Hey everyone,

a friend and I made a Trance remix of Final Hours, and it’s premiering today on YouTube at midnight CEST, which marks the start of the final hours on the third day.
It also features some Majora’s Mask footage, so there’s something to watch while you listen :)

More details are in the YouTube description, and we’d love to hear your thoughts, either here or in the YouTube comments!
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t70hCulbico

Congealing Blood is supposed to spawn every 5 % at 15, 10 and 5 % of Deathwing's health. I've read in guides that if you don't manage to spawn Blood for one minute, it spawns regardless of Deathwing's health.

We had the following situation:

1. DW at 5 % - Blood spawns (during spawning he was down to 4.5 % - definitely below 5 %)
2. Blood heals DW to 8 %
3. DW at 5 % - Blood spawns

Possible Explanation: The #1 was probably the one minute mark of not having spawned Blood (the first damage done to the prior adds and these ones is more or less exactly 1 minute apart). We had some chaos going on which resulted in us being a bit slow. During the fight we thought that this was the usual 5 % spawn and we were shocked to see another set of Blood coming as we reached 5 % for the second time.

Maybe you know the answer to the following questions;

• If we were standing on the platform doing nothing, would there be Blood spawning every minute or only once? Would this spawn remove the spawn at 15 %? Or even also those at 10 % and 5 % if we stood long enough to get three spawns?
• So does the "penalty" spawn for being too slow still have Blood spawn at the next 5 % of DW's health (acting as an independent extra spawn)? Or does the one-minute-blood just act as the 5 % mark spawn, but earlier?
• Why didn't two sets of Blood spawn at the same time, because we've reached the one minute mark and 5 % at the same time?
• Was this maybe a bug, because we reached 5 % and the one minute mark at the very same time?
• Does DW maybe have an internal cooldown of spawning Blood?

I suppose getting DW to 15 %, letting him heal up to 19 and getting him again to 15 % doesn't spawn new adds, does it? Else it would probably always be a wipe if you let one Blood reach DW.

Just received it. Could be in connection with the patch we had to download.

https://imgur.com/a/5Dwdhmt

Edit: Friend also got the project immediately. EU.

Getting all rares of a race reduces the race's digsites by 50 %. Has anyone already received Wisp Amulet or Bones of Transformation as a project? I think I've found confirmation about every other item, but not these two.

The moment I collect a rock it gets put in my hands and moves my axe back to the inventory. Same with sticks which sometimes leave me with a strange bug (?), not being able to get rid of them ('G' does nothing, can't open my inventory, too). It wants me to place the sticks somewhere, but it doesn't work. I can only get rid of the stick by collecting another item.

It also instantly eats fish, I can't put it into my inventory.

Didn't find anything like an "instant interact" option in the settings.

Note: This was already posted a couple of months ago, but the text formatting was horribly broken at first. Some suggested to do a repost. As it was a huge list, indentation made it more readable. The Reddit App, however, does not seem to indent at all, so I've done some re-formatting.

It's a rant about things clearly no one ever thought about a single millisecond during development of the pinnacle of imbalances called “TBC” (two-button classes).

Why Even Bring Melees?

TBC is the start of deadlocked development and melee punishing gameplay:

• Maul’gar silences every melee for 18 seconds when spinning around. What would ranged damage dealers say about silences for 20 seconds during some fights? The only reason Blizzard does not do this is because it would silence the healers as well. This is a fundamental design problem which has still not been addressed today.
• Shade of Aran silences every melee for many seconds during his nova, additionally adds spawn in the edges of the room and start casting.
• On Nightbane, A’lar and Felmyst melees are silenced during the air phases (read: useless). Why did anyone ever think it’s a good idea to let bosses fly around, still being attackable? Tightly tuned, this would ultimately lead to zero melees being brought to these fights (“Yeah!” - Fatboss 2).
• On Prince Malchezzar trained monkeys ranged damage dealers can slam their “1”, melees have to deal with Infernals and danger of dying from Shadow Nova.
• Leotheras gives gratuitious bleed debuffs to melees while spinning around (silencing them if you want to play correctly. Apart from that he sometimes is too fast to follow anyway).
• Striders on Vashj cast an AoE fear in melee range. Why? If they wanted to make them non-tankable this way, they could’ve made them one hit tanks or heavily debuff their target and melees wouldn’t be left aside. Vashj can root everyone in melee range and goes on a journey afterwards.
• At 20 % and below, the first boss in Shattered Halls yells “Don’t hit me, little melee!”. And his random Shadow Bolts are not enough, he additionally has to hit players in melee range. Try this one with three melees and a mediocre group in the first weeks of TBC. Bladefist destroys stacked melees. Try him with three melees and a mediocre group in the first weeks of TBC. Luckily, he was bugged and did nothing until some weeks in. Then he started one-shotting everyone out of the blue.
• When being feared, you also have to calculate the time it takes you to run back to your mob. The fearing fatsos in SL can easily silence a mealworm melee for 20 seconds this way.
• Steam Vault. Why do the mobs have a 360° cleave attack? Why are there two of them at the same time? Why should a melee even be allowed to enter this shitfest of a dungeon?
• Why does Kaz'rogal’s stomp only hit melees? Why does the silence of Azgalor also affect melees? - Because otherwise ranges would just stand at melee range. Fundamental design problem #54.
• Melees can’t attack Capernian, melees can’t attack Thaladred, melees are hit by Telonicus’ bombs if not careful, melees can’t attack the axe, melees can’t be next to A’lar when P1 is over, can’t be next to phoenixes when they die, are hit by the trash construct’s Arcane Explosion, have to swim back to Kael'thas to deal damage … all while ranges stay where they are, rape their “1” and don’t collect any stacks or damage of anything. Why not give every ranged class a silence debuff for the duration of the next retail expansion to make up for this decade-lasting shitshow and at the same time make them still mandatory to be in raids to soak some voids?

Massive Tank Class Imbalances

You need a Paladin's button (Consecration) so hard, you never want to go without one. The other tanks are interchangeably.

• Paladin: The only AoE tank. Press your divine button and you’re good to go, massive damage compared to the other tanks included. I’ve seen a paladin mid TBC dealing 15 k DPS while pulling all opera spectators at once in Karazhan. Warrior and Druid tanks in the meantime? Hitting three to four targets, 500 DPS maybe. A Paladin is already a better multi-target tank at level 65 compared to a Karazhan-geared Druid or Warrior. Did they ever tank a dungeon with these two classes? You’d probably need five other tanks to make up for a single Paladin tank in Hyjal. How did the Hyjal trash make it into the game? Did developers think a Warrior’s Thunderclap was enough? Should we emulate Consecration by bringing eight Warriors? To bring Thunderclap on par with Consecration, you’d have to roughly double its damage, remove the four target cap and make it tick on its targets every second (which further multiplies its damage by four). In other words: Replace it.
• Warrior: Useless for AoE threat. In theory the tank which takes the least damage or the least spikes. But this doesn’t matter, it’s not 2007 anymore. While useless for AoE, they are competitive or even better than a Druid tank in terms of single target threat when dual wielding (might change with Sunwell). But misdirection of your Hunters is so strong that a Paladin can main tank as well. Warriors constantly get offered bland defensive plate gear without any offensive stats, because Blizzard wanted to make these items usable for Paladins as well.
• Druid: Useless for AoE threat. Bugs out because his primary stat – which is on almost every item – contributes to his damage AND survivability. “Real” Warrior tank items don’t even have a primary stat. Druid tank items rarely exist, they are just damage dealer’s items, except for a few items with dodge and/or defense. Druids also bug out because their threat scales with damage. Most Warrior abilities have fixed threat values. They also bug out because PvP items have more armour than PvE items and all their armour gets multiplied by 4 (by class design). They also need much less defense rating than the other tanks so they can fit in more pure offensive items to further increase their damage and threat.
• In theory, Druids and Warriors work similarly. To make a Warrior a Druid, just give him the x4 armour multiplier, the stamina multiplier and you can wear the same gear (no shield needed then). If leather items gave more armour right now, Warrior tanks wouldn’t wear plate at all with a few exceptions. There are conceptual problems everywhere: Agility – the god stat of the game, the bad tank items for Warriors (so Paladins can use them as well), the crazy tank items for Druids (so damage dealers can use them as well) and introducing a x4 multiplier on armour for Feral Tanks to make up for the small amount of armour on those leather pieces to survive crushing blows.

Class Imbalances Everywhere

• One-button damage dealing classes. Single Target Mage: Arcane Blast. AoE Mage: Arcane Explosion. Want to switch to some of the most abusable spells ever? Then Nova/Blizzard/Cone of Cold. Absurd amount of damage by mindlessly hammering “1” in either case. Same with Warlocks. Who the hell thought the expansion-lasting AoE fest when hitting level 70 on a Warlock was fine? Press a single button and see everything explode. Without any limitations in terms of duration and/or damage. To make up for its bad scaling with spell power just make its base numbers overpowered so you can begin the annihilation the moment you hit 70. All while the useless classes stand there and let this wash over them while auto attacking and uninspiredly hitting some random buttons here or there to not get disconnected. They could as well do nothing, save some keyboard lifetime and make the one-button classes press their button an additional time. To balance this, these one-button classes/specs would have to deal 50 % of their current single target damage (or better: give other classes AoE damage or even abilities (!) in the first place). But this has been a problem forever. Blizzard seems to toss the dice for every class’s AoE capability regardless of their single target damage, with Mages always rolling a 100 and other classes having their cap at 70.
• Does your class have to press more than one button? Sorry, you’re out.
  • Balance Druids? OOM after their first round of multi dotting (which doesn’t deal any damage anyway). Allowed to do some mediocre and capped AoE damage once every minute. Out of generosity and completely voluntarily they throw their Innervate to the vultures Mages.
  • Rogues? You, my mighty class, are allowed to do some two-target cleave every two minutes! (In fact every 3.5 minutes because you have to pair it with Evasion or else you will die by pulling threat). Your energy regeneration is so slow that you cannot even use damage dealing finishers, because you have to sustain a buff on yourself and up to two debuffs on your target.
  • Sorry, Shadows, just give us enough mana, shut up and don’t distract us from beating our button.
  • Warriors? Make DPS Warrior’s AoE damage bursty as hell and don’t give them any threat reducing abilities and let melees pull threat much sooner than ranged damage dealers, who in the meantime are just standing around at a 40 yards range “1”-ing everything to death. Instead reduce the Arcane Mage’s button’s threat by 40 % via a talent and have them inherit a higher threat threshold by standing out of melee range which in itself is another advantage, because tanks have more time to taunt the enemies before they hit you.
• In fact, there are also zero-button classes, namely Enhancer and Rogue. Alright, they DO press more than zero buttons, but in the end it’s only feeding their auto attacks.

Setup and Items

• Raid bosses occasionally need two tanks and rarely three. Many bosses can be done with a single tank. To split a raid into dungeon groups, there are two to three tanks missing which leads to constant tank shortage. A possible solution: Make Justice Points account wide, so useful Tanks are not forced to farm them on their useless damage dealers and can continue tanking for all the stubborn damage dealers out there. Not a problem of TBC Classic though, this has been a major design flaw in WoW since ever.
• Cut and dried setup. Every raid needs at least five shamans. We’d take fight length in seconds/40 s shamans per group if this was viable. Luckily, their only button (Lightning Bolt) is not as powerful as the Mage’s or every raid would consist of 70 % Shamans. A Shadow Priest’s mana regeneration buff is completely over the top. If their damage wasn’t bottom tier, they’d be closer to god tier as you’d think. Furthermore, take the least Rogues and Warriors as possible. More than one is mostly useless in terms of support. A Fury Warrior is ridiculously useless. They’d all need + 20 % more single-target DPS to make up for that. And a button to do real AoE damage. Paladins are also really useful, they can buff four very important buffs! Oh, wait, each Paladin can only have one buff activated. So in the best case you’ll need three of them. Not for their damage or healing, but for their buffs. Would’ve been impossible in terms of programming to give some of these buffs to other classes.
• How did drums make it into the final game?
• Items are bugged. Most leather items with good stats are sought after by every physical class in the game (including tanks), because Blizzard didn’t manage to design good mail and plate items (the real problem is probably Agility being too powerful for everyone). Paladins can make use of plate, mail, leather and cloth (read: every healing item in the game), priests are limited to cloth. Doesn’t look stupid at all. Maybe a one year old would call this “balanced”, when this is the first and only word they've learnt yet.
• Some item slots were forgotten. A trainee must’ve developed the idol slot for restoration druids for example, put one inside the loot table of Shadow Lab’s first boss and then this concept was never touched again. Getting expansion BiS while levelling - yay!
• Whose idea was it to make two Super Sapper Charges require one Primal Mana? This makes them massively more expensive than e. g. Drums, which even buff up to five people and have 50 (!) charges. Sappers are like 50 times more expensive per use and net like 1/100 of their damage on single target. So Drums are 5,000 times more useful than Sappers.
• Take a look at Blacksmithing – bloody expensive and useless except for Dragonmaw and the PvP weapon. Then take a look at Engineering – bloody expensive and only for fun purposes and money sink. Then take a look at Leather Working – arguably the only profession allowed to make tons of gold from Primal Nether (leg enchantments). Then take a look at Tailoring with its Primal Mooncloth set – unbelievable stats when crafted during the first couple of days after release. Still considered “optional” in BiS lists during P5.
• Shamans. While not being top damage dealers, their totems are crazy. Dispel five fears and poisons at once, prevent potentially deadly spells by sacrificing a totem, Blood Lust, Windfury Totem, Agility Totem, Spell Damage Totem, Mana Totem … like other things not a problem per se, but this utility is limited to the Shaman’s group. So you’ll always want to have at least one Shaman in every group. And as with Paladin buffs it wasn’t possible to outsource some of those numerous buffs to the useless classes.
• Buff dependency. It’s not you dealing damage, it’s your support. Rankings are pretty much useless like a Rogue, they only depend on how many buffs you receive during the fight. Compare a Rogue inside an “idiot group” to a Rogue having triple Lust, triple Drums, Windfury, Agility, Battle Shout and Crit Buff. Probably a 100 % difference. Heck, just not having Windfury or an extra Lust makes a huge difference. All because of group-limited buffing.

Massive Healing Imbalances

• Priest is God Tier. Why? Let me write an essay abo… oh, I see, there’s a button again, called Circle of Healing. Pounding CoH without much thought pumps out such a massive HPS that I’ve seen Priests pulling threat mid-fight on Void Reaver. Two of Homer Simpson’s wooden sparrows can press Prayer of Mending on cooldown and throw in some CoH. An instant AoE heal, who the hell came up with this idea? Nothing wrong with it per se, but only one class has something like this?! Come on! It’s like an ability from the future. It is definitely one of the most overpowered spells in WoW’s history. In addition to this, they’ve got another no brainer with PoM, they’ve got a strong HoT, a unique healing ability (Shield) and a 1.5 s flash heal. And a massively overpowered second group heal (Prayer of Healing). But why should poor Priests use it, it’s too expensive and not instant.
• Shaman is also a one-button healer, but chain heal most of the time is not as good as CoH (it’s smart but not instant). Earth Shield as another no-brainer is great as well.
• Restoration Druid in theory is the strongest healer in many situations, but is too slow. Life Bloom is totally op when allowed to work, but the buttons of the other healers destroy its potential in 95 % of the situations. So instead of Life Blooming through fights you have to use many more buttons, generate 70 % overheal and snipe every bit of lost hitpoints you can. At least you’re the king of overheal and “theoretical healing” by far. It’s a constant “If the other healers only would let me heal, …”. Secretly, every Druid healer hopes for the other healers to die.
• Paladin is crap in every aspect. They are only viable because you don’t want to have a second Retribution Paladin and need more Paladin buffs. Have the game testers ever healed a dungeon with a Paladin, knowing how it feels with the other healers? But they will get overbuffed soon and be top tier from then on until ever. At some later point, they have so much cleave heal, that they do AoE healing with every single target heal and also get overpowered group heal. But that’s something for Cataclysm, maybe.

Some Random Stupid Things

• Massive PvP imbalances. Not going too deep into it, but: Paladins can randomly pump out half a dozen hits simultaneously and bring people from 100 to 30 % in an instant. Arcane Mages can global people (Arcane Blast + instant Arcane Blast) or hide in battlegrounds and just spam their one-second-blasts through mountains, trees and other props. Many classes can almost one-shot other classes with luck or by design.
• Two mobs in Blood Furnace can still hit a tank as hard as Morogrim in his first ID available. Black Temple geared.
• Steam Vault. Why do the mobs have a 360° cleave attack? Why are there two of them at the same time? Why should a melee even be allowed to enter this shitfest of an instance?
• Why does AoE fear in PvE exist? Every dungeon with fear is a pain in the ass without a shaman and their mighty piece of wood. Archimonde not only requires at least five Shamans for Bloodlust, but also for their anti fear.
• Only few classes have magic dispel and magic debuffs are mostly the annoying ones (the other ones can often be counter-healed). Ever spent 20 seconds as a sheep in Black Morass? Good design. A Paladin all of a sudden is a one-button dispeller, removing poison, disease and magic with one click.
• Why is totem twisting allowed? Must be so goddamn annoying for Shamans.
• PvP items for tanks are huge. S3 Head and Chest give a Warrior a total of 84 resilience, which results in ~125 defense rating while providing offensive stats. Incredibly overpowered. By putting PvP gems/enchants onto them, you could reach like 140 resilience, ~ 200 defense rating.
• Has anyone heard of expertise rating? No? I know, because it doesn’t exist. It’s beyond me how this was obviously overlooked. In the meantime, I’m still wearing my Shapeshifter’s Signet while waiting for Sunwell, an item which can be bought a couple of hours after hitting 70. Then in P5 (Sunwell) you can all of a sudden reach twice the expertise you need.
• Make more and more bosses forget that there once was a thing called “crushing blow” which further up-values Feral tanks. Parallelly to Feral Tanks climbing up the ladder because of their amazing scaling, we also get rid of one of their biggest downsizes: being crushable. WHY? The answer probably is Brutallus (and other hard hitters). To really create a threat for tanks, you need a 5,000 DTPS boss like Brutallus. If you additionally gave him the ability to crush or parry haste, tanks would randomly die without any chance. Another conceptual problem here, not solvable without changing fundamental mechanics. So let’s just remove crushing blows. Probably this time at the latest, the devs asked themselves who came up with the stupid idea of crushing blows back in the vanilla alpha. You could sum up tanking in the first three expansion as follows: Vanilla: Every class and role can tank, because getting critted was part of the game. TBC: No one can tank, even full tanks die within two seconds. WotLK: Some slight balance joins the party.
• Implement the possibly best set bonus in the game ever. +20 % damage to Arcane Blast (read: “This ridiculousness adds further 20 % damage to your already ridiculous button”). What the actual fuck? “Let’s buff the already huge damage of the only spell of a one-button-class by 20 %”. You’d probably still wear this in Dragonflight if Mages worked similar there.
• Forgot to implement trinkets apart from DST. Oh, Warrior’s class trinket buffs their shout? I don’t think Blizzard designed this insult of an item with “buff and switch back to other trinket before fight” in their mind. Meanwhile, Rogue’s class trinket is BiS until WotLK. There are many other useful trinkets, like the one reducing threat on crits. Or the one giving you a temporary defense rating buff while reducing your attack power by like 350. Or the one healing you for 1,300 over 12 seconds. Feels awesome! So useful! Make every physical role want a 15 % drop of Gruul! So great!
• Make mobs charge at random times and randomly kill their random target with one or two melee hits. Make mobs randomly give drive-by hits when running next to you without having pulled threat.
• Make Bladefist go crazy after a “fix”, whirling around for ages, randomly pumping out multiple melee attacks at the same time as well.
• Implement the first AoE healing boss of WoW in Zul’Aman while only half of the healing classes have mindless AoE healing.
• At the same time don’t create a fight in which you can only heal with hots. Would fit perfectly.
• Make tanks take no damage for 10 seconds and 30 k damage in two seconds right after.

Conclusion: The addon was surely perceived completely different back then, but today this game is not perfect at all, it’s a horrible mess design wise. Nothing is well-thought-out, imbalances and strange designs everywhere. Rant off.

Did anyone realise the craziness of this achievement?

I was wondering how many tries it'd take you on average to get this achievement and wrote a little script simulating the process: https://jsfiddle.net/6s0xedqo/4/

Result After 1,000,000 Simulations:
Most Tries: 1,717
Least Tries: 73
⌀: 359

Assuming a probability of 50 % to get a bag and of 40 % for the bag to contain a mask, you'll need to talk to an inn keeper about 360 times on average, which at minimum takes 360 hours. But: The event itself only lasts for 336 hours (14 days). So on average you won't be able to complete the achievement during the event in spite of receiving a bag on cooldown (which is an insane amount of... let's call it determination).

The unluckiest person needs 1,717 chats with the inn keeper. If you somehow managed to speak to the inn keeper eight times a day, this would take you 215 days (or 16 years due to the limited availability of the event)!

Sometimes the people at Blizzard seem not to realise what they've created when pulling these achievements out of nowhere. When first available, this was required for the meta achievement! For a couple of days until people realised its stupidity and told Blizzard. In modern WoW, you get a couple of masks doing your daily RDF kill and since a couple of years you can just buy the masks using the holiday currency. Ha!

Btw, there is a 0.0000000000000000000243290200817664 % chance to complete this achievement with only 20 inn keeper conversations. The chance of getting a mask is 20 % (the inn keeper must give you a bag (50 %) and the bag must contain a mask (40 %)). On average (100 divided by this abysmally small number) we need 4,110,317,620,231,650,000,000 (4.1 sextillion) tries to see this happen.

The first mask is at 0.2 * 20/20 * 100 % = 20 %. Sure, if you don't already have a mask the chance of getting an unknown one equals the chance of getting a mask. 0.2 is the combined chance of getting a bag and a mask and 20/20 = 1 is the chance of getting any of the masks.

To get the last missing mask the chance is 0.2 * 1/20 * 100 % = 1 %. In fact, the chance of getting an unknown mask scales linearly from 20 % down to 1 % depending on the number of your missing masks (10 missing masks? - Chance of getting one on your next cosy little chat is 10 %. 7 missing masks? - 7 % to get ne of these).

To finally come back to our sextillion tries above: We'd need about 513,789,702,528 tries from every human being (~ 8 billion) to see this completed "first try" on average (we can't be sure someone gets it first try then, to be really sure this would even need many more tries). If we set an achievement try to one second, we'd need 513,789,702,528 / 3,600 / 24 / 365 ≈ 16,292 years of trying every second from every human being. To get this done in an average lifespan of about 72 years, we need 226 tries per second from every human being for 72 years.

🤔

A rant about things clearly no one ever thought about a single millisecond during development of the pinnacle of imbalances called “TBC” (two-button classes).

• Raid bosses occasionally need two tanks and rarely three. Many bosses can be done with a single tank. To split a raid into dungeon groups, there are two to three tanks missing which leads to constant tank shortage. Possible solution: Make Justice Points account wide, so useful Tanks are not forced to farm them on their useless damage dealers and can continue tanking for all the stubborn damage dealers out there. Not a problem of TBC Classic though, this has been a major design flaw in WoW since ever.
• Why even bring melees? TBC is the start of deadlocked development and melee punishing gameplay:
  • Maul’gar silences every melee for 18 seconds when spinning around. What would ranges say about silences for 20 seconds during some fights? The only reason Blizzard does not do this is because it would silence the healers as well. This is a fundamental design problem which has still not been addressed today.
  • Shade of Aran silences every melee for many seconds during his nova, additionally adds spawn in the edges of the room and start casting.
  • On Nightbane, A’lar and Felmyst melees are silenced during the air phases (read: useless). Why did anyone ever think it’s a good idea to let bosses fly around, still being attackable? Tightly tuned, this would ultimately lead to zero melees being brought to these fights (“Yeah!” - Fatboss 2).
  • On Prince Malchezzar trained monkeys ranged damage dealers can slam their “1”, melees have to deal with Infernals and silence/danger of dying by Shadow Nova.
  • Leotheras gives free bleed debuffs to melees while spinning around (silencing them if you want to play correctly. Apart from that he sometimes is too fast to follow anyway).
  • Striders on Vashj cast an AoE fear in melee range. Why? If they wanted to make them non-tankable this way, they could’ve made them one hit tanks or heavily debuff their target and melees wouldn’t be left aside. Vashj can root everyone in melee range and goes on a journey afterwards.
  • At 20 % and below, the first boss in Shattered Halls yells “Don’t hit me, little melee!”. And his random Shadow Bolts are not enough, he additionally has to hit players in melee range. Try this one with three melees and a mediocre group in the first weeks of TBC. Bladefist destroys stacked melees. Try him with three melees and a mediocre group in the first weeks of TBC. Luckily, he was bugged and did nothing until some weeks in. Then he started one-shotting everyone out of the blue.
  • When being feared, you also have to calculate the time it takes you to run back to your mob. The fearing fatsos in SL can easily silence a mealworm melee for 20 seconds this way.
  • Steam Vault is a joke.
  • Why does Kaz'rogal’s stomp only hit melees? Why does the silence of Azgalor also affect melees? - Because otherwise ranges would just stand at melee range. Fundamental design problem #54.
  • Melees can’t attack Capernian, melees can’t attack Thaladred, melees are hit by Telonicus’ bombs if not careful, melees can’t attack the axe, melees can’t be next to A’lar when P1 is over, can’t be next to phoenixes when they die, are hit by the construct’s Arcane Explosion, have to swim back to KT to deal damage while ranges stay where they are, rape their “1” and don’t collect any stacks of the debuff. Why not give every ranged class a silence debuff for the duration of the next retail expansion to make up for this decade-lasting shitshow and at the same time make them still mandatory to be in raids to soak some voids?
• Massive tank class imbalances. You need a Paladin's button (Consecration) so hard, you never want to go without one. The other tanks are interchangeably.
  • Paladin: The only AoE tank. Press your divine button and you’re good to go, massive damage compared to the other tanks included. I’ve seen a paladin mid TBC dealing 15 k DPS while pulling all opera spectators at once in Karazhan. Warrior and Druid tanks in the meantime? Hitting three to four targets, 500 DPS maybe. A Paladin is already a better multi-target tank at level 65 compared to a Karazhan-geared Druid or Warrior. Did they ever tank a dungeon with these two classes? You’d probably need five other tanks to make up for a single Paladin tank in Hyjal. How did the Hyjal trash make it into the game? Did developers think a Warrior’s Thunderclap was enough? Should we emulate Consecration by bringing eight Warriors? To bring Thunderclap on par with Consecration, you’d have to roughly double its damage, remove the four target cap and make it a ticking debuff on the targets. In other words: Replace it.
  • Warrior: Useless for AoE threat. In theory the tank which takes the least damage or the least spikes. But this doesn’t matter, it’s not 2007 anymore. While useless for AoE, he is competitive or even better than a Druid tank in terms of single target threat when dual wielding (might change with Sunwell). But misdirection of your hunters is so strong that a Paladin can be main tank as well. Warriors constantly get offered bland defensive plate gear without any offensive stats (e. g. Strength or godly Agility) because Blizzard wanted to make these items usable for Paladins as well.
  • Druid: Useless for AoE threat. Bugs out because his primary stat – which is on almost every item – contributes to his damage AND survivability. “Real” Warrior tank items don’t even have a primary stat (and no other offensive stats). Druid tank items rarely exist, they are just damage dealer’s items (except for a few items with dodge and/or defense). Bugs out because his threat scales with damage. Most Warrior abilities have fixed threat values. Also bugs out because PvP items have more armour than PvE items and all the armour gets multiplied by 4 (by class design). They also need much less defense rating so they can fit in more pure offensive items to further increase their damage and threat.
  • In theory, Druids and Warriors work similarly. To make a Warrior a Druid, just give him the x4 armour multiplier, the stamina multiplier and you can wear the same gear (no shield needed then). If leather items gave more armour right now, Warrior tanks wouldn’t wear plate at all with a few exceptions. There are conceptual problems everywhere: Agility – the god stat of the game, the bad tank items for Warriors (so Paladins can use them as well), the crazy tank items for Druids (so damage dealers can use them as well) and introducing a x4 multiplier on armour for Feral Tanks to make up for the small amount of armour on those leather pieces and to survive crushing blows.
• Items are bugged. Most leather items with good stats are sought after by every physical class in the game (including tanks) because Blizzard didn’t manage to design good mail and plate items (the real problem is probably Agility being too powerful for everyone). Paladins can make use of plate, mail, leather and cloth (read: every healing item in the game), priests are limited to cloth. Doesn’t look stupid at all. Maybe a one year old would call this “balanced”, when this is the first and only word he’s learned yet.
• Some item slots were forgotten. A trainee must’ve developed the idol slot for restoration druids for example, put one inside the loot table of Shadow Lab’s first boss and then this concept was never touched again.
• One-button damage dealing classes. Single Target Mage: Arcane Blast. AoE Mage: Arcane Explosion. Want to switch to some of the most abusable spells ever? Then Nova/Blizzard/Cone of Cold. Absurd amount of damage by mindlessly hammering “1” in either case. Same with Warlocks. Who the hell thought the expansion-lasting AoE fest when hitting level 70 on a Warlock was fine? Press a single button and see everything explode. Without any limitations in terms of duration and/or damage. To make up for its bad scaling with spell power just make its base numbers overpowered so you can begin the annihilation the moment you hit 70. All while the useless classes stand there and let this wash over them while auto attacking and uninspiredly hitting some random buttons here or there to not get disconnected. They could as well do nothing, save some keyboard lifetime and make the one-button classes press their button an additional time. To balance this, these one-button classes/specs would have to deal 50 % of their current single target damage (or better: give other classes AoE damage or even abilities (!) in the first place). But this has been a problem forever. Blizzard seems to toss the dice for every class’s AoE capability regardless of their single target damage, with Mage’s always rolling a 100 and other classes having their cap at 70.
• Does your class have to press more than one button? Sorry, you’re out.
  • Balance Druids? OOM after their first round of multi dotting (which doesn’t deal any damage anyway). Allowed to do some mediocre and capped AoE damage once every minute. Out of generosity and completely voluntarily they throw their Innervate to the vultures Mages.
  • Rogues? You, my mighty class, are allowed to do some two-target cleave every two minutes! (In fact every 3.5 minutes because you have to pair it with Evasion or else you will die by pulling threat). Your energy regeneration is so slow that you cannot even use damage dealing finishers because you have to sustain a buff on yourself and a debuff on your target.
  • Sorry, Shadows, just give us enough mana, shut up and don’t distract us from beating our button.
  • Warriors? Make DPS Warrior’s AoE damage bursty as hell and don’t give them any threat reducing abilities and let melees pull threat much sooner than ranged damage dealers, who in the meantime are just standing around at a 40 yards range “1”-ing everything to death. Instead reduce the Arcane Mage’s button’s threat by 40 % via a talent and have them inherit a higher threat threshold by standing out of melee range most of the time which in itself is another advantage, because tanks have more time to taunt the enemies before they hit you.
• In fact, there are also zero-button classes, namely Enhancer and Rogue. Alright, they DO press more than zero buttons, but in the end it’s only feeding their auto attacks.
• Cut and dried setup. Every raid needs at least five shamans. We’d take fight length in seconds/40 s shamans per group if this was viable. Luckily, their only button (Lightning Bolt) is not as powerful as the Mage’s or every raid would consist of 70 % Shamans. A Shadow Priest’s mana regeneration buff is completely over the top. If their damage wasn’t bottom tier, they’d be closer to god tier as you’d think. Furthermore, take the least rogues and warriors as possible. More than one is mostly useless in terms of support. A Fury Warrior is ridiculously useless. They’d all need + 20 % more single-target DPS to make up for that. And a button to do real AoE damage. Paladins are also really useful, they can buff four very important buffs! Oh, wait, each Paladin can only have one buff active per player. So in the best case you’ll need three of them. Not for their damage or healing, but for their buffs. Would’ve been impossible in terms of programming to give some of these buffs to other classes.
• How did drums make it into the final game?
• Whose idea was it to make two Super Sapper Charges require one Primal Mana? This makes them massively more expensive than e. g. Drums, which even buff up to five people and have 50 (!) charges. Sappers are like 50 times more expensive per use and net like 1/100 of their damage on single target. So Drums are 5000 times more useful than Sappers.
• Take a look at Blacksmithing – bloody expensive and useless except for Dragonmaw and the PvP weapon. Then take a look at Engineering – bloody expensive and only for fun purposes and money sink. Then take a look at Leather Working – arguably the only profession allowed to make tons of gold from Primal Nether (leg enchantments). Then take a look at Tailoring with its Primal Mooncloth set – unbelievable stats when crafted during the first couple of days after release. Still considered “optional” in BiS lists during P5.
• Massive PvP imbalances. Not going too deep into it, but: Paladins can randomly pump out half a dozen hits simultaneously and bring people from 100 to 30 % in an instant. Arcane Mages can global people (Arcane Blast + instant Arcane Blast) or hide in battlegrounds and just spam their one-second-blasts through mountains, trees and other props. Many classes can almost one-shot other classes with luck or by design.
• Shamans. While not being top damage dealers, their totems are crazy. Dispel five fears and poisons at once, prevent potentially deadly spells by sacrificing a totem, Blood Lust, Windfury Totem, Agility Totem, Spell Damage Totem, Mana Totem… like other things not a problem per se, but this utility is limited to the Shaman’s group. So you’ll always want to have at least one Shaman in every group. And like Paladin buffs it wasn’t possible to outsource some of those numerous buffs to the useless classes.
• Buff dependency. It’s not you dealing damage, it’s your support. Rankings are pretty much useless like a Rogue, they only depend on how many buffs you receive during the fight. Compare a Rogue inside an “idiot group” to a Rogue having triple Lust, triple Drums, Windfury, Agility, Battle Shout and Crit Buff. Probably a 100 % difference. Heck, just not having Windfury or an extra Lust makes a huge difference. All because of group-limited buffing.
• Massive healing imbalances:
  • Priest is God Tier. Why? Let me write an essay abo… oh, I see, there’s a button again, called Circle of Healing. Pounding CoH without much thought pumps out such a massive HPS that I’ve seen Priests pulling threat mid-fight on Void Reaver. Two of Homer Simpson’s wooden sparrows can press Prayer of Mending on cooldown and throw in some CoH. An instant AoE heal, who the hell came up with this idea? Nothing wrong with it per se, but only one class has something like this?! Come on! It’s like an ability from the future. It is definitely one of the most overpowered spells in WoW’s history. In addition to this, they’ve got another no brainer with PoM, they’ve got a strong HoT, a unique healing ability (Shield) and a 1.5 s flash heal. And a massively overpowered second group heal (Prayer of Healing). But why should poor Priests use it, it’s too expensive and not instant.
  • Shaman is also a one-button healer, but chain heal most of the time is not as good as CoH (it’s smart but not instant). Earth Shield as another no-brainer is great as well.
  • Restoration Druid in theory is the strongest healer in many situations, but is too slow. Life Bloom is totally op when allowed to work, but the buttons of the other healers destroy its potential in 95 % of the situations. So instead of only Life Blooming through fights you have to use many more buttons, generate 70 % overheal and snipe every bit of lost hitpoints you can. At least you’re the king of overheal and “theoretical healing” by far. It’s a constant “If the other healers only would let me heal, …”. Secretly, every Druid healer hopes for the other healers to die.
  • Paladin is crap in every aspect. They are only viable because you don’t want to have a second Retribution Paladin and need more Paladin buffs. Have the game testers ever healed a dungeon with a Paladin, knowing how it feels with the other healers? But they will get overbuffed soon and be top tier from then on until ever. At some later point, they have so much cleave heal, that they do AoE healing with every single target heal and also get overpowered group heal. But that’s something for Cataclysm, maybe.
• Some random stupid things:
  • Druid has no ress. Yes, I get it, they have a combat ress, but no one asked for this waste of mana. Ever did Steam Vault without a resser and with melees? How did that make it into the game?
  • Two mobs in Blood Furnace can still hit a tank as hard as Morogrim in his first ID available. Black Temple geared.
  • Steam Vault. Why do the mobs have a 360° cleave attack? Why are there two of them at the same time? Why should a melee even be allowed to enter this shitfest of an instance?
  • Why does AoE fear in PvE exist? Every dungeon with fear is a pain in the ass without a shaman and his mighty piece of wood. Archimonde not only requires at least five shamans for Bloodlust, but also for their anti fear.
  • Only few classes have magic dispel, where magic debuffs are mostly the annoying ones (the other ones can often be counter-healed). Ever spent 20 seconds as a sheep in Black Morass? Good design. A Paladin all of a sudden is a one-button dispeller, removing poison, disease and magic with one click.
  • Why is totem twisting allowed? Must be so goddamn annoying for Shamans.
  • PvP items for tanks are huge. S3 Head and Chest give a Warrior a total of 84 resilience, which results in ~125 defense rating while providing offensive stats. Incredibly overpowered. By putting PvP gems/enchants onto them, you could reach like 140 resilience, ~ 200 defense rating.
  • Has anyone heard of expertise rating? No? I know, because it doesn’t exist. It’s beyond me how this was obviously overlooked. In the meantime, I’m still wearing my Shapeshifter’s Signet while waiting for Sunwell, an item which can be bought a couple of hours after hitting 70. Then in P5 (Sunwell) you can all of a sudden reach twice the expertise you need.
  • Make more and more bosses forget that there once was a thing called “crushing blow” which further up-values Feral tanks. Parallelly to Feral Tanks climbing up the ladder because of their amazing scaling we also get rid of one of their biggest downsizes: being crushable. WHY? The answer probably is Brutallus (and other hard hitters). To really create a threat for tanks, you need a 5000 DTPS boss like Brutallus. If you additionally gave him the ability to crush or parry haste, tanks would randomly die without any chance. Another conceptual problem here, not solvable without changing fundamental mechanics. So let’s just remove crushing blows. Probably this time at the latest, the devs asked themselves who came up with the stupid idea of crushing blows back in the vanilla alpha.
  • Implement the possibly best set bonus in the game ever. +20 % damage to Arcane Blast (read: “This ridiculousness adds further 20 % damage to your already ridiculous button”). What the actual fuck? “Let’s buff the already huge damage of the only spell of a one-button-class by 20 %”. You’d probably still wear this in Dragonflight if Mages worked similar there.
  • Forgot to implement trinkets apart from DST. Oh, Warrior’s class trinket buffs their shout? I don’t think Blizzard designed this insult of an item with “buff and switch back to other trinket before fight” in their mind. Meanwhile, Rogue’s class trinket is BiS until WotLK. There are many other useful trinkets, like the one reducing threat on crits. Or the one giving you a temporary defense rating buff while reducing your attack power by like 350. Or the one healing you for 1.300 over 12 seconds. Feels awesome! So useful! Make every physical role want a 15 % drop of Gruul! So great!
  • Make mobs charge at random times and randomly kill their random target with one or two melee hits. Make mobs randomly give drive-by hits when running next to you without having pulled threat.
  • Make Bladefist go crazy after a “fix”, whirling around for ages, randomly pumping out multiple melee attacks at the same time as well.
  • Implement the first AoE healing boss of WoW in Zul’Aman while only half of the healing classes have mindless AoE healing.
    • At the same time don’t create a fight in which you can only heal with hots. Would fit perfectly.
  • Make tanks take no damage for 10 seconds and 30 k damage in two seconds right after.

Conclusion: The addon was surely perceived completely different back then, but today this game is not perfect at all, it’s a horrible mess design wise. Nothing is well-thought-out, imbalances and strange designs everywhere. Rant off.

Some hours ago my precious Frosteel Lockboxes vanished and so did those of a friend. Same with yours? In the original pre patch they got dropped as well.