Thank you 
OOOOOOOH! Bigger bullets! Nava restrains her dwarven hunter with great effort
Bigger BOOM! the dwarven paladin manages to escape, though
Dang, them characters do take a life of their own after a while, uh?
I’m not sure that the inflation is writer motivated. Could be, but Blizzard seems to have a better handle on their folks than that. I think it’s more likely a marketing/sales thing. Last night I was linking some of the new stuff to my guild chat and getting lots of “oohs and aahs”. You can bet the folks that don’t yet have the expansion pack were licking their chops. This will drive sales.
Shibb “Always follow the money” Oleth
I made a new dranei male hunter on Shandris last night. My husband rolled a female warrior. Since the server was new, it wasn’t too heavily populated, but there was still some necessary spawn-camping, especially to kill those walking plants. The new mobs in that area look great.
I also got into Medivh and re-specced my level 60 NE hunter. Before I go anywhere with her, I need to re-learn how to play a hunter of that level. I still need to r-spec all my other characters.
They’re taking down all or most of the servers this morning to deal with capacity issues, as of 5 am Pacific time. I expect they should be up by most of our afternoon/evenings. 'Cept maybe Nava.
I got a quest reward for a simple “go kill 20 of these” quests that was better than the best crafted dagger. It’s not just high end stuff, but the basic stuff you get from common drops.
Oh, and pet theory:
I was thinking… they have to design these zones so that they’re playable by people who just hit level 60, and also by people who’ve put in 10 hours a day for months at level 60 and are completely decked out. A hard challenge.
A possible solution? Give everyone pretty good gear, so there’s a smaller gap.
I just started playing this fall, so I don’t have any 60’s to go romping in the Outlands. I created a Draeni shaman on my Alliance server and a Blood Elf Paladin on my Horde server. It was amusingly crowded… on the Horde server, there’s an early quest to go kill 6 of these things, 2 of those things, and bring me this guy’s head. This guy is up at the top of a tower; I mow my way through a few of the first kind of things and head up to the top to see what the big bad’s like… and there are about 50 Blood Elf paladins up there, twiddling their thumbs and waiting for him to show up so somebody can gack him.
I think I’ll abandon that quest. :rolleyes:
Then I went out into the big bad world and saw much cool stuff.
Hey, it said our crafters would be able to make socketed items now… is that a level-dependent thing, or are there specific trainers who can teach us that stuff?
Didja notice every squishy had their pimp hat on?
I’ve been trying to explain the same to my guild, re: jewelcrafting. I’ve been trying to convince them not to rush out to learn the new trade but to wait until the inevitable “market crash.” Jewels are going to be flooding the market-- now’s the time just to sit back and buy up the cheap goods and sell off all of those gems you’ve been hoarding in the bank.
Oh yeah. I waited a day to let people get a little taste of the game, and for many of the stockpilers’ supplies to wane. (Plus I wanted to play, not man the AH.) All my gems go up on AH tonight before people get clever and start farming.
Sadly, I did pay a high price (well … for runecloth) for stacks of Runecloth as I really want to start using my new cloth for bandages; I didn’t anticipate it would take so long to be able to use them.
I figure the equipment situation is intended to be an equalizer - people wouldn’t be motivated if all the Tier 3 folks just ran right through the expansion with their gear. The gear had to be better to put yourself on an even ground.
I can’t believe so many people have gone nuts. About half the 60s in my guild are already 61. As of this morning I was still halfway to 61. There are people on my server who are already 64, and I hear that someone made it to 70 in 28 hours (through the WoW forums).
BTW, Nagrand is BEAUTIFUL. So is the view approaching Shattrath City. A guildie took me on a mounted tour of some of the new zones and they are quite lovely. Even the swamp has a haunting, eerie beauty.
Haven’t created a character with the new races yet – I prefer to wait until the frenzy dies down a bit and I can actually do the newbie quests. But I thought I’d pop over and check out the Exodar. It’s always fun to see the graphics in a new expansion. Beautiful city, but I was there about 2 minutes before the zone crashed. My hunter ended up stranded there for the rest of the night. I’m hoping the rolling restarts will help a bit, but it seems traffic is going to be just insane for a while.
Oh, yeah… Copper bars were selling for 2 gold per stack of 20. Thank you, jewelcrafters! My dwarven paladin loves you!
Ooh…something to do for my gnomey girl tonight. $$$ (Still haven’t got my Amazon pre-order yet…)
Played last night for several hours. Some observations:
[ul]
[li]Drops in Outland are INSANE. I replaced my leggings twice and got a new neck item. The first upgrade (the one I replaced) was an “of the Eagle” pants that had +37 stamina. It had a minimum level of 57.[/li][li]Blizz has apparently added code that increases the spawn rate based on how many players are in the area.[/li][li]Expansion areas are uniformly fantastic-looking.[/li][li]One of the beginning quests (for horde) in Thrallmar is very very easy and has a cloth leg armor reward that is better than any non-raid drop in pre-BC WoW.[/li][/ul]
I’m on a PvP server (Blackwing Lair) and noticed a strange social phenomenon. For a while, Horde and Alliance were running around in the same area near Thrallmar, and only rarely attacking one another. As time passed and more and more people arrived, it got to be quite a party.
The more people who came, the faster the mobs would spawn, to the point that mobs would spawn the instant that another mob was killed from the same spawn point.
And then, I guess, somebody remembered we were on a PvP server, and all of a sudden it was pure mayhem.
It was like Alterac Valley, but on a big, wide plain, with level 60-63 mobs popping out of the woodwork and going straight for the healers.
And THEN, the Fel Reaver strolled by. He’s about as tall as Ragnaros, I’d say, and really, really likes to step on people. I don’t know how tough he is, but everybody was too busy killing each other or running away to find out.
Also, there are some major bugs. For instance, even in an Inn, I can’t get “rested state” or an instant log-out in Shattrath City, and neither can anyone else on my server, as far as I know.
Well, you’d have to wait 5 levels to start making money off it anyway, since only the teleport to Shattrath City is available at lvl 60. The group portal to Shattrath cannot be trained until lvl 65 (both are trained in Shattrath). Also, as far as I know there are no mage portals/teleports to the new starting zones for the two new races.
I sure wish I knew about the portal from UC to Silvermoon, though. That would’ve saved me a load of time taking my undead mage out there to learn jewelcrafting. And I guess she’ll have to get off her tuckus and mine for herself again since I’ll be damned if I’m paying the latest inflated prices for copper. Sheesh! :eek:
Got it, installed it. Mulling over whether to start a new char or see what my lvl 38 warrior can do.
I got some sort of ports for Exodar this morning, while I was eating my breakfast. It was early, so don’t recall if it was single or group. We mages have a great travel agent.
I thought mages were great travel agents…
And we got the email today…Amazon shipped this morning!
A few comments:
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I’ve never seen Stormwind that empty on a Tuesday night before. The server was full, but everyone was off in the new zreas.
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I still have four copies in my store (town of 2,500 people), so I think anyone who sold out just didn’t plan ahead
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I wish I could have gotten collector editions. I tried Two months ago to pre-order from distribution and couldn’t get them
Up to level 11 with my draenei hunter. These new quests have been great, and everything was pretty easy to get to today, no spawn-camping. Still haven’t gotten around to the lvl 60+ stuff with my NE hunter.