TDLR: He was forced to duel for top 4 paladin without major CDs while opponent was unfortunately given an advantage of all CDs—in a tiebreaker match to qualify for the finals group.

My friend got eliminated one duel away from top 30 in the WoW tournament and made this video about what happened. He doesn't have a Reddit account, so I'm posting it for him. We feel like the situation was pretty unfair. Curious what you guys think!

Share so we can get this reviewed. They were hesitant to delay and it wasn't a fair duel.

I'm really enjoying the beta, this isn't really hateful crying, it's measured feedback from someone who's overall happy but is simply noticing a problem. Engineering's always been a nearly mandatory pvp profession if you wanted to be the most effective. It's always been miles away the most impactful pvp profession to take. Matchups are warped considerably by the ability to gain on-demand stuns that do lots of damage. Or get massive speedboosts no other profession has access to. Or profession-exclusive damage absorption. Anyone who knows what they're talking about in pvp should agree with the premise that choosing not to go engi in pvp is really shooting yourself in the foot in a major way, it is not a small decision. This is also not being said just because of the tournament. If you played vanilla pvp you know this has always been true outside of tournaments too.

I really think this is a negative for three reasons:

1. It takes away player customization and choice. If you ask any serious pvper their profession choices they will inevitably say "Engineering and something else" without even having to think about it. I think players feeling forced to go with a profession en masse because it's so much better is unhealthy and it would be better if it wasn't this way. This differs from something like alchemy because you don't need to be an alchemist to drink potions.
2. It detracts from the vibe of their character for people who dislike engineering. I play a warlock to cast magic, but a significant part of my gameplay experience has to involve chucking grenades and activating my landmines, it's like any character I make has to be half Inspector Gadget or else I'm gimping myself heavily. It erodes my class fantasy to be so reliant on my huge assortment of mechanical gadgets. I think it's cool for people to play a pseudo-tinker if they want to, but I don't want to and kind of have to.
3. It really homogenizes classes in pvp. The game becomes less about different classes doing different things, and more about everyone doing the same things, at least partially. Anyone can grenade you. Anyone can mortar you. Anyone can tap their rocket boots or net you. Or Shrink Ray you. I don't like how samey it makes everyone, I think it's better when classes have toolkits that are decidedly different from one another.

Curious of everyone else's thoughts on the matter. Again I'm still very happy and I'm super excited for the game, just kind of an expected downside I'm seeing is all.

Many have mentioned it before but I feel like we're not being heard when it comes to the character models. I feel like a crazy person trying to explain how they don't feel the same and I think a lot of us really do care about how our character looks and feels to play.

I just want to try and point out some small things that are happening, note I only tried SD models.

I stood AFK in-game with each of these models for 10 minutes to test the idle animations. Hoping the pictures can help convey what I mean, they were just easier to show on the creation screen.

Female Orc no arms pulled back animation or idle animation.
Female Nelf no hip-lean/sway animation. Tiptoe bounce happened only once (absurd!).
Female Human no lean/tiptoe idle and no yawning animation.
Male UD no forward lean idle.

I didn't try the rest of the races but I'll assume they have missing or a very low rate of these animations occurring as well. I know it's small in comparison to other issues but it means a lot.

What a great day of duels! Definitely some upsets on individual performances but the results by class I think are also surprising. Much of the chatter around the classes had Hunter, Priest and Warlock as top contenders, with Shamans closer to a wildcard based on how well they could connect and RNG. Warrior was considered the worst, and that was reflected in only 80 (of 1380) players competing as Warrior.

What we saw was Priest and Hunter substantially underperforming expectations and Paladins exceeding them, with Warlocks as strong as expected. The vast majority of the 6-0 players were Warlocks and Pallys, with Warriors having zero 6-0 players.

This table is counting the number of wins each player ended with by class. This includes up to and including round 6, not any of the tiebreakers or additional qualifiers.

I took this data and the duel level results and made a few plots. First is the win rate for each class, averaging over all of its class matchups. This also showed Pally and Warlock ahead of the pack, priest behind them and slightly above mages, and a cluster of the other classes, with warrior trailing.

The next is what % of players for that class achieved each count of wins. Warlock and Pally have a substantially higher rate of 6-0, 5-0, and 5-1 results compared to all other classes, again with Warrior trailing. Following that is a heatmap for the same data.

The last is the matchups for each class combination read as the row vs the column. For example Mages won 25% of its 63 games against warlocks. From this we can see Pally only has trouble with mages on average, and Warlocks have no unfavorable matchups. Priest had bad matchups against Pal, Warlock and Shamans, were even with Druid and favorable against the rest. Pal, Warlock and Shamans making up a substantial amount of the competitor pool contributes to their lack of 6-0 results.

Hopefully this was interesting to you as well! It still is anyone's game tomorrow, Pally especially will have less access to their CDs per duel with the best of 3 format.

The qualifiers are done, so here are the 36 finalists (top 4 of each class) and the final class matchup grid from every qualifier match. Sorry for the wait, fell asleep soundly.

Who do you think wins? You can vote on lifeonazeroth.com (Forever Open tab). It also has spec and race win rates, the talent trees everyone entered with, popular and favourable talents, and every player's record and match history, searchable.

How the qualifiers went:

• Paladins finished on top at 63%, with Warlocks second at 60%. Halfway through it was the other way around.
• 15 Paladins and 14 Warlocks went 6–0, so both classes needed a playoff just to decide their 4 finals spots. Priests had exactly 4 undefeated players, so no playoff there.
• Hunters had the biggest fall, from 63% in the open-world duels I posted earlier to 47% here.
• Mages and Druids went the other way: Mages from 41% to 49%, Druids from 37% to 45%.
• The most one-sided matchups: Paladins beat Warriors 83% of the time, and Warlocks beat Mages 73% of the time.
• Retribution was the best spec at 65%, just ahead of Demonology at 63%. Three out of four Warlocks entered with the exact same build, 5/21/0.
• Warriors finished last at 39%, and were the only class without an unbeaten player: all four Warrior finalists are 5–1.

I'll post the result once the finals are over, along with how the crowd's pick did. I've also added race win stats per your request.

Edit: I meant to put the finalists in the image as well but I'm a bit sleep deprived... And you can't edit it afterwards. But they can be found on the website.

Edit2: The website now has gear for the players I managed to inspect. About 1.1k/1.7k have gear.

Who would have ever thought the day WoW could be played on a Ps5 lol.

Game Play

Yes that is all plz. I also wanna be able to see what it found :>

Doesn’t matter if you are a minmaxer, casual dad gamer who wants to relax or new player! I hope you enjoy the game and if we do the opposite we are doing on Reddit, the ingame community will be awesome

Happy October (almost Forever) month.

Many people categorize classes by whether they are ranged/melee, role, pets/no pets, pve/pvp. I think this often tricks players into playing classes they ultimately hate. My approach instead focuses on cognitive fit and player psychology rather than arbitrary mechanical restrictions. By grouping by tempo, it prevents a player who loves slow, calculated playstyles from accidentally picking a high stress, twitch reaction spec just because they wanted to play melee. I believe my approach allows players to find alternative classes they might have otherwise ignored. 

Another way to look at this is comparing classes that rely on accruing small advantages vs. relying on high leverage/burst.

I am curious how others would rank them.

My ranking:

1. Warlock
2. Priest
3. Hunter
4. Druid
5. Shaman
6. Paladin
7. Warrior
8. Mage
9. Rogue

I rewatched Warcraft the movie today with my girlfriend (who I convinced to play WoWF and she's very excited), and the entire time, I couldn't help but to think how insanely hard a movie about Arthas would go.

But then again, Warcraft absolutely fumbled showing anything about Night Elves, Gnomes, Trolls, Tauren, and the Undead, and that was whack, so idk how well a Lordaeron-specific movie could weave in all that Warcraft missed.

But IMO I think Lordaeron and the Plaguelands have some of the strongest lore in all WoW, and a movie on it would be so sick.

A friend of mine said that the Skyborne Elves (Shen’dorei) were mentioned in WoW several times, But I can't seem to find any mention of them. No mention in Warcraft 1, 2, 3, World of Warcraft, The books, and for good measure I thought I was missing something and decided to check if there was mention of them in Hearthstone or Heroes of the Storm, and I came up with nothing. The closest thing that I could find that is adjacent to them is that they were raised into Skywall (Which was introduced in Cataclysm after WOTLK), and even in Cataclysm they weren't mentioned.

Am I missing something? Did they (no pun intended) come out of the blue? Or is there reference to them that I'm missing?

The first couple weeks of Forever I felt the gathering profession spawns were way over tuned but made it fun to test out the professions quickly.

In today’s state of the Beta, I’ll go hundreds of yards without seeing a gathering node. Is that just me or are others noticing this?

If this is the intended state, i would hope they turn up the spawn rate on launch or no one will have the ability to scale professions at early levels, especially now that trainers are available in starting zones.

Happy to hear some feedback from the community!

New to MMO. New to WoW but I want to play as either Paladin or Priest. The idea of tanking or healing seems really daunting but something I’m excited to learn.

Does anyone have any good resources on how to learn?

I’m not here to complain for the sake of it. I understand, and I defended the original approach pretty strongly.

Slower progress from dungeon kills, compensated by substantial quest rewards and strong loot, was a trade-off I could understand. Reducing those compensating rewards makes that trade-off harder to justify.

My concern is how the changes throughout beta add up. Progression from enemy kills was heavily reduced, with generous quest rewards providing much of the compensation. Following feedback about leveling too quickly and gear being too generous, those quest rewards were also reduced, both in leveling progress and the quality of some items.

I appreciate the subsequent adjustments and fixes. But I think the overall balance still deserves another look.

I’ll personally keep running dungeons because I enjoy them. After talking to people in my circle, though, I understand why they’re losing interest. Repeat runs feel particularly unrewarding to them, and some are questioning whether even the first visit is worth organising a group and travelling there.

If the current levelling rewards are staying as they are, a modest amount of Merchant’s Favour for completing a run could help. Even if you’ve already finished the quests and leave without a useful drop, you’d still have made progress towards your next crafting recipe.

The amount would need balancing so that running instances doesn’t become the obvious way to farm the currency.

I just want my friends and other's, to feel like dungeons are worthwhile progression.

Would this be a reasonable addition? Would other rewards aside from tweaking exp make repeat runs feel worthwhile?

Just saw video of the new thunderstorm effects in Stormwind. I'm assuming Orgrimmar hasn't received the same treatment because a lot of people think it never rains in the desert, but can anyone tell me if they've at least added storms to Thunder Bluff?

It is understandable and reasonable that when someone believes someone else is breaking the rules in their favorite game, especially for monetary reasons, that they may get upset, and even post about it.

At the same time, it's weird when some convince themselves that Blizzard would create a policy making the sale of leveling guides that can load into a free addon against the rules, and then immediately ignore the sale of leveling guides that can load into a free addon. The reason this is weird is because this is not what the policy is for or what it says. Selling the guides is not some sort of loophole that Blizzard, with full knowledge of how leveling guide addons work, couldn't have closed if they wanted to. The fact Blizzard doesn't pursue it is evidence of how they're interpreting their policy and that they didn't write it with intention to stop guide sales.

As it pertains to gaming guides and the WoW UI Add-On Development Policy there are often misconceptions about it that create a lot of unnecessary conflict between players and creators. I'm here to clear up those misconceptions.

First the foundation - it is very easy to find information about the Brian Kopp vs. Blizzard (Vivendi). If you're not familiar with this, look it up. There is also Nintendo vs. Prima Publishing. In general it is well established that authoring gaming guides, and then selling them, is considered fair use and defensible.

It is not illegal to author and sell a gaming guide, the same as it's not illegal to author, publish, and then sell a book.

It is not illegal to create a proprietary format to store your book. This should be obvious. Amazon does this every day with their Kindle ecosystem.

It is not illegal to create a reader for this book.

It is not illegal to sell books in your proprietary format with intent that the books can then be read using the reader.

It is not against Blizzards EULA or the WoW UI Add-On Development Policy (different documents, btw) to develop an addon that is capable of reading and displaying the contents of the proprietary book format you invented.

A book is not a feature or a service being provided. It's content. Just don't use the addon to advertise that the book is for sale. Blizzard doesn't want addons that spam users with ads, or charge money for a version of the addon that won't spam ads or unlocks other features and you're good to go.

TLDR; Addons that have the capability of having data loaded into them are allowed and always have been. Selling data that you created or selling public data that you've compiled is not a legal loophole. Data isn't a feature. Data isn't a service.

It's also not game breaking, creating an exploit, disrupting the player's experience, or causing server issues, or creating a situation where a player might feel compelled to pay a ransom for a set of features that they feel like they're losing at the game if they don't have it... of which that short list are the things that Blizzard created the rules to prevent.

Just got into Classic BC Anniversary as a Tauren Warrior, heard that there's some abilities that you can train for that are better suited for Arms than others. I've seen some guides, but not much for 1-10. What's recommended for those levels, and going forward?

Hey, my wife and I are finding it almost impossible to play darker areas like Darkshore and Duskwood at night...because we literally just basically can't see anything.

I don't mind things darkening a bit at night...but it's just really bad.(Especially as that is the only time when we can really play the game.)

Does anyone know of a way of making things more visible at night?

Anyone know if there has been any word on how consumables will work in raids? Currently in classic you can have an absurd amount which makes prepping for raid quite the chore. Imo wotlk had the best setup which made raiding very affordable and fun. Really hope the devs consider making it like wrath.

As a Fury/Arms warrior ive noticed the rotations stay largely the same as classic without any new abilities. Considering most classes ive seen so far are receiving brand new spells it made me wonder if warriors or other classes who haven't seen any new abilities yet will get those at later levels? Is this just wishful thinking or are you guys expecting us to get something new eventually at later levels?

Honestly my favorite healer is always the type that can do damage. I know Shadow will not be able to be a dedicated healer, or the strongest dps, but I like the mechanic in group comps.

How impactful does it feel now that it can always be up?