f13.net

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/

The site's getting a little hammered right now. You may have already seen the patch notes though, I don't think they've changed much since the PTR.

I downloaded and installed over lunch with no issues.  I read through the notes and didn't notice anything that was surprising.

So do the badge vendors go live w/ 2.4, or do they require 'unlocking' crap from the new dailies? I never read for certain.

I'm still about 22 badges short on my nifty new x-bow. Rawr.

I have a bad memory, where is the sunwell?

North of Quel'Thalas, I think.

Not sure how Alliance is supposed to get there; I assume there's got to be a teleporter somewhere.

Edit: Ah, Wiki sez a flight path from Ironforge, Horde have one from Silvermoon that's automatically active.

Unlocked from the dailies for the most part.

www.mmo-champion.com had a really good writeup about pretty much everything related to the new patch, including gear lists and whatnot.

The badge vendor either spawns when the town is rebuilt through dailies, or when the gates are magically opened to the final 3 bosses in the Plateau. Blizzard never made it really clear as to which it is, since originally the quests to open the internal gates were sort of a sideline to the whole mess of rep farming dailies stuff, but the gate quests were removed due to "tahts no fairz to our less progressed servur" whining.

The Vortexes and gems will be available from G'eras in Shatt though, if that was something you were looking for.

Nope, just the bow for now.  That's the biggest upgrade I'm going to get, the others are upgrades but nowhere near as big as going from an 83dps bow to 93dps one.  Yarr.  Good to know, though, thanks.

Shit...that xbow is better for BM than the 95 DPS bows off of Illidan and Archimonde. And probably better than the legendary (if the leaked stats are in fact the true ones).

Looks like goofy junk though.

I'm an elf.  Goofy junk is perfect for me.

And lordy yes it's fucking uber (been beast since it was 'proven' to be awesome dps for much less work).  I was already kicking ass on raids.. now I'm going to be untouchable. buahahaha.  :grin:

Well...depending on the speed of your server, it could be yours as soon as tomorrow night.

The server I play on was at 15% of the town being completed by 7 o'clock this evening (when I logged on), and the instance server that all of the BC content (Outland, Exodar, Quel'Danis) is on was down for the 2 hours before that.

Are you sure it was 15% of the TOWN, or 15 % of the first PHASE.

From what i understand, you are liberating the town in stages. First stage is your current staging area.  Second stage is something else.  Third stage is the armory. Conservative estimates from what i was reading suggested that you wont see the Gear Badge Vendor for at least a week (possibly as long as 2 or 3 depending on your server pop), since it took the combined might of the test server two+ days ish to complete Phase 1 liberation.

(http://img.skitch.com/20080326-p5qq48ua5ppnyu6y63a8xrufh1.png)

Some patch issues, obviously.

Damn...I wasn't expecting it this week. 

I'm totally looking forward to New Fishing Daily Quests!

Although, I still need to slog my way through to power level 9000+, past the vicious human paladins and nelf druids....

If only I had an awesome guild to hook me up!  :awesome_for_real:

EDIT:  OH, SHIT I JUST SAW THIS!  "Interacting with objects (chests, mining nodes, herbs) should no longer aggro neutral creatures."  This means that when I check out the mithril nodes in that damn bug tunnel in Shimmering Flats, those stupid drones won't swarm me any more!!!  Hallelujah!

I don't care much for the new content.  Maybe it's just been a crappy night, but all I've enjoyed is having more dailies and specifically a fishing one.

So, spill already, since I'm trapped at work....what's the new fishing daily like?

WORLD SERVER IS DOWN!!!!! :awesome_for_real:

I've done two now.

Yesterday was to go fishing in Orgrimmar (Stormwind for alli, I'd guess) and catch a baby crocodile. Seems they've gotten into the water supply.

Today was go to Nagrand and catch a humdinger of a mudfish.

Your reward is a bag of fishing treasures. So far this has included cash, some lucrative vendor trash, and a couple handfuls of fishhooks that grant +100 to your fishing skill for 10 min.

Here (http://www.elsanglin.com/2_4_changes.html) is a WoW angling site, containing a more complete list of 2.4 changes.

Sweet!  And thanks for the linkage.

Tauren weapons are now tiny when sheathed but return to normal size when unsheathed.  Human females' are freakin' huge when sheathed but shrink to normal when in hand.  And according to a blue name on the WoW boards, this was intentional. :ye_gods:     

Oh, is that it... thought I was going crazy there for a minute.  Though I must say that the Oathkeeper now looks like a toy when my Tauren's got it on his back.

I'm also getting some infrequent bug where I'll cast something, but then the casting bar will disappear, and my character drops out of the casting animation, but a second (or whatever) later the spell effect goes off anyway.

Overall, though, I'm really liking the patch.  Partly for easy money, repeatable quests.  Mostly, though, I like that they added in a crappy blue armor set that my casual ass can actually work towards.  And by "work towards" I mean get in, say, a few weeks, not "Congratulations for finishing this incredibly difficult dungeon, here's your badge!  Now you only have a hundred-and-twenty-four more to go!"

Tiny like 3 pixels across? Huge as in Onyxia huge? Got screenies?

(http://www.kerao.net/external/sheathed.jpg)(http://www.kerao.net/external/Unsheathed.jpg)

Bigger weapons, like two handers, are worse (because they're supposed to be big), but it's hard to get them at a good angle.  Seems like a bit of a lame change (was there some kind of reason for it, anyone know?), but meh.

No reason was given, but the blue name "highly" suggested placing requests for a revert in the general forum rather than the bug one.  It's weird, but I don't really care about the nerf my warlock main got through reduction in Demonic Knowledge yield; yet, I care about her staff being too big.  Hell, I spent the last week catassing in BGs (as an alliance PVP n00b too!  Sweet Jesus, my side sucks!) to get the gladiator robes, gloves, and shoulders to have something that fairly matches the voidheart crown I won on a roll in Kara, since I probably will never be on 25-man raids to get the rest of the tokens.  It's better to look good than to feel good, yo.

Actually that 5 piece blue PVP set is pretty good. It's not mad-dps for sure but all 5 pieces socketed and equipped you get 140ish resilience alone, which while not amazing will give you a surprising amount of survivability. I bought the whole set for my mage, and tried AV/AB a handful of times with my PvE set (which sported roughly 120-150 more spell damage and more crit/hit) and the blue PVP set. In my PvE set arms warriors and rogues could goddamn near instantly kill me (warlocks could melt me pretty easily too), where in the PVP set I actually lasted a good 5-15 seconds longer when I attracted the ire of people rocking S1+. Doesn't sound like much but it saved my ass a LOT since I could live to blink/ice-block off debuffs/nova/catch a heal.

I may actually PVP with my mage and sock away honor for season 4.

Huh. I've mostly played my Belf, so I didn't notice any change in weapon sizes.

Strange. Maybe it's asthetic for weapons clipping through capes and shit?

I haven't had much free time to truly play with this new content, but from the little PvP I've done in BG's, I have to say I'll be spending some time there.  I really like the gains they are giving now with the new system.  I have some large chunks of time available this weekend, so I'll be tallying up some nice honor points for all my alts. 

I really want to see if the arena queue times are better because that was a real drag before.  Our 3v3 team is tons of fun, but we end up spending 75% of the time sitting around waiting.  I also want to see if the new changes prevent us from running into a group of players that have 3x the gear we do too.  That will be very interesting.  Hopefully we can actually start gaining in scores so we get more points each week.

I'd like to try out that new World PvP stuff too.  I'm always up for that.

The PvE stuff looks interesting, but I'll gnaw on that later when there aren't so many people around.  I abhor racing around trying to get MOBs before others do.  The lag is not fun either.

I want to get into some of the dailies too.  Running alts on normal flyers is just painful, so the additional cash flow will be welcomed.

After wading through all the threads in which Tauren players are wailing and gnashing teeth, I found a blue name stating that it was done for clipping reasons.  However, clipping for one-handers is now worse on female humans.  I really hope this is a lame April Fools joke on the part of Blizzard, and on Tuesday (April 1st) they can have their little LOL and revert everything back.

well, we are now a few percent (10 or so i think) into phase 2 reclamation of the island on my server.  GG everyone having 2 or 3 level 70 alts to run the daily quests with :P

15% On mine  :-)


So how is the 25 man Kael Fight different from the 5 man version? Just more birds/orbs? More mobs to deal with? Do people's brains turn off when everyone starts floating in the 25 man fight too?

hmm, well, for one, picture 25 man kael as doing the 5 man Princess fight AND Kael at the same time.

In 25 man, kael has 4 adds.
2h warrior - hits like a nuclear weapon, moves slowly around randomly targeting and attempting to splatter someone
engineer - throws bombs and drops a random stun debuff on people
warlock - lots of fire damage, usually range tanked
shield warrior - aoe fear's.

Phase 1 - You fight each add individually (fairly easy).
Phase 2 - When they are all down, Kael animates their weapons and you have to fight them. When the weapon dies, you can loot a copy of it (sweet Legendary weapons) which have various usefull effects essential to beating kael.  (usually fairly easy)
Phase 3 - After a fixed amount of time, Kael then revives his adds, and you then have to fight all 4 at once, AND whichever weapons you havent managed to kill yet. (not very easy, especially if multiple weapons are still up)
Phase 4 - After a fixed amount of time, Kael himself joins the fight (you also prob still have adds up at this point also, though all weapons had better be down).  He casts fireballs, summons pheonixes (though i hear this no longer happens, might be a bug), drops flamestrikes, Mind controls random people, periodically does a raid wide aoe damage+stun, and periodically pops a special shield, which you need to burn through while he casts INSANELY nasty pyroblasts (which need to be absorbed by the special effect of the Shield Weapon Drop).
Gravity lapse is actually easier in 25 man mode, cause the room is MUCH bigger, he doesent hit everyone with a constant DoT, and there are no stupid energy globes to dodge. However, you cant mele him during gravity lapse.

My group was having TREMENDOUS difficulty with the 5 man gravity lapse phase.


Was our first time in the new dungeon, we went in cold Turkey, not having a clue as to what anything did. The first boss was laughably easy, we killed it despite managing to lock our healer outside of the room and have one of our DPS go rambo on us and dieing. The second boss, we weren't even sure what we were supposed to do exactly outside of "use mana fish buff to burn boss" which we did, 2 DPS died again but we won. The third boss and her little team of jackasses was far more difficult, but we managed to get her on the first try as well with only a mage death I think, tanking it seems fairly impossible, so we just went PvP on their asses.

Then we got to Kael, everyone was inside the room, I started to tank him, nothing spectacular is happening, I'm tanking the nukes just fine, the hunter is kiting the bird around, down goes the egg, oh here comes the floaty phase... why is everyone dead?  :ye_gods: So after a few comedy minutes of a lone prot paladin flying around the room trying to peck Kael to death between phases we try it again. Well people lived at least 5 seconds longer that time. Between the 2nd and 3rd attempts, running back to the room (fuck you invisible balcony wall), one of my group asks "wait, we can move during the floating phase?".  :uhrr:

Half a dozen attempts later and a couple of class swaps, Kael finally dies. We spent more time on Kael then we did the entire rest of the dungeon. Kael looks like its going to be one of those fights, where some people just can not manage. Like the end boss in Sekthic or Murmur, some people can't avoid the boom, and it looks like some people just can't avoid the orbs. Kael also seems to be a giant "Fuck You" to Paladin healers.

We started with:

Prot Paladin
Holy Paladin
Marks Hunter
Fire Mage
Moonkin Druid

We did everything in the dungeon up until Kael with only the normal "hey this is totally new" dungeon pains. By the time we got Kael down, our group was:

Prot Paladin
Marks Hunter
Marks Hunter
Fire Mage
Resto Druid

This was after a half dozen attempts and our Holy paladin basically going "fuck this place, I'm going to bed." To which I can't say I disagree. Kael definitely seems to prefer a Priest or Druid healer over a Shaman or Paladin. At least the shaman has healing stream  :oh_i_see:

Having DPS that can shoot and move at the same time seems to also help. Our Mage was a floaty gnome corpse like 80% of the time. I wasn't much better once the floaty stage started up. I tried to taunt/tank the bird if it was still up, but to little effect. Kael doesn't seem to require any kind of tanking once he starts floating people.


Now lets try the heroic tonight  :awesome_for_real:

MT is really really difficult to heal on a pally. We did it regular the other day before the raid with our guild leader healing (full t6, trinket and mace off Illidan) and we wiped a couple of times, even lost 3 people (healer included) on Kael when we killed him. Our DPS was all in t5 or better.

It is not that the fight is inherently difficult, it is just one of those where having a pally healer is definitely sub-optimal. Kinda like how Heroic Shattered Halls is retardedly easy with a good pally tank.

Yeah, but they probably need to tune the fight a bit better than it is. It's kind of stupid to give a big fuck you to all other healers besides priests and druids.

Why/how does the fight screw Pally healers, do you need instants or something?

You guys think a resto shaman could pull it off?

Resto Shamans would be a smidgen better at it then Paladins, but not by much.


Being able to Heal, Move and hit everyone is the key. Druids and Priests have all the instants and the most dramatic AE heals. (I imagine Prayer of Mending is especially useful in the Floating phase with the constant damage), Shamans would struggle to find the time/place to toss out a chain heal and keep the squishier people alive. Paladins are just Shit out of Luck for that fight.


In order for a paladin to heal everyone in the group, they would have to stop and spam cast their heals one at a time on each person in turn, except they can't stop because a giant floating orb of magical death is bearing down on them, but everyone is still taking incremental damage the entire phase. There may also be a bird made of pure fire nuking the shit out of someone the entire time for bonus fun.

So a entire fight where everyone in your group is taking constant damage and you can't actually stop to cast proper heals anywhere. It's pretty much the antithesis to Paladin healing.

When the grav phase starts, you all swim toward the entrance to his room right?  That buys you a lot of time as the orb ramble down towards all of you.   Then swim out and you only have to avoid them a little. 

Yea, that's our general plan, but we apparently have a lot of people in guild with only 1 eye or something. Total lack of depth perception and some less then lighting reflexes mean people eat way to much damage. :(

Our biggest problem seems to be the phoenix, if we can down it and the egg just before the floaty phase, we'll do fine. If we kill it too early or too late, it just kicks our ass during that phase.

Gravity lapse starts at a specific percent of kael's health (50% i believe).  So if you are in doubt, you can simply stop damage at 55%, wait for a pheonix to pop, deal with it, and then drop him the last few % to start gravity lapse. Also, he takes something like 50% more damage during the interval that he is stunned between casting rounds of Gravity lapse.

I will agree though, single target healers, with no HoTs and no AoE heals are sitting at a pretty hefty disadvantage on Kael.

I think it would do a major service to the place if they didn't make the orbs semi-transparent. Depending on your camera angle and level of panic you could lose sight of them. A more opaque orb might give them a bit more of the "OMG I SEE THE PURPLE DEATH!"

Magister's Terrace, as fun as it is (and it is fun) is a gigantic fuck you to pally healers and any group not sporting at least 3 forms of hard CC. The place REALLY screams for a shadow priest since only the golem and wyrm pulls don't have something that can be MC'd. After the sap (if you have a rogue), MC the most annoying mob in the pull, watch it get instagibbed, then pile right on with the traps/sheeps/banishes.

I started having successful pugs after I wrote a short guide to the Kael fight people can understand.

Phase One: 100%->50% - Kill Kael, Kill Bird, Kill Egg, Kill Kael
Phase Two: 50%->0% - AVOID ORBS, Kill Kael, AVOID THE FUCKING ORBS.

Well, priests that are specced for Circle of Healing are the best healers by far, instant cast mana efficient group heals.

Resto shaman will probably end up being fine once they have done it a few times and know when his AE's hit so they can pre-channel chain heals. Right now it is very much a reactive healing fight with a lot of AE dmg, which means HoTs, group heals, and instant casts make things a lot easier.

My biggest problem with the gravity lapse is the shape/size of the room. I got stuck on architectural protrusions when I did it because the low ceiling tunnel shape is contrary to what I instinctively do on gravity lapse. In TK his room is enormous so you have a lot of room to swim (and you need to spread out/get to the floor) and the distances to things in the 5 man version really make it weird for me.

It would definitely help some folks, but the people who die to the orbs are also the same people who can't manage "stay out of the fire" or "don't stand in the void zone"  :cry2:


There is just SOMETHING about these kind of mechanics that break peoples minds.

Since 2.4 whenever I hearth or portal the game freezes on me, it sucks.

Edit: Turns out it was Gatherer 3.1.

When I had cartographer data turned on anytime I exited the game it would lock up.

Must be something with those kind of mods writing their data to saved variables or something.

I'm liking the changes to PvP, so far.  No diminishing returns and instant honor calculation is a lot cooler than I thought it would be.  Plus, for some reason, now, in my Battlegroup, Horde just seems to stomp all over the Alliance in Alterac.  I've played games where we've ended the game with everything up; the Alliance wasn't even able to take Galvangar.  Before the patch, we generally won in Eye and Arathi, lost in Alterac, and Warsong was a crap shoot, but now we win everything (except maybe Warsong, which I haven't played, because the Queue times are up at like 15-20 minutes because everyone's out throwing sparklers at Brutalis).

Question:  I'm just getting in to tanking, so my gear (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Cenarion+Circle&n=Lender) is not great.  At what point would I concievably be able to tank normal MT without being pounded in to the floor, HP/Armor/Defense wise?

2-3k more unbuffed HP wouldn't hurt.  Spell damage/spell hit reduction talents wouldn't hurt either as most casters there do nothing but sit back and machine gun their favorite spell at you.

The badge vendor is taking forever to come through.   Only 58% through P3 on my server.  How's everyone else doing?

 http://maintankadin.failsafedesign.com/  This will be your best friend as a Paladin Tank.  Especially the Gear section and the Uncrushable before Kara guide.  I levelled as prot solely, so I pretty much had every item on their list when I started tanking heroics.  I haven't done MT yet, trying out the new Ret thing,  but I'd guess it would be as difficult as the other 70 instances, with the exception of a lot more CC required.  I'd make sure you're good in those first.

 

Halfway through 2 I think.  Podunk, backwater server.

PvP server?  I expect those to be behind with everyone crammed-in and PKing the shit outof each other for spawns.

Our portal is open on Eldre'Thalas, when I checked about an hour ago while picking up quests, we were at 69% on the armory. Then another phase after that to get the anvil and the badge vendor I guess, which is ok since I am still 10-15 badges short of getting everything I need.

You need to grab the two stamina increasing talents. Imp RetAura and Vindication aren't doing much for you, those points should go into Combat Expertise. You'll also want Sacred Duty. Most Paladins generally take Reckoning OR 1h Spec, don't really have the points for both.

You'll also want roughly 200 spell damage at a minimum for tanking. More the merrier, as long as it doesn't gimp your tanking stats.


The defense number tanks aim for is 490 to reach uncritable.

So we just got the armory NPCs to spawn.

3 new quests and pvp vendors are up, the new badge gear vendor taunts me with her daily quest and no wares.

My server's odd.  Seems like everyone's just doing the quests on "Mains" during the week, then picking-up alts etc on the weekend.  I've seen an average of 9-10% completion during the week, but the weekend jumps between 20 and 30% completion rates.  We were at 83% when I logged off last night and 86% this morning. Meh..

I want my x-bow dammit. ;P

My server, Proudmoore, seems to be in the lead atm according to the sites. We have a bunch of little grinder monkeys working overtime on this kind of shit. I think they were all pissed off about losing the AQ40 event when we had a close race, and then our server collapsed.

30% of the way to popping up Phase 4 NPCs, and 62% done with the badge vendor.

Thank the aussies I think, since that means we're getting turnins around the clock.

I had a hell of a good day today. Got in on a successful Heroic Magister's Terrace run (fuck Vexallus and alternatively the Priestess btw) and got my mage Kael's robes. My Kara run was killed by Hyjal signups and my guild's Kara run was short a tank so they grabbed me for Nightbane and Netherspite. Nightbane gave me my breastplate, and we one-shot Netherspite who my normal Kara runs never does since people hate him (don't know why, he was punk easy how we did it).

He's easy once you learn the fight, and staying the fuck out of everyone else's beams.  Lots of folks don't like learning that kind of coordination, so would rather skip it. My guild had the same problem until we finally sat down and had someone explain it fully to the folks who were the primary balkers.

Yeah.  Netherspite always takes a few minutes to explain because we need to work out beam assignments because we always have a slightly different group setup.  If we need to explain to someone how to dance the red beam, then we can guarantee ourselves at least one or two wipes right there.  Contrast him with the other 'hard' boss, Nightbane: Don't stand in the fire, let the tank get aggro, kill, kill, kill, don't use curse of doom goddamnit.

Also, if you aren't already doing so, try to run Kara with two healers.  It's SO nice to run 6 DPS.

Run it with a good pally tank, and a DPS warrior who has tanking gear with him (or a feral druid I guess) to tank Maiden.

Go go 7 dps and 22 badges in less than 2 hours.

A paladin can tank Maiden fine, just have to prioritize Holy shield over every other cooldown.


Netherspite can best be described as easier done then said. The explanation for the fight tends to break people's minds, but once they actually see the mechanics, they all go "oooohhh I get it!" and then it's a matter of your DPS not sucking and not standing in void zones.

My server's about fifth from bottom in the Eu realms.  :awesome_for_real:
Eu-Sporragagrgaggarragar.

What happens when all this crap is done.

Some raid instance opens up that 2% of the server will see?

You get to do all your dailies on one island instead of trekking across Outlands mostly. That and the new badge vendor.

And pretty much all of the new dailies are easy as hell.  The only issues I've had with them is having to fight everyone else for spawns and such, and that's getting easier as time goes on.  On weekdays, at least, it seems as if a decent amount of people ignore the ones that aren't going towards unlocking the next phase.  Which works fine for me, that makes easy gold even easier.  Plus, some of the rep rewards are pretty nifty off the quartermaster, though some will get more favor than others in that area.  I'm hoping to be geared well enough soon to at least handle some of the easier heroics, there's several nice badge rewards I'm wanting for my shaman. 

So the dailies won't go away when it's done?  That's going to be an awful lot of gold sloshing around, I'd be kind of worried about inflation.

The cost of mounts aren't affected.  That's all I buy or care about.  This is all good to me.

Sure, I will buy the occassional twinking gear for an alt I'm levell'ing, but at that point I pay what makes sense.  Anything under 5g gets bought, no questions.  Above that will take some real scrutiny.  Above 10G, no purchase.  They can inflate those blues and purples all they want.  I'm not buying it.

I suppose prices for consumables and trade items might go up, but there is a breaking point where people decide it is worth getting into the business for themselves and the market adjusts.  I don't believe you'll see a long term marked difference here.

It might be coincidence, but I've noticed a drastic increase in the price of twink gear lately, especially for the BG "optimal" blues and purples.

Inflation is the norm to MMO's.  Unlimited mob supply with limited money sinks.  I imagine it will get worse until the release of the next expansion, improve a bit, and then get worse again.  It's a pretty natural progression in these games.

I haven't really noticed large increases in the price of stuff on my server, at least.  Probably the only thing impacted would be the market for high level greens, thanks to the supply packs from some of the new dailies, but most that stuff wasn't worth much to begin with.  But no, the dailies aren't going away.  Unless they plan on shutting them all down at some point, and I don't see that happening.  I'm pretty sure I've read that their stated goal is to make it to where if people want gold, they can go do a ton of dailies instead of buy gold from IGE or whoever.  And I have no objections to that.  While you can do up to 25 dailies now, I don't think most people are, or will.  The older dailies are pretty much empty now when I do them, and I have a feeling that as people hit exalted and all the phases and vendors are unlocked, activity on the new ones will fall off as well. 

This is different though, you get ten times more gold than what the mobs you kill would get you.  A lot of the quests don't even require you to kill anything and give you ten gold.  It could speed up the pace of inflation by an order of magnitude, literally.  Levelling up my alts some of the harder to find level thirty "of the monkey" gear is already like 30-40 gold.  I feel bad for anyone starting out fresh on a server without a level 70 to pay their way.

I agree completely.  The newcomers always suffer the worst from inflation.  I just transferred to another server just to support the new toons I'm leveling with an established 70.  I can't imagine having to start cold anymore.  With the leveling from 1-60 being faster, you really need to augment your gear at the AH and the costs are getting crazy. 

While I suppose it could get worse, twink gear for levelling alts has been crazy expensive long before now.  If you're patient, though, you can usually find enough that's not overly expensive to get by. 

On the flipside, so much gold being available to throw around means that you can make good money if you take, say, mining as one of your trade-skills as you level.  Just mining what I came across as I quested kept me in enough gold to get some of the cheaper blues to level with.  Then if you want you can drop it to take up a different one. 

Another thing I've noticed is that now that there are more dailies, there are less people farming for, say, primals solely to sell for gold, so if you're so inclined, it's much easier to just go farm it yourself.  It's a nice change of pace to not have to scramble madly for every elemental spawn.  YMMV per your server, though. 

I got 22 gold for a single stack of 20 Mithril on my new char.  :ye_gods: I always take Mining/Herbs when I start a new char now. Mining pays off early and Herbs pay off mid levels.

I think smart newcomers are perfectly fine.  Get no gathering skills and expect to pay for the shiniest gear in your level bracket all along the way?  Not going to happen.  Leave the twink gear to the twinks and get two gathering professions, you'll be rolling in it with the increased cash available to 70s who can't make their mind up which crafting profession to powerlevel.

I think they're also largely unconcerned about inflation for a few reasons:

1) At 10m subs worldwide they figure everyone interested in playing either knows someone, or knows how to be a 'smart player'  and get gold at the early levels /should/ they need to buy something.

2) Gold is largely worthless.   Sure, if you don't have your epic flyer yet you don't see this, but it really is.  Between badges, pvp gear and raid gear the mount is your only reason to have gold.  They could have dropped the price on mounts like they did before, but instead chose to open-up the faucets.  I imagine that has something to do with all the "wahhh I had to pay 1k gold why don't newcomers!!" whining.   The effect is still the same, but it's more subtle so nobody realizes it.

3) With the purples they're handing out to appease more casual players comes much, MUCH higher repair bills than they're used to.  This required more gold out there, more freely available for those casuals.  Hell, just doing dailies I wind-up with a 17g repair bill if I don't die.  That's not hard for me to come by, but a 'casual' player doing 2 hours of gaming every other night or so will suddenly find those new purples are more expensive than their green/ blues and perhaps it's all more trouble than they're worth and quitting will look attractive.

Do you kill mobs by only letting them beat on your shield spike?   :ye_gods:

What the hell? Did you find some way to headbutt mobs to death? Both of my main toons are mostly epic'd out now and I barely have a 4ish G repair bill on my prot warrior when I do ALL of the dailies.

Each tier of equipment gets more expensive. I noticed a HUGE jump once I switched from my T4 BP to the one off of Hydross. It's really kind of fucked-up.  I went back to wearing lower-tier stuff when grinding mobs.   PVP gear also seems to incur lower repair bills, but I'm not certain on that.

17g did seem high in retrospet, so I just logged-in to check. Last night I only did Quel'Danas dailies, a total of 8 quests.  My durability was:
Head: 75/85
Shou: 82/85
Ches: 118/140
Wais: 39/50
Legs: 91/105
Feet: 57/70
Wris: 41/50
Han: 41/50
MHd: 108/120
Rang: 60/90
Inv: 75/85 (no idea what this was.. maybe my T5 shoulders)

Repair bill was 6g 2s this moring with exaulted Scryers rep. If I'd gone through all 25 it'd have been that 17g bill.  (Should have specified I meant all 25, I imagine you all were thinking "10")  This is on a hunter with Mail.  My problem is I do too damn much damage for my pet to keep aggro.  I wind up meleeing everything after the first 2-3 shots, regardless of how much time I let him beat on it first.

My Pally I'll check tonight.  I don't think I repaired after tanking ZA on Sunday, so her bill was 12g 89s this morning.   Similar durability levels, though, so I think I did repair... I die a lot in ZA.

You're a hunter with a 17g repair bill?  Wow.


I'm also kind of concerned that when Lich King comes out some people might have a huge stockpile of gold and not think twice about paying 100g for level 71 greens.  Oh well, we will see.

Theres absolutely no reason why a new player would ever need AH equipment for leveling.  Quest rewards + whatever you find is way more than sufficient for leveling.  Only people looking to level faster on their second or third chars have a legitimate reason to want the best equipment possible for every level bracket, and they can afford it.  I remember wearing my gnomeragan pants all the way to the high 50s, using a thrash blade for months after hitting 60, etc, now that leveling is even easier it should be even less of an issue.

I only use the AH to get matching gear.  I like matching.

Since the xp changes from 1-60 you outlevel your gear quickly.  This is especially problemmatic when playing classes solo that are dependant on gear for success.  My warrior is a nightmare to solo unless my gear is updated.   Of course, this may be the only exception. 

I can see a warrior needing it.  My hunter gets by just fine at 40 with a couple of pieces from the Fang set and a couple of quested upgrades.

Horde side is also MUCH worse-off than Alliance in terms of quest upgrades.  Alliance as a warrior I always got an upgraded piece of armor or weapon every few levels. Sure ALL my gear wasn't "max for level" but it was rare that I thought about picking a weapon up off of the AH, (unless I REALLY wanted to have something last me a long while.)

Again, these days they expect everyone to be able to have someone run them through instances if it's a big deal.  This is NOT an ideal solution, imo, and they should have revisited a few quest rewards at the least for Horde.

Quest rewards 1-20 in the BE starting area, at least, tend to be pretty useful, and I would suppose it's the same in the Draenai area.  But once you leave that, yu have to go back to the shitty quest rewards.  I really wish they'd go in and alter the rewards a bit, in the scheme of things, I wouldn't think it'd be that hard. 

My tauren warrior has run into this in a number of zones.  For example, I turned in a bunch of quests in STV and I think 3 of them gave cloaks as quest rewards... all of them useless to a warrior.  AO had a cool quest system in that you could select a quest based on the usefulness of the reward.  You'd think that Blizzard would have thought to implement something like this.   

L2 plink and let pet kill shit on the island :p

Seems odd that you would have a 17g repair bill just doing dailies. I was at 40% when I left Sunwell the other night (Brutallus learning, so fun) and I only had a 26g repair bill, and I have about 50/50 T5/6 including weapons.

But gear, especially weapons, does get more expensive to repair as you go up in tiers/quality. More base durability per item for teh yay!

I think hunters are getting screwed.  Our repair bills are comparable to other classes, plus we have to feed pets plus we have ammo costs.

But I honestly don't know what plate wearers are hit with - I don't have one.

My hunter costs the most of my toons (hunter, 'lock, priest, druid).

Plate is an exercise in pain. Basically take the amount of wipes you can endure before equipment breaking as a cloth/leather/mail wearer, and then double them. A good night of breaking all your shit results in 60+G repairs as a tank and probably breaks into triple digits in Tier 6+

That I'm too impaitient to plink is a good portion of my problem.   The other part is that even when I DO plink, a 32% crit rating means, OH HAI AGGRO anyway.. so I do huge damage & shots to just get it over with faster. A few lucky crits and things drop before they get into melee range, but that's only 1/3 of the time. The rest is me-as-tank.

Plate is an exercise in pain. Basically take the amount of wipes you can endure before equipment breaking as a cloth/leather/mail wearer, and then double them. A good night of breaking all your shit results in 60+G repairs as a tank and probably breaks into triple digits in Tier 6+
[/quote]

Yes, yes it is.  I still haven't checked the Pally.. was getting badges for my wife in Kara last night, and only did a quick anvil quest run (54%! Go faster you bastards!) on the pally the night before so I don't have exact figures yet.   I've got a plan in mind to actually test how much repairs cost per-point of durability on plate vs mail vs leather vs cloth for the tiers I have available.. but I need to get more bored first.

Im not sure it is plate, so much as "tank" that is the problem with tank class repair costs.  I know as a Feral Druid, on a full kara clear where i main tank and never die, i still end up with around 40% durability loss simply from constantly getting hit all the time.

I believe that there are all sorts of things that can take your durability down.
- every single time you enter combat appearently has a chance of giving you a durability hit (i actually had a 3 silver repair bill after repairing at the reagent vendor and then doing chess, without ever having cast a spell or hit an npc with my character)
- every time you cast a spell (not sure if this works only while in combat)
- every time you get hit by a mob
- every time a warrior / paladin or shaman blocks with a shield, it has a chance to damage the shield.

Tanks in general are "always getting hit" + "always casting abilities / spells" so have twice the chance of suffering random durability loss as someone just casting spells.

Farm cash on a solo hunter and then try it on a solo warrior.  You're not getting screwed at all. 

Feign death.  The number of times i have been on wipes while learning boss encounters / pugging where the hunter survives EVERY SINGLE TIME over a period of hours, leads me to believe that hunters have less to complain about then they would like to believe.

My guild is to the point they cheer when I die.  I'm a fucking cockroach on raids.

What exactly is the rationale behind repairs anyway?

I know it's a money sink, but why is there no attempt to make it even between the classes?

It defies reason.

There was an attempt, they doubled the amount it cost to repair cloth a couple years ago.

Used to be a clothie in all tier2 gear could walk away from a 0% durability repair only paying like 2g total. 1 death did that much repair dmg to my bow at the time.

So....the badge vendor was opened on my server last night. Bought the xbow and the ring. (still no gem vendor, sigh)

2 words (ok, letters) O. P.

Went to kara for a badge run after picking it up. Thing is just sick. I did just over 1400 DPS on Attumen, and I was messing around with getting misdirect on the tank for 20 seconds in the second phase (while I had heroism, no less).

Am actually somewhat happy that I did not get a bow off Illidan, though the looks of the illidan bow are much nicer.

Xbow looks retarded as hell, but it does the job so oh well.

I bought a set of "Blood Knight" mail on the AH so I'd look right with the bow while dicking around/ doing dailies.   The grey/ brown theme of my current equip will really clash with it on raids.   Ah well.

On an unrelated note, I need to run more with my guild instead of my raid alliance. The loot gods smiled upon me and in 2 kara runs I got everything that eluded me. My GL made me my silly tank gun, and I bought a badge ring.

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Proudmoore&n=Bryce

 :awesome_for_real:

Need the Maiden Gloves still!


What's your block value up to? I can't see it from the armory.

# Dodge: 20.34%
# Parry: 16.95%
# Block: 25.11%

I got the Maiden's gloves but I prefer my T4.

Block Value, not rating :).


How much damage you'll actually block on a successful block. You can get the number from hovering over your block rating percentage figure on your char sheet. Which doesn't work via the armory :(

241 Value in the gear I usually have equipped, and if I swap for all my +block value items I can get 311. Not a lot really. I need to work on a block set for whenever/if ever I see Zul'jin since I think he destroys you with overpowers for dodging in his troll form.

Blocking and defense related to Paladins:

I thought I read here awhile back that block and defense don't mean much to a paladin that heals a lot.  I thought it was said that all blocking and defense goes out the window while casting. 

Is this true?

*Edit: More specific, do all of the defense mechanisms go to nothing while casting? (Parry, Block, Dodge, etc.)*

paladins lose all block/parry/dodge damage mitigation when casting a spell, this is to prevent tanks from just spamming heals on themselves.

Well, in BG's and Arena's that seems to be all I end up doing anyway.  Since I can't be interrupted outside of stuns, etc. it works well.  I guess if I'm able to just be "The Target," yet survive while my buddies tear down the other side, so be it.

I'll have to take another look at my talents now.  I think I can adjust out of the talents for all of that stuff since nearly 90% of the time, I'm casting something.  I really care more about avoidance of stun type attacks.  Those are the killers for me.

If you wanted to fix up your block value, a good place to start would be taking 3 points out of the utterly worthless Tactical Mastery and putting them into Shield Mastery.  Here is a complete list of reasons to ever leave defensive stance while tanking:

1. Mocking Blow.
2. Berserker Rage
3. Intercept

What do all of these things have in common?  They less than 10 rage, which is what you have when you stance dance without any points in tactical mastery.

I just found out that I can search for stuff like bankers, auctioneers, food vendors on my mini map...  WoW guru I am not.

The mini map is a relatively new thing.

(http://img265.imageshack.us/img265/2327/badgeitemsxj5.jpg)

 :awesome_for_real: :awesome_for_real: :awesome_for_real:

That looks like about 1/4 of the people who were there on my server when it finally opened up.  The sunwell/ outland server crashed many a time that day.   Being on a PvE server, several bored people flagged themselves and stood in the crowd near the smithy.  There were many retaliations by the NPCs against hapless players who didn't know they'd just taken a swing at random_flagged_asshat.

Yeah, my server [pvp] just had the badge vendor open yesterday, and literally hundreds of people were standing on top of each other. Every action (even chat) had about ~5 seconds of server lag after it, mages / warlocks / hunters were AOEing the entire bunch (an arcane explosion did about 27 damage to me due to the AOE penalty, 'nuff said), naked priests and warlocks were AOE fearing immediately after they rezzed and every second, someone would die to guards or extended exposure to AOE. There was also an inevitable server crash, though it recovered quickly after that.

Good times! (protip: turn on friendly nameplates, do /target Smith Hauthaa and search for the bright green nameplate to rightclick)


-- Z.