I wouldn’t worry about that. Each race has more abilities than those you listed. Undead also have Will of the Forsaken, which gives temporary immunity to fear, as well as Cannibalism which lets them “consume” fallen humanoids to regain health. Orcs have innate stun resistance (not a bad thing for your Main Tank to have…), Blood Fury, and bonuses with axes. Tauren have Warstomp, greater health (also not a bad thing for your Main Tank to have…) and +15 to Herbalism skill. Trolls have…well, not so much. Compared to the whole list, Blood Elf racial abilites aren’t likely to be in greater demand than any others. Blood Elves will, however, be in demand because they are the only race that can be Paladins, Horde-side.
For the most part, though, racial abilities play a very minor role compared to class abilities. Many of Horde’s racials are more useful in PvP than in PvE (whereas Alliance racials tend to be the opposite).
I just strolled over to Target and picked up a couple copies (one for me, one for my GF). The supply at the downtown store was pretty good.
Of course, I doubt I’ll be able to play much tonight – the login queue on Thunderhorn is going to be insane, I’m sure. It’s been as many as 700 people leading up to the expansion, so I can only imagine what tonight’s will be.
I just picked one up at the Target across from work. They still had five copies left.
I wouldn’t worry too much about creating a must-have race–Blizzard’s been pretty good about not breaking existing games with overpowering add-ons (one reason why they never unlocked the Barbarian in Diablo I… not officially, anyway…). The extra classes in D2, the new units in Starcraft (Bloodwar), etc., didn’t break the game, in my experience.
Thanks for reminding me about target. They apparently had over 100 boxes.
So, Walmart 2 and 7… target 100. Okay, whatever.
But had I known that, I’d have just gotten it today. I didn’t have to get it right at the first possible moment, I just didn’t want to hear “sorry, the next batch won’t be due for a week”
I’ll probably make a new character later, but after work I’m heading through the Dark Portal right away. I stuck my character there last night, but was too lazy to stay up for the midnight sale, so I’m going to grab it today (it’s reserved).
Anyone on Turalyon up for some Hellfire Citadel instance action? Alliance, of course.
I was talking to a guy who played the beta, and he said the new instances (or raids? I didn’t talk to him for too long) use some sort of token system. Instead of having random stuff drop (maybe it does in addition), tokens drop, that everyone can roll for, and then turn in for gear.
As it is, I’ve barely raided, because the idea of doing the same thing over and over and over again in the hopes that a few particular items might drop that particular time isn’t my thing. So many times an item for a class we didn’t have in our group would drop, or something we already had, and it was totally useless, so it got sharded. On many runs, no one gets any new gear, because it’s all so random.
Tokens would make it so much better though - everyone would need them equally and benefit from them equally. You would no longer have useless gear just to be destroyed. You could systematically work towards a goal instead of running it over and over and over and hoping that you got lucky on the random chances. I’m really hoping they implemented something like this, and did it well.
I peer pressured my sweetie into buying a copy. He starting playing at Christmas (he needed an accessory to go with his new toy). I don’t play, but I like talking to him about it and I’ll sometimes take a break from my games to watch him play.
Yesterday he went to GameStop and preordered a copy. The munchkins in the store waiting for the roll out were shocked when he said he’d pick up his copy later in the week, maybe Thursday. He wasn’t going there at midnight? He wasn’t going there as soon as he could on Tuesday? They were so cute in their disbelief. I’m peer pressuring him again to go pick it up today after work.
My hubby was going to pick up two copies today, but our nephew picked up two copies for us last night. We were sort of laughing at him for going to stand in line for the midnight thing, but then he called us and told us he had picked up two copies for us. Saved my husband a lot of running around, so it was much appreciated.
Hubby picked up the copies from nephew this morning, and I am sure, is installing as I type this. I, unfortunately, am at work, so I’ll have to wait until tonight.
It will be interesting to see how it will really be.
Yep, that’s my understanding - not for basic instances (which will still drop blues - just much, much better blues) but for the Tier 4 and 5 sets. I am very happy about this - I never did see the Felheart bracers nor belt drop, and spent 250G for the damn belt. (I have 5 pieces of the set - at least the robes I had seen, just lost the roll on to an outside-of-guild PUGger.
That’s supposed to improve. I really never intended to get into raiding, but out of curiousity, I joined a Molten Core PUG, then another, then another until finally they recruited me. It’s great fun to play with a large group, chat on Vent, get drops for your friends… every time someone got a cherished item is fun when you’re all one big family.
If I had to guess, there will still be limited random drops - for example, most sets don’t cover all slots (like Neck, both rings, both trinkets, and Cloak slots). From what I understand, though, the best of the gems for socketables will be craftable and able to be traded along to others, so hopefully I’ll get most of those from the guild. There is a certain thrill in seeing cool items drop so I doubt it’ll be gone completely. Still, it was agonizing seeing Felheart Gloves and Giantstalker Belt drop again and again after all the warlocks/hunters had them, but yet other classes still had many people waiting.
The spouse picked up our copies today–he snagged me a Collector’s Edition! For retail (minus employee discount, even!) Just walked right into the Apple Company Store and grabbed the last one off the shelf. This is after I’d paid over retail to buy one on Ebay, but that one won’t be here until Thursday, so now I can sell it and recoup my expenditure. I am a happy bunny. I know I’m a dork, but I wanted that Nether Whelp.
What I’d like to know, though, is has anyone loaded it yet? How long does it take? If it’s going to be another marathon patch-download session like the first time or the 2.0 patch, both of which took ~3 hours on our DSL connection, I’d like to know in advance so I can set aside some non-playing time to do it, rather than being surprised when I just want to play.
Just popped in for about 1 minute to check the AH and saw my first Dranei shaman, standing right there by the mailbox. And so it begins.
If you’ve already gotten the patches as of last night, you won’t need another patch. They released the BC patch previously, and a few other fixes since then. You’ll just need to visit the worldofwarcraft.com website, register your account with the Burning Crusade key, then install the CD, from what I understand.
You will have to reinstall the ones after 2.0.0, however if you haven’t deleted them you won’t have to re-download them, just repatch. The one to 2.0.3 is the big one (159 megs), the one to 2.0.5 is tiny by comparison, however 2.0.4 was missing for both me and a friend and we had to re-download the patches after .3. Neither of us was too happy as the tracker wasn’t working well, I’m behind a school firewall (the downloader works, but barely–somehow I still got it first), and I couldn’t find another download.
When you get to the Outlands, look up. The sky is gorgeous–and there’s also some really, really tall mobs to watch out for.
Okay, I think it’s worth it. A bit heavy on use right now, but having a blast in Hellfire Peninsula. Got to fly and drop bombs! And very nice quest rewards. I got home a little before 7 pm, started loading, most was finished by the time I had to leave to take my daughter to soccer practice. My son finished the install (he’s eight years old) and had a Blood Elf mage at level 4 by the time I got home from soccer before 9 pm.
Grabbed 90,000 XP in the new area, between 9 pm and just after 11:30.
I played my 60 mage about 1/4 of the way to 61. The first quest I did gave me a wand that was better than the wand I’ve been carrying for about a year, and another quest shortly thereafter netted me a green necklace that was pretty much on par with the epic necklace I had from before BC. :eek: Oh yea, this is gonna be good!
My level 51 rogue may be able to finish Master of the Arena I’ve been able to grab arena chests that had been sitting there for over one hour! Gee, wonder where everybody who didn’t have to wait for the mail went…
She’s getting to invite all her guildie’s new alts into the guild, too 8)
Not a big fan of the great items. There will be an enormous item gap at around level 58, where pre-58 stuff sucks and post-58 stuff rocks. A lot of the gear people worked so hard to get will be replaced as rewards for easy quests or drops from easy mobs. I would’ve prefered a more gradual increase in the quality of items. I’ve already replaced both of my weapons just to quest rewards. Not a huge upgrade, but an upgrade.
I played my first new instance - the citadel ramparts. I have to say, I like it. Not too long, fairly densely populated but not too many fights overall. The boss fights are challenging without being exceedingly complex.
Somewhere along the lines, pre-BC, blizzard decided “if a 1.5 hour instance is pretty fun, then a 6 hour instance must be 4 times as much fun!” and I really hated that. My favorite instance was probably SFK - because it was fairly well designed, well themed, properly challenging, and most importantly, you could get the stupid thing done without spending 3+ hours.
It’s especially aggravating to spend 3+ hour instances with puggers. Something always comes up. Some moron will say “sorry guys, gotta go to school” an hour and a half into WHAT HE KNEW WAS A 3 HOUR INSTANCE, and boom, you lose your healer and have just wasted the last hour and a half. Or, you might have epic confrontations of personality along the lines of:
Player 1: ur dumb!!11
Player 2: no ur a fag
player 1: no u!!!
player 2: ninjas something and quits
Great.
There’s no benefit to having 4+ hour instances, it’d be better just to make multiple 1-2 hour ones. It seems that blizzard may have learned this lesson - but I’ve only run the one instance… I just hope it’s not an exception.
Every area writer wants to have The Biggest Baddest Mob, The Bestest Exp/Hr Ratio, The Most MoFo Bling. Letting them get away with it actually leads to more frustration (for both players and writers) than satisfaction, in the long term. Writers who are interested in writing only The Next High-End Area will get pissed when The Nextest High-End Area gets in and turns their Biggest Baddes Mob into the Second Biggest Second Baddest Mob. Writers who are able to work on low- and mid-level areas and to ask “what kind of holes do we have in the eq database that I may fill?” instead of just trying to add an even-bigger sword don’t have a problem when others pee farther.
Right now we’re seeing the new eq in the new high-end areas and in the new low-end areas, but there are also a bunch of new quests around in old areas and they do fill in holes. We won’t really see how much of a gap there is in a few days but it looks to me like it hasn’t been done as carelessly as it may seem at first sight. After all, people focus on the spectacular stuff: I haven’t seen anybody remark on the new greys
Does anybody know if tradeskills will go above 300? My herb is at 300 and she’s recently run into herbs she had problems picking, I don’t know if they existed before (probably did and I just hadn’t noticed them).
Nava, 8 years areawriter and editor in a mud who left when area inflation became the norm.
