Died on the boat to Vashj’ir, had to spirit-rez, how wonderful.
I was doing one of the mage trials in Aszhara (Shadow Trial) when the server died.
No idea where / how I will end up (lost in the phase, dead in Org etc.). :p
JM1
3363
Just played my first hour or so. I am very impressed. Lots of nice set pieces.
My 8AM class (first of three in a row today) is populated largely by students in our game development majors. I don’t expect that many to be there (well, there’s also the fact that we got hit with a snowstorm overnight as well). Between skiing and Cataclysm, I’m thinking I might have a half-dozen in class…
Of course, who am I to judge? I got up early this morning and rolled a Goblin mage.
-grumble will not receive physical collector’s edition copy until already at work grumble-
Okay. So. I just rolled a new Human Warrior called Ashurbanipal (because I had been listening to They Might Be Giants) and I very, very clearly do not understand what in the hell I am doing. I’ve downloaded a flaming crap ton of add-ins (necessary after moving computers twice, because my add-on manager apparently forgot that a number of them existed and couldn’t identify others, so I had to wipe everything), and as soon as I got finished configuring all of them, Auctioneer crashed in the middle of a scan and it lost all my settings.
Since I know precisely dick about tanking anyway, does anybody have some standard tank settings/add-ins/configuration for tanks? Preferably a setup that would be portable to a bear if need be, since I fully intend to instantiate Tofudog for reals when I get home tonight.
Brian:
My suggestion is to turn off all of your mods and slowly turn them on when you decide you need one or another - or at least cut back to the bare minimum. If you’re just getting back into the game it probably is more of a distraction than a help to have a ton of mods, and if you’re like me, you probably don’t always remember why you wanted some of them in the first place. Plus, over time Blizzard has incorporated lots of mod functionality into the game (threat meter, map and quest enhancements) so some of the mods may not even be necessary any more.
As for tanking, the most important thing I think you need is a threat meter. There is one built in now but I’m not sure if you can see the whole group’s threat at once. A typical one would be Omen, though there are others, to be sure. As tank, just keep the highest threat on all the mobs and you win!
I wasn’t planning on playing until this evening but I ended up waking up quite early due to stomach pains, so once those subsided, I was able to buy a digital upgrade and get into the game immediately, at around 4:30 AM. I played a couple of hours and was also pleased at the new zone and quest chains (all I’ve seen is Hyjal). Spawn rate was crazy high but that’s good.
The only annoyances were a couple of group quests where you have to kill a boss-type mob - there were lots of people hanging around trying to get in the first hit so they could get credit. But a little grouping up eventually solved that issue.
Don’t forget to update all of your professions - for Horde you can do it in Org, so I assume they are trainable in your capital cities. Between buying the flying and 40g a pop for my professions and tradeskills, I ended up losing a teeny bit of cash even after doing a bunch of quests.
Well, I’m running Omen, because it’s braindead simple to set up, and I also got some kind of Norman Schwarzkopf Collector’s Plates thing that puts plates up on everything for seeing stuff about them that I’m told is pretty key to the experience, but right now my biggest problem is getting Bartender set up again, because my old default is a stack of ten bars on the lower right hand side in small scale and that takes a couple of hours to set up, and since the rolling bar was eliminated at some point I might need to change that over. So if somebody has a good standard Bartender profile that I can just frigging copy and paste instead of having to manually rescale and reorient and replace and re-everything else all the bars, that would be super-awesome.
Your primary point, however, is definitely taken. I think I will turn off everything but the quest arrow and Auctioneer (Bartender can be forced to pretend that it’s the default interface) and start adding stuff as I find that I need it.
I’d like to think that this is the reason why I am dying so often due to being ganged by as many as three (3) dudes in Elwynn Forest (A virtual army! I mean, 3 dudes? Who can withstand the mighty power of 3 dudes a couple of levels higher than him? Maybe tanking is all just one big lie, perpetrated by the liberal video games media to convince the powerful to sacrifice themselves on the altar of altruism to preserve the weak and puny leeches of the world! Yeah…that’s the ticket…), but I’m sure that has more to do with me sucking and the fact that I haven’t quite figured out how a Warrior pulls yet. Going to Warrior from Priest is like having the world’s craziest doctor swap your arms and legs and then trying to tap dance.
Its interesting to see that the updater hasn’t improved much if any in 6 years. I STILL get crap bandwidth while simultaneously killing any network performance at all. You’d think that at 80kb/s (on a 6Mb connection) I’d have plenty of bandwidth leftover for other tasks, but noooo.
I was also rudely reminded of how poor the avatar detail is. I’m sure things will improve once I get into the game, but after spending the last few weeks playing Vindictus and the Rift beta it really makes WoW show its age.
Athryn
3371
Make sure your detail settings are correct, if you haven’t been playing Wow for a while, one of the recent patches changed a lot of video settings.
Athryn
3372
Heh, I’ve been refreshing the Fedex status page to see where mine is. It’s on a truck out for delivery now, now begins the waiting.
And about 5 minutes after I posted that, I got mah copy!
sinnick
3373
I can’t believe they threw out the old armory website. I mean, I can sort of appreciate the desire to consolidate everything into a single “battle.net” experience, but isn’t that like a massive boondoggle? That old website had so much sophisticated javascript going on, I can’t believe it was scrapped, especially when there was absolutely nothing wrong with it.
Lorini
3374
I really would use the Blizzard quest system. It’s pretty good. Not as perfect as Carbonite but good enough :)
JM1
3375
My only annoyance with that is that you can’t move the tracked quests - they’re on top of my buff bars:(
For a starting warrior? Grab tidy plates/threat plates and you’re good. Basically the nameplates will change colors and get big when you need to care about them.
Until you reach level 10, you are squishy. After level 10, you can pick up Shield Slam, +15% stamina, and Defensive Stance, which makes you markedly less so. Don’t use Victory Rush right away, either; save it for when it’ll actually do some good.
Until that point, pull very, very carefully and pick your fights one and two at a time. Don’t be afraid to grind on neutral mobs. Invest in a cheap white throwing weapon to get enemies to run away from packs of their friends.
Warriors are the single most skill-dependent class in the game, but once you’ve got some practice and a few levels under your belt, you are a constantly-moving death pinball and the game really opens up.
sinnick
3378
Grab the “SimpleMiniMap” addon - it lets you move the track quest text.
Ar1
3379
The Worgen starting area (levels 1-5) is nice and very dynamic by WoW standards.
Could have been better, the invasion is somewhat clumsy scripted and lacking drama, but I’m picky.
A big positive is that you can easily be killed if you are careless!
I don’t understand this change:
We recently made a change to the way experience is calculated and wanted to take some time to explain this change in order to clear up some confusion some may be having in regard to their rate of progress. If you are currently at the maximum level that you can be for an expansion (or higher), killing creatures from that expansion will now grant 10% of normal experience.
Examples:
Level 60 or higher players get 10% normal experience for killing creatures in Azeroth (“Old world” content)
Level 70 or higher players get 10% of normal experience for killing Burning Crusade creatures.
Level 80 or higher players get 10% of normal experience for killing Lich King creatures.
Level 85 or higher players get 10% of normal experience for killing Cataclysm creatures.
What does this mean for those that have Cataclysm and are leveling up new characters? This means that you will gain normal experience through to level 60 and will then need to move on to The Burning Crusade zones until you reach level 70 and Wrath of the Lich King zones until you reach level 80. Once you reach 80, it is expected that you will be continuing your leveling adventures in the new Cataclysm zones and dungeons. We have made this change so that players will continue to progress through the appropriate content for their level versus grinding on quick re spawns in a less ideal location.
This change will also affect hunter pets and their leveling rate if the player is at max level, however, this is an unintended change that we will be addressing in the future.
Why does it matter if some dude wants to grind Northrend bad-guys instead of the new stuff? The change makes no sense to me, and seems kind of user-hostile. Especially right now, when the new stuff is going to be so crowded as to be unplayable anyway.
