f13.net

Figured it might be a nice idea to create a thread dedicated to things you might want to watch out for in your preparations for the upcoming Patch / Expantion (as opposed to the general discussion topic that already exists).

I will start this off with an item of note that prompted me to consider makeing this thread:

GLYPHS.

In the upcoming patch, glyphs will be changed to a one time purchase, and you will have a "glyph book" similar to a spellbook, that once you have learned a glyph, you can reference it to swap your glyphs around any time you want for your convenience.
-  Ater the patch, the material requirements to make glyphs are going to roughly tripple (Ie, any glyph that requires 1 of X ink is now going to require 3).   This means that if you have an inscrber alt, you should make at least one of every glyph you want / can make for your other characters before the patch goes live, to save yourself a lot of materials in the short run.
- Also note, currently there are a few glyphs that simply no longer exist in the current PTR builds, which become a [charred glyph] after the patch, and are vendor trash from that point on.

The following list covers all the glyphs that will become charred glyphs that i could find after the patch:

Glyph of Dark Command (DK)
Glyph of Disease (DK)
Glyph of Icebound Fortitude (DK)
Glyph of Unholy Blight (DK)
Glyph of Rapid Rejuvenation (DRUID)
Glyph of Survival Instincts (DRUID)
Glyph of Volley (HUNTER)
Glyph of Possessed Strength (HUNTER)
Glyph of Arcane Explosion (MAGE)
Glyph of Mana Gem (MAGE)
Glyph of Fire Blast (MAGE)
Glyph of Fire Ward (MAGE)
Glyph of Scorch (MAGE)
Glyph of Siphon Life (WARLOCK)
Glyph of Taunt (WARRIOR)
Glyph of Last Stand (WARRIOR)
Glyph of Barbaric Insults (WARRIOR)

- In summary: if you have an Inscriber or know an Inscriber, try to get a complete set of glyphs done for any characters you want them for NOW rather then later, and avoid purchasing any of the above listed glyphs (or try to dump your stock of said above listed glyphs before the patch goes live), cause prices will probably go up after the patch a decent amount.

- Also, if you have a Herbalist, it might be a good idea to stopckpile as many stacks of outland / high level Azeroth herbs as you can find, since a lot of Inscribers may not know of the coming material increase on glyphs and may find themselves short on supplies even for their own personal needs. (make mad money selling herb stacks on the AH).


Feel free to add any other things we may want to know in advance of the coming Patch.

If you're a hunter (or have a ranged weapon that requires ammo) don't buy any more ammo unless you absolutely have to.  Ranged weapons will no longer require ammo, which is nice for hunters since it clears up a lot of inventory space.  Oh, and hold off on buying arp gems since that stat will no longer exist.  It seems my arp gems were turned into haste ones.  And some gems have changed colour, so watch out for that too.

If you're in the habit of buying gems for honor, dump your honor now and stock up. The vendor is going away in 4.0.1.

Thanks for the honor tip, I hadn't heard that one.

Glyph of Frost Ward?

According to WoWhead, the Glyph with the same Item ID as Frost Ward is now Monkey (similar to the Penguin Glyph).

Along the same lines, they are supposed to be removing the 24 hour cooldown on alchemist Gem Transmutes for the Wrath level Epic Gems (the new Cataclysm Epics will now have the 24 hour cooldown), so expect alchemists to possibly flood the market with epic gems after patch.  If you have an alchemist, and Blue Gems / Frozen Orbs are cheap on your realm, you could stock up on a bunch of each and then blow through a bunch of gem xmutes for whichever color you happen to need the most of.

Also, from what I understand, current conversion for honor is 2000 old honor = 48 new honor.  However, 30 Stonekeeper shards = 1 Wintergrasp Commendation (http://www.wowhead.com/item=44115) (Which is Bind on Account), which on live is worth 2000 honor, but on the Ptr is worth 50 honor.   Essentially, what this means is that if you have a lot of Stonekeeper Shards, converting them into WG Commendations before the patch and then using them for honor afte the patch will net you more honor then just letting the auto conversion go through when the patch hits.  Bonus that you can send them to any alt you want and dump honor on them.

• Heirlooms are being repriced to need an equivalent number of L85 heroic runs worth of points to buy (i.e. so if you used to need ~10 L80 heroics worth of badges to get one, now you'll need ~10 L85 heroics worth of points). As there are no L85 heroics, this means that they are effectively having a price increase. Buy them now if you want them.
• Certain specialised bags (hunter quivers, warlock soul-shard bags) are being converted into normal bags.
• Weapon skills are going away (more or less). Get your master of arms/knuckle sandwich achievements while you can.

And a final, obvious warning: Due to the significant class mechanic & talent changes, the next few weeks (at least) are going to be hilariously unbalanced. Expect at least one class/spec to end up ridiculously broken in a good way, and at least one in a bad way.

Thought I'd post something about what happens with the various PvE/PvP emblems, badges and marks and such:

Justice Points
Justice Points (http://www.wowwiki.com/Justice_Point) are the lower-level PvE currency rewarded from normal/heroic dungeon runs. Emblems of Triumph and Emblems of Frost will be converted into Justice Points with patch 4.0.1, at a rate of: 11.58 * (EoT + EoF)
The maximum amount of Justice Points you can have are 4000, though if have more than 345 Frost+Triumph emblems when the patch hit you will go over that limit, and you won't be able to accumulate more Justice Points until you're below the limit again. In patch 4.0.3, any Justice Points above 4000 will be converted to gold at a ratio of 47 silver and 50 copper per Justice Point.

Emblems of Valor, Heroism and Conquest will be converted directly to gold at a rate of 5g 50s per emblem, while Badges of Justice (TBC badges) will be converted at a rate of 1g 83s 30c per badge.

Valor Points
Valor Points (http://www.wowwiki.com/Valor_Point) are the upper-level PvE currency gained from completing daily heroics at level 85 and from 10/25-man raid encounters (so sort of like Frost Emblems now)

Honor Points
Honor Points (http://www.wowwiki.com/Honor_Point) are the lower-level PvP currency gained from non-rated battlegrounds and World PvP. Same as for the PvE currency Justice Points, you can only have a maximum of 4000 Honor Points at any given time. Old PvP currencies (Spirit Shards, Venture Coins, Stone Keeper's Shards, Wintergrasp Marks of Honor, Battleground Marks and old-school Honor/Arena-points) will be converted into Honor Points with patch 4.0.1.

Conquest Poitns
Conquest Points (http://www.wowwiki.com/Conquest_Point) are the upper-level PvP currency gained from rated battlegrounds and ranked arena combat.

Balls.  Looks like I'll be running some heroics tonight and tomorrow. [/list]

Extended maintenance tomorrow for the US.

Any news on actual shipping date for expansion? (yes I was living under a rock).

December 7th.

Uh, having not played in a couple months and not really following the news I'm just coming to terms with how much has been changed.

What's the deal with Prime Glyphs?

Prime Glyphs are the new major glyphs: things that provide simple DPS increases. Major Glyphs are now somewhere between Prime and Minor; this generally includes things like small cooldown reductions, reduced costs, minor secondary effects, etc. Minor Glyphs are relatively unchanged. What essentially happened is they took all the mandatory Major glyphs and made them prime, so that people would actually take the "cool" Majors. www.wowtal.com has a full glyph calculator so you can see all of your classes Prime/Major/Minor glyphs.

4.0.1 is indeed live tomorrow, this is a pretty good summary:

http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/2010-Patch-4.0.1-on-live-servers-this-week

Is there a reason Innervate got hit with an enormous nerf bat?  Or am I more likely missing something?  That seems awfully crappy for a three minute cooldown.

They want you to worry about your mana pool, silly!  :why_so_serious:

The fear is that if innervate is too good, people will stack druids for it under the new 'mana matters again' model. This has also had repercussions for moonkin regen, for example, since they're trying to price it such that the moonkins will need to use their innervate on themselves mostly so people don't stack them too.

There's going to be so many utterly confused people after the patch.

True that.

The nerf is targeted at healers, caster DPS are getting a shitton of intellect out of the next patch which should ameliorate some of the loss.

(bolded the part I'm focusing on)

The 4.0.1 patch? (i.e. tomorrow's patch)  Or a patch after that?  If the later, it's pretty demented that they haven't gotten to a stable, playable state yet and they are pushing this shit out the door.  

I assume that I'm just reading this all wrong.

Edit: by "stable, playable" I'm not referring to the game engine but the class stats and mechanics.  Pushing stuff that is "not right" onto a live game seems... reckless.

The intent is that Resto and Balance will be using it on themselves, so the nerf is aimed at feral druids. Specifically, so that raids don't stack a ton of them to pad healer mana pools.

They're going to be confused for a while too.  Some of the theorycrafting sites are completely useless now for folks that haven't been following along.  At least the rogue section on EJ has a quick and dirty FAQ.  Some DPS lines just seem to be spreadsheets and simulators.  Fantastic, I'll have to brave the official forums.

Not having played recently combines with no beta experience and not paying a lot of attention to the upcoming changes makes all of this incredibly confusing for me.  I'll be relearning my classes one at a time and will probably "that guy" in instance runs for a while.   I'm scared as hell to even try to heal.

The official class forums are actually pretty good about having a sticky up for your spec with the "Spec this retard, now gem this you idiot and cast XYZ you god damn moron".

They bandaided tank threat which AFAIK was the main missing piece in the 'playable til the real expansion' puzzle.

I assume the gear changes are shipping in 4.0.1, otherwise shit's going to get messy quick.

They are.

88 Wintergrasp Commendations.

I am not prepared.

I'm waiting for the first "Y u tnak in blood presents, n00b? Frost is tank!"  :awesome_for_real:

I'm staying out of heroics for a week, most likely. I might do ToC for seals.

I plan on lagging in today and seeing the carnage. I don't even fully comprehend my own class changes yet, so this will be entertaining.

I will say I probably won't heal heroics for anything but friends for a week or two. DPS is fun to watch the cluster happen. Healing this chaos will be maddening.

I'm not going to touch the game for a few days. Things will just be too unsettled and there isn't much for me to do anyway. I've got a pretty good idea how to retool my shaman, but kinda clueless on the DK and pally at this point. Have two months to figure it out and Fallout: Vegas and the Borderlands rebalance are both very close now. My Netflix queue is also full of video goodness, so a couple of days off sounds like a plan.

Although, with the hunter changes, mine is sitting right at 78, with full equipment for the 79 bracket. It's very tempting to hit the BGs with this character, who has traditionaly always been BM.

 :awesome_for_real:

I'll be logging in to see if I can gouge prices for gems or glyphs and the and then promptly log off to play Dead Rising 2.

The streaming client/patcher is also working.

So for example of todays and in the past you had to download the full patch and run it before playing (todays 4.76GB patch).

After today you have to download core content (~75MB) and allow that stage to complete "Setup" and enter the game.
During your game play the rest of the patch "Available" and "Playable" streams (1.3GB) where you might experience some "loading or downloading" screens or missing textures/models.

Part of me wants to experience the clusterfuck. A larger part of me says wait until Thursday.

This is why I mostly play classes with an escape mechanic. I am so ready for this.

I was going to wait until closer to Cata, but I'll probably resub this weekend to check it all out - plus I always like the Halloween holiday stuff that's right around the corner.

I am planning to try some heroic runs tonight to see how much I suck at tanking now.  :awesome_for_real:

I'm already dreading swipe on a CD and Maul no longer "next attack". Warrior looks to be the least affected (it's also the youngest of my tanks), Pally (my oldest WotLK tank) is going to take a bit of thought now that 969 is gone, DK I have nfi on and Druid looks like it will still be strong but will be trying to remember how I tanked in TBC.

Mind you, first thing I'm going to do when I log in is jump on the hunter, put 3/4 of my spirit beasts in the new kennels and go get all the pets I had to drop over the years (Rak Shiri, Snarler, Core Hound from MC etc).

Then I might go have a look at my enhance shaman (main until I was needed to tank) and see if I should laugh or cry (RIP sentry totem that I never once used).

At least it can be reunited with windwall totem in totem heaven.  :cry:

Brace yourselves for add-on hell.  Lots of addons will not function properly in 4.0 and very few have been updated.  Wowinterface has a good one page list of the most popular addons showing which are 4.0 compatible. 

From mucking around in beta I can say that Dominos works, a knocked down version of Clique works, and that's about it.  Pitbull has a 4.0 version but it's still buggy.  I haven't tested the updated Blizzard raid frames but they're supposed to be sufficient.  Whether that means they're as good as your raid frames of choice is another question entirely.

I'm going to be positive and say it's a good opportunity to streamline my UI but there is going to be pain.

Poking around with the new streaming client with squid and fiddler.

First url on firing it pulls is akamai link (http://ak.worldofwarcraft.com.edgesuite.net/wow-pod-retail/NA/12911.streaming/wow-13164-F957D8BA4CEB6DA5176924823EB84DC6.mfil). The streaming link isn't an MD5 or SHA from the wow.exe so I don't know where that bit is recorded except for the WoW.mfil file in the same folder.

Looking at the file contents  It looks like the whole contents from the data directory has an entry meaning you can possible to stream the whole game.

I tested it and confirmed by creating a new folder and copying the wow.exe, wow.mfil, and battle.net.dll to it (no need for the other folders as the client self heals and creates them). Give the application a while but it will start the streaming of the whole client to your computer. On a 30Mbit link it took about 20seconds after the WoW icon disappearing to pop up a full screen and another 30 seconds to get the accept the ToS etc. During this time watched the HTTP downloads hit the Akamai mirrors as it was trying to load the minimal amount of data to load the windows etc. It doesn't have a nice front end loader yet but it seems the whole game is completely moved to the old trial and completely stream-able now.


Edit 1: It failed to auth so, You need the battle.net.dll too, so to work it seems like (23Mb) is required:
Wow.exe
WoW.mfil
Battle.net.dll


Edit 2: GUI Download
Seems like its possible to do this via the Launcher too copy four files to a new directory:
Blizzard Downloader.exe
Blizzard Updater.exe
Launcher.exe
Wow.exe

And run the launcher and you will find it starts the nice gui indicator of when the "setup" stage is complete which is around 130MB

Note: I have found the launcher is totally unstable and slower way of patching vs the direct wow.exe

Edit 3: Now that a live server is up, I can confirm it works. Take a look at the highlighted indicators of streaming content

Yep.  I'll just start over.  Good time to remove the boat and see what Blizzard has implemented that may alleviate the need for certain addons.

Good to know, however, that Dominoes and Clique(kinda) work. 

Funny, I found the exact opposite during the test server.  I didn't have to wait for the entire patch and just hit "Play" after it updated the few required files.  I was playing within 10 mins of downloading the patcher .exe.  No stability issues and no patching issues.

Then again I'm also in Xp.  The wife's Win7 machine that was upgraded from Vista is another matter.  The win 7 upgrade fucked security rights all around on files I'm STILL finding and having to manually take ownership/ set permissions on.

I think its an issue on my end, the patcher tries to talk to an ATT blizzard dist server that keeps timing out. But alas it totally streams fine now and I updated the original post.

Ugh, talent changes are ass, suck, and make me feel like the only difference between my toons and everyone else with the same class is what secondary tree we put our leftover five points in.

All the other changes are ass and suck. Pretty much the entire thing feels like they just changed stuff and tinkered around with stuff that's worked for years just because they were bored. There was no real reason behind any of it, and a lot of it seems to be major changes to different aspects of the game.

Fucking two thumbs down for this.

I kind of like some of the changes, but the trees do feel like there's no optional spec paths due to how the points are setup (3 pointer, 2 pointer, 2 pointer, pick 5 points to advance!)

Disc is interesting now.. the paladin changes seem sweeping again.

My main issue right now is the lock up of "shit, how should I spec" that I always have when a talent wipe happens. Also I logged in my paladin and ALL MY BUTTONS WERE GONE AAAAAAAHHHH.

I just made 1k in 5mins on glyphs, the market is bananas!

Paladins were found to be too unbalanced with hotkeys and so these were removed.  Also, rogues may no longer move.  Now mobs must come to them to be backstabbed!

All kidding aside, I'm a bit out of my depths and still figuring things out.  My hunter loves having infinite ammo though!

Paladins were redesigned again, as this is a required phase of expansion releases.

Borderlands rebalance? More info please?

Great, the game won't patch and the repair thing tells me I have to reinstall. Ugh, this could take forever.

You'd be correct, and that's deliberate.  The complaint from the encounter designers was "it's too hard" to keep track of all the myriad of specs and do things that are difficult for one spec but impossible for those without it.

Yes, it's BS and yes you essentially just have cookie cutter classes now.  It's EQ2's original system but with talent points instead of a new class name.

 The counter argument is "it was that way before. You had to spec "the one true spec" to DPS/Tank/Heal this just cuts away the bullshit"  

I'll agree that they're just dicking with some things to do it.  This is entirely Ghostcrawler's vision for how classes should be played, and he's always been a fucknut.  I'm reserving total judgment overall until I learn to play my class again, but the way they've talked about everything to this point says that BC era balance and gameplay is their holy grail.   That's great that they have a goal, but the BC era was the least fun I had in the game.  It just wasn't a good time and I'm not as in love with the game now that I'll stick it out.  Particularly since I could give a rats ass about Deathwing and the raid/ lore cycle therein, unlike my desire to see Illidan.   I'm probably just a minority there, though.  I'm in no way doomcasting.

See my post above (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=19926.msg851574#msg851574)  :drill:

I have been playing off of it all night, its slow at first but if you have unlimited bandwidth and a decent connection it's great.

:heart: new paladin healing :heart:

BABY AT LAST WE CAN BE TOGETHER FOREVER

I already hate this 'patch as you go' thing. I had to relog for a RL thing, and upon trying to log back in I got treated to the patcher bar being pushed way farther to the right then it had been the first time. Fuck you, I dont want to download shit for cataclysm right now I just want to log into the world I had already downloaded multiple times to test my new shit.

Had to play some admin/downloader-jiggery mumbo-jumbo to get the friggin' patch to get past 99%. Blasted thing.

Installing right now. I'm still going to hold off a day or two on play...I think. Maybe.

Kinda looking forward to DK PvP even more. I was blood with a quasi-tank spec for it. Now I"m looking at unholy and, man, I like what I'm seeing. Unholy/frost PvP. Smells like win. Recovery isn't what I'd call good, but there's all kinds of control and asswhuppin' in those new trees. Lovely.

Eh, my disc priest plays exactly the same with no real issues, and the Mastery aspect gives all the theorycrafters the chance to min\max to their heart's content despite having lousy gear.  I'm kind of tired after logging in to fix 15 different character though...

Should I read up on it?

I'm adoring new Disc, but mostly because smite/heal is overpowered as all hell in random heroics right now.

Nor I. Though everything I see and read says that I'll last for about a month worth of gamecard tickover time once Cata comes out, then back to my random XBox and PC games for a year or two until the suck is mudflated out of the game again.

I'm actually happy enough to play this way though. Keeps MMOGtardness from taking over my life.

Disc can play the same if you want to. I had no issues with just shield/penance/fheal when randomly needed.

And then I found out that I could just shield the currently way overtanky tanks and smite my life away and randomly pop wings (since hey, I don't need the mana), and wheee.

Exactly.  Once I actually trained (doh?) it was actually a pretty amusing mix where I was able to actually DPS.

Left the patcher on this morning and went to work. Came home to find I'm out of HD space and couldn't patch, so I had to delete some shit and rerun the entire fucking patcher.  :oh_i_see: 2 hours later I get to log in.

Messing around with the DK tank, most of the changes are a wash but...did they increase the CD on D&D? Or remove the talent/glyph that lowered it? Because damn...I'm really feeling that loss in heroics now, losing aggro every other pull simply because D&D isn't up and that's been my go-to AOE threat skill for so long. Ugh. Thank god I don't need to run a ton of these to gear up. Otherwise, the RS on the GCD isn't a huge deal, HS being a 3 target cleave again is kinda cool, and the "runes refresh slower" thing doesn't really bother me much.

Once I burn out the heroic strike spam muscle memory I think I'll be fine. Blood and Thunder is a clunky mechanic, otherwise I quite like 'new' protection.

Tanking has totally changed, AoE threat has been nerfed across the board(pallies/bears/warriors, dk haven't looked at). I have been playing the warrior as of late so from testing tonight thunderclap has totally been scaled down and revenge has been scaled dramatically up to cover the DPS difference. I'm running the same rough DPS in overall damage but DPS classes are picking up threat left and right still playing the same crazy AoE fest.

Is there a way to turn off the auto-display of Guild Tabards now? Also, how do I turn off that stupid ability queue?

While it's not the WoTLK standard, the pally Avenging Shield refresh has a hell of a lot of up-time - between that and hammer holding 3 mobs seems do-able as long as DPS don't go nuts. Crusader strike generating holy power (with the hammer) was proccing me 9K shield damage with 3 charges on the boss target dummy.

Feral is really hurting and will do so until we get thrash at lvl 81 - I doubt I'll hang out in heroic HoR on her again as swipe made her the easiest tank in that instance. Maul doesn' feel like it belongs in the priority list/rotation but beserk procs are fun.

I logged the hunter and dropped in a fill the spots up BM spec... I like the kennel options and focus seems to be a lot better than mana ever was (hunter was my main for 90% of vanilla WoW) so I'll be interested to see this class develop. Tossing any trap wherever you want is fantastic as is the new "move to" command for pets... plus spirit beasts got a buff that looks like furious howl/SoE totem.

I haven't logged anything else yet - still trying to work out the DPS versions for my 2 main tanks (Kitty/Ret) s well as glyphs.

Having played with the talents I'm wondering why Blizzard even bothers them. Let me choose mastery and leave it at that - just give me the tools that are going to be cookie cutter anyway.

Time to go see how much more "old school" tanking I can remember - and whether CC classes can find the right buttons.

Why bother brining other people with you at all?  (Stolen from EJ.)


:awesome_for_real:

Word is next week the level cap (finally) comes off and supposedly Pandora gets rebalanced for level 69 play. Think of it as playthrough 2.75. That's the rumor, at any rate.

As for WoW, I couldn't stay away and logged my shaman in. What a mess. 4 hours later, I had her dialed in, more or less, and--I think--I had most of her addons fixed. Some of this is speculation with the new enhsim still in an alpha state. Lot of changes. I'm liking the way it looks though. Even after totally reforging, I still had gobs of crit, considerably less haste, but mastery was looking pretty beefy, especially on the spell damage side. I think I have Shock and Awe up and running along with recount. Might spend some time on target dummies tomorrow to see what's what--although searing totem ignores them while blasting the small furry critters in Darnassus into charred confetti.

Since I've got a bunch of computers with WoW installed, and good old Australian download caps, I downloaded the 3 massive parts today. Well, I started 2 of them in the morning before work, but couldn't start the third because Ausgamers only allows 3 connections per IP. I also screwed up by starting parts 1 and 3. Part 2, being the massive 2.4gb one.

So got home, started downloading that, and three hours later, it was almost done, since the speed was roughly 1/4 of the speeds I was getting this morning.

Now I've copied the files into my WoW directory, and it's downloading the last little bit via the blizzard torrent bullshit downloader. It's crying because I have a router with firewall and haven't set up port forwarding, so the last 30mb or whatever is taking 20 minutes. I may be ale to log in and see my ruined characters before I have to go to bed to get up for work tomorrow. Though my understanding is that Proudmoore has been up and down like the proverbial $2 whiore all day anyway. Yay patch day.

 :oh_i_see:

Now it seems to be (re)installing the entire game. I'm assuming that all the cataclysm zone changes are in this patch, and hoping that the massive bloat of having 2 copies of the entire old world on my computers will be fixed/excised with 4.0.3?

Looks like another 20-40mins at least. Time to retire and watch some bedtime TV. Yay again.

edit - just back to check, and it's now been more than an hour, actually. 80% done.  :oh_i_see:
Back to Alton Brown.

The ability queue thing I haven't looked at, but I imagine it's under interface options.   The tabard thing I heard other guildies complaining about, but didn't have on my toons when I checked them.  All of them were wearing tabards when I logged in, though. When I removed the tabard it didn't display a guild one instead.  Try putting one on then removing it and see what that does.


Yes, all the zone changes PLUS all the texture upgrades and the new water/ light engine were in this patch.   I can't turn everything on (Water is greyed-out above Low), and it won't even give me the option of going above "Low" settings  on the auto-picker so I have to manually turn on textures, etc.   Looks like my 5 year old machine isn't going to cut it much longer.. time to retire.  :awesome_for_real:

it wont let you max your video settings if your graphics driver isnt up to date, once i got a new driver it let me max everything out again

The tabard thing is weird, it seems pretty random as to when it gets displayed. My druid and rogue keep displaying a phantom top half (if you want to get rid of it, put on a tabard and then take it off), but some of my other non-tabard characters, like my priest, aren't showing one at all.

I'd like to second the cursing for the UTTER BULLSHIT Bittorrent they use.  It took 2 hours and 200mb to download the 'extra' 4 mb I needed.  That's an UTTER JOKE.

It's now gronking away, as already mentioned, reinstalling what looks like every file under the sun.  This is going to be a long day.

For future patches: if you just want to use your normal BitTorrent client, use WoWTorrentEx (http://capnbry.net/wow/) to remove the torrent file from the downloader and be on your way.


That last part is kind of unnecessary though, just point your BT client to download to World of Warcraft/Updates (or copy it there afterwards).

Wait, what? I hope they mean "relatively recent", because I'm pretty much not supposed to use the next 3 drivers from ATI, since they're all going to have a hilarious overscan settings problem that makes my monitor just not work right.

What does some of this mean in practice? What DX11 support do they have? Multi-monitor support (Can I put my map on another screen now?)? "Sunshafts"?

Thanks for the "equip and remove" tip about the tabards. Anyone know if there's a way to turn off the default equipment manager?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YubAg6Nm6qc (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YubAg6Nm6qc) (Background music is a bit loud.)

Edit:


There used to be a box you could uncheck under Features in Options.  Is that still there?

The entire "Features" section is gone; I had disabled it before but it's back now and I can't get rid of it.

Can't seem to turn off the display of NPC names now either; all quest givers and quest mobs seem to have their names permanently displayed. There's an option to turn it off, but it does nothing.

Last night was just terribly confusing for the hour I got to play.  I wasn't sure at all how I wanted to spec my warlock, since they've added new mechanics (eh, I cast soulfire now?).  Shaman I did an easy healer spec with.  Rogue I went muti, since I heard combat is really bad right now, although I imagine it's probably not so bad at my gear level.  Apparently I need to backstab again.  With the DK I just randomly chose shit since all I'll be doing with him is mining.

Only thing productive I managed to do was put up about 50 epic gems for sale (nice changes to the auction UI btw).  In a lot of areas there wasn't a raw gem to be found.  My prices were far too low in retrospect.   Glyph market was already flooded by the time I got on and I wasn't really prepared for it.

Even though I had the background downloader enabled, and enabled it to download while I was playing, it took from 11am until 8pm to get it all.  It's as though nothing was even downloaded at all prior?

Anyway.  A friend has a very slow dsl connection.  Does anyone know where he can download the patch or even if it can be done now without going through Blizzard?  (He also has no active account until the end of the month but would like to be ready to play when he starts).

I had everything pre-downloaded and had like 700+ mb to go when it finished patching.  Still let me log in, however, and patch as I played.

Same - but it was 1.3GB after the predownloaded 4.87GB or so of patching finished.   :uhrr:

I'm also not currently subbed, but I like patching things :grin:, so you can definitely patch to current without paying for it.

I couldn't do anything until the installer finished at 8pm.

I guess it somehow wasn't enabled?  I really should have checked a week ago, just as I should have read this thread when it was first posted.

Quick heads up on the water graphics. If your water graphics turned in to a sort of green blueish mist that looks like crap, set the water detail to low and you will get the old water graphics back.

Little surprised at the reports of AE threat problems. I ran HHoR last night and didn't have any trouble keeping the waves on my warrior, although we did use CC there (I always make the dpsers CC at least the hunter).

I don't think AE threat is that bad, it's just that caster dps is absolutely stupid.

This is a fucking nightmare.

A Nightmare.

Are you have patcher issues too or are you referring to the actual game? I'm just going to reinstall my entire game from ground zero and start over.

Thunderclap threat generation is gone way down as its damage done is reduced. Things like the vigilance no longer transfers threat to warrior so its no longer useful on overzealous DPS, and I think the passive threat generation from the stance is gone.

What build are you using?

My warrior is 67 with 30 in prot without shock wave and pug DPS can grab mobs if they don't wait for me to generate a bit of threat(which they never do). One thing I have noticed is rend is now a requirement as charge/rend/thunderclap now will rend all your mobs long as you max the new talent Blood and Thunder (http://www.wowhead.com/spell=84615).

Could be worse, bears swipe is on a 6s cooldown and have to tab target lacerate every mob  :ye_gods:

It may just be that I have my dpsers trained to not be retards.

My build: http://www.wowarmory.com/character-talents.xml?r=Doomhammer&cn=Thorgrim&gn=Slap+in+the+Face

I will say I eventually stopped trying to get rend up before my first thunderclap, the snap aggro on the pack as a whole is more important than spreading the rend immediately. That can wait for the 2nd thunderclap. Also I don't think it is worth it to sit on shockwave until you have 3 thunderstruck charges.

Wife's machine got fucked patching.  Copied my installation over and she works.  This SOMEHOW broke MINE.  So I tried recopying back.  Still fucked.  I tried repair and it said 'FUCK OFF'.  I'm now copying THE ENTIRE GAME across and we'll see how that goes.

I suspect I'm reinstalling from the ground up.  On my broadband that'll take Fifteen weeks.

Try the pugs man. Its insane with every class is going balls to the wall pew pew, mages are by far the worst.

Interesting, i'll have to try it out tonight and thanks for the warning on shockwave I gotta hit 69 before I get the ability back  :oh_i_see:

Did you play around with DPS on the warrior yet? Looking at some post patch raiding parsing (http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/aietk1rsfl02lfcm/sum/damageDone/?s=1670&e=1801) it's really really bad.

edit: fixed parse link

No, I've been primarily a tank since release, I just threw an arms spec together and didn't mess with it yet. Arms was bad before, so it would be pretty impressive if it is worse now. I assume you were looking at fury warriors (and your link to the parse is broken btw.)

Sorry here's the proper link (http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/aietk1rsfl02lfcm/sum/damageDone/?s=1670&e=1801). Feral/fury just barely above the tanks in damage done while all the casters have shuffled to the top. Melee DPS is severely unbalanced at 80, seems like the post 80 abilities are required to level the playing field (if at all).

Well, I don't know if a difference of 5k dps between that fury warrior and the druid tank is 'just barely' but ... holy shit at the casters. Will be interesting to see how it all shakes out as people figure out their new rotations and stuff.

Exaggerated a bit there, but other dps is in a totally different league. Compare it to their run a week before (http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/l3r9hcevc9137euz/sum/damageDone/?s=2374&e=2502), the feral took a straight up 5k DPS hit on the same fight. Same fury took a 6k DPS hit, alas this isn't adjusted for the total raid DPS increase due to the casters.

There's a lot of variables to consider though, I am assuming it's because melee stat allocation has shifted a lot. perhaps they need more hit or haste or crit than before and now they arent geared right for it.

I'm guessing a big part of the fury warrior's problem is he can't reach deep wounds in the arms tree right now.

No, Ret Paladins, Feral Druids, and Fury Warriors are pretty much broken damage-wise.

At this point, if you're playing a class that's wildly overpowered, enjoy it while you can.  If not, just write off the next few months.

Theres some others like the number of DPS on the 12th parse is higher and any other buffs etc. But considering all classes suffered the same shakedown its more then just a bit of allocation fix. If you dig into the warriors parse (http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/aietk1rsfl02lfcm/details/27/?s=1670&e=1801#tab-dmgspell) he had zero misses and a 40ish% crit. It seems the AP change really killed some melee classes where warriors cannot get one ability(Colossus Smash (http://www.wowhead.com/spell=86346)) that will help till 81.

Yeah, it's the removal of Armor Penetration that's really screwed the melee classes.  Feral seems to be doubly hit because instead of weapons providing a straight attack power bonus in feral form, it now adds some kind of 'normalized' dps or something.  Whatever that normalized dps increase is, it seems to be a lot less than the AP they were getting before.

If ret is having a problem it isn't due to armor pen, that was a very low priority stat for them, worse than haste even, and haste wasn't very good. I want to say fury only gemmed armor penetration if they could hit the cap with trinket procs, and I think with ICC trinkets they moved away from that, but I'll admit I don't pay much attention to fury stuff. Arms was definitely all about armor pen, but I don't even know of anyone who has tried dpsing with arms in 4.0.1 yet, because it was just so far behind already in 3.X.

Fury loses impale and deep wounds out of arms until they get the 5 points from 81-85 back (actually I think impale is just out of reach entirely now), that is probably a 20% or more dps hit right there. Rage normalization may be screwing with them too.

EDIT: Oh also enrage uptime is much lower now, so that is another piece of the fury puzzle. They can probably squeeze out some more damage by popping berserker rage to let them use raging blow more often, though.

Well, I don't know anything about Warriors or Paladins, but I can tell you the loss of Armor Penetration hits Feral really hard.  Past a certain threshold, ArP used to scale even better than Agility for cats.

It occurs to me another part of the problem is sunder armor doesn't stack as high as it used to (12% now, used to be 20%), and there are just less melee buffs total now too. Instead of 10% AP, AP shout, and str/agi shout, there are only 10% AP and str/agi now. And kings is only a 5% buff now, which is both worse than before for melee classes, and also *better* than before for casters, since it directly influences their spellpower now that they get spellpower from intellect.

Apparently the removal of feral AP from weapons has completely screwed up bleed damage, which is another reason why feral damage took such a hit.

In other hilarious "This patch was not ready for prime time" news:  The new Shaman CC spell Bind Elemental doesn't work against nature immune targets, which includes most Air and Earth elementals.  :awesome_for_real:

The comments regarding melee dps seem to mirror what I saw on the ptr.  Melee seems to have gotten the short end of the stick this time around.  Even my hunter on the ptr was doing less dps than he was on live, probably because hunters relied on ArP too.  Out of my 5 80's (hunter, mage, paladin, rogue and warrior) my mage, who is my most undergeared toon by far, was putting up some big numbers.  I was getting 15-17k arcane blast crits on a regular basis, and he only has around 2.2k SP.  I'll have to fiddle around a bit tonight and this weekend to see whats what (I spent last night just getting my skills/talents in order). 

Soemthing else that pissed me off is that some of my weapon enchants are gone.  The spell power one my mage had on his staff isn't that big of a deal but I had also had blood draining on my pally's tanking sword and now thats gone.  I think my agi. enchants on my hunter's axes are gone too but I'll have to check again to make sure.

Some people were reporting that enchantments were taking a while to show up, like half an hour or more after logon before you saw the name actually on the item. I didn't notice this problem myself but I saw a bunch of posts about it.

I downloaded the three massive parts to the patch, then patched the rest via the blizz downloader, as stated above. Once that was done, I copied the extra 3 files actoss to the wife's laptop, and then patched both. That was where I left them last night when I went to sleep.

This morning. Logged on my still-pretty-good gaming desktop, and.. immediate freeze once it loaded the character and zone around it. Had to reset button my way out. Rebooted, etc, tried again. Same deal, except this time I was able to kill wow via the task manager. Logged on her laptop - it works. Then I had to go to work. Not happy about the patch killing it on my PC, though. Anyone else heard about this problem/similar? (I can't access 99% of forums from here).

Observations so far

Shaman:
 - None of the specs need to even think about mana now,
 - Earthquake is fun, and without a cooldown seems borderline OP in BG, but I'll enjoy it for now
 - Building Fulmination stacks is a bit of a hassle in PvP (except BGs with critters and such) but it gives some novelty burst damage

Priest:
 - 41K mana in disc, unbuffed Oo
 - Mana management is not a problem
 - Power Word: Barrier seems a bit overly situational
 - WTF is the point of Holy Word: Chastise? Is it supposed to do something?
 - Chakra seems really fun and interesting
 - I'm glad to have heal back

General:
 - New trees have no room for variety in speccing really
 - New glyph system is good, although the long-term income for scribes seems debatable
 - New Raid UI is not really much better than the old

Heh, 3.5k gold from gems overnight.  Should have charged more.

The point of HW:C is to give a spell for Chakra to manipulate. Other than that its just a pvp escape tool.   It's going to take a while to learn how best to manipulate Chakra, but the Aura of Restoration is much fun to just spam around the Auction House.

I cleared 3k in glyphs in initial few hours of crazyness. Selling living bomb for 700g was insane  :grin:

Retribution is fine.

Fury is not fine.  Traditionally the choice was to stack ArP or to stack Str/Crit, ArP was nominally top DPS if the individual could stay at cap with trinket up without much stat waste.  ArP is now for all intents and purposes non-existent, and Str/Crit has lost of shitton of DPS due to further buff amalgamation and rage normalization.

Arms might actually be doing better than fury.

Well, I ran my mage through a heroic tonight just to see how well I did on my new rotations.  Let's just say that on boss fights that I just cast on... the tank has a severe problem keeping aggro and I'm not even talking getting to 4 stacks...  My DPS went from a solid 5500 on a normal heroic boss fight to almost 7k (with poor rotation too mind you).  40k crits on spells are pretty awesome.  I'll be awaiting for the nerf bat to come swinging my way.

It's coming, don't worry.
Sauce (http://blue.mmo-champion.com/t/27187856197/class-balance-as-of-oct-13-2010/)

Oh well, hopefully it will be hotfixed in soon. Looks like they looked at the overnight raiding and agreed WTF. Friends raiding feral finished up Saurfang tonight said he easily lost 5k DPS via the patch changes.

At all. I predict next expansion they remove talents and just have players pick a specalization.

EU servers started coming up about 2pm yesterday UK time, bit earlier than expected, which is always nice.

Patching problems: have you tried disabling the peer-to-peer option in the downloader? When I did this my patching went from ~50k/sec to a nice, steady 200k/sec, which is what my ADSL caps out at. YMMV ofc. My GF's ancient PC only had 13Gb of HDD space free, even after we'd gone on a slash & burn uninstall and cleanup rampage, and a Blizz post on the EU forums said that you need 25-30 Gb free to install the patch! Only option we had was complete uninstall of WoW and downloading of the entire 4.0 client. I'll let you know in another 10 hours or so if that worked.  :oh_i_see:

I only looked at a few of my characters last night. Was feeling a bit overwhelmed by it all tbh, and having 9 level 80s, most of whom have dual-specs has given me the heebie-jeebies, so I'm taking it slowly! Hunter changes seem awesome. Trade chat was full of dipshits saying "Huntars are RUINED!!1" but half an hour of playing mine was enough to demonstrate that they were completely wrong, at least about BM. 25 pets? Pets that can do Blessing of Kings, Bloodlust, etc? No more ammo? Ranged traps? OK THANKS!  :heart:

Druid confused me. Grid was still very broken when I went to bed so I haven't dared heal anything yet, so I have no idea how they play.

My mage seems awesome. Will take some getting used to and I may have to play with specs but I was doing ALL the damage on single targets as Arcane. AoE seemed to have been heavily nerfed on mages though, which is interesting. We did a guild HPoS for a laugh and our low-geared warlock was queen of the AoE with no problems. Our tank was a mid-geared bear and he said it was OK until "that fucking mage" (me) opened up and pulled all the agro off of him repeatedly  :grin:

One of our guildies has just bought a dx11 capable card and kept going on about how awesome it looked. I can't afford a new vidcard right now so I will be having him liquidated shortly.  :drill:

All in all day 1 was fun, if a little confusing, and not without teething troubles, but for a patch of this scope I think it's been pretty good. Compare with the most minor of patches produced by CCP for example.

Spacemonger (http://www.sixty-five.cc/sm/) is a really great tool for figuring out wtf is taking up all the space on a hard drive.

The DX11 mode does not add anything, as far as I can tell.

Honestly, there wasn't much room for variety with specs under the old system.  You might tweek a talent here or there for pvp but that was about it.  Paladins, for example, if you wanted to tank, you specced heavily into prot and invest the rest in ret.  Reverse was true for speccing ret.  The rest of the classes, esp. the hybrids, were pretty much the same.

So far I've set up my prot pally and warrior and the feral druid (plus run off on my BM Hunter to tame the Beast with the new 10 second tame).

Feral DPS... ouch. Kitty mode I couldn't break 2K in offspec T9 gear - I used to hit 3.5 :(

Warrior feels weird - queuing abilities is taking a bit of getting used to and I'm not sure if it's just me or not but TC doesn't feel like it's getting aggro the way it used to. It certainly feeld "different"

Pally... I *think* I like the changes to tanking - no more 969 and mana isn't the issue it was before having to constantly keep plea up. Threat is still an issue I think compared to the old tanking but 9K shield procs with holy power up make me grin.

Hunter Pets... zoning drops them to 1/3 health and they don't seem to hold aggro against even autoshot - WTF? Ok... so cower is on when you tame your pet, that's par for Blizz and it's hidden in your book not on your bar, but growl seems to be disfunctional. Spirit beasts got new abilities buffing agi/str for your group and a nice targetted heal... Core Hounds got Bloodlust (WTF!!!!!!!!!!). Seriously, Blizzrd hates shaman.

Next stop is to sort he enhance shaman out.

Awesome thanks. I think the thing taking up most space was... wow.

in that case I shall be having said guildmate liquidated twice!

Delete the cache folder
Remove all add-ons (move them to a temporary folder if you want to save the useful ones - but most add-ons are unworkable now)
If you manage to get on to the login screen - put all graphics to bare minimum - this patch, they updated the water animation and shadows are nicer now.
If the above fails - delete (or move to a temp folder) the contents of the WTF folder.

That worked for me - I couldn't log on until I checked out the wow forums and they suggested the above.

PS: I would not be unhappy if they somehow permanently kill the GearScore add-on. A more annoying, misleading, misused and useless WoW add-on have yet to be invented...

There haven't been much variance in specs since vanilla, at least in my chosen classes. You could fiddle some early talents around a bit to move up, but the basic stuff was all the same. Ditto in TBC.

The most you can say is you could have PvP specs and PvE specs. Some things--like PvP protection--might depart from dps specs for more anti-CC or to avoid obvious damage traps like +dodge, but they were all pretty much the same when you got down to it.

As things are now, there's still a little variation in enhance. Mostly because the sim isn't really ready for prime time. Still, you can lean to AoE some (which will probably disappear in Cata) or to single target damage (hello early grind spec). Early elemental tree abilities are also debatable, even compared with improved shields. I can say that at first blush enhance is easily comparable to the pre-4.0 builds. Without the sim I can't say for sure, but even with ST weirdness, I was pulling down easily 3-400dps more on the dummies in Darnassus. One heroic run didn't prove much except even fully single target I could do as much damage as I used to, even without the old magma/FN combo. That's also suffering from the usual lack of buff stacks, since the mobs still die so quickly (15k+ lava lash crits are  :drill: ). Also, mana is simply not a concern. Recovery is huge. Also, nice to have an on demand ablative shield and SR for when you inevitably pull aggro.

Too many new abilities and not enough keys, though. I had to write at least half a dozen new macros just to keep new abilities hotkeyed. I see a G13 in my near future.

That doesn't work for me at all. Just tried with my resto druid (5.4k gs), who does indeed have Nature's Ward and Gift of the Earthmother. Yeah, was getting lots of rejuv refreshes from hits but wasn't nearly enough to keep me alive in Drak'Tharon Keep. The first two mobs killed me in about 30 seconds. Plus I was doing so little damage to them that it would have taken hours to actually kill them. Maybe that EJ poster has seriously OP gear or something?

Considering how the spells work, it does seem highly dependent on your health pool since your healing is mostly coming from auto-Rejuv healing for 15% of health.  If you're in middle-ICC Resto gear over say, end-Heroic ICC Bear gear, that could certainly make the difference.

Got it working. Kinda. Updated my drivers. Now my computer gives me a black screen on 50% of restarts. Also, WoW seems quite unstable. I've been randomly disconnected 3 times in a row from since gating to Dalaran. I wasa fine for 25mins when sitting by myself in the middle of nowhere with the level 10 mobs outside IF.

Ok, starting to get the hang of Chakra, this is a really cool mechanic.

We weren't AEing is why you didn't have AE threat problems.  :oh_i_see:

I was also chaining Thorns onto you during multi pulls, which is OP as shit at 80.

I went through my all my level 80 toons last night and specced them. I thought it was a little wierd that the hunter and warlock pet talent lines didn't really have any talents that improve the pets much above the other two talent trees. If they're going to make me put 31 points into the Demonology line, at the end of it I want demons that shoot rape beams out of their eyes and one shot anything below level 70. Spending 31 points and ending up with demons that regenerate mana or whatever 6% faster and have a 6% damage buff is more than a little underwhelming. Frankly, most of the talent trees I used had little to do with what they claimed to.

My pet does alright from talents. Mind you, I'm an unholy DK...

Heh, last night I did some transmutes and icy prisms and they were on 2 hour timers.  Today they're back to normal.  :heartbreak:

Was dueling my feral druid friend. Thought he was lagging out spinning in circles, then I died. Noticed I just killed myself on his Thorns. He laughed at me.


Alchemy gem transmutes where on a 30ish minute cooldown for my friend last night. Dont know if they have changed today.

True. But in the old system, you at least had the option of gimping yourself.  :awesome_for_real: The new system (I've only played my hunter so far) seems pretty gimp-proof.

I found threat generation to be atrocious and mine last night.

The 15 000 DPS shaman and 12 000 DPS warlock might have had something to do with that.  On the plus side, the last boss of HoS lasted 12 seconds.

As far as I can tell, the baseline damage is still set for level 85's, so you know, 3500+ a 'tick'  :why_so_serious:

Nah.. i played my L17 druid for the first time in forever last night and it ripped up some rogues and warriors a level or two above me who didn't know any better, either.  Was much fun.

So I know WHY I can't cast thorns on myself while I'm a bear, but God would it help a ton while I'm tanking. I guess I'll just have to get used to casting it before an important pull and wasting some of it, QQ.

Still haven't tanked with my DK. I am nervous about it for some reason.

Finished my first post-patch battleground, warsong gulch.

Top damage dealers on horde/alliance, both balance druids.  1.2 million and 800k damage, respectively.

Ouch.  Where's that 100k tank hp people were promising me?

At level 85?

Feral/Warrior DPS is back way up tonight. Would be really nice if they had hotfix notes.

Sauce (http://blue.mmo-champion.com/t/27187856197/class-balance-as-of-oct-13-2010/)

Ya balance druids, like pretty much all casters right now, are pretty ballin.

Feral dps in cat form is in the hurt locker right nopw, but I never really used it anyways, as for bear form, I LOVE the changes they did. Ya I cant swipe for ever, but my single target and snap damage were increased by a lot, and the rotation is a lot more fun. Also, I like the built in power auras, it makes me think of old school gaming. 'Hey one of my buttons has a glowy thing around it....time to mash mangle!!!'

Also, I'm surprised no one has mentioned this yet, starting new toons is waaaaaay more fun. I had a lvl 10 lock I had parked there waiting for the patch, and when  it hit I got to spec demonolgy and get that fel guard right away. It makes a huge difference IMO.

Logged in to my level 44 mage tonight.  She was Frost and now I'm all confused. Not only were there significant changes to the class mechanics (Love the new AM proc)  but there was a very significant shuffling of the spells available.  No more blizzard, but I gained ice lance.  Having a pet all the time is nice, but I'm still habitually searching for that Int buff I don't get.   Mana shield disappeared for another level or two and now I've got Arcane Blast to figure out.   Also no more ranged freezes, very disappointing from a control standpoint.

I feel gimped in dungeons, (particularly since Locks kept Hellfire at this level range, but I have to wait until 50s for Blizzard)  but I'm uber out in the world.  I was taking on 3-4 mobs at a time without a problem, even lacking the extra control from my spells freezing things.

Hey, *they* didn't have to wait :P

The buff still exists, but I don't know at what level. It's now +mana/+spellpower

Isle of Shitty Vehicle Mechanics battleground kept telling me I'd gained something like 536 million honor points.

Alas, such was not really the case.

It's like 56-58 or so.  My 53 mage is godly as frost and my 80 raider is pretty much so OP she has to hold back or go splat.

The others seem to like to rub your face in failure with the "You have gained 0 Honor Points." message.

1. Arcane Missiles isn't worth using as Frost.
2. Arcane Blast is useless to you.
3. Arcane Brilliance makes a return eventually.
4. Your Water Elemental has a ranged freeze.

Ok, 5.6 GS prot pally vs 4K GS warrior vs 5.5 GS Druid bear.... bear wins for threat/tanking ease.

The warrior GS plays  big role but god it feels underwhelming (admittedly I hit 80 7 days ago so). I can hold 3 as long as the DPS isn't retarded. TC-rend-SW-TC seems to be a good starting point.

I've respecced a few times on the pally now, I can soak up a lot more punishment but god you break out in a  sweat holding 3. I *think* threat is the weakest at the moment - I've moved consecration to a secondary threat generator as Holy Storm seems to spike aggro more (I'm also using i on single mobs). DPS needs to really not go nuts unless they can tank a mob - which most seem to be able to :( If they fix threat this could be fun again.

Druid Bear - OMFG! Threat in fur and holds aggro as well as it did pre-4.0. Alternating Glyphed maul and swipe with the imp FFF, it's just fun. Prevously I had mangle on one key swipe on another with maul macro'd to both. Spam them and nothing would let go of you. Now you think a bit more, press more buttons and the threat is fantastic especially when you get berserk procs. Easily the highest TPS generator of the 3.

First impressions: Hunter feels gimped and Enhance shaman (5.6GS) doesn't feel like DPS has changed - and it's lost the frenetic pace that made it more fun for me compared to elemental.

I think my brain just broke.

I honestly thought my Prot Pally held the best aggro of my 3 tanks (DK and War being the others).

Yeah I started to notice that.  It's a nice free thing to dink around with and I'm primarily using it when it procs after I've killed something so I can get a manaless start on the next mob.  I've got the Brain Freeze talent now, though, so no more AM and the Free Instant Fireball (and later frostfire)  seems much more amusing and useful than the channeled spell, yeah.

I can confirm that whatever dps problems fury were having are now gone.  I did over 5.5k dps in a HHoR today, whereas before the patch I was only doing around 4k.  My GS is only about 5.2k, with 2 tryanical beheader axes as my weapons.  I was getting 20k+ crits with bloodthrist, raging blow, cleave and execute.

There's definitely something wrong with Warrior tanks atm, my guildie was doing almost 8k dps all night long through ICC 10.   :ye_gods: 

Vengeance?

I havent had a chance to tank anything major on my druid yet, but I imagine our numbers could hit something similar with a full vengeance buff running.

Nifty note for druid tanks also, I think that when they did the balance patch, they tweaked Diminishing returns to reflect the level 85 level cap.  This means that, at least for the moment, agility is probably the single best stat a druid tank can stack, after Stam.

- Bears now get AP from Agility.  Infact, they get  the same AP from Agility then they do from Strength now, and most AGI items seem to have More Agi then a similar Ilevel item has strength.
- Agility gives you Dodge, Crit and AP now (strength only gives you AP)
- Agility will often give you MORE dodge then the dodge rating on a similar Ilevel item with dodge rating instead of agi.

I actually replaced my Old Tank Cape (http://www.wowhead.com/item=50466) (Bonus armor, strength, dodge) with a Dps cape (http://www.wowhead.com/item=50470) (Agi, crit, haste), and gained in nearly every single stat.  More dodge, more ap, entirely new crit and haste (haste is AWESOME to reforge into mastery btw), at the sacrifice of a bit of armor.

Ilevel 264 agility dps rings are now better tanking rings for a druid then a comparative Ilevel 264 strength dodge ring, with the bonus that you will get a full extra stat (crit, or haste usually) on the Agi ring most times since you get more dodge from the agility then you do from dodge rating on a strength ring (which often only has dodge raitng on it).

A tank with vengeance fully stacked up gets 10% of their (unbuffed I believe) HP as attack power. So say you've got a tank with 50,000 unbuffed HP, with a full stack of vengeance that's an extra 5000 attack power. 5000 is... quite a lot, relative to level 80 stats. It shouldn't be as insane at 85 relative to everyone else, in theory.

Who gives a shit if Tanks do awesome DPS while actually tanking?

Lazy DPS.  :awesome_for_real:

I had a stray throught today - take how confused some people were with the 4.0.1 patch, then extrapolate it to the world changes due in 4.0.3.

I like NOT doing awesome DPS as a tank because it's easier to shame dpsers with. "I'M DOING MORE THAN YOU, FIX WHAT YOU'RE DOING."

PvP seems to be completely fucked. I've spent most of this weekend being one-shotted by equal level players, and it's not like I have shitty gear. It's not bleeding edge at level 64, but it's the Heirloom chest, shoulders, and staff with the rest filled out with the old Grand Marshal stuff.

PvP is utterly fucked and likely will be till we actually hit 85 again.

Probably for some time after that too.




You either EXPLODE, or you NEVER DIE EVER.

Yeah it's off the charts stupid right now. I went from 45k health to dead in matter of 7s.

Because of how wonky resilience is atm, you can get like 50-75% DR against players.

Vengeance is actually based on Current Total Max Health.  Which means that it is actually pretty rediculous in ICC, since a bear tank will likely get around 8k ap from a max vengeance stack.

My disc priest with mostly furious (232) gear is nearly immortal in the BG's now.

Also it's nice that I finally have a weapon, wand and offhand frill that are itemized for pvp. I never understood why they wouldn't make pvp weapons available to those of us who don't enjoy the arena.

To force you to arena.

Of course this ignores that you'd have to somehow get up in the top 30% or higher to obtain a weapon, and that gets more difficult if you don't have a weapon...

Yeah the "reward for arena" being a thing that makes you more dominant in arena never seemed to make any sense. It's one thing to let your grinding players who enjoy playing get the awards. It's entirely different to put requirements on those rewards which keep everyone else down.

Wait, you can buy weapons now without rating?

Dunno, I tried to buy boots/belt/waist but they still needed rating.

Yes. You can buy the wrathful weapons and armor for honor points now. The vendors show them as requiring rating still, but it's a bug. Once you get them in your inventory the red text is gone and you can equip them.

Edit: There was a blue post about it, I'll see if I can dig it up.

Edit x2: Here we go:


From here: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=27300871097&pageNo=4&sid=1#76

Also, I have only tried to purchase the lower tier of arena stuff because the best gear is prohibitively expensive - 3000+ points per piece. I didn't think it was worthwhile to wait and try to buy the expensive shit when I've only got ~2 months to play around with it anyway.

Yup I was able to get the wrathful 2 handed axe helm and bp with my stock piled honor points on my warrior and hat/bp/legs on my druid. One thing to note is you cannot get the shoulders but you can get the 251 point shoulders cheap enough.

A day after renewing (just to see the carnage/the old world one more time)...

Cookie-cutter builds :  :uhrr:

New Glyph prices :  :ye_gods:

New graphics :   :drillf:

Massive XP from treat bucket touring with alts :  :awesome_for_real:

The new cookiecutter builds are an interesting change in my opinion.

There is still usually a few small options when chosing a spec.  I specced my rogue alt for combat and I think I had to spend 4 "floating" talent points to get to the end of the tree after takeing all the "no brainer mandatory talents", and there were 6 different 2 point talents that that i could stick those in, not all of which were 100% PVP or PVE only talents.  They also shuffled a lot of personal choice into the Glyph trees now, as there are usually 2 manadatory Prime and Major glypyhs for a spec, but a fair number of options for what to put in that 3rd slot depending on your play style or gear.

As opposed to the old cookie cutter builds. The three I've been fiddling with all have a few points free for whatever floats your boat. The main parting of the roads comes from PvE vs. PvP specs.

Glyph prices are kinda nasty right now, but you only need it once...

Actually, the graphics are the biggest "meh" so far. Stilll looks about the same to me and I have it all slammed to ultra. Water is a bit...odd, but I guess it's all good. What I really want is a slider that removes boomkin from my game. That would get my unconditional seal of approval.

Glyph prices are just now dropping on my server, from ~80g/glyph down to ~20g. As an Scribe I'm not happy, but I knew it would come since they're no longer consumable. Made about 10k profit from them in the past week though, so it's not so bad.

Yeah, I bought a shitton of glyphs pre-patch, and simply decided that I don't care about max-optimising my toons right now, and that I'll worry about it over the course of the next 2+ months. Same deal witht he change of gem colours. PUGs are overall beyond any kind of semi-competance right now, and with new content in 2 months, and heirlooms priced out of the market, I have no reason to worry about maxing my character's potential.

I don't think it matters at all, other than maybe getting some practice balancing gemming and reforging.

PuGs right now are just a mess. Between feathered heathens like boomkin and mages it's just painful. My DK can't even get one disease up before groups are dead. Frost is even starting to look good. Even worse as enhance. I just SS stuff now. Totems...hah. I hope Blizz gets their collective stuff in one bag and fixes this NPC armor BS and gets physical melee damage straightened out. I suspect it won't happen until Cata, unfortunately.

Basically, I'm bored and all dressed up with nowhere to go. Probably would be a good time to overhaul my UIs. At least then I'd feel like I"m accomplishing something.

I'm seeing a bit of the opposite. Undergeared groups in heroics, DPS right the fuck down compared to a couple of weeks ago, and REALLY undergeared tanks who also don't seem to have the first clue about aggro (i'm kind, I hold off nuking for a couple seconds to let the tank get aggro). I think most of the good players have said the hell with dungeon running at this point in time.  :uhrr:

I found out about  Lunar Shower (http://www.wowhead.com/spell=33605) last night after encountering a bunch of moonkin in WSG and being "lol, moonfire"-d to death repeatedly. Being the recipient of moonfire spam is one of the most genuinely irritating experiences in PvP and Blizzard is encouraging it with talents. I've always thought that moonkin were unplayably goofy looking, but whenever I see them now I wish I could cause them to explode messily with my gaze. Runner up for the "Most Annoying Thing to Get Spammed With" trophy is: Exorcism.

I'm a little concerned that spamming the same attack over and over may be the future of pvp in WoW. (Smite, Ice Lance, Exorcism, Moonfire, etc) It's reminiscent of the old Street Fighter style arcade games where some 8 year old kid would dominate everyone by spamming the same overpowered move. I'm sure that the better players won't do it unless it makes sense to, but that won't stop Joe Average from running around moonfiring constantly and still being moderately effective and excessively annoying. Hopefully it's just a temporary situation while we're in pre-expansion limbo.


I'm seeing a fair amount of this in PUGs. Healing HNexus the other day the dps was so low that I almost ran out of mana on my disc priest before they took down what's-her-name the mage boss. I think a lot of folks are in 'gear up alts' mode because there's not much point in upgrading your main that's already got all ilvl 251+ equipment. 

Smite spam  :oh_i_see:

If the Armory is correct, my trinket that boosts crit with ticks of Moonfire and Insect Swarm gives pure stats now.  While I prefered the DoT glyph so I could Wrath and Starfire, and hate Moonfire spam, I'd be hard pressed to not use it now.

I am planning to dive into pvp for a couple of hours tonight and post the exact results. Comedy will ensue.

Ooo! Moonfire spam actually works now?  I may have to resubscribe just to go on a reign of terror with my incompetent Moonkin before it's nerfed!

It was a gang of moonkin that assaulted me. They had tatoos and never smiled. If you seek them out they may accept you into their flock.

I can't really tell, since I had a ton of honour and badges banked pre-patch, but it feels like the rate of currency gain is really slow.

I'd been wondering if Boomkins got a bump recently, the whole solar/lunar eclipse thing had me absolutely shredding mobs left and right in W Plaguelands the other day - was 2-shotting yellows!  My gear is all quest greens, and only half my slots are glyphed, so it's not that...

Hopefully I can get him to 58 and into Hellfire before the nerf bat swings, in any case.

On my priest I could random an evening away for about 3 hours and pull in ~700 jp.

All I know is once I figured out how hunters work my marksmen specced level 33 has become an unmitigated god of ranged death. Most times I don't even need my pet and when I do its because I'm taking on 4-5 level 35-36 mobs which is relatively painless. The new change from mana to focus is without a doubt, glorious.

Overall we got a bump (mainly in the form native dot crits, and the new talent bonuses and the way they effect our spells).   They did recently nerf Insect Swarm damage by around 50% i think.  My ICC geared boomkin was getting Insect Swarm crits for nearly 10k.  And with a 50% crit rate, that shit is insane.

Is it just me or have huter pets lost their ability to hold aggro? Pre-patch and BM specced in T9 my pet held aggro fine - now it's 2 shots and I pull aggro off it (I switched cower off - why on earth Blizard switch it on in the spell book I don't know)

My hunter's bear is holding aggro fine at level 75, but it may very well be all out of whack in raiding gear because of scaling issues.

So is it me, or does this patch just have tons of things wrong with it balance wise? I'm mainly dicking around with some low level alts to get a feel of the game, but from what you guys are saying; it's even worse at level 80. My level 37 can run around 2/3 shotting equal level mobs, fire off 750 damage instant cast exorcisms, (Non crit) Throw around 1k crit heroic strikes and 1200 crit sheaths. I decided to try out the new dungeon finder. Found a group that was A paladin tank, a paladin dps (ME!), a paladin healer, rogue dps, and a shaman healer and we just walked through the instance. No need to rest, or CC, or put any thought whatsoever into our actions. We facerolled our way to the instance and Herod died before he could even start spinning around like a retard.

The instance was me as a dps throwing down AOEs mindlessly and spamming my most powerful attacks, not even bothering to assist the tank and I don't think my health ever dipped below the 80% mark. Isn't this new expansion supposed to encourage rerolling?

I don't see how what you described will stop rerolls, for the majority of players.  They don't want a challenge.

Damage under Cataclysm, either on PTR or Beta, and at any level, has been wonky for a long time.  They just decided to release it and ignore all balance concerns under 85, although I'm still not sold that they've even got that worked out yet.

The new expansion encourages rerolling for players (me!) who don't like leveling by spamming /lfd. They fixed the dungeon and PVP leveling experience in the past few patches, so Cata is an overhaul for the quester. In that vein it seems successful to me; all the quests I've done in the beta have been much better (less annoying, cooler story, more scripted events, etc) than their vanilla counterparts.

I've never had much luck with pets holding aggro for my hunter most of the way through 70-80.  I tried a tank pet, a dps pet, and sadly the dps pet was generally better at holding aggro than the tank pet.  It was my key pet peeve with the class, the whole thing of being a ranged attacker that relied on a pet that could hold mobs at range for you, and yet two or three shots from me would invariably bring the mob running straight for me.

Were you spec'd BM?

If you weren't spec'd BM, then your pet will never hold aggro from you. EVER. Even after pet revamp/talents.

Thus why levelling BM was the thing.

You used to be able to.  I leveled a couple up to 80 going mostly marksmanship and had the pet tanking most of it. 

Depends on the pet. I'm finding that tenacity pets (currently switching between a gorilla and a turtle) hold agro ok, although the occasional FD for 2 secs is required, but that my ferocity/cunning pets don't hold it so well. Either way, FD'ing if you pull agro then resuming the shooting after a few seconds sorts it out. This is at level 73, questing in Zul'Drak. Oh, pet level makes a big difference too. If my pet is the same level as me it holds agro a LOT better than the level 69-70's I pull out for a laugh occasionally.

It may be gear differences then?

I was always wearing top end raiding tier epics when I levelled so even trying to have a pet tank something as Marks was impossible. 1 auto-shot and I was tanking it (though most non-elite mobs they would usually be dead with one raptor strike after they got to me anyway if I hit them first at max range).

fyi, Anzu doesn't need a druid to summon anymore.

Sethekk Halls has some nasty trash though...

So to make sure I'm not losing my mind. For guild reputation gains on dungeons and raids you have to have 80% of the group as guilded correct? Does this seem high to anyone else?

Or am I reading it wrong and don't understand how the system works. I obviously understand you can get rewards via questing as well.

Oooo.  If I did re-up, I'd probably start that grind going.  Along with the Baron mount.   :oh_i_see:

This is correct. Or you could say 4 out of 5.

The crux of it seems to be if the odd man out helps his guild at all. I'm not finding straight answers on that anywhere as of yet.

So, I need to join an actual guild to actually participate in the whole guild leveling business?  My current guild at its peak could only field 4.  :awesome_for_real:

Or I could recruit.  *shudder*

I finally patched up and logged in.

Hunter pets are broken, in that I cannot summon the first pet on my list after dismissing it. All the others I can summon just fine.

I have NO FUCKING IDEA what's going on with my hunter. Most of my buttons are missing. My DPS looks weird. I'm not even sure what my shot rotation should be. I have 8 points of Mastery, and I don't know from where or what it means. My glyphs are freaky. I am confused. I no longer have aimed shot, but do have scatter shot.

I will have to go out into the woods and shoot innocent wildlife until I figure this shit out. On the bright side, I can dual spec for 100 once I figure out what the fuck I want to do.

And in real life, too?  :grin:

That first pet thing is fixable, iirc. Try moving the pet from your "ready" stable (5 slots, callable) to your "kennelled" stable (lots of slots) and back again.

1) The hunter pet thing is a bug.  Swap it into the stable master then replace it and you'll be able to summon from slot #1 again.

2) The way they revamped leveling and removed ranks (no more Aimed Shot R7) means some abilities aren't available until later if you weren't 80 yet.  If that's not the problem, then the ability was either removed, was a button because of your spec, or is now a passive feature of your class (no more need to cast True shot Aura!)

Aimed Shot is a marksman only feature now, not a baseline one. Widow's Shot now does the -healing that Aimed Shot used to do.  Yeah, scatter shot is a baseline skill now instead of requiring survival. yay.

3) Glyphs for the most part are easier once you know what you want to spec.  Across all my characters there's been very little room for debate about what Prime Glyps to use since most enhance spec-related skills.   Major Glyphs there might be one that you could swap out for another but they're pretty set as well.

On my first alt, my pets worked fine. On my 2nd alt, I had to relearn most of my abilities at the trainer to get my pets back.

I might have had to do that on my 1st alt, visited the trainer, and then forgot about it.

I'm concerned about this too. My main guild has 6 people in it, if we can't get any of the guild levelling stuff that requires raiding we're gonna be royally pissed off.

Yes it's 80%. They picked it because it works out evenly across all content.  4/5, 8/10, 12/15 and 20/25.

If you're in a guild small enough that's a problem, why are you concerned at all about achieves for the guild itself?  You can still level the guild up in Heroics so far as I know.

People who are complaining about guilds that are so small as not to have signed the original charter make me a confused man.

As to the 8 points in mastery, you get that as default.  You then add mastery points to make it better.  In my experience, not hugely worth it yet, though the Afflic lock one, strangely, IS.

I think there are a lot of people who are equally upset that you need 10 people to sign a charter.  In fact, that seems to be a fairly frequent trend I've seen among small family/friends guilds. 

Guild started larger, people left. One had a baby, one couple split up badly and we never saw either of them again, etc. We are a friends & family only guild. Not gonna go recruiting strangers.

Good to know that we can get guild XP in heroics, waiting to see how slow & grindy it'll be!

I'm not worried about the guild not being able to advance because it's small. I'm worried about the runs in our guild alliance falling apart because people won't be able to get guild points when they do them, since we're not in the same guild.

It's bad.

There are a few that are great, but at 80, most are pretty lackluster. Frost spec DK has a pretty amazing mastery, +% frost damage. While Unholy has a crap one, +% disease damage.

You're going to have to merge or find more people.  Remember that not only will you not get guild XP, but you'll be locked-out from the bind-to-guild craft patterns, items, etc they said they were doing.

I know this will sound bad, but I wish they would crack down on the small guilds. You know <Naga Stole My Bike>, <We like sex>, <willroxursox>. Stuff like that with only 1 or 2 members that just use it as a personal slogan.

I was running around Org on my lowbie Warlock, and I got like 5 guild invites, just cause he was unguilded. I personally dont think it is every single persons right to have a guild tag.

Thats just how I feel.

That's part of the intent behind the guild leveling stuff, actually.   One of the early interviews had the dev team mentioning that they wanted guilds "to matter" once more, since the new Zerg/ PUG model was breaking-down social ties.

Holy priest mastery is actually pretty broken at the moment; with the ICC25 trinket you could hit 6 million HPS or something due to the mechanic.

Even when they fix it it should be pretty good because it procs off everything and ticks damn fast. The Disc mastery is uninteresting, but undoubtedly valuable. I haven't really played around with the mastery on the shaman.

Seeing as how nobody is harmed by these tiny guilds, and the fact that this broken patch needed much more time in the oven before release; I would see set the likelihood of this happening at about the same as WoW going free to play.

Unkillable druids, Mages one shotting people, low level paladins critting for 1000k, dps specs tanking, tanking specs dpsing, hamburgers eatting people, people wearing shoes on their hands; It's looking more and more likely this patch was rushed out in order to meet cataclysm holiday release date.

Some of those tiny guilds exist so the person has their own personal guild bank.

I understand that. I just don't agree with it. I feel that a guild should be a guild. If Blizzard wanted everyone to have a bigger personal bank, they would have given them one.

I think it's just one of those things to me. Thats why I like the changes with guild leveling, and achievements and stuff. It makes them matter more.

I do wish Blizzard would expand the personal bank a bit. My vanity items from past years have nearly filled it. I can't force myself to sell my old purples.

People made personal guilds because banks weren't big enough. Instead of making personal banks bigger, they just ignored it and let people abuse the guild bank system. Not enough people were getting involved in raiding content, so they offered smaller versions. Still, people weren't involved in enough raids, so they made them easier with harder challenges in the fights. There STILL weren't enough people involved in raids, so they made the raids have two totally separate modes so they could scale back the content even further. Then, people abused the easy epics by pugging the shit out of them.

Now, instead of addressing problems they created with duct tape fixes, they are just going to try to take away unintended behavior with another dumbass system that will have unintended results. You know what the endgame is on forcing people into guilds? Fucking uber-guilds, Hive guilds, and mass gatherings. That's not social connections.

It does sound bad. It (and your later post) make(s) you sound like a douchebag. Who gives a shit? Really? Crackdown? Like how? Forcibly disband the small friends and family guilds because they don't want to invite random dickheads in Org?

Besides, people with a personal slogan guild aren't the ones randomly trying to invite you. We used to have a small F&F guild. I've now got a personal guild between my wife and my lowbie alts and bank mules for the guildbank. Makes swapping shit around a lot simpler. Guilds don't matter in WoW because the fast-play and less cock-stabby game design compared to EQ makes other people less mandatory to get things done in the game. My "guild" is a huga amorphous mob of mostly-pleasant-enough random people that fit a simple criteria with overlords who are set into their own little uber-raiding-cliques and don't give much of a shit about the general membership. As shit and mostly-useless as it is, the players are by and large nice enough people as long as you have low-to-no expectations and still probably better than 90% of guilds in WoW. That they don't hold a candle to either of my long-term EQ guilds says more about WoW than it does the guilds themselves. Guild levelling and achievements can eat a dick, because I have fuckall connection to these people.

Things like another row of bank bags or a tabard tab would help dramatically, but the fact is that their game demands mule characters if you level, quest, tradeskill, and like to enjoy some of the cosmetic items they throw into the game. Never mind if you want to keep some of your old gear that you might be slightly attached to or whatever. They did it with pets and mounts, but with the amount of shit they've added since they became tabbed, what do you expect.

Anyway, if Blizzard didn't want us to have a personal bank, they'd have set up guilds to auto-disband when the members fell below 10 unique accounts. So this means they clearly condone it.  :oh_i_see:

My guild is me, my best friend from college and his brother.  Nebu joined at one point and so did a guy (Muu)  I've been playing with since the start of TBC.  We all come and go at various points, so at times perhaps only one or two of us are subbed.  We hit 5 concurrently on once.  Now with my friend moving back east and Muu getting hacked and not coming back (he was close to being unemployed since his bank got sold), it's a rarity we'll even get 3 on at any time.  

There's a reason though, we go back to this guild.  We don't like random assholes who play WoW.  We don't raid with any regularity.  We don't even log on with any regularity.  The catch is, we don't care for shitty players (we're all quite good) or general internet brand immaturity, and casual guilds have that in heaps.  So ideally, we'd join a mature bunch of competent players that don't care if we raid or not.  That doesn't exist on our server. We'd probably be a pretty good fit for Ingmar's guild, but my friend's brother is a bit outspoken and hasn't found a guild (besides ours) that he won't ragequit within days of joining.

Fuck, we even have a normal MMO guild name: "Murk".  None of us have stupid names either.  We use our bank for fish.  

We're a fucking guild. Dick.

I've often thought that there should be a poor man's guild. Like a fellowship that runs from 2 to maybe 9 or 10 players. Give them a scaled down version of the things guilds have access to. It's nice to have a shared stash and a special chat channel for your online friends and family. Then you have the big, meaty guild system for the big groups that do the things that require a big membership, like raids.

Because people who play with friends and family don't deserve the nice things that raiders do, amirite?  :oh_i_see:

Crack down on those assholes who don't play like I do or like I think everyone else should!

My wife and I would probably fit in with Ingmar's guild pretty well as well, but I prefer Proudmoore (The Aussie Shithole(tm)) since it's always got lots of people on (Aussies, and Kiwis and Americans, all round the clock) on when we play. I've mucked around on some "normal" servers and in AU primetime they are dead as shit.

I don't agree with ketchup on scrambled eggs. FUCK THAT SHIT, STOP DOING IT. WE NEED TO CRACK DOWN ON.  :dead_horse:

Yeah, we're in a bit of a bind.  I've done the big guild thing back in Vanilla/BC, but when WotLK launched I realized I simply didn't have the time for the drama and alll that.  So my dad and brother formed our own guild because we play off and on.  Now, with the required 4/5 to get guild advancement, we're stuck trying to decide if we should find a larger guild to get the perks or not. 

They're all a bunch of retards anyway.

/serious

It's more a matter of need. Most people making the dinky guilds are doing it for a "witty" guild name, maybe a shared stash. Just give that to them.

I'm in a nice medium-sized guild where I'd say the median age is around 24-26, we've got a solid core of long term members and we've managed to weed out the genuinely irritating and awful people and find some sort of internal balance, it's quite nice. From what I know of people in other guilds I'd say there are probably abour 5-6 similar guilds alliance-side on my server (active membership of around 30-40 or so), from what I read I think we're very similar to Ingmar's guild. So there are nice non-cock-stabby, non-dickish guilds around.

I like the fact that people want random strangers to sign a guild charter just for a vanity guild name and extra bank storage and I will happily do so for them.

For a charge - 5g for the service and a 20g administration fee.  :drill:

if you don't even have enough people to cover the charter signatures then you shouldn't be a guild. it's pretty much built right there into the game only they don't enforce breaking the guild up when membership drops below 8-9 people.

Yes, everyone wants everything, we all want lion/scorpion mounts and we all want unlimited bank space or a guild name that matches our character perfectly. However at some point you have to realize that in multiplayer games you have to do things like reward teamwork. We aren't even talking about catass raiding, we're talking about being social enough for a group of ten people

Do I think banks should be bigger? sure but just cause I want bigger banks doesn't make it a flaw of game design, that's how much space they give players and then you do inventory management, like almost every other damn single player rpg. Maybe it's early and I'm cranky but all this sounds pretty whiny to me.

I'm talking about an 80% number in 5/10/25 that is mathematically stupid if you are large or small. Here's why:

Here's an example. My fictional small guild has 7 average active max level characters that can be on at primetime and run together. They are friends with 2-3 of them as RL friends. This guild has about 25 people, but most of them aren't consistently online. In WoW, this could be a very standard, casual guild who enjoys 10 mans occasionally, but they fill in gaps with pug helpers to round things out.

They want to level up. They want to start in 5 mans, and obviously can form two groups. Except, wait how is that going to work? Only one group is going to ever get credit, while the other is going to get screwed on points. No combination of 5-2 or 3-4 is going to get them to two groups that are gaining ground. Oh and their usual 10 man with 7 and 3 pugs? That's just a futile waste of time. Also, who wants to pug with them now? It's a lose-lose for everyone involved.

Now lets up the standards. I have 12 on average online a night, all who enjoy tens. In the past, they split up with 6-6 and ran with some other guilds to make their runs happen since half are west coast and half are east coast. Now, they can't do that. They could try to make a group of 8, but they have 4 people left out in the cold, and the time commitments simply don't work for them.

It's not necessarily about numbers it's about availability and consistency. It's about smaller guilds being poached for larger guilds. It's about a stupid design decision built around the guise of forced socializing on a larger scale having largely unintended results because the math is too rigid. Hell, even 60% opens up a whole world of more options without the horrible remainder issues.

Aside from which, I have no desire to socialize with 99% of the playerbase.

Wow, I didnt realize the hate I would generate with that post. Look. I'm not talking about you guys guild of like 4 to 7 people or what have you. Those are guilds. I was talking more about the one man vanity titles. I'm not sure if I agree with the 80% rule ether. I think any time you run an instance you should get guild exp. Maybe they should give you a 20% bonus to guild exp if your guild contains 80% or more of the members in a run. Thats what I would do.

Blizzard wanted a guild to consist of 10 people or more. Thats why you need 10 to start it. Do I agree with that? Also, not really. I think you should be able to make a guild with one full group, 5 people.

Also, look at it this way, only small guilds really get much "personal storage" with the guild bank. So say that for those guilds of 1 or 2 people using it for the bank need it for the bank space, what about the people with 30 members? Those guys don't get the same amount of bank space as the 1 member guilds, so it's not really a case of "me too".

For you people getting bent out of shape at me for saying Blizzard should crackdown on small guilds, what I meant was the vanity guild names. Those are, and have always been a pet peeve of mine.

So what's the cure then?  Should Blizzard forcibly dissolve all small guilds?  Or should they create some kind nebulous standard of guild naming that can be haphazardly enforced by a large enough to be expensive but not large enough to be effective support team who will generate monthly scandals and drama and be pretty much universally despised?

I'd say the easiest thing would be for you to get over the pet peeve.  :awesome_for_real:

Which is pretty much what I have done. There is really not much that I could see could be done about it, with out hurting people like Rasix with their legit small guilds.

Honestly, I just wish Blizzard would enforce their naming policy a tad tighter, but I can see why they don't. It would cost them a huge amount of time and effort, for no real gain.

So yeah, I'm not saying realistically that anything should or could be done. I was just voicing my opinion on the matter as it was the topic at hand.

My main has never been guilded, which means I get a ton of invites and requests to sign charters when I hit towns.  I've found that if often shocks people when I tell them I'm perfectly happy soloing, and some people get really pissed when you won't sign a guild charter for gold.  But I would appreciate more bank space, as it would make crafting easier and allow me to actually hang on to some neat novelty items.

That said, I enjoy some of the smaller guilds with joke names from time to time - one of my favorites was "I just crit my pants."   :awesome_for_real:

A big impetus for us starting the guild was so that we wouldn't be bothered for invites.  We were some of the first 60s on our server and the amount of invites we got were staggering.  Some of them were really persistent as well.

I'll have to read up on this entire guild system to see just how much I'm going to get blocked out of and what I'll miss.  COST/BENEFIT ANALYSIS, GO!

I had this problem on my vanilla server; I eventually shelled out the gold for signatures and bought myself a tag that Morfiend would've hated: <NoIDontWantToJoinAGuild>.

I just can't see how this doesn't get changed once it goes into effect, small guild membership goes into the toilet, and Blizzard realizes it's servers are innundated with only 15 huge 600 man guilds called "Me So Hordey," "Me So Hordey Too," and "Me So Hordey Again"

Seems like a calculated attempt at subscription retention.  You've got a set of conditions for a guild to advance and you have to advance personally within the guild.  They'll make it so it's deterimental to leave the guild and in turn detrimental to leave the game.

It's just another thing for someone like myself to look at, sigh, and then hit the cancel sub button that much quicker.  They've been removing those potential "this game isn't exactly for me" moments steadily as game has progressed.  This seems regressive for me.  Exciting for others, but regressive for me.

That means you DO have a desire to socialize with 120,000 of the playerbase?  (I think you are missing some decimals there.  99.9999% is more like it I think.)

You don't have any cookies now.

Blizzard is offering cookies for people who like to get together in large groups.

If you are happy now, be happy in the future.

Bad analogy. You can currently raid all content in PUGs, guild alliances, etc. without sharing a guild tag, but you'll be unable to advance your guild in such situations.

Yall don't get it. It means fuckall about the actual advancing of the guild.

You simply won't be able to pull in people for anything unless a large majority of people are willing to give the middle to finger to the guild system. They will try to get the rewards in the simplest way possible, and in turn reduce the number of overall dungeons and raids being done because everyone will selfishly only want to get shit for their guild.

Even if YOU don't buy in, or are in a big guild where you don't care, what happens when you need fill-ins? Where will they come from? The answer is the lowest of the low dregs of WoW society that can't even function in a remotely sup-par guild that's trying to advance itself.

EDIT: This is a horrible idea that will set raiding back in the dark ages of "fuck-you-we're-uber" guilds and mass invite guilds having all the power.

From what I can see from Beta the daily experience caps (both guild-wide and personal contribution) aren't terribly high so as long as you have 10-15 characters questing (normal or daily) actively you should be able to level at a similar clip to guilds getting experience from guild dungeons/raids/rated BGs.

A very small guild (sub-charter size) is going to level more slowly, yes, but if you're really focused on leveling up such a guild there's alts and guild achievements (which ignore the cap).

I do wish the guild-wide cap was lower so it functioned more like kinship age in LotRO but it is definitely low enough to make it so giant guilds have no advantage over an active 15-25 character guild.

Funny how the player cap for large guilds was handwaved away here with a "Not my playstyle therefore it's not an issue" but now that people in their glorified-group "guilds" realise that they're fucked, guild advancement is suddenly a huge problem that needs to be discussed and fixed.

Because the mega guild issue probably effects considerably less people?

Blizzard also retreated considerably on the mega guild issue, going from 500 to 1000 as their cap. Honestly though, I doubt anyone here is in a mega guild, while a good portion of us are in smaller, casual guilds.

Seven people isn't a guild, it's a group with two spares.

I'm glad you feel that my group of six to seven real life friends wanting to play together do not constitute a guild.

It's also an example of the (lack of) thinking from their designers on why several of us have quit.

It's not just going to be you. This design decision, if not reversed to include or incentivize guilds grouping together or any kind of non-guild cooperation, will cause lots of small guild people just to give up on the raiding game and possibly unsub.

Most guilds will just recruit and/or merge with other guilds.

DOOOOOOOOOOOOM  :oh_i_see:

Recruit from what? And better yet, why the fuck should they have to change the habits of 5 years in their social construct because of a patch if they want to be effective in the game? I don't see how this move provides more retention because guilds suddenly have levels, but you don't get points unless you absolutely have everyone in your group guilded. Guilds that are above the cap won't care, guilds below the cap are in for a real Cataclysm.

As stupid as I think this feature is, are any of these guild upgrades really mandatory / meaningful?

No.

Unfortunately yes. High level guilds will have 10% boosts to xp, rep gains, honor points, mount speed, gold looting, and they will also have better flasks, the ability to summon access to the guild bank, vanity items, standards, access to guild crafting patterns, rare reagents, mounts, and heirloom gear.

and you know what, guilds that can raid high end content have better gear than you too! shocking!

and dont give me this guild alliances bullshit, cross guild pugs barely ever raid current content and even then they dont do things like hardmodes effectively. big guilds have an advantage in social game, news at 11.

Neither are raids, or heroics, or set gear, or really anything that everyone plays the game for.  With things that used to be out of reach of anyone but the top 2% becoming doable by anyone, their popularity skyrocketed.  Why would anyone want to return to a WoW that makes the bullet-point buy-me features unobtainable for a reasonable number of their players?

I won't predict doom, but I will call it a stupid system design added to other recent missteps they have made.

 :oh_i_see:

I guess they never broke out of the habit of "If nobody is doing it, it's not that it's boring or tedious; it's just that we need to attach a reward to it!"

This isn't like battling bosses effectively as a gate to better equipment. I can't think of a single reason why it wouldn't make more sense to split all the "xp gains" towards your guild level equally across all members, thereby giving more to the guild with more people participating. The All or Nothing aspect of it is completely absurd from a design standpoint.

It seems like you are crying (again, as you have been for years on this board) about how your "raid alliance" is getting screwed by Blizzard design decisions. You choose to run raids with the same people every week but allow them to be in different guilds for whatever reason (too many people wanting to be 'guild leader'?) which is counter to the way that the entire raid concept was designed. Why not have your three guilds with 15 people each just merge and go on about your business as one guild?

I imagine it's a matter of three guilds, each with friends and family, who get along well enough to play a few hours a week accomplishing something they can't do by themselves, but don't want to have them all in a single guild channel.

Or you know, just listen to what people are actually saying about how even smaller guilds will level but it will take more time.  :why_so_serious:

1 - I've been in the same guild for 10 years across 3 different games.
2 - It's an alliance of 12 guilds with 200+ characters who put together about 2 seperate 25 mans and a slew of 10 mans with no real borders besides who we like. We were put together 4 years ago due to the exact pressure of uber-guilds controlling the only access to raiding. Suggesting we give up the guild autonomy and family atmosphere for the people that don't even raid within the alliance is like suggesting that the US just give up states and become one giant blob.
3 - Just because I like some of the people to raid with out of the 200+ in the alliance, doesn't mean we want to share an always open chat channel, decide leadership, or let certain cliques within the system try to play politics. Nor do we even share similar raiding goals from hardcore to casual across the alliance.


Here's a better question. Care to tell me how simply dividing up the xp is a worse idea than forcing 8 into a ten man? That literally would solve any complaint I have with this system. I don't give a shit about guild achievements or whatever.

It will go down in history as Cataclysm's Vehicle System.  :grin:

Because it's a guild advancement system, not an advancement system for people who happen to be in guilds.

Assuming the guilds are of roughly equal size and you at least have some people who level alts or do their daily quests, the fact you won't be getting any guild experience from raids will be irrelevant.

The daily guild experience cap is that low.

And are these people killing shit not in a guild? Does that guild not deserve some iota of credit for their participation? Why 8? Why not 5? Why not 6?

I agree. I'm sure we will. I'm sure a lot of people will. I just question why it's even a requirement if the cap is so low that we're talking about numbers requirements in 10 and 25 mans. At the higher levels I'm not sure the caps will be as forgiving, or if they continue to add levels in the future, which they undoubtedly will.

If you don't give a shit about guild achievements, then stop whining.  There's no problem.

In reality you DO care and you think it's unfair that you're going to be locked out from certain perks larger guilds will get very quickly.  That or you're concerned that the more hardcore segments of your alliance will grow their guild(s), say fuck off and you'll be doing fuckall besides twiddling your thumbs.  That's the risk you run doing alliances.

There's little incentive to grow your guild into a mega guild unless you're a leader (or leadership core) concerned only with advancing yourself on the loot front.  It leads to too much drama and whining when you're sitting lots of players out.  People also see though that shit quick and quit or form their own guild to avoid such bullshit.

For 25 man raids, the ideal is 30-34 regular players, that's it. Any more and you're going to get folks sitting out too much causing tension. Any fewer and you're often crippled by too many people needing the same night off, or missing due to RL issues.  Your doomsday scenarios of 3-4 megaguilds per server are very Chicken Little but not at all reality based.  This isn't EQ where you could zerg a raid with 200 players, so having a guild of 500 or more was advantageous.  

Because it is a guild advancement system. If your guild cannot muster enough strength to form 80% of a raid, then your guild isn't strong enough to reap the rewards from that raid. The individuals taking part already do, mind you - they're called "loot" and "points". Let's turn it around - why should Joe Bloggs in his one-man guild be able to classify "PUG raid I was one of twenty-five others" as a "guild raid"?

Why 80%? It scales nicely: 4/5 group, 8/10 raid or 20/25 raid.

Tbh that's a large concern. The Mega-guild thing is just hyperbole. The rest of it is just liking all the changes of a guild system besides the oddly placed number requirements that create weird results I don't think Blizzard wants.

So, they can earn some of the rewards, just not all of the rewards because Blizzard tossed in an arbitrary number even when you're doing the exact same activity. 60% scales too.

I'm personally not too fond of the idea. It's another XP/Rep grind type of thing with perks that are going to become a requirement bum bum buuum! like gemming or enchanting, so you can hit target number X for raiding. And then players will just expect that X value, and the actual reason behind leveling guilds (Encouraging guilds to be a fun and interesting thing to belong to) will be pushed aside.

Exactly. I totally agree. MMOG players min/max dryhump things like this into next week. That's why they had to fuck around with items like flasks, potions, etc.

None of the perks (http://www.wowwiki.com/Guild_advancement#Guild_Perks) are more than quality-of-life buffs.

Will being in a level 25 guild with Exalted reputation be useful to you personally, sure.  Will what your guild's level be matter to getting into a PUG, no.

I am totally failing to see the rage and upset that this is causing.  Bigger guilds have better perks?  Say it ain't so!  It's not like if you aren't of size X guild you automatically don't get into raids or heroics...

The poopsock vote has spoken.  Yeesh.  I'll go crawl back in my hole.

Honestly, guilds with 30 members would have no "personal" space in a guild vault. It only takes 1 looter. It'd all be blues for alts and that kind of stuff. Then again, nothing is stopping them from having their mains in a "real" guild and a personal guildbank for their bank alts, either. That's what I have (shared with my wife).



Sure, but it's not much different to people with retarded character names. I met a paid of dickheads (and they were dickheads) on a pug who both had "Kunt" as part of their names. They all fly under the rader until reported, and I'm not sure how you manage to tell that "Luvs 2 Spooge" is a guild with one moron or 16 morons in it.

 :awesome_for_real:

So does 20%. 1/5 group, 2/10 raid, 5/25 raid. The 80% is an arbitrary bullshit number.

Yes, because if 20% of a group is in the same guild it's clearly a guild group rather than an assortment of pugs.   The idea was to have over a majority belonging to the same guild to qualify it as a "guild run."  60, 70 or 80%.. They chose 80 over 60.  Cry more.

This discussion hit full retard.

They released a dungeon finder and gave you a freaking pet for pugging dungeons. Then, within the span of a couple months, create a system which blatantly discourages pugging dungeons. It's like the designers are completely bi-polar.

People were running more dungeons, loved the ease of use, etc etc. Exactly what was broken that led to this?

I really don't know what it's going to involve, but I'm assuming that even when I effectively ignore the new guild-based bullshit, it won't really make much of a difference to my style of play.

500 (or a thousand) people isn't a guild. It's Barrens Chat and West Commons rolled into one. A fucking Zoo of random cunts, the majority of which you'll never associate with in any way.

Aren't they making the rewards for 10 and 25 man the same so that bigger guilds don't have perks?  One hand giveth, the other taketh away?

Many designers, many pet projects, one game. See: Arena => all other PvP and PVE Balance. Dungeon finder pugs will be dead for some time with the new "we make it challenging/hard again - healing and CC matters bigtime" design which will kick the casual and average-skilled players who probably play more as a game than a lifestyle in the balls. Got my RAF mount, so that's a month worth of gameplay that takes me to about the middle of Nov. Add a 60 day gamecard and I'm on till mid-Jan. Then it's Xbox time again for a year or so till all this shit gets shaken out.  :awesome_for_real:

Same amount of loot per person between 10 and 25, but 25 gives more points (per person, natch).

As for guild experience, any guild that raids as a guild (i.e. 80%+ of raid is in guild) should easily hit their daily guild experience cap on raid nights if they're downing bosses.  The advantage that larger guilds have is that they'll get achievements faster but that should balance out as that's a finite amount of experience.

Aside from that, any guild with say... ~10 or more active characters, in the sense that's doing dungeons/raids/rated BGs "as a guild" or questing, is on the same footing.

Numbers are obviously subject to change, but aside from corner cases like Paelos's, the system as it stands seems pretty good between guild sizes.

Edit: Clearly, edge cases such as guilds practically below charter levels and guilds above the new hard-cap are proper fucked for one reason or another.

The problem my guild has with the 80% rule is that even when we had a lot of people play, they were almost all DPS (or only wanted to play their DPS toons). As a result, we were always pugging 1-2 healers and occasionally 1 tank. This could be annoying as fuck if the difference between 2 pugs and 3 pugs is no guild xp.

I can quote too:

If your guild isn't strong enough to form an actual guild raid (as opposed to a PUG raid with a couple of guild members in it), then your guild doesn't get the guild rewards from guild raiding. It's not exactly a difficult concept to grasp. The individuals still get their individual rewards, and the guild still gets xp from guild groups for dungeons, etc.

E: guild guild guildity guild. It now looks spelt wrong to me because I've typed it so much.  :uhrr:

I think you're missing my point. By rather a decent margin.  :roll:

People will still do RDF for the daily bonus. I suspect folks will make guild groups when they can, and RDF when they can't and a week after release people will forget it was any other way.

(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3b/Spelt.jpg/220px-Spelt.jpg)

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/spelt
Not just prehistoric wheat.  :grin:

He actually spelt it the correct way.  :grin:

Missed replying to it the first time.  We didn't hand-wave it.  Several commented it wasn't fair large guilds were being broken up.  A few might have, but unless those exact same people are now defending small guilds, there's no inconsistency.  (And short of "fuck them" being said, not being concerned with one end of the spectrum doesn't mean a "fuck them" is deserving for the other end.)

I think both are stupid.  Little guilds are what I have experience with, so it's what I'm going to comment on.  It's what a large portion of the game knows, so of course it's going to concern them.

Merriam-Webster doesn't recognize it as anything but grain.  Shakespeare is not a good source for your grammar lessons.

The OED disagrees with you.  :oh_i_see:

What does Oxford know about English?

Merriam-Webster actually does. You have to look at the other entries of the word, which they provide links for right at the top (it's hard and confusing!)

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/spelt

(http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRXNgd5ID2y8D8WO35Px2G1273BLXi8q5-9lQ7TJZqEomlcJ3E&t=1&usg=___M8ludmBFYMhfV17NWsiTR0-N0g=)

Back to WoW:  I'm leveling a mage and I'm encountering so many bugs.  Not being able to collect resources which I have the skill for, NPCs that die and remain missing, and more.  I guess with the world revamp these things are a lesser priority, but damn, it's kinda frustrating.

Many of you kids are speaking a different dialect of English as well. Round these parts, "spelt" is the primary variation.

As for your mage, the current patch was poorly tested and is full of bugs. Despite all the "Activision hands-off" stuff, they are clearly pushing unfinished shit out the door to meet their pre-Christmas release schedule, which is a bit of a contrast to TBC, which released in Jan. (aka "When it's done"). Hopefully 4.0.2 fixes it, but I fear it's just going to be full of pre-cata eventage and few fixes.

Listening to a few of the panels at Blizzcon makes it even more apparent that it's being pushed out the door.  Several things aren't going to make it in for launch and will not be available until 4.1 or 4.2, like many of the old world dungeon revamps.

Unlike vanilla, TBC and WotLK which were all clearly feature-complete and fully-balanced when shipped.  :oh_i_see:

I wish i knew who was responsible for the whole "old world dungeon revamp thing", so I could go to his house and punch him repeatedly in the nuts.  I dont care if newbies are lost and confused when they go into Wailing Caverns, Sunken Temple, Maraudon or the like for the first time.  You stay away from my awesome sprawling non linear dungeons, you fucks.   I miss the days when a dungeon crawl actuall FELT like a dungeon crawl, and not like a walk down a long hallway with bosses every 200 yards.

You can take Wailing Caverns and the temple of various shades of Jade Green and do with them what you will. Hated both of those places. Mauradon was not so bad once you were inside. Finding the fucking door was the annoying part.

Eh, the only really confusing place was Sunken Temple, and that was mostly due to the fact that it has so many vertical layers to it (and that pretty much no one EVER went to the basement), and it suffers from "wheres the fucking door" sindrome WAY harder then Maraudon ever did.  It took me all of 3 runs through WC to have pretty much a complete lock on the layout of the place.

The real problem with ST is the fact that the mini-map has been broken since 1.0 and you can't find your group even when they are standing 10 feet away, and that the entire thing is the same dark green with vines. Can't tell one spot from another.

Um, I'm not sure if you were playing at the launch of TBC, but this just isn't correct.

i) The patch that implemented TBC talents and changes completely and utterly wrecked the game for most guilds at the time. DPs went wildly out of contro, and everyone pvped madly until the expansion hit. Hunters were battleground gods, and tons of crap was wildly unbalanced and unfinished. Same thing that happened with WotLK patch as well.

ii) TBC was not, by ANY means, polished on release. TBC initial raiding was the most wildly unbalanced content Blizzard had ever put out. They had to go back and retune *all* of it - repeatedly. It was the most unfun stuff they have ever released, by a *long* way.

iii) TBC also had huge amounts of dead areas that were patched in later - in patches 2.1 and 2.2 respectively. i.e. Sketthis, the Ogre stuff in Blade edge Mountains, the Netherwing dailies etc.

TBC was delayed because it literally wasn't going to be playable at it's original launch date. Cataclysm is most definitely further along than TBC in every respect at this stage.

I've played on and off since, well, original Beta.

i) The last couple of months before the expansion launch has always had some balance issues and players being gods on earth for a month or so. Not sure what you mean by "completely and utterly wrecked the game for most guilds at the time" unless you mean that catassing Naxx was no longer the fun it had been until then? I saw plenty of people raiding and doing their other shit right up to the line.

ii) More importantly, I'm not talking about the fucking raiding game. I'm talking about the actual game. Things working and not being massive buggyt pieces of shit.

iii) Blades Edge Ogres and Netherwing stuff is not especially different to the Argent Tourney stuff in Icecrown. They have always added more content over the course of time. Particularly shit involving dailies, which were being newly implemented in TBC.

But most importantly, the game wasn't nearly as buggy and broken as this prior to TBC or LK.  :awesome_for_real:

All you had to say was "Release version of Shade of Aran" :D

Wreath, chains, elementals AND the god damn storm all at the same time  :ye_gods:

Except yes it was.

And I guaren-damn-tee that two years from now people will be bitching about how new_expansion is terrible and buggy, and that Cataclysm was never this bad, and Activision!   :mob:

Did they bring back the falling through the world bugs from release? Sweet, anyone who's new didn't get to find those the first time.  :drill:

From release? Falling through the world happened throughout most of vanilla, and I saw it happen a couple times in BC.

Look at the "Patch x.y.z is now live" in both chats.

I wish i still had my "pillars of corpses" screenshot from back when TBC launched.

There was a nice bug where if your instance crashed, it dumped you out under the world, somewhere in stonetallon mountains, where you would then fall to your death.   Strange part was, people would hit "bottom" and die at different heights, and different instances seemed to have different "exit points".   The resullt was about 5 or 6 big pillars of dead bodies hanging under the mountains.

Yahs. WoW has been laggy and buggy same old since launch and to this very day. How many years did it take them to fix the lootlock bug? I wouldn't be shocked if it just disappered one day, from an unrelated patch, and Blizzibodies just went "Whew! Cool!"

It just keeps people talking and interested when they're between expansions.  :awesome_for_real:

Nah, we have our share of incompetence.  :why_so_serious:

(I'll answer shit from two or three pages ago and you'll like it!)

One of these? Not my pic, found it somewhere online back in vanilla.

Never seen those bugs, so I stand corrected.
I'll modify my stance to the fact that I didn't encounter any major bugs pre-BC or -LK, but seem to be finding them left and right with the current pre-Cata implementation. Awesome screenshots, though.  :awesome_for_real:

Falling through the world pillars of doom only happened when a raid instance (or a Alterac Valley as in that screenshot) crashed you would end up falling to your death and when you released you would be a ghost at a graveyard way the hell away from where you died, I know horde ended up in Stonetalon, for some reason I thought alliance was somewhere in Eastern Kingdoms, Redridge maybe?

It happened a lot in the 1.8.x builds, 1.9 was A'Q and had its own share of problems, but apparently bringing the 4 green dragons out of the Emerald Dream brought some random holes in the world.

Yep.  Except the one i remember best had a good 4 or 5 columns in it.  Good times.

There is a lot of really retarded speculation about the guild system going on.

Small guilds are not going to be fucked. Mine is small-ish, maybe 25-30 active players tops. I am not even a tiny bit worried about us not having access to the useful things.

The only shit you are going to miss out on in a guild that can't hit that 80% mark for achievements is stuff tied to the actual guild raid achievements themselves, which is what, a couple mounts etc. at the moment? So, same as it ever was. If you can do the fancy achievement shit you get a mount. So not worried.

25-30 active player is "smallish"?

Just shows how clueless I am.  Here's what I thought:

5 active players - small
15 active player - average
25 + active players - large
75 + active players - huge, also mostly unmanageable (guild chat is virtually indistinguishable from barrens /trade chat, little to no cohesiveness amongst the guild members except for within clicks of "average" size)

Me, I start at 10 (you know, the minimum for starting a guild) and work up from there.

 :uhrr:

That they removed the weapon disparity between 10 and 25 raids led me (possibly erroneously) to conclude the 10 active players is the average guild size, not the smallish guild size.

Which was my thinking when I started with 10-15 being the medium/average. 

25-30 active players being smallish implied to me that something larger was the medium/average-sized guild.  If that was the case, why would they de-emphasize the 25-man raids?

They wouldn't. The average guild isn't big. Also, total numbers within a guild may be misleading. Raiding is only about how many people are online on average during the popular nights.

SLAP is not small.

I don't raid much at all anymore but my guild does and is fairly large with 173 total characters(alts included) and even though on raid nights there's around 30 people online when not raiding there's only ever about 15 'active' members on.  Though I bet a lot of the reason people arent online much is due to general boredom and waiting for the xpac, I expect that to change soon.

It's completely absurd for your particular needs, but I think big picture it makes sense. They want guilds mattering. After that the solution is really up to you. Your alliance can form one guild. Or they can all try and find more members and use each other to fill the odd spot from time to time.

Also keep in mind Bliz capped the number members that contribute to your guild experience. You can have 600 people in your guild, but only the top 20 (I think that was the number) will directly impact your guild experience any given day. So while being bigger might have advantages (making sure 20 people contribute each day and having the best possible 20 contribute), having 600 people won't give you an advantage.

(the one area it will however is after they get the 10 percent gold guild achievement - basically free money).

Meh, I just think it's dumb to cap it, but also to squeeze out the smaller end. It's like "Ok kids, if you fall between here and here, you're cool. The rest of you, get with the fucking program."

At this point it's moot. They'll end up changing it in the long run, because I don't think their original implementation is on point. Also, they aren't really releasing a lot of official information packages about it yet, meaning a lot of things are still up in the air.

I thought they removed the "only the top 20 earn" cap a while ago? Also, the real cap on guild size is 1000, not 600.

Hard to know, they don't really talk about the system when it comes to changes. The cap increase is confirmed though. Here's a blue comment:

It varies really, really wildly. The 25-30 is probably a good guess at our average number of people logging in throughout the day, but some months we'll have a hefty four people on at once at our high water mark. I wouldn't describe us as "small" exactly, but we certainly can go weeks without doing a ten man raid because we don't have the numbers.

Sure it has its ups and downs, but compared to a guild that is five people total, there's a difference.

And that guild isn't small, it's silly tiny. And I say that as someone whose Horde guild consists of about five people. Honestly, I don't consider that a guild, I consider it a couple of friends with shared storage.  :grin:

Pfft, like anyone but the inscriber ever uses that bank.

I used it JUST TODAY! I took a piece of chilled meat out for Zandrys' cooking daily.

Yes, they removed the "top 20 earners" system a while ago.  Now it's just a guild-wide daily experience cap with individual contribution caps per character.

25-30 active players is not enough to run a 25 person raid. Maybe if there were 15 person raids we could pull that off. All the guilds I know that run 25s are much bigger than us.

I was in a pretty tight-knit, insular, high-regular attendance guild when I was raiding in TBC and WotLK. A guild that didn't want to sit people, so only had 1 "spare" of any class (at most).

Even in that guild, we had around 35 people. A lot of raids were cancelled because 2 people who were "vital" class/specs would have to take the same night off.

In Vanilla, the most successful guild I was in (which the core of those later guilds came from) liked to stay at around 60 regularly on (5 of 6 raids a week) and a total of about 70 who could possibly be in a 40 man raid on any given night.

These were server leading guilds, with considerably more "hardcore" attendees than other guilds. I know most of them kept "active" rosters of at least 50% more than we did.

As I mentioned earlier, you don't need that many folks.  If you're focused on raiding, as in that's the primary purpose of your guild, you'll have attendance req's for raids (or the "raider" rank if you're like mine and let friends and casuals join.)  Keeping folks feet to the fire on that will mean you can keep only a few 'stand bys' in the roster with zero drama.  30-35 dedicated players who'll commit is all you need.

The class homogenization of WOTLK meant you could cut your roster due to needing buffs or roles, not a specific class.  (Or it happened naturally as folks found guilds instead of sitting out)  Since they're spreading the few class-specific buffs like Heroism out among other classes AND Dual-Spec is a feature it means you need even fewer additional players.

Now to preempt the cries of catassery around attendance reqs, it's like any other club.  Some folks enjoy this as their primary hobby, some don't.  Go bitch at the hardcore softball players first before shitting on your own kind (gamers.)  Seriously, I know guys on 3-4 leagues at a time, meaning they have a game every day or every other day.

Attendance requirements ARE catassy, but I wouldn't pretend they aren't necessary if you want to do raids (especially the bigger ones) on a regular basis. It's a matter of finding the happy medium for your guild. In our case, it's scheduling raids every week and just not going sometimes because we only had 8 DPSers and nothing else sign up that week.  :heart:

Didn't the term catass come from people neglecting their RL duties to play moar? A the height of my raiding, I only logged in for raids and maybe to grind dailies for cash.

I think more than the actual time spent, is the perception that the time is manditory, and on a set schedule. To continue the softball comparison, if someone just wants to toss the ball back and forth, they can do that whenever. But if you join a league, there's a certain expectation of participation.

This.  Logging in 2-3 times a week for 2-3 hours a night for a raid is not catassing.  It's exactly the same as if you were on a softball or basketball league after work.

It also depends a bit on context. Logging on (almost?) every day as a casual to spend 2 hours on dailies is no more catassy than spending the same amount of time online to raid. Honestly, both are potentially pretty catassy if done as an obligation over more important RL activities, or not if they're replacing 2 hours of sitcom viewing - it's all about context.

Then again, raiding guilds where they raid 6/7 days and have something like 80%-90% mandatory participation, and on top of that you're expected to be on enough to farm materials for potions/consumables/whatever and also yadda yadda you get the idea is pretty much the definition of catass. While I don't really give a shit how other people spend their leisure time, that kind of thing has got to be pretty detrimental to family/relationships/chances of geting either of those if you lack them. I always felt that the term "catass" was meant for those guys.

Catass is a level of required play more than "I" am willing to commit to.

jboots

I raise you one Raster.

My Raster camp was 5 minutes.  :awesome_for_real:

Oh, I've been there and had the ass in question. That's why I'm comfortable with my definition. My most recent flirtation was for a 2 week period, 6 weeks ago.  :grin:

Jboots were easy - kill nameds ten minutes before nightfall, then harm touch ancient cyclops. If there was anyone else in the zone, kill them too. :grin:

Icefeather in.. erm.. whatever the first zone of Velious is. And Ragefire circa Solb. With a guild.

This, or simply making a commitment to regularly log into a game, was pretty much the tone around here for years.   And the "I" was made up of people who played 4-5 hours a week.  I hadn't realized the shift had been so dramatic. Nice.

I actually never played EQ that much. But from what I heard, the JBoots were much more catassy before they put them in a quest.

Nah, I did Jboots several times before the quest.  It wasn't tremendously difficult.

After watching a guildmate get his on hour #220 or so, I decided not to try.  That's 220 hours.  For a handful of 1s and 0s.  Jesus.

32 hours at the Drelzna camp. For all intents and purposes, I had an intravenous Mountain Dew drip for a good bit of that.

I got my Jboots doing a random run through said desert and mr Cyclops was up...LUCKY!!!

 :headscratch: This shit isnt wow is it?

Allow us our "remember when", it is the lowest form of conversation after all.  :awesome_for_real: How else are we going to fill the next month and a half?

Heh, "catass" and "poopsocker" are just terms I like to throw at the raiders.  I don't consider you of that ilk unless you're like guys I've guilded with that had over 100 days played when the game wasn't even a year old yet.  I'm sure some of you may have some cringe worth total played stats. Even my small play times (compared to others I've known) would seem completely ridiculous to people that don't play MMOs.

A more interesting distinction might be between casual and non-casual.  Terms like "casual raiding" seem like an oxymoron to me, but being limited from a time scale skews your perception of just the range of activities and what you can accomplish with various commitment levels.

I'm just thinking out-loud, I'd rather not get into a semantic battle over anyone's playing habits.

How's THAT for an analogy? (http://www.hentges.net/misc/TheSafehouseRogue.html)

But yeah, even with current raiding requirements, WoW is still easy mode compared to days of yore.  And I have to admit, I'd never made the comparison between bowling league and raiding, though it does fit.

I never followed any of the other expansion, so I have little context, but reading mmo-blue tracker these last two weeks I'm kind of astonished at what an obnoxious douche bag Ghost Crawler really is.  Has he always been like this, or is it just the pressure of the patch having issues?

He's snarky with shitty posters, if that's what you mean. I like it, personally.

He's not great. His main talent is telling people how to play the game in a way that's fun, that isn't actually a way anyone wants to play the game nor is fun, typically. He's not as good as Tigole for the put downs.

I remember reading a retrospective either post-Vanguard or post-Tabula-Rasa (I think) where one of the big points which came out was that CMs shouldn't let devs ever talk to the player base; there's too much signal to noise, and devs are generally piss-poor at not getting dragged down into pointless arguments or clarifications. Ghostcrawler hasn't managed to go full retard yet, but I really don't think that his interactions with the forums does him any benefit nor the community nor the game as a whole.

 
Except he also does it to cover up his own lack of knowledge or understanding of the finer points of mechanics he's implemented.

I strenuously disagree. It is the only real window we have into what they're doing and why, and I find it immensely interesting and reasonably valuable personally. I always always always prefer when the devs actually participate in the community. Sanya et. al. are just wrong about that IMO.

Fair enough, my experience is that most of the time when GC has some comment to make relevant to a class I play, it's usually about changing an interesting mechanic to a less interesting and generally less enjoyable one in the name of "fun". I do think he does get bogged down in petty clarifications too, but if you find it interesting then I won't deny you that.

The last two weeks it seems like he has two moderator-type posts for every "here's what we did and why" or "we're still tweaking that" posts.  My thoughts are, "Really?  The game currently has a whole new crop of bug and balance issues and you're moon lighting as a forum admin?  Are you fucking daft?  Just concentrate on the balancing, etc, and let the mods do their job."

Well he doesn't need to post about mechanics that are working fine, only the shit that needs to be changed because it either sucks and/or is overpowered.

Devs shouldn't interact with the player base directly. That is a customer service/marketing job. Sure, they can read whatever they want, but devs usually don't have the training or skills to be dealing with the public. Any responses from development should be filtered by the CM types, that should be part of their job.

He rarely seems to fix the genuinely sucky though, and seems prone to picking apart mechanics that are actually quite fun.

He's awful.  He's case in point for Sanyas Shut The Fuck Up Theory.

No, it was way fucking worse when all you got was the useless CM canned response once every 6 months. DaoC is like the poster child for shitty game to player communication.

Tabled.

Ask again next report.

No.

Thanes do not have Evade I by design.  We have no intention of giving them Evade at this time.

 :mob:

Anyway yeah. I think there's plenty of value in direct communication from devs. When we get it from CMs it always feels like lies to me, probably because DAOC was my first exposure to that approach, and what we always heard in the weekly Herald updates, their online documentation, etc., was often really, really inaccurate.

I think Ingmar should be a CM, "really inaccurate" is putting it real gently.  :oh_i_see:

He has all the tact in this family.

I've always liked Ghost Crawlers approachability so to speak, but I don't like his insistance on vision.

Also, where did the friendly squirrel go?

It was a bunny! And I dunno, I felt like a change. A change to horrifying monkeys.

Is anyone else finding that alt-tabbing makes you really, really likely to get a linkdeath as of the 4.0.1? I never had the issue before, but now if I alt-tab while on a bird or somesuch, I'm almost always linkdeaded on my PC, despite usually still being ingame. Doesn't even take long. Just happened to me then, and I've been alt-tabbled for just long enough to write this post (2-3mins?)

Happens to me too

Just happened to me tonight as well.

Lots.  Don't you dare avoid the loading screen....

It's the  landing when on a gryphon that gets you a disconnect.  You can alt-tab for the majority of the flight, but you'd better be back by the time you land or it's LD-land.

You kids and your not playing in a window!

Most frustrating bug of the patch. I always alt-tab out to fart around on the web while flying a route.

This.  I used to crash a few years ago when alt-tabbing too much until I switched to windowed mode (full screen).  Now the problems are gone, even with 4.0.1.

It hits the fps.  Sometimes extremely hard.

The biggest bug for me so far has been that damned pumpkin in the Horseman instance. Just mousing over it causes me to lock up and sometimes disconnect. Talk about yer Halloween Trick.

That's been fixed apparently in the recent point patch.

Wow, I haven't heard "linkdead" in a while. The pumpkin was crashing me a lot too; worked okay yesterday though.

What an odd coincidence.  I cooked and ate spelt for breakfast yesterday for the first time (and hadn't read this thread prior).  Either I cooked it incorrectly or it wasn't very good - I prefer oats or wheat to spelt.

/offtopic

He's always been like this.

I'm not a fan.

What's this alt-tabbing you speak of?

I've been playing in a window as long as it's been an option.  A big window but a window nonetheless.  Why would you want to full screen?

Running in windowed mode can cause performance problems on some machines/OSes, for one. You can't vsync if you're running XP or earlier if you're in windowed mode I think, if you get tearing or whatever. There are other reasons, I forget if WoW has a 'full screen windowed mode' option but if it doesn't having the windows frame around the game can be a deal breaker for some people, that is often why I won't run games in windowed mode.

It has had fullscreen windowed for ages. It is how I played when I started having only one computer and needed to tab out to look at websites as tabbing in fs-windowed vs fullscreen was like a 20 second difference in speed.

Yeah, they said so.  Alas, trying to grab Mage Food in a BG will still lock you up.  It still looks like the Cog problem to me.

Yikes.   I tested it with the pumpkin, however, and didn't crash.  Luckily I didn't try to get any mage food.

Getting into a BG at all was a bit problematic for me.  It'd take requeueing around 10 times or more for a single one to actually let me in the BG.  I was woried that I wouldn't get GNERD rage on two of my characters.

It's not very good.  That's why people eat other grains in modern times.

Nope. I've had it happen while riding on my flying mount towards shoalzar basin from the tournament (long boring trip), and the one that happened when typing above.. I was standing in the argent tent. Not doing anything.
Main thing is that if its happening to a lot of us it'll be noticed and (probably) get fixed. Rather than just "me".

The cog problem happened to me at the horseman, and also in Trial of the Champions, when I was trying to get a lance.

Windowed mode used to be very laggy for me. Since 4.0.1, it's more-or-less the same as fullscreen...except it doesn't crash on an alt-tab. It's definitely worth a try.

Huh, it never lagged for me, lucky me!

FWIW my crash was the exact thing Merusk described, alt-tabbed on a griffon route.

I've had random CTL here and there, but the flying route thing reproduces the bug pretty consistently for me. I'd say 95% repro rate.

I've had it on griffon routes as well, just not exclusively so.

On an alt, I got the bug where you can't harvest resources from a node. Very frustrating.

I haven't noticed much difference since I got a new computer a couple of years ago.  I've been running in a window since I've had a computer that could support it with good performance.

I have had a few crashes since 4.0.1.  I suspect they were video-card-related, as most went away after I downloaded a new driver - oh and updated mods too.  I suspect part of my problem was with mods.

That cog crash - I haven't seen it since before last maintenance, maybe one before?

Run in borderless windowed mode in every game that offers it. The gripes about performance problems only reference 8+ year old OSes. You should be running win7 64 and have 6+ gigs of ram at this point in time. There aren't any real excuses. RAM/Win7 will be cheaper than a mid-range video card upgrade.

I found 4.01 significantly increased performance for me in borderless windowed mode. I'm back to running everything maxxed out even though there's more to max out. And I am solid 60 everywhere but Dalaran and I'm 30ish there depending on time of day and location. (The little horde district is single digits because A52 is virtually all horde.)

Win 7 with 8 gigs here.

 :oh_i_see:

Wait, is there an actual benefit to running in borderless windowed mode aside from being able to alt tab?

Sometimes it means they crash more gracefully when they crash.

You need another benefit?

They seem to have tweaked or hotfixed it. It's not happening nearly as much now. So I can alt-tab again. I'm even doing it right now!  :grin:

Personally, I was going to go with SHUT THE FUCK UP, but I decided against it.

Hey, there's a bug in this game's software, quick, upgrade all 9 million machines !!!

zomg.  Idiocy.  And Elitism.  I smell a position at Fox News.

Like anyone at Fox is technologically literate. :awesome_for_real:

There's a couple. It means you can tab to other apps much faster and seamlessly than fullscreen mode but you still get to play in a full screen, but the big one for me is that if you run with 2 monitors then you can just move your mouse over to the 2nd monitor and interact with any app you have running over there.

We use skype as our voice comms in my tiny guild and it means I can be joined into a convo or add people into an existing one without getting tabbed out of tanking/healing a dungeon, etc. For me it's the killer reason for 2 monitors, well, that and Photoshop.

Only have a single monitor? You should be running 2 or even 3 monitors at this point in time. There aren't any real excuses. Getting another will be cheaper than a mid-range video card upgrade.

My desk is too small for a second monitor, I'm a scrub. :(

You're only using one desk? You should have 5 or even 6 at this point.  :why_so_serious:

You should only be using one desk, they're not tech!

Ohh look, a cat.

Did they hire Lady Gaga for their wall paper or something?  :ye_gods:

You need to make your computing room an abottoir  if you really want to get "into" your monster slaying!

Lol.

What's elite about my 2008-era PC build, my $30 OS and my $70 RAM??

http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=368&Tpk=windows
http://www.newegg.com/Store/Category.aspx?Category=17&name=Memory

 :oh_i_see:

Holy shit, prices change?!

Get the EDU Win7 deal or bug a friend of yours that works at MS to buy you a copy from the company store.

8GB of ram was the price I spoke of above back when Core2Duo was the CPU to buy. Which is still what I have - an E6600 at 3.2 ghz.

In this economy, no one could possibly have a problem justifying spending $100 on an entertainment luxury.

I've been searching on the offical forums, but can't find the answer.  When rated BG's go in, will the PUG BG's only allow single person entry or will groups still be allowed to start a queue?  I see all kinds of explanations on what rated BG's will be, but not what the rest of us will be using.

I imagine that since you have to queue with a 100% full group for Rated BGs (ie 10 for WSG, 15 for AB etc) that you will be queueing specificly for a rated BG.  Would imagine that there would be seperate options for "queue for Rated X" and "queue for normal X" in the event that you somehow managed to put together a fulll group of 10 or whatever who didnt want to do the rated bg.

Holy shit, so what you said noone has an excuse for wasn't accurate when you said it? :oh_i_see: NO EXCUSES!



Because everyone here (and everywhere else) can get a student deal and/or has a friend who works at MS?  :oh_i_see: NO EXCUSES!




Holy shit, so what you said noone has an excuse for wasn't accurate?  :oh_i_see: NO EXCUSES!



You made a stupid comment, got called on it, people made fun of you. Stop trying to defend it so everyone can forget about it instead of making yourself look worse.

The point I was trying to make is that the performance issues do not exist on my PC that was built as a midrange PC in 2008. I honestly do not believe that it's an issue for anyone. Then again I've not seen any windowed performance problems in a very long time. I run everything windowed since, as the thread alluded to last page, I have 3 monitors.

Include smiley faces in your replies. They make me happy.

One remarkable thing about WoW, and a primary reason why it's so accessible, is that the game runs on PCs much older than 2008.  Moving the requirements much higher is not a good move, as it can squeeze quite a few people into either buying a new computer/upgrades, or not playing anymore.

Most people use a shovel to make a hole deeper ...

You're thick as fucking mince and you should shut the fuck up.

 :-)

Sooooo, as much as I hate to do this I feel obligated. You have all heard me bitch about Feral (Bear) Druids i this thread. Time to give credit where credit is due.


America, Fuck Yeah!

Meh, they probably were forced to do that because ripping the guts out of Bears Stamina advantage likely cascaded down through vengeance to end up with bears not hitting hard enough to keep threat compared to all the other tanks.

Which thread had the instructions to change the two files to allow preload of cata shit? I did it on my PC, but need to sort out my wife's and cant find Cal's post.

thank you, sir.

I'm wondering ... I didn't make any of those changes and I think I am downloading Cata:
(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/85916/wowlauncher.png)

Yes?  No?  I'm not even currently subscribed, so I'm somewhat suspicious.  Would rather not be surprised when I eventually get a chance to play it.

It will download everything I think. You just won't be able to go to any of the new stuff* unless your account has the expansions unlocked on it.

*To be more specific, you won't be able to: create characters of races or classes that came with expansions you don't own, enter areas that were added with expansions that you have to zone to get to, that sort of thing. You WILL be able to play the new 1-60 stuff without buying Cataclysm though.

When I logged into battle.net I was offered WotLK and so I bought that as well as Cata.  No mention of TBC.  Maybe need to poke at the account settings a bit but it gave me the impression I only had to buy those two.  I'm unlikely to subscribe just yet since I don't intend to use my old character on Crushridge.

Event seems bugged now, there are rifts but no elementals are spawning so they cant be closed and the whole thing ends in a fail.

 :facepalm:

I imagine that is probably a server by server, probably even a city by city thing - I saw this happen to the IF event back on the PTR while Stormwind was still working fine.

*sigh*
God damn it... I have a question. Since I have BC, I assume I just have to fish up that key to activate it and then purchase Wrath and Cata for this "update" to be complete and then to wait till Cata comes online in Dec? I am hating myself now.

No, I don't think you'd have to fish up the key, unless you never used it with your account before. Did you buy it and then just have it sitting on a shelf somewhere?

If you want to make a new character and just play through the new 1-60, as long as it isn't a goblin or worgen, you won't have to buy anything, just resubscribe. What buying Cata gets you is 81-85, the new races, raids, BGs, etc. Not sure about archaeology, you might need Cata to do that, unsure.

Not sure this helps anyone but looks like TBC came as part of likely Cata:
(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/85916/wowexpacs.png)

I only bought the combo WotLK/Cata pack.

Also, what is "World of Warcraft Remote"?

It will allow your account to buy/sell on the auction house via webpage or smartphone. It's a $2.99/month fee

Edit:
If you don't have one, add a mobile or physical authenticator to your account. It's going to get hacked.

No I bought it at release and played on an old account I thought I lost. I dug out an old email about a character transfer and found my old account name and linked it with battle.net and am doing the downloader for the client.

edit: nevermind. BC is there with my old account. damn it...

Not that this doesn't sound like a great idea, but why would my battle.net account be more vulnerable to hacking once I have an active WoW sub?

I am shocked that the new community boards have a list of all my characters from years ago including my first raid Nelf. I am also amazed that I have not thought about this game at all, then all the sudden my interest gets prodded by some unknown force which starts driving my curiosity to the warcraft website. Wrath did not peak my interest as much as this does and am left wondering what is different aside from the world changes.

Because WoW accounts are considerably more desirable to hackers than, say, SC2 ones.

For me it's this  - For every time that I flew out of Stormwind or flew over Ironforge mountain and wondered about the landing strip up there - now I can log in and fly there myself (not on rails).  I can fly over the damn with the big faces (if it's still there).  Just seems like it would be cool to visit all those places and see them a bit closer.

I was going to say that only if you're level 80 and pay an extortionate amount of moolah for the privilege but it appears that the Flight Masters License is available at level 60 for 250g (before faction discount) so that's alright then. (According to Wowpedia (http://www.wowpedia.org/Riding) anyway.)

The world changes are what's doing it for me - that and restructuring most of the quest flow so that you can do it zone by zone rather than have those tedious fucking cross continent quest chains like the Shimmering Flats bollocks.  It also sounds like they're making a lot more of the quests more involving (in as far as they could ever be called that).  Some great new quests in Hillsbrad, Badlands and Stonetalon Mountains from what I gather.

There are some new race/class combinations for the older races (except the draenei, suck it, draenei!). There's probably a chart out there somewhere showing who gets what new shit. There's also a new secondary skill, archeology, that sounds fluffy and fun, and supposedly they made leveling the various crafting skills less shitty somehow (I haven't paid much attention to that though).

I'm one of those people who fucking loves to level, though, so the world changes (including revamping to some degree or another all the old dungeons - for example, Stockades is a real, honest to god blue loot dropping bosses and everything dungeon now!) are what have me all SQUEE about it.

That and goblins.  :heart:

Whoever said Dire Maul was gone, by the way, was wrong, it is still there. It is a fully winged dungeon now, West and North don't connect, and while those library NPCs are still there I don't think you can do anything with their faction anymore.

I am hesitant, but I am with ya. Coming close to spawning another in the line of characters to start fresh, but that is still being kicked around in my head.

edit: http://wow.joystiq.com/2009/08/21/blizzcon-2009-cataclysm-race-class-combo-matrix-online/ for the new class/race thing. Undead hunter is  :uhrr: for me personally. I'd have liked to see Paladin there, but then again... meh. Tauren will work.

http://www.wowpedia.org/Race#Playable_races (http://www.wowpedia.org/Race#Playable_races)

Can you get your goblin to say, "I got what you need!"?

If I can do that, I may have to switch sides.  What jokes/emotes do goblins have?

They're decent:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgOUmr6kKsw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4oDeQw9Ofk

One of the male flirts is "I got what you need. *zipper sound*" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgOUmr6kKsw#t=1m56s) which I'm pretty sure won't see live.

Male Jokes and Flirts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgOUmr6kKsw (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgOUmr6kKsw)
Male Other Emotes and Attack Animations: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5Vfo6LBPg8 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5Vfo6LBPg8)
Female Jokes and Flirts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4oDeQw9Ofk (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4oDeQw9Ofk)
Female Other Emotes and Attack Animations: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcDBmELHf50 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcDBmELHf50)

Watching these again made it really hard not to plan out switching my Priest over from Undead...

Wow... this gives me something else to think about, especially with the NY accents.

Alright, so physical, mobile or dial-in?  I R confused.

EDIT: Nevermind, I don't care.  Got mobile app.  Can't wait to lose my phone. :oh_i_see:

I don't know what the deal is with the dial-in, but the physical and mobile are pretty much the same. The only difference is the mobile might be free depending on your phone/carrier, while the physical will cost a few bucks and you'll have to wait for it to actually arrive.

Dial-In is an additional measure on top of any account.  As for an Authenticator proper:

- Do you have a iPhone/iPod Touch or Android device?  Grab the Battle.net Mobile Authenticator from the iTunes or Android markets for free.

- Do you have a WinMo 6.x phone?  Try out WinAuth (http://code.google.com/p/winauth/).

- Do you have some other Java-enabled phone?  Try this page (http://mobile.blizzard.com/shared/blizzard_download.php?cont=401&id=2183&title=Battlenet-Mobile-Authenticator&country=us&lang=en) and it should be ~$1.

- Want the key fob? $6.50 plus tax (http://us.blizzard.com/store/details.xml?id=1100000822) (and I got free shipping when I bought mine a few years back), supposed to last seven years according to the manufacturer.

- Feeling cheap and/or just want something on your computer? Use the PC version of WinAuth (http://code.google.com/p/winauth) or set up an emulated Android Authenticator (http://elitistjerks.com/blogs/koaschten/443-emulated_authenticator_edition.html).

Good choice. I bought the authenticator last year but now I've got an Android phone, got the mobile app so that I don't have to remember something else to take with me on the odd occasion I'm out and about with my laptop.

Yeah, they're pretty cool. I have a rogue who's begging to be made a Goblin but maybe I'll just stick with rolling a new Shammie instead.

I do have an iPod Touch... sadly, too broke and unemployed to afford the data plans atm.

Authenticator doesn't have to be connected to the intarwebs.  Just need to download it and link it.  So, you just really have to connect it wirelessly once.

Why do you hate me?  :why_so_serious:

I can't pick up the pipe again... I KNOW WHAT HAPPENED LAST TIME.

WoW, it's a helluva drug.

Hm, I'd heard it was gone.  Combined with the NE Mages coming back to Darnassus and the removal of the faction from the Insane title it made sense.  Kind of odd to remove the faction but leave the mobs.

In response to earlier, accounts get hacked that are even unsubbed. There's no reason not to have an authenticator now, thanks dial in authenticator  :grin:

Make sure you have the serial number to your authenticator(Menu/Setup on the iPhone), email it to yourself or such for safe keeping. If you loose the phone or need to remove it without a working authenticator a quick call to their 1-800 with that serial number the agent will be able to remove it.

Sadly it works for my iPod Touch and was free and took all of 20sec to set up the security codes for my battle.net account. Why is it that when I need a roadblock to stop me getting in over my head, it never comes. Same thing happens when I need something on the floor of my car and can't seem to hit a red light to search for it.

Yea, I was mainly curious about how the hacks are perpetrated.  I'm thinking keyloggers and dumbassery, but maybe there's some new technique I wasn't aware of.  Really, though, no reason not to have the authenticator in some form.  I've used a RSA fob for years to connect to the corporate VPN, before it was replaced with a software token generator.  New corp has an encrypted USB drive + PIN for VPN connection.  It beats doing what I did for LotRO: sixteen random characters for a password.

False. From the Dial In Authenticator FAQ (http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?locale=en_US&tag=dialinauth&rhtml=true):

Quite likely brute force.

The username and password is case-insensitive, there's no lockout, and it works on the forums.  At least that's how it was prior to the recent changes.  I don't know if anyone has verified with 4.0 and the board updates.

Another popular route is forum hacking/collecting as well. Lots and LOTS of people just use the same username and password for their game account and their WoW-forum of choice.

Ah, that's kind of silly as it only triggers when "something unusual" happens and doesn't allow for authenticator-only guild ranks so it's just a half-way tool even by their own admission.

I go with this. I had a second account hacked that had not been used for 18+ months and used an email address that I rarely - if ever - use to sign up on websites with and definitely not on WoW or other gaming sites.  No harm done as there was nothing worth stealing but they signed it up for a Wrath trial and created a low level alt to spam gold-seller messages with.

My main account has an authenticactor attached, an email address and unique (for me) password that is only used for WoW and doesn't get used to sign up for any websites at all.  It's amazing how few Beta invites or account alerts I get on it!

Well that's some sloppy-ass design.  Hopefully there's at least some sort of delay on a bad password, but that really just protects dumbasses with weak passwords from impatient crackers.

There isn't, unless you measure it in microseconds and network lag.

Well, there's your problem, ma'am. :oh_i_see:  Basic resistance to brute-force cracker, install a delay.  Sheesh.

Whatever, this mobile authenticator is awesome.

One issue I'm having with these authenticators is that I can't fit my whole iPhone in my mouth.

Practice on something smaller

You've gotta open your throat, relax your jaw.

If I had a penny for every time I've said that...

You could be on your way to making change for a nickle? ;D

I don't even know what that means.   Isn't it Nickel ?

Yes, my spelling sucks and there was no red squiggle indicating it was misspelled.

A our nickel is what you'd call a five pence coin.

These days, I call a five pence coin a rarity.

 :why_so_serious:

If you didn't know already, the Post-Cataclysm world is up on the PTR now. I imagine it'll be applied to the live servers this coming week but if you're bored enough to let the PTR client download 12 gigs overnight or for a few hours you can try it early.

I leveled a warrior 1-25 in about 6 hours of actual playtime simply questing. I did a couple SFK runs but that was about it for instancing since not a lot of people were using LFD.

The new 1-60 content owns. The quest-lines are well contained, interesting/funny, the rewards are great and genuinely useful (read: well itemized, no more strength cloth :uhrr:), and combined with the 4.0.0 talent changes you don't ever feel gimpy or lack buttons to push after you hit level 10 and get your tree's signature skill.

If I had any complaints so far it's that some of the zones are so phased (redridge in particular) and designed to be soloed that you may as well be playing a single-player RPG where sometimes you see other players running around (I imagine this'll be met with "lol its like that already" but this is beyond the degree even you are thinking of). You're pretty rarely encouraged to group for questing after the starter zones ironically. The simplified talents, tooltips-for-retards, and in-game tutorials will help new players and currently bad players improve/understand their roles/skills but the first time they use LFD it'll feel pretty alien and weird since you're damn near told to just solo everything outside of instances. Also, it goes by almost TOO quick in my opinion. There is a greater grand total of quests per zone compared to pre-cata old-world I think, but there's a flight master practically every 3 feet and the quests are so tightly bread-crumbed that every zone's "epic" storyline feels like it's over in 10 minutes.

Personally I am looking forward to this.  The current "quest here for 1-2 levels, fly to another zone in another continent and quest there for 2-3 levels, then go back to the first zone to finish it" is very annoying.

I understand they are trying to get more folks to play, but I think they've made the game too easy.  This coming from a casual grouper non-raider. 
I like the talent changes (though my prot pally out damages my marksman hunter), but the mobs are all too easy to kill. 

If they're trying to get more people to play, then it makes sense to make it "too easy" for those of us playing already.  Those who aren't playing stay away because of general principle, they dislike the look or it takes "too fucking" long to level.  Easier mobs = level up asap.

It'll scale as they hit Outlands and then Northrend.  Early reports of the 80-85 zones were saying it's going to be more difficult for those of us already playing, too.  So I wouldn't worry that the whole game's going ez-mode.  Just the parts where there's no people so you want to move everyone through it.

Oh, you mean a shilling?   :geezer:

Challenging at what level?

At 80, nothing's a challenge once you have raid gear and are effectively leveled way past 80. At 10, things can be a challenge if you're solo and not using any twinked out gear (at that point, multi pulls are a bitch), and while leveling it's hard to make something that challenges a tank type character and won't instantly murder a priest or mage. About the only way to make a mob that's mean to melee instead of casters are.. Defias Pillagers <3

[Create level 80 character]

Brilliant.  Yes, just chuck all the old content and your game has 5 levels for the new players.  Works great for a PVP game, not so much for a PvE game.

When it comes to quest grinding, there is no too easy. Teleport me straight to every quest location, give me a chain lightning cannon that one-shots every quest mob, I don't care. I just want that shit over with so I can get to the parts of the game that are interesting. Maybe if they put it on enough rails I can stand to level a non-instant-dungeon-queuing DPS again.

I dislike all the phasing on principle, but nobody groups for quests for more than five seconds anyway so I don't even care.

In case you wanted to know my terrible opinion.

Do we actually have an issue with Bliz making it easier to get to the fun part? Didn't we rail against WAR for the very reason it was too much grind to get to the fun? Besides, I am very interested in the new scenery incoming and half interested in the goblin race which makes the lower levels seem perfect to wet my curiosity but I certainly do not want to spend too much time getting through the suck, just enough to look around and marvel and then move on.

There are three main portions of WoW. The 1-80 leveling game, the raiding and the PvP. With some crossover, but not much. For someone who wants to raid, the 1-80 game is irrelevant, and a time sink. For the leveler, the 80's raid game is irrelevant content. For the PvPer, both are a means to an end, getting to the PvP. Making leveling easier is a band aid solution for the guy who just wants to raid with his buddies. Why is he forced to play a game he has no interest in to get to the good part? IF a PvPer wants to run Eye of the Storm, why is he forced to PvE at all? For a leveler, why is he saddled with dumb PvP balance issues when he just wants to konk ogres over the head in Arathi Highlands?

I think most people like at least two of the three portions, but that's just my experience.

So will I need to do a bunch of sixty-levels-lower shit on my main in order to avoid being out of phase with newer characters everywhere? If I level through zones A, B, and C will I be forever out of phase with anyone who leveled through X, Y, and Z instead?

No.

Sure, but I think most tend to focus on one aspect at a time. And the three portions are usually at odds with each other. Even more in Cata, it sounds like.

I now feel obliged to point out Guild Wars solved this long ago.  You can PvP right away, you can get to the endgame quickly (Prophecies less so, but doable), and you can do nothing but run dungeons once there.  And instances are based on the leader.

Guild Wars solved a lot of problems really.

Except how to jump.

Fuck, that still bothers me waaay more then it should.



"I AM PRESSING THE SPACE BAR, WHY AM I NOT DOING ANYTHING ARRGH  :tantrum:"

It's making you autorun to the enemy, duh.  :awesome_for_real: Actually GW's UI is kind of... annoying at times (hey, how do I hotkey shift/ctrl/alt-12345?), that's its greatest weakness imo.

Other than that, it was [and is!] a game waaaaaaay ahead of its time. Static health pools? No gear gap? Flat power curve skills that are still fun to play around with? Companions? This is all heresy!

I never found a need to hotkey anything beyond the defaults in GWs, you only had 8 abilities to deal with, one was probably the rez signet, a couple for self buff/heals then 1-5 as your attack'ish stuff or whatever.


Don't forget no finite mana!

Are you talking about 80+?  The first two zones are completely different from the rest, mainly because they need to work for people in Item Levels from ~280 to ~180.

As for your Prot Paladin, yeah... tank hybrids are pretty Robot Jesus for a long time.

This was the case for me for most of GW, but micromanaging hero abilities (without having to click them) and efficient weapon swaps (for pvp mostly) really need a lot of extra hotkeys. It's not really a dealbreaker, was just sorta annoying.

As for no finite mana... WAR?  :why_so_serious:

Well, they sorta DID chuck all the old content. :)  And they had to... it sucked ass.

Regarding the ez-mode stuff, I actually disagree and think it is "harder" now at lower levels in the way that matters.  Sure, it is "easier" in that you don't have to run all over the goddamn place, and you gain levels faster.  That's the boring kind of difficulty.  But actual combat is MUCH more interactive and involving at early levels now.  Like, at level 3 as a hunter you are learning to manage focus in combat, and even discovering that pulling threat sucks since they do not give you a melee ability and you immediately realize "Hey, I can't do shit if I let dudes get close to me."  It's so, so much better than before.  I really think the ability progression revamp is extremely well done.  You start getting "trained" to play your class almost instantly now, instead of your initial strategies being totally unrelated to what you end up playing once you get all five million talents or whatever.

Also, I like that they seem to have a "don't stand in the fire" mini-boss in most of the starting areas now.  Any of you notice that?  I thought it was pretty amusing. :)  Like, that named scorpion in the orc/troll starting area (the one that poisoned that troll lying by the tree) fires poison globs from range that create poison pools, Vezax-style.

*grumble grumble* make any "stand in fire" effect put a -99% damage debuff on you so DPS stops acting like they shouldn't get the fuck out of it because their DPS will be lower and healers should just burn mana on them *grumble*

I am in full support of this proposal.

Let them die, then point out their dps is zero now.

Silly non-DPS.  Being dead doesn't count.

Counter stops when you're no longer in combat! :D

Plus, my dps would be higher if the heals weren't asleep/stupid!

(can you tell I've got the Bitter Healer mastery spec?)

What if I want to do those quests on my 80 just for laughs? How does the whole thing work?

You just go do them like you would any other low level quest. As far as the game is concerned, they are all entirely new and separate quests, which is why it will fuck over anyone who didn't finish their loremaster or whatever.


The vast majority of the phasing is NOT like the DK starting zone phasing, where you keep being forwarded to the next phase world. It's more you are in the normal world, jump into phase world for a quest, then jump back when you are done (or drop the quest, or just leave the small quest specific area). So you would only potentially be out of phase with someone actively doing the quest in the area, and even then you often aren't separated from the other players in the area, you just see things slightly differently.



I think grouping with someone will pull you into their phase as well, if you ever do get separated by phase world or whatever.

Good times, thanks.

? Wait, if they're new quests and in EK/ Kalimdor how is it going to fuck over folks looking for Loremaster later on?  Seems it only makes it easier, because instead of piddling with all of the 40's & 50's "Run here run there, run everywhere" quests, they can run back to the newb zones and bang those out.  Bonus that they're in the new grouped fashion so running around is minimized.

Ed:  Looked it up since I was confuzzled.  I'd call it easier in Cata than it was before. It's working by the same method as the BC and Northrend quests, in that there's an achievement for each zone.  No more hunting down quests and wondering if it counts towards the 1500 or not.  Just follow the zone story line and get the achievement.

You get fucked over in the short term because you will lose progression. In the long run Loremaster just got a whole lot easier.

Yea, what K9 said. You only got fucked if you were like 50 quests away from being completed, because odds are a few hundred you had done no longer exist.

Yea, that's what I was referring too. If you had like 80% of it done or whatever, then you are more or less back to square one now.

Ahhh.. Well if you were that close you had plenty of warning. I feel bad for nobody! :drill:

Yeah I was 25 quests away from EK\Kalimdor on my priest, but honestly, she was my 3rd one and I got bored with it and don't feel bad.  I'm curious to see how much (if any) count.

From what's remained on my DK; nothing except 19 quests on bloodmyst isle.  The rest of the zones are reading 0 or 1 completed quests. (However I didn't get too far in most zones because i was just doing them for faction.)

I had done nearly every quest pre-Cataclysm (Alliance side) and the only zones I had enough to auto-get the achievement in were Bloodmyst Isle and Silithus. Everywhere else changed too much I guess.

I already did Loremaster, but I've been going back through to see the changes.  Most zones show 0-2 quests completed, but I've run across a number of quests that are just tweaked versions of old quests (number of kills reduced, or quest item from a different source).  Also, Darkshire is much better now that they've moved the Hermit, although it could still use a third flight point at the watcher camp in the middle of the zone.

The vehicle portion of the "Rambo"-themed questline in Redridge was rather entertaining  :grin: 

The giant crack between north and south barrens is fabulous.

If you're ally, I've been told to check out the guy in the canyon between Loch modan and Badlands.  The crazy dwarf from Badlands was moved here and apparently his quest is hilarious.

I started Westfall last night for the achieve and it's one long CSI:Miami joke.  The main character of your quests is Horatio Laine. :awesome_for_real:

Anyone else discovered the transport system in Azshara yet? Go and have a try.  :awesome_for_real:

Forgot to look at the Barrens. Loving Orgrimmar changes though.

Went into Durotar to see flooded Thunder Ridge and decided to jump in and have a look.  At the bottom were a load of Drowned Thunder Lizards, all still sparking away. For seem reason it was a bit :heartbreak: even though they were a pain in the arse and I must have killed hundreds of them over the years.

First thing I did when I saw the track.  :drill:

Flying over 1000 needles I noticed a ton of ore... under the water.  That did the same thing with me, like a small moment of "awwww..."

There is an NPC in the bunker just outside the Org Main gates with a quest involving those poor electrified corpses.

1k needles was just  :ye_gods:.  Navigating around in there as a lowbie has GOT to be a pain in the ass.

...looks like the changes to cooking awards reset those achievements.  I was at 98/100 Dalaran cooking awards, but now I have the 50 achieve and only 2 towards the 100?   :uhrr:

I read something about that, it's related to how they changed it as a currency, and apparently that means they can't retroactively fix it.

Well, at least that character still has a ton of recipes to get from The Rokk, and the new Org dailies to do too.

Still, they converted Frost badges...   :uhrr:

Sorry to jump in.....how do the new quests fit in with someone who has already completed Loremaster? Can i go and do them all, or will they be done for me?

Laugh away, but that was one of the things I was looking forward to in Cata, doing old quests and jumping low levels who are also doing them. Makes this 80 feel like a god lol. Also, a bit of OSD regarding completing achievements  :oops:

Your Loremaster is marked complete, yet none of the new quest achievements required for it are marked done.  So go quest away to your heart's content.

 :yahoo:

Also, you get faction for redoing the quests.  Gilneas is up somewhere in Honored after doing just the southern portions of Eastern Kingdoms, and Steamwheedle faction got a big boost from re-doing Booty Bay.

I was getting Gilneas faction from running heroics with the tabard equipped.

In case anyone gets lost: http://media.mmo-champion.com/images/news/2010/november/levelflow.jpg

Tip for everyone levelling a new alt: The various city faction vendors (the ones with the tabards) all sell a fairly cheap, unique 16-slot bag that needs revered faction to buy, which most characters will hit with their home faction before L20.

OH MY GOD THEY ARE PUTTING TAILORS OUT OF WORK

It's sort of amusing that you can tabbard up a faction from level 15 now, too.

I like it; it helps toward training players on what to do at the cap, rather then slam with a bunch of new mechanics.

Funny I just noticed that bags on the AH have gone up exponentially from last week. I always grab 4 nethers for a new toon and they went from 7g to 15g in 1 week.

...did Negatron spend all of his free time beating up the rocket at Area 52 before?  I only noticed him there sporadically in the past, but it seems like he's there 24/7 now.

He beats up the rocket whenever someone fails his quest.

Yep, but he normally despawns after a minute or two of bashing on the rocket.  Or at least, he used to, I think...?

I think prices for most things that low level chars could want have gone up, simply because there's so many new alts being created now by people with mains with 10's of 1000's of gold so anything under 100g doesn't even register.

I've been clearing out banks and stuff and have made about 5000g in 2 days!

He did.  Netherstorm is all kinds of bugged since the patch.  The bartender goblin who catches on fire never comes back to life on my server.  Makes getting the required # of quests for Loremaster a bit of a bitch.

Been farming SFK on my DK lately. Sold feet of the linx for 25g which I am thinking could have gone for more. Perfect time to farm and play the AH.

Missed this earlier.


The way they setup 1k needles, it's pretty much painless to get around.

Glad to know it isn't just me...  Though the bartender got rezzed normally when I did that quest 2-3 days ago on my server, in any case.

As a permanent mount or just a quest item?

I started up a Warrior on my second account the other day (bought a second account ot get the 2-person rocket) and so while my main account is down, this one goes until January. While on the one hand it's annoying to be levelling an alt without all of those damned Heirlooms I catassed to buy (they're on my main account), it's also quite a lot of fun.

Was doing the normal quest lines - Elwynn > Westfall > Redridge and slowly but surely outlevelling the quests while just doing them. When I got to 15 and started doing a few random dungeons, I started getting something like a level per dungeon run, so now I'm 31 and still halfway through the Redridge quests. Got to decide if I keep going through the quests or if I skip ahead a bunch of zones, or just dungeon my way up. Westfall was fun, and surprising, and Redridge has been good so far, just all the mobs have turned grey.

I did my first random dungeon as DPS with a 27min wait. Since then I've been tanking, with instant queues. Which are :drill: and making me think I might just skip the quests and go back to them when I'm level whatever. Some of the DPS guys are a bit douchey from time to time, but I've learned over the past few days that I don't need to care, since if they screw me around I have instant queues, while they have a 20min wait. Damned sick of Gnomeregan, though.

Oh yeah, while doing the zones, I noticed that some of the quests are zone-changing beyond a few NPC locations, as per WUA's complaint, but then again, who the fuck hangs out in Westfall or Redridge mountains at level 80? Anyway, at 80, 2 hours or under and the zone is done, what with fast/flying mounts and one-shot kills and AE 1-shot multikills. And from what I've done so far, entertaining for the time spent.

According to a thread on MMO-Champ, it is a quest item, that functions as a mount, and is only useable in 1k needles.  I was really hoping it would be a mount towards my even more mounts achievement.

Lame.