I see I was wrong. Some changes were necessary. For the whole of the game, I would say things are arguably better then they were at release.
However, your recent changes have negatively impacted a minor, but loyal contingent of your player base.
With the 30 instance I.D. change, the reason I play this game has its existence challenged. People might laugh and say “lol feral dps”, but its why I play classic, and I do fairly well at it. I get to play with some amazing people and I get to push my personal best’s every raid.
However, this week, I went two 30-id timers and only got 7 MCP’s.
Arguably, this is fine for BWL, and I will just have to say goodbye to being able to compete on the meters in MC (yes, any added dps helps us finish faster)
But come AQ40 and Naxxramas, I will simply not be able to do 30 instances every night for pummelers. This was going to be a struggle enough with the 5 day lockout timer, but I planned to be able to burn excessive farm sessions on odd days and build up stock. This is no longer viable. As far as I’m concerned, their is three ways to move forward.
do nothing, and let people who have invested massive amounts of time and energy in their character have the ability to continue yanked away, disturbing social relationships and activities.
Remove gnomergan from the 30 instance daily lockout. I dont think this would be too damaging, as its a level 30 instance that is rarely farmed. Thoughts and feelings on this one?
Approach MCP and address it for what it is. I dont like this one because its the most massive change, but either allow us to repair the charges, add this item to a drop table on a mob in the open world, or even add it to a vendor (additional gold sink).
MCP is no different to a feral druid then soulshards are to warlocks. Some players choose to get BRD spell damage buff from the NPC’s via mind control, I choose to get MCP.
Feral and Balance were known second class citizens in Vanilla. Live with it, they aren’t doing balance overhauls. And honestly, if they touch MCP at all, it will be to nerf it. Because if people had gone crazy farming it in Vanilla like they do now in Classic, I guarantee it would have been nerfed. There is no world where it makes game sense to have a level 30 weapon be endgame BIS.
Min/maxing isn’t necessary for any boss in the game. It a choice on your part, and if you choose to min/max, it is on you to adapt to changes. The game should never be balanced around the top .01%.
They are completely different. Not even comparable.
What is stopping you from spreading out your MCP farm over the course of 7 days? If you do 30 Gnomer runs every day (except on raid day, only do 25 then), you will have plenty. If time is your issue, then it sounds like you don’t have the time to be a min/maxer, which is perfectly fine.
This is a perfect example of druid players using MCP as a crutch
MCP is NOT a basic druid class mechanic, it is and always has been a (arguably exploitive) luxury consumable that is in no way necessary to play druid
MCP is an extremely niche item that only works as an endgame consumable for one specific class and spec, and likely would have been nerfed had it been used in vanilla as heavily as some people use it now after 15 years of private server min maxing. The only thing keeping it from being completely broken is the fact it is consumable and requires heavy farming to have them for frequent use.
You can still use MCP, you can still farm for it
Blizzard is not obligated to make this niche, borderline broken, consumable easily accessible.
If you want to use MCP on cooldown as a crutch to artificially boost dps on this hybrid class then you’re gonna have to put in the time
Blizzard didn’t design feral druids around always having MCP, they are a hybrid class and pay the hybrid tax just like all the other hybrid classes, their dps is low by design.
That’s probably the best point of all…; if MCP had been used as much in vanilla; there’s absolutely no way it would have gone untouched. The nerf bat would have come out quickly.
I’m sympathetic to druids on this point, but I don’t see how this ends well.
The solution is to actually provide proper feral weapons, and I would be cool with that happening but it doesn’t get fixed until BC and really wrath when all weapons just got default +FAP.
I have to disagree here. Soulshards are built in for warlocks. The MCP thing really didn’t surface until folks started doing it on the private servers. Its use probably wasn’t intended by the devs. Is it useful when you can use it? Sure! Is it game-breaking to have? No. Is it necessary? No.
That isn’t a problem with the weapons themselves. That’s an issue with feral offhands not existing.
But the core of the issue is that the three main hybrids, Shaman, Druid, Paladin, weren’t intended as dps in Vanilla. They had some dps builds that were useful for leveling and pvp, but their intended raid role was healing. So, Blizzard didn’t really care to put in much gear for their alternate specs beyond the bare minimum. Nor did they care to balance them such that their dps was competitive with the other dps classes.
It is a problem when a weapon is added specifically for ferals but isn’t actually properly designed for them. Like blizzard went out of their way to add feral weapons but them screwed up the implementation.
Hence why all feral weapons going forward are two handers.
First of all, your tone will not be tolerated on these forums. Second of all, min/maxing isn’t easy, if they don’t have the time for it nobody is forcing them to do it.
That’s the problem, blizzard has made it so the players will never have the time for it. Because they are limited to 30 instances per 24/hr.
This means those who would spend 2-3 days farming what they needed for raids inside of instances (like the druid here) will be limited to farming per day. Not all of us can play all day every day, we use our days off to farm what we need.
Heck, I’m not a min maxer, but I farm specifically to give stuff to guildies who I know don’t have time to farm.
I’ve sold 3 black lotus (all that I’ve ever found mind you) to our raids main tank for 15g each because he goes through thousands of gold in a raid night on progression. And we are stocking up for AQ.
He uses a flask every week to make our farmed BWL and MC easier on the healers with having more total HP.
I can easily hit the instance cap on my days off trying to help my guild prep for AQ, from NR gear farming, consumable farming, exc.
you can parse just fine as feral without MCP and your parses are far more dependent on your groups overall dps because the kill time is the biggest factor in your parse. There are plenty 9f druids who parse in the top percentages without MCP.
Can you explain how/why utilizing Manual Crowd Pummeler is an exploit? I’ve seen this said quite a few times and asked a few people that have said it and none have responded yet.