Ranulf
4821
I would skip Uldum if 84 already and just go to Twilight Highlands except to maybe get enough rep to buy the tabard in Uldum.
I’m not a fan of “Vage land” as some call it. Its not horrible but I’ve never gone beyond the first section of it. That gets you the breathing spell and sea horse along with some earthen ring rep to buy a tabard. The downside of skipping Deepholm on my first character meant 3-4 hours of running through it at 85. The upside was it was somewhat easier at 85 and made me a bit over 2k in gold at 85. I’ll never skip it again though simply because I generally don’t want to go back after level cap and I want the shoulder enchants right at 85.
IIRC, I went through Vashir first (first part) plus 2-3 instances, then Hyjal and more instances. I was 83 when I went to Uldum, cleared most of it but the Shotz questline and at 84 I went to Twlight Highlands and hit 85 there without finishing it (just opened up the Twlight section).
In general, instances should be easy to get to and discover, and the breadcrumb quests to take you there shouldn’t be stuck halfway through a 40-quest chain. Some people like to quest right away, some people like to do dungeons; both should be equally viable and fully supported options. If they had put breadcrumb “go find this dungeon!” quests at each level on the boards, people would be more likely to have all the dungeon entrances known when they hit level 85.
Throne of Tides should have been a level 84-85 dungeon, which would have given more dungeon variety when it’s needed – repeating normal mode dungeons at 85 over and over, instead of at level 80 where it really isn’t needed, and where people have to jump through hoops to get there, if they aren’t questing through Vashj’ir.
Combining those two changes along with requiring that a character must have completed the normal mode of a dungeon before they can queue for the heroic version, would have made a much smoother dungeon experience this expansion.
Yup I dinged 85 by doing Vashjr, Deepholm and 75% of Twilight Highlands, with almost no rest xp and doing maybe 6 instances total.
maxle
4824
Going back to the “Blizzard does not teach you how to play the game while you’re leveling” theme of a few pages ago, I had an amusing experience in Lightning Halls recently. Whichever boss it is that turns into a bunch of balls of lightning, well, did that. After I realized I couldn’t taunt them, couldn’t hit them, and was taking damage, I got the fuck away from them with about 50% health remaining. All three dps died to the lightning, the healer didn’t. The healer and I then proceeded to kill the boss with no difficulties.
Uh, but you learned how that boss works, right? How can you expect them to teach you every boss mechanic in the game while you’re out in the world questing?
JM1
4826
Strikes me that he did just the right thing - learned during combat.
We had our first bash at Nef last night without reading the strats for the first pull, and quickly realised that a) attempting to kill the adds was a bad idea, and b) having Ony and Nef together was a bad idea.
Course, trying to work out the strats for the entire fight would take a very long time, but there you go. Enjoyed our Chimaeron kill though, got to use my hybrid skills to the fullest! :)
They’re not, though. If you do things in proper order in Vash, for instance, you don’t get to Throne of Tides until the end of the zone. Stonecore is about 2/3 of the way through the zone. Uldum tends to send you to the three (3!!) dungeons in roughly decent order, and Hyjal’s introduction to blackrock caverns is very early on. Grim Batol is pretty far into TH, too.
Overall it seems pretty clear to me that Vash, Deepholme, and TH were designed with the idea of story first, and the gameplay bits fit into the story, not the other way around. Which is pretty boss from a story standpoint but less than optimal for “I just want to get in and play everything” setups. Hyjal struck me as a loser in both departments… (The story was mediocre but there wasn’t as much interesting gameplay stuff in there to me as Vash, either), but it gets points for being a “gamer’s” zone (You end up Revered just from in zone quests, they throw the dungeon opening at you extremely early; only real complaint is I still haven’t found a portal back to stormwind from Hyjal which is… tedious…) Uldum is somewhere in between; I think I just got tired of All. The. Frigging. Cutscenes… Quest. Cutscene. Quest. Cutscene. And I found the Raiders take-off storyline far, far less interesting than the TolVir/Egyptian stuff, which seemed to just peter out (and also have like zero tie-in to the Raiders crap).
TH had the dorf wedding bit, which was probably enough to redeem it by itself. Otherwise it was MMO Staple Zone #B.
JM1
4828
TH had a fairly epic Alexstrasza questline though (don’t want to post spoilers just in case). And the giant Maw.
If someone is one of those “just want to get in and play everything” types (which is fair enough), then it takes all of 30 seconds to get the Stonecore entrance, a couple of minutes for the Uldum ones, 15 minutes for TotT, and however long it takes you to fly to Grim Batol.
TheJare
4829
It’s still a clunky and unnecessary bit of design, it detracts from the game both if you skip it and if you follow it.
JM1
4830
I don’t see how it detracts from the game if you follow it - you get the storyline and quests leading up to it so the existence of a god and a giant octopus actually make sense in ToTT for instance!
This. I guess I can vaguely understand why folks rag on Vash, but I thought Vash had the best, most coherent storyline progression I’ve ever seen in an MMO. (And better than many, many single player CRPGs.) There are persistent characters who you interact with through the entire zone, there are (rather cleverly handled, IMO) flashbacks to fill you in with a bit more information about what’s going on, there’s a single unifying plot that advances (albeit with a bit of random fluff on the side, but then most books have that too), and there’s a logical consistency to the entire thing leading up through the dungeon which nicely caps things off.
I get complaints about all this getting in the way of the gamey mechanics (what with the heavy phasing and the dungeon being something that you’ll be half levelled out of by the time you get there), but the logical construction of the zone as a narrative experience is fantastic.
Yeah, the one time I’ve been in ToTT I was summoned to the entrance, so I had no idea where the final encounter came from.
I could swear that Blizzard said there was going to be boss info with a loot table built into the game, but I’ve not seen any sign of such a thing.
It hasn’t been implemented yet, but it’ll be on the dungeon map.
Can any holy priests please explain why my holy priest can’t cast Prayer of Healing or Circle of Healing while in Spirit of Redemption? It’s really pissing me off. Google fails.
The cursor lights up like it wants a target, but PoH shouldn’t need a target. And even if I give it a target, nothing happens.
No clue. That should work…
In other news, Cho’gall on 25man is easy, and Al’akir on 25man is a painful, painful fight.
I really liked Vashj’ir but I do have to say that the very end was really tone deaf and overwrought.
The very last sub based hybrid cutscene that allowed some amount of interaction but in which your interaction made zero difference was incredibly annoying and had awful writing and terrible voice acting.
I was ready to start punching stuff about halfway through.
idrisz
4837
I don’t use SoR, I considered it an talent that only work if I did something wrong.
Mouzone
4838
Spirit of redemption is pretty cool in that it let’s the boss stay active for a few extra seconds. I was watching the paragon heroic council fight and the only reason they downed the boss was cause a priests sor allowed for dots to tick off the last 1% of health after everyone else died.
Did I black out, hack your account, and write that just now? Because I may as well have. I feel exactly the same way.
The last three days in my daily random heroic I was grouped with a different “tank” from another server that was really just a DPS masquerading with a few tank pieces in place of DPS gear.
I notice it each time before the first pull, but decide to give it a shot since I’m sick of waiting. The first couple of trash pulls go badly (no wipes, just a huge amount of healing required), the tanks in question all were confronted about it (dude put on all your tanking gear). It become clear they they are wearing all they have. One of them even tries to wipe us intentionally. All of them refuse to leave the group since they don’t want the deserter debuff, but it’s pretty clear that the tank isn’t going to be able to handle the content since he’s basically a DPS toon in a tank spec.
After talking it over with a few guildmembers (one of which confessed to doing this exact same thing), the strategy is to queue as a tank and hope for one of the easier heroics that you can actually tank. And if you don’t get that, you just wait for the group to boot you and then you can requeue again in hopes that you have better luck and do get one of the easier heroics. It might take several times, but it is still much faster than queueing as a DPS.
One of the tanks in my guild is making 200 gold per person for running a heroic, so 800 gold a run. He says when he advertises in Trade chat for his services, he fills up the group inside of a minute. I hope Blizzard does something to make tanking a less of a headache so that tanks become a little less scarce.
