World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth general discussion thread 17 July 2018

The Game Room
1

Previous expansion thread: World of Warcraft: Legion general discussion thread 19 July 2016

So Patch 8.0.1 goes live in a few hours and here we are with another new xpac and another new thread!

:smiley:

I think the PvP level continuing on is a great thing but don’t care about War Mode. I left my World PvP days long behind me now and I really doubt I’ll care to go back. When I quest, I really just want to quest, ya know what I’m sayin’?

The news that Strand of the Ancients is being retired is fantastic! Now I’ll be able to block Temple of Kotmogu and Isle of Conquest and still not ever have to play SOTA! Win-win!

I love that Mages get a group buff again!

The listed changes to Arcane Mages seem like good ones, for once.

Legion was the best xpac since WotLK, no doubt, but I did think it was remarkably easy. It was enjoyable enough as an activity, but there was never a sense of achievement. I had multiple times in the past 2 years where I stopped playing for 2-4 months and it never affected my gear rating or my ability to raid or pvp. I managed to get 1 of every class to 110 with their main artifact at 75 AP or more and gear ilvl at 220+, even with vary casual playing time and all that time away from the game (I topped my main out at . I’m curious if BfA will have a similar feel or not.

I’ve deliberately avoided too much information gathering for Battle for Azeroth, so I’m looking forward to seeing what they do, what they kept from Legion and what they discarded. I do know that I don’t give a fuck about any of the new classes. Most of my toons are Gobs now and I like it that way. I got tired of gigantic toons that don’t fit thru doors when mounted; I like little toons that fit in places. I won’t be growing my orcs, although I might change a Blood Elf to a Black Hole Elf or Nebula Elf or whatever it is for Horde.

I still can’t order the CE which is a bummer. I have CEs for everything so far; I’ll get this one as soon as they put it on sale but the wait seems longer than in the past.

The weirdest thing for me is gonna be that I’m going to have to play on my laptop going forward; my desktop OS cannot be upgraded because of the hardware and Patch 8.0+ will not run on my OS (2008 Mac Pro w/ OS X El Capitan 10.11.6 for the curious). I’m sure the 2017 Macbook Pro will handle it fine, tho and I have a dock coming so I can use my regular keyboard and huge monitors.

I seriously hope they fix the stupid tiny default bag, but I’m not hopeful, if ya know what I mean. I also hope there’s a bigger bag for us Tailors to make since we’ve been stuck at 30 slots per for 4 years now.

What’s with Teldrassil & Lordaeron? Do they mean Undercity? Stuff I read was unclear about this.

Again, tho, I’m most looking forward to new areas to explore. Unfortunately, they chose Zandalar this time instead of someplace new, so I’ll have to listen to blatantly racist caricatures for the next 2 years in those zones (minimally: I turn most voice acting off); thanks Blizz. Of course the Alliance gets an all-new place while the Horde gets recycled racism. :rolleyes: Ah well, at least the terrain will be new.

What do y’all think?

2

Looking forward to starting the expansion with my effectively brand-new gaming PC, after sitting out most of Legion due to my 2008 iMac producing framerates that made playing rather unfun.

3

I must be old. I’m dreading having to learn how to play my classes again. I just sorta got good, and now back to square one.

Yep, old. I liked my cheese just where I put it.

ETA: I am still keenly interested in where the lore is going. Horde loses Undercity? Alliance loses Teldrassil? It looks like the factions are lining up on a geographic basis, Horde continent (Kalimdor) v. Eastern Kingdoms (Alliance) except for the Burning Crusade capitals.

4

I’ll be straight up about this: I think the whole concept of this xpac is stupid and amounts to taking 3 or 4 huge steps backward.

Luckily, one thing I’ve learned over the years is not to worry too much about the lore: they’ll re-write it for the next expansion if they want and no one will care, especially if the gameplay is decent.

5

Well, got the game updated and the Battle.net launcher to log me in, but WoW told me my video driver is out of date.

Dum-de-dum down to Nvidia, download current driver file set, install, uninstall the parasitic and overweening Geforce Experience POS, and now WoW will load without complaining. Oh. it still times out and disconnects when trying to log into realm, but at least the display driver is copacetic. Yaaay.

6

WOOT!

I just got an email from Amazon that the CE was available for pre-order finally! Mine is bought and paid for, they just gotta ship it to me!

7

I haven’t been able to get to my toons yet but I have logged in several times.

This is the worst-looking log-in screen a WoW xpac has had yet; it’s awful.

8

I logged in around 8pm Pacific, finally. No new lead in quests, we’re all just nerfed for a week with nothing to do and then 3 weeks of nerfquesting one quick chain per week.

Also, I was horrified to discover that we can no longer block ANY pvp instances. :eek:

9

Please forgive me, but my apparently defective brain isn’t parsing what that means. What’s a “PvP instance” and how would you have blocked it before?

10

A battleground, dude. A battleground is a PvP instance, just like a dungeon is a PvE instance.

11

I really do like being able to toggle on/off world PvP. I’ve come to like world PvP less and less over time, especially when trying to level an alt.

As for the rest… I’m a bit ambivalent about WoW as it is. Partly, with the passing of my spouse I lack my favorite person to share it with. I don’t really feel like I’ve finished with Legion, and in many ways I didn’t like Legion because of all the other crap going on in my life, the gaps of time I was away from the game, and so forth.

I’m not even sure I’m going to continue with WoW at this point, even though in many ways I still enjoy WoW.

I dunno… I’m all very conflicted but it has more to do with me than the game I think.

12

Ok. That makes sense, although it’s not the phrasing I would have used. But “blocking”? I didn’t see any changes in the UI, so the PvP LFG tab on the LFG interface is no more or less accessible than before, and battlegrounds don’t queue themselves.

I can’t picture what you’re describing as “no longer blocked”.

13

Until this patch, we could block up to 2 BGs from the RBG queue. I had SotA and IoC blocked so that I never had to play them.

I was happy that they were removing SotA from the game, so I could now block IoC and ToK, but they removed the ability to block any BGs from the RBG queue, so now I occasionally have to play IoC (and constantly have to play ToK), or accept the 15 minute debuff.

14

Why no love for ToK, Bo?

Believe me, I’m with you 100% on SotA & IoC, but I kind of like ToK.

Can you still get AV & IoC in the random BG queue if you aren’t in the Epic Battleground queue?

15

No, those are in the Epic queue only.

Blizzard doesn’t understand PvP very well at all, IMO. Their CTF games are all shite; they can’t even get flagball right ffs. Don’t even get me started on the flaws with their versions of TKOTH. And their scoring conventions are inconsistent and designed to speed up the win.

ToK is a poor attempt to combine KOTH with flagball. I dislike the arena design, the rules and the resulting gameplay.

ETA: I don’t like having 2 queues either.

16

Thank you for clarifying. Ignorance brilliantly fought. I never did the random battleground thing, so didn’t realize you could (used to) mark some as undesirable and not get thrown into one of them.

This expac pre-patch has wound up disabling or removing a few notable player choice features, hasn’t it?

17

Aye; a few.

The redone PvP talents is lame. Or rather, the fact that they took away all the cool stuff and left all the garbage, which I can now stack endlessly even tho I don’t want any of them, really.

My wait time for REBG (Random Epic BattleGround) has raged from 17 minutes to 47 minutes. Wait times for RBGs still seem to be from 4-8 minutes, so that’s cool at least.

I spent 90 minutes or so today doing the xpac quests. Pretty boring and a seriously lame stopping point.

Remember before Legion how there was gear to help transition? I thought they did a decent job with the quest line, keeping me engaged with the story and loving the carrot-on-a-stick that the new gear provided.

This time: nothing.

:mad:

I am loving the fact that my Arcane Missiles are no longer dependent on a random proc, tho. I can destroy people with 3 casts usually and mobs just melt in one or one-point-five. :smiley:

18

The suddenness of the stopping point was pretty lame, tbh. The NPC boss (Sylvanas or Malfurion) makes vague reference to keeping up the fight or keeping on the pressure, which in retrospect seems to have been an incredibly veiled reference to the WQs in the Darkshore zone. Which I didn’t see initially because an add-on was blocking them on the map.

Add-ons. There’s a story for this expac. I have add-ons I’ve relied on for years and were always updated rather quickly, and until they were they at least failed decisively. But whatever Blizzard did to the Lua runtime and APIs, I have add-ons that half-work or fail silently with damaging effects. Totally bizarro.

Speaking of Darkshore, they did a half-assed job phasing it. You could accidentally pick up zone quests meant for level 15 characters along with the few War of Thorns quests because the lowbie quest givers are right there along side the quest givers for the event. If you are configured to see low-level quests, you’d never know until the phasing made those lowbie quests impossible to do. I got completely psyched by that, and according to the Blizzard forums I’m not the only one

19

The WQs hand out new 210 gear, though the appearances are identical to the stuff we got from the Salvage Yard in our garrisons.

That tricked me at first, but I’ve done those quests recently enough on leveling alts that I recognized them for what they were after reading a bit of the quest text. The yellow “!” icons are also dimmed a bit. My own annoyance with the phasing is that the portal from Rut’van Village to Darnassus doesn’t work, and the inn at Lor’danel isn’t functioning as “rested” space so you can’t log out there without a wait. So, sigh, hearth back to Dalaran and then log out in front of the Darnassus portal to get ready to do more WQs tomorrow.

And speaking of those WQs, on the Alliance side there’s a WQ to kill this big elite shredder that is surrounded by regular Horde mobs. My ret paladin, fire mage, outlaw rogue, and ele shaman did it easily. Then my arms warrior charged in there and got shredded in about five seconds. I swear, for all that armor warriors wear, they sure seem fragile sometimes.

20

Pretty sure the portal for the village is fixed, as I definitely used both ways last night.

Agree that the shredder is funny. My main Enhance Shaman (ilvl 245ish?) could solo it no prob, my fresh 110 druid (ilvl 170ish) got smoked.

On my main, I also wasn’t paying attention at first on the stealth quest and rounded up about 10 mobs to AOE down, I survived but it got a little hairy haha.