f13.net

I'll stop being the wow fanboy for a little bit here. It seems increasingly more apparent that blizzard is muddling up their own game design. Part of it is simply mudflation but it seems like they are haphazardly slapping on fixes/changes to not only their game but their online services like battlenet that they are not able to keep up the same level of quality they have had in the past.

Take for instance this change to the battle rez system.


Maybe it's me but this just feels slapped on and as if they aren't sure themselves how it works now. Having been levelling a hunter recently(got to level 29 I think) got a fresh new talent point and put it into trueshot aura. Oddly, I didn't see a buff so I went to a trainer just in case I had to train it, nope. I then look at my talents and it says "trueshot aura available lvl 30" so now, I could spend a talent point for an ability I couldn't even use for another level.  Is it game breaking that blizzard would do that? no.  Is it sloppy and the kind of thing a newer player would focus on? completely.

As I've said before, this expansion has the potential to be my own personal ToA. I played that expansion for a day in my DAOC heyday, realized the game wasn't for me anymore, and quit completely. The way I feel about this expansion is different though. I'm getting to the point now where if they want to reinvent the entire game from the ground up, I'm not really excited about relearning how to play 5 years after the fact.

I could be imagining things, but I remember the battle rez limits being talked about very early on.

Also, the TSA thing looks like a bug.  The minimum level on the skill is 25 according to Wowhead (http://www.wowhead.com/spell=19506), but you can't actually buy it until 39 (http://www.wowhead.com/talent#cZf0Gkho), and you're saying it's not available until what I assume is 40 (and not 30).

For some reason WoW feels the need to turn every expansion into a significant overhaul.  That they were touting changes this time a year before they had even designed them was a bad sign.  Sooner or later it's going to end up an NGE-level fiasco.  It's not another MMO that is going to bring WoW down, it is themselves.

I know the arguments that they coded themselves into a corner, but maybe their design should have considered that from the beginning since every expansion has raised the level cap.  It was poor planning then, and three expansions later they still haven't figured it out.

Can't wait for the boss encounter that force-kills the OT at 50%. Hope you got your raid comp right!

No, I don't think they're quite that stupid - although I don't know why because Razuvius-25 empirically disproves me. I think they're desperately trying to minimize the amount of non-easily-calculable DPS (or whatever) contribution a player can bring to the raid; there was a blue post (http://blue.mmo-champion.com/t/27495542734/why-weren-t-they-fixed/) not long ago about how they didn't like players rushing to change specs because of a 2% theoretical increase (and then bitching about being "forced" to relearn their class) so I guess they're probably trying to convert every possible class benefit that isn't your personal rotation into a non-stacking raid-buff-type thing. That's why they took the crit requirement off of the shaman crit buff, the mage damage buff, etc, which I thought made them less interesting.

The trueshot thing sounds like a bug, but who knows - Imp Revenge is available at level 39 while Revenge is trainable at 40. I think the old talents always gave *some* benefit when you took them, even if you didn't have all the abilities they affected.

The battle rez change makes sense, even if the implementation feels a little wonky. MMOs have always had problems balancing long cooldowns with progression raiding; when Brez was on a half hour cooldown, do you just wait 20 minutes after a wipe for it to be back up? Is there any point to attempting progression content without ALL of your cooldowns available? Also, why wouldn't you want to stack druids so that you have as many Brezes as possible? You could easily justify taking 4 (bear, cat, boom, tree) to a 10m, which gives you an exceptionally large margin of error; this wouldn't even gimp your raid that much anymore, since there aren't nearly as many stackable raid buffs to manage as there were in 3.x.

Now, there's an argument to be made that Soulstone shouldn't have a longer cooldown since it's a worse ability. Previously you put the SS on the druid (brez) unless you knew someone was bad/lagging/undergeared but still important. Now, the fact that you need to guess which retard will stand in fire should at least grant it 10m cd.

Every other long cooldown has either been removed, or nerfed and given a shorter cd. The brez problem, however, is unique to WoW; most other MMOs either allow all resurrection spells to work in combat, or give all healers a gimpy one that does.

Yes, it was indeed level 39 I put the talent point in and couldn't use the ability until 40. Actually, I needed to re-train my talents because putting that point in bugged my character, gave me an extra talent point to spend but the point already spent in TSA had become useless at 40, not even working until I re-trained.

Talents bug after patches, WoW circling the drain, news at 11.

The brez change seems duct taped (if it's in the game, it should be in the UI), but I can see why. They're trying to make it so you don't take the new healing changes as "bring a lot of druid raid healers or locks for DPS, and woo abuse in combat rez!"

They took the cooldown from an hour down to something reasonable to prevent both "you never use it because maybe you'll need it later" and to prevent guilds from sitting around waiting for cooldowns to come back after a fight. This is just trying to prevent spamming very powerful skills due to their lowered cooldowns.

Personally? An in combat debuff on the caster of the rez would make me happy, or give the rez an in combat penalty (-damage/healing or something else to make it a non ideal situation beyond the lack of raid buffs)

The battle rez thing honestly was actually needed, especially if they wanted to leave Rebirth / Soulstone at a low cooldown instead of the old 30 minutes.   I say this as a member of a guild which had a usual turnout of 4 to 6 druids and 3 locks for any given 25 man raid.

I mean, hell, for our first probably 6 weeks of doing Putricide Hardmode we didnt even bother with a proper "strategy" for dealing with the disease mechanic.  We just passed it to the nearest warlock, had them run off and die, then use a SS or BR and immediately got them back into the fight.  If for any reason we ran out of SS / BR (which was HIGHLY unlikely, even doing attempts every 5 minutes while learning the fight), we could always pass it to a shaman and just let them Reincarnate.

Stacking Combat rez mechanics allows for some really sloppy gameplay.

WoW is weird.  I definitely went through a poopsocking phase on release, and have since returned as a casual participant for a few brief stints.  And for fuck's sake, the same people I poopsocked with on release are still fucking poopsocking 5 years on.  I've never been that into anything for that long.  I don't know how something, no matter what it is, doesn't get old after 5 years of 12 hours a day (or how these people are able to sustain that lifestyle post-college/whatever).  When I occasionally log in SC2 I still see them online with Real ID.  Never fails.

I thought from the title that there were literal cracks starting to form in the world as a prelude to the expansion. I am disappointed.  :sad_panda:

Yeah if they had left it alone you end up with some scenarios where it is actually better to let someone die and combat rez them because of the other changes to health/healing. By limiting the number of combat rezzes you can do in an encounter they make it a lot less attractive to stack druids and use battle rez as a sneaky cheap full heal or as an innervate.

WoW polish is certainly thing of the past.

It is? .. because they didn't put in a UI indicator on a new raid rule?

Actually it's nearly six years since release, way longer for the many who were in beta. I was in beta for about six months, played from release, had three raiding guild careers on two servers and left when the cracks started to show. In 2007.

DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM

 :oh_i_see:

I said this last year and I'll say it now:

It's not that the sky is falling. It's sort of a "Muhammad Ali around like 1975" vibe. They're still the champ, they'll remain champ for the forseeable future, but they've lost a step. None of their missteps of late have been a really big deal, but they keep making them.

god help me....WuA is exactly right.

It's not that these are hideous mistakes but as said before it's like that are using duct tape.

I'm not seeing a misstep here, only a fix for a broken mechanic. 

It is an enormous 6 year old piece of software. Of course you wouldn't do it this way if you were truly starting from scratch, but 6 years of balance changes in a game can eventually lead you to some odd places with certain abilities, especially when they have the kind of sacred cow status that battle rez and such have.

Well, until you try out any other MMO by comparison.

It could be prettier and I suspect it eventually will be, but this is another change in a long line of changes where I fail to see what the big damn deal is.

OH GOD I AM THE FROG IN THE POT AND THE WATER IS STARTING TO BOIL

Once they add some kind of UI indicator it'll be fine. Although I suspect an addon will cover the job nicely; I already use DBM-Spell Timers to track the casts of Rebirth, so simply seeing how many have been used in an encounter will provide adequate info for now.

 :heart:  

Care-o-meter far to the left.  Nuclear clock hovering around 3pm.  Yadda, yadda, yadda.

Sure it's clunky and hamfisted, but isn't every change they introduce to raid mechanics?

Blizzard tends to follow this formula:
1.  Do some shit that might piss people off.
2.  Watch people over-react.
3.  Adjust.

No, because they didn't bother (or couldn't) balance even simplified classes, railroaded all classes into single spec and barfed out half-assed systems, like rated BGs, on live. WoW moved away from successful formula - releasing stable, tested and derivative product. They now offering somewhat stable, untested, even more derivative product.

WoW is Corolla of mmorpgs - bland, unexciting but get it job done. You tolerate it only as long as its reliable and predictable.

I played other mmorpgs because it was exciting, I played WoW because it get its job done.

It now starting to sputter.

It doesn't matter, though.

They have made back their investment several hundred fold at this point. Even if they only sell 5 million copies of Cataclysm, that is 200 million bucks in box sales alone.

The talent system needed to be changed because the two masters it served, new shiny while leveling and end-game balance, were pulling it in different directions.  The only option was to move towards (quasi-)sub-classes.

Bugs slip through, some of their changes don't seem well-considered, so on and so forth. There are people just waiting for Blizzard to stumble so they can invoke the malevolent influence of Activision, and maybe they'll even be correct when they do so, but basically WoW is just getting a little old and starting to creak a bit.

Ali after the Thrilla in Manila. Greatest foes vanquished, legacy secure, years of victory still ahead, but not the bouncy kid who beat up Sonny Liston anymore.

This is just me, but I haven't really felt like they've made more missteps than they used to. I haven't been subscribed for a month, but that's just because having killed almost all the raid content and leveled up as many alts as I felt like there really wasn't anything for me to do until the expansion. But of course I'm coming back when Cataclysm hits, and everything I've seen so far looks great and I can't wait until it comes out.

People said the exact same thing before and shortly after TBC launch, and they'll say the exact same thing before and shortly after the next expansion launches.

Doesn't mean it's not true, but I don't think it's going to change much. WoW isn't suddenly going to lose 5 million subs. Some people will say "meh, too many changes, I'm out" and quit. Some others will say "Jeez, my mates have been playing this thing for 5 years and STILL spend all weekend playing it, maybe I'll check it out". Subs will fluctuate, but probably stay roughly the same over time.

Yeah, Cata is a lot of big changes, but even casually comparing it to NGE is ludicrous. It's not a ToA by any stretch of the imagination either. I don't know offhand what ToA did to DaoC subs in the end, but it was pretty (haha) cataclysmic.

Original pvp system. Retard rocks. Molten Core (all of it). Every bit of TBC content past the non-heroic dungeons at expansion launch. And so on.

If it's genuinely broken,it'll get fixed...eventually. I am seeing a lot of change-fearing as well, though.

I said soon or later.  WUA sums up my feeling on it succinctly.  They're slowing down, making mistakes, making mistakes they shouldn't be this late in the game, and the polish is starting to wear off.

They'll still be top dog for a long time, even if SWTOR, GW2, or a surprise hit go gang-busters.  You don't lose millions of people overnight.

Yep. 

Although WoW polish has always been a matter of comparison to other MMOs.  And let's not look at the past through rose-colored glasses - there have always been bugs and problems and whatnot.  Remember the mail retrieval bug?  The loot bug?

I don't think this expansion will be WoW's ToA, although I also don't think it will be the hits TBC or Wrath were.

I'm no longer sure that the Bilzzard Polish ever really existed. They have lots of bugs, and make wonky design decisions just like every other developer out there. I think it's more that they've managed to build up so much good will with their consumers. Blizzard's average performance is still usually better than most company's best.

This sums up my feelings well.  I enjoy WoW, but it still feels like it's lacking.  I think that's why it doesn't ever keep me longer than 2-3 months at a time.

I'ma bout to send a bunch of people off to WAR, lest ye forget.  What a bunch of jaded gamers. 

People should be jaded. The game is five years old.  I mean, to still be obsessively playing the same game 5 years on is almost full retard.  The stink of it is nothing close to comparable has come out in that 5 year time span.  I know.  I played  Aion.  


It's less that WoW is a bad game or the designers are losing their touch and more that even beating off gets old after awhile.  MSNBC's Lockup has taught me that.  In the desolate prison of our lives, WoW was our only release...and things are starting to look pretty grim.  

:hello_thar:

The reason I am still playing is because of something several people in this thread have been bitching about. I love that they're willing to entirely revamp a class that still sucks. I love that they'll rebuild a system that is no longer working in the game at present instead of trying hard to continue to force it into something vaguely not shitty. I love that they say to themselves, "This sucks, change it," even if I don't always agree 100% what sucks.

Jesus, if everything played the way it did at release, I would've quit years ago. In fact, I did, until they realised there was a lot of shit about the end game that sucked, we better change it. I'm apparently the exact person they're building this game for.

Sure that's great, but it's changing things that don't suck which boggles me.  And making that decision before there's actually a replacement tested.

I would daresay the Blizzard folks know that they need to make changes to the game over time to keep the fanbase from feeling that the game is getting too stale, e.g. graphics, new raids and dungeons, game mechanics, etc.  I personally expect to see great swathes of changes from this expansion.  Nonetheless, this is the first expansion that I won't be buying and playing right out of the gate.  In fact, I don't think I'm going to buy it at all unless there are some significant changes to some of the grind and, well, grind. 

You and I have a greatly different view of what sucks in this game, I'm pretty sure we established that. The old talent system was starting to suck in WotLK, and I totally believe them when they said it sucked even harder to try and make work in Cataclysm.

I'm also curious how they can make a replacement and test it before deciding it needs to be done in the first place.

Prototyping.  Certainly not a live environment.

The *only* thing about the new talent system I dislike compared to the old one is that abilities you used to get at 60 now have to wait until 69 (Shockwave, Titan's Grip, etc).  Other than that, the new system is SO much better than the old one.  I had my worries that it would suck based on what they did in beta\alpha, but what's up so far is actually REALLY nice.  I absolutely hated playing a class a set way until some magic level and then *poof* a new ability changed the entire way it played.

Granted, I've been playing since release and the fact that this game is still the only one worthy of my time and money is really fucking sad and the gaming industry shouldn't be proud of themselves for it.

I had my hissy fit about "you idiots don't test/change randomly/should have seen this was a problem earlier" in vanilla, quit in a huff with an irritated forum post, got over myself and play a bit now. The game is still fun. As much as it annoyed me to have a core piece of my class ripped out from under me for a bullshit excuse, it was still for the best, and the changes to in combat rez strike me as the same thing. The ONLY reason I said half assed is the lack of a good UI indicator yet. That's all Blizzard is missing from this change: an icon.

Me? I threw a fit over the change to negative resists, which were incredibly broken, because it was stated to be an unintended bug instead of just broken bullshit. My complaint was that they'd added polish to it by making negative resists show properly in the combat log, then said "oh god, where did that come from?!" instead of just admitting that it was overpowered and being removed.

Yeah, cracks are starting to show. No one's saying that there is a giant gaping hole in their armor, only that some of their latest ideas have people scratching their heads. Like the soulstone/combat rez thing. Yes that may have been an issue for those guild on the sharp end.........but for the giant majority of those struggling on NON heroic Blood Queen (yeah my guild can't down her)....much less most PUGs which fall apart well before putricide; those combat rezzes make the game MORE bearable: they are not an issue to be dealt with.

Like the changes to Pallies. Blizzard just up and said 'Hey! You Fucks need a new mechanic! I don't care what you have to say, you're just deluding yourself into thinking you're having fun right now... but don't wprry about that, we'll fix everything in a fun way. And for those who don't like it, you can just hide your kids, and hide your wife!!!

So your agreement is combat res is needed because it gives people a  better chance at a boss as long as you stack classes, while Blizzard has said they don't want people to stack classes just so people can throw human wave rushes at bosses.

That's not bad design, that's the point. Also, not being mean but if you haven't killed non-heroic Blood Queen by now (with the buff and so on) after months of trying then, well, you're probably not going to. Sorry.

(Paladins should be used to being redesigned in every release by now - it started two weeks before the game originally launched and repeated in every single expansion and most of the big class balance patches.  :grin: )

What didnt you get when I said the word PUG? It's not a case of stacking druids, it's a case of taking whoever shows up. And as for throwing human waves a boss, lol, I would say about nine out of ten combat rezes die instantly due to boss mechanics anyways. Those battle rezes aren't so much an exploit as a second chance for that dope that you watched stand in the fire, not move from the bosses cleave, but dammit you need his heals even though you snagged him from trade chat. Is it needed in the game? No, not really, but taking it away in this hamfisted manner is just admitting that 'Hey, we can't balance this, so fuck it, we'll just yank it from under you.'

No, it's not one of those getting to Tier 3 in Warhammer moments, that result in thousands of CDs being chucked into the trash almost simultaneously, but it is another self inflicted cuts, one of those that has most of the community saying 'Why are you doing this again? Was this really needed?'

There is only one way to balance them in the end though and that's to cap them.  If you give them to a lot more classes to discourage Druid/Warlock stacking, in general or for specific encounters, you're going to have raids swimming in them all the time.  It's the same as the changes to Bloodlust and Vampiric Touch with WotLK.

Blizzard does a lot of nerfs that are aimed at a particular area of the game that end up affecting another part, this is nothing new.

Funny how GW2 thinks everyone should be able to rez at any time.  It'll be interesting to see how the difference in philosophy works out.

(I've never actually been talking about rezzes, but since people seem fixated on this I'm throwing this out there.)

That is NCSoft there. Aion had no rez limitations other than the following:
You had to have enough rez stones in your inventory (they were bought at a vendor), or be a priest subclass.
Self rezzes via items or spells had a cooldown. (1h usually)

You came back with rez sickness which was up to 5 minutes of slow movement speed and less health. It worked fine, and I think I actually prefer that mechanic to the WoW "no rezzes in combat except a soulstone or druid" mechanic. But that could be me.

WoW is (one of) the first MMOs to limit combat rezzing to a single class. EQ1, EQ2, CoH, and WAR all had unlimited use combat rezzing by anyone who had a rez.

Ashamanchill, you must join some terrible PUGs. All it takes to do 10/12 in ICC10 is decent gear (4.8k gs or so) and a raid leader who knows the fights.

It's true  :cry2: Oh well.

Yes, but 1-3 is basically the status quo whereas 10-25... isn't.  Capping and homogenizing battle rezzes both achieve the same result of not encouraging class stacking; but one requires a complete overhaul of raid mechanics and the other just sticks it to people who were cheesing Heroic Putricide with them (or Vashj back in ye olden times when Soulstones got changed to raid-only).  I prefer a low amount of rezzes when the raid game focuses on "Don't stand in fire."

Also, since Rendakor brought up other MMOs: LotRO is basically the long-cooldown version of the current WoW model.  Rune-keepers get a 1m duration/15m cooldown Soulstone, Minstrels and Captains get ~30m cooldown Rebirths, and Lore-masters get a 10m cooldown Reincarnate with one of their pets.

Edit: Grammar.

It's limited to make dying a problem in a fight. Do we all remember Molten Core and the out of combat rezzer, and how much it completely broke the encounters?

"hey, fred died. Oh well, have the paladin rez him and get him back in the fight!"

Basically it's hard rez limitations, or much more crippling enrage timers/effects.

I'm not saying that limiting combat rez is a bad thing, just that it's a problem unique to WoW. It makes more sense to limit it to "X brez per encounter" than "X brez per (druid+lock)"; the former is consistent, while the second encourages class stacking.

After playing more, and reading more blue posts about changes made and what is to come, it seems to me that there is a completely different team working on the various mechanics in the game this expansion than last or the one before.  Maybe I am missing the overarching vision of what the devs are trying to hit - no, I know I'm missing the overarching vision.  I just don't have a clue.

I assume that I'll be happy with one of my characters, although my main (hunter) is once again my least favorite.  I have no idea where they're going with hunter, which seems completely broken, and there is zero communication from Ghostcrawler (other than to chide people for fishing for blue responses).  He's such a dick; I don't understand why they still let him talk to the community at all.  I tend not to follow blue posts anymore because I can't stand him.  He has time to play forumwarrior but doesn't have time to actually answer any of the pleas for information?

From all that I have read and heard about beta, it does seem that this will be the least finished of the expansions to date when it launches.  Blizzard will benefit from the incompetence of the rest of the MMOs out there - there simply isn't anything else to play.

tl;dr: this is my yearly rant on how I hate my hunter and Ghostcrawler but will play nonetheless.

I'm not down with all the hate on Blizzard right now, maybe I'm just not that invested anymore.  But I will say that back in '04 my hunter was the first class in an MMO that felt 'right' to me... but now, like you, it is my least favorite of my 4 toons.  I think they have focus with the class now, but it's just not a very enjoyable result for me. 

It is time for another developer to step up to the challenge, unfortunately nothing on the horizon is looking to step in.  Rifts has the closest shot and I would suggest to their team to not launch until 110% prepared. 

SWTOR  :awesome_for_real:

The only team I see putting out a better MMO than WoW right now is Blizzard.  It sucks to say that, but I just don't see anyone else having the resources and clout to release a game when it's at a reasonable state of polish anymore.  At least for a mainstream title.  

My personal hope is for some niche titles to start showing up.  I want to find the next EvE, DAoC, or Tale in the Desert done better.

I could see Valve turning out an incredibly good MMO, although it will probably arrive in 2022 if they start now.

Minecraft, the MMO

I forsee an entire city made of dicks.

Dalaran?

Oh, you mean cock palaces.

That's part of the polish. I owned Diablo 1 and 2 (and Lost Vikings and Blackthorne). Played WC2 and part of SC1 at some stage, but I wasn't a Blizzard "fan"by any means. They made games, some of which I bought and/or played. No different to EA or what have you. I did, however play EverQuest for a while.

Go from that, (or LOTRO, today) to WoW and you'll see the "polish". And maybe the Polish if you're lucky.

They're not slowing down, they've never been fast, and they've always managed to miss some shit with each major change.

(This part is not necessarily directed at you Lantyssa) A lot of the shit just emerging now as a problem has always been lurking there, and it's emerging now because the game is ridiculously fucking old to still be in active development and Blizzard has gone through three almost complete mechanics overhauls because they really would like us to not notice that we're still playing a game made in fucking 2004.


Back when arcane shot scaled off of +arcane spell damage, serpent sting scaled off of +nature damage, instant attacks clipped your auto-shot timer, and at some point top hunter DPS was achieved by main-handing a Thunderfury and running into melee range to fish for TF procs by hammering on Wing Clip and Raptor Strike.

I'm not getting the feeling this expansion will be any different than the others, at least from a perspective of "cracks showing."  It's an old game that they keep dusting off and pushing from time to time.  Really, this is what I have wanted in several games of the past, but those other developers all but stop or go completely insane with changes. 

I'm not sure what else I'd want from the game in terms of new features or more polish.  Realistically, my older computer just plain won't run WoW now after the last patch.  It does for a bit and then reboots.  It was marginal before, but something just put it right over the edge.  I've noticed a good slow down on my new computer too even after turning the water effects way down.  I mean, that's on a pretty decent new computer and this is WoW we are talking about.  It is relatively easy on hardware requirements.

I'm all for something new, but nobody has done enough to pull me away.  The last few attempts that even hinted at a chance had requirements on hardware that scared me away anyway.  Looks like WoW for a good time to come yet.

I'd like a polish pass on the original character models to bring them up to par with the goblins and worgens. Maybe housing. Otherwise I'm pretty content with the formula as is, and I actually like the mechanical reboot every few years, it keeps it fresher I think.

THAT is something that really does stand out now. The Character Models.


Really, it's the Goblins that blow everything else away, even the Worgen don't really stand up to them that well (probably because the Worgen have been remodeled 15 times already so far).


You go play a Goblin and have a full range of facial expressions and body animations, then you go play a troll that can't even blink. It's pretty damn jarring.

The easiest explanation for that is the trolls have evolved nictitating membranes to protect their eyes from smoke.

Shadows are even more brutal than the water shader as far as I can tell.

Their stance on housing is very likely the same as their stance on cosmetic items - no way, José. They brought it up during a design meeting and confirmed that nobody wants to water petunias when they could be farming cloth for rep turn-ins.

They've said multiple times that it is something they want to add but only if they can 'get it right', and I guess they haven't come up with a design they like yet. I doubt they will at this point, but you never know.

But what about farming mobs for petunias to put in your house!

Let alone the new tradeskill, "Flower Arranging."   :awesome_for_real:

I would totally do that.  :why_so_serious:

One of my favorite things about LOTRO was farming.  I'd love it if WoW patched in a retired-adventurer's Leisure World, where players could have houses and gardens.  A nearby fishing hole. 

My computer was acting really wonky with the patch until I updated my video card driver (even though I just updated it last July).  My computer is 2 years old; our other computer is about 6 years old.  Both can run WoW fine (the older one has to be set on the lowest graphical settings, but it runs it), now that the vid drivers are updated.

Isn't their new MMO in development supposed to have housing and fluff? I've been of the opinion for a while that the reason we don't see any of that in WoW is because they want to avoid competing with themselves as much as possible.

ten to one odds are their next mmo is going to be a lot more virtual world.

I'm not sure they've said anything like that about it. Given Tigole is a major part of the dev team AFAIK it would be sort of surprising for all that stuff to be in there, but you could be right.

Now entering the Plane of Furniture...

Interior Decorator Class!

*rearranges your room so you go crazy*

Shadow specced Chef lfg, GS is over 5k with epic cutlery set. Can re-spec into sous-chef if needed, pst.

The revamped houses in Neriak with the balcony-patio are p. nice.



Wait, this isn't the eq2 thread.

This thread is coming dangerously close to Circling The Drain...

Are you suggesting that the cracks are starting to show in this thread?

If Blizzard feels that housing wouldn't be popular in their game, they are truly losing it.  There are plenty of examples on the market past and present that would show them that this would be digital crack.

I'm thinking they just don't feel it is necessary to hold their position and haven't put the resources to it.

Digital Crack people.  I have my own island in the sky in Wizard's 101.  I don't play it anymore, but that is the only thing that I'd go back for....putting more rugs down and a bench by my pond.

Digital Crack.

That's exactly it. As it stands now, they will only add things to the game that are the easiest to implement for the most value added. I fully believe that Blizzard is still in the expansion stage rather than the retention stage. The fact that they are redoing all the original content and marketing at new/returning customers seems to indicate that philosophy. Creating housing would be a ton of work that I think they would only put in once they see themselves in retention mode instead of expansion mode.

I stayed subscribed to UO for almost two years after I'd stopped playing it just because I couldn't bear the thought of giving up my house.  Housing in WoW would be a huge success.

This too.  I was subbed for 7 years.  Last two was mostly about playing house builder and interior decorator after all my friends left.  Digital Crack.

I also kept up a UO subscription for years simply so I would not lose my semi-decorated tower.  Trying UO a while back for free, the game had absolutely no sticky, because my tower is gone.

UO's housing system was particularly good though. Having your house out there visible in the world where people walking by could see it and be impressed is way better than the way more modern games do it.  Sadly, there probably just isn't any way to have that kind of housing in any modern game.

I would hazard an uninformed guess that they don't really want to beef up their infrastructure that's devoted to WoW very much and housing (instanced) would likely call for beefier servers.

Weird, I have almost an opposite opinion. I'm not overly enthusiastic about Cataclysm just because I don't give a flying fuck about the bigbad of the expansion (woo, a dragon. I haven't killed enough of THOSE in the last 5 years). Arthas I remembered from WC3 and killing him was one of the main reasons I subscribed. Welp, I killed him, so now my interest overall is diminished.

The gameplay changes in Cataclysm actually make the game feel reasonably "complete" for a lack of better words. All of the weird vestigial organs left over from the 1.0 beta are finally gone (fuck you and die, weapon skills), talent trees aren't crammed to the brim with boring-ass passive talents and talents literally no one ever takes, the UI is actually 100% usable by itself for even hardcore players if need be, and mastery gives blizzard a nerf/buff knob to turn instead of having re-write how a dozen different skills work every patch.

I had a love/hate relationship with housing in SWG. I loved the fact that you could put your house out and that you could decorate it and set it up - it was all kinds of awesome. I was also lucky enough to be part of a well known guild who had a plan with regards their town and had a layout that they stuck to rigidly.  It was splendid. Other towns, not so much. But more than that, there ended up being so many houses kicking around Tatooine that it seemed less like a remote desert planet and more like fucking Coruscant. Also, harvesters: bearing in mind that I spent six months making an absolute mint from harvesting resources and power from about 40 harvesters I had inherited, I couldn't help feeling like basically every planet was being strip mined.  It lost all sense of wilderness and exploration every time you stumbled on a collection of houses or a Corellian house in the middle of Endor or something.

I think the way LOTRO has done it is less interesting in terms of creativity but it preserves the game world. The neighbourhoods themselves feel like they are a populated area (but owing to the fact that the outside of the house can be decorated, every guild house has a Balrog trophy which kind of breaks the atmosphere.)

So I half reckon that WoW won't let houses be implemented because they don't want you wondering through Silithus and finding a Dwarven hovel with a sign outside saying "Dildo Bugger's house of Five-Fingered Fun!" or Elwynn Forest razed to the ground in favour of some uber guild's condo because they know that's what will happen. Because people are dicks.

You'd instance housing, goober. Not put it out there in the normal quest zones.  :oh_i_see:

DAOC had success with this because it was also the AH area.

Why does anyone think a six year old game is remotely their main development priority?

Because it's their main source of recurring income.

And so far nobody has been as successful with their second MMO as their first.  I suppose the WoW devs might just be arrogant enough to believe that doesn't apply to them.

They would be right if Blizzard could pull off a stable, working, twitch-FPS-style MMO based in the Starcraft universe with gear, crafting, housing, and an appearance tab.

 :why_so_serious:

Was Anarchy Online more successful than Age of Conan?

Oh hey you're right. I consider myself disproved.

I'd argue that LOTRO was a lot better than any of Turbine's previous offerings.

What about NCSoft? I am not sure what their first MMO was, but surely one of their newer ones has been more successful than whatever that was.

I have it on pretty good authority that they've shipped massive quantities of staff and resources to the next MMO which Tigole got shifted to post-WLK launch. Even barring that handwavey, trust me please declaration there are any number of signs that they're operating with a smaller team and budget than they were in the salad days. I suppose I should reword my question, since "second games aren't as good" and "it's their main source of income" don't prove anything. Why do you think Blizzard is immune to the hubris inflicting every single MMO studio ever created?

If I had to hazard a guess I would guess that AO had better market share at its peak than AoC has had. I'm sure AoC has better raw numbers, but the market is completely different now. Kind of like comparing Greg Maddux and Christy Mathewson, you have to adjust for park factors, length of season, the dead ball era etc. ;)

Who pissed in your Weetos?

I don't see why making a second MMO, for any company, is a sign of "hubris." Yes, the second MMO tends to make people slap their foreheads and wonder if they learned ANYTHING AT ALL from making the first one, but I don't think it's crazy megalomania to want to try making a second one after the first has been successful.

I think that's fair. But I think it would be fairly hubristic to take 2/3 (or whatever) of your live team on WoW and put it on an untried property, essentially sticking WoW on the path to retention only mode. Especially when you have the hiring power of a small country.

Well, I also don't think it's crazy to think, "We want to make a new MMO" and then think "And I'd rather the people who made our first MMO, with all the experience they've gained doing that, and their familiarity with what we feel worked and what didn't were the ones to do it." I know people enjoy wringing their hands and doomcasting, but I really haven't seen much in this patch or this expansion that screams to me that the new people are hugely worse than the old people. Shit, they've done stuff that I'm pretty sure the old people would've never done, and the game will be better for it.

It's smarter to just keep rolling with your one product and never look towards the future when it gets old?

Everyone makes a product, puts it into update mode with a smaller staff and starts working on something new. To not do that is pretty much declaring you suck at running a company.

What you want to avoid is killing your existing product too early by leaving a shitty support staff.

If Blizzard didn't give some of those artists and designers something new and different to work on instead of WoW, you can be damn sure a lot of them would have jumped ship by now and gone somewhere else to scratch their creative itch.

God forbid they lose the armor artist...

Blizzard can take 2/3rds of their WoW development staff off onto another project and still leave a team many times larger than any other MMO has on it.

Makes sense for them to accept that WoW can't remain top dog forever, that at some point they will inevitably go into retention mode and that they would be best served by already having the replacement well into development. Even if that's 5-10 years from now, which is, let's be honest, the usual Blizzard dev cycle.

Cataclysm is far too ambitious a concept to be the sign of a company that's resting on their laurels aka moneybeds.

Are they probably using their A-team on the new MMO? Sure. But the B-team could have easily slapped on another continent, added 61 point talents, thrown bandaids over the resulting gaping holes, dealt with the bitching and called it a day. We'll see how well they pull it off, but they aren't treading water, and as a result people are a lot more excited for a 6 year old game than they otherwise would be.

I can't imagine anyone who's played for 6 years straight isn't a little tired of WoW and just burned out from the number of hours they've logged, but for someone like me who plays 3 months a year, which is probably the majority of the playerbase, I'll buy the expansion and have fun with it.

Never having played UO, what was it about their housing system that made it so much better than anyone else's?

How did UO avoid having slums sprout up everywhere?

I did play DAOC, (housing was instanced), but it always felt slapped on to me, and I never really got that into the decorating aspect because, even with decorating, all the houses looked mostly the same. 

I would love housing in WoW if it was part of the world, and not apart from the world. 

I think the best thing about it is that UO housing was as you say "part of the world."  If you were lucky enough to get a prime spot and had a little talent you could do some really impressive things with a customized house.


It didn't unfortunately.


I just don't see it happening with any modern game. The best you could probably get would be a zone dedicated entirely to player housing and it's just not the same.  In UO I had a villa across the road from the Yew cemetery and there was a constant stream of people coming by to fight skeletons. If they let you do something like that in WoW the Barrens would instantly turn into an overcrowded slum with wall to wall houses.

I always thought that Asheron's Call did a really good job of implimenting player housing.   They had "housing for the unwashed masses" in the form of instanced "appartment complexes" so that even the lowest of the low could get at least a room to call their own, but they also had outdoor housing, in the form of little communities that were sprinled across the map where you could get a one or two story house with 3 or 5 rooms if you were decently well off, or shoot for one of the larger houses (usually only 2 or 3 in a "community").   And then they had huge sprawling mansions for guilds to use, tucked away usually in pretty "way off the beaten path" places.  Of course, one major advantage AC had is that it's world was HUGE by most game standards, with a LOT of largely unused empty space / virgin wilderness everywhere that could easily be developed into small, scattered housing districts.

The major problem i see with doing housing in WoW is that the game world, for the most part, is simply not designed around the idea of letting players place houses, or even for the devs to really plop down little gated communities for people to buy space in.  Take nearly any random spot in the game world large enough to accomidate a player house or small community (barring a few zones like the Barrens), and there is usualy already something important there, or within spitting distance of there, that would just make the house / community seem out of place.

They've openly stated they don't want their housing to 1) clog the landscape and 2) replace the capital cities as the central social points. Most other games with housing have failed at one or the other of those (UO and DAOC being the iconic examples of each, respectively.)

LotRO didn't kill Bree as a gathering place with its housing, but the houses are almost purely cosmetic there, and it being Blizzard we're talking about here I think they probably want actual systems attached to their housing. They're not big on putting something in just for looks past really simple stuff like pets.

Put me down as another huge fan of AC's approach. Their system only really worked because while the real houses were very rare, it was a constant grind to keep housing up. I can't remember what the thingies were, but you needed some item to pay the rent and if you didn't pay, you lost your house. I was part of a fairly large size guild with a mansion and I remember them needing to organize in the last week of the month so they didn't lose it. It wasn't just a formality.

The other issue of course is WoW zones are so heavily designed for quest flow and such that there just aren't a lot of 'dead space' areas that might be appropriate to toss some housing into - especially with Cataclysm taking a hammer to underutilized spaces like Azshara.

What happened to your house in UO when you unsubbed?

After a number of days it went bye bye.  I believe it was refreshed by you opening the front door if I remember right.  You could actually lose your house while you are subbed if you didn't log in and "refresh" it.

The reason you won't see housing like that anymore (among the other reasons stated,) is the huge amount of lag it created.  UO's biggest problem from beginning until, well, now probably is the amount of items in the "world."  When you got around heavily populated areas, you came to a crawl.

Given that, I'd much rather they put resources towards a good smooth lag-free experience than cut back just so houses can clutter the landscape.  That's why I'm perfectly fine with solutions like FFXI's or Wizard 101's or even the guild compound system Guild War's has/had.  Housing just plain needs to be instanced or you run into the problems of the past.

What about some kind of middle ground where players can place the physical house, but walking in takes you through a loading screen.  This would hypothetically allow you to have communities sprout up, but cut way down on the number of items sitting around in one place..

So, SWG?

The main problem is sprawl.  If there aren't pre-defined lots then people will build everywhere.  If there are pre-defined lots, then guilds and friends get upset when they can't move in close to one another.

Travel and world-size have huge effects on this, too.  Housing needs to be easy to reach.  You need enough space to accommodate players.  People want their own unique place, but instanced housing solves a lot of issues.

Clearly the solution is more lighthouses along the coast of Westfall. Lighthouses for everyone!

I don't really have a huge problem with instanced housing to begin with, I'm just trying to think up alternative methods.  As a really good example, I enjoyed the hell out of LOTRO housing.  Instanced neighborhoods, so you could often get into the neighborhood where your guild had the guild house, and even if you couldn't its real easy to zone over to it. 

I'm curious how Horizon's towns would have worked out, had it been a good game.

My ideal system is a bunch of easy to reach hubs, which is where towns spring up around, with a lot of empty space between and maybe a few hidden lots out in the middle of nowhere.  But then I love huge open world designs.  I just think there needs to be some convenience factor in there as well.

Malakili:  That's an interesting idea, but there would still have to be some control over it.  Just by even having the "item" of a visible house and portal might be enough when multiplied by 10k to be an issue with connection stability for many. 

Perhaps you have designated "housing" in different areas throughout the world.  Each one is represented by some type of graphical representation of a "village."  To start, it looks like a very small gathering of maybe 3 houses.  As soon as you step into the area, you are instanced to the "village."  There will then be a large area with a few houses to visit.

As the "village" is populated more, the outer world graphic of it will grow to look more impressive, etc.  When you zone into it, the area is the same size, but with obviously more houses/structures.

Another benefit to this could be that a "village" could work together to get improvements to their graphic of their town.  I'm thinking moats, walls of different materials, flags, etc.  All of it would be fluff, but that's really all we are talking about here.  Those items would change the instance for the "village" too, so people can build pride into their accomplishments as a community.

So with that idea, there would just be maybe 6 "villages" for each faction in different areas.  That wouldn't clutter anything up but could give people a feeling of space yet an easy way to reach their "village" and home/guild.  If the 6 areas fill up, Blizzard can implement more.  Make sure there is a UO like rule of only keeping structures that are actually used regularly too.  That keeps the number down significantly over time.

Damn it!  You guys got me talking about it again and I want it again.  I'm going back to dreary reality now.  Thanks...

That's a cool idea Dren - especially like the idea of the outer village getting large as more folks build houses/improve houses in the inner village.  Would be neat if they implemented CoX's "door" technology in the outer village that would allow you to zone into different parts of the inner village.

To prevent arguments you'd probably have to lock the theme of the outer village, and have the upgrades be solely based upon the number and quality of houses within the inner village (your idea having the village residents work together is much nicer in a fairytale land where anonymous strangers where able to get along).  Even then you'd have people bitching at residents to upgrade their shit.

Well, when I said work together I was thinking more along the lines of what you wrote.  It would be more of an automatic thing where as the residents build and make their own structures better the town improves as well.  Maybe you lolore it as "The residents of this town are more prosperous, so they are taxed higher, so there are better improvements to the city as a whole."

Actually, a tax system might be exactly what is needed.  It would handle the improvement idea as well as the "keep your house refreshed" idea.  If you stop paying your taxes, your house goes away.  If you build a larger structure with more and more neat things, your tax increases, which, in turn, improves the town that much more, etc.  Wood fence turns into a stone wall which turns into a brick wall, etc...  (The Artists can have a field day with this kind of thing.)

Hey and then HOAs could form and kick people out if they don't pay their 10g fee or keep their virtual lawn clipped. :grin:

The debacle that has been Wintergrasp over the course of this expansion qualifies as a misstep in my book. It's gone from a massive uncontrolled world PVP event to, on a lot of servers, a 5v5 battleground where 90% of the players wishing to participate are locked out because they're all in the same faction. Sure that may have been totally predictable, but at least Blizzard got all that sweet faction/server transfer cash, right?

Where the misstep becomes a crack in the armor is where they carry this model right into Cataclysm with Tol Barad and such. Either they're content to have a lot of people locked out of ever taking part in it, or they're content to have a lot of people locked out of taking part in it until they finally break down and cough up some more delicious transfer money just for this.

If SOE did this, people would either be laughing or shitting blood, depending on whether they played or not.

Was this not everyone's experience?

World pvp doesn't work because there's no such thing as a fair war in games or life.

Blizzard has NEVER gotten PvP right in WoW, not that this is an excuse, but it is hardly news.

*grumble* could start by trying to game match by average ilevel of gear, and having an internal timer say "fuck it, not enough" and mismatch to keep the timers from going nuts.

That's pretty much how it works now, give or take. In the long run people prefer faster queues to aggressively balanced matches.

http://www.masterofwarcraft.net/2010/06/world-of-warcraft-trip-down-memory-lane.html

I found this nostalgic.

He was flat out wrong on some stuff.

But there were some good old 'fun' things in there like dying if you didn't pop up from Feign Death after 6 minutes.

He also totally missed the biggest thing they fixed pretty quickly: Raid instance portals were all inside of normal instances. (MC was in BRD, BWL was going to be in UBRS, Naxx through Strath dead)

All of those still exist and you can travel through them except the one in Strath undead side (blocked by a gate).

But yeah, I remember alot of those various aspects of the game at release and looking back how many of them were... "interesting" to say the least.

That's what that portal at the end of UD Strath goes to? Never knew that.

It's mentioned a couple of times in the quests\lore if you read it.  I think the reason they changed it was because of the attunement requirements for Naxx...

Actually, the reason they put the weird teleport thing outside was the 5 man cap on Stratholme. You can't run a 40 man raid through an instance with only a 5 person cap.

I think the one to BWL was turned off as well.

The original change to the whole mechanic was when they added the lava-dive after MC attunement (which you actually didn't need to enter MC through BRD, just to use the lava portal) which saved about a half hour of clearing/running through BRD. Imagine wiping and having to corpse run to BRD, and then run all the way to the MC portal after a wipe O.o

Pretty sure the Naxx portal inside Strath never actually went "live". It was there, and everyone pretty much knew where it was supposed to go, they just never turned it on, because Naxx launched with the outside portal pavillion already in place.

As to MC, there was never a time where you would have had to corpse run all the way through BRD to get to MC if you wiped, becaue the Attunement went in roughly the same time as the "Tagging a raid boss puts the entire instance in combat" mechanic went in.  Before that, you never "full wiped" because there was always at least one OOC rezzer standing by to rez people who died, and after it, you had enough people attuned that those who weren't just waited for a rez or a summon.

The portal at the end of the canals in Stormwind remains unexplained though.

Isnt that the place that is believed to be the "stormwind housing district" which started all the speculation that WoW was going to eventually have player housing?  It has been around since vanilla I believe, and nothing was ever done with it.

That nostalgia site showed a pic of an attempt at player housing from back in alpha/beta (?) - I think that's where the rumour came from.

There's nothing behind there to indicate what it was meant to be.

I sort of forget that all of that was never experienced by most players.  It even feels recent enough to me that its not even really "nostalgic"  I think I'm getting old.

I think what makes me feel especially old is that that "list" makes little clear distinction between funky things that happened in early alpha and funky things that happened throughout ALL of vanilla WoW, as though both are effectively so ancient as to never have really happened to anyone currently playing.

Example of two adjacent comments:

Spell schools used to have a skill system similar to todays weapon skills. "Your skill in Fire has increased to 93" (Ah, what a silly little pre-release feature)
Wands couldn't auto-shoot so you had to click it each time you wanted to hit. (Ah, what a silly little... wait, no, this pissed me off for what feels like years, and I still remember the uproar from hunters who wanted to be the only ones with "auto-shot.")

The outside pavilion was put in place because they had already made Stratholme 5 man max.

As to the "never full wipe" yeah, there was NEVER possibly a chance that a raid wiped on trash, like the stupid imp cave, or a fearing core hound respawning in the middle of their raid or anything. Just because you COULD ooc rez doesn't mean everyone always had one in every possible case.  :oh_i_see:

Just poking my head in to comment on a few things re: housing.  I can't believe WoW still hasn't implemented something like this for players yet, but then again, I think I play EQ2 just for the housing sometimes.  It's not the most exciting implementation of housing ever, I'm sure, but the devs have been fairly consistent with adding some improvements (e.g. - the added outdoors ares to certain housing in the main cities mentioned upthread).  There is a huge interest in decorating to the point that people will pay large amounts of ingame plat to have a good decorator come to their server if need be just to decorate.  As Dren says - digital crack, all the way.  

On the flip side, adding guild halls pretty much made the main cities even bigger ghost towns than they were previously.  If WoW devs are concerned about that aspect of housing, they have a reason.  Not that the EQ2 cities were hubs are random folks chatting all the time, but right now there is no reason to goto any main city if your guild is large enough to have the amenities.  However, I can still recall the sheer amount of chatspam in Ironforge when I played.  There were tons of people all just standing around creating lag and talking in city chat - it never felt like  a city, more like an uncoordinated mob to me.

I miss the AC way of doing housing, especially when new houses were added and the game was to find out where they were placed without getting killed (I was on DT) and managing to save a community if you and a bunch of friends wanted to live near each other.  Housing was kind of hidden out in the wilds sometimes, near great hunting spots or convenient cities (better before they changed the buy/sell rates of loot in the cities to be the same), or just away from everything else in a pretty location.  You had to actually work to pay for housing upkeep and not just dump rent into the system for X amount of time and go on your way (I can currently pre-pay my EQ2 rents for like 12 weeks at a time now).

Blarg, sorry, this got long and probably really off-topic.  Sorry.

Hell, that's what the game looked like when I played it.  I suppose female trolls look different now. :oh_i_see:

Dey be hawt, mon!  (As long as you pick the one good face.)

The short time when Forsaken were undead was amazing. I spent an entire session just sitting at the bottom of a lake ganking anyone who went swimming.

Also polymorph drowning, which I guess isn't possible anymore?

Not with diminishing returns on CC

It takes a lot longer to drown now, too.

The best part about Polymorph drowning was that Sheep sank like rocks.  So if you managed to find someone floating in deep water, they were usually screwed, because all it took was one polymorph to send them right to the bottom.

Well, wet wool is heavy!

You people and your non-druid classes!

Lest we forget Baroness Anastari and her lovely mind control/teleport: Moonglade for druids.

That was pretty awesome yea.

The newness over-rode any of the bad UI designs or broken game mechanics that a lot of people look back and complain about now. I miss IF being too big, lagging into the crevice in the center and taking 5 minutes to get out.

Did you down Hogger yet? I got this sweet ass green mace from him. Totally want to replace it with the blue one that drops in Dead Mines though.

I HATE that face. She doesn't look hot, she looks stoned, and not in a haha trolls am i rite way.

I always pick one of the angry faces and feel annoyed my tusks can't be bigger.  :heartbreak:

Tusk envy.

It's totally true!

So they seem to have lifted the level cap on raising secondary skills, which is sweet during this Thanksgiving holiday, my level 8 hunter already has a 300-ish cooking skill.  :drillf:  I haven't checked if they did the same to regular professions yet, I'm on a laptop right now and I hate playing on one of these damn things.

Discussed already, doesn't add any useful game-play, does detract from shared social districts -> not implemented. And I tend to agree with that call.

Or to put it another way, the "I must have housing or I won't play your game" market is just too small for them to care about, otherwise its just a bunch of people saying "that'd be nice, but I'll play anyway."

"Detracts from shared social districts."

What a joke. Let people shit up Trade chat from their houses, place a bunch of NPC characters wearing the latest raid tier around the current hub city to lag the hell out of it, and who would even know the difference?

Lol. For some reason that cracked me up way too hard. I kept picturing some obvious forgery, like Lord Marrowgar or some shit, standing around Org in crummy shoulder pads.

Maybe this has been covered and I missed it, but I found a crack that I'm amazed isn't being dealt with quicker.

Strand of the Ancients:
1.  Currently the Hangar doesn't work.  You can capture it, but if you use the portal you either get dropped from the sky out in the middle of the zone and die OR you just don't go anywhere.  What happens is that there is ALWAYS somebody in the raid that will go capture the Hangar.  Multiple people will die trying to use it.  Then, if the other side is smart, they don't go recapture it because now anyone dieing in that area will rez at the hangar, which is a huge waste of travel time to get back into battle.  In my experience, Alliance is always the one taking the Hangar even though 1/2 the raid tells them not to at the beginning.

2.  For Alliance, when you knock down the Horde gates, they are replaced by a huge bright pink block that does not allow you to pass through it.  At all.  The Alliance keep does not have this issue, so Horde can use whatever method they need to knock down the gates and storm the castle.  Alliance has only one option once a gate is down to end the game.  They have to take the docks and use catapults to get over the walls.  There ONLY other option is to prevent Horde from getting the gate down and outkilling them character by character for the long drawn out win.

I put a ticket in the other day after weeks of going through this just to see what they say.  I cancelled my ticket after 3 days of sitting there.  Then I got mail 2 days after that explaining that they are aware of the issue and working on it.

My issue is that with a problem as big as this, take it down completely.  It is so one-sided that all it is a farming opportunity for Horde.  When I join the Random BG queue, many times I get this POS and lately I just /afk out and go to another character for another shot.  In my mind, this is the biggest "in your face" bug that I've seen for WoW yet.  Plus, they are just taking the stance that, "Yeah it sucks, but deal with it noob!"

Maybe the ticket sat there for so long because they were confused by you telling them there was a hanger in Strand of the Ancients?  :why_so_serious:

That is one thing that I have always wondered about.  I realise that WoW is probably billions and billions of lines of code, but how exactly do they manage to (quite often at that) fuck something up durring a major patch that from everything we can see, should never even have been touched by whatever it was they were changing in the codebase?  How do you get code taint that bad?

I mean, I remember once when they patched something in Burning Crusade, and for about 3 weeks after, Neffarian in Blackwing Lair was broken because he suddenly gave the ENTIRE raid Rage Bars i he did a Warrior Class call?!!?  How do you fuck something like that up?

So this is bugging the shit out of me, more than it probably should considering shit like the Strand of the Ancients bullshit above, but I have run into stupid grammar mistakes several times in my quest text and it's pissing me off. Mostly because the latest one I noticed was someone saying "could of."  :mob:

Pshaw.  It's not like anyone reads quest text.

I don't think I've seen any bad quest text myself but a guildmember was in desolcase that got a quest called "breadcrumb" and said "I'm just a small placeholder but one day I hope to grow up into a full fledged breadcrumb: to feralas!"

you did that on 'purprose'!

Yeah, Fordel saw a roadsign that said something along the lines of EXPLORER'S LEAGUE QUEST HUB --->

You mean the problem that programmers have spent hundreds of hours developing a plethora of SVN tools to solve?

Or is you misspelling Nef's name meant to be a subtle commentary on how easy it is to fuck things up in OO programming?

Eh, I have always referred to him in the short form of Neff with an extra F.  It just carrys over whenever I try to spell his full name.

Still no draw for me yet until they let me level my 80 or make a goblin. One more week!

Oh DOH!  I meant Isle of Conquest....I always get those two confused.

For me, that's been nearly literally true since BC. I would much rather alt-tab out and look it up on wowhead than read the quest text even once.

Wowhead.  Feh.  It's all about Carbonite, or Quest Helper. No alt tabbing, no reading.  Just follow the arrow.  :awesome_for_real:

Wowhead is for looking up how best to get achievements.

Only Addon dependent newbs use either for quest content.  The default UI does a bangup job of actually showing you where mobs spawn (all locations) and includes the "run here" arrow these days.

I saw a small typo in a new quest the other day. In Duskwood. In the new Worgen quest hub near the cemetary across from Westfall.


I think it was a missing letter. I thought "this is th end of the universe". Then got on with my life.

You could do both! Race/faction swap!



Have they been updated for 4.whatever? I'm enjoying the NewOld World, but when I get back to BC, I just want to tear through it ASAP.
I liked the TomTom combo with the other quest helper addon (forgot the name). I could mark all three of the "go here, kill that" locations then do them in my own order, rather than follow their order. Also good for getting info about stuff that's unclear from the quest text.

The day Blizz integrated their own quest tracker was a real treat.

I use an addon called Lightheaded that pulls in the quest comments from WoWhead. I tried Carbonite but I don't like how it makes my minimap look shitty and really the Wowhead comments are all anyone could possibly need to complete the quests.

Wowhead seems to be very out of whack currently - I keep finding lots of old quests listed that no longer exist and placeholder quests that were in Beta.  Going to give it a couple of weeks to get their database sorted out.

In other news, I got some bizarre whispers on one of my newbie alts last night while doing some of the Troll starter quests. First thing I thought was "Wow! That's really meta and very clever." I figured it was another character like Zuni, Dumass or Johnny Awesome who just whispered random things to you.

Then I realized it was actually another player.  :facepalm:

I go the next step and use wow-pro's add on. It's basically questhelper with a set of pre-made optimized levelling guides built in--primarily Jame's. Unfortunately, not yet updated for the new zones.

If WoW is such a great game, why are people in such a hurry to blow through the content?  I can see using a guide on the third or fourth time leveling an alt, but what's the point of rushing to the end game unless you really just don't enjoy the game itself?  

We'll I'd say that most people here are probably on their nth alt by this stage.

That said, the new levelling experience is seriously tempting me to do 1-80 again with something new, and take the time to enjoy the ride.

Because people don't play MMORPGs because they are fun, they play MMORPGs because there is constant positive reinforcement.  Guides just help that positive reinforcement come faster or at shorter intervals.

If you go on holiday to a city you've never been to before, do you buy a guide book and a map and ask people who have been before if they've got any tips or suggestions of things to do or even avoid?  Or do you go blind and wonder around in case you see something interesting (but also run the risk of missing all the good stuff and only seeing the bad stuff?)

I used Jame's guides to level a lot from way back before TBC came out because
a) I was prepared for some quests by already having a Gynochromawotsit so wouldn't get fucked off by flying all the way back to UC to get one
b) it introduced me to quest areas I'd previously missed (like the boat in Faldir's Cove in Arathi)
c) stopped me getting pissed off by trying the tediously long winded quest chains which had you crossing continents like an asshole.

That shit wasn't fun. Using a guide meant I could do the fun things and feel like I was making progress.

They're less necessary now because the quest hubs are signposted, the flow is far better and most quest chains are contained in the same zone. That was noticeable from TBC onwards - it's like the quest designers looked at the quest guides and said "You know what? This is how we should do it!"

#1. Becuase there are levels besides Great and Awful. It's not a binary issue.
#2. Some people are ambivalent about the leveling game, but like the endgame.
#3. Some people like to optimize their questing. Speed running the content is their metagame.

I'm sure there are other reasons.

I don't get it, either Nebu.  I'll turn to a guide if I'm stuck, but I like to actually explore the world I'm in.  In any game.

A city in WoW is like a block in real life.  I've got the equivalent of the entire realms of five WoW's between work and home alone.  That's a terrible analogy.

Here's a stab at why I might rush through quests and/or use a guide:

1) Quest as they are built right now are essentially reading a story and getting a reward (note that I haven't done any of the new quests).  There is no variability in the quest execution, there is no variability in reward.  If I care enough about the story, I want to get to the end of the story quickly - while I still care about the story.  If I only care about the reward, I want to rush through everything as quickly as possible.

1.1) The quest mechanics in MMOs are all pretty much the same.  Other than comedy value, they really offer nothing new.  It's hard to give a rats ass about someone dying when he/she/it will just respawn for the next person to ride the ride.  If there is no chance of loss, how can there be any pathos?  We're left with comedy and loot.  The Perilous Adventures of Mr Floppy I thought was one of their better quests - it was funny, and the joke didn't involve reading quest text but actually occurred via scripting.  If they added easter egg elements to quests that reward taking your time, maybe more people would take their time.  Current tech and/or implementation doesn't seem to support that.

2) Combat is completely disconnected from the quest story.  It doesn't add to story tension.  Failure or success do not alter the story (because you just restart if you fail).  That said, I find the combat, while not challenging, amusing enough in and of itself to be entertaining (for awhile).  The quests offer a directed way to do that (rather than just grinding), regardless of whether I find the quests amusing or not.  In this sense, Malakili is correct, I will optimize my experience + loot game while doing something I find entertaining (combat) just because I'm built that way, rather than it being something I find fun in and of itself.

3) Grouping with friends.  Taking the time to read quest text slows everything down.  Hunting around for a glowy slows everything down.  Grouping with friends while doing quests takes on an easter-egg-hunt type of feel - it's fun because you are cooperatively competing with each other.  Reading quest text slows that down.

edit: fixed crappy sentences
edit 2: tried to make sentences make sense

1) Obvious answer is obvious.

2) The endgame is a leveling game.  Just of a different variety.

3) If that's your metagame, then why rely on the optimization of another person?  

I'm sure there are reasons as well.  That we can agree on.

It was really meant to be more of a rhetorical question.  I guess I have to be careful about stepping on toes considering the huge fanbase that WoW has.  I figured the "cracks starting to show" thread would be an appropriate place to express my lack of enthusiasm for WoW.  After 10+ years of playing MMO's I'm starting to appreciate Schild's assertion that MMO's just aren't very good as games go.

Agreed with Nebu and Lantyssa; to each his own, sure, but I always want to feel immersed in the world I'm playing in (but yes, I'm mainly a roleplayer, so I'm biased)...Not reading quest and just rushing seems like an awful "mechanical" thing that has nothing to do with gaming.

I disagree, but I'm not going to jump on your wagon of "play like us or your wrong."  If you don't want to use an add-on, don't.  Those that do aren't doing any less "gaming" than you.  You are equating the RP aspects of the game as the entire game and it quite obviously is not.

Hehe, no no no,anyone can play as they wish; like others, it was mostly a rhetorical observation. I guess WoW also succeeded because it's a "nexus" of lots of playing styles.

I'm just not sure why quest helpers are even relevant considering how the game has now changed. I'm pretty sure you could level to 80 now and never read a single bit of quest text, everything is on your map. Hell I even noticed some quests don't even bother telling you where to go beyond maybe a cardinal direction or "over there by the mountain" it's all on your map now by default.

I don't care how other people "play".  I'm just wondering where we draw the line between "playing" and some Pavlovian response.  To me the addition of a quest guide is along the lines of "Follow the arrow to the X and we'll give you a treat".  If that's fun for people, great.  They'll have a plethora of gaming options available.  It just seems like a veiled attempt to turn the "game" into an exercise that a 3 year old can do. 

You really should at least once, I think. There are a lot of really fun new quests.

I find the default quest helper stuff is more than sufficient, and it never stopped me from reading the text and such, but also never felt like it was overly holding my hand (I think the sparkly quest clickies break more than the arrow saying "this way, you moron," if we're complaining, which we are!). There's been plenty of quests I've done so far where merely knowing where to go is not a gigantic help. I had some quests that had puzzles! Not hard puzzles, I totally overthought one in fact, but merely knowing OVER HERE, GO OVER HERE AND CLICK THIS didn't solve the quest for me.

Another thing that I'm liking is they sort of know there's a lot of people that don't read the quest text, so they're doing a lot more showing than telling as far as quest payoff goes. As someone who DOES read quest text, it's still a great step because seeing your result rather than just being assured there was one in your text is always going to feel better. The quest text generally seems more like a "if you want a little more detail, read this" thing.

Even if you were a person who used guides/quest helper mods before there's really no reason to do it now. The time optimization part is more or less 'built in' now as each zone has a fairly ordered storyline.

I wasn't talking about cities in WoW so I don't know what you're getting at. My analogy was comparing using a guide to go sight see a city to using a guide to level in WoW. It doesn't have to be a city - it could be a museum. Or a theme park - which might be a more apt.

On the other hand, and where I do side with you and Nebu, is that I don't try to rush past content. I just don't do exploring very well and get really fucking bored very quickly if I feel that I'm wandering about aimlessly and failing to find something to do.  Apart from the odd occasion when my plan is to wander about aimlessly and just see what's there.

Is it my turn to say "Obvious answer is obvious"?  :grin:

/McMahon

You are correct, sir.

/McMahon

I'm probably skewed due to running those quests over and over just to get other classes to highest level.  I certainly had fun the first time through where you had vague directions, etc.  I wouldn't still be playing if I didn't.  After one time through, the quests were just something I had to do to get to where I wanted to go.  So yes, it was a Pavlovian response at that point.  However, the quests weren't the "gaming" I wanted anymore.  It is now Raid content and PvP.

All that said, I do plan to run a new Worgen or Goblin from scratch at some point.  I'll have all the help we are talking about, but I won't be in any rush.  I'll be doing it for the fun of experiencing the new content rather than trying to get yet another 80.  I'll probably go to a totally different server and switch to horde too.....maybe even a PvP server.  I'm ready to do this for a completely different perspective.

That's the one! Lightheaded + TomTom used to be  :heart:

Malakili is at least partially right. The constant positive reinforcement (hello, fellow Skinner rats!) make me want to do dungeons where the exp is fast and the dings and new abilities and talents come quickly. At the same time, I've really enjoyed doing the new quests.

With the quests though, I enjoy looking at the (new) scenery as I go through and reading the quest dialogue (yeah, I actually read it), but I don't enjoy the part where I have to search for 10mins to find the NPC I need to kill or the button I need to press. I didn't use that stuff back in the Vanilla days, beng an EQ vet, I'd alt-tab to Allakhazam. In TBC I started using the addons, and did for much of it, and with LK, I really didn't play for that much of it's time, and when I came back recently, the UI had changed quite a lot.

When I took my Pally through the 60s in TBC recently, though, I honeslty just wanted to get him the fuck through it and to Northrend ASAP. My wife and I have 80s, so when I get around to levelling my Pally and Rogue through WotLK, it'll probably be with that mentality in mind again. And the same again, I'm sure when my alts that are going through the rejigged content now get to TBC/LK.

Because I'm doing dungeons (and enjoying them) with my insta-queue warrior alt, I'm outlevelling many of the zones I'd have liked to play through, but then again, I'll get a chance to do many of them with the other alts, later, and when we take our max-level mains through them for fun.

These days I'm older and grumpier and probably less patient with the timesink of looking around for 10 minutes to find something as I used to do back in the days of EverQuest. Now that I'm a growed-up big boy with a career, wife, etc I have less time for mechanics and quest types that I class as a fucking waste of time (see LotRO) than I used to put up with well enough in the past as a young unemployed person or University student.

This plays into it.  Repetition plays into it (oh, another 'guess where it's hidden!', er, quest). 

But at a fundamental level it's down to what floats your boat.  Nebu seems like he enjoys solving the puzzles that the devs create and so he cannot understand why anyone would by-pass that (and when a game has too-predictable puzzles, you quit).  It's probably really hard for someone who gets some level of satisfaction out of solving those types of puzzles to understand folks that get their satisfaction elsewhere.  I have never had any fun at all playing "guess what I'm thinking" or "where's Waldo" in these games, in fact I find them annoying.

I can relate to both sides of it really.  I used to be relentless with my desire for progression that I didn't really care if I used quest helper or anything else, it was all about using any tool just to keep reaching the next goal, the next level, the next item upgrade etc.

At some point I hit a huge fucking wall and I haven't really enjoyed an RPG since, whether it be an MMORPG or not.  Using the guides or not I feel like every RPG (and most single player games in general I should add) I play lately are just glorified laundry lists of tasks to complete, and I frankly don't give a shit to run down the list checking them off anymore.


Edit to add:
Somewhat ironically, a game like Portal or Half Life 2 where the player has no choice at all what to do seems less offensive to me in this regard.  You just keep forging ahead and eventually beat the game.  RPGs like to tout all the choice you have, but the reality is ..well like I described above.

I enjoy how getting new abilities modifies your options during combat.  That is why I enjoy leveling.  I'm also not immune to the lure of phat loot.  But primarily, I like the combat.  If the network and technology supported having you characters be controlled like they were in a console's fighting game, I'd go to a game that pulled that off in a heartbeat.  Something like an MMO version of Demon Souls (yes, I know that technically it is an MMO).  As that isn't available, this style of combat (WoW, GW) is the current high water mark.

I agree with what you have said in other threads (or maybe I read into what you said) - I have no love of traditional stories told through a game (single or multi player).  Party because the writing is frequently weak, but mostly because the implementation results in the story telling being detrimental to the action (and vice versa).  Whatever the reason, the effort that it takes to read and solve the quests too often just isn't rewarded with a good story (or, a good story is ruined by the frequent breaks due to action).  Which is why I'll get out of the habit of reading quest text.  Which is why I'll use wikis to get past quests.

All that said, I'll be leveling a worgen after the 7th and I'll be giving the quests another chance.  I'm very willing to be pleasantly surprised.

You mean like Vindictus?

I think it's because they dress it up like you have options, but when you step back you realize it's just as linear.  The draw of Portal or Half-Life is the story.

In the end, Nebu enjoys trying to find Mankrik's wife. I don't. That's why I used tomtom+lightheaded+questhelper. Though, that was for my 2nd, 3rd, 4th characters. When I did my first runthrough at launch, none of it existed.

Apperantly I'm the only one that thinks that the dumbing of society is becoming evident in games as well.  People are even too lazy to read (and write using WHOLE FUCKING WORDS). I guess that's the curse of being an educator.

I'm not talking about guide use for the nth time through content, by the way.  I'm describing the avoidance of core 1-80 gameplay (namely questing) due to sheer laziness.

Oh, I just figure that angle was just assumed. 

I think the laziness thing is misplaced though, there are people who put in serious time and effort to plow through the content.  I think its less laziness and more wanting to skip boring shit.  It has less to do with reading (they are reading the guide after all) and more to do with the fact that realistically no one gives a shit WHY the town needs you to go kill 20 bears and bring back their asses.  Its not the amount of words per se, but the fact that the majority of the words are actually irrelevant to what they actually care about, namely the objective, where to go, what to kill, etc. 

Goodness knows I lament the lack of reading that goes on in society in general, but I think the power leveling thing has far less to do with lack of wanting to read in and of itself, and more to do with the fact that people are just highly results oriented and not process oriented in general (which might or might not speak to your general dumbing down point, I'm undecided on that).

/raises hand

I read every word, watch every cut scene, etc., in any game the first time I'm seeing a given piece of content.

You're sounding like an old curmudgeon  :why_so_serious:.

On a serious note, I agree.  

As for the RPG situation, there are some games lately that don't necessarily feel like they are "on rails", but really only Fallout 3/New Vegas have fit that niche for me.  MMO's suffer from the following story line issues:  1.  the overall story line is too inaccessible to folks with normal time commitment availability, 2.  moronic story lines that are watered down because, "hey, it's an MMO", 3. fucking repetition, or 4.  story lines that are too broad to piece together (WoW syndrome).  I'm not sure why games can't look at how good AoC was in the Tortage portion of the game and try to do more with that style game.  

Right, everyone who doesn't enjoy leveling is clearly just too dumb and lazy to appreciate the masterfully authored experience that is each and every whack twelve foozles quest.

Dude, talking about "laziness" doesn't even make any sense in this context. It's a video game. It's not supposed to be effort.

If people do not enjoy leveling, then why are they playing a game that is all about leveling?  (Which I think brings us back to his original question about why people find it fun or is it just Pavlovian?)

I suppose it's time for Blizzard to start all new characters at 85, raid-geared, and all achievements already awarded? :headscratch:

People enjoy the ding part of leveling more than the in between dings part of leveling I think.  Why do you think every game thats released now has some kind of leveling system even when its totally unneeded.  Hell, in Black Ops, it gave me the opportunity to start over at level 1 and give up all my unlocks just so I could go 1-50 again but this time at "prestige level 1." (and you can do this a LOT of times, prestige level 2 and so forth).  Clearly people enjoy/like/get some kind of positive feeling from seeing numbers go up.

90% of the game time I play in WoW does not involve leveling. There are a lot of people out there like that.

Not leveling in an overt YOU WENT UP A LEVEL sense, maybe, but the core of it is still character progression.

My snarky response is "Because WoW has levels and makes cargo plane loads of money".  Unfortunately, I come up with the same answer when I try to think of a serious answer.

The serious answer is "because (most) people like levels." It is just sometimes hard to get them to admit it.

If people really liked levels and experience bars then Warhammer Online would have been a raging success. 

To clarify a few things.

WoW is about progression, whether it's levels or just getting a new purple item from a raid you are still playing to advance your character.

I think it's wrong to say people enjoy only the ding part of leveling. With the new content revamp and all the new quests my guildchat has been filled with "did you see X, how about when Z happens in this zone!" New content is fun for a lot of people and seeing it is a goal in and of itself.

I believe many people, mmo players specifically have confused the concept of levels and content.  We have been trained in a pavlovian way in mmo's that levels are just a way to get to the content. We often forget that leveling for the first time 'was' content but we had done it so long ago it fades from memory.  Many people sit at max level, waiting for an expansion or blowing through old stuff on alts because they want something new.

There's nothing wrong with this of course, it's what most people do in single player games.  Long gone are the days of replaying a game over and over, now people simply play a console game such as castlevania, or a single player pc game such as fallout and devour the content. once it is over they move on(taking a couple playthroughs in the case of fallout)

Though single player games all have levels and progression too, we rarely consider that people play zelda just for the ding-grats of getting the hookshot.  

That's sort of like suggesting because I like ham, I would also like to consume an entire 15 pound ham in one sitting.  :-P

Me too, first time through.  But as you go through a game and start to realize that writers haven't succeeded in making you give a shit about the story, why waste your time if you still like the other parts of the game?  I don't understand how that is laziness.

Also, I like character progression, it pleases me to buy in to the illusion that my character is getting more powerful.  It's probably why I like these games more than FPS shooters (given that the combat in FPS games tends to be more fully realized).

Because they like killing things and leveling, but still don't care why the village needs bear asses.

I'm not going to say I'm immune to the allure of ding-grats, but the most fun I've ever had in WoW, no question, was with a character that I stopped leveling at 29. I wouldn't dream of progressing him because being decked in near-BiS gear and playing BGs for no other reason than to win was just too damn enjoyable - until Blizz put an end to that.

Take that as you will.

As sort of noted above, but also particularly relevant here, I actually was totally unable to get into Zelda Twilight Princess, even though I loved the hell out of all the rest of them before.  Also, I tried playing that after I had my fall out with RPGs/single player gaming in general.  Possible relation there, but I'm not sure.  

I guess its the double whammy for me which is that I really don't care about the story any more, AND I don't care (with probably the very specific exception of ARPGs/diablo-likes just because the mass monster smashing style of those games does appeal to me from time to time) for leveling/progression either.

The remaining games I've enjoyed most over the past say...yearish, competitive multiplayer games.

Because they don't need bear asses and we all know it. It's a farce. There's no reason for me to read flavor text because it has absolutely no change to the world. Except for this catastrophic event, that same guy is sitting there asking for bear asses 5 years after I GAVE HIM SOME FUCKING BEAR ASSES! How many asses will it take to fill the void in your soul, quest-giver? A hundred? A thousand? Millions? I pity you. I really do. Because your unquenchable lust for bear asses has cost you everything you held dear.

Too true. 

I am appreciating the banter here though.  It's interesting to see the different approaches to the game. 

What I'm trying to determine is: What is the primary motivation for wanting a quest guide to just tell you where to go.  Is it because the current content is uninteresting?  Is it because players are programmed to not care about the 1-80 content and instead only care about the content at 80?  Why do players pay $15 a month to play a game and then not want to play the game?  Why not just charge people $20 for a level capped toon?

Level 80 is the game for me with little exception.

Achievements and raiding 10-mans with guildmates who I like are all that pique my interest in the game really. My interest in PvP has waned because the barrier to entry is too high for my time or patience; quests I had done my fill of (although the new world could well drag me back for one more ride). But frankly Having done 1-80 twice now (one starting in vanilla, one starting in TBC) and having a DK done 55-70 (levelling through this stuff again is dull), doing the same stuff again held zero interest to me. Endgame is where the novelty is at, and that's where I play. I'll enjoy the levelling content in Cata, just like I enjoyed my first time through Outland, and then Northrend. But running through the same zones time and again just doesn't grab me. I didn't use questhelper on either of my first two toons, but I can see why people would for any alt really.

Also, you could point the same question towards people who cheat in Single Player games. The folks using third party software to beat Starcraft II baffled me completely for example.

Different people like different stuff.  My interest goes down quite a bit at level cap.   So I try to take my time leveling, but I usually fail.

Would we care if a quest had a lasting effect on the game world? The cynical part of me says "No.". Digging deeper, I don't necessarily care about bear-ass-less village, or the crazy guy collecting bear-asses. Hell, I'm pretty much ambivalent about the Horde/Alliance situation, or how Bolivar is now the Lich King. It doesn't impact my game, and if it did, I'd probably resent it.

There was a time when I wanted MMORPGs to break out of the camp the spawn mentaility. Now I want them to break out of the questgrind mentality. It's high time for something new to drive player action. Personally, I think the next big thing is going to be giving players more freedom and responsibility in their motivations and actions. You see the beginnings of such in Eve. It's time for somebody like Blizzard to file the rough edges off that kind of thing.

I think they do want to play the game, they just define playing the game as different than you.  To them its all 100% pure meta game.  There is no "World" of warcraft, there is no "their shaman" not to say there you enjoy roleplaying, I really don't know if you do or not, but just the fact that to you the game is consistent with what is actually happening in the game world is different than how a lot of people approach I think.

Consider the following to statements "I have a level 80 shaman in WoW "  "I am a level 80 shaman in WoW"  My feeling is that you would identify with the former and the people you don't understand would identify with the latter, because to them they don't really buy into the whole thing as a package, so reading the in game quest text, or following a guide, both are just sets of text that get them toward beating the game, or beating the content, or whatever, and one set of text is a lot more efficient/better at achieving that goal.

All of that may be complete bullshit though.


I think a huge amount of this revolves around quests also.   Quests have killed RPGs for me, but more importantly, everyone realizes they are just a laundry this at this point.  As Paelos said, everyone knows they don't actually NEED bear asses.  They say they do, their is text saying they do, and their is an XP reward at the end of giving them bear asses, but thats it.  There is no actual bear ass shortage requiring attention.  Imagine that quest with no XP reward.  No one would do it.

Guild Wars 2 seems to be saying they'll offer a different approach, where the quests that get completed, or the actions you take, or however they are structuring it actually have some effect on the state of the zone. Now that would be interesting, then maybe there actually WOULD be a need for bear asses, to make leather armor for the NPC soldiers to push back the goblin hordes or something.  I'd be pretty damned interested in an MMO where bear asses were actually needed.

And that's why you're my snugglebutt.  :heart:


I'm one of those damn dirty levelers, and I don't read quest text after I've done the quest on a character (although I will reread it occassionally if it's been a while and I remember liking the quest in the first place). I also don't think the default quest guiding really ruins the experience for me. I read the text, but sometimes even then the directions aren't perfect (and sometimes I am a moron who fucks up what direction southeast is ... for some reason I go all dumbass when it isn't N, S, E or W) and it's nice to be able to open my map and say, "Oh duh, it's over there."

I also don't say "I'm a level 80 <whatever>" as often as "I have a level 80 <whatever>" because I have a lot of 80's, and I wuvvum them all.

I can't really get behind the whole QUESTS ARE TEH DEVIL thing, either. Yes, of course they're just excuses to send you somewhere to do something in order to give you experience, but so fucking what? That's all quests have EVER BEEN in basically every game ever.

For me, it's that my character is doing shit for other people. Yeah, he gets some XPs and a widget at the end, but really they could cut out the quest and just make me wait for the 5 or 10 minutes it would take do do the quest, then give me the reward for all I care. Raiding and PvP is, on some level, a bit more of me (my character) doing stuff for myself, instead of drudgework for some moron who can't figure out how to pick his own fucking flowers, or whatever.

There's been an amusing number of quests so far where my quest giver comes with me. It keeps me from getting lonely!

To me the debate seems more empirical as opposed to philosophical. The numbers on how long it takes the average player to level (in any fashion; i.e. item level, pvp ‘level’) are more important then the goal posts in the debate. I mean, if your are totally opposed to grinding, or totally inured to it, the the game ain’t for you, and they don’t care: they know how a bell curve operates.

If you are going to be reductionist then I think nebu is absolutely right, this shit is pavlonian. I mean, you ring a bell and make a dog salivate; well human brains are more complex, so it is going to require a funkier bell.  And for those that dabble in that ‘science’ it’s a question of getting the numbers right.

Put it this way: if WoW is a run through a maze for cheeze and we are mice, then they have done their homework. No one is going to want to be in the maze where you have to slam your head against the wall a thousand times just to get a crumb (Aion, WaR, what have you), but you know what? If it gave us the prize too easily, then we would be full, so to speak, and the cheeze would become devalued. Their art is knowing what pushes something past both those yard marks.

The old issue with having been through all the old world content dozens of times notwithstanding, I use Carbonite, and Quest Helper before it, to point the way to where the bear asses are.  I'm not the "Must get to 80 and raid" type, but I also don't have any interest in wandering around aimlessly, spending an hour in the totally wrong area, looking for bear asses that will never be there. It's the same frustration I have when I have to kill 20 bears just to get one bear ass to drop. 

I still read the quest text, and I still have to walk/fly/swim to wherever.  So, to me, I'm still playing the game, I'm just cutting out some unnecessary time wasted.  That said, playing a new Tauren Paladin,  I've had less need for Carbonite so far, as the quests have been much better laid out, and I'm not having to run all over hell and back.  I'm only in Azhara, though, so that might change as I level along.  They've also improved the drop rate issue for quest items, and I think loot in general, though I may just be blessed this time around.  So far I've had very few instances where I didn't get the quest drop from every mob I killed, which is nice. 

On a side note, I actually wish they'd roll back the xp boosts they added to the 1 to 60 game in the past, as I am outleveling a lot of the new content.  By the time I got done with Mulgore, the little Warchief Sez Go Here Next billboard quests were already green, and they've been that way through most of Azhara.  So, if I go back to North Barrens, I'm going through grey quests, which takes away some of the enjoyment for me.  It'a bit too much like picking on grade school kids, or something.

As someone who uses a full leveling guide, I am mainly in this for the social aspects. It took me really the end of my EQ2 career when I'd lost faith in the game designers to even get past middle level in WoW because I just don't like the solo-quest-grind game. With my current alts, I'm leveling almost entirely through instances.

Why a full quest guide rather than Questhelper (or just the new tools built into WoW)? Well, one of my main criticisms of vanilla WoW was that it used travel, often from a quest hub to a killing area multiple times, to slow advancement. A leveling guide instructs you on things like "do this quest before that one, because it opens up 2 more that kill the same mobs and they're all a good 2 minute walk each way across the Barrens so you don't want to make the trip more than once." It also screens out the quests that are ludicrously time consuming for little reward. In other words, it corrects for bad quest flow design.

Cata's been a big advance from what I've seen for a lot of what a leveling guide fixes. Through Silverpine, I never ended up going repeatedly to the same areas. And there was actually context to the quests. It was also about 10 times as fast as it was the first time I did it. Cata has also put the dungeon quests inside the dungeon, which eliminated the use for a levelling guide to say "btw you now have all the prequel quests for Dungeon X, so you should do it now." Back when that meant shouting in a zone for a group, that was pretty big.

This 100%.  I don't use quest guides because I have to get through the game ASAP, I use them because my first 2-3 times through the game the horrible quest layout and designs with all of their built in travels to far away lands for a single foozle made leveling a real pain in the ass.  Not to mention that until a few years after release, you might very well run out of quests and end having to grind to gain a level or two.  The guides spelled it all out so that I didn't waste time running around doing 1 quest at a time traveling 10 minutes each way to get there or accidentally skipping quests that opened up new quests or waste time on quests that require 8G worth of materials to craft a turn-in item that netted me 80S and some small XP bonus (Jarl in Dustwallow... looking at YOU!).

Now that Cata has mostly come out, I don't need a quest guide for the 1-60 game anymore.  I still use it for Outlands and a slight bit in Northrend, but the incredibly slow and painful process that was the 1-60 game has been fixed.

This is both funny and hits the nail on the head why the quest text just doesn't matter.  Unless the quest is funny - which I think Blizzard understands, which is why so many of the quests try to inject humor.  If you are a person that has a blind spot to the quest not mattering (in the grand scheme of things), I guess I could see how the humor might be annoying.

About the only crack this expansion is showing is that while we all knew in Wrath that Outlands was just a terrible layout/design/plot/everything, the revamp of the old world's quest design has made it even more jarring.

In Wrath leveling, going to Outlands was where your character suddenly got a lot more powerful feeling. In Cata leveling, going to Outlands is where the quests suddenly start to suck, send you all over creation at random, and generally go back to using travel as a pacing mechanic.


Also: hah, the new undead area's quest rewards are funny. Going from 1-10, I got around 8 leather belts as the only leather reward option for most of the quests.

The Cataclysm should have closed the portal to the Outlands. At some point they just need to do it. That content is unquestionably horrible.

I was hoping that they'd at least add new 60-70 content so you have the option to skip Outlands.

Outlands goes by so fast anyway.  One or two dungeons per level?  Something like that (but maybe that's on rested xp only).

Put me in the camp with people who like leveling to max_level more than I like being at max_level.  In fact, I want to find a new server where I can make alliance toons (pvp please) because even though I have one of almost everything, I want to go back through leveling each race to 60, and my slots are full where my 80s are.

I started some little hordes on Arthas but that was a mistake - horde outnumbers alliance by almost 3 to 1.  Ick.  I prefer even odds or even being in the minority.

Love love love the horde Stonetalon questlines.  Thousand Needles barge quests were quite amusing as well.  It's weird being in Strat and Scholo in the 40s.  Tried zipping through Ragefire to pick up baby greens on my 45 shadow priest and had to sit and drink all the time.  Dungeon mobs have a lot more hps now, even little elites.

Questing is far faster than instances in outlands, still. But it also further shows the "wow, outlands sucks", since they didn't put quest givers in the instances in Outlands yet. So not only do you have the bizarre "go pick up X Y and Z out of the way quests for this instance, but the instances themselves don't normally give a lot of xp (outlands heavily reduced the amount of bullshit trash in instances, barring Shattered Halls and Shadow Labs, and trash is where the XP is)

They didn't put quest givers inside instances in Northrend, either. There are a few which have always had them (UK, UP, CoS), but the old ones are still scattered about and/or hidden behind long chains.

Azshara and Northern Barrens are both 10-20 zones. You're not really meant to play through both on the same character anymore. There are 2-3ish leveling "paths" you can take on either side, which means subsequent alts after the first one could be totally different quest experiences. I think this is a big plus, not a minus.

Helps with overcrowding as well by spreading the population out. Same thing they learned in Wrath with the two identical level zones to start in so there wasn't the "release week hellfire" crapfest.

Yes, it does suck, and they will continue to make it shorter and shorter until eventually people won't have to go there. My thought is, just cut out the middle man. Put in one zone for the regular content, put all your 70-80 quests there, and close the Outland content. It's now the most ancient and useless part of your game, and the most laughably out of place in your already laughable lore.

Outlands from a lore standpoint does continue to get more and more absurd. But I think that's going to happen to all the content as a new BIG BAD OH GOD WE WILL ALL DIE event happens, but you're still being asked to fuck off to some other continent/dimension to screw around. Like, the entire Horde + Alliance theme in Wrath just doesn't mesh with the whole "Horde and Alliance are at WAR" thing going on in the rest of Azeroth.

We're doing a lot of stuff now that will probably make less sense once Deathwing is dead too. Just the nature of the medium to an extent.

Short version for me:
I like levelling. I like questing. I read the quests. (I do grey quests to have done them.). I enjoy the scenery as I move around the world.

I do not like wandering around looking for the one interactive valve in the field of pipes, or the pile of papers that is almost invisible in the grass, or the pile of dirt that is subtly similar to all of the other piles of dirt in an area. I do not like trying to figure out just what the questgiver means by "near the edge of the mountain" for 10 minutes, or where exactly the specific type of bears his current bear ass fetish demands live - despite the fact that they look just like the bears that are right here. I just want to go over there and do it.

Maybe to you, the game is all about the second point. Figuring out "puzzles", trying every handle, spending 10 minutes looking for the correct gnoll. For me, it's not how I wish to spend my time - deciphering vague directions and trying every pump handle in the station to see which one turns.

While no system is perfect, having come from EverQuest where quests were structured slightly differently, I'm very happy to do WoW-style questing. I no longer need to realise that this particular a_Goblin_tooth is not flagged as junk, and leave the game to search in the internet to see what quest it's used for, in which city, and what other crap I need to get hold of.

Those quests gave fuckall xp. So you got a group of friends or randoms together, found some orcs, set up camp, and sat there smacking them for an hour or two.

Yeah, the WoW model is so bad. Fucking kids these days...  :why_so_serious:

I remember when Outland was launched to universal praise about how much it was a quantum leap ahead of old-world content.  :grin:

Which it was in a lot of ways.

But the Nth time you have to go through Hellfire Peninsula, you just want it OVER.   :drill:

One thing Blizzard has done consistently is look at their work critically and improve on places where it needs it. Northrend was leaps and bounds better flow-wise than anything they had previously released.

Except Blizzard's problem here isn't the medium, it's that they have absolutely no plans to gracefully retire expansions.  You have to trudge through every fucking one to reach the end.

The easy fix is to keep the zones intact, and just build the zone portals a little more creatively.  For example, to get into Outlands you need to be inside the Goldshire inn, with a pint in front of you.

Meh, you can level through Outlands so fast these days it's hardly worth complaining about. With the RDF and lowered XP curve you can pretty much bypass HFP and just hit up Zangarmarsh (which does have a reasonable quest flow).

I'm broken like WUA.  It pissed me off that they feel the need to remove Wrathgate, but leave all the shit about fighting Arthas intact.  Particularly since the new Undead intro explicitly states he's dead.  Leaving everything intact and having a beer induced time warp would at least be coherent.

They didn't take out Wrathgate, just the battle for UC.

It was a huge leap in terms of how you structure quest progression through a zone and through the world as a whole, but it was not, in my opinion, a huge leap forward in terms of how you make quests tell a coherent overall story of the world and your character.  Outland pretty much is an insane mess in terms of story, with almost no coherent story being told as you progress through the zones (at least imho).

But yeah, from a technical standpoint the quest progression is much closer to the quality of current questing than it was to Vanilla.  It's just that there's no reason to give a shit about anything you are doing.  It's just this random-ass alien wonderland of incoherence.

Unfortunately I imagine part of the reason they didn't want to make it totally irrelevant is that it's one of the only times that the Draenei and Blood Elves (especially the Draenei) are relevant at all.  I imagine this tension is part of what motivated that recent comment about how they didn't do a good job integrating the Draenei into the Alliance.

It is kind of striking to me how easily you can just ignore that TBC ever happened and it barely changes the feel of the story at all.  In fact I'm not even sure what HAPPENED in TBC for the most part (other than Sunwell, which I don't even think was going to be part of the expansion in the first place).

If they had conveyed the story for Outland properly then i think we'd all feel better about it, but they didn't.

TBC, if you're Horde, isn't quite as terrible story-wise as if you're Alliance. You get the blood elves joining the Horde because Sylvannas demands they get let in plus they're all "Weeeeee know there are still ooooorcs out there, Thrall, maybe we'll help you find them!" and then they later finding out Kael'thas is a douchebag (although this is not nearly as dramatic as it should've been, Drakuru turning out to be the Lich King's homie was done way better. Shit, Abercrombie's I AM BAD reveal, which anyone who reads the text already knew from basically his second sentence, was more dramatic.), Thrall's coming home and finding his roots (this gets cockblocked by shitty dungeon quests though I think? I never actually finished the series and I seem to recall that's why.), the introduction of Garrosh, and finally the cleansing of the Sunwell. Alliance you have these aliens crash into the planet that are allowed to join because mumblemumblemumble, you get to find out some people from WC2's expansion are still kicking around, and uh ... Well, Caverns of Time was pretty cool, right?

The draenei going back to Outland isn't nearly as interesting as the orcs, because no one gave a fuck about them to start with, plus there's no "oh shit some of us are still here and not slaves to demons or anything!" aspect to them. The draenei were a last minute "shit, we have to come up with something" race and it shows in almost every way.

Yea, Draenei as the player race, could not exist at all and Outlands would hardly change story wise. Their contribution started and mostly ended with them being wiped out by the Orcs pre-Azeroth invasion.

I think that when they release an expansion, the expansion should be the level 70-80 content and the rest should shift downward appropriately.  There's really no need to expand the level cap in the game, as the end game of raiding makes it all moot anyway.  I also think they should cull out a lot of shit people don't do any more, or make it more end game level appropriate. 

You need to raise the level cap to do a proper gear reset.

Only because of the way combat ratings work, which they had changed prior to TBC to force a hard gear reset because they wanted people to wear their TBC clownsuits.  Which lead directly to Sunwell Radiance, Chill of the Throne, and capped combat ratings.

It would be easier in the end if the multiplicative stats on gear were separated from additive stats, and the cost in item budget were tabulated accordingly (easiest way is to convert ratings into percentages based on an arbitrary level derived from the iLevel of that particular piece, rather than the level of the player wearing it).  At which point they could go fucking crazy with iLevels, not increase player level, and the only numbers which would inflate would be attack power, spell power, and stamina.  Which is good, because those three stats should be all you need to mudflate all your previous content assuming that they keep shit like critical strike chance close to targeted values.

Of course, you'd probably want to do something else to segregate the new expansion into zones and brackets, which to an extent tells the player where they should be.  But nothing precludes you from having TBC, WotLK, and Cata from all being level 60-65, but having those five levels only persist in the expansion you earned them in.

The itemization problems that led to Radiance/Chill of the Throne are because Timmy the Itemization Intern is fucking stupid.

All a gear/resources reset needs is a means of funneling everyone through a process so they come in different but come out the same.  That can be a reputation wall or just adding some new areas and tuning the new stuff to the new, hysterically powerful, gear.  It's just the level is the default "You must be this tall to ride the ride." number.

Actually it was because they ended up with one more tier of raiding gear than they originally planned, with hardmode gear on top of it. We weren't supposed to get 4 tiers with 3 levels of gear each, just 3 tiers with 2 levels each, in the original conception. This screwed up all the gear scaling for the whole expansion.

Timmy the itemization intern is pretty stupid regardless.

Sorry for the edit in my first post, don't hate me.

1. Retardation was partially the problem.  The second part is that they tried to treat 1 dodge as if it were equal to 1.5 stamina (the two grew in equal proportions as ilevel increased), because that's what the item budget spreadsheet says.  Which leads to point two...

2. They started with a great system for slow mudflation.  While that level 20 piece which gave 1% dodge would always give 1% dodge, it still wasn't much of an issue because the stamina of higher level pieces made the difference so long as you didn't make a level 20 piece with 10% dodge.  Since stamina scales logarithmically you're free to mudflate to your heart's content, because no matter how much stamina you stack you're still not ever getting into melee immune tanks on gear appropriate bosses.  The same goes for AP and SP, which scale damage output logarithmically.

EDIT:

3. Ratings seems to have lead them to take liberties with avoidance, assuming that the hatchet job they did to make pre-TBC avoidance gear degrade as levels increased would fix scaling problems perpetually.  They don't have the extra tier excuse for Sunwell Radiance.

No, but the point was they said "ok that sucks, let's have a plan to not have to resort to that in the last tier this time." And if they had stuck with their plan, it would have been fine.

Regardless with all the extra avoidance from +defense gear and talents (and other various avoidance talents besides) removed I really have a hard time imagining it getting out of hand this time.

Man, great thread. A lot of insight, history, viewpoints and very little nerd rage. Kudos, f13.  :heart:

I played WoW from launch until mid-Northrend; had a lot of fun. Every once in a great while I consider picking it back up, then I come to my senses. I can't gather another bear ass, not even for some awesome title in front of my name. The first time through an instance is always great; by the 5th I want to kill the devs, everyone around me, and myself - in that order. I'm not going back for Cataclysm ... kinda sad about that in ways, but it's for the best.

I was a Master Angler. I'm a sick, sick man. LET'S GO FISH!

Third time's a charm? :why_so_serious:

They're doing a lot of insane tweaking to keep avoidance levels in check, when it really doesn't have to be that hard: just stop handing out avoidance in ever increasing amounts, chucklefucks.

I'm not even sure why we're having this argument, because they're pretty much already committed themselves to rebuilding the world a third time if they ever want to remove the craters and officially kill off Methwing.

We need a way to sticky posts that will come back to haunt us later. :-P

I'm hoping they'll be updating the world as the content patches come later down the line. It seems like they spent a lot of time on the technology to do that better/faster or whatever.

Hellfire > Terrokar > Nagrand > Borean Tundra

I do Zangarmarsh too so I can get to 70 and then hit Northrend.  Some of the mobs being 70-71 when I am 68 cause more issues than I like to deal with.

Yeah, the odd thing to me now that everything has suddenly changed is that it doesn't feel like this had just happened. The game world feels like The Sundering (or WTF it's called) hit about 6 months to a year ago in most places.

Hellfire > Nagrand > Howling is my route, with only a few dungeons and BGs thrown in.

It's not consistent, that's for sure.  Loch Modan and Wetlands (Menethil especially) feel like The Shattering was relatively recent.  Stormwind still has some rubble and scaffolding around.  Then you have Orgrimmar which has been completely made over with only light touches of construction still left.

That's because the Horde builds everything out of sticks and old animal pelts--cheap to put back together.


Just you wait, they'll add that "Assmaster" achievement yet.

I spy someone who hasn't been to New Orgrimmar yet.  :awesome_for_real:

This wasn't exactly true BTW. It added to the problem, but Wrath was already broken before they even started introducing the extra tier for heroic. Blizzard were just covering for their silly mistakes when they announced that.

i) We started off too powerful. Unlike the previous transiition from Vanilla --> TBC, when raiding guilds farmed Naxx they were getting substantial increases to their power and surviveability ahead of what we had in Tier 6 / SWp. Loot in Wrath simply started off at too high a point, and before we'd even heard of raiding heroic modes people were commenting on how Naxx gave up far too good loot for it's position in the raiding tiers. even in the very first tier tanks were getting far too high stats, and to much avoidance.

ii) The leap in ilevel between raiding tiers was higher than it ever has been - for no real reason. Still not sure why Blizzard committed to so thoroughly rendering the previous tier of raiding utterly worthless, but by giving folks a 19 ilevel increase between tiers it ramped up the stat inflation far more than any other jump. An extra 6% power each tier really doesn't help the situation.

The number is 13.  The jump between Naxx10 and Ulduar10 is atypical.

Nope.  I've done pretty much all the Eastern Kingdoms, but none of the Kalimdor stuff.

IIRC Uld25 -> ToC25 is also 19, as is ToC25 -> ICC25, and ToC10 -> ICC10. I'm not sure whey they couldn't decide on a uniform increase.

Indeed - I went and looked up the increase before posting to make sure I wasn;t doing something silly. ToC to ICC is 19 again (245 to 264), and there was absolutely no need for it to be that high.

It was set that way because hardmode ToC 25 gear was 258 iirc. Now, why they went for a full 13 ilvl tier jump on the hardmode stuff is a good question.

It was like that in Ulduar too; Uld10 regular dropped 219s, heroics were 232s.

It feels like the idea behind the world is "we all came back from northrend with the lich king defeated and WHAT THE SHIT HAPPENED BACK HERE!?!", but it is very sporadic timespan wise. I mean, I get Org, thrall was just sitting on a shitload of resources and peons, so rebuilding was pretty quick. Dude had been running lumber mills across kalimdor for years.

The Horde are just that supremely organised and efficient.

Deathwing destroys Orgrimmar and the Horde have rebuilt the city before the Extreme Makeover: Home Edition team have even got out of bed.
Deathwing destroys Stormwind and the Allies are still standing around saying "Can anyone smell something burning?"

Efficient?! Any time I see Alliance peasants, they're out chopping trees. Meanwhile, the horde has to conscript every level 2 orc in durotaur to wake the lazy bastards up!

Alliance have unions, work breaks, lunch breaks, vacation, time off. 

Horde are lucky to ever get time off and have to sneak in the occasional nap, if they do they are often clubbed over the head.

And the Horde brought in guest workers rather than do it themselves.

The goblins are totally scabs. Or slaves. One of those.

Until the day the Horde and Alliance both realize that the goblins, after decades of selling to both sides, now own the entire world.  All hail the new goblin overlords!

Or abducted by the Dragonmaw to nap in the Outlands instead.

"What you want?  Me busy."
"ARGH!  BOOTERANG!"

Skip to step 3: Profit.

The Horde presumably has masons that either don't expect to be paid OR actually ARE paid. The Alliance, not so much.  :oh_i_see:

Maybe the Alliance is dealing with some very restrictive Union regulations.

No seriously, the last time they rebuilt Stormwind, they didn't get paid, so they formed the Defias terrorist group.

They should award achievements for laying bricks.  The city would be rebuilt in record time.

fix'd.

Aside from not wearing pants, I have a hard time disagreeing with VanCleef the Younger.

Bitch knifed Blanchy, fuck her!

Blanchy had it coming! VanCleef was just a death panel that was desperately needed by the Azerothian healthcare system!

Blanchy was old six years ago.  The Furlbrow's are necromancers.

I think ATITD has a business practice patent on that.

Test of the obelisk.  Ugh.

Man, and I totally just brought ATITD up in another thread. :)

My wife was obsessed with making bricks.  I'd log on to find insane quantities of bricks waiting for me.  Staggering quantities that no one human should be able to make.

I feel crabby, so I came to the crabby thread.

a) Vashj'ir is way too fucking big. I feel like I've been in the fucking zone forever, and it's starting to kill me. I BELIEVE I'm in the home stretch, but goddamn. Hyjal may have the same problem, I don't actually know, but man.

b) I understand, I suppose, wanting people to have to actually see the instance entrance before letting you do it, but again, Vashj'ir's instance is too far in for the level range it supposedly is.



It's funny, the things about a water zone that I worried about aren't problems at all, but I still don't think I'll go there again for quite some time after this initial character.

Throne of the Tides is way too late in Vashj'ir I agree, also it takes a long time before you can discover the flightmaster.

Do they not have a summoning stone outside anymore? I know we used one outside Blackrock Caverns last night.

EDIT - remembered it was the Blackrock Spire meeting stone.

ALL the zones feel too fucking long.  Vash is 145 quests long, Deepholm is 143 and Twilight Highlands is 120. No idea bout Udlum's exact number as I skipped it and am going back to quest for cash after working on Archaeology.  I'm sure it's 100+ quests like every other goddamn zone, though.  That's more than zones in WOTLK, which also felt long.  BC zones were 50-75 quests long until you hit the last zone.  Those felt good. You were in and out and even if you didn't ding, you felt like you'd accomplished something as you moved on to the next zone.

I didn't realize what a psychological strain staying in the same zone is until this expansion.  Breaking things down into smaller zones or changing theme/ scenes a bit more would have helped a LOT.  Yeah the mini-hubs are supposed to help with that but you still know you're 'stuck' in the same zone.


Yes, they do.  It's one way to get them discovered so people in guild who are behind the curve can /random with you.  (A few still haven't gotten it in the mail.. Go go UPS!)

Levelling doesn't seem to take anywhere near as long as it did in BC/Wrath though. I made 81 last night by just doing a BWD run and the Kelpthar Forest quests (~40 of them?) and that's including getting stuck on that damned "Blood and Thunder" defend the boat quest.

My biggest beef with it so far is that there didn't seem to be anywhere to repair gear.

It's not really a problem for my Alliance people, as they are in a real guild and thus have guild runs with summonses and such, but as Horde, I basically go it alone and I find it really frustrating to know that I'm going to have to haul my ass way the fuck out there in order to random properly. It was just a stupid decision, in my opinion, and that's what bugs me.

The first one's just to suck you in.  I think it's taking an average of 8 or 9 hours per level if you're straight-out questing.

What's even more annoying is to queue for the next 2 instances, your average ilvl has to be 272.  Mine in all raid gear is 270 and I haven't found more than 1 piece to replace anything in all of Vash'jir so far.  So I can replace my gear and take hits on all the stats just to queue, or get summoned and have guildies run me through (I choose the latter).

I'm finding lots of very minor upgrades, but only if I fully enchant them and reforge all the mastery to haste (mastery is useless for resto shaman). It's just not worth it for something I'm going to replace in a level when I'm not having any problem doing my thing.

You could throw on some gear just for the queue, then switch back to your raid gear right?

Deepholm was where I started getting items that were clear-cut upgrades over ilvl 264 gear, and the average ilvl ramps up fast.

Yes, the 80/81 stuff is all there just to get everyone up to ICC-like gear.  Once you get to 82 the hammer really comes down on skill costs and mob health but each zone provides a steady half-tier increase in item level.  By the time you're in quest blues from Uldum/Twilight Highlands and some of the rep items, you're going to be pretty close to being able to cue for Heroics.

You don't even need to do that; the game updates your average ilvl as soon as you get a piece of gear even if you don't equip it. The only way I got into Stonecore was by having a bunch of random cloth and leather greens sitting in my bag.

Yeah it's nuts, you dont even need gear that your character can use, my clothie had loads of plate in her inventory ( sells to the vendor for more heh ) and that counted towards the ilvl score.

We're making sure we run new dungeons for the first time in guild groups only. Which, given that there's only 6 of us and we have some big variations in working & playing times means we've only managed one run in Throne of Tides so far.

It was great fun going in there knowing nothing about the place and working it out between us. Was fairly hard for us, mostly because 2 out of the group were still level 80 and in only mediocre gear. Luckily tank and healer (me) were 81 and decently geared so we managed. Couple of fights ended up with only us two standing.

Deepholm is *gorgeous* too. Anyone thinking WoWs engine looks terrible needs to watch someone flying round here. Very impressive.

I cranked my settings up from High to Ultra yesterday just to see what would happen and oh my god what a difference it made in Vash'jr. And it didn't seem to hurt my performance much either. I was surprised.

That is kind of wierd.   I know the blizzard in game gearscore thing looks at the highest Ilevel Piece that you currently own for each Item Slot (regardless of if it is equipped, in your bags, or in your bank), and uses that to calc your score.  I didnt realise it could actually use pieces of gear you cant even equip as part of the formula though.

This; Deepholm is without a doubt the best looking zone they have ever made.

I've gotten two bugged quests so far. One in Deepholme, with getting the guy rope and whiskey. Not a game stopper, so I'm only a bit miffed. But the last quest in Vash'jir, where

I did the rope and whiskey quest with no problems yesterday, though a lot of people in the zone were complaining about the same thing today.  As for the quest in Vash'jr, I almost had the same thing happen to me before I realized there were stairs that took you down below.  Its a pretty narrow opening and I almost missed it.

The rope and whiskey don't seem to sparkle for some folks.  I had the sub issue, too, but it was fixed by logging off then logging back in.

A lot of the bugs seem related to phasing problems, in fact.   Had a guildie who couldn't see a questgiver in Twilight even though the ? was on screen.  When he logged out then back in, he was back.    I'm noticing a lot of problems in Twilight myself.  I had a few when questing but now that I'm done with the zone there's some mining nodes that like to show on my minimap but then disappear once I get near.  The bastards.

Also;  When you remove over half the mining nodes in a zone, don't say "some" in your hotfix nodes.  :mob:  Went from being able to find nodes without a problem to finding it easier to mine in zones other than the plane of earth.  That's kind of fucked up.

I had a problem with the rope and whiskey about 2 hours ago. Turns out that there's 2 quests with the same name ("The Admiral's Cabin").

First one you get from the dwarf up on the top deck of the airship, and you have to hand it in to some NPC at the wheel in the cabin below her. Then he gives you another quest with the same name to get the rope & whiskey. I didn't see the ? above his head 'cos the cabin interior is yellow, so when I wowhead'd "The Admiral's Cabin" I only found the 2nd quest and thought it was bugged.

Convoluted way of saying have you checked the dude in the cabin at the wheel?  :awesome_for_real:

We were doing this quest 5 and 6 times in a row with all varieties of people on my server and no one was getting credit.  It was definitely a phasing problem because you could occasionally see the NPCs on the sub, but most of the time you couldn't.  So as far as I can tell it was bugged yesterday.  Some people in the guild were all "it worked for me the first day!" and I was all "that's nice, but it's not working NOW."

470 skill enchanting recipes which require a 515 skill rod

 :mob:

There sure is a lot of bitching over this expansion. :awesome_for_real:

Everyone is clearly just overwhelmed by the new content of the expansion. Once we roll some damn alts, the problems will all go away!

 :grin:

2H - Might Agility? Think that must be a mistake because all the other 470 - 510 recipes only need the Titanium rod.

I'm guessing so, it is annoying because it seems like such an obvious bug that should have been fixed months ago. How it got shipped is baffling.

Enchanting is being the same old pain it is to level for two main reasons though:

1) Quest items need a relatively much higher enchanting skill to disenchant (500 for deepholm blues, 475 for uldum greens) compare to previous expansions (Icecrown blues only need 325 skill to disenchant, ilvl200 epics only need 375).
2) Dust is dropping a lot less relative to essences, same as it was in WoTLK, and it creates a block to levelling.

The disenchanting thing is annoying me most, as I have a ton of quest rewards I want to disenchant, but I can't because of this absurdly high skill requirement. I'm assuming it is an artifact of the ilvl curve being so sttep compared to previous expansions.

I had the same problem with Dust before I got to 475.  I finally broke down and bought the half-stack I needed for ~200g and as soon as I got 475 I picked up 100 Dust from the quest rewards I'd been keeping in the bank.

There always seems to be one strange quirk with Enchanting per expansion, hopefully this one is it.

Obdisian prices are mind-boggling. The quests are giving an asston of money though so I guess everyone is flush.

The market for it is crashing quickly though. It's gone from 60g/ore -> 40g/ore, and last night it was 15g/ore. Still crazy, but not "I finally own an epic mount" crazy.

Well give me a bunch then.  :awesome_for_real:

That was Tuesday.  I was selling 5 stacks of Heartblossom at 300g a stack as fast as I could pick and list it.  Made about 5k gold that afternoon.

I'm saving/using them now so I'll send over the elementium I'm mining from the deepholm dailies, I only sold two stacks due to never having 300 flying on anybody <3

Yep.

FREE

FREE OF VASHJ'IR

The final thing was buggy for me too, my theory is the zone didn't want to let me go.  :why_so_serious:

Yeah it's it 15g ore on my server too.  Glad I farmed it early and sold off big.  It's still crazy expensive compared to Elementium, which is only 9g per.   I blame the fact that the nodes are only in the starter areas with a few spots in Deepholm.

On the upside my alt is making a ton just DEing the greens I'm getting and selling the way-too-fucking-rare Hypnotic dust.. which is selling at 30g per.  Good luck getting your 22 slot bags any time soon, as they require 15 of those damn dusts in addition to the 75 bits of cloth per bag.  It's currently cheaper to make the Glacial Bags from WOTLK than the 'common' bags from Cata.

Cobalt ore, from what I remember, was always inflated compared to saronite as well, for the same reason.

Maybe I've played this game too long but I am seriously underwhelmed by it all. I decided to start at Hyjal, completed the first 6 or 7 quests and WTF, no linking to the next quest line. The original Hyjal inn that you can bind yourself to won't let you rest, the quests feel generic - TBH it was more fun going back on a baby alt to the old world and leveling to experience the changed content.

The artwork is nice, the system hasn't changed but damn it feels stale.

Maybe I'm just pissy over the >1hour queue on Blackrock to get to a game that really is more of the same (I've been on BR since release so at least it isn't the old vanilla queues).

The low level content really is more of the same though. On this trial Dwarf shaman I got I came up to a outpost that literally gave me four generic kill quests all at once.

Am I the only one that thinks "New expansion, good time to take a two month break?".

No now is a good time to harvest and sell stuff to the achievers.  I've made 6k selling blacksmithing stuff and gems.

I'm the exact opposite. "YES, NEW EXPANSION, TIME TO HYPERFOCUS."

I don't care about getting firsts or hitting cap fast or anything, I just really like new shit and feast upon it as soon as it becomes available.

Testify sister.

Seriously though, laugh all you want, but I actually blew off a semi important RL meeting just so I could get some sweet sweet leveling in. I mean, look at my posts, I'm not in danger of getting some real firsts, or even some realm 1000's for hitting 85.......but I want to get their so bad  :why_so_serious:

Stupid friends and their making me level a low level pally just so I can level with them. Don't they know they are making me cut like three hours out of my sleep time to sneak in some Mt. Hyjal grinding.

I've decided that the on rails aspect of the new zones works fucking amazingly well at the low levels where you're constantly moving and changing storylines. It works EXTREMELY FUCKING POORLY when each level is hyper long. Seriously, Vashjir and Uldum were interminable. They just went on forever, especially Vashjir where every single quest was "kill nagas" or "bring fish to these hungry people". As excited as I am with the revamped old world stuff I'm really floored at how poorly the same philosophy plays at the higher levels.

Given that the dungeons so far have left me pretty underwhelmed I reckon I'll last about as long as expected this time around with a few months hanging out with friends before transitioning to Rift and (hopefully) GW2.

The dungeons really don't ramp up until Grim Batol/Halls of Origination/Tol'vir on Normal and they've all been pretty great on Heroic.  The first four are all either still essentially Wrath dungeons or transitional.  Heroic Deadmines especially is many shades of amazing.

Yeah I hit 85 last night without doing any dungeons at 84 so I'm holding off on judging that fully until I see more.  Still, I don't see how this holds my attention in the face of what Rift and GW2 are offering. It seems like WoW style quest grinding is now the baseline for all MMOs; from there you now have one of two directions:

1) Quest grinding with a hyper focused storyline, including lots of cutscenes and gated by questline content. That's New WoW and KOTORO.

2) Quest grinding with some emergent, randomized stuff to spice things up in the broader world. That's Rift and GW2.

Given the choice between those two and having dabbled in the latter  :nda:? I know which one holds my interest more nowadays.

I sold, last night night, 10 stacks of elementium ore at 700 gold each.  I am laughing all the way to the bank.

I tried to tank my first heroic. Ow. First boss we got down, but the second in BRC was just non stop "no you idiots don't stand in the beam until 100 sta.. god damnit people!"

Then I went and tanked a few normals, and concluded that both my usual normal tanks are Bad At Threat because dear god nothing can touch my DK's threat, and that most of my LFD DPS is stuck at 5k dps for no fathomable reason.

Also, that people have forgotten where their CC buttons are. "sheep that mark" *20 seconds after pull sheep lands* Gee, thanks!

Its going to be hard to break the bad habits people have learned since WOTLK.  I include myself in that group too, though, I've been doing fairly well so far since playing a dps warrior is pretty straight forward.

I've kicked about 5 people from groups so far for outright refusing to CC.  One mage said "CC is for pussies" while the last hunter said "Fuck you."   :awesome_for_real: 5 might not seem like many, but I've been queuing as DPS, so with 45min+ queues that's a high percentage.

It's actually worse than I'd thought it would be right now, and the game is actually unfun to the point I'm thinking of leveling an alt instead of struggling through right now.  With people refusing to learn or use CC in normals, pugging them seems out of the question and within the guild our only heroic-capable healer is a priest who is lolsmite specced.. which apparently is stupidly broken and unworkable.  Bleh!

On the other hand I've quickly learned how to sacrifice my pet to keep my ass alive.  A button and ability I'd forgotten about the entirety of LK.

When tanking, I totally think of my ghoul as less of a "more dps!" button and more of an "and you're a health potion. Seriously, just so we're clear about our relationship from the start."

I will admit I don't fully "get" when to use Army in a 5 man though, since they can taunt bosses and drive the entire group batty. Stop spinning the dragon you idiots and just eat him!


I do think we're back to early TBC heroic issues though. Which is that DPS classes without CC are worth less to me than those with CC. Warriors and DKs? Love yall, but a mage, rogue, shaman, lock, or priest is probably just flat out better for clearing this instance. Late TBC and Wrath swung too far into the "AE or go home", but the problem with early TBC was "have CC on every DPS or go home"

I always felt bad about using Sacrifice (silly RP), but it has saved my arse on so many occasions.  "Buh-bye now!" <bubble> <Fel Cast> "Welcome back, hon!"

Though I didn't like adding yet more buttons to Warlock, the new soul stone mechanic seemed like it'd play well with that.

I feel bad if the pet has a name. My DK's minute ghoul? He's a health potion. The army of the dead? I once summoned them to see how it would work on a boss we needed to burn, they all died in 5 seconds to a pulsed AE <3

AotD is *awesome* in Vortex Pinnacle on those packs of glowing balls that pewpew every group member.

I am trying to teach people how to deal with CC in normals, in preparation for heroics, but the number of times that tanks & DPS just ignore it and aoe, breaking Hex depresses me.

I think I need a macro that marks a target, hexes it and says "Don't hit the frog ffs!" or something.

Mine, too, if I even remember to pull them out.  I think the only time I've seriously tried to use Army was against the Maiden of Pain with another DK where we wondered what would happen.  Other than making her dizzy, they didn't do much, and stopped us from getting the Kill in Under X achieve because they kept her in the void.

I'd say you've figured it out perfectly.  :awesome_for_real:
(Dragon roulette best roulette).

So Tol Barad, supposedly the major new endgame PVP attraction, has finally come before the general public only to be greeted with universal revulsion and shock that something like this actually made it through testing.

Is this the end of the world or a harbinger of DOOOOOM? No. They'll patch it into something playable soon enough.

But Ali didn't used to take this many punches back in the sixties. Say what you will about Blizzard's weird grindy raid-gear-dominated PVP designs of the past, but at least it was theoretically possible for either side to win any of the battlegrounds.

Dude, no more boxing analogies.  They're circling the drain.

iirc, AV at it's introduction was HEAVILY alliance biased.

That said, in Tol Barad, horde and alliance have an even shot at winning the BG. The losers are whoever is attacking, not realm based. It's a world version of Strand right now, where the offense has a HUGE bias over the defenders. It's just that at least Strand lets both sides play offence in a round.

Blizzard will just hotfix it to "Defender needs to hold two bases" and consider it done.

That might actually make it work just fine.

Yep, and that's probably the logical fix.

Make it hold two bases, give a bit more time to recap if you lose two, and I'd be happy with it. Right now it's comically easy to defend (and yet still, doomhammer alliance lost it)

This early in the cycle there probably aren't enough 85s to consistently have one side succeed. I could easily see horde taking it from us in a 10v10 type situation.

Well I meant I've learned as a DPS. Admittedly I'd ignored it as a tank during WOTLK, too, but as a DPS that 25% heal every 2 min has proven pretty invaluable.   Nice that it coincides with Unholy's ghoul summon timer, too.

I, too, feel bad about sacrificing him but mainly because "damnit, there's another dot that's not going for x minutes."  It's a pretty potent dot as Unholy, too.

Army is great for bosses that don't have breath mechanics and you can blow it to give the healer a break.  We started blowing it Coroborus last night during the last few seconds of the 2nd phase so we can beat the adds down quicker and give the healer a breather.

It proved very good in Halls of Origination.  Blow it after the 1st lever phase so they can taunt the boss while the healer tops everyone off or regens mana.   We also blew it on a few others but it's not sticking in my head atm.  Took me 3 hours to clear the damn place, it all started blending together.

I agree on the CC thing and it's one of the reasons I'm starting to look at tanking instead of DPSing.  At least there's still a role for me that way, unlike BC where a few classes had to sit on the sidelines because their CC wasn't reliable or reapply-able enough.

I've decided to not even activate Cata yet. I'll give it a couple of weeks or month or so to finish off the LK content and level up some alts to 80ish. I'm sure I'll still be able to make some money from ore in the weeks to come. Got to get a miner up that far first, actually...

Yes. Go with MMA ones. Much more up-to-date.

If you're a broski in an Affliction shirt.

You say that like there's a higher form of art than skulls, wings, spiderwebs and random scratchings in a sketchbook style with the Olde English font plastered all over it.

Whatever happened to those f13 t-shirts, anyway. I'd probably buy some of the better ones now that I am permanently employed...

This seems like the best place for a random Cataclysm gripe:

The Worgen idle sounds drive me up the wall. That dog mouth-smack/sniff-pant/snort noise irritates me so badly I have to yank my headphones off whenever I'm in town as alliance. Does it bug anyone else or am I just insane? (I know, I know false dichotomy)

Nope, I played through the Worgen newbie zone and don't plan to go back to the character until the snuffling and snorting stops.

The snorting and snuffling is annoying.  I am also annoyed by the idle riding animation which, like the Draenei, is set to happen all the god damned time.  Its a wonder worgen aren't falling out of the skies judging from the exhaustion they exhibit when riding gryphons.  They yawn and stretch constantly.

The noise mostly just makes me miss having a dog.

On the other hand everything about my newbie Goblin Shaman is pure awesome.

I love my goblin.  I mostly don't love the car noise with my mount.  I take off my headphones when I drive around.  This will be a non issue once I get another mount to use.  It's Exalted to use another racial mount, right?

Yes on the exalted.

Also, agree with the worgen-noise-hate.

I'm happily scanning the AH when some dogchick (bitch?) comes in and stands next to me. SNIFF SNORT SNUFFLE. At first I'm like, oh, that's new. By the second time, it was already OLD.

I might have to roll a gob soon. But it sounds like the trike suffers from the same problem the old roflcopter used to. They fixed the roflcopter now, though. Maybe there's hope for a trike muffler in the future too.

My goblin enhance shaman = awesome.  The trike constant rev up, shift, rev up, shift is not awesome.

Currently dungeoning my way to raptors.  Hm.  I may switch that to wolves.

Although a goblin on a chocobo may be awesome.

The trike doesn't bother me much but it'd be fun to get another mount anyway. I'm not going to grind for exalted though.  If I have to I'll just wait until I get to Ungoro and can get a Venomhide.

Venomhide is my ultimate goal.

I'm not grinding to exalted so much as leveling via RDF.  I tried questing, and was bored with it by level 16.

Oh geez.


Y'all are totally about to make me switch back to Horde.

Of the low level zones I've done so far the Horde ones have been the best. Silverpine for the Forsaken and Azshara for goblins have been just amazing.

I am pretty comfortable in saying now that I've been playing Cata for a while that there is really only one Giant Fuckup - victory conditions on Tol Barad. Total screwup, no real excuse. It hasn't changed hands in over a week on our server, ever since the population at 85 got high enough to have decent amounts of participation.

When WoW Insider dedicate a whole post to "How to fix Tol Barad" rather than a "Ya know, Tol Barad isn't really that broken guys" then you know something is up.

We got within about 90 seconds of it flipping due to the horde monumentally screwing up, but yeah. It requires the defense to fail, not the offense to succeed.

Another problem with Tol Barad is that the rewards are pretty meagre. You get a somewhat unimpressive chunk of honour, access to VoA Mark 2 and about 5 extra dailies. There's nothing you can get from winning Tol Barad that you can't get from losing. At least WG had the commendation gear which was frankly quite useful to people looking to gear up for PVP; Tol Barad does not parallel this in any way.

The extra dailies are enough to push it so you can actually cap out on Cata dailies, right now doing everything leaves you with 4-5 out of 25 still left. They also are a pretty significant boost to the rate you can raise that faction and get access to the mounts and trinkets - and the trinkets are a tier beyond anything you'll see in heroics for now.

Given how fucked it is in regards to that right now, it's probably for the best.  :why_so_serious:

Are the TB dailies limited to level 85 like the portal is or can you get there before reaching cap?

I'd guess they are limited to level 85, although I haven't heard of anyone trying to be summoned onto the island. The fixed portal is 85 only, and there's no other normal means of getting there.

Meh the epic dps trinket is actually below the blue heroic ones.  TB is worth it just for access to the loot pinata that drops t11 gear though.

It is really interesting to see how unimportant PvP polish is in Blizzard's eyes. Current state of arenas, BGs, Tol is nothing short of complete clusterfuck. Hunters and Rets (classes that got reworked) are total non-viable mess in PvP.  I wonder why they even bother adding new PvP content if they going to release it in such rough shape?

As to making ToL work? 2-base cap will guarantee it changing hands every time - too easy to zerg. Ideal solution is to turn each base into mini-IoC, where you have gates + cannons to get past in order to re-cap it.

A lot more interesting trainwreck to watch is how fundamentally player base fucks-up in Looking For Dungeon system with current slightly more difficult dungeon system. They increased difficulty and retards about to clog entire system - queues are already 50+ min for DPS and most "random" heroic groups only take 1 random person for a buff.

Knee-jerk reactions to something new they don't understand and don't have explained to them is typical of the "just tell me what I have to do for fun" crowd that is WoW's audience.

It may be broke but I am positive they are taking a close look at the situation and making the right long term choice, rather than the options players think is viable.

Not saying they will be right, but rushing a fix isn't their M.O. unless it is *obvious*.

A big problem with the LFD system in Cata is that at minimal gear levels some CC is required, but there isn't a CC role players can queue as. And while there isn't a dedicated chanter class in WoW, at least the LFD system should factor in what classes are CC-viable for what instances, and make sure to provide one of said classes to every random group.

Example: a Rogue is good CC for Blackrock Caverns since the mobs are Humanoids, but not for Vortex Pinnacle which is mostly elementals.

Of course, this wouldn't magically teach bads how to CC, but at least the group would have the appropriate tools for the job.

The problem with weighting by dungeon is that would mean some classes never get to see certain dungeons, and the group without much crowd control might see their queue times increase even more.  With there already being a huge disparity between tank/healer queue and dps, it'd be another poke in the eye to dpsers.

I haven't seen any lack of ability to crowd control, just an absolute written on stone tablets 100% unwillingness to do so.

Warriors in particular suffer from a lack of crowd control; Unholy DKs too. Then you have the classes who can only do so if talented/glyphed accordingly: Frost DKs, Shadow Priests, etc. The most guilty class for refusing to CC so far has been Warlocks, because no one likes switching to a pet that's going to do no damage; "I"ll just fear one around" gets an instant votekick.

Succy is actually the highest affliction dps pet right now. The problems with lock CC are:

A) people still don't trust fear, and don't know it can be glyphed for pve (I do that, because why not)

B) pet AI with glyphed fear is broken. If I fear something on the pull, my pet will try and run over and beat on it by default.

C) everyone forgets I can CC when marking for CC. I have to repeatedly point this out. Which amuses me, because locks are frankly overpowered for CC. I can at the same time lock down 1 elemental/demon, 1 humanoid, and 1 anything. And none of that has a terribly brutal cooldown. And Banish even works on things that are already in the middle of the melee crowd, since it renders them invulnerable.

The only classes lacking in sustainable CCs these days are Priests (very few Undead this go around) and the Plate wearers aside from Ret Paladins.  That's even before you get to the Hungering Colds and glyphed Psychic Screams that make the openings to nasty pulls (read: double Evoker in Heroic Deadmines) a lot easier.

At least most Warlocks I've run into have Glyph of Fear, but I very rarely see a Succubus used.  I don't think I've ever seen Bind Elemental used and I'm pretty sure Druids forgot they had CCs before Cyclone was added as I have trouble remembering an Entangling Roots or Hibernate.

E: Forgot about Ret :awesome_for_real:.

I've seen shaman get a lot of use out of Bind Elemental, but I've never seen a glyphed Fear. Every lock I've run into has had either an Imp or a Felguard. Rogue's only reliable CC is Sap, but if that's not glyphed it won't last the whole fight. Hibernate is useful if you're in the right instance; Entangling Roots isn't bad, except its usually the casters you want CC'd not the melee.

imp locks are destro, and kind of bound to it (seriously, a good 30% of their damage is imp-related due to talent procs beyond the imp's actual firebolt), the felguard ones are annoying demo locks who don't read forums. Succy is actually higher dps for them glyphed single target.

I glyph fear because reliable instance CC? YES PLEASE.

edit: I fondly remember when you were a badass lock if you could juggle CoEx and Fear/break fear to keep something CCed in the old days.

Yup, I remember the days when I fear-juggled one mob (curse of recklessness/curse of exhaustion), kept another seduced, and kited a 3rd one with COEX back in the era of endless UBRS runs. I do not miss those days. :awesome_for_real:

That said, I try to make the most of my CC. The main reason I went with druid for my tank and shaman for my healer character is just that -- I can cc two mobs with my druid tank (usually only one... but virtually every trash pull has a melee-only mob) and CC at least one mob with my shaman, sometimes two (BRC, Grim Batol, Stonecore...).

Bind elemental is the shiz. Problem is tanks don't tend to mark for it or even bother to ask about it. If I try and "help out", some jackhole always breaks it, so I don't much bother anymore. Heck, that was quick. It usually takes me a couple of months to get disillusioned at spell use; only a couple of weeks this time around.

Hex is still pretty good. At least PuGs have asked about it lately. Dimbulbs still break it, but not nearly so often.

This all is actually rather surprising. Shaman have excellent CC now, but rarely do people ask or even notice. Only caveat is enhance needs some cast time, so if you (all three of you) ask for it, it's best if I pull.

Funny how experiences differ.  We have had some locks in my BG sharing the glyphed fear thing in their groups and its begun to spread.  I'm seeing it more and more and it's a good thing.  Now if only they'd rebanish after the initial pull, too.   Locks atm are the master of CC, with the Succ, Glyphed fear and banish you can shut-down a lot of the really annoying and dangerous pulls in some places.   If you can talk shadow priests into remembering where their MC button is, you also increase Priest CC quite a bit.   

As someone else mentioned, only the plates are missing a good CC right now.. and the nefarious part of me wants to think that's by design.  Want to be valuable in a group and you can wear plate.. start tanking.  Hell, some of the trickier dungeons with lower geared groups I've been asked to throw on my tank spec and offtank an add on some bosses.  Works out pretty well, but I didn't think we'd see offtanking in 5-mans.

I'd love to see offtanking make a come back. It was my main role in EQ as a shadowknight, and one reason I rolled a fury warrior in vanilla. I've had to do it a few times as enhance, but that wasn't what you'd call intentional...

The Adepts after the second boss in Vortex Pinnacle are a great target for holy priest MC, since they have a heal which does about 200K HP per go.

Arenas seem fine from the limited 2v2 I've been doing. Certainly no worse than last expansion, if anything healers aren't as broken as they were in the small scale stuff.

Also a good place for DKs to use Scourge Strike.. which many seem to forget about as it's seen as a PVP ability.

They're broken for priests

Necrotic Strike you mean?

Yeah I even thought Necrotic as I was typing.. I blame the booze.

I finally made it to 85 (it took me a while because I was leveling two toons simueltaneously, a problem I've never had before), and I've gotten to run a few heroics as a tank, and a few as a dps. Fuck that. I think I'll focus on pvp for a bit until they dish out some gear to make heroics trivial again. You can count me amoung the group who is scratching their head regarding the new 'fun' change to heroics.

I'm with you in that regard; heroics are much more ANNOYING now than they were previously, and as a result I'm less inclined to do a bunch for my guildies now that they're (heroics, not my gulidies) practically useless to me personally.

I'm using Hex & Bind Elemental all the time and seeing rogues sap, locks do all the locky stuff, mages sheep, the works.

Problem is I'm also constantly seeing warrior, DK and paladin tanks just storming in and AOEing all the CC'd mobs. 9 times out of 10 it's the tanks that need CC explaining, not the DPS.

My most potent dungeon CC is Solar Beam, it can trivialize just about any trash pack with that.

There isn't much opportunity to use hibernate yet, but I haven't really done the Dragonkin filled dungeons yet either.

Rooting a melee mob is trivial and just makes the pull easier to handle. Plus it's funny watching Ingmar try to break the root effect with his untrained rifle skill.

It's not the boss mechanics that are so irritating, it's the fucking trash. Nothing is more wiping repeatedly to trash.

Rifle skill doesn't exist anymore. :headscratch:


Shit that should have happened to not make Blizzard's vision suck:

- Better tank pulling tools.  One AoE move worth an absolute fuckton of threat that only works on targets which are out of combat.  Like a rogue opener, but for tanks.
- Tricks of the Trade and Misdirection are a 30 minute buff on the tank, and re-apply the hunter/rogue buff when out of combat.
- All CC imparts a regenerating damage shield of n strength (threat from damage still counts vs. shields).  To break a sheep you need to do n DPS, where n is proportional to the caster's [noun]power.

Man am I the only person willing to admit that they totally didn't mind AOE roflstomping Heroic Whatever in 15 minutes flat during WOTLK? Whatever man, it was amusing, it was fast, it wasn't a raid or serious business or anything. Get into a good group, stick together, pound out like four instances in an hour? Fuck yeah.

I'm with you. Hell, half the point of raiding was getting new gear so I could watch bigger numbers appear over baddies's heads.

Don't take my post as a refutation of the WotLK model.  That was actually pretty badass for my fury warrior.

No, not really your post in particular. I just keep hearing people everywhere go "I don't mind more challenging heroics but..." and want to be the first to officially just blurt out "Fuck you I loved easymode LK heroics!"

Want moar welfare epix plz. Fuck it, it's just pixels, I pay my $15, and the epeeners have raids they should be caring about.

You don't actually have to explain your rationale, I don't think.  I would fucking love being able to queue for a five man Lich King fight which ends in me looting his corpse.  I think anyone else who doesn't must just be broken in a way that you and I aren't, and we're broken in a lot of ways.

Thing is, this is as difficult as they are ever going to get. As the expansion progresses, and people gear up, I fully expect the heroic to head back to twenty minute to half-an-hour speedruns. The real contrast is that LFD didn't get added until, what, 3.2 or so? So people are comparing two-tiers depreciated heroics (in an expansion where Blizzard admits gear scaling went out-of-whack by the end) run by classes with strong AOE to brand-new content run with (essentially) levelling gear and after a major AOE nerf.

They're already speeding up significantly.  The first time I did Lost City - normal mode - it took us an hour.  Heroic was an hour fourty-fiveish and involved several wipes, both in guild groups.   Ran it yesterday with a similar group of guildies and it took us just over fourty-five minutes.  Now, being a raid guild we're a little more focused on gearing up than most, so the average ilevel was somewhere north of 345 (except me, who's at 340)  but everyone will get there eventually.   Still not LK ezmode, but it won't be the painful wipe fest it's been the first month.

I LIKE more difficult heroics. The problem is they're balancing them to be "hard" if you have heroic and raid level gear. So if you have the 329 average ilvl to queue for them, they're near impossible in a few cases (it's also 329 to queue for any heroic, and all heroics are not equal.)

They also had scatterbrained mechanics, I think. They said we had massive tank damage in Wrath because it was the only way to pressure limitless mana healers. Okay, so they limited mana on healers and made average tank damage pretty healable (it IS. Renew + Heal can heal pretty much anything sub heroic with the tank using appropriate cooldowns, it's ~12k hps). But then they decided to up the skill level required of the DPS. In order to do that without just having short enrages everywhere, they made it so DPS ABSOLUTELY MUST INTERRUPT SHIT. And the end result is that your tank eats massive spike damage constantly because people aren't interrupting (or have shitty interrupts)

One thing not mentioned about the plate DPS and their lack of CC: what they were given are the best interrupts in the game. The only class with a badass pve interrupt AND cc are shaman. The casters all have painfully long cooldowns on their interrupts for pve boss usage.

But basically, it all comes down to heroics are slightly overtuned right now for starter gear, and the tank/healer mechanic model is broken by a failure of interrupts on bosses, and the occasional bullshit trash pack (I'm looking at you, Lost City. Every one of your trash packs has an instant cast bullshit ability that can murder someone)


edit: And let me come right out and say it after leveling three 85s now: the mana regen model on DPS specs of healing capable classes are all bullshit. Boomkin, Ele Shaman (less so than the others) and Shadow Priests all get dicked on mana regen mechanics, when the idea was that dps shouldn't have casual mana issues doing a dps rotation. My lock either has lifetap and constant health regen from spells, or just to completely fuck with boomkin, as destro:

2% mana restored any time I cast chaos bolt or soul fire, as well as triggering replenishment. And any time my imp crits a firebolt, I get 4% mana back. Oh, and that chaos bolt heals me if I feel I need to lifetap. They mauled healer capable dps specs because they were afraid we'd use them as off healers with limitless mana pools. but it made the casting dps specs feel like they're permanently OOM.

It's not just boomkins/ele shamans/spriests, mages (fire mages at least, and it's the best PvE spec) also have to manage their mana quite a lot. Locks just get a free pass with life tap.

I have basically enough interrupt tools myself without DPS having to interrupt, once you count spell reflect, the problem is DPS never notices when I have that up so it gets wasted most of the time.

It's not just lifetap, though. My shadow priest goes through half a bar of mana to kill one even con mob while questing. My lock goes through about 10% of his mana bar to do the same thing.

I think the biggest problem with trash in heroics currently is that tanks have no way to grab threat selectively on mobs after part of the group gets ranged CC'd. For example, if I'm facing a 4 mob pull with three casters, and one CC available, how am I supposed to make sure the two casters get to me as a warrior tank? I can't rush in there and AE.

I mean short of always taking two CC in at all times of course, which may be the answer. Not ideal I think, because that's one of my biggest gripes about TBC. Heroic LF1M lock/mage. Heroic LF1M mage. Heroic LF2M healer/ranged.

Fuck you melee dps, you need not apply.

Do what we've always done and corner/LOS pull?

Oh, I was more thinking of raids/heroics.

Yep, and that's a nice stopgap solution in some instances, not in others. It's still slow as shit, and not what I would call ideal design. The LOS pull has (and always will be to me) just a watered-down exploit of a bad system at play.

Depending on the distances involved you can also heroic throw one, charge/shield bash the 2nd, then intervene back to the other guy who ran forward to CC the 3rd caster. They should have to run far enough forward during the silences that you can find a spot to AE safely from then on, assuming your CCer isn't terrible. A moonkin or mage can range-interrupt the 2nd add for you too, instead, a DK could deathgrip, etc. There are lots of tools available, part of the idea is tanks can't do the entire job themselves anymore.

That works Ingmar, but it's fucking annoying. If it was a boss encounter I wouldn't mind that level of work, but trash should NOT be that difficult. Not over and over, 10 times between each boss fight. I've done exactly one Cata dungeon (and it was regular) on my war tank, and all it did was make me miss my DK.

If you are running out of mana as a shadow priest you are "doing it wrong" we get shadow fiend,dispersion, archangel(a fast cooldown) and now SWD is a sort of lifetap. even if its not awesome dps, throwing it into your rotation a couple times ensures your other cooldowns will keep you in plenty of mana.

In addition to all that, spirit = hit for shadow priests so there is no reason to ever take hit gear over spirit which will still boost your mana regen.

Yeah that should have been my main focus on my first point. It's not that there are no tools to do the job. There are tools to do it, but they require a heavy amount of tanking experience, savvy, and timing to pull off what should be the simplest parts of the dungeon in true form (ie - trash).

Plus I hate using intervene. It has always vexxed me since they put it in the game, although i can't explain why.

And you'd be making a stupid mistake. Every shaman has a ranged interrupt. DKs have several (although one is very short) ranged interrupts. Warriors have a ranged interrupt. Any of this can pull a recalcitrant caster mob in. Hell, shaman can hex a stubborn caster, taking him out of the fight for the better part of a minute. So can ret pallies.

Now finding people that will actually DO it might be an issue, but finding tanks that don't suck is an issue as well. I don't know much about healers, but I've seen enough bad ones to know they can screw the pooch as, too.. It's a basic problem with LFD. I can deal with the stupidity (for a while), but when it's tied to 45min queues, then we have a real problem and I'm not seeing any solution to that other than swearing off PuGs.

3 minutes, ~1.5 minutes, 1.5 minutes. SW:D is the only really effective form of questing mana regen. You don't get meditation, so spi is 2700 out of combat regen, 300 in combat.

The problem is the spell costs. Shadow Word: Pain is 22% base mana cost. Corruption deals nearly the same damage talented, and is 6% base mana cost. Unstable Affliction is my most expensive spell, and costs the same as Vampiric Embrace. The base mana costs on shadow priest spells are crazy high, which is why they require all these sub 5 minute cooldowns to restore %mana. Everyone else can just cast away without caring until the fight's gone on for 5 minutes.

edit: and all those cooldowns compare to my dps armor effectively restoring 2% of my mana every 5 seconds. Comparatively to any other ranged dps class, hybrid mana regen blows.

I don't run out of mana and the only class competing with my dps is a warlock, YMMV

For grinding I use Mind Spike spam and Mind Blast/SW:D when arcangel is on cooldown and DoTs for the one kill every few minutes when it isn't. Fill in with dispersion and shadowfiend and mana isn't an issue. If anything I generally found that I had to eat to heal more often than eat to restore mana while doing 80-85+

Priest DoTs are all very expensive and as far as I can see they only do decent damage once you can ramp up all the relevant debuffs and buffs, which on world mobs just doesn't happen.

http://www.wowhead.com/spell=3018


Good old shoot!

Yeah, shoot still exists, but weapon skills are gone.  If Ingmar can't break CC it's because he rolls natural ones.

EDIT:


No, they don't.


24 seconds isn't painfully long for a ranged interrupt, and spellsteal makes one hell of a consolation prize.

24 seconds is ungodly long when the boss has a 90k nuke he casts every 10 on the dot.

The comment was mostly on the lines of "melee dps is far better at pve interrupting", because they flat out are. Ranged interrupts are useful if you need to get a caster in a trash pack to come to you, or pvp. But for a boss where you absolutely must interrupt a spell they cast every 10-15 seconds, bring a frost DK.

FIFY.

How absolutely great melee interrupts are and you totally seek to have at least one is irrelevant when shaman interrupts are better in every conceivable way.

They also bring two CC's, buff/utility totems, and bloodlust.

Shaman do win the interrupt war, and have a hard CC to boot. They don't suffer any of the drawbacks of Warriors or DKs dpsing a heroic. Rogues are the same deal (relatively easy to use interrupt, CC)

But really, running with two hunters and a lock as your DPS means you have trash packs down to a trivial science from all that CC. But you're going to have a shitty time with a few bosses who expect interrupt spamming.

edit: and for laughs, the fel hunter's spell lock doesn't even interrupt half the bosses I've tried it on. Seriously, what the hell.

Is it just showing up as immune for the silence effect?  Or is the entire cast resisted?

It's not flashy enough.  I know I've never noticed it on tanks.

Then again I'm also an interrupt fanatic.. I've got mind freeze macroed with a /say that spams "Mind Freeze <Merusk>" because I'm used to being on interrupts from raiding.   We use it to keep track of who's turn it was and I've had people bitch at me in random heroics about it.  Meh.

If you are really desperate to move a caster mob you can have a priest MC it then use Leap of Faith to break the MC, this will pull the mob to the priest. Only works on humanoids though.

Ingmar's spell reflect is up like 5 of every 7 seconds a well, so its easy to just ignore it.

It was giving me invalid target earlier today when trying to use it for basic stuff, like interrupting hymn after pulling the levers.

Invalid target indicates something completely different.  Possibly your macro was telling your hound to spell lock a dead or nonexistent target because it failed to set/clear focus. (you use a macro, right?)

Wasn't using a macro at the time, haven't really pvped on the lock, so I haven't reset all my felhunter macros. Was just target boss, click icon, invalid target.

Invalid target means a UI / targeting error.  You're going to have to figure out the rest.  I'd start with dismissing and recasting the demon.

A Tol Barad offense win will now give 10x as much honor as a defense win. Ensuring that the battleground changes hands regularly by only rewarding offense seems heavyhanded and silly, but if this were WOTLK-era Wintergrasp it would at least work.

But this is Cata, and the battle is population balanced. It's nothing but a great way to make sure that 500 people queue for offense while only 5 get in, since that's how many queued for the worthless defense.

What the fuck are they THINKING?

My bet is that offense WILL win every battle, but only because the defensive side will begin actively lying down and letting them win. They basically just said "Win-trade this please!"

Clownshoes.

I think it is a band aid 'fix' til whatever the real solution is shows up.

Carpet bomb the world pvp idea?

Probably more something along the lines of tweaking the win condition and capture speed on points.  :oh_i_see:

Must take/hold two is a far better win condition as far as requiring both sides to play a solid defense and offense. I'd like to see the towers altered as well somehow. They're trivial to destroy (the tanks have a truckload of hp and are automated) as is.

They could also do something with the current "encourages win trading" solution like making the honor value for offense ramp up per failed offense. Succeed immediately, 180 honor. Succeed after 10 failed attempts in a row, 1800 honor or something.

But I think right now they WANT win trading, so that the zone actually flips on occasion.

After playing it enough times, just taking 2 would favor the offense too much. Something involving the towers would be needed - maybe you need to take 2 points, but they're not capturable til the corresponding tower is down, something like that. And yeah I think the encouraging win trading thing is probably deliberate for now.

Automated population balancing. Offense can give infinity honor while defense gives a kick in the balls, and all that will do is increase the number of people who can't get in because no defenders showed up. You must have missed the tales of 5v5 Wintergrasps at the end of WOTLK.

I still maintain that Blizzard's utter inabillity to design a battleground that is... forget fun, even just basically functional this time around... represents a pretty blatant failure of competence. I can't think of anything in the past that has been so bad or imbalanced that they've had to just go "Fuck it, win trade!"

And it's not some quirk of "world" PVP fucking them up when 10 times as many people show up on one side. Again, automated population balancing.

Doesn't happen on our server, but I kind of feel like that sort of thing is a separate problem that you're not going to fix through any tweaking of TB's win conditions. Regardless of population issues, TB needs mechanical changes.

Yeah it's a separate issue, but it does mean that incentivizing one side over the other is meaningless. Once they get the mechanics sorted out, rewards on both sides will NEED to be more or less equal or else the win trading will just continue.

Which will cause people not to show up for defense, which means people don't get in, which means 1 dude goes roaming around alone in a world of shit.

I really wish they would, it's goddamn stupid. YOU SUCK AT IT BLIZZARD, AND THAT'S OKAY, JUST STOP DOING IT.

Yes it does, it's just 15 v 15 instead of 5v5. :P


-edit-

I should add it's 15 v 15 untill a horde raid guild decides to all queue up, then it's their 25 man raid squad against our random puggers.

The crappy ones where I've been ported in late are like 25-40ish on a side.

And all the ones where you don't get chosen for battle?  :why_so_serious:

I queue for TB every single time I'm on, got in once. Utterly pointless zone and I agree 100% with WUA.

I'll repeat that. I agree 100% with WUA. Proof that something is terribly, terribly wrong.

Speaking from the side that is horribly outnumbered, I love the 1:1 enforced ratio. I get in every time I queue, and it's never anything less than 30+ on each side. If they changed it back to tenacity I would never go to the zone, ever.

My guild agrees.  The one time someone got in it was a "stand around and lose" session since apparently the next time you get 1800 honor or somesuch.  I fail to see the point of such a zone.

PVP has never really been Blizzard's strong suit when it comes to this game, and that's fine. It's a PVE game with some PVP bits tacked on, we all know this. The problem is that they seem to be getting progressively worse at it all the time.

People didn't seem to like Strand of the Ancients very much. They liked Isle of Conquest even less. Wintergrasp worked as a game but was crippled by population imbalances. Tol Barad doesn't even function on the most basic level, and their solution to population issues seems to be to strangle the game with a 1:1 player ratio until everyone gets fed up and sorts it out themselves by purchasing transfers.

Now there's a blue post talking about how they disapprove of win-trading and you do it at your own risk. It's meaningless noise, of course, and just something that had to be said with all the "WAAH WIN TRADING!" talk on the forums. But I do have to wonder if they really wanted to free up the PVE instance by winkingly encouraging this behavior, or if they just looked at their data, realized nobody was queueing for offense since it never wins, and decided to take a hammer to the problem. I feel like they COULD seriously be that out of touch.

Anyway it's not the end of the world, blah blah usual "I am not doomcasting WoW" disclaimer, but this is a pretty spectacular fuckup and not the sort of thing one expects from Blizzard. Static about how the B-team is fucking up the game will be less easily ignored. They're just lucky that their competition consists of utter hapless dipshits whose triumphs are usually less fun than a Blizzard fumble.

There's certainly an outside chance that the current TB design is Kalgan's untouchable baby right now and it will take a while longer for it to sink in that it just doesn't work. I don't know that I'd say things are getting worse on a clear curve, though. Halaa/Zangarmarsh/Hellfire pvp objectives come to mind as worse than TB, for example.

I can't speak to BG popularity, really. I think Isle of Conquest suffers a bit from having too many different objectives for a PUG to figure out what the right thing to do is. I always liked Strand and Eye the most of any of them, personally.

Before random BG queues I used to see 4-5 Alteracs running on Whirlwind, then click over to Isle and see anywhere from 0 to 2 at most. And those towers you could cap in different zones, nobody ever did those but they were never anything but a sideshow anyway. This was supposedly a major feature of Cata PVP.

People were less inclined to queue for Isle because it was unforgiving to the zerg mentality. You had to at least run together in order to win, and you couldn't just fuck around all over the place and make tons of honor. In AV you can basically do whatever you want and still have a W/L huge honor bump if neither side turtled. It was all about the most efficient zone to farm honor, and had almost nothing to do with the fun of the instance.

WSG suffered the same way because matches took forever. People simply hated waiting for them to finish because they didn't want to win. They wanted their points and to requeue.

Isle is annoying because most of the time it winds up involving just running back and forth to doors with bombs for 15 minutes.

Naw man.. we just had a level 84 Dk in the isle I did on my priest who had it all figured out.  You see, we're idiots for trying to kill the boss because he's unkillable.  That's right, there's no possible way to kill him.. you have to zerg the workshop and then you'll win.  Whoever owns the workshop wins.   :awesome_for_real:

Strand is pretty cool.  It's Assault mode from UT, if they tightened it up a little it would be great.

Isle is a clear example of Blizzard not being able to design buildings with PvP in mind. Nothing about the keeps actually helps the defenders at all.


Shit, the Alliance keep is so badly put together, the Horde can drive the demos up to our door and be out of LoS of our own cannons due to the geometry of the keep. At least the horde can hop down onto their own walls (not by design either, just happy coincidence) to attack anything outside of them.



Blizzard doesn't devote any priority to PvP on a world/art asset level. It goes all the way back to AV, those buildings were just random Orc and Dwarf towers taken from the PvE zones. Neither was built with the intention of players actually fighting in or around them.


Or the trees in WSG that don't actually block LoS, or the Blacksmith and Stables roof that is climbable due to shitty terrain and doodad placement.





TB has the added bonus of Kalgan logic attached to it though, so not only do you get terrible world design, you get terrible game mechanics attached to it as well.



fake edit - sometimes the Isle bosses DO bug out now, they get stuck in their anti-kite mode and just one shot everything they touch.

That's a feature, fordel. They're just popping their boss cooldowns.

Gotta love the classics.

Blizzard doesn't devote any priority to PvP on any level. This is rather strange considering they have substantial PvP community, enough people to support MMORPG title on its own.

I have no data beyond my own observations, but I'd say that the proportion of the population which is purely interested in PvP is pretty tiny. I guess it depends what you mean by PvP community.

Best part about the new TB: if you cross the bridge as it ends you get full honor/rep/tokens.  Now we have about 10 people who actually get in for offense and hundreds sitting on the bridge waiting for the reward.

No one bothered to do that at 180 honor a win. But at 1800...

Well, you can kiss win trading in Tol Barad goodbye.   They bitchslapped the honor that the assaulting team gets for a win down from ~1800 to ~400.  Not that anyone with half a brain in their head didnt see that coming from a mile away.  Don't think they fixed the whole bridge camping thing, but now there is a hell of a lot less incentive to do it.

Bridge camping is unreliable if you're the attacking side, especially since the attackers are more likely to be the lower numbered faction and it would just let you into the battle.

Personally, I do the bridge camping because I "Want" to get into TB and fight but only 15 alliance regularly queue up for it, I've even gotten 10v10 in there. I consider the bridge honor my reward for waiting around on their sorry asses.

Getting let into the battle isn't exactly a problem when they're just win trading anyway though.

Yes it is, people don't queue for defense.

I was responding to Lakov's statement that actually getting into the battle while trying to bridge camp was apparently undesirable, not saying it wasn't hard to get into the fight (it can be).

I only managed to cheese like 2 pieces of honor gear out of the 1800 :(

Win trading was a joke. It happened once on our server when the horde thought it was a brilliant idea. Then the alliance got TB and decided they "would rather have the dailies so fuck you." That was the end of the trading on BWR

We had it going for a few days on Doomhammer, more or less. You had to bridge hump to actually get any honor though, since we have like 3x's as many alliance as horde on our server.

We win-traded every TB on Andorhal since the 1800 change went live.

So how are rated battlegrounds? Anyone doing them? Forum baww is that there are no trade pugs forming and it's all just 15 man arena teams nobody can be bothered with.

Edit: Tol Barad offense honor reduced to 360 due to win trading. Meaning they really are just trying to incentivize one side in a population-capped battle. Clueless.

I'm not, because Fordel and I can easily cap our conquest points for the week with arena. Organizing rated BG groups is on par with organizing raids logistically, with the extra "benefit" that the size of the team changes every week. Not interested personally until they figure out 'rated BG implementation version 2.0'.

Honestly I think I enjoy 2v2 arena the most out of the pvp stuff I've done in WoW anyway, which I wouldn't have guessed before I tried it all.

I thought 2v2 didn't award points anymore... did they bring that back?  I know 2v2 was exempt from something at some point... If they're back to awarding points I might join a 2v2. 

You can't get the rating required shoulders or weapons or gladiator titles from 2v2, that is all.

Ahh, ok.  Missing shoulders isn't terrible, but what are folks doing for weapons now?  Does honor allow weapon purchase in any way?

I'm not sure that even that is the case anymore.

There are 3 sets of PvP gear avaliable.


Honor Gear - Currently the shitty blue pvp items. Missing slots. Purcahsed with Honor Points.

Arena Gear - The Purple PvP items. Fills every slot, including weapons. Purchased with Conquest Points. (Which come from Arena/Rated BGs)

Arena Rating Gear - The Purple+ PvP items, better then the plain arena gear but nothing too dramatic atm. Cost Arena/Rated BG points AND have rating requirements.

You left off crafted, which are a half tier below honor gear.

The rating required armor has the same exact stats as the non rating required, it is just a slightly different color.  The weapons are upgrades though.

Well the hotfix to Tol Barad has returned to it's previous, old broken state, instead of it's more recent, new broken state.

Defenders now always win, nobody queues for attack any more. It was 10v10 this morning. Pointless.

40 minutes for 180 honour is totally worth it.  :oh_i_see:

When I played WoW, honor was something I got while having fun.  I'd play all the BG's and wintergrasp a few times and BANG!  I'd have honor. 

Apparently I was playing the game wrong?!?! 

That would only be true if Tol Barad was actually fun though.

^^ This.

Tol Barad isn't fun. It's just zerging whichever base the herd are all going for at that moment. Not that you can get much of a zerg going with 10v10....

But there's no other way to get into BH. So, it's going to be dawn premades to take control of it, and then defenders hold it all day. Awesome.

The issue with honor is that you still need a baseline of PvP gear on most (if not all) specs to actually have 'fun' in PvP. Walking around with zero resilience is pretty much the opposite of fun still.

The way resilience is setup now it's even more crucial, it's just a flat damage reduction. No Res, full damage. Decked out in Res? 20-40% damage reduction.



Each piece of Honor gear costs 1500-2500 honor points. Each 10-30 minute BG win is about 50 points. Losses are about 25 points. The first random BG of the day you do will net you about 150 points in bonus. If you are horde, you add on another 10-30 minutes of queue time due to participation imbalances (if your alliance you get instant queues  :grin: ). Unless you are a poopsocker supreme, its going to take a long long time fro the average dude to get his honor gear in order, time spent waiting then dieing then waiting some more.



WoW PvP is magical.

A boost to kill honor in TB would help drive some more participation I bet, but still doesn't solve the core mechanical problems with it.

EDIT: The starter pvp crafted set served me well enough in terms of getting rolling on resilience.

The crafted pvp gear is a good step forward, but honor gain rates seem.. gimpy at best compared to conquest point gain rates.

They severely upped the drop rate of cloth from the horde infantry. One ownership of TB, and I farmed up 15 stacks of embersilk.

They upped cloth drops for tailors for everything, it went from a 25% chance to a 50% chance to drop bonus cloth.

When did they do that? Crap, I'd just been buying low cloth at 5g and reselling it at 7g, guess I can actually level tailoring now.

DecJan 3 hotfix I think.

Yeah, looks like yesterday's notes. I like it, it let me skill past the irritating end of tailoring. 10 bolts/8 volatiles a combine, woo! All for pvp gear nobody wants!

On the up side, another few days and I'll start making my tailoring epics. I don't think I'm going to waste the money on my volatile air dreamcloth though. That's what, 1200g in volatiles?

When I was making gear for myself, I farmed/bought the airs for the dreamcloth, but now that I'm just selling anything I make with the dreamcloth I don't bother, way too expensive.

It's actually like 10 minutes.  Even losing beats most bgs for honor gain.

A losing attack takes about a half hour, since the towers always get knocked down. And like 95% of games are losing attacks now that there's no incentive to win trade for the defender.

Yeah this current system is the most broken of all the latest iterations of it. For fucks sakes, Blizzard should either nuke this one from orbit (as has been suggested by many before me), or just make it so that the zone auto flips every two hours and thirty minutes, and everyone online at the time gets 500 honour. It can't be any worse than their latest attempts at making this competitive or relevant. Seriously.... Tol Barad is systemically not working....dicking around with the honour gain is not going to 'fix' it.

This. No question. Having BH access dependant on something so fundamentally broken is retarded beyond belief.

I tried really, really hard to tell myself this xpac was going to be awesome.  It's just not. 

I've leveled 4 80s.  I don't want to level another to see the old stuff.  Even though it's "new", it's still old to me after four times.  That's a huge part of this xpac that is wasted on me. 

Getting to my 80 pally, the game is so disjointed - first I'm attacked by a sea monster under the water and 160 quests later we finished there.  Next I'm sent to mt hyjal, 20 quests in and I have no idea why I'm there, or why i should care.  I'm killing 10 of this and collecting 10 of that, though.  Neither of the two zones have anything to do with each another, other than what NPCs are telling me about the cataclysm from Deathwing. 

The whole experience is so utterly homogenized and unfun.  Add to the list that I'm not fond of the pally changes (my main) and I'm not seeing a reason to play anymore.  It's a damn shame, because I hate to leave my dad behind - the game was something that actually brought us closer together six years ago.  But I just can't really stomach it any longer. 

/gah

With a guy named Deathwing as the main baddie you would think it would be the greatest story ever told.

On a more serious note, the idea of refreshing starting areas just seems really weird to me. In FFXI they tried to give people reasons to go back to old zones with level capped battles, the alternate past versions, campaign (fighting hordes of strong enemy invaders) etc, but those were all focused on trying to make existing players make use of older areas on their existing characters.

The thing I fundamentally don't understand about Cata is they redo a bunch of lowbie zones but you aren't a lowbie anymore. You're supposed to re-roll just to see the changes? It's like someone doing me a favor by sprucing up the apartment I moved out of 3 years ago.

It's almost as if they're trying to pull in more new players.  :oh_i_see:

I have a feeling that a few years down the road a lot of people will be thinking of WOTLK as the game's peak. It's biggest flaw was Blizzard allowing nigh-unrestricted paid transfers to drastically unbalance some server populations, but other than that everything basically worked and was worth participating in.

You would be amazed at how many honest to goodness "I just got the game yesterday" people there really are. Even now some 5-6 years later.

It also incentivized me to make a ton of new alts, and I'm really enjoying the 1-60 leveling on them personally.

I dont want to sound cirtical, but if you don't know why you are in Hyjal you must have walked away from your computer for 10 minutes when you went to the zone. You get a fly by of the entire zone, and you see deathwing summon Ragnaros in front of you complete with burning spire and all. You then talk to the Green Dragon (Ysera?), and you see them attacking the World Tree. Hyjal could not be more clearly explained or signposted when yuo go into the zone, and every quets and NPC reiterates why you are there and what's going on.

Also worth noting that you shouldn't be doing Hyjal after Vash'jr - thats why the quest will have be green for you. It's Deepholme at 82, which follows on from Vash'jr / Hyjal in that you go and deal with the mess deathwing caused at the Maelstrom.

I don't think WotLK will ever be seen as Blizzards greatest expansion. It was routinely slated throughout it's life, by raiders and non-raiders alike. It had huge swathes of missing content and opportunities, and I think there's a huge amount of rose tinted nostalgia going on if you think it's incredibly better than Cata. So far, barring the monstrosity that is tol Barad and some of the..."wierder" professions choices, Catcaclysm as an expansion knocks TBC and WotLK out of the park. It's far more polished, complete in every way and the content is of a level of quality we havent' seen in WoW for some time.

I found it shallow and pedantic.  :grin:

Seriously. I've posted about my gripes. I found Cata to be so disappointing in nearly every way. The few interesting bits just couldn't keep me from unsubscribing, and I haven't missed the game at all. I only miss raiding with my guild.  :heartbreak:

This is pretty much my feeling on it as well.

I know I did the zone flyby in Hyjal, but I didn't see Deathwing attacking anything.  Maybe I'll send an alt there to review the flyby and it will make more sense.  I don't really want to be that disappointed in the game; going to try what I can to find the fun. 

Having just gt my 3rd char to 85 I can say that the game is too damn scripted to be fun. Too linear in each zone and god forbid someone else is collecting the 10 rats you need to get to the next step or worse, a required mob bugs.

Normal instances were fun but for gods sake, heroics and their reliance on CC are boring. It was fun in BC but not now. Enhancement weapons (slow/slow) are few and far between and the professions feel far from useful, LW random starts are lol, BS are "meh" until you hit 525 compared to quest rewards and only engineering seems to shine for hunters - but god forbid you'd want to farm up all the earth needed for that bow you want.

WotLK told a far better story and AoE tanking/instances were fun. Not because they were a challenge (they weren't) but because they were a means to an end (points for gear). Smash, raaggghhhh, collect points and get gear. First time = fun, then diminishing returns kicks in. Fun is shinies. Sadly, I say that as someone who has played since release day 1.

PvP is ass - it sucks, blows and tries to pretend it's fun. It's not and with the exception of the original AV and Wintergrasp before pop imbalance made it one sided, the rest are exploit ridden bore-fests. Mind you, I'm not convinced newer players or even old players would queue for the old AV... but I would, god it felt like you had purpose and Kazzak owning you on the hill was funny.

I'm not feeling Cata. I love the new world but it's just more of the same but with a captive audience.

Cata is a big step forward in questing as story in a lot of ways.  If SWTOR plays out the same it won't be the crapfest I've been expecting. (caviat on stable gameplay vs buggy shit.)   I can understand some people disliking it because you're completly on rails through the whole thing.  No more "Man I hate this hub, I'm hopping over to xyz to do his quests instead" because xyz is locked until you complete hub tvw.   That rankles me on a level but at the same time makes it feel much more like an RPG than any other MMORPGs have over the last 15 years.

However, once you're through all that it all falls apart.   Burning Crusade was shit for dungeon design and even Vanilla was more fun but the bosses weren't overly complicated.  Your casual players could get the hang of even heroic bosses easily and once they were geared up it was a-ok.  WOTLK had its problems in terms of AOE shitfesting but lack of fun wasn't one of them and some of the bosses were a little trickier than BC but you didn't get demoralized wiping on trash to get to them.

Cata dungeons feel like all the worst mechanics of Burning Crusade and WOTLK combined.  Tough bosses that require you to be on your toes combined with will-sapping trash that also requires you to be on your toes and geared to an appropriate level.  The catass factor won that battle at HQ, because the sentiment from Blizz so far has been "Go do normals if you can't hack it, scrub."   Since I'm not raiding anymore due to time constraints the whole thing feels pointless.  Why should I bother gear-leveling through this shit? It's not fun and once I plateau the chances of PUGs running raids when I'm able are slim to none.. in all it feels like time to unsub once all the alts hit cap.

I just resubbed to play with a friend who's playing for the first time.  He's having fun.  The only problem is that he's had the game for maybe three weeks and is already level fiftysomething.  The game goes up to 85. but for him it stops at 60 because otherwise he's going to have to shell out something like $80 for the expansions.  If Blizzard wants to attract new people, they need to look at that.

Personally, I'm not really feeling it this time through.  I logged on to my main, saw the phrase "your talent points have been refunded" accompanying a string of empty spaces on my action bar and groaned.  An hour later, I was still working on this shit.  Assign talents, save everything, fish the new skills out of the book and put them on the bar, switch specs, do it all over again.  But that's not all, since I also have a bunch of new stuff, like armor specialization, that I have to visit a trainer to unlock.  So I truck back to Dalaran, only to find that the portals are gone, apparently.  There are trainers there, but I can't get out of Northrend.  So I have to trek all the way back to the Howling Fjord and catch the zepplin there back to the Undercity.  Except that's apprarently the wrong city, I need to train my flying skill but the flying skill trainer is only in Orgrimmar as far as I can tell, so I have to get back on the Zepplin and head over to Orgrimmar.  While I'm there, I wander around and notice that Thrall evidently isn't leading the Horde anymore.  I don't know why, or anything, you'd think someone would have sent me a memo or something, but whatever.  Still haven't done any actual questing on the guy, maybe that'll come later.

Rolled an alt to play with my friend, and so far, it's kind of meh.  The new races are pretty interesting so far, but the old content "redone" is mystifying to me because it's like 75% the same.  I mean, it's been re-written and re-itemized, but the actual quests are basically the same quests.  Started a gnome, and had about five levels of Gnomereran (which was cool) before I hit Kharanos and started getting deja vu.  Go kill the yetis in the cave, go get supplies, find me some shimmerweed from trolls, clear out troggs from the quarry.  There are new quests in there, but they're sprinkled in among retreads of the old quests so the whole thing feels kind of half assed.

The new races fare a bit better, but a lot of their quests are starting to feel gimmicky to me.  Old WoW quest, you'd have to collect ten flowers or something.  A bit repetitive, but you at least knew what you were doing.  New WoW quest, you have to collect ten flowers, but you do that by using this item which makes flowers appear when your pet starts barking and then you have to fight the flower guardian or whatever.  And if you don't "get" the gimmick, you die.  Had to do a quest on my Worgen which was "sneak in to this place and assassinate some guy" and they gave me an infinite reuse stealth potion to help.  Fine, stealth in, kill guys.  But the guy I turn the quest in to was surrounded by enemies, and talking to him drops stealth and kills me.  So I spent a while clearing out enemies (why they gave me a stealth potion in the first place I'm not sure) and talk to the quest guy, and when select my reward, the guys who were trying to kill me become friendly to me.  Thanks, that would have been handy to know ten minutes ago.

Plus, the mechanics just seem dumbed down to me.  WoW was never exactly a super complex game, but now it feels lke a Facebook app.  Every other class has a Sinister Strike move now: Warriors, Paladins, Shamans, everyone.  Weapon skills are gone.  Guns don't take bullets, bows don't need arrows.  Which talent tree you use is more important than how you spend your points in it.  Every talent tree is clearly labelled with an icon so that even if you can't read the description which tells you it's for healing, you'll still be able to make an informed choice.  I mean, I'm not someone who thinks tedium=hardcore=better game, but this game feels like the Playmobil version so far.

I'm only a few days in, though, maybe it'll get better once I get used to it.

(http://i.imgur.com/VNtSK.jpg)

"Every talent tree is clearly labelled with an icon so that even if you can't read the description which tells you it's for healing, you'll still be able to make an informed choice."

I kinda lost you with that complaint. Labeling something as a healing tree/skill doesn't seem like a bad thing, it seems like a UI design from 1991 thing to not have it. Most of the apps I use for work have pretty clear labels like giant red ! or X if I shouldn't do that right now, or at least should know they're kind of a big deal.

I mean, I have my gripes and I even started this thread but god DAMN there are some sandy vaginas in here.

Most of the sandiness seems to be coming from people who are just burnt out on the game.  It happens to everyone eventually. The trick is to let go, move on to a new game and avoid turning into a grumpy old man shaking his fist at the kids on his lawn.

Yeah, i was going to get into a big arguement about quality, but ultimately it just boils down to the fact we've been playing this game for years and its completely rational to want off the ride at some point. Its just bein able to recognise that is important, as otherwise yiu. An end up forcing yourself to keep playing whilsy actively disliking the game like many of us did with EQ - whuich wasnt healthy!

Personally, i almost quit during wrath because thr quality of the expansion and content was so ridiculously low post Ulduar, and in my mind was some of the worse content they have ever done. Cata raids and instances are fun whilst challenging, rewarding decent without the horrible grinding heroic s of TBC. The quality of the new raids is absolutly top notch even if the 10/ 25 split isnt working too well, and overall the game is simply fun again. But thats my subjective opinion!

Thr only thing i would say is that the poster above who was sayin this is some form of 'dumbed down' game is, factually, not correct. The vast majority of classes are tougher to play to a high level than they were in TBC or wrath. Fights are more complicated, trash is more complicated and classes are more complicated - one critiscm you cant level at cata is that its easy mode. Heck, for the first timr si ce vanilla outdoor mobs are an issue for my mage - thise freaken wildhamme dwarves in twilight highlands are *dangerous*, and if i get more than one I'm pulling out sheep. I havent done that in 5 years...

Maybe for people like me (yes, I just need to let go, if not for family playing I would in a heartbeat), but Kail brings up some really valid points in the first 2/3 of the post.  As a returning player, there's a truckload of dumb shit you have to do just to get to play the game.  It's been optimized for the new player, but not the player that only plays for six months after an xpac.  

I still contend that there's too many goddamn abilities.  Hell, they even went so far as to start roping abilities into swing-out buttons (warlock/hunter pets, portals... etc.).  Which is good, because my hunter in BC had too many abilities to fit into all 60 buttons on the stock UI.  Did I need all of them?  Nope.  But they gave them to me, so my rationale was that I'd need them at some point.  

For the record, I like the changes to ammo and reagent usage - less tedium is in the right direction.  I'm just not a fan of everything else.  :/

There's another trial going on, for those that want to see Cataclysm and have Wrath:  Trial Stuffs (http://us.battle.net/en/info/cataclysm-trial)

Since I'm going to be out for a few days after getting my wisdom teeth pulled, I figured I could pay my proto-drake (and a few friends) a visit.  I'm just using it to do the Worgen and Goblin areas.  I might putter about on my 80s, but doubtfully for long.

If you only have time for one newbie do a goblin. It's starting areas are way better than the worgen.

You have no idea how much I like to fuck with people doing those dailies on the horde side. They sit there picking off a dwarf or two, I fly in and almost instantly murder every orc on the field, and every remaining dwarf takes off after the horde <3

Solo pve wise, locks are in a good place ;)

Agreed. As an altoholic I love the redone old world, but the 80+ content is just leaving me really underwhelmed.

This is exactly the issue.  I played a bit, but just can't get back into it because it has become a boring chore to level up a character.  That doesn't mean the game isn't well done. 

One change I would really like to see is "gearless" PvP.  It's been shown that people will do shit just for an achievement status.  It would be much more enjoyable to participate in the battlegrounds if there was an even playing field.  I don't want to have to grind BGs for months just to be even mildly competitive.  And I don't want to participate in Arenas for months to get on a level playing field with all the poopsockers. 

I would agree in a vacuum, but knowing Lanty she will far prefer the worgen zone, it lacks the silly factor.

I asked the guild who was up for the daily random dungeon run yesterday. One of them responded, "Man, I feel like I'm already doing the same thing everyday. This is like a job."

 :oh_i_see:

Oddly I felt more that way about the daily heroic in WotLK, but I'm not sure I could say why.

Not really a complaint (Icons on talent trees?!?! WTF *RAGEQUIT*), it's just contributing towards a general impression.  It's hard for me to pin down, everything just seems less complex and more streamlined in the hopes of making the game even more retard proof than it was.  Like apparently only one DK spec is a viable tank, now, so if you were confused about the difference between a Frost tank and an Unholy tank, now you just go Blood, no thought required.  Might just be surface deep (I haven't done much with anyone over level 15), but that's the impression I'm getting.

The DK tanking change is less about dumbing things down for players and more about making tank balancing easier for the devs.

As outlined above, it really is surface deep. Whilst they have made levelling vastly easier in terms of talents and abilities, classes as a whole are more complicated to play to the top of their ability. The only ones I think aren't are probably shadowpriests compared to TBC and affliction warlocks.

Yeah, this was a change that needed to happen.  Without it you could wind-up with Tank specs that DPSd hard (PVP bitch) or DPS specs that were wholly shit (lol dual-wield blood DK I saw struggling in Blasted Lands.)  so Blizzard just kept DKs at a "meh" level after their initial nerfs because it was too hard to fix.

The complexity is not only still there, but increased in a lot of cases.  It's just moved from the preparation side of managing tons of stats or talents to the combat side. 

People have been wanting to fly in the old world ever since BC came out. They've always said that there were a variety of tech reasons it couldn't be done and that it would require rebuilding the whole world. They rebuilt the "whole" world, but decided that if they were doing all this they may as well change shit up. Add 2 new races to run through it all, open up a bunch of new class/race combos, scale the 10 levels into 5, release.

Sure there are fewer levelling zones, but while I can't remember who said it here earlier, it's not like everyone was hanging around Grizzly Hills...

Just out of curiosity, what exactly is stopping you from simply hopping on your level 85 toon and going back and doing the lowbie zones?  I mean, yeah, you might lose out on the tiny bit of immersion that is "oh no, you cant get this quest till you ding level 15" when you are 13 or 14, which i suppose, could mess up the "intended" quest flow through the zone by a miniscule amount that only a hardened lore geek would even complain about.  And I suppose one shotting pretty much everything as you mow through the quests might possibly get boring after a while, but aside from being unable to do the new 1-8 / 1-10 ish absolute newb starter areas, every single other quest is open and available to you.

Nothing really forces you to re-roll a completely new toon just to experience the new old world zones.

Instead of thinking of it like the old appartment you moved out of 3 years ago, think of it more like improvements to the playground down the street that you stopped playing in as a kid, but still think on fondly when the nostalgia hits.

Except they tend to lock you up when you're 46 and go to the local playground for a romp.  Trust me.

 :oh_i_see:

I am so glad the parks around here have banned hunters as well.

My complaint du jour is the Blizzard community.

I've noticed a huge increase in hacking/botting lately.  Maybe that's because I've been out in the world picking herbs and mining nodes more, but last week I found 5 underground miners/herbalists in Hyjal alone.  Battleground botting is also still a problem.  Does Blizzard actively try to find these guys, or do they simply rely upon players reporting them?  I cannot imagine it's all that difficult to fix.

Also, on my server, Twilight Highlands chat is worse than tradechat ever was.  I don't know if this is just my server, but some people have absolutely no boundaries whatsoever between what they say publicly and privately.  I never considered myself easily offended or shockable, and have quite a potty mouth myself - yet I've been reporting folks right and left for offensive chat.  (Explicit descriptions of lurid fantasies, for example).  These folks seem to have no consideration of the idea of being in public. 

I don't know what the penalties are for bad behavior, but apparently they're not strong enough to deter people from behaving badly.

It's a generational thing.  Any attention is good attention in the "I'm a superstar" world they grew up in.

So the generation playing WoW today is a different one than was playing 2 years ago?

I think its just more extreme trolls. I actually noticed this in some guildmates. Basically, in an attempt to do joking trolls, you slowly become what you are joking about and pretty quickly general explodes.

I don't think they really consider it "public" in the way you do, would be my guess.

Once any form of meaningful public censure was removed from the individual server communities (don't group with that guy, he's an asshole) with the introduction of LFD why should they behave?

Unscientifically, based on the size of my ignore list and the number of "just plain foul" character names I see...  Yes.

(edit:  I swear it wasn't like this just a year ago.)

We had pretty notorious pricks in trade chat before LFD, and they just became tiny server celebrities. Public censure in an MMO of any size seems like a terrible method of enforcing anything.

I think it's more that the game keeps growing, and even if the percentage of obnoxious pricks stays static, the total number of them found in a particular channel will increase. You get a few pricks talking to each other, and the channel becomes useless.

Yes, when dealing with teens 2 years is a mighty long time.

Younger folks always seem to be the ones doing the gross trolling.  Anal (skill) or describing something in detail.  Most on my server haven't been over 19 when asked in other channels.  (Through a series of coincidences I found out what the private troll celeb channel was on my server and used to belong to it. )  Let's say your avg. troll of this type is a teenager between 15 and 17.  2 years ago the 15year old troll would have been 13, possibly playing for the first time and seeing what the trolls of 2 years ago did.  In typical teenage fashion, that's old and tired and "normal" so it's time to push beyond that into something even more scandalous and shocking.  It's exponential.   

Now, if you're going with the assumption that it's kids in their early 20s, then the things can be different.  Tho it's been my experience that the ones in their 20s take it a little more seriously and use political trolling or issue-based trolling.  Things like Sarah Palin is awesome. or Obama killed my grandmother.   These guys develop a personna and might have 2-3 different characters that they troll with.  The ones here you worry about also like to dip into pedo trolling. Those guys are creepy. 

They also don't care when they're banned.  It's a joke to them, and they're doing it for the attention and the mini-celeb status.  They love being talked about, weather it's by their little cults of personality or reviled by the rest of the server.

Just based on my experiences, though.

I have to confess that if Blizzard opened an old people's server (like 30+), I'd probably resub.  I'd even pay $5 more a month. 

I thought that was the intent behind creating RP-PVE servers.

That's pretty much why I play on those types of servers, when I am subbed.  Signing up even comes with its own walker that has the fuzzy tennis balls on the bottom.

Yah, I'd pay extra for that.  Then the assholes would just be mostly political trolls, and you'd skip a lot of the plain gross immaturity.

Hey, when you joined my guild we had an entire group and all us were over 30.   It was nice when we could field 4 out of 5 people in a group and just ignore the random idiot DPSer.

Slap in the Face always felt "old," even though I was only 26? I think? when WoW came out (  :ye_gods: ). We actually do have some younger people in the guild now (college age-ish) but our relentless old person crabbiness seems to rub off on them for the most part.

<Get off my Lawn> Now recruiting.  PST with your location when Kennedy was shot for possible invite.

Could we settle with when the challenger blew up?

You know, I was totally thinking to myself that the Challenger is probably a better metric at this point. zomg twinz

What I find fascinating is that even the kiddies hate being around the kiddies. In the DCUO chat the other day, some guy started doing Barrens chat classics of various kinds like "Hey, it's MLK Day, that means I'm supposed to like n***ers" and so on. And then twenty minutes later, he suddenly says, "I wish they'd make a server for mature people, I'm so tired of all this kiddie crap on chat channels".  :uhrr:   I see that all the time on WoW trade chat too: the worst offenders themselves want to be in an environment where it's not cool to be an asshole on trade chat, and think that the way to get there is to find a server where there's lots of grown-ups.

In class, watching it on TV... yeah.

Haha!

We had the day off due to snow.

I was in class... freshman at college.

I wish Blizzard would try something like this - League of Legends is introducing The Tribunal where players evaluate cases of bad behavior. (http://www.leagueoflegends.com/news/griefers-beware-tribunal-coming)

While I understand the potential for griefing, I really don't see how it would be worse than the current situation, given the proper constraints.

(In the Sierras, a cross-country skiing vacation; in first grade - I suspect basing a guild on the Kennedy assassination timeline would result in perhaps 20 members across all servers. I'd sure love being in a bg with just other old folks though.)

Yes, I'm sure a tribunal hosted by the trade chat trolls wouldn't be abused.  At all.

Yeah that sounds quite significantly worse than the way things are now, to me.

Yeah i don't know why anyone would ever think that is a good idea.

I was home from school (2nd grade, I believe) but I have no recollection why. I think I was sick, but not 100% sure on that. I also don't know why my mother didn't call me in to watch it lift off, because we usually watched launches together when we could. I'm sort of glad she didn't, though. She came running in to tell me about it right after, and we watched replays over and over and over.

As for trade, I wish it would just get nuked from orbit. I have to settle for just turning it off immediately on every character I make.

Man, I have the personality to handle being a Trade Chat Judge! It will be a reign of peace and prosperity. Right after the summary executions.

I was four and a half, and my parents were packing up our stuff to move to Dallas.

When the challenger blew I up think I was in sixth grade.  I was at home watching it because my mom (who was a teacher) had stayed home sick so I stayed home too.  Creepy stuff. 

Sure, if there were no restrictions upon who the judges were.

I assume that not everybody would be given the opportunity to be a tribunal judge.  I also assume that there would be more than one judge - perhaps a score or more - per case, so that the cases would be decided in aggregate by the judges, which would be reviewed by GMs.  I also assume that there would be a reputation system in place for such a thing to even be considered.

Under those conditions, I fail to see how it would be worse than the current situation.  I could be wrong about this, but I think you're being too reflexive.

That system could work if it wasn't a free-for-all, which means not getting Barrens Chat trolls involved.  If Blizzard could choose unbiased folks to run it the process could work.  Of course finding unbiased people could be troublesome...

Me too - our entire 8th grade science class and another class joined in watching it. I still remember looking at the teacher and seeing her expression go from, "What just happened.." to "OMG, I just showed a snuff film to my kids."

I was two! Well, actually, two and a half.

And I approve of this tribunal system, both in LoL, and WoW. Both games are VERY socially reliant, to the point where one dick (or even not a dick, but a 'newb') can wreck the game experience for the rest of the group members. I'm not sure it's a smart business idea, for either game, but it's something I personally would like to see implemented. Too often (again, bot in LoL, and WoW) someone has been a total asshole, and I have thought 'Man I can't wait until that person gets their just desserts......Oh wait, that doesn't happen.' The frustration and bitterness that results from that has bascially led me to resume playing one player games for the first time in about 3 years.

I was in Year 11 - about all I can remember now is being horrified and that it only took 4 hours for the NASA=Need Another Seven Astronauts joke to do the rounds (This is pre-internet Australia).

I am certain that hearing the joke about Christa McAuliffe's dandruff is what turned me to a life of dark humour.

How did NASA know that Christa McAuliffe had dandruff?

As for Tribunals, Blizzard could call the volunteers Counselors.  What could go wrong?

I was in High school as well. And I also remember hearing that joke on the day.

(Aside: I recall that the Challenger disaster spawned jokes almost immediately - I heard the first one at work back at work on Monday or Tuesday.  I don't think I've ever heard a joke about 9/11.)

It's becoming more difficult to attempt pug heroics.  Are tanks and healers no longer queuing? 

The people who love that heroics are hard cannot be the same population of those typically using the LFD tool.

It seems to me that a lot of people are playing alts.  I had a 15 minute queue on my little worgen rogue (25ish) for dungeons yesterday, while regular 85 dungeons were ~30, and heroics were ~45.

BG queues are almost instant, no matter the level (as long as one picks random bg).

Oh, and another crack.  The Isle bg boss is practically unkillable now for level 80-84 bg.  When he jumps, everyone dies.  The only way to win that bg is by attrition.  Taking the workshop and using demos to kill players is very effective.  Trying to explain this to alliance is like whistling in the wind, as usual.

It would be better if they had more 85 non-heroic dungeons and more non-heroic gear progression.  People who want to play via the random dungeon feature, or people who just don't freaking feel like not standing in fire in 5-mans, should be fine with regular dungeons.  Problem is that half of the Cata dungeons are wasted on pre-85 levelling.  With the quest rewards, you end up maxing out on non-heroic progression after a very few regular dungeon runs.

If all the dungeons were 85, all had loot better than quest rewards, and perhaps all had some more reasonable way to get justice points, then I think there'd be less pressure to do heroice.

Yes, tanks are healers have stopped queuing. There is nothing they need now from JP because they got it all through having instant queues, so they only do them for the VP random, and only then with groups they hand pick. I think I pugged one person when I did a regular this weekend for a friend, and that was to pull in a healer. As far as the people saying they love harder heroics, they are always going to be the people who blow through them the fastest and never see them again. That's why you don't listen to them when you designing your non-raid content.

As a healer (85 pally) let me give you my take.  I re-upped because my wife wanted to and I heard they "fixed" the pvp aspect of the game and that my favorite archetype (the healer) was terrific.

To say I feel mislead is a bit of an understatement.  PvP is non-stop crowd control fest where I enjoy most arena's and Bg's from the form of a sheep, frozen block, or running around screaming in fear.  Solo PvP as a healer is worse than solo PvP as a tank,  because my damage output is so anemic that practically every dps class can outheal it using the myriad of "self-heal" abilities that Blizzard saw fit to put in the game.  Alternatively I am stunned, silenced, cc'd to the point where I can only take instant actions.  Effectively Arena matches turn into pillar humping fests where I have to desperately avoid cc while I throw an occasional heal to my partner.  Fun times.

PvE is worse.  I only queue with my wife (who plays a mage and is having an awesome time in PvE and PvP), and folks have tried to kick my from more than half a dozen groups.  In all of these cases I feel confident in saying that the fault for the poor performance was entirely the fault of crappy DPS who couldn't be bothered to learn rudimentary mechanics like "do not stand in the fire."   I know that probably sounded a bit arrogant, but being that i have played a helare in MMo's for almost a decade now, I think I am pretty familiar with the mechanics.   Unless I am incredibly lucky every dungeon run turns knots in my stomach as I try (often in vain) to keep the party up while simultaneously trying to manage my mana bar (and as a pally I have the easiest time doing this of any of the healing classes).

I pretty much just gave up random queing, I am waiting for a few rl friends to level up so we can run the 85 instances together.  Occasionally I have  a moment of madness where I queue random heroics with my wife (who butters me up because she wants the 5 minute queue with me instead of the 50 minute queue without).

Meanwhile I am leveling a dps class and having a grand time in PvP and PvE.  I think I am going to stick with this and let someone else deal with the headache.  I imagine I am not alone in this reasoning.  

Rather than bitch about it anymore I just unsubbed.  It's so unfun I don't even want to bother finding a raid group that works on EST instead of PST where I'm going to bed at 1am.

Same.  I had considered writing a lengthy post with all the reasons this is unfun, but I just realized that I don't really care to spend my time throwing words at a brick wall.  Maybe I was one of the 'bads', but at least in wrath I was having fun.  It is a shame, after six years of playing for it to end this way.  I have a weird feeling like I won't be back.  After that amount of time I've lost the hook.

I canceled my subscription yesterday.

My main hit max level last week - and I was enjoying grinding rep more than I was seeing the new content. I'm not going to RDF again, no desire to raid, and I can't bear the thought of leveling another alt.

...as a side note, did anyone notice the detailed questionnaire you fill out when unsubscribing now?  o_O

Yes, where it basically tells you to learn to play.

Yeah I had a laugh at the choices for "It's not fun anymore."  Talk about not getting it.

Did Tigole write the exit survey?  :why_so_serious:

Is there a link? Can you give us an idea of what the survey was like?

Can't get a link, as it would be linked to my b.net account.. but hey, I couldn't even bring up the survey again when I tried a few mins ago.

There was a list of 4-5 choices.. none of which really were my reason but the closest was some variant of "I'm not having fun anymore"  It then asked me if I'd tried Battlegrounds, Raids and Arenas or some nonesense.

Know what, fuck it I'm going to reup then screencap the fucker.  I didn't pay close enough attention to give a lot of detail, but I remember thinking "None of these work or are the reason."   It was 3-4 questions in before I got to a "fill out your reason" and that was limited to something like 180 characters.

Upon review it's not as bad as I first had the impression, but it's not great either.

The first page
This list, however, definitely smells like "We've heard your qqing before, what is it this time?" 

Finally it let me pick the reason down at the bottom.  I was wrong on the length allowed as it's actually 255 characters.  I said it was bad form to push people to play one way for two years, then suddenly decide "No, you're playing all wrong."  It was their fault, their decision and their problem, not the players.

Seems like a reasonable range of questions, but seems focused on a problem with the player(s) not the game.

Pushing people into the LFD tool.. hilarious if your problem is you're at cap and the LFD tool sucks.

These seem reasonable. The list of games to be playing instead was a little outdated as it listed The Sims2.  :awesome_for_real:

Your typical list of problems with MMO players.

Still, as Sanya pointed out once about MMO playing I played for 6 years.  6 vs the 2-3 months other games might get.  I can't bitch too much about things if it kept me engaged that long.

For me it's no one thing I can put my finger on, but I am just really shocked that right after an expansion my interest in the game has just plummeted. Maybe I really have just been playing this game for too long.

I think it really boils down to the fact that they changed everything about how we do what we do. It's easy to cut ties from a world that's completely different.

WoW has always been a comfortable MMO to come back to.  Often I try other DIKUs, but I find something off-putting so I end up coming back to WoW.  Regardless of whether they like or not, they set a new comfort level with max level dungeon running (and perceived gearing) that they upset significantly with Cat.  So, they managed to make WoW look unfavorable compared to... WoW. Heh.

And yes, it's getting old.  I've played this game for longer than all other MMOs I've played combined (and not by a close margin either).

Still playing, but unless they shake it up, I don't think I'll manage too long at max level.  But it'll be a while before I'm there, my goblin is at Outlands and that shit I can only handle in short spurts.

I would tend to agree. You just don't do that to a player base. They don't like shit like that.

Has anyone ever completely revamped their system successfully? A 'one fell swoop' massive set of changes, not a class revamp or some mechanics futzing? (Let's not discuss SWG. Surely someone else has tried it).

I think the mechanics changes PLUS asking players to basically relearn their monkey reflexes in dungeons was just a bit to far.

I could understand it if crowd control was important part of anything pve but dungeon-running. Except it's not, and never will be in the raiding game. They are stomping on their playerbase for no tangible reason. Was facerolling heroics for fun really costing them players? The reverse certainly is.

The last time they seemed to be starting to lose their grasp on subscribers we got the big 'everyone can raid now' philosophy change, so I'd expect big changes again if they're really bleeding subscribers.

along with a lead designer change, no doubt.

It's not just the CC.  It's the fact that they intended to make AoE, CC, and threat all work harmoniously in Wrath, then didn't, still haven't, and in the meantime they've made faceroll to victory non-viable.

From the talking out both sides of your mouth department:

Ya, that quote drove me bonkers.  So they put in place a quantifiable hard cap (ilvl) on dungeon entrance requirements, but knowingly set it lower than what the instance requires to be successful?  I just... I don't have words.  It's like signing up for a karate class, a few weeks in they hand you a black belt.  Then you wonder why you just got the shit kicked out of you every day after that. 

It is set lower than what the instance requires to be successful in a pug, but you could succeed at that ilvl with a 'real' group. I kind of feel like they should up the PUG requirement a little, and just waive the check for a premade.

...and they are nerfing healing again in the new patch notes.  Jesus, I can't believe this is Blizzard it is so clownshoes.  Welp, it was fun for the month I reupped  (actually it wasn't, come to think of it).

I'd argue that Burning Crusade was a much larger overhaul of fundamental game systems than Cataclysm is.  It almost completely remade the class paradigm and introduced:

• in-combat AddOn restrictions,
• downranking nerfs,
• pet scaling,
• ratings,
• 25-man raids (and the return of 10-mans),
• multiple difficulty levels for dungeons,
• fractional loot,
• Arenas replacing the Honor system, and of course,
• flight.

And it's not like people didn't bitch about Heroic Shadow Labyrinth four years ago either.

I was literally thinking this morning 'While heroics are a lot harder now, they aint got nothing on Slabs' - dear God I had some scary runs through there.