If you want a vanity guild there, catch me (Muzungu, Rumpole, Awsmpallytnk) on Cairne some time; I have an alt on Argent Dawn who was promoted to guildmaster of the guild he’d randomly joined when everyone else left the server or possibly the game.
So far, only 2 for Uldaman, and those for the outside of Uldaman at that. And I must say the Garrett Family Treasure quest turn-in was worth a smile, though lord that was a PITA to do, even with a high-level Ally warrior being ultra-nice and tanking stuff for me all the way down.
And the payoff for the Gnome quest-chain, after you kill 3 different sets of earth elementals, was pretty fun. But still, mostly very bland.
The goal is to be standing behind them and facing them while they are facing away from you. The first step is to unbind your S-key. There is no reason to ever backstep. Also, remember that “facing them” means the entire 180 degree arc in front of your character. So the trick is to strafe through them and have them placed at an extreme angle so that only a slight rocking of the mouse brings them back in front of you. If they’re standing still, you’re at a point where you’re bouncing behind them all of the time with only a twitch in your wrist and they’re trying to keep up with a twitch in their elbow and approaching the failspeed of their mouse. Oh, and don’t jump. Jumping tells them exactly where you’re going to land and then you eat a frostbolt and then you die.
You must be using mouse look for this. Keyboard turning is just way too slow. You’re always mouse looking too, so you need every command with a shortcut key on the board. 1-2-3-4-5 whatever works for you. I use 1-2-3-4-5-q-e-r-f-s with my mouse shoulder button as a modifier key.
Once you’re setup in the pattern, you’re pretty much dominating the fight. Unfortunately, as soon as they start moving, you need to set up again. That’s why fights against rogues involve kiting them until they die, which is surprisingly easy.
General consensus (not just here, but everywhere) is that that is one of the most poorly-designed quests in the entire game.
Eh, I’m kind of looking for reasonably active RP guilds (both Alliance and Horde), though I haven’t had much luck so far. I haven’t spotted any roleplaying at all going on Horde-side (granted, my only Horde toons on AD are this tauren druid and that level eight belf pally I deleted) I’ve spotted some promising-looking guilds Alliance-side, though, and have stumbled upon some roleplaying scenes.
From what I know, there’s one specific RP server where there’s actual roleplaying going on - I forget which, Moon Guard maybe? I levelled up to 80 on Argent Dawn and didn’t see anything like it there.
Something I learned to do yesterday on my pally – maybe this is obvious. But I had finished Dragonspire except for all the group quests that involved taking down elites; I had six or seven of them. I was going to skip them because whenever I tried to take them down in my normal dps gear (two-handed sword, str/stam stats) I would run out of mana quickly and be unable to keep myself healed.
So I tried switching back into my healing gear, which is a mace and shield and not 100% plate armor but a lot more mp5, spellpower and Int. And I switched to Seal and Judgements of Wisdom.
Now, pretty much the only damage I was doing was Holy Shock and weapon damage. But, I was gaining mana faster than I was spending it on Holy Light. So I could pretty much keep it up indefinitely. So some of these elites took me nearly ten minutes to take down, but I was at full health/mana when they fell! That was something I could never do on my priest.
Heh. I’m waiting for my leatherworking nelf hunter on AD to get an angry letter about severely undercutting another leatherworker’s crafted item on the AH. Dude posted a bunch of low-level leather bracers (the kind of crafted item that is only there to level your skill on) for 8 gold a pop, and I put mine up for 50 silver. Most things I won’t undercut that drastically (I’m of the “undercut by a few silver” school), but if he complains, my answer will go like this:
“Why? Because you posted ten identical, low-level crafted items for a stupid price that nobody is going to pay, and I’d rather not post mine for a similar price and then waste my time reposting them over and over when they don’t sell.”
Actually, though, odds are they won’t sell for 50 silver, either.
Somewhat productive weekend for me on Argent Dawn. Nelf hunter to level 42 (lots of “fun” doing that quest in Dustwallow where you have to kill crocolisks in range of that lightning-shooting totem - the quest is bugged, where if your pet gets the killing blow, it doesn’t count for the quest, so you have to dismiss your pet and melee the things to death); dwarf warrior to level 20 (yay riding ram!); human mage to level 25 (Arcane spec - she suddenly became much more powerful once Arcane Missiles improved to 5 missiles per cast); tauren druid all the way from level 1 to level 15.
My level 80 Alliance toons on Lightbringer are sort of in a holding pattern, waiting for Cataclysm. I’m burned out on running random heroics and find I’m at the point where I really don’t care about getting that T10 gear. So my main is parked in Dalaran in front of the spawn point of the last book she needs for [Higher Learning], and I log her in a few times a day to see if it’s there. I’ll do the fishing daily if it’s Jewel of the Sewers or Disarmed! (both in Dal, don’t require travel). On Sundays I do the WG weeklies on both of my 80s. Other than that, I’m enjoying playing Jabloo, my troll hunter on Cairne, and leveling alts on Argent Dawn.
Yeah, I should have looked into that before I started rolling toons on AD. From what I’ve heard, Moon Guard is pretty much all ERP. Somebody mentioned Wyrmrest as the place all the serious RPers have moved to.
My RP toon is on Wyrmrest Accord, and there is usually something going on in Silvermoon–that doesn’t involve nakedness, even. The idea of leveling up a new toon makes me depressed, though, so I’m only about 62-ish on there. My friend and I are Horde-side, though, so there’s that.
Honestly, though, even there, the RP pickin’ isn’t hugely great; it’s just better than we’ve seen anywhere else (cough Shadow Council cough). We mostly end up RPing our Eitrigg toons in IMs.
My death knight is level 82 now!
I’ve been enjoying the beta a lot–even with all the inevitable bugs, it just feels so nicely “polished” compared to the older content. They really made an effort to tie the quest chains together and make you feel like you’re following a path instead of just wandering around looking for random quests. This is true both in the starting zones for the new races (the whole Goblin experience from level 1 to about level 16 or 17 is just one big long quest chain as you move from one location to another–I’m only level 7 as a Worgen but it feels the same way) and for the max-level characters (I started my DK in the Hyjal zone–I think you can start in one of two, but I picked that one) and the quests led him logically from one place to another with very little confusion or downtime. I suppose it’s possible to do some of the quests “out of order” (I’m not sure–I didn’t try) but doing them in order just makes sense.
Instancing was a little daunting, though. There are no addons in beta (at least not yet). I was questing on Saturday night and saw a message from a group looking for a tank for Twilight Caverns (one of the first 5-mans) so I said I’d give it a try but that I was still getting used to my new talents, the lack of addons, etc. It didn’t go so well. I’ve heard from several people that they’ve changed the way aggro works in Cataclysm–they want to discourage the “AoE-fest” pulls that people are so used to in WotLK, and bring back crowd control, focus targeting, etc. I can believe it. My team didn’t get this concept (to be fair, I didn’t really either) so we tried to bull our way through the trash packs and died horribly. They were pulling aggro off me right and left, and without my Threat Plates addon it was tough for me to tell what had aggro on what in a big pack of stuff…it was very demoralizing to have come off tanking through Lich King quite successfully (including several hard modes) the previous night, be geared in full 264-277 stuff, and feel like a fresh kid out of tank school. On a 5-man.
Ah, well. It was a learning experience, and the leveling and questing is a blast. I’ll try tanking again when they make a few more passes over aggro generation and fix the bug where you have to drop one of your tradeskills before you can train your new class abilities. I’ll be damned if I’m going to drop my 450 Mining or Engineering. They were too much work!
I think the max level right now is 83, so when I hit that I’ll swap over and level my mage. That should be fun, and he should be more successful in instances because I’m better at handling threat as DPS when running “naked” (no addons or UI enhancements).
Anybody else in beta? If anybody has any questions or anything you want checked out, I’ll be happy to help out.
Oh, and btw:
Just found out today, Hogger will be a wing boss in the new Stormwind Stockades! 
'Fraid I can’t help you there. You might want to see if the Gold Capped feature on WoW Insider has any articles that list addon suggestions for that level of tracking.
Not 100% true. Tanks, for example, when pulling trash packs, will often need to back slowly out of the pack to get everything properly positioned in front of them. However, you should never use the “back up” key any time you want to move *quickly *away from where you’re currently standing.
Dammit. Weird network issues this morning–half of the posts I’m checking aren’t showing up. Some of these won’t link back, sorry. 
Do you have a DK on the server you could use to farm it, even of the opposite faction? Having an epic mount plus a speed boost plus being able to one- or two-shot everything speeds things up remarkably.
Ah, I assumed you were Horde since you mentioned the Mechano-Hog. The Alliance version is called the Mekgineer’s Chopper.
Not just possible–I’d say that’s *typical *for a ICC25-HM group. The guild I’m in right now *requires *10k DPS *minimum *from any potential applicants. I was over 10k DPS myself on Saurfang last week (with only a teeny bit of Whirlwind spillover on the adds), and Fury is my offspec.
I’m trying to remember what my health pool was like back in TBC, and that does seem a little light to me. Of course, that was also when 70 was the level cap, as opposed to just one more point you were passing through. As long as your HP isn’t so low as to make you really hard to keep alive, you should be fine. (What are you gemming for, out of curiosity? Should be Stamina, except for anything you need to activate your helm meta gem, if you have one.)
Woohoo!
Without even seeing how she performed, in a random Heroic? That would be an asshole move, IMO. As long as someone can pull at least 1.5k, it doesn’t matter how retarded their spec, gems, chants, or rotations are.
Rep in WotLK mostly comes from (a) tabards worn while in any Heroic dungeon or any level 80 regular dungeon and (b) quests and daily quests. (Not wearing a rep tabard in the dungeons listed in “a” will cause your rep to spill over to general Northrend rep for your faction.) No tabards will grant you rep in raids, and the only Wrath raid with an associated faction that you can earn credit with by killing stuff is ICC/The Ashen Verdict.
Part of the problem is that the original models are just old (read: lower-quality). There’s been a lot of speculation about when Blizzard will update the models for the original races, especially as they’re not aging well in comparison to the new races that have been added so far.
The other aspect, though, is the WoW “cartoon” style of graphics, versus a “realistic” style used by some other MMOs. Personally, I think that the WoW style ages much more gracefully than that of games that go for more realism. When you ride through old zones, they still look pretty decent; versus older content in a realistic game, which is inherently limited by the technology of the day, and quickly starts to look “out of date” compared to how much more realistic cutting-edge technology can make it.
Ahahaha, I approve.
I’m mostly in BC dungeon blues with a couple of NR greens/blues from UK. I’m gemmed for stamina. I keep meaning to scan the armory for other level 70 tanks to get a comparison. Someone who tanked BC endgame stuff, even heroics, would have had better gear at this point.
Dang. The AoE-fest pulls are/were becoming my niche on my mage. Also makes for nice, quick Emblems of Triumph (and 2 Emblems of Frost per day) grinding random heroics.
Hey, I think I’ve finally figured this out - I’ll bet all that “of the Gorilla” gear (+STR, +INT) was supposed to be pally gear in vanilla, amiright?
So as a feral druid, what stats am I looking for on gear?
Agility, stamina, strength. Roughly in that order. If you’re specifically going bear, swap stam and agility.
If you’re a bear, then Stamina is your biggest stat, followed by Agi. Naturally, Parry and Block are useless because you don’t have those. Dodge is decent, but last I looked into it, Agi is better. Hit isn’t a bad idea, same with Expertise. But Stamina and Agility first.
I’m not really up on cats, but Stamina isn’t a priority for them, Hit is your first priority until you cap it. Er, at 80 I mean.
For newb druids, what Bosstone said.
Also, for bears, aim for the Survival of the Fittest talent. That talent is why druid tanks don’t have to worry about Defense.
I tried out Silverdragon this weekend, and I gotta say, I’m liking it. Unfortunately I decided to load the data while hovering over the village of the vrykul (?) in Storm Peaks. Got a ping on Skoll, and spent the next 10 minutes flying around trying to find him without any luck. Nuts, said I. NUTS. I’m not particularly into spirit beasts, but I will admit that I would not have sneezed at Skoll were I to trip over him… OH WAIT.
For market data over time, I like Market Watch. It gives you all kinds of graphs for specific items that you want to track. It needs a few days of scans to get started on the data points first, but once you’re there and you’ve got it set up, you’re all good. However, the more items you track, the longer the scans take, so I limit that to things like high yield herbs, specific gems, infinite dust, and eternals. There’s also an addon called Brew which will scrape your auction data and put it in an exportable format that Excel can consume, but it doesn’t play well with my other addons (QuickAuctions and LilSparky’s Workshop). If you aren’t using those, that might be an option for you.
Go to the AH and buy a full set of Cobalt armor, or just buy the materials and give me a shout when I’m online and I’ll get Reins to make you a set. If I remember right I had around 12-13k hp with that set, of course I had it all enchanted as well.
Tanked an ICC10 on Saturday with my druid, made it to Rotface before people started dropping out. Had a rough time starting the run with 3 wipes on Marrowgar, my offtank insisted on standing underneath Marrowgar and pulled aggro from me a few times, and of course the boss cleaved the raid. Came away with the pants from Festergut so it was a pretty good run.
More fun times in ICC25 on Sunday. Our RL brought in her character with the 25man Kingslayer title to give Heroic Rotface a couple of tries… and we failed horribly. Which meant we had less time to work on BQL when we got to her. I had fun since I was DPSing most of the night and I came away with a 264 token from Professor.
Our ICC10 group is getting better at the LK fight, last week our best attempt was 31%. Pretty sure we could have killed him if we had explained phase 3 better to everyone, but we have our strategy down this time so hopefully Tuesday will be the day we kill him.
I bought a full set for Azraq the other day (couldn’t be arsed to look up the mats; in any case I figured they’d be cheaper to buy made since people are probably still levelling their BS skills); I’ll log in and see what my current stats are looking like in tank form.