official World of Warcraft

[treemonster]

I was the exact same way and came back maybe a month ago and started leveling like a madman, on a purely casual basis. I managed to get to 57 following some guide which at last login before this latest patch had me in Western Plaguelands. Okay fair enough. However, I log in after this latest patch, my quest journal where'd I'd had *many* chains still unfinished, was completely cleared out/spider webbed. I was standing by some wreckage in the forest surrounded by mobs now 20 levels below me and my talent points had been completely reset. Since I don't hang around test forums or game forums generally, I suppose I didn't know a complete respec was coming for me but oh well, just take several minutes and try to remember where I had everything.

I was using my nephews 80 mage to 2-box and port myself around and the travel is still ridiculous compared to other MMO's, and apparently they've just made it MORE cumbersome by eliminating the portals in Dalaran - there may be more I dunno.

I canceled before going any further, even with the upgrade special it was just really bad timing for coming back - for me at least. The day I activated my account they patched 4.0.0 or 4.0.1 or something, which completely changed stuff and after this latest one the guide I had been using is undoubtedly outdated in 1 days time so not really sure what to do even if I was going to keep playing.

Best of luck though I mean it's not like there isn't some fun to be had in WoW...for awhile.

i feel your pain about logging in to a fresh respec and changed zones and quests all over the place and so on. that's how i've felt about logging into my mage for most of wotlk.

but as far as travel goes, what are these other mmo's you're playing? even using the flightmaster and zepplins to travel from city to city is a breeze compared to pre wow mmo's, even if they had teleporting between cities and to spots on the map. having cheap mounts that go relatively fast make travel even easier compared to most mmo's i've played. let alone having amage to bounce back and forth between major cities instantly. removing the portals form dalaran is kind of a PITA but it just makes mage portals for a few Gs more in demand again. even with out the portals it's still doesn't take too long to get from dalaran to orgrimar for example. one flight and then the zepplin to org and within 15 minutes you are there. with flight being added to azeroth travelling around the world will get even easier. and it seems like they have added even more flight paths to azeroth as well.

compared to my previous mmo, l2 where porting from major city to major city took a few jumps and cash, and even after porting to a world port point i usually had at least 5 minutes of running at normal speed to get to my hunting spot. and the best hunting spot sometimes took like an hour of running from port in spots to get to through mobs you had to clear out and designed in such a way it was easy to take a wrong turn and get lost and lose a half hour or more on top of the fastest route's long travel times.

nevermind that travel time has been completely removed from dungeon grinding as you can just hit the dungeon finder and as soon as the party is ready, bam instantly ported to teh dungeona nd away you go, then when it's over ported right back to where you started. i actually have some thoughts about how this is going to kill some of my world pvp business later on as i use d to camp dungeon entrances for parties waiting on 1-2 members to get there and will no longer be able to do that.

as for guides, yeah most of the really good ones are out of date, but carbonite beta works with the new patch. some might argue that following a guide to teh letter kinda kills the experience though, unless it's your like 5th alt going to 80, but then by that time you'd probably know the different paths off by heart up until this point anyway.

anyways you don't have to hang around wow forums or test forums to anticipate spec resets with big patches that have come right before the last two expansions. i guess if you were totally solo and didn't do any reading on teh game news at all, it might come as a surprise. at this point everytime i take a break i totally expect to come back to a free respec and a even more gimped mage.

[+.Vamp Subscriber²]

I recommend Nagrand, Alliance and the guild Friendship before Glory. Because we are amazing. Also, the server doesn't actually seem to have many ###### on it compared to a few others I have played on.

Thanks for the recommendation - I may well give that realm a try and look into the guild too :)

oh and short run down on melee classes...

Nice summary! I would be tempted to try a Paladin but Worgens dont have that option - so possibly a Druid or Warrior. I've played a tank before (Guardian in Lord of the Rings Online) and enjoyed it a lot, so the Warrior would be a little familiar, but the versitility of the Druid is appealing too.

I was the exact same way and came back maybe a month ago and started leveling like a madman, on a purely casual basis. I managed to get to 57 following some guide which at last login before this latest patch had me in Western Plaguelands. Okay fair enough. However, I log in after this latest patch, my quest journal where'd I'd had *many* chains still unfinished, was completely cleared out/spider webbed. I was standing by some wreckage in the forest surrounded by mobs now 20 levels below me and my talent points had been completely reset. Since I don't hang around test forums or game forums generally, I suppose I didn't know a complete respec was coming for me but oh well, just take several minutes and try to remember where I had everything.

I was using my nephews 80 mage to 2-box and port myself around and the travel is still ridiculous compared to other MMO's, and apparently they've just made it MORE cumbersome by eliminating the portals in Dalaran - there may be more I dunno.

I canceled before going any further, even with the upgrade special it was just really bad timing for coming back - for me at least. The day I activated my account they patched 4.0.0 or 4.0.1 or something, which completely changed stuff and after this latest one the guide I had been using is undoubtedly outdated in 1 days time so not really sure what to do even if I was going to keep playing.

Best of luck though I mean it's not like there isn't some fun to be had in WoW...for awhile.

Well I'll be starting from scratch so won't have anything to re-learn really, hopefully it'll be easy to pick up :)

[treemonster]

yeah druids are great because if you get bored of doing a particular role in teh future, you can change it up fairly easily. though depending on how much your guild wants you to stay a healer or tank as a druid though. dual specs kinda help with that nowadays though it seems.

[Soulsiphon]

i feel your pain about logging in to a fresh respec and changed zones and quests all over the place and so on. that's how i've felt about logging into my mage for most of wotlk.

but as far as travel goes, what are these other mmo's you're playing? even using the flightmaster and zepplins to travel from city to city is a breeze compared to pre wow mmo's, even if they had teleporting between cities and to spots on the map. having cheap mounts that go relatively fast make travel even easier compared to most mmo's i've played. let alone having amage to bounce back and forth between major cities instantly. removing the portals form dalaran is kind of a PITA but it just makes mage portals for a few Gs more in demand again. even with out the portals it's still doesn't take too long to get from dalaran to orgrimar for example. one flight and then the zepplin to org and within 15 minutes you are there. with flight being added to azeroth travelling around the world will get even easier. and it seems like they have added even more flight paths to azeroth as well.

compared to my previous mmo, l2 where porting from major city to major city took a few jumps and cash, and even after porting to a world port point i usually had at least 5 minutes of running at normal speed to get to my hunting spot. and the best hunting spot sometimes took like an hour of running from port in spots to get to through mobs you had to clear out and designed in such a way it was easy to take a wrong turn and get lost and lose a half hour or more on top of the fastest route's long travel times.

nevermind that travel time has been completely removed from dungeon grinding as you can just hit the dungeon finder and as soon as the party is ready, bam instantly ported to teh dungeona nd away you go, then when it's over ported right back to where you started. i actually have some thoughts about how this is going to kill some of my world pvp business later on as i use d to camp dungeon entrances for parties waiting on 1-2 members to get there and will no longer be able to do that.

as for guides, yeah most of the really good ones are out of date, but carbonite beta works with the new patch. some might argue that following a guide to teh letter kinda kills the experience though, unless it's your like 5th alt going to 80, but then by that time you'd probably know the different paths off by heart up until this point anyway.

anyways you don't have to hang around wow forums or test forums to anticipate spec resets with big patches that have come right before the last two expansions. i guess if you were totally solo and didn't do any reading on teh game news at all, it might come as a surprise. at this point everytime i take a break i totally expect to come back to a free respec and a even more gimped mage.

well this time you certainly didn't come back to a gimped mage! ;) Travel, so EQ2 (veteran player direct teleports, wiz ports, boats, flight paths you can drop off of at any point, passage bells to pretty much everywhere, guildhalls with the same things just in the gh), Ultima Online (markable/recallable *anywhere* basically for any player with a small bit of magery), Star Wars Galaxies (starports, shuttles, personal shuttles, etc etc).

Don't get me wrong, being able to 2-box with a mage makes the travel in WoW a bit more bearable and certainly not a game breaker by itself.

[gigapixels Veteran]

Undead starting experience is undoubtedly the best in the game.

Here are some LOLs for you guys:

[Slane]

I'm leveling an Undead Hunter. I'm blown away with the quests and how awesome the leveling experience has been. Not to mention I'm flying through it. It's just so much better than what it was before. Expansion isn't even out yet and I'm in love.

[Osiris]

Troll levelling has been interesting, ive levelled all my toons sans the pally and now the troll druid through the undead zones so looking forward to seeing how it flows, looks really interesting now particularly Silverpine and Hillsbrad.

[Slane]

Silverpine and Hillsbrad.

Silverpine is awesome. I'm on the last chain for it before moving into Hillsbrad, but damn Silverpine is awesome. Worgen vs. Forsaken and Forsaken vs. Hellscream is always amazing.

[Osiris]

oh yeah whats the go with Hellscream...nub just runs around picking fights with everyone.

Hellscream - Kills Cairne, Flat out death threat exchange with Voljin, pretty obviously distrusts the forsaken since wrathgate and warns the banshee queen her time may come sooner than others.....this dude thinks hes a one man horde.

maybe hes just uber angry to balance out Varians emoness.

Why is malfurion chillin in darkshore spinning up some wind.

Also seems the explorer achieve is now impossible till Cata. Boats @ darkshore are gone now and you get to bloodmyst/azure etc via flightpath so no go hordeys.

[treemonster]

w00t! hit 80 tonight, daramatically improved my item level average, and my dps(though still coming in dead last) and did my first ever heroic 5man runs. probably going to put in my transfer on monday i think.

[Shaun N.]

w00t! hit 80 tonight, daramatically improved my item level average, and my dps(though still coming in dead last) and did my first ever heroic 5man runs. probably going to put in my transfer on monday i think.

GZ Tree! What class/spec are you?

[treemonster]

GZ Tree! What class/spec are you?

mage frost/arcane

[the evn show]

w00t! hit 80 tonight, daramatically improved my item level average, and my dps(though still coming in dead last) and did my first ever heroic 5man runs. probably going to put in my transfer on monday i think.

Are you sure you're doing it right. I wish I were joking because I have a mage I play once a week to do icc25h and it's so boring:

Make a macro:

/cast mana gem
/use 13
/stopcasting
/use 14
/stopcasting
/cast mirror images
/stopcasting
/cast arcane power

• Bind that macro to 1.
  
• Bind Evocation to 2.
  
• Bind Arcane Blast to mouse-wheel down.
  
• Bind Arcane Explosion to mouse wheel up.
  

then just employee this strategy:

• When you see > 3 mobs in a pack run into the middle and spin your mouse wheel up as fast as you can. (you'll never use any mana this way so it's idea for farming heroics)
  
• When you see only 1-3 mobs: target one and spin your mouse wheel down as fast as you can. If it dies, click on another and keep spinning that mouse wheel until everything is dead. (For "elite raider dps" switch to a new target when your current one is at 25%)
  
• When you come to a boss: press 1, then spin the mouse wheel down as fast as you can.
  
• If you run out of mana you can cast evocation, mana gem, and mana potion. Until you're into hard mode ICC running out of mana before everything is dead won't be a concern.
  

You have other abilities but doing the above will get you 90% of the damage of playing perfectly. I find that if I do all the minor things to improve my damage i just end up threat capped and doing nothing anyway so this is probably closer to optimal than not. You've only got 2 weeks before it's back on the leveling grind.

[treemonster]

Are you sure you're doing it right. I wish I were joking because I have a mage I play once a week to do icc25h and it's so boring:

Make a macro:

/cast mana gem
/use 13
/stopcasting
/use 14
/stopcasting
/cast mirror images
/stopcasting
/cast arcane power

• Bind that macro to 1.
  
• Bind Evocation to 2.
  
• Bind Arcane Blast to mouse-wheel down.
  
• Bind Arcane Explosion to mouse wheel up.
  

then just employee this strategy:

• When you see > 3 mobs in a pack run into the middle and spin your mouse wheel up as fast as you can. (you'll never use any mana this way so it's idea for farming heroics)
  
• When you see only 1-3 mobs: target one and spin your mouse wheel down as fast as you can. If it dies, click on another and keep spinning that mouse wheel until everything is dead. (For "elite raider dps" switch to a new target when your current one is at 25%)
  
• When you come to a boss: press 1, then spin the mouse wheel down as fast as you can.
  
• If you run out of mana you can cast evocation, mana gem, and mana potion. Until you're into hard mode ICC running out of mana before everything is dead won't be a concern.
  

You have other abilities but doing the above will get you 90% of the damage of playing perfectly. I find that if I do all the minor things to improve my damage i just end up threat capped and doing nothing anyway so this is probably closer to optimal than not. You've only got 2 weeks before it's back on the leveling grind.

hahah that sounds terrible.

my arcane rotation is arcane barrage -> arcane blast -> fire blast and then arcane missiles when it pops up. generally speaking on elites in heroics i get aq single rotation off.

i've been using blizzard for AOEs due to the impression it was a great way to pull aggro. if that's changed i'll change that up. so far i get one blizz cast off per mob group.

anyway i won't do those weird binds because i already use an n52.

i''m not sure how much pve i'll end up doing in cata anyway. right now i'm just farming dungeons for gold mainly and some loot upgrades.

[the evn show]

hahah that sounds terrible.

I wish I was joking, but that really is the best way to play right now. Tonight is alt ICC so I'll fraps something like putricide or sindragosa (arguably the hardest encounters in the zone) to demonstrate the idea.

my arcane rotation is arcane barrage -> arcane blast -> fire blast and then arcane missiles when it pops up. generally speaking on elites in heroics i get aq single rotation off.

Fireblast has no place in an arcane mage's utility belt (the only time you need an "instant" and won't have either POM+AB or Arcane Barrage up is on something like Blood Prince Council or Anub'Arak and you're stuck on orb duty).

The "intended" arcane mage rotation is: arcane blast to until you have 4 stacks of the debuff then arcane missles if you can and arcane barrage if you can't. Doing this should cause you to gain mana slowly over time. When you're at high levels of mana and/or evocate is up you're supposed to just spam arcane blast - when you get down to about 50% mana you go back to doing arcane blast x 4 then arcane missles/barage. You're supposed to be be stacking cooldowns (potions, gem, arcane power, trinkets, mirror images if you have 4 piece tier 10). A typical raid boss (something that doesn't die in < 30 seconds goes like this:

• 
  1. OMG cooldowns -- use a haste potion 1 second before the start of the fight.
  2. spam arcane blast as hard as you can. When mirror images die you will probably pull threat so make sure you have your finger on the 'invisibility button'. I have invisiblity and ice block bound to the following macro:
  

#showtooltip
/stopcasting
/cancelaura invisibility
/cast invisibility

(swap invisiblity for iceblock)
Doing that allows you to instantly stop what you're doing and turn invisible or into an ice cube, if you press the button again you'll drop out of being invisible/cube and be able to start doing damage again. It's useful for things like quickly dropping threat or clearing off a debuff (like infest on lich king if your healers are picked up).
3. You hit about 50% mana: use evocate
4. Arcane blast x 4, arcane missles/barrage. Keep doing this until arcane power / mana gem / etc. are off cooldown
5. (BONUS STAGE) AP/gem/trinkets will be off cooldown 1 minute before mirror images. If you have 4 piece tier 10 then you'll want to consider waiting to blow your cooldowns until they are up. If the boss isn't likely to die in the next 1 minute and 20 seconds: keep doing step #4 until mirror images to come.
6. Go to step one.

i've been using blizzard for AOEs due to the impression it was a great way to pull aggro. if that's changed i'll change that up. so far i get one blizz cast off per mob group.

Arcane explosion has a large -threat component.

anyway i won't do those weird binds because i already use an n52.

feel free to check the bindings, but I was serious when I said your best DPS is to just spam arcane blast until your eyes bleed. Arcane mages are broken right now and you're rewarded for ignoring all of the above and just pressing your AB button.

i''m not sure how much pve i'll end up doing in cata anyway. right now i'm just farming dungeons for gold mainly and some loot upgrades.

Arcane blast spam is extremely powerful in PVP too. Anybody with half a mind will never let you do it but in battle grounds you can easily get a 4 stack of AB and rape kids. You can also gank people pretty quickly with an AB>AB+POM+AB. They won't have a chance to figure out what's going on before they die.

My mage in "okay" PVE gear can one-shot fully PVP geared players. I'm getting 40k arcane blasts on people with 1200 resilience.

[Alladaskill17]

Undead starting experience is undoubtedly the best in the game.

Here are some LOLs for you guys:

[awesome attached images]

I don't even play anymore and I want your UI, Gigapixels...

[treemonster]

wow that's crazy.

i actually don't seem to go more than 2k mana below my max in these dungeons. i ran out of mana once so far since restarting and i have no idea how that happened because i've done nothing different otherwise.

also i don't plan on doing any raiding actually, so it's kind of a moot point, but i'll keep in mind the arcane blast spam for boss fights. the rotation i came up with was because i figured dps from 3 spells is better than dps from only 2.

as for my gear, i have like 2 pieces of level 200 and one wotlk arena wand(forget the item level but it's what bumped me up from 178 to 184 to get into heroics last night)

are those numbers before the damage and healing numbers were reduced? because right now the numbers i see are more in line with what i got before getting arena gear in tbc from my spells. i think i was doing around 2k dps average at the end of the night according to recount, but it might have been lower, and the top dps was around 3 or 4k iirc. and all the boss fights were like less than one minute total except anub arak or w/e his name is(the big guy with the bad stuff mechanic) which was only long because of the parts with teh adds and the bad stuff, but other wise it was like instantly going from one bad stuff and adds part to the next, maybe 1 or 2 rotations.

i'll start using arcane explosion more though for sure. it doesn't seem like i use much mana otherwise to make it not a good spell to use for that reason.

i haven't had much of an opportunity in these fights to even consider using cooldowns at all, let alone need. i even keep forgetting to use mirror image in boss fights. though i am liking it so far in teh few duels i have used it in. even if i'm casting something like frostfire while specced frost and the images are casting frostbolt, it seems to be a real pain in the ass to deal with, as my bro used it against me while he was spoecced arcane and it honeslty wasted my dps while i twas up(killed about 3 images befor ei twas done lolz) but it was the first time fighting against it in pvp at all so :p

speaking of which, say i do come up against another mage who is say specced frost or arcane in pvp and he pops mirror image, what's a good counter to it, other than trying to figure out the "real" mage based on spells cast animations? it seems to change your target from the real mage to one of the images so i'm not sure what do at this point and simply waiting isn't an option and i'd rather save my iceblock cd for more dire circumstances if i can.

anyways, the whole portal removal from dalaran thing has got me facepalming already. first portal request was ok, got tipped 15g and the guy was standing right in front of me already when he asked. found out the hard way it reset the queue though :( the next guy PMed me when i was in teh far edge of icecrown from like dalaran or something, didn't tip me but offered to do some runs, which was cool because as a dps with a well geared tank + my bro as a well geared healer should mean instant queues and fast runs, well we get occulous ofc and then 2 minutes into actually starting after he was afk for 3 minutes he drops group. (which even more hilarious the next tank had rez sickness and fell off his mount in teh air and dies). the next guy offers me a whole 1g tip, like wow, 1g is even worth my time or reseting my queue right?(just given the value of gold these days and how easy it is to farm it), unfortunately for him i forgot i wasn't party leader so i ended up not inviting him for the portal(tbh i usually don't care much about the tip anyway )

forgot how annoying it is to be a zone away and get pmed for portal/food requests while you're doing stuff. hell my guild in tbc bought me the mage table book just so i would fly over to them for lots of free food all the time.

[Tharp Daddy]

I am really not enjoying the new hunter focus system (i'm reduced to auto-shoot half the time) on my 36 hunter, so i'm debating whether i want to keep playing the hunter, or reroll a new class. I imagine once you start getting haste and what not your focus regen gets better, but unsure of what other class i could roll. The only classes i have yet to have are Paladin and Mage.

[treemonster]

i thought focus was supposed to fix hunters so they were less like mages' mana management?

i saw a 80 hunter without a pet last night kiting gamon around with skill shots just fine. not sure if he totally soloed him as a took a few shots at him myself but yeah.

speaking of gamon does he drop loot or anything? there was like a full raid in org last night just farming him nonstop for a few hours. ofc it is an RP server so they were spamming shout chat too but ummm.

[the evn show]

I killed Gammon with my Mage (slow kiting) and he didn't drop anything you couldn't get from trash anywhere else.

Damage classes are a sprint: you want to do do as much as you can.

Let's say arcane missiles does about 15k damage in 1.5 seconds of cast time.

Arcane blast does 20k damage in 2 seconds of cast time (at 0 stacks) and about 30k damage in in 1.5 seconds of cast time (at 4 stacks)

Other abilities like fire blast do about 10k damage in 1.5 seconds of cast time (even instant cast spells have at least 1 second of "cast time" because you trigger global cooldown). Arcane mages value crit over haste so the should be closer to 1.5s than priests that should be striving towards the global cooldown haste cap.

Consider what does more damage (FB+ABr+AM)x5 = 25 seconds and 180k damage.

Ab spam would be

20k + 23k +26k + (30k)*25 or about 900k damage.

You don't look at the number of spells but either the damage per second of each ability or the damage per cast time (different things)

In either case AB is one of the highest damage per cast time and damage per second abilities you have (deep freeze is higher damage per cast time but it has a cooldown and conditions that make it lower damage per second than 4 stack AB.

[treemonster]

Damage classes are a sprint: you want to do do as much as you can.

Let's say arcane missiles does about 15k damage in 1.5 seconds of cast time.

Arcane blast does 20k damage in 2 seconds of cast time (at 0 stacks) and about 30k damage in in 1.5 seconds of cast time (at 4 stacks)

Other abilities like fire blast do about 10k damage in 1.5 seconds of cast time (even instant cast spells have at least 1 second of "cast time" because you trigger global cooldown). Arcane mages value crit over haste so the should be closer to 1.5s than priests that should be striving towards the global cooldown haste cap.

Consider what does more damage (FB+ABr+AM)x5 = 25 seconds and 180k damage.

Ab spam would be

20k + 23k +26k + (30k)*25 or about 900k damage.

You don't look at the number of spells but either the damage per second of each ability or the damage per cast time (different things)

In either case AB is one of the highest damage per cast time and damage per second abilities you have (deep freeze is higher damage per cast time but it has a cooldown and conditions that make it lower damage per second than 4 stack AB.

what you say makes sense but at the same time those numbers are way over what i'm getting per cast.

i forget what arcane blast does for me but arcane barrage does like 2.5k per cast and 5k crits, and crits fairly often. fireblast crits for about 3k and crits often. magic missile do about 900 per missile normally. i'll be playing drunk tonight so i won't remember the numbers when i log in later but yeah, you rnumbers are a lot higher than what the well geared players seem to be getting.

[the evn show]

I'm going from vague memory of my Mage which I only play in a raid setting and who has several orders of magnitude better gear than you do (level 270-something average).

I'll toss on my old level 60 "prove a point" blues and get real numbers in a couple of hours.

Killing time between classes.

[treemonster]

regardless i'll try stacking Ablast tonight and seeing if my dps seems to improve any.

[treemonster]

i think i'm seeing what you mean by AB spam evn, i was getting 10k crits on gamon with AB spam. still only hit 1k dps after all the misses though.

[Leonick]

Hi guys.

Gonna start playing WoW and thought that maybe I could get some realm and guild recommendations here.

I want world PVP to be available even though I am mainly a PVE player so any alternatives given have to be European PVP or RP-PVP realms.

The realm would preferably be have a decent population and be rather balanced between Horde and Alliance.

For any Guild recommendations the will have to be on the Alliance side.

Thanks in advance.