I always greet PUGgies and thank them at the end, even if we otherwise don’t say a word.
I started a “practice druid” last Friday and have been having a lot of fun. I’m raising him as Balance (the “real druid” will grow up as a healer) and just got owlkin; being able to go kitty when oom, drop some heals if the healer is lagging and go bear if the tank dies (or dc’s, or turns out to be an ass) is fuuuuuuun!
Continued the PvP and Argent Tourney grind this weekend. Had a great day in BGs yesterday until running into a Alliance pre-made in AB yesterday - first AB I’ve lost in a long time, and we lost something like 1600 to 60. It was a massacre. Holy Pallies are very difficult to kill, but hitting them with a well-timed Silence is fun.
I also spent some time tracking down elemental rifts; I got Air (Borean Tundra and Crystalsong Forest), Fire (Zul’Durak) and Earth (Grizzly Hills). Just need to track down the last one tonight.
Hmm. I just went back into the game and checked out the damage log. I came in #4 for DPS at 1.3k, but #1 only had 1.8k and was level 72, so it wasn’t that huge a spread. And looking at total damage delivered I actually tied with him (although I think some of that was done in the bit of soloing I did after the instance). Interesting. I’m going to have to pay more attention to the damage logs at instance completion so they’re not corrupted by solo data.
Nope, they spawn at specific locations:
Rumbling Elemental
Searing Elemental
Surging Elemental
Gusting Elemental
I got the achievement on my warrior last night, and man, what a PITA. She’d already gotten the Air buff on Friday from a rift in Crystalsong Forest that opened practically right on top of her while gathering Elven Masonry and the other materials for the quests at Crusader’s Pinnacle, and then got the Fire buff from a rift right next to Sentinel Hill in Westfall while I was there for the first step of the Black Knight quest chain (checking his story that he comes from Moonbrook).
But here’s the problem: As near as I can tell, every rift in a zone — in the world, for that matter — spawns at the same time, and those spawn times are an hour apart. So it does no good to make a circuit of the various spawn points in a zone hoping to find one that’s active, 'cause they’re all going to pop at the same time so you may as well just pick one and camp it. This was somewhat confirmed by the Fire rifts in Westfall; while taking the taxi from SW to Sentinel Hill I spotted an active rift near the eastern border of Westfall, and then spotted another one right next to Sentinell hill as I landed less than a minute later. I got the Fire Powered buff from that rift, then mounted up and rode to Moonbrook, did the BK quest thing there, then rode directly from there to Duskwood, where I stumbled upon an Air rift in Raven Hill. (Once spawned, the rifts stay active for 10 minutes or until they’re destroyed, so I assume this rift opened at the same time as the fire rifts in Westfall, as it was less than 10 minutes from the time I first entered Westfall to the time I found the air rift in Duskwood.) I’d already gotten credit for destroying an air rift on Friday, but I spotted a level 22 tauren druid getting her ass kicked trying to kill the elementals (they were at-level for her) and so, being the friendly player I am I stopped and finished off the elementals, and got a /hug from the druid.
I hadn’t yet checked Wowhead for locations at this point, but I made an educated guess that STV would be a likely place to find Water rifts (water figures heavily into the STV troll lore), so I headed there next. I wandered around the zone for about 30 minutes without any luck (judging the time by watching the 60-minute buffs from the previous rifts counting down), and finally resorted to Wowhead. I found a spawn point just north of Booty Bay and camped it. It finally spawned when my Fire and Air buffs were just about to expire; I destroyed it and got the Water buff. Consulting Wowhead again, I saw I could find Earth rifts in Redridge Mountains, with one spawn point right in Lakeshire. So I flew there and located the spawn point, and waited it out for almost an hour (killed time reading webcomics and the SDMB). With 4 minutes left on my Water buff, the Earth rift finally spawned and I destroyed it for the Earth Powered buff and the achievement/feat of strength.
Then, as luck would have it, I was finally making my way back to the Argent Tournament to turn in that BK quest, and spotted an active Water rift at Sindragosa’s Fall, so I landed and fought alongside the Cult of the Damned members and a couple frost wyrm whelps to destroy it, and then clicked the Mysterious Object to get the daily (since you can only get the daily from “level-appropriate” rifts, I couldn’t get it from the old-world zones).
I hope the feat of strength wasn’t a one-week-only thing, since I haven’t managed to get it on my other 80s yet.
I can’t tell if you’re aware of this or not, but it’s not necessary to get the buffs while you have the other buffs to qualify for the FOS. You just have to have gotten each buff at least once at any point.
Yeah, I decided to do the rifts in Outland, since it’s relatively compact and not very heavily populated now. In addition, you can do all of the rifts either right within or right outside of flight point towns: Fire in Thrallmar, Water right outside Swamp Rat Post, Air in Stonebreaker Hold, and Earth in Garadar. I camped Thrallmar until the rift opened, fought elementals until it closed and I got the buff, hopped on a taxi for Swamp Rat, got there before the Water rift closed, closed that and got the buff, then flew to Stonebreaker to camp the Air rift. Fastforward an hour, got that buff, flew to Garadar and got that buff. Got the Feat of Strength in a little over an hour.
I’m pretty sure it’s going all the way to Cata launch. The way people are talking about it the rifts will start growing in number as we get closer to launch, but being the WoW geeks we are, we must get as soon as possible instead of waiting for it to be easier! Ha ha ha.
You can be with other people fighting the rift - you just need to be there, and I assume, kill one of the lesser elementals powering the rift. So population doesn’t matter. I got 2/4 by dropping in while other people were in the middle of fighting the elementals.
I had a great time this weekend–finally got up the nerve to try tanking some Cata dungeons in beta (I tried before and it didn’t end well, but then I was level 83 with mostly my level 80 gear (which is very good for 80 but not so much for 83) and this time I was a premade 85 version of my DK in full epics–160K hp, woot!). Anyway, I started out with normal dungeons so I could see them through before I try heroics, and did Grim Batol (long and fun and probably going to be a bear on Heroic), Stonecore (fun and somewhat frustrating), Lost City of Tol’vir (lots of fun!), and Vortex Pinnacle (really fun, and gorgeous to boot!). Since I’ve already been through Halls of Origination and part of Blackrock Caverns, the only normal dungeon I have yet to see is Abyssal Maw, which for some reason wasn’t included in my list of randoms I could queue for. I’m not quite sure why that is.
Anyway, all in all I’m really enjoying the Cata dungeons. They’re definitely harder than BC, and actually require some thought and strategy. It’s about time.
Yup, knew that. I was just trying to get them while I waited on my hearthstone CD. I’d finished the frog-kissing daily and hearthed from Grizzly Hills back to Dal, then flew to the tournament to turn it in, picked up the BK quest, the flew back to Dal and portaled to SW and flew to Westfall. So with my hearthstone still on CD and not feeling like waiting for the boat back to NR, I figured I’d just grab the rest of the rifts I needed while I was in the old world.
Actually, you don’t even to kill anything. The first time I ever picked up the daily was after my paladin had finished rescuing Crusader Kul the Reckless. She’d let him out of the cage and had mounted up to fly away when I noticed a blue exclamation point on the minimap and said, “WTH is that?” Found the Mysterious Object sitting there and got the quest. So it looks like you simply have to get to the object before it despawns. Kind of like the Brewfest quest to fend off the Dark Irons or the Hallow’s End “Stop the Fires!” quest - the object sticks around for a bit, so you can show up after the fact and get the credit, even if you didn’t lift a finger.
The Mysterious Object doesn’t count toward the feat, the buffs do. Pretty sure it doesn’t grant a buff, anyway. The two are unrelated so far as I know.
Just follow everyone else. If you hit “m” to bring up your map, you should see dots that represent the other people in your raid.
That’s definitely something useful to do. However, one of the biggest benefits to playing an Arms Warrior is that you have Mortal Strike, which lowers healing on your target. Since vehicles can’t be healed, it can actually be more useful for you to go against players on the ground instead of attacking the vehicles directly.
If you got useful gear like the epic helm, you can equip it now. If you got fun items like the permanent helm for yourself or the temporary helms you can put on anyone or the wands, you can use those whenever you like. Anything else like candy will be disappearing soon (look for a “duration” on the item tooltip), so use it up while you can!
Well, it’s certainly not *bad *etiquette. 
Mostly it will depend on whether you’re killing things that they need for their quest. If not, it could actually be helpful for them to have you clearing the area of mobs they don’t need.
Basically, you want to keep Rend up, but not use it on anyone who already has it, because it doesn’t do as much damage with its initial hit as other attacks do. Mortal Strike, Execute, Victory Rush, and Overpower all hit harder than Rend and you should use them instead if your target already has Rend on it.
It’s an attack that is only available after you’ve killed something, and it heals you when you use it. Definitely try to use it in PvP! But you do have to be in melee range for it to work, like 99% of your abilities. So make sure you’re standing next to the person you want to hit with it.
Getting feared twice and killed another three times is actually a pretty solid track record! PvP generally means dying a lot, especially any time you’re outnumbered… And you can be “outnumbered” even if you have allies in sight, if they’re too far away to heal you or attack the people who’re attacking you.
Congratulations! It’s always amazing to hit one of those moments where you’re *so *involved that your adrenaline really kicks in.
I keep a little list of every moron who’s tried to gank me while I was fishing in WG on Korgath. I can only assume that it’s the people who’re so completely shitty at PvP that they only ever go after what they assume to be easy pickings, because I’ve killed all of them, except for the Rogue who pulled a cowardly Vanish instead of sticking around to take the beating he so richly deserved.
Congratulations! I know people who’ve been grinding that for years and haven’t seen it.
As **Oak **guessed, Wintergrasp is separate for each server, because it’s an actual in-game zone. So you’ll only ever play there with other people from Alexstrasza. Battlegrounds, however, are divided by battleground, and they’ll soon be pulling players from even larger pools, so you may run into one of us there.
Nope. It just means that you have to rez at the WG/BG Spirit Healer instead of running back to your corpse, but people do that most of the time anyway. It doesn’t hurt you or damage you in any way.
Those are “buffs.” They’re temporary benefits to your stats that you get from other players. Warriors don’t really have many to give out–ours are all short-term, lasting only a few minutes.
Some dailies or weeklies cycle through different ones. Because Blizzard doesn’t want people saving the easiest ones, they only let you share them when they’re the active one (and sometimes not even then).
Congratulations!
Ahahahaha.
Hahaha, yeah, I’ve totally had that happen to me, too. FYI, the “raid leader” or “battleground leader” position really doesn’t mean anything in a PUG (i.e., any group that the game puts together randomly). It’s just assigned to the first person the game randomy picks to form the group, so there’s no promising that the “leader” knows what they’re talking about.
Congratulations! Late or not, it’s still the ultimate boss of the expansion and something to be proud of. Now you can go have some fun ripping your way through the easier HMs–a lot of them are a cakewalk compared to regular LK. The only ones I’d think would give you trouble would be LDW, PP, and Sindri.
What a bunch of assholes. I can only hope that they just weren’t paying any damned attention and somehow failed to notice that a party member was dead.
Future reference, AK and AN aren’t that hard to find. Just follow the arrow back on your minimap, drop down into the holes in the ground, look around where you’ve dropped 'til you see the Nerubian NPCs, then head towards them. The AN entrance is just next to them, to the right, and the AK entrance is down the short tunnel to the left of them (R/L being as you face them).
Oh hell no. My post count is ridiculously high enough as it is.
Congrats! And good luck with the Mage. I really should dust mine off and see how Frost is doing since the patch. Blizzard definitely used to be great for AOE for us, but I’m not sure how that goes since 4.0–and with the massive nerfs every tank took to their AOE threat, I’m sure they won’t complain about you going single-target.
Congratulations! And thanks for making the rest of us slackers look bad.
Harder than BC or harder than Wrath? Or both? I must admit I’m curious as to how many tiers of gear it will take us to get back to the AOE-fests.
On Preview:
AFAIK (from looking at the criteria on Wowhead), **Bosstone **is correct that it’s the buffs you need for the Feat of Strength. You can get credit for the daily by simply looting the item off the ground, but you need to pick up the buff from the mobs to get the Achievement.
Yeah, I’m no longer sure under what circumstances AOE is even useful any more, unless we’re talking like a swarm of non-elite mobs.
Oh, I just remembered. I grabbed MiksBattleScrollingText and…holy crap that’s overwhelming. I know you can tweak each scroll area, and I probably will eventually, but for now I killed everything but the Static box. I much prefer seeing damage numbers pop up over the thing I’m attacking, and none of the other notifications seem all that useful to me, but the Static box has been mightily helpful.
I really need to look at cleaning up my UI, though. I’m running 1440x900 and everything still feels incredibly cramped. I barely even HAVE room for MSBT’s scroll areas. Right now I think IceHUD is the biggest problem, as is the fact that I still have the default unit frames on the left side of the screen, but while those are redundant with Grid and Tidyplates, each shows a particular piece of information that I don’t want to lose and haven’t yet figured out how to incorporate into other addons.
Oops, typo. Harder than Wrath. The trash packs hit harder (even on normal–I’m looking forward to seeing how they do on Heroic) and the whole design just seems more focused on making players think about how to approach a particular pull rather than just wading in willy-nilly. This is particularly true in Stonecore, and Blackrock Caverns too IIRC (it’s been a while). That might change, though, as people get geared better. Some of the Wrath dungeons were a little hard at the beginning too.
I don’t really think the bosses are harder, though. Most of them were fairly tank and spank, with one or two quirks that once you know them, they’re not that hard to deal with.
Me too. I (and a couple of BDL doggies) got all of our VoA25 achievements because the lesser bosses also give out justice points in a short time span, so our group of 25 actually stuck around to do the two easier bosses which before 4.0 used to be next to impossible to convince others to stick around since they only had lowel level epics. I asked our raid leader this time far in advance who pushed the idea and made it happen.
Also, I found this JP/minute table on wowwiki and it shows VoA being near the top of the list, and the Frozen Halls being the (very) suckiest.
ETA: I notice those were NORMAL Frozen Halls…the heroic is near the middle of the pack.
Knew that too - my mind was wandering and I misread what jayjay was talking about.
[QUOTE=Shot From Guns]
Congratulations! And thanks for making the rest of us slackers look bad.
[/QUOTE]
Eh, y’all are busy raiding, which I don’t do at all. You know me - I’m all about the journey, not the destination In the absence of raiding, my main (human paladin) literally has nothing left to do (well, aside from maybe grinding vanilla/BC reps — boring! — and cruising vanilla/BC dungeons). Her PvE gear is now all iLvl 245-264 except for her iLvl 232 weapon, with no upgrades available at all outside of a raid (GS 5600+), so her running heroics is kind of pointless. She has 50+ mounts, 50+ pets, Exalted with every NR faction except Ashen Verdict. Loremaster. All the Argent Tournament titles.
Okay, well, she’s 2 achievements shy of the Salty title (need to fish something in Org and fish up Wossname in the raid under Coilfang Reservoir) and needs 5 more achievements to finish What a Long Strange Trip. Two of those are missing simply because they have dungeon requirements, and she never entered a NR dungeon until earlier this year during Lunar Festival (so just needs to complete the “Elders of the Dungeons” achievement, and needs to obtain a Santa hat for “'Tis the Season”); then there’s “Fa-la-la-la-Ogri’la”, doing that bombing quest while mounted on a reindeer (I’d never bothered to do that quest while leveling through Outland, and didn’t even know where it was as of last Winter’s Veil, but I’ve since done it while working on Loremaster so it won’t be any problem doing it this year), and then two PvP achievements (“With a Little Helper from My Friends”, virtually identical to “G.N.E.R.D. Rage”, which I’ve already done, and the big bad one, “School of Hard Knocks”.)
So she’s basically just doing dailies and crafting to make money between holidays. I guess I should start focusing more on PvP and figuring out how to accomplish the School of Hard Knocks objectives, so I’ll have some idea what I’m doing when the time comes. My mage doesn’t PvP at all, and I haven’t tried it on my warrior yet.
Now to decide on 80 #5. Probably be one of my hunters; I have two of them at level 70, a night elf and a troll. I was really happy that one of the early quests in Borean Tundra gives out a nice bow as a reward. My nelf hunter is on my RP server, and for RP purposes I wanted him to only use bows. Unfortunately, there is a depressing shortage of decent world drop bows, and next to nothing on the AH (every time I checked, the best usuable bows had a level requirement of 55, which isn’t too useful for a hunter getting close to 70), so as he approached 70 he was still using a quest reward bow he got in Hellfire Peninsula :mad: Once 4.0.1 dropped and did away with trainable weapon skills (meaning he could instantly pick up and use a gun or crossbow), out of desperation he bought an engineer-crafted gun off the AH (30+ DPS improvement over the bow he’d been using). Fortunately, he didn’t have to use it very long before he got the new bow in BT.
I’m now 8 quests from Loremaster, but I’m stuck because I’m at the bottleneck of the Orgrim’s Hammer chains and the Bone Witch chain and all of the five I have now are world elite quests that I haven’t been able to solo (+ghoul+armyofthedead+gargoyle). I’ve had my ass kicked by the cauldrons and Corprous and the Harbingers and that Vyrkul thane that the Bone Witch wants you to humiliate. And the sad thing is that I HAVE a guild, a very willing-to-be-helpful one, but I can’t bring myself to bother them with coming and helping me get a shiny, if ugly, tabard.
ETA: I’m going to go on Wowhead after work and see if there’s anything there on some kind of strategy for these mobs that I’m missing.
EATA: My earworm lately has been the Icecrown zone music. If that ain’t geek, ain’t nothin’ geek…
Yeah, I felt totally weird using a gun on my nelf hunter. Guns are for dwarves, gnomes and humans! Was happy to finally get another bow (although it be a crossbow). I had never used a gun until it dropped off a boss in Northrend, but the DPS increase was too much to resist.
Oh FFS just ask your damned guildies already. The cauldrons in particular I can guarantee you there’s no way to solo: you need at least two people because the CD on your item is too long.
My draenei warrior used a crossbow (geez those Outland draenei crossbows are ugly - they look like molded plastic) until she got that fancy gun from the Nesingwary quest in Sholazar to ride a mammoth and kill that protodrake broodmother. My troll hunter will use anything - I made a point of keeping his skill up in bows/guns/crossbows so that he could use whatever was best at the time (though he prefers guns), which now turns out to have been wasted effort with the 4.0.1 changes.
When I started my Draenei hunter, I specifically ran his overdeveloped level 1 ass into Ironforge to learn Guns and get a starter gun before hearthing back to the newbie zone. 
I likes the guns.