MoP-ing up after the Cataclysm: Updated WoW General Discussion 8/22/12

Of course you’re allowed to kill it. You’re even encouraged to. Of course, the extra-special Zandalari rares do take more skill, or greater numbers.

The key is learning their “special moves” and how to avoid, mitigate, or survive them. The special moves are not per individual rare, but rather by rare type (Pandaran, Mogu Sorcerer, Jinyu, etc.), so there’s somewhat less to learn.

As pointed out by wiser voises, much of “avoid” is akin to “don’t stand in the fire”: movement. Fr’instance, Mogu melee types cast a cone AoE shock that hurts a fair bit, so if you’re melee, run through them while they’re casting and start whacking them in the kidneys. They don’t follow you, and assuming you aren’t lagging or glitching, you won’t get hit and you’ll get a few free shots at the baddy’s back.

Some caster types have “don’t stand in shadow pool” DOT kinds of things; the response to this is to step out as soon as the cast finishes (you’ll take maybe 1 tick). Sidestep a bit and drag the caster away if you need more room.

The only rarespawns that give my melee types is the Mantid ones that spawn tornadoes, but I think I could avoid that with sufficient melee kiting. The ones that give my hunters fits are the Pandarans, because they’re Spinning Crane Kick will two-shot a hunter pet, which means I have to concentrate on rapidly recalling my pet before the spin starts (during its cast time). If you can do that (and it’s a brief cast time), he doesn’t follow his aggro target while spinning. Otherwise, running away is just exhausting yourself before he Crane Kicks your ass to death.

Not a rare spawn, but my paladin has fun soloing that Behemoth thing for one of the GL dailies. As long as you can get behind him before he lands that big stomp thing, you’re okay (and some self-healing ability doesn’t hurt either) I had to do it twice yesterday, which was kind of annoying. I got him the first time outside of the actual ruins, so I had a bit of help from the GL NPCs out there. But then he actually managed to surprise me while I was in the ruins (he came up behind me just as I was finishing with the last mob I needed for one of the other quests). So I had to fight him again while simultaneously dodging the Lightning Pools those frakkin’ black wind serpents were spitting at me. Good times.

HOORAY

Finally got a second character through Outland. No, that wasn’t a typo. My repository of alts seem to be capped at level 61. :smiley:

It’s just painful to go through there, but with heirlooms and rested XP it’s going much faster. Technically I’m still in Shadowmoon Valley, but I’ve never quested outside of Hellfire and Terokkar before so I wanted to explore. I tried Netherstorm, but instead of a bunch of blood elves, all I get are goblins sending me on boring quests so I moved on.

Seeing as the point of this exercise was getting me a max level Hordie, I spent some time questing in Nagrand for lore and ha ha everyone hates Garrosh, just as it should be. And Saurfang the Younger :frowning:

FOR QUEL’THALAS!

Y’all totally know I’m just doing this because the blood elves actually get to do shit now.

What a difference a good weapon makes! I’ve mentioned that my tauren paladin is way behind my other 90s, gear-wise. She’s been at 461 vs. my Alliance toons all being 485+. I had taken her through the first solo scenario on the Isle of Thunder a while back, and it was such a difficult, frustrating experience that I just left off going any further and haven’t played her much at all.

She accumulated enough Honor via the Grizzly Hills PvP dailies to pick up a 476 ring, and as I mentioned a couple days ago she blew 28.5k gold on that Bloodmoon, Reborn axe (iLvl 502). With only those two gear upgrades, I took her back to the IoT and blew through the rest of the solo scenarios with very little trouble, and not a singe death.

Did you open a ticket? Losing the weaponry ain’t normal. I still have a bunch of stuff I kept from vanilla simply because I liked the names.

I was going to suggest that Raza check some WoW databases to see if those items still exist in-game, but realized that it’s very unlikely that you’d remember what the weapons you had were named after all this time.

Guess I’m just wondering if the items you had were removed from the game, which (presumably) would mean that anyone who had one of those items would lose it.

I can’t think of any case where items other currency have been flat out removed from the game, made unobtainable yes, but then people who already had them would still get to keep them. In some cases existing items were converted into grey vendor trash, eg ammunition, thrown weapons, rogue poisons, but never removed from people’s inventory.

My bow showed up in my backpack the next day. After reading some similar complaints on the Interwebs, they suggested changing zones and re-checking mail and bags the next day, and it worked. All hail the burning dogs!

So what’s everyone up to in-game?

I scored some shinies last night. I became Exalted with Shado-Pan, and got the 3 faction tiger mounts, the onyx cloud serpent from the finale quest, and the pandaren kite mount. I also did my 5000th daily, and made a Blingtron 4000. I’m going to push through the last 3 Pandaria rep grinds so I can get to 55 exalted reputations, and then it’s on to battlegrounds.

Let’s see…

I was logged into my 85 troll hunter, Jabloo, whom I haven’t really played much this expansion. All I’ve done with him is run Grizzly Hills PvP dailies to accumulate HP and get him fully kitted out in the Cataclysmic Gladiator PvP gear. Still, that gave enough XP to eventually get him close to level 86. Apparently, he was sitting at 1 XP point shy of dinging. While looking at the world map, I was puzzled to see that every capitol city was represented on the map by a little gray tower icon, except for Exodar. It finally occurred to me that it was because this toon had never set foot on Azuremyst. Still, the icon for Darnassus was showing, and I couldn’t remember him ever going there, either. So I flew him over to Teldrassil, and looking at the zone map I was surprised to see that he had, at some point, managed to completely explore all of Teldrassil except for Darnassus (I’m still not sure how he managed that). So I flew him straight up the side of the tree (instead of braving the portal) and inched him into Darnassus far enough to “discover” it … and immediately dinged level 86 thanks to the 8 XP I got for the discovery. Then I looked at my XP bar and it said 7/X-whatever. So 1 point to ding, + 7 carryover to the next level :smiley:

After that I took the boat over to Azuremyst and fully explored both draenei islands, which also ended up earning Jabloo the “Explore Kalimdor” achievement. I hadn’t realized he’d explored all the rest of the continent.

Meanwhile, I got my dwarf paladin, Aigerlinn, to 85 yesterday. She promptly equipped the iLvl 450 chest and cloak that my level 90 toons had found for her in Pandaria, as well as the iLvl 463 trinket my 90 nelf hunter had “made” from Archaeology. Aigerlinn is my fourth or fifth paladin, but the first one I’ve leveled entirely in Protection spec. You’ll notice she’s wielding an Agility mace. It’s actually her second Agility mace. I seriously cannot find any good Strength 1-handed weapons on the AH, and they’re few and far between as quest rewards. Her first +AGI mace was a Cataclysm weapon that she equipped while still doing WotLK content, and her current mace is an MoP weapon she equipped while doing Cata content. So the massive, inherent DPS increase more than offset the lack of +STR on the weapons.

She has the quest to go to Pandaria, but I’ve locked her XP for now because I want her to spend more time finishing Cata content (hell, she hit 85 halfway through Deepholm). I did the same thing with WotLK content when she hit 80, because I wanted to take the time for her to grind out all the Argent Tournament reps/Champion stuff so that she could obtain that Argent Charger mount. My human paladin has that mount, and it’s my favorite ground mount, but I discovered that it isn’t an account-wide mount. So each of my paladins will need to earn it separately. I know I could have just continued leveling while I ground out the AT stuff, but I know from experience that, once I’ve started on the next expansion’s content, it’s hard to make myself go back to the older stuff.

I think I mentioned a while back that my human paladin, Eilyssana, had solved the Mantid Sky Reaver archaeology artifact, but that I had no toon on the server to give it to. She was Ret, my warrior is Arms, and my DK has been sitting idle at level 60 for a few years now. So, what the heck. I’ve finally gotten comfortable playing Protection, thanks to leveling Aigerlinn, so I changed Eilyssana’s off-spec to Protection (previously, her off-spec was a PvP Ret spec). Got her a shield, equipped the mantid sword, and used her two most recent Battlefield: Barrens weekly quests to obtain a helm and shoulders suitable for Protection.

Edit: Oh, and I’ve finally resigned myself to playing WoW on my Windows laptop instead of my iMac. I still hate the small screen, but the improvement in performance was just to great to ignore any longer.

Just trying to kill a few more heroic ToT bosses before the next raid tier to get our server ranking up enough to recruit new players if needed. Currently only have 2/13H, but should be able to get 4-5 down before the patch if the roster holds up.

Other than that… finished up the Kaxxi and go the Wakener title. Probably moving on to Shado-Pan next, but not entirely sure. Just started looking at cooking/Tillers stuff, because it hasn’t really been necessary yet this xpac from what I can tell.

Glad that I likely won’t have to do LFR any more (unless I don’t finish up the cloak questline before the patch). But instead it looks like they’re going to make flex-mode raid gear powerful enough that it’s semi-mandatory. Hopefully not…

I don’t know if I’m getting better at PvP, or if I simply keep getting attacked by people who are even worse at it than I am. I’ve now won seven consecutive, 1v1, world PvP encounters. Eight if you count that lvl 90 DK that attacked my lvl 90 paladin in Grizzly Hills, and then ran away when he wasn’t able to kill me quickly. Five of those eight encounters involved my shadow priest, one on my human paladin, one on my human rogue, and last night, one on my tauren paladin. In every instance, it was the other player who attacked me first — I never initiate world PvP.

Last night’s fight, between my tauren paladin, Donoma, and a worgen druid, was more amusing than anything. Donoma is my weakest, most undergeared level 90 toon. OTOH, that druid that attacked her must have been geared even more poorly, given that he had about 10k fewer hit points. Anyway, he attacked me, as was his right, when Donoma was in the Alliance area of IoT, doing the PvP dailies. He basically just kept spamming Moonfire (or whatever druids have at level 90 that looks like Moonfire — I’ve never played a druid past level 24), and trying to make me come at him while he stood in the middle of a bunch of NPCs. Since I wasn’t going to fall for that, I turned the tables on him and just turned and ran for “open ground” away from nearby Alliance NPCs, until I was out of range. That forced him to come after me if he wanted to continue, and once we were away from NPCs I engaged him in melee (while he kept spamming Moonfire). Meanwhile, we were both self-healing, and it was basically a stalemate — neither of us was overcoming the other’s self-healing.

He kept trying to draw me in amongst the NPCs, I kept drawing him back out. I evenually managed to get his health down far enough to force him to retreat. I allowed him to retreat back amongst the NPCs; I only needed to kill two more Kirin Tor to finish my quests and wanted to get done with it. So I found the two nearest Kirin Tor and engaged them. Naturally, that’s when the druid decided to try again. I let him keep Moonfiring me while I dispatched the NPCs. Then I decided, “Okay, my quests are done, I’m ready to turn them in, and this guy is getting annoying.” I popped Avenging Wrath, summoned my Guardian of Ancient Kings, and unloaded on him. He didn’t last long. He died, I /saluted him, and teleported back to the Horde base :smiley:

In other Donoma news, she’s finally into the Battlefield: Barrens stuff. She did the Blood in the Snow scenario on Wednesday night, and did Dark Heart of Pandaria Thursday night. The latter scenario took two attempts. The first time she queued, she was grouped with a hunter and a warrior. We killed one of the elite elementals, and then the hunter decided to pull the big, named elemental. That didn’t go well. I died, then the warrior died, and then the hunter kept trying to solo the elemental until he finally died. It really looked like he was probably way overgeared and figured he’d “carry” us. Not realizing that I was kinda undergeared. Of course, neither the warrior nor I could rez while he was still in combat (what’s up with that, anyway? it seems unique to scenarios). When the hunter died, both he and the warrior dropped group. So I had to queue again, and ended up with a different hunter and a rogue. We did fine until the last boss, which took three attempts. But we finally got through it.

I didn’t get my rogue to the Barrens until Thursday, and by that time there didn’t seem to be any big groups doing commanders, so I decided to just grind mobs for the weekly. There seemed to be only three Alliance in the whole zone — me, a shaman, and a warlock — and the shaman persuaded us to form a group with him, insisting that he could keep us alive. I said that there weren’t enough of us, but he was insistent that he could keep us alive. Guessing that he was majorly raid-geared or something, I went ahead and joined the group. He tried to keep us alive. He failed. Four deaths later, I decided that was enough (w00t! 87g repair bill! Good thing my rogue is rich!) and went back to grinding mobs.

My rogue is finally geared well enough that I discovered last night she can go back to doing Shado-Pan dailies. I’d been avoiding those because some of them seemed so tank-centric, and my sub rogue has such pathetic AOE that I just didn’t like dealing with the crowds of mobs on certain of those dailies. But she did them easily last night.

I really think that Soulforge/Lightforge paladin armor must have been designed with dwarves in mind. I haven’t gotten the DMF transmog gear for my tauren paladin because it just looks ridiculous on her (not surprising, given that there were no tauren paladins when that gear was designed). My human paladin is using it (the Battlefield: Barrens version, not the DMF transmog gear, though she has the red & yellow DMF version as well) for her off-spec tanking set, and it looks kinda “meh”. But it looks absolutely perfect on my female dwarf paladin, Aigerlinn: World of Warcraft

Oh, for any Burning Dog Legionnaires who might still be reading this thread: I can’t remember who plays Lingyao, who took over as guild leader. Um, the leadership is up for grabs again because you haven’t been on in a while. Actually, there’s hardly any BDL members logging in these days.

Yeah, the BDL seems pretty inactive right now. I get on with my level 90 Paladin Kalathan at times, but haven’t really decided if I want to spend the time grinding the weekly Barrens quest with her or not. She’s already exalted with multiple groups; about the only one left is Isle of Thunder rep, and I’m not crazy about those dailies.

I also have my level 90 hunter Korona in the BDL. She still has a handful of quests left that she hasn’t actually done. I’ve done a few dailies with her, but (it seems strange to say after leveling one to 90) hunters aren’t exactly my favorite characters.

Mostly I’ve been playing my human Death Knight Blackspear. He’s got exalted rep with even more groups than Kalathan (those purchasable “double reputation” items for an account really pay off!), and I’ve done the Barrens weekly with him multiple times – I’ve got DPS and Tanking gear for all the available slots filled from those quests, and still have a couple of Radical Mojo leftover that I haven’t figured out what to do with yet.

I’ve got a few other toons scattered around Windrunner and Cairne (Cairne’s my Horde server, Windrunner’s my Alliance server) of various levels, very few of which have seen much playing time lately. Most of my time has been spent leveling a Blood Elf Death Knight. She’s currently level 82 and just started Deepholm. When she hits level 85 I’m going to lock out the XP for her – I want to make sure that I get the full experience with her.

I also have a level 20 human monk that I started a couple of weeks ago that I play every now and then.

I don’t know if anyone else feels this way, but it seems as though leveling goes too fast nowadays. I know with the monk I would hit a level where it was time to move on to the next zone in what seems like a remarkably short time. What with guild XP bonuses and all, it seems as if it only takes a handful of quests to reach a new level. The monk hit level 20 (and time to move to Darkshire) with a lot of Redridge Mountains left still to cover. Kind of miss the days when reaching a new level was a big deal…

Donoma went ahead and dethroned Lingyao. If somebody else wants the guild leadership, I’ll hand it over. I just figured there should be somebody in the spot.

Le roi est mort. Vive le roi!

My rogue hit Exalted with the Shado-Pan today (finally)! She finished up the storyline that ends with defending Niuzao … I somehow didn’t realize there was more story. I’d been neglecting the Shado-Pan dailies, and the only “yellow” quests my rogue was seeing were the “Challenge So-and-so” quests. Didn’t realize there’d be more once she hit Exalted! So anyway, she’s got her fancy Onyx Cloud Serpent now :slight_smile:

OTOH, she also bought a Red Shado-Pan Riding Tiger, and … it wasn’t what I was expecting. I thought it was going to be one of those shiny, metallic-skinned flying cat mounts I’ve seen all over the place. I mean, my bad, I should have done my research, but I don’t recall any other possible vendor that sells the shiny mounts. Where the heck are people getting those? There seem to be too many of them out there to be a raid drop…

They’re Jewelcrafting mounts. There are four whose patterns are sold by the Order of the Cloud Serpent quartermaster; you can then create a fifth if you have the four of them made (but not learned).

Ah, cool, thanks :slight_smile: Shame I don’t have a jewelcrafter! OTOH, this rogue is filthy rich (well by my standards), so maybe I’ll buy one at some point.
Remember that Alliance druid that my tauren paladin beat in 1v1 world PvP a couple days ago? Tonight we both found ourselves in the Ruins of Ogudei at the same time. Specifically, at the big bosses down at the bottom of the ruins. So we got to help each other take them out. Then once we moved up to the “main” level of the ruins, I helped him dispatch a few of those tethered mogu. However, despite my emotes, I didn’t get any indication that he recognized me :frowning: I did look him up on the Armory, though, and that confirmed my suspicions that he was more poorly-geared than Donoma is. He’s wearing a mishmash of green (iLvl 437), blue, and purple gear (highest being a 522 necklace). So probably a somewhat-fresh 90.

I have managed to improve Donoma fairly quickly. She was actually my second toon to 90, being my main Horde toon - I got my human rogue to 90, then I got Donoma there. But then … I got my hunter to 90 (the one I moved to Quasi’s guild), then my human paladin and nelf priest followed, and I wound up neglecting her just because I didn’t have time to run all those dailies on five 90s. But my Alliance 90s are pretty much as geared as they’re going to get outside of raiding (they all have full 476 Malevolent Gladiator gear, and I’ve filled most of their slots with appropriate 489 & 496 PvE gear so that they have both PvE and PvP sets; right now it’s just a matter of obtaining PvE trinkets and jewelry, as well as cloaks for a couple of them), so I’ve been focusing on Donoma lately. Between getting her through the IoT scenarios so she can do the PvP dailies there, doing Battlefield: Barrens, running dailies for VP, and blowing most of her gold on that 502 axe off the AH, I’ve bumped her iLvl from 461 to 479 in fairly short order.

You know, this is the thing I’m enjoying so much about MoP, compared to Cata. Months after they’ve hit level cap, I’m still improving my toons, slowly but surely. Cata just completely boned players like me (i.e., non-raiders). My 85s in Cata just … hit 85 and then … nothing. Hey, Molten Front! Ooo, new … rings. Yay. Being a non-raider, I don’t expect instant gratification. I don’t mind being able to, slowly but surely, grind out incremental improvements to my character. It’s satisfying being able to get on my rogue and knock out those Shado-Pan dailies that, a few months ago, she couldn’t do. Cataclysm didn’t give me that. Those Molten Front dailies, once I earned the gear they gave, weren’t much easier 3 months in than they were the day I started them. MoP is providing a sense of progression that Cata never did. I don’t see myself cancelling my subscription for the last six months of the expansion like I did in Cata.

OTOH, I think I need to start running scenarios. For JP, since all the current VP stuff is going to convert to JP with the next patch. The only scenarios I’ve run so far have been the ones required for Lion’s Landing/Dominance Point and the ones to open Battlefield: Barrens, and Theramore (Alliance-side, pre-MoP launch). There’s a bunch of scenarios I haven’t touched at all. And maybe start doing LFG again for 5-mans. I haven’t grouped for a 5-man heroic since Wrath.

I agree. My overachieving completionist tendencies had me finishing off Cata dailies at the same time I was leveling in Pandaria, so any rares or epics I got from Cata factions were quickly replaced by Pandaria greens. I had a nonexistent feel for Cata @ 85. I still have the sense, though, that Pandaria at cap is a much better experience. I have a greater incentive to finish things off. In Cata, I was just doing them for the Exalted rep, maybe a trinket, and the meta achievement mount. With Pandaria, though, there’s epics from a few factions I’m considering.