How has Cata been so far?Follow

For me it has been a blast. Well after I got Trash, was fairly meh prior. Tanking is far more fun and engaging. Gearing up has been a blast as I love the look of the new gear.

Other want to give a opinion. I'll add more in the morning but it is bed time.

Underwhelming enough to make me not want to buy it.

Two new races is interesting, but the rest is just sort of meh. The only reason I might get it is because I want a Worgen Druid and I want to see what kind of health pools I can pull off at level 85 in tier gear. But that's probably not going to happen.

Thrash, I mis-spelled it in last post, is actually pretty sweet. The first two dungeons and to some extent VP and Stonecore, have nothing to do with how the big boy dungeons work. Once you get into LCotT, GB and HoO the thought of mindless AoE vanishes.

Even in the nerfed state to bear AoE when you are using Thrash/Swipe on a pack while focusing down skull by the time skull dies you have the rest of the mobs until they all die. Aassuming you have the room to AoE as stuff gets CC'd once again. I'm dreading having to do heroic Stonecore, the trash before the second to last boss is hard to pull cleanly on regular. Not looking forward to doing it on heroic.

Lacerate->Mangle spam is a thing of beauty. Works best when there is only one kill target as after it is dead you can target around and spread Lacerate then just Mangle spam. Even then you still may have to work in Swipe/Thrash depending on procs, plus the Thrash animation is win.

As for leveling, I barely touched the two starter zones. Hyjal bugged on me early so can't really comment on the zone. Vashj'Ir was underwater and way over crowded, was a gank fest, so I got to deepholm ASAP. Did mostly BRC and TotT, with some VP, to get to level 82 then I went straight to Deepholm. Deepholm was fairly bad ***. Also Blizz has done very well with cut scenes, I have enjoyed all of them so far. Messed around a bit in Uldum as I need some more xp to hit 84 and can't find like eight quests in Deepholm. I think the new auto-turn in glitches on occasion.

Uldum has a great sense of timelessness that has recently been disturbed. I prefer Deepholm but most everyone likes one of those two the best from what I can gather. Twilight Highlands, I've only done enough to open the SW portal up as I've been focusing more on doing the 85 dungeons to get ready for heroics.

I've been questing mostly in cat form as they die faster one at a time. Pulling big pulls will also get you dead quite often as well. Flight form makes some quests ez-mode, as you don't leave form and can pick up quest objects. As of now I've replaced every thing but exalted AV ring and my 264 trinket. I look 9001 times better than I did in my T10, which I always thought was hideous. Depending on what your gear was doing you may can start getting upgrades either right away, in the new dungeons or at the latest in Deepholm.

Haven't healed anything yet so can't directly comment on mana but the most telling experience would be a Stonecore run. the priest was holy. He was using, judging from recount, a very Wrath based style. He was going OoM insanely fast. Did LCotT with a different holy priest. He used Heal often and a more triage based style and things went very smooth. He did go OoM on one of the bosses but the boss fight was pretty epic.

Mana is definitely a concern once you get into the pre-Heroic dungeons. Maybe even VP/Stonecore, the middle dungeons, as well but not as noticeable unless you spamming excessively and forcing everyone to be at max health. Which maybe be the case depending on how much new gear people have as getting more HPs is needed even for DPS. I've done Stonecore and seen people die from unavoidable damage just from lack of health pool.

Overall, I like Cata way more than Wrath. Blizz done good, IMHO.

As in it is a level 82 dungeon and AoE can hit for upwards of ~25k in a very short time span. So if you aren't at full helth and take damage you could avoid or random AoE you could die.

A combination of both I would say, more so the issue is lack of new gear with the accompanying stam boost.

You're not getting gear at level 82?

And I thought we were moving away from the 'oh noes, GCD capped' mindset of healing. If DPS can die that fast to random AOE, sounds like healing didn't get changed, it just got harder.

Isn't that kind of Dungeons 101?

Edit: What the **** is the tag for the "D:" face

Edited, Dec 11th 2010 12:30am by Norellicus

I hate Stonecore. The trash before Orzuk is annoying, I will ***** about this until everyone out gears it so...

But ya I had to let a resto in the guild know that it was ok to HoT a DPS and let the HoT work and use more Nourish. He changed it up a bit and had way less mana issues and people weren't dying. Standing around is kind of ok as a healer, pre-casting on the tank would be better but w/e.

As for health I'm sitting at 121k unbufffed in bear form and 1-2 pieces away from heroics. I think it's my feet as I have crap for drop luck and no real rewards to replace my crafted 264 boots.

The dungeons really step it up a notch every set you go through. BRC/TotT are easy and were easy for the most part from the start. VP was tough when we did it at 80/81 but gets easy when everyone is 82+, Stonecore... see above comments.

Then GB, LCotT and HoS take a big jump up. LC and HoO require marked pulls and CC for most all the pulls. GB can but it entirely depends on how the dragon part goes. It an either be easy trash or hair pulling WTF please kill me bad. The bosses in those ones are also waaay more involved. Then either of the prior two tiers.

I really like how they do the dungeons and slowly ramp them up in complexity.

It's really not that healing, or anything, has gotten harder. It's that players in general have become much much worse at the game and it's hitting them hard right now.

Okay, now that I've actually played some of it, I can comment on it.

Vashj'ir was kinda interesting, though as a herbalist, finding those Stormvine was a pain in the *** with all the glitter and bubbles and crap.

Hyjal I'm liking a lot more. Maybe because the underwater thing got old after the first 150 quests. Maybe because I like being able to jump on a rider and go AFK while I fly to wherever. It feels less isolated, which I guess is the point.

I like how they turned leveling into sort of a story. The cutscenes and the phasing was really nice. On the downside, the zone being so linear and so long, I have no desire of ever pulling another character through it. I guess I could go the other way around and just do Hyjal instead, which is probably what'll happen.

Dinging is getting more boring as we go, to be honest. At least when you're low level, you get something new every other level, which is every hour or so. I spent the better half of an entire night grinding quests and hit 81 some five hours later. Okay leveling speed, but the reward was underwhelming. A talent point to put in the tree, but there's nothing exciting left to spend points on. Thrash was a huge letdown as well. And the only new stuff I can look forward to is Stampeding Roar, which is next to useless and the Mushroom spell, which is completely useless for a Feral.

My fun so far has been to stack so much Mastery that my Rake crits now two-shot stuff.

Edited, Dec 13th 2010 3:55am by Mazra

What hunter spec you using?

Mastery is silly good for feral DPS. I am slowly building a DPS set from old tank gear and when I get a full set will get it reforged and gemmed so I can make stuff bleed to death where ever I go.

I've played around with the Mushrooms a bit now, and I feel very let down. I honestly don't see them being very viable for much besides maybe pvp. It takes a global cd to put down each mushroom and then you have to detonate them. Each mushroom only does an avg. of 3k damage. Maybe I'm missing something here, but I think I'm going to be better off just sticking to the rotation and not worrying about the mushrooms. It does make for some interesting pulling while questing though.