Quite a pottymouth for a man of the Light…
It’s funny how disaparate PUG groups can be. I’ve been queueing for heroic PoS a lot lately because there are two upgrades for me (belt and boots), not that they have dropped yet. Saturday we couldn’t get past the first boss; the DPS couldn’t grasp the concept of clearing the stacking debuffs by hiding behind the boulders. I can’t heal the tank AND you if you’ve got 20 debuff stacks ticking away! That group fell apart.
But yesterday I had an awesome PoS group.
Other random comments:
– I’m enjoying NOT doing the holiday quests. I did them all on my main last year (got the Drake) so I don’t think I’ll kill myself doing them all until I get another 80. I’m doing some of the easy Valentine’s daily quests, though, because the XP (or gold for my main) is really good.
– Tried VoA25 for the first time since the new boss was added. We wiped twice, because DPS wasn’t burning those white globes fast enough. We would have probably beaten him but we ran out of time and lost WG.
– Burning Dog Legion: This Wednesday is Ash Wednesday, so the dungeon run may start closer to 9:00 since I may go to church after work.
See, all the stories like this I hear/read make me even less interested in dungeons and raids than I already am. I get peeved enough at asshats who can’t be bothered to dismount from their mammoths when talking to questgivers or who like to sit on their mounts in front of people trying to fish in the Dalaran fountain (gosh, that 1.5 second cast time for mounts still just takes too long QQ); I don’t want to deal with even more of it in dungeons. I play games to relax. Sure, this means I don’t get “geared”, but my pally has managed to reach a 4021 GearScore without ever setting foot in a NR instance, and frankly, I kind of like not looking exactly like every other paladin in Dalaran.
Ran my warrior around Dalaran a bit last night tossing rose petals at Hordies… once again, I had the hardest time finding an orc DK (I used to see them everywhere - where’d they all go?) and belf mage. Amongst belfs on Lightbringer, it seems like they’re all paladins and priests, and there seems to be an overall dearth of Horde mages. Warlocks galore, but few mages, and most of the mages seem to be trolls.
My paladin completed Elders of Eastern Kingdoms and Elders of Northrend. It looks to me like you have to get all of the elders for a particular achievement during the same year’s holiday for them to count. While my paladin earned Elders of the Alliance last year, she also collected 13 Coins of Ancestry, which means she must have talked to more than just the Alliance capital city elders, but none of the elders on any of the other achievements were marked off. While in Moonglade she found a raid group and was able to join in killing Omen and earned Elune’s Blessing 
Speaking of Omen … I also took my warrior to Moonglade to turn in the quest with the invitation, and tried to find Hordies to throw rose petals at while she was there. I rode her off toward the area where Omen spawns, wearing only her Lunar Festival Finery dress (I didn’t intend for her to join in that fight, so stayed well away from Omen). Well, what do I see but a belf hunter fleeing from a big wolf, which a mouseover revealed to be a Minion of Omen. That belf must have been way too low-level, because the Minion was only a lvl 59 non-elite, and it killed him quickly. Then it came after me (lvl 69). I hit my “Combat set” button, but since I was now in combat, that meant I could only switch in my axe. So, swinging the axe while “armored” in nothing but a pretty green dress, I killed the Minion 
Remember that you’re not hearing people’s stories about the 37 random groups they got that went smoothly, cleared their place quickly and uneventfully, and maybe had some pleasant banter during. It’s only the grim tale of woe that gets shared. The vast bulk of my experiences have been positive, and while there is frequently someone to chuckle about in guild chat, rarely is the entire group so terrible as to actually fail at heroic farming.
They’ve got some genuinely fun and engaging fights in there. I even like Valithria just because it shakes things up and lets the healers show off in ways they’re not usually able to do. My beef with it is that there’s a lot of tedium. The trash is almost all AOE zergfests with not much variety or distinction between it. The first four bosses are a TOC-grade waste of time that you can’t skip at all, Festergut & Rotface are pure tank & spank with sparse moments of flavor, and Sindragosa is 90 seconds of interesting with 6 minutes of boredom to get to that point. My raid’s had issues with the healer roster going on vacation lately so we haven’t downed lich king to get into heroic modes yet, but from what I’ve been seeing it looks like only Putricide actually shakes things up from the normal mode.
Agreed – I’ve had many, many excellent PuGs with my Belf paladin Kalathan. In fact I had one this morning; finally managed to finish heroic Halls of Reflection (although we did wipe at the last ice wall the first time; couldn’t take down the last undead before the Lich King reached us). I’ve also had several excellent PuG runs with my Death Knight (enough to get the “The Patient” moniker several runs ago). It’s the bad ones that stick in your brain – probably because of the way our caveman brains evolved. (“Oohh—not do that again; look what happen to Throg!”).
It just seems – and again this might be purely coincidental – that these last couple of weeks (while the holiday world event is taking place) there have been more instances of encountering jerks while running PuGs than I’d encountered in the several weeks before.
Yeah, the normal or good runs tend to not stick out. It’s the “omg no WAY” runs that do stick out in your brain because you’ve run a dozen dungeons that day already and then someone does something entirely stupid like not mount up at all for the jousting in TOC and expects everyone else to do it (and protect them) or whatever.
I have a quick question about the expansion packs.
I mentioned a few pages up that I’m back now after a long hiatus. I originally played pre-BC, and stopped playing before the expansions were ever released (I vaguely remember rolling a blood elf… was there a beta for BC?). Now I’m back, and I’ve convinced my wife to play with me. We’re a night elf rogue and a night elf druid, respectively. My wife is brand-new to the game, and I only ever got to maybe 40 or 45 with my main back in the day (an Undead Mage).
My question is this; at what point do you suggest we pick up the expansions? Keep in mind it was a miracle that I got my wife to join up with me in the first place, not to mention getting her OK for the two copies of the software, and two monthly subscriptions for a hobby that she used to give me so much shit about. So I don’t want to push it. But I don’t want to miss out too terribly either. I know we’re already missing out on some race and class options. At what point will we also be seriously missing out on content with our NE mains?
Well, you’re definitely missing out around level 58+, as that’s when you can go to Outland… if you have the Burning Crusade expansion. Without the expansion, you’ll hit a level cap at 60. Most players leave Azeroth at level 58 or even a level or two earlier, so it’ll be harder to find groups around then in the random dungeon finder, if you’re using it.
Hmm. I think you’re also missing out on the chance to be a jewelcrafter. Maybe Inscription - do you have a tab for glyphs in your talent panel?
It’s safe to wait until you’re approaching lvl 58-60 before installing BC, and 68-70 before installing WotLK. Before lvl 58, all you’re missing out on is blood elves, draenei, and death knights. And you can’t really do anything in Northrend before lvl 68.
And for that matter you can’t get a death knight until you’ve leveled to 55, I think; so really just dranei and blood elves (and jewelcrafting).
Belfs, Dranei, Death Knights, Jewelcrafting, and Inscription.
And I guess, you can’t get any achievements related to the new races. So achievements that require you to find a Blood Elf Mage or to put out a fire in Silvermoon City, you can’t do.
Almost forgot - I spotted an undead priest in Dalaran last night with the best name-title combination ever:
Headnurse the Patient
Yeah, from watching videos it does seem that a lot of the fights are rather derivative. I mean, I know that after 5 years of making raids that it must be hard creating genuinely new mechanics for fights, but it’s sad to see some that seem so simplified in ICC. Sindragosa seems like every other dragon fight they’ve made with a smattering of Kalecgos and Sapphiron added together, and a lot of the other fights I’ve seen seem to be able to described similarly. Valithria seems new-ish, Blood-Queen Lana’thel seems interesting just due to the bite mechanic (as the rest seems a bit of Mother Shahraz and Razorscale), and Putricide seems the most interesting fight so far.
I read something on MMO-Champion about Blizzard continuing to make PvE and PvP content prior to Cataclysm’s release. I wonder what they will add in terms of PvE (I don’t PvP much)? They said ICC was the last tiered raid, but that doesn’t discount a raid along the lines of AQ40 back in Vanilla, where they made a raid that was not tiered but a step up from BWL. I’m hopeful.
Even without all the expansions, you’re still playing WoW- Wrath of the Lich King version 3.3.2, you have all the data files, the game simply won’t let you access any of the expansion zones without a TBC/WotLK account. So there is nothing technical that stops you from finding a Blood Elf Mage, although it might be tricky as alliance when you don’t have access to Dalaran.
Oh yeah, almost forgot, Inscription is available without WotLK, I trained it on one character after patch 3.0 but before WotLK was released.
You could still find a BElf Mage if one was standing in front of you in the “old world.” You have the graphics for all those new races and everything, you just can’t become one, or travel to the new lands.
:smack: Of course, I was being stupid. I mean, I was just testing you.
I mean, yeah, you can’t hunt one down in their “native habitat” or anything 
- though it does seem like the BElves all clear out of SMC ASAP anyway.
Sad, really. I’ve been bashing my head against a stone wall to get my guild to include me in more ICC raiding because I’m an exploration junkie / lore junkie. This, of course, means I’m not much of a power-grinder, so I’m not ‘uber’ enough to see those places. Makes me a sad panda, and more sad that the fights are repetitive enough that my guild will probably get ‘sick’ of it, and I’ll never see the darn places.
As for later PvE, there’s always -all- of those other ‘closed’ portals underneath Wyrmrest temple. I suspect they all lead somewhere interesting. Also might be cool to find out what’s really going on with the Infinite Dragonflight, though with the big bad black dragon coming in Cataclysm, I suspect it may be more focused there.
Honestly, the lore/exploration was the main driving force in me coming back. I just really want to participate in Arthas’ demise, and that’s why I’m here. I do wish that it was a bit more epic, though I wish they had made Illidan a more epic figure as well. I also am a bit ambivalent about the Normal/HM differentiation in figures like Arthas. I wish they had made some other dude instead of Arthas be the normal end-boss of ICC, just to keep that kind of “epicness,” but then that would probably bar a lot of people who aren’t “hardcore” raiders from ever seeing him. So, I understand why he’s there, it just dampens my enthusiasm for seeing him on Normal.
As for Wyrmrest, I thought they were going to regularly put portals down there for each of the flights throughout the expansion, but it seems they have ignored it after Sartharion. Re-releasing Onyxia was rather meh, for me (having farmed her and solo’d her many times), wishing that they had put in an Infinite Dragonflight lore line through there. Clearly, Deathwing has a lot to do with the creation of the Twilight Dragonflight, but where does Nozdormu come in? I think it’s him in the future that created the Infinite Dragonflight to stop something terrible from happening (perhaps the Cataclysm itself?), but nothing has been shown about that. This is two expansions now with the Infinite Dragonflight seeming like a tacked on pseudo-nemesis that you quickly forget about when a bigger enemy steps forward. We shall see, though.
Quite. My last post snarled about the jerks who dropped group after they got the Elder’s coins, but I ran 7 dungeons that day, and the jerks only appeared in two of them. The others went very smoothly, and even the two where the guys dropped went well after we picked up new tanks.