So, as expected, patch 4.0.1 came out last tuesday (a couple days after my last post), and I decided to take a few days before posting my first responses. As you've probably noticed, i'm kind of an altaholic... or that could be a major understatement lol. So what i'm thinking i'll do is list things by class.
Druid (tank) - HOLY DOGSHIT SO MUCH FUN. Swipe cooldown is.... quite a change, especially in heroics, but honestly it's not terrible. A lot more tab switching to keep aggro on packs, but otherwise it's not so bad. Heroics are quite a bit harder to keep threat on everyone, but easily doable. Raid tanking on the other hand? HOOOOOLY SHIT. So much fun. Maul being on a cooldown is different, but it's off the GCD so it's not quite so bad. Pulverize is such a great addition to the rotation. Lacerate is weak nowadays, but that's alright. It's more filler to use between mangle/maul/pulverize. FFF really has no room in the single-target rotation anymore, and neither does swipe... and that's perfectly alright with me.
Hunter - Hrmm... Focus... I felt pretty comfortable with it on training dummies, but getting in and doing some heroics and even a quick raid (3 drake OS) I just felt very... *thrash, buttonmash, flail*. I think it's going to take a lot of getting used to. More so than other classes i've played.
Warlock - I'm leveling a warlock right now... Level 42 right now. This is a lot of fun. Having a felguard at this level feels ridiculous, but not TOO ridiculous that i'm absolutely unkillable. I can't take on large packs of mobs because felguard's don't have the staying power they used to have, and that's alright... Levelling should be easier, not trivial, and it's really not for the most part. There's a new spell in the Demonology tree called Hand of Gul'dan... holy CRAP is it strong. My very first one at level 39 crit for a little over 1000. Leveling the warlock is fun, can't really talk about the endgame part.
Paladin (ret) - Holy power took a little getting used to, but it's not a severe change really. The rotation feels a bit strange at times, but I think it'll be easier to find a way to fit into than focus. Haven't had a lot of time to play with it much... maybe i'll go into more details in a later post.
Death knight - So i've tried frost (DW and 2h) and unholy specs for this. Man it seems like a lot of fun. Festering strike is a nice addition to the unholy rotation with the rune change to Scourge Strike, and Sudden Doom feels a lot more suited to unholy's playstyle. It almost felt more like frost DKs with the proc watching and little unpredictabilities to the rotation. That's a lot of fun, to me! Dark transformation is also COOL AS HELL. As for frost DKs? They're still fun. I feel like I'm hitting frost strike a lot more (as 2h). Killing machine's change to no longer effect Howling Blast is a bit of a let down, but I feel much less RP starved when runes are on cooldown that i'm not wasting time.
Mage - Now my mage had been shelved for quite some time, but i've recently picked him back up because the changes to the mage class seemed REALLY exciting, just from reading about them. And damn if i wasn't right about that. Y'know why I stopped playing my mage? Because for a long period of time it was "arcane or nothing else" and the arcane rotation was absurdly boring. Mana management made it more interesting, until they made missile barrage procs mana-free... then mana management wasn't a part of the game anymore, and it was just a faceroll spec. I like being engaged in my rotations. I like watching procs and timing different things and having a lot of different buttons to hit... arcane was the antithesis of that. I mean sure, they had missile barrage procs, but lets be honest. It procced all the damn time, so my mage was laid to rest with some middle-high ulduar tier gear... and there he remained until last week. I tried both frost and fire out. Fire plays very much like it did previously, but the improved scorch/firestarter combination (scorch while moving? wat?) make things REALLY different, and the combustion change is unusual. Frost is a lot of FoF procs, Brain freeze procs, and puts out some solid damage. Blizzard seems to have finally figured them out.
That's really the extent of my experience with things since 4.0 came out. Less than a week and 5 different classes... Wow... that's crazy LOL. Anyway. Enough of my babbling. I know that I mentioned that I am the World of Warcraft writer for mmoreporter, it's a good site... you should check it out!
Congrats on your position at the mmoreporter :)
ReplyDeleteAs for getting used to the changes in 4.0 I'm still learning *lol* I almost have my warlock's destro spec down now. It's in large parts similar, just have to remember that we've added a spell and rotation is changed a tiny bit. Oh and knowing when to pop the soul shards.
The other classes I've not played as much, and I still feel a bit lost when I'm on them because of it. Most of them have had a change to rotations, some even which spells/skills you should use and when. I think Holy Priest to me is the one that has had the most done to it (for me). Still didn't get my head around that Chakra business :)