New WoW General Discussion Thread 6/8/10

The Zuuldaia Ruins are on the beach in the northwestern area of STV.

Will look up there. I have noticed a few occasions where the shield is placed in the worng part of the map when tracking the exploration achievements

Thanks!

Huh? There’s no indicator on the map that will show you where to go for exploration achievements, is there? :confused:

In the Achievements screen, some achi’s have a little tick box in the bottom right to Track them. If you enable this then quest helper shows on the map where to go. I think you need the quest helper add on for this functionality.

You think correctly, for Quest Helper to do something you need to have it installed, which I don’t, never will, and my opinion of that addon is something that should not be aired outside the pit.

All the Ahune groups I’ve been in, even with my lower-geared mage, have been as ranged DPS (5 different 80s), and ranged have always been expected to DPS Ahune throughout. It may be a battlegroup-based expectation; I dunno.

There have been times where my character was the only ranged DPS, and I was expected to DPS my ass off on Ahune. Not so fun when I was stuck in a higher-end group with my low-geared mage, one melee DPS died, and the dead guy gave the oh-so-helpful instruction for me to DPS Ahune. Yeah, doing that, thanks.

Well I never was able to get back on Cairne last night, for whatever reason. Fortunately I had done all my daily emblem runs so it wasn’t that big a deal; I got on my dwarf DK on another server (which I had only played once before, when Cairne was down) and almost finished the DK intro quests including the Battle of Light’s Hope Chapel. I don’t really know what I’m doing on my DK though; just flailing around trying to dps.

I utterly failed to get on yesterday at all, server troubles or no. I feel kind of bad, because I’ve got two characters I really do need to earn emblems on, and that was 8 Emblems of Frost I gave up yesterday just in dailies, but it felt right to take a day off, especially since I got the holiday meta in one day on Nahren. :smack: I needed a break after that, what a slog.

That’s actually pretty standard. Almost nobody runs the optional bosses in there (the mushroom guy and Jedoga). I only do it if someone in the group really needs them, but mostly people just want to skip.

Technically, as long as they have their 5/5/5, a DK can make a tank spec out of any of the three trees, as long as they take the right talents. That’ll be going away in Cataclysm, though, when IIRC Blood will be the only tanking tree.

I just use Grid; most people I know use Grid, with or without Clique.

Don’t AOE them. Just single-target. At least in the first phase, you probably won’t have more than two out at a time anyway, at which point AOE is just a waste of mana, anyway.

Is there a reason you need to know where the tank is? Mainly, if somebody’s marking a tank in a five-man, it’s the healer.

Woohoo!

Looking very determined. :smiley: I’d hate to be the guy who gets in his way…

Check the drop-down. It’s possible that you now have “random BC dungeon” and “random WotLK dungeon” options, and it’s defaulted to the latter. Otherwise, nope, nothing you can do about it. However, if you’re willing to forego your random-dungeon bonus loot, you can select specific instances to queue for.

1.) Enchant and gem Defense up to 535 or 540. (Get your Enchants on first, then see where you’re at.) Fill yellow gem sockets first, to get the bonuses.

2.) If you have a meta slot in your helm, stick an Austere Earthsiege in there (which should be the Stam/2% Armor one).

3.) If you have the meta gem, put a Nightmare Tear (+10 all stats) in the empty, non-blue socket with the best Stamina bonus. This will activate the meta. If you don’t have any with a Stam bonus, go for Strength.

4.) Fill everything else with Stamina gems.

/jealous

Grats!

Back when I was kicking out Explorer while waiting for Wrath to be released, I found it helpful to look for blank areas on the map. So open your map (M) up to fullscreen (the arrow in the corner, if it’s not taking up the whole screen), look for any space that’s not colored in yet, and ride into the middle of it. You may have to run around a bit to get it to pop, but that always worked for me.

I’ve run into a couple instances where someone either accidentally pulls a mob or something spawns outside the tank’s aggro area or I get aggro and I need to run to the tank so he can get aggro back but there’s just so much chaos going on I can’t actually find the tank fast enough. Plus the tank is almost always the dungeon guide, and it’s nice to know who I should be following. :smiley:

Someone upthread mentioned putting your focus on the tank, but unless focus means something other than what I know, I’m focusing on enemies to kill them.

If you right-click on a portrait, whether of a teammate or enemy, you can opt to “Set Focus”. This will pop a new portrait of that person/creature on your screen which will stay even if you switch targets. It’s useful for keeping an eye on someone, and you can also set up macros that target your focus without ever changing your active target. For example, a Hunter can set the tank as their focus, then have their Misdirection macro misdirect to the focus. That way, they don’t have to spend precious seconds selecting the tank, activating Misdirect, then selecting their target again.

As melee DPS, I try to stick close to the tank so that I can quickly get behind whatever he’s attacking. So it really helps if I always know where the tank is. I’ve complained before about tanks that run around in circles; I’ll get behind the mobs and start attacking, only to have the tank start going in circles or simply running straight through the crowd and suddenly they’ve turned the mobs so they’re facing me now, and it takes me a minute to realize the tank has moved because I simply can’t see him in the middle of all those mobs.

Some tanks also have a tendency to just take off for the next group of mobs the instant the fight is over, and when the mobs we just killed are giants (or simply gigantic), they often completely block my view of the tank and which direction he went (largely because, since I’m melee, the corpse falls right on top of me). This is compounded further when the tank is a gnome or dwarf, or even a bear - their low profiles can be hidden by even the smaller of the “big” corpses. In the more straightforward instances where it’s plainly obvious where to go next, this isn’t such a big issue, but some, like AN and OK can be a bit confusing and a tank that runs off quickly can be out of sight almost immediately. On one recent OK run with a gnome tank, we killed Prince Teldawossname, and were standing around loot-rolling, drinking, and what have you, and didn’t even notice that the tank had run off until he started with the “WTF?! Where the !@#$ are my heals?!” A big yellow dot would have been helpful.

And then you get the tanks who think it’s cute to chug Pygmy Oils and Noggenfogger Elixirs until they’re near-microscopic. Though my new policy on that is to simply announce that I’m not going to run with a tank I can’t see, and drop group. It’s not worth the hassle for me, and they can replace me quickly enough.

The Cartographer addon also has a nice feature that will shade the unexplored areas of the map with a nice, obvious color.

Then next time, say that in party chat. Seems reasonable enough to me! My guess is, they thought you were just slapping raid icons on people to be annoying. (Yes, people do that.)

Like **BT **said, Focus is an actual game mechanic. Besides using the right-click menus, you can set and remove a focus by using the **/focus **and **/clearfocus **commands. When you’re setting a focus, you can either do it with just the command (which will use your current target as the focus), or you can add the name of the person you want to make your focus as an argument, e.g. **/focus Sleutel **if my character is tanking for you and you want to make her your focus. Since you can only have one focus at a time, the clear command works on its own; you don’t need to select anyone or add any name to the end of it.

However, this won’t help you see where the person is in relation to you–it just lets you keep an eye on their health/resources/buffs/debuffs/etc., as well as giving you a quick way to select them or cast spells/abilties on them. If you need to track their physical position, your best bet is always going to be to mark them; just let the group know what you’re doing and why.

I can think of a few spots where this doesn’t help, one is Forge Base Oblivion in Netherstorm, discovering Forge Base Gehenna will reveal the map for the area but it is Oblivion just to the south that is required for the achievement, luckily the names are actually written on the map itself so they’re easy to find.
Bloodmyst Isle is far worse though, 28 areas to discover, some of which are out in the water so it’s isn’t obvious if they’re grayed out or not, and one small spot called Tel’athion’s Camp that is so small it doesn’t appear on the map at all.

Hsssss! God, that place was ridiculous when doing World Explorer.

Bloodmyst Isle is why I’m never going to bother with Explorer, at least on a Horde toon. Tried to get that one one day and got bored/frustrated with circling the whole island in the water. And that on a Death Knight who could use Path of Frost.

For the discovery achievements, I usually bring up WoWWiki in a browser behind the game, then type in the name of the zone in question. Each zone’s page has a link to each specific region, and sometimes just the description of the subregion will give you a clue, or else loc coordinates may be given. A little fiddly, but if you need to find some of those tough ones it helps a lot.

It helps if you’re one of those crazy people who have, over the course of playing this game, made at least 10 alts for each race and thereby know ALL of the starting areas and adjacent zones as if they were rooms in your house.

Also helps if you went back and did all the starter quests you could for each race, so as to boost your rep with those factions.

Oh, I am. In fact, I play Draenei most often, so I’m well acquainted with Bloodmyst (and even when I don’t play Draenei, I use the -myst Islands instead of the other starter zones because they’re just so much better). But getting all 28 areas is a massive PITA.