I used to be a hardcore raider. Not in the sense that we were pushing cutting-edge content–our guild was usually in the top 3 on our server, but nothing earth-shattering–but in the sense that I raided all the time! For a while there I was raiding 6 nights a week anywhere from 2 to 4 hours a night (in addition to playing all afternoon). I got pretty bad there for a while, and the spouse was getting pretty (justifiably) grumpy about it.
Along about Dragon Soul, I dialed it back. I was bored with the content, we’d hit a wall on some of the heroic stuff, and I just didn’t want to do it anymore. I limped along until the end of Cataclysm. When MoP came out, I made the conscious decision not to raid at all except for the occasional LFR.
Best decision I ever made! All this free time, nobody depending on me to be around, no studying boss strats and keeping up with the latest changes in my class to make sure I was taking advantage of everything I could…Now I just level my toons, run heroics, run LFR when it suits me…it’s great!
I think I can say with reasonable certainty that I will never go back to full time raiding again. It’s just not compelling to me anymore. Everything seems like “been there, done that” and it’s a constant treadmill where you never win and the only reward is a new treadmill.
A lot of my raiding friends have hit this realization fairly recently too. Might just be burnout from playing so long. I still enjoy WoW, but I’m a casual now and never been happier.
But it is, if you use other skills. The TT was designed to be great if you’re going hunting for pets, as you won’t “accidentally” kill that blue with an unexpectedly high crit from your 3-levels-lower pet.
I’m just LFRaiding - my former “raiding guild” has been taken over by one of those groups where everybody knows each other “outside”, you ask for comms, they say “nah, not needed”, but *they *are on comms. My ex-main is still there because of some friends, but well… she’s become my ex-main.
But hey, more pets for hunters! About bloody time!
Man the Horde is damn near unstoppable in BGs in my group lately. We’re struggling to win even AV or Isle of Conquest, the ones Alliance used to dominate. Think I’ve managed one win in the new BG in somethng like a dozen tries so far.
Crowd control is just ridiculous. Fear-stun-fear-stun-dead. Wash, rinse, repeat. I think they need to ramp up diminishing returns on crowd control in pvp…maybe once you get stunned, you’re immune for a minute…or even 30 seconds. Same with fear. It’s really sucking all the fun out of the game.
Yeah, my group is fairly happy with our slowly limping through old content each Saturday night. We cleared ToES last weekend, better late than never! No, seriously, I’m still wanting that damn Majordomo Staghelm kill from when I was in my old guild.
I was playing my human ret paladin and doing some PvP quests in Venture Bay (so I was flagged) when I got blindsided by yet another Horde DK … and, for all intents and purposes, I beat him. He had 447k hit points to my 378k, yet without casting a single heal on myself I knocked him down to about 25% health while never dropping below about 60% myself.
And then … he ran away. That was completely unexpected. I asked in General later, but nobody could tell me: Do DKs have some sort of “get out of combat” ability, like rogues have Vanish? I don’t know exactly what he did, but he disappeared from my sight and I suddenly found myself fighting a floating sword. Next thing I saw was the DK a short distance from me (maybe 50 yards), flying away on his sparklepony.
My only explanations for my “success” in that fight are that he either sucked more at PvP than I do, or that he was wearing no PvP gear and failed to notice that I was dressed in full Malevolent Gladiator’s gear.
Or, possibly, he was expecting to gank a mid-70s character (it was in Venture Bay, as I mentioned) and was unprepared when I actually turned out to be level 90.
Huh. From the blue posts for the May 29th hotfixes:
I didn’t know it was broken. Maybe my dps will go up! Ha ha.
In other buggy news, I’m one of the people who is having trouble with the Overturned Shipments in Battlefield: Barrens. Basically, the broadcast message will come up in chat, but the shipments never materialize. A blue confirmed it was buggy. Really annoying, because I’d like another way to get resources.
I suspect we’re getting announcements for spawns in realms we don’t see. In other words, the spawns are happening in a non-cross-realm “layer” or phase, but the messages are being spammed across all realms in a battlegroup, so the majority of the messages have nothing to do with the server you’re playing on.
When the message comes up, I check the map. Legit spawns show up there. Otherwise, it’s back to grinding individual Kor’kron supply weenies, waiting for caravan announcements, and wishing we could get enough people together to down a boss or two.
Oh, yeah, other annoyance: escortable caravans that travel close enough to the edges of the North Barrens zone that they or their attackers phase in and out. Very annoying to be continually Rapid Shot at by Kor’kron Caravan Raiders I can’t see or defend myself against. (I think I’m not the first to complain about that here. It is very annoying.)
That sounds similar to the still-not-fixed CRZ problems with Wintergrasp, wherein there is serious disagreement between my world map, Dalaran, and the zone itself as far as which faction has control. I’ve learned to never take the portal from Dalaran to WG; I’ve stepped through that portal twice on my human rogue and found myself in a Horde-controlled WG Fortress. Fortunately, since it was my rogue I was able to Vanish out of trouble, but ever since then I always take the flight path instead of the portal. Because the portal LIES.
No, no no. The cake is a lie. The Portal is moist, delicious, and truthful.
I dunno. I was speculating, and I certainly don’t know the implementation of CRZ, but the spawn message problems certainly felt like a CRZ partitioning issue.
CRZ: another Blizzard technology where the solution is worse than the problem.
I just discovered yesterday that in addition to the Ethereal vendors who do Transmogrification, Void Storage, and Arcane Reforging, there’s also one (at least in the Pandaria level 90 ‘safe house’ inns) who will upgrade items in exchange for Justice Points and Valor Points.
I was able to upgrade a couple of the blue items on my BE Paladin using Justice Points. Sadly, it appears that in order to upgrade purples (or perhaps it’s just items of level 476 or higher, which on my toons all happen to be purple) you need to use Valor points. So my Death Knight still doesn’t know what to do with the 2000+ Justice Points that he’s amassed from running scenarios, etc.
Oh, and I’ve been doing the weekly quests where you have to get the 150 meat, 150 lumber, 150 oil, and 150 stone. I was on Sunday morning, and apparently myself and one Night Elf were the only ones in Durotaur that morning. A couple of caravans overturned, and we had the looting all to ourselves. Bliss.
Also, if you can find a group that’s running around taking down the bosses, you can accumulate the 150 of each item a lot quicker than grinding through mobs getting one or two of each item at a time. I’ve done that 2-3 times now, and it gets tedious. Thank goodness it’s a weekly quest, so you can at least break it up over several days…
Depending on your ilvl, you don’t really need to do the weekly more than once. IIRC, the items that you can make with the weekly bonus currency and the dropped armor tokens is 480-something, which I’m far past. Once I figured it out, I did it one more week to pick up the Gahz’rilla pet and haven’t done it since.
It’s level 489 gear that you can get from the weekly quest - basically the same as what you can buy from the various quartermasters with Valor Points. For my Death Knight, I was able to replace a couple of lower-level pieces (463 and 476) with the 489 level pieces faster than I would have by trying to grind out Valor Points via dailies and Scenarios.
Ditto with my BE paladin; although she only has a couple of level 489 pieces of gear thus I’d be running the weekly several times if I want to go that upgrade route. That’s why I was thrilled to discover that you can upgrade the lower-level gear with Justice points (and bummed to discover that you need valor points to upgrade the level 489 gear).
Or maybe I’ll just leave her as is and amuse myself by leveling one of my other, lower-level alts.
Oh, and for the record, just let me state that I find many of the dailies on the Isle of Thunder extremely annoying to the point where I don’t want to bother with doing them.
Is there a minimum iLvl for doing the Barrens stuff? With four level 90 Alliance toons, my poor lvl 90 tauren paladin has been sadly neglected (sitting around iLvl 461, compared to my other 90s being 480+). I tried doing the Isle of Thunder stuff with her, and managed to get through the first solo scenario, but died three times in the process. She’s clearly not well-geared enough; doing that scenario wasn’t fun, it was tedious and frustrating. Having a way to pick up at least a few more 489 pieces would be a big help.
I like the PvP dailies, but I really don’t like the PvE quests at all. In particular, the one time I stuck it out through a whole series, I ended up with a quest that required jumping from pillar to pillar while avoiding the electrified ones. Aside from not being good at jumping games (back in Molten Front, I always ended up doing the same set of dailies, because the other set included a stupid platform jumping game), the sad fact that I have to run with all my graphics set to “Low” (except View Distance and Particle Density, which are set to “Fair”), I literally cannot see the difference between the electrified pillars and the “safe” ones.
I recently tried doing the PvE quests on my hunter, since he’s finally fully geared in the iLvl 476 PvP gear and can take a break from the PvP quests. I got the quest to kill Shan’ze Mogu, and discovered that the Shan’ze Reanimators were practically impossible to kill solo thanks to their “start self-healing as soon as they’re almost dead” ability. My damage output couldn’t keep up with their healing. I could beat it if I could pump out non-stop damaging shots, but unfortunately my Focus regeneration couldn’t keep up and I’d be forced to switch to Cobra Shot to gain Focus, and before I knew it the mob’s health would be completely topped off again.
My impression is “Not enforced, but you’re kidding yourself if you aren’t at least ilvl 450+. And proceed cautiously if you aren’t mostly epic (even fabricated or welfare)”.
Just the entry quest chain with the two scenarios (Blood in the Snow, Dark Heart of Pandaria) will kick your ass if you aren’t heroic-5-man equipped. (Unless your class is fundamentally OP.)
And then the Barrens grind? You can win the one-on-one grind fights in the different resource areas, but you’re much less likely to survive an execution mistake (fail to avoid Kor’kron Outrider’s explosive arrow, for instance) or an overpull if you’re undergeared. So expect to die a few times more than otherwise.
The special events in the Barrens will be pretty challenging, too. You may just be able to peck at the edges of boss fights, if there’s already a big crowd in on the fight, but don’t count on it. And nowadays, there aren’t enough people doing the boss fights to make that feasible. Caravan escorts will be pretty frustrating; you may not be able to down Caravan Raiders faster than the add rate for them, and you could die from the accumulated damage. I guess looting the (fairly rare–lots of false positives) overturned enemy caravans is mostly low-risk.
Yeah. Whoever keeps putting stupid platform games into WoW needs to quit. Now. But it double sucks that a critical mechanic of that game (the electrified platforms) requires graphics hardware beyond the documented in-game hardware requirement. (In other words, if the game permits you to play on hardware that can’t display life-or-death graphical elements, the game has failed already.)
For Animators, you need an interrupt. Silencing shot is my MM hunter’s choice. And you have to save the interrupt for Consume Life (the channeled vampiric self-heal). Otherwise, yes, expect them to heal back all the damage you just applied. Extremely frustrating. And also yes, in any multi-mob Shan’ze dude situation (like the mixed patrols of Animators and Bloodseekers), the Animator is almost certainly first priority. God help you if you have multiple Animators and your interrupts have too long of cooldowns. I suggest running away.
Technically, my 2008 iMac’s video card is officially “unsupported” for MoP, which is why I despair of being able to play the next expansion. I’m already at the point where questing in certain areas is terrible just because of video performance. Like in the GL dailies — if they send me to the Whatsit Garrison, half the time I just skip it because my FPS drops to 10-12. I honestly think, though, that there is a bug involving draw distance. There are 2 million mantid on the other side of the wall, and even though the wall stops me from actually seeing them, I think the game is still trying to render them in the background, and it’s totally screwing my FPS. I ran into the same thing in Kun-Lai, in that small village near the wall (Shado-Pan Fallback, I think?). There’s that “fortress” with all the yaungol and sha outside, and when I’m inside, I’m completely surrounded by walls where my computer shouldn’t need to be rendering anything except those walls. If I face north (toward the mountains) my FPS jumps to 30+. But if I face south, toward the door, outside of which are all those mobs, my FPS plummets to 12-15. It’s like the game is forcing my computer to render stuff that I can’t actually see anyway.
As soon as I can afford it, I’m buying a dedicated Windows gaming PC. First, I’m buying a big monitor to plug into my Windows laptop, which renders the game just fine (though I still use low graphics settings). I’m worried, though, that the laptop’s integrated graphics are going to choke trying to handle a much larger monitor (I’m looking to get a 23" or 27" - my iMac has a 20") and be no better than what I see on my iMac.
I ended up skirting the fringes of that area and just picking off the lone Bloodseekers, but it took a godawful long time.
Oh, and I wanted to link the latest Dark Legacy webcomic:
I got my flying hover-disk thingy from the Loremasters recently. Not as visually impressive as some of the mounts, but it’s kinda cool. Sorta cheated to get it. I don’t do archeology, so I googled up a guide to finding all the various lore scrolls in Pandaria, and spent a couple of hours flying around clicking them. Quick route to exalted rep and a new mount…
I think finding the lore objects is the only way to gain rep with the Loremasters. I’ve discovered that doing the archaeology daily doesn’t award any rep. But I do love my Red Flying Cloud (though I don’t understand the “Red” part of the name). Using it almost makes me feel like I’m playing City of Heroes again - it handles similarly to the Rocket Board “mount” you could get in CoH. And if you have the Colossus enchant on your weapon (my rogue uses that one on her off-hand dagger), and mount up on the Red Flying Cloud while the enchant’s proc is active, it makes it look like your toon is inside a snow globe
Hey - maybe people here will know this. I’m looking for a webcomic I saw about WoW when BC just came out. I think it’s by Ctrl+Alt+Del, but I can’t find it. I think there were just 2 panels, the left showed a warlock in full epic tier something gear, and the right said something like “30 minutes after questing in Outland” and he was wearing a ridiculous mishmash of greens (with a tiny umbrella). Can anyone find it?
