29/11/2024

Another Five Down, Four More to Go

Back in September I wrote about how I've felt encouraged to experiment with alts in The War Within. This eventually escalated into me deciding that I wanted to have a max-level character of each class this expansion, a prospect that actually wasn't all that daunting considering I had one of each class at level 70 (the old level cap) by the end of Dragonflight. I've reached 80 on five more characters since then and wanted to jot down a few more impressions of the different classes I've levelled.

Berrine the night elf druid, Helena the dwarf paladin, Shinfur the pandaren monk and Groghue the worgen rogue standing around the Warband campfire at night

Until I took this picture, I hadn't realised that the Warband screen also follows the day-night cycle.

Marksmanship Hunter

My fifth character to 80 was my human hunter, and I'm honestly not even sure why. I think I wanted a character for easier solo farming and hunter kind of fits the bill. That said, I feel a bit ambivalent about the hunter class in retail. I've long loved the classic hunter with all its challenges of micromanaging ammunition and taking care of your pet, and I never quite got over how all of that was taken away in Cataclysm. In terms of pet interaction, the modern hunter feels more like a Pokemon collector (no actual investment in the pet needed, you can just collect as many as you like and I guess there's some appeal in hunting down rare models), and the supercharged shooting animations look a bit ridiculous to me in the way they make your character treat their bow and arrow like a machine gun.

I'm Marksmanship spec because I was never a huge fan of BM (while I liked taking care of my pet, I never liked the idea of my pet doing all the damage for me - I still want to be the hero myself, OK?) and being melee as a hunter still feels like an abomination to me. That said, I can't say that Marksman feels all that great to me right now either. It doesn't actually seem to me that it has too many buttons, but I don't like that you're basically not supposed to have a pet at all (I tend to just not take the Lone Wolf talent) and it does still feel to me like there are probably too many complexities involved in having a good damage rotation. I thought I had a pretty good idea of which buttons did the most damage, but when I did an LFR wing on this character, even though I was mashing my buttons like crazy, my damage output ended up around the same level as the tanks - way, way below the other hunters in the group.

I also don't have much to say about the hero talents for hunters, because they feel designed around the idea that you're an elf and want to cosplay as either Tyrande (who isn't even a hunter!) or Sylvanas, and I want to do neither. I did pick Dark Ranger because it sounded slightly more appealing, but just as I thought I was getting an idea of what to do with it, Blizzard completely revamped the way its main ability works and I'm once again back to square one. In summary: the class still lives up to the hunter's reputation of being decent for soloing stuff, but feels too fiddly for me in group content.

Guardian Druid

This would be the druid I levelled during Mists of Pandaria Remix. I still love watching her cute and fuzzy bear butt, but the way druid tanking works still feels a bit weird to me. I was initially a little confused why she seemed to be taking so much more damage than my warrior, until I realised that you're supposed to be using self-heals all the time (something which the warrior doesn't have as much).

I also don't really like the way the Ironfur buff works, expecting you to constantly pump rage into keeping up this mitigation buff that only lasts a few seconds. It was only later that I realised that protection warrior actually has something similar going on, I just hadn't been using it because at low difficulties you basically take no damage as a warrior anyway! I've only slowly started to adjust to that as we're starting to crawl our way up the M+ ladder. Still, the point remains that I'm not a fan of having this sort of "mitigation rotation" where you're supposed to constantly be mashing defensive buttons to keep all your buffs rolling.

Regardless, like the prot warrior, a druid tank is really good for soloing as well, so I've been using her to tank some easier content like Timewalking and sometimes to solo delves (tank who can also stealth and sneak past mobs = OP). 

For her hero talents, I went with Druid of the Claw because I bear, I maul things. Why would I want to shoot moonbeams or whatever?

Holy Paladin

Unlike with some other classes, I never know quite which spec to choose with paladins since I do actually somewhat like all three, but I figured I'd stick to healing with this one and see how paladins are doing these days. Funnily enough, I found it very pleasant to quest as holy - I'm starting to think I like levelling as tank or healer in WoW because they have such simple dps rotations - things may die more slowly but at least I feel like I know what I'm doing, as opposed to many dps classes where I mash buttons that look like they should be doing good damage but then don't because I either didn't string them together in the exact correct order or because I'm missing some crucial talent without which the whole build is destroyed.

Anyway, as I was feeling a bit insecure about my abilities as a paladin and knew that regular pugs could generate quite insane healing requirements, I decided to practice my healing by doing some follower dungeons first. Sadly, they turned out to be of limited usefulness for that purpose as Captain Garrick pulls quite conservatively, to the point where the required healing is minimal, and I didn't quite have it in me to try and "ninja-pull" more trash onto her to make things more challenging. Also, even when there was already almost nothing for me to do, the elemental shaman NPC would actually feel the need to throw off-heals around too? Bitch, let me do something here!

In search of a slightly more challenging environment I eventually healed some LFR wings, but there I once again couldn't quite shake the feeling that I was doing something very wrong because my healing was very low compared to other healers. That said, I also couldn't be bothered to do any research into how to remedy that. I may want to level every class to 80, but I have no interest in playing them all in endgame content.

As an aside, this character also taught me that it's possible to lock yourself out of choosing certain hero talents if you don't make the right talent choices because I was "only" allowed to choose Lightsmith. This should probably tell me that I'm not good at making my own choices when it comes to filling out the new talent trees, but if Blizzard is giving me all these choices I'm damn well going to make my own!

Windwalker Monk

Levelling my pandaren monk from Remix was a pleasant surprise, because I initially wasn't sure about all the changes that had been made to the class since Shadowlands. (During Shadowlands, my human monk was my main and was primarily a Mistweaver, but occasionally I'd spec Windwalker for questing and a lot had been changed since then.)

Unlike most of the other classes whose play styles I bemoan in this post, monk has been delightfully easy to pick up and play. I didn't put any more effort into learning the class than with the others (meaning I read all the talent tooltips and picked what I personally thought sounded most useful) but for some reason my monk seems to do decent damage even with me mashing buttons semi-randomly. I don't know why more classes can't be like this.

I was even more surprised when I looked up their current standing in terms of raid dps and Mythic+, and they're apparently... not very good? I can't say I got that impression at all while soloing.

Subtlety Rogue

Rogue's a class that has never vibed with me, but it's worse in retail than in Classic. At least I found my AoE finishing move again... at one point during Dragonflight, Black Powder disappeared from my bars and I still don't know whether that was an intentional change or me messing something up... either way not having an AoE spender for several months was super weird. It's back now, but sadly just alternating between Shuriken Storm and Black Powder on dungeon trash still leaves me barely outdamaging the healer.

Similar to death knight, rogue feels built around the idea of constantly having some sort of short-cooldown dps booster up, but for some reason where on death knight this feels fun to me, on the rogue it feels bad. My combo points always seem to fill up either instantly or incredibly slowly, with no in-between, and I just can't wrap my head around it. There literally isn't a single button that makes me feel like I'm doing good damage, it's always either just "virtually no damage" or "you just hit a cooldown, now have a little bit of damage". (While editing this, I actually decided to quickly google a guide for this one just to get an idea of how badly I was going wrong and... yeah, not happening!)

In terms of hero talents, I picked Deathstalker over Trickster because I thought it sounded a bit cooler, but ultimately it's another choice that didn't feel very meaningful to me. I know I won't be playing this character very much, but let's be real: The main reason I wanted a rogue at 80 was just to finally be able to open those damn Bismuth Lockboxes, so I don't really need to know how to play.

Now I only have warlock, demon hunter, mage and shaman to go.

4 comments:

  1. The "plug and play" aspect of how you've found windwalker is something I find I enjoy with destro warlock. I tried affliction a couple of times to see how it felt, and that spec definitely feels more like one of those where messing up once (i.e., missing when a dot falls off becsuse there are so many) makes things tank considerably. That, and soul shard generation feels much more intuitive with destro atm.

    Indeed, I notice that outside of enhancement, my 'main alts' are all simple but mostly fun rotations: frost DK, destruction, havoc, and devastation. Just nice and easy to learn rotations.

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  2. You've been prolific with your leveling. :) I 'only' have eight at 80 right now, with seven more I want to hit 80 with. I have a few that will stay at 70 for now. The rest of my low level alts will get pushed up to a milestone level because of the anniversary events, but other than that they'll stay there until a rainy day when I feel like questing with them.

    It's interesting to read why you prefer to play Marksman as I'm a BM player. I just love being a team with my pet, plus the easier rotation just makes soloing things so much easier for me.

    For my druid, I'm with you on the annoyance of having to micro-manage a defensive buff. I don't find that sort of thing interesting or fun. I'd rather set up a buff for 30 seconds or so and then be able to concentrate on what the fight needs.

    As far as healing goes, LFR healing seems to be everyone just spamming their AOE healing spells. You generally don't need to worry about mana, so mash those buttons. I had wanted to get a feel for the fights on my Holy Priest, but with so much healing going out I just let the group carry me on. :sigh:

    That said, I do have more engagement with Timewalking as a healer. Ironically Classic tends to be the most heal intensive as pug tanks think they can pull whole rooms at once and not die. Most of the time I can keep them alive, but sometimes I'm just out of mana or chained silenced and we're just out of luck.

    I've been raiding with my monk as a healer, so when I've needed to do other things I go Windwalker, too. I've found that it just feels good as a spec. I figure I might as well enjoy it because I know in the future Blizzard is going to tamper with it and who knows if it will be fun for me. ^_^

    I find it funny that you too wanted a rogue to unlock those lockboxes. Mine stays Outlaw as I just like the spec and Subtlety has been too mind-bending for me to play well. This old brain will stick to the simpler rotations! (Oh, you have a typo in the second sentence of the first paragraph about your rogue. The link should say "Black Powder", not "Black Power". ;))

    I'm enjoying this articles on what you like and don't like about the various classes and specs. It's nice to see a different view of them.

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    Replies
    1. Lol, thanks for pointing out that typo! Fixed now.

      I agree that Timewalking makes for pretty good gameplay practice, for tanking as well. It's not hard exactly, but you will take damage if you make large pulls and it encourages you to figure out your cooldowns. Though you still get the type of tank sometimes who just spams AoE and keeps running, which I find awkward to go along with no matter my role.

      It's a shame that the specs with easier rotations are apparently often ones I really don't like much in terms of class fantasy! Because I really don't like complex rotations, but I also don't want to be carried by my pet or be a pirate... (RIP Combat).

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    2. I have about half the Legion Mage Tower weapon appearances. I find some of those cool enough that they've influenced which spec I play on alts. Though, to be fair, I tend to go for a simpler DPS spec (or the DPS spec) these days as I seldom queue as other roles. Though I do find I'm more comfortable healing these days as I get more into it.

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