Originally Posted by
xtramuscle
My first thoughts about WOD beta:
Firstly there are some amazing spell effects, not only for the players, but it seems NPCs got a big boost this exspansion. Khadgar (the mage) blowing up damsn n shiz with a frost/fire/arcane bomb! Shamans (npcs and mobs alike) ripping rock from the ground to pound you with. The zones ans spells within them are visually pleasing.
@Boomkins I'm running without guided stars atm. I'm a 14/14 HC raider, so would like to say I have pretty good situational awareness, even without a list of in game addons I'm missing. Its incredibly good for tagging mobs whilst leveling, which YOU KNOW on release will be harder than actually killing them. It has that 'here comes the pain' feeling in dungeons too. Honestly, I've not wiped the group once by pulling the world with it. Youre forgetting (in theory) everything behind you is dead, there arn't usually two packs directly infront of each other, and if you only want to hit a certain pack you hug the wall and the pull range is cut in half. I like the starfall changes, and the fact it shares charges with SS will make for good game play.
I'm missing NS HT, but honestly that's about it.
My main concern is leveling SUCKS. It always has as boomkin, 85 to 90 was a pain in the ass, but this is even worse. (Take this with a pinch of salt though, as I'm playing a premade ilv 500 chicken, cant really compare it to my 587 on live, or the fact I'm questing alone and not in a party of 3-5 players like I will be on release).
With that said, as a ilv 500 chicken, I'm pretty much only casting starfires and that's annoying as hell. Even when you run around and think you've managed to stay in combat you 'sunfire' only to find the bar resets and you've just moonfired that 1 mob in the middle of 5 others.
Yeah sure you can AC to solar, but doing that on every pull isn't fun. With our survivabilty somewhat nerfed pulling too much, and then only being able to starfall/moofire blanket before having 3 days of starfire casts can be dangerous. (Again fixed by better geared, ppl with you etc but its a genuine concern while solo questing). The insta SS perk will help alot too.
I managed to lv to 92, and got enhanced boomkin form at 91 and again at 92, so I'm guessing they've not fixed perks yet. It also increases my armour number, but doesn't chance me damage reduction for some reason.
Last night I did a dungeon with stellar flare, and honestly it felt horrible. I found myself on trash against 3-5 mobs, wanting to put SF on all of them, but know they would all be different strengths, I found myself missing moonfire/sunfire casts because of it, tracking if I should use wrath or starfire was a nightmare and overall the only thing that felt usefull was starfall. Looking at logs this morning, flare does hit hard, as does starfall, and sunfire if theyre clustered and you can either get it off at 100% eclipse, or maintain good uptime at either end of the eclipse. But the rotation was an absolute mess.
That's with about 5 hours of 'questing' rotation practice, obviously it will get better, have standard ui, and no weakauras was a massive pain, and once beta allows for addons I'm sure I'll be much more comfortable with it. Obviously dropping flare would make the rotation easier to begin with, but balance of power seems a little meh, and Euphoria feels as though it would only make matters worse (total speculation I have tried neither BOP or Euphoria yet) but will report back once I have.