Monday, September 10, 2012

Shenanigans!

Apparently there's been some shenanigans going on with people using the new cross-realm grouping in the game to farm rare spawns across multiple realms, mainly the new Darkmoon Rabbit world boss... which I would link to but doesn't seem to have a Wowhead page yet. I can, however, link to it's loot. This pet is currently listed on the AH my realm for 250k, which I doubt will sell, but I can't necessarily argue against that price considering its present rarity.

Hard to say if Blizzard will consider this worth fixing-- mainly because it's such a hard thing to limit without removing some functionality from the cross-realm feature itself. I think the least disruptive solution would be to give World Bosses specifically a special flag to prevent them from being engaged by off-realm players. Using this technique to hunt other rare spawns is a lot less overtly disruptive, but still a bit disheartening considering the amount of time I spent hunting then just on my own realm.

I am in love with the Warrior ability Shield Barrier. It really is the most beautiful, responsive, awesome-feeling ability. Damage comes in, you hit a button and wham, stop it in its tracks. Assuming the Protection buffs currently in beta make it through to live we are looking at a situation of having sufficient rage generation to maintain optimal uptime on Shield Block and still have leftover rage to use Barrier as needed to cover the gaps. The only wildcard is boss avoidance-- your rage generation relies significantly on your ability to hit the boss-- so I'm actually getting excited about reforging into expertise/hit again. The jury's still out on how theoretically optimal this will be, but in terms of my own playstyle I'm pretty sure I'll end up doing this. I guess it would make really good sense from a design point of view if stats that provide a benefit to the reactive rotation were more optimal than passive avoidance, but I'm less confident that the designers would bend over backwards to create this situation in the game.

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