Another year with no flying horse for me 
Otherwise, I’ve been enjoying the expansion. Heroics are way easier than the Cata ones, and I did my first Raid Finder run tonight. Killed the three bosses in the first part. Maybe tomorrow I’ll queue up for the 2nd stage. No loot for me, but it was fun to see the bosses for the first time.
To follow on from this, dinged 84 last night before I even got to Therazane. Post-expansion leveling is always so much fun.
I have to admit, I was majorly skeptical of the changes to the class powers, especially with the new talent system. I’ve been enjoying the heck out of my Ret Pally, though I’m still a little baffled that the major damage dealer in my arsenal is Exorcism. I gotta say I don’t mind having plenty of ranged offense, but it still seems odd.
I also decided to completely dump my AddOns folder. I had ended up with 60-some addons by the time I was done with WoW last time, totaling over 200 folders in the AddOns folder, and every time I logged in I was greeted with an error screen. I changed the AddOns folder to Backup-AddOns, moved the Blizzard folders back in, installed ElvUI which is freaking fantastic, then started slowly moving addons back in as I needed them. The game feels a lot leaner and healthier for it, especially since ElvUI handles the job of like 10 of those addons I used to use.
I have a complaint about ElvUI though: it is defined for a very specific range of screen sizes, and not modifiable from the game - if you want to modify it at all, you have to edit the file. Since my biggest screen is smaller than the range of screen sizes, I’d have to dig into “how do I take this part out” and “how do I move this bit elsewhere” in order to be able to use it. Doing that to modify something purely cosmetic such as a text message is as much as I dare…
The letter size is more or less like this in my “big” screen - imagine on the laptop
I am irritated that some features like font size are left out and you can’t really resize the windows, but it’s far from unmodifiable. Every panel in the UI can be moved around freely, and there’s still loads of configuration options even if some key ones are missing. I particularly like how you can define exactly how many buttons on each action bar are visible, and how many buttons there should be per row.
I don’t need two chat windows, so I told Elv to lose the backdrop on the right window, moved the single chat tab on the right side over to the left where it tabs with the others, and put Skada where the right chat window had been (technically still is, but invisible). The data bar at the bottom with ping, FPS, and session time is still visible and useful.
You’re probably right that it’s not the best choice for certain resolutions, and the font size is pretty tiny (I found the ElvUI Alt-Text font to be a lot easier on the eyes), but it’s so thorough in the other areas that I’ll forgive it the drawbacks, which aren’t dealbreakers for me.
Is there a way to move the action bars? I found how to move the rest but not those.
Yes but then we’re back to collecting addons.
When you click Toggle Anchors in ElvUI, the pop-up that lets you lock the UI elements down again has a drop-down that defaults to General. Choose All from the drop-down, and it’ll let you move the bars.
That was the first wall I ran into, too.
Mini-rant: I got woken up by work way too early today, but not so early that I could fall back asleep. So I figured I’d get some WoW in before going to the office.
Bloody maintenance has every server down this morning.
There is little worse than having bonus wow time but be thwarted by server downtime.
Finally hit revered with The Tillers so have 12 plots of land and can plant special seeds to grow mats. Motes of Harmony and Cloth are now guaranteed every day, I like how it has been implemented.
All Blizzard have to do now is make your farm grant rested XP and we have player housing of a sort.
The idea of the farmhouse being an inn for rest purposes is great, but I don’t understand how rested XP figures into it, since you can’t begin the Tillers grind until you’re max-level. The official inn is, what, 40 yards away?
As far as I can tell, the farmhouse isn’t really “yours” until you hit exalted, and Yoon tells you you may well consider the farm your home too. (Certainly, that’s the point I imagined the farmhouse would become an inn, and was disappointed when it didn’t.)
To me, the main convenience of the farmhouse as an inn would be to log out at the farm without the 20 second timeout; especially since the farm is instanced, so there’s no good combat exposure reason for the timeout. Since Gina Mudclaw adds a mailbox at the roadside after you “best friend” her, so it’s already kind of like an inn.
Did they not do maintenance Tuesday? It seemed my realm was available Tuesday morning for me to pick produce (all I do before heading off to work)…but I thought they may have taken the system for weekly maintenance after that. If not…was today’s downtime supposed to be the week’s maintenance outage?
Odd we can’t even count on Tuesday outage any more.
From what I understand, you can start it at 85 if you’re willing to make the run.
And that’s true, as far as it goes. You can start at 85. You can’t finish at 85. You can’t get very far at 85. You certainly can’t get Exalted at 85, or at any point before 90.
You can do the introductory quests as soon as you get to VoFW, but after the initial sequence all the quest givers literally tell you to come back after you have more experience… and they have no quests until you get to 90. You get to Friendly with the faction, but that’s all. All the individual Tiller NPCs show up as “Stranger” except for Gina Mudclaw until level 90.
Yeah, you can plant and pick stuff (from your 4 pititful little patches), but you don’t get the approximately 50 rep points per plant harvested the way you do after you unlock the next set of quests at 90.
Also, you can’t give friendship gifts from dark soil patches until 90. You just have to hold them in your bags. (You can’t see dark soil until you’re 90, either, but you will occaisionally harvest a gift item while working your four pitiful farm patches. I hope you can spare the bag or bank space.)
As far as I know, it’s categorically impossible to get Tiller Honored (let alone Exalted) before dinging 90. If there is a way, I need a pointer, because I have two alts at 86 and 87 respectively, and they camp in Halfhill, and they aren’t seeing any quests at all. And my 90 main (exalted and all NPCs “Best Friends”) had to wait until 90 to begin the grind.
And, responding to myself, I just realized I never tried cooking and feeding the NPCs their favorite foods… you don’t see any quest marker for them until you already have the food in your inventory. OTOH, those never provided any Tiller faction rep while I was doing the grind on my 90, just rep for the individual, and it’s Tiller rep that matters for progression of the farm. So (A) I don’t know it’s possible, and (B) I don’t think it would matter.
Thank you, I’ll give it another try one of these weekends (that’s when I have the not-so-small screen).
Apologies if folks have already discussed this upthread, but when I was doing some Archeology, I found the Spear of Xuen like on my 5th or 6th solve, and even for a RetPally (lvl 87), this spear added and extra 5k of dps over the Spiritblade Decimator that Rahmon made for me 10 days earlier…hate to say it, but this is my new two hander for now.
Well, heck yeah; I’d take a level 463 weapon over a level 45 weapon any day…even if your new weapon has a bonus to AGIL instead of STR
I broke down and dropped $40 on the xpac on Saturday. I am loving it! Great storylines, interesting structure to the quest achievements compared to the previous parts of the game. I’ve been through Jade Forest and Valley of the Four Winds and have started Krasarang (LOVE the quest where you have to kick-roll the panda back to the village!), and when I get home I am going to RUSH back to Halfhill to pick some scallions for that panda in the market! Definitely worth the money…hell, just the training montages with the Hidden Master in Four Winds were worth the money!
My human paladin found an interesting world drop today:
The interesting part: “Requires Level 80” :eek:
I don’t know if that’s intentional or not, but judging by the comments it’s making confetti out of level 80 PvP and Wrath heroics. Hell, it’s better than anything you can get in Cata! It sounds there’s one of these iLvL 409, lvl 80 weapons for most classes/specs.