Warlords of Draenor: WoW General Discussion thread 10/13/2014

The Game Room
521

Hmmm… is all your gear 695 Empowered with the correct suffix? Gotta min/max your spec, after all! :smiley:

Surely you haven’t ground out 5,000 Saberon claws, have you? Because I still haven’t, and I’m sick enough in the head that most grinds don’t bother me, but that one does. :frowning:

(Comment in passing: I didn’t realize that the 100 claw reward for the “kill animals” daily quest doesn’t count toward the achievement, because the achievement is specific to “looting” the claws. So, more farming Saberons. Lots more. Yaaaay. :mad:)

Better luck than me. I got the shark pet (“Left Shark”) on an alt, but haven’t caught a sniff of a mount from any mission. RNG is a cruel mistress.

Seems odd, doesn’t it? I can’t imagine they’d just limp along on 6.2.x for another year or two before 7.x (whatever it is). WoD hasn’t really been out very long. But looks like this raid tier kills all the baddies, so I don’t know how they’d extend WoD.

Wait, no they don’t have raid fights for all baddies. We still haven’t killed Gul’dan, and Kil’Jaeden is still out there somewhere. (With Archimonde’s defeat at the end of HFC, Kil’jaeden would get another opportunity at the front of the Burning Legion, after having been discredited by the failure of his plan to corrupt all the orcs… thanks to Garrosh’s interference.)

522

No, I haven’t farmed 5,000 Saberon claws. That grind looks very grindy indeed.

And no, not all my gear is the optimal suffix. I still have some work to do on that score.

523

Could be pretty soon. Announcement expected on 6 Aug..

I have no idea* what the content/lore will be. There are still loose ends in WoD, but there may still be time in 6.x to tie them up.

*Ok, not literally “no idea”. The article I linked quotes a now-deleted forum comment from someplace purporting to leak the scenario of the new xpac, but I don’t give it much credit. Simply because there’s ABSOLUTELY NO HINT OF ANY OF IT in the current content.

Blizz has been pretty consistent lately in foreshadowing the content of the next xpac with the current one, so I don’t see any reason to believe unsupported speculation.

524

Hard to believe that WoD is already on the way out, but I guess it’s true. Maybe there’ll still be some decent content patches, though.

Maybe a little 1-boss raid to kill Gul’Dan?

525

I was reviewing the timeline of WoW, and I see a possible historical precedent.

Burning Crusade went live January 16, 2007. Wrath of the Lich King was announced early August the same year (at Blizzcon). WotLK went live November 13, 2008, so more than a year after initial announcement.

So, WoD has maybe 1 year and change to run, unless Blizzard has gotten massively faster in bringing out content, or is willing to release way less content as a full expansion. (Shrinking the deliverable to speed up the schedule.)

Certainly seems like they’d have the time, but they’ve made lots of noises about “last tier”… so if there’s no tier loot, what is there? Raiders won’t sit still for that.

526

I hope that “leaked synopsis” is not correct - because out of all the Warcraft lore and backstory, the Zandalari troll lore is among the least interesting to me.

Wonder what they’ll do with garrisons? Move them to the South Seas? I could dig having my own private island, so long as I could plant some palm trees and hang up some hammocks, build a little cabana, maybe. xD

527

To quote somebody I read somewhere, “The only WoW-killer will be Blizzard itself.”

I’ve cancelled my sub, as mentioned, but I’m already missing my MMO fix. When I cancelled WoW at the end of Cataclysm, I had City of Heroes to fall back on, but then NCSoft yanked that rug out from under me (just in time for MoP).

Now, I have subs with Aion, and D&D Online, and LotROL, and Rift, and Champions Online, but they all suck, and they don’t work on my Mac so I have to play them on this ridiculously tiny Windows laptop screen, and I can’t be bothered.

Please, WoW, stop sucking. You nailed it with MoP. Do that again.

528

For me, it’s not that the troll lore is not interesting enough – in the in-game history, they’re an ancient people, as old as the Elves. They have an interesting culture and internal politics – plenty of opportunity for conflict and adventure.

To me, the problem is that they’re played out. They were the focus of a lot of MoP, particularly Isle of Thunder. In terms of lore, they should be badly disorganized and no real threat. Their leadership is dead, and what’s left is discredited with the rest of the race (and their former allies). They shouldn’t need to be the focus of concerted action by the Horde and the Alliance, because they’re already defeated. It should be generations before they’re a problem that needs addressing again.

If my little farm in Valley of the Four Winds is any indication, the garrison will just sit there basically unoccupied and unused. NPCs will putz around, but nothing will get accomplished, because nothing there needs accomplishing after the new xpac goes live.

After WoD, the only thing I ever did with my farm was raise Songbell for Motes of Harmony, before Blizz made it so you couldn’t buy archeology crates with Spirits of Harmony any more.

Sure, I enjoy just chillin’ on the front porch of my little hut, petting Luna the kitty, flirting with Gina Mudclaw… but I have a real front porch and real kitties and a real wife (who’s really fun to flirt with), so why would I do any of that virtually?

If places like the garrison are to get stuff done in the game that you can’t do anywhere else and that are needed to get along in the game, and you no longer need to do them to get along in the game (because the game has moved on), why would the place matter?

I can see Blizz setting up a new garrison-like thing in the next xpac sited in the new area… but magicking the old garrison through the Nether (and across parallel universes) to plop into the new area seems cheap and immersion-breaking. So maybe Blizz might do it. :mad: But IMHO, more likely they’ll [del]make us[/del] give us the opportunity to do it over again in a different place with different rules and objectives.

529

Blizz has tried over and over to kill WoW, but as your experience shows, the lack of a viable alternative in MMORPG universe keeps us addicts attached and feeding the machine.

I hope that Blizz hasn’t gotten the mistaken impression that they must be doing the right things in the right ways, just because we junkies can’t go cold turkey.

In all fairness, Blizz doesn’t always suck. (Blind squirrel etc.) But stuff like making garrison play into Mandatory Fun (“You want your legendary? Oooh, you’re gonna have to do the garrison shipyard then. kthxbye.”) was a grave misstep. I think their subs are down, but for now they’re still making obscene money, so they don’t have to be good – only better than all none of their competition.

The next actually good MMO will slay them dead in months.

530

I’m playing Star Wars: The Old Republic while I wait for the next xpac. It’s free to play now (so you can check it out for awhile to see if you like it.) but they have an in-game store where you can buy stuff for real money. This doesn’t affect me because I bought a life-time account back when it first came out so a lot of stuff that is limited to free players aren’t to me and I get free money for the in-game store once a month to spend there.

It’s got a couple of things I like.

  1. Each class has their own storyline. About 60-70% of the game is the same for Jedi or Sith (They each hit the same planets but do different stuff on that planet.) But the other stuff is class specific to your story.

Like the ending of vanilla SWTOR for the Bounty Hunter is you fight the big bad bounty hunter of the galaxy. The ending for the Jedi Knight is you fight the Emperor.

  1. You can go light side or dark side on any class. I went light side on my bounty hunter even though it’s on the Sith side. Most conversations you have a choice of how to respond and sometimes that influences your actions. You can choose the light side response and get light side points or pick the dark side response and get dark side points. Like for the bounty hunter there is a quest where you gotta cut some guys head off and bring it back to someone. You can choose the light side choice and let the guy go or pick the dark side response and cut the guys head off.

  2. You get companions who fight along side you. Each class gets 5 by the end of the game and they have different functions. Like a healer, a tank, ranged or close combat. I’m playing a smuggler (Han Solo type, I even got the outfit to look him.) and my current companion is a Wookie. You can also get customizable armor for the companions and I like to deck them out.

  3. There is customizable armor you can get. Each piece has several slots to customize for stats not for looks but they do have the dressing room function like WoW does where the armor you see is not what you are actually wearing.

  4. They have ship battles where you can get a ship and level it up and customize it and do space missions. I have not done this yet but I’m thinking about checking it out soon.

531

The one big complaint I have about the way Blizz handles WoW is the way they continue to react to every complaint by going to the complete opposite extreme in the next expansion. Like, they reacted to complaints that WotLK heroic dungeons were “too easy” by making Cataclysm dungeons so fucking hard that the result was a completely toxic atmosphere in dungeons. Then they reacted to complaints about Cataclysm having “nothing to do” at max level if you weren’t a raider by giving non-raiders plenty to do in MoP … in the form of dailies (which I personally loved). Then people complained about all of the dailies, so in WoD they decided to go with almost no dailies … Good God, Blizzard, can you fucking wrap your collective head around the concept of “finding a middle ground”?!

But will it run on my Mac?

Heh. By the time somebody pointed me at City of Heroes, that game had gone “free to play”. But they had the option of a $15/month subscription option, which gave me access to more stuff than the FtP players got. But there was still the store. And I spent money in the store. But the offered merchandise wasn’t “pay to win” stuff, it was mostly cosmetic gear (in CoH, “gear” was purely cosmetic; stats were handled in a different way), giving me more options for costuming my characters. I probably spent $400 dollars in that store during the one year I played CoH. Costuming options were important to me, because in only a year, I created more than 100 unique superheroes/supervillains in that game. Here are some desktop wallpapers I created featuring a sampling of the characters I created.

And then NCSoft shut the game down. Pulled the rug right out from under me. Which is why, no matter how much I hear that Guild Wars 2 is completely awesome, I won’t play it. NCSoft will never get another dime from me.

532

But I actually came back to this thread because I remembered that I have a second WoW account. A trial account that will only let me level a toon to 20. I’m certain that I had already rolled a human paladin on that trial account, but it wasn’t there when I logged in.

So I rolled a troll mage, and that brings up a lore question. In the troll starting area, you have a conversation with Vol’jin, and he shows you a vision of his confrontation with Garrosh. At one point in the conversation, Garrosh calls Vol’jin “whelp”.

Garrosh basically called Vol’jin a child.

That made me wonder … how old are these characters supposed to be? Is Garrosh that much older than Vol’jin? I know that Garrosh is older than Thrall, but Vol’jin always struck me as being “older” himself.

Vol’jin also strikes me as being the Horde version of Tyrion Fordring. I don’t know how many of you read the books, but the novel that led up to Garrosh’s trial in Pandaria (War Crimes) heavily featured Vol’jin, and in the book he works closely with Alliance characters, and comes to respect them. That reminded me of Tyrion’s encounter with a rogue orc, and the events that resulted in Tyrion being sent into exile for “aiding the enemy” (events that happened between WarCraft 3 and WoW).

As a primarily Alliance player, I’ve been extremely happy with Vol’jin being the new Horde Warchief. I like the guy.

533

Great video about Vol’jin:

534

New WoW expansion, “Legion” announcement and info.

Highlights:
New continent
Level cap raised to 110
New Hero Class: Demon Hunter (with DPS or tank specs, Nelfs or Belfs only)
Class-focused Orders
New PVP honor system
Artifact weapons
New dungeons and raids

I’m not a raider or really a PVPer, so all I can comment is I think restoring some focus to classes is a good move, and I’m looking forward to Demon Hunter. The link says what weapons DHs can use but nothing about the armor class; I’m hoping it’s mail.

535

Hard to know. Most DHs I’ve seen are practically nekkid. Maybe leather, giving DPS/Tank mechanics similar to kitty/bear durids. (C’mon, you know how much Blizz loves recycling stuff.)

Interesting. Another hero class which is an anti-hero:

Yeah… hated and feared by their enemies and allies alike… disciple of an evil power turned in the cause of good… where have I seen that before?

The upside is that finally, they’ve found a way to make Blood Elf guys less pretty. :smiley:

For all of that’ I’m relieved it wasn’t that bogus troll stuff (:p, it was a troll) in the fake leak.

536

Sounds like I’m rolling a female Nelf DH, if they still have that booby-bouncy animation!

I admit I was kind of surprised by the DH announcement. I think I’ve subconsciously been hoping for a Diablo Necromancer/Witch Doctor-ish class to be added. (And as long as we’re picking from other games, a blue mage would be fun too.)

537

I looked and no it doesn’t. Which is a bummer cuz it’s fun playing in the Star Wars universe.

And Yay! New expansion. New continent and new class. I’m excited.

538

What’s going on with Auctioneer? I see a red message telling me they go offline unless I demand them, but I am not doing that correctly. Once I managed it, but it was purely by accident and I don’t remember the steps.

Rik I did see your messages, but too late to respond, sorry. I’ll miss you and I interacvitng on Lightbringer and Alex.

Thanks and y’all have fun with the game. Say hello sometime.

Q

539

Hi Quasi!

I’m actually back in, for now. I meant to log into my “trial” account, but inadvertently logged into my main account instead, and got a window that said I could get another 30 days of game time for something like 26K gold (basically, buying a WoW Token), with the cost being spread evenly across all of the characters on my account. So, what the hell, I’m back in. For now. Still don’t have much spare time to play, since my new management gig is eating up a lot of my “spare” time.

540

Oh, Dude, you were so close to getting away clean. :smiley:

Well, welcome back. And, as you note, you have real-world responsibilities to keep you grounded.

A Quasi sighting. Excellent! What a week!

Sorry, though, about the Auctioneer issues. I actually haven’t played this week at all, so if Auctioneer suddenly broke I’ve missed it. Maybe something changed in the game that Auctioneer has to accommodate? Client patches can do that sometimes.