Well, the problem for Alliance in Kalimdor and Horde in EK is that in both, there’s a broad swath of the opposite faction’s undisputed lands in between their starting areas and the more neutral zones where both factions can pick up quests. And quite a few of those other-faction lands have “gate guards”: the Algaz tunnel guards in Loch Modan, for example, or the Mor’shan Rampart between Barrens and Ashenvale, with its 5 or 10 guards. Although at least Barrens has a work-around off to the side.
Given my unfortunate habit of dismounting myself mid-air on my main (a Warrior) by doing things like accidentally hitting my Archmage Vargoth macro or forgetting that switching specs has a cast time, I’ve gotten very good at quickly finding the “Naked” button on my Outfitter bar.
1.) I was thinking more along the lines of asking here. 
2.) You’d be surprised the kind of responses you can get to reasonable questions. Sure, there are assholes, but if you don’t just get a bunch of silence back 'cause no one’s watching General, there’s a decent chance you’ll get at least a couple of useful answers.
Places like ST (and, to a lesser extent, Scholomance) are where I really have trouble suspending my disbelief, for one simple reason: these are created structures. Part of me is always saying, “This floorplan makes no sense and is totally impractical! Nobody would design a building like this! Everybody they brought in would require a 30-day training course just to find the damn privy!” I don’t have this same problem with places where the dungeon is a naturally-occuring complex of caverns*. I don’t have an issue when the floorplan of the building is clearly defensive and intended to slow intruders with chokepoints and inconvenient stairs and corners ruining line-of-sight (for example, those delightful dwarf fortresses scattered here and there - the ones with the big garages - I griped about finding my way around in those when playing Alliance toons; it wasn’t until I had to invade one on a Horde toon that I came to appreciate the point of the layout - sucks being a hunter when you never even see an enemy until you’re in melee range, and tight corners and stairs make it impossible to back up to ranged distance and still be able to see your target.) I say “lesser extent, Scholomance”, because that’s basically a keep or castle that probably started out as one simple building but then got additions tacked on over time (see the disparate architectural styles in the different sections) - not something that was likely designed as-is by the architect. You see that kind of thing all the time in the real world. But Sunken Temple isn’t a military fortress, and it isn’t a main building with multiple later additions. It’s, well, a temple. It’s a single, purpose-built, working structure. There’s no sensible reason why, to get from one side of a room to the other, you have to go up two floors, down three, and spiral around on multiple stairways/ramps back up a floor and a half. If the building was badly damaged and the paths had to be “improvised”, okay. But that doesn’t seem to be the case here. The building is mostly intact - it’s simply sunk straight down. The design really serves no purpose other than “game puzzle mechanic” and “make it seem bigger by forcing a lot of backtracking and overlapping”.
- I gripe about caverns (like BRD or those night elf barrow dens) being confusing, but I don’t have a suspension of disbelief problem with them.
I like this bit:
“A Variation on the Welcome Bear for Alliance players can be an Obsidian Elemental while exploring and accidently wandering into the Burning Steppes from the Redridge Mountains…”
You’re more likely to get burned down by the gaggle of little gibbering demons that hang out in one of the lava pools right on the other side of that gate - the elementals are a bit further in.
This is why I really love the addon TourGuide. It leads you through a very sensible progression from one zone to the next, as well as laying out the most efficient order in which to do the quests within a particular zone. Of course, it’s going to be completely broken come Cataclysm, when most of the old-world quests are going to go away/change. It does have a few issues, though. The leveling guides are a bit old and don’t take into account the more recent big increases in the amount of XP you now get from quests, or even rested XP, so you can quickly find that you’ve out-leveled where you should allegedly be according to the guide. And the arrow it provides to point you to particular NPCs is sometime drastically incorrect. I was standing right in front of an NPC in Stormwind once, and QuestHelper’s arrow was correctly pointing right at the NPC, while TourGuide’s arrow was pointing me 700+ yards in the opposite direction. There are also some rare instances where it has you pick up a particular quest, but never directs you to turn it in, and you don’t realize it until 10 levels later you’re looking at your bags and you say, “why am I still carrying that?”
On an unrelated note for Alliance players … is it just me, or has Fiora Longears (the high elf on the Auberdine dock) stopped offering that breadcrumb quest that sends you to Astranaar? I mean, it would make sense - her quest was redundant since the head night elf dude in Auberdine also gave out a “travel to Astranaar” quest. I seem to remember reading somewhere that Fiora used to be somewhere else - like Menethil Harbor when that was the Eastern Kingdoms port that connected to Auberdine (pre-Wrath, pre-SW Harbor, I guess?). She would have made more sense there, to send players to Kalimdor. In fact, I think even after Wrath (when I actually started playing) there was a male human NPC in a keep somewhere whose only purpose seemed to be to suggest you go talk to Fiora, and he was still saying she was in Menethil.
I played my level 70 BE Hunter for an hour or so last night – hadn’t played that particular toon in ages and ages.
Holy Flying Spaghetti monster, I’d forgotten how crowded her action bars are. I’ve got all the “Track whatever” icons on the Shift+2 bar, out of sight (since I don’t usually have to hit them in a rush), but there’s still hardly any room left on the rest of the action bars. Between the different shot types, melee attacks, pet effects (feed pet, mend pet, etc.), traps, “Aspect of…” abillities, potions and water/food, there’s hardly any real estate left. And I **like **having visual gaps in my UI so I can more easily pick out the lesser-used items.
I’ll have to think about that interface for a bit…I’m sure it’s not very efficient, but if I move things around I’ll never find them again 
I also noticed something in Dalaran for the first time last night - the male high elf bartender and the female human innkeeper at the Legerdemain Lounge both have the last name “Azuregaze”. In interspecies married couple, apparently? The last name is somewhat amusing in the woman’s case, since it literally means “blue eyes” - she’s a dark-skinned, brown-eyed woman.
Just to expand on this, a lot of people will answer someone’s question in a whisper, so as not to hog General chat, so that may give the impression that questions don’t get answered, but it’s just that you don’t see the answers.
Hmmm…I haven’t played a hunter in forever. Does the tracking dropdown button on the mini-map include the hunter tracking types? You probably don’t even really need to have them on your bars if it does.
Here’s a screenshot of my hunter’s UI. I use the Dominos action bar replacement addon. My hunter’s only lvl 49, so doesn’t have all your hunter’s abilities, of course. But I don’t bother putting the various tracking abilities on the action bars, since they’re automatically added to the Tracking menu button on the minimap, and I just switch them from there.
New thread! /cheer I missed keeping up with the old one for a few days back when it was only about 25 pages and never caught up. I will be more diligent about this one.
Yes, the Tracking Humanoids/Demons/Elementals/Whatevers can be found on the minimap button now, freeing up bar space.
Ooh, Hadn’t thought about that Mister Rik, Jayjay, and CreaseMunky. That toon predates that feature, IIRC, so I could definitely free up space on the Shift+2 bar.
Probably move some of the pet effects there, since you don’t have to feed pets, etc, as much.
Sniff…Sniff…hmmm…New Thread Smell.
What a time having my computer down while everyone else is kicking ass around here.
I do have WoW loaded on my work computer, but I really can’t fully participate in long instances, or long and hard fights, etc. Maybe I should start my switch over to JC from mining and a quick daily RDF for the 2 frosties. Haven’t heard anything yet on my computer…it’s been a week already. Missed the last 5 Monday Night runs and the last 2 (soon to be 3) weekly SDMB poker tournaments. I’m getting quite irritated over the whole thing.
Thanks, jayjay! My wife, D, thanks you as well! And once more, I want to reiterate that not only was it the longest, it was (and is) the most civil of threads.
Quasi
I’ll have to contribute a shot of my current hunter’s UI to the thread when I get home. I use a bunch of bars, but I also use Bartender4 which can fade out or hide bars until you mouse over them or you’re in combat. This frees up a very nice amount of screen real estate.
Potions and food stay in my bags – for me, I find it convienent to just pop my bags open and click on them. (I will also add that I’ve occasionally done that when I’m in a fight and looking for a pot to use instead of sticking it on my bars. I can do this because I always put them in the leftmost column of my Backpack in a very specific order)
As for aspects, shot types, and so on, I use a whackton of macros which can help a lot. Especially with melee spells and aspect-switching. The latter reduced it to only needing 2 aspects on my bars (cheetah/pack for runbacks).
Plus, IIRC, there was a change in one of the patches awhile back that says that if you’re tracking one of the +damage mob types, you get that bonus for all the types without having to specifically switch.
I have a bar with “emergency” combat buttons that only appears during combat but is otherwise invisible. This includes my health and mana pots, healthstones, Fade, Will of the Forsaken, and that holy priest insta-heal I forget the name of. Then I have another bar that only shows up out of combat that has my tailoring, enchanting, disenchanting, cooking, fishing, campfire, etc.
If you’re ever in Milwaukee, come check out Marquette University’s Lalumiere Hall. That thing is *at least *as stupidly laid out as ST. Everything’s behind doors (including staircases and sections of corridors), some offices don’t have windows while bathrooms do, and when you come out on the fourth floor, you enter a weird maze of walls before you can actually get to any of the offices. :smack:
Or disguised members of the Blue Dragonflight?
Can’t imagine how much that blows. 
Best of luck!
This is where I’d insert a cheerful “Fuck you!” 
but I don’t think the mods would get the joke.
Yikes. I would strongly recommend against this strategy for anyone who might need to click a pot in a hurry–like a tank. (Even if you know exactly where it is, that extra couple seconds of opening the bag and moving your mouse around could be fatal.)
Here is a screenshot of my hunter’s UI. I use Bartender instead of Dominos as my bar replacement addon, though I don’t have any of the hidden bars enabled. Since I’m leveling by dungeons only, I just took off any skills I wasn’t using (Aspect of the Beast, melee attacks, certain traps, etc).
I have two characters in range for the alt dungeon tonight, my paladin and my hunter, so I’ll have to flip a coin to see who gets to go.
Just as a general thing, anyone interested should go look up the addon DagAssist. It’s a simple little thing that groups all the non-combat actions and abilities into a single GUI button (clicking on it opens a drop-down). It combines things like Teleport/Portal spells for Mages/Druids/DKs, Profession windows, access to Abesik Kampfire, hearthstone, etc. It auto-collects the abilities, so you don’t need to configure it in any way. It’s a really nice quality of life addon that keeps my action bars clear of things I don’t need for combat while still keeping them relatively convenient and close at hand.
Hmmmm…
WowWiki doesn’t say anything about that:
There is probably some joke involved in two people with the initials A.A. working in a bar, though
Either one is fine; but keep in mind you’ll be rolling against (probably) two other pallies for gear and no other mail-wearers.
Ugh, tell me about it. One night when flying to ICC I accidentally dismounted over the wrathgate. The debuff made it so i couldn’t slow fall or ice block, and I fell to my death in some area that i couldn’t get to as a ghost. I got to show up to the raid with rez sickness and some 50+ gold in repairs :mad: