3501

I’ve already found two greens which replaced two of my WOTLK purples, one of which was a 700+ Honor Point shield from a vendor. I even found a relic to replace my old Libram.

So glad I didn’t buy any new gear a week ago when I was saving up honor points.

3502

My understanding is that this is intentional. The only casters whose gear will be directed toward spirit should be healers. I think.

3503

Lots of callouts to old NPCs like Finkle, Budd and Milhouse Manastorm are amusing.

3504

Spirit/regen is only needed for healers, right? Could it be that Blizzard itemized the 80-85 gear for caster dps, assuming most people would be using a damage-dealing spec when questing? Maybe you’ll see more regen gear as you get closer to the level cap and people switch to a healing spec for heroics/raids?

3505

That does seem rather fast. I was expecting the five levels to take maybe 20 hours. I guess the difference between 20 and 6 is insignificant in terms of player retention, so why not let players cap quickly?

I bet a lot of players had quests saved up and ready to turn in too.

3506

Yeah, no caster should really have to worry much about regen right now – and healers are the only ones who care about Spirit these days (although some caster DPS specs have talents to convert Spirit to Hit Rating.) Anyone in ilevel 200 gear should be picking up upgrades left and right in questing, and even more so by doing dungeons, eventually.

The new food/drinks provide a ton of fast mana regen between fights, which should be more than enough for all casters leveling up, healers and DPS. Mana regen really is only a concern with level cap content.

3507

Could be. It doesn’t really affect my priest in shadow spec much, and I probably won’t do much healing until I’ve done a lot of the solo zone quests, so there’s still plenty of opportunity for better stuff later on.

3508

At 85 with new Heirlooms and guild xp, I heard the XP buff will total 60%. With just WOTLK heirlooms it was 20% and I was leveling really fast.

3509

A brief testimonial for the Drop Bears: What a friendly and helpful bunch! After a two-year absence from WoW, this guild has made returning a real pleasure. They also scrapped my original reason for coming back (playing a goblin) but a good guild makes the game. Thanks, Bears!

3510

While I certainly wouldn’t expect the first tier of raiding to be overly difficult, particularly in normal mode, my understanding was that Blizz really wanted to make sure people farmed both normal 80 dungeons, and then heroic 80 dungeons before stepping into the new raids. So I had assumed they would tune those encounters expecting a high amount of heroic 5-man and point gear.

There’s not really any way that Paragon could have reached 85 and farmed out a bunch of heroic 5-man gear in a day, if only because of the heroic lockouts. Sure they all probably saved up 4k justice points, but at the end, the only explanation is that Blizz really didn’t tune the raids as intended.

Yes, saying Paragon is highly skilled at the game is an understatement, and they undoubtedly got a lot of experience with the content during the beta, but you can only overcome gear deficiency by so much.

So while I was expecting a ton of 85s yesterday, I really wasn’t expecting to see that many first kills, even if it did take them 9 hours of raiding to get them.

3511

Unless things have changed dramatically in raiding since TBC time spent is more important than skill. Also whether or not gear is a significant factor depends greatly on the individual encounters. Could be those first several encounters in the new raid aren’t all that gear dependent at all.

3512

IIRC, didn’t Ensidia clear all of the T7 WotLK raid content (except Sartharion’s hard modes) within 48 hours of Wrath’s launch or something like that?

3513

I thought Blizzard was aiming for “normal” mode to be a lot more accessible, while increasing the the challenge of heroic versions this time around. I’m not surprised to hear about the downs in normal version.

3514

When my 76 Paladin gets 1088 experience for killing a level 69 MOB in Northrend and my 75 Warlock gets 82 experience for killing a level 70 MOB in Outland, there’s something really wrong.

3515

Silverpine and azshara are both great. Northern barrens is the same it was 4 years ago, skip it

3516

For those struggling to reach the new 80 areas, the quest text tells you exactly where to go and what to do, though I recommend tracking the Hero’s/Warchief’s board quests. At least from SW, Hyjal is much faster to reach the first time since you don’t have to wait for the boat.

If you don’t want to read the quests, this is a very helpful guide on how to get to the new areas:
http://wow.joystiq.com/2010/12/06/cataclysm-101-what-to-do-first-in-cataclysm/

Also, don’t forget to train up your professions before leaving Stormwind/Orgrimmar, the trainers there can all take you past 450 now.

3517

How does Cooking work past 450? Maybe I’ve just been unlucky, but after completing ~55 quests in Mount Hyjal, I didn’t loot a single cooking item. Is that normal? In Wrath, I remember finding shoveltusk and elk and other kinds of meat all over Howling Fjord and Borean Tundra.

Would it be easiest to just level fishing at the same time and cook the fish I catch?

3518

I had almost all of these problems myself. You need to go into your wow\cache folder and delete everything there. That should resolve the issue.

3519

I never sell white items, and I just looked to see I only have a couple of cooking related items. Looks to me like the recipes mostly are fish-based.

For a long while one of the best ways to level cooking was to level fishing alongside it. Now that you can hang out in a capital city and get skill ups, you don’t even have to leave your home until your fishing hits 450. Just queue for random dungeons and fish for hours (and hours… and hours…).

3520

Then you didn’t do all of the Sons of Hodir dailies.