One of the great joys of WoW is how couple-friendly it is. My wife and I are suckers for some cooperative multiplayer, and we haven’t looked back since we set up her account. We play together all the time, doing dailies, farming mobs, instancing and raiding (although we’re learning that being new parents isn’t really conducive to raiding, so that’s trailing off). Also, leveling alts.
We have some experience leveling a number of duos.
Continuing yesterday’s explanation of Wrath itemization, let’s experiment and take it a step further. Here are some further class changes Blizzard could make to simplify the “nobody in our guild could use this loot” problem. (Rampant armchair game design follows.)
I love what I’m hearing about the new itemization from beta. A lot of it is still in flux, but there’s a core variable that isn’t: a number of formerly separate stats have been combined:
This is absolutely wonderful. If you’re wondering why they’re doing this or why it’s so important to the quality of PvE, let’s geek out a bit and look at each class, the kinds of gear it currently wants, and what just the spellpower (healing + spell damage) combine means in terms of how it’s going to make your PvE instances and raids happier.
Yesterday, I talked about How to Read PvP Gear for PvE, and shortcuts on how to evaluate PvP gear when it comes to enhancing your PvE set. The big takeaway from the article was: use PvP gear to patch your PvE set, not for overall gearing.
Today, I’ll list as many of the commonly-patched cases I can think of. If Blizzard’s going to keep polluting sprinkling in pvp items in your pve instances/raids, you might as well cherry-pick pieces from the pvp side that will actually help you in PvE.
Continued from yesterday’s Intro to Using PvP Gear for PvE.
(I apologize in advance for the formatting, I don’t have the patience for proper html coding.)
PvP gear is typically heavy on the following stats. I’ll explain how each matters in PvE.
Raids and instances are PvE. Battlegrounds and Arena are PvP. You get to play multiple ways with the same toon, it’s really fun! The cool thing about WoW is that even in PvP, with no group, you can get gear to help you in PvE.
This article is written for the PvE player looking to supplement their gear with some PvP gear. I’m assuming you are a newbie raider who has been to a couple of instances and wants to take the jump to Kara, ZA, Gruul and so on and not suck at your role. To do this, you can definitely help yourself out with some well-chosen PvP gear.
I went on my first pug raid in quite a while: a full Kara clear with my mostly-battleground hunter. It was decently fun; Kara’s a good time although by now I’ve spent entirely too much time there. This being summer and all, the raid chatter tended to center around genitalia and bodily functions.
Over the course of the 3.5 hour run, a total of five of the ten initial raiders left during the raid, every one of them by disconnecting without warning.
The series: [Introduction, and a call for comments, Solo Difficulty vs Group Difficulty, PvE vs PvP, Variety vs Specialization, Solo Performer vs Group Utility, Your role in a PvE raid]
This is how every talent tree of every class fits into a pve raid.
The series: [Introduction, and a call for comments, Solo Difficulty vs Group Difficulty, PvE vs PvP, Variety vs Specialization, Solo Performer vs Group Utility, Your role in a PvE raid]
In grouping, not all classes are similar. Some provide simple and easily defined benefits, while others provide auxiliary benefits beyond their basic stated role that more than make up for an apparent lack of output in that role. That was wordy, let’s talk examples.
The series: [Introduction, and a call for comments, Solo Difficulty vs Group Difficulty, PvE vs PvP, Variety vs Specialization, Solo Performer vs Group Utility, Your role in a PvE raid]
No class is globally better at PvP than every other class. WoW PvP is a huge rock-paper-scissor game, where there’s an answer for every move, or in WoW’s case, Class A always feels overpowered to an opponent of Class B, Class B over Class C, and Class C over Class A. (except expanded out to an 11-way graph) While no class is universally dominant in PvP, some builds are universally better than other builds in that environment.
