The Next World of Warcraft Thread

[Weak With The Dawn]

In current raid information: Finally got my creepy rogue T8.5 Helm! Woot! TOC tonight, hoping for an offhand upgrade still...

In other news: Remind me not to get involved in any conversation about Cataclysm when in Trade chat. The amount of people who refuse to believe that any of these updates are real even though they swear that they "read the faq" is amazing.

*Sigh* Trade chat is going to make me gray faster then normal.

Shamans almost level 74 ^_^ Have not bought him Cold Weather Flying yet, but it's next in my plans. BoA shoulders + BoA chest is basically a whole new game.

My guild is trying to decide if we should all re-roll goblin when the x-pac comes out. Personally I want to roll a Goblin DK and be the realm first 85 Goblin, but that's an undertaking I don't know I'll be committed to in a year.

Also: Guild Levling and Talents sound pretty awesome. The devs have hinted towards the following potential talent choices

1: Less durability loss

2: Mass raid ressurection

both of which sound awesome. Looking forward to hearing more on this and the Path of the Titans.

[Grim Shady]

So they've announced cross-realm instance grouping finally. They're going to start it off with just 5-mans and see how it goes before opening it up to raids. And they hope to get it implemented before the x-pack. It'll work with the same BG battlegroups supposedly.

While I like the idea of finding PuGs potentially faster, the mix of realms in the battlegroups is kinda crappy. I've had people from pvp servers in BGs whispering me and harassing me just cause I'm on an RP server, so now I'd have to put up with those noids in instances as well? I wish the battlegroups were all PvE or all PvP realms, not a mix.

I'll hope for the best and see what we get.

[Guest Nadine]

What a jack shit day. Nothing done except for cooldowns - cloth, transmute, titansteel, northrend research and some other stupid thing.

If you do northrend research and you don't learn anything does that mean you are done learning? Cuz I have done NR 3 times and didn't learn anything, but I am still learning new transmutes when I make titanium.

How many glyph books do I need to learn everything? I have been buying them in expectation of finally reaching 55 but now I am concerned I have purchased too many.

[Third Knight on the Left]

[Grim Shady]

If you do northrend research and you don't learn anything does that mean you are done learning? Cuz I have done NR 3 times and didn't learn anything, but I am still learning new transmutes when I make titanium.

I think if you've gone 3 days without NR turning up anything new then you got 'em all. The transmute discoveries are seperate from the potion/elixir discoveries, I think there are two Northrend transmutes for each of the elements. Like two for turning fire into something, two for turning life into something, etc.

[Grim Shady]

PvP ranks are coming back. They'll be part of the rated BG system.

Not sure how I feel about that. Was kinda fun to have some characters with titles that can't be obtained anymore. I may suck on my hunter, but the Legionnaire title gets me a little breathing room before people just assume I'm a huntard.

[Grim Shady]

Who does a girl have to sleep with around here for some raiding action?

Just say something over voice chat and 8 of 'em will eagerly give up their raid spot for you and start randomly mailing you gold and items.

I still remember when me and YW were just starting out and we were in Westfall and he asked in General how to get to Darnassus. He got no replies. I, on a female toon, asked like I thought a girl would (all cute like, with sugar on top) and I instantly got a detailed list of directions and an offer to show me the way. :lol:

Ah, the power.

[Rexor]

Just say something over voice chat and 8 of 'em will eagerly give up their raid spot for you and start randomly mailing you gold and items.

I still remember when me and YW were just starting out and we were in Westfall and he asked in General how to get to Darnassus. He got no replies. I, on a female toon, asked like I thought a girl would (all cute like, with sugar on top) and I instantly got a detailed list of directions and an offer to show me the way. :lol:

Ah, the power.

Yeah, I'm not ashamed that, more than once, while leveling my first character up, I pretended to be a girl to get help/gold. People are stupid.

[Guest Nadine]

lol, and most of my toons are male. I guess I fucked up Bobby Terry, didn't I?

[Weak With The Dawn]

Who does a girl have to sleep with around here for some raiding action?

*raises hand* Just be mindful of the tusks :P

J/k.

Finally got Icehowl down last night, and god was that easy. My guild has no patience for strategy talk, and we don't adjust well on the fly, so it took us longer then we should have to finish Beasts or Northrend, but we finally got it down. Jaraxxus is next. We don't have too much in the way of interrupts (basically my kick and an arcane torrent or two) but everything else seemed easy enough. We wiped at about half health and our MT d/c's due to connection issues he's been having all week. *sigh* Hopefully we'll get it down tomorrow.

Hope you all had an eventful weekend, in WoW and otherwise.

[Rexor]

I am down to 500g from bankrollong my spawn and I don't get the reaction on wow that you speak of. Guess I'm doing something wrong :(

Do you say things like "I'm playing on my brother's account!! Can't figure out if I want my own, yet ;)"

or "I'll have to give you a link to my myspace sometime! Got some hot pics on there ;)"

You gotta ";)" a lot.

[Guest Nadine]

I sold my mojo flasks by saying they would increase your mojo with de ladez today. Sometimes I love wow. Like when some tool puts up a flying machine for 400 bo but 2 silver bid. Got that bitch for 12 silver and i bet you romance novels to dollars I will NEVER move that stupid thing. The AH has been fucking me without lube these last few days. And I am more broke than Mandy even. Why? I spent every damn gold on my shaman since he really tripps my triggers and then we ran ToC and I ended up upgrading EVERYTHING I bought AND need 4 gems. Ouch. Best go off and start fluttering lashes.

[Grim Shady]

Gave up and finally queue'd for some PuGs tonight. As a healer. And sat there. And sat there. Well first I queued up on one of my mages but I was the only one in the LFG channel on that server so that went far.

Finally got in a HoS run on a Shaman which wasn't what I wanted but I was half awake by then anyway. I thought I had squared everything but it seems I forgot one tiny detail and forgot to modify my spec back to PvE oriented. No big deal but I felt something was off until I realized what it was. Run was brutal. We had a tank who had never been there which is ok if he listens to those who have and this guy wasn't listening. We wiped once and a couple people got smeared before I could so much as begin casting a heal at them. The Lock whispered me and assured me I was doing fine and that the tank just was not listening.

Too bad that DK I used to hang with has been MIA for 18 days. :P

WTB Evasion Rogue, pst.

[PhelanArcetus]

I wish they would reveal their plans for the Holy Paladin tree. That is a poorly designed tree if there ever was one.

I've got no real issues with the tree, though I find myself taking a few points I don't care about to reach a later tier, but I wouldn't be surprised if Cataclysm, with all these major gear changes, saw the addition of a new paladin spell, ala Righteous Fury, to enable healing without holy-paladin-only gear.

Something like "while this stat is active, Str->Int, Hit->Spirit" or some such?

We are seeing the Horde becoming more aggressive, but I am curious as to see how the Alliance responds. If the Horde is the only side developing an aggressive expansionist policy, then the Horde will look more and more like "the bad guys," but if we see Varian Chynn and the Alliance also develop a similar policy, then that should even things out a bit more.

Wrath has the Alliance getting more aggressive. Bolvar was pretty willing to allow detente, and Jaina is always a voice of peace (or more accurately, stop beating up on my boyfriend!), but Wrynn hates the Horde, and moving Thrall out of the way to put Garrosh in charge just puts two angry and aggressive people in charge of the factions.

Finally got Icehowl down last night, and god was that easy. My guild has no patience for strategy talk, and we don't adjust well on the fly, so it took us longer then we should have to finish Beasts or Northrend, but we finally got it down. Jaraxxus is next. We don't have too much in the way of interrupts (basically my kick and an arcane torrent or two) but everything else seemed easy enough. We wiped at about half health and our MT d/c's due to connection issues he's been having all week. *sigh* Hopefully we'll get it down tomorrow.

Hope you all had an eventful weekend, in WoW and otherwise.

I actually didn't play all weekend, owing initially to being out, then to oversleeping and what do you mean people are coming over to watch stupid baseball at 4? And then to just not feeling like logging on. But Thursday night... ugggggh.

We had to swap group makeup a little; our regular OT is out with a blown power supply. And the result was about 2 hours of Northrend Beasts, mostly wiping on the worms. And two frustrating wipes on Icehowl because the OT got stuck on pillars or something and went into the trample zone. Bah. Jaraxxus we one-shot though, both weeks. And the PvP fight I already loathe.

Ok, that's not entirely fair. I loathed it as soon as I knew it was a PvP fight. I don't PvP, I don't enjoy PvP, and now, much like in Magister's Terrace, it's been forced into my runs. There's no tanking, so here I am swapping specs to Arms, something I don't like doing... to just get splattered. About half the group doesn't PvP often, if at all, so a lot of us don't have any of the trained PvP instincts. I'm wondering actually if this week (assuming we have critical mass; we've got a paired vacation going this week) I should just stay Prot and just try to keep a healer locked down.

Of course, all the damn time spent on the Beasts and the PvP fight meant that we didn't go into Ulduar at all.

[Weak With The Dawn]

We had to swap group makeup a little; our regular OT is out with a blown power supply. And the result was about 2 hours of Northrend Beasts, mostly wiping on the worms. And two frustrating wipes on Icehowl because the OT got stuck on pillars or something and went into the trample zone.

First time we got to Icehowl just about everyone did a great job with the worms but someone new killed a few of us with burning bile after they were down. After wards the few left were doing an awesome job on the yeti until our tank got caught in the trample. OT picked him up but not fast enough and we wiped with, no lie, 2k left on the damn beast. Most disheartening wipe I ever had.

I know how you feel about Ulduar too, been trying to raid just about everything lately because my off hand weapon is too slow and I'm energy starved :-(.

Good luck with that PvP fight. I'm not looking forward to it either, mostly I just want the sweet axes that drop off the Demon Lord, I couldn't care less about anything else :thumbsup:

[Weak With The Dawn]

somehow I double posted O_o.

[Mack Kilimaro]

I'd definitely like to echo the frustration with the faction champions. For me, that's compounded by the fact that both my Alliance and Horde raid groups were flummoxed by the encounter in the past week. The 25 man version felt completely hopeless, because we spent about four hours worth of wipes on it without ever downing a single one of the enemy team. As normally a prot warrior with shitty fury gear, I was not terribly useful in that fight and I wasn't able to get any grasp of why it was failing so badly. I think people just aren't used to having to react as quick as you do in PVP, particularly healers. I don't think people were doing a very good job of running away from the huge guys with big swords and axes, and I don't think healers were using their full set of survival tools. Paladins dying without having bubbled, priests dying without having hit psychic scream, etc. CC and interrupts were also dodgy. We spent every attempt trying to burn down the healing shaman first (2.2 million HP on 25 man) and we did get him to 50k once. Then he got hit with hand of protection, no priest did mass dispel and he healed up.

10 man was the same frustration, just to a lesser degree because we only spent an hour on it before moving on to Ulduar. Also, I am a healer on Horde side again, so that felt like it was in my hands a little. Working out how to be able to heal seemingly random and intense damage is going to be a challenge. At least I can say that I never died without having used my bubble. 10 vs. 6 with the 6 only having 400k HP felt a lot more manageable. Still, the best we did was getting the first healer (shaman) down to 2k (!) health before the same bubble/heal up problem happened.

How many healers would you say are necessary for 10 man and 25 man? We had three healers in 10 man... not sure what the 25 man was going with. Is it worth leaving one or two people specced for tanking?

[Weak With The Dawn]

I'd definitely like to echo the frustration with the faction champions.

Looks like my raid group will be doing a lot of tank spot watching for this one. All of our best arena teams are not very high rated and most don't raid.

It's ironic, after all the casuals complaining about having to PvP for Orphans week, now all the raiders are complaining about it for raids, for once, both Casuals and Raiders agree.

[Tobin]

Gilneas actually...looks kinda cool...

If Garrosh proves to be too much of a dickhead we can always reroll Worgen and make a "Horde Refugees" guild.

[Nathanael]

I actually thought Faction Champions is a dynamic and interesting fight. My 10-man group one-shot it, but then again it was a really good group that one-shot Jaraxxus as well. I got saved to a fail 25 that couldn't get Jaraxxus down so I haven't a chance to see what they're like on 25man.

Yes, it is PVP-style, but complaining about that seems odd to me. Everybody wants different and interesting mechanics on bosses - look, here is one! It takes strategy, sure, but so does every other boss fight.

The biggest problem I think most raids will have is that most dps either have either lost or never developed the right skills in the first place. The vast majority of fights they just do their rotation, move out of/into stuff, and decurse if they have it.

This fight requires a lot of awareness, cc, and interrupts. The key for dps and tanks (I'd actually recommend they stay as they are because (a) they're comfortable there and (b) having one or two with extra hp/survivability can help. Exception might be warrior tanks because their dps is low and will be even lower if they aren't getting beat on.) is to keep the enemy healers either cc'ed or otherwise contained (and possibly a dps or two as well) as you focus fire one champion down.

The healers have to be quick as well, because the champions will randomly focus raid members as well. Anyone who isn't a tank is going to need leet heals to keep them up - which isn't to say the tanks can just shrug off the hits.

Everyone has to be ready to blow damage cooldowns, pop defensive cooldowns/racials, purge/spellsteal buffs, etc.

If everyone gets to the opposite side of the arena from where the champions jump down, they give you courtesy of the first move. Each champion can be moused over to see their class. However, go to wowwiki ahead of time so you know which priest, paladin, shaman, and druid are "healer-specced."

10man gets 6 random, 25 gets 10. You'll notice the ratio is quite different, so I would assume cc/interrupts are more important for cooling off the damage from dps on 25-man.

Our 10man chose not to do healer first in hope that we had competent CC for the healers, of which there were 2. The idea was that if we left the healers til the end they couldn't kill our raid members alone, and each dead dps would cut damage output by at least 25%. Kill order should be established, and marked. Know which dps are more deadly, etc. I'd consider killing the rogue first just because they are squishier than the warrior or DK, and probably is about the same threat level. Those are also top priority.