World of Warcraft

[Kouran]

Agreed, with one further step. Don't like how the chaos orbs work - they really are a profession specific material rather than something anyone that wins can use. I'm JC/Ench and have no use for them, yet there's nothing stopping me from either intentionally or unintentionally screwing over someone in a random by rolling and winning it.

Yeah thats a problem as well. I lost an orb in a pug to a guy who couldnt even use them. He even admited that he was only 510 skill. I doubt I ever run a heroic pug again due to shit like this.

[RaceBannon42]

I'm guessing that the Chaos Orbs will be changed to BoE at some point.

[Inigima]

A fair point, Race :P

Kouran, Let me point out that Blizzard likes money and thinks long-term. No cap means lots of people will play as much as possible to get their gear fast. A cap means they'll do it every day.

[Kalbear]

510 skill is okay as long as you can actually use them at some point. I think that's perfectly fair two weeks into the expansion.

[Matrim Fox Cauthon]

Talk about a difference between old and new content. I tried out a worgen druid, who will likely become my main. I have already leveled through both all of Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms, but once I got to Outland, I came to a grinding halt. My character's level 67 now and almost level 68, which would be good enough for Northrend, but I'm aiming for Loremaster. What's worse, is that so far I've completed only Hellfire Peninsula and Zangarmarsh. Outland is just horribad in comparison with Cata and Wrath. There is no such thing as quest flow, phasing, or zone storylines. The quests all follow the same pattern: go out and kill X of Y in the usual method. They do not streamline things, so you have to run back to the quest giver to turn in the quest and get the quest that sends you right back to the same place you were.

[Shryke]

I dont like what they have done with justice points, as a hunter once you buy all the gear you need wtf do you do with your spare justice points? I have been capped after buying all the JP gear I needed for 8 days. They need to add something meaningful to buy with JP, rep tokens, gems, chaos orbs, etc. Valor gear is nice, should be buying my chest this week, but the weekly limit is dumb. The way the weekly valor limit is setup you will hit the cap every week if you raid and do daily randoms. Putting a limit on how much I can meaningfully play is not a good mechanic.

Kouran, Let me point out that Blizzard likes money and thinks long-term. No cap means lots of people will play as much as possible to get their gear fast. A cap means they'll do it every day.

Actually, the whole point of the cap is so that you DON'T have to play every day.

At some point, you've maxxed out on VP and thus don't have to pointlessly run the Heroic Daily every day to get more, even though you don't need anything from it.

The cap is there so you don't feel obligated to play constantly every single day in order to max out your VP gain. Forcing people to log on constantly in order to keep from falling behind is a terrible mechanic.

I dont like Tol Barad and how horde get to dictate when alliance gets to have access to the dailies and raid zone, limiting the battle to 1:1 and needing to take all 3 towers is fucking retarded. I am on a server with about 7:1 alliance to horde so all the rtards in the world on alliance side queue and only the most progressed raiding horde guild queues, so its alliance scrubs vs horde elites. If the population is that imbalanced alliance should have it 7 times as often as horde not the other way around.

Yeah, no. That just fucks over already fucked over factions on unbalanced servers. Ideally, TB should float at around 50% control per faction, to give both sides equal chance at it.

Unfortunately, right now TB is fucking horrifically imbalanced because unless your defense consists of gibbering retards, you can't lose. Most servers, from the people I've talked to, haven't had TB change hands in like 2 weeks.

Attacking is just too damn hard, when the zone should be balanced the other way, where defending is harder then attacking so the zone switches hands more often.

[Shryke]

Talk about a difference between old and new content. I tried out a worgen druid, who will likely become my main. I have already leveled through both all of Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms, but once I got to Outland, I came to a grinding halt. My character's level 67 now and almost level 68, which would be good enough for Northrend, but I'm aiming for Loremaster. What's worse, is that so far I've completed only Hellfire Peninsula and Zangarmarsh. Outland is just horribad in comparison with Cata and Wrath. There is no such thing as quest flow, phasing, or zone storylines. The quests all follow the same pattern: go out and kill X of Y in the usual method. They do not streamline things, so you have to run back to the quest giver to turn in the quest and get the quest that sends you right back to the same place you were.

At least you can GTFO of Outland with only 2 zones under your belt now.

[jurble]

My server's Horde won TB like 5 am on Monday. The alliance held it from Thurs->Monday. Hopefully we won't lose it anytime soon.

[Lyanna Stark]

I dont like what they have done with justice points, as a hunter once you buy all the gear you need wtf do you do with your spare justice points? I have been capped after buying all the JP gear I needed for 8 days. They need to add something meaningful to buy with JP, rep tokens, gems, chaos orbs, etc. Valor gear is nice, should be buying my chest this week, but the weekly limit is dumb. The way the weekly valor limit is setup you will hit the cap every week if you raid and do daily randoms. Putting a limit on how much I can meaningfully play is not a good mechanic.

Overall I give Cata a good B+ with the downsides being silly badge mechanics, artifical limits and lack of gear for some classes/specs.

I don't mind the basge mechanic so much: I actually like that raiding will be a primary source of gear.

I totally agree that the gear thing is dumb though. Tailoring has 1 epic healer item and it's a belt, which is the ONLY rep item you can also get as a healer. There are NO OTHER HEALING cloth items. No patterns, no rep rewards, just loads of DPS shite. WTF were Blizzard thinking?? You can also easily burn 30k on levelling tailoring as a stack of cloth bottoms out at 220G on our server. Per 20. And you get 4 bolts for that. Since Alch is looking so good, I am thinking of dropping tailoring for Alch and make my priest a potions master. I have a transmuter already, and the SO has an elixir master. As the mats requirements for pots, flasks and elixirs are so sick as well, it will probably pay off.

Yeah, no. That just fucks over already fucked over factions on unbalanced servers. Ideally, TB should float at around 50% control per faction, to give both sides equal chance at it.

Totally.

[Greywolf2375]

Yeah thats a problem as well. I lost an orb in a pug to a guy who couldnt even use them. He even admited that he was only 510 skill. I doubt I ever run a heroic pug again due to shit like this.

At least can use it at some point, I see those as no different than the folks that spent 9 hours flying around Hyjal doing nothing but farming ore - that one is just farming orbs. Course, it seems they did put in a hotfix yesterday - after the final bosses dropped I (and another in my group) couldn't even see the orbs to roll on since we had no profession to use them with. haven't seen any posts about what the existing orbs status will be - can we trade, sell, etc.

[Arataniello]

The Chaos Orb thing is being hotfixed today I believe, along with many other tweaks.

[Inkdaub]

Totally agree. If I want to play some 80s arcade game again, I would find it on the internet and download it. Mount Hyjal in general up to that point seems particularly lame - rescuing bunnies and squirrels? Escorting fawns to safety? Meanwhile in Vashjir, you are riding sharks to eat naga. I know which was more enjoyable.

Admittedly after doing the bouncing bear cubs quest (retch, how twee), Hyjal gets much better. The last quest in the zone almost made up for the gag-inducing stuff I had to wade through to get there.

I agree that the joust in Hyjal isn't very fun. I hate all jousting crap, though. I did just enough to become champ of Darnassus and Exodar at the Tournament before stopping completely. I had gotten my 'of Darnassus' title which is the title I wanted so it became an exorcise in irritation after that. The Hyjal jousting was a bit more interesting because of the flight mechanics and the fact that it was over quickly and then never seen again...unlike the Tournament.

I liked the other stuff in Hyjal. The bunnies and bear bouncing was fun for me. It breaks up the quests I think to have little curve balls like that thrown in.

[Kouran]

Yeah, no. That just fucks over already fucked over factions on unbalanced servers. Ideally, TB should float at around 50% control per faction, to give both sides equal chance at it.

Unfortunately, right now TB is fucking horrifically imbalanced because unless your defense consists of gibbering retards, you can't lose. Most servers, from the people I've talked to, haven't had TB change hands in like 2 weeks.

Attacking is just too damn hard, when the zone should be balanced the other way, where defending is harder then attacking so the zone switches hands more often.

We will have to disagree on this one. Given the ease of defense once the limiting reagent side gets the BG the numerically superior side is fucked. At heart this is a flawed mechanic because it always favors the side that queues the fewest people. Obviously for maximum benifit if your are the fewest people and on defense you basicly cant lose.

I have queued for Tol Barad 12 times so far and never gotten into the battle, this is a broken system.

I do like the changes they made to Chaos Orbs, but they really should have set the skill level requirement to 525. I have a miner that I use to tank heroics when a tank isnt available for guildmates and he has 425 engineering that will never be leveled, but I could roll on the orbs.

[Rhom]

Just tried to log on and saw that servers are down for maintenance today... any reason why?

[Arataniello]

Just tried to log on and saw that servers are down for maintenance today... any reason why?

http://wow.joystiq.com/2010/12/22/surprise-urgent-maintenance-today/

[Rhom]

http://wow.joystiq.com/2010/12/22/surprise-urgent-maintenance-today/

Wonder what could have been so urgent across all the servers one day after a regular downtime?

[Kouran]

Most likely the PVP fix. Seeing people with 2200 rating requirement weapons wandering around was pretty bad news.

[Shryke]

We will have to disagree on this one. Given the ease of defense once the limiting reagent side gets the BG the numerically superior side is fucked. At heart this is a flawed mechanic because it always favors the side that queues the fewest people. Obviously for maximum benifit if your are the fewest people and on defense you basicly cant lose.

I have queued for Tol Barad 12 times so far and never gotten into the battle, this is a broken system.

The problem is defense is too easy. Tilt the TB the other way and it's fine.

Your idea is terrible because it further fucks over the side with fewer people.

There's no reason the side with more people should get more shots at the dailies and the raid from TB. It's not like there's a line-up or something so they need more time to do it. A roughly 50/50 split is what you want.

[TerraPrime]

So far, did a few heroics. The pugs are.... how to put it.... horribly bad in a horrifying way. Two days ago I got Stonecore for random, and we ran through 5 healers, and probably 7 sets of DPS, for 2hrs, and still can't kill the first boss. People were either under-powered (like barely 4k dps for some of the dps classes like mages or rogues), or they were stupid. I mean, really, see the dust on the ground? Yeah, don't stand in it. We went in with a guild group last night and cleared everything in 1 shot, other than the 3rd boss, because I missed a stone mash (I was tank). It helps though the guildies know of a trick to make the first few pulls a lot easier (basically, ignore first pack, go around, and kill all the following packs. Then run back and engage the first pack - this way, that NPC jumps only once.)

Heroic Tol'vir was pretty easy with the right cc. I also did heroic HoOr and other than not seeing the graphics on the ground that heals the void boss trash, we did well.

We also did TolBarad twice. It was pretty easy, though I had to rely on the other tank for the taunt off alert since Grid is not functioning properly yet in that instance.

The guild went into Blackrock Cavern last night. I helped with the trash pull up to first boss, then they attempted the first boss with just 1 tank. They killed it after 1.5 hr. I was listening in on vent. The second boss they brought in a different off tank and they didn't get it down. So I think we're going back tonight to give it another shot.

In the mean time, I got exalted with Therazane now and got the shoulder chant. Now I'm working on Earthen Ring rep to get the head chant. Also, grinding engineering. I need A LOT of obsidium. I had over 120 ore stored and it only got me to 474. I'm now out of Obsidium and need to farm more of it.

In terms of gearing, I'm dying on hit and expertise. Trying to put all expertise gems in sockets and it's still way below cap. I don't know how the other tanks are doing, but a lot of the plate tanking gear (iLvl 333 or thereabouts) are low on expertise.

[Kalbear]

I love stonecore, but it is a PUG killer. Each boss has all sorts of fun challenging 'don't stand in stuff' that is completely unforgiving. In addition, the first encounter requires good burst AoE or you basically lose. Then there's the fun trash pulls which can quickly result in wipes, that each boss has its own special fuck you to players (getting behind pillars on Slabhide but also LoSing the healer, Ozruk's shatter mechanic and then deciding to shockwave the melee for no reason, Azil's interrupts, etc).

It's wonderful. It is almost entirely a perfect test of a pre-raider.