Well, my hunter got to lvl 80 and there doesnt seem to be much to do now, except go round the dungeons trying to find better weaponary. But since I hit 80 the people I got sent into groups with seem to be total pricks. One group kicked me out of the dungeon before the fight started cos they didnt like the armour I was wearing.

Now I have a Paladin/Mujahideen character. He's up to level 30. Its a lot harder to play, but I guess more fun that you cant just send your pet to attack the enemy and stand there and shoot. I miss having the ability to see the enemies on the mini map on the top though (although I can see undead at least)

Welcome to the World of Cliquecraft!

...Elitecraft!
...Antisocialcraft!
...Repititioncraft!
...Gearcraft!
...Statscraft!
...Mathcraft!
...ProgressQuestcraft!
...

They call it a roleplaying game, but it's pretty much an FPS with a ton of stats. It's more or less a MMOFPS.

I don't know what the acronym's mean, but it sounds like
junior high school to me!

Well, I dont understand it. All but one of my pieces are blue (and the one that isnt is green)... the wank stain that wanted to kick me out of the dungeon was crying about the fact that I couldnt play because I had pieces of armour that re-generated mana... which I do so I can hit the special shots and stings more often. If my character isnt set up in the mathematically perfect way I am sure having common sense more than compensates for it.

I like the social side of it, and up until lvl 80I never had any problems really except every now and again.

I guess the main thing is I dont see that there is much left to do now I am at 80

I dont know how to get into the 10/25 man dungeons, and I already did all the level 80 5 man dungeons that the dungeon finder can show multiple times. There's no point doing the normal missions cos I dont get any xp or any equipment thats better than what I have from them.

You just won WoW. Now go play LOTR Online. I hear they're more mature and nicer there.

hmmm... maybe. IF I can play Tom Bombadil!

Dude, you can be a hobbit. Be satisfied.

It bums me out to hear about all of your guys' bad experiences at 80...

You all just need to transfer to Garrosh and join my guild. We do 10/25 man raids weekly and we don't do them for progression purposes. We do them to go have fun together. I have the 16th most geared protection warrior on my realm and every single piece of gear I have was gotten through fun and challenge rather than grind and dealing with dickheads.

There's a lot of fun to be had with the endgame content of this game. You just have to find the right people to do it with.

hobbits are pretty lame, their only talent is basic goodness. I'd at least want to be a high elf.

SF, it's kind of hard sometimes for people to remember what it's like to be new to WoW. I've been playing the damn game for over five and a half years now. So many of the social and mechanical constructs in it I know better than I know aspects of my profession, and I know them instantly and effortlessly. That might not be useful in the big picture, but it's the case.

So when I join a group and see someone who clearly doesn't understand all that, it can be difficult to rearrange my expectations and paradigm to what they might be thinking. This isn't to say that the douchebag wasn't a douchebag, just that he might honestly have no capacity for remembering that everyone hasn't been playing as long as he has. The dungeon finder has been a great addition to the game, but it's also had the consequence of tossing wildly different groups of people together with mixed, at best, results.

I have been playing a hunter for a very long time. I'm the GM and raid leader of a 9/12 HM ICC25 guild. If you have any questions about being a hunter or playing the game, I am more than happy to answer them.

As a bit of unsolicited advice, hunters have no need for mana regeneration on their gear. Your stat preference in descending order should be hit (until you have 8%), agi, ap, crit, arp, haste. If you need mana in combat, your fastest way to get more is to switch to aspect of the viper until you have enough to get you through the rest of the fight, and then switch back to aspect of the dragonhawk. As your gear gets better, you will need to switch less frequently. Hope that helps.

Now Im up to level 41 I have to say that the style of play of the Paladin (or Mujahideen as I like to think of him) suits me perfectly!

Ive played every character up to level 15 or so now other than priest now, to try and get some impression of what I'd enjoy best... and I definitely like being a bad man holy warrior.

I've gotten my paladin up to level 24 so far...

I have previously had a hard time playing the class because you spend a lot of time auto attacking and waiting for your two spells to come off cooldown at lower levels. That was very boring for me, but I pushed through and, now that I'm getting more powers, it's becoming quite a fun class to play. I'm going with protection spec, because I really like to tank.

What role does your paladin play, SF?

Keep it up, pallys are the best end-game tanks, imo. Divine Shield + Consecrate round up all the baddies rather nicely for me to dps.

cata release date: 12/7. block out your calendar accordingly.

That's the day I start a troll druid. I'm quite excited for it.

Ugg. I cant stand leveling. Im gonna pay to turn my druid into a werewolf and be done with it.

Ah yes, two months left to finish leveling my alts so I can have a capped character of every class for a week or so until Cataclysm comes out. I should be able to manage it only three 73's left to go.

I'm actually pretty excited to level a troll. There's going to be a lot of fun new things to do with him with the new Darkspear Isles starting area. Then when I'm done there I get to move on to the drastically changed Barrens area.

With the way they're changing so many areas and putting new quests in and such, I think I'd be missing out on a lot if I didn't start a new toon.

Trust me, if it was the same old Valley of Trials quests I've done a billion times, I'd be paying to just transfer the tauren druid I had before to a troll. I've already deleted him to make room for my troll to start fresh and experience all the new content, though...

I've blocked off my vacation accordingly. Skogafoss and I will be vacationing in Azeroth for a week, just like a couple years ago we vacationed in Northrend.

I think they're positioning this as "playing it again for the first time."

They're trying to get way more life out of the game, but you can't blame them.

---------- Post added at 06:33 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:33 PM ----------

You don't understand how much I wish my relationship were as nerdy. :thumbsup:

Not only are they trying to give a "playing again for the first time" experience to old players, they're trying to give a more in-depth, world immersed feel to new players, as opposed to the almost constant feel of grinding through levels by running into people who want you to go kill things they could easily kill themselves, but are too lazy to. I support both of these reasons for change.

I mean, if you look at how they're changing just the starting zones, you can really see a difference. There are things actually going on now. Right off the bat, you're brought into a real story. Because of the way they've learned to use phasing, some of the things you do actually seem to affect the world around you. They took the success they had with the death knight starting zone and have applied it to the others.

Honestly, at first, I wasn't too excited for the things they were going to change come Cataclysm, but after seeing a lot of it, I think the changes they're making are all going to make the game much better.

I just thought of something. How are they going to manage the changes to the world for those who don't get the expansion?

Will the non-expansion players see the Cataclysm world but sill only have access to the original world stuff or what?

From what I nave read the old vanilla WOW is dead forever changed by cataclysm.

So what separates paying for the expansion and not paying for it? The access to new areas, new races, new flying permissions, new level cap, etc.?

you won't be able to get into the new end game content, I have friends who only recently bought LK and they would board the ship to northrend and be bounced right back to the harbor. All the changes will be reflected because the cataclysm is a world event, you just may not get access to some of the new and improved game. new races shouldn't be available to you either.

If you don't buy the actual Cataclysm expansion you will not be able to get into the new zones, you will not be able to get into Cata dungeons or raids, you will not be able to fly in Azeroth, and you will not be able to play a goblin or worgen...

You will, however, have total access to all the new race/class combos, so that's a plus.

It sounds like questing in general will be different overall, but maybe not entirely different. I'm just wondering how the experience will change if you don't actually buy the expansion.

All the zone changes to old world are going out to all players regardless of buying expansion or not. The only thing I don't know is how the Worgen starting area is split off if its an instance that will block people out like Quel'thalas did for Blood elves.

It sounds a bit like the DK starting area at level 55.

If they don't buy the expansion the level cap is 60 and there was no flying mount at all since you couldn't get to Outland. One of my friends bought vanilla, played that to 60, then bought BC played that to 70, and bought LK and is now just 1/3 of the way to 80.

As far as starting the game over, I don't have any alts, but it may be compelling to level someone new just to get the beginning of the game.

uh oh, new patch seems like it is drawing me back in. I don't even remember how long its been since I played.

wow.. some radical changes.

earthquakes are a nice touch for the world event.

Hopped in for a bit to take a gander. Earthquake animation (shaman spell) is really aggravating to me as a melee class. Lots of classes have their own ground effects that help kind of see what's going on and that thing just craps on them all, kind of like the old desecration animation.

Hate that my game is broken now, thanks blizz

very different for hunters since they have no ammo or mana management. they said they got rid of volley because they didn't think it made sense that hunters cast a spell and arrows fell from the sky, yet now I don't have to carry ammo, so I have magical ammo all the time.

We don't have to equip underwear, it's just assumed that we have it on. Same thing for ammo, makes sense to me.

From what I read it looks like being a hunter is fucked. The thing when you summon a storm of arrows was my favourite spell and they took it away, and special types of ammo too. And taking away mana and replacing with energy means that you cant even hit all your special arrows on a motherfucker anyway.

Im waiting for the patch to load anyway, but from what I read its all negative...

I guess I have to try and get my Mujahideen/Paladin character higher (lvl 42 now) and just forget about the hunter. I havent read the changes to Paladin but hopefully they are not so gay.

In vanilla it was important to manage your inventory of ammo, you had to have a dedicated bag to manage it, not only that but you generally just carried what you used arrows if you only used bows. The epic gun drops during an encounter? You had to wait until you could get to a vendor to buy ammo to use it.

Now, you also had the option of buying BETTER ammo. So for grinding, I would use the lower class ammo, and the raiding the better class. I think that made it part of the R in MMORPG. I don't take it for granted because it has always been an important part of being a hunter.

The same thing for Warlocks, having to manage their shards was an fundamental mechanic of their game play. To remove it may be easier for casual players, but I think it adds to the roleplay and game to have to manage such a small item.

Ive got a hunter and a lock. Things have gotten easier for both over the years. I dont mind the ammo loss on hunters. I had different ammo like Cyn, for grinding or raids. That being said, I did slack off on trash a bit so as to not waste a bunch of ammo. Kinda sucked having to pay to do damage. Still havent gotten my rotation down good. I dont miss the shards on the lock though. I would go thru a ton on summoning closets so ppl could go back to town for crap. New healthstones are awesome, but I miss my fire/spellstones

The biggest thing that annoys me is the way you have to specialise in your talent tree, rather than picking a mix of talents.

For my hunter I like to have spirit bond to heal quicker, but its impossible to get it without specialising in beast mastery now.

And I am still pissed off they took away volley - which either "feign death" is probably the attack I value use the most when doing quests and so on. Multi-Shot is a very lame compensation

The ability to throw a trap at someone is a waste of time.

And replacing mana with focus (and making it regen at half the speed of rouges) just takes away even more attack power

I might not be the best player in the first place but I feel like the changes have just made my main character twice as weak

if you're just standing there your regenerate is slow but if you incorporate steady shot your your speed will be much faster. two steady shots gives a speed buff.

Well saying the hunter and lock changes were there to cater to the "casuals" is a cop out. The point is, there is no point to simulating the economic drain of ammo for once class and not others, nor is there a legitimate reason why locks and hunters had to sacrifice 20% of their inventory space for so long just to perform their roles.
When they said "oh hey well now you can just buy the ammo and repair it" that was fine, but still, from an itemization standpoint, it was just creating extra work for their dev team to have to produce new item names, item id #'s, fitting the dps increase in to the ilvl budget, creating new art for arrows, new art for ammo, creating a new recipe, a new reputation requirement or source location/drop rate for said recipe, inventing the materials required that would fit in to a reasonable economic relativity compared to old ammo.

Sorry, there's nothing hardcore about going to a vendor and putting something in your bags.

Hardcore is being good with the tools you're given, learning to give constructive feedback based on your expectations (realistic anyway) and being consistently good at understanding mechanics & encounters, both old and new. As well as having the ability to research said mechanics and encounters.

Honestly, the only thing that bugs me about hunters right now is that they were all about wanting all the talents to be optional, where no one talent would surpass another so wholeheartedly that one would always avoid another. Well not sure what you'd call the focus regen talents then, because really it's the difference between the redcoats and the U.S. Marines in terms of firepower.

that said, all the classes are a mess right now, because relatively speaking, most classes are seeing a minimum of a 30% increase in damage (yes, even the warriors who complain that their damage is lower than ever, there are others who learned the new spec/rotation and overcame it) Some of these tactics are unintended and will be balanced eventually.

So all the mats for priests, rogues, and shammys are not too much work? There are many many more mat types than ammo types. So I can expect that rogues will lose the ability to poison their weapons?

as far as DPS for warriors, I played the other night with a warrior that peaked the meter at 45,000dps during the Sindragosa whelps fight. All the warriors playing didn't get it because they never hit over 5k. ever.

The best hits I ever get with my hunter are like 9k with killshot

I dont know why, I have a purple gun.


These are my stats are they bad for lvl 80?

Health:18,379
Mana:10,211
Base Stats
Ranged

* Strength: 211
* Agility: 590
* Stamina: 1036
* Intellect: 363
* Spirit: 97
* Armor: 9028

* Damage: 702 - 961
* Speed: 1.74
* Power: 1972
* Hit Rating: 107
* Crit Chance: 13.75%

Hunter shot damage is based on your a percentage of your weapon damage + a percentage of your Ranged Attack Power + a base amount. For example: Killshot's damage is 150% of your weapon's damage + 30% of your RAP + 325. Basically to hit harder you want higher damage weapons which means slow weapons. Stay away from weapons faster than 2.5 because they aren't meant for hunters. Even if the DPS is higher go with the one with the higher damage.

Weapon Damage and AP aren't the only stats you need though. Hit, crit, haste and Mastery rating are all important too. You get 2 Attack Power and 1 crit rating from each point in Agility.

I would not be surprised to see rogue poisons become castable spells, the thing is they don't have to come out with a new tier of reagents or poisons every time they release a new content patch and a new ilevel tier. They had to do that with ammo, it was slowing them down.

I don't know if you noticed but they removed the reagent cost of a lot of buffs, or even better than that, removed the raid versions entirely and made it so the baseline spell buffs everyone in the party/raid as well.

Shamans went from 4 totems to just being able to equip a relic that acts as all 4 totems.

I haven't taken a real close look at shamans since the patch but again, they're streamlining a lot of inventory elements to free up the players to focus on more important things besides troubling everyone with "that guy" in their party who forgot to buy xyz reagent/poison/ammo


They did streamline poisons as well now that I think about it. used to be a vendor with like a dozen ranks of the same poisons, now it's just one of each.

Hm. yer crit and agi seem kinda low. Make sure you are gemming agility and are wearing all mail gear. Here are mine at 80:

Str 99
agi 1933
stam 2297
int 109
spir 116

rdam 1709-2230
hit 223
Crit 65.19%

Servers are down and I've got nothing to do so I figured I'd come by and type a little.

So, Hows everyone enjoying their class changes? I've got 7 lvl 80s and I haven't had time to even spec all of them.
My shadow priest is almost untouched which was kinda surprising. There are no new buttons to learn, just slightly different timing.
My druid tank is my best geared character and he's really powerful and the rotation seems like it's really going to be fun on a raid boss but only having 1 AOE on a 6 second cooldown is really making 5mans a pain. We have thorns which does awesome damage but having to shift out to use it makes it impossible to use while tanking other than when running in for the pull. They either don't want bears to have it or they'll end up letting us cast it without shifting out.
My hunter was my main for the longest time. I think he has 160+ days /played time on him which is insane, imo. I've been through a lot of changes with him since late in Vanilla WOW. I really don't know if the new playstyle is right for me though. You really have to take an active role in resource management and I feel like I'm tunnel visioned focusing on that focus bar(heh get it? /groan) This might change between specs though or at level 85. I really haven't had a lot of time with the character and it's really going to be one I have to spend a lot of time on to relearn.
I've not even touched my horde pally, DK or Warrior yet. I've mostly been playing my Alliance Prot Paladin. I started him about a month ago and hit 80 a few days after the patch. At 77 he soloed Amphitheater of Anguish and there was only one boss in the place that was able to move his HP bar below 80%. With a 11k heal that turns 100% of the overheal into a 6 second shield every 12 seconds he is pretty much invincible. He was tanking heroics very quickly too. Being crit immune from talents made it very easy to walk into the easier heroics and pick up some drops and easy justice points.
I'm really enjoying the rotation of the prot pally too. The rotation is simple enough to memorize yet it's not something you can just faceroll. I need to step up my bars to handle the buttons a little better because there are a LOT of buttons to push compared to other classes I've played. I just don't have enough hotkeys to use everything without clicking some things and moving buttons around for different situations.

Ok, Well it's 2pm and server should be up so I can quit typing now. To sum up the post, I'm enjoying the new changes. Not every change really helped me and I've been put off by some of the changes due to class mechanics changes but It's really nothing to get upset about. This is the 3rd pre-expansion overhaul I've seen and based on the last couple of times doing this is that nothing is ever finalized until the first raid bosses start dying.

My only lvl 80 character is a hunter. The change to using energy rather than mana actually works out quite well. Once I get the upgrade I think I can get spirit bond while still specialising in survival - but the fact you have to specialize in one talent tree is still annoying to me. I also am pissed off I lost volley that was my favourite attack

_

Since I thought there's no point playing the hunter till I can start levelling up I played the Death Knight a little more. This cocksucker named Arthus or whatever still pisses me off a lot, I'd like to murder him. I was forced to execute my god damned nanny that looked after me when I was a kid, on the say so of one of his prick minions.. And now I turned good and I am suppose to not even enact revenge on the guy who ordered me to do it by slitting his throat.

I had to run through Stormwind to deliver a message to the prince, and these fucking peasants were throwing shit at me. I yearned to run one or two of them through with my blade, but there were all these lvl 80 guards about disrespecting me, talking shit like theyre gonna hang me. Cocksuckers. Now that I am speaking on this, I didnt care much for the tone of voice the prince took with me either. Only cos this girl Jaina Proudmore who gave her ring at a lower level (on my hunter) was there did I resist trying to hit him with a fucking ice bolt right betwene his eyes and not even care that he is 20 levels stronger than me and could kill me easily

To be honest it angered me so much I stopped playing the Death Knight again. I have a lvl 42 Paladin, I guess I might play them a bit or just not play till the new version comes out properly and I can get my hunter up to 85 or 90 or whatever the new top lvl is and then start getting some decent gear for them.

OK between this, your post on Dexter, and your locked thread about the Dog. You've gotta be trolling hard. lol. That or you have a great sense of humor that I'm just not in on yet :D

No, that's just him. I find it easier to just ignore his nonsense.

I keep thinking about going back to WoW. I have an 80 Tauren Shaman. I just got so sick of the guild drama and the constant pressure to run raids 24/7. I have a 40-something Druid that I could mess around with, though.

God, this release is coming faster than I want it to, that's all I know. Not looking forward to it, at the same time, I am. Make any sense? I guess that's always my relationship with this game but it primarily comes down to that my server/faction seems to be losing it's identity due to transfers on and off the server. I don't really know anyone anymore and feel like an old coot, senile and stuck on the lawn of stormwind making fun of the whippersnappers in Goldshire.

I think every time an expansion rolls around my guild has fallen apart, after the last time back after Wrath came out I just never found a decent guild again so I've occupied myself in other ways... achievements, alts, etc. Maybe after Cata comes out and my main hits 85 I'll start looking to get into raids again but who knows, the entire raiding hassle has definitely gotten to me. For now it's back to finishing my goal of getting one of each class to 80 before the Cata release! Once the raid/not raid decision is made and all these horde toons are 85, I might just do it again on Alliance. I really need to find more hobbies.

both best buy and amazon are now offering points for cataclysm orders that equate to 10$ on another purchase. i'm pretty sure you can use the points on time cards to play even.

in other news, there's a trick to download the cataclysm stuff without your serial #, so you can just enter it and play right away when blizz unlocks it...

Want to preload Cataclysm without pre-ordering? Here's how

We got a tight bunch of people on Windrunner :thumbsup:

But we are Alliance

Sigh, I wonder if I should play again. I too, like a lot of you quit awhile ago (played since beta.) But so far WoW still seems to be the only MMORPG worth playing atm. I can't wait till one comes to topple it.

i got an email for a free 7 days of wow from blizzard, probably to get me in for cataclysm. it has to be used before the end of the month though so you have to pay to get in on day 1 of release i think.

i'm probably gonna cash it in and play some over this turkey weekend. if any of you are considering coming back, you probably have the invites too and it would be a good litmus test for yall.

I just cashed this in this week, but I realized that upgrading to 4.0 will be a 4 gb d/l. I'm doing that now.

There is a good chance that I'll be sucked in again, as I have little willpower.

Should I ask for Cataclysm for Christmas? :)

Just out of curiosity, since I have a crappy HD, what is the total GB for the WoW client these days? Including the xpacks, that is.

My WoW folder is 28gigs. That's with 2 expansions and most of the data for the next expansion. It's huge, for sure.

Right now my folder is sitting at 25.3GB

32.6GB for me, but I have a lot of screenshots at 1920x1200 and mods dating back to November '04

So we finally managed to pull a few members of our guild together and down Lich King last night. It was definitely an interesting fight. I wish I'd gotten to see it before some of the mechanics were made trivial.

No you dont. I had 46 wipes on sindragosa 10m back in May and 33 wipes on LK25 before we downed him. I like the one pull kills now much better.

Ive got my main parked with 25 dailys to turn in for Cat. Im ready to go. Time to work on the alts.

When Wrath launched I thought the old quest turn ins did nothing?

holy fucking shitballs


blizzard really knows how to put together an amazing trailer, furthermore, using all IN GAME graphics. They've really upgraded the texture/poly detail and view distance over the years.
Skywall looks absofuckinglutelyamazing.

25 daily quests will give 33% of a level at 80. Fishing, Cooking and Weekly quests don't give XP. I'm not prepared for any kind of rush to 85. I tried it last time and was leading until about 76 until until another Hunter passed me using "clever use of game mechanics" got to 80 about the same time I turned 77. I'm pretty much completely broke besides a lot of Northrend mats I'm sure will make a profit.

Oh nice im never in a rush had couple guildies take a week off work and play almost non-stop to 80 I got there 3 days after they did and I got sleep :D

played a little last night, and felt like a noob with all the talent changes. liked the changed landscape but didn't appreciate all the portals being gone. dealing with portal pimp
mages can be a pain in the ass.

http://l27.sphotos.l3.fbcdn.net/hpho...3_110918_n.jpg

Alexstrasza vs Deathwing, Caught this screenshot as they came crashing down the side of the mountain by Ironforge.

Very cool cutscene.

So I think I finally decided to come back after all these years (since BC first came out.)

I downloaded the game instead of installing with disks (cause I lost them). My account is still there, and it still says burning crusade is there (which is what I've bought up to). I want to play again, but I wanted to make sure that when I downloaded the game that BC will still be available before I pay a monthly sub fee.. I really don't want to have to buy BC again.

Does all that make sense?

So does the download come with all the expansions? And so long as their on your account you have access?

Anyone know? I'm having trouble (read: can't) posting on the official forums to ask. And calling support takes literally 30 minutes of waiting (had to because of some errors yesterday..unfortunately I forgot to ask this important question).


....yes I'm poor enough that 14 bucks matters enough to risk...its also kind of a principle thing. It'd piss me off and make me not want to play. And I want to play again, I now know 3 or 4 real life friends that all play. Should be a lot more fun knowing real people.

Yes. When you bought, installed, and logged into BC, you essentially upgraded your account to BC. This allows you to download up to BC from the account at anytime, which is what you did. I threw away my disks and was able to d/l up to WotLK this way.

As soon as you pay for a month subscription, you're good to go in Outland, etc.

Yay, sweet! can always count on you BG! Such a timely response!

edit: next question: should I buy lich king +new or just buy the new expansion and skip lich king? Are the lands in lich king expansion kind of dead now?

No problem. Obsessive-compulsives are good for this kind of thing.

But do you know if there's a point in buying both expansions or just one?

Well, you might as well finish BC first. If you aren't level 68 or higher, there's no point in buying WotLK yet. Just as well, getting Cataclysm won't make sense either, as it's generally for level 80 to 85. You will have access to some new stuff, but not the new areas.

If I were you, I'd hold off until you have a character who is actually ready to use the new material.

Oh well, too late :D got both as an early christmas present to myself. The download is taking forever though...

Any thoughts on the new races? I really wanted to play a goblin druid but that's not allowed. Worgen druid just seems pointless racial ability wise. Druids basically get all those movement speed things already.

I don't have Cataclysm, and I'm not sure when I'm going to get it.

My views on race selection, however, were always based on aesthetics and how much I love/hate the starting areas.

The goblin and worgen starting areas, alone, warrant, at very least, starting one of each and playing them to 10, in my opinion. They both have incredible story immersion (more in a silly way with the goblins, though), and it only takes an hour or two to experience all the content involved.

Worgen druid actually seems like a really good fit, though.You can travel form outside and if you need a boost of speed inside you essentially have two dashes at your disposal. Also their crit booster will help any druid spec. Increased skinning can help being that you wear leather. Plus, they're shapeshifters anyway...

Of course my druid's a troll now. I love the look of their forms, and that's what's most important to me in a druid.

Oh, and good thing you got both. You can't run Cata without WotLK.

They greatly reduced the XP requirements for getting through the older zones for BC and LK. If people were able to get worgens and goblins to 80 by day 2 of cata it's not inconceivable to get through them pretty quickly.

The real question is do you want to play end game content or do you want to play leveling content. End game play is very different than leveling play.

I finally will get to play tomorrow night but I'll be running Naxx Immortal run so I still won't see new content until Tuesday afternoon, and then it's raid night so really it's Wednesday until I can start leveling.

Cyn, You're still raiding LK content?

I've hit 85, leveled my mining and engineering to max and made my epic goggles. They're pretty sweet but I can't afford the meta gems on the AH.
I finished 1 heroic dungeon and I have no plans to return without a guild group for at least a few more weeks. There's just too much coordination required to be running with random people. We got off pretty easy with Halls of Origination being a relatively easy heroic(except the trash) but I've had friends that wiped in Deadmines for about 4 hours straight because they just didn't have the necessary CC.

Our last official LK attempt was Dec. 5. I assume I will still be trying to do LK because I am upset that too many guildies left and we kept having to start from scratch to re-gear newbies at least 3 times. Each time it made more guildies left and I think that guild is no longer viable in any ways or means.

I purchased digital copies and holy cow is it taking forever to DL and upgrade. Its been hours and I still haven't even gotten to cata yet.

---------- Post added at 01:16 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:48 AM ----------

Argh! Apparently you don't get a free month of play with the expansions? Grrr that's messed up.

I don't own a credit card, so now I have to go back out AGAIN and get a time card. Assuming I can get this thing to finish DLing and upgrade to cata.

Ok after 41! minutes waiting for support (on the phone) they told me that because I bought it digitally I won't be able to play for 2-3 days because of confirmation processes. Would have been nice to know ahead of time...sigh.

weird. if you had a time card and downloaded it digitally i would think that you could jump right on, BUT I bet that is the MO of the gold farmer hackers so the delay is probably a counter measure.

That's really weird, I bought Cataclysm digitally 6 hours before the launch and I was able to play at midnight (well 1am my time) when servers launched.

Lucky. Heh thanks for rubbing it in. :D

So what are the initial thoughts on Cata?

It's really fucking hard. Just how I like it.

I spent 3 1/2 hours cycling through party members in heroic randoms, trying to do heroic deadmines. I don't forsee randoms getting good at heroics for quite a while, took a guild group, not even geared enough to run randoms yet (wont let them queue) and did it in just around an hour.

Achievements - Shaukdotdj @ Galakrond - World of Warcraft

logged out in my lame dps gear cuz I had a daily to do. Oh well.

I just started last night. Wife came home after being gone almost the whole week. Somehow in that time frame, the cat hid the authenticator so we spent 50 minutes trying to get our accounts accessible.

Now, I"m 5 bubbles into 80 underwater. It's fun, interesting and different but still familiar and the same.

Yay finally got everything ready. Now my problem is all my friends play on another server...

Since I played WoW I joined a dungeons and dragons group and they all play on feathermoon I think. I can't transfer there for free, and I can't afford the 25$ after dropping a 100$ to upgrade :( does anyone know if I call support they may have sympathy and do it for free?

Sigh, nope. They wouldn't do it for free. Not surprised I suppose. I find it annoying though since I just dropped 110$ to upgrade.

Just one more reason you should have went with EQ2

Tried it. Didn't like it. I used to play original EQ, loved it. Miss it. EQ2 took out all the good stuff from EQ.

You know, that's one thing I've always felt they needed to work on. They do a poor job of offering incentive to come back to the game if your reason for quitting is that guilds mass transferred off, friends quit playing, or server imbalance has become too noticeable

1stly, I think they need to address pvp servers with an imbalance.
Mal'ganis for example is something like 95% horde, and the only reason people play on that server with that kind of imbalance is for PVE reasons. Not pvp. They need to offer free faction changes to level 80-85 characters that qualify.

2ndly, offering 2 free weeks of game time or offering on the refer a friend/scroll of resurrection programs aren't really valued incentives.

I've quit for long periods of time over 6 months in one case, over a year in another, etc... at 15$ a month, they lost tons of money by insulting me with 7.50$ of game time if I took their offer, or 15$ of game time if I took a ressurection offer.

Those didn't address the reasons I quit. Guild drama amongst the top guilds? guilds falling apart? transferring? plummeting in quality?

To give you an idea, Kil'Jaeden at one point during the wrath era was the 3rd top most progressed server on wowprogress. There were many guilds doing end game hard mode content, you had options, and you weren't nearly as confined by class makeup then. While the #1 guild might need a DK tank, maybe #2 did, maybe that's why they were #2 instead of #1

NOW? due to so much transferring, they've fallen from 3rd to 30th, and only horde has downed any bosses, it used to be a 50/50 split.
ok just checked again and they climbed back to 12th, the point stands, only 2 alliance options, one of them has a raiding schedule that I cannot possibly meet (they start too early before I'm off work) and the other one has a code of conduct which includes not posting on any forums outside of the guild forum (really, what?)

So yeah I eventually came back, I begrudingly paid that transfer fee for one character, and ONCE AGAIN, the reason I transferred there has disappeared, my friend that I transferred there to play with has left the server. So what are my options now? you guessed it. Settle for a less engaging/less skilled server community, or gamble my money away trying to find a server/guild that meets my criteria.

I would have been ALL OVER any email that said "come back to wow, transfer/faction up to 3 characters for free with a 6 month resub!"

All of the things you're describing are social issues that occur all the time to thousands of players and, for better or worse, are just a natural consequence of human interaction over time. Groups are going to fall apart. People are going to stop playing or start playing on different servers. Guilds are going to poach members. There's nothing blizzard can do to force people to not do those things, especially with a game the size of WoW. Starting a new character at this point in wow's history is absolutely trivial. There are people who got characters from 0 to 85 faster than I got my main from 80 to 85. If you don't like where you are, start over. If you are absolutely in love with your character, then pay the $25.

Any e-mail offer like that would go out to hundreds if not thousands of players and it's a $165 value. I can't fathom why you think blizzard (or any company) would ever make such a generous offer to entice people back to the game, especially in its current state, in which they plainly do not need to make desperate attempts to get people playing.

Blizzard designs the game. It doesn't, and shouldn't be expected to, control the people playing it, especially insofar as guild drama goes or having your friends transfer off server. They very aggressively try to reduce load on overpopulated servers by offering free transfers and they do the same with unbalanced servers by offering free transfers of one faction to another server with the opposite imbalance. I don't know what else you expect them to do, and if you expect them to hand out 11 months subscription value to a bunch of people just because, I think you're being pretty unrealistic.

What they're charging for the service does not imply value.

In all reality, it costs them nothing other than the automation of running a script to move data from one server to another.

Paying 55$ for one faction/server combo transfer is absurd considering what little they have to do. It costs more than the game does. 11 months value "just because" they paid for a 6 month sub is hardly overly generous, it's basically 40-50% off the sub for the year is all it calculates to, and ensures they're making a player happy enough to continue that sub since they're in a better social environment since then.

You aren't including the soft costs of development of the software and scripts to handle it. Nor are you including the costs of the person who executes it.

While I don't think it is worth $55 there are plenty of people who do.

The cost of the game is borne out of the subscription not the loss leader of the boxed CD or download.

As I said, if $55 is too much for you, it has never been faster, easier or more fun to level a character. Other than it costing them to develop and maintain the service, Blizzard doesn't want people transferring faction or server on a whim. I think the somewhat high prices are intentionally higher than whatever "value" you get to dissuade people from using it and make sure that the people who do use it are serious about it.

Don't get me wrong. I understand your complaint and why an intensely social game becomes much less fun when your social network collapses, but I think you can't expect blizzard to spend more time trying to remedy that than they already do, and I think they do give you options both for a slower fix (leveling a new toon) and a faster fix (paying for transfer). If you don't like either of them, then I don't know what to tell you.