5121

http://www.elsanglin.com/fishing_and_cooking_alliance.html

5122

They aren’t too bad. Just pick up mining (stam bonus) and jewelcrafting, find a guide online, and start mining. You’ll probably skill up mining faster than JC, and mats are fairly cheap, so you may just want to buy, say, iron ore, instead of mining it more when it is gray. Don’t try to do it all in one session. Just think of it like a rep grind. The nice thing is that it is a bonus that you will basically get forever. It will last through gear upgrades (with some profs, you’ll have to pay more when you get gear, but you get the idea.)

5123

Welp, I think I’m done with WoW. Again. The feral druid nerfs in PvP were just too much for me.

5124

I finally canceled my accounts tonight. I can tolerate jerks on the Internet, so it was nothing to do with dungeons or queues or Trade chat. What did it for me was the change to quest structure. My favorite part of the game is leveling alts, but I don’t like the extremely linear nature of the quest system now. You will go here, you will do these quests, you will now go here, you will watch this cutscene - it killed my sense of freedom and exploration, and tore my enjoyment out of my alts. Cataclysm questing turned me from a knight-errant into someone on an amusement park ride.

It took me a few weeks to figure out what was missing. I got one character to 85, and a couple to 83, but meanwhile kept going back to play a 50-ish Tauren druid. Pretty soon, I was exclusively and happily playing the druid through Outland and Northrend. After a bit, I realized I had a sense of dread about the druid hitting 80 and having to start the Cataclysm zones. I then realized I was avoiding my 80+ level characters, so I knew the end had come.

Not a rage quit, I very much enjoyed my time in the game, it has just been changed into a game type that I don’t seem to enjoy.

5125

I’m not asking this as any sort of dig on the way you want to play the game. But how many characters have you leveled? I ask because I’m curious what sort of freedom and exploration you’re referring to that’s no longer possible with the way questing is designed now. You had to travel way more and sit afk on boats and birds, but I don’t exactly consider that exploration and certainly not freedom. The old quest flow got pretty tedious, especially if you had already done it on a few characters.

5126

I canceled my account a few weeks ago for the same reasons as you. I couldn’t quite pinpoint why I disliked Cataclysm’s quest structure because it seemed logically sound, but you’re right about the linear feel of it; it just doesn’t feel like an MMO anymore. I stopped playing my Worgen priest around 25 as I realized I just wasn’t having much fun questing. I did manage to experience the new Cataclysm zones and level through almost all of them. Despite the amazing environments of places like Deepholm and Vashj’r, they weren’t much fun to quest through. In comparison, I had a blast leveling through Outlands and a pretty good time in Northrend too.

Personally, I still miss Outland and am sad about how irrelevant it has become. I was almost tempted to join an Outland-only guild, but I know there’s only so much content to experience there before it gets old.

5127

I’ve been through the old quest system many times. I’ve been playing continuously since January '05 (though I did quit for a few days during the RealID fiasco), and have every class to at least 80 on Alliance (with an 80 paladin and priest on Horde). If I remember correctly, I had five level 60 characters by the time Burning Crusade came out. I’ve got all professions to at least 450, as well. My Dwarf Priest is a Loremaster, and I got a couple characters their Explorer titles prior to old world flight.

A big part of the missing freedom is the inability to skip quest hubs. I know which quests I hate, so I skip those & do the ones I like. For example, Watcher Leesa’oh and her Sporeggar pals can go fuck themselves, they no longer get help from me. If you skip ahead in Cataclysm zones, you find only mute NPCs staring at you, so you must finish all of the quests you are given before you can move on. It is the questing version of my mom making me finish my Brussels sprouts before I can have dessert.

The abundance of “invulnerable cutscene” quests is awful, too. For example, during most of that opening sequence in Vashj’ir, your actions are irrelevant. They should have learned from Wrath to just make these skippable cutscenes. I think only three of my characters ever finished the Wrathgate Undercity fight, since it was so long & pointless.

They also slammed the level requirement door pretty hard on the new zones. My 80 warlock was killing mobs in Uldum pretty well as I leveled up her herbalism. Why can’t I start doing quests there when I’m only two or three levels under the quest mobs? I’ve spent 80 levels killing quest mobs that were +3 to me, but suddenly that is prohibited. I can understand making the 1-25 leveling experience a directed one, so new players learn what to do, but 80-85? Let me do what I want, no need for the shooting gallery ride at that point.

The level 80 requirement for Cataclysm zones is disappointing, too. If I want to jump to the next area at 58 or 68, I can. I might get my head knocked in a few times, but at least the choice is there for Outland and Northrend.

To me, all of this combines to make the game into the rail shooter of MMOs, and I don’t like that. I’ve got another week on my subscription, but the only thing that sounds enticing to me is futzing around in Northrend on my 75 Tauren druid.

5128

Totally agreeing with this!
First time those cutscenes might be fun but they are a chore already when you do them with your first alt from 80-85.
They are simply boring a 2nd time and a waste of development resources better spent in other shit like fixing all those damn broken dailies (fuck you “Bomb the Elites” that is broken every other day (troops not moving and not attackable) and “Pulling the Wildhammers off their gryphons” (hello evading mobs and “No valid target”)).

There is too much sign-posting going on. The joy in discovering some hidden quest before is gone (a random mob drop or some clickable item in the zone).

5129

Question for good raiders: We are getting our ass kicked by Omnotron. Another dozen or more attempts last night, the lowest we got them was 32%.

I’m not sure what’s going on, honestly. We can consistently get them down to 45% at which point usually someone just drops dead. I don’t know if it’s healers running low on mana or what; I just know that we are getting absolutely pwned.

Log parses here. There’s 15 of 'em. :( http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-umq39frbzja4hjk5/

From what I recall last night we’re just having folks randomly drop dead. A lot of it is due to mistakes; people getting killed by Toxitron’s slimes are a big one.

5130

Seriously?

WoW was never ever that random. Players making their own fun? C’mon. This was not the game to do that in.

I was the king of “Making our own fun” in the raiding guild I was in during vanilla WoW. We did sightseeing tours (which mostly involved wallhacking through to the areas behind the zones, which I miss dearly) played dodgeball(with the leather ball item) and many other fun class related workshops. (Kiting contests,PVP in our raiding gear etc)Lok’delar was the shit in PVP.

But the game really hasn’t changed much from then, they have streamlined some stuff, taken away a lot of the difficulty, but the game is better for it. The game was much more frustrating in the past, everything just feels much more well designed now. The quests all are much more interesting than the usual “grab x item from y mob”. Do I miss the old days? Yes, terribly. But WoW is a better game now. I actually find myself reading the quest text, and wanting to move the story along. I feel more involved with the world, and less like a giant cow hunter trying to break the mechanics of the game. Back then it was easy to see the seams in the game, and I spent most of my free time trying to get my character location to say “Location Not Found”, but now… I don’t feel the need to, I am much more engaged as a player.

5131

Making sure you alert people to upcoming slimes is crucial, as is DPSing them down ASAP once you know their targets. Apart from that, are you interrupting Arcanotron properly? And dealing with targetted beam from Magmatron?

Man, those logs are hard to get a feel for. You’ve got DPS getting melee’d by bosses without tanks being dead, I think. Oddness.

5132

Can’t really tell from the logs, but you might want to look into how fast people are switching off of the shielding bots. If DoTs break the shield, or if Arcanotron isn’t getting interrupted constantly until shutdown, it might explain the sudden deaths.

5133

Nope - some of them aren’t interesting in the least, first time or no. At least not the one that I remember the hardest. That fight for the toilet bowl with the giant modest Dr. Manhattan inside of it where he gets face-humped to…death?..by a big squid goes on FOREVER, particularly the part where you’re standing in a damn submarine and watching a lot of stuff happen around you. I ran up the stupid ramp twice for no reason because I thought, surely I’m supposed to do something, because there’s not even anything significant and unique happening outside the windows - it’s just a bunch of generic dudes generic exploding when generically placed generic bombs generic blow them up, while Weird Looking Smaller Blue Guy with Unexplained Moai Head crapped out unique lines and the superfluous gnomes sitting in front of the windows so that it was even harder to see out of them spouted the same lines over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

However, as far as the quest design goes, I guess I’m the kind of idiot that’s ruining the game, because I STILL missed Budd floating around in the seaweed forest and had to look up which quests I missed online before I could get the diggity damned achievement. I also wandered into Twilight Highlands on a level 20-something Warlock, so I’m quite glad that it was zoned to be deserted as hell when I got there (though it would be better if maybe that big door didn’t open up and let all those many-legged dragons out into The Wetlands). I don’t really mind being directed from point to point to point, so long as the quests themselves are kept local, because one thing I definitely do NOT miss is running all over the place trying to clear seventeen different quests that want me to go twenty three different directions.

5134

We did lose DPS on one or two wipes to melee when the third or fourth Tron went active the first time. That’s a tank screwup we’ve already accounted for.

Slimes are definitely the biggest villain. Our problems there seem to fall into two categories:

  1. People not paying attention / not moving fast enough / trying to get that one last cast off before they start booking it.
  2. People standing too close to Toxitron when he’s the off-Tron. On at least two separate occasions we lost raiders almost instantly during Poison Protocol because they were standing within a few yards of Toxitron.

Arcane Annihilator is mostly getting interrupted; he gets it off occasionally but we interrupt the majority of them. Flamethrower we handle pretty well.

It’s really hard to figure out what’s going wrong. We consistently get them down to the 33%-45% mark and then things just fall apart. It’s always at the same point, too.

Tankero: We did have one or two wipes from shields going down (Hi Magmatron). We’ve corrected that now; everyone knows to stop DPS at 55% energy to ensure there’s no shield damage. For Arcanotron we leave a tank and a melee DPS or two on him for interrupts and have our mages spellsteal his buff away.

How do people like to position the Trons? Do you just tank them kind of where they end up? Is there an ideal way to position them?

5135

We’re not too fussed about positioning I don’t think, except with Toxi. Melee DPS on Arcanotron can be counter-productive if you’re slack about the buff, it speeds up his casting and can make interrupting even harder. Slimes are all about clear communication of who the target is and making sure that no-one is next to them when they spawn.

5136

JM: Right, the only reason we have melee on Arcanotron is that we run two mages. They just spam spellsteal and rip his shield right down; it stays up for maybe 3-5 seconds. He never gets a haste buff; it gets stolen immediately.

5137

It might be worth just completely ignoring him at that point except for the tank who interrupts when he can. The extra DPS on the live target ought to help. We certainly found it easier switching me away from interrupt/purge duty when he was being offtanked.

5138

You can still keep DPS on Arcanotron. Once his shield is down (3-5 seconds) you DPS him normally. If I’m tanking Arcanotron I can interrupt half his annihilators at most; having a second DPS brings that up more toward 80%.

5139

To each their own but some of my most memorable experiences in vanilla WoW was me running through Duskwallow Marsh far too low level on my lock to reach the Barrens for I think the succubus quest line.
I aggro’d everything by just sticking to the road due to my low level and died tons of time. It felt REALLY good to finally enter the Barrens!
Taking a wrong turn from Swamps of Sorrows back to Duskwood netted me aggro from one of those lvl 55 birds and luckily some lvl 60 was at the same place killing the mob while shouting at me: “WTF are you doing?”.
Good times.

Oh and I can’t forget Stitches patrolling the road in Duskwood and killing me when I was afk…
Tol Barad’s Problim is the only thing remotely comparable and I always laugh when someone afk gets owned by him! :)

5140

Vash’jir has at least three random elites running around who can flatten you in a blink if you hang out in the wrong spot. They’re on a completely different level from the easily soloable Problim.

It is pretty strange that they only packed the less popular initial Cata zone with elite mines, but they do exist.