I couldn’t play yesterday because of the queues, over 3000th I line, waited a couple of hours and never got low 2000. Tried to change realms to horde server and it said all servers were locked.
Today the same, except queues are even longer now.
I think today (Sunday after launch) went much better - really the best day since launch. I only had one very brief disconnect, a few short periods of lag that managed to resolve itself quickly, and no queues.
Not bad, considering.
I’m not usually one to do lots of questing, preferring to level by doing LFG dungeons, but the XP for that is pitifully low, and the queue time very long. To the tune of 45 minutes most of the times I’ve checked. So there’s pretty much nothing to be done except bite the bullet and do the quests.
It does put me out of my comfort zone, but on the other hand, it’s been quite the experience. I’ve quested through Shadowmoon, Gorgrond, and Telador now, and done all the bonus objectives for those zones. I’m now up to level 97 and finally starting to see more and more items that are iLvl upgrades from my burdened Timeless Isle items.
The garrison stuff is interesting, but am I the only one that’s thinking it feels like Blizzard took an entirely different Warcraft-themed game and grafted it onto WoW, Frankenstein-style? It’s just such a departure from previous expansions. Honestly, I feel like I really don’t know what I’m doing yet, just kind of blundering my way from one exclamation point to the next. Hopefully it’ll be making more sense by the time I get to 100 and can give the questing a rest.
I still haven’t actually played the expansion stuff yet. Thursday and Friday the queues were just too long. Saturday I just wasn’t up to it (constipation + gas that couldn’t “escape” resulted in something of a heart attack scare). Today I sent my warrior through the portal, but as I was on my Mac, that immediately dropped me to about 3.7 FPS, and I couldn’t be arsed to drag my Windows laptop into playing position.
sigh I really need a new computer. But I need a new car more desperately.
So I just finished up Townlong Steppes quests on my paladin for the zone achievement, ran my mage around the Timeless Isle in hopes of finding a Burden or two (nope), had my priest make another piece of Imperial Silk for her bagmaking, and then started my now-85 warlock in Jade Forest to start her on her way to 90.
Not having played the expansion yet I can’t say for sure, but the notion of having followers who do stuff for you and building up a settlement actually sounds a bit like a return to the original Warcraft game, now called Orcs vs. Humans. Of course, that was a long time ago, long enough that some current WoW players weren’t even born yet when it came out.
Haven’t played the expansion yet because we don’t get our copy until Friday or so - the spouse wanted a hardcopy box with the extra bits, so instead of downloading we’re waiting for actual physical delivery.
I’m not sure why you think that? Orcs vs Humans was a pretty bog standard RTS, I don’t recall any wonky mechanics with units doing things for you. It was pretty much select and command, albeit without the interface improvements made later in the genre.
Edit: Oh, is it because of the road mechanic where you built up a settlement around a town hall connected by roads? Yeah, I can see that.
I’m talking about the mechanic where you told your peasents/peons to gather resources and they went out to chop wood and mine ore for you so you could build your town.
That, and “Me not that kind of orc!”
Yeah, I like tormenting my peons. Only because they’re terrible, embarrassing, pitiful representatives of the Orcish race, out here in my Level 2 Fortification. I caught one of the sleeping on the ground. In front of an outhouse. Well, actually, half in and half out of it. I had to glare ineffectually at him until one of my Troll axe-throwers came over and woke him up. The peon cowered as the troll “yelled” at him, and then he went to back work. I /facepalmed.
(No, I’m not making this up. Apparently, there are NPC interactions programmed in for this kind of thing. Pretty cool, I guess.)
I would cheerfully spend Garrison Resource points and gold to buy a booterang.
The garrison missions remind me of SWTOR’s usage of minions. You had a lot of minions, but only one could accompany you at a time, so rather than let them sit around doing nothing, you sent them on missions.
Now to be honest I’ve been having fun with the missions, if it’s just bonus XP for a follower, I like to assign the lowest follower to it. So far the lowest success rater percentage I’ve had come back as success is a 54%. I’m going to try for one that’s less than 50% tonight just to see if they can pull it off.
Is there a way to reverse a decision made to build a building in your Garrison?
I want to replace a “barn” with a “trading post”.
According to Icy Veins, you can just drop a new building on the one you want to replace at the architect’s table. I don’t know if you get the resources for the old building back or not, though.
Have you noticed that, if you stand in one spot in your garrison, say, in the middle of a path, moving NPCs will actually go around you instead of walking through you? I thought that was a nice touch. And of course, if you’re walking around, the uniformed NPCs will salute you when you pass them.
Yeah, I finally got started in Draenor today. Of course, having been in the beta (limited as my participation was), I had already gone through the opening Tanaan Jungle sequence several times. I will say that there were a number of noticeable improvements to the experience, compared to what I saw in beta. There were also a couple amusing differences I noticed, though maybe I just didn’t catch them in beta:
When I freed Ga’ran from his outhouse shit-shoveling duties, I literally howled when he made his speech about wreaking vengeance upon those who enslaved him … but first, he needed to wash his hands. (Sorry, I’m a professional cook and need to wash my hands a lot. That bit was just hilarious to me 
Second, when I turned in the gunpowder keg quest, Hansel Heavyhands (even in the beta, I was delighted to see him there!) said, “… don’t do anything inappropriate with that gunpowder!” I don’t remember him saying that in the beta. For those of you who weren’t in the beta: originally, when you grabbed the barrel of powder, it would leave a visible trail of gunpowder leaking onto the ground behind you. Naturally, players took advantage of this. As long as you didn’t hand in the quest, you could run around the area, leaving a trail of gunpowder behind you. So people were using this to draw dick pics on the ground, and write profanity. So they removed the visible trail for “live”, and it would appear they inserted the “don’t do anything inappropriate” line as an inside joke for the beta testers 
Anyway, this is now where I say, “Fuck you, Windows!” My draenei warrior (I figured he should be my first toon through the portal) was in the mine sequence, in the middle of combat while escorting Yrel, when the game just suddenly blipped out of existence. And I found myself with my laptop performing a Windows auto-update. Despite my settings telling Windows to do that shit at 3:00AM, it decided to do it at 10:30AM. No wonder I was getting such crappy game performance. So I was playing the game, and Windows just started shutting down every open program (including WoW) so that it could restart and install updates. So I had to sit there for 10 minutes while Windows did its thing. Thankfully, when I finally logged back into the game, my warrior was, miraculously, not dead.
Then I had to deal with this bizarre bug, or whatever it was, where I would be playing the game and, suddenly, the screen would just go completely black. As in, the computer completely shut down. Not a simple game crash; my whole laptop literally “shut down”, completely powered off, so that the only thing to do was press the Power button and start over. This happened to me four times today. Three times on Draenor, once while taking a taxi from the Shrine to Halfhill.
I’m also boggling at how long it takes to launch WoW on my Windows laptop. This laptop is four fucking years newer than my iMac (2012 vs. 2008), yet it takes five times as long to launch the Battle.net client, and five times longer to actually launch the game than my iMac. I swear I click the “PLAY” button in the bnet client, and it seems to be trying to launch two simultaneous instances of the WoW client.
Anyway, griping aside, my human paladin and my draenei warrior have now established their garrisons. Now I just need to do that on six other 90s … plus my dwarf paladin who is almost to 90, and my warlock who is on her way there …
That kind of crap never happens on my Mac.
To my delight, it appears that Gatherer has been updated for 6.0.3! I need a heads-up gathering display so damn bad on my boosted 90.
Erm, that should have been inserted before the “Anyway, griping aside …” paragraph. Missed the edit window.
Couple of neat Easter eggs–the follower you get in Stormshield makes a reference to Gary Gygax, and there’s a lumberjack NPC outside your garrison named “Kenny Logins” 
He’s all right. Don’t nobody worry 'bout him.
I haven’t run an Alliance toon through the xpac intro yet. I should; I took my orc main on an impromptu tour of Shadowmoon Valley (fishing for blind lake sturgeon for the fishing daily), and it’s quite lovely. And my 8-year-old daughter wants me to get an Alliance garrison up so I can build a stable and have horses. Lots of horses. I don’t know if that’s how it works, but she’s certain. Stables always have horses, right?
Okay, but why Orcs vs Humans specifically? That’s been true of every Warcraft RTS game.
I just did this last night (except, replacing a Barracks with a War Mill) and I don’t think I got a refund. That said, getting the Barracks was a clear mistake (since the War Mill/Dwarven Bunker doubles your chances of a quest item upgrade, so pretty useful while questing and leveling). So the cost was more-or-less worth it. I just wound up a smidge short last night upgrading my War Mill after completing the Spires of Arak quest chain (which awards a medium building Level 2 upgrade schematic of your choice). I imagine if I hadn’t had to replace the Barracks to begin with, I’d have a Level 2 War Mill waiting for me. :smack:
Great! Thanks!
I played a little while on Sunday . . .
. . . am I the only person out there who wishes questing was a bit more difficult? I know this is not new with WoD, but I can’t remember the last time I was ever concerned with being killed doing non-endgame content . . . Lich King maybe? It just makes playing through quests feel tedious, as there’s no mental work that goes into succeeding.
I mentioned upthread my surprise at how easy these quests and “world rares” are. I don’t know about “disappointed”, but I keep worrying a little bit I’ll get into one of these fights and accidentally completely underestimate it and get pwned. But it hasn’t happened yet, and I’m only 1 1/2 levels away from cap.
I’m playing my LFR-geared main, so maybe it’s easier for me than for an all-in-blues alt or a new toon fully boosted, but it is kind of silly. I legitimately have more trouble traveling around than with any of the fights. Hell, finding some fights is harder than actually winning them. I’m still one-shotting level-appropriate mobs. And I’m a sub-optimal MM hunter. /shrug