f13.net

Took 45 minutes to install, no problems.  Far better than the terrible, terrible TBC install which crashed horrendously way back when.


It's nice to be earning xp again - even though it's less than a fortnight since I stopped.  Question now remains whether to get some levels in Outland zones.  Still got all of Nagrand and above to do, quest wise!

Yeah, I have a similar thing.  My druid is just about to hit 69 in Terrokar, with most of Nagrand, and all of BEM, Netherstorm and Shadowmoon to work through.  Part of me says to stick with my levelling guide and get another 2-3 levels in Outland, which means lots of sweet, sweet gold from the quests once I hit 80.  Another part says 'Not Blade Edge fucking mountains again', and to just hop over to Northrend once I hit 70, maybe 71.  Decisions, decisions.

I don't actually have that worry: this is my first 70 and he made it to that with half of Terrokar to go.  Something about Nagrand is already pissing me off though and no-one's going to be around to do the King of the Ogres chain in BEM but I think I'll have to do Netherstorm and SMV because they look so cool.

Any additional patching?

Also, are the servers going down before it goes live, or are they just flipping the "on" switch at midnight for WotLK on the servers? (like world events just spawn or despawn without servers going down?)

After installing the disc, it repatches 3.0.2 and 3.0.3 which doesn't take long - unless you've deleted them from your machine in which case you'll have to download them all again.  No new patches after that. There are rolling restarts on EU servers in a couple of hours but apart from that no downtime of any description.  We also didn't have the post patch problems and server downtime you guys had either.  No missing mail or free epix for us! :)

Decided that I'll mess around in Howling Fjord first - shame not to see some of the new content straight away and at least get the quests for the instances.

I found BEM way, way, way less horrible once I could fly, if that helps.

They did rolling restarts on the US realms about 2 hours ago, wonder if that was to blaze the way.

Just got all my mail items back from blizz.....actually thanking them now because I have 30 days to look at stuff that would have poofed about now :p

You're going to have years to grind gold at 80. Skip Outland and go for the new shiny.

Heh, depends on whether there's any big expenses in Lich King or not.  Also I hear there's just generally more quests in Northrend than in Outland, so you'll get more gold anyway.  Plus Northrend dailies pay more.  So overall it's -probably- better to go ahead and start up Northrend.

The complicated thing is factions.  Like Honor Hold, they probably have some shit like that where if you don't do stuff in the right order, you're fucked and have to run a 70 dungeon dozens of times just to get to exalted.  Or like Cenarion Expedition, where if you do your stuff in the right order, Exalted is easy, wrong order and you're stuck doing Steamvaults SO many times.

Big expense in WOTLK at this point is the Mammoth.

Rumor has it they have a mailbox, repair/reagent vendor, and an auctioneer.

If that fucker has a bank on it too, there is no way in hell I am not gettting one.

Aren't the beta monkeys putting this shit up somewhere already?

Wait, this is the 15k mammoth mount you're talking about? It comes with all that shit attatched?~  :drill:

Jame's Levelling guides already are up to 73-74 with the rest being filled in.

I got mine (7-11 FTW) and in the manual it says you can create a Death Knight on the server you have your 55+ character on. Not just as many as you want on any old server. They planned this all along, and rightly so. Letting people create usefully high-level alts instantly on any server they chose would have been ridiculous.

God....we ventured into the kingdom of nerddom tonight (Gamestop here in Champaign) to get our copies. 100 people packed in the store, 300 people+ in line outside at midnight.

Got our copies and bolted.

I am almost done with the install....glad they made a nice/easy/only thing you can see website solely for upgrading accounts that seems to work nice and fast.


EDIT: They did not pull punches on the score for the installer, I feel like I am watching Excalibur or something lol.

My LK copies were delivered yesterday. During the only 2 hours in the last 2 weeks when I wasn't in. And the ParcelForce driver wrote the tracking number wrong on the card they left for me. And I can't drive to get to any of the 3 possible post offices they could be at. Hopefully get them by tomorrow.

 :mob:

Got mine from WalMart with no wait at midnight, installed fine, cleared Utgarde Keep within an hour of installing. Yay.

Hey. So what's a Death Knight play like?

I wasn't in beta, and the thought of being one of the 5 million people to roll a DK never interested me. But I'm curious.

Wow. I just logged in. So many DKs already.

I think I'm gonna check out the 50-59 BGs for lulz.

Edit: There are several level 60 DKs on my server. 3 hours after midnight.

I think a lot of people played "Wookie Hookey" today. Especially those in nerd jobs where their bosses are doing it too.

I was able to install, patch, and play, easily.  Much, much better than BC launch.

Postie just dropped our 3 copies (plus the wire season 4, yay!) through the letterbox \o/

NFI what the parcelforce thing was that wants a signature then... whatever. Installing now :)

I feel like a dip for being the ONLY PERSON AT WORK RIGHT NOW. And one of two cars in the garage.

I have my little DK however (gnooooooooooome!), and if hellfire gets too crowded I'll just level the priest.

DKs are odd to get the hang of (I keep winding up with nearly max rune power and not quite grasping the build rates of things) and my little frost dps spec has too many procs to keep track of for optimal ass kicking.

However, this is balanced out by hilarious 1700 AE crits in hellfire. I've just started herding anything.

Maybe I've been away from melees too long, but my crits seem way out of line for what they should be doing. I have a feeling some of the multiplier stacking will be altered a month or two in.

I broke down and attempted to purchase Wrath at my local 7-11. Despite having the boxes out for a week or so now, they don't actually have the software behind the counter. Guy said it would be in tomorrow.

I'm glad actually. Means I'm going to Fred Meyer here in just a few hours and get a copy with a proper store reciept and all that.

I have to work today, so I took Fridany and the following Monday off instead of Thu/Fri - also, I have to wait for the CE to arrive in the mail.

After that arrives, I'm gonna pull some ninja shit to try to get out of work early to sneak home. Utgarde Keep calls me!

WSG.

All Death Knights.

Must.. find... new..... game........

<rose colored glasses>
I miss the good old days when I could just pay SOE a fee to upgrade my account, and not have to mess with all this real life go to a town large enough to have a store with games stuff.
</rose colored glasses>

And I have all of my end-of-semester projects due! Yay! I'll get right on playing WoTLK after I finish the term papers I have due this Sunday, next wednesday, and then the monday after that! Oh right and all my usual homework. I wanna shoot myself.

From what i understand, factions are going to be pretty much a non issue.  Once you get a faction tabard (at honored i think, could be friendly) ALL dungeon rep you gain goes to that faction as long as you have the tabard equipped.  So no running dungeons you hate or dont need anything from to gain rep.

If you are talking about your DK, believe it or not, this is where they want it. BIG CRITS is kind of the flavor of the class. They have nerfed those abilities  (Frost Strike, Howling Blast, Scourge Strike) to get them in line. It wasn't uncommon on beta to be putting out 1000+ dps at level 60 around HFP, which was a bit op. Quite a few people believe that DK's will get another pass when people start to raid as its expected their DPS may actually be a bit low compared to other classes. We'll see, but I doubt there will be any more nerfs coming.   :awesome_for_real:

My realm is full.

Forgot how much fun waiting in a queue can be.

I still haven't played WOTLK.

My realm has a 1200+ queue right now.

I got down to 500, then my internet connection huccuped and I was forced to the back of the line.

This is all after the WOTLK CDs I bought wouldn't run in my drives because they're not compatible with everything or someshit according to the forums.

Needless to say I'm getting a bit fucking upset at this point.

Big fat queue on Doomhammer, 1400-ish. Whee!

I imagine my server is queue free.  TBC was an absolute breeze and it was hard to get groups for any group [3] or higher material leveling up.  Podunk servers really suck at maturity though.

Don't have any queue problems on my server apart from queuing for quest mobs. I decided that Outland be damned and headed to Howling Fjord. I found myself back in Nagrand making a start on the Nesingwary grind simply because I got sick of killstealers (can't tag mobs quick enough with DOTs) and hanging around waiting for certain mobs to spawn. So back to Outland to do some of that content before heading back out in a few days.

On the plus side, the Isle of Quel'gankas was suprisingly clear and managed to do all the dailies in 30 mins raking in 100k xp and 40g. That'll be worth doing for a couple of days until the madness dies down.

Went to Target at lunch.  Picked up 1 of the two CE copies they had.  Got home and installed, patched and was playing in about 40 minutes.  No lag.

Also, I play on Gilneas.  It never has a queue.  Well until last night.  That speaks volumes to me.

If it makes you feel any better, having WOTLK installed hasn't meant I've been able to play for more than 20 mins three times since  :uhrr:

Was gonna head straight for Northrend but had to make my DK duo first (Obstreperous and Ostentations, him'n'her undead) and was unable to resist the urge to play with them. Still pretty much button-mashing them, nfi how DKs work yet but at least they've both got a giant glowy sword and a bunch of whackamole quests so maybe I'll start getting a clue next session  :awesome_for_real:

My wife got my copy at Bbuy during the day and I installed when I got home last night.  Big install, but everything was smooth.  I'm surprised the lag wasn't worse than it was.  Even the mob spawning was keeping up with demand.

The big issue now?  THE DREADED QUEUE!  I got on early so I missed it, but I heard reports from guildmates of over 1000 at peak.

I have to give credit to Blizz on how smooth this is going.

Only a couple of "why the fuck did you make a named mob right next to the main town in Borean a quest mob"? kind of moments so far.

I love the look of Fjords, and Nexus was pretty cool.

But man the gear jump is even faster than in BC.....t5+ quality blues from the first Nexus quest, t6 quality weapons in the dungeon itself.

I'm not finding the gear jump that bad.  I'm seeing some advancement but it feels....right, rather than instantly replacing my outfit.  I'm not uber geared either.  I expect to have replaced most of my gear by 65 or 67, but it looks like it's going to go pretty much the way gear upgrading went from say, 60 to 70, or 30 to 50 pre-BC.

Um.

Kara shoulders right off after completing the Nexus.  The jump is actually just as bad.

Meh.. Kara gear you should expect to get replaced, they have to balance around something and most folks have run Kara.  This is particularly true for "offpsec" gear or folks who Koy is talking about T5/ T6 stuff getting replaced as if T3 did in Hellfire but I certainly seem to recall hearing that T3 lasted well into the late 60s.

  T5/ T6/ Late Badge and Sunwell Gear should last you until 74 or 75 from what I've heard.  Seems reasonable to me. 

Do the expansion disks contain the original game and Burning Crusade or am I going to have to dig up my old disks and install them again first?

My stuff is Tier 4 and 5, and I've disenchanted every green drop and reward so far.

I  haven't been to Utgarde yet though.

You need the original installs for WoW and BC.

Oh well. At least I won't have to patch them. Thanks for the info.

I got a staff with 199SP, 41 INT, and some spirit and stamina off a trash mob in Utgarde. I'd say that was a jump.

Got my DK up to 60 last night.  Holy shit is he fun.

Now I have to plvl my friend from 48-60 so he can play with me now.  It's funny, a year ago I would of said fuck off I need to race to 80!  Now I'll take my time.

I heard Blizzard lowered the pop caps on the servers to ease on the load.  Read it on FOH I think, no linked source though.

A 199 SP staff isn't that big a jump imo. Utgarde's caster weapons were ZA levels of SP, with fewer extra stats. The shaman gear was barely an ilvl above Kara (1 more SP, 1 more mp5)

I'm glad I didn't spoil any of this stuff by playing the beta. Borean Tundra is huge and has some really cool quests - and funny ones. I love the murloc quests (gang of baby murlocs following you around was hilarious) and the quests mocking the Nesingwary quests of old are great - the mobs like "loot crazed hunter" have some really funny flavor quotes too.

I haven't actually replaced anything yet, with a mix of Kara, SSC, Gruul's and Sunwell badge loot on. The shoulders out of Nexus (quest reward ones) are pretty much on par with my T4 shoulders, except I've got the T4 shoulders enchanted, I get a set bonus, and I've got them gemmed, so eh, why replace just yet. The dagger I got off the final Nexus boss was just about on par with the T6-type daggers that were badge-bought from Sunwell Offensive vendor, but about 1.5 dps less and with slightly less attractive stat bonuses. Though as a rogue one of the interesting puzzles is the amount of + haste gear instead of + hit gear--I need to read the theory folks to see exactly what that means and when/whether I should start building lots of  +haste, which might dictate an earlier shift to Northrend greens and blues than otherwise.

So far liking Fjord--much of the rest of my guild went to Borean first. Geography can be a bit disorienting at times--there are some very teeny-tiny quest hubs that are easy to miss, or areas where you have to go which are easy to ride right past and not even get an exploration credit for them because their boundaries are so small. (I was looking for one area called Thorvald's Camp that's near to the second Horde hub that took me a long while to find, even though it's quite close and near the main circular road.)

I haven't messed with it yet since I was playing my new DK, but I do expect to replace several items on my pally.  She's still very geared around the old spellpower/ int paradigm instead of WeaponDPS/ Str/ Avoidance one. (Rings cloak and accesories in particular)  I expect ret pallies might find they're replacing a few bits of gear as well, but yeah, I wouldn't think most folks who had better than Kara will be replacing stuff in the first zone or dungeon.

My top 3 chars that have full purples from Kara, Mags, Gruul, and assorted other raids will not be replacing much right away.  My warlock has been DE'ing everything but maybe one item and that was pretty much a wash (read very small improvement.)  My other characters with greens and blues will be upgrading immediately and by a huge amount.  It should be fun.

The one thing my warlock is improving dramatically is on enchantments.  The first 5-6 you get by stepping into town are exceptionally nice.

I've not been in any TBC dungeons, and I still haven't found anything better than my 4 piece Undead set. I've replaced my weapon, bracers and boots though. And haven't even been in Nexus yet.

Just finished my first run thru of UK and the quest rewards are just barely better than my current gear.  It's almost a toss up. So far the gear drops seem perfect though I am wondering why so much Spirit.  I seem to recall it was the same in Hellfire Peninsula.

There is a heavy focus on spirit now for mana regen and stuff.

Yeah. The spellpower enchant for gloves is 10 points higher, and a ton less expensive in ingredients.

I might actually have be tempted with an all-in-one box.

*twitch* only 5 hours to go.

I'm so sad.

The new DK experience is amazing. Hats of to Blizzard for that. It really is amazing.

I've only replaced incidental bits of gear so far; the welfare epic set that dropped from the scourge invasion last week is thus far better than the quest rewards I've come across.  Plus, three whole percent extra damage against undead!  How can that ever be replaced, I ask you?

 :ye_gods:  That's my panic face.

1 CTD for me on install, and some client-server sync issues (where if you have no ranged attack you can't hit the mob killing you).  Smoother than Tuesday, to be sure.  My girlfriend's machine CTD'd pretty regularly between patch 3.0 and when I replaced it prior to 3.0.3.  So I guess, again, I  bitch about their quality control and how this is considered good for MMOGs.  We picked this server prior to TBC because it had a low population, yesterday we had a short queue. 


Gear jump looks to be about the same as TBC, but without the obviousness of Stamina rescaling (just look at the gems instead).  Since I switched specs I have swapped a resto ring for a quest green to better fit with enhancement.  It isn't better, to be sure, but it is more appropriate for what I'm doing than anything that I forgot to disenchant.  Some of my gear will last through to 80 and beyond, most won't.  Neltharion's Tear from Blackwing Lair was still great for a lot of classes until Badge trinkets and new Heroics started offering better in the last couple months, there will be similar items with this expansion (e.g. Shard of Contempt for anyone who hits things with a weapon).   

It will be nice to be able to turn badges into tier pieces, that should greatly improve player's ability to get the items they really want from an instance (and tier pieces will be available through this mechanism without doing anything more than heroics).  Of course, that will reduce the number of times the big instances are run overall and we'll burn through LK content even faster than TBC content.  As it is, my guild is flying through the levels with a Deathknight at 71 and three (Druid, Warlock, Warrior) at 75 through solo or duo play. 

The druids have their own version of PETA. there: Druids for the Ethical and Humane Treatment of Animals (DHETA). They're a subset of the Cenarion Expedition and are set up in direct opposition of Hemet Nesingwary (Mr. Kill 30 Animals). If you kill a wild animal, you'll get an Animal Blood debuff that last for 3 minutes. DHETA will instantly aggro anyone with the debuff. I watched an Ally hunter ride into the camp with the debuff and get thrashed in 2 seconds by 3 questgivers.

So far I've had 3 different quests that let me ride something else as a mount: a tank, a kodo, and a wooly mammoth.

Must... resist...

I rode the mammoth last night.  It was way too short of an experience.

Good stuff.

Edit:  For those resisting:  You fight while on the Mammoth.  You kill the boss for the quest by ramming him and stomping on him with your HUGE elephant!

Confirming this. Sadly.

Help me.

It makes me happy as a beta tester to see lots of you jaded bastards enjoying the content.  :grin:

Comparing Nexus/Utgarde gear to mine and others it seems the instance blues are balanced somewhere around ZA level. Kara gear should get replaced relatively quickly, ZA gear less so. Depending on set bonuses (T6 4pc being awesome for most dps classes)  and such you can expect T5 gear to last until ~75-76 and quite a few people raided Naxx on beta with T6 and Sunwell gear at level 80. Heroic epics and blues seems to be about the jumping off point for those people to start upgrading but I doubt set bonuses will be broken until 10 and 25 man Naxx.

Alot of people, though, didn't spend months farming BT/MH or even SSC/TK so even if not everything you see is an upgrade you'll likely be boosting yourself in your weakest slots. The jump from quest/instance blues to Heroic/Raid epics is pretty huge though, at least from what I've seen perusing wowhead and wowdb. And, or course, those still sporting Kara gear and old heroic epics will get upgraded rather quickly.

Keep in mind, also, that BAD (back then) was me stripping off freshly acquired Tier 3 40 man loot at level 60 and replacing it with quest reward trash greens that were actually quite a bit better. So, top of the line Classic loot getting replaced on day one, thats not happening at ALL this time.

DK experience is really fantastic.  The overall feel of the class and it's power level make the game extremely entertaining.

Sunwell/T6 will work for Naxx but the ilevel 187-200 (200 is from heroics) blues are a fair amount better. Also, actual raid-quality epics from heroics!

Did the first couple of instances tonight; understandably they are a stroll. Utgarde Keep was pretty dull, the Nexus was a lot more fun though, I look forward to trying it out on heroic.

Honestly, I would recommend *everyone* get WotLK JUST for the DK starting area. Even if you hate WoW with the fire of a thousands suns, you'll enjoy the DK starting area.


Like, ever wonder how you could do a 'story based' MMORPG, the DK area is a preview.

I agree. Level 55 - 58 with my death knight was worth the money by itself.

Lucky me I got a 65 priest then. :awesome_for_real:

Over 1300 for me right now. Yay! Everything old is new again!

I was skeptical, but I think this 'phasing' shit just might be brilliant when applied correctly in the right places. Doing quests and actually seeing the world change as a result of those quests was awesome. What's more, I've never heard of another game doing anything like this before. Blizzard may have done the unthinkable here and actually innovated a bit for once.

Their next MMO needs to be built with stuff like this in place from level one onwards.

EDIT: Seriously, I almost want to delete my DK just so I can make another and do that "flying on an undead dragon and fucking up a whole city while dodging projectiles twitch-style" quest again.

1800+ queues on proudmoore.

I dont think you would want to be trying naxx in sunwell / T6 gear.  While it IS very decently itemized, the sheer difference in stuff like Stamina on a similar slot dungeon blue from level 78-80 dungeons is HUGE.   I mean, a full sunwell geared warrior would probably have 8k or more LESS HP then a full Blue dungeon geared war.  And the guy in blues would likely have better mitigation stats as well.

Hell, i have seen blues drop out of level 72-74 instances that have more stam on them unenchanted / gemmed then my fully enchanted / gemmed T5 gear does, while still packing a decent amount of other stats as well.

*dramatic moment*
LOL
wtf?
*exposition*
lol
whats going on?
this is crazy
lol
*more story*
what do we do now?
wait its over?
*story*
YAY!
lol
this is stupid
wheres my hearthstone


MMO and story do not go well together. Seriously I had to expand my chat box and scroll up all the time to read what was going on. It was fun, it was just not some amazingly immersive experience.

you know...you can filter our general chat or create new tabs/windows for different types of chat....

I'm just saying...

I was giving the same advice to friends who've sworn they'll never return to WoW - the DK experience is worth the price of admition.

That said, clearly you can't please everyone. 

Well my point was that the MMO experience and stories don't go well together because people are idiots. You can turn all their words off but then it's not really an MMO experience. I'm not saying it wasn't fun, just that the MMO part of it added nothing to the event beyond stupidity. Players can construct their own narrative and that's what makes MMOs fun, but they just get in the way of developer narratives.

For just once it was nice to destroy a village, come back, and find it fucking destroyed with your own side having advanced and taken up position within it. Instead of, you know, the usual "I guess we can call this destroyed if a few red sparkles count as the building being ablaze and we leave within the next 15 seconds before it all goes back to normal, oh crap respawns." Some tard is always going to /tickle the Lich King as he gives his evil speech, but that's no reason they shouldn't at least make an effort to give us a story and the illusion of a dynamic world like a real RPG instead of the usual MMO retardation.

I've always said I don't want a virtual world, I want a game that makes an honest effort to fool me into thinking it's a world, and this was a fine example of that. You wouldn't want to phase the whole game like this, lest it get too confusing with everyone constantly seeing different things or not seeing each other at all, but for specific, signifigant, tightly-plotted quest lines it adds a lot to the suspension of disbelief by temporarily doing away with some of the dumber "Didn't we sink that enemy fleet half an hour ago?" MMO tropes.

Seriously, I'm imagining a Starcraft FPS/RPG MMO built from the ground up with stuff like this, and it's giving be a boner. And I'm not even a Starcraft fan.

Just a quick update regarding the online account upgrade;

In your account management page, there is an option to upgrade your account to WotLK (get a new key), unfortunately there appears to be 2 problems, namely...

1. If your IP is outside the NA region, you get a 202 error with instructions to call customer support. (This apparently includes US military personal in IRAQ and Japan)

2. Even if you have an NA IP, many many people are getting charged every time they resubmit but without their accounts getting WotLK enabled.

While some leeway can be given due to the sheer volume of the customers, what is really galling is that there has not been a single Blizzard response to the dozens upon dozens of wailing posts regarding this.

Note: The Blizzard store has also started selling boxes and online upgrades as of a short while ago. But people are reporting the same problems.

Not as good as Tortage.

The queues are getting totally ridiculous. If you're not on by 5 server, you're going to have a 400+ queue, and it gets up to 1800+ by 9 server.

That's because the poopsockers never log out.

People are starting to hit world first level 80 achievements on my realm today, there's been a few so far.

We had 80's dinging late last night on Doomhammer. I love that it announces to the world "Catass Gnome Mage, has no life!"

I couldn't figure out how they were doing it.

I mean, I've put in quite a bit of time and I'm less than half way through 72. For my standards, what I've been doing is total catassing. I'm using a level guide, too.

What's actually happening is a trick that somehow combines joining and dropping a group inside an instance along with mob tagging that gets all of the XP to one person. The game's first 80 was already banned for it.

Makes you feel pretty stupid for grinding the normal way, doesn't it?

That method gets you there in under 30 hours though. The first 80 on my server got it legit, and my brother is 78 as we speak from just questing and he didn't even do beta to know where to go. He just isn't sleeping much and hasn't left the house since release. He's not a shut-in normally, he's a school leaver and is going on to further education next year so he has no obligations at the moment and so he just didn't go out like he normally does. A friend took a week off work and was a 72 Death Knight last time I saw him. I'm not doing it hard this time around though since I'm not going to raid and so there's no need to cap out fast.

Fair enough. I suppose it's just difficult for me to grasp because I only see so much being done in a day.

I mean, I've been playing a lot by my standards - but I'm in no way the type of person who can sit there and grind for 12 hours.

Guild Wars says hi.

I am not Slyfeind.

Does it? I thought Guild Wars was made up of all instanced zones, and not a persistant world.

Wow


do all the quests in dragonblight until you get to the wrathgate, just do it.

Wow.

The merged Nihilum/SK-Gaming guild cleared 10 and 25 man Naxx today apparently, as well as downing Malygos and Sartharion.

This means that all WoTLK raid content has been cleared within 4 days of launching. ha!

Arthas isn't dead yet!

BAH FUCKING QUEUES DIAF!

I didn't get to play yesterday since Happy Hour turned into getting home at 10:30.  The queues were 2 hours long so I went to bed.  I spent all day grinding Stratholme with my good buddy to get him to 60, now 58 however, so he can level with my DK.

They are a sponsered guild, their JOB is playing wow.

I could not care less if they beat content in 2minutes because it doesn't mean jack to your average player or even your average raider.

The Ultra PoopSockers ran out of shit to do?  :oh_i_see:


Who cares?

See, those aren't even the type of people that fuel poopsocking jokes, though. Those people are in fucking diapers.

Who has time to aim?  :ye_gods:

Guild Wars, just saying.. they didn't really come up with it on their own.   Also Lotro does this as well.

One thing: The tadpole quest is aids. AIDS.

This is all just all sorts of awesome for me. I can play so infrequently that I've got *months* of new content ahead of me. Most of my 70's are in BC quest greens and rep blues so the gear upgrades are gonna be fast and furious for me. My server has no queues at all that I've seen so far. I'm loving the DK quests and am starting to get my head around how to play them.

All the catassing stuff going on, with all content cleared in 4 days, level 80s everwhere etc just highlights to me how it's such a poor way to play the game. I mean those poopsockers have rushed to the grindy endgame in 4 days? FOUR days? Well done guys! You congratulate yourselves and start sitting around wondering wtf to do for the next six months while the rest of us, y'know, have fun  :awesome_for_real:

I dont wanna spoil anything, but if you think the DK dragonflying was fun, wait til you get to Zul Drak. One word : STORM GIANT.  :drillf:

Diaper Raiders are going to clear the content at a ferocious pace no matter what a dev does. Balancing the content difficulty for them means locking out 99% of the rest of the players.

It just means that when my guild gets to the raid content, we'll have fun instead of bashing our heads against a brick wall of cockblocks.

Heh, and it just means by the time I get to Raiding everything's going to so mapped out it'll be cakewalk  :awesome_for_real:

Last night was the first real session I had since the expac arrived, and I've already replaced a few quest blues and even that sword from Mana Tombs (good Mage sword there, too arsed to look it up). Funny that. Exact same thing happened when BC hit. The very first upgrade replaced by main hand within the third quest in HF. Maybe it's tradition. I do hope it takes a bit longer to replace my Hologogs though. That wasn't a cheap combine.

I pretty much stuck with DK in beta so all of the Northrend stuff is new. Spawn rates are crazy fast. I don't know if it's timed or due to activity but it's working whatever it is. Until I'm the only one in a cavern trying to get out.  ;D

I will say that it seems what little I've read is spot on: Mages did not get the uber bump we got with BC. I can still kill stuff fast, but damn if they're not hitting me hard. I imagine that's why stuff has all sorts of STA on it.

All those catass raiders had the best gear in the TBC in every slot.  Blizzard tuned the first tier of raiding for people with level 80 greens/blues and made it easy on purpose.  Of course they beat it all.

Idiots.

I've now done Utgarde Keep, Nexus and Azuj Jerub (sp) and all there are fucking fun instances.  Maybe UK is a bit bland, but it's the newbie instance. 

First, all three are doable in less than 2 hours.  Important to casual gamers like me.
Second, they have fairly challenging encounters but not crazy hard.
Thirdly, the loot isn't too bad.  I have like 4 pieces of quest rewards as my gear.

WoW was Raiders of the Lost Ark
TBC was Temple of Doom
WotlK is Last Crusade with a dash of The Right Stuff, Casablanca, Wizard of Oz, and Star Wars thrown in.

That means the next expansion is going to be Crystal Skull!  :ye_gods:

Also no one seems to remember that all 3 of the first raid instances were open on beta and had all of these poopsockers running them for months before.

Oh, and Naxx has been in the game technically for over 2 years.

Whooptie fuckin' doo.

Unless they've substantiallly changed the technology since I last played, no, I don't think LOTRO does.  A zone will remain the same irrespective of what you do in the Book story instances. The only slight variation on this is the starter zone which is an instance, not a phased zone.  Similarly, I understood Guild Wars to be mostly instances rather than phased zones too.

I haven't done much instancing since like the fucking Scarlet Monastery stage. Everytime I tured on LFG it was just this infinite sea of rogues and mages wailing "we need healerssss and tanksss" like lost souls. I did a little Caverns of Time and some swamp instance, but I don't even know what the inside of any of the others even look like. Fuck you guys, I'm not speccing my pally into the Boring tree so I can be the healbitch.

Plus I don't like stupid "Didn't anyone tell you to stand on one foot and rub your stomach when the boss turns blue? Woops you insta-die!" gimmick encounters.

Archimonde is just like that. Totally naff boss.

Teron's like that too.

Teron is just hoping any of the "THAT GUY"s in your raid don't get picked to stop constructs.

There aren't any of these types of encounter outside raids, at least not that I can think of; even in raids true "gimmick" encounters are pretty uncommon.

You miss out on a lot by not doing instances imo. The nexus is pretty fun for a starter instance, and since retadins are pretty desirable DPS I don't see what would hold you back.

You could spec prot and tank since prot kicks some ass now I hear.

Or you could just start your own groups for instances. That usually works believe it or not. Take the initiative and grab people off of the LFG tool/channel and the local channel in the instance's zone. Yeah, pugs have a bad rep but you'll get good at picking non-retards just by looking at character and guild names.

edit: Seriously, I heartily encourage you checking out all of the leveling instances at least once. About half of the instances in BC were boring as fuck in design but WotLK has some pretty cool stuff in it.

I'll let you be a judge of how many THAT GUY we had in our top group. There's a reason I'll never lead them again.

I hit the LFG queue and then I joined a pug yesterday for Azol-Nerub.  Turned out none of us had ever been there.  We died twice at the first boss, easily took down the 2nd boss and then almost wiped at the last boss.  Even with a sub-par tank and the server's highest DK (75, may God have mercy on his cat-ass soul).

My point is that the LFG tool works.  I just entered the queue for that dungeon and solo'ed until I was invited.  Also it was so cool to go in a dungeon without any one knowing any strats.  Sure we died but we did it ourselves.  Never happened to me before in WoW.

Yeah, I appreciate it, trust me. That other alliance my guild has is sorta the same deal, and their side of the leadership -really- wanted to keep trying Archimonde. yeeeeeeeah, that was gonna happen.

Killing Turkeys isn't going to get old.  It's fucking hilarious.

Lord of the Rings Online has this as well. Oh, wait, I see other folks pointed this out. I think its implementation is almost exactly the same as the way it's done in the DK opening questlines, in fact.

I hit 73 late last night and decided to just go take a ride and see what I could see in the zones. It was a lot of fun. It looks like the really upper-level zones require a flying mount for access. But if you go into the 76-78 zones like Crystalsong and Sholazar, there are so few people (most of the earliest level 78-80 catasses are either exploiting a bug to level or they're just grinding shit in one place) that you can ride around pretty easily without worrying about mobs, because of dynamic spawning. Sholazar looks to me like it'll be an important resource zone: lots of herbs and minerals. Starting to already see Dragonsblight fill up with more toons: it's really interesting to track where the leading edge of the average levelling wave is.

More evidence of how smart Blizzard's designers have become: having two starting zones plus the DK experience has neatly split up the players without losing critical mass in any area AND given people reason to level alts in order to have some of the range of possible experiences. I see people in my guild alternating between levelling their DK and their main(s). Going through Outland instances with groups of 5 DKs, or 4 DKs plus one guildie who comes to help with healing, etc. is fun for a lot of people just because it's a new way to experience something old and familiar. The achievements drive this too. None of this is revolutionary, but basically, how is anyone else ever going to compete with WoW on this kind of terrain? Answer: they're not, don't even try.

I don't know about LotRO.

Guild Wars is all instances, however that's simply their design instead of using shared space.  They do change based on quests you've performed and other situations, and you can't go back once it's happened.

So the implementation may be a little different due to the base design of the game, but fundamentally they don't seem all that different.

I've tried. On rare occasion it's worked. But mostly after 20 or 30 minutes of "3 DPS NEED HEALER AND TANK" aka "SOMEONE PLEASE DO THE SHITTY JOBS SO WE CAN GO" my patience is used up.

Seriously. Leveling and questing is more fun for me than anything at endgame, so I'm in no hurry, I'm just enjoying myself. Also enjoying my DK even into Outlands, I wasn't sure I'd stick with it beyond a test drive but he's fun to play.

I was actually crazy enough to think that this was going to end that sweet-long-dripfed wow lull...

Man was I wrong. Wotlk is so on the ball in terms of fun that... I haven't had this much fun in a game for years. I'm just taking my time and sucking in all the good stuff. Impressed by almost everything so far. I still haven't travelled beyond the two starting zones (bar Dalaran and some random exploration). Really... I'm impressed, and theres this warm and fuzzy feeling inside of me... it's like being a kid in a candystore!

I also gave the new Battleground a try, nothing too serious, but it is something completely different to the old ones.

Granted, it's still same old WoW. There's just so much new STUFF to check out that it'll keep me busy for months to come.

Well, since I'm playing the Korean WOW now (S-L-O-W-L-Y because my Korean sucks) I'm not all wrathy yet.

But I am LOVING the achievements. I'm peacefully fishing and ~BAM~!!! They are like adorable mini-dings of pleasure  :drillf:

In fact, I spent most of my lunch hour yesterday just browsing all the achievements (minus crazy raid-related ones) to see just how much coolness I can acquire.

Of course, I'm nowhere near Northrend levels yet, but maybe I'll make the boyfriend have a guild member summon me to the cool stuff or something once it starts.

~goes back to studying Korean some more~

Tanking isn't a shitty job.

...tanking for PUGs is a shitty job. Some of my most miserable online experiences have come at the hands of PUG dpsers blaming me and whoever the lucky healer is for the many, many wipes their own fuckups caused. Luckily being a tank makes me a special princess and I can pick and choose who I tank for. (Except for the THAT GUYs in my own guild of course.)

The problem of course, is that without training, those shitty dpsers will never learn what they're doing wrong, and will just go on being shitty, making the next PUG for the next tank crappy, etc. Vicious circle. It has only gotten worse since protection paladin tanks made AE threat so trivial that you could mash any button and still win, too. Warrior AE threat is pretty good now, but it still won't hold off an all-out AE deployment.

Tanking for PUGs was a great way for me to learn to tank in a trial-by-fire sort of way, but yeah, it can be pretty annoying. However, as a tank, I can be the giantest bitch in the entire fucking world to the idiot DPS, because deep down they know they ain't doing shit without me. I can almost be just as bitchy as a healer, but I usually don't need to be, as long as the tank vaguely knows wtf they're doing, which on my server they usually did.

In PUGs I either get bitched at for doing too much, or too little damage. With no seeming difference in what I'm doing. Maybe I'm simply the worst Hunter evar. Or maybe many tanks and healers are prima-donna fucks. Or most likely both.

That said, I was in a group of people the other night who were just being unbelievably insulting, racist, and homophobic. Volleying/multishotting a few groups and then feigning and watching them all die warmed my heart.

I save complaining about too little damage for /o.  :awesome_for_real:

I don't care about doing too much damage - there's no such thing; I do care about pulling aggro. If you're not feigning until *after* you pull a mob off of me, you're doing it wrong and endangering the healer. That said it isn't as much of a problem as it used to be since they made taunt longer than melee range.

I'm kinda on the fence about Northrend now. I've run into a couple of quests that are bugged and I cannot complete them. And a lot of the rest are "Keel seex snow moose" stuff. Utgarde Keep was fun, if plain.
Starting in on the Borean Tundra now. The quest where you summon the boatman is frikking annoying. I got DCed just as he hopped off the boat, and by the time I abandoned the quest and re-took it, there were two more guys on the shore trying to do the quest at the same time.

Having a blast on the DK.  Hadn't logged in since April previous to this.  This is my 5th trip though Outland and it's not nearly as bad as I expected.  Really looking forward to hitting Northrend with the near universal praise I keep hearing.

Went Unholy and having a 120% ground mount and mounted water walking really keep things moving.

Fjords is a better experience than Borean, imho

There are great, fun, innovative quests, but sure, there's more than a sprinkling of the "kill seex snow mooses" shit. Of course. Though even some of those are ok because of the topography or something else. It took me a while just to navigate through the crashed Scourge base in Borean, for example--that was sort of a challenge of sorts.

Another thing though, that Warhammer taught me: killing shit in WoW when you have a kill quest is *fast*. That was my mental impression, but I'm insanely sure of it now.  That makes a big difference in psychic feel: killing ten things when they all die quick is just mentally healthier than killing five things that die slow.

Ditto for healing. Healing 5-mans before you outgear them is about as interactive as the game gets, since you have no fallback. However healing malcoordinated PuGs isn't worth the time.

Getting into a good guild can solve 99% of PuG related issues of course.

The D.E.H.T.A. quests were fun, and the achievement "D.E.H.T.A.'s little P.I.T.A." is full of win.

I have to agree on the quest progression in Wrath, it really is good. Wonderful pacing and variety on the quests, some interesting game mechanics and a sense of actually progressing make them surprisingly addictive. Lovely little touches like when you finish the warsong quest line in borean tundra the guards start congratulating you occasionally as you pass, when you finally put together a gnome flying machine it launches and driving a siege tank is just too much fun.

Did a Utgarde keep run with some guild folk. We rejoined wow a couple of months ago (vanguard, what an error that was) so our gear is decidedly sub-kara and it was actually nicely challenging, especially without spoilers. Died a lot, wiped multiple times and had to try and work out boss effects on the fly but got through it in the end. I can imagine the uber-geared are finding it boring but blizzard built heroic mode for those guys.

Yeah. My group was all guildies with tier 5 gear. One had previously been through UK and knew the bosses. So we didn't have much trouble at all.

Do those quests prevent you from doing the Hemet Nesingwary quest line?  Because I'm totally siding with good ol' Hemet on this one!  Fucking hippies.   :drill:

No, they don't prevent you.  They just seem to be an extra source of Cenarion Expedition rep.

After my four-day Wrath weekend, I'm halfway through 78. I would have been higher, but as soon as I was able to use my Netherdrake again, I went and harvested piles and piles of Saronite ore. I have to ride the 24 hour cooldown transmute train to get 8 Titansteel bars, so I can get my Titansteel Destroyer (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=41257).

My guild managed to clear 10 man Naxx, 10 man Sarth, and I think 10 man Malygos as well. Also, they finished 24 man Sarth and possibly 25 man Naxx as of last night when I logged. I wasn't hardcore enough to roll with the super poopsockers, and I kind of wanted to do dungeons with my real life pals.

I did most of the dungeons - just did The Oculus last night. The last boss encounter is super, super neat. The entire instance is vertical and outdoor, so after you kill the first boss, you get your choice of a tanking drake, a DPS drake, or a healer drake. You then fly vertically between areas, hopping off of your mount to clear trash and fight bosess. Just before the last boss, however, your drakes get buffed, and then you take on the last boss while ON the drakes. Pretty neato, as it allows for some role swapping. Our mage tanked it on his tank drake, and I got to heal on my healing drake.

All in all, the quest content is super, super epic. They really outdid themselves.

I get the feeling that someone at Blizz felt that there werent enough dragons in TBC, so they're mildly overcompensating in Wrath, there's motherfucking dragons everywhere.

Not that I'm complaining, having cleared Borean Tundra and Dragonblight I'm really liking this.

My only current petty complaint is a number of quests that require you to target tiny fast-flying birds as they whip in and out of range. Trying to target stuff before it flies out of range for another 2 mins is kinda meh. Still, it's only two or three quests out of several hundred, and most of the rest range from average to awesome.

The ability to do both, particularly since Hemet is AFTER D.E.H.T.A., is like an extra nice little fuck you to the druids.  "Oh, sure, Hemet's a bad guy. I see that after my slaughter through STV and Nagrand.  I'll take your stuff and then.. uh.. tell Hemet what I REALLY think when I see him again."

One of the loudest complaints when BC was new and shiny was, "Wtf is all this crystal and psychedelic shit?"  The Blizzard "High" fantasy didn't go over well, and they promised a big time return to "Low" or "common" fantasy with this expansion.  I think they've delivered in spades.  You'll note there's also a lack of floaty open-webbed impossible weapons like the Outlands axes and swords.  They've all looked solid and possible to build without some sort of funky crystal magic to hold them together.

Post++

Same here--got in a nice PUG for Azjol-Nerub. None of us had been there, none of us read the strats, we had a level 75 warrior, rest of us were 73-74. So we just figured it out. Wiped once, had a close call on the final boss but took him down. It was quick, fun, visually interesting. So we said, "Hey, let's try the other one that's right here, why not?", Ahn-Kahnet, The Old Kingdom. And we had a couple of wipes and had to get a bit more careful on pulls, but we figured out the bosses quickly enough. That's one thing I liked: the strats were intuitive, not the sort of thing where you had to go study six YouTube videos just to find out the exact timing of various sequences. The third boss in The Old Kingdom, for example, you have to very quickly kill an add that the boss calls forward--if it gets to the boss, the boss powers-up. We were surprised the first time, but totally understood what it was that we needed to do. The choreography on the boss encounters in the early instances is very good--challenging but not obscure or ridiculously precise in the sequencing it requires.

I hadn't tanked in about a year and a half. I respecced tonight to Protection.

...

I think I got into the instance about four pulls before I dropped the group and respecced?

Tanking now is only as hard as the people in your group make it. If you run a five man with 3 competant DPSers and a decent healer, you can pretty much just AE everything. If you have 2 competant DPS and one idiot, you can put vigilance on him as a warrior. If you have 3 idiots and a shitty healer, no good tank can save that situation. Luckily I've yet to encounter such a group.

My favorite thing so far is to take in a healer, mage, ret pally, and some other form of DPS. You can Vigilance the ret pally, get 10% of his threat, have him toss out consecrates to hold things in place and keep your taunt refreshing, and then just burn the shit out of the groups with mage AE. It works through trash with little to no pain in the tanking department what with shockwaves, thunderclaps, and the Sunder Glyph.

Maybe I'll try grouping again now that ret pallies are actually useful. I keep forgetting that we've gone from a bitch-spec to something decent.

"Kickin' Nass and Takin' Manes" is the most awesome quest name ever.

The quest at the end of a Sholazar Basin questline where you get to drive a Titan around and blow shit up is pretty good too.

I'm 75% into level 79 now, I'll be 80 shortly after I get home.

Pro tip for any Melee DPS - Fly into Icecrown as soon as you can, and land on the airship. After that, do the series of quests from the death knight that involves retaking Shadow Vault. Once that is done, you can do some quests for them to hit friendly with the Ebon Blade (if you haven't hit friendly already from their quests in Zul'Drak).

Once you're friendly, you can snag the Ebon Blade tabard, to champion their faction up. Revered with the Ebon Blade nets you a 50 attack power 20 crit rating head enchant.

I hit 72 and got tired of doing my quests, so I decided to go to En'kilah in the Borean Tundra and burn off my rested XP tearing shit up randomly. With the super fast respawn rate, I ended up in a pattern where I was running no more than a few seconds between abominations, burning them down in an average of 8 seconds each, and making 1700+ XP per kill thanks to being rested. I kept at it for about 45 minutes and, when I decided I'd had enough, was up 250k XP. I did the math, and I was averaging 20 seconds per kill. Probably less, since it took me a few minutes to find the pattern and I sat down to chug looted drinks a time or two.

That was some quality grinding. The next couple times some "doesn't start a chain and I don't feel like bothering" quest comes up, I can ignore it and not feel like I'm behind.

Another great place to grind is in Dragonblight.  There are undead camps around the center titan camp "Garakrond" or something.  The respawn of the ghouls is crazy fast.

How will I go, if I return as a 70 Druid who quit soon after TBC launch?

Heroic Violet Hold, second boss.

KILL THE ORBS!!!!!!

OH MY GOD.

RUN!!!!!!!!!!

DON'T TOUCH THE ORBS!!!!!

WTF, TELEPORTED ONTO ORB!!!!

JJHDFJDHEFKLHEFWIKFNCMAXAJNAMNRFM!!!!!!!!!!!11111111

Fuck.

After three wipes with a melee-centric group and reading up on multiple strategies, I finally found something that is not fun in WotLK.

You could be high 60's in quest greens and come to Northrend and be fine.

Within about 10-12 quests of hitting Northrend you'll be in the equivalent of all T4 gear more or less. Slightly sub-par stat distributions and too much haste, but once you get those done you'll sail as fast as everyone else through the rest of the content.

I got in a guild group to try out Azjol-Nerub. None of us had been in there before, no one knew any strats, and to quote one of the other guys quoting someone else "fuck it, we're doin' it live!" We had one semi-wipe on the first boss because our healer got webbed and we didn't know what to do about that. We came back and pounded the boss. He drops one hell of a nice dagger (Cobweb Machete (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=35655)).

The 2nd boss' room is a serious vertigo experience. The "floors" are see-through webbing so at times its hard to get a reference point for depth perception. Add to the fact that you're going to fight Shelob and its some good nightmare material. After that boss is one incredible drop. Make sure you look around as you fall. It looks like Blizzard made a ton of scenery for that dungeon that you only see while falling by it.

We found out the hard way that when the final boss is aggroed, webbing pops up around the platform he is on and prevents people from coming in and stops LOS for spells. Not good when the person trapped outside is your healer. I was tanking and our ret pally had to heal me. I died at 8% and our DPS warrior tanked the rest.

Its a real nice short dungeon. You can easily beat it in less than 45 minutes. There's almost no trash. Most of the "trash" are part of the boss event (kill 3 waves of trash, then the boss aggros). I'd recommend Azjol-Nerub for anyone in the 72-75 range.

The last boss on heroic Halls of Lightning is ridiculous. Our group had already hit apathy when I learned from my guild you could Line of Sight his 14k aoe lightning, so we didn't try him again after that.

He drops my axe I want that is made out of axes (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=37852).

You sure it was the 2nd boss?  On normal the first boss is an Etheral guy with an "Orb of Doom" (my personal description of it) that he summons and it moves around the room doing MASSIVE dmg if it touches you.  The second boss is somewhat random, a drakonid will open one of the barriers in the room holding baddies, I've done the ice/water elemental boss and the nerubian/scarab one with his guards so far.  The final boss is basically Azuregos (pre-BC 40 man world boss) made into a 5 man boss which is pure win.

My favorite 5 man in TBC was The Dark Portal in Caverns of Time.  The Violet Hold is basically Dark Portal only made better and it's right in Dalaran, the Shat of WoTLK.  It has to be my favorite 5 man so far in Wrath with the Nexus being a close 2nd.

The "orb of doom" from that first boss probably needs to be tuned better or be given a slight delay when it spawns before it does its massive damage, only wipe I've had in there was when it spawned right next to our tank on our first attempt and he went from full to dead in less than 2 seconds, as a prot pally in T5/ZA/Northrend gear with over 19k hp.  I can't even imagine how deadly that thing must be on heroic mode.  :ye_gods:

Queues on my server are down from 1600+ in prime time to about 100, 150.

Are THAT many people transferring to low pop realms, or are people just dropping out like flies?

If I recall correctly, the queue is based on how many people are logging into same areas so that a crush of people in one zone doesn't crash the servers, so it could be more that people are spreading out levelwise and not all in the two starter zones. 

The super poopsocks have hit 80 and are no longer playing 12 hours a day. Probably people in general aren't playing as long per session now that "ZOMG NEW EXPANSION" is wearing off a bit.

Another nitpick brought to you by Calantus: They need to fix the no flying area in Dalaran so I can use my flyable/noflyable switch macro without using a modifier key. >_<

(for those that aren't aware you can make a macro that will use your flying mount in a flyable zone and your ground mount in a no flying zone but it somehow doesn't work in Dalaran)

This happened to our group, none of us had been in there before and we just winged it. Our mage and shadow priest got stuck outside when the event started. Me, holy priest, a prot warrior and feral druid eventually killed the boss albeit slow with the mage watching and the shadow priest group healing with not much else to do.

Really enjoying the expansion after being burnt out on the game a few months ago, almost has the feeling of playing the game when I first started back in Nov '04

The quests, overall, seem to be tons much more fun than any they've done before.  I mean, steam tank?  Hell yeah.  And some of them crack me up, a lot.  Like one where you have to chop up corpses with a machete.  Once I was done and was handing the machete back to the guy, he was all, "Wow, you...you were really good at that.  Have you done this before?" and acted all creeped out. 

Ran Azjol-Nerub and Old Kingdom last night. Those were all cool boss fights! I have a feeling the trash in Old Kingdom will suck on heroic though.

I liked the last boss in Azol'Nerub, the first two died before I could actually figure out what they were doing. The second boss in particular didn't seem to do much other than eat some spiders, hiit our tank twice and die. It was a fun instance though, overall, I look forward to trying it on heroic.

Also, the Bronze Dragonflight quest from chromie is  :heart:

Is that before or after I Typhoon half the room?

"You're going to be at a party and there will be pie, don't eat the pie"

So far, Old Kingdom is the coolest looking dungeon in terms of pure aesthetic. The insanity fight at the end and the circle of doom fight on the third boss are two of my favorite designs so far.

"Man, I forgot what a noob I was."
"Keep us safe and get some better gear!"

The final Old Kingdom boss is pure win, and I like the one before it too. There's also just some really fun touches--the passageway that looks like it's collapsed is something I haven't seen in the game before. The webs plus long drops in Azjol'Nerub are also a hoot.

The first time we ran Old Kingdom, we did it blind, figuring it out as we went.  That tunnel after the Prince that looked collapsed, looked like scenery, so some of us started back tracking until the rest poked our heads in and realized the tunnel went down.  The design of the dungeons and the encounters is pretty much top notch throughout, but Old Kingdom is one of the ones so far that stand out really well. 

queue queue QQ

Yea. The rule used to be never try to play an MMO on patch day. With WoW it's you not wanting to try to play in patch week  :oh_i_see:

That's nice.  Now fuck off.

You first.

edit: Oops. Didn't catch the gold seller link. The nastiness was well deserved then. Sorry about that Draconian and thanks for pointing it out WUA.

Goldseller link in the newb's sig. I'm with Draconian, he can fuck right off.

I can report that Draktharon Keep is another fun instance, the last boss is entertaining. Really the only dull instance so far for me was Utgarde.

Post soon to be deleted.

nvm then

5 lines is too much

That's nice. We might read it if you add line breaks.

So I finally hit 70 with my DK and I've been running around Borean Tundra.  I have to say that this expansion is awesome.  I've been saving the awesome as I was leveling through the Outlands.  The mob models and the item textures all look badass.  Shiny and awesome.

I love those Mist creatures and the Mist effects in that one area.  I can't wait for the instances.  I have a bunch of quests for the Nexus.

Still guildless on Mal'Ganis.  I need to make some friends.

Oh come on it wasn't that bad. I was impressed you guys got him done with only three left in the group. And if you can't share personal stories in a sub-forum, then what the heck is it here for!  :grin:

Yeah, I liked that one. Interesting that they'd change Loatheb from his pre-BC incarnation, though I have to say this one sounds better, especially since it's more about squeezing as much healing out as possible and not [just] spamming consumables. My favorite DK story so far was an utgarde run, second boss (or bosses).

Our healer [shaman] died halfway through the fight due to uncontrolled aggro (a few seconds after we killed the caster boss), leaving the warrior tank, a ret pally, a demo warlock and me. Instinctively I hit raise dead on the shaman, not thinking much of it at the time (hey, it's a wipe, might as well make it fun!). The fight went on and we tried to ping pong aggro between the 4 of us (warlock was in demon form). Eventually the others all died, leaving only me, the boss... and the ghoul. I used every trick in the book and got him to 2%, then I died. 3 seconds later, the boss died too, and the ghoul was happily jumping up and down on the corpse.

Who needs healers when you have player-controllable ghouls?!  :awesome_for_real:


-- Z.

Wait.

The shaman could control the ghoul?

Yup. If you cast 'Raise Dead' at a dead party member, they get to control a 14k hp ghoul as a "pet" for the duration.
It is made of equal parts win and awesome.


-- Z.

If you hit a player with your summon ghoul spell, the player is rezzed as and can control the ghoul.  It's much fun to slap it on a healer after they've bitten it. (Fake ed: Zetor beat me!)

So far my favorite mechanic of the expanion has been the NPCs helping you out after you rescue and/ or heal them instead of running off like bitches.

I never noticed cuz of the permanent ghoul thing.  This is awesome to know.

Yeah I was just overreacting because of a bad day at work. I realised after that my monitor is huge so what seems like a few lines to me would have been quite a bit longer for someone else.

Anyway here's the story again in line break form (though longer I think, more explanation of the mechanics):

First a quick rundown on the situation. We're fighting Loatheb in the 10man, which is a boss who puts a debuff on the raid that reduces all healing by 100% for roughly 20 seconds, with 3 seconds between the debuff ending and being put back up. He also puts up a nature damage dot on the raid and periodically does a shadow AoE. Basically you have a 3 second window every 20 seconds to heal up the raid and the tank.

We have 2 holy paladins as our only healers and they aren't known for their AoE healing so it's not proving to be easy. Luckily I do happen to have the only 2 abilities a paladin can have to multi-target heal: Glyph of Holy Light which makes my holy light heal 5 other targets within 5 yards for 10% of the healing, and Beacon of Light which clones all of my heals done on the group and gives them to the target of the beacon, essentially letting me heal 2 people at a time. I get the raid to stack up on eachother behind the boss so they get the holy light AoE and put beacon on the tank so I can concentrate on healing the raid.

The fight starts off okay with everybody being kept up until we reach the point where he does his shadow AoE twice as often. The other paladin dies and the rest of the raid soon follows until we're down to just me, my brother (prot specced warrior in DPS gear), and the MT (prot warrior). Loatheb is still at 18% or roughly 600k HP so the raid leader calls the wipe, but the 3 of us keep going. With beacon on the tank I can Holy Light myself or my brother, then Holy Shock the other one, and the tank gets both of those heals. This is enough to keep all 3 of us up every time the 3 second window comes around and we manage to 3man him for the 10 minutes it takes for our crappy DPS to burn him down.

It was probably the most fun I've ever had raiding in WoW and cemented Beacon of Light into my talent selection. Since then I've found it so goddamn useful to either heal 2 tanks in a double-tanking situation or healing the tank through raid healing on an AoE encounter. I actually hardly heal the tank directly anymore unless nobody else is taking damage.


And nice story Zetor. You should try army of the dead as well for more ghouly fun. On a tauntable boss you get to watch the boss spin around like crazy as they ping-pong between all of them until they die.

Is it just me, or is the seemingly incredible amount of reused graphics getting on anyone elses nerves?

I mean, my two main characters are plate wearers. It seems like they flat out made ONE set of plate for 70-80, and reused it about six times with slightly different colouring.

I have no idea if they've reused it at 80. I assume they have. Twice.

I'm finding the armor to get bulkier overall as I level, but otherwise looking the same, and honestly, I don't mind at all.  It beats looking like a circus clown with all the mismatched quest rewards that used to be the norm.  And really, it's not like it's a bad looking 'look' to the quest reward armor. 

I've seen like two cloth robes, and a ton of re-hues.  I've seen a bit more variety in cloth shoulders. 

I don't mind though, as it's leaps and bounds better than the clown suit I wore while leveling in Outlands.

I actually have been a bit curious about the reused assets. And I was completely underwhelmed by the CGI (the one that launched with WAR is hella better). However, if that was a result of them putting more creativity into some of the quests/storylines and the use of that phasing system, it's all good.

It was a deliberate choice to avoid the "clown suit" look that folks complained about for the last 3 1/2 years on the forums.  Squeaky wheel gets the grease, and while I always lliked the varieity and ability to put-together 2 different suits (one for looks one for usefulness) this expansion threw the first option out.  Booo.

The 80s raid and pvp armor both look different from each other and the quest/ leveling sets.  However, the armor for 10 and 25 man encounters look the same (and reuses the original Naxx armor models), just a retinting between the two.  (The DK armor @ 80 looks badass, however.)

This.

I think making most of the as-you-level upgrades use the same texture, recolored, was a stroke of genius.  Being able to upgrade without worrying about how hideous X piece of armor looks, or how it breaks my outfit, is awesome.

(Of course this would all be solved by an 'Appearance' tab like some games, but whatever).

It also hopefully means they used most of the art budget on level 80 stuff.

Creating different sets of art that look good together would be smart and creative.

Slightly recolouring the same textures/models a million times is being cheap.

I mean, they're reusing Pre-BC sets. So I'm just saying.

Where'd you get a pre-bc texture/ model?  All I've gotten are the spiky shoulders look so far and I'm 79.

My weapon right now, a level 78 blue, is Pre-BC. As well, the Scourge event armour I just replaced was recoloured T2. Also, one of the raid sets is recoloured T3.

That's what I know of. I guarantee there's more.

The Scourge event armor is Recolored Judgement, only the most popular and frequently requested armor set in the game.

I wish my Druid had the same model reused "problem" ...

(http://www.nexuszero.net/Img/SturmClown.jpg)

Hey, not saying I don't *LIKE* the stuff that's being reused.

Just saying it's being/been reused TOO MUCH.

I mean, the plate set that I keep getting from 70-80 looks great. Really. But EVERY SINGLE FUCKING PAIR OF SHOULDERS I GET LOOKS THE EXACT SAME.

It's cheap. It's lazy (considering the money they have). It's annoying. It's boring.

By the way, I see you're in Zul'Drak.

Leave ASAP.

Possibly the worst zone in the expansion.

I specifically remember someone making a remark about one of the early Zul'Drak Scourge quests being bugged in /1.

Immediately, I jokingly quipped something along the lines of "abandon the quest line now and save your own sanity".

I was greeted by about ten lines of "WTF NOOB that quest line is E-Z".

Well, yes. It's easy to do the same thing over and over again, kill 60 of the same mob with an annoying-assed scourge pet that you need to constantly run and replace, constantly job around at run speed in a scourge costume, work a bunch of boring quests against a depressing and uninspired background, and teleport back and forth many more times than is necessary. However, that doesn't make it anything anywhere near good design.

But it's certainly E-Z, NOOB. It's XP without any difficulty. So, I mean, as long as everyone is more concerned overall with getting their XP, bad game design doesn't seem to matter.

The average MMO player never ceases to amaze me.

But I liked blowing up trolls with my fat abomination  :cry:

All the sets from the new Naxxramas are the same, just recolored, as the old ones from Naxxramas.  I think they said they were going to use the same graphics like a year ago, because they thought the sets were cool and very few people got them/got to use/see them in the past.

If they could make different but still matching outfits, I wouldn't mind that.  But I prefer this to the completely different and therefore totally mismatched outfits we've always had up to now.

Personally, I don't mind not having different looking armor every few levels.  One set of armor that looks good is better than a dozen that look meh to horrible.

Well, as long as they said it a year ago - then I'm just a noob who should be listening better to their random posts on their shitstain-infested forums.



See, again, the point is being missed here.

If the sets look like shit or don't match well for one reason or another, this is the fault of designers/art designers/possibly artists.

Not the fault of the idea of diversity itself.

Picture yourself an an Art Lead, designing armour sets. Is it SO hard to deliver a couple of different sets from 70-80 that don't look like a clownsuit when intermingled?

Come on, not really.

With the amount of money Blizzard rakes in, there's no excuse for constantly recolouring (or not even) art assets to the degree that they do. IMO.

You were doing it wrong.

You don't fight the mobs with the abom. That way lies MADNESS.  You tag mobs, round them up in groups of 6-10 and then explode.  The explode oneshots all the trolls.   Then go tag another abom and repeat.  I had it done in 5 mins.

The 'bugged' quest isn't actually bugged.  There's UI add-ons that interfere with the charm for some reason. Disabling add-ons lets you tame the ghyst, but I had to google that after being unable to collect a crystal for a good 10 mins.

I really wasn't. I'm speaking in general.

Although the Abomination quest did get bugged for me for two explosions, which was annoying.

I've enjoyed Zul'drak so far, far more so than Grizzly Hills, which I found astoundingly dulll.

I also disliked Zul'Drak, it seemed like my xp per hour went way down as soon as I went there. It may not have as I don't measure it or anything but that one zone was the only one where it felt like a drag. It picked up later on though with the troll lines which were pretty fun.

I was always under the impression that they deliberately made the sub-level-cap gear look a bit crappy so that the nifty looks of the end-game gear were another hook to draw people into raiding/honor grinding etc.

I've hit Northrend in BC quest greens and rep blues, so the replacements I'm getting every quest are actually making my chars look *better* than they did before  :awesome_for_real:

I'm levelling my DK up through Outland at the moment, and dread having to start replacing her gear with a clownsuit.  :ye_gods:

It's Extra terrible for DK's, since they start off with so much good looking stuff.

It just refuses to die, doesn't it.

I just finished Borean Tundra and my DK doesn't look bad at all.  Looks pretty decent for a mix of greens and blues.

I managed to level one of my Death Knights all the way to 68 without picking up a single piece of visible armor in Outland, and I didn't feel particularly weak doing so.  That armor is good quality.  Most of the Outland pieces I might have upgraded to also had slight downsides, as well.

I suspect that armor is part of the reason everyone thinks death knights are so overpowered.  Most of their experience with them is in the Outland levels where they're equipped in armor just a few ilvls below Tier 2.

Did Naxxramas 10 man last weekend - picked up a boatload of loot, and a lot of badges.

I'm feeling pretty powerful. I was 1st on dps as a WARRIOR. That is truly a sign of the times.

It bugged for me on the first try. It was also camped, and I realized that I'd have to blow up 6-8 aboms to get it done. Running back and forth to gather pets only to blow them up doesn't equate fun to me. I dropped that quest, cancelled all the rest of my quests in Zul'Drak, and promptly left. It's the only zone I've outright hated.

You realize you can also do this in a group yes? The quest takes all of ten minutes...I swear some of you people are WAY too whiny and in need of instant gratification at all times. Yes maybe one quest isn't making you wet your pants, so what? first it leads to a very cool ending and second it is fast.

Fuck you, whiny bitch. Go get your instant gratification wetpants elsewhere, faggot.

IBTL

By the way, I'm now mentioning multiple times that I was speaking about the zone in general. I just happened to mention that quest. I guess you enjoyed it, or it was E-Z XP. Fair enough. There's no need to defend it like it's your first cousin, though.

It was a mismash of dull, plodding, repetitive and half-baked ideas that all ended up ultimately far more tedious than fun.

I don't think my defense of this particular zone/quest was all that vehement but my experiences were the complete opposite of your own. My vitriol however is simply directed at those who won't be satisfied until the game literally reaches out from the screen to give them a hand job.

I can't fucking wait.  I might start paying for two subs a month if that gets implemented.

...what would the other account be doing?

Cupping the balls.

In my day, MMORPGs were about rep grinding and stabbing yourself in the scrotal sac with a rusty fork to replace groans of boredom with groans of testicular tetanus and WE LIKED IT.

Edit: I can't decide whether to continue with the handjob talk or not. I'm wondering how close we are to a lock.

Arms or Fury?  Inquiring minds would like to know (aka my curiosity is peaked), and a link to a talent build would be excellent if you had one.  On a hunch I'd guess your arms because I ran a 5 man with a warrior in full S4 and a slightly higher lvl rogue with Warglaves, with the warrior topping the damage meter with ease.  Although that could be because he had a deathwish and liked to Bladestorm groups of 3-4+ everytime the cooldown was up, making me actually work to keep him alive.

I have a 70 arms warrior with T5/S2/Sunwell badge gear on another server collecting dust but I have been itching to try the new arms talents.

Can they give it a space gypsy accent while it pleasures, uh, people?  I love accents.

Fury! Here (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Illidan&n=Non) is a link to my armory, so you can check out my talent build.

Basically, you pick up Titan's Grip, Impale, Deep Wounds, and Two-Hand Weapon spec.

Combine that with the Chaotic Skyflare Diamond (the metagem that gives +21 crit rating and 3% crit damage), and you just do piles of damage.

The Oculus is fun.

Figured I would throw this in here. Whats one more derail?


I for one--not being a paladin--welcome these changes. With the new OMG Ret changes, getting owned by a pally in a few seconds while their shield was up, with nothing you could do about it, was unfun.

Not surprised. Won't be the last time that Pallies get the nerf bat.

BoP and Divine Shield better not share a cooldown. It would suck royally not being able to BoP someone and DS at the same time and would be a heavy nerf to holy paladins in 2v2. The rest of it is good though. Personally I wouldn't have been surprised if they made it -100% damage.

There isn't a whole lot of reason not to have made it -100%. Offensive use in PvP (especially arenas) will be about nil now.

Can someone tell me what the fuck it is with Strand of the Ancients that keeps kicking me randomly out of the BG (no deserter debuff, once it kicked me to Westfall).

He makes it sound like you still can cast them both.

And here is a fun one. In responce to someone bitching about spellpower plate.

I liked Zul'Drak. The second troll-y half of the zone in particular is a lot of fun, despite it being more trolls-doing-bad-stuff-to-their-own-animal-gods.

Plus, the Storm King's Revenge was pure awesome. With awesome on top.

The kick happened to me last night, too.  I've never been kicked to an odd zone before, but I've seen it happen on Disconnects. (Once, our main priest got DC'd from a raid and showed-up in the middle of the great sea when he reconnected, then in Westfall/Stormwind/Burning Steppes on subsequent spammed /whos)    That's a weird combination of errors there.

Mana burn nerf more than makes up for not being able to DPS inside a bubble once every 5 minutes.

Edit: Oh and I just noticed SotP is going to give its 15% damage increase to ALL seals and judgements. Looks like every ret is going 5 into Holy.

As I read it this only affects drain effects, burn effects won't be changed. Although those were already nerfed a while back.

Mana burn, mana drain, if it makes mana go away it's a % now, is what I've come to understand on the boards.

Yeah, I think looking from the outside and not actually trying it, Titans Grip doesn't seem so attractive because of the 5% hit penalty which is in addition to the DW hit penalty.  Seems like you would need a ton of +hit to really get the spec to perform well, which traditionally is a pain to itemize for even as Arms.

Not to mention in my experiences so far with Fury warriors in Northrend, they haven't been that impressive, even one's with really good TBC gear.  This might be due to them being clueless about how to properly spec though because nearly all I've seen have like 60 or more points in Fury and don't even have Impale ( :uhrr:) which has always been a staple dps talent for both Arms and Fury.   I haven't played my warrior in quite some time so I wasn't sure if grabbing all the high end Fury talents was worth passing up things like Impale or not.

I think all the new talents and abilities are by far my favorite thing about expansions in WoW, especially Wrath with so many talent tree revamps.  All the old cookie cutter builds are thrown out the window and until new ones become the norm you can really get a good idea of who understands their class and how to optimize it with a simple inspect of their talents.  Plus experimenting to find new and interesting specs is just fun.

Edit: Although as a bonus, my warrior is a space goat, 1% hit racial ftw.  I'm really gonna have to try all the new warrior goodness sometime over the holiday.

Judgements of the Pure getting buffed, not Seals of the Pure. Woops. Oh well, means I can pick up Kings.

Dammit I wish Dranaei had been Horde and Blood Elves Alliance. I really want a space goat and I cannot fucking stand belves. But I can't play Alliance, just can't, makes me feel dirty.

/derail

It's not just me then!  :drill:

Although I'm extremely glad that Drainys aren't Horde. I despise them as much as I do Nelfs.  Not as much as gnomes though - they get a special kind of loathing.

Well on every server that has launched since TBC, Horde is the new Alliance thanks to BE's.  Playing alliance on one of those servers was actually pretty cool, especially a pvp server, since it reminded me of playing horde back in the day.  I mean I've played both sides on a multitude of different servers and the stereotypes about horde and alliance are well...... just stereotypes.

I have yet to get a Horde Character to 40, think my highest is 36 now?


This is after four years of 'playing' it.

On many pvp servers, alliance never outnumbered horde, even before BC.

And rest assured, for every "NE hunter" stereotype, there are two equivalent "undead rogue" stereotypes. :p


-- Z.

It all depends on the battlegroup.  My alliance is on Alleria/ Rampage and Alliance gets rolled there so often it's not worth trying to do the PVP daily without it being AV or -maybe- EOTS.   Meanwhile my highest Hordie is on Zul'jin/ <whatever they are> and it seems about 50/50 with a slight Alliance bias on that BG.  The Druid I had on Venture Co. always won in the lower-level BGs, unless the Alliance team was full of level-capped twinks.

It's nothing to do with the personalities or numbers of the players on either side, it's just the style and lore and feeling of the factions.

I've got a couple of Alliance 60's and I was in a great couple of guilds and have some good friends on the Alliance side, I just hate elves and gnomes so much. I am Horde to the core baby.

Besides, I have an orc called Gorgeous. Really, it doesn't get any better than that. Oh, apart from his undead mate, Hideous  :awesome_for_real:

FOR THE HORDE!!11

There's a questline to initiate the taunka(sp?) into the horde, reading the pledge made me feel really proud.

Lok'tar ogar, Victory or death!

You have an interesting way of agreeing with people.

Alliance is the new Horde.

Blasphemy.

No self-respecting organization that would call itself the Horde would ever allow gnomes in its ranks.  Ever.

I think the self-respect part of that went out the window when Paris Hiltonelves joined  :oh_i_see:

Gnomes > Blood Elves.

Talking heaps of shit are > Elves

You know, I always try to take the side of being fair to all the races.... But then some shit happens that reminds me of how retarded elves are.  Like last night when the Nelf Hunter wants to roll on cloth and then runs out of arrows when we're pulling the final boss of the instance.  Fucking PUGS, man.  Fucking PUGs. 

I may be taking the unpopular side here but while I find draenei to look/sound cool I simply do NOT like their lore at all. Blood elves at least make a bit of sense, ok they're power hungry addicts, you can work with that. Draenei though? They're supposedly evolved from the Eredar(demons) and now worship the light and crashed on azeroth in their space ship...wut?

DEMONS...IN...SPAAAAAAACE!

Actually, that would have been the story that DID make sense (small group of Eredar gets redeemed by the Naaru and becomes good).  Unfortunately they decided to screw it up instead of following the storyline that would have fit seamlessly into the old lore.  The Eredar (original) are the same as the Draenei, then the Legion came, the vast majority of them joined up and became demons (or what we now call Eredar), and the few that decided being demons just wasn't for them escaped with the Naaru.

As for the crash: Crash was unintentional, coming to Azeroth was not.  Blood Elf sabotage caused the ship to crash, but it did arrive roughly at its intended destination.  Also, not a spaceship in the traditional sense.  I suppose technically it's a spaceship, but think more TARDIS than USS Enterprise.

Maybe it's just me, but WoW 'lore' makes me cringe.

Two years go by and they haven't cleaned up a single piece of that spaceship.  Them's lazy Draenei. 

Although I thought it was cool in Borean Tundra that there's some of the Azuremyst stuff that migrated up there, the moths and bloodspores and such. 

There is a reason why it is called lorelol or lollore.

I think the reason the Draenei bother people so much, is they are such a fucking detour in overall story line.


You can see how the Blood Elves make sense, their motivations and origins and all that. The Draenei?

"Here's some race you've never heard of before, ever, and they brought their semi-divine WindChime Gods with them. You're BFF now! Oh btw, there are OTHER people you've never actually heard of before either, that are totally evil and look just like your new BFF!"


That's one thing that WotLK has done, is really put a contrast of comparison between itself and TBC. The Alliance end of TBC, outside of the "Hay I saw your statue in Stormwind!" reunion aspect, is just one weird ass sight seeing tour. While the Horde was trying to find salvation or redemption for itself in outland, the alliance was having one elaborate camping trip. "So you guys live on top of giant mushrooms, cool."

See, it's quite simple:
Flying castle = OK (See: Naxxramas, etc)
Dimensional Travel = OK (See: Dark Portal, etc).
Flying castle with dimensional travel = lollore. Not quite sure why, though.

I'm fine with the Dranaei.  Mostly 'cause of their looks and accent.

The lore didn't bother me because by that point I realized they had pretty much given up trying.  Immersion and their tenuous attempts to make a coherent story were already being ruined in every conceivable way.  At least I got a race I liked to look at.  Of course everything else was too much.  Until the blizzard cub. :|

I don't think the problem is with flying castles, it's more of an aesthetic thing.  "The Exodar" is not the name of a castle, it sounds like the end of a sentence that begins with "Mister Worf, lock phasers on".  And the look of the ship castle itself doesn't do much to dispel that; they've got holographic projections and glowy neon wires and pipes inlaid in walls that look more like plastic or concrete than stone or wood.  It just looks like a Halo level or something.  Compared to the gnomish tech which at least looks like it kind of fits with the rest of the world.

When I heard Dranei I wanted to play as a mutant with sickle-bladed weaponry.  What we got was okay, except the whole shitting all over the established story from War III and the space camping expedition.

I sometimes wish I knew more of the WoW lore, but there just seems so much of it and whenever I start reading it (out of game) it feels confusing and disjointed. I suppose that's because of the way the lore has built up, piecemeal, along with the games.

The bits I have picked up in-game have always made me favour the Horde though. They always came across as the actual "good guys", having been manipulated and fucked around with by other forces and their tale seems mostly to be one of trying to recover their true natures after all the meddling. I did like the little story you get told when you enter Shattrath for the first time and get your guided tour, that was actually quite moving and did soften my attitude towards the Blood Elves (slightly).

I also have no problem at all with the whole spacey/sci-fi aspect of BC. Mainly because I think that the graphic design of it all looks very cool, even if it doesn't exactly fit with the rest of it. I love the inside of the Exodar and Netherstorm is my favourite zone ever. I sometimes get on my Netherdrake, fly up to one of the floating rocks, turn all the volumes down except the ambient, which I turn right up, and just sit and relax, watching and listening to the storms. Beautiful.

And Draenei girlies are fucking hot. Unlike Blood Elf girls who piss me off. They need to eat some fooooood ffs!

Draenei engineering is very OP.

I'm also starting to get VERY ANNOYED with the random BG kicking.

Yeah, the "here's some brand new old gods that have always been around, you just never heard of or noticed them before. Fo' sho'."  was a major issue with Everquest. At least with WOTLK, they're revisiting stuff that has a precedent and integrates a lot of pre-known lore with Frozen Throne. - Arthas, Dalaran etc, along with the "realistic" low fantasy setting and viking-look over the floaty crystal castles stuff in BC.

I liked a lot of BC, but I never really got into things like The Consortium, Sporegarr, Shattrath or The Exodar or even Tempest Keep in terms of design. The Exodar is the thing that bothers me the most though. Aside from a shitty layout even by WoW-capital city standards, theres big fucking holes in the ground that still haven't been fixed.

If we're advancing the storyline and if the place is supposed to be a capiral city, they can surely buy some dwarven concrete and fill those gaps...


I really think what they need to be doing NOW is seeding the game with more and more elements that will be revealed fully in the next couple of expansions to avoid the total disjointedness that BC had to anyone who hasn't tried to delve into the confusing Warcraft lore offline. Besides just Un'Goro and the sleeping dragon in Dragonblight.

Of course the Horde is the good guys.  Thrall got his orcs and fled and the Alliance chased them to another continent!

I liked seeing Baron Rivendare in the early part of the DK experience. I thought to myself, that guy is a real bad ass. I've killed him so many times, yet there he is chattin it up with the overlord. :)

So far I am quite impressed with the DK start. I'm only about a level into but I love how they just keep feeding you blues and nice XP chunks :)

I like how they feed you the talent points one or two at a time as quest rewards as well. Dealing with 40 of them right at character creation would have been a pain.

See, if Dalaran had to transport itself to outland or whatever, I don't think anyone would even blink.

Somehow it's because they're 'wizards' as soon as you say it was wizards, people just nod and go 'oh, that makes sense'

Damned wizards and their floating cities, eating pie all day.

Based on the Dalaran cooking dailies I have been getting, they eat hot dogs with mustard all the time.

Sewer Mushroom Meatloaf here.  :awesome_for_real:



Lakov, that's what I'm getting at. With the Draenei, they have their weird ass crystal "technology" everywhere. The Warp Coil, The CryoTubes etc...



Like, if the Gnomes made a spaceship, no one would even blink, because it would be steampowered with 1950's rayguns. Fuck the Goblins made an actual ROCKET SHIP and no one seems to care  :grin:


The Draenei are just so out of left field compared to everything else in game.

The initial look of Zul'drak (too much grey!) turned me off, but it's actually quite an interesting zone. It has a really strong progression / story to pull you through it and does give the feel of an immense ruined troll capitol city. Some good quests too, both the early horde lines and the troll gods.

It also had a quest which I wondered if it was inspired by Warhammers public quests. In one area you have to kill a number of mobs to make a slightly stronger named spawn. When you kill them they drop a chest containing one of the treasures you've been tasked with returning. The trick is that it is largely group independent. Everyone killing trolls contributes to the bosses spawning and the chest they dropped can be used by everyone, whether you were in the party that got the named kill or not.

Dinged 80 in Sholazar so still have multiple zones and lots of instances to explore. They've certainly piled on the PvE content and the quality is high.

PvP and class balancing I'm a lot less impressed with.

I have a love/hate relationship with Wintergrasp currently. The zone is buggy as shit currently.

The only issue I have with Zul'drak *really* is that it's trolls fucking with their gods. For the bazillionth time. Shit, one of my quest turn in ladies was like, "I know it sounds like the same old story, trolls using gods they should be worshipping, but it's different this time, seriously." Only not really.

In hindsight, Blizzard can suck a dick for having pvp survivability hinge so heavily on resilience.

Try it when half the time you have to click off a debuff to get a rez prompt, and you never keep your rank between deaths <3

Yeah, I respecced after two days of that.

I'm slow and only just learned you can actually get Tier armor via Heroic Badges in this expansion.

Holy crap that's a nice change, particularly for those of us who are already running heroics while waiting on guildies to level-up so we can't do 10 mans yet.  Not to mention that once you DO start raiding, you're not forever fighting against 3-6 other people for that one tier token that rarely drops.  Get enough badges (what, 3-4 runs? I think 10 man bosses still drop 2 per kill.) and you just go out and buy it yourself.

Only two pieces (chest and gloves?) are badger buyable.

That said, still a nice boost if you want to farm up early, or even if you want an off set without feeling like a prick for rolling on the dropped token.

I would suggest stockpiling badgers later though. If they hold to form, better badger gear will come out with every content patch.

I am highly confident they will do no such thing.  If you want better gear, you will have to get the better badgers that will drop from tier 8 content - Just like how you can't buy half the badge loot that exists now unless you're running 25's.

I fully expect them to keep this two tier system going forward, and have 10 man Uld/25 man uld, with new 10 man and 25 man badger prizes for them.

25 man will simply be ~10-13 ilevels over the 10 man gear still.

I'd be very surprised if they kept separate badges for each tier and type of raid; more likely I think is that we'll have one type of badge for heroics/10 mans and the other type for 25s, and they'll just add more gear to buy going forward. Giving 2 new badge types every time a new raid comes out would seem to be pointlessly unwieldy.

Or they have badge types associated with ilvl, so T8 10 man raids will share emblems with T7 25mans etc.

Would rapidly make heroics useless, though.

They kept the same badgers for all the tiers in TBC, seemed to work out fine. The two tier system is basically the same thing, with a nod to 25 man raiders and giving them slightly better badgers. You just jack up the cost on the new better gear.

I agree about the heroics as the main reason they wouldn't release more badge types. Blizzard wants people to be able to obtain gear through 5 man content. Not all the gear, but some.

It didn't work out though, it stymied progression because most people could zerg-farm kara and heroics until they had the gear to brute-force higher tier encounters. I guess it depends on your perspective on progression. With all raids having both 10 and 25 man versions there's one less barrier to raid progression, but if you're using heroics to gear up for raids one or two tiers higher than expected, why aren't you just running the lower-level raids?

I would say that if they add new heroics that match raid releases, then that would make sense, i.e. T8 difficulty heroics that would require T7 level badge gear. Much like how MgT provided a source of good Kara-level gear to help nudge smaller guilds into ZA.

They didn't start zerg forcing any content until well after it had been released AND when Blizzard had released newer badge rewards for the precise intent of helping people zerg content. Blizzard was controlling the pace of progression through their encounters, but they began to realize that they TBC had some horrible fucked up designs.

Will similar things happen in WoTLK? I'm not really sure it will. The encounters thus far aren't exploiting one classes singular abilities so far, and they have better melded DPS, tanks, and healers together without having one class as an obvious standout. Gone are the days where you NEED 4 shamans to raid, which was stupid. Raid-wide buffs saw to that, while the talent changes to classes saw to the rest.

I'm still trying to figure out if rogues or warlocks have a purpose though over other forms of DPS. They seem to be the odd classes out in most of the 10 mans I do.

It's a fair point, and I think that the addition of parallel 10 and 25 man progression fixes the biggest flaw in TBC raid design and pacing. Hence why you may see overlapping tiers of badge rewards.

Perhaps. The currency system makes that more likely than in the past. Having to hold onto bags and bags of different badges would have been a PITA. Speaking of which, I think they went WAY overboard with the "quest item" stuff. I pick up 5 quests and I have 4 items in my bag that I have to use on different things, or I have to collect 3 types of each thing that work with my item. Bags are for loot.

My only complaint with the expansion so far is that my item management skill hasn't budged even with my constant practice.

WTB 22 slot bags on the cheap please.

Personally, my biggest gripe with the currency system is that it doesent cover MANY things that SHOULD be currency.  There are a ton of items that drop in different zones that are soulbound, useful ONLY in that zone, and are used as currency to buy buffs or similar, but dont go in the currency tab simply because you can sell them for 10 copper each.......

Fuck that noise.  Take the sell price off them and stick them in the currency tab so i can get my 6-8 bag slots back.....

We're not going to think about it that hard. If one of our rogues or warlocks (or hunters or mages) signs up, we'll take them.

Yet another reason I went ahead and rerolled with a DK main.  "I'm a DPS who offtanks" seemed more valid a reason to drag me in than playing as a prot paladin who (hilariously) gets told to offheal when there's no reason for a 2nd tank.  Or a DPS.. who... dpses or does nothing at all.

Thus far my predictions about "There's going to be a shortage of healers..." have proven true, too.  I have one friend who heals, he's always busy and getting tells for groups. Meanwhile I'm LFG as dps, or (with a few gear swaps) always the Tank of a full group looking for a healer.  :awesome_for_real:

The "prediction" that there would be a shortage of healers was obvious. If you give healing classes a good option to DPS, the majority of players will flock to it. It's always been hard to find a druid healer because 75% of them went feral. Shamans don't want to heal because of their buffs, dps, and utility. Now, pallies got a legit DPS buff while breaking their healing tree, so they all went prot and ret. Priests are the only people healing things now, with the occasional druid. If you find a priest, there's a very solid chance it's a healer. That's not true with any other class.

Healing is still poorly implemented in these games... I love playing healers in terms of group responsibility, but soon tire with the fact that I spend all of my time watching the interface instead of the game.  If they woudl simply tie healing to damage output, I think players would have much more fun healing.  Design desicision failure tied to old diku class mechanics. 

I couldn't agree more, and here's some concrete proof that it doesn't have to be this way (sample size is one! how much more concrete do you need?!)

Disciple of Khaine (WAR) was the first healer I ever played that I thought was fun to play.  Target an enemy, target a friend, beat on enemy and heal that target at the same time, spam a group heal occasionally, may a hot if you were feeling like you cared about whether your friends lived or died.  Every other healer class I ever played I hated.

I have a lot of fun healing as a priest.

The doom and gloom from the pure dps classes needs to stop.

-Warlocks are still the indisputed kings of AOE.
-Still bring a curse baseline.
-Can do a decent job maintaining their own HP pool if necessary/useful (A warlock/resto druid combo was how we dealt with the back two horsemen)
-Do lots and lots of single target DPS.
-Imp brings health boost if you lack a warrior for commanding shout.
-Health stones
-Soulstones
-Ritual of Summoning is awesome for respecs between fights or subbing people in; it can be a VERY long walk from the front door.
-Demonology locks offer a spelldamage buff if you lack a shaman.

Rogues are somewhat behind the other pure DPS classes at the moment, but
-Their two real DPS trees offer +2% raidwide physical damage or +3% raidwide crit.
-Dismantle works on some bosses.
-Expose armor is a love letter to the other dps if you lack a warrior.
-Still have some of the best oh shit buttons of any class and thus require less healing than most others.
-Tricks of the Trade.
-Kick.

Edit: The only class-spec combo that is really, really bad right now is ele and maybe enhance.  They're pretty pathetic.

Until we start seeing warlocks running around with 2800 spellpower, elemental shamans still bring the single best spellpower buff in the game by a large margin, so you'll see one in every 25 man raid for now.

Warlocks also scale better with gear than any other caster. I'm not in a min-max guild though, and I feel that the serious min-maxers are a small minority of the overall playerbase.

Did you give up drinking or is there some other reason you've decided to just be a huge prick for the last few months? Get laid, douchey.

I focus on Holy with my Paladin because my guild needs healers. PUGs and random wankers can use bandages and potions and fuck right off.

So I worked counterclock wise through Howling Fjord and I only have 77/105 quests in the area and I've done all the instance quests.  Same thing with BT and I'm 134/150.

I don't get it.

My guild got server first kel thuzad in the 25man so some first hand.(yay for no life?)

~rogues are usually in the top five dps

~our moonkin is number one in dps usually with me a close second (spriest)

~druid tanks are a LOT better out the door at 80 since they can defense cap through talents.

~warlock dps is sorely lacking it seems but they bring a lot of utility. Running a raid without summons SUCKS, especially is someone dies in a gauntlet area or falls off a ledge etc.

~raiding guilds already sunwell geared won't have trouble with the fights but these bosses are harder than karazhan level if you're in 80 blues so this won't be content most people race through.

~I have much more fun in tight knit 10man than 25mans and the gear level difference is negligible.

He seems to be agreeing with you, and you're jumping down his throat? I don't get it?

I never thought I would say it but:

Volley is now the best spell ever.

Even before my LOL upgrade my ranged weapon 2 times in one Naxx timer weekend, I was able to put out retarded DPS by just using volley on any pack with 2 or more mobs in it.

Our guild has 0 shaman right now. I think the majority of the "OMG SHAMANS" burning crusade people all rolled DKs or something, I rarely see many on.

On a side note, still using several blue pieces/my Hyjal ring and not having really any good gems or the best enchants, I am now over 5k AP with AI/Mark/Kings/Might on my hunter. I am guessing with just heroic/10 man naxx loot I will be able to break 6k AP.

There are rather a lot of quest chains that start/continue off of dropped objects - you may have missed some of those. Did you do all the walrus guy quests?

Do you have an armory link for the druid tank you raid with?  Just interested in comparing gear between him and me.  I still feel very squishy compared to how i used to be PRE bc.  I went from near max physical mitigation (like 31k armor if healing buff to armor procced) and 55% dodge in full raid buffs to around 22k armor and struggling to get 43% dodge in full raid buffs.

I now routinely run into warriors who have more Armor then i do, and better mitigation through parry / Block / improved defensive stance, and it makes me cry.

There aren't that many in HF or BT but here - with obvious spoiler disclaimers - is a list of all dropped items that begin quests (http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?page=833).

now granted he's gotten a lot of gear in the last couple weeks but as soon as we hit 80 he tanked 10man naxx without issue.  fully raid buffed hit can hit 41k hp.

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Blackwater+Raiders&n=Truebeast

There's a few pockets of quests that are very easy to miss, especially in Borean.  Skip over a single dude with a ! over his head and you can miss large chains.

A few that I can think of in Borean:

-The rock quary quests.  Probably about 8 or so quests over 2 quest givers. Probably ran into them doing the DHETA quests. 
-Moth/kobold quests right outside of the horde starter area.
-There are 3 sets of walrus dude quests in different locations, make sure you've done all of them.
-Make sure you haven't skipped the Borgorok outpost quests.
-There's a few quests at the Amber Ledge, but I assume you did them as they lead up to the Nexus line of quests.

Working on Howling Fjord right now.  I really don't care for the flow of it so far.  It just takes you all over the place and there's a decent amount of running back and forth for just a few quests. It's nice that I can solo the 3 man group stuff pretty easy.

In BT?  Yes.

Speaking of HF, I found that sprite person up north, the taurens in the excavation pit, and that treant in the burning tree area in the south.  The only area I may be missing something is in the SE portion of the zone.

I'll check later tonight I think, then go look around BT for anything I might of missed.

Did you do the Walrus guy quest that starts off near the Ancient lift? It's one quest that leads to at least 10+.

What's the situation with Mages? I still love mine and have no plans to change, but the huge boost we got in BC power-wise (from 60-70 anyway) doesn't seem to have translated to a similar boost in WotLK.

Arcane mages are ridiculous for PvP currently. That's about all I know for certain.

Good question.  I don't see mages a lot anymore, even in my PUGs.  It's all been locks, hunters and ret pallies w/ druid tanks.  Hell, I've grouped with more rogues than mages so far, which is just plain odd since nothing gets CC'd, it's all AOE'd.

I feel like a "lot of people"* gave up on Mages because they weren't all that for PvP in BC and started to become less relevant in later BC raid zones. It's also easier nowadays to follow the fotm train because of the faster leveling. And then there's the need for Blizzard to sell WotLK boxes so why wouldn't they a) make DKs the preeminent class befitting their "hero" label; and, b) give some much needed love to classes that weren't so much so prior.

I have seen all of two other Mages since stepping into Borean Tundra.

Totally separate question: is Howling Fajourd (/mikemeyers) a very different user experience from Borean Tundra or just different textures? I'm thinking of when I get my DK up that way.

* In my extremely deep pantheon of insights from my single guild of my single faction of my single server, and then only at my primetime every other day or so when I feel like logging in to largely solo anyway

I was, but I was also pointing out how it was an outright certainty given Blizzard's design choices before the expansion even released. There simply were no other options than less healers when they removed a viable healing class tree.

Also, if you are having trouble finishing up the quest requirements in a certain area, make sure to check the unexplored portions of your map, or the surrounding large islands. Also, check any places on your map that uncovered themselves in large bulk areas. Lastly, MMO Champion added a compilation of all the quest item drops per area and by monster. Those usually start large quest chains. Here's that link: http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?page=833 (http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?page=833)

I lead a group through UK last night with two mages.

Howling Fjord is far and away the better zone compared to Borean. It's not as ugly, the quests have a Norse feel, it's more focused on the Vykrul lore, and I found it more fun. Also, the UK instance was right out the front door.

I also have 4 mages I run 5 mans with regularly, and they don't seem all that different to me. They aren't topping the meters all the time, but they still have a ton of utility with sheeps, tables, ports, AE, freezes, slows, and solid ranged DPS on bosses that do whirlwinds and cleaves.

You're going to want to hit BT first for the easily obtainable, blue weapon reward.  Should be miles better than anything you're exiting BC with.

HF starts off with the undead and has some humorous quest lines about the new plague. HF is somewhat bothersome to navigate and the quest areas seem to be more spread out and fewer quests per area.  The overall lore and narative seem to be a bit tighter in HF as opposed to BT. I would definitely hit up the walrus guy near the Ancestral Lift as it leads to a great series of pirate quests.  Overall, the quests seems to be easier in HF also.

They also want there to be a reason to do heroics 2 years from now like there was in BC.

I personally prefer the quests and flow of questing in the Fjord over the Tundra. I mentioned this in a guild instance group last night and didn't get much objection, just a lot of agreement. Whoever said the quests send you all over the place, I found most any quest that required more than 1000yds of travel to provite transportation in some form. Mostly NPC's ferrying you around. I leveled my main up through the tundra and since then 2 alts through the Fjord and don't plan on any more of my alts doing the Tundra unless I get really bored. There is enough content in all zones you really don't need to duplicate or overlap questing in them, and from what I saw, both zones actually seem to slow the 70-71 leveling a bit by having a lot of 68-70 mobs in the lower ends.

Yeah, at HF make sure to actually read the quest text. I didn't on my paladin and quickly got frustrated with the endless riding around. Did it again on my priest and saw the part about talking to NPC's and flying to the quest points. Whoops.

I liked Borean Tundra. The elder quests from the Easter Island statues got a little annoying simply because the relic guys there have such a quick respawn time, but the Thassarian quest line was pretty good. I like how they're integrating the Lich King into many of the levelling quests to make a more coherent narrative.

No major complaints about WOTLK to this point, having loads of fun. The hardcore tears on the General Forums about how easy the game is are especially tasty.

yup here too.  What's the latest?  Just a wait-and-see for a few months till they are patched? 

Ooooh I missed those.  Nice.  Gonna get to this tonight.

The wowhead.com zone maps (e.g. Howling Fjord (http://www.wowhead.com/?zone=495)) have a drop-down menu above the map that shows the location of all quest givers for either side. This might help you.

Did they ever implement the two talent specs per character?  I haven't found it in the few days I've been playing the BC return "trial", so I wasn't sure if it was a Lich King thing, still in the works, or dropped completely.

It's still in the works. 

One of the things I really, really want, yet fear will never come.  I've never once been asked out of the blue or invited in to a group yet in WOLK for DPS.  Everyone wants me to be resto. I'd like to get groups, but I'm not leveling as resto.  I just don't have that much time to watch mobs keel over exerting themselves trying to kill me.

It's all about what happens at the top, really. Levelling without the dungeons is actually preferrable if you want to do it faster. I've found they really put the emphasis on questing rather than dungeon xp. There are a few good quests, but I always check the rewards. Just my two cents on that part of it.

The other part is how druids are going to be forced back into healing roles. They've taken away some of the dominance of the bear tank survivability, which in groups is ok but in raids would be a more OT role. Shamans are going to be in a similar place because from what I've understood, one of the DPS trees is extremely broken/unpopular right now. Pallys are never coming back as healers until some drastic changes are made to their tanking ability and/or healing issues. Priests are doing great healing with CoH atm, but that will probably be nerfed as it's made them too "one button" for Blizzard's taste.

I prefer Fjord.  Seems to have Much more interesting / important lore going on.

Also, im not 100 % sure, but i think you NEED to do a few quests from New Agamand as horde if you intend to get the Wrathgate quest to open up, because one of them might be the questline / string that starts the whole chain of events.

The quest from New Agamand to Venomspite is just a breadcrumb quest; you can get to that same step from Dragonblight.

---

There is no reason to think druids will be forced into healing roles any more than they are now, nor is there any reason to be gloomy about priests.  Let me refresh you on the Latest From GC (tm).
They are both in line to be nerfed.

The nerf has been on the table for a while now. 6 second cooldown is the likely form from what I understand. It still doesn't do anything to fix holy paladins.

Sheep bot.

I'm wondering if Blizzard is reconsidering. Adding a cooldown is likely trivial and could have been hotfixed in if they really wanted to. What really should happen is COH gets its mana cost upped and Holy paladins get some sort of AOE heal or Bacon gets buffed. If I know Chilton, he's probably whining Holy Paladins will dominate 5's in Arena if they can AOE heal, as if that shit matters.

The answer for why healing is fucked up is due to pvp without a doubt. I'm getting really really sick of it.

Ahh shit, now I'm curious if I'm the broken one or not.  I know my current spec (enhance) is pretty unpopular in pvp because you've got survivability of wet paper bag.  Shaman forums are proving unhelpful.

And my want for dual spec does go a bit deeper than leveling.   I'd love to be enhance for soloing, but the most common need of others for my time tends to be healing.  Will be even more so now that I've decided to give up on being unguilded for the time being.  Too quiet.    Heh, of course last time I was resto my guild had zero enhance shaman and problems fielding any melee dps at all.  :oh_i_see:

AFAIK elemental is the one generating the most tears, mostly because they can't AE down the trash with the other casters, and because they scale poorly. It feels weak to me at 71, a big step down from how I felt in TBC endgame (I was a mighty draenei who bestrode the DPS meter like a benevolent god) but I have no idea how he'll shake out in the endgame. As usual I am concentrating on my warrior for now, he is my one true love.

Paladin single target healing is sick which has splash healing and there is also that ability that copies the heal to someone else.  They are incredible in 10 mans supposedly.  This isn't first hand experience though.

Paladin healing could be 5 times as powerful and effective as the other 3.5 healers in game, and it still wouldn't change the fact its absolutely retarded to play.

More than that, the paladin just flat out sucks at raid healing. Encounters like Malygos really highlight that. The splash healing on holy light is useless for doing anything other than a little topping up of your melee dps.

Elemental Shaman got Shadowpriest complicated where a rigid rotation actually loses dps relative to "cast whatever lights up first."  Their DPS is also 'balanced' which means they are well behind Hunters, RetPaladins, Deathknights and Druids.
Enhancement Shaman feel unstoppable but sometimes puny caster daggers deal more dps than skullthumping hammers.  They are a little less balanced, and will get less so when their abilities/glyphs work properly.  That means they can top damage meters for specific fights, but lack the AoE required to perform well overall (your 25man raid only wants 1).  No other Shaman spec beats Enhance for levelling, no matter what your end goal spec is (every 2 min you can fill your mana bar while you fight - if you managed to empty it in the first place).
Resto Shaman lost Brain Heal and look to be migrating towards another 1-button wonder, LHW for an entirely new gimmicky build.  With Priests and Druids handling the raid healing and Priests and Paladins handling the single target healing, Resto Shaman are wondering wtf to do.  This one respec'd enhance.

Shaman were abused with this release and they haven't sorted themselves out yet.   A well stacked raid still wants 2 Shaman for heroism/Bloodlust, so that's Enhance +1 depending on what is available.  Shaman got CC in the form of Hex (which everyone ignores because the order of the day is to AoE everything), and the wolves return health for the damage they deal so that goes a long way to keeping you alive when you've ripped aggro and only have 18k health to last until a tank notices.

They are apparently the ultimate PatchWerk healer though, so its fine  :oh_i_see:

Hunters are the golden gods of DPS right now. I have this one other I've been dungeoneering with, and we both have pretty much equivalent gear, he's consistently a good 5% higher on DPS charts, for no real reason.

It basically goes:

Hunter
Me
Rest of DPS

Not to say that fury warrior aren't totally busto right now, but hunters are MORE busto.

10 man and 25 man Naxx are BOTH easy. Malygos is pretty fun, except when your healers are retarded. Paladins are only good for single-target healing, and lack ANY type of sufficient group/raid healing. Holy Bacon is a band-aid on a festering wound.

I rock at healing!

*AE damage*

... fuck.

The sad thing is that Malygos exists after they acknowledged their old design of random high raid damage was completely fucking over paladins. Malygos just takes it to 11 and fucks over shaman, too.

To be fair, they can NS + Chain Heal.








Once every two minutes.

You expect a DPS specced tank class to outdamage a pure DPS class? The price you pay for running an off spec IMO. With some gear, you can respec and become a great tank. DPS classes cannot. I personally think similarly geared rogues, locks, mages, and hunters should have the edge on you. Then stuff like Fury warriors, any spec druids, any spec shaman, ret pallys,  shadow priests, should be slightly less.

As a hunter, I can't, on a whim, decide I'll respec and heal for a 5 man. Less DPS should be the price you pay for versatility. Everyone else seems to pay for it.

Woe to the "pure" DPS classes when dual-spec comes out. The hybrids will all be running around as heal/DPS, DPS/tank, or tank/heal, while a billion super-coolio kiddie rogues sit around going "Durrh, I'm DPS/ ...different DPS!"

 :awesome_for_real:

As I've seen blue posts recently, the design no longer includes a price for versatility.  They keep saying that their intention is that between say, a hunter and a druid/shaman/warrior/paladin/etc specced for DPS, the difference should come down to player skill and gear, and that neither one should be noticeably inferior purely because of their class.

More likely PvE DPS/PvP.

Ding ding ding.

I would loved to have had dual specs back when I was raiding hardcore, as a Raiding PVE Rogue was absolutely horrible at arena. I ended up spending over 100 gold a week on respecs, also, now including Glyphs are going to be even more expensive unless they add in dual glyphing also.

There isn't a tank in the game who wouldn't want a viable DPS spec as his second. The same goes for the healers. With the DPS classes, I can see a dual spec offering utility in raiding beyond just simple pvp/pve. What if certain boss fights are DPS races? All the DPS can go to their highest DPS spec. What if it's more of a survival fight? You can swap to the more pvp/stam/survival gear and spec. Those are the only two kinds of boss fights there are, you either outlive, or you outdamage.

ummm.... when do glyphs expire?

I've respecced 3-4 times now and I still have all my glyphs.

Spec specific glyphs. There are a TON of them.

I don't think they'll offer a different glyph spec.  It's a viable way of maintaining the profession.  With enchanting, you're always changing your gear (mostly).  With inscription, it's probably the way it was intended.

I've been buying up lots of scrolls and consumables on the AH.  More so than before.  They're very handy.

I'm pretty sure I remember reading a writeup about them saying at Blizzcon they were planning to have glyph-swapping included.  It's probably in one of the panel writeups on MMO-Champion or in one of the recordings on wowradio.

That would explain it, although thats pretty useless since there are very few spec-specific glyps for priests (5/27 priest glyphs are linked to a talented ability, and of those 5 only two are of any arguable use), and even fewer that we would actually use. I can't say for other classes though.

I'll be using it for all my chars in one way or another.  I could REALLY use it now for my Paladin considering he's 80 and we need healers for raiding NOW.  I've been dragging my feet because the holy spec for Pally's is terrible for anything else right now.

I'd probably rock an elemental DPS+PVP // resto PVE dual, with minimal equipment changes.

It doesn't need to be tied to a specced ability to be 'spec-specific'. You're not going to see shadow priests carrying many healing glyphs. If you want to be at top effectiveness you need to change your glyphs out. The good news is they told us at Blizzcon that we'd have two glyph specs to go with our two talent specs.

Right, I misunderstood. Still, for priests the difference between disc and holy is one major glyph at most, since most priest healers will take the Flash Heal and Dispel Magic glyphs.

No.  The most recent blue posts are that yes, the 'pure' DPS classes (rogue/hunter/mage/warlock) are supposed to beat the other ones on the meters assuming completely equal gear, skill, raid buffs/debuffs, and no bias from the fight design (e.g. Loatheb is biased in favor of specs that value crit highly).  Earlier, the party line was what you said, but it has evolved

I did Borean Tundra and then decided to go feast on Howling Fjord. Between that and my random grinding, screwing around in Outland to help lower level friends, and so forth, I'll be 75 before I leave the starter zones of Northrend.

 :awesome_for_real:

You guys are both right. They designed out most of the difference, but the pure specs will still come out ahead. The margin is much, much smaller, though, and the random nature of who gets upgrades when during the raid progression process will for the most part obscure it completely.

Beacon of Light is an OK bandaid, but that is all it is, and the splash healing, as mentioned, is not enough. Also, if I do anything but Ye Olde Flash of Light spam, I run my ass out of mana right quick. My disc specced priest is far more versatile and efficient. Holy paladin healing is boring and more difficult at the same time (no HoT or REAL AE healing makes a lot of encounters blow more than they need to, plus any fight that involves movement), and a lot holy paladins are finally saying, "Fuck this, I'm doing something else."

And, of course, leveling a holy paladin fucking sucks, especially after they nerfed ret paladins and they got caught in the crossfire. The bad part is that sure, one could respec, but then they have to build a second suit from scratch, unlike, oh, all the other healers.

This. The reason I say that hunters need an eyeball is that while I'm fine with pure DPS classes being 2-3% ahead of hybrid classes with equal gear and skill, a hunter shouldn't be 5-6% ahead of EVERYone.

I'm sure they will be, though, as most WWS parses I've looked at are something like this:

Hunter
Hunter
Fury Warrior
Hunter
DK

Who I truly feel bad for is rogues - with so much emphasis (at least in these tiers) on AOE and AOE packs, they are consistently fighting to keep pace with tanks.

Also, this:


From Wowhead on Volley

I finally got both quest achievements in BT and HF and I'm about 400k shy of 75 before doing any quests in Dragonblight.

Drill it down to just DPS done on bosses using WWS or the like and I suspect the lead won't be as silly. Volley is kind of nuts at the moment, but trash dps doesn't really count that much as far as the raid's actual success.

Trash DPS allows my Prot Paladin to win the meter half the time.  :oh_i_see:

Blizzard has already stated that Hunter DPS "may be a tad to high" and are "keeping a close eye on it".

An eagle eye?
 :oh_i_see:

Great so between that and dual specs there really is no longer a point in playing certain classes at all

The biggest difference between DPS classes will be utility uses.  I'm already seeing this now.  Many times we get into an instance and somebody will comment on how [insert class] would be nice for [insert utility].

Our guild has a severe lack of mages, priests, and shaman.  Each of those have their own buffs, utilities, interrupts, etc that are beneficial.  Do you HAVE to have them to get by in some instances?  No.  In my book, that is a good thing.  Only the flavor changes.

I do have to say that certain combinations of classes still make for "better" runs.  Last night my group ran 3 heroics in a row within 2.5 hours.  With a shadow priest, tree druid, and ret pally using judgement of light, we had such a thick slathering of HPS coming at everyone at all times that we had only one wipe.  That one wipe was because the ret pally wasn't paying attention and pulled a boss on us during a trash pull.  It wasn't the highest DPS in the world, but is certainly was SAFE.

Conversely, there's every reason to play the class you want to now.

Only if all you do is solo.  If you plan on raiding you'll sit out a lot (Particularly as DPS because there's way too many of those these days.) or continue to be forced into a spec because you're short that archtype.  (Healers of all stripes I'm looking at you.)  If you refuse that respec, nobody raids! Whee, goodwill from everyone!

This only holds true if you were short healers to start with. Most functional raiding groups already have the healers they need, I would think.

The really high end people were already making people hearth and respec for specific fights and doing all sorts of other crazy stuff like that, so nothing really changes for them.

I'm a shadow priest, have been for three years now and I welcome the new changes.  In burning crusade one, maybe two shadow priests were absolutely necessary as mana batteries.  Yes this insured me a spot in every raid but quite frankly I didn't like being there just because i had a buff we couldn't raid without. Why because i tired hard, i cared about doing the most possible dps i could and i would like to be brought in because of that.  

For instance my guild regularly ran with two shadow priests and the other sat on his hands most nights doing not much more tham spamming VT/mindflay why? because he knew he didn't need to do much.

I hear a lot of complaining about too much dps but I'm sorry, that's been the problem in every single game since they introduced the holy trinity of tank/healer/dps. There's always too much dps but at least now in wow you don't need to worry so much about needing two spriests or at least three rogues or whatever. You can take your friends, or you can take good players and really if you don't have any friends at all and you can't play well? then that's your own problem not the game.

Where I think the dual spec thing will really shine for us is when we have 5 people on and want to run a heroic, but our lineup isn't right - we have 2 tanks, or we have 4 dps, or whatever. For our raids the pool is larger and it won't matter that much except for those 'hey we don't need 2 tanks for this fight' type situations.

I look forward to making you respec to fury every time we have too many tanks.  :drill:

My raiding group, including myself, has 7 tanks atm. We do a roll every night when we 25 man. Top 3 tank, and the rest go DPS. The funny thing is, nobody gets pissed about it because we are all in a similar gear situation.

Ingmar is a big fat tank hog. The result isn't really bad, mind you, he's always really, really sturdy and good for slightly undergeared healers and such, as he is obsessive over his gear. He just needs to LEARN TO SHARE. <sob>

I can always steal his throne with my Paladin again  :oh_i_see:

You just know he died a little inside when it turned out I was a better choice to MT whatever boss it was I MT'd while he had to fuss with the lowly adds.

I did enjoy that all my teasing about "clearly it was the tanks fault" was technically correct  :grin:

Figured this would be the best place for a DKLOL story.

Just did a VOA 25 man pug with 9-10 other DKs. I was amazed I was able to do decent DPS with the amount of lag all of that Icy Touch, desecration, and ghouls + Army of the Dead caused.   Guy went down really fast.   

Sadly, my 31 roll wasn't enough to win the gloves that dropped.

I've had to pass on lots of heroics because they had a healer and needed DPS. I would probably use dual spec to swap out Holy for Ret on non-raid days.

The splash healing from Holy Light is negligible, but it's one of the only good glyphs, so I take it anyway.

Beacon is sick. we 8 manned plague and construct wings last night. Healers were me (Holy Pallie) and a Shaman. We have a tight group with good gear, and that helps.

I use Spell Reminder addon to keep track of Beacon of Light and Sacred Shield and that's the MT and OT covered while the throwaway healers  :grin: raidheal.

Patchwerk is still horrible. He eats all my mana, but he's doable with Divine Plea.

Not if you want a group in fewer than 3 hours.  Roll rogue and you can fill up DPS slots.  Roll most other classes and you can fill up 2 out of (DPS, heal, tank) spots.  Roll druid and you can fill up any slot (yes, yes, with some small sacrifices). 

Blizzard should man up and make dual-specs a real, Final Fantasy style job system because, as it is planned now, it's a job system but only for certain classes.
 

If Blizzard were to do this, it would unfairly affect classes benefitting from it.  The only way that allowing dual specs would be a solid idea would be if all classes had viable dual function abilities.  Some classes really don't fit this and would suffer exclusion.  I'd love to see an MMO out there where EVERY class had a viable tank, dps, or healing spec.  Sadly, we haven't evolved that far yet. 

I think what he meant was "today I'm a priest, tomorrow I'm a death knight."  It doesn't benefit hybrid classes then, since anyone can be any class whenever, but the dual spec system does specifically benefit the two true hybrids more than the other classes.

Sooooort of. I find myself a little jealous of rogues who will be able have a PVE sec and a PVP spec and be good to go, whereas as a warrior I have my main tank spec to spend, and have to pick between a PVE dps spec and a PVP spec for my other spot.

Isn't DC Universe trying to take this route, where you can switch your focus between defensive/buff to offensive/debuff?

I want a raid spec, and a spec to switch to any time you inspect me.

DCUO, from that one video I've seen, seems to be a mix of Guild Wars-like skill selection and stances that changes what skills you can use.  I don't think it uses static 'specs' so respeccing would just be a matter of swapping out the skills you bring to the mission.  Of course, I could be wrong.  Details are still sketchy.

I didn't get the impression you got to choose the skills for the spec, though if it was Guild War's eight skills you choose, and you can have multiple specs/template to switch between anytime outside of combat, I would approve.

That's what I meant. My dual specs are fury warrior and holy priest or whatever.

Even better, ditch talents, put the good ones into base class skills, balance, and then let me pick two classes.  Fuck talents, I've hated them since they were put in the beta (the super-early non-tree talents weren't as bad, but were boring).  I am really veering into fantasyland now, however.