Cataclysm

[Numtini]

I was kind of surprised at how easy the dungeon I ran was as well.

[K9]

Dungeon difficulty seems to correlate with group skill based on my RDF experiences. I have enjoyed Throne of the Tides more than Blackrock Caverns I have to say. I can see how some of these fights are going to be brutal on heroic in the early stages.

[Hutch]

I ran out of quests in Hyjal; I did the one to kill the Dragon lady and then flew back to the camp in the middle then.... nothing.

So I did some instances instead.

I ran out at the exact same place, I think. I actually went back up to Nordrassil (the first place you land in the zone) and then flew along near the footpath to see if there were any ! on my minimap, and I found one at the Grove of Aessina, and that led to a fun little quest, and from there it was serious business again at the Sanctuary of Malorne. I haven't finished the zone yet, but I also haven't run out of quests again.

And whoever said the Joust quests were going to be hated, yeah count me in. That sucked. The only redeeming factor was that you get rewarded with a mini-pet.

[kildorn]

Dungeon difficulty seems to correlate with group skill based on my RDF experiences. I have enjoyed Throne of the Tides more than Blackrock Caverns I have to say. I can see how some of these fights are going to be brutal on heroic in the early stages.

Heroic on a few of these will be hilarious. But the main complaint I've seen is that we're still overpowered, and the scaling changes maul healers at 82/83ish. The base mana pools skyrocket, and take the base mana costs with them. And suddenly you outscale all your +int gear and wind up with crazy casting costs.

At 80/81, I thought underwaterland was harder than caverns due to a few what the shit healing fights (I think my tank/dps was doing something WRONG, because it took chain spamming flash heal/penance/shield on the tank to keep him from dying on a few trash packs), caverns was a joke to heal at 80/81.

But if my spells all triple in cost at 82, things will go differently.

[Morfiend]

I played my DK up to almost 81 in the underwater zone. I found some stuff frustrating, but in general the zone is pretty damn cool. I then skipped over to play Alliance and my new Worgen for a bit. Got the Worgen to level 10 with a friend. I really like the look and feel of Gilneas. Its very Gothic like the Empire in Warhammer Fantasy. The quests are pretty cool, and playing on a super low population server, there was only a few other people leveling Worgen as the same time, so no problem with quest mobs and stuff. Also, a really cool cutscreen at around level 6 I think. Well done starting area.

[K9]

I ran out of quests in Hyjal; I did the one to kill the Dragon lady and then flew back to the camp in the middle then.... nothing.

So I did some instances instead.

I ran out at the exact same place, I think. I actually went back up to Nordrassil (the first place you land in the zone) and then flew along near the footpath to see if there were any ! on my minimap, and I found one at the Grove of Aessina, and that led to a fun little quest, and from there it was serious business again at the Sanctuary of Malorne. I haven't finished the zone yet, but I also haven't run out of quests again.

And whoever said the Joust quests were going to be hated, yeah count me in. That sucked. The only redeeming factor was that you get rewarded with a mini-pet.

Ok, thanks. I'll go back and check that out.

Dungeon difficulty seems to correlate with group skill based on my RDF experiences. I have enjoyed Throne of the Tides more than Blackrock Caverns I have to say. I can see how some of these fights are going to be brutal on heroic in the early stages.

Heroic on a few of these will be hilarious. But the main complaint I've seen is that we're still overpowered, and the scaling changes maul healers at 82/83ish. The base mana pools skyrocket, and take the base mana costs with them. And suddenly you outscale all your +int gear and wind up with crazy casting costs.

At 80/81, I thought underwaterland was harder than caverns due to a few what the shit healing fights (I think my tank/dps was doing something WRONG, because it took chain spamming flash heal/penance/shield on the tank to keep him from dying on a few trash packs), caverns was a joke to heal at 80/81.

The giblin packs before the mind control squid boss have some sort of stacking debuff+poison combo that ramps up damage fast, and the mobs which toss you in the air do a LOT of damage with their quake if people don't run out of range quickly. The rest seemed pretty straightforward; bar ranged DPS nuking the squid during absorb magic (which heals him I think).

For BRC I got a couple of duff groups where the DPS were terrible at minimising their damage. For an entry level dungeon there seem to be a lot more PBAoE and cleave type effects which hits the melee quite hard. That said, people are still playing with the zerg mentality of WoTLK heroics, so maybe with CC things will go better.

[kildorn]

I did BRC as a melee dps, my problems with incoming damage were either unavoidable (those two elementals), or idiots not using interrupts (the trash packs drop fields that throw tons of random AE around, but it's a slow fucking cast and interruptible), or my bear tank not being able to hold threat from a naxx10 geared unholy DK putting out 3.5k dps :P

[Rasix]

I think last night is the first time I've sat down and played for like 4+ hours in a single stretch.  Helps that the wife and kid are out of town.

I decided to play a goblin, since I figured the 80+ leveling content might be a bit cramped, and while the same might be true for the new race, it wouldn't be as bad.  At first, I thought Kezan was too noisey and the goblins were too Jersey.  But the variety of the quests, and the overall experience won me over.  It really starts to shine once you get off Kezan.  The Lost Isles stuff is really varied, and as mentioned, pretty silly and funny.

Starting off as a hunter with a pet that actually taunts was a great improvement over starting one back in the TBC time period.  Although with an heirloom gun, the pet didn't get a lot of action until around lvl 10-12.  Chose BM to start, since that's been the traditional leveling spec.  Not sure I like it, but it's still early.  I'm probably going to take off my exp heirlooms and just enjoy the ride to 60.  Need to prolong the good stuff until I get thrown into the complete crap that will be my 6th time doing Outlands.

[Simond]

Woo, Blizzard fucked up guild xp and are taking a chainsaw to in in response: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/1088190414?page=1

We have decided to remove the added bonus of gaining Guild Experience from Guild Achievements earned. This change will realign Guild Achievements with our philosophy held for normal Achievements, which are intended to be predominantly their own reward (barring the rare exception of special achievements that grant an additional reward.) Previously, the experience reward had been seen as an additional side bonus and not something that should have been significantly skewing the advancement of guilds. During the beta, we greatly increased leveling speed across the board and since most characters were copied from templates, guild experience from Achievements didn’t seem imbalanced. It has become clear that an imbalance does exist and should be addressed to ensure that guilds progress at the rates expected within the daily Guild Experience limits.



For guilds that are currently above the normally possible experience limit, we will be readjusting it back to the expected limit once more. This will not affect Guild Reputation gains at this point in time.

Translation: Every non-bank-alt guild will now basically level at exactly the same rate no matter what. Also, the Realm First L25 guild achievement will now boil down to "Who can get the most poopsockers online at 3am, April 11th next year".

[kildorn]

I'm fine with the guild xp changes, a few of those achievements are blatantly biased towards huge guilds (the kill X number, DE x number of items type things)

[Lakov_Sanite]

Currently the daily exp cap for levels 1,2 guilds seems easy to hit. However if that daily exp cap increases as the levels and total exp increase then it will take a bit more participation.

I'm not against smaller guilds getting to max level in time but should have to work on it.

[Rasix]

My guild got 22% or so toward our daily cap... with 2 people playing. 

[Ingmar]

The daily (?) guild rep cap is what irritates me. I should get a founder's bonus.

[Ingmar]

I am a little disappointed in the change myself, mostly because I'm not sure what the point of a leveling system for the guild is when you can't really do anything to influence it anymore.

[K9]

The daily (?) guild rep cap is what irritates me. I should get a founder's bonus.

This puzzled me too, although looking at how slow guild xp will come I'll be exalted long before most of the rewards for that come along.

[caladein]

The problems I have with Cataclysm cutscenes are purely interface-based.  There are plenty of times the game makes you sit through some NPCs talking and you have no control of your character.  Dangling the ogre over the airship propellers in Deepholm is a good example, as are the various "Fly around and get introduced to the zone." quests they've had since BC.  These are all mandatory cutscenes that a) tell you they're mandatory and b) leave your interface on.

Unlike those cases, Cata cutscenes go into letterbox and if you press escape it asks if you want to cancel it.  (Like the Deathwing one two (?) weeks ago.)  Sometimes when you cancel it, it skips it, canceling the cutscene and dumping you to the next area (I remember the Uldum intro working this way).  There are a lot of others that let you cancel but not skip them, leaving you at the trigger NPC to start it all over again.  If the game told me "You cannot skip watching this cinematic, you can cancel it and watch it again later." in those cases, I'd dislike them only for their content and not for their very existence.  For example, I dislike the Harrison Jones ones both because some are skippable and some aren't and because the joke got old.

As for the guild achievements change, guild leveling is now just kinship age with a daily activity requirement.  That's a much less interesting and engaging system than what it used to be .

[Threash]

It is no longer possible for an ill-mannered person of the opposing faction to one-shot a flight trainer in Stormwind or Orgrimmar, which in turn made the 500 players standing on top of the flight trainer with their mammoths really sad.

Hah.

[ezrast]

re: dungeon ease - as a healer the Stonecore is a LOT more challenging than either of the two introductory dungeons. The first time I went through it I was drinking after every other pull. I think they may have been overzealous in trying to provide a hps-hpm spectrum - my efficient heal is useless and my fast heal makes me go oom spectacularly quickly, so now I just cast my big heal all the time. I do use the fast heal in clutch situations but I always have to drink after. I actually find myself (this will only make sense to resto shamans) throwing CH on people with full health just to get Tidal Waves, so that if I happen to need quick healing in the next 15 seconds I can do it with GHW instead of HS. Healing Surge is that bad.

Vortex Pinnacle is harder too, but it's more about dealing with "gimmicks" (purge buff X, cc mob Y) whereas Stonecore is all about raw damage/healing/survivability.

edit to add: what's with healer queues being 10-15 minutes now? Is nobody maining a tank? How long does DPS have to wait?

[Lakov_Sanite]

edit to add: what's with healer queues being 10-15 minutes now? Is nobody maining a tank? How long does DPS have to wait?

Bout an hour

[K9]

I figured the long queues were partly due to:

 - People not discovering the instance
 - People not meeting the ilvl requirements for instances they have discovered
 - People choosing to quest rather than dungeon grind
 - Tanks speccing to DPS to quest

It will probably even out in a week or so when we're all back to floating around at the cap and dungeons are what people are primarily looking to do.

[kildorn]

re: dungeon ease - as a healer the Stonecore is a LOT more challenging than either of the two introductory dungeons. The first time I went through it I was drinking after every other pull. I think they may have been overzealous in trying to provide a hps-hpm spectrum - my efficient heal is useless and my fast heal makes me go oom spectacularly quickly, so now I just cast my big heal all the time. I do use the fast heal in clutch situations but I always have to drink after. I actually find myself (this will only make sense to resto shamans) throwing CH on people with full health just to get Tidal Waves, so that if I happen to need quick healing in the next 15 seconds I can do it with GHW instead of HS. Healing Surge is that bad.

Vortex Pinnacle is harder too, but it's more about dealing with "gimmicks" (purge buff X, cc mob Y) whereas Stonecore is all about raw damage/healing/survivability.

edit to add: what's with healer queues being 10-15 minutes now? Is nobody maining a tank? How long does DPS have to wait?

for queues, it's 25-35 for dps. There are not many tanks, which is why I brought my dk out of retirement. It's also a case of a lot of the resource pool not having discovered the instance entrances yet, and the ilvl requirements barring a lot of the Wrath era "how did I wind up with a brand new just hit 80 tank in this heroic?" thing.

[Polysorbate80]

I'm still waiting for gear upgrades before I try tanking anything.  I'm only not-quite-82 and still only maybe midway through the underwater area but I haven't seen much in the way of tank plate.  It's been heavily on the healer/DPS side.  Does it come later, or are they hiding it somewhere else?

The 6k-ish health increase for leveling from 80->81 was nice, though.

[Ratman_tf]

Yeah, I've seen a lot of hate for cutscenes in general chat and I don't get it.   They're a nice addition and you'll only ever have to watch them once, take some time and enjoy 'em.

[Sjofn]

goblin

I started this up again to have something to do this winter. I have to hand it to Blizzard, they made Goblins awesome. Last night I was strapping fireworks to jungle chickens and disabling bomb-throwing Monkeys. I can't remember the last time I had this much silly fun in an MMO.

I really, really, really enjoy that no matter the problem, a bomb will get involved somehow.

[kildorn]

I'm still waiting for gear upgrades before I try tanking anything.  I'm only not-quite-82 and still only maybe midway through the underwater area but I haven't seen much in the way of tank plate.  It's been heavily on the healer/DPS side.  Does it come later, or are they hiding it somewhere else?

The 6k-ish health increase for leveling from 80->81 was nice, though.

Hyjal is full of tank plate, from my experience there. I also ran BRC as DPS, and picked up a ton of it since a druid was tanking <3

[Sjofn]

As for the guild achievements change, guild leveling is now just kinship age with a daily activity requirement.  That's a much less interesting and engaging system than what it used to be .

That was basically my thought too. It doesn't super bother me, really, but I have to wonder why they didn't just severely cut back the XP for achievements instead of nuking it all. Ah well!

[Ironwood]

81 tank here (warrior) and I've replaced almost all my shit, which was all at least 232.

I have no idea why you ain't found more.  The stuff is just better by miles.  The stats are tricky though - took me ages to find stuff with dodge on it.  They really put dodge down a lot.

[kildorn]

81 tank here (warrior) and I've replaced almost all my shit, which was all at least 232.

I have no idea why you ain't found more.  The stuff is just better by miles.  The stats are tricky though - took me ages to find stuff with dodge on it.  They really put dodge down a lot.

Avoidance stats seem to have been heavily shifted into mastery on tank plate, from what I've seen. Which just makes me question my DK's tank readiness, since I've never tanked with the whole blood shield thing.

[K9]

I have to say, I'm not sure how well I would trust a DPS specced tank to handle these dungeons even with proper tank gear. Wasn't that a design intent?

[kildorn]

I have to say, I'm not sure how well I would trust a DPS specced tank to handle these dungeons even with proper tank gear. Wasn't that a design intent?

Well, that and making dual spec dirt cheap. Right now, it's tank spec or GTFO, due to crit avoidance being tied up in the tank tree talents, and most of your survival talents being deep in there as well.

[Polysorbate80]

81 tank here (warrior) and I've replaced almost all my shit, which was all at least 232.

I have no idea why you ain't found more.  The stuff is just better by miles.  The stats are tricky though - took me ages to find stuff with dodge on it.  They really put dodge down a lot.

I've found a couple greens, but overall the stats compared to a gemmed/enchanted Wrath purple have been pretty much a wash.  I did swap one ring for a blue, and I'm finally getting a non-PVP DPS set put together at least.

[Ironwood]

You misunderstand.  I have about 5 blues and the rest greens.  I'd be intersted in what's a wash with this expansion - The stuff I'm finding is in another time zone in comparison.  Hell, on Stamina alone, you need to DO IT.

[Reg]

The new stuff is just ridiculous. I found myself upgrading with mage cloth quest rewards and throwing away my old leather caster gear.  Once I find the leather equivalents I'll be even better off.

[Polysorbate80]

The green stuff has more raw str/stam, but once I figure in the loss of 2-3 gems and enchantment bonuses, they come in about dead even on most stats, and I lose a little armor.   They do shift stats around a little, I swapped out one piece for a green because it had expertise on it (which I'm lacking)

Now, I haven't found shit in the way of blue tank plate; I'm sure I'll toss out the old purples once I find some.

[SurfD]

I did BRC as a melee dps, my problems with incoming damage were either unavoidable (those two elementals), or idiots not using interrupts (the trash packs drop fields that throw tons of random AE around, but it's a slow fucking cast and interruptible), or my bear tank not being able to hold threat from a naxx10 geared unholy DK putting out 3.5k dps :P

Dpsing in Bloodpresence?