f13.net

Inscription profession, barbershops, achievements, pets/mounts tab, and new class talents!



Patch notes from PTR in entirety:

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/test-realm-patchnotes.html (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/test-realm-patchnotes.html)

General

    * All players will have their talent points reimbursed and will have access to new talents throughout their trees; this includes the 51-point talents. Several new spells and abilities have been added for all classes. Players will need to visit their class trainer to learn new spells.
    * The Kirin Tor have made their move and so has Dalaran. Please watch your step around the crater that has been left behind!
    * The Barber Shop has been implemented and you can now visit one of the Barber Shops in the major cities to change your appearance. Be sure to get your Shave and a Haircut!
    * The all new Achievement System has been implemented and the Achievement panel can be accessed via the interface. While many achievements are not retroactive, we have done our best to credit as many as possible. Gamemasters will not be able to grant achievements for past accomplishements.
    * Stormwind Harbor is now open for business.
    * New towers have been added outside Of Orgrimmar and in Tirisfal Glades. Crews are currently at work to establish a new Zeppelin route to Northrend for your travel pleasure. Please no /spit off of the towers.
    * A new entrance is now viewable in the Caverns of Time.
    * Hit Rating, Critical Strike Rating, and Haste Rating now modify both melee attacks and spells.
    * Spell casting and spell channeling pushback has been changed to the following:
          o When casting a spell:
                + The first and second hit will add .5 secs each to the cast time.
                + All hits after the second will have no effect.
          o When channeling a spell:
                + The first and second hit reduces current duration by 25% of total duration each.
                + All hits after the second will have no effect.
          o Spellpower:
                + All items and effects which grant bonuses to spell damage and spell healing are being consolidated into a single stat, Spellpower. This stat will appear with the same values found on items which grant “increased spell damage and healing” such as on typical Mage and Warlock itemization.
                      # For classes which do not heal, they should see no change in the character sheet other than new tooltip wording.
                + Healing characters will see their bonus healing numbers on the character sheet decrease, however, all healing spells have been modified to receive more benefit from spellpower than they received from bonus healing, with a net effect of no change to the amount healed by their spells. Some talents have had to be rebalanced to accommodate this change, but the amount healed will remain roughly the same. In addition, some talents will provide only healing spell power.

Known Issues

    * The current patch notes are incomplete, but will be progressively more comprehensive in each patch.
    * All classes are currently undergoing a balancing pass of all talent trees.
    * Inscription is not fully implemented and still has non-functioning glyphs.

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[class changes snipped, follow the link to see class changes]
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/test-realm-patchnotes.html (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/test-realm-patchnotes.html)

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PvP

    * Arenas
          o Buffs that have 30 seconds or less remaining will be removed once the game starts. However, the mage spell “Invisibility” is not affected by this change.

Professions

    * New Profession: Inscription is available to train up to 375.

User Interface

    * New Calendar feature: Players will be able to access the new Calendar feature by clicking on the new icon located in the top right corner of their mini map. The calendar will track in game events, allow raid scheduling, and more.
    * New Vanity Pet and Mount changes: Players will now be able to access their non-combat pets and mounts by clicking on the pets tab in the Character Info panel. These pets and mounts will be now learnable much like spells or abilities. Once a vanity pet or mount is learned, the icon will disappear from within a player’s inventory andreappear in the appropriate tab under the pet tab under Character Info. Say goodbye to your vanity pets and mounts taking up bag and bank slots!
          o Lost pets and mounts (one time quest rewards) can be recovered by visiting a stablemaster.
    * A new Agro Warning is now available and currently functioning in dungeons.
    * Focus Frame is now available. Players will be able to right click on any unit frame and select “Set Focus”. The focus frame will only display when the focus is set. Players may also set a “Focus Cast Key” in the options/combat panel that can be bound to shift, alt, or ctrl. When holding the focus cast key and triggering an action, the action will be performed on your focus and not on your target.
    * Lost tabards (one time quest rewards) may now be restored by visiting a tabard vendor.
    * Lost keys (one time quest rewards) may now be restored by visiting a blacksmith.
    * Error messages should play less frequently.
    * Tradeskills can now be linked by shift-clicking the tradeskill icon.
    * Quests can be shared with party members at any distance.
    * Quests can be shared with party members by linking the quest into party chat.
    * Quests can be shared in raids but not battlegrounds.
    * Randomized Daily quests may now be shared, but only on the same day as the quest is given.
    * A 5 minute timer will appear over the player’s unit frame showing the countdown until your PvP flag is cleared.
    * The /cower emote now has an animation.
    * Macros and key bindings are now saved server-side so there is no longer a need to reconfigure them when logging in using another computer.
    * Shift-clicking to loot mail: You can now hold Shift and click on mail in your inbox to automatically loot any items and gold without opening the mail. This default behavior can be changed via Auto Loot Mail in the Interface Options (Controls).
    * Combat Log Changes:
          o The combat log now differentiates between a spell failure due to resistance and spell failure due to missing the target. Where once both events reported as a resist; a spell missing the target is now reported as a miss.
          o Overhealing is now reported in the combat log.
          o When a source of damage is entirely prevented (by a shield block, a full resist, or a damage shield like Power Word:Shield, the prevented amount will now be displayed.

Items

    * Druids and Shaman can now use items while shapeshifted.
    * The Abyss Shard has been changed to grant a passive 15 stamina bonus, but no longer removes the soul shard requirement from casting a voidwalker.
    * Devilsaur Eye now increases your pet’s attack power for a short duration instead of increasing its critical strike chance. It also provides a small amount of passive Agility.

Glad I stockpiled all that Peacebloom and Ragveil.  To the Auctionhouse, Batman!

In other news, avoid all BGs until people figure out how to kill Ret Pallies.  (they will, in time) because the whining will be unbearable on both sides.   Although, there IS something wrong about a class that can solo (at least) past the first boss of Underbog in Heroic purples. (My friend did this.)

Also; prot pallies are equally broken, but keeping their mouths shut about it.  I went in and was able to solo Sethekk Halls in Kara-level protadin gear on the PTR over the weekend.   I didn't give any heroics a try becuase I got bored and figured why waste the time when it "doesn't count" on a PTR.   I figure my ret buddy and I can go start cranking out achievement bosses we'd been skipping Wednesday night.   :drillf:

Yay!  This was such a pain.

Who's got Mage specs in mind for tomorrow?

me but I'll stick just with fire for PvE to finish my last 2 levels to 70.  So generic fiero.

Yah. Except that tonight's play plan has just changed to copious amounts of farming of sungrass in feralas. And hunting for last minute bargains on the AH from people who don't know better.

Thank god.

You could solo Non-Heroic Sethekk now, it would just take 5 times as long.

Im missing something - or its in the full notes I cant read coz I'm at work.  Why the farming of mid-50s herbs all of a sudden?

The primary ingredient for inscription is herbs.

It occurs to me - is this an anti-bot measure?

No.  And for people who don't want that, (like me) there is a way to disable it.
I have more than one computer and sometimes I play WoW on one that doesn't have a G15, a Nostromo N52, and a MX Revolution mouse, so server-side keybindings would make me redo my keybindings every time I switch computers.

Dual-speccing not implemented yet? Interesting...

Pretty sure it's slated for post-WotLK, but I base this on magical happy dust.

I remain unconvinced they'll ever get dual speccing working.

 :oh_i_see:

It's any herbs - my herbalist is only 49 and currently in Feralas. I might risk some runs around Ungoro & Felwood etc later though - before everyone else gets there.

Inscription relies on herbs in the same way that Jewelcrafting relies on ore. Get 5 herbs, "mill" them, get pigment, inscribe.  Any herbs will do - even bloodthistle from Eversong Woods from what I've read. There are 8 pigments (7 in patch I guess as 8th will be from Northrend herbs) and they're grouped so milling either sungrass or firebloom will give you the same pigment.  (Spoiler filled guide here (http://www.elsprofessions.com/inscription/milling.html))

So - current business plan:

1. Collect herbs
2. ?
3. PROFIT!

This will only fail if everyone on the server has already stocked up or no-one wants to power-level Inscription.  Judging by the fact that post-release TBC ore was being sold to Jewelcrafters for 4/5g a stack of copper, I'm hedging my bets that I should be able to make a tidy sum on the 100+ stacks of herbs I've currently got stored.  :drill:

The Notes on the actual Blizz Website aren't up to date it seems.

Yeah, the PTR server notes haven't been updated in an age.

Dual-spec feature will come in the first post LK content patch, according to info from Blizzcon.  It will also swap your action bars automatically, so you don't have to redo all your hotkeys every time you swap specs, and they say it is likely they'll have it swap glyphs as well, so you can have one set of glyphs for one spec, and another set for another.  In addition they are considering adding an ItemRack like function into the base UI to make equipment-swapping easier.

What Koya said, but add-in lots of bitching from "pure" classes so say that the combination of Hybrids able to heal, tank and dps along with the glyph swapping and built-in item rack means that they're 'useless' and 'nobody' will take them on raids and it's now "World of Hybrids!"

See, Blizz plans on making you able to swap specs anywhere, any time so long as you're not in the middle of combat or an arena.  The logic being, "Well you can already hearth, respec, warlock summon so any sort of cool down makes it less convenient than that and would be pointless."

Then add more bitching from future inscribers who say that auto-swapping glyps when you respec means that the profession is "useless" because you can't keep selling the same spells like enchanters and jewelcrafters do.  They must not know about Smithing, Leatherworking and Engineering.  You know, those other professions that are worthless as money makers after the first 5 months of level-cap raiding.

Aha!  I see said the blind man!  Thanks.

I've read that prot warriors are awesome-on-a-stick in 3.0. I'll have to check and murderize a few squishies prot-style in a battleground. Maybe I can even hit a ret pally twice before I get roflstomped by 15k crits, or something. :drill:

And yeah, I find complaining about the dual specs silly too. What is a "pure" class? Even pure DPS'rs like mages, hunters, locks, rogues have pve and pvp specs they switch between... and as someone who plays a "tank class" and a "healer class" most of the time, dual specs are pretty huge.

That is, after dual specs actually get implemented (2009?) and the various spec-related horrendous bugs / exploits fixed (mid-2011). I mean, this IS blizz we're talking about here, right?  :awesome_for_real:


-- Z.

Dual specs are pure win. Designers made instances that required totally different raid setups, and you either had to zone out and respec, or just deal with a sub-par group composition. This move lets you take whoever you want into runs, which is the whole point of playing together with your friends. You don't have to worry about much about raid setup, and you can start to worry about people actually being fun.

These talent changes are a pain in the fucking arse.  Also, Blizzard appears to have forgotten that level 11 chars don't have seed of corruption.

Maybe you will when you log in. There was at least one anomaly in the shaman tree with water shield, but the latest patchnotes say we now get it at 20.

I would be cautious in interpreting Blizzards dual spec thing. They said it would be soon. When paid character transfers were going to be soon it was something like 16 months. There's time and then there's Blizzard time.

I for one welcome our new Ret Overlords.

Managed to get the reccomended amount of herbs to get me to about 310 tomorrow in inscription; the new talent changes are going to be a pain to figure out though. The biggest immediate news is the raid instance nerfs though.


There's a bunch of low-tier talents that affect high-level spells *shrug* it's not like they don't also offer benefits to characters at the level to get them.

I know.  It actually pisses me off.

This is what one guy in my guild posted in our forums. No clue how good they are. My highest mage is 35.

It's fucking wrong to be clockwatching for a goddamned computer game patch, but I find myself doing it.

I really shouldn't, any way, because we all know that 2pm PST time is going to stretch out until 5pm or later.  Then there's the rollbacks and emergency restarts.  Goddamnit I want to play my new wtfpwnage class.

Excuse me while I whine...

The patch is about 1G and is an update to a 6.5G file - which means that you have to have 7G available on your WOW drive to support the 3.0.2 install. Sadly (for me) I have WoW on an ancient 10G partition so I have to spend my evening installing my new 1T SATA and moving partitions and drives around to support a FRIGGIN VIDEO GAME.

Bother.

I now return you to your normally scheduled adult discussion.

Man up, nerd. Man up.

On the plus side, the WoW Directory is totally self-sufficient.  So at least there's not moving and registry hacks and other shite you have to do.  It's like tossing a pancake.

Has anyone had any experience with elemental shaman and these new talents.  I don't feel like redownloading the game and resubbing just to check em out.  That thunderstorm spell looks neet.

I'm going to spec into it, charge down the flag in EoTS and have some fun.

The background dowloader got me to about 98% when I fired up WoW today. I usually have only teh hate for the Blizz downloader.

Wot?


(Seriously - don't answer that. I don't want to know.)

Tossing a pancake.  Yeah, first time I heard it, too.  Seems a simple concept.. they're flat and round, they throw easy.

You 'flip' the directory to its new location.  Run the game.  You're done.  Now play WoW.

Been home for two hours, tried to login, got error on character retrieval. Now I cant login at all. Did Funcom buy out Vivendi?  :why_so_serious:

They broke the char retrevial.. and now the login server and wow site are fuck'd.  It's normal business for a big patch day/ expansion as millions of folks reup to check shit out.

Exactly. In my small group of RL friends who now play we have a Warrior, a Resto Shammy, a Lock and 3 mages (unless I play my rogue, but Mage is more fun). My rogue is Assassination spec, since it seems to work ok as a Hybrid spec for PVE and PVP, but it's not perfectly set up for either. My mage doen't bother me being deep fire, since my wife is deep ice so we have that complimentary thing going on. We all do ok in BGs, except the poor Warrior has to respec every time we want to do an instance run, or we have to search for a "real" tank to either let him be "rogue in plate" while one of the DPSers sits out, or he misses out.

Ludicrous. The BETA is stable and this isn't. Mounts and pets are disappearing on Mal Ganis after people learn them due to zone instability.

Four fucking years, Jesus.

Like I figured, the release is rushed, they haven't gotten things working to a standard level of operation.  I mean, there's always bugs and issues, but this sounds worse than usual by a good bit.

I can't even log in to my server  :awesome_for_real:

Something I discovered after the patch that I hadn't seen talked about anywhere was that gathering professions apparently now give passive buffs as you skill up.  For 375 skinning, I have a 15 crit strike rating bonus. 

Did an impromptu Shattered Halls run with my guildmates in 500ms lag and it was a breeze. Charge, thunderclap, back up, shockwave, demo shout, start into rotation, done.

I went with an UBRS group to get Leeeeeeroy, and it was insane. SO SHINY. Then I sat in Ironforge on my mage for about an hour shooting sparkly things.

We cleared Karazhan in an hour and a half. Moroes got one vanish off. The Maiden was dead in 40s. The Curator didn't get an evocate off at all. We didn't even bother marking shit, I just ran in there and started shockwaving and thunderclapping. The rest was gravy.

Downhammer is living up to its old nickname again.

Seriously though this is one of the biggest patch fails I've seen in a long time. Toot toot, all aboard!

Whoa boy, life as a druid just got five times better.  Sure, they nerfed our armor and dodge/crit, but oh the things we got in exchange...

Free Barkskin in shapeshifts.
Free Nature's Grasp in shapeshifts.
Free 'oh shit' heal in shapeshifts.
Free 1200 HP heal in all forms. (well, that's an herbalist thing, but more the merrier!)
AT LONG FUCKING LAST, POTIONS IN SHAPESHIFTS.
Charge for cat form.
Entangling Roots working indoors (also at long fucking last).
Uncrittable!

Now if only they hadn't crippled my ability to play the game by screwing up all of my UI mods...

The Ret Paladin Nerf whines are already in full force. It's pretty epic!

Ret pallies are pretty sick. Granted my guild is in T6 but our ret pally was soloing the outland dungeon achievments. Granted blood furnace isn't the hardest thing out there but solo?

Did you miss where my buddy got up to the first boss of Underbog in just Kara and Heroic dungeon gear?  Yeah, no mana problems at all for ret pallies and seal/ judge of light doing insane healing + art of war means things can go pretty smoothly.

They're kind of ridiculous, but it seems like every class got turned up to 11. I think people just need to adjust to having so much awesome running around willy-nilly.

Ret Paladins will eat a nerf, probably their burst in PvP. I can't see that staying as is, especially at 80 with the 20 second Justice combo.


If you want to solo shit you have no business soloing, Protection Paladins are where it's at.  :drill:

Ret pallies, as much as they have suffered being a piece of shit spec that was unwelcome on raids...need nerfed. A pally in the blue PVP set with a blue two-hander nearly smoked 3 epic'd-out DPS and nearly kept up with my threat generation. That ain't right.

As expected the background downloader torrent shenanigans are preventing me from completing the patching process..... 97%....

I expect improved hammer of justice to be moved farther in the prot tree more than I expect a ret nerf.  The 20s cooldown is needed so protadins have a reliable interrupt.   They will probably even-out ret's dps at some point, because it's far too streaky right now but it's probably going to stay where its at in terms of overall damage output.

Thanks. Not sure if my next round in WoW is going to be more PvP or PvE, but 10/51/0 seems like a good PvP build. Seems a bit reliant on crits and other chancy type things I wouldn't want to abuse on dungeon crawls right away.

To be fair, there’s some merit to the concern about dual-specs favoring hybrids – at least from PvE or primarily-PvE players.  In WotLK, Blizz is shifting from a more EQ-ish class system of trying to find a niche for each class to a more EQII-ish archetype system where you have 3 real “classes” (tank, dps, heal) and classes (and specs) that add some flavor but are interchangeable as far as roles go (a protection paladin, a bear druid, a protection warrior and a wtf-ever emoknight are supposed to be interchangeable tanks in 5-mans and raids barring perhaps a gimmick fight or two).

For my gimp warrior, being able to transform from the guy who brings the mad pewpew into the guy who tanks like a champ is pretty fucking hot.  For a rogue, being able to transform from the guy who brings the mad pewpew into . . . the guy who beings the mad pewpew with a different weapon type is not so hot.

Now, this might not turn out to be a problem at all (there are loot distribution issues with class stacking, it’s hard to imagine that you won’t need a minimum fixed number of dps for all fights, etc).  But I don’t dismiss the concerns of my friends in “pure” (perhaps more aptly called “one-dimensional”) classes.

As one person put it, Blizzard just added a job system to WoW.  But only for some classes.

Ok, been out of things for a bit. Is there a synopsus somewhere of this dual-spec thing of which you speak? And can I get my Mage a halberd so I can be a insta-hit precasting Mage?

Having lived with the system in EQ2, it is primarily of use for characters with multiple roles (not necessarily hybrids--warrior would be a good example), but it doesn't really overpower them in any way. Most characters that will use the option have one group friendly spec that is not solo friendly and one solo spec that is not group friendly. This lets people switch without cost. At least in EQ2, the cost was the only difference because people were switching constantly anyway, they were just coughing out plat to do it.

Our Ret pally in Karazhan managed to pull Moroes off me after killing all 4 other adds. He's in epics and put out 2,200 dps in that run. I'm fairly sure that wasn't the intent.

There's no real synopsis anywhere yet.  There's several multi-page threads circulating the Blizz forums where players are arguing stuff back and forth, with blue piping in once in a while but that's it.

Numtini gave a fairly concice version of why Blizz said they originally wanted to implement it.  That way Healers, Tanks and others could swap back and forth between their raid role and and a gold-farming role without having to pay 50g every time.

The whole idea, however, predates the revisions we've just seen like spelldam instead of +heal/+dam and tanks being able to do actual damage output.  So now there's a countermovement among players saying "hey wait!" because they're worried "There's no reason to take a rogue/ hunter/ <my class choice> if you can just have Hybrid Hannah over there able to swap into that role at-will."

However, this argument ignores that 1) You need the gear to do that role 2) There's nothing other than gold and a soulshard preventing players from doing that RIGHT NOW.  In fact, my guild did it for a few encounters in SSC with our healers and Warlocks. Removing the idea isn't to force players to drag along lame asses just because they are a certain class or spec any more than it does right now.  It DOES, however, make it a lot easier to take along players who are good at multiple roles and not force a swap for someone else or a respec in the middle of a raid, killing momentum.  (My Protadin, for example, can go on a raid and switch to ret for fights we don't need a second tank instead of swapping out for my hunter.)

The most intersting aspect is seeing the people who hate the idea try to convince all the heal-enabled classes what a bad idea it is, to get them to be against it as well.  "Well, with dual specs you'll be FORCED to heal! No more 'I'm only a shadow priest' or 'I'm only a feral druid!' because the response will be 'well your other spec can be healing!1!!'"

I don't think people are going to mind healing on certain boss fights while dpsing on the majority of the raid. I don't mind doing DPS on some bosses and tanking the rest of the raid. What I think the problem was in the past was that if you needed to heal, you had to do it the whole time even if you hated it.

I think on trash in raids you'll see a lot of dps and minimal healing, while on bosses you'll see rotations of specs to get the optimal level of tanks and healing.

As I mentioned in some thread buried in these forums, the dual spec idea still doesn't fully sit right with me. At this point it's like they just gave us double talent points, except you can't use them all at the same time.

It seems like there ought to be SOME limiting factor; 24 hours, some potion that costs less than 50g but more than 10s, a debuff you incur if you do it too much, etc.  Can you swap specs at any time? Only out of combat?  In arenas or BGs?  Can a marksman hunter feign to get out of combat and rise again as a beastmaster?

From what I've heard, it would be out of combat, it would most likely be on some form of short timer, and it wouldn't be allowed in arenas at all. The bigger question though is outside of pvp, why should there be a limiting factor? I would like to hear your thought process on that one, because I don't really understand it.

In other news (and at the risk of demonstrating my age, noobishness, and overall lack of skillz) is anyone else having a problem with having just too many damn abilities to hotkey conveniently?

With the new talents and the UI reset, I have over 30 skills that I want to have hotkeyed for immediate use (just in one stance).  Even with a fancypants mouse with sidebuttons mapped to shift-alt and contol-shift-alt, and manual use of the alt modifier, it is quite a pain in the ass to keep everything in easy reach of WASD (no, I can't change).  Plus a few more skills coming with WOTLK.  I'm sure I'll eventually get a handle on it, but sheesh.

I wish they would loosen up on the macro restrictions a little.  Goddamn G-keys (to say nothing of the Nostromo) are too far away to make illicit conditional macros worthile (not that I'd engage in such a practice!).  

This may be a warrior-specific issue (or warriors + certain other classes I don't play), as I don't feel nearly so jammed for useable space on my rogue or druid alts.  

Undead mobs. Ret pallies would rip face against undead just with Judgment of the Wise because mana wouldnt be a consideration for Exorcism.

According to a post today by Ghostcrawler Ret PVE DPS is fine. The upfront burst is likely to be nerfed though, I'm guessing the stun component when Command is Judged.

That SOC stun is from a Glyph, IIRC, not the ability itself.  I haven't looked at ret in a while though.

ElGallo: It's that you're playing a warrior.  Hunters complain of the same problem.  Druids less so because you've got so many abilities that are usable only in one form.  Rogues have stuff (in my experience) that they just plain ignore based on spec.  (For example, backstabbing / Ambush is impossible as a swords rogue.)

I have this problem with a lot of games.  While it does feel limiting at times, the smaller skill bar is one of the things I like about Guild Wars.

No, when SOC is judged when a target is incapacitated it deals double damage. What's going on is that Judgment of Command has a spellpower coefficient, and Ret pallies have a talent where their Spellpower is scaling with their Attack Power. That's increasing the damage by a good amount, plus there are talents that greatly increase the crit chance, and the crit damage from Judgments.

The upshot is that a well-geared Ret pally is going to have around a 60% chance to crit you with a judgment before resilience, and if you're stunned that judgment is going to do quadruple damage plus an additional 20% if it crits. I haven't been able to test stuff out extensively but on a quick run to the Blood Elf island my tier-4ish equipped Ret pally with 2100 AP was capable of dealing 10k damage in about 4 seconds if the stars aligned. I'm guessing a Sunwell/Brutal-equipped pally could exceed 15k in that span.

I'm having to learn to replay a bit on my enhance shammy, I've gained several things I can do instead of just stormstrike and earthshock.  It's been a lot of fun, and I feel less beholden to windfury procs. 

If it becomes trivial to find a trick to swap specs, it seems like they might as well have just dropped the pretense and doubled the talent points we get instead.

The only real hard limiting factor is that you can't exit combat with a boss in a raid instance.  Even then, need more healers? Let your feral druid die, run back respeccing and reenter the instance, all midfight.

World PvP and battlegrounds are yet another thing, particularly for classes that can exit combat like rogues and hunters.  If your spec isn't working against the other guy, just get out of combat, hit the button, turn around and shoot your new ultimate ability at them.

And the problem with this is?

I find it's not very fun to be useless.  Mobs probably aren't going to get their feelings hurt by doing this.  Do you care how I play the game?

Were it a PvP situation, which I don't really see happening, then they could do the same.

So do it the way that they do in EQ2 and require you to see your trainer. All the same to me. The point is to not go broke trying to swap between two specs both of which effectively cut off half the game to you.

I agree, I find PvE arguments against dual spec to be extremely hollow. They usually seem to center on the fact that they want people more defined, or they want the game to be harder. I hated the idea of specs anyway because of the limiting factor. WoW PvE already limits you by your class abilities, and they further limit you be the gear needed to compete. We have to be limited again by our specs? I say that's just too much. You can't run out of instances and reenter during boss fights with different specs. The fights close the instance until everyone is OOC. Let's say you have a 2 warrior tanks and a pally tank. In a 3 tank boss fight, you have it nailed. In a one man boss fight, your warrior and pally can swap to their dps specs, or the pally can go for extra heals if that's his thing.

It's about increasing adaptability and decreasing raid composition rigidity. No longer will you have to jump from one foot to the other because different bosses require different things. It opens up the ability to play with more gear options than simply going after one particular style. It will increase competition on gear for sure, but it also means that less gear will get sharded.

That wouldn't work, since most [all?] boss fights in instances lock people out of the instance while a fight is going on (you get a "battle is in progress, can't enter" style error messge if you try to zone in).

Avoiding the "oh, the rogue blinded and restealthed, now he's switching to full assassination spec" problem would be simple by making it a pure out-of-combat ability with a 15sec cast time or something...


-- Z.

Or just not allowing anybody to respec while in a BG or an Arena.

Problem solved.

World PvP.  But someone will probably just say who cares about that playstyle.

I mean, I play EVE, so maybe the point about making the game harder and being a masochist hits home.  Still, arenas and boss fights will be the only place you can't be everything.  They're the exception.

So I guess I'm not so much complaining, because I can certainly see the argument that finding people the right spec for a given fight is nothing but a headache and doesn't add to the fun or challenge of a raid or 5-man meaningfully.  But I'm seriously asking - if they're going down this road, why not just give everyone all talents instead of putting a trivial barrier in place?

No, it needs to be possible within a single instance, without leaving, because otherwise it slows everything down as you go from a 2 tank boss to a 1 tank boss and one of the tanks has to port back to a trainer, respec, and then get ported or run back. It just wastes everyone's time.

That's the exact sort of scenario they are trying to address with this change, according to the panel.

Dual specs doesn't destroy game balance, it just increases convenience. Giving everyone all talents all at once does destroy game balance. The game is not balanced around people having access to all of those things *at the same time*.

It's only 30 seconds from the talents. The Extra 10 is from the PvP set bonus.

I don't expect Imp HoJustice to be moved even deeper, simply because they are running out of low level talents to actually spec into in the Prot tree. There's already a little bit of an issue going deeper into the tree as it is. Ironically, most Prot Paladins end up skipping the talent themselves, since it still doesn't let them reposition a caster.

Did they change or tweak the graphic engine?  Things look snappier, brighter, sharper, clearer.

I haven't seriously logged in to play yet.  Waiting until they fix the broken things.

They did something to it. Colors look more saturated and the spell effects are definitely torqued up somehow. Check your settings as well, mine were turned down a notch and are usually maxed out. Were there shadows before?

Shadows are new, some spell effects are updated, otherwise it's the same thing as before.

I think some of the item glows have been updated which immediately make all the high level characters have more visual interest. (Of course it's also possible it just hooked into something on the video card that some of us weren't seeing.)

About those herbs...

I've just made 65g in about 15 minutes. That's selling peacebloom, silverleaf and mageroyal at ~10g a stack. Sure I did the same with Netherweave bags a couple of days ago but come on - peacebloom? I've just put the next lot on at 15g a stack which is half of what anyone else is putting it on - and I haven't even got onto the hard stuff yet.

Silly money.

EDIT: I realise that for those of you who have been raiding/doing dailies etc. for ages that this is pittance but at the moment this is like a kings ransom to some of us.

Also shadows: check out the wind-riders/whatever-monstrosity you ally types ride




Arse. Pissed again.

It was fine by the time I got home and patched (I d/led the standalones during the day when I was at work).

Cash in on it! Some people stocked up on herbs before the patch, but it seems there are a lot of last minute Charlies.

Oh awesome. I've got a couple of chars with banks *full* of herbs. Probably 200 full stacks. Might have to see if my back can stand up to logging in and AH'ing for a bit :)

Things I like about this patch that weren't necessarily in the patch notes

1. Shadows are cool. Windrider shadows pass over you while you're plodding along on the ground. (I'm sure I will turn them off for performance reasons before long)
2. Wands no longer trigger global cooldown == nearly as awesome as
3. Corruption is finally insta-cast as default
4. No more demon trainers. No more buying sodding demon skill books.
5. My hunter's cat knows prowl. And kung-fu but I'm more impressed about prowl. (I never trained it before the upgrade)
6. New Soul-Drain animations are sweet
7. Herbs will make me richer than Croesus. (Well, richer than before).
8. (EDIT) Bolt of Netherweave now only needs 5 pieces of cloth instead of 6.

Things I'm not so sure about

1. I used to like having to go out with my hunter, find an animal, train it and then learn it's skill. I will miss that.
2. My 'lock does not seem to be quite as powerful as he once was. My voidy takes damage and doesn't seem to be able to hold aggro. I ran out of mana and didn't know what to do. I got pulverized by a Draenei Warrior (although apparently that isn't new.) Maybe it's just been a long time since I played it properly or maybe I should have not specced afflic.
3. I was going to respec my pally to prot for some AOE grinding in Plaguelands but there hardly seems any point now so I stayed Ret.
4. Gnomes didn't get removed from the game.
5 (EDIT). FUCKING BOLT OF FUCKING NETHERWEAVE ONLY FUCKING NEEDS 5 FUCKING PIECES OF CLOTH!  The day after I grind a fuck load of these fuckers out at 6 pieces of cloth they go and fucking reduce the fucking requirement.

They definitely reduced the power of the 'lock.  I'm still demonology spec after the changes, haven't had any serious issues though but I do notice the VW has trouble keeping aggro if I put more than 2 DoTs on the mob.  I do miss the "1 resistance per level" Master Demonologist change to the Felhunter though.  And yeah, I spent a few gold the other day upgrading my pets only to find that they are now built in (which is nice, but still).

Oh, and 15G for 2 stacks of Mageroyal and 10G for 2 stacks of Peacebloom that had just been taking space?  Win.

I have around 7 Chars at 70, all different classes.

This patch was pure fucking love for all of them.

However, my Prot Warrior is just waiting for the nerfbat.  He soloed Ramparts.

...

Read it again.  Soloed it.  Closest he came to death was 151 health after taking on 10 at a time.  No joke.

Christ, it's insane what they've done to the Prot Warrior.

Yeah prot is a powerful spec for both classes that have it now.  Go try something harder and you'll be surprised.

I did some dailies with my friend who plays a protection pally last night, and it's like playing with a whole new class.  He can do a lot more, and doesn't seem so...plodding.  And his gear is really nothing special.  It's a nice change, and it's gotten him to enjoy his paladin again. 

Shaman wise, any thoughts I'd entertained in the past of speccing out of enhancement at some point, even for a bit, are gone.  Maelstrom is nifty, and I love the spirit wolves. 

It's beyond enjoyment.  It's actually exciting.  Tanking has never been this much fun.

Shockwave is really cool, the new TC is great and the changes make shield slam fun.  You put that together with the sheer fucking amount of rage you're SWIMMING IN and the fact that revenge will remove limbs now and you've got yourself a party.

I may get bored of it, but for right now it not only helps my game, but makes me look forward to soloing as a Prot chap.

God my prot warrior has become amazing. I am actually a threat in pvp now I do enough damage to kill people and if you thought a stun locking rogue was bad just wait till you see shock wave, concussion blow and improved rend.

My prot warrior got jumped by a pally last night while doing one of the SSO dailies. In the past, that usually meant a slow inevitable death since I could take a ton of damage, but my attacks did less damage then wet noodles. After getting over the initial surprise, I just started slamming, revenge/HS (yea glyph), TCing, shockwave. He had to bubble and run off, I wanted to chase but I aggroed some other stuff durin the fight and had to take care of that. Not sure what spec the pally was, but I was happy as hell.

Of course, 4 minutes later I get jumped by a druid and my brain freezes up. For some reason I was freaking out more during this fight trying to decide what to hit. At one point I stopped pushing buttons for 5 seconds going "Concussion Blow! I need to use Concussion Blow! Where the hell is Concussion Blow! Shit, I didn't map it after the respec!" I did take him down to about 1/3 health.

I've got way too many buttons now and I need to figure out how to arrange them better. Right now they're still set up in a pre-3.0 style which doesn't work well with the new mechanics.

Best change about this as a prot paladin IMO?  I can kill single mobs without taking all night and burning up half my mana on each one.

Multiple mob fights were always easier, but now they're silly easy.   Even with my PvP suit on (so crappy dodge, parry & block) three or four mobs will keep me in endless mana no matter what I spam.

In the same half-purple/half-blue PvP gear, I can now heal for an amount that's not an embarassment.  Got the glyph that does an extra 10% of Holy Light's healing to 5 targets within 100 yards, I likes it.

Avenger's shield change is OK for DPS, but awesome for BGs.  No more stopping to cast the damn spell while the person I'm chasing just runs out of range before it goes off.

New three-target hammer melee attack seemed a bit meh, but that's probably because I'm using a +spelldamage weapon; a DPS 1-hander might be more impressive.

Fuck spelldam weapons. Seriously.  Get a tanking/ DPS weapon.  My pally's a blacksmith so I made that Dragon-headed mace (only the 91dps version.) I'm hitting 3 mobs at a time for 6-700 damage (non crit) where with my "uber" 41.7 damage-capped spelldam weapon I was hitting for 2-300.   Yeah, My spelldam is 300 lower and "only" 311 without it, but that damage is better for aggro than the shitty extra spelldam my +aggro attacks get.

Hmm...Affliction-specced, I don't really feel much pain. Maybe a -little-...I didn't have much +dmg, though, ~460, so maybe it's the coefficient change that   hit hard. Between the tweaks and Haunt, I know I DO feel like a pally in a dress. I have more health coming in than I need to tap out. It's a little crazy

Demo-specced, why on god's green earth would you ever have the voidwalker out for anything other than a free shield while fooling around in a contested area? Serious question.

I can confirm that prot warriors are  :drill:. I specced my warrior [all in s3 arena gear, haven't pvp'd since mid-s3] 5/5/51 on a whim (season2 weapon+shield, not even 'proper' tanking gear), and ... wow. I can kill stuff almost as fast, and actually have a better shot at some classes than I used to in my old arms spec. I actually stunlocked a shaman from 100% to 0%, kept him from healing anyone on his team other than a NS healing wave and a riptide or two... and I feel sorry for that arms warrior who tried to gank me on the isle of QD. Prot may not be a rogue in plate+shield, but it's pretty close.

I hope they don't nerf pally/warrior tanks as collateral damage when the nerfstick begins to swing at ret pallies.. right now prot feels fun without being overpowered (mostly because all other classes got buffed like crazy as well).

Edit: Not that I'll end up playing WOW over WAR much, at least until WOTLK is out [and probably a while after]... the WAR shiny hasn't worn off yet, kek.


-- Z.

Prot is certainly more fun one on one now. You are no longer a total joke in pvp, which is the way it should be. That being said, there are still classes that can beat your head in.

http://blue.mmo-champion.com/5/11296670044-retribution-paladin-changes.html


Not like we didn't see that coming.

I still seem to be hemorrhaging mana more than I used to although tap helps (and Dark Pact seems to have negligible effect which means I'm either using it wrong or it's not great).  VW isn't as bad as I thought it was although does seem to have trouble holding aggro if I stick more than a couple of DoTs on. 

What're your talents? And gear?

Because I like tossing him into 4-5 mobs at a time and holding aggro on them all while I beat them down one at a time.  Sure, the Felguard is nice, but the VW just seems to have less downtime even if the killing time is slightly slower.

Less one month, Wrath is coming. cant wait.  :oh_i_see:

I'm having fun on my priest. Deep disc is a completely new style of healing compared to 20/41 holy, and I'm enjoying a new playstyle. The only thing bugging me is that my PW:S glyph seems to be broken.

I've also made ~1000g off glyphs so far, mostly off the Slowfall Minor I discovered. I doubt this gravy train will last very long, but for now I'm loving it.

Im a little dissapointed in the feral druid changes for feral tank specced people.

I compared my old stats to my new stats, and even though i was supposed to gain 10% dodge from new talents, AND I gained about 40 pts of Agility due to the stat redistribution from most druid armor losing it's extra Armor, I actually ended up with about .6% LESS dodge then i had before the patch.

So I basicly lost 10% dodge, AND about 10% physical damage mitigation off my armor (though i gain that back from Protector of the Pack as 12% total damage reduction in a 5 man group.

On the plus side however, I get 6% crit immunity from Talents alone, meaning I need like 1 piece of resilience gear to push me over the level 70 Crit immunity cap.

Critical hit immunity at level 70 is 5.6% for raid bosses I believe.  Druids are now crit immune out of the box, and daze immune too.

Hunter changes are interesting.

New disengage is funny, makes it useful outside of, well, nothing which is what it was useful for post BWL.
Deterrence being a core talent is still a headscratcher, woulda thought scatter was more of a core talent than deterrence.
Change to kill command makes it almost a waste of mana (basically an extra special attack worth of dmg a minute for your pet, snooze).
Steady being affected by ammo is really pretty noticable.
Aspect of the viper is a mixed bag, sure you basically get a full mana bar by auto-shotting for 25 secs, but it has no OOC regen ability which is what made it the great farming/levelling buff, the dmg penalty makes it really annoying to leave on.
EVERYTHING randomly cancelling autoshot is getting on my nerves.
Misdirect having a 30s cooldown is nice, but if you have a focus macro, using it on your pet is annoying because if you mount, your focus gets cleared because your pet disappears.
Best change to pets (outside of the whole Loyalty level talent point shit) is that they took out the 4 auto-use talent cap it looks like. Now if they would only let us make a second pet bar so we can have all the skills visible at once.

I have not had a chance to spec anything but BM (had to get my exotic pets to level them to 70 for when LK hits) but overall the changes are probably not terrible.

My druid lost a little, but still wtfpwns quite a bit compared to other classes solo.  Making faerie fire not require talent points to get was stellar.

Keep an eye on all of your pets abilities.  They randomly turn themselves off or on. (This is most noticible with pets that have cower, as suddenly it will hold 0 aggro.)

Also, check out your dodge. You have none. Hunters got nerfed hard because "Well you have mail aspect of the monkey and disengage, you should be fine." (from Blizzcon)

They announced 2 days ago that Viper will be changing (again) because they don't like the way its working.  And apparently late yesterday they announced that hunters will get a new aspect at 75 and 80, replacing Aspect of the Hawk and Monkey. It will be called "Aspect of the Dragonhawk" and all the abilities of hawk and monkey will be in it.  All talents that affect monkey or hawk will affect the new aspect.

I setup my Disc priest for Deep disc as well, but I haven't done anything with him yet.  How are you actually healing?  You useing PW:S a lot, or just when the shield talent procs?  I keep hearing that "it's a new way of healing" but no one ever actually says how it works.

Incoming scattered thoughts and impressions:

I'm not sure I've figured an optimal pattern, but generally I toss up PW:S then use the Borrowed Time for either Penance or GHeal (3s GHeals suck so hard). Then either flash heal, renew or PoM. PW:S + hasted Penance is amazing for dealing with spike damage on a tank, and it's a lot of fun to heal with. The biggest problem is that GHeal as a 3s cast is noticeably slower. I ditched the PW:S glyph for the flash heal glyph and now I'm using flash as my main standby heal, only using Gheal when Borrowed time is up. I'm using renew a lot more too. If you don't have Borrowed Time up one or two flash heals is probably a better option.

Grace is too short, it's always dropping off the tank the second I have to heal someone else. This is more of a 5-man problem I guess, since in a raid I could delegate the raid healing to someone else. Still coming from deep holy I do feel far weaker at dealing with group damage, but the single target healing is more engaging. I'm slowly settling down and finding a rhythm; although I'll need to see how ZA goes over the weekend.

One nice thing is that as almost everything is instant now I feel like I have so much more mobility. Even the penance cast feels quick. Divine Aegis is fun, the main problem is that all my existing cloth healing gear has sod all crit. I've swapped in a few good former-dps items, but I need more crit to be getting the most out of the 56/6/0 spec.

Also, I've had zero problems with any tanks and shields. Even with chained DA procs and PW:S none of my tanks ever had problems with rage or mana.

That's because tanking classes have abilities based on regening mana/ rage from actual tank stuff instead of being healed or taking damage now.  Even soloing my Pally doesn't have mana problems unless I take on a series of 3-4 single mobs that don't proc my defenses enough for the mana output.

Yah, as a warrior I'm literally swimming in rage when tanking. As long as a mob is hitting me, I get revenge procs [2-rage attack usable after a block/dodge/parry], which in turn can proc free shield slams along with making my next heroic strike costs 0 rage. Add the fact that blocked attacks generate 2 rage each, and it's very hard to dump all that rage. Even if I spam my most powerful abilities, I just don't run out of rage [unless I'm soloing a caster or something].

Not that I'm complaining, mind. :P


-- Z.

I can't dump rage fast enough on heavy or fast hitting bosses (Lynx for example), I love it. The best part is that my rotation is gone. It's pretty much a prioritization scheme now, where I hit the most valuable skill that's up. That's way more interesting than the crap I was doing before, but you could really just roll your face across your keyboard and tank now.

Not sure if this is the best place to put it, but I just resubbed to check out the changes since WAR wasn't letting me log in last night and I found that I don't have a guild anymore.  I havn't played this game for any substantial time since before the summer and I gots no one to play with.

So if any guild wants a level 70 A: Shaman or a H: Paladin lemme know I'll transfer so I can play with some decent folks.  I think I'm going to attempt to play WAR with WOW on the side.

Bah, I still have dodge, but christ....only having 14% with 800 agility unbuffed is retarded. 22 with monkey. The amount of expertise on most gear now totally negates most of that.

How about they make it how it was instead,  put deterrence back as a talent (it has already been nerfed to shit over the years anyway) and give us scatter as a core ability if they deem it necessary to give us yet another core talent.

My guys are starting our guild back up on Tich, Horde side. Its going to be casual with 10 man raiding. No more 25 man hardcore shit, so if your interested, send me a PM. MrHat and Jayce where both in it before.

The Protector of the Pack doesn't stack with armor mitigation, it takes off whatever gets through the armor.  So if you were at 70% armor and are now at 60% armor, PotP takes 12% off of the 40% that gets through, bringing it down to 35.2%.  Which means your effective armor mitigation is still 4.8% lower than before.

However, I think the goods outweigh the bads for bears.

-The Natural Reaction talent, on top of the 6% dodge, makes dodging beneficial to rage generation rather than a detriment.  Back when dodge=no rage, dodging kinda sucked for bears, but now it's wholly positive.
-Brutal Impact cuts the recharge time for Bash in half.  Yay for five-second stuns every thirty seconds.
-+30% Swipe damage from Feral Instinct, plus Swipe hitting limitless targets (plus my Idol of Brutality) makes Swipe a sweet little baby.
-Survival Instincts gives bears a much needed oh shit button for when the healers aren't awake at the wheel.  (And doesn't use global cooldown!)
-Potion use without having to powershift and lose all that built-up rage.
-Barkskin use in bearform for no rage cost, free 20% damage reduction at will that also affects magic damage, which used to be a big problem for bears.  Heavy armor doesn't do a damn thing against spells, but Barkskin does.
-Feral Faerie Fire for free now, and it does damage to help with long-range pulling.
-Nature's Grasp for free, at 100% effectiveness, equivalent to 5 talent points pre-3.0.2.
-The Maul Glyph makes multi-tanking a much easier task.
-Frenzied Regeneration heals more than before.

I really like the new pet talents, plus of course the additional stable spots, and the fact that new pets automatically jump up to -5 levels of you, and of course no more loyalty - really these pet changes are all awesome and very welcome. Although I am a bit disappointed so far with the Exotic pets, there just isn't enough of them really. I thought a Devilsaur would be cool, but the constant stomping got annoying quick. Not to mention every time you turn around there's a hunter with a Devilsaur. Eh, I have a wasp now which I really like, and I'm considering getting a moth.

My Shaman specced back to Enhancement and I love the changes there too. More stuff to do, Maelstrom weapon is huge, and those spirit wolves are awesome with a relatively short reuse timer. Shaman just has a lot "oh shit" buttons with the wolves now the icing on the cake. I've only done some Isle dailies so far but I was carving up mobs so quick it was a bit surreal.

Everyone is loving Ret Pallies now but I brought my level 67 out of retirement and he played as boring as ever, dunno about that.

Still haven't checked out the new Balance stuff for my Druid, looking forward to that.

Barbershop is awesome.

It's not about a lack of boring, It's about seeing big numbers and (to a lesser extent) being viable.   If these guys were melee fans they'd have rolled a melee class with all the tricks and tools that they are now whining that Paladins don't get a long time ago.   They're Paladin fans who only want to play a class that has the tag "Paladin" (that acts like a rogue, or a warrior or a priest)

So the PvE -30% HP thing made stuff that was basically a mechanic fight a loot pinata.

We just did ZA with most of our old bear run group. We used to do pretty well, having like 3-5 minutes to spare on an average bear run. We had 27 minutes left on the timer when we killed the lynx boss. Basically took 25 minutes less than we used to, with a group comp that would not have been viable last week (no pally tank, only one pally, no spriest, no real consumable buffs). Hex lord we just killed all the adds and then burned him down in 2 spirit bolt phases. Zul'Jin died in less than 2 minutes. We were in the zone for a total of 35 minutes. Threat generation is a joke too.....I used to have to watch my threat, esp at the beginning of fights with high threat generating tanks. I CAN'T pull aggro now, and I am doing at least 15% more DPS than I was a week ago.

There are guilds on my server that had never set foot in sunwell 1-shotting brutallus with 1minute left on the enrage timer.

I am not trying to sound like an elitist, but a large part of the fun of the game as far as raids, even 10 mans, was the challenge of it. After that ZA I dont have any desire to set foot in a BC raid instance. I am just going to keep plunking around on various acheivements I can do solo/in small groups and call it good.

WotLK had me somewhat excited, now I am not sure I will be able to stomach it. The leveling dungeons and lvl 80 stuff is either going to be as trivial as the top flite stuff is now, or so hard that unless my friends who tanked all through tier6 content are around it would be suicide to enter.

The leveling dungeons will be trivial to you because you'll be massively outgearing them. The level 80 heroics are appropriately tough IMO and balanced with all of the insane goodies we have now.

You do remember that in addition to the power boost from the new talents we got, the bosses also got 30% of their HP hacked off right? The end-game content I've tried so far in the beta is decently balanced. The heroic 5-mans overall are more consistent, so you may find them "too easy" compared to say pre-nerf heroic Shadow Labs which was akin to beating your dick with a hammer. The entry level raids are probably going to seem easy too since they're not going to be horribly broken/cockblocky like Gruul/Mags 1.0 or "sneeze and the flame wreath goes off" Kara 1.0.

We'll see how the difficulty scaling is when we get to Ulduar.

So it's not a loot level reset like BC was?

The BC loot reset was in a large part due to the reworking of stamina itemisation on BC gear vis-a-vis vanilla gear.

It's a bigger loot reset than BC was in raw power (BT/MH gear starts going away about level 76-77, you'll replace some SW gear before 80), but the leveling dungeons were designed this time to be totally doable with non-healing specced healers and non-tanking specced tanks. They're also designed to be done by people in zone-level greens.

It's not elitist, but when all 25 or 10 people have to line up and click buttons in exactly the right order with just the right combination of gear and pray to the luck gods at the same time, that's not fun to most people.  As described earlier, "beating your dick with a hammer" type fun.  You may miss every now and again, but most of the time you hit yourself and eventually wonder "why do I keep beating myself with a hammer in the hopes of missing?"  I'm glad that now I might just get the chance to see some of the raid zones because I specifically stayed out due to the crappy mechanics and insane time commitments to get there.

I know the 30% reduction was in there. I had mentioned it specifically but edited it out because I thought I sounded too whiney.

Basically, with the huge leap in power of DPS/Threat/Healing, 30% was overkill. It goes beyond trivializing the content. 30% is just overkill.

I know they want everyone to experience the content. But making everything so easy that you can trade channel pug Illidan just seems a bit meh.

Effectively I am a little bitter about the whole thing. I was in a guild that was farming Hyjal a year ago, we were the first on the realm to kill Brutallus. I will never have the "Burning Crusade Dungeon Master" acheivement while people who were wiping on Gruul's 3 weeks ago will probably have it before the xpac hits. Hell, I am as much annoyed by knowing that if the 15 of the core of our guild's raiding force who are still around wanted to get together and pull in 10-15 more randoms, we could have Kil'Jaeden dead by the end of the second timer. That zone was hard. They needed to do SOMETHING to make killing K'J pre-patch mean something to the people who did it as the whole removing the Bear mounts. I don't know, maybe they did and I missed it. This is not like people whining about removing attunements, this is totally trivializing stuff at the same time as making having done that thing worth "something".

Hate to say it, but you are not going to be trade pugging Hyjal or BT end bosses any time soon, unless your trade pug pool consists of tier 5 and 6 geared people who want something to do on an off day in instances they no longer care about.

Even with 30% knocked off of them, some of those fights are going to be hard if people are unfamiliar with the encounters. 

Sure, the first 3 bosses in Hyjal will likely be killed by a lot more people now, but Azgalor will still wipe raids quite handily because people will stand in the fire, or not run to the doom tanks, etc.

The change just makes it easier for people slightly below the curve who could already get the bosses to low health kill them more reliably.  Terrible people will still be terrible, and getting a group of them together will not magically allow them to clear Hyjal or BT through numbers alone.

Or in summary:

30% less mob health will not cure bads of their situational awareness issues and poor reaction skills.  And those are the issues that most often wipe raids, not lack of heals, or dps, or a bosses enrage timer.

Are those raids you're whining about going to be PUGgable? If yes, then Blizzard is doing something right. If no, then casual players still won't be able to touch them, so why are you whining?

I really wish they would have some content, even entry-level content, without the blasted lockout timers.  Those are the only things that keep 10-man "raids" from being puggable while they're still relevant.  Face it, Kara is the Upper Blackrock Spire of Burning Crusade, Naxx will probably be the UBRS of Lich King, but you won't see pugs going for them like there were in the old days for UBRS, because if you kill an easy boss and then the group sucks when you start to get higher up, you just wasted a week.

In the old days I'd estimate that well over 65% of all UBRS "raids" i got into wiped when it started getting halfway difficult, past Rend (sometimes even at the rookery or just beyond).  But, at least all I wasted was an hour or two and could come back later that day or maybe tomorrow and try again with the next bunch of retarded monkeys.  In BC, it wasn't until relatively recently that I saw serious Kara pugs actually succeeding sometimes, simply because all the -good- players that actually might want something from Kara didn't want to waste their week lockout timer on a group that might be complete nitwits.

These days Kara pugs succeed because there are enough people that outgear them by such a wide margin that they feel like they can make up for the rest of the group's slack (which is true) and are thus willing to give it a shot a little more often with people they don't know.  And because, it's just for badges and all, anyway.

Please tell me you used the term "bads" in an ironic fashion. WoWForums vernacular is retarded.

Tee hee.

Kara is the UBRS of BC.  Oh I remember when that was pointed out 2 years ago and everyone said "Bullshit it'll never be like that."  Ah, memories.

There's plenty of folks that PUG kara on my server, yes, because the overgeared folks drag them along on badge runs.  The same as overgeared folks dragged idiots along to UBRS and the thing keeping people out (and keeping them from getting "Jenkins") was the key.

I'm from Tichondrious.  Such forum vernacular is practically engraved in our bones by this point.

And Merusk, I really wish Tich was like your server.  It is pretty much impossible to get into a kara "badge run" unless you are full t5 / badge gear, because the people doing them simply dont want to waste the extra 5 minutes your sub 1k dps will force them to suffer with.  There is just no compassion left any more. They dont care if you have 3 other characters who are all exalted with the Violet Eye, and that you could do kara in your sleep.  If you dont overgear the place, they wont even touch you.

Our server has been incredibly flaky since the patch.  It's obviously thrashing under some load, but we're getting dumped from queues, timing out on attacks.  Needs to end so I can get me candy treats.

I have a level 70 warrior that I foolishly transferred to a server to play with some f13 folks a long time ago. I decided to patch up and play with the new prot talents. Despite that server being a low population one and it not thrashing under any load at all it too is flaky as hell. Seems to start the same way, you can fight, but you can't loot, eventually the client continues to pretend but you're in limbo and the server doesn't respond at all. Sometimes there's a 5 minute period of unresponsiveness and then the server suddenly updates the client. Other times you're dropped. Eventually the server gives up and reboots or somebody restarts it. Usually that is followed by a little bit of rollback. It all takes me back to launch. Ah, nostalgia.

 The looting error is the same launch bug WoW often had with mining/looting/herbing etc.  You time out to the server and stay crouched.

Gear is nothing special:

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

Though I am going to be tweaking that and moving Imp HS to Imp Felhunter...Apprently the new affliction thing is to have the Felhunter out, rather than the phased imp as a DP manabattery. Yeah, Dark Pact feels really inadequate right now, to the point that I'm thinking of dropping it. :\ It's gone from  replacing lifetap to being something for emergencies only.

It's nice that that will effectively give me a purge and a silence, but a chunk of your DPS depends on actually having him chewing on something, which...Idunno, if I wanted to be frobbing things with a pet, I'd have gone demo. I have to give it a bit to see how I like it, though.

Wow another person from my server. Weirdness.

Hmm...Maybe I'm just an underachiever. I think they're awesome, now...My armor and dodge kind of went in the shitter, but actual tanking feels much more fun, now. Swipe changed from three targets to cone AoE? Glyph of Maul? Longrange Growl? Barkskin in-form? Uncrittable with only 3/3 SotFittest and no +def gear? Additional bleed synergy?

 I'll take one in every color! >:)

Hah! Yeah, despite it being one of the ancient hi-pop release servers, I almost never run across anyone who's on Proudmoore.

You're in good company here strangely enough. There's like...5-6 other people who post here regularly that're on Proudmoore. We're all alliance-side though I believe.

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

I was up to my ass in five-mans all last night on my 70 ret pally and I never had to drink. Not once. Jesus. Mana hax.

If I remember right, all casters are going to have to start stacking Spirit at least to some degree for mana regen. It's part of the whole standardization of loot kick Blizzard is on. Instead of a set amount DP may scale with your Spirit - don't quote me on it but I remember reading something about it when Beta began.

Alliance! Heathens!  :grin:


Ooh, that's a good point. Yeah, I have that stuck in the back of my head, but forgot to look up exactly when they were doing, and how it affected non-prousts. Thanks for the reminder!

Since that last post, I've gone back and bascially Learned 2 Play.  Once I stopped trying to keep playing like I was still Demon specced. change my rotation to include some extra spells (how did I live wiithout Haunt) and I'm not having any problem.  I've managed to up my spellpower gear which means lifetap is far more effective than I remember it being.  I know the Felpup is meant to be pet of choice for afflic but to be honest, I'm still using the VW which I think still generates more threat so can tank longer. No matter what happens, I end up drawing aggro from it anyway but with the felpup, that would be almost instance and I don't have the survivability I did with demon.

Not as nerfed as I first thought.

We ran Zul Aman last night for the first time since the raid zone nerf/talent change.

Holy shit is it easy now. We went from a guild/alliance that was barely getting the bear boss down right around the 20 minute timer, able to get the eagle boss down, and failing on the others, to getting bear/eagle/lynx all done under the timer with 8 min to spare and killing every boss in the zone.  :awesome_for_real:

Its no wonder they took the bear mount out, or every level 70 character in the game would have one.

yeah, za is rediculously easy now.

Guild i am with now could reliably get to the 4th boss with time up on the timer for 4 chest, but 90% of the time, would fail the chest with a 1 or 2 minute over time.

Our first za run after the patch, consisted of us basicly saying Screw CC, and AoEing down trash pulls, then crushing the bosses.  We finished the 4 chest run with almost 22 minutes to spare on the timer, and that INCLUDED a wipe and rebuff before dragonhawk boss because some bug with hunter pets caused the hunter's pet to aggro 2/3 of the trash gauntlet before the boss all at once.

T6 guilds who could always get the timer could probably clear the place right to zul'jin before the timer ran out.

Actually, TBH, you should probably drain-tank rather than even have the pet tank at all.

That's pretty much what I used to do. Now it's not working out as well.

Not that it matters - I'm questing way below my level so I just spam siphon life/CoA/Corr and Haunt and I have no downtime.

We had a go at Kael tonight by teaming up with another guild. I now see what all the fuss is about, our best attempt was around 70% HP in phase 4. I don't know how those guys did it back when all you had was T4-T5 gear and no clue what was going on.

ZA is a lot easier now post-nerf, the dragonhawk boss is still the hardest animal boss imo, just because it needs the most control. We wiped a bit on Akil'zon because his storm isn't preceded by the rain noise anymore. The toughest boss though is definately the gong.

In other news, it seems like the downstairs mirror version of Kara is getting a boss as part of the WoTLK scourge invasion event:

The gong boss is a lot easier when you realize its channeled - just click it once and leave it alone.  :grin:

We would have not had trouble with the dragonhawk, except apparently our DPS needed to be EXPLICITLY TOLD to help the pally tank killl the hatched birds. I kind of thought that went without saying, but apparently not. As it was we killed it with 4 people still alive or so.

Did they fix it so it works again?

First couple nights after the patch you would click and it would hit once and stop so you had to have everyone click at the same time.

We wiped on the gong boss 2x that night, then proceeded to finish the zone in less than 40 minutes door to door.

True Story  :uhrr:

The dragonhawk boss is hardest because with the new lower hp on the boss and higher dps from players, getting everyone to stop bloody DPS so he doesent hit 30% and bust all the eggs at once is and effort in frustration.

We did that too, thankfully Judge of LIght is all kinds of retarded about agro !  :oh_i_see:

Yeah, we did this on our first attempt in 3.0.2

My guild is crushing Kara and ZA in about 1.5 hours each since the change.  Our biggest problem is just being sloppy due to how fast we are mowing through things.  We were able to do the first two bosses in CoT-Hyjal as well, with only 20 players.  14-15 of them having never been to Hyjal at all.  Our progression was limited to 4/5 SSC and 3/4 TK before 3.0.2.

Achievements and other changes have tons of people logging back in.  It'll be double, maybe triple the amount of people online once WotLK goes live.

Even with the max talent for anti-pushback on channeled spells I find it way more efficient to let a vw take most of the hits with my lock. I can do drain tanking. It just feels way less effective because my drains get interrupted so much. I haven't tried since the new changes to how spell pushback works went in though.

The changes to spell pushback are very noticeable, and welcome, although I've only really been using static casts, not channeled spells.

Yeah, I just run around questing with the Imp out.  Pull with a SB, follow up with Haunt, then Siphon Life, Corruption, CoA.  After all are on, I pull the next mob, and so on.  With Dark Pact, I don't have to stop for mana.  If I ever need burst health, there's Deathcoil.  Juggling about 3 at a time seems best.  More than that, I gotta Drain Life for a fight, e.g. slow down.  The Voidwalker was much much slower.

With the XP changes in Outland, I've gained about 2.5 levels in a few hours.  It's nice.

So you're whining that your elitist catass badge won't mean anything and that god forbid, the masses might get to experience some of the content you did?

 :awesome_for_real:

Go try Black Temple :P

My new guild is TK /SSC geared mostly, with badge gear / za gear (all bosses except Vashj / Kael down SSC /TK) walked into BT with pretty much no experience except a few guildies who had been there before on another toon, and 1shot our way clear through to bloodboil, whom we 2 shot. We didnt attempt mother sharaz because no one has any shadow resist gear.  But the boss fights were pretty easy.

Karathess = Joke
Supremus = Ez
Shade of Akama = wow, that was fast (adds died so fast we were on the Shade himself after about the 4th wave)
Gorefiend = Constructs? what constructs?  We had 2 people die and constructs in the raid, and basicly just burned the hell out of him.
Bloodboil is pretty much a joke too.  As long as the target of Fel Rage manages to stay alive, and people can do the Blood Boil dance, he should die just like the rest.

Hell, it might be amusing to try mother, to see of you could kill her without needing as much shadow resist.

My guild went to Black Temple last night.  I'm not a raider, and joined this guild a month or so ago.  My guild apparently used to raid, but no longer does.  Decent players.

I have only been to Kara 3 times, and only since I joined this guild.  I have never been to TK or SSC.  My gear is season 2 bg stuff with the exception of 3 pieces of T4.

Our raid had no resists.  Mother was an iffy fight but we did it in one try.

Anyway, we made it to the Council before being unable to continue - I think that's the 8th boss.

So with some geared people in key positions and most of us in T4 or worse, we downed 7 bosses.

For people like me, this is the only way I'm going to see this content.  I like being a tourist and visiting, but I don't really want to become intimately involved with raiding mechanics.  I'm much more interested in the economic/crafting game.  My idea of fun is not in spending night after night learning fights and struggling really hard to defeat bosses for weeks or months. (I know some people do like that).

Mother can just be zerged to death now.

My guild threw together a raid last night with a guild we're buds with and one-shot everything up to the 4th boss in Hyjal. We called it there since it was really late and the raid was so impromptu. We'll probably kill that guy tonight and do some BT since Archimonde takes like an hour to learn.

so farming for shadow resist is meaningless vs mother then?  Good to know.

Another nice change I didn't notice until the tip on a loading screen told me so: you can now have 10 characters per account per server. So, everyone who wanted every class can still do that in the expansion.

Wasn't it always like that? I could swear a few folks in my guild are already set up like that.

10 character slots has been since pre-TBC for sure. Don't know if it was in at start but know it's been around for the 2 years I've been on and off playing.

So did the 30% nerf hit old world raid bosses too?  I got together a group of about 12 folks on my server last night and we did MC.  We started pulling at about 8:00 and were to Majordomo by 9:30.  That's just nutty.  Hell, the only reason we weren't done with the place by 10 was we had to wait on cooldowns/ swap people's alts for the quintessence to put out the runes and spawn Domo.

For anyone else doing this: It's easy to overthink the fights.  We did the whole place with 2 tanks, me and a feral druid.  Just get a 3rd person to pull the priests out on Sulf as they still complete heal each other faster than you can DPS them down. I think we discussed how to do him and Domo longer than the actual fights took.

I'm not sure if there were nerfed but I got pulled into an MC run of mostly 70s for the MC achievement. We took down Rag in a little over a minute. Not sure if that's just an indication of how much stronger 70s are or if Rags was nerfed as well.

Were you mass pulling?  We started off only doing traditional 1-2 mob pulls, but as we got towards Sulf/ Golemagg and began to gel as a group I just begain picking up 2-3 packs as did the druid.  That was entertaining, as I recall vividly how bad it used to suck.

It still stucks getting tossed up onto one of those walls in Rags room and dying, though.  Whoops, no LOS to rezz!

Ya it's always been 10.

It's always been ten and I swear to fucking God if they don't up the limit next time they add a class I'm going to knife someone.

I'm 100% sure it was not in at least until some time after the WotLK announcement. I know this because there was a heated argument about there not being enough slots for people to have every class and Blizzard said they were not expanding it.

The heated argument you're talking about I think was "what if they add ANOTHER class". I've had 10 names reserved on my server since release day.

I had 10 characters - 1 of each class and a bank alt - on my last server.  I haven't been on there since shortly after TBC came out and well before the WotLK announcement.

Also, a change like this can be easily googled if it ever happened recently. This gamespot news article (http://uk.gamespot.com/news/6153087.html) about realm transfers from 2006 explicitly mentions the 10 slot availability.

Weird. I would have bet good money on being right on this one. /shrug

Zombie got your brain maybe  :grin:

In case you were wondering, you also have a cap of 50 characters for your entire account. And back at release, it wouldn't properly reset if you deleted a character, so you could hit the cap without actually HAVING 50 characters. I spent a lot of time chatting with friendly GMs about that one.  :grin:

And I thought I liked making a lot of alts...  Of course that might be tempered by wanting to keep all my alts on the same server.

It also wouldn't properly register you as having a character if the server wasn't in the selection screen for some reason. So you could have more than 50. I had substantially more than 50 for a while. I had to delete over a dozen of them when I wanted to make a new character once.

No.

But the scaling from 60-70, especially with the power of new itemization and the new talents like LOLRET make early raid stuff seem so much easier than before. MC was tuned to be doable with a 40 person raid rocking the poorly itemized blues from Stratholme/Scholomance/and Blackrock Spire (and later Dire Maul). As itemization got better, the power curve went up a lot. Personal DPS of 300-400 was rockin the top of the charts in the MC days, by Naxx it was 2 and 3 times that. Golemagg still has 800k Health, but when you are running a 10 man group that puts out 3x the DPS that a 40 man level 60 group would have, and you have tanks with up to 3x the health and 3x the armor they would have had at 60, the balance shifts a lot.

That sounds identical to what happened when Kunark and Velious expansions hit EQ.  Funny how things change yet stay a bit the same.  I guess it's just the diku mechanic: make a boss hard by increasing his dps and maxxing his hps.  Sooner or later the power curve catches up as expansions release.

It would be refreshing to see an MMO expansion come out that didn't immediately render all old content useless.  Yes, I know it's been done... it would still be nice to have it be an extension of the existing game rather than a new game built on top of the old game.  Marketing, moneyhats, and all that kind of make it impossible, I guess.

You already said it.  DIKU makes it impossible.  It is very difficulty for any level-based game to prevent mud-flation.

We spent a month cleaning out the DB to re-itemize our MUD, and it would be miniscule in comparison to current games.  The downgrade was also not as extreme as what would happen in something like WoW.

I wanted Horde and Alliance characters, but not on the same server (a leftover habit from DAoC, I suppose) and I was reeeeeally indecisive about race/class combinations in the beginning when I was making my Horde people. But I do make a lot of alts anyway. And I level those bitches, which is why I will seriously storm Blizzard's gates if they don't expand how many characters you can have per server if they add more classes. I have a grand total of one character left that is under level 40 (a level 12 mage ... I suck at leveling mages) on my Alliance server. I can't delete one after I get a Deathknight. I can't.

<sob>

I imagine we were but I didn't get summoned in until right before the Majordomo fight. A lot of the guild (including me) have never seen these fights but we just treated them like a straight up tank-n-spank.

EQ expansions didn't really render old content useless.  Plane of Sky was tough in the Velious Age, and still had worthwhile drops, even though it was introduced pre-Kunark.  All the way until Serpent's Spine, which was the last I played EQ in, your non-cutting edge players were doing content 1-3 expansions old to gear up for the next expansion.  My guild was raiding the Demiplane of Blood and was just working on defeating Lord Mayong Mistmoore when Serpent's Spine came out, which was two expansions beyond Darkhollow.  We raided new bosses too, but the new bosses were basically the low-end of the next expansion content.

WoW instantly obsoletes old content because the quest drops and mob drops in the expansion are better than raid gear from the previous era, meaning that only the highest-end of the high end raiders have raid gear that lasts them all the way to the new max level.  Tier 1/2 gear was getting replaced before 70 when BC came out, some of it replaced as early as 62 or so - some of the Naxx gear was still useful at 70, especially sets, but only the top end raiders ever touched Naxx before BC.

There's upsides and downsides to both ways of doing things.  Lich King looks like it's going to strike a little more of a balance than BC did (the massive itemization revamp with BC was a lot of the reason for the instant obsoletion) but it's still going to make everything before it completely obsolete by the time you're 80. 

The thing I like about EQ's method of doing things however, is that it means that, unless you are cutting-edge, there is always a LOT of content for you to be doing.  Dungeons and raids from 2-3 expansions were all relevant.  In WoW, the amount of relevant dungeons, raids, and quests seems very very small in comparison, because only the latest stuff is useful.  That, combined with Blizzard's rather slow pace of content creation is one of the primary reasons I get tired of WoW often and wander off to play something else.

This I honestly do not understand. You get tired of new content, but having buckets of old content you've already done adds longevity?  :uhrr:

Old content to you may be new content to someone else.  Having old content remain relevent means that newer players have more choices.  In WoW, new content seems to render old content useless after a certain point. 

Yeah, there's enough total content that I didn't do all of it very often.  I may have done it a few times, but it's not like doing heroic Mechanar for the 3rd time this week.  There was enough to give me a ton of variety and so if I didn't want to, I didn't have to go to the same places more than once every couple weeks, and still have something to do every day.

Everything is new to a new player though. I don't see many people going "oh woe is me, I only have 16 possible TBC dungeons to run" when they first start these days.

While everything is new to the new player, not all content is worthwhile for advancement.  With the spread of fan and cheat sites, old content gets filtered by even new players if the old content doesn't aid in their advancement.  MMO's attract achievers generally. 

There's also pain in the ass content. Maraudon and Uldaman are dungeons that apply here.

Sunken Temple is the kind of place you want to do one runthrough of, mostly because of all the quests, but also because it's a fun run (once) and you get to kill dragons. Too long, however. ZF (or Z-whatever) in Tanaris is much the same, mostly because of the carrot and many quests.

Dire Maul is too far away from anything, and despite the wing design, is too confusing. Seperate names and a bit more differentiation a la the TBC dungeons would have been good, but that's a lesson learned. The level it's aimed at (low 50's) is also a poor choice. BRD has a similar issue with levels, but most people used to run at least part of it, though that may have been because of the Ony chain.

Most of the TBC dungeons on the other hand, are at least passably differentiated, and the addition of the heroic mode adds longevity to all of them. Having travel distances to all of them be short or trivial also helps a lot. (Strat/Scholo were successful despite the long flights up because they were the only games in town at the time aside from UBRS/LBRS, also Strat was and still is a damn fun, well-designed instance).

The inherent problem with dungeons and raids in TBC was that everything was front-loaded difficulty wise. The only thing that kept the number of Hyjal and BT clears down was the keying requiring you to clear both TK and SSC where even the earlier bosses were more complex fights than late BT and Hyjal fights. From what I hear, they are actually tuning WOTLK raids to be more progressive with Naxx 2.0 being on par with the pre-3.0 Karazhan and scaling up in difficulty from there. The addition of the Undying etc. achievements will make less tightly tuned instances more repeatable for the bleeding edge, while still accessible to the less so as going through an entire 10 man with no deaths in your entire raid is something that not everyone will be able to do.

I can only assume that the "hard wing" of each instance on Heroic is still going to be retardedly difficult without specific classes/overgearing at the beginning of the new expansion simply because Blizzard has a hell of a time tuning 5 man content all the way back to the beginning when Scholomance was 4 hours of pain and suffering.

Only the east wing was doable at sub-60 in Dire Maul - the west (at least Immolthar/Prince) and north wings were probably the hardest level 60 5 man dungeons available.

It is kind of interesting that the 2 dungeons you mention as being good ones (Sunken Temple, Zul Farrak) are two of my least favorite in the game, and the one you mention as confusing etc (Dire Maul) is one of my favorites - probably only dead side Strat was better originally from my perspective. Sunken Temple for me practically defines confusing in terms of dungeon layout, or would if BRD wasn't also hanging around.

Unrelated question (sorry for derail): 

Does anyone know if they've announced what kind of boxes they're releasing for WotLK?  Will there be a "full WoW build with all expansions included" or just the expansion itself?

My current predicament is that I don't have WoW installed on my current PC.  Got the 6 CD's for the original game, plus the couple CD's for Burning Crusade, and I figure that it will be sufficient if I install them in order (with no patching) and then install WotLK.  However, I will probably still have to download a huge patch for the Sunwell stuff, which I'd rather not have to go through.

So, have they said anything about a full build?

See, the problem with that line of thought, is that if you're not cutting or bleeding-edge, there's the issue of "wait.. so why am I buying this expansion again? Oh, for the level/bank slot increase and the one token introductory zone. Great."

With WoW on the other hand, there's content that everyone can immediately access. And it seems they're taking this philosophy further with wotlk with the scaling instances. If you're not already decked out in Purples, you'll be able to use the dungeon drops, if you are, you'll replace them all a few levels in (75-77ish). Nothing wrong with that. You want to be wearing your level 60 armour forever and going through the instances forever saying "hmm.. pass" or "hmm.. sidegrade"?

The intensity of EQ1's mentaility "You must be this tall to enter! Go back and farm those old dungeons before you can do these shiny new ones." Is not something I miss.

I understand WAR has just introduced such a mechanism though.  :awesome_for_real:

Don't bother with your old CDs and all that swapping, go to account management and there is a link to download the latest full client. At the worst it's 1-2 patches behind.

You misunderstand a little. I think Sunken Temple is a good dungeon to do once. This is because of all the quests in there, and also it's the first time you really get to kill dragons. Not something that's fun in terms of doing more than once though. Same deal with ZF, only less cool and fun (the pyramid event is cool though) and because you want ot get your carrot on a stick. Again, not somewhere to voluntarily return to.

What you say about DM illustrated my point perfectly. I didn't know all that, because noone was ever interested in travelling all the way out there to do the place. BRD is also confusing, but it's convenient to get to. (for Alliance at least). BC+ seem to be avoiding making the instances a pain in the butt to get to, and as a result everyone does them all.

The text on that page seems to indicate that after downloading the "Full WoW client" I will still have to apply the Burning Crusade CD to it.  But, anyway, I am trying to avoid downloading, if possible.  That's why I posted the questions.

Except for Crypts.

There is a full BC client as well, and yes, you will have to download.  Beyond that, I don't know.

Spoken like an ally.  Crypts is very popular for one run through for Horde because there's a long and interesting quest chain in Nagrand that cuts through Crypts.

I enjoy taking guildies through it.  It means the dicks will never try to get me to run it again just because "It's the daily!"

Crypts has two levels of retardation that make it annoying:

1) Only 2 bosses, one of which has a retarded -haste mechanic that makes healers want to stick icepicks up their urethras.

2) The stupid fucking bridge.

It is an easy zone, but even post 3.0, it takes us 2x as long to do crypts as we used to do Mechanar before the patch.

The bridge is horrible. It's on par with the Tor Anroc map of WAR in terms of stupid knockback mechanics that can one shot you.

The bridge would be workable, except the things that knock you off are INVISIBLE.  :ye_gods:


And yea, the first boss goes "What, your healer isn't a druid? Fuck you then!"

You know, with lolraiding nowadays, I've been to SSC and Tempest Keep, and I'm still left thinking that the most impressive "Shit... Wow!" zone I've seen is the main chamber in Blackrock Mountain.

I miss that place, just for the ambiance.

Blackrock Mountain is fantastic. For the atmosphere it was always my favourite. The chains, the dragons, the fire... Awesome. But for ambience and atmosphere, Ahn'Qiraj alongside with the music was heavenly. It was fantastic, really. Naxxramas also.

Blackrock Mountain was THE zone. There's never been another zone that put so many people into one place at one time. It wasn't just flying mounts that killed world PVP in WoW, it was the move away from good old Blackrock Mountain. It was just such a great zone to fight over too with the atmosphere, chains, multiple levels, and possibility of falling into lava. (although it was also a bitch when you were already running late and your MT was getting ganked on the way to the raid instance)

I miss it.

Actually Old-School AV and Blackrock Mountain are the things I miss most about vanilla. :sad_panda:

I personally classify the Bridge as an idiot test.  The idiots who usually stop on the bridge and try to kill the Raging souls are the ones who get punted off.  I mean, even basic situational awareness usually lets you avoid the knockback (the range on their explosion is something like a 5 yard radius, so you only have to step a little bit away from it and it detonates harmlessly).

The boss can be a bitch, but the only people who really suffer on that fight are Shamans as healers.  And you should be able to stand at max range and only have 1 stack of the casting debuff.  The annoying part about that boss was never really the casting slow, but rather the nasty as fuck Stacking AoE rend the thing did.

Really, the single reason everyone hates that instance is because it is the only instance in TBC that has 2 bosses in it.  That is just stupid STUPID design there.

Nope, Sethekk Halls also has only 2 bosses (except on Heroic when you're with a druid that can summon Anzu).  Coincidentally, most people don't like going to Sethekk much, either, but they don't hate it as much as crypts.

Uh, the first boss is also a giant "fuck you, you fucking fucks" to paladin healers. Of course, MOST of the boss enounters were big fuck yous to shamans and paladins.

I needed something to keep me awake, I guess.

I just hate crypts since every single aspect of the dungeon is annoying. Every elite mob summons non-elites with irritating abilities, non-elites wander everywhere so any aoe effects like demoralizing shout or thunderclap just brings more adds, the bridge is awful, the first boss -hates- healers without instant cast heals, and for only having 2 bosses there is way, way, way too much trash.

Also it has the same boring styling of Sethekk and Shadow Labs.

Yeah I read that and I'm fairly certain that the first link is the full client. The 2nd link seems to be for people who still have just vanilla wow but want to upgrade it to BC.  I started up the "Full Client" patch and it was going to be 3.2 gigs.  It's also only patch 2.4, so you'd have to download 3.0 and the two smaller updates as well.

Either way, as Selby says, you WILL have to download something.  The client install means fewer downloads, though.  If you install from disc it'll go through a series of small, annoying patches to upgrade you from the BC disk's 2.0.

Crypts also have the MC mobs you can't dispel, that last for a minute. Ever have someone get MC'd, then wipe the party, then leash back with the other mobs?  :awesome_for_real:

I believe the possessors cast it on whoever is closest to them, which is typically the tank; pre-3.0, I was always yelling at worthless mouthbreathers to KILL THE FUCKING POSSESSORS.  You have about 5 seconds to kill a non-elite.  It's not hard, yet people would consistently failed at this extremely simple task.  Post-3.0, I can blow them up myself, so they're not such a bother.
Be happy you never ran pre-nerf crypts.  In an earlier incarnation, those roaming non-elites were hostile.