Yeah, it’s exciting. Until yesterday, I thought that purchasable greens were just a perk of the beta. But they’re definitely going live. They will be a bit inferior to quest gear, but quite enough to get by. It makes it more appealing to level alts because you won’t get slaughtered by mobs in the first quest zone. And it’s easier to fight back in same-level pvp!
I find it amusing that I’m still receiving MoP beta test invitation phishing spam. Spammers need to check their calendars…
Have you levelled a new toon recently? I am on a high pop realm and while levelling I can go a few hours without seeing another player, this is Blizzard’s way of making that low level world a bit more of the MM in MMORPG.
I did not know this, excellent idea and makes switching specs and roles so much easier, I am currently trying to get a +int set together for my paladin at level 56 and it is quite hard. Not even any BS pieces to help at that level.
So release tonight what is the first thing you will be doing? For me it will be getting on my main and starting the push to 90, probably concentrate on that before I do anything else though my 85 druid is my farmer so want to get him going at some point, Gold to be made.
I have, but I guess my playstyle is different from the majority…I usually solo, anyway. I haven’t done a dungeon in years. I’ve never done a raid. Progression is extremely low priority for me. In other words, I LIKED having a zone all to myself.
Sadly, I still have 3 nights of work this week, so I won’t get to start playing at 3am my time when the Pandaria expansion goes live (supposedly without server restarts, but we’ll see how that actually goes). I plan on levelling my Resto/Ele Shaman to 90 first, though. I’m further not going to allow him to leave Pandaria until he hits 90 and the Vale of Eternal Blossoms. After all, lorewise, he’s supposed to be stranded from a shipwreck, and it seems kindof story-breaking to pop back into Orgrimmar whenever I want to.
Here’s something I’m curious about. Based on my experience with WotLK and Cata, is it safe to assume that the purchasable greens, quest reward gear, and random drop stuff in the level 90 area looks exactly like the purchasable greens, quest reward gear, and random drop stuff in the level 85 area, only with minor color changes?
I can think of a reason:
There’s a lot of PvP servers which are about as PvP as my left pinky toenail, due to the enormous population skew. I have a toon in C’Thun because some of my friends play there: the first time I saw an Ally was in Dragonblight, and no I hadn’t been avoiding contested areas. And yet, when you hear players from those places talking, it’s all “oh we’re so macho, but them carebears haha, we’re da troo playahs, woh-yeah!”… u-hu. Right. When the population on the other side is 99% NPCs. Truly macho, mucho but not at all.
Mash two of those servers, with the skews on different sides, together… purr
RP events seem to be getting more people too, but since I basically run by those at full speed I can’t really be sure.
World PvPers are really excited about it, there’s been a lack of world PvP since cities became the hubs of the world. On reddit there’s been a lot of excited people posting screens of Dark Portal and Molten Front PvP.
Don’t you like seeing other players going about their tasks even if you have little desire to interact with them? For me it makes more ‘real’
Exactly more people in each zone = more people to fight. Though my server is RP-PVP and they are only matching us with other RP-PVP realms, as we are the highest pop we aren’t seeing much of a difference. Hopefully Blizz will allow us to CRZ with PVP realms soon though a few RPers are against that, I see their point but I’d rather have the busier zones.
Oh, joy…
The roleplayer in me who wants “immersion” just can’t grok something like Molten Front PvP. I mean, I understand the whole “if it’s red it’s dead” concept. But it just seems out of place in an area like that - petty squabbling while a world-destroying threat is just over the hill. It’s like here on planet Earth, some cosmic accident has sent the moon falling out of orbit, and the impact is going to obliterate all life on Earth, and Iran decides it’s now the ideal time to launch a nuke at Israel.
Sure, so long as their tasks are not the same as my tasks. Do you think that’s likely to happen?
Nothing is so infuriating on an MMO as when you cannot do content because somebody else is already doing it.
Well, as long as they keep the Bloodthirsty Murderer demographic on the PvP/RPvP servers, I’m fine with it. That’s why battlegrounds exist…to keep that group locked away from the rest of us…
Blizzard said this:
[QUOTE=Blizzard]
Lack of Realm Community
We understand that players are concerned about CRZ potentially impacting the sense of community. Cross-realm zones were intended to make lower level zones feel less empty, but may also impact other more populated zones. With more populated areas, we’re aware of concerns over increased competition for resource nodes as well as quest and rare mob spawns. This is something that we’re in the process of evaluating. We’ve already taken some steps to address it by increasing the spawn rates of most rare spawns. If a zone becomes too populated, we’re capable of adjusting how many realms are able to connect to it. Just keep in mind that we do choose spawn times of creatures and profession nodes with a certain zone population in mind – CRZ affords us the ability to better maintain those populations.
[/QUOTE]
So they think they can fix it but aware it could be a problem. I guess we find out tonight when it all kicks off in Panda land, I give it about 30 minutes before I click an Alliance character by accident rather than a mob/quest giver and start a fight.
Yep they will only group realms of the same type.
While we are here I am offended by the Bloodthirsty Murderer remark. Bloodthirsty sure, I am a re-animated corpse who speaks to demons to gain power, but murderer? There is a war on you know, the clue is in the title of the game.
As a member of Sentients for Interspecific Mutual Pacifism (SIMP), I decry the war…at least among the rank and file. We lowly footmen and peons must come together to overthrow the tyrants who throw our lives away to gain a square inch of godforsaken alpine gulch or weird floating island or creepy ancient fortress or, worst of all, to get a flag from one end of that stupid valley to the other! We are not chess pieces! Rise UP, Azerothians (and Outlanders, I guess)! Newbies unite! You have nothing to lose but your lousy starting equipment!
ETA: Aw, who am I kidding? I don’t care how much you all split each other’s heads open, as long as it doesn’t inconvenience me while I’m noodling around completing quests and trying to grow my toon up…I still have PTSD nightmares of pre-battleground Tarren Mill. shudder
I didn’t come here for a lecture on communism, hippy!
This will be my first expansion on a PvP realm, transferred from a PvE realm a few months ago, I may be agreeing with you in a few hours.
Martu, what realm do you play on? Emerald Dream by any chance? I’m RPPVP as well(Maelstrom horde), and CRZ is making our low pop backwater quite grumpy. Anytime someone steals my node or ganks me or loses a duel while gracelessly denigrating their opponent, it’s someone from ED. They’re loud, numerous, and rude. They’re basically the New Jersey of our cross-realm node. 
I don’t even roleplay, so I don’t care about that. But my mat-farming is suffering significantly. And although I’m on a PVP server, I am the world’s biggest carebear. If someone comes up to me, I will /cry and /hug and /beg them not to hurt me. I will fight back same-level ganks, and I even win sometimes. But nearly all of the involuntary world PVP I have encountered since CRZ comes from level ?? players. I really hate wasting my time like that. I really hope CRZ becomes opt-in, or rubberbands based on character level. 
Left-click to interact rather than right-click. Left-click will still interact with npcs and objects in the world, without turning on your auto-attack by accident. Alternatively, keybind “interact with target” and “interact with mouseover” through the main Blizzard menu (I have both bound on my numpad). Then, instead of trying to click an npc in a sea of hostile targets, type out /target npcname. Hit your interaction keybind, and voila! No more accidentally punching a dude instead of turning in bear asses. This is really helpful if you’re in an area where guards break up PVP altercations!
Is this a transmog question? I’m not sure, really. I only got stuff from the very first gear vendor on Beta, and there were a lot of placeholders at the time. Plus, I only leveled a monk, so I didn’t have any baseline Cata gear to compare it to. However, a lot of the quest rewards are unique compared to past gear art. They look appropriately Chinese/Kung Fuey. Pointy hats, interesting new flowy cloak/robe models, sandals. I *really *like the new gear concept. It’s much better than the poopy browns and wooden weapon models in WOTLK. And I dunno, did Cata leveling even *have *a gear concept? I can barely remember, I hate Cata so much.
I was originally going to take off Wednesday, but goddamn. I came into work today and found out I was scheduled to be off Tuesday *and *Wednesday. Which is cool, but I only have enough hours to take one day right now. So I’m taking off Tuesday instead. I know the servers are probably going to be up and down all night/day because that’s how launch goes. But I feel like a kid at Christmas! I don’t care! I will take all the horrible launch-day experiences if it means I can level slightly sooner… yay! So, I’m going to pull an all-nighter tonight. I won’t sleep until Tuesday night, unless they announce extended downtime between now and then. Going to be starting off with my baby panda monk. Gotta get her the hell out of the starting area, choose horde, then grant her up to 80 (where the real journey begins). I’M SO EXCITED!
What I meant was that, in Cataclysm, they really cut corners on green-quality gear models. The leather shoulders that dropped off mobs in the Twilight Highlands used exactly the same model as the leather shoulders that dropped off mobs in Hyjal or Vashj’ir, with some minor recoloring. Same for every other armor slot within a type. WotLK wasn’t quite as bad - there seemed to be about 3 models per slot (though that was still repetitive across 10 levels). Compare to Vanilla and BC, where the gear drops had so many different models. Look at the number of different “visual sets” you could assemble from BC gear. Wrath and Cata gear was strikingly homogenous.
To be fair, the lack of model variety helped to avoid that “clown suit” look while leveling up, but at the same time it was rendered moot by transmogging. And with transmog, look at what most people are farming for their looks: BC gear. There are very few ways to create a unique look with non-dungeon/raid gear from WotLK and Cata.
Gotcha! I like clown suits myself, they’re temporary so it’s all in good fun. And it gives you lots of mix and match options for transmog, later on. I don’t know how much they’re going to reuse models for MoP gear yet. Hopefully not as many as before. 
Extremely casual raider says, “Better late than never!”
Got my Destroyer’s End three hours before Pandaria launch. Yay for my first ‘current’ tier complete! 