official World of Warcraft

[game_over]

Does installing WOTLK bring anything to the game? I tried to get on a boat but was returned and got the message 'you need to upgrade to WOTLK to go here', i'm only level 54 so i didnt think i needed it, it's only £10.99 so i'll buy it if its worth it?

Also, a question about questing does it matter what pattern i follow or how many quests i complete? at the moment i have quests all over the map, i've also been running the dungeons which dramatically increases my level and some quests will turn green/gray making them worthless. Should i cancel them? or focus on the quests more than dungeons?

I've have herbalism as a primary profession, at the moment i just throw them on the auction house, is there a better secondary profession to take advantage of them.

I having mining, herbalism

cooking, first aid, fishing, riding

i hardly using cooking or first aid

(human warrior)

[chrismgtis]

Does installing WOTLK bring anything to the game? I tried to get on a boat but was returned and got the message 'you need to upgrade to WOTLK to go here', i'm only level 54 so i didnt think i needed it, it's only ?10.99 so i'll buy it if its worth it?

Also, a question about questing does it matter what pattern i follow or how many quests i complete? at the moment i have quests all over the map, i've also been running the dungeons which dramatically increases my level and some quests will turn green/gray making them worthless. Should i cancel them? or focus on the quests more than dungeons?

I've have herbalism as a primary profession, at the moment i just throw them on the auction house, is there a better secondary profession to take advantage of them.

I having mining, herbalism

cooking, first aid, fishing, riding

i hardly using cooking or first aid

(human warrior)

I wouldn't buy it until you're high enough of a level to quest with the expansion. Just in case you quit before then.

Yea, cancel gray quests. They are pretty useless, unless their are quest rewards that you can use, or you just want the achievement and want to finish the quest for the instance while getting it (if it's an instance). If I remember right, green quests are the ones you want to work on. Also look into getting Quest Helper (I think that's the correct name?) it maps out the locations for you and makes it easy to do quests in the correct order and in the shortest possible time. I haven't played in about a year personally.

Most people barely touch cooking. First aid can be helpful. Somewhat. I never really used it much, because I would rather use the resources for other things. Mining+Herbalism is good if you want to sell resources. The two together for crafting wouldn't be a good combination. Though you can always harvest with that character and transfer resources to other characters. Just depends on how you want to do it. You could do herbalism+alchemy if you want to craft. Or mining+blacksmith.

Excuse me if I'm a little rusty. It's been a little while.

[firey]

Does installing WOTLK bring anything to the game? I tried to get on a boat but was returned and got the message 'you need to upgrade to WOTLK to go here', i'm only level 54 so i didnt think i needed it, it's only ?10.99 so i'll buy it if its worth it?

WOTLK = Expansion, so new quests, new world, new items, new raids/dungeons. WOTLK is geared for level 70-80.. you need to get Burning Crusade (58-70) Expansion (offers same stuff as WOTLK (New gear, world, items, raids, quests)

Also, a question about questing does it matter what pattern i follow or how many quests i complete? at the moment i have quests all over the map, i've also been running the dungeons which dramatically increases my level and some quests will turn green/gray making them worthless. Should i cancel them? or focus on the quests more than dungeons?

Both are Viable, quests = great for rep and just doing stuff solo. Dungeons = great for exp and quick gear. Drop green and grey quests, focus on questing in one area, do all quests there and move on to the next. Wow is setup for alot of zone progression ie) Complete All in area A, get quest to go to B, and so on, so follow those chains.

I've have herbalism as a primary profession, at the moment i just throw them on the auction house, is there a better secondary profession to take advantage of them.

I having mining, herbalism

cooking, first aid, fishing, riding

i hardly using cooking or first aid

Well Alchemy or Inscription both use Herbs, but just keep selling and making a profit, you can usually get into a guild with an alchemist or scribe that can make potions dirt cheap or free (if you provide mats) So stick with what you have.

Also, cooking will become handy later on to make specialty foods. And first-aid is awesome and you will use it all the time, I play a disc priest and will often bandage for quick health if out of mana.

[ylcard]

Instead of using QuestHelper, which is fine, I'd suggest you not download it, use WoW's own quest tracking and if you need further help - go to Wowhead. Best WoW web site, ever.

Simply open your quest log, hit enter to open up the chat's edit box and SHIFT-CLICK on the quest's name, this will "link" the quest in the edit box, copy the name and go to Wowhead, paste the name in the search box and voila.

Read the comments, they're mostly helpful.

Always abandon Grey quests, UNLESS you really want the reward from them, but keep in mind you'll be replacing items left and right in Outland, when you hit 58, you get to go there.

So, don't get stuck on some cool level 40 Blue Leggings, they will be outdated by the time you'll reach Outland, even level 55 Blue items will be outclassed by Green quest rewards.

Green quests are generally easy but reward less XP than Yellow/Orange/Red, don't abandon them unless it's a really useless quest that makes you travel through half of the world for just 1 quest.

I'd suggest visit quest hubs and not do the random go 10,000 miles to drop off this package for me, when you're done with that area, go to the next.

To find such areas, use Wowhead !

But, usually, they are in almost every map, in your Faction's camp/town/city.

Theramore for Alliance in Dustwallow Marsh for example, or Stonard for Horde in Swamp of Sorrows.

If you need gold, check your Auction House (AH) for Ores/Bars, figure out which one sell best and "cheapest" to make, and do that. From my experience, Copper Ore sells best. So you can spare 1-2 hours of simply farming Copper Ore and sell that on the AH, you'll make a lot of gold (for your level) that way.

Same for Herbalism, but in my opinion it's a bit trickier.

Install GatherMate or Gatherer (preferred) to help you keep track of mining nodes or herbs that you pick up (or you can import Wowhead's database into the addon to see thousands of nodes/herbs waiting for you :p

Don't bother with secondary professions (EXCEPT for Riding), they're somewhat useful in end game, but they're utterly useless while leveling, sure a bandage in the right time could be useful, but the time it takes you to level it up is time that could have been spent on leveling up your character instead.

If you don't have anything to do, just log out, figure out what you want to do, where to go, etc' and go with a goal set in mind, you'll level much quicker that way, even if you play less.

[game_over]

thanks for the replys, very helpful

[DrunkenBeard]

Okay, here's how I have been doing in case it's of any use to you :

If you want to level quickly drop any quest that's not yellow/orange, you'll find that's it's much more efficient to level through dungeons and quest only when you're queued. When you're bored with dungeons try some Alterac Valley (especially on Call to Arms, really it's just easy phat chunks of XP). For the AH, I say don't bother with a crafting profession before hitting 80. I personally have Skinning/Herbalism and it works great for easy gold. The two professions don't mess with each other (unlike mining/herbalism), skinning is so easy to level and once you can skin Borean Leather it becomes extremely profitable (you also have Arctic Fur which sells 80g/piece but it's rare and you have to know where to farm). Also you'll hear faily often "don't go to outland before 60 ... don't go to northrend before 70" BS, you go from 58 to 60 in Outland a lot quicker than you do on Azeroth, besides you're leveling through dungeons anyway.

Now if you don't care about getting to 80 and end-game content, you can take it easy and level through questing. In this case, don't do all the quests, my advice is to do the quests that you "like" and you think are worthwile. It's how I have been managing before hitting Outland and getting sucked into the gear/gold/xp race.

[Spookie]

Also, cooking will become handy later on to make specialty foods. And first-aid is awesome and you will use it all the time, I play a disc priest and will often bandage for quick health if out of mana.

This.

Cooking is an end game profession really. You use it a great deal when raiding. If you're not raiding? Well it's a distraction I guess!

[chrismgtis]

Instead of using QuestHelper, which is fine, I'd suggest you not download it

There is absolutely no good reason that he shouldn't download it. Unless things have changed drastically since ~a year ago.

As far as questing. Enjoy the content. Experience it. Don't rush. Rushing is absolute nonsense. End game in WoW is absolute nonsense. You may enjoy the raiding for a few weeks. After that, the odds are your desire to play the game will turn into absolute hatred for it.

The only problem is that Blizzard is dumb as a rock and completely screwed everyone that wanted to experience the old content and gave them every reason to rush through (or completely avoid it). That is the main reason I don't play anymore. They basically gave away gear to get players to avoid old content. Whoever thought that up needs a powerful nut busting uppercut.

[lalalawawawa]

There is absolutely no good reason that he shouldn't download it. Unless things have changed drastically since ~a year ago.

There is absolutely no good reason why he should download it. :p

[Slane]

Tom-tom with the wow-pro addon, with Lighthead is pretty much win, when leveling. Lighthead gives ya all the comments from WoWhead in-game (cords and that what not) while Tom-tom with WoW-pro has in-game guides that you can follow step-by-step. Most of the guides are good and can help ya to level quickly. Especially when you get to the guides the dude who runs wowpro does himself. It works.

[the evn show]

That is the main reason I don't play anymore. They basically gave away gear to get players to avoid old content. Whoever thought that up needs a powerful nut busting uppercut.

Once a guild fell a tier behind they began to fill the roll of "feeder" guild for everyone above them which further slowed progression and worsened the cycle.

By the end of classic the typical player was 3 tiers behind the end-game raiders. By the end of TBC the typical player was still about 3 tiers behind the end game players.

Today the difference between someone with < 1 day played at 80 (1 hour per day not being carried) and someone who has been farming ICC25 hard mode for months can be as little as ½ a tier.

That's good for new players who can get caught up and see most of the content they paid for

It's good for re-rollers who can realistically expect to "finish" the game on multiple toons

It's good for end-game raiders who now have a large pool of 'qualified' applicants to recruit from

It's good for 'casual' guilds through reduced poaching by higher-end guilds and the feeling that they're still doing relevant content.

My perspective is 'from the top looking down' and the game is vastly improved despite being on the "losing" side of the changes.

I can only imagine how much better WoTLK is today for somebody that would have been working through molten core 3 months before TBC came out.

[ylcard]

There is absolutely no good reason that he shouldn't download it. Unless things have changed drastically since ~a year ago.

As far as questing. Enjoy the content. Experience it. Don't rush. Rushing is absolute nonsense. End game in WoW is absolute nonsense. You may enjoy the raiding for a few weeks. After that, the odds are your desire to play the game will turn into absolute hatred for it.

The only problem is that Blizzard is dumb as a rock and completely screwed everyone that wanted to experience the old content and gave them every reason to rush through (or completely avoid it). That is the main reason I don't play anymore. They basically gave away gear to get players to avoid old content. Whoever thought that up needs a powerful nut busting uppercut.

There is actually quite a few reasons for not downloading QuestHelper.

1. QuestHelper dumbs everything down by 10 notches into a mere Hack & Slash game.

2. It's pretty much integrated into WoW already, which isn't such a good thing when you argue for "enjoying the game" rather than rushing through it, but still, it's another reason not to use QH.

3. It uses a lot of memory.

4. When you have more than 10 quests (just throwing a number out) your map will look very "distracting", you can always adjust QH's settings to make it a bit more user friendly, but then again you can just avoid it altogether.

That's right off the top of my head, you seem to agree that he should experience the quests and enjoy the game, how can you be supporting QH then ? It's the complete opposite, it's only useful for those who want to rush through quests.

What old content are you talking about, by the way ? Vanilla and TBC ? Some things are better left forgotten, simply look at Naxxramas and Onyxia remake, bloody awful.

Think of it this way, they gave a reason for people to play the new content, it seems like the classic glass which seems to be half empty to some and half full to others, I'm not a very positive person, but try looking at the good things they brought.

People were going crazy over the Tournament and Ulduar, but now ? They despise ToC and the dailies there, they complain about Ulduar being too long.

You can never please everyone, especially not the majority.

The giving away gear, sure, it's a bloody crime, but hopefully they'll redeem themselves in Cataclysm with those points or whatever, when I logged in after a fairly decent hiatus from WoW, I was shocked to see three new emblems, WHAT A MESS ! So much gear is going to waste !

[MR_Candyman]

Honestly, I want to get back into wow, and I might pick it up again, but I have some issues with the game.

1: They made it too easy. They dumbed down the classes, and they diversified their talents. Soloing, nobody has any real weak points anymore, and the talent trees don't make as big a difference to how you play your character. Don't get me wrong, it's still dumb to be improperly specced, but it's not a death sentence

2: Instances aren't as immersive in WOTLK. Kara was a great example of what an instance should be in my opinion. It had very diverse bosses. Everybody had to do their role and do it well. The later bosses were a lot harder than the beginning ones (though WOTLK still does this well), and it was GORGEOUS. There was a lot of little detail that was great about that place.

3: Grind-fest. I'm sick of collecting 50 candles from midgets. Why do they all have a candle, but I only get a 1 in 5 drop rate? WTF?

4: Vehicles. Don't get me wrong, those outside quests with the vehicles I LOVED. I thought they were the best things to ever happen to WoW. Then you get the instance vehicles of various types. Oh boy. What. A. Pain. I LOATHE those things. Yes, let's make all our gear and hard work getting them essentially useless. Let's make it so all our skills/spells/abilities are pointless. Great idea :rolleyes:

Not to mention the fact I played a nice little competitor for a while that had a LOT of great things in it that I thought WoW could and would eventually adopt. That game is Warhammer Online. Yes, people have mixed feelings about the game, as do I. I feel though there is a lot to love about it such as:

1: Unique classes for the races. WoW started on this path, but less so...then they dumbed it down so basically any race can be what class they want. I see the logic behind this, but it just leads to my second point

2: Races have character. They are all different. They have different goals, they have different quests, they have different movements, classes, and weapons of choice. This makes each character a truly unique experience, and in my opinion makes you sympathize with your character and race.

3: The world is constantly in motion. You're supposed to help defend against an attack? Well, hurry up because they're already attacking! None of this spawning when you accept the quest crap.

Yes, there's a lot of things WoW does better, but I just felt like WoW lost the little soul it had, and it became very repetitive. I'm hoping Cataclysm will rectify that. I want the new races to be TRULY unique, unfortunately I know they won't be simply because they have the same classes. A Goblin Warrior? Really? Goblins are chickens. Warriors should be more a lone wolf barbarian type. Goblins travel in packs, wield small knives, swords, and bows and are scared of anything that has the slightest chance of besting them. I won't go into the other equally stupid classes (I'm looking at you Warlock). Then there's Worgen Rogues. Ya, a Worgen's really going to be very sneaky going through a crowd to knife somebody in the back. Again, I could go on about the other classes not making sense (priest? really?). Still, here's hoping for the content to be fresh and not grinding.

[game_over]

I do agree about QH and the grinding. i spent around 4 hours in UnGoro Crater last night trying to grind through the quests, i had to collect an unbelievable amount of stuff and the drop rate was appalling. i'm still not finished. There needs to be a wider scope on quest objectives, surely they can think of more than grinding, delivering an item or talking to someone.

[ylcard]

Some quests are notorious for having abysmal drop rates, Un'Goro is not a very good place to level in my opinion, old world is pretty "meh", just try to force your way through those quests - or better yet, simply use the Dungeon Finder to go through these levels, get to 58 and go to Outland, the questing there is much better.

This will be addressed in Cataclysm I think, their major issue is to attract new players and keep them, so far the starting zones have been terribad for almost every race, it puts off a lot of players, even after you finish the starting zone, the world seems so big that many don't bother playing.

[chrismgtis]

There is actually quite a few reasons for not downloading QuestHelper.

1. QuestHelper dumbs everything down by 10 notches into a mere Hack & Slash game.

2. It's pretty much integrated into WoW already, which isn't such a good thing when you argue for "enjoying the game" rather than rushing through it, but still, it's another reason not to use QH.

3. It uses a lot of memory.

4. When you have more than 10 quests (just throwing a number out) your map will look very "distracting", you can always adjust QH's settings to make it a bit more user friendly, but then again you can just avoid it altogether.

That's right off the top of my head, you seem to agree that he should experience the quests and enjoy the game, how can you be supporting QH then ? It's the complete opposite, it's only useful for those who want to rush through quests.

What old content are you talking about, by the way ? Vanilla and TBC ? Some things are better left forgotten, simply look at Naxxramas and Onyxia remake, bloody awful.

Think of it this way, they gave a reason for people to play the new content, it seems like the classic glass which seems to be half empty to some and half full to others, I'm not a very positive person, but try looking at the good things they brought.

People were going crazy over the Tournament and Ulduar, but now ? They despise ToC and the dailies there, they complain about Ulduar being too long.

You can never please everyone, especially not the majority.

The giving away gear, sure, it's a bloody crime, but hopefully they'll redeem themselves in Cataclysm with those points or whatever, when I logged in after a fairly decent hiatus from WoW, I was shocked to see three new emblems, WHAT A MESS ! So much gear is going to waste !

It doesn't use a lot of memory. Never did for me. If it uses enough to hurt you, you have an ancient system and severely need an upgrade.

When did they "integrate" a feature as useful as that addon into the game? It must have been done in the past year if that's even true. I doubt it's usefulness, at least to the extent of how nice QH was.

How in the world are you distracted by something like that? I found it very helpful. So did millions of others.

It can be used for rushing through, but I don't use it for that. I just used it because I've done things before and don't want to try and remember where everything is on my 4th character. It just makes it easy to figure out where to go without running around all day long trying to find where quests are (or alt-tabbing to look things up which I had to do years ago). It makes it easier to do things in a timely manner, rather than wasting your time. Which isn't really rushing. I just hate walking or riding 5 miles in the game and remembering that I went to the wrong place.

Some people like the old content. I like going back to places like Maraudon and enjoying it all over again a year later. With these new terrible updates, they made it nearly impossible. Though players had a large part in that, not wanting to touch any content prior to max level. Which is absolutely ridiculous. Why rush all the way to max level and jump straight into raids again? If people want to do that fine, but they made it an incredible pain in the rear to actually get groups together and be able to re-experience the old content. What about new players too? They barely get to touch instances prior to <insert newest expansion here> and that's not fair. The most fun I had was in the pre-expansion days.

I actually resubscribed not too long ago and didn't buy WoTLK. I just played classic/TBC, because I enjoy it.

It just kind of sucks when everyone is off doing dailies and end game raids and when they decide to roll another character, they just say the hell with grouping and rush through quests to get that character into the same raids they've been doing for months on another. The game should be about groups. Not just in the end game. You of course should have the option of soloing, but people should be able to find others to group with rather than sitting in a queue for 5 hours before filling a 5-man group. Meanwhile 15 people have dropped from the group because it's taking to long to find 5 people.

I've done the raiding thing and I like to do it now and then, but it's never been a driving force for me in the game. It burns you out too fast and at that point you don't even want to log in and walk 5 meters, you're so disgusted with playing. It's all a lot of people care about doing, but I mainly like starting over and experiencing the game again on another character.

[the evn show]

Some people like the old content. I like going back to places like Maraudon and enjoying it all over again a year later. With these new terrible updates, they made it nearly impossible.

...

they made it an incredible pain in the rear to actually get groups together and be able to re-experience the old content. What about new players too? They barely get to touch instances prior to <insert newest expansion here> and that's not fair.

You can press "I" and "join queue" and be in a dungeon inside of 15-30 minutes as a DPS class: that's much faster than you could ever get into a 5-man dungeon in classic. If you're willing to tank or heal then the wait time drops by several orders of magnitude. With dual spec it's reasonable for players level 40+ to have 'optimal' solo-leveling spec and a first-rate dungeon crawling spec/glyph setup.

Best of all you can continue questing while you're queued up for a dungeon. We've come a long way from the days of "Rogue LFG princess run, have scepter"

How is this worse in any way to the slog fest of classic? At 60 it's not like you'd be able to "LF5M AQ40" and have a reasonable shot at getting anywhere.

What's your proposal exactly? Remove the random dungeon finder? Have 'mandatory' 5-man dungeon time before you're allowed to level? Only let priests/druids/shaman/paladins queue as healers? What change to end-game raid situation has made the leveling game worse?

You of course should have the option of soloing, but people should be able to find others to group with rather than sitting in a queue for 5 hours before filling a 5-man group. Meanwhile 15 people have dropped from the group because it's taking to long to find 5 people.

Queue for random dungeons as a tank or healer and that goes away. If you're convinced you have to level yet another DPS class then you're going to wait - and that's the standard issue DPS class dungeon experience from classic through cataclysm.

[DrunkenBeard]

@Uplift,

Yep grinding sucks, and they'll be adressing that in Cata hopefully. The DK starting zone is certainly the best starting zone quest-wise, and Outland/Northrend have a lot of "smart" quests with unique gameplays but still there is room for improvement and they should update the old world quests too.

BTW I hit 80 on my druid today ! Yay \o/ Hello HCs, GS and mailbox camping :woot:

[I am Redbeard]

I haven't posted here in forever.

/wave

[lalalawawawa]

When did they "integrate" a feature as useful as that addon into the game? It must have been done in the past year if that's even true. I doubt it's usefulness, at least to the extent of how nice QH was.

God, I can't believe this. Stop bitching if you haven't played the game lately.

[DrCheese]

That is the main reason I don't play anymore. They basically gave away gear to get players to avoid old content.

Speaking as a vanilla guild leader, this is a good thing. When you had to field 40 man raids you always had at least one or two people a month drop out due to burn out/real life issues blah blah so you always had to recruit. Unless you was a top guild you rarely was able to recruit anyone who already had decent enough gear so you had to pick up fresh 80s and gear them up, meaning you was stuck in molten core forever and ever. It was maddening.

That said, there must be someway to make the old raids (of that expansion) relevant still whenever new stuff comes out, instead of dumping it totally.

[Eric Veteran]

When did they "integrate" a feature as useful as that addon into the game? It must have been done in the past year if that's even true. I doubt it's usefulness, at least to the extent of how nice QH was.

Some time ago now. There's a list like QH that can be collapsed to get out of the way and shows you a numbered list on the map screen and dots on the map that show you where the quest area is. It also has buttons in the quest list for important quest items. The only thing it doesn't do is prioritize the list, something I hated in QH anyway. :)

[Slane]

Some time ago now. There's a list like QH that can be collapsed to get out of the way and shows you a numbered list on the map screen and dots on the map that show you where the quest area is. It also has buttons in the quest list for important quest items. The only thing it doesn't do is prioritize the list, something I hated in QH anyway. :)

Nor does it provide an arrow, but with making the world map smaller it's pretty easy to do that and point yourself in the right direction.

[Spookie]

That said, there must be someway to make the old raids (of that expansion) relevant still whenever new stuff comes out, instead of dumping it totally.

Easy. Make each new dungeon drop gear from one raid patches ago, the badges received still bog standard bottom rung. Then make badges bind on account.

Anyone with a surplus of badges can gear and alt without burning out and those wishing to start raiding till still have to begin from the bottom so you can tell the mouthbreathers from the decent players since they will get left at the cata equiv of naxx.

[the evn show]

Make each new dungeon drop gear from one raid patches ago, the badges received still bog standard bottom rung.

That happened in TBC: world+dog just farmed karazhan for badly itemized 128 or 141 gear instead of working their way up to current content.

The same thing has happened now: if heroics and 'weekly raid' dungeons weren't dropping frost badges for bottom-level tier 10 nobody would

be going to those places.

Endgame today is iLevel 277 and 284. 251 and 264 hasn't been endgame loot since lich king was unlocked.