The AT World of Warcraft Thread (Where do you play) and general BS

[RiDE]

Ret paly in beta = LOL

Not my SS

 

[Aikouka]

I got Robes of the Scarlet Sin'dorei on my mage this weekend... my first Heroic Magister's didn't go so hot... I think I had around 15 deaths haha. The second time, I believe I died twice... once on a wipe on Vexallus and the other time a wipe on Kael. The Fel Tinged Mantle also dropped, but I let the other mage have it hoping that the chest would drop. Oh and if you want a Shard of Contempt, you just need to do Heroic Magister's Terrace with me... it's dropped every time so far . Also picked up the S2 shoulders, so all I have left to replace is my neck, boots, two rings, 1 trinket and my wand. I'm most likely going to replace the spell hit enchant as suggested and just kind throw the bloodgem in until I can get Belt of Blasting and the wand off Aran (dropped last night but was on my Shaman ). That should recap me without having to use the bloodgem, which I'll switch back to my +damage gem. Right now, I'm sitting at around 905 damage:

http://www.wowarmory.com/chara...xml?r=Alleria&n=Cureli

I've also been working with my Shaman a bit. I'm trying to get his badge count up a bit more to get the Stonebreaker Totem (the chance to get AP on shock totem) for 20 badges. It's not hard, but I kinda got passed up for half of Kara and I haven't had a chance to hit up heroics just yet. Although, I did get into the second half of Kara where we did Curator and Aran (will continue tonight at Chess) and I think each time I go, I really tend to show that I not only bring good DPS to the table (I'm fairly sure I was either top damage or easily top 3) and I'm still in greens and blues (but S2 axe ). I'm looking at grabbing some of the nice rogue gear as the only rogue that was with us has epics in most slots already. Also working on pumping out Aldor rep to try to hit exalted (I'm around 5000 right now)... need to get that so I can get the +200 AP proc from my necklace.

Also, what's a good damage meter that people tend to use? I've heard the add-on recount tossed about a bit and I was wondering if that's good enough? I normally don't like damage meters as people tend to care too much about damage and not about playing properly, but at this point, I want to make sure my damage isn't slouching.

Originally posted by: AntiFreze
WOW.... our guild is moving servers. the leaders just posted. I'm going to copy and paste the post. I wanted to know what you guys thought. I'll reserve my opinion, but I would of liked to see a vote..... here it is:

I wouldn't do it. It costs me a ton of money to transfer servers 'cause I'd need to move all of my characters as they're practically worthless without their partner (okay, not worthless ).

Originally posted by: rh71
The battleground queues are longer and it seems there's little to do.

O rly? You know queues are linked among battlegroups not servers. On Alleria ( a PVE realm ), I almost always have insta-queues.

Originally posted by: rh71
There's also something to be said for being on a PVP server and having to watch your back everywhere you go. It makes things MUCH less mundane. PVE server drives me to complete boredom, even though my real-life friends have the characters there. That should say enough.

It's fun fighting someone where you actually have a chance of winning, but 90% of the time, fights are instigated by people 8+ levels above you. In other words, they never initiate a fight if they don't have a large advantage.

I think I can honestly say when leveling my human warlock and undead rogue on Lightning's Blade, that I was attacked maybe 5 times by someone that I actually had a chance of killing. They especially love to do it when you're fighting an elite mob or a named quest mob or something ~_~.

 

[Anubis]

O rly? You know queues are linked among battlegroups not servers. On Alleria ( a PVE realm ), I almost always have insta-queues.

this is true, and the length of the que has mostly to do with the Ali:horde ratio in the battle group

if 4x aws many horde are queing then Ali, horde are going to have 4x longer que times

 

[BadRobot]

Whats considered good dps for a hunter in Kara or in Gruul?

 

[Aikouka]

Originally posted by: Anubis
this is true, and the length of the que has mostly to do with the Ali:horde ratio in the battle group

if 4x aws many horde are queing then Ali, horde are going to have 4x longer que times

That's actually why I didn't stay in the Vindication battlegroup. Queues were always bad when I was playing there on Lightning's Blade. But I've always had good luck in Rampage as queues are typically really short, or as I mentioned, instant. Very rarely am I stuck actually twiddling my thumbs waiting.

 

[Malladine]

Originally posted by: nanobreath
See I'd vote PvE. Yes I'm a carebear that likes to be able to play the game without interferance. Nothing is more frustrating than trying to level and getting ganked over and over. It can REALLY kill an evening you had planned to spend in WoW. Some people enjoy the challenge. I prefer not needing a bodyguard to level.

Levels are a crutch. Down with levels.

 

[Xavier434]

Ok, I have spent a good deal of my time since last Wednesday playing the Beta. I posted a few reviews on my guild's website. So, as promised, I will post here too which is basically going to be a copy and paste job of my reviews and another guildie's reviews from our site. Feel free to ask me any questions and I will try to answer them.

My Reviews:

Overall, the game just feels like more fun. I really enjoyed it when TBC was released. I am enjoying WotLK even more as far as first impressions are concerned.

Quests

Questing is a lot more fun. It is not drastically different. There are plenty of quests which feel familiar such as the classic go here and kill X number of things. However, Blizz did a much better job varying what you do in each quest to keep things interesting unlike TBC where you would often have 5 or more killing quests all at once. There are also some quests which have a brand new feeling just like the bombing quests felt like when we first played TBC. For example, there is a quest where you get a hawk that you must feed and gain its trust in order for it to be commanded by you to attack specified targets (not like a hunter pet). Lastly, I have already found one daily quest which was available right from the beginning so I imagine we will come across them throughout the entire game rather than just end game. It involves riding a Zeppelin and bombing pirates. Lots of fun.

Lore

So far, I have discovered 2 major aspects about the lore. First, they are doing an excellent job developing the Titan lore as promised. There is a very strong presence of Titan lore in Howling Fjord. Second, the lore that one experiences in both the quest text and while you are doing quests is more vibrant and very interesting. I highly recommend to anyone who normally makes a habit of skipping the quest text or just skimming it to locate the main objectives to really take the time to read it. The juice is well worth the squeeze. Many of the quests involve more interaction with NPCs both friendly and unfriendly too which expands on the lore quite a bit.

Enemies

They are very well done. Most of them so far feel very different and interesting yet in that familiar way. The skins are excellent and the animations are wonderful. Their interaction with the world is very cool too. For example, the Shovel Tusk species acts kind of like the Clefthoofs in the sense that they travel around in herds much like cows with a male leading the females and children. However, the really cool part is that if one herd happens to get really close to another there is a chance that the two alpha male Shovel Tusks will start fighting each other for dominance. They have sprint abilities which makes it that much cooler because you see them charge each other and then they duke it out.

There is one very crucial point which I have discovered about WotLK that separates it from the Vanilla WoW to TBC transition. When we went from Vanilla WoW to TBC the big jump was with the stats and loot. Particularly Stamina. That is not the case in WotLK. What they did instead was make a jump when it comes to the enemies and their stats. They are not overly difficult. However, they do have a lot more health than TBC enemies. A very basic example would be to say that your average level 68 enemy in Outlands has a lot less health and does less damage than your average level 68 enemy in Northrend. That is the real kicker so far. Blizz knew that many of us were going to walk into that world with great gear from TBC and we were also being give excellent talents which increase our power. In order to balance things out they buffed the Northrend enemies. Again, they are not hard so to speak (at least, not with my gear) but you will notice the difference almost right away.

Dungeons

So far, I have only run Utgarde Keep which is the 70-72 instance in Howling Fjord. I have run it 3 times so far. My impressions about it as opposed to the dungeons in Outlands is that it is just more fun in general. There are several reasons why. First, it does not take very long to run the instance (45 min tops). Second, while the instance doesn't take a while to run, the dungeon still feels large. The two reasons why it feels this way is because there is less trash mobs to pull as you go room to room and each room feels considerably different as opposed to TBC instances where the same tile set was used in nearly every room from start to finish. The trash also varies a good amount from room to room which also keeps things interesting. The last thing I can say is that Utgarde Keep is linear meaning there is only one path to take from start to finish which is what we are used to.

Loot

There is little to say about loot that isn't already available all over the net so I will keep this simple. First and foremost, the loot transition is not nearly as big of a jump as it was from Vanilla WoW to TBC including even the nicer blues that come from Utgarde Keep. Greens will not be of any interest to you if you are big on raiding, PvP, or even just a 5 man heroic player. Low level blues will seem impressive in some cases, but they are still not up to par if you are T5/T6. There are some very few exceptions where T4 loot will want to be upgraded from Utgarde Keep blues. Very often, what you will observe at first is that all stats on blue gear are lower than your T6 gear and even more noticeable is the fact that one particular stat is completely absent making the item much weaker. Based on my initial observations of the trends, I do not believe any of us will see worth while upgrades to our T6 loot until we get blues from level 77 content or higher. There will probably be a few exceptions, but not many.

Miscellaneous

Just some additional random thoughts and bullet points:

1. Ret Pallies are really powerful now. Probably will get some nerfs because they can both tank and deal dps very effectively at the same time, but I am positive that they will be well worth playing regardless I would recommend to any Pally to give it a try while leveling. Lots of very good feedback about them in game.

2. Achievements are wonderful! Adds a lot of motivation to do things in the game in such a way that didn't make sense before if Blizz tried to turn the goal into a quest. It will be a great success.

3. Graphics are gorgeous and worth upgrading your computer to configure the settings to max or near max.

It seems like whenever I think I am done with the quests in Howling Fjord I find a gazillion more. I think there is even an achievement for completing 100 quests in that zone, but I am pretty sure there are much more than that. This isn't a complaint btw. It makes me really happy actually hehe.

I know I already mentioned it, but I am still very impressed with how all of the quests feel diversified especially considering how many there are in just this one zone. All of them seem to have a small twist involved which makes them unique and enjoyable. More or less, the way that they did it for all quests is that they have the player interact more instead of just reading about something. For example, in the past you would go out on your typical collection quest and turn the stuff in the stuff to get credit right? Well, you still do this sort of thing but the difference is that rather than simply reading about what the quest giver does with the stuff you are actually instructed to do something with it. There was one quest where the Tuskar were upset because the seals had no alpha males to mate with near where they hang out. My instructions where to go out and collect some fish, but instead of just collecting and turning them in I needed to take them and go find one of these males and use the fish to lure it closer to the females. It's just a small twist, but it definitely makes questing feel more fun because such things add a unique feel to each quest.

I visited Dalaran for the first time over the weekend. Unfortunately, there is not much to tell yet because it doesn't appear to be complete. The city feels very dead. However, it truly is gorgeous. It really does feel like what Dalaran should be especially if you are familiar with the lore behind it. Currently, there is no AH and nor is one planned to be implemented just in case some of you were wondering. It is located directly in the middle of Northrend though which is nice. In fact, it has it's own separate zone. I believe one or two instances are planned to be located there too. Anyways, I will report more on it as more becomes available.

Guildie's Reviews:

- Somehow Blizz made a game we have played and loved for nearly 3 years, into something new and even more fun.

There are two ports of Entry, make sure you take the right one.
1. SW which leads you to Borean Tundra
2. Minithil harbor leads to Howling Fjord

I took Howling Fjord with Xavieer.

It is an exciting port with lots to do, but I only got 3 quests out of the way between the 2 hours I played and the server crashes.

Achievements gets you addicted from the very begging just like leveling did at 1 -> 2
As soon as you enter port and learn your new first aid skill you get a shiny notification and ding that you completed an achievement. Very cool.

Our Gear
- Let me emphasize to you that this is NOT like Burning Crusade.
A few of the pieces of green gear I saw was no where near our tier 6 gear. I really do not see us changing gear well into level 79-80 Blues. So Rejoice.

Leveling seemed at pace with Burning Crusade and Gold has not changed much.

Riding enchants/items are now used like an armor patch on your mount. This means I get to sell more riding crops. Oh and we got a free carrot on a stick for some reason.. dunno why. In any case, it's a very nice change.

Arrows have unique animated graphics now it seems, or they changed them all.

Specific to my class I will post on the hunter section.

The Death Knight
Everyone has to make one. Simply for the most amazingly put together beginning for any class. I wont ruin anything for you, but yeah - it rocks.

The class itself is awesome to play. You get great gear at the beginning and rune forging is sick as hell.



Graphics - beautiful art work and lighting textures. It looks to me they improved on the game eng. again.
Sound - Epic Blizz music from the very beggining, not surprising.

Continuing -

I cannot emphasize enough how important it is for you to play a DeathKnight the first few levels.
This is by far the coolest most story driven class in all of WoW.
The quests you do in order to gain your skill points/weapons and other surprises are simply exciting.
There are surprises in every corner, even when you die and during your death.
I HEAR VOICES!

Guys I don't want to say much more as to not ruin it for you - but do yourself a favor and play a DeathKnight for even just a few levels.

Disclaimer - don't let my hype ruin it for you, I get excited about shit. If you don't find it as exciting as I did, sorry.

-----------------------------------------------

Instance - Utgarde Keep
When Blizz first said they wanted to make sure instances could be run in under an hour I thought to myself, "how can they do that and still keep the epic feeling and excitement?" Well, they did. I ran Utgarde Keep and felt like it was a pretty long instance, not tiresome or boring, just a good pace. When I turn around and it was all over it was 32 minutes later.
Good work Blizz

The loot was pretty normal, but there is one thing that Blizz changed that I really like, the starting instance felt like it was a short level 68 instance in BC, like a step up and not a level 70 hardcore bosses instance. It was a nice taste and warm up for later dungeons.

Good pacing and generally fun. I have an issue with the bosses, they seemed way to easy and boring. Not sure if it's because they were incomplete or that we just had a sick ass group of tier 6 and arena geared guys.
At one point I said "wait that was a boss?" This came to mind when the "boss" was 40% health and I had been tanking the whole time. None of us noticed until I mentioned it and FD'd for our tank to grab it. This was our first run and it was just light hearted.

I think most of you will like this one for the first 5 runs. Then you will realize that there is nothing there for you.
I also noticed that I did not get any rep from the run... I thought I would get the starting area rep (forgot the name).

I found one major bug - As with BC they give you a shortcut out of the instance. The gate opened and as we ran out we all fell through the world and died. Yay, this was reported to Blizz. Mind you I just rezed and ran back. No big deal to find that in beta.

Hey you know what's awesome? I found this major bug in a Beta and not a "Final" release like in one game I can mention.
*COUGHCONANCOUGH* Did I ever tell you the story how SevenBlue and I fell through an instance at the end into an oblivion? Yeah that was "funny" waste of 1 hour. BTW seven, how are you?

-----------------------------------------------------------

There is an interesting find, I am seeing that your profession when maxed out gives you a passive buff in your spell book now. Example - I am a max skinner, I saw a passive buff saying "You are a master skinner you gain 30 crit rating" Something like that. Very nice bonus for choosing a profession! I'll see if I can screenshot it.

----------------------------------------------------------

The world - I went exploring more. My god it's beautiful. The level of detail and imagination is staggering.

Interesting Quests - One quest had me fly to camp and parachute into the camp. That was fun as hell.
- Another quest had me get a protective bubble and run through hundreds of undead/scourge burning them to get a sword for a pally. VERY FUN
- Interesting quest lines that are easily done. Oh and it seems so far that a quest that involves killing a specific mob doesn't require you to kill the specific mob, just go past him to get "the item" if he is already dead, or kill him to get to it.

 

[Beev]

I vote for PvE as well, but then again I never agreed with the whole Horde/Alliance choice anyway. Everyone got along in Warcraft 3, no reason we can't now. Not to mention that we all have a common god damn goal, AND we share the main city of the game/use the same NPC's.

 

[Anubis]

im prob the only person that thinks Achievements are stupid, they are stupid on the xbox as well

 

[Xavier434]

Originally posted by: Anubis
im prob the only person that thinks Achievements are stupid, they are stupid on the xbox as well

I recommend that you do not knock it until you try it with WoW. They do not feel the same as 360 achievements. I enjoy 360 achievements but I spend very little time going after them. With WoW, I feel inclined because enough of them seem like more fun. Plus, the nature of an MMO is very often the completion of content, challenges, and just about anything which provides the player with some kind of feeling of incentive. The achievements in WoW provide all of those in a unique way.

In any case, you can always ignore them too.

 

[Aikouka]

Originally posted by: Anubis
im prob the only person that thinks Achievements are stupid, they are stupid on the xbox as well

I think that depends on if they're just lame afterthoughts or actual, nice additions. You know... it shouldn't be like Avatar here .

Dang, you Xavier... dang you! I want to play. I watched the final Death Knight quest thingy and it was pretty sweet to say the least.

 

[exdeath]

Achievements will be stupid because there are going to be so many there are one time one person only and it's going to come down to who happened to be online that hour.

One time or one person events are a bad idea in a world of lucky RNGs.

Woot made it to phase 2 M'uru last night as well as all of our attempts going smoother and lasting for several minutes. Thirty second wipes are a thing of the past. Should have him dead this week.

 

[lupi]

They may have used the term achievements, but I'm pretty sure they are patterned more after the Deeds of Lotro. In Lotro they would give you access to new titles or improve a chars stat/ability in some way. Wonder what the blizz ones will give other than titles that have been mentioned.

I heard murmurs of game wide graphic improvements, any word on this?

Did they strip AH from the northrend hub like Shatt, and if so does the trip between the new hub and the old way go quick enough that it doesn't matter (at least it's not a one way trick pony like shatt's portals.)



BGs; oh god did they suck on my old server. Before it went battlegroup wide our nice 4-1 faction ratio let horde have near instant (with AV almost never spawning except some weekends) while ally had to wait 45 min+ just for AB or WSG. Ugh those were the bad days.

I actually pugged a good bit of the eye this weekend and was getting 1.5-3 min queue times regularly.

 

[TaylorTech]

Originally posted by: exdeath
Achievements will be stupid because there are going to be so many there are one time one person only and it's going to come down to who happened to be online that hour.

One time or one person events are a bad idea in a world of lucky RNGs.

Woot made it to phase 2 M'uru last night as well as all of our attempts going smoother and lasting for several minutes. Thirty second wipes are a thing of the past. Should have him dead this week.

That boss will be the god damn end of me, I swear.

I've spent 1000g so far on him. I hope we kill him tonight, or I'm ripping someone's head off.

 

[exdeath]

Originally posted by: TaylorTech

Originally posted by: exdeath
Achievements will be stupid because there are going to be so many there are one time one person only and it's going to come down to who happened to be online that hour.

One time or one person events are a bad idea in a world of lucky RNGs.

Woot made it to phase 2 M'uru last night as well as all of our attempts going smoother and lasting for several minutes. Thirty second wipes are a thing of the past. Should have him dead this week.

That boss will be the god damn end of me, I swear.

I've spent 1000g so far on him. I hope we kill him tonight, or I'm ripping someone's head off.

I hear he's like Vashj and Kael in that he's the hurdle to free epics off KJ.

 

[Anubis]

Originally posted by: exdeath

Originally posted by: TaylorTech

Originally posted by: exdeath
Achievements will be stupid because there are going to be so many there are one time one person only and it's going to come down to who happened to be online that hour.

One time or one person events are a bad idea in a world of lucky RNGs.

Woot made it to phase 2 M'uru last night as well as all of our attempts going smoother and lasting for several minutes. Thirty second wipes are a thing of the past. Should have him dead this week.

That boss will be the god damn end of me, I swear.

I've spent 1000g so far on him. I hope we kill him tonight, or I'm ripping someone's head off.

I hear he's like Vashj and Kael in that he's the hurdle to free epics off KJ.

KJ isnt exactly free epics
hes not as hard as Muru but her harder then all the other bosses in the game

also 100G isnt much
"After 19 nights of wiping, over 500 attempts, and 40,000g from the Guild Bank in consumables/repairs, M'uru was finally dead.,"

we posted that up a few weeks ago

 

[TaylorTech]

I said 1000g, add a zero. And it's a lot for someone who barely has time to raid, let alone farm.

And I've been to KJ with a friends guild, it's fun, considering we only got him to 80%

 

[Chimley]

KJ is no joke. It doesn't require the "pinpoint" execution of Mu'ru.. but people really have to be on thier game. There's so much shit flying around that can kill you that if people get "tunnel-vision", they're dead.

The KJ fight has the following:

- Lots of Raid-wide Damage
- Adds to Tank and Kill
- Multitargeting
- 1 mega Raid-wiping ability on a cooldown
- DPS check before each phase
- Dragons


It's fun!! But not easy by a longshot (best for us is 55% after two days on him).

 

[Xavier434]

Originally posted by: exdeath
Achievements will be stupid because there are going to be so many there are one time one person only and it's going to come down to who happened to be online that hour.

One time or one person events are a bad idea in a world of lucky RNGs.

I have not seen any achievements that fit this description yet. Most of the ones that I have seen are achievable by everyone although some do require a group to get. Others require a particular raid and there are some which are completely PvP oriented. The goal that Blizz was shooting for was to have plenty of achievements for every type of player rather than create a one size fits all sort of thing. The entire list is not intended to be completed by any individual even though I am sure there will be some people that manage to do it.

Originally posted by: lupi
I heard murmurs of game wide graphic improvements, any word on this?

Graphics are looking very nice. It is not any kind of huge leap or anything like that. In other words, it doesn't look like a new game. It definitely looks better than TBC and most of all there is a lot more to look at in a given area on average. Some areas in particular are pretty harsh on my FPS, but it is far too soon to draw any conclusions about system requirements for the game to run smooth everywhere considering that it is beta and at this time I do not believe performance optimization is a priority. That should come later.

Originally posted by: lupi
Did they strip AH from the northrend hub like Shatt, and if so does the trip between the new hub and the old way go quick enough that it doesn't matter (at least it's not a one way trick pony like shatt's portals.)

Currently, Dalaran is incomplete. There is no AH right now and based on what I have read there are no plans to implement one. There is a portal to each major city from Dalaran including a portal to Shat. However, there are no portals from anywhere else in the game to Dalaran as far as I know. The good news is that Dalaran is located directly in the middle of Northrend making it easily accessible from anywhere on that continent. The other good news is that getting on a boat to Northrend is also very easy if you plan to visit an AH since there is one located in the new SW Harbor as well as Menethil Harbor. These boats do not take you to Dalaran, but you can easily jump on a Grif to get there from where the boats drop you off until you hit level 77. At level 77, there is a quest line which is easy to complete and allows you to fly in Northrend. This quest line currently does not involve any sort of gold sink so you do not have to worry about saving gold now or farming it to earn your wings again later.

 

[Anubis]

where do horde take a Zepp to/from to get there? Undercity?

 

[lupi]

Org and UC, each which it seems takes you to a different place.

 

[Xavier434]

***EDIT***

lupi answered the question.

 

[AntiFreze]

So I decided to just create a new char on the server my guild is transferring to atm. I'm having a blast leveling. Just a lvl 8 NE druid atm. I've been debating on rerolling a shaman but who knows.

I forgot how fun it is to be a lower level.

 

[Beev]

Hey Anubis, I'm still wearing my FSW boots, should I try and get a pair of the Boots of Blasting? I'd lose 18 damage but get a nice bit of crit.

Edit: Hmm, they're BoP. Well, should I try and get a pattern?

 

[nanobreath]

IIRC, the boots of blasting are very comparable to the badge boots. Granted the badge boots have spirit on them, but are still better for DPS I think.

IMO the only reason to go with these over FSW is if you really need the +hit. Otherwise they are a DPS decrease. If you have other pieces of gear that you can switch out to balance the +hit and gain more from them than you are losing in the boots switching can be beneficial. Only thing is that the upgrade would be very minimal. Something maybe to look at if you have no other upgrades to get.