Damn, well I might have to wait a while before my server reaches that stage. Maybe I can reroll warlock or something and get a quick invite.

Speaking of raiding, and I don't know how many of you guys are going to be hitting it up other than Sere, but Naxx is really amazing. Right now it's really buggy and clearly needs tweaking, but the encounters are dynamic and the atmosphere is absolutely amazing. It's dark and creepy and tough. Everything I'd hoped. So far we've taken down the first two bosses in the deathknight wing and have made passes at the first boss of spider and plague, though without full raids so it didn't mean much. I can't wait for them to get this fixed and released and I highly recommend getting on test and checking it out if you can.

We've just started poking our head into the instance and it does look like it will be really nice. However, dying and having our spirits pop up at The Barrens is more than a little frustrating when it happens to half of the raid on each boss attempt. We will probably try again after the next mini PTR patch.

Barrens...? Ow. Wipe recovery can be a little hard to set up in Naxx (or people might just not be paying much attention because the runback is (supposed to be) very short) but that stinks. Ah blizzard, I love you so. Let me count the ways.

My guild will down Nefarian in a month or so. We're currently on the drakes in BWL, so Chromaggus is the next big challenge. I have a question for the raiders ahead of my guild: we're seriously contemplating skipping AQ40 and going straight to Naxx. If we have BWL on farm status after 2 or 3 months, would it be advisable to go straight to Naxx? I've heard from multiple people that AQ40's gear isn't THAT much better than BWL's, it's simply different. I don't want to get into the rep grinds that AQ40 requires if the gear isn't much better than BWL. Any suggestions? We're already behind schedule because of 30-40 full tier 1 gquits and are just now making more progress in BWL.

Well, this is entirely up to you, and if you choose to go straight after Naxx, you will hardly be alone. There are a lot of guilds out there planning to do the same thing. Here's the problem, assuming Naxx continues the trend they start in AQ40, what you did in BWL will not prepare your guild for how the encounters work. AQ40, particuarly Emps-C'thun is all about personal responsibility. In order to defeat these encounters, the raid has to break down into several smaller groups that each take care of themselves and do entirely different things during the fight. C'thun, in particular, requires people to take care of themselves, because one person standing in the wrong place during C'thun can wipe the raid, no problem. From what I can tell, Naxx is going to require a similar division of the raid force into smaller groups.

Additionally, people who tell you that AQ gear isn't better than BWL gear are silly and aren't looking at the big picture. Upgrades at endgame aren't about enormous jumps in quality, it's about small increases on every piece that lead to a meaningful upgrade overall. This says nothing for the fact that even if you don't like the armor sets, the weapon, ring, cloak and trinket upgrades in AQ are pretty amazing for just about every class. Is there better stuff in Naxx, sure? But, frankly, getting to and killing Fankriss for an ancient qiraji ripper is going to be a lot easier and faster than getting to and killing Sapphiron for hungering cold.

Another option would be to work on them both. From what we can tell so far, the deathknight wing is meaningfully easier than the other wings we've tried. I don't know if it's going to get tweaked to be harder and the others easier or what, but you can get to the first bosses in each naxx wing pretty fast. You might start working through AQ40 and the first bosses of Naxx simultanouesly and see how that works for you.

I've started rambling at this point, but I think you get the idea. I think you should do AQ first, then go to Naxx when you're ready. New raiding guilds start in MC, even though BWL and AQ40 are out, after all. I don't see why just because the next instance is out everyone feels so pressured to go there. AQ is hard and unforgiving, and if you just hate it, stop going, because you have options now. But there is a lot of good loot there, and if you have the time and energy, I think it's worth getting.

Yep, we just hit Firemaw last night (oneshotted Broodlord on our first try there.. piece of cake). Definitely looking forward to getting into AQ40 (Huhuran's Stinger, Barb of the Sand Reaver? Oh yes please!) - and I don't think we're gonna try Naxx until we've made at least decent progress into AQ40.

EBONROC DOWN!!!

Which means that in about a half hour we should have a post with "FLAMEGOR DOWN!!!!!!!"

does anyone have a 10 day guest pass that hasnt been used?

Ha ha ha. We started a new instance today and my guild killed Razorgore the Untamed, Vaelastrasz the Corrupt, Broodlord Lashlayer, Firemaw, Ebonroc, and Flamegor in the same run!! Our record before tonight was only up to Broodlord. We're seriously starting to get the hang of BWL and it's becoming like MC now.

Any good strategies for Chromaggus? I hear he's a bitch. :)

I got 2 pieces of Wrath tonight BTW so now I'm at 5/8 tier 2. YEE HAW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We fight Chrom exactly like firemaw and just LoS behind the wall for all the breath attacks. Your healing needs to be very good and your hunters need to stay on top of tranq'ing. He does a LOT of damage, especially if you get the DOT breaths, and I've seen tanks go from full to dead in under a second a few times, particularly after the 20% enrage.

That's by no means the only place to tank him, but it works for us. Time lapse is a little different, but basically have everyone except an OT and a few healers get hit by it. You'll see. He's not so bad.

Edit: Also, this fight is cleanse or die. If anyone gets all five brood afflictions, he turns into a drakonid minion of chromaggus and goes around killing people. Each one is a different type of debuff, so keep track and get them off people. We usually assign cleansers to groups to make sure no one gets missed in a free-for-all.

I think I still do somewhere, PM me if you still want one. :)

Well I finally broke down and got a new 256Mb vid card, and it's so much better to play WoW. 64Mb was just painful in IF and crowded spaces.

I've been playing alot with the wife and getting myself some new gear.

Clegg and Aloysius led Servant of Sevine into Stormwind last night on Garithos. This is what it looked like:
http://www.gamesandbkbcards.com/WoW/...Untitled-2.jpg

You can see my skills going up. Well, that was the point of everyone attacking him, obviously. This went on for four hours. This next pic shows my skill bars after a good few hours of beating on him, but after four hours, I got everything but two skills to at least 175, and those other two were about 150 and 160 respectively.

http://www.gamesandbkbcards.com/WoW/...Untitled-3.jpg

Crazy times.

Edit: You can also see the rumor going around that "he has to die in the throne." Not true, people. Thottbot it.

Hi WoWers. I'm new to the game, just hit level 20 with my undead priest on Doomhammer. Curious how I should build him? Prolly to fight for levelling, then later I can rebuild to heal? Any suggestions? Also, is it worth it to learn daggers? Right now I just use staff and wands.

As a priest, spec shadow to level. It doesn't matter what weapons you use, all that matters is the stat bonuses on the weapons. You'll be doing most of your damage with spells and wands.

You'll be able to re-spec later to a healing config.

So my guild, Drama, transferred from Shattered Hand last night. Wow was that a weird experience. I feel bad leaving all the people I know on SH behind, but one must follow the guild, I suppose. SH is going to be a weird place. Both Drama and Death and Taxes, by far the best-known guilds on the server, decided to transfer to Korgath, so I'll be interested to see what happens in the SH community. Naturally, I'm making an alt so I can still chill with all my friends there. I hope we didn't blow it and transfer to worse queues and lag on Korgath than we had on SH, but it seems unlikely that anything could be worse that than. Here's to keeping our fingers crossed.

The only for sure downside is that someone ninja'd my name. I can't believe I'm notorious enough to have someone bother, which makes me think it was a friend. Hopefully the GMs can restore it for me, since Kguy (which is what all my guildmates call me) doesn't quite look as nice as Kaesth (try pronouncing it, now you know why they call me k-guy).

Thanks for the advice Hal. Time for more levelling fun!

This happened to people when my server transfered. You can just tell the GMs that someone did it with malicious intent and you should be able to get the name back.

And indeed I was able to, yay for that.

/Confused.

Who's the Servant and why did he not die after hours of attacking him?

I checked thottbot, and apparently Lady Sevine (is she from W3?) is somewhere in the Blasted Lands, and she summons the servants to help her. I was told elsewhere that there's some crystal you have to destroy before you can kill the servants.

Here is my little guy, Haeze, on Doomhammer.
http://users.adelphia.net/~szap/WoW/Haeze.gif

I almost felt sorry for this poor mage I killed.
http://users.adelphia.net/~szap/WoW/2654Ambush.gif

HA HA NICE!! That mage got F'ed up.

We killed Chromaggus last Sunday on our third attempt ever! 1st attempt = 90%. Second attempt = 85%. Third attempt = dead. :) He wasn't bad at all. This week we have time lapse so this Sunday's BWL is gonna suck. We did get to Nefarian phase 2 last Sunday though (after many, many wipes trying to figure out phase 1).

Here's the current look of my warrior in 6/8 Wrath:

http://www.appstate.edu/~bt52438/wrath1.jpg


http://www.appstate.edu/~bt52438/wrath2.jpg

I think the AB boots match better than Wrath so I wear them with run speed on them. :)

http://www.appstate.edu/~bt52438/wrath3.jpg

Yeah, for PvP/dps purposes, Wrath is pretty lame. The premier DPS gear for warriors at the moment is a nasty combination of crap from BWL, MC and AQ40, though, so Wrath is much more accessible to most people. Congrats on the kill though. Good luck on Nef. He's an asshat.

I hate how most classes have set gear that can be used for PVP but warriors simply can't PVP in Might or Wrath. My PVP gear makes me look like a clown. :thumbsup:

I spent at least 10 levels not being able to find leggings better than "Dreamsinger Legguards". You talk about looking like a clown; I looked like Richard Simmons' bitch running around azeroth. Didn't find anything better until I hit up SM for the first time and Scarlet Leggings dropped. I also got my sweet Aegis there on the same trip. :)

Of course all you level 60's are laughing at me talking about this stuff. :p

Heh, he didn't JUST get f-ed up. he got bent over and spanked. The ambush made his health bar look like a tiny red sliver already. I would estimate he had about 150 health left... so I dropped the 1700 backstab on in hopes that if I do enough damage, maybe his ressurection timer will double as a way of the game telling him how badly he got wrecked.

As for Chromaggus, Bronze was actually one of the eaiser breaths for my guild. If we ever got blue and bronze we would basically all take alternating naps while we fought him, since having anyone who wasn't tanking get hit by a breath wasn't getting hurt anyway. It's the Incinerate combined with any of the DoT breaths that wrecked us due to the insane heals needed for the tank.

For Bronze it was easy enough for us just to dual-tank him, and just before the bronze breath, the tank who doesn't have aggro runs out of LoS with everyone else. MT takes the breath, and Chromaggus runs for the second tank, who is already running back to the tanking spot. Chrommy never even got around the corner to see the rest of the raid, more or less put anyone in danger.

So whats the point of him being in SW? I saw people talking about getting there weapon skill up but never bothered to check it out.

Since these guys can't die, and they do very little damage (by comparisson to most mobs their level) people love kiting them from the Blasted Lands up to Stormwind. Once there, they let guards, or someone like Highlord Bolvar Fordragon attack the mob till the NPC gains aggro, then they leave. Given several hours, one of those little things can even kill Bolvar. Thing is, since they cannot die, and are a higher level mob, they are great for levelling your weapons on. Just set yourself on auto-attack and go have dinner, then come back and switch to another weapon you want to train up.

I have heard rumors that you can get them to despawn if a priest mind-controls it (Dropping all of the guards and such on it, and making all players no longer able to attack it) then the priest logs out while it is mind controlled, it will despawn. Since I am not a priest I have not had the chance to test this theory.

A post I recently made on my guild's forum that I thought I'd share here:

My second character, Circuit, hit 60 today.

Of how fast a person can level to 60, I've realized that getting the xp is really only half the battle. I look back and can conclude that learning and fine-tuning a class is probably the most taxing, time-consuming, and rewarding part of getting involved in a new class. I really give props to Blizzard for creating classes that may seem kind of shallow on the surface in their roles but are truely unique when it comes to options in playstyle, especially when dealing with such horrid fanboys.

I wanted to thank everyone who helped me with my own learning and fine-tuning, especially Charity and his many knowledgeable forms.

So enough fluffy heart bubbles and more rocking out. I went out with a bang today and it was quite the unexpected climax. I hit 60, looted painweaver and they ony key, and got two aq20 purples with a friend's guild's run which was my first time there of course. /dance

Thanks again for the help and effort. I'm truely proud to see it stand, especially during the recent drama-filled times.

For your viewing pleasure:

Circuit, undead rogue
http://timcannady.brinkster.net/60a.jpg
Whorpe, tauren shaman
http://timcannady.brinkster.net/60b.jpg
Dollie, my gf's alt ;)
http://timcannady.brinkster.net/60c.jpg

That mace your rogue has is so damned cool. :)

NEFARIAN DOWN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! YES!!!!!!!!!!!

Wrath BP dropped and I would have got it if I didn't get the Chromatic Boots in the same run off of Chromaggus. Oh wellz. I'm #1 in DKP now so I should get the next one that drops!!

Congrats on Nef man. Now that you can kill him, I'd recommend getting 10 of your best-geared friends together and running UBRS through the Rend event and spend the whole time mocking him while he's standing on the balcony. One of my friends has his death yell macro'd and spams it. Then later that night when you clear BWL you can make fun of him more while he dies.

And then you'll have a feral druid pull hate and almost wipe you at the zerg. Because that definitely didn't happen to us yesterday. Nope. Not a chance.

Hit Field Marshal with my gnome mage this tuesday and he looks fucking gloriously radiant. :p

Castilion on Whisperwind server :)

Gonna probably try for grand marshal, and if the grind doesn't kill me i should hopefully be updating this in a month or two.. or three.. god i hope not three.

It looks like the vast majority of you guys are Alliance, but I just wanted to mention this in case some of you are Hordelings: I run a shared Horde site known as the "Horde Consortium" to try to assist servers' Horde and the faction as a whole in progressing in PvE raiding and eventually world-PvP. It's open to any Horde guild but would be most useful to a Nef-slaying guild. If you're interested you can drop me a PM here as I don't really want to spam my little speech here. :p

Spam your speech sere! I want to see how the other side thinks. I can only imagine how different the game is horde side. I've never gotten a horde above level 20, mostly because I'm really terrible about making alts. And, uh, I'd never been inside orgrimmar until the night before Drama transferred servers and we went and raided it to say good bye to all the horde people we'd PvP'd with for so long.

Bizarre.

I just started playing the game a few days ago, and I really like it.

I am currently a level 7 Tauren Hunter. Anybody care to offer some tips as to how to go about building up my character? I'm really not sure what professional skills would best complement my character, or what type of things I should look for. My apartment roomie is a level 10 Shaman, and once I catch up to him, we plan on going around together.

My roomie actually works for Blizzard, so I was able to get a "guest pass" that doesn't expire for some obscene amount like 20 or 30 years. :):):)
Well, someday I hope to be able to understand most of the terminology and reach a high level...hopefully.

Leatherworking and Skinning is good for a low level hunter.

So I broke down and started playing again. Rolled Alliance this and also playing on RP/PvE server this time. Such a change from playing 2 60's Horde on PvP...I still have those quirks of panning all over with the camera though...old habits die hard.

It's also good to see the game from Alliance side and do all the questlines. It's like a whole new game! :) Well...not really, but you know what I mean.

ooops...hamfisted the mouse button there..! :thumbsup:

I'm 7/8 Wrath now since I got the BP of Wrath off of one of our last Nef kills. We killed The Prophet Skeram and got to Battleguard Sartura in AQ 40 the other night. WoW is waaay funner once you get into a good raiding guild, especially one that has an over-the-top sense of humor like mine. :thumbsup:

Have ya all seen the flying mounts preview? It only shows the mounts for 2 of the Alliance races (Dwarf and Gnome), But its pretty cool. I would have liked to see some Horde ones as well. Anyone know if there is any information as to what they will be for the remainder of the races?:confused:

Unless I'm thinking of a different video, the flying mount in the preview is some rare, special mount. It's not the racial mounts. I don't know exactly what you have to do to get a nether drake, but I'd guess it resembles the wintersaber trainers grind. To the best of my knowledge, the racial mounts haven't been released yet.

On a side note, I finally, after millions of fruitless runs, got my DS shoulders last night. I still am on a 7 month streak of not seeing DS gloves, but I solved that problem by blowing a ton of points to get my tier 3 gloves, which are too hot for words. I also picked up the gun off Ouro the other week. My DPS has skyrocketed recently. Makes me a very happy hunter.

Well, now that I think about it... they never said it was the racial one. Dang. O well. It was on the WoW website, so I got exited.... haha:lol:

Went ahead and registered. ;)

Thaddius down. Picked up my second piece of tier 3 off Gluth. Naxx is such an amazing instance. I'm having quite the good time running around this place.

For those of you guys clearing BWL and starting AQ40, depending on your schedule and available time, I migth recommend seeing if you can get anub and instructor razuvious down. They both have very respectable loot tables, including a great tanking ring (Instructor) and cloak (anub). They're no harder than sartura at the worst, so if you find yourself with extra time and energy, I think it'd be worth trying to fit them in.

MC cleared....in 4 hours...man that was fun as hell, didn't get my mageblade or Arcanist belt:(

Grats on the T3 Frosstbyte! That's awesome you guys are so far along in Naxx. I'm hoping to get into there sooner than later.

On other news, here's my a link to my newly-created CTProfile of my alt-turned-main Circuit ;)

Do we have any RANK 13 players here? I am a little more than 50% into it but we have 3 honor farmers that been holding back 3 GM's already.

So I been trying to keep close to them and not let them get too far ahead. (one of them has been standing #1 7 weeks in a row.)

The Game Masters won't do anything about it. And he has admitted to sharing his account with 3 people and paid on ebay to have this character power leveled..
It sucks.

Who loves guild drama?

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...l&T=216789&P=1

I left Souls of the Banished for Damnation, and I'm glad I did. Maryllaira's first post basically sums up the general childness my old guild has resorted to (the sad part, is that the childness is largely coming from the new officers in the guild).

Funny how one of the things that led to the separation was the insisting that SOB have a loot council. Within hours after Damnation was created the leadership of SOB suddenly decided that now would be a great time to try to shift to DKP. Douchebags. At least I got my character geared the fuck out before /gquit'ing.

Man, I hate this game. It dominates my time like nothing else.

I have 2 "mains" and my time commitment for both is getting pretty ridiculous.

My druid is in a BWL/AQ40 raiding guild and I was just made the druid class officer. My warrior is in an MC raiding co-op and I am now the warrior class leader. My entire week is just raid raid raid.

As far as gear goes, I have everything a druid could possibly want from MC, but I have a long ways to go before I am elligible for any good loot in BWL... especially because we don't get any druid drops at all.

My warrior is fun because I have enough gear to both be a main tank and come in #2 on damage meters (I love fury). However, I plan on pouncing on the Bonereaver's Edge or the Spinal Reaper as soon as one of them drops. I'm getting an itch to tear shit up in battlegrounds. Fury may be good for DPS, but MC fury itemization is a dead end. Since I don't see my warrior in BWL any time soon to gobble up the doom's edge, crul'shoruk (which everyone in my BWL guild wants anyways), chromatic boots, drake talon pauldrons or master dragonslayer's ring, I figure I'll just get a nice MC 2h and switch to arms.

You must be the only ones with a lack of SR in your BWL runs, Hal. I'd say a solid 50% of our guild's nexus crystals were once pieces of stormrage. Ah random loot, how exciting you are!

On the subject of good random loot streaks: 5 ashkandis in a row; in the last 5 c'thun kills we've seen three DEoIs and one death's sting.

I pretty sure none of that is supposed to happen.

I have made the decision to return to WoW. Since I have left WoW I have moved cross country (from Virginia back to Utah) and I used to play on the Zul'jin server. That is an East Coast server and when I reinstalled the game tonight it re-assigned me to that server. My ping was 300. I would prefer to find a server closer to home if possible. Is there a way I can find a server closer to home? Thanks!

Well, for reasons that no one really knows, blizzard eliminated the old easy way to find a server closer to home. Back in the day (at some point earlier that I can't remember), the server list showed what timezone it is based in, so it was really really easy to figure out what servers were where. They've since stopped doing that.

Now your options are either just create random characters on random servers and type /time until you find one that matches your timezone or (probably more practically) find a website that lists all the servers and where they are located. I'm pretty sure they exist, but I don't have one handy.

if you go to http://www.warcraftrealms.com/ you can find the us server stats on there it will tell you what timezone the server is in.

mines western and im on east coast but the interface mod has a clock that I can change.

Halx, you could try going 2h fury. I'm 2h fury right now with an OEB and it's pretty fun. Better PvE DPS than arms and you can still put out some impressive numbers in PvP although I still miss the MS debuff. Dual wield fury does more damage I believe but also requires better gear to support it like lots of +to hit which is hard to get pre-BWL.

JESUS CHRIST!!! Does anyone have a Battleguard Sartura strategy??? I've read a dozen and all of our officers have and we are just sucking it up. We're missing something major. The adds don't seem to be a big problem, but the tanks and hunters, etc. just can't keep Sartura out of everyone else's hair. Any tips?

PS: I got the Breastplate of Annihilation the other night and almost started to cry when I found out that my stats go down when I equip it by breaking the rank 8 set bonus. :( I need the Fankriss leggings (Scaled Sand Reaver Leggings) to make use of the BP of Annihilation now.

My guild also cleared BWL in 1 night for the first time this past week as well. About 3.5 hours, not too bad! We also have MC on speed runs now (like 2 hours). A week ago we also ran two ZGs at once which definitely started the funniest general chat I've seen in a while. :thumbsup:

Wow Lasereth, we can clear BWL in like 5 hours MC in around 3 hours if no one has to leave...ZG is no problem for us now that all are regular players have 3 epics + Should be doing Naxx by October. AQ20 is fun we are getting the hang of it now...but I havn't been on when the try AQ40:(

For people who pvp a lot and hate waiting for queues there's a neat mod to help pass the time: http://www.curse-gaming.com/en/wow/a...ac-holdem.html

For those of you who are afraid to click links its in-game 9 player max (i think) texas holdem :D

http://static.curse-gaming.com/mscreens/9673.jpg

good times :p

So, on my warrior, I've ditched fury and switched to arms. My brand new OEB is puttin' the hurt on everything! I've actually got higher DPS than I did as Fury. I do better in PvP as well. I'm absolutely loving it when I charge up to something, smack them, MS, and get a sword spec proc. I love it even more when all 3 hits are crits. Then theres sweeping strikes, cleave and whirlwind.. I make sure to make use of everything to pump out as much hurting as possible.

Of course my bravado gets me killed easily in PvE, but I'll take it. I'm addicted to big numbers.

Oh ya.. how big of a geek am I to have 2 characters in full tier 1?

You are a huge geek, Hal, but that's ok, because you're in very good company here.

As for Sartura, basically you want to pull one add left, one add right, and tank/kill one just inside the door. A warrior or two and a bunch of paladins should drag Sartura down to the middle of the room and keep her stunned with HoJ and/or taunted until all of the adds are dead, at which point you circle around her and basically have Shazzrah version 2.0. Having a hunter OT Sartura like hunters can OT the swarmguards won't work very well. She does way too much damage, so you need to rely on a taunt rotation when she's in whirlwind mode and good stuns from your paladins when she's not to keep her in check.

Sartura is an odd fight, since everything everyone has learned about aggro since day one gets thrown out the window. Focus fire adds down fast and pull her pretty far from the raid and you should be ok. The adds should be dead in under a minute and then you can go to town on her.

Reading the posts feels like I'm reading a different language. Poor me and my level 16.

Thats like my GF when she hears me and my cusin talk about are lvl 60's and all the epic gear and stuff.

I played this game to about level 20 then quit for eq2 many months ago. I'm thinking about starting again on an EST realm and was wondering if anyone had any recommendations for a good one to start on. My biggest fear is starting a character that I put a lot of time in then find it's a horrible community or there's no opportunity for new players to find a decent raiding guild. I really don't have any preference for PVP/PVE. Also, what classes tend to be the most needed at 60?

Finally my Arcanist legs dropped in MC last night :D, just need alll\ the other pieces...lol

http://home.cogeco.ca/~tylerdonlon/pics/wow_038.jpg

I dont have any suggestion as far as realms go. I'm east coast, but I play on a west coast server. However druids, priests and warlocks are hard to find for guilds. Neither are very exciting classes to play in a raid environment, but you have a good chance of getting into a good guild if you make yourself available as one of those classes. All the other classes you usually have competition.

Classes that are almost always needed: DRUIDS and Warlocks. As for servers, I don't know. I would personally recommend starting up on a new server if you're starting by yourself. New servers have better technology, and starting a druid that you plan on spec'ing resto on a new server can basically get you into one of the top guilds on the server once get him to 60.

Believe it or not Mages are hard to come by on are server. But PvP mages are easy to find, but Raid mages have to be frost and/or arcane spec not fire, I was given the 10g to respec for my guild...lol We got maybe 6 mages in are raid guild...of 200+ 60's. But the funny thing is you roll a new char and thats the only class you see is mages.

Yeah, as everyone said, druids and warlocks. Once you start playing one, you might also figure out why they're relatively rare. Druids are strange because leveling up you have to figure out how to be a mage and a priest and a warrior and a rogue all at the same time, but once you get to endgame your focus narrows to almost exclusively healing. Warlocks, on the other hand, are just kind of an odd class. They have some cool tricks and neat spells, but soul shards are an enormous pain in the ass to deal with and figuring out how and when to use all the pets and their respective abilities is a challenge, to say the least. They're also quite difficult to level effectively, at least until you get death coil.

Another consistently solid option is to roll a dwarf priest, since most raiding guilds are always looking for another fear ward. My friend leveled a shadow priest to 60 in less than 10 days /played.

Been awhile since I played but I thought warlocks weren't needed as much? Sure they're rare but I thought guilds only needed 1 or 2 (active locks) since you start to get a lot of overlap with utility. And I thought hunters and mages were better at ranged DPS.

But I havn't really ever been in a raiding guild so I'm just sayin what I've heard (read).

You'd be surpirsed the number of times you struggle to find the 2 (Curse of Elements and Curse of Weakness/Recklessness) warlocks that every raid really needs.

Patchwerk is the benchmark DPS boss right now and, for a variety of reasons, fury warrior, rogue and mage DPS fully buffed going all out for 5 minutes tend to hover at 600-ish. Hunter is just over 400. Warlock is just under 400. Obviously this depends on gear to some extent, but all the distributions seem to be in that range. In my opinion, what a warlock loses in damage he more than makes up for in summons, healthstones, soulstones and knowing when and what to curse.

Hunters' lacking DPS on patchwerk is largely a function of the fact that we lack many AP buffs that rogues can get. We're pretty much stuck with mongoose pots and blasted lands agi buff and consecrated sharpening stones if we're lucky enough to have one. Rogues can stack mongoose, giant growth, firewater, juju strength, blasted lands buff (if they wanted), battle shout and elemental sharpening stones. Our fully juiced AP isn't a massive increase. Their fully juiced AP goes WAY up. I'd be lying if I had any idea why hunters get the shaft in this department.

Fross, Have you ever had a shadow priest fully equiped and spec'd for dmg? I'm curious where they'd fit in (DPS wise).

As far as the hunter thing I heard that hunters are meant to be sustainable DPS but not at the top. So maybe that's why they can't get as many buffs. Short of that I'd say its just that Blizz doesnt' want to spend the time implementing something for ranged weapon dps since there's only one class that seriously uses it.

We had one who recently left the guild, unfortunately. Good priest but he never talked on vent and didn't coordinate with our other priests very well, which is bad if you're a class leader, incidentally.

Anyway, I've seen a fully geared shadow priest and fully geared balance druid go full DPS and they both have two big problems, at least in boss encounters. The first is aggro control, which they don't have much of. You can't really ask them to go all out because they're almost definitely going to pull aggro. The second problem is mana. They can both do very good high burst damage-comparable to mages and warlocks, but they run out of mana very quickly. Priests have good regen abilities on critter death and druids can innervate, but their spell selection sucks for mana efficiency.

Short answer: on shorter fights and trash they can put out pretty solid-not mage level, but solid-damage. On longer fights or aggro sensitive fights, it's a bit of a wild card.

Shadow is awesome for leveling, though. I leveled a mage at the same time my friend was doing his priest and he just blew through stuff because his downtime was so low. Even after I got good at AE grinding he leveled much faster than me. I don't know enough about druids to tell you how good feral/balance are for leveling.

I have a 58 lock and my friends' raiding guild is just waiting for me to get to 60 so I can join their raids--and they already have several warlocks. In a raid situation, being a warlock is probably the easiest class. You just throw up your soulstone and cast curse after curse. And being able to summon people is ALWAYS handy.

The biggest problem I have with my warlock is that she's, well, boring. I like my rogue much better--but she isn't as useful to other people as the warlock is.

No kidding. Rogue was my main class, I'm thinking of trying out the changes when they go live but I almost don't see a point. The talent review, so far, hasn't addressed any of the major problems with rogues.

Easy class we do are raids with maybe 3 locks and they always die first....no idea why.

well over the weekend Skogafoss and I got a new gaming rig. With all the graphics turned down, I jumped from 8 FPS (during IF and SW crowds) 20 FPS (40 man raids) and 26 FPS (solo) to a whopping 60+ FPS with all the graphics dialed up.

It's like playing a whole new game!!!!

Doing AQ over the weekend Ony and MC last night totally rocked!!!

I'm on Altar of Stroms, which is a new server, and it seems pretty cool thus far. I'm a 45 Undead Warrior, I'm in one of the top few guilds thanks to a buddy I made on the server repping for me. I generally don't see too many 12 year olds, and the ganking is surprisingly tolerable. Economy is lacking a bit currently, but i'm sure it'll turn around eventually. The AH has been killing me lately! Anyways, people are starting to stack up around 60, but it's not too late to get into a good guild. As far as horde goes, there's one major, major guild that's tearing up the raids and the other are still trying to sort out getting the right mix/caliber of people before they get crankin on the end-game raids. Lemme know if you roll one on there. I go by Druptight.

I am on Altar of Storms too! I am my guilds token Shadow Priest. I am only lvl 43 though because for a few weeks I was in the middle of moving across the country. I am Divineshadow, hit me up if you want.

Ya I love my 45 FPS in MC:D

But when the fights start it drops to about 32.

In case anyone who reads this thread has been hiding under a rock and not read either the WoW forums or read any gaming websites or has any zero guildmates who do so, raid cap in the Burning Crusade will be 25 man instead of 40 man.

So much for playing the expansion.

What so because it's not 40 man you're not going to want to play BC?

I dunno, I think it's a bit challenging to consistently get 40 guildies together more often than once a week. Usually when we do MC it's a minimum of 32 and we're just above that around 35. Even last night we wanted to do AQ20 but for whatever reasons not enough locks were on so we ended up doing ZG instead.

PUGs suck for a variety of reasons to pick up the slack, from poor coodination/playing to DKP.

That sucks I was hoping they where gonna have so 60 man raids:(

but having like 70 lvl 60's online Wednesday night is insane(its are MC/BWL night)

I don't mind the 25-man raids at all. It really can't put a hindrance on anything. If your guild has a consistent 40+ people logging on for raids, then getting 50 on to form 2 raids won't be a problem.

I'm loving all of the new info about the expansion.

Oh yeah, I got my last piece of Wrath the other night. 8/8!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I don't know if I'll play when the expansion comes out or not but sounds good to me...why would you want it to require 40 people? Personally, I'd rather the game never required more than 5 to complete anything except maybe some optional epic type fights (optional meaning you could get equal gear from 5 man stuff).

I guess neither I nor anyone else really knows what will happen, and the expansion isn't coming out tomorrow, so who knows. I might change my mind.

I think, however, that blizzard is trying to fix a mistake by making another mistake because it's the easier solution.

Blizzard blew it by releasing Dire Maul and then releasing BWL, ZG, world dragons, AQ20/40 and Naxx and not doing anything for small-man content except the dungeon 2 set with limited success. It sucked for everyone because it created a severe split in the community between raiders and non-raiders and it villified raiders who did enjoy the content because they were constantly defending it against non-raiders who told us our play style sucked. Since no one on the official boards can carry on a reasonable conversation, everyone acted like 10 year olds and fought.

What most people (raiders, casuals, non-raiders, etc.) wanted from the expansion was more content and a smaller gear discrepancy. I was hoping for difficult 5/10/20/40 man content with an ilvl gap between the 5 man and the 40 man of around 5-10 ilvls instead of the ridiculous 20-30 ilvls now. It provides higher rewards for the coordination and time involved in 20 and 40 man content, but doesn't leave people who don't like that behind to rot. Most raiders like smaller content too, as we all have closer friend in our guilds that it will be cool to hang out with without the pressures of being in the main vent channel with everyone screaming at each other during a 40 man raid.

Blizzard created the 40 man raid and they nurtured it. Shit, less than two months ago, they released the longest and most complicated 40 man raid in their history. 5 40 man raids have been released into WoW. That created a social community of guilds built around populating and balancing 40 person raid groups. Every time they released new 40 man content, they reinforced the guild structures designed with that content in mind. Now, abruptly, they're eviscerating that entire playstyle in some bizarre compromise.

I don't contend that 40 is a magic number or the requisite number for creating epic, difficult battles, but BLIZZARD made 40 the magic number and for two years people have relied on that number in the hundreds upon hundreds of hours people have put into creating guilds and loot systems to conquer the content that blizzard released.

25 is a much more accessible size for raids. It is without question easier to coordinate 25 people and will allow these raids to be experienced by many more people. However, the time to make such a paradigmatic shift was not two years into it when hundreds of thousands of people have put time and effort into making 40 man raids-and their support structure, guilds-function effectively.

Guilds either are going to be doing some major downsizing (which sucks, and ought to suck for many obvious reasons) or they're going to have to deal with the logistical nightmare of running two raids. The difference between running multiple progression raids and multiple farm raids cannot be emphasized enough. How do you split the guild? How do you deal with raid ID problems? What if group A has too many tanks and not enough healers and group B has too much DPS and not enough tanks? Do you impair progress in the interest of fairness or do you make an elite group and a second-string group? How do you handle all the drama that will come out of splitting people like that?

Like it or not, two years of social engineering have been put into making 40 man raids work. Blizzard is giving all of that effort the finger, and it sucks.

Good points. But I can't agree that it is a bad move on their part. Sure there are some guilds streamlined around 40 man content but the majority of guilds arn't, this won't effect them, and they'll see it in a positive light (whether it really is or isn't). There are probably less than 200-300 people per server in those guilds you mentioned (streamlined for 40 man). Sure there are more than that who are in raiding guilds, but most of those won't care about adapting that much.

To reiterate though, I do agree with your points. They should have made these changes a long time ago but the majority will be happy with these changes. Shoot, the majority would probably be happy with more 1-59 content for alts.

FB, I guess, our guild didn't get to MC until very recently. Initially they had to join with another guild early on in order to get to the 40 man point. There are a couple of other guilds that we still borrow from time to time of regular raiders that track DKP in our guild.

For me at the beginning of the game, I liked the fact that I could play for an hour or two solo or with a group. Raids don't allow for that flexibility since most raids you have 40 people wanting to go as far as one is willing to push. I don't have 4-5 hours to play all the time. It's not feasible in my current lifestyle. If I was still in college or a teen, maybe.

It's not that I don't have the time, it's just that I have better ways to spend it--as much as I enjoy WoW it's something I cannot spend 4-5 hours doing, which makes those big runs nearly impossible. I just don't see myself sacrificing 2 nights a week to MC, so smaller raids are really appealing to me, or dungeons where it's easy to just kill one boss instead of a series. We'll see how it works out in the expansion, but I'm looking forward to more high-end soloable content.

We get alot of people logging on, we had a full BWL and MC riads Wednesday night and the other 20 that logged on late went and cleared ZG...it was insane


oh and gratz on the full wrath:thumbsup:

Sorry to break it to you guys that are eager for this change, but you do realize that the number of people requirement changes nothing about the time, money and frustration requirement. These new instances will be just as hard and as time consuming as AQ40 and Naxx, they'll just be with 15 fewer people.

The new instances aren't going to take less time to learn or less money for consumables, they'll just have fewer people in them. It doesn't address your desire to have difficult-but not as time consuming-content, and it destroys the entire guild system that was built around 40 man raids.

I am ALL FOR content like Karazhan which has a ten man cap and in which you can save your progress as you go through it so you don't have to do the whole thing in one night. I think that's great. I don't see why having more content like that also requires taking away 40 man raids for those of us who like them and whose guilds can both support them and were designed for them.

I realize it which is why I said I wasn't sure if I'd ever come back, so I know it won't take care of all my concerns. But in my mind it is a step in the right directon.

I still don't understand how WoW went in the direction it did (with raids) in the first place when they were so casual gung ho in beta and early release. Anything that requires more than 15 people or more than 3 (4?) hour play sessions (including mistakes and learning) can never be casual. So I know that they knew what they were getting into. I think I'd blame tigole and furor but who knows?

WoW became more hardcore and less casual because there was nothing to do at 60 until the 40-mans came out. If they stop making raids, there's just nothing to do.

While moving from 40 to 25 man raids will have a number of complications... I can't wait. As a raid leader I rely on my CLs (class leads) to keep people performing, but frankly the tendency is to coast (which we highly discourage).

We're a group where a lot of us like the idea of doing speed runs on easy content... unfortunately with 40 people it's way too easy to let people slip through the cracks... sometimes casting half the spells as a similarly spec'd class member or swinging half as much with the same speed weapon.

With 25, I would imagine it'll be as easy as 20 man content in figuring out where the weak link is. Try to fix it, if it doesn't work toss 'em out and get a new one.

As a side note I also love the idea of earning honor points and spending them... :D

Yeah, double, from that perspective I hear you. Guilds in MC and to a lesser extent BWL and AQ40 definitely have a lot of hangers on and it'll be a great opportunity to get rid of the people who coast for ezepix. My guild, unfortunately, happens to have done all of that internal housecleaning already, because, quite simply, you can't finish AQ40 or start clearing much of Naxx with people who aren't playing at the top of their game. The gear and skill distinctions between our top 35 (25+substitutes) and top 55 (40+substitutes) will be so meaningless once we've been clearing Naxx for a while as the expansion comes out that it's just going to be madness trying to come up with who to cut or who to put in the B team instead of the A team.

I guess it's no secret that guilds clearing 10+ bosses in Naxx are by far the exception and not the rule, though, so maybe while we're a devoted and vocal group, we're not the best people to be designing the game around. Doesn't make the impending guild drama any less gross to see looming on the horizon.

I think there could be plenty of other things to do at 60 than how raiding is currently. They could have worked on PvP more, they could have done smaller raids from the start (10 or 15 man), they could have done all dungeons wing style ala SM, solo content (think of hunter epic quest fight against those demons), alternate advancement ala EQ, etc.

Anyone else on Kargath realm?