World of Warcraft: Cataclysm

[Kaotik]

What fixes?

Shadow priest plays like a dream right now. I tried mine out in early vashjir and simply waded through mobs thanks to self-healing and shield. Essentially infinite health, AND infinite mana with the spirit tap glyph. Not that I need the glyph really as I never popped dispersion or shadowfiend even once, I could switch out the glyph for sure and never suffer. Just use my other mana regen skills every now and then.

The new graphic on the shadow orbs is pwn by the way. Now blizzard just have to stop the buff from expiring, like they did with druid eclipses. No mastery bonus should expire, that's just bad game design.

What fixes?
Feasible in PvP, decent dmg in PvE for starters
No, "hybrid class" isn't an excuse when all the other hybrids are or have been just on par with the "pure dps classes" if not even better in both of the above.

Okay - I admit that we did have one week of PvE goodness - that was the first week of Karazhan in TBC. Then the others got gear and went flying past us even though we got the same gear too.
And in PvP we were "workable" around early BGs and Tarren Mill - Southshore, but by no means anywhere near the top classes.

Health is far from infinite especially with the newest nerfes to VE, infinite mana, yeah, that we had, but then came Cataclysm and it's far from infinite even if you use Dark Archangel, Dispersion and Shadowfiend every CD (The first zones are easily walk in the park, but it turns out quite a bit different once you get to Deepholm)

 

[Grall]

I think you're just complaining too much TBH. The shadow priests I've encountered in PvP are very powerful, very hard to kill. And in dungeons they seem to offer competitive damage as well. Sure, it's not a very popular spec, but I don't think it suffers all that much right now actually.

Shadow priest is lots of fun, I'm really enjoying myself playing it right now, but I have to focus on leveling the druid, which is supposed to be my main... It's fun too, but not AS fun unfortunately, due to needing to get to 85 for shrooms (lotta work with nothing to show for it in the intervening levels), and I can't switch main either due to me having invested so much effort into this druid. Maxed zandalar rep, virtually all potions in the game (except one outland flask discovery which still eludes me to this day), all northrend and below cooking recipes (except the kickin' chops one), over 100 minipets and so on.

So no, the druid will simply have to be my main, lol. I'm stuck with it. But shadow priest sure is damn fun too. And hunter too. I'm drooling for camouflage!

 

[Kaotik]

Been shadowpriest since before BWL was launched, I've been through it all and have the right to complain

 

[homerdog]

The new water looks very shiny, lots of improved textures. There is a new D3D11 version, which looks exactly the same but seems to have a reasonable improvement in framerate. Sadly, it doesn't seem to work with eyefinity.

Texture rez and variety has gone up by A LOT. [...]

Thanks guys. I guess WoW will never be technically cutting edge since it has to support a lot of really old hardware, but it's good that they're actively improving things. And I didn't realize they were officially supporting the DX11 renderer. That's cool

 

[Kaotik]

Thanks guys. I guess WoW will never be technically cutting edge since it has to support a lot of really old hardware, but it's good that they're actively improving things. And I didn't realize they were officially supporting the DX11 renderer. That's cool

AFAIK they're not officially supporting it yet
(you need to modify the config.wtf yourself to enable it, it's not selectable at game menus or anything like that)

 

[pcchen]

Why would you need DX11 for "fuller" reflections? Valve did that on DX9 in their Lost Coast demo years ago... Is it just laziness/implementation choice, or is the WoW engine simply old, outdated and wonky and it couldn't be fixed any other way?

No game engine has "real" reflections on curved surfaces. There will always be cases that's rendered incorrectly. As I said, WoW's old reflection works for most of the time, only incorrect in a few specific cases (which will be obvious). Its DX11 engine improved on that.

 

[Davros]

you would need render to a cube environment map every frame for real reflections wouldn't you ?

 

[Sonic]

As a ling time warlock (affliction for the better part of 4 years) Shadow Priests are what Blizz should have done with affliction. They nerfed the crap out of siphon life and even with the vampiric embrace nerf S-priests are ahead of aff locks. Though I am destro now so don't have a problem with any class at the moment unless they are flat out better geared or better skilled than me.

Though it is true, S-priests got the shit end of the stick for years.

 

[pcchen]

you would need render to a cube environment map every frame for real reflections wouldn't you ?

You need at least that, yeah. However, even a cube environment map every frame is not enough if there are some objects very near the water. To make a correct reflection for, say, someone flying just above the water can be very difficult.

Back to the topic, I have done the Mount Hyjal quests and I think it's quite good, although I still like Vashy'jir more, although the last quest in Vashy'jir bugged, very annoying.

 

[Grall]

Back to the topic, I have done the Mount Hyjal quests and I think it's quite good, although I still like Vashy'jir more, although the last quest in Vashy'jir bugged, very annoying.

I started on the Hyjal quests, but almost immediately you learn the fate of Fandral, which means I immediately had to go back to the old world and start questing through the various zones to learn the backstory leading up to this point - I'd already started, but took a break at the end of Darkshore. ...Or I assume there IS a backstory hidden away in one of the zones anyway, and that I won't have to buy and read a fucking novel to learn what happened. Some of the new Cataclysm lore simply isn't explained properly anywhere in-game and instead assumes you read fscking Stormrage by Christie Golden, which rather sucks IMO. Oh well.

Anyway, I just finished the new Desolace last night and nary a trace of Staghelm there. Didn't get any breadcrumb quest, but I'll continue south and see what happens. I'm sure I'll stumble over some Night Elf stuff in Feralas...

Thansk for the technical detour re. reflections btw! Very enlightening, to a layperson such as me. You are one reason why this forum is head and shoulders above almost any other 3D gaming forum on the webs. I suppose switching to raytracing instead of faking it with various render target techniques would solve the reflections issue, but bring a host of new ones instead...

 

[pcchen]

Tom's Hardware did a comparison between DX9 and DX11 mode. On lower resolution, DX11 is 30% faster than DX9 mode, which is ... quite a lot

 

[Grall]

Yeah, I noticed! I'm sure there's lots of room left though to improve efficiency in WoW's engine, it's remarkably slow in many circumstances compared to how simple - relatively speaking - WoW's graphics is. It also does some pretty incredibly dumb things, sometimes, like rendering all of crystalsong forest - with shadows and all - and then drawing the city of Dalaran on top of it, which really kills my framerate when setting shadows to max...

 

[pcchen]

After reviewing Tom's test results, I think the article's conclusion on the DX9 vs DX11 is probably not correct:

In what almost seems like a stroke of irony, it looks like the folks most likely to see big speed boosts at the hands of Blizzard's DX11 code path are the ones with fast processors and near-overkill GPUs. If you built your PC with balance in mind, there shouldn't be as much room for API optimizations to augment performance beyond what you're already seeing.

This paragraph is puzzling because less improvement on the high resolution side generally means the improvements are not related to fillrate (in most case it's related to CPU or other related bottlenecks). The CPU scaling tests of the same article also suggests that scaling doesn't stop at any level (faster CPU always produces faster performance).

So I think the most probable explanation of the performance improvements of the DX11 mode is on the CPU side. As you said, it's probably some inefficiency w.r.t. the older DX9 engine.

So the short version is, if you have a DX11 enabled video card with a DX11 enabled OS (Windows Vista or Windows 7) you should always enable DX11 mode unless it brings some problems.

 

[Grall]

On the original topic though, I've quested through all of Hyjal, Vashjir and Deepholme now, and some of Uldum.

The zone I've liked the most is Deepholme, definitely, thanks to the amazing scenery. I'm sure the novelty will wear off soon though, lol.

The one big issue I can see with the longevity of Cataclysm is that the new zones really aren't:

A - that big overall, really.

B - spread out all over the place across the two original continents, and disconnected from each other, making travelling a bit of a pain.

So once you finish with leveling your dude, you've discovered all the sights, run all the instances 30 times...what then? Another two-year wait for the next expansion would seem a bit steep at this point. I'd prefer if Blizz could knock out 5 levels/zones on a yearly basis instead, that would make the game feel more alive and keep the sense of progression in story and character development going.

 

[cjo]

On the original topic though, I've quested through all of Hyjal, Vashjir and Deepholme now, and some of Uldum.

The zone I've liked the most is Deepholme, definitely, thanks to the amazing scenery. I'm sure the novelty will wear off soon though, lol.

Agreed. Deepholm does look the best out of the new zones. Uldum is pretty good too

The one big issue I can see with the longevity of Cataclysm is that the new zones really aren't:

A - that big overall, really.

B - spread out all over the place across the two original continents, and disconnected from each other, making travelling a bit of a pain.

Deepholm and the Twilight Highlands both have portals back to Stormwind. There are portals from Stormwind to each of the zones. Vashj'ir has a flight point to Ironforge. Mt. Hyjal is a few mins flight from Rutheran (sp?) village. Uldum is the only PITA to get back from - you can get from just about every other zone to another in less than the time it took to get across Northrend.

So once you finish with leveling your dude, you've discovered all the sights, run all the instances 30 times...what then? Another two-year wait for the next expansion would seem a bit steep at this point. I'd prefer if Blizz could knock out 5 levels/zones on a yearly basis instead, that would make the game feel more alive and keep the sense of progression in story and character development going.

You're meant to start raiding Leaked release schedules suggest 18 months for the new expansion, so much quicker than WotLK.

 

[pcchen]

You're meant to start raiding Leaked release schedules suggest 18 months for the new expansion, so much quicker than WotLK.

I think this is a better strategy. WotLK has too many tiers of raid instances. If you played all along then you are fine. However, if you took a rest for a while, for example, with Naxx items, and decided to come back and everyone else are already raiding ICC, then you are going to have a hard time finding a raid group. The very fast pace of random instance run also makes some random PUGs very unfriendly to new players. It's like that every PUG wants to clear today's instance in 15 minutes or something, and all are very impatient. However, this problem is partly caused by the "too many tiers" problem. It's easy for some with ICC level items to think that someone with level 200 items "shoudn't run heroic instances," However, that's how it used to be done, i.e. heroic instances were played with level 200 items.

It looks like that current plan is to have only like two tiers in an expansion. This way, new players (or players who didn't play for some time) will have easier time to catch up. I think this is better and hopefully will "fix" this "Gear Score" culture in late WotLK.

 

[cjo]

I think this is a better strategy. WotLK has too many tiers of raid instances. If you played all along then you are fine. However, if you took a rest for a while, for example, with Naxx items, and decided to come back and everyone else are already raiding ICC, then you are going to have a hard time finding a raid group.

I started playing when ToC was current content; I essentially skipped both Naxx and Ulduar, finding a guild that was willing to boost me in ToC for a week or two; I managed to catch up suprisingly quickly.

The very fast pace of random instance run also makes some random PUGs very unfriendly to new players. It's like that every PUG wants to clear today's instance in 15 minutes or something, and all are very impatient. However, this problem is partly caused by the "too many tiers" problem. It's easy for some with ICC level items to think that someone with level 200 items "shoudn't run heroic instances," However, that's how it used to be done, i.e. heroic instances were played with level 200 items.

PUGs certainly aren't quick any longer. I've not managed to finish a PUG heroic in the last 3 days; the dungeons are hard enough that they are protected against overgearing them to an extent - mainly due to DoT mechanics that will kill you if you ignore them.

It looks like that current plan is to have only like two tiers in an expansion. This way, new players (or players who didn't play for some time) will have easier time to catch up. I think this is better and hopefully will "fix" this "Gear Score" culture in late WotLK.

Two tiers in 18 months doesn't sound like enough IMO. I'm already in average 342 gear, 346 being the maximum obtainable from heroics. ICC was certainly old and boring after 9 months of raiding it - one new tier every 6 months seems like a better idea. I quite like the idea of a Starting tier -> Old God - > Final boss progression (a bit like WotLK without ToC).

 

[Reznor007]

Sorry for the thread necro, but in case anyone didn't know, as of the latest patch WoW now has an optional 64bit client for Windows and Mac. On my system it seems to be a little bit faster, maybe 5-15% depending on what's going on.

 

[Kaotik]

Sorry for the thread necro, but in case anyone didn't know, as of the latest patch WoW now has an optional 64bit client for Windows and Mac. On my system it seems to be a little bit faster, maybe 5-15% depending on what's going on.

I'm yet to raid with the 64bit client, but in stormwind crowd, the performance difference is indeed noticeable, IMO.
Q6600 @ 3.33GHz / 8GB / HD6870 / Win7 x64