f13.net

Creating a splinter thread from the original behemoth to specifically discuss initial thoughts of MoP.  I'm 87.5 while writing the post.

Overall world:  I'm playing just between Good and Fair for graphics settings, and the views are still impressive.  Some of the forestry and orchardry is exceptionally well done.   A few negatives here include falling off the continent a few times (sigh) and collision detection with plants that didn't exist before this expansion.  The best compliment I can give though, is the world feels new.  For an aging game, I think this is a huge win.  Overall grade:  A

Questing:  Lore is a huge factor here and I like that the quests aren't point A to point B forcing completion for completion's sake.  The quests are also created in such a way that you're meaningfully exploring the continent.  I felt like Cata suffered here:  okay, I have to get the world pillars, that's cool...but it felt very arbitrary when I had to go here or go there.  Pandaria quest lines have a good flow to them.  A huge negative about them is they are buggy as fuck.  I get that it's week one and all, but the bugs have been really, really apparent.  I had a quest added to the known issues list after contacting a GM.  A lot of it has been MoP's management of a group getting credit for an event but no applying it to an individual character.  For example:  girlfriend and I get a quest to fly somewhere and talk to the flight master.  She gets there first because, c'mon gentlemen, ladies first.  It awards her credit and pops the new ! icon for her next quest.  I get credit on the bird, arrive in the town, and don't ever trigger the next !.  Unfortunately, abandoning doesn't work and I just have to skip this line of quests.  Oh well.  We found the same thing when doing the four adventurers storyteller quest:  we were instanced separately, I got credit for something which then gave her credit but never triggered the next action for her to take.  All in all, quests have been very pleasant compared to WotLK and Cata expansions.  Overall grade:  B

Dungeons:  Dungeons are awesome.  They feel fresh, with exciting mechanics I can't wait to do on heroic.  Also, they aren't too punishing for the stand-in-the-fire types, so I find them pretty well balanced too.  The new wipe->walk in near your corpse in a dungeon thing is freakin' awesome too.  Lots of nice things to say here.  Only issues I've found so far here is the five suns event in Temple of the Jade Serpent has failed two out of the three times we've tried it.  But, forgivable with the other awesomeness involved.  Overall grade:  A

Professions:  Cooking, Herbalism, Fishing, and Alchemy are my chosen professions and the most underrated thing I've found so far is just how useful the professions are early on.  I can make +250 stat food very early on (think within the first 25 skill ups, which you get through a quest).  Also, alchemy potions and the IL 450 trinket you get feel powerful, extremely so when you can pot yourself for around 90k HP.  Oh, remember when you used to have to equip your fishing pole to fish?  And then you forgot to take it off until the last boss in your raid?  Not anymore.  Fishing poles work like old mining picks an skinning knives now.  Granted I haven't crafted very much other than food and potions yet, but I have very little negative to say here.  Overall grade:  A+.

Farming:  I've completed the quests so far, but I can't finish them for 24 hours while the crops grow?   :oh_i_see:  I'm sure I'll have more to write on this later, but I have a hard time coming back to some random zone just for Tillers rep.  Farming itself was okay though.  The things you'll have to do grow the crops seemed novel at first, but I have a feeling they will tire quickly.  Overall grade:  C+

Pet Battles:  This is hearsay, but from the number of people getting the achievements I've been seeing in my guild and the number of people completing the Menagerie (125 pets) achievements, this has a lot of traction.  Since I haven't actually done it and I'm auditing the course, I'll grade this one on a pass/fail basis.  Overall grade:  Pass.


All in all, Pandaria has been worth my coin.  Extremely engaging, beautiful landscapes, and fun gameplay has trumped any mouthbreathing from anyone I've come across in-game.  I think this is the most telling sign:  from all of the DONTNERFPLZ and
WAHUHAETHUNTERZ111! before the game released, I haven't heard anyone say anything about disliking his or her class in MoP 85+.  In fact, I haven't heard anyone say anything negative about Mists with the exception of some buggy client behavior. 

I think that's because on the final exam, when MoP was asked the question, "Is it fun?" it simply replied, "Yes."

Regarding farming, don't worry about it too much until 90.  That's when the dailies open up that allow you to build up rep, which unlocks quests that open up more farm land spaces to use.  Crops grow to full at the stroke of midnight server-time, assuming you took care of whatever ailment the plant was suffering when you planted it.  You might even get lucky and get an instant harvest when you plant too.

The Five Suns event has bugged about half the time for me too; that's the only real glitch I've seen in MoP so far but I've mostly been soloing (I'm 89.1 at the moment) and most of your problems seem to have been group related.

Good catch on Fishing Poles; I hadn't realized that you don't need to equip them anymore.

Regarding farming, after the first 24 hour wait for your crops there aren't any more quests until 90 but you can keep growing crops to skill up your cooking, or for the daily which requires 20 of a food material.

Edit: Regarding Fishing Poles, they only changed it so you can fish without one equipped. If you have one that provides skill bonuses, you still need to equip it to get those bonuses.

I haven't had a single problem with the five suns.. I didn't even know there was the possibility of a problem. Huh.

The crops thing does make me wonder if they fixed the unkillable weed problem from the beta.  The 7-line general chat channel spam makes me think it's not yet.

Didn't know any of that about fishing, thanks for the heads-up.

Occasionally after killing all the trash, the boss will spawn but never become attackable.

Level 86 and roughly a half, as of last night.

I had an early quest bug up on me, because I followed the npc into the cave, got distracted by something shiny, ran back out, and when I ran back in, the npc was gone.

Logging in and out didn't work, but, running off a ways did work. So I had a phasing issue, but not a fatal one.

The only professions I've got any real points into are First Aid and Mining, just due to the abundance of resources that I've stumbled upon.
I was at 193/200 of Iron Chef before the expansion, and then I bought, what, 15 or 20 recipes from the first panda cooking trainer I found.

I did not know that you can fish just by having a pole in your bag. That's fantastic.

I ran Jade Monastery and the Brew house last night with some guildies. The Brew house is a little silly (he said, as he played through a continent full of pandas), but the last fight is a lot of fun, so I'll take it.

I started pet battles last night. Check out the achievement list sometime. There's a heavy "gotta catch em all" vibe in there o.O

My issue here is there is so much lag time for the next quest:  I shouldn't be able to bust out parts one through five in 20 minutes and then have to wait a day for part six.  I would've rather seen a one-time use grandfather's miracle grow or something.  I mean, we just found her favorite flower underneath the hut...


Interesting.  I think I have a blue pole, so I didn't notice that.  I've always wondered if +20 skill is really that big of a deal though.  Sure would be nice if they made it passive a la skinning knives and mining picks.

Oh, and let me reiterate:  I really suggest levelling cooking as you go...the stat food is a pretty large bonus that'll make a party member or guildie's day when you mail 5 food back to him or her.

Anyone wasting precious cloth on first aid can DIAF. *tailorrage*

I saw it because I immediately tried fishing without a pole, and pulled out a wooden stick instead of my blinged out pole (http://www.wowwiki.com/Jeweled_Fishing_Pole). Then I check my skill from the window and saw it wasn't taking the bonus either.

When fishing in the spawned fishing holes, you don't need to attach your pole because those never have junk in them.

It's when you're fishing in open water that you need the full array of equipped pole, pants, hats, lures, and a nice cooler of beer to get the job done without catching a boot.

Oh, also?  The sniper rifle quest.

 :heart: :heart: :heart:

I've been mostly leveling my new panda monk the past 2 days (lvl 19 now).  Went with the dps spec to start (windwalker???) and I've done a few dungeons with it.  The dps seems pretty decent so far using only one heirloom weapon.  My rotation is mostly jab for 2 chi, tiger fist thing x2 for moderate damage and the 10% armor reduction per use, then kick to finish them off.  Fists of fury is fun to watch, esp. if you're in a group full of panda monks all doing it at the same time.  Doing rolls and activating Super Flying Kick is pretty amusing too.  For duel spec, I'll probably take Brewmaster just because while I'm not fond of tanking, I hate healing even more.  

I did a run in one of the new lvl 85 dungeons (Jade Something or Other) on my warrior, as well.  It felt much easier than when I tried the first Cata dungeons.  It was more WOTLK in difficulty, which I'm ok with.  No one needs to be cock smashed with the introductory dungeons.  

Pet battles have been more fun than I thought they would be and will be a nice time waster later on when you've gotten your characters to 90.  I have all 3 pet slots open and I managed to get my Mini Thor up to lvl 5.  It was disheartening to have him killed by a bunny, though. :heartbreak:  I can see more than a few people doing pet battles almost exclusively.

Pet Battles are surprisingly "one more turn" sticky.

The video optimizations are pants though.  Everything they've done to pretty up the game comes at a huge cost and video card fan at 100% is a full time experience while WoW is running now.  I'm pushing 2560x1600 so this isn't the resolution the game was designed for, but I can't find enough stuff to turn off to keep the load lower on the card and worry for its longevity.  It is kinda silly to have a high end setup and end up degrading the video experience because they worked so hard to enhance it.

What's your GPU? It runs silky smooth on my GTX 670 at Ultra settings at 1080p.

Radeon HD 6970. 

I could bump it down to 1080p and concede that I'll only get max resolution with relatively recent games, but my new monitor is so purty.

One thing I found pretty cool was during a quest to visit some shrines in Jade Forest. In one of the fountains I noticed something glowing. Clicking on it yielded a gray item called Lucky Pandaren Coin worth 95g. A nice bonus and a nice touch IMO. The world feels more alive and lived in than Cata zones.

Ooo, I must have missed that one, but I found a grey Saurok Tablet in a cave later on that vendored for 100g.  Appearently the item is visible to everybody, but only lootable once per character (i watched 2 other people loot the thing while i was in the cave killing lizard men.)

Oh, there's more than that: http://www.wowhead.com/news=206309/mists-of-pandaria-rare-spawns-lost-and-found-preview

Also: http://www.wowhead.com/guide=1021/mop-all-exploration-achievements-and-maps-with-location-of-rare-mobs#sorted-by-zone-jade-forest

So some of the stuff I wanted Blizzard to steal from GW2? They've already done it.  :awesome_for_real:

Stuff is dirt cheap right now, not what I expected.  I had been expecting an embercloth situation where it was as expensive as ore or herbs but nope, almost everything we're fighting is humanoid so the market is flooded.  I used mine on first aid which they also made easier, think I used less than 100 to get to 600.

That hidden stuff explains where I keep getting these high gold gray items.

While ore and herbs are as usual absurdly expensive right now I think they might crash hard once more people open up the vale hub.  If you want to save/make some money you can buy things like 20 ghost iron bars or 20 herbs for one Spirit of Harmony there.

So chests are back?

Cloth is beyond dirt cheap.  It's approaching vendor-pricing levels already on the AH - something you never used to see until mid-expansion.   There were stacks of 10 and 20 up for 20 gold on my server last night.

Ghost Iron is selling well for some ridiculous reason.   I'm almost maxed on Engineering (I need more motes to advance and they aren't dropping, damnit!)  and nodes are still everywhere so I'm selling what I find.  I sold a few stacks of 20 for 400 gold each yesterday, only 2% below market average, and it was snapped-up within 5 minutes of listing.   

Trillium isn't moving at all, though.  First night it was listing for 3,000 each at the low price, but none of mine sold at that level. (Got some off a rare mob)  Yesterday it was down to 300 a unit for black and 600 for white on the low end.  I still don't expect it to sell after I listed it again.

I've noticed the same. Everything is selling quickly, but not at outrageous prices. When Cataclysm launched I made a killing off low level mats with people leveling worgen and goblins. I stocked up again this time expecting the same, but everything is very low.

Herbs as of last night were around 300g/stack on my server.  I don't understand this, considering it takes all of five minutes to gather a stack of herbs.

Common sense tells me herbing shouldn't amount to 6,000 gold/hour.

All I can figure is it's gold farming auction house bots getting raped because they're using data models from previous expansions.  Which is ok with me, really.

Some people are buying mats if they're like me, with two crafting/no gathering professions (BS/Inscrip) because gathering professions have shitty buffs for raiding. My gatherers are my alts, and they're not getting leveled yet so I don't mind dropping a few hundred gold a stack on ore since I've got plenty of gold.

Ghost Iron is down to 150g/stack on my server. All of the crafting professions seem much easier to max this time around.

I deliberately took my rogue inscriber out first - I hit 575 inscription before I hit level 86. Big props to Blizzard for this.

I don't feel the need to rush to cap any more so I log for a bit then leave and play something else. This is a good thing.

I am swimming in Ghost Iron. I don't feel like I'm having any competition for nodes. There just must be a lot more than in the past.

I think the abundance of herb / mining nodes probably has something to do with the tweaks they made to resource / rare spawn spawn rates being affected by the number of people in  the zones.   Massive numbers of people in zones = much faster respawn times on nodes / rares.

I am a herbalist on my druid, and you practically cant move more then 100 yards in any direction without tripping over a bushel of herbs on my server.

I took Engineering from 525 to 579 tonight.
I burned through a pretty hefty stack of ghost iron, and still have a bunch left.
Of course, since this is Engineering, you can't do it without other mats.

I started off with Mirror Scopes, which each take 2 lapis lazuli gems. Bought those off the AH, pretty affordable.

Then I switched to Tinker's Kits, which may or may not be more cost effective than buying them off the vendor, but as long as they stayed orange I was fine with crafting them. They take 2 cloth per craft.

And then, I crafted 3 of the Ghost Iron Dragonlings. 5 skillups each, 12 cloth each. I made one for myself, and got my guildmates to donate cloth in exchange for the other two.
I would have made more, but only had two takers, and then the recipe turned yellow.

All of my orange recipes want trillium or spirit(s) of harmony, or both, so I'm pausing here for a while.

You can make thermal anvils up to 595, takes about 300 bars though so pricey.

http://www.wow-professions.com/wowguides/wow-engineering-guide.html#500

When you roll up a pandaran, after you...um. I'd better err on the side of caution, I suppose.

When you've

Dinged lvl 90 with my DK yesterday.

- Got Pandaria Loremaster
- Got Pandaria flying
- Got my daily groove in full gear.
- Got Pandaria Explorer

Still having a good time, and it's getting better and better.  Haven't done anything with scenarios yet, but I plan on knocking that out tonight to get myself a nice 450 two-hander for entry-level heroic tanking.  Not that I couldn't do heroic now; apparently I'm eligible with just the quest greens and blues I've got (all between ilvl 430 and 450), along with 450 neck and rings from my own Jewelcrafting, the dodge trinket from updated Brewfest, and the Engineer drake trinket.  Still, I wanna do some more world stuff and what not before I go full-bore heroics.  All of the valor and justice points in the world won't amount to a hill of beans without proper faction standings.

Speaking of that engineer drake trinket, everyone of you guys need one.  It's dirt cheap to make, anyone can equip it, and you can customize the three cogs to your liking (for example, I went with +600 Hit, Expertise, and Mastery, which works for both my tank and DPS specs).  I can't imagine anyone NOT using one of these until the next tiers come out with larger rating boosts that would make up what that drake can do.

As far as factions go, right at 90 I'm working on Klaxxi, Tillers, Anglers, Golden Lotus, and Serpent Riders.  Shado-Pan and August Celestials won't even give you the time of day until you get Revered with Golden Lotus.  Also, the second you hit 90, go talk to Wrathion and pick up his quests so you can start farming his faction.  It only raises from killing lvl 90 end-game mobs out in the world, a la Hydraxian Waterlord-elemental farming style.  However, if you're a bastard Rogue who has a completed set of Fangs, you can bypass a lot of his crap.

Klaxxi are  :awesome_for_real:.  Reminds me of Ebon Blade dailies from Wrath.  You do random stuff in the zone each day, but the kicker is that each of the paragons can grant you one of two stackable zone-wide buffs (Easter Egg: all of the buffs are rock/metal song names).  Right now I'm sporting a buff that stacks a run-speed buff on mob kill, and another that stacks a blade-turning buff everytime an attack against me gets dodged, parried, absorbed, resisted, redirected, blocked, or missed.  At 10 stacks, it does a point-blank AoE nuke plus 5 second stun.  As a tank, this happens A LOT  :drill:

Tillers are alright.  I think things will ramp up more once I break into Honored with them tomorrow and get more farm space, which will let me farm more stuff, which will let me cook more stuff, which will let me gift more stuff + benefit myself.  The dailies so far are pretty standard.  Keep an eye out in the world for Un'goro style dirt mounds.  They contain rare gifts that the Tillers like for personal rep.

Anglers really are the MoP version of Kalu'ak.  There's even a walrus dude there that gives dailies  :awesome_for_real:.  Each one not only gives you rep, but Fishing skill too, but just like Kalu'ak, there's only three dailies.  Fortunately they're all in one zone, and they reward rep decently.

Golden Lotus is Molten Front Lite.  You're not 'building' anything, but you start each day at one spot, and then randomly get sent someone in the Vale after completing a set of dailies.  At the end of series, you face a big elite and get rewarded with a prize bag that may have crafting recipes in it.  Storyline progresses as you rep up.

Flying Serpent is the new Netherwing and Winterspring Frostsabers combined, complete with racing and randomly planted serpent eggs to collect for rep and raising your own serpent from baby to full grown as you go from Friendly to Exalted rep.  If you've done either of those factions, you've already done Flying Serpent, with one surprise being that there are four bonus dailies that can be done for extra rep.  These dailies require your own secondary crafting skills (Arch, First Aid, Cooking, and Fishing) AND your own mats/work from those as well (the First Aid quest had me bandaging up serpents with my own bandages, not quest provided ones.  Same with Cooking; my own fish, not a quest fish.  The Arch and Fishing ones just require you to work wherever you can do those things and the quest items will be looted up with your surveying/catches).

I hit 90 2 hours ago, my take:

- Quests are surprisingly enjoyable. Will have to see if it'll be fun a second time as well - this was a weak point of cata's super-linear questing imo. MOP is a bit more loose, but you're still expected to follow a certain path.
- I ended up 100%-ing jade forest, valley of the four winds, krasarang wilds, and kun-lai summit. I dinged 90 about 2/3 of the way through the (non-repeatable) quests of the dread wastes, ended up skipping townlong stepps completely, but pretty much had to do everything else. With rest xp and/or heirlooms, this MAY be a bit more forgiving.
- Dungeons are fun, but with only 4 of them available during levelling (2 of those only after 87), levelling via dungeons isn't going to be as viable as it was in cata (or when levelling through previous expansion content).
- WTF have they done to jp/vp stuff and why? Apparently you need to repgrind your way (through daily quests only, apparently) to be able to even buy anything. And then you need to do it on alts all over again. I will just end up not bothering because a] grinding daily quests can die in a fire b] the gear isn't really good anyway (though they may just put better gear there as later tiers roll out)
- Insert a half-page semi-coherent rant about daily quests and rep grinds here, because the previous bullet point wasn't enough.
- Scenarios are fun! Some of those HP pools take for-freakin-ever to whittle down though (with an ungeared group - or with a healer, since that basically removes 1 dps from the equation). Really recommend doing the arena scenario for a weapon asap.
- I was able to queue for heroics after hitting 90 and doing two scenarios. However, I got lucky in that I got the two mail drops from the mogu dungeon that were i450, and that + the arena weapon + a blue ring I got from a scenario reward chest + green/blue quest rewards from the dread wastes put me squarely at 440 ilevel.
- Heroics aren't difficult at all, Coren is though  :awesome_for_real: (need to have a lowbie stand next to the second brewmaiden so they get barreled instead of the tank)

I gotta say, the fact that the post-quest game at 90 seems to be daily-grind-a-go-go makes me think it might be time for another 12-month break once my existing sub expires. I'm unlikely to have enough time to play in order to grind enough dailies, and frankly, I'm a bit over the daily-grind as a substitute for actual gameplay. If I come back after a year, I'll be interested in the game again, and all the blue shit will be replaced by faceroll heroic stuff, and hopefully they will have changed back from levelling up of pants back to real loot for VP/JP.

Ahyup. That's why I'll come back in a year after they've unwound those particular thumbscrews. I can't imagine the larger amount of casuals staying for that.

Same here - I hate dailies with a passion. They need to steal the system from GW2 where you have 4 criteria to complete a day which are part of your usual questing/gameplay.

I believe the logic here is that PvErs now have two distinct gearing paths:
A: for the Raid Crowd - Raiding - Kill bosses to initially collect gear, use valor / JP to upgrade your gear once that system goes live.
B: for those who hate raids, but still want raid Ilevel Gear - Rep grinds and daily quests - earn JP / Valor from dailys / dungeons, buy gear from rep vendors, spend points to upgrade gear when that system goes live.

You are not really "required" to do both to get your purples, though the true min maxers who want the "best in slot" gear for every slot will probably end up doing so, since i imagine the rep-grind gear will often have some of the better stat itemizations over the same slot raid gear for certain specs.

Of course, prety much every faction has mounts and goodies at exalted that everyone will eventually want to get most likely.

The way stuff is setup now, Bliz is buying themselves more time to develop and deploy patches at a pace they're comfortable with, instead of having to rush stuff to keep up with the hardcores that burn through content like nobody's business.  By putting a set limit on how fast you can unlock access to Justice/Valor gear, they can control how fast mudflation occurs, and also validate some of the more interesting things they're doing with the dailies that some of the factions involve.

I would concede that perhaps by next year there will be a faster way to rep up with the MoP factions, either through item acquisition or just increases in how much rep is awarded on dailies' completions.  But I don't think they're going to go back to the tabard dungeon grinding way.

Did a couple scenarios last night and this morning.  I like them for the quick and simple goal-driven aspects.  I hate that I can't /votekick a bad/DCed player because Bliz honestly forgot to put that in  :angryfist:

Unfortunately whilst they have often aimed for this, it has never, *ever* worked in WoW. People who raid always end up doing the dailies and grinding heroics for gear because often its better than raid gear or it's simply the fastest way to gear up for a raid fight. It was one of the (several) things that stopped me platying - the fact that every new tier of raiding I'd have to return to the drudgery of grinding out heroics every week just to buy the latest trinket or token or whatever.

From memory, there was always one piece of equipment or one enchantment (shoulders?) that required you to grind the dailies and it was mandatory for raiding. I finally crashed and burned on the dailies last expansion. I'm sitting this one out.

Enchantments are the exception.  Head enchants are flat out gone, and shoulder enchants got moved to Inscription.  Rep now is for Valor/Justice gear, vanity stuffs, lore, and mounts.

You don't have to do that one anymore.

It seems like you only need to get to revered and only with some of the factions to unlock the honor/valor gear.  You can only get 1000 valor a week now so just to buy a pair of pants will take three weeks if you max it out.  So you don't have to do all of them at once, which would be a terrible grind.  You find the one piece you most want and run that group's dailies, by the time you've saved up the valor you will be at revered I imagine.  The long grind from revered to exalted only gets you perks like mounts and other vanity items.

From what I can see here's how the faction things break down:

Golden Lotus - If you're Leather or Tailor, you have to do this to honored for patterns. As for everyone else, the epics at revered at chests, rings, and shoulders. Necessary to be revered for other factions.
Order of the Cloud Serpent - Good for JCs, but otherwise it's just a fancier version of the Netherwing. It's a mount faction.
Shado-Pan - You have to be revered with Golden Lotus to get the daily hub. Enchanters will want the patterns here. Epic Trinkets, Headgear, and Cloaks are here at revered.
Anglers - Fishing faction. You get a goldfish pet, a badass raft that you can sail across water on, and one of those water bugs that you can ride around on at exalted.
August Celestials - Epic bracers, gloves, and boots for points. Also, you can get buffs for making offerings.
Klaxxi - Epic necklaces, pants, and belts. They have cool transmog weapons at exalted. Absolutely required for Smiths, since there's a ton of plans here. Also a scorpion mount.
Lorewalkers - No dailies, no quests, keyed with Archeology. You get a flying disc mount, a rock that ports you to arch sites, and a map that randoms your digsites for the continent.
Tillers - Farming faction. You get a goat mount, and rewards for your farm.

Doing Tillers stuff will make feast-making/Cooking in general easier.  Heck, once you get at least 10 plots open, you make a Harmony mat every day on the relatively cheap-side.

I don't mind dailies; they still seem like the best post-max option for solo gameplay.  They absolutely need to jack up the spawn rates of every daily mob about 9,000% and increase item drops to 100%.  Or add shared kill credit and drops for everyone who damages every mob, not just the miniboss types.  It's absurd how long I spend standing around waiting for something to kill, often standing at a static point waiting on respawns a la EQ/AC.  

That, along with "sell junk" & "compact" bag buttons, needs to be stolen from GW2 yesterday.

This is a good write-up on each factions rewards/process: http://www.wowhead.com/news=206830/mists-of-pandaria-reputation-quick-facts

People said that Catacylsm didn't have enough end-game content and the dailies/scenarios are Blizzard's attempt at making more end-game content besides raids and dungeons.

Theramore was garbage but the other scenarios have been a bit more fun. I can't really see much incentive to run them more than once or twice though. The drop rate on getting loot out of the bag at the end is poor and it may not be for your spec. Once you've geared yourself in heroics (which are apparently very easy in MoP) you won't have a reason to run them.

You'll probably want to run Arena of Annihilation as soon as your character hits 90 for an easy 450 weapon though.

The dailies haven't been impressive but I'm keeping an open mind as the daily hubs open up. So far it's been mostly kill/collection quests, so their claim that these daily quests were a different breed seems false.

Also, Cloud Seprent faction and Lorewalkers both seem to be REALLY easy rep-throughs if you are lucky (or something), since I have seen multiple people who are exalted with those factions as of 2 days ago at least, which means that there is some mechanic that allows you to hit exalted with them very quickly after you hit 90.

I think you get exalted with lorewalkers if you find all those lore scrolls.

Yea, Lorewalker exalted takes ~2 hours once you're 90 and can fly. I haven't done Cloud Serpent yet, but it's next on my list.

Hotfix has been applied to remove faction requirements for JP gear:

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/6759237078

So much for waiting a year or so  :why_so_serious:  I can understand why though, and I'm not sure why Bliz didn't until now, unless they just didn't want everyone that was sitting on their JP reserves from Cata to be in 450 blues the second they hit 90 in the first week.

Now if they could just make the rep crafting recipes BoA...

My thoughts so far after a few days at 90:

• Dailies: There are lots of them, and they're pretty important. I don't really mind them in MoP for a number of reasons: the removal of the 25/day cap makes it viable to grind all your reps (if you're so inclined) instead of forcing you to focus on a few at a time; it also frees up Blizz to give each rep a LOT of dailies. Each faction's quests are generally concentrated in one area, so you can bang out a whole set at once. The biggest change I'd like to see here is giving quest credit to anyone who touches a mob ala GW2. BoA crafting recipes would be another nice change, so I don't have to grind every faction on every alt. I'm glad they've unlocked JP gear from rep grinds, and wish they'd do the same with VP.
• Farming: This is a lot of fun so far, although I see no reason to gate 90% of the content behind a level 90 requirement. Some of the dailies are in places inaccessible without a flying mount, but the majority are not so you ought to be able to do this whole faction much earlier. I've always liked the Harvest Moon series so I'm already a fan, but the simple act of finding gifts for people, making them dishes and growing crops is pretty cool to me. I just wish you could use the vegetables to make food for every stat instead of requiring fishing for the majority as always (because fishing fucking sucks).
• Scenarios: I've only run 3 of them, and besides the new Ring of Blood I don't see the point of them at all. You have a small chance at what, an ilvl 450 item? I'm honestly not sure since I didn't get one any of the three attempts I made, but if the items aren't at least on par with Heroic gear they're just a waste of time. While we're talking about itemization, why don't any of the mobs in Scenarios drop loot? I don't mean gear, I just mean coin, cloth, vendor trash, etc. Loot issues aside, they seem like a decent diversion but felt a little long for how (un)rewarding they were. One of them felt like a 20 minute long escort quest (A Brewing Storm) that just left me feeling like I should've done a Heroic. In the Cata world where Heroics were 1-2 hours these might feel short, but not compared to most MoP heroics.
• Dungeons: There aren't enough leveling dungeons; more than half of the new dungeons are Heroic only which makes dungeon-leveling non-viable. Other than that the new dungeons are great, and a huge improvement from the slogs of Cata. I've done 8/9 so far (Mogu'shan Palace hasn't come up in my random rotation yet); the only one I dislike is Siege of Niuzao Temple because it felt pretty long and trash heavy. The bosses in general are interesting without feeling cockstabby; with only DBM to guide me I've had very few wipes tanking most of them blind and just listening to the warnings. I see more people die to trash than the bosses, mostly due to standing in fire (or water, or sha-residue) that mobs drop when they die. I'm not sure I'm fond of the return of vanilla-style rare boss epics, because I remember the horror stories (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caYYYQfojkQ&t=5m24s) but I suppose at least it'll allow nonraiders a chance at some epics.

See, that's an incredibly good thing. I've got 4 characters I enjoy playing now, and while I can understand a rep grind to get a mount (even if I don't love it - I've done it for quite a few in the past) needing to do so just to unlock the ability to spend JP was ridiculous. Especially given Blizzard's stated "we wanted to not force people to play one character over another" goal which they used as justification for mount and achievement-consolidation. And, well, frankly, I'm over dailies. I never fully opened up firelands, nor got the pets or mounts from Deepholm or Tol Barad, since it just becomes boring grind-gameplay, and I already have a job. I don't mind dailies as an option, but for them to essentially be mandatory was a silly move, and one I'm glad they corrected.

Instead of heading into new zones, I rolled a monk.  I started him on Saturday, and tonight hit lvl 35.  Granted, I do have two pieces of heirloom gear, but holy hell leveling is fast now.  I'm not sure how sticky the monk will be for me, but it's an interesting class.  It feels like 10% of the monks will be awesome, and the other 90% are going to be terribad.  Seems like a highly skill based class so far.

They also knocked down some of the epic VP reputation rewards to require honored instead of revered, fyi. Belts, rings, etc.


Unless I'm going crazy, mobs do drop loot in scenarios. I remember thinking it was a pretty good place to get motes of harmony. I don't know how they plan to get people to re-run scenarios, but then again people never really re-ran group quests either which is what scenarios are supposed to replace. It seems pretty clear that scenarios weren't cheap to make though, in comparison.

Enough guild-mates hit 90 for me to check out the new heroic dungeons. I like them so far. They aren't difficult, but there seem to be enough mechanically interesting fights to keep me happy. I'm also in love with the tanking changes, which has made easy 5-man content much more exciting.

I have NO idea why they removed the rep tabards. Some people like to grind rep by doing dailies, others like to farm massive amounts of mobs for drops, others like to run dungeons. I'm in camp#3, and the change just screws me over without any apparent reason. They could also possibly make each scenario give rep to the 'appropriate' faction (though I'm not sure any of them fit klaxxi) from killing mobs/bosses and completion.

Speaking of scenarios, I've also seen SOME drops in them [mostly cloth and greys], but it was kind of on the scarce/low side when compared to Theramore at level 85. The nice thing about scenarios is that you can do one of them while sitting in a dungeon queue as DPS, and your dungeon queue will pop when you finish the scenario (it counts your time spent in the scenario as "standing in queue time", if that makes sense).

Maybe some of them drop loot, but they certainly ALL don't which is stupid. We weren't even getting coin for most of the trash in Brewing Storm.

I do miss the options we had previously for rep grinds, particularly because grinding dailies takes very long since you're limited on how much rep you earn/day. Even if each dungeon/scenario only gave it's appropriate rep instead of whatever tabard you were wearing that'd be nice; while none of the scenarios fit the Klaxxi there are a couple dungeons where you could make it work.

Good call on the VP rewards Rokal, I'll have to go check those out tomorrow.

They haven't removed them exactly it's just there are none for most of the new factions this expansion (except Horde/Alliance Panda rep), I like the change tbh.

Rep tabards made those factions 'grinds' ridiculously easy, I'd already be exalted with everybody by now and waiting around for my raid days or leveling an alt out of boredom by this stage in Cata or Wotlk. You could easily do a rep a day, if not more and it required no more of you than wearing a tabard and doing what you were doing anyway. Dungeons were triple dipping on rewards, you got rep, gear and JP/Valor Points to buy more gear should the right stuff not drop or simply gear you even faster. Sure each faction had dailies but it was useless to do, unless you wanted some gold, I hadn't done any since the crusaders in Wotlk.

Needing to do multiple differing things to get where I want to go (raid ready) was and is great, at least for me. I didn't do any dungeons at all on the path to 90 because in previous expansions I burned out hard on them really quickly, to the point were I hated doing them, pretty much haven't done a 5 man in 6 months before Mists. But they felt really fresh and needing to go out into the world and do my dailies has prevented me from just sitting in 5man's till I pass out. I'm pretty much as geared as I need to be to enter raids but I still find myself wanting to do the stuff for fun. Also the rotating daily quests are good, even the same area can be different which is interesting.


The Golden Lotus phasing bug seriously ruined my day though.

 

Once you hit friendly with the tillers (i think it is friendly, might be honored), this problem is somewhat alleviated by the ability to package up unwanted Veggies / Cooking Mats into baskets of Groceries, which can be turned in to an NPC for Ironpaw tokens, which can then in turn be used to purchase other Cooking Mats.  The major downside to this is that the conversion rate is generally around 4 to 1.  Ie, a full stack of Unwanted Mats (100 vegies or 20 meat / fish) converts into 1 token, which only buys 5 fish / meat or 85 veggies.

In the end, if you need a specific fish, you are probably further ahead to just go fish nodes for them.

As someone who enjoys fishing, and also enjoys selling the fish, I'm glad fishing sucks   :drill:

When in Jade Forest, I was rushing (such as it is for me) to 90. I got to 86.5 and found Halfhill as of night before last. I'm still doing quests, but I think I'm going to take a pause here and smell the flowers. For the first time I think I'm just not in a hurry to max level.

I'm with you on fishing. It's been basically providing me with gold for my other tradeskills.

Started angler rep and turned on the fish pool finder in the mini map for the first time in pandaria, seems like it's the same as mining/herbs in that pools are freaking everywhere.  Which I'm fine with.  I'm looking forward to fishing up those rares to improve nat pagle freindship, I want that hat that which puts unlimited lures on the pole.

I typically level up my druid to harvest to get gold but maybe this expansion I won't need an alt and will just fish up money.

If you're done the fishing daily from SW, you get the bag that has a chance a hat with unlimited 75 lures +5 skill. I use that hat until I get the fancy epic hat.

Oh and while we're talking about professions engineers don't have to scour the old world for mats to make tinkers anymore, you can just buy a tinker kit from the vendor and you use one for each and every tinker item.  The new goblin wings we can put on our cape are awesome, instead of a levitate type effect you are basically a hang glider and can steer.  Also remember engineers can use the AH bot.

All the non functional panda relics can be repackedged into a turn in item to get useful archeology items.  You can buy items to randomize the digsites and transport you to random ones (pandaria only sadly).

First aid was incredibly cheap and easy to level.

Cooking can be levelled up from 1 to at least 525 standing in front of and buying from one vendor trainer.

The alchemist potion from cata is still usable and has had its stats buffed up to MoP levels even though it is the same item.

About the bolded part: potato potahto. They basically removed the ability to get rep via tabards for the new factions is all I was saying.

IMO the best way to deal with rep grinds is to not have them at all OR... have them be something that maxes out while you're doing stuff that you enjoy, which was what the tabards were. Heck, even back in vanilla (the Dark Age before daily quests) you could get ZG/AQ20 faction rep from killing stuff in dungeons, and Argent Dawn rep from... killing stuff in dungeons or turning in stuff that dropped from stuff you were killing in dungeons. None of that is available anymore, and farming trivial mobs or playing silly repetitive minigames in 25 installments (* number of alts) every day is very much on the 'eff that noise' end of the scale for me. GW2 is pretty good in this respect, as I finish up the daily achievement in 30-45 min no matter what I'm doing (wvw, max-level farming, alting, maybe even dungeoning except for the event requirement).

RIFT had rotating quests in their level 50 zones... didn't really help, it's still doing mostly the same things in the same areas without much of a challenge. RIFT actually does a bit better because there may be an invasion or two to spice things up. Not sure about SWTOR's daily implementation - by that time my hatred of daily quests has prevented me from doing any of them.

I'm actually ok with rep grinds if they had more carryover to your alts. I think every faction should sell a 300% BoA tabard at exalted for your alts to wear for dailies.

This is a suggestion that should be made.


Real engies make their own damn tinker kits!

But yes, the cloak tinker is the most damn useful thing I've had this expac.  Pandaria being as hilly as it is and being unable to fly makes it REALLY great.  Plus it's a fantastic "Whoops, too many adds" escape in a number of places, where you can just hop off the hill.

One general Pandaria tip I just learned about:  http://www.wowhead.com/item=85777The Ancient Pandaria Mining Pick (http://www.wowhead.com/item=85777The Ancient Pandaria Mining Pick)  It's a ground spawn in the mine in Jade Forest.  You can't mine gems without it, and even then the drop rate on gems is pretty abysmal. I finally picked-up the pick 2 days ago and have only found 2 gems.

OTOH; when I had a guildie prospect ore for me. I sent him 12 stacks and he sent me 5 full mails of gems in return.  So it looks like prospecting has had its rate increased significantly.

They've said they want to implement some sort of tabard storage solution. Hopefully it'll just be account-wide. Besides the tabards, the mounts are the big reason to hit exalted with each faction so you really won't want to on your alts. I'm okay with hitting revered on each alt that I actually want to play, that isn't too big of a hassle.

Panda monk is now 52.  DPS has been pretty good in dungeons, esp. with trash mob pulls using fists of fury and the spinning aoe kick ability.  I still can't believe how fast leveling has been.  I leveled every class (minus DK) to 70 from vanilla to BC and I remember it taking me months to just get from 1-60.

I like this. However, i still want my damn epic alchemist trinkets......why are they NEVER available at the opening of the new expantions.  Everyone else usually gets craftable epics right off the start, but alchemists are always stuck with nothing but pots to sell.

Pet battles are (sadly) addictive. I levelled my rogue to 86 and maxed inscription and made a tiny profit on shoulder 'chants and glyphs. Flogged off my 3 dark whelplings, 3 sprite darters (I'm horde) and mechanopeeps etc at 3-5K each. That made up for the butthurt over the 3 mechanohogs I'd built in WotLK.

My rogue (last of my level 10 capped toons to hit level 85) is now a panda and is wearing a leather dress and an eyepatch for shits and giggles. I like the look because I'm a RPing hack and besides, who doesn't want to go stabby-stabby as a ball of fur in a dress?
It beats the Belf that she once was!

I'm finding it hard to get motivated levelling though (usually I level my hunter and pally or druid first), but I have got my Monk panda to 41 through dungeon tanking. As a tank, they seem like the DKs or Pally tanks of old. I'm nopt sure if I'll maintain enough momentum within the game to cap all my 'toons or even to hit raid-finder. My nights are usually: put another 2 levels on a GW2 'toon, play some WoW and hit a few bars.

The game is fun again, I'll give it that.

The most fun is riding through the barrens on my swift Zhevra. Some poor sucker asked my how I got it... so of course I told him it was a small-chance drop off Zhevras. Three days later he messaged me with all sorts of abuse :)

Done.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/6794229784?page=3#57

One of the quests had me riding yaks through a giant car wash.  :why_so_serious:

This expansion has quests that are obviously the same as before, then you get stuff like that which just makes me smile.

Another personal favorite is rolling barrels down a hill and lighting them on fire.

As I quipped in /g, "I want a yak mount now!"

You can buy them right near there.

Did they change the way you get justice points?  I noticed on random dungeons finder that  not getting any gear for it.  Also it is only 60 justice points for a dungeon. 

I have no idea how you get justice points at 90 anymore.  I had to do a bg, get the honor, convert it to justice and then buy the item I wanted.  I think the only way you can get it is doing random normal modes which 90's can't currently queue up for.

They hotfixed the "90s can't queue for regulars" thing.  You still get Justice from boss kills in heroics.

It's always been that way, you guys have been running nothing but Heroics for too long and forgot.  Normal dungeons give JP on completion, Heroics give JP per boss and VP on completion.

My biggest bitch right now is that Heroics required (until the hotifix) iLevel 340 to get in.  There are 4 heroic-only dungeons that give quests.  The rewards for those quests are... iLevel 340.  :uhrr:   So, as usual Quest Itemization is bullshit.

I did two heroics last night and while I didn't count my jp the other people in the group said they weren't getting any on boss kills.  I'll remember to check tonight.

It used to be during Cata @ 85 you could cue for the Random Dungeon and get Justice Points up to 7x a week, Heroic Random Dungeon and get Valor Points up to 7x a week, I could have sworn I got a loot bag all the way to 85 with my mage doing the Random Dungeons.  You also got JP for killing the bosses. 

Now it is 60 JP for the random and no bonus for the dungeons or more for the bosses.  Not high enough to cue for the Heroics.

And the fine print:


I like it, though I think double rep from Revered to Exalted is kinda overkill.  Also, if this is reverse-applied to ALL PREVIOUS factions (Vanilla, BC, Wrath, and Cata), that would be  :awesome_for_real:

42 per kill. I checked myself this evening.  Like i said, too many people have been running nothing but heroics for the last 18 months and forgot you don't get JP for anything but completion in normals.  My guildmates were bitching about the same thing the other day and still don't believe me that it's the case.

There is also the possibility that they were JP Capped.  If they have been chain grinding Heroics and get in a groove, it is easy to forget that you might cap out.

I hit 90 today, opened up the dailies, and started flying around the island.

Time to rep grind! Can somebody please tell me how that's supposed to go? Do I head to that shrine place first and talk to everyone?

Oh, you're right. This guy. (http://www.wowhead.com/npc=64518) He sells a couple "cheap" i.e. 3k mounts, and the new expedition mount for 120k.

I thought that was ridiculous.. then I started doing all my dailies.  I'm pulling-in about 1k a day without trying between the rewards and dropped things.  I'll certainly never grind for it myself, but I'm about 6k up after leveling just the hunter.  That's even after blowing 2-3k on gems and reforging.


Yes, go to the Pagoda underneath the Spear-Pandas for the Golden Lotus Rep. It works like Molten Front - do their series of 5 quests then get sent to the 2nd node for the series that gives the reward box at the end.

Then - since you have a job - pick one of the other factions to do for the day.  Tillers, Cloudserpent or Klaxxis (and later Shado Pan) and do theirs.  You should have quested through the hubs already but if you don't know where they are just ask.

If you want to do the fishing ones they take very little time and you can do those as well.  If your aim is raiding then go Klaxxis because they have gear.  The others are more vanity and trade factions.

The main town in the Vale of Eternal Blossom, has a semi circle of dudes that are representatives of each faction (or at least they are  in Horde town) , right out front, that will direct you to go speak to various commanders in the quest hubs, after that you just have to remember where the hubs are at and go there daily.

Obviously Shado-Pan and August Celestial aren't unlocked at the start and as I still haven't unlocked them I'm not sure how that goes.

One of those quest givers with the non-dailies you get in VOEB at 90 gives you a quest for the Shado-Pan.  You have to hit Revered with the Golden Lotus before they'll talk to you.  August Celestials work the same way, unlocking at Revered. Their hub is at the Crane shrine in Karasang, I believe.

Monk is almost 45, less than a week of starting him.  I did the dwarf route of Loch -> Wetlands -> Arathi -> Hinterlands -> WPlague -> EPlague is where I am now.  With two heirloom pieces, I'm consistently 2-4 levels above the quest level, which is likely slower leveling.  But it's been fairly fun. 

I didn't do much of the Cata revamp leveling, but it's pretty fun.  I miss the old world's quirkiness, but this quest flow is superior. 

If anyone else is rolling a monk - have you tried tanking with him?  What's it like?

I don't really like the energy/chi resource model so I'm not enjoying my monk.  I also thought the animations would be better, some people love them but I think they're just meh.

I haven't been impressed enough by what I've seen live and they didn't immediately lock-in as "FUN" during Beta.  I also refuse to roll a new class after the rollercoaster that was the Death Knight nerf cycle.  I expect many 'adjustments' to the class over the next year or two that don't make me want to give it a try.

The biggest issue I have right now is like other classes, I have nearly two hotbars of abilities but I only have time in my cycle for about 3-4 abilities.  It's silly, really.  I will hit cap and have another two hotbars of abilities that I will never have touched.

Ok thanks. I'm guessing much flying will be involved.

I don't get why they didn't just halve the number of rep points from Revered to Exalted. I guess it looks more epic this way.

It's perception, yes. Buffing rep gain gets more love than nerfing the total.

There's more to it than that.

It preserves the granularity with which they can tweak shit at a later date.
It's less messy looking in the UI than having different goals for each faction.
The change is not retroactive, so people halfway through the grind still see a massive buff, even though by the time they're done they will have done equivalent to 75% of the original grind anyways.
They don't have to do bounds checking in order to implement it this way.

And WoW is, what, eight years old now and reputation is probably still using vanilla code? Nobody is going to want to touch that if they can help it.

Also: 5.1 on PTR "soon" (http://us.battle.net//wow/en/blog/7481208)

I am really enjoying the non-linear zones. It is nice to be able to pick and choose what zones/quests you do. For whatever reason Karasang Wilds' scenery didn't do it for me, so I skipped it. It might make alts bearable again.

One conclusion I've come to while levelling through Pandaria - Blizzard needs to give up on the EPIC, WORLD-SHATTERING EVENTS and just keep making 'normal' quests.
(Also the music is gorgeous).

Agreed. I think the storytelling is nice in these quests. In Kun-lai, you have a final battle against a yaungol warlord. The music kicked up as it started and I actually cared what happened during the quest. It was pretty cool.

Word is the raids are tuned pretty hard on normal, which I guess is the new thing since the progressive nerf system is going to be in from now on along with LFR. I think I can kinda deal with that. If it's not doable in heroic gear, hit LFR and gear up a bit there. Or just unsub for a month or two and then come back when it starts getting whacked with the nerfbat. I'm sure the hardcore crowd will baw their eyes out but they won't unsub ever, like usual.

Also I played a bit; the questing seems a lot more focused in a good way. Just a bit less hand-holdy/cutscene heavy than Cata which is fine by me. Also wow, they really still know how to stretch these art assets. The music and art really do a good job of keeping WoW looking good.

Haven't bought MoP, but did the Pandaren newbie zone.  Gorgeous environment, especially the Pei-Wan(?) forest.  Music is incredible and like the above poster said, I actually CARED about the zone climax. 

But I haven't bought MoP because, after GW2, WoW's gameplay is old and busted. 

Monk just hit 60, started him 8 days ago.  Literally hit 60 on the final quest turnin for Swamp of Sorrows.  Also his trip to 60 got 1.5 levels to our guild rank (3 to 5) and exalted with my guild.  Going to run around ungoro till mining hits 275, then off to Outlands.

Isn't that exactly what the hardcores want? Don't they want it to be really hard? To me they nailed it in this expansion. I realize I can't raid. I don't have the time. I'm too casual but I have lots to do still. The hardcores have their difficult raids and challenge modes.

Hardcores want it hard.  Faux hardcores - those who bitch about 'casuals ruining the games' and 'free epix' - don't.

My guild went in and tried Moshugun last week. Their complaint was the first fight is an exact rip of one some old boss fight.   I didn't recognize the name, though.

My son found a neat quest @ level 11 where he was rounding up Raptors and then launching them into space!

Ahhh god.  I loved some of the questlines in the revamped Ashzara.

Blizzard ususally does a great job of having a decent number of quests that just have you laughin your ass off while doing them.

No, the hardcores want it to be hard forever and to have a tiered raiding system back where the dumb newb badscrubs can't ever get close to their shinies. I mean they're going to whine when Blizzard turns on the progressive nerf system for this tier. Then they'll whine whenever they put in catch-up gear on new 5-mans or for justice points or whatever.

Not the real hardcores and you know it, Fab.  The folks in the top 30-40 guilds in the world couldn't give two shits about that because it's small potatoes.  They're running hardmodes and pushing for world/ server firsts then waiting for the next content cycle. 

The folks who bitch about the nerfs are the ones who say "another week and we could have had "X" down and now it's meaningless"  But they ignore that 1) it's a damn video game it's always meaningless and 2) they can turn off that buff and have it mean the exact same thing - but they won't.

Took the plunge and made a Pandaran Monk.

I've never been so bored in a starter zone in my whole WoW Career.  It was really, really dull.  The only excitement was watching Elena chase down the mad bunnies with me.

I duuno, I'm the very definition of a middle of road/bad raider, got into my first raid last night, only downed 1 boss.

Gearing might be an issue still, some our usual roster isn't 90 yet, the off tank only had about 2 hours to gear up, he did alright I guess.

The first boss was tougher than most DS bosses, but not super difficult, the co-ordination between tanks was more than I've had to do in months, we solo tanked 4/7 DS bosses, even in Heroic mode and most of that basically solo tanking with two separate targets. It's very similar to Omni-tron Defense System, lots of stuff for the tanks to do, alot to monitor found it difficult to get into a decent rotation and I still topped DPS as a tank.

The Second boss 1% off getting to second phase, seemed easy enough though, again very tank orientated, still have to master the tomes, I was getting better but I need another few goes.

I like it being a bit more difficult, DS was a joke until you got to last two bosses and then Heroic and then it was a brickwall of fuck you after first boss, which was still pretty easy.

Brickwalling like this occurred with every expansion beforehand.  Everyone says it's always easier when going from a launch raid to a patch raid, mostly because they're entering the patch raid in full purples, gems, and enchants.  People enter launch raids wearing a clown suit of greens and blues, with maybe a token purple, cheap enchants, cheap food buffs and MAYBE a flask or elixir.

Or, as Boromir sez, "One does not simply walk into Mordor Naxx Blackwing Decent Mogu'shan Vaults"

PVP in Stormwind sure looks pro!

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

Pandaria 'clownsuit':
(http://i.minus.com/iPHzGp0HtoJT3.jpg)

I've had worse.  :grin:

That's rather fetching.

Well I'm enjoying the hell out of just questing and looking around.  It's nice to be doing quests that amuse me and help others in small ways rather than the "OMG SAVE THE WORLD" at every turn in Cataclysm.

Are you suggesting that washing yaks isn't saving the world? Because you and I have very different definitions, sir.

Surprised there wasn't more talk of this hack here unless I missed it in another thread.  Apparently the same people behind the sever crashes a few weeks ago.

edit: On second thought I'll just make a new thread.

Probably because we assumed it was just another bug with DKs being able to PK people with Blood Plague again  :why_so_serious:

Still, if the worst that could happen was just insta-gibbing people in cities, and not actually thief their stuff or delete their toon, it's not a big deal to me, really.  Heck, it took them this long to do something like this?  How long as this game been around again?

The annoying thing is I spent a while putting together a transmog set of slate grey/cobalt blue plate for my tanking gear towards the end of Cataclysm and then my levelling gear is pretty much exactly what I was looking for anyway. :facepalm:

I don't understand the design decision behind Golden Lotus reputation in this xpac. I fully expect that after the next series of content comes out, they will change it. Right now it feels like a very slow and artificial gating to the factions. Not only do you do 10 dailies every day just to get a paltry amount of rep gain, but you are REQUIRED to grind those if you want to see the August Celestials and Shadopan factions.

Normally, I'd say who gives a shit? Factions are there to be long term goals in an expansion. Well the problem arises when you realize they've tied two bad design decisions together. Gating factions through other factions, and putting JP and VP gear on those factions. It's not good enough to just get the points, you have to grind a faction so you can grind a faction to have the priviledge of spending those points you earned. It's convoluted and needs to be addressed.

It's worse than 10 dailies.  When you get to Honored you don't get the 'end' quest as the 10th, you get referenced to another hub with 5 more.  So now it's 15 dailies per day for me.  Group-up for them or go mad.

It *IS* an artifical grind meant to occupy time.  They said they wanted to 'keep people out in the world' more.  Well, it's working but it's also going to turn people off a lot quicker.  I've already abandoned Klaxxi faction because fuck 6 more dailies on top of the 15 for GL, the 3 for Fishing, and the 6 or 7 for Tillers PLUS cooking dishes and the 5 Cloud Serpent dailies.  Tack on the Darkmoon Stuff right now and my tolerance for it is dropping to the levels of most of you who say "fuck dailies" and I've always enjoyed them.

Part of the problem is I'm a completionist and that's working against me.  I think their intent was to give a variety of things to do and you're not really MEANT to grind out all of them every day.  Pick some, dink around, and have a mix of things to do.  

They misunderstand the player base here, though.  If you give them to us they feel mandatory and we HAVE TO do them  until rep is maxed.  Daily quest tabards would make sense for this crap.  Then I wouldn't feel like it's such a waste and I could pick the quests I *LIKE* doing instead of grinding them all out.

It also doesn't give me much joy that you cap out on one 'reroll' token a week but every quest gives you a token.  I'm already seeing many complaints about this in my guild and will expect to see it from the casuals soon.  I've got almost 2 stacks of 180 tokens but I can't turn more than 90 in at a time. I'm going to have a huge stockpile by the time I hit exalted with all these factions.  Not a good thing.

Ditto capping my VP.  Here again, the buff for capping is meant to encourage you to do other things or play other characters, but tying it to faction gains means people will grind regardless of their best interests and the designer's intent.

Verdict so far: Content Fun - Engame Grating.   Maybe my attitude will change with LFR unlocking today but it's showing a clear lack of a greater vision for the endgame right now.  They were desperately tossing "more things to do for the casual players" against the wall and didn't pace it right.

I don't mind the dailies. I mind the gains. It's absurd that the gated part of their content with Golden Lotus only gives 100 rep per completion. Anglers give, what? 500?

There's a happy middle ground there, and they missed it.

I wrote the Golden Lotus and it's associated factions off as a loss, for all the reasons Merusk mentioned. It feels like the stupid Firelands dailies all over again. I am working on the Tillers, Anglers, and Order of the Cloud Serpent, and I'll just get my gear the old fashioned way.

In other news, LFR does not seem to have actually unlocked yet. I've got the required ilvl but the tooltip still says "You do not meet the requirements for this dungeon".

Try again in 15 minutes.  Should be open at the 1300 EST reset.

Kung fu panda is now 81 and doing Cata quests.  Leveling was incredibly fast and easy, esp. with the daily xp buff I got from going back to Panadria and doing a quick quest.  The monk is windwalker (dps) so I don't know how the other specs are or how they play.  Dps has been pretty good in dungeons so far and once I figured out rotations and priorities it went up quite a bit.  With groups of mobs, I use single target dps rotation with 2 mobs, 3 mobs use spinning crane kick instead of jab to build up chi then single target dps, 4 or more spinning crane with chi burst.  For bosses, I don't wait for tiger brew to get to 10 stacks I just use whatever I have up.  This is the only time I will take tiger claws(? damage buff) up to 3 stacks.  Using it on non-boss mobs seems like a dps loss for the short amount of time they are alive.   Survivability seems good with your healing abilities doing damage, too, and a few short term damage reduction abilities.

You're a braver man than I, trying it on the release day.  There's enough fail groups halfway through the content because of people cheating iLevel with mix-spec or PVP gear or queuing for offspec roles just to get in quicker.  I don't want to attempt LFR for this week or next because of this. Glad X-com came out to keep me from attempting it.

The goal behind gating two other factions behind Golden Lotus is to not overwhelm you with daily quests you "need" to do. Once you have gotten Golden Lotus to revered, you will most likely be done with Klaxxi (and probably Cloud Serpent too). Two major daily factions/quest chains are replaced by two more daily factions/quest chains. You can (and should) put Klaxxi/Golden Lotus Exalted on hold until Blizzard makes the reputation changes to speed up exalted, if you want the mounts/tabards from each faction.

The only thing more obnoxious than gating Shado-Pan and August Celestials behind Golden Lotus would have been having both factions available now and feeling like I needed to do 50 daily quests a day to "keep up" rather than the 25-30 or so that already feel like too much.

I finished Klaxxi revered last night and I'll finish Cloud Serpent in another 2-3 days. By the time I unlock Shado-Pan and Celestial dailies, I'll have had a bit of time to rest and not feel so overwhelmed by dailies.

The only mistake with the reputations in MoP, imo, was throwing so much VP/JP gear on them with high faction requirements. I'm fine with the gating.

No, you're mental on this one. I look forward to crap like this being fixed by the time I finally give MoP a spin.

So... assuming that you started at 85 and played the game 4h daily, how long would it take you to consume all of the Pandaria content with a good guild?

I see that people who aren't playing the game are again experts on the current content  :oh_i_see:

Every night I hear people complaining about how many dailies they "need" to do before logging. Doubling the amount of dailies available every day would not have helped the situation, as people still would have felt pressured to do them as quickly as possible to access the power rewards they offer.

In a few months I expect Klaxxi/Golden Lotus rep-per-quest to have increased. That will shorten the grind without increasing the amount of quests your character does every day. The gating I expect to stick around, and I'm fine with it.

I feel comfortable opining on this one what with the 7 years of rep grinding in WoW I have behind me.  :-P

The "need" to do all available dailies at the fastest possible rate is entirely in your head. You are a thinking adult; you should be capable of prioritizing tasks within the time you have available.

The MoP rep grind is truly in a league of it's own. It's like having 3-4 molten fronts to do every day.


You realize we're talking about WoW right? Blizzard has never been afraid to make changes to the game to discourage unhealthy behavior that people should have had the common sense to avoid. This isn't any different than waiting a week to unlock raids so that people didn't feel the "need" to be ready to raid within the first 48 hours of the expansion. It's not much different from the reasoning behind the original daily quest limit, valor caps, weekly dungeon bonus limits, etc.

If there is a way to improve your character's power faster, plenty of people will do it even if it causes them to enjoy the game less.

I just did lfr on my resto shaman. Seems fairly easy and straightforward except for the first boss(es) that seem to do some weird petrifying shit. The LFR raid solved that problem by stacking them up and hitting them repeatedly in the face - only issue then was healing through the explosion damage (120k or so, so wasn't a problem even when two of the guardians blew up at the same time). Last boss also had some trickiness with the spirit world, but it seemed like the main purpose of it was to pop in and pop out for a massive mana regen bonus.

Ended up with a healing cloak, which isn't a bad haul for 3 bosses - my loot track record for LFRs was usually far worse, especially in the first week!


Also, screw rep grinds and dailies (yes, it still needs to be said  :awesome_for_real:)

~24 days to get all the golden lotus dailies done, 12-20 more days to get Shadopan to revered, depending on your other quests you did and your passives. Right now, only one raid is open Moguwhatever Vaults. Heart of Fear and Terrace of Endless Spring opens on October 30. LFR modes open in November.

Paelos didn't include leveling in that, I note.  I played a good 4-5 hours a night from release day and didn't hit 90 until I had the weekend to sit down and catass.  I was taking approx 6-7 hours per level because I had no rested XP and didn't run dungeons more than 1-2 times per level.

 So you've got another week or more just in the leveling content before you get to the rep grind.  More if you decide not to skip zones/ quests as you level and insist on running through every quest.  I haven't touched a whole zone and didn't clear all of the starter zone before hitting 90.

Logged in this afternoon to find some peeps forming a Sha of Anger world boss kill, so's I hopped in and tanked the bitch.  The Horde was a problem, trying to kill us at the same time as the Sha (and this is on Earthen Ring, which mean's we deal with "The Instance"'s AIE guild a LOT), but we overcame.  Didn't get any loot, even after burning my reroll coin, but the cash from the first and second rolls were decent, and hey, achievement.  Also, first time kill gets you an item that starts a quest for free epic boots for your role.  :awesome_for_real:

Then I managed to get into a LFR for Mogu'shan.  Although I had read up on it, I was still kinda confused on how the council fight first boss worked, but the Druid that was leading the thing was really knowledgeable and shot-calling like a boss.  Downed the lion's on the first go.  No loot from either the roll or reroll though, but I did get the first of 10 quest items I needed for the legendary.

Second boss was decent, and once I had the shield part down, it was cake.  Our first attempt ended in failure though as the person who was sent the bomb, while they did successfully run away from the group, was Leap of Faith'd back into the group by a Priest on auto-pilot following the leader's instructions of stacking on the boss  :why_so_serious:.  Second try was no problem.  Picked up a new set of tanking bracers with my reroll.

Third boss trash was interesting...half the raid died before they realized to kill the bat flyers overhead  :why_so_serious:.  After that, the boss itself was relatively painless.  Just a little group coordination and we had it down on the first go.  I managed to score a set of tank boots, and burned my reroll before checking the boss' loot table and realizing that he only has ONE piece of tanking gear, and the reroll was a success for another pair of the same tanking boots I has already won.  So now I have two identical LFR epic boots AND the epic tanking boots from the Sha of Anger quest reward.  I put in a ticket to Bliz to see if they'd exchange the Sha quest boots for the DPS version; we'll see what happens  :grin:

Overall though, I can see how an ill-prepared or leader-less LFR could fail easily on these bosses.  I think I lucked out because most of the people scoring the gear were probably semi-hardcore people anyways, since they're all sporting at least 460 ilvl averages this soon after release.  I imagine once some of the slower peeps catch up and start queueing things will go downhill.  But by then the nerfs will start to roll in as well.

This right here is all I needed to know. I was concerned that they were going to restrict  the epic drops to non-LFR-group-only in the same way Shadowmorne drops were 25-man raid only.   That's awesome.

Who (name) and where?

I read that post and then found this:


Going to try it out as my newest and highest toon has no cooking.

I didn't see Golden Carp on the vendor, so you may need to do some fishing (or AHing) too.

This would explain why Golden Carp is worth a metric fuckton on my server.

Golden Carp is the MoP trash fish.  As long as you're not fishing in a pool, you've got around a 50% chance of getting it.  It valuable because it's used in a number of generic 500->535 recipes, one of those being a daily quest for the serpent riders' faction to make 5 Fish Cakes.

So if I'm reading that right, it's easy to level cooking for your big guys, but starting from a level 1 char, you're doing it the hard way ?

From level 1, it's just like any other prof.  As long as you keep up with it as you level by killing stuff and cooking the meats, you can stay afloat.  The quick leveling bit that they added with MoP is for those that want to get in on the Cooking craze now that they've made it more interesting, so long as you don't mind the gold sink.  Honestly I wish they did that with all professions at this point in the game's longevity, but god forbid we make this game TOO easy   :why_so_serious:

No, I'm sorry, but that's bullshit.  Due to the incredible speed at which you level, coupled with the skill gains on a prof versus a gather, it quickly knocks you right out of synch.

It's something that they should have sorted by now, but they haven't.  They started doing it with the Blood Elves and spiced bread, but it's just not enough.

For a brand new, cut right out of the mold player that has never played a MMO before, I can see the current system still working, because that new person is going to take time and do and learn things, not just straight shot to 90.  The quick prof. leveling for Cooking is for us vets that don't want to kill raptor after raptor for each of our alts just to get max cooking.

I'd be surprised, but ok.

Can't you get almost-max cooking relatively easily during the thanksgiving event (fully through vendor-bought materials)? I seem to remember I did that on two of my chars.

Yeah, you can.  The Thanksgiving was what allowed me to level up really quite high on 3 of my chars.  The turkey capture is a pain in the arse (especially for my priest, since thanksgiving was over when he went out to catch them), but it was much better.

Speaking of Tillers and cooking: Consider what this individual sells (http://www.wowhead.com/npc=64940), then look at this quest. (http://www.wowhead.com/quest=31535) Now also remember what this jolly individual (http://www.wowhead.com/npc=64395) will exchange for a token.

tl;dr - all MoP cooking ingredients are convertible into any other MoP cooking ingredients.

Odd.  One wonders why the fuck the price of Carp is so high then.

Yeah but the conversion factor is shit on that.  Baskets take 20-100 items and the bags give 5-20 of an item.  Dropped items being on the low and planted/farmed on the high-end.


1) People are dumb. I"ve seen may "I can't find any goldfish pool!" comments in general.
2) People hate fishing.  Fish have always had a higher price than other items - at least on my server.
3) Needed for the Cloud Serpent dailies. Price will drop as more people hit exalted and don't run them anymore.

It's takes 100 farm-grown veggies (non-meats) to make a basket, while it takes 20 meats from NPCs to do the same.  It's not bad if you're in a pinch and need just a handful of something to make food for your group or yourself that night, but it's not a profitable thing.  Even with 16 food plots, unless it's Jogu the Drunk's Foretold Pick of the Day, you can't farm enough of any one veggie to make a basket (5 quantity per plant x 16 = 80).  If it 'is' Jogu's Pick, then you get enough and then some ( (5 quantity per pick + 2 bonus) x 16 = 112).

So far, my planting strategy has been to max Way of the Oven (which I did the other day), and then plant what I need to master the other Ways.  I'll worry about Harmony mote farming later.

Yeah don't trade in any veggies for a grocery bag, they sell for a lot of gold right now.  As in they cost way, way more than herbs or ghost iron on the AH.  To get the last 25 skill points in each type of cooking takes a metric fuckton of veggies.  I imagine the price will go down once everyone has 16 plots and people aren't trying to cap out each cooking line.

If you want to get to 600 in the each type of cooking you will also need five items of hundred year soy sauce per line, each cost a mark of iron.  If you don't need them for tradeskills you can also trade in one spirit of harmony for one mark of iron at the harmony vendor near the flight path at your eternal blossoms city.

I love what they did with the trash fish this expansion, it's actually useful.  Didn't know you needed it at the 1-525 trainer.

Edit: Oh another reason why veggies cost so much is that there are ten seperate friendships to build up and they each want five items of food each day for, like, a lot of days.

A good guide to the friendships. (http://www.elsanglin.com/tillers_farming.html#friendship)  If you only want to focus on one it would probably be Tina Mudclaw, she gives the farm hut a makeover and basically turns it into player housing.  Note that the blue exclamation marks don't even appear unless you have at least one item of food the person wants.

(http://i.elsanglin.com/i/sunsong_furnished_hut.jpg)

Simplified Tillers' guide.


 :awesome_for_real:

As someone who just rolled a Monk that is at 62 now, I agree.  My experience was that for Mine/JC, I hit every node I passed and supplemented maybe 50g from AH gems to have 300/300 when I strolled into Outland.  The ore is plentiful and the leveling smooth for professions.  Except for Cooking and Arch.  Neither is a huge deal, because the levels went so fast to 60 that I never once sat to eat.  At lvl 62 my cooking is only 178, and I treated it like nodes, collecting everything I saw and skilling up whenever in a city.

Wait, when did WoW add Harvest Moon?

Currently, raiding is hard.  Like, you better be in 463s or come back next week with your LFR/VP stuff.

We were 8/8 H, but couldn't get the council members past 75%.  Hoping to get back in on Friday, but a lot of our raidmembers aren't much interested in gearing up their toons with so many other things to do.

I don't get all the "have to complete every daily" folks.  I've been doing dailies at a leisurely pace and will hit honored with Golden Lotus today or tomorrow.  Not having honored/revered hasn't stopped my fun in the slightest.

Well the daily grind stopped your raiding because people need to grind out all the factions to get that better gear to come back and raid.

And are you talking about normal or heroic mode?

The same time they added pokemon.

And both are fun.

This is actually a legitimate complaint. You can't fish up trash from pools, so any fishing skill will work fine for them. If you want to catch Golden Carp, you need to go through the slog of leveling fishing and waste 5-10 hours with the profession that gives archaeology a run for it's money as the least-fun activity in the game.

I switched to a monk for MoP which meant starting with 0 fishing again. Currently at ~300 and the experience has not been enjoyable.

Do you get to comfort your cows?

If you build up Nat Pagle friendship you can level your alts to 600 without ever fishing, just costs gold.  I guess 12k for 0-600, not including any discount type benefits.

Nat's Fishing Journal (http://www.wowhead.com/item=88563)

Nat Pagle friendship, however, requires a lot of fishing on an 85+ who already has fishing skill.

I'm going to disagree with you there. Even in the times when I had a lot of time to play, and as a tank (instant queues) there's no way in hell I'd max a rep in a day. Further to that from your post would suggest that you ...play a little more intensely than the average person.

Yeah it may have been possible to do a rep a day, but easy? Whatever man. Easy for an unemployed teenager in the summer I guess.

Looking over that cooking shit.. wow.

I think I'll play till Jan-Feb or so (my sub expires at the end of December) then I think I will actually take a year off (and play Battlefield, xbox and paint miniatures instead) and come back a year later to play in Nerfedl-Panda-Land where reps and dailies and grind don't matter anymore.


 :uhrr:
I already have a real job with built-in grind. At least that one pays me with real money. The rep grind in this expansion overall seems far worse than what went before, excepting maybe Vanilla and specific things like Molten Front. After work yesterday the most my wife or I could be bothered doing amounted to three kill quests in the Jade Forest chain, and the bits before and after them where you trim trees, paint a picture and find your centre. Granted, that's not much but even if you only play for an hour a day you should be able to achieve some progress. How long does that cooking "do it every day" session take? It looks like an hour of fucking about in and of itself.

People ask for something to do outside of dungeons and raids.
Blizzard give it to them.
People whine about the grind.
Sky is blue, water is wet, fire is hot, MMO playerbase is unpleasable.  :awesome_for_real:

Quick reminder: None of the factions are actually mandatory. All of the JP gear had the faction requirements pulled within a few days of launch.


e: Meant to reply to this a while back and forgot -
To spell out the inevitable conclusion to my previous chain of thought. Most people using the AH are imbeciles. Bear that in mind alongside the Tiller trade-in, and I suspect one could get any amount of any ingredient one would require fairly cheaply.


...or make a lot of gold. You know, either or.  :grin:

Okay.. so what exactly is gated behind the rep grind at this stage? And FWIW if you could Tabard your way to rep instead of only grinding dailies, I'd have been fine with it. I'm all about choices and more than one way to do things.

All current tier valor gear will be gated behind the factions.  When the next tier comes out, they'll step the current tier down to Justice, and you'll still need to grind for access to the latest and greatest.

Alternatively, since gear can be upgraded now with Valor points, there may not be that much MUDflation in newer gear anyways.  So the gear that's there is more valuable because once you've got it, you can make it better and keep using it rather than cycling stuff out so often.

Valor is pretty easy to get now. With the cap at 1000, you can hit cap by doing the dungeons pretty easy, and scenarios.

I hit the cap doing the terrible dailies.

Can anyone give an assessment of the fun factor for a super casual player so far with the new expansion? 

Leveling-up; Tons of fun.  Only frustration was "dammit I want to fly over some of these vistas."

Endgame:  Depends on you. 

We've outlined the daily grind info, then there's the usual dungeon & raid cycle and PVP for those inclined.  There's also scenarios for when you just don't feel like taking things seriously and want a dungeon NOW. (My approach to them.) 

There's also Challenge modes - AKA "HARD HEROICS." Throw those in the face of the kids bitching in general that heroics are too easy, it's fun.  (OH, heroics are too easy? So you've completed gold challenge mode right? What's your time in the server rankings...")

There's also Pokeman, which is incredibly addictive and much more fun than anyone realizes until they get involved.

Since I got my iLevel to the LFR point I've cut way back and focused on X-Com since it came out. I'm only running 1 faction's dailies a day and doing my planting. This is good enough for the days between raid resets. 

I'm also *very* slowly leveling-up my Horde Paladin for the Two-Faced achieve.  I've spent 3-hours on her the last two Sundays while watching football and she's only just hit level 86.  Taking it that slow I'll probably not hit 90 until late December.

To be clear, my level of play will be "leveling up".  I'm not much of a social player and I don't endgame.  I don't even dungeon, really.

I'd say it's fun. I haven't done any of the dungeon content yet really, and it's pretty easy going to get things done and find upgrades just questing around and doing the scenarios.

All the MOP dailies give Valor points now, so you can do those if you like. Or you can do scenarios which don't really tax you too much for 30 valor a day (15 each after).

XP to get to 90 will take you a good long while, so the leveling curve will take a ton of time to see it all if you choose. I'd say probably 40 hours?

Knocked out the Glorious! achievement today.  Yay for burning through content  :awesome_for_real:

How populous is your server?!?  On mine, most rares are tagged and dead within seconds of spawning, meaning that getting Glorious is going to take me a while, and a lot of luck.

It's Earthen Ring.  Believe me, it's populated, and a good third of the NPCs I killed were ones that I managed to invite the person that tagged it into a group just before the mob died so I could get credit.  At least half though were ones I solo'd outright, and a few I camped on the spot for up to half and hour because of the mob's survival rate in comparison to it's spawn location (i.e. Ferdinand spawns by the lake right next to the Serpent Riders' ranch.  Because of the high traffic, he typically doesn't live long the moment he spawns, and even while I was fighting him and after death I had about a dozen people fly in close because their NPCScan went off).

Focusing now on gathering the mats I need to finish all of the Cooking Ways.  Will knock out the third of six today; it's just a matter of growing the right stuffs.  After that, the farm will be used to grow the stuff I need to finish becoming BFFs with the Tiller NPCs, and finally moving onto Harmony mote farming.

On the PvE front, I have 800 lesser Elder coins, enough to buy the big coins for the next two months.  So I should be set for loot bonus rolling for a while  :why_so_serious: 

I logged into my paladin, couldn't decide on some of the talents, and logged back out. That's not actually a bad thing, as I couldn't decide which I liked best, rather than which one sucked least.  :why_so_serious:  My indecision is making it hard for me to shell out the money for MoP, though.

The cost to respec a talent is a reagent that costs 50 silver, and it can be done instantly with no cast time if you are out of combat. No reason to stress out about it, you aren't committing to anything permanent and you should really just try them all eventually.

I find myself switching between the aoe stun and the 20 yard CC as a monk (only for CMs), but otherwise I use the same exact talents as a tank or dps do not see myself switching much over the life of the expansion. I'm not going to say the old talent system offered more choices, but the ones we are given now are mostly still false choices.

The last tier for monks is a good example. My options are:

1. A cone attack that costs 2 chi yet seems designed to start pulls (grants stagger). I will never have 2 chi before a pull, and there are better things to use 2 chi on after a fight has started, so this is never going to be a good choice.

2. Roll now gains a damage/healing component. I don't want to fling myself out of position during a fight as a tank or dps by rolling through the thing I'm trying to attack. I'd also rather keep Roll as a movement ability, rather than having it be on cooldown when I need it because I used it for dps/healing.

3. A tiger pet that costs 0 chi, lasts for 45 seconds, and does cleave damage.

As a tank or dps #3 is the only "right" choice. Healers will pick #1 for an additional aoe heal. My hunch is that if Blizzard released talent spec popularity statistics, there would still be a cookie cutter build for most specs at 90.

This site has done that already:  WoW Popular (http://www.wowpopular.com)

Might help make decisions anyway.

#2 sounds awesome for PVP. Autohealing tagged onto your defensive repositioning move? Yes please.

What a surprise, every hunter uses the same talents with very few exceptions.

Rogue is even more skewed.

I'm not sure why this is surprising; fewer choices just make cookie cutter builds easier to copy from the forums.

Even with the lack of variety on certain talent picks it looks like there are more different builds per spec now than in the past.

I'm not particularly concerned with gimping myself or having to pay to respec or anything, I'm just indecisive. :P

I also don't really give a shit about what other holy/prot paladins are doing spec-wise (although I suspect I'll have a lot of overlap with the "popular" spec, I almost always do, even by accident), so that's not an issue either!

More different builds than Cata maybe (but not WotLK nor the early Cata alpha/beta 76p builds) but a different build now means 1-2 different buttons or passives at best. Most of the new talents are very situational or PVP focused anyway, resulting in very little change to gameplay.

With a lot of the talents, I can see a case where they might be useful in PVP. Unfortunately "PvP talent vs PvE talent" is exactly what we had with Cata talents, and wasn't deemed compelling then either.

Was there a recent hotfix that made Surveying give Arch. skill up again? While leveling mine from 525 to 600 I swear I was only getting them on completing an artifact until today, but now I got skill ups one for one for an entire digsite.

I find priest very flexible with talents.  I can see Halo being more useful than Cascade in some places,  and the samewith Mindbender over From Darkness, Comes Light (for both shadow and disc).  Also, the survivability talents are pretty solid as well.

LFR part two last night...was hilarious to watch 75% of the raid fall down the hole, to which I replied, "raidgroup go down the holeeeeeee"

 :grin:

Girlfriend got three sigils and four pieces of gear as well.  For six bosses, that's pretty sick life.   :drillf:

Shocking nobody, the warrior talents at 90 were dumb choices. Everyone uses Avatar.

How are people doing with their Elder token rolls?  I'm only one for eight so I'm not getting much with them.  If that keeps up I won't be farming dailies once I get revered with everyone.

Doing my research before I hit LFR to see if the boss actually has something for my tanking roll before I burn a coin or not.  No point in using it if the boss only has one piece of tank gear and I've already got it.

Also, I have 800 lesser coins. Would really like to have something else to spend these on.

Yeah the lesser coins really add up, and the stupid cap of 10 major coins is dumb. We should be able to treat those are real currency for a vendor on something else. Like actual gear instead of just additional rolls.

I stopped running dailies for lesser coins when I realized I'd done a week of dailies and had 2 1/2 weeks of coin turn-ins. At that point the grind seemed pointless.  I have no use for the gated items since my GS lets me do LFR so it's just grind for cash and faction which I can delay. I'll get my serpent tonight (Because I'm out of cloth for bandaids and haven't been able to do the bandage quest for 3 days.) and then I'll be done with them as I focus on Fishing and Tillers.   

Golden Lotus have fallen to the wayside because it's too damn many people to compete with.  I'll come in on the weekends when I have more time, but fuck taking an hour to do the first set of 6.  My GL is still running everything every day.  Last night he was bitching he'd been doing dailies for 2 hours straight and he still had 2 hubs to go.  It's too much, particularly when I love X-Com so much and I've let Torchlight and WOT lie fallow for weeks now.

As far as rolls vs wins.  I've used 4 and won once. A very nice belt in Moshugun.

Last night I quit two LFR groups after the 3rd wipe to the same damn drop mechanic.  Even after being warned to watch on the first one we lost 50% of the raid.  The 2nd attempt we lost 4 people.  The third we lost the tank after the boss vortexed him back in as the floor went away and I dropped, unwilling to take another repair hit.   Next raid, same pattern.

I'm going to avoid that section for a week, I think.

Golden Lotus may trump attunements as the dumbest "gating" design decision Blizzard has put in a game to date. I understand the thought behind it, and I understand why they want to keep content flow at a certain progression.

What I don't understand is forcing massive amounts of dailies down your throat in the same 10x10 box so that everybody killsteals while they skullfuck the zone into oblivion. All for the priviledge of using those points you earned doing something fun.

I dunno...getting a free heroic chest piece last night for doing the Revered Golden Lotus quest unlock kinda made it worth it.  And I can look forward to a free Valor-grade epic ring when I reach Exalted for that quest, so I can save and spend my Valor on other priorities.

But I agree with the dailies overkill and Golden Lotus gating.  I think we can expect that to get the axe within the next month here anyways, as most people will be divided into two groups:those that got Exalted Golden Lotus and those that said fuck that shit and waited until they fixed it.

The single best fix they could do is just flag every damn GL mob as !.  The pick-up spawns suck enough for fighting over, let's not add in normal mob fights as well.

Setting 50 spider babies on fire is the worst quest in that series by far.

Yes I wouldn't mind the dailies at all if everyone were able to work together like in GW2.  The vast majority of why I hate them is other people.  At the very least they need to increase the spawn rate by 1000% for some of the mobs, it's nothing but a brutal tagging competition right now.

Goats in Valley ot4 Winds are by far the worst in my experiences thus far.  Low meat drop-rate, along with small spawns.  Genius!

Semi-rolled through the second half of Mogu'sha Vaults LFR this afternoon.

- Spirit Kings was interesting.  I can certainly see the difficulty of this encounter in a 10-man or 25-man normal, but once again the nerfs of LFR combo'd with raw spam healing and DPS overcame.  The raid reset for some weird reason on the third king, but we nailed it out pretty quickly.

- Elegon is what lorelol people think it is.  The mogu got a hold of Titan tech and reverse engineered the shit out of it.  LFR nerfs the encounter by removing the stacking buff/debuff one gets from being in the inner ring, which negated a lot of damage + removed the tank swapping.  Still, the remaining mechanics did put pressure on the healers (I let the auto-bot tank keep Elegon's attention while I corralled the adds that spawn.  Obviously no amount of warning to both read up the encounter and get out of the inner ring at the right time prevented at least half of the cat herd from falling into the pit in stag 3  :why_so_serious:.  But once they got that down he was pretty simple.

- The Will of the Emperor is a modified Tribunal of the Ages fight.  Sheer DPS and healing power couldn't overcome this one.  With the steady stream of different add types, the dual boss constructs with large sweeping AoEs, and the occasional room-wide damage amp debuff, it took six attempts, but we finally got through it.  Would love to tackle this as well in a 10-man.

I've had a good deal of trouble healing on my priest as disc or holy.

I was holy for all the fights in DS (normal) and did pretty well, I thought.  My overhealing was really low.  I felt I could really manage my mana through long fights and short intense damage periods.  5-man dungeons were usually no problem unless someone did something extremely bizarre such as pulling the whole room of mobs + Ozruk in the Stonecore dungeon.  We all lived but it was hairy.

The new MoP dungeons are really making me feel stupid.  Both the normal and heroics give me fits.  I have a good idea of what the bosses are going to do because I've read up on them on Icy Veins and youtube walkthroughs.  I felt obligated to do that because hey, I'm the healer.

Hasn't seemed to help me that much.  I would say a third of the dungeons (both normal and heroic) are fine in that while I am low on mana after the fight, nothing occurred that I couldn't handle or adjust on-the-fly for.

The remaining two-thirds have been pretty nightmarish.  If a DPS pulls aggro, I have to let them die because I use too much mana keeping them alive before the tank has gotten threat back.  And by too much mana I mean I won't have enough left to finish the fight after popping a pot and Divine Hymn/Mindbender.

Other times the tank will take a huge spike of damage that makes me shout 'WTF??' at my desk and frantically spam my keys.  I get alarmed when this happens because I know I'm going to dump a shitload of mana to stabilize things and be out the remainder of the fight.  For example, I tried the heroic Mogu-Shan Vaults 5-man last night.  The first boss, about 10 seconds in the fight, hit the tank with Ravage and dropped him to 30% health the first tick.  So I used holy's shitty PW:S, PoM him quick, and start spamming flash heal to keep him alive but my mana was burned and I OOMed a bit after that.  After we wiped, I left group.  This time I didn't bother going back over the combat logs since I was too depressed.

Well, not exactly depressed.  Puzzled and frustrated.  My iLvl is 444 so it could be a gear and spirit issue.  But my spirit is just under 7K which seems like alot but clearly isn't.  Sure, some DPS did bad things, some more than others.  I definitely don't have the mana to correct alot of 'standing in bad shit' mistakes.  Some tanks have been easier than others but if it was their gear, their skill (knowing how to use their cooldowns) or just a class thing.  Or if I am not that good at priest healing and Cata spoiled me.

I dont have any other leveled healers to compare this to in order to narrow down the issue.  But all that said, I have enjoyed the expansion so far.  I do like healing even if it makes me rage and ages me during raids.

One tip is to make SURE you take the mindbender talent.  Having a shadowfiend on a one minute cooldown is a MUST HAVE for mana regen.

I agree mana management is a big deal on a priest.  That being said, I've found a few things through my personal playstyle that seem to contradict theorycrafters (points one and two).  

The first is that I find haste to be the most overrated stat for pretty much everyone sans the so-called experts.  This is because I very rarely want to cast faster.  I want my heals to hit harder and my shields to be bigger.  So, I reforged out of haste and went mastery/crit.

The second is semi-linked to the first, but Renew is no longer optional.  I find myself using renew closer to how I used it as a holy priest in Vanilla.  The reason for this is the Borrowed Time haste buff is going to give you two extra ticks to renew.  I'm IL 466 in heal spec, I believe? and my Renew's HoT is comprable to a Greater Heal.

Third, try not pre-shielding so much.  Instead, let a tank get to 75% or 80% (whatever you're comfortable with) and  Power Word:  Shield, Renew, and Penance.  Then, if the tank is still getting melted, Borrowed Time is still available for you to bomb a Greater Heal at Flash Heal speed.

Fourth, make good use of Spirit Shell.  I find myself stacking big spirit shells on a tank when he or she is pulling giant rooms.  For example, rooms like the students in Scholomance, the butchers in Scholomance, and the hatred groups outside of the last boss in Shado-pan Monastery are good examples.  I find my tanks tend to spike like crazy here, so I pop Spirit Shell so I can stack a 250k shield on them above and beyond Power Word: Shield.  This essentially makes my tank's HP pool 600-700k, and gives me a much larger margin for error.

Next, don't forget about your most underrated oh shit buttons:  the combo of Void Shift and Desperate Prayer.  Things getting hairy and you want to start fresh?  Void Shift, Desperate Prayer, and Power Word:  Shield.  This will buy you a few seconds to calm things down.

Also, if you're macroing Power Infusion to your spells still, you really shouldn't.  Being able to drop a 150k Flash Heal, 240k Greater Heal, or 60kx5 Prayer of Healing on demand is amazing.

Finally, don't feel like you have to use Pain Suppresion and Power Word:  Barrier like you would in Cataclysm to negate big damage.  If you can use them that way, more power to you, but in the world of Looking for Dungeon, god knows how bad your tank might be.  So, if your tank is falling behind, be more aggressive with Pain Suppresion and Power Word:  Barrier.

I don't think the question in Mists is "How do I get more mana?" but rather, "How do I spend it optimally?"

I thought that as far as Haste went for healers, it was never about "stack more haste" but more about "Get to X breakpoint then ignore it till you can safely get to the next one".    Ie: you grab haste up untill your Main HoT gains an extra tick, then try your best to maintain that exact amount of haste while reforging the extra into Mastery / Crit, untill you can safely go for the next breakpoint without having to reforge back into too much haste.

Thanks for that.  I don't remember offhand but I believe I went overboard on 'reforge to haste' on my disc.  I'll try the mastery/crit route and see if the extra oomph on my spells and bubbles helps stabilize things for me a little bit.

It's possible your tank was doing something wrong or wearing completely inappropriate gear. I can't think of any situation where a heroic 5-man boss in MoP hit for 50%+ of a tank's life and it was normal. I did a really messy Brewery run with a DK tank who was spiking like crazy and kept losing threat, only for him to realize halfway through that he didn't turn blood presence on. There are big obvious mistakes like that, but every tank has more responsibility to keep themselves alive in MoP due to the active mitigation model.

The other thing I'd mention is that you're comparing intro expansion gearing to end-of-expansion Cata gearing. No healers in queue-required gear had mana problems in Dragon Soul or the 4.3 dungeons. It's not a great basis for comparison.

I'm not saying you aren't doing something wrong (I have no idea), but there are other causes to consider.

Tanks standing in the fire are also hard to heal.

I'd blame your tank.

It's that time again!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUcaH8eR3dY

I'm gonna get me a sword for tanking!

Cataclysm at launch was really rough for healers.  If you dig back through 4.0 talent specs you'll find that almost everyone was recommending DPS take survivability talents, because AoE would bleed healers dry.

Very much so.  Cata was completely un-fun for healers and tanks in almost all 5-mans, especially heroics.  It drove off a good number of people from the game as a result.

FIFY. It was shitty for DPS too.

OK, pet battles are totally fun.  :why_so_serious:

Stop saying nice things!

FUCK PET BATTLES FOR EATING MY ENTIRE EVENING

The implementation of pet battles seems to be the one thing Mists did that has had little negative criticism because it's so damn fun.

One thing I really like are all the static rare spawns, they are challenging and fun to hunt and try to solo.  Also, enchanting mats ++

Heh.. I figured this was the case when I saw you pop up on my friends list last night.

My post got lost in the Verizon internet shuffle yesterday, but in 4.3, I advocated a haste/crit strike build because you could build up essentially what was a spirit shell using Prayer of Healing spam before mechanics like Morchok's stomp or Hagara's lightning phase.  Also, spirit was so useless that I remember tooling around with something around 3000 spirit.

In 5.0, I find haste sub-optimal because Borrowed Time gets you to the two-extra-tick breakpoint of Renew without needing any points in haste.  So, I don't want to cast my heals faster, I want them to be bigger.  I diverge with Hamlet's spirit analysis with disc because disc mana is so rough right now.  Instead of limiting spirit stacking, I think we should be limiting haste stacking and focusing more on overhealing less.

I like that so much flavor/holiday stuff happens right after release. It makes it fun to do the holiday events in the normal gameplay that you're already working on for gear/pets/mounts/etc

I will totally admit part of the reason I wandered back into WoW is because I heart Hallow's End.

Also Harvest Elune.  :grin:

The farming thing is basically my main reason to get to 90, I think.  :why_so_serious:

Just a tip: never throw away or vendor ANYTHING you make leveling the various cooking ways.  All the single serving dishes used to level it can be given to various tillers for rep bumps with them.  I made the mistake of vendoring the 10 jade witches brew i made leveling brewing, only to find out that the damn fish wants 10 of them later on down the road for a rep quest....

That's good to know, thank you! I just ... need to find bank space for it (my vault is stuffed with a lot of dress up/transmog clothes :P).

Yeah, with the crazy amount of Cooking mats needed for mastering all the ways, I am happy to hear that they are discussing some kind of cooking mat storage system that may be independant of your bags / bank vault.

Something like GW2's 'crafting material' bank tab perhaps, with options to send crafting materials there directly from your inventory? 'Coz that would be kind of  :drill:

That would be fantastic and I hope they steal the shit out of it.

Oh, fucking WHAT ??!

 :ye_gods: :heartbreak: :heartbreak: :heartbreak:

Yeah, each one of the Tillers that you can gain rep with actually have their own Daily quest, that ONLY pops up if you have a 5 stack of their Favourite Food dish in your inventory.  Each one of the Cooking Ways has 2 recepies to level before you hit feasts, and each of those recepies is a "favourite food" for one of the Tillers.  The exception being Way of the Brew, where as far as i could tell, the Jade Witches brew is only used in one specific quest by Jogu once you get your rep with him fairly high.

You don't need a stack for the quest to show, just one of the item.   the "quick guide" was linked earlier in the thread.

I am mostly having fun in this xpac so far.  Still in the first zone, maybe 2/3 of the quests finished.  Nearing 87. 

Frustration sets in; I try twice to do normal random dungeons.  Wait 25 minutes each time, only to be added to the last boss.  I've never been to the zones before, so I don't get to see the dungeon story.  Twice.  GW2 may have spoiled me a bit with regards to how much it wants everyone to work with each other.

I'm having fun with it. I started a new priest on an Aussie server since my play hours match up better with theirs than they do with US servers.

I'm currently nearing 30 and doing pet battles along the way. It's good times.  :grin:

Hit revered with Golden Lotus over the weekend finally.

It added yet another node of dailies to the rep.  -╯□）╯︵-┻━┻

I'm done with them now. I'm not a tailor, I don't need exalted. On to Shado Pan and August Celestials.. which combined take less time than the GL dailies do now.

On the happy side, I've gotten 3 sigils of power from LFR.  I love that.

The problem with August and the Shadow-Pan is that'll take twice as long to hit Exalted.  You only get one group of quests for each faction at all levels of rep.

That said, some people are popping up with Pandarian Ambassador.  Apparently there's a rare elite hozen that has an off-chance of dropping a peace pipe that boots your rep by 1000 with all Pandaria factions per use.  That's pretty much the only bypass right now to the daily grind.  5.1 with the double rep at Revered needs to get here already.

I care not a whit for hitting exalted. I'll run a bunch daily for cash anyway.  I'd have given-up on the GL dailies a while ago because they are horrible in implementation and concept.  Such a small area for each quest hub with a large amount of kills/ collects required.  If they weren't required to unlock SP and AC I'd have stopped them after the first few days.

Klaxxi have a similar problem for me.  The vehicle quest sucks because the bug kills slow and the kill quests require too goddamn much grinding of mobs.  My limit is about 8 kills before I think, "Man, this is bullshit."  Klaxxi with their "Kill 20" or 40 whatever the damn number is goes way too far.

I don't mind any of the dailies except for the Lotus ones. I do think the Shadopan "Kill 4 elite bugs" quest is stupid because 1 - The spawns are too small/infrequent, and 2 - Half the bugs go into evade and can't be killed.

Heh, DLC actually covered the Shado-Pan sillyness recently. (http://darklegacycomics.com/1008xNx360.jpg.pagespeed.ic.byGWJMiQB1.jpg)

Remember that they plan on doubling rep gains from revered to exalted come 5.1, unless you really want a particular mount I wouldn't bother grinding out exalted until then.  I don't mind the tiller dailies so I still do those, should get my last four plots in a few days.

Exactly, that's why I stopped Lotus. Here's the ones I don't mind doing right now:

Tillers, Anglers, Serpent, the Arch daily, and I fish up one of the special rare fish.

My main drive for GL and the others is the achievements.  They all have 'chieves that vary on available completion because of the dailies changing. 

Also, 489 epic quest rewards for Klaxxi and GL at Exalted too.  Kinda makes them hard to pass up, IMO.  Means you could save your Valor for other stuffs.

Specific reason I'm completing these daily, even if sometimes I don't want to.  Gear score makes a huge difference when you're carrying people in raids.

Yeah, Tillers and Anglers are all pretty fun and I'll do them even after hitting exalted/ all "Best Friends."

The only Tiller quest I skip is the "plant this seed!" daily.  I'm trying to harvest witchberries,and  jade pumpkins, bitch, I don't need no damn turnips!  (And I need no more motes of harmony.  I have 15 of the damn Harmonies as an engineer. Nobody needs that many Pandarian Dragonlings.)

My Valor Points are getting saved until I can get "real" gear off of VP vendors anyway. I'm an LFR guy right now so my gearscore means jack.

Still, you need the gear to at least get into LFR, and 470 is a somewhat steep min. needed to get so you can play in the newer raids next week.  I have several 470+ pieces right now and I still average below 470 due to itemization and stuff.  Valor helps, but right now it's an upgrade every other week because of pricing.  The good news is in 5.1 we get to upgrade Valor gear with small amounts of Valor, so the curve won't seem so bad.

Meh, 470 isn't that steep.  I haven't replaced a trinket, chest, shoulder or wrist and i'm at 464 equipped.  If I actually get back to running Heroics and Scenarios (which the dailies keep you from...) I should hit it.

I haven't reforged in a while, so I shouldn't share but here:
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/alleria/Ayarae/simple

The "plant this seed" quest doesn't require you to harvest it; plant it, turn your quest in, then dig it up with a shovel.

Yep, I do that. Free coins.

I think the August Celestial and Shadopan quests give 250 per. With the guild rep bonus (+10%) and the Hallow's End wickerman buff (+10% rep, +10% exp) that's 300 per quest which means they progress at almost the same rate as GL but with 1/3 the quests. I am okay with this.

I just said no to the daily bullshit and have been building my gear sets via heroics, and pick up raid world bosses and raid finder. No bullshit rep daily grinds necessary.

Same. My shaman is very close to 470 now, all I need is some lucky drops from LFR (yeah I know, :why_so_serious: x100)... haven't done any dailies.

A bit of an aside, but I tried out battle pets today. OH MY GOD IT'S FULL OF STARS -- but seriously, it's pretty interesting and fun (I've never played any Pokemon, so the concept is mostly new to me). Don't really want to do pvp matches with the "let's put a level 1 next to two level 25 pets and roflstomp noobs" shenanigans I've read about, though.

Are any of you doing LFR as non-dps? What are your findings of the difficulty and people's reaction to the environment.

I may be DPS but I watch some of the tank mechanics out of old habit.  Seems fairly straightforward on the first 3 bosses, but the last 3 require a lot more coordination from the raid.  Particularly the 3rd of the 2nd half of Moshugun since the DPS need to keep the Courage and Strength off the tanks.   If you don't have someone willing to step-up and explain this to the newbs, things can get ugly.   Even then, the Healers seem to like to stand there when the Rages focus them and are then turned in to paste.

Elgnon was the hardest for everyone to learn so far, though.   So much movement, quick-repetition of tasks and add-swapping seems to send some in to shut-down mode. Things I learned:

*  In LFR you can keep the guardian add up near the boss for DPS, so I recommend you do so.  When we did that on Friday evening the boss went down without a hitch related to adds. When we tried to keep them away, no difference except that people did not switch to the adds.
*  Make sure SOMEONE yells out to kill the sparks.. then AGAIN.. then AGAIN.  You'll probably get the towers on the 3rd try as everyone seems to burn CDs on the first two.
*  No matter how much you spam "GET OFF THE FLOOR" idiots are going to fall.  Expect one wipe due to this right now and take it in stride.  Say "Ok, now you see what that's all about so get off the floor."  If it happens a 2nd time start vote-kicking people. 
*  This boss more than the others brings out the trolling assholes crying about other people failing while they suck, don't fall to that level and votekick them instead.
* 

I'm honestly not very familiar with the mechanics but as a healer we seem to be able to heal through most people not following the mechanics that don't one shot, like Elgnon's floor.  Last time on Feng I'm pretty sure the tanks didn't even use their damn items, I know the protective bubble never went up.  Had some fucking moron DK who thought he was a third tank in blood spec taking aggro from the two actual designated tanks the whole time too.

Edit: Meant feng not guardian.

I haven't tried as a tank, but tank queues are said to be REALLY long - and tanks are still the single biggest factor in many of the LFR bosses (if you have a tank who doesn't know what to do, you'll either wipe or make the healers work REALLY hard)

As a healer, things are straightforward for the first 3 bosses (first one is just mindless aoe healing for the most part, second one has predictable burst phases when everyone's clumping up (though it can get clusterfucky in a jiffy if people aren't moving out when they get debuffed / the offtank isn't taking the second crystal), third one has "heal the debuffed people" and "enter the portal if you're oom". The second three bosses are a lot nastier, as there are plenty of non-oneshot avoidable damage sources that people suck at avoiding, which drains mana like crazy. Specifically:
- getting hit by flanking orders / volley (spirit kings)
- not killing the adds and/or dragging them into the raid (spirit kings)
- taking hits from the 'rage' adds attacking you instead of kiting them (will of the emperor)
- standing in the various AOEs done by the two bosses, both as dps and especially as tank (will of the emperor)
- standing in AOEs created by the 'strength' adds (will of the emperor)

When I did WOTE on my shaman, the healers were running completely dry multiple times during the encounter - of course some of the healers just mindlessly spammed aoe heals with high overhealing / low hps that probably didn't help.

Yeah I'm not sure what it was but in the latter stages of Will of the Emperor there is titan gas combined with some raid wide damage that combined with a soft enrage that almost wiped us because most healers ran out of mana.  I got a hymn off at the end but one more burst would have wiped us.

Still, I've only wiped two out of nine times doing panda lfr and very few people knew the fights so they're only going to get easier for a couple months.

LFR Mogu'shan Vaults is easy.

- 1st boss: Pile up lions and AoE.  LFR damage on petrify is kinda harsh, but not insta-kill.
- 2nd boss: Pile up on the dude and AoE, maybe the tanks will use the absorb/reflect shields.
- 3rd boss: Pile up on the dude and AoE, maybe DPS will use the portals to fight the bads on the other side.  Tanks are forced to swap automatically through the fight due to the dude's execute mechanic.
- 4th boss: Pile up on the dude and AoE, move to avoid guard lines and don't overdo the AoE when everyone is a target (also refrain from DoTs/debuffs as well)
- 5th boss: Pile up on the dude and AoE, move to avoid falling, kill columns, back to the dude.
- 6th boss: Kill Courages, kill Strengths, kill Rages (in that priority order), THEN you may have my permission to die attack one of the two dudes, whichever is closer after you've handled the adds.  The gas is just a 10-20 second damage amp, not actually doing damage, but makes the blade combo sweeps hit hard.  They can be avoided if you know which way the blade will swing, which raid addons like DBM can do.

Leveling up a monk is boring as fuck. Way too much space between new things, and every single Alliance leveling zone pisses me off story-wise.  :heartbreak:

I would love to know how DBM would tell what direction the Devistating combo hits are coming from.  Unless the boss whispers you something when you are tanking, as far as i can tell from a DPS standpoint, the only indication you get is a visual clue from the Boss Model windup animation, which I didnt think DBM had any way to read.

Also, I think the Gas is also the enrage timer, since on one of the first LFR attempts i was in, there was a point where the Gass came out and then never went away, resulting in the whole raid eventually dying to AoE damage from it.

I have literally the opposite problem where even the new Horde leveling experience is fucking awful. Goddamn Kalimdor is the shittiest continent, and I wish it would have sank into the ocean.

Yeah gas is part of the enrage mechanic and appears after approx 12 mins without going away.   If you're hitting that then your melee and your tanks aren't avoiding the Devastating Combo mechanic and getting the Uber-damage buff it gives.  (One-use 1-million-damage button each time you avoid it.)

DBM may be able to predict where devastating arc is going because there are pretty lights that flash to one side or another. That has to trigger a graphic effect of one type or another and DBM might be searching for that to give the warning.

Kalimdor is, indeed, the shittiest continent (my monk is a NE, actually, so she started there too ... I ditched for Eastern Kingdoms at about level 10). But at least with the Horde Kalimdor shit, it isn't an endless parade of HA HA, FUCK YOU, YOU LOSE the entire goddamn time.

I'm telling you the truth; DBM was telling me which way the swipes were coming, and I was able to avoid all of them once I got the jist of it down.

Exciting week for me.

- Knocked out Exalted Klaxxi, Anglers, and Golden Lotus, along with BFFs with the Tiller posse.




- Fuck getting BFFs with Nat.  If those fish dropped on a more frequent basis than just 1%, I'd be fine with doing them daily for a month.  Since their not, fuck him, fuck his fish, and thanks for the raft.

- Knocked out all of the achieves related to the Golden Lotus dailies (except the kill elites one), all but Chi-ji's 'chieve for the ACs, all but the Dark Skies 'chieve for Klaxxi, and all but the 'Know Your Role' and 'Getting Around...' 'chieves with the Shado-Pan.

- Not having to use my farm to grow food for the Tillers means my plan of Harmony mote farming is coming closer to reality.  Just a couple more days to get the Brew feast mats needed and I'll have all of the Ways mastered.

- 4 non-difficult quests for Shado-Pan and August Celestials and that's it till done?  NO PROBLEM  :awesome_for_real:

Good lord, do you even have a job?

I did Tillers quests (except fatty goatsteak fuck that line), Klaxi quests and 2/3 of shado pan quests last night along with Headless Horseman and it was 9:35 when my raid queue popped.  Did Eregon and WOTE and went to bed at 11, with AC, GL and the rest of SP untouched.

I've found grabbing a couple buddies to do GL and Klaxxi shortens the time it takes to run through dailies considerably.

I find I can knock out three factions' dailies in about 90 minutes.

The leveling experience is pretty fun so far. Did the Stormstout brewery and it was pretty fun and WotLK-y in that the mobs weren't terribly involved and the boss gimmicks were fairly forgiving. Hopefully that lasts.

I'm vaguely dreading tanking LFR when I get to it since I'll be pretty late to the party.

This should actually work out to your advantage...most folks won't fall down the hole during Elegon and other assorted early-on LFR mistakes.

Except the new tank, the loser!  :awesome_for_real:

Hopefully the progressive nerfs will have started going in by then. I'm pretty much pure casual now and so is my guild, which I figured would be raiding normals by now. Nope; they just groupqueue for LFR and that's good enough because fuck organizing this crap anymore after 7+ years.

We've pretty much headed that direction and I've switched guilds since my old one moved to RIFT for some ridiculous reason. Also, nobody wants to roll a healer this expansion.

Even my Guild - the last 25-man guild on Alleria - does the group LFR thing one day a week.  It's just too easy to pick-up upgrades to heroic gear and learn the basics of the fight that way.

Speaking of that; did Blizzard pull a Cata again and make healing suck shit?

Healing isn't the thoroughput spamfest it used to be, but it doesn't suck shit.

Also, I have a 10-man raid group on Grizzly Hills that raids Fri/Sun at 730p EST that has space for one.  Would prefer heals or DPS, but we might be able to swing a tank, if you're unhappy with your current raid situation.  We're 1/6 because people are gearing molasses-speed,. but 8/8 HM last expac

I wouldn't say healing is as bad as it was at the start of cata but you definitely feel the sudden reset in terms of lower mana regen.  Or at least I do as a priest.  I guess monk healers are doing amazing, so they'll probably be nerfed.  Druid and shaman are both strong.  No class seems "broken" but disc priests are very unhappy and seem to be struggling.

I notice you don't even MENTION paladins, so I'm going to go ahead and assume they are exactly the same as they were last expansion (which is good, imo  :why_so_serious:).

The healers I know don't play healers anymore. I think Cata burned them and they never went back.

That being said, I think the changes to mana pool didn't help. Priests are having major issues dealing with it, and a lot of people played those that were healers. Gear solves that problem with regen some, but you have to put up with the ramp up factor right now. Once you have the gear, I think it's similar to warrior tanking in terms of effectiveness to gear standard.

Pallys seem to like ret and prot right now; I see almost zero paladin healers anymore.

Druids seem pretty pleased. They have a lot of tools to make them work, and they don't suffer the mana hit as much.

I don't know about shamans. The ones I know all ragequit when they changed totems.

Monks are new. Who knows?

Our regen is kinda borked, but the way the mechanics are going, I think we'll need nerfing by the end of the expac.  If I could get about 20% more regen (I'm at 10k spirit raid buffed right now), I'd feel better.  Currently I'm on fumes on LFR fights with bosses at about 20% hp and I outgear the content.

The atonement mechanic makes us hard to balance, I think.  Anything that heals from DPS is sketchy when gearscores strat going up.

Priests have sucked since WOTLK.  It's just so much easier to heal on the other classes that I only do it on my priest if I want short queue times.   In the team's fervor to appease the "wahh I'm bored" crowd they didn't look at the non-priest classes for provision of tools.  "Because that would cause too much homogeneity between classes! And look, you have "THE BIGGEST HEAL" "    :roll:

Yeah, I know a lot of shamen who've ragequit, too, Paelos.   They and Death Knights have been the rare classes in my experience.  Also; despite all the bitching about 4 trees here, Druids have seen a big uptick.

Found this site, which apepars to be about current L90 characters. http://www.worldofwargraphs.com/statsglobal-classesrepartition-0-0.html

That data matches pretty much what we have in the guild and what i've seen in my heroic randoms.

I seem to always draw a hunter, a ret pally, myself as a tank, a druid healer in most cases, and one of my DK buddies from the guild (we have 4 actively playing).

If I'm drawing an extra 2 spots to a group of guild three, and it's going to be dps? The odds I'm getting a pally or hunter are gigantic. I've yet to see a single rogue or lock.

Right now we have 13 90s in the guild, with about 6 more who are actively leveling up toons from 85+:  4 DKs, 3 warriors, 3 pallys, 2 druids, 2 hunters, 2 monks, 1 shaman, 1 rogue, zero mages, zero priests, zero locks.

I've been screwing around as a mage and a paladin (I can't shake the paladin habit) but I seriously cannot decide what I want to actually play to level up. One of the classes I was eyeing, I sort of never got around to hitting 85 with, so I'd have to slog through Cataclysm again first.  :heartbreak:


EDIT: Clearly it should be my ~rogue~, so I can be a special snowflake (apparently).

My resto shaman feels very strong, and I actually really like the totem changes. Dropping totems every x minutes (and back in BC you were expected to do totem twisting too) was tedious busywork, and the new toys they added are pretty nifty. In my mostly blue gear I can push up to 75k (!) HPS in burst situations, though this was with the dungeon buff - it also ran me dry pretty quick*. Usually I'm #1 or #2 in LFR, though that is probably because of all the stacking (again). About the only issues that I can see is that shaman really suck at doing damage compared to other healers, and telluric currents (used to be a talent, now is a glyph - get some mana back if you cast lightning bolt) is pretty bad now -- though with a 3-min cooldown mana tide I was able to keep chugging along even in the worst "tank stands in every single combo" WOTE boss fight that went on for 10+ minutes. Very good PVP healer too, though doesn't approach the OP that is resto druids (insane cc, almost BC resto druid levels of unkillableness AND very good burst damage? sign me up!).

Main changes from cata:
- healing stream is a short-cooldown smart heal, still very strong.
- healing tide is an insanely powerful oh crap heal, and the 3min cooldown is good. It is not uncommon for this spell to be #2 or even #1 on a LFR 'healing done' meter for shaman.
- ascendancy gives you the green buff from ultraxion - obviously pretty great, especially in clumped up pvp situations.
- capacitor totem is a great aoe stun (much better than the old ele fire nova), the delay allows for some strategizing. Really good in pvp too, as people haven't yet learned to nuke the totem (the 'drop dummy totems' minor glyph helps here too), but if you have the totemic repositioning talent, they wouldn't be able to do so before it was too late, anyway.
- shorter-cooldown fire elemental and the new stormlash totem are decent burst DPS boosts for the group (stormlash is especially good and underestimated in a 25-man environment)
- unleash weapon now combos with healing rain, I'm not sure if this was possible before - it's more beefy aoe healing (as if shamans need any more of that, har)
- earth shield improves ALL shaman ST healing on the target, I think it used to only improve the caster's. On the flipside, it doesn't have the pushback resistance anymore (I haven't seen more than 2 resto shamans in LFR at a time, yet... but if there were, I'd put the third ES on the dps prone to standing in fire as a dubious badge of honor)
- riptide isn't consumed by chainheal anymore, so chainhealing off the tank (or myself) is preferred in most cases.

FWIW I've seen a lot of DKs in my random heroics at 90, mostly blood though (which is really strong). I haven't seen too many rogues. Hunters are kind of on the weak side now, but I still see a good number of them.


* context: in Siege of Niuzao Temple, the first boss' room hits everyone really hard unless both slime groups are killed... but the tank didn't know that. Let me just say it was a "challenge mode" fight.  :awesome_for_real:

I cried earlier about my priest and decided that maybe I should try another toon.  I also got sick of being expected to grind dailies.  I did dailies for one day and got annoyed with the GL stuff.

So I leveled my mage as frost.  I had a lot of fun as frost leveling up and doing dungeons.  I was doing decent DPS as frost.  With no heroic gear at all and only a smattering of dungeon gear I was doing 30-35k in non heroics.  And when leveling I could kill any Pandaren rare that I happened across.  It really felt fun.  Then I hit 90 and refused to do the dailies and got bored.

So I decided let me try my druid!  During Cata I was feral/balance.  I did a level or two as Balance and realized I hate the Eclipse mechanic and stopped.  I might switch and make him a bear tank.  But, some of the boomkin changes I really appreciated.  I love being able to cast a few heals without breaking moonkin form and I really loved the glyph that lets you NOT look like a far owlbear.

So then I look at my pally.  My first character in the game and I left him in a sorry, sorry gear shape.  A mix of PVP dps gear and tank gear in ret spec when I didn't know a thing.  All I did was disenchant and JC on him.  But with the way the beginning quests work I found it really easy to fix that gear.  I started off as ret but I remember I really hated it.  Just...all the buttons and holy power and melee dancing.  So I decided to give holy pally a try and leveled/dungeoned as holy.  I do a lot better as a healer as a holy pally.  I have occasional OOM issues but much, much less that my priest.  A group last night pulled the entire library/bored student room with the boss because the shadow priest used that expanding blue circle spell and it just seemed to expand and expand and expand.  I was OOM at the end with the tank, myself, and 2 DPS at 20% health with one dead dps.  But I couldn't have done it on my priest.  Maybe I have just shaken off the rust.  Anyways, holy pally healing is pretty fun.  But I have been so unlucky with heroic drops so I am still only about 440 ilvl.  I can't bring myself to do the dailies.

Reading back on that I don't mean to say its all roses with my pally.  People still die.  Almost always a DPS because I won't spam them with heals when they stand in stuff.  And its a lot easier for me to tell now.  If someone stands in something for a tick, fine.  Finish your cast or just were a little slow to react, no big deal.  I have the mana for that.  But if you take a massive amount of damage and your health bar is dropping fast and YOU ARENT MOVING then I have to let you go.  Either you fucked up by drawing aggro and couldn't dump it or you stood in something that was avoidable.  Nobody has said a word about it.

And one last thing about healing.  It seems like all the rage now in Mogu Palace, on the second boss, to jump down from the balcony instead of going down one side of the staircase.  It happens so often I've made a 'Please don't jump' macro.  I'm not proud of it but I leave group if the tank jumps down.

So, frustrated with poor luck at heroic drops I decided to give healing a break and try DK tanking.  He was about 399 iLvl in Cata and I did tank some of the DS fights.  I think I want to tank because I go into a rage when the tank does something dumb in a dungeon and I'm all 'I am better'.  or, even more petty, when the tank inexplicable pauses for random lengths of time.  Just...stands there.  We'll be moving to the next trash group and...stop.  I know they aren't watching my mana or waiting for a cooldown because they've never used the cooldown and they'll charge right at a boss when I'm at half mana.  But then the pause.  Well, obviously my pet peeve.

I just don't know what class I like so I'm kinda trying all of them.  I'm far, far behind gearing for raids in the guild I joined.  None of my toons can even do LFR yet.  I just seem to like trying out the new mechanics of the toons I leveled more than concentrating on one (my priest) and grinding my enjoyment to death.

Nice, my most played 80s (never did 80-85 in cata) were the 3 sitting down by the monk.  :awesome_for_real:

Leveled my youngest toon (Rogue) first as combat. That was fun and quick as I went from BE to panda and did it entirely on rested XP. I then went to level my hunter and pally but found that I have lost the hunter love again (the first time was in TBC when I'd played it throughout vanilla) and that ret is just too busy. Given that I hate queueing for dungeons I started dungeon-grinding and was more than happy to see a tanking sword drop resulting in my finally being able to use the Facelifter as a transmog - happy days. But dungeon running bored me so at 86 I switched to my Blood/Unholy DK which hit 90 in no time flat running dungeons and questing with ease as blood (god I wish prot pally could do the damage of a Blood DK). In fact I never left the second zone as DK until I hit 90 and was 89 when I ran out of rested.

In the process of levelling these two, I 600 capped:
Herb/Inscription (90 Rogue)
Mining/Engineering (90 DK)
Enchanting/580Tailoring (85 Warlock using green drops and cloth drops )
Elixir Mastery (85 Priest using left over herbs that the Rogue found)

On top of that my Pally hit 585 Blacksmithing with leftovers from the DK's mining.

The speed of levelling these rocked and Inscription/Engineering/Enchanting/Elixir were all worthwhile although I guess I need to rep grind enchanting/elixir/tailoring/blacksmithing to get the good stuff?

Cooking and First aid were awesome to level too, you can hit cap in no time.

DK tanking is still fun but now I need to work out what is next - 'lock, Shadow Priest, or my Druid/Pally/Warrior tanks - or do I push my monk past 46 (I've only ever dungeon crawled with it)?

With 8 85s to go plus the monk, I need to make sure I don't burn myself out capping them - maybe I need to just go play pokemon :D

I feel like my shadow priest is in a very good place this expac, healing is a terrible oom mess right now but dps seems good.

My Far East DK Gnome (http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/earthen-ring/Cryptwidget/advanced)

The coloring is better if the Klaxi tabard showed on the model viewer, but still  :awesome_for_real:

I've meant to ask you who runs Tamarack now.  I was part of it back in Vanilla and early BC, when Thoron and Kelkasha ran it.  I didn't realize you played Renwin until I saw you logging into him in my friends list. 

Earthen Ring is a very small world.

Oh wow, small world indeed  :awesome_for_real:

Let's see...Thoron went to work for White Wolf, and passed the torch onto Ynari and her hubby.  She left about a year ago and passed it onto a co-leadership between Dawne and Abratane.  Abra's recently left and passed on the mantle to Magnus, who's still trying to get situated in the role, but we're still truckin' along as one of the last vanilla guilds on ER.

I'm having problems motivating myself to play alts in MoP. It's a combination of a few causes, as best as I can tell.

-Professions in Cata were a good motivation to level other characters, but in MoP you can level professions for 200-400 gold just sitting in Stormwind.

-85-90 questing feels like a huge undertaking. This was great on my main character when the quests and zones were all fresh, but it is unappealing for alts.

-The 90 "end-game" is primarily reputation factions. I'm almost done reps on my Monk but there is absolutely no way I would want to repeat that process on other characters, even at 2x the rep.

-Gearing up in heroic dungeons isn't fun enough that I would want to repeat it on additional characters.

Unrelated note: Challenge modes are pretty fun. You can get bronze in any dungeon as long as you aren't wiping 6+ times. Silver feels like it would be easy to reach with normal play and 0 wipes. Since there are no repair bills, wipes don't feel too punishing on anything except your time and the VP rate when you do the daily CM seems generous regardless of what medal you get. My server's leaderboard (a medium pop server) only has 1-8 scores for any given dungeon, so they do not seem especially popular. Similarly, I've only been able to run 1-2 a week because there are only ~7-8 people in my guild with any interest in them and there are rarely 5 of them on at once. If anyone on here is interested in CMs, on US servers/Alliance, feel free to add me Rokal#1479. We're usually looking for dps slots to fill. Patience would be required, as we are only consistently getting bronzes and still have a long way to go.

I was Loreck (hunter, my RL brother was Randir (warrior).  We came in maybe 6 months after launch and stayed till the Seraphim schism.  Pissed everyone off when we left, friends were lost.  I likely would have made different decisions about that in hindsight.  It was fun and a new experience building a guild from the ground-up, but it cost a lot in goodwill to make that happen.  

Really good to see TO still around.  Ynari and Dawne were always good peoples.  I'm pretty sure TO turned on the lights for ER, and it would be very fitting to see them turn them off one day.

----
Regarding Pandaria, I'm torn.  

It's the most beautiful expansion and zones they've built so far.  In many ways I really like the layout and progression of the zones.  However, I can't shake the 'sameness' of it all.  I thought the first zone was very competent in getting the player interested in Pandaria, but then it dumped me in the Valley and I was mostly doing farming quests.  It just feels kinda silly, and it's just not sticking for me.  I can't quite put my finger on what I don't like, because it's all so damn pretty.  But something isn't quite right.

I would probably put it down to a lack of a sense of urgency after you get out of Jade Forest.  Jade Forest has this great buildup into the horde vs alliance conflict which is starting out on pandaria, ending with the neat cutscene / sha fight, and then you get dumped in the Valley, where all that buildup goes poof and you spend the rest of the zone helping farmers with virmen problems.  It isnt really untill you get into Towlong / Dreadwastes that any sense of "important" things happening really comes back.  Even the Yaungol raids in Kun Lai really seem generally more like a distraction then a serious issue.

Hopefully, with the next content patch rolling out the increased Alliance vs Horde tensions, things will heat up a bit.

I had the opposite reaction. Jade Forest was nice to look at, but the alliance vs horde and Old God Sha corruption stories just felt like the same boring "storyline" we've been following for 7 years. Valley of the Four winds quests had a lot more humor and felt like a real change of pace: laid back, slice-of-life quests. If Valley seems boring you can head to Krasarang which has a story with more urgency.

http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/2987-Patch-5-1-PTR-Build-16208
(http://i.imgur.com/JEDBc.jpg)

Nobody tell Lantyssa.  :grin:

Well, okay.  I'm not huge into pets but I NEED THAT.

Nice, but not sufficient to bring me back.

Did I mention you can play not-pokemon with it?

I guessed as much.

Red pandas are one of the cutest critters around.  They're not going to cause me to lose my mind and purchase an expansion for a game I lost interest in long ago.  Especially when there's so much more out there that I do find interesting, and is more to my tastes.  For those that are playing, I hope you have a stable full of the little buggers.

If it wasn't for Pokepets, I'd be seriously, seriously fucked off with this expansion.

It's utterly boring and pedestrian with very very little in the way of fun, until you hit the crack cocaine that is collecting and battling with small imaginary animals.

I like levelling my new monk (gnome, obviously). Coming from GW2, the dodge roll ability is amazing.

That said, most of the level 90 stuff (dailies and rep grinds) is dead to me. I do LFR every week on my resto shaman and occasionally pvp (which is... broken, but I don't think anyone is surprised). Playing alts is fun, and I have just now stared into the abyss that is pet battles. I have 6 level 12-ish pets now, and I think I'm getting more sucked in with every new pet I catch. Close to the 150-pet achievement now!  :ye_gods: :why_so_serious:

I kinda agree with this but the jankiness of how you go from the Jade Forest to the Valley of the Four Winds is pretty noticeable.

I mean, my side and the horde show up, militarize the respective two races you idiots kicked out of your government, then destroy a gigantic jade dragon statue you guys needed for your benevolent serpent god to be reborn properly as well as unleashing cuthulu-sha...and because I guess I ran some errands for a few villages and beat up some Mogu you thank me and give me a gentle kick in the ass to the valley to go follow Chen and his terrifyingly bigheaded niece around. Did I mention the pandaren children are scary looking?

Oh, and at least on the alliance side, my critically wounded named allies are wisked away somewhere and I'm not really supposed to care I guess.

It's not so much all that, it's the fact that I have this story (with only a couple of instances) to grind through with 10 chars.

With cataclysm, I at least had differing zones I could alternate with.  With this, I'm just levelling my Panda Monk slowly and gathering PETS OF DOOM.

I suspect this will be the last gasp for me.

(Bear in mind also I have XCOM and Torchlight 2 currently ringing my bell)

I'm a little burned out already.  I'm hoping it's just from playing too much all at once to get to 90 and then some factions up.  I like raiding but we aren't ready yet so that isn't hooking me in right now.

They really could have done without all the faction bullshit. It was their biggest design flaw in the whole thing.

Um, what? In Cataclysm at launch to go from 80-85 you had to do 4 of the 5 zones if you weren't excessively grinding instances/PVP. In MoP Jade Forest is going to be mandatory (at least some of it) but you can skip half of the other zones because (even with no rest or Heirlooms and only a guild XP buff) there is way more questing content than you need to get from 85-90.

On the first character maybe. My 2nd 85 dinged in the desert zone, so less than 3 zones totally done from 80-85. I wasn't running dungeons, no XP heirlooms, just guild bonus and a lot of rest xp.

I did every quest because I'm a loremaster fanatic but with only a few dungeons here and there I was 90 before hitting either townlong or dread wastes. I could have skipped any given zone about halfway through had I wanted.

It's true there there are no alternate progression paths but you aren't locked into zone completion the way you were with cataclysm.

You aren't even locked in to a true fixed path once you enter the zones, either.  Most of the nodes will let you pick-up quests even if you didn't do the feeders.  Just find the starter mob and run the nodes you liked.  I'll skip all the Jinyu on my next alt.  Fuck those fish people.

We ran all of the heroics the first month of the expansion and our priest healer never had any problems.  We weren't all that well geared either.  The key (he said) was that he had to pay more attention to mana management but that was about it.

I enjoyed the difficulty of the heroics.  You had to pay a little attention, but they were still pretty easy overall.

On another note: I found the big numbers my mage put out to be offputting.  I don't like the scaling.  I want the damage and hp like they were in vanilla... just with more abilities.  Still... fun expansion.  We lasted a month before moving back to SWTOR.

I'm still trying to get over my cata-induced trepidation of LFD. I'm just done with people being pushy because I'm not pulling fast enough or whining that I don't know fights or tanking for groups of retards who die to every instakill mechanic.

We used the dungeon finder often to fill our last spot.  It was odd that we either got an amazing player that rocked their class or the exact opposite (dead weight that stood in fire).  Maybe I just remember the extremes, but that's how it seemed.

You're just remembering the extremes.  When I was still running dungeons I had a pretty varied experience.

I feel your pain, Fabricated. The same thing is keeping me from leveling my healer, which I've always done in Dungeons. I'm still shellshocked and don't want to try even though I know they're considerably easier than they were.  Too many assholes ruined it for me and I generally liked LFD.

There are certainly a lot of vocal assholes.  Between their inability to have fun and the dps meters so ubiquitous in the game, it became an exercise in epeen measuring.  If I'm going to start doing the epeen thing, I'll do it in pvp.

As someone who has mained a healer in the last three MMOs I've played, blaming the healer is ubiquitous.  It doesn't matter that some DPS has stood in the fire so badly that his damage taken meters are above the tank's, it's still my fault.

That being said, I wish e-peen people would get off DPS/damage done and start looking at shit that matters like damage taken, activity, and overhealing.

/raidleadersoapboxoff

Healing in LFD seems fine.  It's way, way better than at the start of cata.  Be sure to gem/enchant for spirit instead of int and use a spirit flask if you're just starting out.  Only times I have had problems in LFD is when they want to do the achiev for a boss, as a healer I wish it wasn't possible to do achieves in pugs.  There are some things that have to be interrupted but between the tank and three dps someone usually gets around to it.

I'd say the hardest fight is Armsmaster Harlan in Scarlet Halls.  His always-kill-you-if-caught vortex, plus the adds plus needing someone to dispell his buff is difficult for a pug.

In WotLK I used to run LFD over and over again while drunk and had a great time even with bad players and was nice to people who genuinely tried.

Outside of when it first launched and Deadmines/Stonecore were ridiculous, people were fucking assholes in Cata and dropped the instant things didn't look good. And I didn't really blame them honestly because not a single one of the launch heroics were fun.

Goddamn Cataclysm was a shit expansion.

I can say the same about raid leaders. I got bitched at on the DK because my DPS was 'way down'  However, my Damage Done, Activity and Damage Taken were always  top 3, top 3, bottom 5 for DPS.  Didn't matter because my "DPS" number was low.  Hi, DK dots fuck that up (and skew activity) because they keep your DPS running but do low damage so your DPS number is lousy.

Once I started standing in the fire my DPS went up but they bitched about my damage taken.

Raids put the asshole in and take the fun out of gaming for me.  I hate any encounter that takes more than 5 people. 

Yep I pretty much stopped doing anything beyond 5 people at this point. I may do some LFR if my guild wants to group up and get it going, but if not I don't really care. Valor rewards are there, heroics are there, challenge modes are there, and I like to fish.

I think that's why we went back to SWTOR.  Better pvp, 4 man hard modes, and 8 man raids.  You can get mostly friends together and noone cares if we wipe.  If you want a challenge, we do hard modes with 2 or 3 people. 

I strongly disagree with the 'better pvp' for swtor. Both swtor and wow pvp are seriously broken, but I found swtor pvp much less fun than wow's.

e: I guess I should give my reasons - complete gear dependency with a ridiculous grind attached, no baseline resil/etc for new 50s (the blue set is a joke), rampant pugstomping due to no separate premade queues, lack of cross-server fights meant fighting the same premades all the time. Lots of wonky mechanics too, though they may have gotten fixed. The only thing SWTOR pvp had going for it was better baseline class balance (but even then I was being ganked in an opener by operatives and marauders even with my team actively trying to peel them off me)

To be a bit more on-topic: healing as a resto shaman has been a breeze so far, and I actually had people complimenting my healing in LFR (twice!)... which is a strange and definitely un-Cata-like experience.  :ye_gods:

Levelling my baby monk has been good too, though instances shoot me past levels WAY too fast (and I only do each of them once) - I'm sure this will change once I hit level 60 and the BC Suck starts. Lowbie instances are still crazy easy with heirlooms, even if I get the occasional jackass prot pally who thinks it's funny to queue as dps and keep taunting everything in sight.  :oh_i_see:

This is how Cata in a nutshell affected me to the point I won't even group or go into dungeons with any characters.  I never saw beyond the initial dungeons\heroics in Cata and haven't done a single one in Pandaria.  Too many assholes made me almost quit the game entirely.

Anyone have a GOOD Pet Addon Manager ?

What features are you looking for?  The "You don't have this" and "Here's the quality of the pet" features in the mod linked earlier were all I was looking for.

Yeah, but also 'you are in this zone and here's shit you can get that you need' would be good.

I'll search for your link.

Ooh, that'd be a good feature, yes.

I just keep this page (http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/6758627164) open while leveling my alt. Seems to work fine so far...

Cool, thanks.

Curse does seem to have an addon or two that does what I want;  I'll give 'em a shot tonight and report back if they're any cop.

I stopped doing Cata's launch heroics as soon as I had my main geared up. I never did LFD, partly on the basis of the stories I was hearing, and partly because if I was going to slog through those damn things, by golly I was going to do it with my guildmates.

Pandaria, different story. The 5-mans are relatively brief, the mechanics are less punishing (i.e. you have to move, but you can beat the encounter without a dispeller or interrupter). I still prefer guild-only or guild-mostly runs, but I've solo pugged a few times, and had pretty good experiences so far. Just lucky, perhaps :D

I almost want to say that Blizzard pushed the pendulum too far in the "easy" direction. WotLK had some 5-mans, notably Gundrak, Old Kingdom, Utgarde Pinnacle, and Occulus, that I dreaded going into with a pug. So there was a mix, instead of "all hard all the time" vs "everything is cute and furry".

I didn't think Gundrak, Old Kingdom, or Utgarde Pinnacle were that bad even at release. The last boss of Gundrak could put out fairly ugly damage on blue-geared people but it wasn't bad at all. Utgarde was never really hard, and Old Kingdom wasn't TOO bad. Occulus just sucked because of the dragon gimmick which was kinda poorly conceived but well-intentioned.

Loken was about the most deadly of the early WotLK 5-man bosses. In leveling gear he'd one-shot most people with his aoe.

I was petrified to try LFD when I came back during the last half of the Hour of Twilight patch since everyone was geared and I was in shit (still all blues). I got some "fail HP" whines from healers about my hp totals and then a drop, got kicked from a couple for my HP totals, then I got one of those silent groups that never says anything and ran the whole series without incident- picking up several upgrades along the way. Lucky I guess.

I've run the first two dungeons a handful of times as healer on my Druid, and so far it's been decent.  I'm still not quite ready to dust off the Prot Pally, and try tanking again, though.  Dealing with the unrelenting stream of jackasses bitching about everything in Cata soured me on tanking for pugsever again, I think.

Blizzard had realized the enormity of their fuckup by the Hour of Twilight launch.

Don't expect this to change. I'm currently levelling my prot pally in dungeons (because I hate healing and Ret makes my fingers bleed and my brain explode). On single targets I'm lucky to pull 13K dps and have the DPS whinging about carrying me etc. Fuck 'em - I've had this pally since she was a human in Vanilla and moved her to BE and I know how she works - a massive damage soak.

Then I look at my 90 Blood DK and cry because she was pulling twice that DPS while tanking at 87 but take a damage spike when I rune starved and had to hit CDs. My Bear tank is somewhere in between.

Interestingly Blood DK still seems to put out figures that leave me in a happy place - some fights I can top the meters. I wish prot pallies had a chance to come close.

I still haven't got the new prot rotation down myself so I can't offer finesse tips, but Prot Pallies can definitely dish damage if you're doing it right.   One of my guildies is often #1 or #2 in DPS because LOL VENGEANCE.

Use crusader strike, not Hammer of Righteous on single targets.  HOR got it's teeth kicked-in on damage comparatively.  20% weapon damage vs CS' 125% + Fixed damage.  Also make sure you've got Holy Wrath in your rotation.  That's my guesses for what you're doing if you're oldschool.

PetJournal ticked all the boxes.  Just so you know.

Looks like I'll be replacing my mod. Thanks, IW.

Cheers, I did notice I was hitting HoR a bit too much, rather than for just the debuff. Plus I got rid of the consecration glyph and went back to the old-school run in and consecrate as a filler. I pulled a few more K DPS and had a smoother rotation. Admittedly I still have some 378 purples on as I only hit 88 last night and am still in the Pandaria starter zone - I probably need to quest more :)

I played around with ret a bit more - it's nicer than I thought once I slowed down and stopped button mashing.

Yeah Ret is a lot nicer than it used to be.  It's also what you "should" be leveling as unless doing dungeons according to most of the stuff I've read.  (I'm still prot and 87, but I also round-up 4+ quest mobs at a time, which is easier now than it was at launch.)

This FAQ at maintankadin helped me tremendously this week.  I looked it up after I realized (and posted) that I didn't understand the rotation wholly. 
http://maintankadin.failsafedesign.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=33033&sid=2ffa439d34306bd1afcdcf8549dbb994

I've switched to dps. My guild is just so full of tanks that I went and picked up some gear and made myself some weapons to DW with my smithing.

As a warrior, it's simply not that hard to do 40k dps just be facerolling in LFR.

Yeah, I hate warriors for that reason.  I'm at ilevel 372 but still hovering at 35-37k on the hunter while the DKs and Warriors are eating my lunch with lower scores.  It helps that there's so much AOE going on, I suppose, because I notice I jump in to the top 5 on single target fights.

True. Fury will always been middle of the road on single target because DW bladestorm doesn't do much.

Some warriors don't realize that fury is all about quick bursts. You build up your rage, you fill up the bar, then you flip all cooldowns and crit your way to massive damage in the span of 20s.

Going back to my original concern about cross-server zones -- yes, it is a huge fucking pain in the ass to level an alt on a pvp server, since there is a fairly significant chance of some bored 90 from some high-pop pvp server running around in lower-level zones* (whether they are gathering stuff, doing pet battles / archeology, or just having nothing better to do) deciding to one-shot you just 'cause. Chain-running dungeons can be an alternative, of course.

* in practice, this refers more to BC/WOTLK/Cata zones. There are so many zones with 1-60 - not to mention that levelling is insanely fast even if you only do each dungeon once - that even getting camped by some 90 isn't a show-stopper. Plus a lot of sub-60 zones are at least partially phased, which also helps against gankers.

I've been leveling an alt on Barthilas and never had a big problem.  Occasionally, yes, I'd be one-shotted by a 90 doing Arch/Herbing/Mining but they would always be gone by the time I got back to my corpse.  So except for an extra minute of corpse-running the cross-realm stuff there was pretty painless until I hit 80 and went to Hyjal.

There were 3-4 groups of 5-6 Horde hanging around each of the beginning quest nodes there.  Goldrinn's Shrine and places like that.  They were a mix of people from Frostmourne and Jube-something.  All 90s and all one-shotting the 80s.  There were calls for help going on in a few of the channels but there didn't seem to be much response from our side.  I managed to finish a few quests by just being lucky and ignored amidst the chaos.  But I logged shortly after knowing the other hubs were being fucked with.  My alternative was to go quest in Vash'jir.  Ugh.

I am kinda used to (at least in my experience) Alliance apathy about Horde attacking but it was shitty they were all cross-realm since its not like I can nurse a grudge and get back at them because they aren't on my server.

This is why you don't play on PVP servers. PVP servers are fucking dumb.

If Bliz offered one-time guild server transfers, we would've moved to a pve or rp server looooooong ago. Paying big $$$ to transfer 4-5 characters per person is not really an option for us, though (especially when most of the guild isn't even playing now). We didn't really have an issue with the pvp server thing since Crushridge was never 'big' (I levelled during launch week in Cata with only 3 people of my level attacking me... none of them straight-up ganks), and it had a really small ganker population + there were always peopel ready to hit them back. With cross-server zones though, all bets are off.

And yeah, I started to have issues in Hyjal too (a fair amount of 90s and 85s hanging around questing areas ganking people). I didn't catch the server names for most of the gankers, but I know at least two of them were Frostmourne. They also try to corpse-camp the lowbies after killing them, which is hilariously sad and pointless at the same time (even as a non-stealther, they won't be able to get me in combat before I get on my 280% flying mount after rezzing out of LOS).

Flying mounts make this much less painless, which is nice.

Cleared 4/6 last night.  Elegon is a brutal fight, and seems like what you'd want out of a raid boss.  Although I appreciated what spirit kings were, they were extremely easy compared to Gara'jal.

I have to admit, while the dailies are an awful grind, I enjoy being out in the world.  Anything I can do to stay away from /2 is a win in my book.

I've heard that one of the pandaria factions is easier/faster to max out than the others? does anyone know which one it is?

3 are in my experience, but don't give gear.

1) Lorewalkers - Just fly around once you hit 90 and find all the lore objects that tell the story of the Klaxxi, Mogu, Pandaran and Jinyu and Hozen.  Instant exalted rep and flying disc.
2) Jinyu/ Hozen (faction dependent) - You should be exalted once you complete Jade Forest and/ or Kun-Lai summit.
3) Cloudserpent Riders - Do the profession dailies and it's about 2 weeks of questing. Get some egg spawns and it's faster than that.

After that Tillers is the next easiest as you get rep for harvesting as well as the dailies.  The dailies are also pretty quick so long as you always ignore that goddamn fatty goatsteak one.

One more day for Shado-Pan exalted.  Will still check them daily after like I've been the others to get the achieves, but I should be more than ready to tackle the next factions in 5.1 when they come out.

I'm on Blackrock - total alliance ganks of my toons = 1 out of 3 now-90s

It really doesn't seem to be a problem and hasn't been post-TBC.

Having said that, the one gank was a 90 hunter vs my 87 prot pally (I was farming turtles/rat-dudes). Death by boredom to them as their pet died to adds that they picked up as we played chase and I had AS glyphed and think I had popped all < 3min CDs twice in the fight plus the 2 big ones never once saw a scatter shot or trap - I know their death was more due to them sucking than me being any good because my pally was hitting like a wet noodle.

Well yea, but I assume you were levelling those characters from 85-90 (which are not cross-server). My problem is with level 90 gankers in cross-server zones, especially BC (60-70) and Cata (80-85). My level 83 monk has been ganked about 7 times now (90s in almost all cases, one 85), and one of the 90s as well as the 85 tried to camp me as well.

And yep, gankers are almost always bad at pvp when it goes beyond one-shotitng lowbies - comes with the territory, I think. I used to enjoy killing the level 60 rogue gankers in low-level contested alliance zones (Redridge/Wetlands/Duskwood) with my warrior back in vanilla.

They really should have level bracketed the cross-server zone, tossed all similar level characters into a reasonable number of instances regardless of server type, and just auto-flagged the pvp players.  Might actually be sort of fun if it was +/- 2 levels or so.

Fuck dailies.  Seriously.  I don't subscribe to do what is very obviously busywork.

LFR is getting annhilated on the last boss of the first half of Heart of Fear which opened today, they're going to have to nerf that down.  There is a giant purple circle under the boss and when people get under it he stomps on the entire raid, so any random person out of 25 can screw you over.  Plus a screwy tank to tank to dps swap that requires more coordination than can be expected in lfr.  It's kind of funny because you can't get any lfr that isn't stuck at 2/3 bosses finished with the raid cycling through queueing more people up as they leave.

Odd, my very first HoF LFR queue today was a 2/3 complete one, which stuck us at the last boss, which that particular group then proceeded to oneshot.  It got kind of hairy at the end, when there were phermone pools literally everywhere, but for the most part, seemed to go pretty simply.  I think we also only had like one person die to the Crush.

I've read the strat on Garalon for 10/25 man.  What aspect did they nerf for LFR?

As far as I can tell it's just reduced damage, the mechanics are the same.  So far you have been able to ignore mechanics but not on Garalon.  There is a complicated switch on the phermones that anyone not involved can screw up, there is the purple zone that anyone can screw up, the people with phermones have to keep moving (actually everyone has to keep moving) while kiting the pools to the outside.

I believe something in the phermone trail / pool / debuff mechanic has been changed for LFR.  Either a reduced duration on phermones, or lowered chance for it to jump to others, or something, that makes that aspect of the fight (which is argeuably the most important) a bit less reaction intensive in regards to instant wipeing if it goes bad.

Pheromones only seem to jump to the tanks on LFR. I didn't quite follow that as all I had to do was, "stand in the green circle, avoid the purple and kill legs not the boss."   

My experience was the exact same as SurfD.  Came in on 2/3, people explained it as I did above, we wtfpnd in one try, end of story.  Though I gathered my group had several wipes before I joined and they kicked the tank who refused to run back.

I didn't even realize what the pheromone pools were until the end of the fight when they were all around the area, I stepped in one and DBM yelled at me.

One hint.  Be sure you expressly tell the DPS that 1) Standing in the green gives you a 100% damage boost and 2) That this boost ONLY works on the legs.  Several people who'd stuck out the wipes said "Oh, ok!  I didn't know that!"   (Which then got others bitching "Oh, sure, get a DPS increase and you'll pay attention to the goddamn mechanics.")   

You can try to explain that killing a leg drops 3% off the bosses health, but really the folks who care about that would know it already.  Just point out "circle =  loldeepz!"  and you should be good.

I think Garalon is much like the first week of Will of the Emperor. Lots of wipeing the first few times groups do it, then once people get a grip on the mechanics, it will be a standard easy LFR fight.

As to ignoring mechanics, there seemed to be plenty of mechanics on the first two bosses that you cant ignore.

You can ignore the sound circles on the first boss, but if you dont get in the Bubble during the AOE yell thing you will put a lot of stress on your healers, and probably eventually end up with people dying. You also cant really ignore the MC'd people, especially on the final phase, if you still have MCd people up when he casts the AOE yell thing.  You CAN heal through it, but if too many people are standing outside of the Protective Bubbles, you will likely end up with people dying.  Also, I saw at least one person die during the AOE yell phase because they were MCd, got focused by a couple of people with high burst damage, got burst down to like 30%, then died to boss damage when the MC ended because they were outside the bubble.

On the second boss, you can ignore most of the mechanics (untill the final phase, where you need a minimum number of people who can avoid tornadoes or you will wipe), but you cant ignore the one where he vanishes and attacks a random target, because if you dont get enough people stacked around that target, they WILL die.  On my frst run on him, we had two people die to that mechanic because the first person it targeted got a Boss Mod raid marker stuck on his head and then proceeded to run away like a little girl, resulting in him getting himself and the one unlucky person who was next to him killed when the boss popped in and oneshot them.

Garalon however is the only LFR fight in game I am aware of that has a 100% instakill mechanic that is totally up to the individual player to avoid (if you are still in the purple circle when he does a crush, it WILL kill you).  However, you pretty much have to be a complete failure to die to that mechanic, since you have something like 4 seconds to get clear when the in game raidwarning screams INCOMING CRUSH at you.  (sort of like if Ultraxion was allowed to Oneshot you with the attack that no one pushes the button on in LFR)

Just discovered something I REALLY wish I had known like, a month ago :(

If you are an achievement whore (like me) and are doing Getting Around With The Shadow Pan (http://www.wowhead.com/achievement=7298), The Achieve to do 15 dailys with each Shadow Pan companion, make sure you are DISMOUNTED, standing beside a DISMOUNTED Companion if you attempt to turn the quest in.   Appearently if you are Mounted, and your companion is mounted (flying on their Kite), you have a high chance to get no credit for the Quest.  This drives me nuts, because i could be like 90% done with that achieve, instead of like 20% because I have been turning in most of the quests directly to my companion while hovering over the battlefield.

Also of note: if the August Celestial Dailys happen to be for Nizuao's temple, do those with your Shadow Pan companion, as appearently they also count as credit towards that particular achieve.

They need to fix that stupid Shadopan pet getting on the kite at all opportunities. Are we done fighting? Let me get on my fucking kite so I block your looting.

They need to fix a lot of things with the shadowpan pets.  The hunter is almost useless 90% of the time.  Dumbass will drop traps at his feet (miles away from mobs), sometimes just stands there doing nothing, other times runs in and starts meleing, instead of shooting things, and likes to disengage into other packs of mobs just for fun.

There's a webcomic out there I read about them once upon a time.  Can't remember if it was in this thread or not.

Also, I specifically don't get a companion because they are worse than Barrens General chat from Vanilla.

nyone have any experience downing 10m reg Elegon?  Guild group is struggling a little bit.

Know that they use the same AI as mobs and it becomes clearer why they do some of the dumb stuff.  I avoid any of the companions with pets, but the rogue, 2hdps, monk and tank all compliment me fairly well.

"Mr. Merusk, you sure look great in that armor.  Is it a new transmog set?"

/technicalwriteroff   :why_so_serious:

That joke was bad and you should feel bad!

Wasnt sure where else to post this, but it gave me a really good laugh.

Quality WoW machinima is alive and well:
http://youtu.be/qMlzJdeOeVc

That was impressive.

The fung-fu version of the Arthas showdown is probably better than the actual one.

ARTHASU!

A horde fury warrior that was the same level as me challenged me to a dual yesterday. Literally 15 minutes later he gave up because neither of us could kill the other. I couldn't get him from 10% to 0 for some reason, and he could never get me under 70%. Was kinda funny.

And what were you ?

For good times*, duel a holy pally as a blood DK.


* not really

Oh bah, I should've said. I'm a prot warrior. It was a massive exercise in futility.

Second wind is utterly retarded.  Hell, a LOT of the DPS class "self healing" abilities are poorly though out and badly in need of balancing.  I mean, yes, I know that playing a dps class is boring when you have to med up between fights, but they should not have gone to the point where some classes can do compedative HPS to actual healers (in some case without really having to actually DO anything) while still maintaining good dps.

To be fair, my blood DK outhealed a lot of LFD healers even in Cata.  :why_so_serious:

I was doing 2s as a blood DK with a rogue as my partner.

The rogue was smashed but the ret pally/resto druid combo couldn't drop me below 80%

I'm going to miss death strike :(

I still haven't got my ret pally sorted - I get hit like a truck by other rets but need more gear I think.

Is this worth getting for a few months of casual playing?

I have been totally overwhelmed by work lately and havent really been following it.

The 85-90 leveling experience is pretty darn good.  Dungeons are crisp and other than a few minor incoveniences (Wise Mari in Jade Serpent, I'm looking at you), 90 is fun too.

If you've read this thread, you've seen the qualms with dailies.  All I can say there is YMMV.

LFR experiences are pretty good right now, too.  Most folks are over the learning learning curves in MV and HoF.

Plus, I think Friday has MoP for $20. 

So, my vote is yes, worth the price of admission for at least 30 days.

Seriously ?

My view :  The leveling experience is a long and shitty non stop conveyor belt of 'kill some things' quests with fucking annoying phasing.  The dungeons are shit and there's only 2 of them.  Well, there's 4, but once you've leveled the first two, you'll only get the next 2.  Experience in dungeons is also very shite, so you're really just going there once for the items.

Pet battles, gardening and, if you have a daughter, raising your pet dragon.  That's it.

And fucking forget alts.  You'll be bored RIGID.

Avoid.

I'm gonna echo Ironwood on this one. This is the xpac of the grind. The xp required for the levels is just way too fucking much. Maybe if there was more than 4 dungeons to hit up it would be better, but hey.

I rather liked the storyline and don't mind a little grind.  Believe it or not, some people actually like that.  :)

But then again, I don't know what game would appeal to most of f13.  I'm pretty sure Kate Upton or Justin Timberlake screwing you while you enjoy your flavor of Trammel/Morrowind/Dark Sould/pre-NGE/(insert favorite game here) would still get negative reviews.

She didn't work the balls. Would not fuck again.

Counterpoint: It's the best expansion they've every released, some people just want something that's not WoW. It's the least linear expansion they've released since TBC (I skipped an entire zone and a whole bunch of quest hubs while working with no rested XP) and not one of the daily quest hubs is actually needed - finishing Dread Wastes gives you a set of gear good enough for heroics, and heroics plus Sha of Anger is enough for LFR. Speaking of heroics, they're tuned more like WotLK than Cata (or TBC).

Oh, and the quests are (mostly) local affairs rather than the "Do this or THE WORLD IS DOOMED!!!" of Cata and WotLK. It's nice to do things like help a pair of lovers elope against the wishes of their family, spend time training with not-Shaolin monks and help farmers save their crops from stupid, turnip-hating rabbit-things without having the WEIGHT OF THE WORLD ON YOUR SHOULDERS. In my opinion, anyway. I mean, hell, once you get past the first zone there's exactly one pair of opposed Alliance/Horde quest hubs in the entire continent; the rest of the time is you wandering the earth and making beer doing good so even the "War(craft) never changes" bit is toned way down.

...until 5.1 anyway. Fuck Garrosh.

I like the questing this time around. Some of the storylines in Cata were fun IMO (Vashir) and I wasn't annoyed like 99% of people apparently were at Uldum, but it all felt kinda janky in that the quest requirements weren't given much thought. Like, I was fighting for spawns with people in Vashir and Uldum despite only sharing the areas with like 2-3 people tops because they were dumb and required way too many kills/drops to finish. Despite the zoning tech lumping me in with like at least 2+ dozen people in each area, Pandaria I haven't had those "I wish I could kill people of my own faction" moments I did in Cata.

I like the leveling fine. The dungeons aren't great because the rewards are so fucked up in comparison to points and the points system involves dailies. I'd say give it a month, see what you think.