PST - Episode 103

This week:
0:23 - Should Blizzard bring back the limited attempts system?
6:01 - Will we ever see brand new servers again?
9:10 - Should there be a way to get offspec gear in LFR?
14:17 - How can I get my guild to help me recruit without causing a fuss?
18:09 - How much of an effect does the time difference between US and EU have on the world first race?
25:52 - If getting the right raid comp is such a pain, why have buffs and debuffs at all?
32:12 - How do you feel about tag sharing on world bosses?
37:29 - Should we be able to get more than 3 Greater Charms per week?

According to simulation craft, noxxic and varying other sites, Balance druids are actually the worst dps class (singletarget at least) by quite a bit.

There is already a sort of workaround to get offspec gear in LFR (or more accurately, there's a way for tanks to get around the long que times for lfr and still get tank loot). LFR loot is not based off of what you queued as, it's based on what spec you are (just as Sha and Galleon are and there's no role que for them). Which means if you are just looking to gear up your tank offspec but don't want to wait an hour-plus que (or if your tank-gear is still too far in-progress to actually be the tank) you can simply que as dps and just kill the bosses in your tank spec. Your dps may be awful (especially since you won't have much in the way of vengeance), but LFR is fully capable to be killed with a few people scraping the bottom of the meters (you'll still be more useful than that healer that's afk).

It's not perfect, and I agree that there being some other sort of system in place to let you get offspec gear without intentionally being bad, but at least this will help in the meantime.


Also, on the buff topic, the drums do still exist. Well, Drums of the Wild were drastically changed at the start of cata (they're now a party wide hot that only heals for 2k total), but they were only changed because MotW and Kings were merged into the same buff and Drums of Forgotten Kings fill that role. The Kings drums still work and they provide a 4% version of the buff as opposed to the 5%. It's just a matter farming the wrath leather/scales to make them. There are also still inscription version of the fortitude buff, Runescroll of Fortitude III provides an 8% stam buff as opposed to the 10% that the real version provides, and it's made with MoP level mats (there are also 6% and 7% runescrolls that take wrath and cata mats respectively). I don't know if any of the other 6 raid buffs have consumable versions or not (and I don't think any of the debuffs do).

Also, if you are willing to spend Charms, you can change spec immediately on the kill and use the charm quickly after you change spec. The roll with the charm will look at your current spec.

I'm guilty of queuing as tank and dps in lfr and just being a third tank on all the fights.

Yep i'm doing the same thing now. I spent about 4 hours in the tank queue last week, so this week i'm queueing as dps and being terrible at it as a tank spec. I'm sure I would be much more effective if I could play frost and roll on blood gear, but the system doesn't accomodate that.

I'm queuing with a healer friend, yet to get an hour long queue

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Tengenstein

I'm queuing with a healer friend, yet to get an hour long queue

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Its a zero-sum game. The fact that you're getting shorter queues for queueing with a healer means that I'm getting longer queues as a result queueing with nobody. If I queued with 2 healer friends, you'd be getting longer queues as a result.

The basic problem is that there are too many people wanting to queue as a tank for a 25m raid. Queueing with others helps the individual, but does nothing to alleviate this basic problem.

almost makes me miss when no one wanted to tank anything and i got instant queues.

Surely the Blood Legion thing shouldn't have happened now that the WoWProgress actually shows number of pulls aswell as has always shown the kill order of every other boss.

Blood Legion killed Empress in 85 attempts. Method in 156 attempts.

In this case I think is clear Blood Legion did better, and the '1 day advantage' didn't come into play at all.

I think you are underestimating the advantage of the US guilds. First, to put a number on this:

• American Realms go up at 11:00 AM PST on Tuesday = 7:00 PM GMT on Tuesday
• European Realms go up at 11:00 AM GMT on Wednesday

So we are talking about a 16 hour head start.

Looking at the rankings for the two endbosses, this would have changed the positions as Paragorn would have taken #1 on Shek'zeer (even being 10 man and all), but especially the earlier bosses in the instance would have changed a lot. You might argue that the first bosses don't count for the overall standings, but even when not changing positions this still is a problem: Wowprogress.com is giving out points based on the seconds you killed the boss after the very first kill of that particular boss, so even if the ranking would have remained the same, Method would have gotten more points for their kill (which would have been only 2 hours after BLs kill) and BL would have gotten less for their WotE kill.

About the "BL was behind in progress and had to overtake Method after Zor'lok", that might be true, but that only translates to "BL used up all their head start on Zor'lok", which does not make it less of a head start. An argument I could accept to a certain degree would be the hotfixes that were applied to Zor'lok at the same time for EU and US BUT both hotfixes went in at a time far better suited for US progression than for EU progression:

• The first Hotfix went in "shortly after" Nov 7, 13:28 PST which is around 21:30 GMT, late in the day for EU realms but early in the day for US.
• The second Hotfix went in "shortly after" Nov 8, 14:17 PST which is around 22:30 GMT, late in the day for EU realms but again early for US.

While technically they went in at the same time, the timing did fit the US guilds a lot more than it did the EU guild. For my guild (Pulse on Blackmoore-EU, GO ALLIANCE!), we read about the second hotfix at around 23:30 local time and had the option to either stay up and hope for the hotfix to go in or just call it a night, get some sleep and start again the next morning. For all we know, the hotfix went in about 30 minutes later, but we couldn't know that. I hope you see my point.

All that being said, this discussion is basically as old as WoW. It died down a bit in the last couple of years, because the last US World First was back in 2007 and so there was nothing to discuss about.

Thank you Lore, for keep me updated with everything in WoW. Keep up the great work with PST, and The Marmot. Im currently depolyed and have been ever since MOP came out. Can't wait to get back and play again. Once Thank you for keep me up on MOP, can't wait to get back and play again.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Flipp

I think you are underestimating the advantage of the US guilds. First, to put a number on this:

• American Realms go up at 11:00 AM PST on Tuesday = 7:00 PM GMT on Tuesday
• European Realms go up at 11:00 AM GMT on Wednesday

So we are talking about a 16 hour head start.

Looking at the rankings for the two endbosses, this would have changed the positions as Paragorn would have taken #1 on Shek'zeer (even being 10 man and all), but especially the earlier bosses in the instance would have changed a lot. You might argue that the first bosses don't count for the overall standings, but even when not changing positions this still is a problem: Wowprogress.com is giving out points based on the seconds you killed the boss after the very first kill of that particular boss, so even if the ranking would have remained the same, Method would have gotten more points for their kill (which would have been only 2 hours after BLs kill) and BL would have gotten less for their WotE kill.

About the "BL was behind in progress and had to overtake Method after Zor'lok", that might be true, but that only translates to "BL used up all their head start on Zor'lok", which does not make it less of a head start. An argument I could accept to a certain degree would be the hotfixes that were applied to Zor'lok at the same time for EU and US BUT both hotfixes went in at a time far better suited for US progression than for EU progression:

• The first Hotfix went in "shortly after" Nov 7, 13:28 PST which is around 21:30 GMT, late in the day for EU realms but early in the day for US.
• The second Hotfix went in "shortly after" Nov 8, 14:17 PST which is around 22:30 GMT, late in the day for EU realms but again early for US.

While technically they went in at the same time, the timing did fit the US guilds a lot more than it did the EU guild. For my guild (Pulse on Blackmoore-EU, GO ALLIANCE!), we read about the second hotfix at around 23:30 local time and had the option to either stay up and hope for the hotfix to go in or just call it a night, get some sleep and start again the next morning. For all we know, the hotfix went in about 30 minutes later, but we couldn't know that. I hope you see my point.

All that being said, this discussion is basically as old as WoW. It died down a bit in the last couple of years, because the last US World First was back in 2007 and so there was nothing to discuss about.

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But all that is splitting hairs. If the servers opened up for both realms at 11am GMT, then that would mean it opens up at 3AM PST, favoring EU guilds. If they opened up both realms at 11am PST, then EU guilds would have to raid through the night to keep up with US guilds. What about this week and Thanksgiving? Does that give EU guilds an advantage since they don't celebrate Thanksgiving and many US players are going to be gone Thursday?

As for the Zor'lok. Look at it with this analogy. The US got a 12 hour head start in the race, but there was a bus crash on the road 1 mile down and they had to wait until it was cleared before they could continue the race. The EU guilds started the race 12 hours later, but met up with the US at the same bus crash. There was no way around this crash, no amount of speed or skill could get them past the crash. Finally, 2 days later the wreckage was cleared and everyone got to start again, but this time on even ground. You may say the time of the hotfix favored US guilds, but the top EU guilds were still up, and started progressing the same time that the US guilds did. Paragon and Method were not asleep when the hotfixes went in.

The only reason it's even an issue at this point is b/c the bosses are dropping within days of being available. In T13 noone ever argued about the difference. It still wouldn't have been an issue if a US guild got world first Madness b/c at that point it was a month after it opened. Then the only stupid argument would be the amount of hours of sleep each guild got per day.

I don't think buffs needs to be done away with, but they could be more attainable. In beta I had suggested one of the tiers for dks to be 3 buff choices, ap, melee haste, and coe or whatever uh had before. You can do that across all classes and give 10 mans an easier job of getting all the buffs without taking them all away and seeing class stacking.

@Therec:
It is not splitting hairs. From "The Free Dictionary": "Split Hairs: to argue about very small differences or unimportant details". A difference of 16 hours might be small if the instance takes a month to clear, but it for sure is not "small" if it only takes a couple of days. Say both US and EU kill a boss at the same time, 31 days after the instance opened up for EU, then it would have taken the EU guild 744 hours to kill the boss, whereas it would have taken the US guild 760 hours to kill the boss. That is a difference of 2% and I wouldn't argue "US advantage" in that case. But if the instance is cleared within 3 days, you have 72 hours for EU guilds and 88 hours for US guilds, a difference of 22% which is quite significant. Obviously, I am ignoring time spent sleeping, but assuming that everyone sleeps about the same amount this only extends the time in which the advantage remains significant.

I can agree to what you are saying, if Blizzard would release the content at the same exact time for EU and US this would still not be an even start because of the time differences. However, there is an easy fix for that problem: Ranking should be done by "seconds since instance availability" and not by "absolute date".

Again, I can accept the argument about Zor'loks hotfixes in part, and I still stand by my argument that those hotfixes came at a far better time for US than they did for EU. Yes, people were still up, but the hotfixes hit at the end of a raid day for EU, while they hit at the beginning of a raid day for US.

I'm guessing my battlegroup must be really poor on tanks, as queueing solo as a tank provides queues within five minutes, often instant, and DPS queues take about 30 minutes.

Which is annoying when the only remaining items I want out of LFR are either Haste items for my Tank spec, or simply offspec items.