And another thing–real names aren’t going to be unique for at least some people. So how the hell am I going to tell Mike Smith #3 from Mike Smith #2,847?
I hope so! My husband and I ended up playing WoW after a graphical upgrade by City of Heroes/City of Villains made the game quite literally unplayable on the computers we had then. I complain occasionally about the lag fest that Dalaran can become on patch day; well, the upgrade that CoH did turned even walking down the street in a not very populated area into a slideshow.
Dalaran is an especially big problem because it’s a single, small hub for all max-level characters (and quite a few *under *max level). In Cata, we’re going back to the old-world capitals, so hopefully that will cut the lag down.
I’ve recently decided that I object to Dalaran being called a “city”. It’s too small to be a “city”. It’s more like a … “campus”. Or “enclave”.
Hey, guess what? I’ve found new in-game things to be annoyed by!
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My paladin just shelled out for the iLvl 264 crafted boots, the Hellfrozen Bonegrinders (the price has come waaaaay down), which bumped her GS over 5.3k. And since she’s finally geared enough to solo the level 82 elites in Icecrown, I thought I’d try doing that “Neutralizing the Plague” daily that Thassarian hands out, which is listed as a 5-player quest. I wanted to do it because, hey, 22g+ reward! So I accepted the quest and off I went. And discovered it was un-soloable. No trouble killing the various mobs, but the quest item — a flask of liquid that you have to pour into a plague cauldron — has a stupidly long cooldown on it and when the game says “Add more wossname NOW!”, you can’t do it because the cooldown isn’t up. You have to have at least one more person and take turns pouring the wossname into the cauldron :mad:
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I logged in my warrior, who has been languishing at level 74 for some time now due to neglect, and decided to finish leveling her mining and start farming saronite. Once she could mine saronite, I spent some time in Icecrown. Let me just say this: mobs really shouldn’t be allowed to run 30 yards straight up a sheer, vertical cliff face to attack me. It took three deaths just to escape from Malykriss - The Vile Hold.
Amusing: She barely beat a level 80 tauren DK to a titanium node in Sholazar. DK responded by … challenging her to a duel. Um, yeah, right. She’s level 74 and wearing quest greens and blues and heirloom shoulders, and she’s going to duel an ICC-geared level 80 :rolleyes:
That’s WoW’s style. It exaggerates features the players need to be concerned about and diminishes those it doesn’t, so you end up with huge streets and shops while living quarters and such are nearly nonexistant. “Realistically,” the cities are supposed to be, like, 5-10 times bigger than they really are in-game, as is the world in general.
Course, that all said, Dalaran is definitely a small city. It was originally exclusively a place built for mages to congregate, study, and learn. It probably realistically isn’t any bigger than a real university campus, and is built along the same lines.
All of Azeroth is way too tiny to be a world, too. 
But would you really want to have to run across 12,000 miles at 12 miles an hour?
Yup. I could have told you that. I was annoyed about the same thing. Even with *two *people, things get tricky, because a single hit from a spawned mob will interrupt your cast. So ideally you have at least three people: one tank to pick up the spawns, and two people to pour the crap in the thinger.
Pathing can be ridiculous sometimes. On the plus side, it will also work in your favor as a Warrior with Charge. I can Charge pretty much any enemy in my LOS, even if I couldn’t physically run up the surfaces between us (assuming we’re talking about something like a steep incline).
Lorewise, I believe what is now called “Dalaran” was originally basically the “mage quarter” of a much larger city called Dalaran. The ruins in Alterac/Hillsbrad bear that out to a certain extent.
“Compressed” is the term I use. There’s enough there to give the impression of a big, wide world while not wasting time and space with non-essentials. One of the most ingenious design aspects of the game is simply the way line-of-sight and the curves of roads combine to make a small area seem much larger. This was brought home to me in the dwarf/gnome starting area. Sticking to the road (and I think it’s human nature to stick to the road when traveling), it takes a couple minutes to do that mail delivery quest, going from the “town” to that NPCs camp site; I discovered later it’s about a 10-second run if you just cut across that open field through the troggs and wolves 
But if you look at the distances/yardage QuestHelper gives you, you realize that Northrend is only about three or four miles wide. I think I noticed that one day when I was in Howling Fjord and QH was pointing me to the fishing daily in Borean Tundra. It said something like 5,000 yards.
I’d actually done the quest once before - with a partner. But that was a few months ago, before I ever started running heroics. So I was ungeared, which meant the fights were much tougher, and that’s all I remembered.
My first encounter with this came when one of my toons was leveling in Redridge Mountains and doing the quest that has you killing gnolls in the hills above and behind Lakeshire. If I got too close to the edge of the cliff while fighting a gnoll, there was this one Lakeshire town guard (who patrols next to and sort of behind the inn) who would run straight up the cliff and steal my kill
The warrior Charge thing was useful when mine was doing that Algaz Gauntlet quest between Loch Modan and Wetlands - trying to get to those Dragonmaw orcs wandering around above me.
Erm. More accurately, I guess, the mages were sort of the “ruling class” of Dalaran, and what we now call Dalaran was basically the “keep” around which the rest of the city of Dalaran was arrayed.
Dalaran has always been Mage Central; it was built by and for mages before there was even a Kirin Tor. Now, it was destroyed by the Burning Legion, so what we see is the rebuilt version. But I’m pretty sure it’s the whole of Dalaran – at least everything within Dal’s walls – with some outlying farms and commoners’ dwellings left at the crater’s edge.
Nope. Dalaran is, was, and always will be a city built by and for Mages. The entire thing was encased in a protective bubble before the launch of vanilla and then lifted out and teleported to Northrend for Wrath. Anything left behind is just outlying buildings. IIRC, you can see larger conceptions of the city in things like cinematics from one or more of the Warcraft RTS games.
Sindragosa down! Now on to the Lich King!
Didn’t drop my shield though, boo. Looks like we’ll be extending our lockout until the Lich King is dead, I know I don’t want to go through Sindragosa again anytime soon.
My paladin is finally defense capped, for heroics at least. Though I havn’t stepped foot in one yet, a little nervous at trying to hold threat against ICC geared DPS or just getting a “OMFG 30k hp?! /leave” reaction. A little silly concidering I already have 3 other tanks at 80.
Respecced my paladin’s secondary spec to holy seeing as how all this spellpower plate was dropping and now I can’t get any to drop. I swear I’m jinxed or something.
The upside of getting my feet wet with bear tanking in Ahune was that the DPS didn’t really care about me being half-geared. As long as I could hold the elite’s attention and keep the non-elites off the squishies, the DPS were more than happy to just burn everything down.
I’ve got ten gem slots not yet filled, and I ought to replace the other slots I have. I’m sitting at 30k HP right now, but that would shoot me up another 4k HP easy. I haven’t got the money, though, and the gem market seems kind of sparse.
Well, not wanting to continute the RealId debate (my take: it’s incredibly stupid of them), heard about the new Cata talent systems?
Theyv’e decided the old talents are kinda a mess and ratehr than keep adding onto it, they’re just going to squich them down. Now at level 10, you choose a Talent Tree, get a signature ability like Dual-Wielding for Enhancement Shaman or Mind Flay or Shadow Priest. Then you’re locked into that tree’s talents until level 71. You’ll also have half as many talents, but they’re apparently removing almost all of the passives and folding them into the revised mastery system. So no more taking dull talents because you bascally must to be anything more than a useless mook.
I say it’s a real;ly good change, and hopefully will help players who don’t know what they’re doing get into it. let’s face it, by the middle levels anymore, an aweful lot fo players just don’t understand what they’re doing and drop out. this should help them “get” the game, and along with the new and improved Classic world should encourage them to follow along the entire game experience. I know the first time I played WoW I had a fun time, despite the grinidy nature of it all. Then I got to Outland, nobody was there, and I gave up for a while.
Already in a purple chest (Wrynn;s) but all was not lost. They had a pair of Sabotons that were an upgrade from my tempered saronite.
Grats on the Sindri kill! And I wouldn’t get too excited about not having to go back to that fight yet… the LK is worse. It’s one of those fights where everyone has to be on their toes, mainly because of (a) Defile and (b) Valks, two mechanics where one person screwing up can get a lot of other people killed.
Make yourself a /p Spiel about being a fresh 80 macro. You can replace a prima donna DPS in seconds; they’d have to wait a lot longer to replace you.
Don’t spend money on them–use Honor or badges. 10k Honor will get you a gem of any color. 10 Honor badges will buy you a mixed-color gem; 20 Honor badges will buy you a solid-color gem. Then all you have to do is find a JC with the cuts you need, which the guild may have.
AFAIK, that’s not correct. We’re moving from ~40-talent trees to ~30-talent trees; that’s a reduction of 1/4, not 1/2. (However, I think we may have something like half as many *points *to spend–certainly not picking them up every level.)
IIRC, aren’t those DPS boots?
I know how to get gems. 
That’s still a heck of a lot of farming, more than farming the gold would be.
I’m kind of in a low activity mode anyway. This week has been utter hell at work, and the whole business with RealID has left me less than enthusiastic about the game.
Depending on how your server does in Wintergrasp – doing the 5 weeklies plus the victory will net you over 20k honor in a single battle (assuming you win) plus 50 shards and 3 WG badges (which can also be used to buy honor tokens, which are BoA so you can send honor to your alts too).
ETA: Winning the daily BG will also net you around 6k honor. The ease of this again depends on your battlegroup. I’m fortunate in both – horde owns WG 99% of the time on my server, and we win over 70% of our BGs.
Or if you’re running dungeons during the time periods that your side owns WG, you can get stone shards that way, and cash them in at the WG vendor.
Pff. Yeah, if we won WG more than thrice a week. That’s viable on my Alliance toon, who generates honor by sneezing. Decent honor gain as Horde on a server where Horde never wins WG means farming random battlegrounds, which isn’t as fun as it sounds. I’m also unsure how often Horde wins its BGs; if they win a lot, that’s viable, but if they lose as much as they lose WG, that’s an exercise in frustration.
I’m prepping for a new laptop, I run everything on minimum settings already and noticed a tiny bit of lag in Utgarde Keep. I’m hoping that I can draw the one I have out until Xmas (I need to replace it for other reasons that WoW, the primary one being the screen is falling apart and held together with screws and electrical tape).