jiminey crickets! no thread yet for this event?? and you call yourseles dorky, virgin nerds...for shame!

I'm still in contact with some of my old guildies. I told them I'm planing on coming back for Cat, but they suggested I come back now to not miss the events leading up to release and to also familiarize myself with the changes to talents. I hadn't thought of that and started to look into the changes via EJ and other forums and it seems like they are redesigning a thing or two.


Thoughts?


I do miss the guys ever since i stopped playing. The guild leader was one of the people i've been in contact with and when I told him I was planing on coming back he told the rest of the guild and they all e-mailed me telling me to come now, among other things, har! those silly SOBs.

Do so.

Patch 4.0.1 dropped about two weeks ago, changing all of the class mechanics to the Cataclysm standard over what was there before. Everyone had to learn how to play their classes again (and resto druids became incredibly OP).

Other Cata talk was in the WOTLK thread. I don't see the need of preordering, but the street date is the day finals start. -.-

relearning how to play class, bleh, hopefully others will get the basics down and post them online.

I've started downloading the patch, been about 4 hours and I'm only at 11%. ugh.


skip finals and play Cat.

Would if I could. I've got four 80's to get to 85, a Worgen Warrior, and a Dwarf Shaman to play.

i planed on making a dwarf shamen as well as a worgen hunter

also have 4 80s. i dunno how you level, but i won't be in a rush to get to 85 even though before I left wow my guildies were saying they wanted to race to that number. I should think I would like to relax and enjoy the leveling. Part and parcel kinda why i left was the amount of time having to put into the end game raids, it was looking like the guild was moving more to a hardcore raiding guild from a casual one. I dunno if that has changed or not in the months I've been gone.

I have a levelling partner that I'm actually sticking with this time around, though as an experiment I'm going to see if my resto druid can flower-pick his way to 85.

There's been substantial RaidID changes - you aren't saved by dungeon anymore, but by boss. You can now raid, snag one guy, raid with a different group to get someone else completely, and return to the original set to keep going (save that one guy you downed). It increases flexibility on renewing ID's, but at the same time it does kill some parties who had 25-man heroic raiders slumming it with 10-man regular raiders.

had a leveling partner for vanilla. She was a 6th grader of all people, but one of the best players I've ever played with.

great on the raid changes, looks like the raids can be spread out more mayhaps instead of one or two 4+ hours days.


80 percent on the download...entering the home stretch.

I'm likely going to let my account expire for a bit, and rejoin after the new year when things settle down with work.

plus gives the newbie areas for worgens and the like to clear out, if I do keep up the account it's just going to be to log in and do researches on my scribe.

welps. i've returned to WOW a few days ago. good to see old friends still there.

less pts in talents. and can't spec into others until you get 31 in your main

learn glyphs. nice for us but me thinks inscriptionis are not happy

getting rotations down isn't too hard

in a few weeks it all changes again

Are you kidding? Scribes are ecstatic because the market on glyphs just skyrocketed. What was 2g is now 100.

Are you kidding? Scribes are ecstatic because the market on glyphs just skyrocketed. What was 2g is now 100.

Actually only on some servers, others many rolled their own scribes (like me) due to the raised prices even if we don't have all the recipies we can trade a few here and there to get the ones we need for out alts.

when you have alt-itis like me... the cost ot level a scribe is a good investment

hmmm. mayhaps i should move my scribe to another server? make some nice dough?

well. what ya'll think about the new trailer ?

my paladin talents reset again.

interesting changes to the zones

no portals in dal

Moon Guard's economy is among the most skewed of all US servers. I have a full gamut of professions available so I don't actually pay for any finished product off the AH.

well leveling a worgen, and my god the speed is insane.

I already outleved darkshore with 3 hours. (doing dailys in SW, and 1 dungeon a day) All the quests are now grey, plus I'm about to just skip the next zone more or less doing the same.

Add in the leveling up to 80 is also sped up.. good night.

Yeah, questing was both streamlined and turbocharged. We had realm first 85's about 12 hours after the expansion went live.

That's about 17 million XP in a 12 hour period. 84 to 85 is around 9.5 on its own.

Meh, I stopped playing shortly after hitting 80 in WotLK. The game became more of a chat program than a game since I was bored to tears. BG's were still kind of fun though. I think the problem is I raided too much in BC.

They did two intruiging things with pvp this time around.

One, they introduced rated battlegrounds that work much like arenas, and the War Games function, which lets your group challenge another group to any battleground or arena venue - provided population isn't an issue.

So, you can play who the hell you want to in Arathi, Alterac, Warsong, etc.

Can you do that cross realm?

After BC I retired my Blood Elf Warlock (T6) and leveled my Bood Elf Paladin. I turned into a healbot because it was much different from playing a Destrolock.

No, cross-realm wargames are not planned.

I'm getting sick of healbotting, especially with the new changes to the healing mechanisms. Before I had to worry about my heals not having enough oomph, now I have to worry about them not having enough oomph and costing 10x the mana they once did.

/shrugs

Im so far out of the loop on WoW that I likely wouldn't know what was causing the bump in mana, All I know is I had a great deal of fun healbotting after playing a destro lock where my rotation was something like Immolate + 3 or 4 Shadowbolts + Immolate +Curses and such when necessary.

just to make sure you are pronouncing it correctly

Welps, i bought what i believe is the last game card for this game. I maxed out all muh guys and even did some raiding. I've found that I've been playing much less lately as RL has taken up most of my time again and it seems that yet again i'm forcing myself to play, if it weren't for leveling my golbin shammy i'd think I would be done with the game by now. Most of my guild has apprently gone the way of the do-do with RL affecting a great many of them since i came back, many furthering careers suprisingly. Didn't help that that licentious chick in guild left the game, shacked up with a guy from our guild for a bit, but now looks like she moved on, shame she was nasty...in the good way . I almost didn't buy the game card but our defacto second in command wanted to try raiding again, knowing her for a few years I gave her into her request and bought the card but wheter or not we get back up, i thinks i be leaving.

Will see how it goes, never say never, but looks like this wow chapter is coming to a close.

Guild maintenance has taken up the lion's share of my time right now, so I haven't gotten a chance to raid. I think a lot more folks are disappointed with the expansion this time around, since they made the dungeons much less forgiving for mistakes, and there are a LOT of people who don't exactly pay attention in them.

Healbotting a paladin is more fun now, much less so on the druid. Shame, that.

Pretty much my reaction on coming back to WoW after skipping most of Wrath of the Lich King was, "Dude, did everyone just forget how to raid?"

To which the answer was, "Yes. Yes they did."

Apparently Wrath introduced such massive healer mana pools that many raid encounters were more or less, "Randomly push buttons and epics pop out." People weren't bothering to even move out of the fire because the raid could just heal through the damage.

Last month I witnessed a guy die from standing in a void zone and then proceed to bitch at the healer for letting him die.

In Wrath, the incoming damage and debuffs have increased significantly, but the healing ability of those classes capable of it hasn't increased at the same pace.

As I said, I left shortly after Wrath was released. So the last raid content I saw was Black Temple with it's infamous "Superbowl of Not Standing in Stuff", i.e. The Illidari Council. I was used to doing things like Reading Up On The Encounters, Paying Attention To What The Target Is Casting, and Moving When Stuff Under My Feet Is Glowing. Threat meters and other stat-trackers were among the first add-ons I installed when re-installing the game. So far when in groups of people that adopt the same raiding attitude, things go fairly smoothly.

On the other hand, the massive increase in bad raiders that Wrath created makes me hate random pick-up groups even more. I pretty much only raid with folks I know.



-k

Yeah, that's all pretty accurate. Because most of the random passers-by you'll dungeon or raid with are so bad, Blizzard is instituting an augmented rewards system for healers and tanks to convince them to queue for the unwashed masses. Suffice it to say, my warrior's going to be one hell of a rich man when I get him capped for heroics. I don't get to raid lead anymore, as I destroyed a guild I wasn't even in by leading one.

Actually, in retrospect it was pretty damn cool.

Yeah, the current problem is that most of the GOOD tanks and healers get snapped up by regular raid groups, and thus have little need to PUG most times. There aren't many tanks and healers in general, everyone wants to be damage-dealers and watch their DPS meters soar.

So you have left either A) Guys starting out that don't entirely know what they're doing yet or B) Bad tanks/healers or C) the vast masses of DPS.

Unfortunately the new reward system, I suspect, will not significantly draw the 'good' tanks and healers back out to PUGs. More often I think what will happen is that many DPSers will queue as tank or heals. Yes, this should probably reduce waiting times for getting into random groups, but it means MORE bad groups.



-k

It'll pull out maybe 10% of the decent tanks/healers, but since they demand you solo queue now even that number's going to drop. Wrath produced a lot of bad, but that was because Blizz wanted people to experience more content. Cata saw a shift in the opposite direction, and I'm still not sure it's for the better. I preferred being able to get more than one heroic done a day and I could skillfully tank or heal an instance without having to worry about my health/mana pools being at a certain level to even be able to compete.

Forcing a lot of folks to bulk up on pvp gear to meet the gear quotas for heroics was, as always, a bad idea.

From what I've seen/heard, I'm kinda glad I dropped out of WoW right before Cata. The questing/leveling stuff in the beta (and the revamped old world) seemed pretty great, but the end game seemed..bleah.

There is always Dark Millennium though

It'll reduce queue times not waiting times. I think we should differentiate between the two.

Queue times is the amount of time you sit in the LFD queue. Waiting time is the amount of time you spend waiting for dungeons overall.

So crappy tanks and healers queue up (in order to get uber rewards). They fail miserably. The group spends a ridiculous amount of time completely the dungeon (and the tank or healer gets the reward) or the tank/healer quits/gets kicked loses the reward and has to go right back into the queue.

The solo queue portion is what kills this and makes the thought that geared and skilled tanks would start queuing laughable. Cataclysm gear levels haven't progressed to the point where tanks can carry DPS through heroics. That's why chain tanking heroics in Wrath was a viable situation. The only geared/skilled tanks/healers that will do this are those who have a strange obsession with collecting mounts and pets.

This change WILL create more groups. The problem is that the average group quality will significantly drop and I suspect that dungeon completion rates also decline.

They're hoping it's a stopgap solution for another two content patches until the average ilevel rises to the point you're overgearing content again.

I just wanted to call this out. I see tanks doing this even now. I don't know how many times in the past couple months I've seen tanks pulling when the healer is out of mana and still sitting and drinking. Usually it doesn't end well.

I suppose I just wanted to grump some more about Wrath creating bads.





-k

I wasn't talking about chain pulling. I meant chaining heroic after heroic after heroic. However, chain pulling is a serious problem that causes more delays in Cata. (Note I stopped playing Cata awhile ago)

PuG's are slowly learning this. I'm happy to let them know up front if there's going to be a problem if they think they're going to chain pull while standing in the bad.

If they don't listen, I don't need heroics on my pally that bad.

I burned out bad during Lich King. Spent every week raiding 10 man towards killing Heroic Lich King. Ended up exasperated over the fact that post patch guild killed him with a druid solo tanking the encounter. That really destroyed my interest in the game. I still don't know if the problem was a healing issue or dps issue. I'm inclined to think it was a healing issue since they went 1 tank, 6 dps, 3 healer instead of 2 tank, 6 dps, 2 healer.

Sounds like a combination of both. DPS wasn't able to tear him down as fast as they needed, so you had to expand the healing pool to compensate.

WoW Insider has a good starter article on the problems with pugging in Cataclysm - in essence, the columnist calls it a WOTLK mentality with a BC difficulty level. Introducing the finder when they did (when most folks were far overgeared for heroic content) changed the runs from effective tanking to fast tanking, and folks are still in that mindset. I still far prefer healing to tanking as I can directly control who stays alive - and that'll be the guy who's supposed to be generating threat.

my main is a pally holy/tank spec. I like playing the healing role, its my favorite. I've taken up the slack when need be tanking wise as well in guild. Its nice that people think i'm competent in both roles, but raiding is too long and even 5-man's take a bit of time now, too many tells when i just want to veg out a few minutes after i put the kids to bed. I'm and old man can can't stay up like i used to to eek out that 5 man before bedtime. True passion for the game for me is leveling professions and once i hit my shammy to 75 and maxed out the last two professions that i haven't I think i will achieve all that I wanted to with this game.

my time expired and i still haven't renewed yet. I have re-watched naruto fights and movies i missed on youtube and have been yucking it up watching this.

We had the DPS. I will admit that it's possible it was a tanking issue. A lot of our problem was getting out of P1 for Lich King was a crapshoot. The enraged shambling horrors screwed us over a lot. There were times where I'd be tanking horrors and Holy Wrath and HoJ were on CD and the priest couldn't do whatever it is priests do to ensure I didn't die.

Really, what exasperates me the most is that the druid could tank both shambling horrors through enrages and Lich King all at the same time by tossing on a third healer. Really. They were only able to do it because Druids were OP at tanking after that patch and it was before the druid tanking nerf hit.

I've gone back and forth many a time about leaving wow, but it looks like this might be it. My guild is gone gone. A coupla women and one guy are the only ones that play with regularity anymore, I myself play maybe a few times a week if that and if it wasn't for the 3 peeps on asking me to stay a bit longer i wouldn't have purchased another game card. People didn't leave the guild, but seemingly left the game entirely as our numbers havn't changed for months. I play wow mostly for the social aspect and leveling professions, I've had some offers to joining other guilds, but i miss the peeps i've run with since '07 I found some old screenshots on my old comp the other day, lol! good times...good times...