The Queue: Suffer well, Paladins!

It’s 2 am as I write this. It’s been a heck of a week, some good, some really bad. I’m listening to Everlong by the Foo Fighters.I spent much of yesterday messing around with transmog and putting together this sweet mog for my DK. I like to think she hangs around the Paladins and acts all confused when they don’t like her.

Let’s get this Queue train rolling.

Do we all roll alts? I mean, I do, and most people I know do. But I’m sure at least some of us don’t.

That’s not really important, sorry, I just started drifting there.I have to admit I disagree with your assessment of Pandaria and its voice actors. I mean, Jim Cummings.

Anyway, I hate Vashj’ir. I won’t go there. I get why other people like it, but I don’t.

You have called for Rossi, and Rossi will answer.

I love Rampage. I just freaking love it.

On the whole, I feel like tanking specs are too weak and the whole ‘let’s making healing interesting again’ nerfs to all tanking specs went too far and are based on a misconceived notion. If you want to make healing interesting again, make healing interesting again. I suppose one could debate whether or not healing was ever interesting, but you get my point — redesign healing to be more fun for healers, don’t take what tank players liked about tanking and throw it out.

Arms and Fury are solid. I think Arms will be a better leveling spec because it has Victory Rush and Fury just has Bloodthirst, which does not heal for enough, plus the increased damage Fury takes when it goes into an enrage is brutal. Don’t like that at all, and we’re going to see Fury Warriors dying like roadkill in raids from it.

Overall I think Blood’s the most fun I have on my DK, although Unholy has its charms and I still dig Frost. On my Hunter, I can’t grok Survival yet, I’ve tried, but I’m stubbornly Beast Mastery for now. We’ll see how I feel once we get into Artifact country. I haven’t even tried Marks yet.

I’m afraid to try my Shaman. I’m told Enhancement really plays weird without the Artifact, and I’m honestly two expansions out of date on how to play him as it is.

That about sums it up. I’d say Warriors need some tanking love, my DK feels strong but still has issues in some dungeons, my Hunter is ranged 4 life, and I’m scared to play a Shaman now.

The answer to your question is simple: They’re not going to learn dungeons until they’re higher level. Low level dungeons are essentially unimportant. You run them once to finish your quests and by the time you do that you’ve outleveled the gear that might have dropped in them. It’s pointless to resist. Heirlooms have helped to render leveling nearly meaningless until you’re around level 60 or so. But it’s not just heirlooms at fault. When I was leveling my Monk, I wasn’t even using heirlooms and I trivalized every dungeon we ran.

I killed entire rooms with Keg Smash. (I am of course speaking about pre-7.0, I have no idea what Brewmasters are like now.)

So for me at least it feels like we’re in a place where the leveling game needs a revamp. For starters, heirlooms need to go — they contribute to an atomosphere where nobody learns how to play their class or deal with the mechanics for close to fifty plus levels. Then gear itself and the item squish needs to be retuned so that when you get a higher ilevel drop, you actually care. Even when we leveled without an heirloom, we quickly started to notice that gear remained stagnant. Some of us used gear from Outland up until mid-Pandaria or later and it worked out fine.

Also, in general the time it takes to kill stuff, especially between level 20 and 70, needs to go up. Things die before you can even target them sometimes in groups.

Much less than the Garrison. I think if you combine the time you’ll spend in New Dalaran with the time you’ll spend in your Class Order Hall, you’d be looking at about half as much time as we currently spend in Garrisons. You’ll go to your Garrison to get quests and missions, upgrade your Artifact, and do the Campaign stuff (which is pretty cool, honestly) and the rest of the time you’ll be doing dungeons, world quests, and other things of that nature.

Then there’s raiding, but that’s another story. I’d definitely expect to spend a lot less time in my Order Hall.

I find myself buying gear on my more flush characters just because four out of the five characters I play now wear plate, which makes it easier. But I get what you’re saying.

I’m weird and many of my alts are on different servers so I can’t just mail gold to myself, so this is a workaround.

Okay. This has been the Queue for this Friday. I’d like to take the moment and say thanks to everyone who helped me out Thursday with book promotion and just generally offering well wishes — it’s been a traumatic year and your support very much helps. Thank you.