Holy shit, no one told me we started a new thread!
Anyway, let’s talk Tides of War!
WTF Hiroshima? Do Not Want.
Kalec and Jaina’s romance was so contrived and boring. Le sigh.
Still don’t like Varian’s (literal) magic transformation into a calm, moderate ruler who actually talks Jaina down. I miss my old awesome Jaina. 
Found the last couple pieces for my priest’s transmog today:
http://www.mister-rik.com/hosted/wow/syanalle_transmog.jpeg
I’d made the 3-piece Primal Mooncloth set (robe, shoulders, belt) for her many months ago. Today I was perusing the AH just looking for a suitable hat and some white gloves, and I quite accidentally found the Gloves of Piety, which are a perfect match for the Primal Mooncloth set.
Looks good, I don’t like those hats myself though it does match.
I will post my transmogs over the weekend, have my warlock and 70 hunter all ready.
I’m glad you have a plan! Sorry for assuming you didn’t have any 85s yet. ;_;
I’ve been looking around for monk transmog sets. There’s a lot of chatter about what people are planning to mog, but almost all the sets I’ve seen are chestpiece + pants. I don’t like that look on female pandaren at all. Robes all the way! All I know is, I really want this hat model, because IT HAS A NECKLACE OMG.
Oh and, monks are being added to the classes who can equip Warglaives. Not that you can transmog them. Frankly, I don’t see the point. I guess people like looking cool while sitting around in queue?
I did also buy one of the plain white hoods, just in case I decide I don’t like that hat 
[spoiler]Not to mention:
Magic as math? Do we really need to ruin another universe’s mystical force (coughMidichlorianscough)by linking it to something mundane (if useful) like mathematics in ours.
and
A former Aspect and supposed master of magic can’t keep up with a bleedin’ Goblin Zeppelin?
I honestly enjoyed Golden’s last book, Thrall: The Mary Sue story…I mean Twilight of the Aspects…but Tides was painfully cliche to me in practically every way. The only good thing was the continued tradition of Golden killing off Knaak’s Mary Sue characters (Krasus in the last book, Rhonin in this one). Honestly, I’d love to see the two authors get into a character kill-off war and make Game of Thrones look tame in comparison. ;)[/spoiler]
Given that I literally just levelled Tailoring to 525 on my Priest, I’d say that farming up Frostweave and Embersilk will also be beneficial, though probably not immediately at launch. It takes something like 1400 Frostweave and 1700 Embersilk cloth to hit 525 currently, and that’s not including the crap ton of cloth that tailors will need for older bags until prices stabilize on the new MoP tailoring bag, the Royal Satchel. Even then, technically, the Illusionary Bag has more slots (26 to the Satchel’s 24), though the Satchel is not bind-on-equip. Prices on cloth will probably tank briefly post launch as people dump off their supply on their toons, but pretty soon after, I suspect embersilk especially will jump in price.
Not gonna lie, I was going to go on a rampage if Shandris bit it. Luckily, because Metzen very likely literally wants to be Malfurion (and Thrall), she survives through the Malfurion->Tyrande->Shandris chain.
WoW seems to suffer from having a sliding scale of power for characters. To keep everything balanced, Tyrande needs her awesome scale brought down so her experience doesn’t overshadow Varian, which has his awesome scale brought up to compete with other, older characters. This leaks over to Kalecgos, who has to be slid down the scale to not seem too powerful now.
I miss Korialstrasz - he was the first WoW character I liked from being in WoW, not in Warcraft III or other media.
On an unrelated note, I hate guild drama. Pretty much everyone but the guild leader and his wife left, and even though I had no stake in the drama, I left just because I was lonely. Now I feel bad because I still like the couple people I left behind, but I missed everyone else too!
Currently on my server embersilk is about half the price it has been through all of Cata (so 40-45g per stack, instead of 85-90). It’s an ideal time for an investor to buy, with an eye for reselling it in ~2 months. That grotesque inflation is exactly what happened with frostweave (which for months has sat steady at 70g per stack, occasionally selling for upwards of 100g to the desperate buyer). But embersilk in MoP, while a good investment, is a fairly long-term hedge. It’s pretty likely to work, but the returns aren’t sufficiently temporal for my liking. 
However, once MoP drops, I am not going to worry about gold at all for the next, oh… 2 months. I am sitting on about 38k right now, after lots of dailies, leveling, and the propitious drop of a Battered Hilt while my DK was soloing H HoR. 
I don’t think I’ll need to run through more than 20k of that to get my monk raid-ready and current on flying skill. The money she’ll make while leveling 80-90 is nothing to sneeze at, either. It won’t be enough to counteract the initial investment, not by a long shot, but it will help mitigate it. I’ll probably still have enough left over to fully fund some decent professions on her, but I’m going to go on a mining binge for the next 7 days to prepare.
Playing the auction house is not an enjoyable pastime for me, it’s more of a necessary evil. Generally speaking, I don’t have a sophisticated money-making strategy. I haven’t *needed *one. On my main realm right now, I have 8 85s and 1 75 to level to 90. So, between quest money and dailies (and occasional fishing fundraisers), I’ve always managed to do better than break-even. Not to mention, between my own professions and my guildmates, I’m not often at the mercy of the auction house. Other than gems, because I transferred my JC off the realm.
I’m probably going to make my panda a JC/BS, which will mean that I have every single profession covered between my alts. Never leveled blacksmithing before, I’m not looking forward to that!
That was in an old beta build, the current Royal Satchel has 28 slots and is Bind on Equip.
I just finished the Theramore scenario(horde version), and it was…ok, I guess. Pretty easy, I suppose it has to be since you need to be able to do it with just about any class/spec combo.
Kind of like doing an instanced 3 man quest.
I did it (Alliance version) on my rogue tonight, along with two paladins.
I just ran the scenario myself. Meh, I’m underwhelmed. I knew I likely would be given the specific content, but still.
So we’re the group that saved Thalen in the novel? Jee, I feel great to be a member of the Horde now. Can I join the Alliance after all? You know, right after I toss my mini-mana bomb into the Orgrimmar orphanage…
Well there you go, a plain white hood would be much better in my opinion.
Here is my level 70 twink Hunter, Aemas of the Undercity http://i49.tinypic.com/19oymo.jpg
Blacksmithing is a pain to level, I am on my third BS toon at the moment as I like for my plate wearers to have BS. Always scanning the AH for cheap ore as I don’t like to make my druid farm if I can help it.
I ended up doing guild stuff all of last night so missed it but those that did it said meh. Not a good sign.
but resumed the grind. MoP is beginning to not look as terrible as I had denounced it as being. I guess my rationalism mechanisms kicked in. I guess I’ll plunk down the money for the upgrade
My main’s latest insanity has been trying to invert Shattrath faction reputation from Aldor exalted to Scryer exalted. Wowjuju’s reputation calendar tells me I need 1080 basilisk eyeballs to get from deeply despised with the haughty elves of Scryer-ville to merely “meh”. I think I’ve ground about 940 of that. And let me tell you, I thank God for a military career which mostly inoculated me against boredom, because running around Terokkar forest shooting oversized lizards and getting ganked by bored rogues and cat druids is BORING.
I didn’t realize that WoW was running the “Fall of Theramore” scenario thingie. I’ll have to try that tonight. If it’s “meh” enough, it may save me from upgrading the account after all.
FoT is pretty boring, even compared to the other scenarios. And after the first playthrough, most (all?) of the scenarios quickly become boring. But scenarios are not all (or even most) of what MoP has to offer. I really think you should give it a try. The new raids rock. The new 5-man content rocks. Pandas, monks, challenge modes, and the profession changes (especially cooking) are expletiving spectacular. Several people I’ve known who were opposed to monks warmed up fairly quickly after playing the class, it is supafunclass numba one! And holy shit, I’ve been squeeing over pandas since I first played around with their character customization.
I’m SO much more psyched going into this xpack than I ever was going into any other, and I’ve been playing since early Vanilla. Having experienced a small part of what’s coming via the beta, I am so excited. My only gripe going into MoP is cross-realm zoning. But that’s still being tested, bugfixed, and refined. And CRZ alone is not nearly obnoxious enough to make me quit the game.
Apparently CRZ is playing holy hell with the two fishing tournaments. It appears some people have caught the fish on one server, then had a friend invite them to a server in a later time zone so they can turn them in there. One person reported a winner being announced 8 seconds after the STV tournament started. Other people have had a problem with the Northrend tourney; since the tourney covers the whole continent and you can end up changing servers from one zone to the next, a few people mentioned catching the shark and then hearthing to Dalaran, only to find themselves in an earlier time zone where the tourney is already over.
Blizzard’s solution? Cancel the tournaments until they can figure it out.
I’m still trying to figure out whether I want my monk to go Brewmaster or Mistweaver. I tried Windwalker in the beta and was underwhelmed. Brewmaster because… because… Chen Stormstout, and Mistweaver because it looks like an interesting healing class.
I’d do both, but I assume that’s foolhardy, since a dual spec Mistweaver/Brewmaster is probably going to be a lot harder to get gear for than a Windwalker/Brewmaster. Any opinions on either? Or does Windwalker get a lot more interesting later?
WHY are they doing CRZs, anyway? Is there some huge demand for a random mix of realm denizens? It seems like a solution without a problem to me…besides, for some reason the extra gobbledegook in the nameplates for “foreign” toons are really annoying me.
Mistweaver’s stat goals are very different from both Brewmaster’s and Windwalker’s goals, true. But there’s no reason you can’t do both. I am going to main spec Mistweaver/offspec Windwalker. WW is for questing, and MW will be there so I can get quick healer queues for dungeons. You could easily do the same with BM/MW. BM for quests and MW to heal dungeons. I’d recommend starting as BM, because soloing as a MW is pretty painful. Then start healing once you hit 30 and can pick up dual spec. Assuming you’re starting from level 1, it’s very doable to maintain 2 separate gear sets. 1 with int/spi for healing, and 1 with stam/agi for soloing. Only priests can really use the same set for both roles, and plenty of people (including me) have leveled hybrids like this. I like to do dungeons until I’m sick of idiot pugs, then respec & go questing for a while. 2 sets of heirlooms will help, but aren’t necessary.
I definitely recommend getting a taste of healing from 85-90, if nothing else. That should be enough to discover whether you like it or hate it. And there are vendors in every MoP zone who sell greens to help with exactly this. Two sets (one for MW, one for BM/WW) of item level 372 are available right out of the starting gate, from this vendor in Jade Forest. You can use vendor gear from every zone as you level up, to help flesh out your off-set and any missing pieces. Each zone has a progressively higher level of available gear for purchase.
Incidentally, Singegruff’s gear is also a great way to help bump up your alts geared in Cata blues & greens.
That’s actually amazing, and increases my desire to do BM/MW to a great degree. I’m so happy they made non-trash vendor items.
