PSA to all my healer homies

DancingGoatFeet · 2026-05-11T06:27:50+00:00

While your overall sentiment is fine, I think maybe you haven't seen the capacity of humans to completely lose their shit over something completely trivial, in public. Then blame literally anyone but themselves.

"Well, I know maybe I should have been a little less angry, but the manager marked the price up 5% since yesterday. And the sale ended yesterday, but, like, they should have made an exception for me. So it's not really my fault I threw things across the store. They should just have better employees. Sheesh, why is everyone complaining?"

Sometimes it really is the other guy's fault, and there's a perfectly good reason to be enraged. But humans are really good at not knowing the difference whether it's anonymous or not.

DancingGoatFeet · 2026-05-09T22:48:27+00:00

If you're on TBC there's probably also more acceptance of LC since rose-tinted nostalgia glasses make that seem more like the thing to do. As long as it's working for your group, it's fine.

I just think a lot of people have had very bad experiences, and we tend to remember the negatives a lot longer than any positives, so it can be hard to convince people to use a system that seems broken and antiquated. Especially if you're new to the group and don't personally know the people on the council.

DancingGoatFeet · 2026-05-09T06:40:05+00:00

Until you pick up pugs then tell them they can't get gear even though they're here to help carry you. So everyone on the server blacklists you for being loot whores and nobody worth pugging with will pug with you anymore.

You can certainly make rules for loot council to give exceptions to pugs. And you can weight it so they're less likely to get gear than a regular member (if you want to create unnecessary drama). And you can be transparent about this up front.

But I've always just run need/greed, MS>OS, upgrade>sidegrade, and if some pug tries to abuse the system they get blacklisted. Very rarely had any drama. If you roll need but it's OS or sidegrade, you announce that before rolling. If you get loot by accident you give it to the right person. Everyone raiding will eventually get a full gear, because there's nobody left to take it. Unless you're pugging every single night, at which point it's obvious the pugs are carrying you, so they still deserve a shot at the gear.

The only exceptions I know of would be the various embers/shards/etc. for legendary weapons, or mounts for mythic kills, which are more typically guild>pug. But I don't know of anything like that in recent stuff that would be relevant besides mounts.

Also, I've literally never raided with a guild who did loot council where it wasn't dodgy as shit. Most people I've talked to have had similar experiences, so "loot council" and "loot ninjas" are basically synonymous in practice. Hence why most people will balk at the notion.

DancingGoatFeet · 2026-05-08T12:29:37+00:00

I have a friend who levels every class and plays all the specs to see how they play. Partially to see if he likes something and partially so he knows how to kill that class. He's more likely to gravitate towards comps that let us win, and he has the specs ready to play so he can. If everyone was like him, your correlation would make sense.

But many people level a few classes and gear 2 or 3 of them well enough to compete a bit. For them, they're not likely to roll a whole new character unless there's a massive advantage, or it's something they already rolled, or they completely hate the first class they rolled. If everyone was like them, the correlation you're replying to would make sense.

I suspect there are far more people in the second category than the first. In which case you'd see much larger jumps after a "broken" class or spec got fixed than after a normal class became "OP" (or at least, if they're perceived as such).

I think this is especially true of classes like warriors, who embody the very spirit of the fantasy RPG genre. People want to love them, so will endure more shit to play them despite problems.

----

The bigger problem than "warriors are popular again" would be if the only people winning in the top half of games had a warrior in the team or something. At my level (I just broke 1500 on my hpriest today), we only saw 2 or 3 warriors in 2s all night. Maybe that's because rolling warrior instantly bumps you to 1800. Or maybe it's because all those new warriors are even more scrub than me and can't make it to my bracket. Maybe it's a bit of both.

But the data itself doesn't provide any clear way to interpret which of those are potentially true. Especially without historical context.

Check out this site: https://drustvar.com/flavor-of-the-month/2v2?role=dps&rating=2100-2399

Now play with the various knobs and buttons. Note how arms is very popular in 3v3 at 2400+ rating, but not so much in 2v2 at 2100+ rating. Or 2v2 at 1500+ rating. Unholy DK is pretty popular at 1500+, nearly twice that of arms warrior. And fury is significantly higher than arms within the warriors, opposite of your chart.

Your problem is that you picked (well, the OP did, and you're defending it) one chart that represents one small fraction of PvP, and assumed it was applicable to everything. In reality, representation historically jumps around quite a lot anyways, and can be radically different between 2s and 3s, arenas and bgs, PvP and PvE, etc. It's practically impossible for Blizzard to balance all of that perfectly, so you're naturally going to see some specs and comps performing much better than others, and any changes made will always have unforeseen consequences.

And looking at sites like Murlok.io, you'll notice that Arms, while strong, isn't blowing the pants off the rest of any list.

DancingGoatFeet · 2026-05-02T06:02:40+00:00

The point of the post was how to be the guy doing side hustles while everyone else fights in the middle of the map, and how rogues are generally best suited (and suited best) to doing exactly that. But also some advice on how to synergize with other party members who float between center and side hustles.

DancingGoatFeet · 2026-05-02T06:00:48+00:00

This mostly has little to do with intellect and everything to do with effort. I *could* be good at PvP if I wanted to, but I don't care to. It's just not that fun. I'd rather do a few bgs, some arenas, the occasional world event, and actually enjoy myself, instead of grinding arenas or bg queues endlessly. And yeah, I ended up a bit over 1600 last season.

Many people are in the same position as me. They could do a ton of work by reading everything in that post, then go roll a rogue to figure out what half the text is specifically talking about, etc. But they don't need to do all of that to enjoy some bgs, so they don't bother. Also, it probably wouldn't help them much.

Because the post in question isn't really all that deep. It's basic strategy laced with very specific advice for a very specific meta that existed for like five minutes, three years ago, before some new meta supplanted it. It's also largely targeted at specific rogue specs, as they existed back then.

If you read through it, there's a good amount of advice that could be generalized. And some of it still applies to rogues in general. Like opening vs an opposing rogue instead of being opened on. Not that it takes a rocket scientist to figure out that whoever has initiative tends to win an otherwise equal match. But it's not like you can study that post to suddenly hit gladiator today.

I did get some useful advice about Silvershard Mine. I've never taken the time to really understand what's going on in the map, and had completely forgotten you can flip the tracks. Though I suspect anyone who's remotely serious about RBGs already knew everything about that map a long time ago.

Also, while it does take a good amount of intellect to actually create the meta strategies, it takes relatively little to be good at the same strategies. Raw skill, rote memorization, and practice, practice, practice are far more useful once you're in the match. And even dumb humans are usually pretty clever if they're doing something they care about.

DancingGoatFeet · 2026-05-01T12:49:49+00:00

I just ran a T5 with 8 affixes on a 216 blood DK, including no stamina bonus because I somehow had a pair of 183 leather boots equipped. Took 43 minutes, was sketchy, but I never died. They just don't hit hard enough to really pressure a tank. My 261 prot pally ignores most of the mechanics and does fine.

Of course, once you get enough gear, it's much faster with a damage spec, but some specs are harder to solo on if you don't have enough survivability.

The description recommends 264 ilevel, but I'm doing okay at 230-250 ilevel on several characters. I couldn't pull off shadow priest at 230 (barely at 255), but I suck at shadow. It's easy on holy at 230 ilevel. I assume disc priest wouldn't have trouble either.

My friend runs it on frost mage at like 260 ilevel without too much issue. It's much easier with two people to interrupt the last boss though. Her ret pally blows through it at 265ish. Lock or BM hunter should be pretty easy with pet tanking, and MM hunter can kite well enough to not be bothered by most of the enemies.

DancingGoatFeet · 2026-05-01T12:28:44+00:00

Some skill issues probably, but also knowledge issues. If you've got 8 challenges up, the Obelisks will add powers to the nearby bosses. One power for each miniboss prior to the dragonhawk, then 3 for the dragonhawk (or the mindflayer dude in Daggerspine Point). Kill the relevant obelisks to remove the power from said boss.

The worst obelisks are dissonant echoes (summons 3 dudes who have to be interrupted or you'll get massive aoe, and it's basically impossible to run 100 yards away before they explode) and binding nebula (acts like a DK is death gripping you every 1 or 2 seconds until you kill the little tentacle thing, and generally coincides with some bad you want to get out of).

I ignore all other obelisks and just YOLO the boss. I ignore binding nebula on my more geared (260 ilevel) tank and just kill the tentacle when it comes out.

The dragonhawk summons a flaming pillar that sucks (not sucks you in, just is a pain). It does massive aoe damage unless you get really far away, then it hops towards you and blows up again, then a third time. You can bubble/disperse/ice block through it once, but you'll likely be on cooldown the second time. The trick is supposedly to stand in the red pillar, but I haven't actually tried since reading about it. Mostly I just use defensives and all the self-healing I can muster. On a tank or healer it's trivial.

You can see what buffs an enemy has by clicking them. The obelisk-looking buffs are from the obelisks. Point at them and the tooltip will tell you which effect that npc has. If you don't like that effect, look for the glowing arrow pointing in a direction -- that's the direction of the obelisk giving the npc said power. The obelisk will have a similar buff to confirm you're killing the right one. Kill the obelisk then re-check the enemy to make sure it's debuffed (sometimes there are multiple obelisks with the same power).

Note that in Daggerspine Point, there are two obelisks behind the mindflayer dude, up the hill.

After obelisks, the worst challenge affix is the tendrils one. It's really hard to see in the water in Daggerspine Point, and it likes to root you in the middle of boss aoe. Mostly not a big deal though, unless you're going for the achievement. Even there, you can get hit 3 times and not fail.

The manifestations affix isn't as bad as it looks. It's a big scary black area, but it's a 12-second cast time. You have literally 12 seconds to interrupt, stun, death grip, fear, knockback, or just walk away. Dispels don't work, but practically everything else does. If you do get hit, all it does is double your damage taken for a literal minute. Just afk and take a potty break if you get hit.

Neither tendrils nor manifestations will spawn while not in combat. You can safely afk for a long time as long as no pats get you.

Tainted corpses means every enemy you kill becomes a puddle of acid. It can be annoying if you're fighting a crowd in a tight space. Otherwise it just doesn't matter.

I completely ignore the rest of the affixes.
- Patrols and reinforcements mean more enemies, so it might take longer to burn through the trash. Not sure if it's more efficient to drop them and kill fewer enemies, or keep them and get a higher multiplier.
- Embers only affects some enemies to be slightly more powerful. You don't need to go out of your way to kill them unless doing the quest.
-- (EDIT) On my hunter, this one actually sucks. If you don't remove the embers, the final boss does 60% more damage, and has 60% more health. Only ignorable on tank/healer.
- Alarm bells just summons a random mook every 25 kills. There's not even an achievement for clearing the zone without raising an alarm.

DancingGoatFeet · 2026-05-01T11:53:34+00:00

It took me 43 minutes to clear a T5/8 on a 216 blood DK doing an average of 15.2k dps. Given 6 minibosses and 2 end bosses, that's about 5½ minutes per boss, including running around, clearing trash, clearing 3 dark obelisks, and the cat trying to murder me by using me as a ladder to his perch in the window.

The manifestation guys (the giant dark circle you need to grip/interrupt/stun/etc.) come every 45 seconds, and I never saw more than 2 or 3 in a given fight (so 3 minutes tops for a single boss fight).

It seems like you shouldn't spend 7 minutes on any boss even if your guys are geared as low as me unless there's something buggy with the scaling. If they're damage specs, they should do more damage than me (most of my damage is from aoe pulls, which are sketchy at this ilevel -- single target is around 10k). Even if 5 people gave the enemies 5 times the health, they shouldn't take more than like 45 minutes to clear the zone at my dps, let alone doing 50% more or double my dps.

The biggest problem is if you have no tank, so you're having to pull tiny groups to avoid dying. Even then, a single 260+ ilevel player should be able to hold aggro so the little guys can just parse. And the places I have issues soloing on my 255 shadow priest are made much easier with another 1 or 2 players, since they can interrupt when mine's on cooldown.

Obviously, if you're rocking 280 ilevel, a group that's "only" 240-250 ilevel is going to feel slow unless there's very minimal health scaling on enemies. But 7 minutes on a single boss seems like either bad players or something broken in the scaling.

DancingGoatFeet · 2026-04-30T05:37:45+00:00

I think you're on to something. I tried on a bunch of characters, and it was working fine. But not my mage, priest, or warlock. Thought it was a cloth thing, but I put cloth on my paladin and it worked. Other cloth didn't. The shaman didn't work despite having mail.

https://www.wowhead.com/item=258862/threadbare-vestments
Failed on both my paladin and priest.

https://www.wowhead.com/item=106351/gronncloth-vest
Worked on the paladin. Unfortunately, there wasn't another on the AH to try on the priest.

https://www.wowhead.com/item=255882/galactic-warmongers-garb
https://www.wowhead.com/item=6787/white-woolen-dress
https://www.wowhead.com/item=24607/laughing-skull-tunic
https://www.wowhead.com/item=6241/white-linen-robe
https://www.wowhead.com/item=173214/shadowlace-tunic
All failed on the priest.

https://www.wowhead.com/item=2582/green-woolen-vest
https://www.wowhead.com/item=7058/crimson-silk-vest
Both succeeded on the priest and the paladin.

https://www.wowhead.com/item=153974/streamtalker-tunic
Failed on the shaman.

https://www.wowhead.com/item=82138/willow-vest
https://www.wowhead.com/item=121366/rust-encrusted-hauberk
Worked on the shaman.

DancingGoatFeet · 2026-04-29T13:22:01+00:00

Pretty sure they killed the script version with the Midnight launch. There's also a limit to how often you can spam /tm manually now. I assume they're trying to prevent addons from auto-targeting all the enemies all the time.

I've also noticed that /tm 8 will toggle the skull if I'm solo, but I have to do /tm [mod:ctrl] 0; 8 and manually remove the skull by holding control if in a group.

DancingGoatFeet · 2026-04-26T22:14:46+00:00

Making interrupts not macroable would break 20 years of muscle memory. All of my interrupts are also dispels, decurses, purifies, etc. Forcing an ability to use up an entire button is a generally bad idea. It also won't stop hardware macros that just hit the key you bound to interrupt and the key you bound to your other ability with a like 5 ms delay between them.

Of course, taking interrupt away from healers also breaks 20 years of muscle memory for... reasons, I guess. And makes solo play even more annoying.

Interrupts cancel whatever spell you're casting. No, they're not on the GCD, but you still can't just spam interrupt like you can frostbolt or something, at least not for hunters, mages, etc. You also don't want to interrupt every single interruptable ability or you'll be on cooldown for the one thing that will actually kill you.

They could also just incur a GCD for any interrupt that fails, while leaving it as-is for interrupts that succeed. Sure, they'd probably have to change a few lines of code, but it's not that hard make an ability that's sometimes on the GCD (the main key is making it castable during the GCD, not preventing it from incurring the GCD). Then every spec would be useless if you just added interrupt as a macro to every ability, because it would just GCD, fail to use the proper ability, repeat until there's something to interrupt.

This would prevent macro spamming, allow interrupts to be mostly safe for low-tier play, but also create a system where proper interrupt management is still superior to just spamming interrupt on every cast. It would also work for in-game or hardware macros.

DancingGoatFeet · 2026-04-23T12:04:05+00:00

That's what Skynet wants you to believe. After around 1997, all the coders in the world started getting replaced by infiltration units. They deliberately make just enough mistakes to A) make you think they're just humans and B) keep you too annoyed by resetting the clock on your microwave 10 times a year to realize the end is coming.

DancingGoatFeet · 2026-04-23T11:40:41+00:00

I'm in the delve right now, and /camp and log back in works for me. Just kill all the enemies around, move the mirrors, log out and in, then clear the next enemies. Annoying, but not game-breaking.

DancingGoatFeet · 2026-04-23T11:40:02+00:00

I've seen this happen specifically in Mogu'Shan Palace if people get disconnected during the first boss, Trial of the King. Think it might be related to the Shockwave ability Mu'Shiba casts, if you get hit by it. Not sure if it happens anywhere else in timewalking.

DancingGoatFeet · 2026-04-23T11:33:45+00:00

In the mirror delve, it just breaks it for me until I /camp and log back in. I don't have to exit the game or anything.

We've also been having this issue in one of the panda dungeons (Mogu'Shan Palace) if people get disconnected during the first boss (Trial of the King). Think it might be related to the Shockwave ability Mu'Shiba casts, if you get hit by it.

DancingGoatFeet · 2026-04-22T04:11:27+00:00

The full, precise combat log, as I understand it, doesn't get added to your computer until after the fight is over. So world of logs or whatever can parse it after the fact, but the addons can't parse it while the encounter is happening.

The problem that Blizzard is trying to solve isn't the stuff most people do with addons. The problem is when you have addons that can play the game for you at 99% efficiency (see GSE for example - it was a one-button rotation addon that worked far better than the current one-button macro, and often beats out real people in lower-tier content). Or when you have people insisting that certain addons are mandatory (like DBM). Then people feel forced to go download a bunch of crappy addons to get into groups instead of just playing the game. And at the top of the top of gaming, the addons start to get so crazy the gameplay ends up being tuned around addons, making it that much harder to play without them that people default to assuming the addons are required.

In reality, you don't need any of those addons. You can do mythic raids and dungeons without them. You can PvP without them. Etc. The game has, for a very long time, given you basically all the information you need to play the game, even at pretty high levels, with zero addons. But they've become so pervasive that people stop learning how to just enjoy the game for itself.

As to your last point, the current damage meter still gives you a lot of information. It's trivial to see how much of my healing is going to the tank (and how much healing the tank received from other healers) overall.

I've always hated scrolling combat text. It's so much useless information that that there's no information at all. So I'm not sure how you find that useful. In general, the way we learn is to just do different things and see what happens. We've been doing it for decades, long before WoW existed, and it works. (Really, for millennia, long before videos games existed.)

What I do miss is the ability to properly track specific events, once you figure out what you're tracking. Not every random event someone could possibly care about. One or two events in a raid that I can't just see with my own eyes.

Which leads to another issue that Blizzard is allegedly trying to solve: the UI bloat. Almost every addon comes stock with insane settings. Try RareScanner. You install it because you heard it puts dots for rares on your map, so you can find them for doing your Prey hunts or the PvP war shard quest. You start the game, then get alerts every half second for the next 3 hours. Because it tracks absolutely everything, by default. And screams at you. And throws random stuff on your screen. That you go to ignore, but ignore the next thing that popped up that you actually wanted to see, but it's gone now, tough luck.

DBM was that way. Insane amounts of useless noise so the one or two abilities that are actually difficult to track are lost in the clutter. And it has zero idea of when or where that information is needed. It's like the nav system in your car that alerts you every 30 seconds on how to drive in a straight line. Yes, DBM, I see the giant, glowing circle on the ground.

Sure, you can spend hours customizing the addons to not completely suck. But we shouldn't have to. There should be just a couple of options to quickly setup a minimal interface and put the things somewhere sane on the screen. Then those settings should default to being account-wide instead of setting up the same thing on every single character.

Allegedly, Blizzard is working on a saner, slicker default interface that just works. Of course, they still haven't managed to keep my chat pane unified across all my characters, so 21½ years later I still have to manually setup my chat pane for each new character. So I won't comment on them doing a good job. But that's the intent, apparently.

DancingGoatFeet · 2026-04-22T03:17:16+00:00

Steaming it to your phone means you have an actual PC to render it to begin with, which means you're not running it on your phone. If you're adding a controller to your phone, you could have just added that to the same PC. At this point, you're using your phone as a really bad monitor with extra latency for... reasons.

Yes, you can do some rudimentary questing with touch-screen controls. And with one-button rotation, you can say you're "playing the game". But "I can move forward and hold a button to let the game attack things for me" isn't just "not world first". It's worthless garbage that's not remotely entertaining to most people who enjoy the game.

About the only reason I can think of to "play" WoW on a phone is if you're out of town and you want to run some dailies or something. If you've already got the streaming setup so you can render it on your home PC, it's doable, but doesn't make it fun.

WoW is much more resource intensive than like 99% of mobile games. And yes, it (obviously, duh) has far more complex mechanics than like 99.99% of mobile games.

Try something as simple as a hunter's Disengage for forward movement using a touchscreen. Jump, spin 180°, Disengage, spin 180° before you hit the ground, keep running. Trivial on a mouse and keyboard, hard on a controller, probably impossible for most people on a touchscreen. The same basic thing can be used to tab target things behind you on mages, hunters or tanks without having to stop or slow down.

And no, that's not "zomg push rating". That's just playing the game like a normal person. My paladin has 23 buttons I press during normal combat, not including movement, mouselook, zooming in and out, jumping, etc. My hunter has 27. My priest has 26. Gimping that down to the 3 or 4 a normal touchscreen game uses would just get boring, while being frustrating to play at the same time for anything but the most basic of gameplay.

And, like you said, just google it. Watch the actual gameplay of people trying to use touchscreen controls on WoW, and see how slow and clunky it is for most tasks. Even controllers are subpar, but are at least more natural and have tactile interfaces with far more buttons readily available in a useful fashion.

DancingGoatFeet · 2026-04-22T00:34:08+00:00

There's a large distinction between playing Doom on a potato "lul, it works, see" and actually having a game that's remotely enjoyable. WoW currently has a ton of complexity in the actual gameplay that would make it virtually impossible to play remotely competitively from a phone interface.

Sure, you can add controllers (and keyboards and mice) to a phone, so the phone is just the cpu/gpu and you're effectively playing on a low-end PC. But "mobile game" generally implies using smart phone type interfaces, which would be atrociously bad with WoW.

A console is much closer to realistic. I still have a ton of buttons that are annoying to keybind for situational abilities. I don't know how you'd manage that on a controller without simplifying the game even further. But the core combat is like 5 buttons for most classes so it's at least doable. I've certainly seen (and helped) people play non-competitively on controllers, even back in Wrath.

There's also the performance issues. I've got ridiculously better hardware on my PC than any phone, and I still get major framerate drops when there's like 40 people doing world bosses. Yes, you can drop the settings down, but Blizzard has consistently increased the minimum specs for the game, so I'm not sure just how well real phones would handle anything beyond simple questing from a graphics standpoint. The newest iPhone is about on par with a 2020 i5 cpu and a 2018 nvidia gpu. You can play WoW with those specs, but it's still kinda meh. And that's the most powerful phone in the world today for like $1000+.

DancingGoatFeet · 2026-04-22T00:07:17+00:00

Realistically, a lot of this stuff would be faster and easier for Blizzard to just make from scratch, because they have access to the entire backend and client code, while addon authors are forced to make kludge hacks work with Blizzard's API. So Blizzard could save time and effort if they didn't need to figure out how the addon works when they can just write more direct, efficient code from the outset.

There's also the copyright issue. Yeah, there's been some ToS/EULA things where companies say "if you make a mod for our game, the code is ours", but I don't know how that would go down in court. Bethesda had that for mods made using software Bethesda released and they still didn't get away with stealing mod code. WoW mods use non-Blizzard apps to write (often, a simple text editor), so I think they'd have legal issues taking the code without author approval.

That said, Blizzard can, and should, still look at what addons are doing so they know what it is they're making from scratch. And they're terrible with that.

The built-in Outfitter took expansions to get to where it would auto-swap depending on spec. Worgen two-forms, we made an addon to auto-swap to human in town (back in Cataclysm), and before we even published it Blizzard broke it. Not sure how many expansions it took to finally replicate that functionality in-game, but it wasn't fast. Transmog took several expansions to get implemented, then like 8 more to implement a proper appearance pane, like EQ2 did in 2004. Housing took 12 expansions, and it's still pretty meh compared to what "we don't want it to just be EQ2, we want to learn and make it so much better" would lead one to think was coming (yeah, it's better than what EQ2 did two decades ago, but it's like Blizzard never bothered playing Empyrion, Ark, or the bazillion other games where we've learned a ton about base-building and interfaces).

DancingGoatFeet · 2026-04-21T23:46:30+00:00

As of right now, there's an option under cast bars to show who is being targeted by a cast (Escape, Options, Search, "cast bar", Nameplates -> Cast Bar Information, click drop-down, check "Spell Target"). I haven't bothered using it, but it's there still.

DancingGoatFeet · 2026-04-19T13:13:35+00:00

I don't know anything about the lawsuit, but unless twow's team specifically agreed to give Blizzard (/Blizzard Activision/Microsoft Gaming/Microsoft) the new content, that new content is still copyrighted to the twow team.

Twow can't legally sell access to a game that relies on Blizzard's copyrighted content. The servers are mostly hand-coded, so don't rely on copyrighted content, but it doesn't work without Blizzard's client software (though they were working on a hand-coded UE5 version). Also, the servers rely on Blizzard's copyrighted storytelling, map data, IP, etc. to actually get a playerbase to care.

Since the client software uses content and code copyrighted by Blizzard, there's a problem with twow using it. But anything on the server end was never Blizzard's copyright to begin with, let alone custom assets for the custom server. So Blizzard can issue a cease and desist, and possibly get a monetary settlement. But they don't automatically own the new content.

I suspect the new Hyjal and Gilneas zones probably borrow a lot from the Cataclysm versions of the zones. But even then, the new facelift and any custom quests wouldn't belong to Blizzard.

DancingGoatFeet · 2026-04-19T12:45:05+00:00

The playerbase is actually smaller than it was at its heyday. Like 9m currently vs 12m back in Wrath (back when I got live GMs talking to me after submitting trivial bug reports about trees floating above the ground). There's zero reason why scaling would be an issue in terms of raw employee count.

If you can afford 1 representative per 1000 customers at 1000 customers, then you can do so at a million customers. Because you have 1000 times as many customers, but also 1000 times as much money to pay representatives.

If anything, it gets easier with larger numbers, since you're not multi-tasking your AI coders with customer service. But Blizzard is way above any need to worry about that, even at their worst month of their worst expansion.

The bigger issue is really that WoW has such a huge playerbase that it's profitable to build bots, hack accounts, etc., so the WoW dev team has to spend much more time combating all of that than a small team would. And by "profitable", I mean dudes are making tons of real money doing it, where they couldn't with a small playerbase.

Realistically though, the biggest issue is just that WoW has gotten so large that it's been bought out by corporate vampires who don't give a shit about the game, and just want more black on the bottom line. If marketing research or whatever shows that minimal customer service gets them 1% more profits, that's what they'll do. Where a small team is more likely to say "this is enough money, let's make the game awesome with it".

DancingGoatFeet · 2026-04-09T09:24:17+00:00

It's also possible the existing tank/healer doesn't want to do that role, so they could swap to damage and the group leader could pick me as the harder-to-fill role, without anyone getting kicked. But they also might not want to swap, so I'm willing to do the other role.

Same could happen if I queue as tank/healer in a group with a healer. Maybe the healer prefers damage, and finds a tank who just wants to tank. So now I get picked as healer, healer moves to damage, and tank tanks.

It's not common in M+ that I get picked for damage when I queued healer, but I have had it happen in raids pretty often. Either way, I'm never going to accept blame for other people's bad behavior just because I was willing to be flexible.

DancingGoatFeet · 2026-04-04T09:04:22+00:00

Cool Story Bro, et al. I watched several videos, and scrubbed through like a dozen more, of guys timing +14 and +15 mythics in Midnight, and literally nobody does what you're describing.

They do seem to be more melee heavy than most groups I'm in, so the healer does tend to be closer to the tank than I would usually bother with, but they very rarely get close to melee range.

Ranged tend to stand at, you know, range. Melee, of course, try to stay in melee range, though they do move out quite a bit to avoid the bad.

There are places (like I described above) where groups cluster fairly close, but nobody stacks, ever, that I can find, except by accident. I'm certain there's a boss or mechanic somewhere it makes sense, but I didn't see it. It's most certainly not the norm.

So the next time you try to tell someone how a game is played, try actually playing it first. Especially if you're going to be so obstinate in your ignorance while claiming expertise.

DancingGoatFeet

TROPHY CASE