Maintenance keeps getting extended today…first it was 1 PM Central, then 3, now 5. 
Crap.
I don’t remember MoP being this unstable this long after release. Then again, it may not have been as radical a change as WoD.
They better get that stuff straight, soon. I need to run Everbloom and get through this stage of the legendary ring quest chain. And maybe do some more mount taming (the Stable is fun!)
And now we’re having a second round of rolling restarts…
Hope they start to get the servers under control pretty soon. It would be interesting to know exactly how much their subscription base has increased in the last month or two.
My guild has tripled in size, old players I haven’t seen since Lich King keep coming out of the woodwork, the chatter in Trade is tenfold what it was over the summer.
Are there seriously twice as many people playing now?
I took a bit of a break over the summer and have taken my time leveling this expac (i should hit 100 either tonight or tomorrow). I’m looking forward to doing some difficult heroics and raiding! What are folks using for DPS meters these days? Is recount still the way to go? I’ve spent the last 3 expacs tanking almost exclusively, and was never too worried about dps numbers other than the totals.
I understand the DDOS attacks are still ongoing. It’s not just WoW, either. Other MMORPGS are getting massively hit. I belong to a Final Fantasy XIV group on Facebook and people are not able to log into that game, either. It’s this Lizard Squad or whatever they’re calling themselves.
ETA: Yes, Lizard Squad. Just checked some resources. They’ve also taken down XBox Live, apparently.
What I saw last night didn’t look like a DDOS, at least not one that should affect Battle.net infrastructure. The overwhelming weight of what I saw on ipviking was HTTP from some Kuwaiti ISP (botnetted home users, I expect) against stuff in the St. Louis area. I don’t believe Blizz has any colo or core network assets there (but I could be wrong). And it was just HTTP, so other than wire congestion I don’t think it should have affected game-related protocols.
I think last night was just a poorly-deployed server-side content patch. The fact that the outages and poor performance seemed to shift around among various realms tells me it wasn’t infrastructural, or externally sourced.
Disclaimer: I’m a systems engineer and a former systems manager/administrator. I am not your systems engineer, nor am I Blizzard’s. This does not constitute legal, medical, religious, moral, or technical advice. Your mileage may vary. Take only as directed.
OK, WHY are these people doing this? Some agenda? Just to be jerks? What?
I do not know from experience, because my lone level 100 hasn’t qualified for heroics yet, but I suspect you’ll get your wish for difficult heroics, at least until the inevitable nerf eventually comes.
From what I’ve seen, the regular level 100 dungeons are pretty hard–I put them at the level of MoP heroics, maybe a notch above. WoD heroics pretty much have to be beyond that.
Okay, what am I missing here? The buildings I choose at each of my outposts say, before I choose, that they will give me some special ability that I can use within that particular zone. But how do I do this? I’ve searched my spellbook, and I can’t find these abilities anywhere. Nor can I find an item in my bags to activate these abilities.
For example, my Sparring Ring in Gorgrond said I could call on my pitfighters for help while in Gorgrond. The only thing I’ve seen resembling this “ability” is clicking on Odd Boulders and having Beatface appear to smash it for me. My Trading Post in Spires of Arak is supposed to let me summon a “rare goods vendor” while in SoA, but, again, I can’t see how to actually do that.
WTH?
A “Call to Arms” button should appear in the middle of your screen, when it does you can drag it to your action bar. If you’ve already done that in one zone, each zone should automatically work. From what i’m reading, if you drag it off of your action bar the button should immediately reappear in the middle of your screen. Otherwise, maybe you have a custom UI hiding the button?
In other news i hit 100 last night and got my Bronze/Silver/Gold Achievements for Proving Grounds DPS! Now if i just had high enough ilvl to queue for heroics 
As far as I can tell, you get a different ‘button’ for each zone? So when I’m in one zone, I can mount and do combat on a wolf. In another zone, clicking the same button gives me some helpers for 30 seconds. Don’t you choose which action you want at some stage in questing?
God, this really highlights to me how much I don’t understand about this expansion. I mean, every night I log in, and I go to my mine and I mine the nodes and I set some work orders…and I think to myself ‘Why am I doing this?’ I’m not an engineer so why am I mining?
Similarly, I’m supposed to be saving up garrison resources to upgrade my town hall. If I send followers on missions, that costs resources. So should I stop sending my followers on missions? And what actually happens when I get my town hall to the next level? New missions? More missions? For what purpose? What are my followers actually for? I get that sometimes I get gold from a mission or a piece of gear. But most of the time, I’m getting XP for my followers, so that they can do harder missions. Why?
I’m thinking I should just stop doing all that garrison stuff and go back to how I used to play the game. Continue with my heroics to gear up enough to raid.
Oh, and whilst I’m on the subject of heroics, I can’t see any difference (apart from difficulty) in the dungeon mechanics between normal and heroic, from the ones I’ve seen so far. So the mechanics seem just the same, no new boss abilities or actions. Or am I just being non-observant?
Yes, that’s about it.
I put the button on one of my action bars. The icon changes depending on which zone I’m in, but it’s always the same button. So, in Frostfire it summons a crew from my garrison. In Gorgrond it summons a shredder that throws saw blades and has a flame thrower. In Spires of Arrak it summons the rare good smuggler (a vendor). There is a quest in each zone which allows you to chose, usually involving the outpost of your garrison (in Arrak, for example, if you choose the trading post as your building you get the rare goods guy, if you choose the other one I think you get a group of guys to aid you in combat).
Good question.
Here’s the answer: you don’t have to mine. Your mine will still be there, but you can just ignore it if you’d rather do something else. Really. The Mine Police will not log on and drag your toon kicking and screaming into the mine.
Right now I mine for three reasons:
- to get ores to sell on the AH
- to give some to the spouse, whose toon does use it
- save some for alts that will use it in the future.
The mine and the work orders do seem to be where I’m getting apexis crystals these days. Those aren’t important early one, but later you use them to purchase stuff. I haven’t gotten that far yet myself, I just know it’s down the line.
It depends.
You can pick and choose garrison missions that only bring in some gold or resources as well as follower XP (I’m pretty sure some of them give you XP as well - I dinged 97 when reviewing follower missions one night). You can stop sending them on missions. I sent one out on a lot of missions, upgraded my barracks, and now I have a bodyguard three levels above me! (She dinged 100 before I did!) Now, if she would just stop getting herself killed… (but I don’t die as often, so I guess it’s working out).
If you want to do instances you might want to swap your barracks for a tavern, where you get a daily quest for instances. Which other buildings you have depends on you - I have a tannery because I have a leatherworker and burnished leather is a lot easier to produce with a tannery. I have an herb garden but I’m not sure if I’ll upgrade it because I’m getting more than enough herbs for my needs with level 1 and selling the surplus on the AH. I have the enchanting studio so my LW/skinner can get enchantments there rather than the AH, but I might at some point swap it out for an alchemist’s lab… or maybe not.
But, the important thing here is you don’t have to make the garrison central. You do need to have one, but if you’d rather instance or PvP or explore the world go out and do that.
By the way - a MUCH more efficient way to get garrison resources is to farm silver-border rares. That puts you out in the world among the quests and other players as well, which you might find more appealing.
Go ahead, then.
But do empty your garrison resource “bucket” every 2-3 days. It stops accumulating resources at 500 but your character’s cap is around 10,000. You want to keep those accumulating so if in the future you want to make changes you can do so more quickly.
In most zones, the choice you make is which building you choose in that zone’s outpost (e.g., ride a wolf versus create a demolisher in Nagrand, lumber camp v. sparring ring in Gorgorond, etc.).
(This explanation is Horde-centric both because your example is, and because I am. Alliance has direct equivalents.)
In your starting zone, there’s no choice. “Call to Arms” (the Swiss Army button) just summons some garrison NPCs to fight for you. Good if you need disposable tanks and a little more DPS.
It’s the one button. What it does varies from zone to zone, and in the zones other than starting, you decide between two alternatives what the button will do. For free, at the appropriate point in the quest line in that zone when you choose the building. For 10,000 gold later, if you want to change your mind and replace a building with its alternative.
You really don’t have to. If you don’t have a use for the ore, it can’t possibly be a priority to gather it. Certainly, don’t expect to make any money on the AH with it. Commodity prices have been driven down by the fact that anyone who wants ore can have a fair bit of it completely for free, without any actual gathering skills.
In theory, doing work orders can generate extra stuff (like a few Apexis Crystals), but if you do the strategic dailies or the other zone events, you’ll have more than you can use. Not to mention that just killing Level 100 mobs can generate a fair bit of them.
It’s a mini-game within a game, like pet battles is. Followers can be helpful in certain ways, like assigning a properly skilled one to an upgraded production building increases its productivity. For instance, my engineering facility cranks out two Gearspring Parts per engineering work order rather than one, and my level 3 lumber mill turns out 30 Garrison Resources per timber work order instead of 20. Also, those NPCs can sell you stuff related to the tradeskill that you can use without the tradeskill. If you have an engineering follower in the engineering facility, they’ll sell you useful gadgets like Walter (a Jeeves-like repair-and-bank bot, except it’s one-shot and usable by even a purchaser with no engineering skill).
You certainly could. In my experience, Garrisons help main-game experience mostly in tradeskill support and questing (such as the strategic dailies and garrison campaign). For me, the tradeskill support has been crucial. My main is a hunter with engineering and leatherworking – a straightforward raiding build. Even if engineering has lost its combat perks, the fact that you can (and I have) craft the best non-raid-drop rifle and a damn good epic helmet is enough for me.
The heroics I’ve run, and the ones I’ve studied, there are some mechanics differences; usually, just one more thing to look out for and avoid (such as the additional Hunter’s Mark/Explosive Spear shtick in Heroic Skylord Tovra in Grimrail Depot). IMHO, the baseline mechanics are often the hard part, and require the majority of the familiarity and awareness to succeed in the instance.
sigh And the quest/dialogue text makes this abundantly unclear. I dragged that button to my action bars when I got it in my garrison. But nothing that I read while setting up my outposts mentioned that the new abilities would use the same damned button. So I guess, apparently, I could have been summoning a shredder every time I encountered one of those overgrown hidden treasures in Gorgrond that said, “You need to be in a shredder to clear this away”?
The mine: My paladin is an enchanter/alchemist, and I see that some of the Draenor alchemy recipes use ore. So, useful to me. As are the Herb Garden and Fishing Shack.
My paladin is 98 now, and plugging along. No hurry to get to 100. I want to see each zone’s whole story, so quests it is! Talador was very cool. Except for that demon area leading up to the confrontation with Gul’dan. It got very old, very quickly, when it became apparent that every mob in that area, whether demon or orc, had the same tactic: engage, jump in the air, land behind me. Also, having ghost ogres tagging along behind me whilst trying to navigate a spiral ramp up a tower was a pain in the neck. I CAN’T SEE WHERE I’M GOING!
Now here is where I thank Og for addons. I’m using a HandyNotes plugin that shows me where the various “treasures” are, and includes tips on obtaining them, where necessary. So, in Spires of Arak, I got that Shadow Potion, or whatever it’s called. The tooltip said something vague, like, “Drink near a Shrine of Terrok for a glimpse into the Shadow World”. Based on the tooltip, I assumed it was some novelty effect, like letting me see ghosts or something. Which means that I probably would have just used it at the first Shrine I came to. But, thanks to the addon, I moused over a nearby treasure icon on my minimap, and the tooltip told me what the treasure was (a 585 blue crossbow), and pointed out that it was at a Shrine and I would need to drink the potion to see and obtain it. Well thank goodness my paladin didn’t waste the damned potion on a crossbow! The very next Shrine I found yielded up a sweet 585 blue STR polearm 
Also, freaking achievements are broken again. They broke in, I think, Patch 5.1. My rogue went through most Pandaria zones and got the zone quest achievements, before 5.1. But since these are now account-wide achievements, they show up on every character, but mousing over them will show, “Not earned by [current character]” if the current character didn’t actually earn it. So my paladin went through Jade Forest after 5.1, and completed all of the quests, but the “Upjade Complete” achievement insists she didn’t. The Pearlfin Village and one other storyline are greyed out as if she didn’t complete them. Since my paladin is my “Loremaster” character, and she has the Loremaster achievement for everything through Cataclysm, it’s very annoying that she can’t get it for Pandaria. Anyway, they fixed this issue (finally) in 6.0, and these achievements were showing as “earned” for her. And now, a few hotfixes later, they’re once more showing as “not earned” :mad:
To top it off, this paladin is, so far, my only Alliance character to move out of Shadowmoon, and she’s completed the zone quest achievements for Shadowmoon, Gorgrond, and Talador. Yet looking at them now, they’re reading “not earned”, despite every storyline sub-component showing as “complete”. During the recent Pilgrim’s Bounty, my warlock was the only one of my characters to participate. She picked up a handful of the holiday achievements … and within 10 minutes of earning each achievement, the tooltip switched to “Not earned by Hodela”. Very irritating.
I finally passed the silver proving grounds as dps. First heroic was Auchib-something or other. It wasn’t too bad. Second run was Bloodmaul Slag Mines. Egads…that place is insane. Seems like it is designed to minimize mage dps…constant movement…very annoying. We got the first three bosses, but multi-wiped on the final guy until the group fell apart. So no legendary piece for me today.
That was an awesome explanation, gnoitall, thank you!
Aranyax cracked her knuckles and accepted the silver challenge. She summoned her cantankerous void lord, and laid into the mobs with her conflagrate and incinerate.
Round 1, 10 seconds left over.
Round 2, 20 seconds left over.
Round 3, 20 seconds left over.
Round 4, 10 seconds left over.
Round 5, omg what happened? 2 seconds left?
Round 6, holy hell, this isn’t possible!
I check my glyphs and talents, chose some stuns and summoned my Observer to help deal with the healer, and retry… for 2 hours.
Rather than give in to tears, I decided to go fish up some more sea scorpions to practice first aid. The operative word being “more”. I still had my fishing pole equipped from my previous foray. :facepalm:
This silver challenge really is much easier using a caster staff instead of a fishing pole.
They really need to make a separate equipment slot for fishing poles.
I remember the first time I forgot to equip my weapon and couldn’t figure out why it was taking so long to beat a mob to death.
And then there was the time my warlock tried to DPS Razerfen Kraul with a fishing pole instead of a staff.
Gosh, haven’t we all done stuff like that?
I did it in a WotLK heroic. Couldn’t figure out what happened to my dps…and nobody said anything, just let me run the whole dungeon with the fishing pole (and maybe the hat, too, don’t remember).