Cataclysm

[Callie Del Noire]

Maybe they'll increase the bloody drop rate of the mount if they do that!

[Bayushi]

Knowing them, they'll just remove it entirely.

I STILL don't have it. And I've cut my solo clear times down to 12 minutes. And that's clearing EVERYTHING!

I LOVE Fan of Knives!

[Callie Del Noire]

12 minutes? I've done it in like 10 once.. but that was before the exorcism nerf (what the devil? A casting time!?) and I definitely didn't do everything.

Just the bosses, in to meet the 'football team' and on to beat down the baron. Most often I take about 18 minutes or so.

Of course I haven't done it since I got my 'Argent Crusader' title.. working from honored to exalted in 1 day sort of burned me out.

[Bayushi]

Heh.

Realize that's 12 minutes to kill everything in the instance(and loot scourgestones), as a leather-wearing class with no healing, no armor to speak of, and no real defense outside of Evasion every couple of minutes.

Eating takes too long, especially when 50% of the time any eating you do is interrupted by the Eye of Naxxramas.

[Callie Del Noire]

Well before the Mana potion nerf I could do it faster.. Pali dps requires Mana..

I'm contemplating deleting the new 'lock I made to leave room for a Worgen type.. of course I shold be online right now doing dailies to get my rogue her 'legacy' armor chest to up her xp grindage.

[Bayushi]

I'm waiting for the faction switching service before I come back, personally.

I'd like to move my 80 to the Horde(probably to a BE, as I don't care for Trolls and despise UD). Then I'd be able to find my IRL friend and run stuff with his 80 Shaman or his 80 DK.

[Callie Del Noire]

Perfectly happy with my Alliance heavy account.

3 80s, 2 70s, 1 50 and a scattering from there.

[Serephino]

My question is, is the instance situation going to get better or worse?  For the last two weeks I've had trouble getting into them.  You have to sit there trying to get in over and over for gods knows how long.  Tonight it took a half hour to get into BRD. 

[Callie Del Noire]

Sounds like a server population issue.. we had it for a while (some moron at Blizz thought it would be absolutely brilliant to open an original server for free transfers).

[Serephino]

That's probably part of it.  Another part is high levels farming lower level instances.  I admit I do it myself once in a while, but now that we have Death Knights it seems to be worse.  It probably wasn't a good idea to have a class that starts off at 55.  That puts them way behind on things like professions and rep.  I've been on lower level alts and unable to quest because a DK was killing everything. 

[Callie Del Noire]

I tried to do what I had to for my profesison (Herbalism) but having MULTIBLE 70+ toons at the time I managed to get my DK through her low level skill stages quickly enough.. about 3 hours in the 20s zone followed by a few spots in the 40s and 50s..then it was time to rush through the BC content.

[Bayushi]

I tried to do what I had to for my profesison (Herbalism) but having MULTIBLE 70+ toons at the time I managed to get my DK through her low level skill stages quickly enough.. about 3 hours in the 20s zone followed by a few spots in the 40s and 50s..then it was time to rush through the BC content.

Not to mention, farming the consumables for things like tailoring, first aid, and enchanting is easiest done in instances. For most of my low level Disenchanting materials, I took my Death Knight to the Deadmines and ran it to it's hourly limit. Repeatedly.

Best part was, as a blood specced DK, I could pull everything possible at once by running through, and tank it all in one spot and have little worry about health.

[Callie Del Noire]

Not to mention, farming the consumables for things like tailoring, first aid, and enchanting is easiest done in instances. For most of my low level Disenchanting materials, I took my Death Knight to the Deadmines and ran it to it's hourly limit. Repeatedly.

Best part was, as a blood specced DK, I could pull everything possible at once by running through, and tank it all in one spot and have little worry about health.

Oh yeah.. the Blood specc.. or as I call it when I was tanking Naxx. "Mr. 4th on the Healing list'.

The paths bit looks interesting. I seriously want to check out the other paths.

[Bayushi]

I had fun with the Death Knight.

The Deadmines was a boon in more ways than one. I had chosen to go tailoring and Enchanting on my Horde death knight. Deadmines has a high amount of wool cloth, which is difficult for Horde to acquire. With the wool, I skilled up in Tailoring. While I was disenchanting the greens and blues that dropped in Deadmines.

Some wool also tailored into green items, which were disenchanted for skill ups and for further enchanting materials for yet more skill ups.

The tailoring from the wool raised the skill level enough so that I could move on to Scarlet Monastery and farm Silk to do the same thing, except that silk tailors into far more green/blue items than wool did. Which only accelerated the enchanting skill up process.

I do believe my DK is already 350ish Enchanting and just over 300 Tailoring. That's in less than 2 days played overall.

[Callie Del Noire]

It's those last 40 points or so that my enchanter had problems. I hate the idea of MORE enchanting grindage. :(

[Chris Brady]

So I downloaded the trailer (Would have been nice to have a link in the first post, but meh, not like World of Warcraft is hard to find) and I have to say...

Not all that impressed.  They increased the Level cap AGAIN?  So everyone's level 80 gear is now invalid?  Just like the 60 stuff, or the 70 stuff?  What are they?  SADISTS?

I was wondering when they'd bring Deathwing back.  He sorta disappeared in WC3.

And it's sorta telling when they have to REDESIGN the entire game world JUST to allow flying mounts.

You all know WHY Blizzard didn't allow flying mounts pre-Cataclysm, right?  Well, they never finished all of Azeroth before Burning Crusade.  There were huge gaping holes in the world that they had put those big place marker Infernals to keep people out, which were hard to reach from land, but by air?  Easy peasy.  They didn't want that.

So instead of actually finishing Azeroth they redesgin it.  Well, it did need a good kick in the teeth as for setting.  Still, it's pretty crapsack.  They've got how many enemies going now?  Yeesh.  Too bad they could be fighting each other as well as the Players.  :p

I wonder if they'll ever get around to fixing the memory leaks in the major cities, but namely the one in Shatt.

Well, there seems to be new stuff, so apparently, it's finally moving out of the beta state it's been in since release.

I hope all you current players of WoW have a kick ass time!  Seriously, it looks like a lot of stuff is happening, and hopefully, you guys will be having fun during the entire time.

Me?  Sadly, this sort of bloat is no longer appealing to me, and thus is the end of my even contemplating WoW ever again.

[Bayushi]

Not all that impressed.  They increased the Level cap AGAIN?  So everyone's level 80 gear is now invalid?  Just like the 60 stuff, or the 70 stuff?  What are they?  SADISTS?

Cause releasing an expansion we pay money for, that players actually WANT, would go really far with nothing to do, right?

You all know WHY Blizzard didn't allow flying mounts pre-Cataclysm, right?  Well, they never finished all of Azeroth before Burning Crusade.  There were huge gaping holes in the world that they had put those big place marker Infernals to keep people out, which were hard to reach from land, but by air?  Easy peasy.  They didn't want that.

Azeroth was designed in a manner so that the landscape was to be viewed from ground level. The top of each city is pretty empty, Orgrimmar and Thunder Bluff excluded(of the original game's cities). This was done to improve render times for the players, as it would otherwise take an exorbitant amount of memory to load up everything in a city section, not to mention all the NPC's, players, mounts, cosmetic pets, combat pets, et al.

You can see just how the 'top' of cities weren't done by going up to 'Thunder Falls' in Elwynn Forest, and moving east, move into the actual Stormwind City zone. Then you can look down at Stormwind City itself, and it's really REALLY screwy looking. Thunder Falls is almost directly above Crystal Lake, which is right outside the City itself.

I wonder if they'll ever get around to fixing the memory leaks in the major cities, but namely the one in Shatt.

I am unaware of any actual memory leaks. Shattrath is merely memory intensive, as it does not use the 'distance rendering' and ground-level rendering model that Stormwind and other old Azerothian cities use currently. It also has fifteen BILLION NPC's that do nothing but walk around, swing swords, and laugh.

Not to mention, EVERYONE hung out in Shattrath. EVERYONE.

[Callie Del Noire]

I am unaware of any actual memory leaks. Shattrath is merely memory intensive, as it does not use the 'distance rendering' and ground-level rendering model that Stormwind and other old Azerothian cities use currently. It also has fifteen BILLION NPC's that do nothing but walk around, swing swords, and laugh.

Not to mention, EVERYONE hung out in Shattrath. EVERYONE.

AND there FRIGGIN DOG!

Once upon a time I used to AVOID it like I do Dalaran when Wintergrasp is about to start.

I know for a fact that one a peak hour a GOODLY portion of any server's popultion has to be going though Dalaran.  <god it was awful till I got my MacPro>

[Bayushi]

AND there FRIGGIN DOG!

Once upon a time I used to AVOID it like I do Dalaran when Wintergrasp is about to start.

I know for a fact that one a peak hour a GOODLY portion of any server's popultion has to be going though Dalaran.  <god it was awful till I got my MacPro>

It was HELL on a High-Pop server, let me tell you!

I play the game with all settings at Max(Max draw, detail, shadows, etc). NOWHERE in the game does it lag like it did in Shattrath. The closest I've seen was when they unlocked the badge vendor on the Isle of Quel'Danas for the first time on my realm. Every retard(this was on a pvp-enabled realm) and his mom was Elekk/Kodo camping the vendor. And all THEIR buddies were standing inside the Elekk and Kodo's, to further make things suck.

It's really one of the biggest miconceptions about WoW. People claim WoW is a horrible game.

No, WoW in itself is actually a very well put-together MMO, as evidenced by the fact that no MMO can touch it's subscription base. The problem with WoW is the patently RETARDED portion of the playerbase. Rooftop Campers, Corpse Campers, Meeting Stone Campers, Ninjas, RP grievers, Speed hackers, Elitist Raiders, Elitist PvPers, Forum/Internet Tough Guys, ArenaTards, etc.

[Chris Brady]

No, WoW in itself is actually a very well put-together MMO, as evidenced by the fact that no MMO can touch it's subscription base. The problem with WoW is the patently RETARDED portion of the playerbase. Rooftop Campers, Corpse Campers, Meeting Stone Campers, Ninjas, RP grievers, Speed hackers, Elitist Raiders, Elitist PvPers, Forum/Internet Tough Guys, ArenaTards, etc.

No offence, I'm calling Bullshit on this.  The NO.1 reason why WoW is so popular is because it's based off Warcraft, which had a HUGE following.  Actually, I need to correct myself.  It HAS a huge following, still going strong.

WoW itself is a bog standard MMO, nothing overly revolutionary.  Which is also good, because no one wants revolutionary.  They want something familiar.  And seriously, the game runs on low end basics.  One or two combat animations, chunky low polygon count models, small zone maps.  If it were any other company, it would have been laughed out of the MMO arena.  The only reason they've survived is the strength of the love of Warcraft.

The stuff they bolted on after the fact is evidence they weren't ready for it.  The PvP system and various reboots.  The Arena addon, which is.  The constant rebalancing of the classes.  The Server Upgrades.

WoW on a purely level is nothing special, in fact, it could be another Everquest clone.  But attach the name Warcraft or Blizzard to it, and they are golden.  They are the ONLY game company where they can say "It's done when it's done." and no one will be bothered by it.

[Bayushi]

WoW on a purely level is nothing special, in fact, it could be another Everquest clone.  But attach the name Warcraft or Blizzard to it, and they are golden.  They are the ONLY game company where they can say "It's done when it's done." and no one will be bothered by it.

Other than the fact that WoW's "low poly count" and the like makes Everquest look like it was running on an Atari 2600?

The fact that they have "low poly counts" makes the game run on just about any hardware made in the past 6-8 years. That is one the major reasons so many people play it. I first played it on an 800 mHz Athlon Thunderbird with 512mb of ram.

I can play it at max graphics on an old dual core machine. As in, the machine was purchased in 2006, and has only had upgrades in memory and video card(it had onboard graphics)

Most games now CANNOT be played by the majority of PCs available. For instance, I can play WoW at it's highest settings with no problems(as I can with Elder Scrolls Oblivion and a number of other 'high poly' games), but couldn't even get Age of Conan to START. FunCo's response: Your graphics card sucks!

At the time(and probably not even now), an 8800GT that's factory overclocked does NOT suck.

Finally, WoW was done well as in it has CONTENT. It MAINTAINS a large playerbase with the amount of content available and SOME linearity available to keep people on track. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there is Warhammer Online. It has a middling amount of content, but has large gaps in the leveling curve where there is little to nothing available, and ZERO linearity to help new players figure out what they're supposed to do, or where to go.

I will, however, say that I am NOT a WoW/Blizzard Fanboi/girl. I enjoy WoW for what it is. I've quit the game twice now, and have decided to return to the game both times. I've played other MMO's and have enjoyed things about them(Warhammer, Guild Wars, Star Wars Galaxies, Ultima Online, City of Heroes/Villains) but I just don't feel as involved there as I do/did with WoW.

Dislike it all you want. Don't mock those who do, however, or make uninformed assumptions.