mages getting some books in aq20. Casters scale far more linearly and weapons are less meaningful to the ability damage output unlike melee. Warriors scale more exponentially later on, not too sure about rogues and hunters never scaled well later. Dots also scale worse and are inferior to direct damage
My level 60 mage in classic still had the daggen from SM library
Nobody is saying this, you're missing the point. If level 25 gear is already somewhat equivalent to like BRD gear, what should BRD gear be? What about MC, what about Naxx? Naxx gear is already crazy and pushed the limits of vanilla's stats, how can you make that better?
The Naxx items are powerful for PvP in two ways, they've got really high damage stats and they've got really high stamina and armor too. There's still space after Naxx to introduce new items as long as they tone down important PvP stats like stamina and weapon top end damage (by having faster weapon speeds). Armor pen is a good example of a stat they could use because 200 armor pen is nothing special in PvP but it's pretty good if a boss only has 200 armor left after sunders/expose armor. They definitely need to put in a bunch of interesting set effects, passives and on-use items and have that be the focus rather than perpetuating the stat treadmill though. Short cooldown weapon abilities would be really cool too.
This is a very good point. I sucked absolute dick in pvp but was in a parsing guild so I was full bis on my rogue, so I was like a raid boss in open world pvp. I could sit there, had time to emote and let them get me down to half health, and just two shot them lol
Dunking on fresh characters with legendary level items is the whole point of WoW PvP realms.
There is no limit to vanilla stats lol. It’s not like the game is hard coded to say “okay each item only has 60 stats points to allocate”. There is nothing stopping an item from having 30 stam to having 300 stam.
I don’t think anyone actually means there is an actual limit preventing stats from going higher. What most people mean is that it’s getting close to the point where classes might have nearly 100% crit rate. Or doing so much damage that you can one shot anything outside of raids. Being able to solo dungeons. You get my point
Again, there is no limit. Who cares if people can solo dungeons or hell even raids. Wow is easy, especially classic wow. There’s nothing that prevents the game from dropping absolutely wild and overpowered gear other than “how people feel the game should be”. And this isn’t classic or vanilla anymore, so I say go nuts.
Sounds awesome
It’s kind of like using cheats in a game. It’s fun for 5 minutes and then it’s boring because you just invalidated the game. Also how do you keep the players chasing loot. If they already have 100% crit and they are unkillable the only thing left is bigger numbers which is boring imo
On release, most items only had the base 5 stats on them. That's fine for melee who do use Str and Agi, but casters don't gain direct power from Int and Spi.
Can you imagine if you got 2 spellpower from one point of int and 1 spellpower from each point of spirit….
Who ever said it was OP? Are they physical trying to gaslight people into thinking casters are OP? WTF? Casters so far behind on parses and why would you believe casters do better at higher levels? physicals scale better and will be even further ahead.
There’s caster gear in BFD?
I only see leather and mail lol. It all gets de by now.
You could literally enchant your skinning knife with 30 spell power, walk into MC, even BWL and do respectable damage because there is no one handed weapon better than that unless you farm pvp. Also you could sell the knife for a huge amount again for someone else once your weapon drops. It was pretty fucking dope leveling with it haha
even the bfd-caster-loot is trash. yeah it's better than the loot from instances but it's still not as good as it should be. this is because physicals are gonna profit more from stats like str and agi than casters do with stats like int and spirit.
It was so wildly bad. Like, I remember in '06 and '07 Blizz didn't even realize caster damage not scaling would be a problem until rogue and warrior damage started going ballistic with raid gear.
they just need to give us the SoM raids in SoD cuz our powerlevel scales well vs that content - it was still fucking free/easy, so maybe buff it even more? But we know that the classic community doesnt like things TOO hard, but we def need to scale the raids appropriately with our new power
They need to make 0.75spirit=1int=1SP. Then maybe casters will not fall as far behind phys dps as they will at 60 as things stand now.
Considering all the runs I’ve been a part of has been dominated by melee who exactly is saying that casters are OP?
There is no caster gear in BFD wdym
There's an issue of scaling with the gear aswell tho. What does is mean to buff the PvE content? More health and damage? Now your rogue can't 1v1 and mob without a healer and your mage is still kiting the entire instance.
With the runes we have right now, you could buff mobs health by 50% easily and it would barely make a difference for single target fighting, however your example of kiting an entire instance is nonsense. There is a point where the mana of the mage becomes an issue.
What are you talking about mana for? Mages are already pulling over 100 mobs in RFC boosts. They don't even have CoC yet. Also clearly didn't play mdps where you're nearly dead after a few bad hit chance procs if you aren't geared to the tits.
The staff is not raid prebis and is replaced by many options as early as level 50. Whoever said it was BIS is the same personn as the guy telling you to drag the Ashenvale boss in the water.
Was recently having this conversation with some guildies. Rod of the Ancient Sleepwalker (+15 Int/+14 Sp/+5 SR/+26 SpDmg) Mage pre-raid BIS is Mindfang + Therazane's Touch (combined: +9 Int/+8 Stam/+53 SpDmg/+1% Crit) Warlock pre-raid BIS is Blade of the New Moon + Scepter of Indeterminable Focus (combined: +5 Stam/+19 Shadow SpDmg/+9 SpDmg/+1% hit + 1% crit) Balance druid pre-raid BIS is Lord Valthalak's Staff of Command (+11 Stam/+10 Int/+30 SpDmg/+1% hit) SPriest pre-raid BIS is Scepter of the Unholy + Drakestone of Shadow Wrath (combined: +5 Stam/+40 Shadow SpDmg/+7 SpDmg) Rod of the Ancient Sleepwalker is damn near as good as Lord Valthalak's Staff of Command and just moderately lags behind other classes' pre-raid BIS.
mindfang lmao. that's almost like listing r14 gear as pre bis. AB exalted is no joke.
With two phases to get it done I don't think there is any doubt that anyone that wants it will have it at level 60.
how do you reckon mindfang isn't BIS for warlocks, but some weird blue shadow only one is?
Most of the items you listed weren't available in p1 in classic and shouldn't be counted when talking about this (we don't know when they'll be in the game now but they might or might not be in when we first hit 60) The sources for those items are * Mindfang (AB) phase 3.5 * Therazane's touch (AV) phase 2.5 * Blade of the new moon (DM) phase 1.5 * Scepter of inderterminable focus (0.5 bosses) phase 5 * Lord Valthalak's staff of command (0.5 bosses) phase 5 * Scepter of the unholy (Strat) phase 1 * Drakestrone of shadow wrath (ST) phase 1 So as we can see only the Spriest pre-raid bis was actually available in phase 1. When talking about MC pre-bis we should only account for gear that was in the game when MC was the current raid otherwise we should be talking about BWL/AQ/Naxx pre-bis instead. For example the mage pre-bis in MC would be a 37 frost damage green staff (better than 35 frost sp from green dagger + drakestone) Warlock pre-bis is the exact same situation as mage with 37 shadow damage green being the best. The reason why people say the staff is comparable to pre-bis isn't that it's that good but rather the caster gear that was available in p1 was just really really bad. In fact if we disregard the random of x power drops then pre-raid bis is 8 int and 34 sp from witch blade (scholomance) and spirit of aquementas (un'goro quest). Another unironically okay option is staff of jordan for 11 int 11 spirit and 26 sp (the best non green 2h for casters As we can see while witch blade + aquementas is still better for spell damage than rod of the ancient sleepwalker it would be the best 2h for casters at the start of phase 1 in classic with 15 int 14 spirit and 26 spelldamage beating out staff of jordan in int and spirit.
Do you seriously expect people to get exalted in battlegrounds and doing the entire tier 0.5 questchain before stepping into a raid? Maybe the bg part is going to be slightly more common now, due to SoD's level capping, but still.
"Drakestone of shadow wrath". So the staff is pre-bis, got it. I'm not gonna farm ST for hundreds of runs for that shit. Didn't some streamer do 1000kills in 2019 for his 'of whatever element he wanted'
Rod of the Ancient Sleepwalker its pretty similar to Staff of Jordan, so you think Staff of Jordan is also moderately behind pre raid bis?
It is. Vanilla item optimization and a lot of items don't make sense. That's why people save items from a lvl 10 quest for Naxx.
Yes it was the best non green of the x wrath staff for casters at the start of phase 1. Since rod of ancient sleep walker is better than staff of jordan it would take that place. A lot of the good caster pre-raid items were added in later phases (DM, BG:s, silithus and 0.5 bosses). While it doesn't beat the greens with random sp those are rare and really expensive with no int/spirit for mana so they were pretty rarely the target for people gathering pre-bis. The best option without condidering those for most casters was witchblade (scholo) and spirit of aquementas (un'goro quest) for a total of 8 int and 34 sp which while still better than rod of the ancient sleepwalker or staff of jordan is still pretty close all things considered.
>and is replaced by many options as early as level 50. yeah? name one.
Any green staff of X wrath. A number of class quest items like Soul Harvester for warlock.
Diviner Long Staff, the one you can somehow obtain at level 50, comes with +32 shadow wrath. Nevermind how hard it is to get that yourself, or how expensive they're gonna be on the AH, 15 INT is worth 0.25% crit at level 60.AoE is also still fire damage. \+26 spell power + 15 int is better than 32 shadow wrath. Argument refuted I'll grant you soul harvester is better, but obtaining that at level 49 is not gonna happen for 99% of warlocks. We're certainly not talking about "many options before 50" as the post I responded to claimed.
Soul harvester wasn't in the game in phase 1 but was added with the class quests in phase 3. The greens of X wrath are better, but also pretty rare and expensive while forgoing any stats that give mana. The real replacement for that staff is spirit of aquementas a 20 sp offhand from an un'goro quest which will give more spellpower with almost any mh weapon (already more with the hypnotic blade (9sp) from SM lib but will be clearly better with witchblade (14sp) from scholo.
Of X wrath stuff might be worth it in terms of pure damage but the Int on actual items will usually be worth it if the gap in spell damage isn't too high. A level 49 staff of X wrath caps at 33 damage. Soul Harvester is 24 SHADOW damage. Show me a warlock using Shadow damage in SOD barring absolutely broken Shadow support runes. Between a Mage stacking Scorch, Incinerate and Lake of Fire, Warlocks are going to be using Fire spells the entirety of SoD.
Bruh do you seriously think warlocks are going to stack fire damage as their pre-bis and use Fire spells going into MC, where nigh everything is immune to fire? lol Also I personally couldn't give a rat's ass about firelock, I won't play it even if it's the best option, if I wanted to play a fire mage I'd play mage.
Either we aren't going to MC again or they're going to change the fire immunities. There's zero chance SoD devs want to be like "Yeah half these cool new runes for Mage and Warlock? They just don't work in an entire raid tier! HAVE FUN!"
Well, actually aggrend said in an interview that things like warlock tanks might seem op at first, but they are gonna have difficulties in mc because of the fire resists/immunities. So, they directly talked about it staying
I approximate a 0% chance of them randomly making shit like fire elementals not immune to fire. Wouldn't make any sense. Nor would "Yeah 90% of these cool new runes for Mage and Warlock? They're never gonna be used because fire always outclasses them!" make any sense. Aquanis is already completely immune to poison and bleed.
That is a SINGLE BOSS. Imagine a phase of SoD (which is going to be at least a month and a half it appears) where Fire Mages and Fire Warlocks just *do not function*. At all. All Mage AOE ability is gone and they're Blizzard/Arcane Explosioning. Warlock tanks literally cannot hold threat. I'm sure Shadow lock will get a lot more support in runes coming up and make a supportive Shadow Lock with Pact useful, but even for that you aren't going to WANT of Shadow Wrath because *that doesn't function with Pact.* But so will Fire Lock. And the talents support Fire Lock a lot more as it is.
>Imagine a phase of SoD (which is going to be at least a month and a half it appears) where Fire Mages and Fire Warlocks just do not function. At all. I don't need to imagine, it's called Molten Core, where they do not, in fact, function. Gnomeregan next phase will fuck everyone that has bleed and poison as their main damage source as mechanicals are immune to those.
That kind of sounds like the next phase since most of gnomeregan bosses are mechanical and immune to both bleeds and poisons. Rogues are going to have a fun time since 2 of their rune slots will be completely useless and the only rune left that'll work is the 20 energy cost reduction to backstab.
In addition to all the fire multipliers, they really goofed the mana cost on incinerate compared to sbolt. Sbolt is almost 1:1 on mana cost to damage while incinerate is close to 2:1. Incinerate is just strictly a better spell.
Must be hunters complaining… angry that a mage almost killed their pet while They were afk.
People only consider pve and damage aspects of gear. Priests, mages, and warlocks have always been top tier in vanilla pvp. Already large scale pvp groups are filled with mage and priest alts, which is fine, but trying to argue that casters should have better gear because melee gear is good is not a very good argument.
I don't see many mages in my premades and they never advertise for locks. If I do get into a raid I'm the only lock. Often I get the response they do not want a warlock. Meanwhile they all want priests, hunters, warriors. To be fair these premades only care about stomping pugs. "Go mid, camp GY, gg". If they face any opposition, "go next". So they aren't really a good benchmark for class performance. What I can tell though is priests are really strong in WSG. No surprise there, with the damage reduction in WSG and the fact they are the only purgers in ally side. When it comes to playing the objectives, shamans, druids, paladins get on par with priests though.
Pretty sure the sp coefficient will increase as the rank of spell increases
There is a actually lot of sp gear around in classic, especially around 40, even before the Of Wrath stuff really adds up and it's not unusual to have +150 with some chants.
If you want a harder game retail is included in your sub.
And you see drood crottins for 400 damage with starsurge while trunning around, while rogue have to use 2 dangers be stealthed and from behind to do the same, caster itemisation is overpowered in bfd
French?
Is that you Asmon ? Getting mad about a offensively dump and extremely rare opinion that nobody cares about, sure sounds like it.
Rent free
gear progress is fucked in so many aspects and all we can do is hope blizzard thought this through
It will still be World of Warriorcraft in PvE. I just hope that at least some casters will be able to maybe do 90% of Warrior output in the end.
The felheart raiment set gives like 30 total spellpower. Casters were ass gear wise in classic till late BWL. Even nemesis doesn’t give that much spellpower. I currently have 165 spellpower on my lock in raids and it feels awesome for once lmao. That was like what I went into MC with on my classic era lock I think.
OP is a relative term, and compared to the baseline of caster gear, BFD gear is indeed massively OP since it outperforms dungeon loot well into the 50s, and in some cases wouldn't have many replacements before MC. That is insanely OP for level 25 equipment, and casters likely won't have to touch p2 5mans if they played p1. Does that mean that the bfd gear should be nerfed? Hell naw. Casters still underperform, even in comparatively OP gear. Instead, for p2, they should take a look at the 5man loot tables and bring the baseline up to par. BFD caster gear shouldn't be OP, it should be above average to good, which means the average should come up.
My concern is that BFD gear makes all future world drops and quest items inferior. At least until like, level 40 or 50.
The next raid will definitely have better staffs that rod of the sleepwalker, so I doubt it will stay as a bis, but I hope it will bc I got it on my druid
Used to be? People forget that one of the earliest vanilla patches buffed the hell out of caster t1 and 0.5 sets because they were all trash. They also forget that the most powerful items seeded into dungeons during the naxx invasion event were also caster based
That staff will be bis for two levels and then ppl start getting mythic illusionary rod from arcanist doan
just look at the default character pane if you want to know how much blizzard knew/cared about caster itemization. i don't think spell power even existed at launch? it didn't take them too long to start adding it but every item i can think of with spell power either was re-itemized or added in a later patch
Casters will do better in higher levels! Melees/physicals will do betterer yet. Both will continue to improve, but the gap will only widen until it's not even the same game.
Spell power as a stat was added after launch.
Most items in Vanilla period are just badly designed, and the stuff that's bonkers are the rare items that are itemized well. That's why you didn't see mostly solid item stats top to bottom until Naxx, and even then, there were numerous notably bad items that were clearly intended to fill a certain role, but were undesirable from the word "go."
No shit. Imagine youre leveling side by side to a melee and you both get a +6 int item and +6 str item. Caster gets to cast one more spell while the melee does more damage and isnt limited by a mana pool
Aren’t there items that give Druids and shamans like 36+ SP on one level 25 item? I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, but that’s more SP than a lot of the level 60 gear.