SM was nowhere near 3 weeks until very recently post-ICC with the loot changes where more tokens are also dropping for tier gear. The main change SM had was all bosses, even normal bosses, dropped shards as if you killed it on heroic mode even if you did normal mode.
Meaning for the good guilds the drop rate was unchanged.
The only other buff was that you could get shards before you had someone done with the pre-questing, which moved the line up by a week or two depending on how sweaty your guild was but didnt actually affect drop rate.
Youre just talking out hot air at this point. SM could take up to 10 weeks if you had bad RNG. I saw a week where we had 0 shared drop from optional bosses, meaning it would be 10 weeks at that rate. Avg was like 7-8 weeks. You needed streamer luck to see anything better than that.
I literally just looked at WCL. 95th on saurfang warrior is behind mage, feral, and ret. Going to other single target fights it moves around slightly, allowing warrior to tie or be a pixel ahead based on what bracket your looking at. Its literally only cleave fights warriors beats those other classes on and even then, looking at LK, mage is handidly ahead of warrior and feral is tied with warrior.
WoW for a long time has been caster focused (exception of rogue). Even in WotLK 3s, 5s, and BGs is caster dominated. A warrior can die in under 3 seconds in 5s with over 1200 resil in def stance. We will see how the final patch of cata shapes out over the course of the tiers as we havent actually experienced that but from what Im seeing on beta my ele shaman in quite a bit worse gear than my warrior can burst and dps quite a bit harder on the dummies. When I played cata originally casters were a menace and we also have private servers to compare to now as well.
Man why are you angry over fury being bad in wotlk? I get it sucks you guys didn’t get a buff in naxx/ulduar, but you guys were good DPS in ToGC and top in ICC.
Also they did buff smourne drop rate right from the get go for ICC. They made it so you didn’t need to be on the quest for shards to drop. They made primordial saronites a lot easier to farm. They made it so you got a guaranteed 4 to drop if you killed the end boss of each wing. They made it so normal also gave the same drop rate as heroic. Those are really good changes and then buffed it again later on. With ICC going to be out a lot longer than Firelands + DS combined.
Also your worst case scenario for a legendary on smourne was 10 weeks WITH buffs, then 3-4 weeks with more buffs and ICC will be a longer main raid. Caster staff will be 10 weeks without buffs and it will be a main raid for 1/2 the time or less than ICC.
Also you’re not seriously going to say that warriors have been terrible in arena/pvp for classic/tbc/wrath. Arms warrior has basically been A-S tier for 2s/3s/5s throughout all of TBC/Wrath. They are insanely OP and it just speaks volumes that you struggle in arenas as one tbh.
They made it so you didnt have to do the pre-quest for shards to start dropping which moved everyone up a week or two, but didnt improve the time to actually get the shards. This is because they knew ICC would be shorter than originally and they wanted to get people started on the 50 shard aspect because its at the end of the expansion. The saronites was because without this change than none of the craftable gear would be achievable as guilds would hoard all of it for the quest. They would have cost like 10k ea or more if you coudlnt earn them outside of raid. Prob woulda been 20-30k ea the first couple weeks on the big servers.
I can go to 2010 forums posts and data to see that drop rates are largely unchanged. In 2023/2024 classic I had weeks with 5 shards drop… some weeks with 10. The only major change was that the normal mode drop rate was made to be like the heroic drop rate.
The “drop rate” change they made was that the heroic drop rate applied in normal mode. The 5 final bosses also had slightly more chance but it was a very small change. That was the biggest real change, so that the casual guilds wouldnt be taking 15-20 weeks to get the shards because they cant kill stuff on heroic mode. The drop rate on normal kills originally was lower so that got buffed but if you were in a good guild the drop rate wasnt changed.
The actual shards finally got a drop rate boost very recently now that its been almost 6 months of ICC and the Cata pre-patch is on the horizon…
Youre also making assumptions about how many weeks well have for the staff. You have no info public about the time tables for that.
Do not buff the drop rate. Do it like ICC where the actual drop rate is unchanged. Do it like ICC where towards end-game the drop rate gets buffed. If you want to treat extraneous quest lines for the staff like shadowmourne then sure but the staff doesnt have the same level of pre-work to get it started.
If you want to see firelands shards dropping before you finish the pre-quests for the staff then that makes sense and follows precedent. If you just want a straight up drop rate buff so that you can get it faster than intended then that is not good, and does not have precedent. The only exception to this would be if they intended to make cata classic move substantially faster than prior CLASSIC expansions. I.e. classic so far has already been going a lot faster than the original and none of the legendaries have had increased drop rate. Only reduction in pre-requirements for drops to start or matching normal mode kills to heroic kill drop rates.
did you not see the twitter post that said we will be in DS by January? we’ll be in the final tier within 8 months, as compared to getting to the last raid tier after 13 months and then staying in that same tier for another 8 months. so we’ll have had 21 months of Wrath, we had TBC classic for 15 months and we had Classic for 22 months.
WE’LL BE IN THE ENTIRE CATA EXPANSION AS LONG AS WE HAVE BEEN IN ICC
the drop rate for both cataclysm legendary weapons needs to have increased drop rate to make up for that fact.
They added a guaranteed SF shard drop from each end boss wing and LK, they 100% upped the drop rate of SM even from the start of the ICC patch. Feels like half the people here never played the game and just want to argue
100% Disagree. They should drop at the same rate whether 10/25man. Promoting 25mans at this point in classic just feels HORRIBLE, and doesn’t really follow the loot distribution in cata, seeing that 10/25man drop the same ilvl loot. Giving people an option to have smaller groups, which they’ve already said they’re going to change guild level perks so that smaller guilds can achieve them at the same rate, it seems more beneficial for everyone if smaller groups have as much timely access to it (phases will be shorter and we’ll be out of cata by Jan.)
You are misunderstanding, I was not suggesting those to be the drop rate. I was stating that is what the drop rate WAS during original Cata, and I was suggesting earlier in the post that the drop rate should be increased from these values.
So?(I don’t think this is true btw, because MORE loot drops on 25m)
The mechanics are identical in 10/25 through cata anyway, does doing 25 man make you feel like you have big muscles or something?
come on now… lets not resort to that. They like 25m raid format, you like 10m. Either way… the point is that the rate of acquisition of loot should be similar between 10m and 25m. Which is why 25m drops more, because there are more players in a raid. But what is more important for this topic, we need to see an over all increase of loot drops because of the shortened Cata Classic timeline.
But if you don’t prevent a way to not make the staff another valanyr incident where only people go there if they get paid for it… you would need to suggest how to make the place relevant still even after DS launches.
But they kinda have to. With this 2-3 month per tier cadence theres no way that more than a couple ppl will be able to complete it before ds come let alone to make it for raiding in firelands.
Read the quest line. Its colecting the shards x3 consecutive time one after another.
Theres less bosses than in ICC and theyre also significantly harder than anything inside of icc, it wont be that simple to farm.
Legendary’s are not meant for every person to get one. this is beyond horrible if everyone can get it then it takes away from the prestige of getting one.
Well in this version they are meant for everyone because everyone is so used to retail and getting everything they want. HANDOUTS make LAZY PEOPLE. and WoW is the prime example of this.
But thats what they want!!! these are people who didnt play Vanilla,TBC,wotlk or even cata when they were LIVE. they grew up with micro transactions and being handed everything they want without having to put in the work. Blizz gave into the Participation trophy generation. The catch-up mechanics the handouts all created self-entitled lazy people.
I’m going to call you out on this. I WAS around for most of that, and I’m calling for #changes to how you get Dragonwrath in Cata Classic. It’s not laziness when you can’t no-life the game like a bunch of us could 13 years ago.
The reason isn’t because “hurp derp, ebrywun shud git lejundry!”. I would expect people to do the raid in a group and earn it the same way as everyone else has in the history of WoW. Just because it’s easier to get in retail these days - to the point where you can get it solo - doesn’t mean that they didn’t have to go through all of the work to get it. You still have to do the quests and run the instance regularly to get them.
The reason I think they need to accelerate acquisition of this is because of the condensed timeline of Cata Classic. The first time around, Firelands was considered “current content” for 5 months. This time, we’re getting 3 months. In addition, we don’t know how long Dragon Soul is going to last before we are into MOP Classic (assuming it’s coming). The first time around, Dragon Soul lasted 9 months, with one month of that being on the 5.0 MOP Pre-patch. I don’t expect it to be anywhere near that long this time around - of course, I didn’t expect ICC to be 8 months, but ICC was one of the most beloved raids of all time, while DS is one of the most hated raids…
So the total ORIGINAL timeline of being able to get Dragonwrath while it was still current was 14 months. That is longer than the expected timeline of the ENTIRE CATA CLASSIC CYCLE!
People got to play with Shadowmourne and Valanyr while it was current in Classic. Let the caster DPS and Rogues have their turn. It’ll be over soon enough and then NOBODY gets a legendary again until EVERYONE gets one in MOP. Then you can go on and cry about that as well.