official World of Warcraft

[Prosidius]

Expansion cleared.

[mattmatik]

I know most people hate the way WoW has evolved but I just got back into WoW (my last toon was before TBC :laugh: ) but I am really enjoying it so far. Lvl 20 ret pally, and having a good time with some of my friends working through the game. My goal is to make my character ready for MoP, and I really want to try out the Monk.

If anyone else is realtively new to the game, would love to hear your experiences as well and maybe hook up for some runs.

[mattmatik]

Man, not that its difficult or anything but I wish I would have jumped back to WoW sooner. Trying to find people to level with is pretty sparse at this point (going through 20s right now). Thank goodness for LFD but being in a guild is almost impossible. Ah well.

[Blackhearted]

Honestly.. If wanting to play with others while questing and leveling is what you want, then WoW and games like it aren't really where you should look. As for guilds, what was so impossible about them? I didn't have any problems with guilds, even when leveling my priest alt earlier this year before i quit again(and for good this time).

[Shaun N.]

This thread has been dead for a month, This shows the state of the game atm.

[Slane]

This thread has been dead for a month, This shows the state of the game atm.

Sure that has something to do with it, but it's also the end of the expansion. I'm sure once cata hits, or people (who are still playing??) start doing the events leading to cata there will be more posts and more activity.

[Prosidius]

[S00N3R FR3AK]

Already pre-ordered collectors edition.

[dead.cell]

Sure that has something to do with it, but it's also the end of the expansion. I'm sure once cata hits, or people (who are still playing??) start doing the events leading to cata there will be more posts and more activity.

Yeah, I can't wait for cata to hit too! :woot:

[Slane]

Yeah, I can't wait for cata to hit too! :woot:

Well, you can tell how much I'm paying attention to wow. Getting the expansions mixed up. :rofl:

[Shadrack]

This has to be the oldest active thread on Neowin...

The OP hasn't been on for over a year...

Maybe with "Mists of Panderea" there can be a new official thread? Just throwin that out there.

[Prosidius]

Nah, theres some good stuff in this thread. I like go back in this thread and see how much of a noob I was when I first started playing. :)

[Slane]

Nah, theres some good stuff in this thread. I like go back in this thread and see how much of a noob I was when I first started playing. :)

Ain't that the truth? Just a few weeks ago I found my posts when I started progressing in BT/Hyjal. Good times. Though I still can't fathom how I managed 840~ posts in this one thread.

[Tomoko]

Nah, theres some good stuff in this thread. I like go back in this thread and see how much of a noob I was when I first started playing. :)

I never even realized this thread went back to 2004. There goes my evening... :laugh:

[vanillaketch]

KEEP THIS THREAD ALIVE!

[dead.cell]

I remember when I thought this game looked so stupid. Then I mined a copper vein and was hooked. Simpler times back then.

Well, you can tell how much I'm paying attention to wow. Getting the expansions mixed up. :rofl:

lol! It's all good. Actually made me think of the times I stood in line for Wrath and Cataclysm (digital release? pffft **** that). Good times.. :(

[Prosidius]

Damn I was a retard when I started playing. I had no idea what realms were, I think I originally thought they were continents like Kalimidor and that you were stuck on them. :s

[the evn show]

I plonked down my $40 for mists today. The expansion is over - here's a summary so we can look back in a few years and compare:

• Leveling was excellent fun?the first time. Story driven zones were engaging and I made it through all of them at least twice on live (in addition to 3 or 4 times on beta).
  
• The early days of heroic dungeons were excellent fun. I leveled my first toon almost exclusively in instances. I was doing heroics in ilevel ~300 by running out to the portals to bipass the ilevel check on queing. They were a ton of fun. Trash heavy, but about as close to early TBC heroics as we've seen.
  
• Guild leveling was garbage. "Nice work on sinestra. Everyone remember to go do a couple of 5-man dungeons for guild xp tonight". That's just not good content. Our solution was to invite random baddies into the guild, give them a rank that couldn't talk in /g, and pay them for accomplishing certain things (ie: run 5 dungeons as a guild group and you each get , you get 1000g, farm up 10,000 fish: we'll pay you 20,000g). That can't be what blizzard had in mind.
  
• Tier 11 raiding was excellent. Sure it was hard, yes it was broken (especially 10m), yes it had class requirements and it was unforgiving: it was still good content. If you subtract "kill the adds" from Tier 11 bosses there are still mechanics you can name. The same isn't true for Tier 13. By the time Tier 11 was 'done' they'd got it pretty well balanced - it's one of their better raid tiers. I prefered 10m to 25m for damn near every encounter - the main issue was 'carrying capacity'. on 10m I couldn't screw up and there was almost always something 'important' for me to do. On 25m i was an easily replaced cog in a machine, even as the main tank.
  
• Tier 12 Blizzard mostly got their 10m/25m balance right. The launch was the smoothest one I can remember. The encounters were reasonably memorable though a couple were boring. They complete ballsed-up pacing though. 6 disposable bosses followed by a brick wall: that's just bad design. On the whole I though 10m and 25m were pretty equal. I liked some encounters on 25m more (baleroc, domo, rag) some on 10m (alysrazor, beth) but on the whole they felt like they had the "fun" pretty well balanced and I was happy to swap sizes. Once the 30% nerf rolled in the place became horribly boring. It was all trivial pre-nerf in ilevel 380 (save for rag - it felt like we needed to hit 385 before we were ready to hit the DPS check in p3). Months of farming that could have been okay if T13 was good but?
  
• Tier 13 was just plane crumby. The bosses were disposable, they had no personality (see: putricide, maloriak), their mechanics required absolutely no real skill. Gunship was pretty good for a trash fight but the rest was pretty lame. Spine as a gear check was good - it's a shame that they built it around burst DPS (rewarding legendaries+class stacking). Madness on 10m was pretty rewarding I guess - it's not a bad encounter at 0% in Firelands gear. IMO 25m needs to have about 25% more health on all the mobs: You shouldn't go from 6 weeks of spine wiping to killing the final boss on your 12th pull ever. Illidan was the last "end of content" boss that fell over that easily and it was pretty disappointing after the awesome council fight before him. I'd argue this was among their worst tiers ever and 50+ heroic madness kills hasn't made me like the place any more.

I really hope normal mode content is about as hard as T11 was. IMO normal mode should be what 70% of the raid population works through - they shouldn't feel compelled to grind on heroic mode. If they do it's because they're being robbed of content appropriate for their skill level. If normal mode is so easy that everyone considers heroic the only 'valid' tier then there's not really 3 levels of difficulty, there's only 1.

Challenge mode content seems like it'll be fun. I'm curious how tightly tuned it'll be. I suspect I'll be able to make some really good coin selling the gear/mounts during the first few months. This is probably the content I'm most looking forward to: small group stuff is extremely fun.

Black Market AH looks fun - I've been trying to shed gold as fast as possible but I'm still sitting on hundreds of thousands (people on illidan have given me ~75k as "thank-you" presents for my youtube videos: so weird). I'll likely buy a set of T3 for my priest because I'm "infinitely rich" if all I ever do is buy materials to make potions/gems/flasks/etc. Having gold was pointless in Cataclysm - MOP doesn't look like that'll change but at least I can buy vanity items.

The whole "pvp is back" thing is a joke and we all know it. I don't mind though, I haven't really enjoyed PVP since patch 2.0 came out. I'm still not sure what I'll be playing next tier. Priests are pretty good but there might be a spot to tank in my guild - if so I'll probably end up filing that.

We'll still be doing the ~8 hours/week raid thing and our roster looks pretty solid for the new stuff.

[Prosidius]

• Leveling was excellent fun?the first time. Story driven zones were engaging and I made it through all of them at least twice on live (in addition to 3 or 4 times on beta).
  

I disagree with this to a degree. I enjoyed Northrend leveling better. During Lich King I managed to level 6 level 80's. Only 3 of them made the trek to 85 in Cataclysm. Vash'jir is beautiful and worth a run through but after that there is no point in doing it, it's slower than Hyjal. I was never a fan of Deepholm, Uldum is meh, and I dislike Twilight Highlands in general. Too much RP to get through to begin questing in the zone. Cataclysm leveling was merely okay, nothing great.

The early days of heroic dungeons were excellent fun. I leveled my first toon almost exclusively in instances. I was doing heroics in ilevel ~300 by running out to the portals to bipass the ilevel check on queing. They were a ton of fun. Trash heavy, but about as close to early TBC heroics as we've seen.

No disagreement there. I enjoyed them quite a bit.

• Guild leveling was garbage. "Nice work on sinestra. Everyone remember to go do a couple of 5-man dungeons for guild xp tonight". That's just not good content. Our solution was to invite random baddies into the guild, give them a rank that couldn't talk in /g, and pay them for accomplishing certain things (ie: run 5 dungeons as a guild group and you each get , you get 1000g, farm up 10,000 fish: we'll pay you 20,000g). That can't be what blizzard had in mind.
  

I dislike how guild leveling transformed guilds. As a result of guild leveling, players won't join a guild unless it's level 25.

Tier 11 raiding was excellent. Sure it was hard, yes it was broken (especially 10m), yes it had class requirements and it was unforgiving: it was still good content. If you subtract "kill the adds" from Tier 11 bosses there are still mechanics you can name. The same isn't true for Tier 13. By the time Tier 11 was 'done' they'd got it pretty well balanced - it's one of their better raid tiers. I prefered 10m to 25m for damn near every encounter - the main issue was 'carrying capacity'. on 10m I couldn't screw up and there was almost always something 'important' for me to do. On 25m i was an easily replaced cog in a machine, even as the main tank.

The T11 tier was a turbulent time in my WoW career. I had been in 3 guilds during T11 but I felt the content was pretty good. It was certainly difficult enough and to this day with T13 here some T11 encounters remain quite difficult (Sinestra). I didn't like a few bosses though. Heroic Atremedes was pretty boring, was never a fan of heroic maloriak either. Hated heroic Al'akir.

Tier 12 Blizzard mostly got their 10m/25m balance right. The launch was the smoothest one I can remember. The encounters were reasonably memorable though a couple were boring. They complete ballsed-up pacing though. 6 disposable bosses followed by a brick wall: that's just bad design. On the whole I though 10m and 25m were pretty equal. I liked some encounters on 25m more (baleroc, domo, rag) some on 10m (alysrazor, beth) but on the whole they felt like they had the "fun" pretty well balanced and I was happy to swap sizes. Once the 30% nerf rolled in the place became horribly boring. It was all trivial pre-nerf in ilevel 380 (save for rag - it felt like we needed to hit 385 before we were ready to hit the DPS check in p3). Months of farming that could have been okay if T13 was good but?

I thought T12 was the best tier this expansion and have relatively few problems with it besides the rick wall that is heroic Rag. They started nerfing this place way too soon however.

Tier 13 was just plane crumby. The bosses were disposable, they had no personality (see: putricide, maloriak), their mechanics required absolutely no real skill. Gunship was pretty good for a trash fight but the rest was pretty lame. Spine as a gear check was good - it's a shame that they built it around burst DPS (rewarding legendaries+class stacking). Madness on 10m was pretty rewarding I guess - it's not a bad encounter at 0% in Firelands gear. IMO 25m needs to have about 25% more health on all the mobs: You shouldn't go from 6 weeks of spine wiping to killing the final boss on your 12th pull ever. Illidan was the last "end of content" boss that fell over that easily and it was pretty disappointing after the awesome council fight before him. I'd argue this was among their worst tiers ever and 50+ heroic madness kills hasn't made me like the place any more.

T13 is awful. The worst yet for an end of expansion tier. The Deathwing fight is not as epic as it should be, I'm going to argue making it 2 fights was a bad idea. Heroic Spine has to be one of the worst encounters Blizzard ever designed. It's boring, and not fun. It's probobly my most disliked encounter in WoW. Madness was dissappointing as well. Heroic madness is enjoyable after pushing DW into P2 which is more than I can say for heroic spine, but otherwise it's killing a tentacle and wing 4 times. The fight lacks the excitement that Kil'Jaeden and to an extent the LK had.

I really hope normal mode content is about as hard as T11 was. IMO normal mode should be what 70% of the raid population works through - they shouldn't feel compelled to grind on heroic mode. If they do it's because they're being robbed of content appropriate for their skill level. If normal mode is so easy that everyone considers heroic the only 'valid' tier then there's not really 3 levels of difficulty, there's only 1.

Blizzard said T14 will be about the same difficulty as T13.

The whole "pvp is back" thing is a joke and we all know it. I don't mind though, I haven't really enjoyed PVP since patch 2.0 came out.

On a server like Illidan, pvp definately won't be back, it'll be the same old.

[Blackhearted]

I dislike how guild leveling transformed guilds. As a result of guild leveling, players won't join a guild unless it's level 25.

When there's so many perks to speed up/improve so many things you can't really blame people for not wanting to bother with lowbie guilds. After all, why would you want to deliberately make things slower/worse for yourself?

[+ir0nw0lf Subscriber²]

I'll be buying the lowest price edition (digital?) for my account. Debated buying one or two sealed collector editions to sit on for a few months and try fleaBaying for like 1.5-2x the cost like people have done with previous CE's.

[Prosidius]

When there's so many perks to speed up/improve so many things you can't really blame people for not wanting to bother with lowbie guilds. After all, why would you want to deliberately make things slower/worse for yourself?

Well yeah, but it makes starting a guild harder. Why would I want to join your guild when I could join this one that is level 25 with all the perks?

[S00N3R FR3AK]

I'll be buying the lowest price edition (digital?) for my account. Debated buying one or two sealed collector editions to sit on for a few months and try fleaBaying for like 1.5-2x the cost like people have done with previous CE's.

I wouldn't bother. Cata boxes sat around long to get cut in half at major retailers(6-7 months).

Damn I would run 5 mans and fish to get paid lol. Though I've had around 18k for the lasy year since I bought the sandstone drake and I just have nothing to spend it on lol.

[episode]

I'll be buying the lowest price edition (digital?) for my account. Debated buying one or two sealed collector editions to sit on for a few months and try fleaBaying for like 1.5-2x the cost like people have done with previous CE's.

Don't. I can't move the 2 Catas I have left, and with a Digital CE this time, it will only be worse.

[LittleNeutrino Veteran]

After cata i just cannot bring myself to pay for wow again, I have tried using Diablo 3 real money auction house to pay for a wow subscription but people just arent buying commodities yet. If wow did not cost so much i would have kept my sub. I just cannot justify the cost of the game.