WoW Times 5 SoD Times
Hello! I lied! I’m sorry! I’ve got my mains pretty much where I want them to be aside from my priest. She’s 30 right now but I’ve got a 60 boost that I think I’ll use when War Within comes out because I really don’t want to do Dragon Isles again. If we could level in Zaralek Cavern or the Emerald Dream that’d be one thing since I haven’t done those THAT much but I’ve done the other zones about five times. I’m more than over it. So since I’ve been less busy I’ve been playing Season of Discovery here and there and it just makes me happy. Just running from place to place makes me grin, I don’t know why. It’s fun picking up items, like for runes, or coming across an asset that looks out of place and being like hold up, what was that? When doing some quest in Mulgore I came upon a bush by a cage hanging in a tree. Weird. I can click on the bush, I can attack the bush but nothing happens. Wave, kneel, dance, nothing. Google it, it’s for hunters, oh okay, bye bush. I was running around in Durotar doing my shaman quests and someone is in chat asking for a healer to help them with something. No one was helping, there were plenty of healers about but no one was giving them a hand. Someone came back with “you’ll just have to wait a few hours until people get out of work” so finally I was like “what do you need? If it’s not time consuming I can splash you a bit.” Then someone was like “it’s for a rune” and “need a healer”… Okay, shift-click my name, you’ll see I am, so I respond “well, I AM a shaman…” then I got a group invite. The guy was all the way down in the centaur crag, good god, okay, here I go. So I get there, clicked a portal, he got his rune, I got a rune, everyone’s happy. I can’t remember the last time I helped some random person with something, it was fun in its own way.
Before all that, when I was in Mulgore, I had to go into an awful cave with a bunch of Venture Co. people and there was a warrior there doing the same quest. He sent me an invite so I accepted, should be better with two of us. I immediately fell into what I would typically do in retail, stay behind and shoot lightning bolts. Nothing wrong with that I suppose but I don’t have the mana to do that all the time so it’s a bit of an adjustment. It was like oh yeah, I don’t HAVE to sit back here, I can go smack the things too.
So, after helping the priest with his rune I went back to doing my shaman fire quest and I had to get something from a cultist in a cave (they were the Burning Blade? Doesn’t sound right but okay Google). I killed the few guys outside, took one step into the cave and like five of these thugs rush out at me. What the hell?? So I run away, come back, happened again! Finally they stopped doing that, I don’t know if it was because more players showed up so the rush was handled or what but it was so weird. After getting my quest item I turned it in so I could get my searing totem. Started the fight with the fire elemental, hit it with flame shock, immune, huh, you don’t say? How novel. Flametongue also no good. MAKES SENSE. It’s so ridiculous how shit like that just does not matter in retail anymore, it’s dumb stuff like this that I actually enjoy.
So it’s nice that Season of Discovery is like Classic but slightly different and I’d like it if some quality of life things made their way into the game. Quest givers on the minimap would be nice, I hate the idea that I might miss a quest because it was in a house. I love the name plates in Classic vs retail but I would also like to see the enemies cast bar under their name. It’s rather obvious when they’re casting but seeing the cast bar just triggers my finger to push earth shock. I have it under their portrait but that’s over there, and I might be able to move it but I like it up there. I would like it if you could see all three of your talent trees at the same time, side by side you know? Just because. It seems silly to have them in their own tabs. Switching talents or having “loadouts” would be nice also. I remember in Vanilla I would heal for instance groups from time to time but I wasn’t specced in restro, I was questing just before and will be after, why would I put any points in restro? It was fine for the earlier dungeons but not so much later on. It’d be nice to switch talents on the fly just to save time. Keep the cost to change it if you want but it just seems like a waste of everyone’s time to be like “yup sure, let me go to Orgimmar and do that. What talents did I pick again?” I would like to dabble in tank shaman but would also like to be able to alternate every other dungeon or run or something. Or if I’m with a group and we go through once where they let me try tanking then after that run someone else wants to give it a go I can switch and we’ll go in a second time. Granted I understand the max is 25 right now and I’m level 11 and still in Mulgore, I can’t imagine there are many places to go after The Barrens. I’m guessing even if you don’t spec in healing you can do fine for the first few dungeons. I originally thought that the shaman tank build was going to be more for elemental based on the runes but after looking at the talent trees it seemed apparent that enhancement was probably the way to go. I was playing around with a talent calculator last night and, although the calculator was for 60, I plugged stuff into both elemental and enhancement for what I thought would work. So the way I look at it pretty much I want to use a shield and my shock spells as best I can. Now I look at the stats and stuff and (this is probably the stuff that I got hung up on years ago too) and I see strength is good for blocking with shield, okay probably want that, intellect is for spell damage, okay so I’m probably wanting strength and intellect. Is there (leather and later mail) armor like that? I don’t know, but if there’s not then clearly my way of going about this set up is wrong and the developers have a certain intention as to what “right” is but I would enjoy having the tools to succeed the way that I want to, you know? The way I’m going about the talents is probably heathenistic to most of you but that’s what would be fun for me. I don’t want to rely on my weapon for my damage. I want to piss everything off, block with my shield, interrupt things as often as I can with earth shock and hope I’m quick enough with certain totems in niche situations.
I like the old HUD over all and I don’t mind reading the quest log. Reading the quest log and walking everywhere really drives the communication in chat. In retail no one hardly talks in chat and it’s pretty much get the quest, look at the map, fly to the spot, do the thing and repeat. My server is pretty quite for the most part I’d say, I hardly see other people out doing quests. It’s like a single player game most of the time. If I don’t know what I’m doing for a quest I can try reading the quest log more carefully, ask in chat or if worse comes to worse just Google it. No need for all these big circles on my map.
I don’t know the intent or game plan for Season of Discovery but it seems to be Classic with other mischief thrown in so if it were a blend of Classic and retail I think it could be really interesting. I think right now in retail they just went over board with taking the most popular add-ons and put them in the game themselves. I think at some point they could just add in the new races, not the allied races but the Burning Crusade and Cataclysm crowd. Blood Elves could start with the Undead and Goblins could start in Durotar, or they could pick where they wanted to start. I think they could keep paladins and shaman on their respective sides and maybe introduce them later down the road or have some kind of quest line to unlock them. Maybe make the Blood Elf and Draenei starting areas some sort of event thing where everyone can go and not be just starting zones. I hope if it continues it somehow continues down the same path, like I understand it’s hard to make things interesting expansion after expansion where as an alchemist, for example, you’ve been making healing potions. Well okay now you make a BETTER healing potion but I like alchemy the way it is and I kind of like my spells the way they are. In retail my shaman has so much shit that I don’t press half of them and there’s this rotation I’m suppose to use but in Classic each spell has its purpose and you don’t have the infinite resource we have in retail so you have to be careful with your spells. I’d like them to somehow keep going in that direction. I also have been really enjoying the “low fantasy” armor transmogs I’ve been seeing on Reddit. The armor in retail is so over the top; it’s either super spiky, glowing or has lightning, I like the simpler looks. If they keep going with this idea I hope once they get to the over the top type armors they either dial it back a bit or make new sets all together.
The other day when I was playing I was getting lag and I’m like “what’s going on?” and I see the lovely little latency bar is in red and I’m like “how in this day am I in the red??” After looking it seems the server I’m on is a west coast server, most of them are. There’s like two in the middle and none on the east. Why? I remember when they took the east servers out on HotS it was basically unplayable for me, the lag was so terrible. It’s the only instance lately I’ve had with lag but still, lag is never any fun, 20 years ago or now. I remember lagging in dungeons all the time, I would get so mad. Oh the good ol’ days…
So that’s that. What do you think? Anything to add? Leave me a comment, please and thank you, I’m just gonna shove this out real quick so I can fool around on SoD a little bit more before my work week. Bye-bye!
My usual look and my "low fantasy" I'm working on.
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