Yeah, mounts, plus the half-hour cooldown on the hearth, means that you can get your first set of quests, mount up, go to the graveyard, do your questing, hearth back, and repeat for Duskwood, so it’s not that bad.
I lost the roll on the Battered Hilt the one time I saw it drop. 
Oh yeah. I liked Duskwood save for the fact that the before the reduction in Riding Skill levels, it was a pain to run from Darkshire to Raven Hill.
Also: I don’t know if it still there, but there was a green ?? dragon sitting in that little cove right in the middle of Duskwood. I wandered in there once (before I became addicted to QuestHelper) and was enjoying the serene atmosphere and then BAM! Dragon’d. That dragon and Stitches made Duskwood worse than a horror flick.
Edit: Well, damn. Snake Legs beat me to it.
Maybe it was bugged a bit the first day, but my group did all 3 dungeons and it dropped 2 hilts. Also, like I had mentioned in one of my above posts, I noticed a large amount of epic bop non-boss drops that night.
Wed/Thurs I didn’t see any epic bop drops so I don’t know what’s up with that.
I would usually just fly to Sentinel Hill and head east to the cemetery area. Also there were a few quests in between Darkshire and Raven Hill Cemetery (killing zombies/skeletons), so often by the time those were completed along with any current cemetery quests, your hearth was ready to go.
The dragon in Duskwood is completely avoidable, though, since it never leaves the Grove. Stitches is another matter, since about 3/4 of his path is on the only freakin’ road.
Went through regular ICC last night on my priest and it was like Christmas. The random number generator essentially looked at my gear and said “hey, those lvl 200 pieces you’re wearing in those slots are sooo yesterday”, and coughed up a robe, shoulders, ring, staff, and a dagger (which has +hit but also +haste). I was grouped with a pally (my husband, in prot mode), 2 DKs, and a hunter, so it was A-OK for me to be a loot-ho in this case. It was also nice to not have to decide between those items and my Ulduar pieces - how kind to drop so specifically. 
A hotfix on Wed reduced the drop rate of epic items from trash in the new instances and raids. There seems to be some debate about whether “epic items” includes the hilt or not.
I got my hilt Tuesday night and picked up my Quel’Delar, Lens of the mind last night. Now I’m wishing I’d rolled on the ToC offhand back when I didn’t need it, because the only offhand i have right now is Faces of Doom.
I finished my quest as well. I got the ilvl 251 caster sword. Easy quest line, pretty awesome sword.
We beat Deathwhisper and Gunship on 25s last night. The instance bugged, so we couldn’t advance to the last boss.
BTW, just for my peace of mind: is the hilt like some of the holiday items, in that it won’t be lootable by someone who’s already got one/done the quest?
Enjoying ICC so far. The new PUG system seems to work fairly well (only had time to try it twice so far, since I mistimed leveling a DK alt I’m very excited about with the ICC release, so I’ve been splitting my time between him, my main, and my almost-main). We’ve already got somebody in my guild who has the pug pet. Cute little guy.
Have finished two of the three heroics (we got frozen and DC’ed at the end of heroic Halls of Reflection and most of my group had a raid that night, so haven’t gotten back in yet. That’s on my list for this weekend). Wednesday night my guild went in and took down the four ICC25 bosses–lots of fun. We wiped twice on Marrowgar, three times on Deathwhisper, one-shotted the Gunship Battle, and wiped twice on Saurfang. We found the fights to be fairly easy once we got the hang of the mechanics. Lots of fun, though! We were especially amused by the bear-butt jetpacks on the druids during the Gunship Battle. 
Tonight my mage is set to do 10 man ICC, and tomorrow night my DK tank is going to be offtanking for another group. I’m nervous about the latter one. I’ve gotten a lot better as a tank than I used to be, but tanking new content for a 10 man group is a little scary. Hopefully I won’t embarrass myself too badly (and hopefully some good gear will drop!)
So wait, you don’t even get to kill Arthas at the end of ICC? What the hell kind of final boss is that? (Or did you guys just not get that far)?
For the third part of ICC:
You face down two bosses and their lackeys, then Your Side’s Leader (Sylvanas/Jaina) runs ahead, right into the Lich King, who proceeds to damned near kick her ass without breaking a sweat. You “grab” her and run off, and he stomps after you, sending his Scourge after. It’s a gauntlet where you run ahead to an ice wall, your Leader breaks it down while you’re on a timer for him walking to you while you fight more and more of his forces (he does massive damage and you will not survive against him), and rinse and repeat maybe 4 times. You run through the last wall and… you come out on a parapet high over the rest of the citadel. Dead end. The Lich King tromps toward you, mocking you, nearly out of the cave and onto the balcony…
And the captain of your side’s airship fires a massive blast into the cave, sealing it off, and saving your asses. He lowers a ramp onto the balcony and you all escape.
There will be more parts of ICC released as more patches come out; this is just the beginning.
To tell the truth, any race + the Barrens. I’ve got a few Horde alts on Cairne that are bogged down in their low 20s thanks to the Barrens. I did all/most of the Barrens quests on my tauren hunter, my first Horde toon, and really, that was enough. Plus, the Barrens really sucks for casters. In particular, there’s one quest way to the south where you have to kill three named quilboar mobs. They’re in a big, wide-open space, but the problem is there are all these stealthed quilboars sneaking around there and you never see them until you walk right into them. That’s doable with a melee class, but as a low-level clothie with extremely limited CC abilities and only enough mana to take out two mobs before you have to drink? Uh-uh.
I really think the Barrens was designed with hunters in mind. Casters just don’t have the survivability, and thanks to the way the mobs (quilboars in particular) are packed so close together, it’s hard for melee classes to attack anything without aggroing a whole crowd.
The Alliance equivalent, I think, is Auberdine/Darkshore, the night elf “secondary” zone. I hate, hate, HATE that place. Insanely long runs, mobs that have something like a .0001% drop rate on their quest items (Strider Stew, anybody?), a couple escort quests where you end up wishing there was an option to kill the NPC you’re escorting, and too damned many bears (which you never see coming because there’s so damned many trees that there is no line of sight for any distance)!
The first time I saw Stitches, I was doing one of the quests to talk to old hermit dude and when I found the old guy, Stitches was just standing there right behind/next to his shack. I couldn’t get close enough to hand in the quest, and I had to go grind for a while until he went away. More recently I was leveling an alt through there and I saw him coming down the road, so I ran well off the side of the road where I sat and watched while he pulped the guards who were waiting in the road. I thought I was far enough away, but noooooo… he finished off the guards and then came right after me :mad:
And, of course, there’s the fact that the whole Stitches quest chain is the first of several “sucker quests”. You know, the quest lines where you think you’re helping some innocent citizen, only to find at the end that you’ve been helping a villain.
Is there even an actual quest chain involving those dragons? I can say I’ve never run across it if there is. Would it be part of the An’Qiraj quest chain that ends in that big green dragon attacking Moonglade?
Just out of curiosity, are the new dungeons the reason for all the iLvl 245 pieces I spotted on the AH yesterday? I found some 245 gear (holy crap, high-level DPS plate! w00t!) — a couple chest pieces and some bracers — that I would have snapped up in an instant had the asking prices not been 7000g+.
Anybody know offhand what a server transfer costs? I’m getting very close to wanting to move all my toons off Lightbringer. That server is getting so crowded that it’s showing “High” population ever after midnight on school nights, and the lag is bad enough to make questing un-fun even in the Old World. Don’t get me started on Dalaran and NR in general. The biggest problem I can forsee with a server transfer is the fact that all 10 of my toons on Lightbringer are in my “vanity guild”, so I’d want to move all of them, and I don’t know how they handle the guild bank in that kind of situation.
Cairne (which is in the same battlegroup as Lightbringer - so maybe it’s a battlegroup problem rather than a realm problem) isn’t much better lately, either, even when it’s showing only “Medium” population. I logged in Keliraeda in Dalaran late last night, and it was a battle just trying to run her from the inn to the bank. Then when I flew out of there to head to Moa’ki, it took almost two minutes just to get out of sight of Dalaran, as my framerate dropped to 2fps, and my minimap disappeared and didn’t return until I landed in Moa’ki. From there I took the turtle boat to Borean Tundra and rode up into Sholazar to farm some Rhino Meat so I could do the cooking daily. That was a real challenge, because Keli is lvl 72 and the rhinos are all lvl 75-76, but the upside to that was one of the rhinos dropped a shield that’s actually an upgrade for me (though I can’t use it until lvl 74, so I’ll probably have a better quest reward shield by then). Once I had my rhino meat, I then had to fight my way to the flight point in the middle of the zone. That took a while, because again, every mob I encountered was 3-4 levels above me … and the lag was still bad in Sholazar, well away from Dalaran. And this was at maybe 1:00 AM, server time. The plus side is that I now have the flight points I need to be able to do all of the fishing dailies except the Terrorfish one in Wintergrasp (Keli doesn’t fly in NR yet, and I’ve never actually found a ground route into Wintergrasp - my human pally always just flies up from Star’s Rest in Dragonblight).
Whoops, never mind, didn’t see the edit about how there will be more parts to ICC coming out later. I’d feel cheated, except I’m not going to be geared up for an Icecrown raid any time in the next couple months anyway.
Just remembered another question: I’ve been seeing a bunch of these Core Hound Pup pets. Is that something that drops in the new dungeons, or is it the latest buy-with-real-money pet?
Only the first four bosses are available now. After 4 weeks, they will release the next wing and then some period of time for each of the following two wings. The Lich King is definitely the final boss of ICC, but he won’t be available to fight for at least a couple months.
Thanks. Like I said, I’d be offended about the bait-and-switch except that I’m not going to be an asset to an ICC raid before then (if ever) anyway, so the only way I’d have been able to go kill Arthas would have been by being dragged along by a better raiding group.
It’s the “thank you for buying an authenticator to protect your account, here’s a goodie for you” pet.
It’s adorable too. He makes growly sounds if you touch him, and will roll over, and occasionally throws a bone up in the air, catches it, and chomps it down.
The Lich King is indeed waiting inside Icecrown, and the goal is nothing less than his demise.
But for now, his fortress is only partially breached. You fight your way in from the foothold garrison the Argent Crusade & Ebon Blade have cut out just inside the front door, and eventually clear out a mid-level platform on the spire. You get picked up in your faction’s gunship and taken to the upper parts of the Citadel tower, deal with the uber death knight posted as gatekeeper…and find the door solidly barred. The gunship starts disgorging smiths and engineers onto the tower, they promptly set up a siege camp and get to work on the door. They say it will take almost a month to get it down.
IRL version: the raid instance is gated. We’ll only be able to access certain chunks of it at a time, like they did for Sunwell Plateau and Trial of the Crusader. It’ll be some months before the path to Arthas is available. This is the source of some consternation amongst the high-end raiders, since Heroic Icecrown is also locked until you’ve slain Arthas, and normal is…well, normal. My group 2-shotted each of the bosses in half our scheduled raid time, and then here we are, stuck with this locked door until January. We just called it and split up to check out the 5-mans. It’s cool and all, but we want to get started on the real meat already. We’re more than ready to leave the garbage that is TOC behind us.
And this is definitely not the case. The Icecrown raid, at least the bosses we can see so far, is not really a gear check at all. The item level 226 to 245 gear you can collect entirely from heroics, emblems and crafting, is not only sufficient, it’s all actually quite good. Some of the emblem pieces are absolute best in slot even for hardcore raiders. The new LFG system is amazingly painless, too. You could simply do only a single Random Heroic every day, and completely ignore crafting and the Icecrown 5-mans or heroic TOC and you would STILL be Icecrown-raid-ready, starting from total greens, in under a month. My latest 80, a prot warrior, has already tanked 10-man TOC, despite dinging under a month ago, and tanking is the most gear-stressful role in a raid.
Blizzard’s completely overhauled the game in the goal of making everything accessible to anyone who wants to do it, and while I might go grumpy-old-man at that philosophy, they’ve certainly managed to achieve it. The only real obstacles to raiding these days are the social ones.