3661

I don’t think it’s just the worgen areas, there have been a ton of quests that have been breaking all over the place. I know I almost ragelogged last night because the new Crucible of Carnage quest in Twilight Highlands was bugging out and spawning multiple bosses, and we were getting autofailures. I’ve seen quests in Vash’jir break and drown people, bottles of whisky and spools of rope go missing in Stonecore, cutscenes break all over the place in Uldum, and phase changes prevent quest mobs from showing up in Hyjal and Uldum.

3662

TBC 5-man Heroics were very touch and go and needed lots of CC. Wrath just made people soft.

3663

This expansion is so highly phased in so many different places that buggy quests don’t surprise me at all.

I did a Wailling Caverns on my Warlock (heirloom weapon + chest + shoulders). There were two Warriors in the group in full heirloom, one of them tanking.

The Warriors combined did 80% of the group damage. I couldn’t even finish casting a Shadowbolt before a trash mob was dead, and AOE has gotten nerfed so f-ing hard that I’m pretty sure Rain of Fire was actually healing the monsters.

It’s just business as usual. They made mobs in all the lowbie dungeons healthier, but all that did was make full-heirloom melee require three hits to kill something instead of one.

3664

No, it’s not dead. Both sites (Auctioneer and Gatherer) are currently down, but I’m sure they’ll be back up at some point.

3665

You can get a current version of Auctioneer off of the Curse gaming site. I have the version they put out after 4.0a and its still working fine.

3666

Let me tell you, trying to tank as a lowbie without heirlooms in a party with heirloomed DPS is an exercise in frustration. And of course, you get blamed for being unable to hold aggro. When I ran Deadmines on my level 17ish troll druid, there was some asshole in the party who started bitching about my inability to keep enemies off him - o noes, he had to occasionally use some of his paladin healing abilities! When I patiently explained that we were fighting multiple mobs at a time and I did not have any way to generate AoE threat, he told me yes I did - Faerie Fire and…something else I don’t remember the name of, neither of which were available until the mid-20s at least. I pointed this out, and he told me that he’d tanked as a druid before so he was right and I was wrong.

3667

I had the same buggy nature with the later quests. Usually, there’s a timer before the “big battle” script sequence – at least it was in the DK areas. So, I missed the invasion and had to abandon/retake the Tobias quest. Also, it wasn’t very clear to me in the transformation sequence I was the werewolf. I’d caught the bit about me being bitten, but thought they were referencing someone else during the cut scene.

3668

I played through the goblin stuff and encountered no bugs. I’m maybe a third of the way through the worgen stuff – I am at the part where I am actually a worgen now. So far, no bugs.

I’m not defending Cata. Just chipping in with my experience so far.

3669

I wouldn’t say they were bugs so far. The latter portion of the Worgen area seems to be prone for events happening and you have no idea what to do.

3670

I take back what I said about Vash’jir. Once you get past the first 30 quests or so it is pretty outstanding! Though oh so long!

Deepholm was really good too. Uldum is OK; the constant cutscenes are annoying kind of.

3671

So there’s a new Ring-of-Blood-type event in Twilight Highlands called “Crucible of Carnage” (you’ll see people looking to do “CoC” in chat). As much as I’m enjoying the expansion, it’s amazing how, the third time around, Blizzard still managed to foul this up so badly.

First of all, it’s a public outdoor event, so you have groups constantly waiting for the questgiver to go active after each round trying to start their fight. Which isn’t so bad if you have just two or three groups and they’re willing to trade off back and forth. But at the moment, it seems like you constantly have 7 or 8 groups all fighting to start their event, and it turns into a total cluster.

Second, you have people flying in solo and starting the quest on their own, either hoping that the massive crowd will help kill the bosses, or clueless that they actually need a group for the event and that completing the quest actually starts it. So they’re just creating more traffic and backing things up.

Third, it’s just flat-out buggy. We’ve seen bosses fail to despawn after a botched attempt, so no one else could start a new fight. We’ve seen two bosses in the ring at once. We’ve seen people on the correct part of the chain not get credit for kills, and we’ve seen events fail mid-fight for no reason. It’s just a mess.

And what annoys me is that most of these problems could easily be avoided. Instead of having the event start right at the first quest guy, how about adding an initial breadcrumb to weed out a few of the solo folks? Why not use some of that awesome phasing technology so that groups aren’t clawing over each other to start the event? Or if you wanted to get ambitious (god forbid) how about not letting people start the fight solo or adding a queue system for groups so they can line up in an organized fashion?

The sad part is that this isn’t something you want to ignore. It’s 5 bosses, a crazy amount of gold, something in the neighborhood of 500,000 XP for the full gauntlet (I think it’s 100k per fight), and a 333 weapon at the end, which is as good as you’ll get outside of dungeons. So you just have to suffer through the sillyness and hope you get a group together at a quiet time and that the quests don’t bug out on you.

3672

The weird thing is, they totally had a breadcrumb for the one in Zul Drak, I don’t know why they didn’t have one for this one.

3673

Bah!

LOOK AT ME!! I’M A MANATAUR!!

and “Hacking the Wibson” that leads to “Gnomebliteration” quest.

Some damn funny questlines so far.

3674

If they really wanted to get ambitious, they should have just made it give credit PQ-style.

My Shaman is getting close to Cataclysmically Superior, which will mean being done with Heroics other than one a week. I need only a half-dozen items, each of which is from a different instance.

I think my Guildies are going to try our first shot at raiding tomorrow or Monday; that’ll be interesting. Tol Barad wrecked our tanks, but now we have better gear! :)

3675

Has anyone else done the Joust quests in Hyjal yet? I had heard there was going to be jousting in cataclysm (and I groaned), but I didn’t know they meant like this! Simply excellent and, so far, the highlight of the expansion (most of the rest of Hyjal has been pretty poor, unfortunately).

3676

I spent a large chunk of the day working on Archaeology, and managed to go from the end of 80 to the start of level 82 just off of xp from digs. I’m up to 183 skill now but haven’t found anything interesting yet, though one of my current targets is a Golden Chamber Pot…

One tip I wish I’d learned earlier is that the skill gains from the digs stop at 100 skill, so it’s best if you don’t solve any artifacts at all until you hit that point. Also, you find these special items which say they help contribute to artifact completion, but it’s not immediately obvious how to use them. Look on the progress page for your current targets and there might be a hexagonal slot under the progress bar; those special items can be dropped in there to help speed it along. Not all targets have that slot though, which is why I couldn’t figure out what to do with it at first.

3677

An extremely annoying quest in deepholm involved “subduing” an ogre on a flying ship. Basically, you need to wait for him to spawn and then fight him, except winning the fight doesn’t win you the quest. You need to talk to him. All the players basically just gather round, waiting for someone to attack him, and then everyone tries to talk to him first.

This is the worst part of WoW – quests which you can’t complete because of other players doing the same thing. I sort of can’t believe the issue still isn’t addressed.

Deepholm is a pretty amazing zone. Beautiful and very Outland-ish. I agree with those who weren’t impressed with Mt. Hyjal. I never got a sense for the zone at large - it felt like a lot of little disconnected areas, with no real character overall. And entering it certainly didn’t have the same kind of awe-inspiring feel that, say, going through the dark portal, or your first boat ride into the Howling Fjord did.

3678

One of the things I’ve found that really sucks is how easy it is to get out of phase with someone. I’m 83 and a friend is 82. I had done nothing in Deepholm other than the breadcrumb quests and the first “go talk to my friend quest.” She zoned in at 82 and we were out of phase. We looked at the achievements and found that I had done 4 quests to her three. It turns out what had thrown us out of phase was that 83, I had done nothing more than accept the two Uldum breadcrumb quests. Dropping those put us back in phase.

3679

Oh with my shadow priest, I killed the ogre with shadow word death before he can take someone hostage, and everyone in the group got quest complete without going through the talk.

3680

You could turn this into a drinking game.