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Regarding Death Knights and professions, do you think that we'll start at 1 and have to gather or buy linenght leather/copper/low level greens/herbs, like everyone else? (We being the Death Knights, of course)
In the same vein, what will leveling, say, leatherworking, from 1 to 376+ be like after the expansion hits? I understand that the last few levels to 375 are pretty brutal at the moment.
What was it like getting professions to 301+ when The Burning Crusade hit? Did Blizzard make it easy for players?
Thanks!
A plague of exploding high-fives.
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Quote:Regarding Death Knights and professions, do you think that we'll start at 1 and have to gather or buy linenght leather/copper/low level greens/herbs, like everyone else? (We being the Death Knights, of course)
In the same vein, what will leveling, say, leatherworking, from 1 to 376+ be like after the expansion hits? I understand that the last few levels to 375 are pretty brutal at the moment.
What was it like getting professions to 301+ when The Burning Crusade hit? Did Blizzard make it easy for players?
Thanks!
I suspect that DK's will be given professions at 275 to avoid a wave of pseudo-Goth pink-pony-tailed Gnomes infesting the low-level zones. I also think there will be recipes early on that jumpstart lagging skills, allowing a quick dodge past the 350-375 range. Bliz did make catching up in TBC easier by providing easy access to Master trainers (especially for Enchanters).
In any case, since DK's are by definition at least the second character on an account, we've got some time to save up mats for profession sprints in WotLK.
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My priest resides on Aman'Thul, one of the PVE servers with free transfers to Thaurissan. *Lots* of people have made the jump including the top two guilds on the server. Combined with the transfer from Nagrand, Thaurissan went from a server where the best Alliance guild had killed Gruul to one where they are 4 guilds working on M'uru.
Apparently Alliance were so hard to find on Thaurissan pre-transfer that Horde were calling them "rare spawns", and there were "screenshot or it didn't happen" demands every time someone reported seeing one.
As a side-effect of all the moves, I'm now in the number 1 ranked guild on Aman'Thul. To quote Homer Simpson: "De-fault. The two best words in the English language."
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Quote:Apparently Alliance were so hard to find on Thaurissan pre-transfer that Horde were calling them "rare spawns", and there were "screenshot or it didn't happen" demands every time someone reported seeing one.
I'd be very interested in hearing your thoughts about life on a PvP server after all this time on a PvE server, after you've been there a few weeks. Was it what you expected, etc etc etc.
-Bolty
Quote:Considering the mods here are generally liberals who seem to have a soft spot for fascism and white supremacy (despite them saying otherwise), me being perma-banned at some point is probably not out of the question.
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My priest is still on Aman'Thul. Several people in my guild shifted alts over to Thaurissan, but my alts are on Malygos which wasn't eligible for the free transfers.
I'm pretty much a carebear at heart, although I do a mid-40s warrior on PVP server somewhere - haven't played him in months. Lake Wintergrasp sounds like my kind of world PVP. If Blizzard is smart, they'll make the zone similar to Quel'Danas - small area, but stuffed with daily quests to give people a reason to go there.
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June 18 News
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Patch 2.4.3 is live on the Test Realms today. It's got several very interesting changes in it. Chief among them:
-Mounts at 30?! Yes, it's true: Apprentice Riding and mounts are now available at level 30. Training costs 35 gold.
-When a stun wears off, the creature that was stunned will prefer the last target with the highest threat, versus the current target.
-The Eredar Twins will now award the same items regardless of which order they are killed in.
-The new stopwatch feature can be accessed via the /stopwatch, /sw, or /timer slash commands. Inputting a time into the slash command will make the stopwatch count down. For example, /stopwatch 1:0:0 will make the stopwatch count down from an hour, /stopwatch 1:30 will make it count down from 1 minute, 30 seconds, and /stopwatch 30 will make it count down from 30 seconds.
Head on over to Pesmerga's Thread to check out the discussion on it.
~Not all who wander are lost...~
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June 24 News
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Mike Schramm asks if WoW is getting or has gotten Too Easy. There is a lot of unbased whining about this topic, but when you boil it down and look at it as a whole, the question is a good one. I've been playing WoW a long time, and no one would mistake it for the game I started playing, back on Feb 11, 2005 (Man, has it been that long? Account info ftw...) but is it a WORSE game, an easier one, a dumber one? I think that one of those three is accurate, and I think that's not really a bad thing. The game, inarguably, easier. But it's easier where it needs to be. I started out as a complete and total MMO n00b, and I made some pretty big mistakes. I missed a lot of things, I did things the hardest way possible, etc. I hated herbing because even with the minimap dots, I had trouble seeing several of the plants. I missed a lot of quests that I'm finding as I slowly alt my way through thanks to some of the new minimap features as well. Now, one could say that the end game is easier, that it's been dumbed down and made accessible to the slavering hordes. I see that as somewhat of a good thing, too. I'm all about awarding those who have the time and skill to play in the top end guilds. I would have been in one of those top end guilds, but my schedule sank that. But I also feel that things should be 'nerfed' over time so that more folks can see it. That's what this game is all about in the end, really. Seeing all you can of it. So, I don't think that the game is "too easy", you don't see tons and tons of folks putting Kil'Jaeden into the ground, after all, But with their continual tweaking of several aspects, you can see where Blizz is making the game better overall.
~Not all who wander are lost...~
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Quote:June 24 News
~~~
Mike Schramm asks if WoW is getting or has gotten Too Easy.
My biggest complaint is the removal of the elite zones 1-58 (Stromgarde in Arathi, Vilebranch in Hinterlands etc). It opens up quests for solo play but it removes the most important part of WoW, in my opinion - small group content. Those areas did not need five people like an instance. Three would suffice if you were of level. They provided a somewhat challenging task that required you to branch out, stop following your leveling guide and gather a group together.
Oh, also, zones need more +5 elite wandering mobs. A sense of danger would be nice in the game that coddles you an almost embarrassing amount.
"Just as individuals are born, mature, breed and die, so do societies, civilizations and governments."
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I agree the early part of the game (pre-Outlands) has gotten easier, most days I'd say it's for the better. The leveling boost was a bit overboard, as it ensured I get to see less content before moving on to the next zone. With the lowered requirements for Riding, my alts will be moving to the next zone a lot sooner at +60% speed.
I would half-heartedly agree with ima_nerd about the removal of elite zones. Would be nice to have more areas to level in tandem with my g/f's warrior or shaman & these areas were a bit too tough for a duo. Now is fine too, instead of being challenged by 1 elite mob at a time, we're instead challenged by normal mobs that spawn constantly. I'd want more wandering elites in all areas as well, silver or otherwise. I think they are a better way to disseminate more better-quality items into our inventories rather than the recent flood of greens from normal mobs.
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I think the flaw with the expansion was not that it was too easy or hard but that they HAD to nerf content. The progression was not linear nor were most attunements pugable. Magtheridon was a much harder fight than anything other than Kael and Vashj in the tier 5 raids. Kael and Vashj are much harder than most of the fights in the tier 6 raids, even Archimonde. The non linear raid progression lead to guilds falling apart because they would progress smoothly then get STUCK, HARD. And the worst part about these spots you got stuck on, was that before Blizzard started removing the required attunements you *HAD* to do them to move on making these raid stops even more frustrating for most guilds. To contrast pre expansion the raid progression was more linear, one boss was (more or less) a little harder than the one before it. ALSO, no attunement required anything nastier than a trip through BRD, UBRS or to the auction house. Attunement is a great way to see if that new applicant is lazy or willing to put some effort into their character.
Additionally it looks like in WOTLK they are removing certain things like crushing blows and what not. I for one look at that and sneer because a crushing blow was the great equalizer between plate and fur. It is also a great way to measure if your tank is good or merely holding aggro.
A game needs challenge to stay interesting. By removing the amount of skill it takes to play a class and adding the ability for even casual players to see the end game, I think Blizzard is really shooting themselves in the foot (long term) with WOTLK. People will quickly "master" their class and see all there is to see in the game, then move on.
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Quote:My biggest complaint is the removal of the elite zones 1-58 (Stromgarde in Arathi, Vilebranch in Hinterlands etc). It opens up quests for solo play but it removes the most important part of WoW, in my opinion - small group content. Those areas did not need five people like an instance. Three would suffice if you were of level. They provided a somewhat challenging task that required you to branch out, stop following your leveling guide and gather a group together.
To be honest, that all depends on your server and whether you're in a guild or no. For the rest of us who just can't get access to a Party In A Canâ¢, those elite areas were a huge levelling block. It's also no coincidence that all those blocks occur at pretty much the same level...
I remember struggling for weeks to get through the Stromgarde after finishing all the solo quests. Arathi was my alternate choice, having started the 30-40 grind in Desolace (With it's annoying centaur reputation system that's also a requirement to levelling and thus also a severe block), and once all you have left in Arathi is the Stromgarde line, you're either forced to pick up low-return green quests elsewhere or just try and power your way through.
I'm not sad to see the elite zones go. If I were in a guild, they would at least be doable, but sitting on your kiester trying to scrape together a group for Stromgarde (And then getting ganked repeatedly by a level 50+ Alliance party that had no business whatsoever there aside from, naturally, ganking lower-levelled Horde parties), to make meagre progress through one of a dozen sequential quests ("Thanks for doing that for me in Stromgarde, now here's another quest that involves you going back in there, good luck finding another party after the ad-hoc group you spent hours forming decided to call it a night."), before having to do it all again tomorrow, is just not fun.
I probably spent longer in Arathi than I did anywhere else before hitting the level cap. There were other zones, but, well, when you've got a bunch of unfinished quests in one zone, you really don't want to move on until they're resolved. And then I moved on from Arathi to Hinterlands, where the whole bloody process is copied pretty much ad verbatim.
It was in the Hinterlands where my patience finally snapped: The second any questline in any zone led me towards the elite subzones, I'd abandon it. No questions asked. Ditto for anything involving a 5-man that I would easily level past by just doing solo quests.
Group content is fine while there's groups to actually do it, but when you're in a suitably high-levelled zone such as Silithus only to see, maybe, two or three other names in /chatlist 1 and you have a few quests that demand a full and balanced group, you realise what a pain it is. Thankfully, this is something TBC got right; granted, most major questlines cap things off with a few group quests, but there's always an alternative to help you level on up to the next zone.
When in mortal danger,
When beset by doubt,
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Hi,
Quote:A game needs challenge to stay interesting. By removing the amount of skill it takes to play a class and adding the ability for even casual players to see the end game, I think Blizzard is really shooting themselves in the foot (long term) with WOTLK. People will quickly "master" their class and see all there is to see in the game, then move on.
Maybe, maybe not. People will leave if they get bored, true, but they will also leave if they get frustrated. Hard core gamers are usually the first to jump onto a new game, and the first to run through new content. To make end game content hard enough to slow down the hard core gamers is to make it too frustrating hard for the casual players. And there are a *lot* more casual gamers than hard core. What it looks like, to me, is that Blizzard is trying to hold the casual player by reducing the (already low) player skill requirement and hold the hard core players by adding end game content. By introducing the new content at a high difficulty, they make it interesting to the hard core players who hit it first. About the time those players are 'done' with that content, Blizzard nerfs it so the casuals can play it. Seems to be working.
What I'd love to see is some realms that are like things were early on. I feel like I've missed out on most of the game, and that I'll never really get the WoW experience.
--Pete
How big was the aquarium in Noah's ark?
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Quote:My biggest complaint is the removal of the elite zones 1-58 (Stromgarde in Arathi, Vilebranch in Hinterlands etc). It opens up quests for solo play but it removes the most important part of WoW, in my opinion - small group content. Those areas did not need five people like an instance. Three would suffice if you were of level. They provided a somewhat challenging task that required you to branch out, stop following your leveling guide and gather a group together.
Oh, also, zones need more +5 elite wandering mobs. A sense of danger would be nice in the game that coddles you an almost embarrassing amount.
You can do most any instance with three people as it is. I almost never do instances with a full five unless it's at 70 or I think it's going to be difficult. Which it never is.
ArrayPaladins were not meant to sit in the back of the raid staring at health bars all day, spamming heals and listening to eight different classes whine about buffs.[/quote]
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06-27-2008, 07:00 PM
(This post was last modified: 06-27-2008, 07:06 PM by Sir_Die_alot.)
Quote:Hi,
Maybe, maybe not. People will leave if they get bored, true, but they will also leave if they get frustrated. Hard core gamers are usually the first to jump onto a new game, and the first to run through new content. To make end game content hard enough to slow down the hard core gamers is to make it too frustrating hard for the casual players. And there are a *lot* more casual gamers than hard core. What it looks like, to me, is that Blizzard is trying to hold the casual player by reducing the (already low) player skill requirement and hold the hard core players by adding end game content. By introducing the new content at a high difficulty, they make it interesting to the hard core players who hit it first. About the time those players are 'done' with that content, Blizzard nerfs it so the casuals can play it. Seems to be working.
What I'd love to see is some realms that are like things were early on. I feel like I've missed out on most of the game, and that I'll never really get the WoW experience.
--Pete
I don't think we really disagree fully if at all. I'm all for early content to be tank and spank easy. But as you move along things should get more and more complicated, not all at once like they have done in TBC ala Mags Vasj and Kael. The casual guilds will still have their content to work through but they won't hit brick walls they will just take longer and longer to kill a boss but it will still feel like "progression". What we have now is the "hard core" gamers get semi stuck on fights like the current Vasj/Kael cockblocks, get them down, then fly through content again. Every guild on my server (pre attunement removal) had the first 2 bosss in MH down their first night there. A few had the first 3. This is often after a month or more of wiping on Vashj and Kael. Obviously this is not a linear progression of boss difficulty which causes progression to quickly start and stop. IMO this puts more strain on a guild than simply slowing down as progressivly harder fights would be. Again I use the example of the pre BC raids, for the most part the fights were pretty linear in difficulty. There were still some easy and/or gimmick fights, but by and large one boss was just a bit harder than the one before it. Not everyone saw Naxx pre BC but you can (and I have) gone back to see it now you just need like minded people to take with you. :)
Quick edit: The cockblocks also cause people to jump guilds, causing guilds to slow down even MORE in their progression. So not only do they cause the same frustration of not being able to see further content, they exacerbate it by forcing guilds to bring new people in before they can move beyond them. Before the attunement change this could halt a guild's progression permanently as new people needed to do the difficult attunement fights before they could attend high end raids. This was a terrible design and probably the dumbest thing Blizz has yet done in wow.
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Quote:What I'd love to see is some realms that are like things were early on. I feel like I've missed out on most of the game, and that I'll never really get the WoW experience.
Maybe I'm just being nostalgic, but I'd like to see that too. Keep all the changes to talents and balance and content, but roll back the XP acceleration. Maybe top out at 60 so there's some incentive to poke around the large amounts of formerly top-end content.
On the other hand, to get the true experience, you'd have to drop half the flightpoints, move the auction houses back to SW/Org to provide a proper level of city lag, and eliminate all the meeting stones. Add more loot lag and server hiccups, and season to taste.
Oh, and make all the mobs outside the Deadmines elites.
In any case, I think you can still get some of the WoW experience now, you'll just have to twist some arms to get a group to level with you (raises arm). The levels go by faster, but the big difference is not being forced to do most or all of the zones at your level. You can still see all the content, you just are usually a bit overleveled for the area. And there's no shortage of money anymore.:)
You did miss the discovery phase when everyone was charging around finding things out, and the older raid instances just won't happen for you (in the style they were intended, anyway). I guess it's up to you if that's a deal-breaker.
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Quote:What I'd love to see is some realms that are like things were early on. I feel like I've missed out on most of the game, and that I'll never really get the WoW experience.
--Pete
I'm not sure how much i'd like to have things back the way they were early on where you either needed 40 people to run a dungeon or content was completely trivialized by the zerg fest.
What I would like to see is the Heroic versions expanded to a lot of the earlier dungeons so that even at 70 you could go back and experience a dungeon you may have missed before, or that you could re-experience it with added challanges. As it is most of the "leveling" dungeons are trivialized by so many things including Level/gear/group makeup/etc that there really is no way to do a dungeon "at level". There are so many well designed lowbie dungeons that i would love to go through with actual challange. I wouldn't mind seeing pre tBC raids revamped so that there are 10 man 70 and 80 versions so the people that missed out on MC-Naxx could experience that content in a decent way and for it not to go to waste.
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Quote:I'm not sure how much i'd like to have things back the way they were early on where you either needed 40 people to run a dungeon or content was completely trivialized by the zerg fest.
What I would like to see is the Heroic versions expanded to a lot of the earlier dungeons so that even at 70 you could go back and experience a dungeon you may have missed before, or that you could re-experience it with added challanges. As it is most of the "leveling" dungeons are trivialized by so many things including Level/gear/group makeup/etc that there really is no way to do a dungeon "at level". There are so many well designed lowbie dungeons that i would love to go through with actual challange. I wouldn't mind seeing pre tBC raids revamped so that there are 10 man 70 and 80 versions so the people that missed out on MC-Naxx could experience that content in a decent way and for it not to go to waste.
When heroic instances were first announced thats what I hoped they were going to be. Thankfully Naxx is being re-released for wrath, since almost no one got to experience that. Hopefully they make some heroic versions of old instances rather than the letdown that are the current heroics.
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Quote:When heroic instances were first announced thats what I hoped they were going to be.
I don't get this comment. The original versions of the heroics, running them in the greens and blues that people had at the time, were quite a challenge. But they had to be nerfed because some of the mechanics were just stupid. At that level of gear, pre 2.1, you needed certain group compositions to run heroic Shattered Halls (considered the hardest of them all). Heroic Arcatraz's end-boss couldn't be done with just one healer unless you got very lucky with his choices of mind flays. And there were other stupid things like Underbog Colossi literally one-shotting a tank.
Yeah, heroics now are easy. They've been nerfed, and the gear people have trivilizes them. Nowadays I run around with +2550 healing, and when I was first running heroics, I had about +1000 healing. That kind of stuff has impact.
"Easy" and "hard" are very relative. Blizzard's learned a lot from TBC, and yes the game is getting more "casual" as we go, but when TBC first came out the end-game was pretty damn hardcore. Ask any guild that ran pre-nerf Magtheridon and Gruul what it was like back then, as hardcore raiders were quitting the game in droves because it was so stupidly hard it wasn't worth it.
BTW, nice seeing STSIs back again :)
-Bolty
Quote:Considering the mods here are generally liberals who seem to have a soft spot for fascism and white supremacy (despite them saying otherwise), me being perma-banned at some point is probably not out of the question.
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Quote:When heroic instances were first announced thats what I hoped they were going to be. Thankfully Naxx is being re-released for wrath, since almost no one got to experience that. Hopefully they make some heroic versions of old instances rather than the letdown that are the current heroics.
It's easy to underestimate gear-flation. It used to be a rule of thumb that a tank was ready for a heroic at 10-11k armor and life. My warrior now easily exceeds that in DPS gear and has mostly welfare gear (the warrior doesn't really raid).
Gearing has scaled to the point that current heroics are virtually obsolete.
Conc / Concillian -- Vintage player of many games. Deadly leader of the All Pally Team (or was it Death leader?)
Terenas WoW player... while we waited for Diablo III.
And it came... and it went... and I played Hearthstone longer than Diablo III.
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Quote:When heroic instances were first announced thats what I hoped they were going to be. Thankfully Naxx is being re-released for wrath, since almost no one got to experience that. Hopefully they make some heroic versions of old instances rather than the letdown that are the current heroics.
The first heroics were quite hard. When a single mob can take your tank from full to dead inside the cast time of a single heal and the pull has two of them (Underbog, just before the first boss) completing a heroic run was something to be proud of - though that satisfaction was about all you got since the badge selection was limited and most drops were useless even then. They've since been nerfed, gear has inflated wildly and people are more experienced with the instances so they're not the challenge they once were.
I'm hoping the next expansion's version will tier the heroics so that the 5-man game keeps up a bit better - not to the point of overtaking raid drops but enough that instance drops are superior for instance use to PVP items and enough that I can take my raid gear to them and still need to pay attention.
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