f13.net

So I've been playing WoW again for a little over two weeks, in the company of my reincarnated UO guild.  Half the people in it are UO folks I've known for at least two years, and the other half are people recruited since the guild reconstituted in WoW.  We're Horde on a PVP server, which wouldn't have been my first choice, but seems to be working out okay.  Thoughts:

*  Having a good guild makes this game 1000% more fun.  No MMO cuts the mustard as a single-player game, after all, and the company of the common WoW retard certainly doesn't make any difference.

*  Speaking of which, Barrens chat.  It really is that bad.  /leave general

*  My Tauren shaman is up to level 23, and I'm slowly cutting my PVP teeth.  Everyone I've /dueled has been cool and polite.  Blood elf pallies have been easy to beat up so far, but rogues are hard.  Chalk it up at least partially to my having experience playing a paladin.

*  Total lack of PVP death penalty for the motherfucking win.  I jumped a warlock four levels higher than me and almost got her.  I know what I did wrong, and if I fought her again I know I could take her.  Me and a mage friend also squashed a Draenei shaman of roughly equal level who had the temerity to attack the both of us.  Fun.

*  Still, I'm completely fucking sick of getting one-shotted by every bored high-level Alliance faggot who comes running by.  (Fucking rogues!)  But hey, when in Rome, right?  Woe unto the Alliance lowbie who crosses my path once I level up some more.

*  Grinding is less grindy than questing.  Seriously.  Run here, get that, bring it to this other city, no you're killing the wrong sort of boars, now go bring me some hooves, blah blah blah.  Fuck that noise.  I go out and kill shit while blabbing on Ventrilo with my guild.  I don't mean I stand in once place and camp, I mean I just run around mowing down every zebra and giraffe and dinosaur that crosses my path.  I do that, and I run instances with guildmates to get better gear than anything those shitty quests are giving out.

*  I've convinced my guild to stop saying "Ding" and "Gratz" because fuck that EQ shit.  We say "Pork" and "Beans" now, for some reason.  Suffice it to say "I porked three times today!" sounds funnier in Ventrilo anyway.

*  I find myself doing the grind/instance thing just long enough to feel I'm making progress, then the rest of the time I'm out powerleveling guildies lower than me and running around helping with random quests.  Instead of being a permanent gopher for stupid villagers, I just kinda do what I want and still get by.

*  Seriously, I'm gonna fucking rape some Alliance cockbags once I'm leet.  Assholes.

Barrens chat lays waste to the idea that Horde players are somehow more mature than Alliance.

Questing works if you have some idea as to what quests are in which area (there are guides for that sort of thing) so that you're not running back and forth too much.  Foregoing questing can make reputation gains problematic as well.

Ganking is not more prevalent by Alliance than Horde; both sides do it.  Certain zones are KOS zones; others not.  STV is; Desolace isn't.  Generally speaking, that is.  I never thought Ashenvale was, particularly, as a horde, but when I tried levelling my daughter's alliance hunter there, found that I was KOS by everyone.  After the third gank, I rampaged on my main, killing every little horde I could find. 

I second the good guild part.  Having friends to just talk to while you level\quest away really makes a difference in the game (really, any game).  The only drawback to guilds is when everyone becomes really high level and the decision to take it to the next level (raiding) becomes part of the decision.  Usually the guild officers and leaders can cause a ton of problems and break the guild apart over this.  I made the move to raiding once I hit 60 and got a bit of experience at instance running and it was nothing but problems.  The really uber guilds don't want new guys with them because they assume they just want the loot and will DE set pieces that I wanted even though no one else in the group needed\wanted it (all in T2 or better and me with my greens ;-) ).  And of course the amount of guild hopping that goes on by various members I knew showed that the end game players on my server was quite a small community and everybody knew everybody.

And PvP can be quite fun if you are enjoying it.  My other half actually enjoyed flagging and ganking every Alliance she could, even if she would (and did) lose.

I think its awesome that you are giving the game a second chance. There is a lot of fun to be had in the right situations. Yeah, getting ganked by high levels sucks, but its really not that bad cause the majority of high level players are in outland.

Let us know if you have any questions or such.

Two pieces of advice.

1) Improved Ghost Wolf can really save your ass when leveling.

2) FROST SHOCK!!!

Good guilds can make ANY game bearable for a time.

Barrens chat is no better or worse than many of the densely-packed public spaces, as anyone who's spent the week in Hellfire can attest. /leave general indeed. I've always wondered: did UO ever get "zone"-wide chat, or is it still all local? I recall West Brit Bank being as bad as, say, Stranglehorn Vale.

And it's your own damned fault for starting on a PvP server when you knew this game was level-based PvP. Sorry to be so blunt about it but you know better. Good to see you make it to 23 though. I never even bothered.

You are experiencing the suck that is horde zones. I despise every horde-centric zone from 1-40. I highly recommend you quest though, at least the non-irritating ones, since rep gains can be helpful for affording mounts and services later on. Not all quest equipment is junk, but yeah, quest greens in 90% of pre BC Warcraft suck some ass compared to even dropped greens.

Oh they still haven't done a content pass for Horde? That was one thing that kept me from having a serious Horde alt. I think the Undead had it best, but that whole experience just freaked me out (little girl crying in the Alchemy lab in UD... not with two daughters, thanks). Orc seemed next, with Tauren ok and Troll just almost outright sucking.

Blood Elves meanwhile seem awesome through level 20-ish when you're unleashed unto a nice run through EPL (or is there a flight/port/quest to get outta that place now?)

In the very back of the Spire of the Sun (I think that's the name), where the regent is, is an orb of translocation that teleports you to right outside of the Undercity, in an area to the west of the courtyard.  So no mad dash through the Plaguelands needed. 

So what does reputation do for me, anyway?  Make my mount cheaper?  I gotta tell you, I'd rather farm X% more gold than go back to "No no no, that's a Stickleback Piglooter, not a Stickleback Lootpig, we're in the wrong place and these ones don't count!" and farming 4000 goat penises for some villager's goat penis stew recipe.

Also, I'm not complaining about it being a PVP server really.  I'm just saying, eventually some innocent Alliance newbs are going to pay for my frustration at getting owned in one hit.  Once we're all leveled, I'm gonna grab a couple more ex-UO peeps and do newb killing runs.  Just because.

Trying to remember, but your Daughter's hunter is a Night Elf right?  That may be a contributing factor in the rate of ashenvale gankage.  Something about Night Elf Hunters just irritates the hell out of the average Horde (bonus points if it's a MALE night elf hunter)

With the new game, reputation doesent do much for you till you hit outlands (unless you really WANT to grind some Argent Dawn rep to get into naxx later just to see the place).   Most of the old reputation groups are no longer worth the rep grind, unless you want some of the crafting recepies for completeness sake or something.

In outlands however, quest Rep is a pretty key factor for getting efficiently to Revered with the factions in outlands (99% of mobs stop giving you rep at Honored), and each faction is pretty important.  Each dungeon set (Hellfire Citadel, Coilfang Resivoir, etc) is tied to a reputation group which you need to hit revered for to get the Key that unlocks the advanced instances (shattered Halls for HFC, etc).

Also, reputation with different factions gives you access to some VERY sweet purchaseable rewards.

I'll grind that bridge when I come to it.  I'm level 23 and I'm not doing un-fun shit now because I'm worried about getting into uber dungeons in Outland some ungodly time in the future.  Thanks for the info.

No, he's saying that it doesn't even come into it until you get to 58+ and into the outlands.

In that case, rock on.

BTW, with the uber shit reportedly dropping in BC five-man level 60 instances, are the days of 40-man raids over now or what?  Aren't the BC uber-raids just 25-man?

Unless you're decked out in Naxx gear, yea, old-world raiding is over. There's no reason to go except for kicks. Anything that didn't drop from Naxxramas is replaced by the mid-60s, and some of it probably through soloing quests. They REALLY threw the kitchen sink at this expac to ensure nearly everyone either buys it or wants it so bad they'll eBay for it. It's not just about gear. It's about how getting Tier 1 quality gear went from requiring 40-man raids to just knowing where the NPCs are around the first outpost you hit in BC.

Leads me to wonder what they're going to do with all that content.  That seems like a lot of work to just pitch out the door.  Heroic mode MC?

But that's another thread.  Good thoughts on the game, WUA.  This thread gave me a different appreciation for your playstyle.  I personally like quests.  Kill quests give a bonus to your grinding and even fedex can be part of an interesting storyline (and sometimes can't).  The key IMO is to be bold about ditching the boring or timesink ones.  Accept often, drop often  :mrgreen:

My father (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=5129), who still plays every day, works the game this way. He's done time trials and found that very few quests are worth the time investment compared to educated grinding. You get more money, more experience, and better items if you don't have to travel back and forth to the quest NPCs and just stick to areas with mobs that respawn quickly, are vulnerable to your character's abilities, and compliment your play style. When he gets bored of blatant grinding he goes for a hike and kills everything he sees... or he tries to get into a guild instance run. Some of the quests were fun the first time, he says, but there's only a few worth doing once you've seen them before.

He's Horde, too. Maybe it comes with the territory.

WUA, I am glad your enjoying yourself. Facts as I perceive them. WOW is a very good game, Yet played with a known group of friends, an order of magnitude better. That can go for most games out there, but WOW is a good game. Is tight, is polished. But the friends bit is important? no?

BTW, I love my shaman.  I stood back and healed in Shadowfang Keep, then immediately went to Wailing Caverns and tanked.  It's kinda like playing my old paladin, except I can actually inflict damage.

On my 3rd toon to 60, I used a levelling guide (James guide I think).  Only had to do half as much because I only played on rested.  Using a leveling guide is a really nice way to get up; probably faster than straight grinding.  Certainly less boring.

Yes, NE hunter.  Still, I don't want to hear any more horde complain about Hillsbrad.  It's no worse than Ashenvale for the other side - at least Nightelves, who are the only alliance sent there by quests.

I still think Taren Mill is the worst. It sends the Horde there 5 levels earlier then the alliance and you keep going back as alliance until you hit 60.

Yeah, that was just bad planning. Horde level in Hillsbrad 22-30. Alliance are around 32-38 or so. Jesus, how could they not see the problems coming?

I completely agree with this, there have been a lot of games which I have stuck with for much longer than I ordinarily would have because of my guild.  When Jessica Mulligan and the Liars Ken (ken Karl and ken Troop) were busy with their monthly nerfing of everything that made the game fun, the only thing that kept me from quitting the bait and switch that was Asheron's Call 2 was the people I was with.

The same can be said for Star Wars Galaxies.  While that really wasn't a bait and switch like Asheron's Call 2, it was the player driven content that kept you in the game for as long as I played it (up until the CU).  The best experience I have ever had in MMO's came in SWG at the beginning because of the guild I was in.  I have never seen so many people work night and day, cooperating with each other, and just plain having a great time as I saw in the first few weeks when everyone was working towards getting our PA hall built.  It was a great time, and there was a great sense of accomplishment when we saw the guild hall go up for the first time.

Oh dear, someone mentioned that game.  Watch out, the floodgates are open.

(Although I totally agree.)

Guildy:  "It's a night elf!"
Me:  "Rip out his uterus!"
Guildy:  "What?"
Me:  "All elves have uteri, even the males."

So now some of us have a "/e rips out his uterus and stomps on it" macro set for when a night elf dies.  We know the alliance guy can't see it, but we can, and that's good enough.

I agree. I'm actually playing WoW with the people I went through that PA hall building experience with. I think WoW could actually achieve a similar experience with player housing/guild halls if an "AQ war effort" type of thing was required -- make all our crafters and gatherers work together to get enough materials and complex crafted components to raise a guild hall (although maybe being instanced will not make it feel as impressive if we can't park it outside Theed and have passers-by marvel at the uberness).

Having played 60 on both sides I don't believe this.  Given the poor BG record alliance has - they will often look for open field pvp fights to vent their frustrations and return to an era wher numerical superiority was an option for them in pvp.

As an alliance guy I was solicited by alliance guys at 60 to "practise" pvp at cross roads and I have seen similar tactics by alliance in playing my horde alts in a variety of horde starting areas (pvp flagging themselvs - and trying to sucker guys who are true newbies in the game to attacking them).  In 2 years of playing this game - I have not seen horde do this.  Of course it does happen, but my experience of alliance seeking easy pvp ganking reinforces my perception that deeply suppressed sexual functions, coupled with arrested physiological development with its concomitant mental impacts, defines the alliance member population.

For thos of you who play alliance on these boards - my condolences on your SAD FUCKING STATE.

That could also be because of Crossroads. There simply is not an alliance equivalent. My brother used to log onto his lvl 15-35 horde characters all the time whenever he wanted a lowbie duel because the ONLY place you can reliably get one on either side is Crossroads because of how much population moves through it.

These were 60 alliance looking for action though.  My point to them was - go flag yourself by Ogrimmar and you will get meaningful practise.

My current server has horde repeatedly ganking and griefing [ie. having mobs kill the players by debuffing them] alliance in duskwood [20-30 zone] and redridge [15-20 zone]. I can name at least 5-6 horde doing this, and two-three guilds that used to organize raids to said zones [with all 60s of course... these don't happen now, since everyone is grinding 70].
My old server had TWO horde guilds completely locking down zones and preventing alliance from ever completing quests in ashenvale unless they had stealth. The two first rooftop camper griefers (this was before the booty bay / gadgetzan guards got guns) were an undead priest and an orc hunter.

But I don't derive any sort of "deep psychological conclusion" about an entire gaming faction of 3+ million people from this. :p


-- Z.

I play on Muga'thol, and being ganked by the Horde is just as prevalent as alliance ganking the horde. Some zones have more of it than the others, but its all part of the game.

I just hit level 63 last night and I'm doing about 1.5 levels a week. But overall I think the game is pretty enjoyable for one that wasn't built around PVP in the first place.

I'm getting to love the world PVP in WoW.  I've quickly become immune to any real frustration at getting run over by high-level Alliance, thanks to the total lack of a PVP death penalty.  Meanwhile, doing my newbie best to help in battles between higher-level guys (an unresisted Frost Shock at the wrong time can fuck with anyone) and fragging Alliance around my own level are both a lot of fun.  I won't deliberately commit suicide solo-attacking someone I have no mathematical chance of defeating, but everyone else is pretty much fair game.  And yeah, I'll gank people.  Shit, why not?  Reroll PVE if you don't like it.

If you want meaningful PVP with consequences, go play Eve.  My brother has started playing it, and it looks and sounds like a very impressive game.  I give them all the credit in the world for being the ones to finally make an item-loss PVP MMO that looks, functions, and is marketed like a product for grownups.

But this is WoW, and WoW PVP is basically DikuMUD overlaid with a first-person shooter level of PVP.  Boom headshot.

If I'm not mistaken, the difference between this post and the two refutation posts are that the refutations are on a PvP server (correct my if I'm wrong). That sort of makes sense to me... PvE servers have an abundance of alliance, and that they would be carebears who don't like PvP in which they aren't guaranteed a win would not surprise me.

Not that everyone in said situation is of that mindset, but the demographic skews in that direction.

On PVE servers, whenever the horde try to gank/grief in turn, they just get rolled by the alliance train.

Doesn't stop them from trying though  :-P

Ya I am talking about PVE servers.

The more often I see posts like the ones from you two, the more I think Blood Elves are the best thing this game has ever introduced.

A friend of mine who plays the level 19 twink scene is totally discouraged. A huge flood of elves have poured into those battlegrounds, roughly equalizing queue times for Horde and Alliance. More than half of Horde players on any given team are blood elves between the levels of 10 and 15. Horde hasn't won a single Warsong PUG since Burning Crusade... and, again, the queues are longer now.

lol. i find it hard to believe that those BEs are second rerollers from Horde. I guess it might be Alliance migrating over to the evil pretty race huh? :P
I totally agree about that Alliance playerbase, I got ganked in Duskwood by Horde last night. So I went back to town...about to fly out to another zone to quest, when some Alliance lowbies are complaining about being ganked in pvp. I told 'em it's natural..and their replies are funny shit:

'PVP is not about Rock vs Eggs'
'Yeah, it's pvp but it's rude to do so! (to gank)'

I just laughed so hard and flew back to Stormwind to do some crafting. Bunch of funny people.  :-D

You didn't qualify that in your original post, making broad statements about the entire 5+ million alliance population and all, based on the actions of ~50-100 people. :P

I have no desire at all to play on a pve server; not only there is an insane population imbalance (4 alliance to 1 horde?!), but I like to have at least some excitement while leveling up and being out in the world at 70. My server has enough roaming horde gank groups / guilds to keep things interesting. Even if they gank and corpse camp my level 20 alt repeatedly.


-- Z.

I don't understand the point then, since I thought the discussion was about ganking.  Although that term tends to be very diluted these days, I haven't so far heard it used in an honest reference to a time when someone is essentially looking for trouble or a fight and gets killed.  Which is what flagging is on a pve server.  Looking for a fight and looking for trouble.

The scary thing for me is that I have played Alliance to this point, but I'm enjoying my blood elf mage now.   I may actually get to a high level on a horde character.

I can only keep faith that I'm really not a retard.  No, honest.

I've been resisting the blood elf urge -- I've kept my sub-10 undead Warlock (If you're going evil, go EVIL!)  -- but I might roll a belf simply because the Dranae area was so well done. I'd like to see the blood elf area.

If you actually think the Draenie starting area was well done, the Blood Elf starting area / Home City will probably blow your mind.

Belfs, their capitol, and their areas are the best. If you haven't rolled a belf yet, do it. The initial rush of people have leveled up and have moved on making the areas even better.

Make a belf. Do it now. You will not regret it

Compared to the hell that was the Night Elf 1 to 20 area? Oh yeah, much better done. Then again, I hate hate HATE Darkshore.

I liked the look, the design -- the layout of Exodar takes a bit of getting used to but it's not bad. The only thing I don't like is apparently there's no bird path off the island, which is irritating.

There is a flight path from Silvermoon to the Ghostands.  To leave Silvermoon, you have to use the transporter in the capital spire or you can walk into the Eastern Plaguelands.  Your choice.

I'm hoping they add it to the flightpath network in the next few patches.

Sorry, I was talking about the Dranaei -- you just hop the boat next to Exodar to Auberdine. The problem is that -- for some odd reason -- there's no bird path from Exodar to Auberdine (as there is from Ru'theran to Auberdine), or one from Exodar to Ru'Theran -- there's a single flight path between Blood Watch and Exodar and that's apparently it. I have no idea why that's not connected to the mainland.

I do like the Shaman trainers and the Broken. Kind of a neat tale of how Shamanism rose up amongst the Draenai. Also the fact that half the Shaman trainers are those hairy beast guys -- Furlbogs.

From the best I can tell, they seem to have stuck the draenai and blood elf areas in a sort of instance type deal.  Last I checked, which granted was a few days before the expansion hit, the entry from the Plaguelands to the Ghostlands was an instance portal, but I'd have to guess it's still something like that, if they're wanting to keep people who haven't bought the expansion from going there.  If that's the case, that would be what prevents them from having flight paths connect like they by all rights should.  If I'm right about that, I don't see it changing any time soon, unless they open up the areas somehow at a later date.  I could, of course, also be using too much supposition. 

Yeah, but there's the boat out of Auberdine. Do you just not see it if you don't have the expansion? Do you see people just run off the end of the pier and stand there in midair? How does that work?

Anyone know anyone without the expansion, willing to run to Auberdine and check it out? I'm curious now.

Now that you mention it, I do recall it loading when I took the boat -- I wasn't paying a lot of attention, though. That's pretty irritating, as now I can't do something like grab a bird from Nijel's point and flight to Exodar.

Honestly, I'm not sure.  I've heard that the boat doesn't work for you if you don't have the expansion, but I'm not sure how they go about doing that.  I'd hop on my GF's account and get her there, but since the latest patch, WoW seems to initiate some sort of critical error with her graphics drivers and everything crashes.  The moment I fire up her account on my computer, I'm likely to get kicked off. 

I tried to take the boat before the expansion came out.  About halfway there, you abruptly end up in the Auberdine graveyard (alive, though) with a message that you have to have the BC expansion installed to access that area.

I would imagine that the flight routes are simply not available to those w/o the expac.  Since you could never go there in the first place to get the FP, problem solved :)

They're not available at all. I have the flight points at Exodar, Blood Watch, Auberdine, and Ru'Theran. There is no connection between them at all -- the only way on or off the Draenae area is via the boat. (And the usual portals, summons, whatnot).

I bet you end up in the graveyard at Auberdine if someone at Exodar tries to summon you there, and you don't have the expansion -- probably just a simple load check.

Perhaps the new starting areas are on a completely different server. Like there's an Eastern Kingdom server, a Kalimdor server, an Outlands server, and a Exodar/Silvermoon server. Sicne they're not on the same server, you can't have a flight path there.  You can only zone there where you get the loading screen.

That's what I was thinking -- kind of an odd choice, but I can see it simplifying some matters.

Back in the leaked alpha, before they added the extra right-click to zoom out to the global level to see both the Outlands and Azeroth, the Outlands were another dropdown on the selection of continents, and the Blood Elf/Draenei zones were in the Outlands one.

On a technical level, they're on the same seamless 'zone' as the Outlands, (Eastern Kingdoms is zone id 1, Kalimdor is 2, Outlands is 3 - they're on 3) probably in another corded off area, but in the same 'zone' nonetheless.

I think I fought the worst guy in WoW tonight.  I'm a shaman, he's a mage, and he's six levels higher than me.  I find him sitting in a tent at that racetrack in the salt flats.  Thinking maybe I can score a quick AFK kill, I jump on him.  He immediately hops up though, and we start going at it.  Half my shit is getting resisted, but when I go down I'm one shot away from having won.

Holy shit, I hope he sticks around because I want another go at that.

I run back to my body, get myself back up to full strength, and then go looking for the dude.  I see his figure and name in the distance, so I step out in the open to see what he does.  He's just kinda randomly moving around.  I close in, and he's just kinda standing there with his back turned.

Oh well, fuck him.  I've already learned to do frequent 360 pans with the camera to avoid surprises, and it's time this guy learned the same lesson.

I'm already in melee with him by the time he knows what hit him.  We go around a little more, and this time he goes down.  Not quite what I would call easily, but it wasn't a skin of my teeth win either.  So yeah, I fragged a mage six levels higher than me.

Which sounds pretty awesome, until I realize I probably pwned someone's little sister or something.  Screw it, points are points.

you bully.

Shammys are tough cookies :( but yeah that guy could've done better to keep alert. You'd be surprised how many people seem clueless in pvp server like this 40 rogue who got cocky seeing me (36) and (33) priest he went on us without stealthing, just went off his mount and dashed to us. I was laughing as we just chain dotted and feared his ass off. He could've sapped one of us and made it 1 v 1 easier. He kept chasing us on his mount too...we didn't corpse camp cause I was more interested in getting to Booty Bay flight point than fighting in STV roads. He caught up with us twice did the same shit again, unmount and attack lol. Same ending XD

The third time we ran across a BE Paladin 37 and Mage 39. We took out the Mage before the rogue caught up and finally finished us off. He sat on my corpse and looked so happy about it  :-o I wanted to tell him 'Grats on the Alterac Bread honor points man' but I can't speak Orcish lol.

I was wrong in originally predicting Dreani would draw more to the alliance - more recently - I have seen the reverse and fear the exact trend you describe.

Horde until the XPac won most BGs for 2 reasons:  We didn't have paladins, and our players were not sexually repressed.

With the BE - that is changing :(

My impression up to now:  Gods I love Draenei.  I was told I have a crush on mine. :|

I do too - great job on the culture angle behind them.  All the races seem unique in that regard - I was just chuckling at a Troll quest giver shouting at me 'Watch the Voodoo man.."

hehe.

Did AB last night with my 33 BE pali - I know - I was a bit of a jerk going in early. I defended a couple flags with a 39 shaman. It was comedy gold when we got jumped by 3 38's. They went after him and I just healed him and attacked whatever he was attacking. AE silence is going to get a nerf I am guessing. I was amazed when we took out the 3 attackers. Think Horde won 2000 to 860 or something sad.

Another pointless WUA world PVP story:

I'm out beating on mobs for some quest, when I see an alliance mage of my own level attacking the same mobs.  He sees me as well, and moves off too far for me to see.  I run behind a hill and cast Far Sight way out in front of me in his direction.  Yep, there he is.  I move a little closer and observe him unseen with another Far Sight.  I see him attack a mob, so I drop Far Sight and start running in that direction.

He's at low health and sitting down to drink as I arrive.  I come up from behind with a Frost Shock and a Windfury proc from my shiny new two-handed hammer.  Flawless victory.  Yes it was dirty, but damn if it wasn't funny.

What surprises me is how afraid some people are of dying in PVP, even with the total lack of penalty.  The begging night elf I mentioned last time, for example.  Or this gnome mage today.  A bunch of us are rolling into the Deadmines to get gear for some of the newbies, as well as just for the hell of it.  He's in there all alone, PVP flagged, and of too low a level to have a hope in hell against us.

I don't want to get fragged by an alliance group while screwing around with some random guy, so I tell everyone to ignore him unless he does something.  This gnome just goes screaming through the dungeon, drawing aggro from everything in sight, frantically trying to reach the instance before we can get him.  We happily followed right behind without bothering to blast him, since it meant we wouldn't have to fight all the mobs that were chasing him.  I think he took a wrong turn and died.  So it didn't save him a trip back from the cemetery, and since it was a PVM death he took durability loss.  Newb.

With no PVP death penalty, I have so learned to love the gank.  Me and a friend got squashed by some uberlevel in STV and camped.  We laughed about how much fun it must be from his end.

Not to belittle your achievments but once I read the first part I knew how it would end ;)

I'm 69 now on my Warlock and I must say I'm impressed.  I fully quested Hellfire, Zangamarsh and Terrokar, and am just grinding through 70 so I can quest for gold through Blade's Edge, Netherstorm and Shadowmmon Peninsula.

If/when Blizzard fixes the Halla guards it will be the best pvp in the game.  Its too much fun.

Just wait until you hit 70. :P "The first rule of Seed of Corruption is: you do NOT talk about Seed of Corruption."

Anyway, I'm a bit miffed about some of the itemization. In the early zones it's extremely heavily skewed towards hybrids (yeah I know, everyone needs to be viable, but after seeing four different pieces of moonkin and elemental shaman loot, my poor warlock self was feeling neglected :p), while in the later zones subsequent quests (in the same zone, even!) will give out basically the same rewards with maybe a few stat points shifted around. I got all the following items within 2-3 hours of each other -- http://thottbot.com/?i=58655  http://thottbot.com/?i=58266 http://thottbot.com/?i=58012 http://thottbot.com/?i=59064


-- Z.

I remember hearing a person talk about seed of corruption.  "I saw an Alliance Pally working on a couple mobs and he looked like he was having a hard time, so I seeded both the mobs for him."

Also FUCK SPELL CRITICAL RATING I DON'T WANT YOU >:(

(until I spec destruction at 70 or something)

The embarassment of quest riches has frightened me into paranoia.  I am sitting in Thrallmar, looking at three beginning quests that will give me T1 (at least) green items in exchange for killing eight orcs.  I can't decide with my druid if I want to go feral, resto or balance, and am afraid that if I start picking all the great quest rewards for one route up until 70 and decide to change I won't be able to because I exhausted all the quests  :-P  My heart (just to be different) says balance, but all the forum monkeys on the druid AND warrior forum have apparently agreed that druids are better warriors than warriors now. 

Feral druids ARE better warriors than warriors (and they make pretty decent rogues, too) all the way until 70 when warriors start getting epix. Actually this isn't really different from pre-BC wow, but it's more pronounced now because everyone is levelling at the same time.
Anyway, I've seen quite a few moonkin firing laser beams at people, so it does seem to be a popular path to take, though not as much as feral. Restoration druids are rare.. there's a drood alt in my guild who's decided to go full resto spec at 60 and just level via instances and grouping. Right now he's 62.. we'll see how it goes. Especially since he's an alt. :P


-- Z.

Druids are awesome as feral now, however, a feral druid is a shitty healer.  A resto druid can't kill shit, though.  Ask yourself what you enjoy most and go that way.

 The wife went balance w/ some resto (she's 68 now) and has 521 to damage AND healing from her various quest/ instance gear and a 17% spell crit chance if she's in owlbe--"moonkin" form.   She heals well enough that we can duo almost all the 'group required' quests. (Durn needed a real tank rather than my pet, and one of the later quests we added a 3rd just because the dps was so low it would've taken forever.)   She also does damage well enough that she's nearly mage-like in some of her kill-crits. (I think her high crit is 2450 on wrath right now.)   Were I to have a druid I'd go the same route. 

Lots of folks are down on balance because it sucked so hard before.  It wasn't called "OOMkin" for nothing, after all.

Wow, thanks.  That sounds like the kind of setup I want- something other than feral (I hate FOTM stuff, both on a personal level and in a tactical sense- more people will learn how to fight the FOTM ferals than balancers), with healing and damage ability both maintained.  Plus, the quest gear I pick up will be largely interchangeable.  How deep in balance does her build go (ie, all the way to treant, or a 31/30 or 36/25ish type)?

Grouped w/ a balance druid on my shaman yesterday.  With the stormstrike debuff +20% nature spell damage, he was literally taking half life off mobs in 2 shots.

You mean all the way to Moonkin?  Just loaded her up to check. She's at 51 in Balance, and 9 resto right now.  I almost typed everything out here.. duh there's tools for that.  Her Spec. (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/classes/druid/talents.html?51032231253313523105100000000000000000000050210000000000000000)  Some of them don't make sense to me, but I think she just decided to throw all her points in Balance, then started tossing them in Resto as she leveled.

One thing to mention, however, is  that a LOT of the quest rewards have been aimed squarely at Feral druids.  (Ditto with warrior stuff aimed at Arms/ Fury) As a result she's taken a few cloth rewards to up her dam/ healing as she goes.  Right now she's wearing cloth wrists, helm and boots because they were good upgrades.

She loves those damn trees though.  Uses them almost every time the cooldown is up, tough fight or not.  My cat will be there chewing on some mob then *BAM* 3 treants are joining-in.  Kinda fun.  :-D

Nice, thanks again.  I didn't know the quest rewards part...sigh.  I just hate the FOTM ferals I see everywhere right now...ironically, I was feral before I quit in November.  Ugh, more research required I guess although I think balance will work.  I doubt the treants are that powerful but the spell interrupt on annoying locks/mages alone would be attactive.

The trees are an AWESOME "oh shit" button.  They level-up as you do, so it's exactly like having 3 mobs beating on something for the 15-20 seconds they're active.  They just don't stick around long enough/ have enough HPs to make them super dangerous and unbalanced.  I think I've seen some mages AOE them down when they were on someone else, but I could be wrong.

I think a lot of druids take moonkin because they want to have the mana pool and +healing to manage healing in instances. Most of the new moonkin leather is +dmg+healing from what I've seen so it can do double duty. In beta at 70 my feral druid had accumulated close to 500+healing and about 7k mana when dressed in my healing set but a moonkin can get quite a bit beyond that I think.

I'm 21point in Resto (up to Natures Swiftness) and the rest in Feral. I'm 65 now and my healing is adequate enough in Instances (up to healing two warriors and a feral druid at once without too many mana problems), while not much beats ripping through questmobs as a selfhealing swiping bear of destruction.

I'll go back to full resto in 70, but up to then I just carry around both Feral Solo gear and my healing gear. I started BC with Full Healing, but it wasn't difficult getting both gears during normal playing (heavy questing and some instances).

yeah, not sure where you get the idea that a feral Druid makes a bad healer.  A resto druid makes a "more efficient" healer, but I just did a Steamvaults run with a feral druid as our healer (he had up to Leader of the pack, not sure how many points left to put into resto that leaves) and we did perfectly fine. 

Feral druids main healing all comes down to what healing gear they have.  A feral Druid with good healing gear makes for a good healer, while a Resto spec druid with good Feral gear wont be quite as effective in the role reversal.

They are pretty fragile and get boned by AE CC pretty badly, but they also cause so much panic in PvP, it's down right funny. The way they just appear throws people off. Noobfire + Swarm + Trees is mostly enough to kill anything squishy, or it was at 60, no idea how well it all scales up at 70. Tree damage gets some sort of scaling from your own SpellDmg, but I have no idea how much at what rate. They are basically a vicious interupting DoT. Being able to pop them anywhere in the spells range is keen as well. Someone pestering you from a perch out of reach? Send the trees up there!

My only real complaints with them are the short duration and the wacky AI. They are just down right random at times. It hasn't happend yet, but I am certain I will cause a instance wipe with these things sooner or later. Sometimes they just stand where you spawn them, doing nothing. Most of the time they behave and kill the nearest monster to there spawn point... but sometimes... sometimes they seem to get possessed by BoneArcher AI from DaoC and gallop off into the sunset to attack the monster 72 yards away.

I'm feral with 11 points in restoration right now.  (I don't care what everyone else is doing, I enjoy playing feral, so that is what matters to me.)

If you do a lot of soloing I recommend getting a few points in Nature's Focus.  It is very handy to be able to shift out and heal yourself quickly thanks to a reduced chance of interruption while a couple of mobs are beating you upside the head.

I'm full feral build too and I found that using barkskin to get off an uninterrupted heal makes points in Nature's Focus unnecessary.  Instead, I put those five points in Naturalist, -.5 seconds off healing touch plus a straight +10% to ALL damage, its value that can't be beat. 

I keep a full set of healing gear for instances that need a healer, but I think my mana pool is still too shallow.  If I'm the only healer I don't have the mana it takes to last through a long boss fight.  However, I've been able to MH successfully with almost all the pugs that asked for it.

Most pugs I've been in want the warrior to be MT (even if they are levels below me), so I'm not sure the 'board' wisdom that feral druids are omg awesome instance tanks has propegated to the masses.     

You know, I'm not very good at PVP.  I know my ass from a hole in the ground, but that's about it.  I know that I should use frost shock to slow people down, earth shock to disrupt spells, and flame shock to keep people from stealthing.  I know basically what totems to drop, and not to let a rogue get behind me.  And again, that's about it.  Any more advanced tricks or strategies elude me.

And yet, I'm constantly amazed at how many people on this PVP server have reached my level or beyond without meeting even my very basic level of competence.  I jumped a night elf priest, and all she did was keep trying to mind control me while I fucked up her attempts with earth shock and beat the hell out of her.  I jumped a human mage, and all he did was try to run away without bothering to frost nova me.

I mean, the guys who come looking for a fight still rock my shit more often than not, but I have no idea what some of these other people are even doing on a PVP server.

Many people play on PvP servers for little more reason than to say that they play on a PvP server.  Silly, I know... but so is anyone that connects their self-esteem to video game prowess. 

people on Normal server (PVE) can't even PVE right.  :-P

Amen.

Sometimes I turn on /general in cities just to watch equipment discussions. 

People have no clue what the different server types are.  I've seen level 50's ask what an (RP) server is.  On one of them.

I've noticed in both PvP and PvE, people everywhere just seem to be very rusty.

You have the raiders who are used to mentally checking out with their 39 other friends and just filling their one little role, suddenly required to think and react to "oh shit" situations that their gear can't make up for.

You have the people who have played AB/WSG/AV so much that all their PvP instinct is geared towards rush stables, defend LM, zerg the bridge, etc. They have forgotten what to do when you get jumped by someone while you are questing, or how to survive on your own against each class. They also don't have their insane gear superiority to bail them out.

So I finally hit 40 the other night.  One of my friends in the guild hit 40 the next day.  Tonight, we celebrated our newfound uberness by going to Duskwood and killing an epic number of newbies.  And boy, was it ever fun.  The range of reactions alone was priceless.

Most of them just run and get chased down and killed.  Some of them run until death is imminent, then turn around and try to land a hit or two on the way down.  Some just stand there and sullenly wait to die.  Some rightly don't give a shit and fight back, apparently just for the hell of it.

Like this one gnome mage.  He's like 18 levels lower than we are, but he hits his frost nova and somehow manages to freeze both of us.  Instead of trying to run away, he immediately turns around and starts blizzarding us.  The element of lunatic "Yaha, now I've got them right where I want them!" literally made me laugh.  I had my mage friend sheep him so I could give him a /salute before we finished him off.

Anyway, no individual newb lost more than a minute or two of their time since we weren't camping, and I somehow got about a dozen honor-kills along the way.  Eventually someone called in a hit-squad from their guild, and a bunch of level ?? came in to kill and camp us.  We just laughed.  We knew it was going to happen sooner or later, and it's not like we didn't have it coming.

/random story over

heh same just hit 40 shaman here, wondering if shd get my mount. Started my dual wielding with 2 maces from Scarlet monastery and Uldamann.
Main hand's pretty ordinary with nice dmg and +15 to heals..the off hander is sweet...chance on hit 98-120 fire dmg.
Uldamann was a rough go for PUG grp, so my high lvl guildies gave me a hand and I finished 5 quest in one sitting...pretty slick :P

So about three months in, and I've hit my limit.  I managed to hit level 50, and the grind is utterly soul-crushing at this point.  If I kill one more skeleton in Western Plaguelands, or furbolg in Felwood, or whatever, I'm going to poke my eyes out with a stick.  Maybe this is "fast leveling" to someone who played Everquest, but to me it's like putting my nuts in a vice.

The charms of fragfest PVP have worn thin as well.  When I get ganked anymore, the feeling is similar to having the phone ring with an important call just as I'm sitting down to take a shit.  Ganking others got too boring to do as anything other than a completely incidental activity weeks ago.

So yeah, a guild can make a crappy game fun for a while, but not forever.  Back to UO with me.

I'm feeling the strain myself lately. I find myself not even logging in at night anymore because there's no point beyond me just grinding for cash. I'm 70, completely geared in the best stuff you can get out of 5 mans or off the AH, and I have revered in all the instances with all the keys including a Karazhan key.

Basically, unless we're running Karazhan or Gruul's Lair, which is only 2-3 days a week, I have fuckall to do. We had a solid group of 5 people who ran instances every night, so now we're pretty much done and spinning our wheels. Two of them went over to the Horde side, one of them took 4 weeks off to entertain family, and one rolled a shaman to 45 to stave off boredom. It's getting to the point where I may have to roll an alt or two seriously, and I hate alts.

Funny part is that I never thought I was leveling too fast, but here we are two months later and I'm waiting on the slowpokes just so we can get a serious raid going in heroics or whatnot.

I lost interest about a month ago, and I didn't even get to 70. My guild, while mostly nice people is too big to care about anyone unless you're both in the cool kids club, and even with that there are so many alts you never know who anyone is. My wife has played something like twice since our holidays ended before her account expired again last weekend and my two mates who raced to 70, then stopped playing only hop on from time to time, leaving me with pretty much only the solo option, which just got boring.

Started a n00b on WUA's server, but the thought of grinding my way up to the same level as them so I could actually play alongside kinda crushed that thought after a few sessions. Bro-in-law bought BC, then lasted for something like two sessions, then never logged on again, all the shit I sent him has now bounced back.

If the five of us could form a semi-coherent group, even based on one night a week, then it'd still be fun and I'd be into it. As it is, it's just boring, and with the WoW-style-worse-than-EQ1-style rep grinds to look forward to, I find myself doing pretty much anything else to logging on. My game card has just under a month left on it. meh.

I have been thinking that this was going to become a serious problem.  They have 2-3 years' worth of endgame content that was wiped off the map with the release of the expansion.  Even with all that content, people sometimes complained that they were bored, but between AQ* and Naxx, everyone pretty much had something to do.  Now they have to come back up to that level of content in the time it takes people to level to 70 and master all the new content? 

They're already behind, not surprisingly.

Personally, I beat the system by leveling to 62 in Outland, logging off in Zangarmarsh, then rerolling Horde. 8-)

I'm still keeping myself entertained, but then I've been pacing the same way I paced when the game was released.  The cap was 60 for two years, that gave a lot of people a lot of time to just ease-up to there, then find stuff they wanted to do.  I still know folks who haven't hit 70 yet, but had 60s on BC release.

Frankly, I haven't understood the rush to get into Kharazan, then the 25-mans.   The content will STILL be there in a few months, and  if you take your time you don't burn yourself out trying to get there.   Besides, rushing just means waiting for the new content, which Blizzard isn't exactly quick with.

That was kind of my thing, I was never really rushing at all. I was just enjoying all the new 5 mans with my crew and running about two of them a night. Do that long enough and you just start leveling pretty fast. Hell, it's like 100k xp for running one 5 man really.

I'm enjoying it still, but my classes are raping me sideways (don't take online classes from different campuses) so I haven't been able to log on more than one or two days a week, and that's usually to do some quests on my alt, cut some gems as my alt, then sigh and stare at my prot-warrior which is just awful to quest with.

The rest of my guild has been able to play more so they're pretty much all at level 70 and running instances left and right. I still haven't done a full run of the crypts, or durnholde.

Level 50 for me has always been that way (4 toons' experience).  I left a rogue on a pve server at 53, and have never been back to it.  Now I have a 70 hunter, 65 warlock and 60 priest on a pvp server.  But yeah, 50 is really the low point.

Taking a break is a good idea.  But, I'll tell you, Outlands is really awesome.  I think  you can start there at 58.

My hunter just got keyed last week for Kara, but likely won't go anytime soon, since I only instance on weekends.  I have one heroic key (Coilfang).  I got my fast epic mount a couple of days ago.  Now I wish I'd save the gold for my warlock.

My warlock has only leveled on rested xp, and I'm more satisfied with how it scales up than my hunter (I'm disappointed in how hunter has scaled).  I've been trying to maximize rep gains due to being a 375 jewelcrafter.

My priest is really a tailor.  I don't think I've ever played her as a healer - maybe I was holy specced for 10 minutes once.  Mostly I tailored and played some bgs pre-TBC.  I will likely continue to use her as a bag maker, and might level her up.  Haven't decided yet.  I'm certainly in no hurry.

I haven't done too much instancing.  There's a couple I haven't done yet.  I doubt I'll ever make it to whatever I'm supposed to do after Kara, and may not even make it there.

I'm still enjoying playing though.

I've done one instance exactly one time and I'm working my second character 70 (almost 66 on druid).  My druid gets invites out of the blue often though.  "HEY, R U FERAL. NEED TANX". 

Mothballed the shaman since I'm enjoying the druid a whole lot more.  I just suck ballsack as a tanking though (which is odd, I was a damn good tank in EQ).   I did manage to tank Ring of Blood in shitty gear without getting anyone killed except myself.  You'd think a level 70 priest would be able to handle the spike damage on the champion, but NOOO.  At least the fury warrior and 2 hunter pets were able to keep him busy so it wasn't a wipe.   I swear.. people need to watch their goddamn aggro if I'm full rage, spaming every ability I've got, and they're still making me yoyo-taunt a mob off them.

And I've just hit the gravy point on the druid.  Nagrand is my favoritest zone ever.  Still up in the on whether to switch to a boomkin.  Seems awefully awesome and I'm a sucker for new dances.  Just.. being a tank is so handy and I do enjoy mah melee. Ohh, and I hate downtime.

But yah... still waiting on burnout.  Sometimes I just don't feel like playing though, and in that case.. hello PS2 or book. 

The game hits a real low point for leveling at around the 50s all the way to 60 (I guess BC content now, which is 58 I think) unless you know every goddamn quest in the game and when to do them, so you're probably just feeling that. Not that I'm saying you should keep going over the speedbump, just saying that WoW is nice leveling up til that point (with a few hiccups in the mid 30s and lowish 40s). If you don't like doing 5mans for loot over and over, PVP, raiding, or rolling alts then now is a good time to quit anyway unless you want to grind through the 50s to hit BC content.

Very true. Part of the problem is the plaguelands have something everyone says they want in WoW but they miss it by the time they get there. That is, a ton of hidden quests. Junk in old barns start's quests, dead druids in ruined houses and npc's stuck in hidden valleys. All those hidden quests are great but I guess by that time most people are too used to being led around by the nose or something. Also a lot of people seem to miss some zones that have good quests. Burning steppes is one that comes to mind. Blasted lands has some good quests too iirc. The demon Rakh'likh quest line is one of the coolest in the game imo. I've leveled alts to 60 without ever going to plaguelands at all. Granted they had a lot of rested experience but there are enough other places you can go that you can almost completely skip the more common zones.

I found the 40s bad enough. But I have been following Jame's Levelling Guide (http://www.wow-pro.com/node/754), which has helped a lot. It's not so much that I'm interested in the quick now no fun grind, but it is a good guide of places and quests in general, and also has notes for picking up this or that and saving them for future quests, or stop at this location on your way to pick up this quest because the drops are at the same place, which saves an incredible amount of time.

I also exhaust my blue and then take a few days off to sit in an inn and being a healer I liberally sprinkle in instances, particularly higher level ones.

I'm also swearing by that thing, for the reasons stated.  Also, nothing says you can't go off the guide if you don't mind taking the time and a quest or exploration seems interesting.  edit: or some quest seems impossible and you don't mind a bit of extra grinding at the end.

The only downside to boomkinism is that you are moderately less desirable in any 5 man group.  This makes sense in a cold light- hell, if I wasn't a boomkin, I would probably be the guy saying "If we are getting more DPS, get DPS with CC".  It doesn't keep you from getting a group EVAR, but boomkins are still so rare that some who have never grouped with them won't want you.  Usually, once they see you (1 on dmg meter and other caster DPS loving your aura) they will come around. 

Hmmm, just this weekend I started thinking about cancelling. Over the last week or so, I log in and just have zero motivation. The only character that I seem to enjoy these days is my Draenei Hunter. My Tauren Shaman is 63, my Human Priest is 64, and my NE Druid is 62. And for some reason lately I just dread logging onto them - leveling up is just feeling like work right now. The prettiness of the new zones has worn off and I just find myself staring at my xp bar, seeing how slowly it goes up even at rested xp on all of 'em, and I just think of all the work that needs to be done to get to 70.

It's funny, when I look back at the time before the expansion, I was looking forward to it so bad. But I was having fun PvPing in BG's with my three 60's. Now as I'm out there leveling I'm realizing that I'm not having fun. I just want to be at 70 and PvP without worrying about leveling.

So I find myself playing lower level alts, just kind of dicking around. But I really think it's time for a break from the game. This always seems to be the way it goes ... I spend untold hours and it's all good, then one day the bottom just drops out and I have no motivation, it all suddenly seems so pointless ...

Heh, I know the feeling.  I'm considering lighting up a bud's account and trying out this dual-account thingy I keep hearing about.

Ouch. I reckon you dug yourself a bit of that hole by playing the same zones 3 times over instead of taking one guy through it once and going from there.

I'm pretty sure that's why I'm burned out as well.  I'm one of those alt-a-holic types and I keep making new characters, getting them to 15-25 or so, and getting bored.  And now I dread doing all the newbie missions *again* before the characters get their interesting abilities.

It seems to have affected everyone, and I've put my finger on exactly why.

It's the god-damned Karazhan key quest. It's the reiteration of the Onyxia questline all over again, except this time, it's like trying to find everyone keyed people to get into UBRS. It was one of the stupidiest design decisions they've ever made, and if they don't do something about it in the near future, they are going to lose TONS of accounts over it. Here's why.

Let's say you're not in a raiding guild. Let's say you have people who are really quick levelers and have a bunch of time, then you have some in the middle, and some at the bottom. That pretty much defines most regular guilds or alliances. Ok the people at the top blast through, get done, and then have everything out of the five mans they need. They all get keyed and want to do Karazhan, but they don't have the right mix of classes yet. So, they help some others to try to get keys, but they are more casual and are still leveling a lot of alts. So, the top people wait around and get bored or waiting, and they start alting. When the regulars are starting to get ready, they need help getting keys, but it's like Jailbreak all over again. People really don't want to do the same instances they did over and over and over to help new people.

Here's the kicker. With everyone getting there at different times, the top people get pissed off that they are constantly being hassled to help key people, but they can't run things without getting more keys to support standby postions in their raids. When, just like everything else, this could all be solved by having the Karazhan key OPEN THE DAMN DOOR. Why the hell should everyone and their dog have to have a key just to get in the house? Nothing else worked like that except Onyxia, and it was a 40 man short raid.

Top that off with the fact that one of the hardest classes to consistantly find in numbers (priests) happens to be one of the most important in terms of CC in Karazhan, and you set yourself up for a feeling of total malaise amongst your users. It was a really stupid design decision.

Not to mention that pugging Black Morass (and heck, even Arcatraz can get pretty bad) is the equivalent of stabbing one's eyes out with a rusty spork, repeatedly. It's just like the 45min strat run; yeah, it's ok for a guild group in vent with the right group makeup, but pugging it? kek.


-- Z.

edit: Black Morass is the last step for the Kara questline, for those who don't know

The difference, from what I've seen, is that there is incentive for people to go back and help the slower people along and that is faction. I've met quite a few people who've said they did a lot of black morass runs for slower guild mates to get exalted with the keeper's of time. Not everyone needs it but there are some nice items for a lot of classes on the vendor so that's a bit of an incentive to keep going back. Arc on the other hand, is a pita so most people would rather run Mech or Bot for faction than do Arc again. :(

Most of my guildies hate the Shadow Labs more than any other instance. They hated the Black Morass until they got a feel for it, and they've been successfully pugging it since.

It's much worse than that, though.  On top of all that stuff you hit a point where you have more than 10 keyed people, but not the right mix or what-not to do 2 Kara runs.  People start getting pissy about not going, or being forced to sit out from UBRS 2.0 for a week at a time.  They're sitting on their ass doing nothing, when they see shitty player_816 in 'required class_02' going week after week and they get really pissed.

Add-in idiot raid-leaders who do things like schedule people, but then swap-in others because "you're not the right class for this boss, and we didn't get far enough to need you yet." and it's a formula for utter shit.

Ya, I hated Black Morass the first 2 times.  Now it's free loot, even w/ pugs. Because of my play time and sporadic class changes, I tend to pug alot.  As long as you take control, it usually ends up ok.  Also I have 2 rules for Pugging.  1: 3 wipes and I'm gone, regardless of how close we get to killing whatever we're fighting.  2: I have absolutely no qualms about kicking team members, if yer a dick, yer gone, if you suck, yer gone, if a guildie wanted in and we haven't started yet, yer gone.

Keeps it simple and quick for someone on my limited play time.

We are in that spot right now.  Silly me figuring every guild needs an extra healer, but it turns out to be the one thing we have too much of and no one wants to go dps spec.  Also not being part of the officer clique I am cooling my heels in Kara group #2, too bad it hasn't been formed yet.  Nice guys, but I am getting tired of just PUG'ing instances while they work through Kara.

Multi-day 10-man 'epic' instances are really not very much fun from an organizational / drama perspective. Class balance is so brittle that you run into a veritable dumptruck of problems. It wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't the only thing out there and didn't have part of the key to Serpentshrine.

I'd just like to say "I told you so" to no-one in particular (or perhaps Blizzard) because I predicted we'd be seeing a massive drama-bomb because lower numbers means stricter requirements, and that smaller raids != casual raiding. There would need to be more changes such as gutting consumables, starting the bar at the MC level as opposed to the Naxx level, and dropping difficult attunements. It seems Blizzard either wasn't going for casual (and the sizedown was for other reasons, say hardware or just making guilds tighter). I read one delicious post on WoW.com or Elitist Jerks where someone said that they had thought there would be a surplus of raiders looking for guilds but surprise surprise it's exactly like before because new guilds formed to fill up the gaps. Oh and guilds still carry shit players because that's how they are structured not because they can get 30 good players and poof all of them  disappear at that magical number and 25-man is going to fix it all soon.

Again, not directed at anyone. I'm just happy/smug to have been right and am remembering the rage I felt trying to convey this to WoW retards on the official site (in my defence I do this because I want to experience rage, like how you might watch a tragic movie to feel sad, or a comedy to feel happy, etc (and the wow boards are all of these)), but don't want to infect them on myself long enough to tell them this directly and I'd have to re-up to do it anyway.

Um.  If you say so.

I can still attempt these dungeons with a small group of close friends.

I couldn't do that with MC, Onyxia or Naxx previously.

Am I likely to get owned ?  Possibly.  Does that  matter ?

I didn't say it mattered. If cutting the field down to 25 (or 10, if you're talking about Kara) makes your guild or group of friends work then that's great. I was specifically talking about the crowd who thought that the change would be all happiness and rainbows and fix all the problems with raiding, when 99% of those problems are not that you need to field 40 people. In other words it wasn't the casualisation that so many on the WoW boards toasted it as.

See, that's just it Cal. The requirements AREN'T any stricter.  You can PUG Kara, and people WILL be doing PUG Kara soon enough.  I wasn't kidding when I called it UBRS 2.0.   It's hard right now because of a few things.

 The first problem is the people running it right now are still so focused on the Pre-BC mindset and they haven't broadened their view of classes OR specs at all.   My guild forced all priests to go Holy once again, because "it's a raid instance!1!"  However, dragging 2 holy priests and a resto druid AND a holy pally is fucking overkill on healing, and shit for DPS..  So what'd they do?  "Druids, spec balance/ feral."   :-o  

 Fact is, a Shadow Priest can shackle just fine, just use a resto druid as your secondary healer and voila.  But that's too difficult, apparently.

The same shit is happening with Hunters.  We don't do BIG UBER BURST DAMAGE.. but a well-played hunter easily hits their target on DMs.  Instead I'm getting passed-over for a mage who dies in the first 30 seconds because he's a dipshit who - literally - laughs LOLZ DID YOU SEE THAT CRIT right before he's pasted and winds-up doing nobody any good.

Ditto for Locks.  Locks have been told "Spec affliction" but the fights are all so short that their damage output is largely hindered.  So what's happening? They're dropping Locks for mages/ rogues now, and only taking the locks in for specific fights, where a banish or two is needed... err..

The second problem is everyone's jumping headfirst into Kara.  It's a pain in the ass to even try to get a Shattered Halls/ Full Actraz / Steamvault run for the blue set.  Everyone wants to 'rush da purlez' and hit Heroics and Kara.   So what's happening? They're getting pwned in Kara and uberpwned in Heroics.  It's like trying to run MC at 60 in green/ blue quest gear.   Of course you're getting pwned, you're underequipped.   But no, THAT'S not the problem, it's the CLASSES.. "UR USELESS"  "ROLL A WAR/ MAG/ PRIEST, NUB"  >.< :mob: :dead_horse:

Heh, sounds like a riot. I almost wish my last guild made it to BC to explode into a bigger ball of flaming hot drama than it did. I'm sure it's much more fun looking in than being in though, I could never stand having to deal with that shit while playing.

I hear the 25 mans are brutal from a few friends and reading boards, with some Naxx completing guilds sitting back and refusing to throw themselves at it anymore until Blizzard does something about it, only an elite few having more than 1-2 bosses to kill, people bitching about potions all over the place, etc.

Really?  Normally, my affliction specc'ed lock uses totally different attacks/methods when dealing with trash as opposed to bosses.  Trash I use my instant damage attacks.  Bosses I use my DOT's.  In either case I come out as one of the leaders of DPS most often.  While never the highest, I certainly get the job done and provide all of those nice utility spells/powers that everyone can benefit from.

As for this conversation, my small guild that never had a chance at Onyxia or Molten Core has been keeping up with the Jones' pretty damn well.  No 25-man yet, but getting close.  We're working on getting everyone keyed for Kara with a few done already.  Why aren't we there already?  Because many of the members like to PvP or at least like those rewards.  They are splitting their time.

Our guild membership is way up, not down.  The expansion has been nothing but good for us and our more casual approach to the game.

Um again.  I'd be happy to hear what you think the 99% percent of the problems actually were.  And I put it to you that, even if you can, it doesn't matter if you can't actually field the 40 people that's the FIRST 1% of the problem...

Unless we're talking 5-mans it matters because the logistics are not so different when talking 25mans and 40mans that the change would enable a lot of people that could not complete those things before. People who have a readymade group of 25ish are rare, hence the 99% pulled out of my ass percentage. The actual specifics I'll do in the morning since it's 4am here. Well, middayish today I guess would be more accurate a timeframe really.

You're right, that is definitely part of it. I think the other part is I've been playing for two plus years and the game has just ... become too much a routine habit of my life. My wife could hardly believe it when I told her I cancelled.  :-D

There are up's and downs. Karazhan is shitty for the reasons I've mentioned before. The key quest is convoluted and ridiculous, and the rewards need to be reworked. As for the 25 man raids, I LOVE LOVE LOVE the rostering for those as a leader. Filling 40 mans with retards was an exercise in frustration every week. I'd have 25 solid folks and 15 idiots. Now, I just have 25 solid folks and a few standbys.

However, the developers made the 25 mans insanely hard. You can tell they were pissed that guilds whomped Naxx so fast, so they set up impossible barriers in the next iteration. I have the best gear you can get out of 5 mans or can buy off the AH for a warrior, which essentially equals about what you would have in stats of full Tier 3 or better in some cases, and I still get whomped hardcore for 5k average by Mulgar in Gruul's Lair with 9k spike damage. And that's not even Gruul himself. It's beyond overkill compared to what we had to do in Onyxia.

My horseshit theory on why the 25-mans are so ball bustingly hard is that Blizzard is attempting to cockblock people from the higher-tier 25-man raids so they can polish them further. Shit, the instant some of the uberhardcore guilds started breaking into Serpentshrine there was a patch to "polish" the bosses there. I imagine Gruul/Magi will be made less face destroying after a big content patch. I came to the sad realization that the raids past Karazhan really aren't for casuals due to the Triple XXXtreme difficulty and consumable drain. Also, the fact that Blizzard has absolutely no reason to add any more 5/10 man content.

Karazhan I dunno on. I'm not even 70 yet. Me and all the other officers are wondering if enough of our regular players are actually good enough to do it since getting more than one of our...less talented players in a guild run usually results in wipe city.

That's been my experience. After a couple of weeks of being brought in only when there is a shortage of people or for particular bosses believed to be ranged DPS-centric, I got bored. When I logged in after a week or so of not bothering to, I got whines about not having been there... for the occasional bosses they could have used me for or for potion making. I'm pretty much not interested in playing a hunter at any point in the future, but my guild has decided to put hurdles in the way of changing classes, so thats that.

My guild is doing pretty damn good in Karazhan. We have cleared the entire thing except Nightbane, just got the quest to summon him finished last week. From what other guilds on our server are telling us, we are going through at a very fast pace.

We are pretty small guild as raiding goes, being built of friends from different guilds over the life of wow. I think we have a total of 28 level 70s, including casuals like Hat, so hitting the 25 mans has been hard. We are having the problem of more raiders than spots now, so what we have done to try and be fair is bring our "best" guys on the new encounters, and constantly sub in and out other people for bosses we have the strategy down for. This is working ok for now, but I think a lot of people are getting itchy for more raid time.

My theory on this is that they are trying a new way of making people do progress. If you look at the gear coming out of Karazhan, it is berely better than the blue stuff from level 70 5 mans. This new form of forced progression keeps the gear gap relitivly low, but also stops skilled players from passing up a bunch of the midrange raid content. So now instead of forcing people to run raids over and over to get great gear, and then throwing gear check bosses in the next instance, they are just requiring that you get keyed but beating lower instances first.

The only thing I hate about Black Morass are the damn script bugs. Through no fault of your own mob waves will spawn later and later than blam, boss spawns while you are still clearing a portal. Other times I've done it where the whole thing was on fast forward. Not even a second  to drink between waves. If' they'd fix that crap I'd like it a lot better.

No, it's the dragonlings that do the evade bug that annoys the fuck out of me.  The instance going perfectly and 'fuck' you're done.

Big problem is the crappy risk/reward on the heroics. Who wants to do a much harder version of the same dungeon for the same damn loot that dropped in the easy version. Kara is actually easier for the upgrades than most of the heroics and the heroics don't have a clear upgrade purpose for Kara. If there was loot in the heroics you needed to be able to do Kara I bet more people would be doing them.

I was going to go more indepth about why raids are not casual and why the fact that they were 40man is the smallest problem of all of them, but I'll do the quick (note: quick != short) version instead because I lost a lot of care factor over the day.

The lockout period is the first reason. A normal instance simply exists, it's always there and you lose nothing by not going there for a week. A lockout creates a situation where every guild has X potential loot from every lockout instance every week, and those potential items become in effect a kind of resource. If you don't farm that instance during the lockout you've lost those potential items, which means that you really have to farm it every week. Whenever a raiding guild misses out on an instance for the week everyone would immediately talk about the opportunities missed. This creates a situation where people become obligated, either officially via mandatory attendance or unofficially through peer pressure or self guilt, to show up to instance runs even when they might have other things they could be doing or are simply not wanting to play WoW. The lockout also means that you can't have too many raiders or people miss out every week. This creates a situation where guilds have to juggle between too many and too few players, which makes it harder to just recruit big so as to lessen the tension on your raiders. And even if your guild is big, if you don't attend a raid you miss out for a week, so if you enjoy raiding it really puts you on the spot when you're feeling tired or have something else you'd like to do.

The popular looting systems that come about because of lockouts and random drops also create a situation where raiders feel obligated to attend as many raids as possible. If an item you want can only drop once per week and has a 10% chance you could very well only ever see it once, or maybe even twice over your whole time of raiding that instance. You will also be competing with everyone else who wants the drop too. If you miss a raid that one raid could be when the item drops and you'll have missed your chance. DKP makes this worse in that not only do you have to attend the raids that offer the drop, but every other raid as well so as to be in a position to recieve the item in question should it drop.

That's just discussing the pressure it puts on a raider who can attend. A lot of people cannot ever raid simply because they cannot devote huge blocks of time to play the game for whatever reason. The lockout is again mostly responsible for this. When someone ducks out of a 5man it's a PITA but getting a replacement is doable because you have the whole server to choose from. When doing a lockout instance you have to immediately cut out everyone who is in a guild (or regular PUG) that does the instance. Then, everybody who is left is very unlikely to have any real knowledge of the instance or of raiding in general so unless you want to teach them as you go they're not going to be much help either. That leaves the people in your guild, which is generally kept at a size where you don't have too many people left on the sidelines every week because otherwise they get left out of the encounter for the whole week. This means that you can't just be subbing people out over the course of the clear, and so you need most everyone to be there the whole time, which excludes a lot of players.

The size is of course a factor, but I would say the size kicks in at around 15-20, as opposed to some number between 25 and 40. 25 is still a lot of people to schedule around and get into the instance ready to pull. This means 2 things. First it means that instance runs are a lot longer than they otherwise need to be, making it even harder to devote time for a full run. Secondly it means that you can't simply go for an hour and call it a day. All the logistics and organisation involved, as well as player preperation, travel time, and time spent waiting for late arrivals means that you need to invest X amount of time for the run to be worth the effort. That is the main reason that guilds do 4-6 hour blocks, not because the content requires it or because they're catasses, but because doing 7 days of 1-2 hour blocks is just not worth it.

Then there's consumables. It's been put better by tonnes of people elsewhere but I'll repeat it here. Consumables right before BC were worth more than a tier's worth of upgrades in raw power. Right now, with the shallow tiers BC has, consumables are several tiers worth of power. This means that either Blizzard needs to tune fights without consumables and see every hardcore guild pot up and thrash every encounter they put out within hours, or tune with consumables taken into account and require people pot up. This means that raiders are required to spend X hours mindlessly farming to support their raiding, which already takes up too many hours a week for most casuals.

Everyone and their mother was saying that 25man raids would enable them to only field their core of good raiders and kick their filler to the curb. This is flawed thinking because it doesn't take into account why guilds have filler in the first place. Some guilds are made up of X amount of friends from previous games or RL or other online communities, and if X is ~20-40 then those guilds are going to benefit, but those guilds are a minority. Most guilds are made up within the game for the game, and so have no set number of core players that are going to be super resistant to quitting the guild. 40 man guilds typically had 25-30 "core" players because that is obviously the rough % of core players you get via the normal recruitment methods. Filler gets in because you need to fill a spot fast and so can't get too picky or you miss out on raiding for a week or 2 (which is bad), and while many guilds just say they will kick crappy players out they tend to stay either because replacements are hard to find, the leadership can't bring themselves to kick them, or the crap players make friends that will be pissed if they're kicked. If you took a 1L container of air you'd have roughly 0.2L of oxygen (oxygen is ~20% of air). If you then used a 0.2L container of air, if wouldn't be full of oxygen, you'd have 0.04L of oxygen. So why did people think that having a 25man guild would leave them with all core players, and not ~15 core players? Because they were wrong. Raiding will still be dragging X amount of shitty players along for the ride regardless of size unless guilds change their policies.

Other people thought that because raids would be cut down to 25 it would make recruiting easier, but that would never happen because the reason you have X guilds is because that's how many guilds the server can support at 40man. The number of guilds a server can support goes up with the 25 man requirement. Those raiders who are now out of the 40 man guilds or who would have gone into 40man guilds are not going to sit around with their thumbs up their asses waiting to get a spot. Guilds get started all the time but die due to lack of numbers, with more numbers those guilds succeed and lower the number of free raiders to choose from. So recruiting is always going to be hard unless you're a superstar guild. Always.

All those factors lead to why raiding is not casual friendly and why raiding is "hard" in a variety of ways. Cutting down to 25 makes for less logistics hassles for officers (made hard again by Kara and leveling, but I digress), and can make for a tighter guild. It can also enable the very few groups of 20-40 friends that exist in WoW but need to bring along a bunch of outsiders in order to raid 40mans. It also makes it so that there is less stress on the servers IIRC some comments made by Blizzard around the announcement of the change. But that's all it changes. It doesn't mean you don't have to farm for pots. It doesn't mean you can jump in and raid for an hour and then go pick up the kids from soccor practice or w/e. It doesn't mean you can only raid once a week and not miss out. In short, it's not all rainbows and sunshine and a great victory for casuals.


Now if you were talking about the solo content or 5mans or Kara then there's no question those things were needed and a great addition (questionable for kara due to the lockout and long nature of it all), but I was never talking about those, and really they've always been there, just neglected for a long time.

Also, before anybody comments, Ironwood (foolishly :P) asked and I like to hear the sound of my own keyboard so there. I also didn't do my usual read-over of this because it's frankly just too long so don't be too picky if my grammar sucks balls or something.

TLDR'd your own post? Cunning.

I may be misinterpreting your post, but didn't you just leave a guild full of fuckwits? These guys you're describing don't seem all that great either...

Also, nice ass.

In depth indeed. The simple reasons that raids are not casual:  Casual players do not schedule their lives according to a guild's raid schedule, and casual players *usually* either cannot or will not be locked at their PC for the 3+ hours each raid requires.

Really I think it comes down to the simple fact that raiding requires you to be more serious about the game than most casual gamers are willing or able to be. Sure there are casual guilds that may throw together a raid once in a while in blackrock spire or something, but that's not really what we're talking about.

I think you hit the nail on the head as far as why casuals won't raid. They can't or don't want to schedule their lives around a game. That's pretty much it for the root cause since the rest of the reasons just feed from that main point. As far as seriousness goes, I think there's a lot of middle ground where both groups meet up. However, the hardcore outliers are usually the reference points when people talk about raiders and casuals in that regard, which is a shame.

Heheh I'm kinda confused with the 'casual' guild I joined last month on my Draenei Shammy. After hitting 70, I'm getting mixed messages from 2 end of the guild.
1. I cant' believe a part of them wanted to raid MC. And still planned to raid it tomorrow as well as helping those who are not attuned. Considering one of the warrior getting owned so hard by Steamvault Bog Lords,I guess he probably wanted something lighter but still retain that massive epic instance feel lol. The reasoning they gave was 'we need to train to raid together as a guild'  :roll:

2. There's another 4-5 guildies that did their own runs which I hang around with since I know the priest IRL. We kept running rep runs whatever is there, one hunter left the guild after hearing we're gonna raid MC. Basically they can't wait for the guild to start Karazan, and are already keyed up and pushing me to do the same. Mage, Druid Tank, Warlock, Holy Priest, Hunter. sometimes I didn't get invite cause Elem shammies don't get a single form of CC  :| but that's fine than running MC imo.

Me? I'm just working on my Leatherworking to get Netherstrike set. Then I might drop Skin for Tailoring to make Spell Dmg Threads with Scryer rep recipe etc. Basically farming clefthooves for the Thick Leathers now Grindy shit. Made a full tanking leather set for the Druid on the process at least. 368 / 375 LW  :hello_kitty:

If a guild tells you where you will be playing and when you will be playing, it isn't a casual guild.

I belonged to the same type of guild for exactly 2 weeks.  As soon as they "hinted" to me I needed to attend more raids, I quit.

Sorry, I play when I can and how I like.  If that keeps me from the uberest equipment in the game, so be it.

Retards.

Really.

Run away fast and run away long.

To honest, I'd love to raid into MC. The reason: I've never been past Geddon. My guild is pretty casual (no class or spec requirements, just do what you think is fun). By the time we got enough people high enough and geared enough to start into MC, we hit the pre-BC blues and people stopped showing up. So I've never seen the end of MC. Never stepped foot inside Onyxia, BWL, AQ40, or Naxx. Even though most of the gear is crappy by BC standards, I'd still like to go in there at least once just to experience it.

Ya it's too bad WoW decided to break the mold and make all pre-expansion content effectively a complete waste of time the way they did. In EQ people still raided the orignial planes of fear and hate well into the 4th or 5th expansion, and old content was still worth doiing by up and coming guilds as they leveled past where it was originally tuned for. It's still kind of boggling with Blizz's glacial content creation speed that they'd decide to junk such a huge amount of it.

...

Do we have to go over the why, yet again? Plz no, mommy.

This might have already been rehashed many times, but I missed it.  I was thinking through this the other day and only came up with the following.

Blizzard wanted to be sure people had to purchase BC.  So, they made a very clear and crisp break between the original content and BC.  They also made it so there was a huge incentive to want the BC stuff.  Thus, anyone that purchased BC effectively left the older content behind.

My thought is that once Blizzard feels they have milked the BC off-the-shelf revenue, they will combine BC with the original in a new box-set.  They'll rework the original content to include the new item sets, etc. by working the instance level system into the older instances.  They will probably put in more of those "Finish in 45 minutes and win an extra carrot" too.

This will all happen over the next 1 to 1 1/2 years to keep people satisfied with new or "old" things to do before the next big expansion comes out.  Then, you'll go through the same old thing of being "forced" to purchase the new content and leaving the old behind for another day.

That's how I would have done it myself actually.  Pretty smart and from the numbers, it seems to have worked.  Time will tell on the transition though.

Onyxia is a 40 man instance that doesn't suck.

However, attunement does.

If they do, it will be a change from the statements they have made to date.  They've said a few times there are no intentions of going back and revisiting 'old' content.  It's old, and been around for nearly 2 years in some cases and they'd rather spend the time & money developing new stuff.  It's there for those who want to go back and experience it, but that's it.

 As to the remarks of "but it's wasted!1"  Blizz's response has been, "So Scarlet Monestary, Deadmines, etc are wasted content when the majority of the game is beyond that point?"  They're stretching there, because there's a difference in group size & classes you need to run between 5-man and raid content but they do have a point.  Ony was 15-manned by some friends of mine with one death - a 63 mage in quest gear.  If you get a bug up your ass to go do it, you can.

No, the reason for the equipment reboot was to get folks on an equal footing.  Changing the raid size fucks things up majorly.  What's the point of growing your guild to run MC/ BWL/ Naxx then cutting 2/3 (or more) of them loose when you start to run 25-mans.   Additionally, when the majority were only running MC - at best - you're falling into that EQ trap of only desigining for the minority of your players while casuals run around in their shit-gear trying to hit ancient (in MMO terms) content so they can work-up to the new, good stuff.

 Deadmines is good xp/loot for the late teens/early 20s.  SM is great for 35-45ish.  BWL and AQ40, while they are ostensibly fun instances, are good for exactly squat, since you have to be 60 but the gear is a significant downgrade from green quest rewards 15 minutes into Outland.

Well, if anything they should go back and make those older instances easier to be more inline with the way TBC content is done.

If I were lvl'ing a character up from 0 to 70 now, I certainly wouldn't waste any time running instances to get equipment.  I wouldn't even run them for the quests.  You certainly don't need them to hit 60.  Once you hit 58-60, go to Outlands and you'll instantly have better equipment than anything you had previously by far.

If they leave it like it is, the progression for new players or new alts would be:
0-50 the old fashioned way with normal quests, dungeon quests, etc.
50-60 with just basic questing and grinding
60+ TBC
70 - Go back occasionally to the old instances to get gear that is nowhere near as good as what you have.

It really wouldn't take much to make those dungeons viable again.  They just don't make any sense as they stand today.  Tone them down so they make sense for the 50-60 leveling process and you're done.

Although, I suppose it doesn't make any sense from a resource standpoint.  Why waste the time when new content is what everyone *really* wants.  It is still just hard to see it all wasted. /shrug

I think it would be interesting to see them add some solo and/or duo instances. They wouldn't have to be huge; maybe like 1 wing of SM or something. Someplace where you could quest and get some decent loot without having to endure a PUG. Maybe limit the number of times they can be run to prevent farming...once a week or something.

It doesn't really have to work that way though, because if we are talking about the optimal progression path to 70 - yes; however if played for fun, the instances on the way to 70 are quite enjoyable. For example, i'm levelling a rogue atm (being a relative newbie to WoW) and my friends are playing alts when they aren't in Kara. I'm in no rush to "get to the endgame", and they have all been there and do it. So we play for fun, doing things the stupid, non-powergamer way.

A couple of nights ago we ran a four-man VC, with my rogue, a hunter, a shaman (Dranei) and a mage, all around 22. While there was some gear to be gained (Tunic of Westfall, Cruel Barb), it wasn't really about that at all. It was about the mage "blink-kiting", the hunter running out of ammo mid-run and other antics.

Or, last night on the Gnomer run, even with a level 70 oomkin for speed:

(http://img241.imageshack.us/img241/4083/wowscrnshot032907010253rb1.th.jpg) (http://img241.imageshack.us/my.php?image=wowscrnshot032907010253rb1.jpg)(http://img259.imageshack.us/img259/7981/wowscrnshot032907010255dq5.th.jpg) (http://img259.imageshack.us/my.php?image=wowscrnshot032907010255dq5.jpg)
(http://img101.imageshack.us/img101/5377/wowscrnshot032907010304dd0.th.jpg) (http://img101.imageshack.us/my.php?image=wowscrnshot032907010304dd0.jpg)

(I was low level enough to pull across the room.)

Oh I agree that a new player would probably be interested in these instances, but actual new players coming to the game will be very few and fewer as the years go on.  It's all good really.  I'm happy with it the way it is.

By the way, I'm not talking about the lower level instances.  Deadmines, Gnomer, Stockades, Scarlet Monestery, etc.  Those are all great instances that help quite a bit while leveling up.  I'm talking more about the huge time sinks that occur with Black Rock Depths, Black Rock Spires, Molten Core, Onyxia Attunement, and on up.  Basically the content that took being a lvl 60 char and then better equipement as you went up in difficulty.

Basically, by the time you get to the level you would normally be hitting those places, you'll be ready for Outlands and scooping up items that blow anything before it away.

What I'm saying is drop those dungeons down so that it makes sense to hit them at level 50-55 or something.  Then they would be more inline with the leveling progression.  Right now, if you blink your eyes between 59-60 you'll never even know they existed.

I agree WAP.  Smaller group instances would be interesting.  Even though I can (and do) put in a lot of time with the game, it is in small increments and at odd hours (to everyone else in my guild anyway.)  I play for 1-2 hours early evening, so I miss out on a ton of 5-man instances.  I can get on some on the weekends where my playtime opens up more, but it would be nice to hit some during the week too.

Small group instances would provide some flexibility that might fit within my normal play schedule.  I'd be all over it.