official World of Warcraft

[ylcard]

I was always very fond of the attunement chains and rep grinds. It kind of goes against what Blizzard wanted in terms of progression though. In TBC, the attunements forced progression through earlier content. They wanted a complete 360 in LK. I would love to see it come back though.

lol

[vip]

For some casters spirt = hit, and when you need 1742 hit to be capped that healer gear starts looking pretty damn good. Roughly half of my 'best in slot' gear is healer loot.

I expect the same is true for warlocks and moonkin. Enhancement shaman apparently get something out of using caster weapons right now too.

The first tier of gear has some pretty rough itemization so sometimes even if a stat is useless to you (like spirit to mages) healer gear might still be an upgrade to the alternatives.

I ran every heroic and the first 4 raid bosses with a group average of 325 -- we couldn't even use the random dungeon finder to get in to heroics. You don't need gear, you need experience. Right now ilevel is sort of a proxy measure of experience. If someone is at 350-something you know they've been raiding, if they're at 340-something they've been doing heroics, and 330-something they've been into normal mode dungeons.

That almost works right now but it'll start to fall apart very quickly. "Welfair epics" are just around the corner. Right now it's PVP blues (you can honor cap yourself in < 5 minutes with the new tol barad changes) but it'll expand fairly quickly as more crafted gear become available, as people start selling conquest points, valor points, and raid epics trickle down, and lose 10-games arena/battleground teams collect points, etc.

IMO some sort of attunement chain for heroics similar to magister's terrace would be a good place to start. Maybe bring back some element of the TBC rep grinds where you had to run normal mode dungeons a couple of times before you could go to the heroic version. That's annoying as hell for alts, but this early in the expansion it's not going to be a big deal.

Thought they said they're making sure enhance shamans are to made to avoid caster weapons?

We want to make sure Enhancement shaman avoid caster weapons.

[the evn show]

Thought they said they're making sure enhance shamans are to made to avoid caster weapons?

They want to, but they haven't yet -- just like mastery is still worthless for unholy DKs and ret paladins. They should be looking for melee 1-handers now, but until that stuff is changed they'll be playing the game we've got now.

[treemonster]

That almost works right now but it'll start to fall apart very quickly. "Welfair epics" are just around the corner. Right now it's PVP blues (you can honor cap yourself in < 5 minutes with the new tol barad changes) but it'll expand fairly quickly as more crafted gear become available, as people start selling conquest points, valor points, and raid epics trickle down, and lose 10-games arena/battleground teams collect points, etc.

you don't get points for losses in arena or rated bg's.

but right now you can cap weekly point with 5 2 man wins and get an epic for your first 3 weeks.

we'll have to see how that evolves though. some of the higher cost items such as the pvp weapons are going to be very grindy or multiple weeks to get, depending on how the point cap/points per rating works.

i haven't tried tol borad but maybe i'll try and queue up for it tonight if it gives killer honour. won't stay that way for long though given how grindy bg's are even if you do win.

i also have repair bills(although small) after doing only pvp. kind of annoying since you don't get ANY money from pvp to make up for it. something like 3g per night.

[ANON86364]

lol

lol indeed. I meant 180.

[James Caster]

Anyone got any advice for a 17 year old who's been playing with games and computers since he was 3 who wants to start playing Wow< but has Super slow internet, and a piece of junk computer?

[firey]

IMO some sort of attunement chain for heroics similar to magister's terrace would be a good place to start. Maybe bring back some element of the TBC rep grinds where you had to run normal mode dungeons a couple of times before you could go to the heroic version. That's annoying as hell for alts, but this early in the expansion it's not going to be a big deal.

Aye, I liked the Attunements. Especially for the raids too, like having to be Attuned for Kara and such.

[treemonster]

Anyone got any advice for a 17 year old who's been playing with games and computers since he was 3 who wants to start playing Wow< but has Super slow internet, and a piece of junk computer?

depends on how slow your internet is. and how old/low end your computer is. you might be able to run wow on low settings and solo world quest decently.i guess it also depends on your class but i don't have any good suggestions for that.

might want to stay out of the more well populated cities like org or stormwind too.

Aye, I liked the Attunements. Especially for the raids too, like having to be Attuned for Kara and such.

i always disliked attunments and have met alot of people who found them annoying. never were as bad as l2 attunements for certain raids where the quest chain took about a week of 8 hour play sessions including the part where you had to grind a certain mob spawn that was hard to get to with normal melee(auto) attacks only that reliably procced your quest item after almost exactly 8 hours of doing so.

[Noveed]

lol damn, wow is srs bzns. People like you that get so worked up over a game is a major +1 why i started to think i wanted to leave the game.

Dayum people like you with comments like that in THIS forum are hypocrites. I never said not once I was getting worked up, I am disgusted and appalled but certainly not worked up and certainly not loosing any sleep over it. I simply commented on my observations and gave a reaction. Maybe wow would be better if people like you leave I can imagine you being quite the keyboard warrior trying to act cool saying stuff like "wow is srs bzns" to other people in trade chat or whatever.

Didn't really want to take the topic down this avenue but just want to get some responses.

You pay a subscription for something, in this case a game you must obviously take it serious enough to pay it, if not you could just get pokemon for the Gameboy and play that. Even if you are playing the game for "fun" or to "pass time" be casual or whatever one still has to pay a subscription, I do not think people will part with their money if they were not serious about getting some form of enjoyment/entertainment from it.

[James Caster]

i have two options for computers to run it on. my mostly clearable Dell Dimension 2350 Desktop which is hooked up to my HD Flatscreen as a monitor, or mt brand new laptop with a 500 Gig external hard drive.

depending on which computer i use i'll eithe rbe stuck with an old 56k Dial up that runs at 26.0 Kb/s at it's BEST or i will have to play solo unless i go to a friends house where he has fast internet without a bandwidth limit.

My laptop is an Acer Aspire One D255 Series running Windows 7 Starter. and the external hard drive is a Seagate 500 gig Free Agent

any suggestions?

[treemonster]

i dunno what the actual specs are for either model you mention. can you give some actual specs? CPU amount of ram video card?

and no you cannot play wow or any modern mmo on dial up. not even solo.

[the evn show]

you don't get points for losses in arena or rated bg's.

but right now you can cap weekly point with 5 2 man wins and get an epic for your first 3 weeks.

"10-game teams" was the derogatory name for teams made by people that didn't intend to compete. No matter how bad you are, the system will eventually find someone just as bad and you'll trade 5 games to each other and get your points. In TBC that meant raiders /dancing in the middle of the arena for their weapons, now you have to try a little more. Even then: keyboard turning fire standards will get their arena gear with 30 minutes of effort each week.

i haven't tried tol borad but maybe i'll try and queue up for it tonight if it gives killer honour. won't stay that way for long though given how grindy bg's are even if you do win.

Change went in yesterday. If you're attacking and win you get 1800 honor, if you're defending and win you get 180 honor. The new norm is for the defenders to try and lose as quickly as possible so that they'll get to attack in 2 hours.

You just have to be in the zone, not even queued for battle (which means hanging out on the bridge right before the end will get you honor points).

[James Caster]

Desktop:

OS: Windows XP Home Edition Service Package 2

Intel Celeron CPU 1.70 GHz

as far as sound or graphics cards, i'm not certain. it was used when i bought it.

Netbook:

OS: Windows 7 Starter

Intel Atom N450 CPU

Graphics Card: Intel Graphics Media Accelerator for mobile.

i used a small hack to use a bit of virtual memory to give it 2000 to 3000 RAM

[treemonster]

"10-game teams" was the derogatory name for teams made by people that didn't intend to compete. No matter how bad you are, the system will eventually find someone just as bad and you'll trade 5 games to each other and get your points. In TBC that meant raiders /dancing in the middle of the arena for their weapons, now you have to try a little more. Even then: keyboard turning fire standards will get their arena gear with 30 minutes of effort each week.

Change went in yesterday. If you're attacking and win you get 1800 honor, if you're defending and win you get 180 honor. The new norm is for the defenders to try and lose as quickly as possible so that they'll get to attack in 2 hours.

You just have to be in the zone, not even queued for battle (which means hanging out on the bridge right before the end will get you honor points).

even if you try and get the minimum effort it'll be grindier than actually trying in arenas now. you'll just feed teams like mine whoa re just coming back to wow but not at the top of their game but still lose lots of matches. it'll be a lot of queues befor eyou get a team to trade wins with.

but yeah i know about the 10 match teams. i basically became one of those people in tbc becuase my teams just we'ren mtoivated to improve and practice and get better, and in some cases even log in on our arena day for our ten losses that week. well we didn't lose every match. and no i don't really blame mages being gimpy at the time or our terrible comp. we just didn't have it in us. i wasn't a great arena leader and my team didn't listen to my directions or feedback anyway. we couldn't focus fire properly let lone spike or interupt/cc healers.

i'll have to look at tol borad, that being said horde pvpers are just awful in my BG/server so i won't be surprised if alliance wins everytime.

still depending on how long the battles take it could be faster honour from losing than the average bg. especially given how many 20 minute ctf bg's i've had this week.

Desktop:

OS: Windows XP Home Edition Service Package 2

Intel Celeron CPU 1.70 GHz

as far as sound or graphics cards, i'm not certain. it was used when i bought it.

Netbook:

OS: Windows 7 Starter

Intel Atom N450 CPU

Graphics Card: Intel Graphics Media Accelerator for mobile.

i used a small hack to use a bit of virtual memory to give it 2000 to 3000 RAM

desktop MIGHT run it at min settings.

netbook idunno. if you upgraded hte actual ram to 2gb it might run it at min settings, but i have doubts. i have the same cpu on my netbook and have thought about trying to install wow for lul even though with that small of screen it would be next to unplayable. PS virtual memory isn't even in the same league as actual ram.

but again, wow isn't going to be playable on less than isdn .5mbps down 256k up.

[the evn show]

i always disliked attunments and have met alot of people who found them annoying. never were as bad as l2 attunements for certain raids where the quest chain took about a week of 8 hour play sessions including the part where you had to grind a certain mob spawn that was hard to get to with normal melee(auto) attacks only that reliably procced your quest item after almost exactly 8 hours of doing so.

I'm not arguing for the old style attunement chains. Karazhan was "good" - fun, something you could pug, and generally not ****-blocked by strange requirements. I felt the same way about onyxia apart from chasing Rexar around Desolace for 45 minutes it was a pretty good chain. I'm looking for "Run the place on normal mode with some sort of a minor quest chain entirely in the zone" and then some kind of ****-block mechanism that makes you go back on normal mode once or twice before they let you into heroic.

Anything beyond that is garbage. I don't mind them for optional perks (IE: doing an attunement chain gets you access to a trinket or ring that is better than say Tier N-1, but worse that current teir drops) but nothing mandatory. The teleport/shadow resist necklace and class trinkets from black temple were good rewards for doing the attunement chain for Black Temple after it was dropped as a requirement.

SSC/TK attunement? Trash. Black Temple/Hyjal? Absolute garbage. The game was miles better when those requirements were removed.

i'll have to look at tol borad, that being said horde pvpers are just awful in my BG/server so i won't be surprised if alliance wins everytime.

still depending on how long the battles take it could be faster honour from losing than the average bg. especially given how many 20 minute ctf bg's i've had this week.

They should be taking less than 5 minutes for 1800 honor if your'e attacking. The defenders are being paid to lose.

use i'll eithe rbe stuck with an old 56k Dial up that runs at 26.0 Kb/s at it's BEST or i will have to play solo unless i go to a friends house where he has fast internet without a bandwidth limit.

I just throttled my connection down to 26kbit/s (from 25mbit) -- the game is unplayable. Latency is too high to even use the auction house or interact with vendors, questing and killing mobs would probably be impossible and any sort of group play is right out of the question.

Also, even if you go and buy the latest version of the game right now, you're going to have gigabytes of patches. The last minor patch (4.0.3 -> 4.0.3a) was close to 500 megabytes. These patches are not optional so you're talking about days of downloading just for a minor update.

[James Caster]

okay then, looks like i have a few more things to upgrade around here. i'll see what i can do. of course, i'm sure i can find a beter graphics card somewhere. and if nothing els, i'll save up for a few terabyte external hard drive.

[treemonster]

yeah i agree with you on attunments.

an old mmo buddy quit wow forever due to some vanilla raid attunement. said he'd had enough of that **** and was never coming back. which was too bad because he was a great guy to hang out with in vent.

i don't recal minding kara attunment too much. i sitll have the lolzy epic it gives in my bank. i knew lots of guilds on my old rp server that banged their heads on it for ever though. my pvp guild failed at clearing it quickly in arena epics after i gquit.

i think something of a lead up quest chain that give some peice of gear relevant to that raid dungeon rather than some kind of "attunement" required to do it would be best. something ebtter than what you're going in with but not as good as what drops there.

anyways, i think i'm going to try tol borad tonight. i'll let you know how it goes.

okay then, looks like i have a few more things to upgrade around here. i'll see what i can do. of course, i'm sure i can find a beter graphics card somewhere. and if nothing els, i'll save up for a few terabyte external hard drive.

make a thread in hardware hangout asking for advice with teh specs you gave me here.

include your budget and time spans.

and DO NOT install games to external hard drives. omg lolz. seriously don't.

include what game syou want to play and the specs of your monitor.

i think if you have a budget of at least say $400-600 or more we can help you build a computer capable of playing wow on decent graphical settings. depending on where you live.

otherwise i'd also look at upgrading your internet. you can get fairly cheap packages with enough speed and bandwidth to play wow and browse and do email and watch youtube. again depending on where you live.

[Stokkolm]

Anyone got any advice for a 17 year old who's been playing with games and computers since he was 3 who wants to start playing Wow< but has Super slow internet, and a piece of junk computer?

I played from Afghanistan on a slow satellite connection with a laptop that had a geforce 7800 mobile card, so it's possible.

[gigapixels Veteran]

Maybe I'll try healing again once I get better gear. As an elemental Shaman, 100% of my spirit counts for hit, so I can essentially gear for healing while still doing better on DPS.

[treemonster]

well i can confirm that tol borad gives nothing at all for losing. but at least it went fast.

EDIT: no i did it wrong. i found ht ebridge on the next go around, but only 5 of us got in. :no:

anyways did week 2 of 2s tonight and overall we did a lot better. my bro improved his leading and target calling and we both did a better hjob of communicating working together focus firing.

we also got lucky with getting matched against teams where one person failed to load, though one of them was a badass lock who almost took me down despite being outnumbered.

burned a dk down befor ei even knew what was happening in one match. was barely ramping up.

overall used my spells particularly new cata and wotlk spells like mirror images much much better this time around. time warp seems awesome to open with along side the fireball pet thing as i was getting 1.4s frostbolts.

ended the session with a new epic cape which was a very nice upgrade and now up to around 1k resilience for 11% damage reduction.

[treemonster]

this is wow loading up on my ssd. does this seem right to you evn? (in advance sorry about ht ecrackle, you may want to turn it down, though it's not too loud)

[the evn show]

this is wow loading up on my ssd. does this seem right to you evn? (in advance sorry about ht ecrackle, you may want to turn it down, though it's not too loud)

seems kinda slow, what kind of drive did you get?

Some controllers are apparently really slow (jmicron, indlix(?)) some are really fast (intel, sandforce). Yours looks like it's about half as fast as mine.

Some of that is addons - you've got carbonite i think, and probably a few more than me but that shouldn't make it that slow.

Mine's a RAID-0 set of SSDs but IMO the performance between the raid and single SSD wasn't noticable at all.

Do you have AHCI turned on for your SSD drive? that makes a huge difference. I don't know what it does, but some nerds at school practically crapped on my head when I told them I wasn't using it.

[Slane]

Do you have AHCI turned on for your SSD drive? that makes a huge difference. I don't know what it does, but some nerds at school practically crapped on my head when I told them I wasn't using it.

http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=505&Itemid=38

I still don't know what it does, maybe you'll have better luck understanding.

[Got3n]

that SSD setup looks slow, my Raptors load waaaay faster than that lol. Also new drake ^_^

Did some archy today and got my raptor!!! And now im done with that stupid profession.

[00000]

http://benchmarkrevi...d=505&Itemid=38

I still don't know what it does, maybe you'll have better luck understanding.

The primary thing it does is enable NCQ so if your SSD supports NCQ you should see a noticeable difference, even if it doesn't AHCI is still the way to go as it is the native operating mode of the controller, using the IDE legacy mode just introduces a compatibility layer.