Faction Imbalance Due to Paladins

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
84

Man I don’t know for sure but sure seems like sitting to eat crit to stack reck charges is a working strategy.

I know I had used the fact that casters would often sit to drink and the garonteed crit was really nice on my end as a hunter.

85

The thing is that they didn’t remove the mechanic that sitting forced a crit.

Blizzard made it so that forcing a crit via sitting would not proc spells like Reckoning or Enrage. The workaround was to abuse server latency, spam sit, then make the server believe you are sitting when you get hit to force a crit and then make the server believe you are standing when the crit actually hits you so you get the proc.

86

Was that a vanilla fix for sure?

87

Seal Twisting says hold my beer…

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88

I am still bitter towards Shaman to this day. Playing vanilla as a Druid… especially early on… as Alliance… was unemployable.

Originally, bear form increased your armor by like 60% only. Cat Form was fairly useless (little gear had enough +stats to increase your damage appreciably). Druids could remove only curses an poisons (which were somewhat rarely used - poisons at least). Originally, Viper Sting still burned your mana even in Bear or Cat Form. . . I’m almost wanting to say you could still do Mana Burn and Drain Mana to Druids in forms as well… We had the longest heal in the game (3.5 seconds untalented at max). HoTs were punished somewhat severely by by limiting gain of +healing power… Regrowth was almost rarely worth it…

For several months, shapeshifting was bugged and wouldn’t remove Frost slows… Frost Shock seemed to do an awful lot of damage, have a long duration,short cool down, and diminishing effects weren’t in place… Add in a high damage two second interrupt on a six second cool down, the cheap purge spam of any of your buffs… and… well… It wasn’t great. You could almost never cast Healing Touch (2 second interrupt + 3.5 second cast time + multiple pushbacks that were more severe in vanilla > 6 second cool down). Rejuvenation was worthless. Before weapon speed normalization, there was some two handed slooooow weapon with high damage… Seemingly every enhancement Shaman had it. I kind of want to say Windfury weapon + Windfury totem could stack off of each other as well (and proc off of each other). I believe there was a trinket that gave you a 2% chance on hit to hit again as well… that could trigger Windfury or be triggered off of Windfury…

They got their stupid Ghost Wolf form 10levels earlier (albeit with a cast timer and didn’t remove slows/roots… just like Druids for months hahaha). They could resurrect themselves if they died (which could be strategic if placed properly). They had Astral Recall (which is valuable when it’s cooldown is only 30 minutes compared to 60 minutes for Hearthstones and didn’t cause your hearthstone to go on cooldown!).

I remember life as an Alliance Druid being hard in general haha. Shamans galore (purge + interrupt + endless face bashing), Priests (AoE fear + dispel + mana burn + mind control + seemingly overwhelming numbers of Undead priests with Devouring Plague), Warlocks (Drain Mana/Health + Soulstones + Healthstones + a pet that would increase stealth detection all magic resistances automatically eat enemy buffs and/or your debuffs and automatically interrupt on a low cooldown + Soul Link if talented + fear), and Hunters (Viper Sting and maybe an interrupt? I can’t remember in vanilla if they had countershot). Factor in Wound Poison and Mortal Strike…

I could always be like “Fools! You’ve activated my trap card! For every 500-700 damage autoattack you do, my Thorns will return 34 (something very low) damage! You’ll be defeat in no ti… Oh… it was removed…”

Don’t misunderstand - there were enjoyable portion to being a Druid, but you had a significant chance to lose against equally geared persons (unless they had really bad gear)… especially AQ40+ since Druids scaled less effectively with gear. I did solo several BRD bosses (which I thought was impressive until I followed a Paladin who could solo most of Maraudon… albeit at a painfully slow pace).

Sorry - I probably went off-topic somewhat. I don’t think Shaman are bad. They have a lot of benefits - especially in PvP. Horde racials were pretty good as well (weapon specialization for Orcs, I think a haste for trolls with minor self inflicted damage, and Tauren with the only? AE stun in the game). You’ll get a cheap travel for, for 20 levels (which can save a ton of time). I also think you’re spared, somewhat, from reagants costs. I believe you only need ankhs for reincarnation. I believe you have to waste four bag slot for your totems, though. I don’t remember how long the quests for them are. The Druid form quests (especially Aquatic Form) are long…

Typed on my iPad… apologies for typos or autocorrects.

Edit: I forgot Greater Heal had a four second cast time untalented, but Flash Heal was almost exclusively used because of how fast it was and it was more mana efficient.

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89

The Will of the forsaken nerf in 2007 says otherwise.

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90

Will of the Forsaken was crazy - especially for the time period. I think initially it couldn’t be used if you were already feared/charmed/sleep, but was changed to be able to be used while feared/charmed/sleep. I think it provided like 20 second immunity or something on like a two minute cooldown or something and was instant cast. This was prior to the PvP trinkets (you couldn’t really remove anything yourself - Priests/Paladins/Warlock felhunters could remove magic CC from you). Compared to the 1.5 second cast Escape Artist which I think shared a similar cooldown, was subject to knockback, and only removed slows/roots at that exact time (no period of immunity like Will of the Forsaken) or Perception (which I tried valiantly, in vain basically 99% of the time, to locate Rogues) with a similar cooldown. It was definitely out of whack relative all of the other racial.

The only other racial that might have been as powerful would be the Tauren racial War Stomp. I believe it was the only AoE stun in the game at the time. Orc’s Blood Fury wasn’t readily useful in PvP due to reducing healing you take by 50% (especially if a Warrior does Mortal Strike on you haha). I guess Orc’s had Hardiness (resist stun effects by +25%) and that was pretty good. Troll’s Berserking could be pretty good (10-25% melee and casting attack speed based off your current hp for 10 seconds, 3m cooldown) as well.

Dwarven Stoneform could be good in certain situations (armor +10%, immunity to bleed poison and disease effects for 8 seconds). I liked Shadowmeld for defensive purposes, but was somewhat annoyed when they made it break when you started to cast. You also couldn’t eat/drink and its detection radius was quite a bit higher than stealth (untalented). For those who cared about reputations, especially back then, Diplomacy was somewhat OP haha. Human Spirit was useless mostly (can’t regen HP in combat, and mana regen is halted for five seconds from the last spell you cast… usually you don’t have that long of a break between spellcasts).

Vanilla certainly was an interesting time… some certain glaring inequalities that benefited both sides…

91

There was a little website called elitistjerks where all of this was discussed in great detail.

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92

Dude elemental shaman in tier 2.5 are murderers

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93

It’s been 10 years and you’ve got me wondering, but I don’t think you could do this. Otherwise I would have been putting rockbiter on my weapon and placing WF totem down at some point, and I don’t recall doing that either.

Someone correct me if I’m wrong on that.

Druids are awesome! Hybrids are awesome!

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Faction imbalance due to undead?

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I could be remembering incorrectly, but I’ve played for a long time… I’ve played since before release. I’ve played on PTRs. I’ve played on beta. To my recollection, it was fairly early on, but I could be remembering incorrectly about Windfury Weapon and Windfury Totem stacking (or maybe it had something to do with dual handed weapons and changing their order or something to make it glitch). I think that was fixed soon (for whenever it was… could have been on a PTR version for all I remember).

I do, however, specifically, remembering that after release Windfury procs could proc themselves (although the statistical likelihood was low). Arcanite Reapers were considered better than almost all weapons in Molten Core (unless you were super lucky and had the DKP and the early on drops of both components of Sulfuras, Hand of Ragnaros) before weapon speed normalization. I found the trinket - it was Hand of Justice. Although the likelihood was low, you could potentially swing and get four procs from it alone (which I remember a Tauren Warrior on my server posting a photo - his opponent literally died in one swing because of the procs). If I remember correctly, Hand of Justice and Windfury could proc off of each other. It was eventually changed (I think before BWL) to where they couldn’t proc off each other and they couldn’t proc multiple times in a row. Maybe with the same patch as weapon speed normalization? It was a hard time to be alive :worried: .

So many things have changed, especially from early on. I remember one have my friends had either… 4/8 or 6/8 Stormheart Raiment before BWL was even released… /very/ early on you could get tier 2 drops from Molten Core bosses. Ironically, most of those items had worse stats than than their tier 1 equivalents before BWL was released and the values were changed. The other Druids in his guild didn’t want it because Cenarion Raiment was better at the time. The tier 2 drops at the time also didn’t have the eventual graphics that were given to tier 2.

I was an Alliance Druid, and I was one of the few Alliance (to my knowledge) to complete the quest from some goblin in Orgrimmar that let you use the teleporter in Booty Bay to get to Gnomeregan. When guards were (I believe) L35 and lacked their nets and super knockback guns and didn’t hit like trucks and swarm everywhere all the time, it was a common theme for lower level Horde (maybe 5 levels or below their targets) to attack Alliance. The guard would start attacking the Horde character, the Alliance character would think they could retaliate and kill them, but they would teleport away. I got tired of it and could chase them haha. Before vanilla was over, they made that NPC hostile to Alliance characters, though… So it was no longer possible. I even remember a time if you had a buff (Flame or Fire Shield or whatever from Warlock Imps, Thorns, Retribution Aura, and /maybe/ Frost Armor), the passive damage back to your attacker made guards attack you haha. For a while, if you weren’t careful and cancelled those buffs in neutral cities, a naked character would attack you to get guards to kill you to take durability damage. . . #memories

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96

They never stacked.

There was a bug with the 2.0 patch where dual-wielding shamans who had Windfury on each weapon could have procs from one hand proc it on the other hand. This may be what you were thinking of.

This was a myth. Windfury could never proc off itself.

It could proc off things like Hand of Justice and Sword Specialization, and it had a bug where it reset your swing timer (giving you an additional immediate autoattack; and that new auto could proc WF). But it could never actually proc off itself.

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97

I’m not saying that it wasn’t OTT, I’m just saying there was a mass exodus of undead players when it got nerfed.

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I think we’re kind of saying the same thing. You’re taking my statement as de jure where it has a de facto implication. While Windfury itself did not, in fact, proc off of Windfury, until 1.4 it basically had the chance to. While my exact wording was incorrect, my intent was the same. It was especially crazy with the Hand of Justice and the extra hit chance with sword specializations haha.

  • Windfury - Fixed a bug that caused an additional attack beyond what was intended. In addition, fixed a bug that caused the next normal melee attack to happen sooner than intended.

For posterity, I attempted to locate the old photo that I remember from the Tauren Warrior on my realm all those years ago, but the historical records of that time seem to be … not readily accessible. I can’t find any complete or even decently comprehensive forum backup of the original forums. I even thought maybe it would have been discussed and logged by the Blue Tracker, but it didn’t happen. Honestly, I don’t even remember where people uploaded photos back then. Imageshack? Photobucket? I tried QQ.

All I know is I’m bitter towards all the bugs that benefited Shaman early on! :sob: shakes fist

99

The primary difference is in the potential for infinity.

There was a finite possible amount of damage, since the ‘extra attack’ bug happened only once even if that additional attack itself procced Windfury.

This was generally irrelevant in PVP; the target was dead. But it’s the reason why, for example, there are no videos of shamans one-shotting Kazzak like the original uncapped Reckoning did.

100

Interesting. I didn’t realize that its potential to reset the swing timer (in the bugged version) was limited to only once until completion of a normal swing timer autoattack?

101

Because of Arena, not because of BG or PVE. Since there is no Arena instance PVP, there is nothing to worry about.

/stoneskin.

102

Yup. It was a weird bug.

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103

Why are we even having this conversation exactly? Paladins will be part of the Alliance. Shaman will be part of the Horde. They will be as they were. Seems silly to have endless debates over crap you KNOW is not going to change.

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