5281

I intend to move to those zones, I just didn’t expect to be forced into them before I was ready. I understand that I can remain in Northrend and continue questing there until I feel ready to advance, my issue is very specialised: I do dailies, work on my crafting tasks, and I hit random dungeons to heal and shepherd our upcoming forces. That’s it. And now not only can I not do Northrend Heroics (which sucks because, as Athryn points out, they are more and varied compared to Cata, plus there was an overlap between Burning Crusade and Wrath), but I am too inexperienced for Cataclysm dungeons via the finder. I’m in this weird water between two shores: I can stay where I am and not do the things I really want to do, or cross and not do the things I really want to do. I doubt it’s a position anyone else is in or cares about, and I really just came here to complain about it. Done now :)

EDIT: Actually, I guess my real intention was to learn if this is really the way the dungeon finder is supposed to work, dropping Northrend dungeons like that, and I have my answer :)

5282

Yes, it was a change that they just made this patch.

5283

I’ve seen this a lot… and I completely understand the ‘on-the-rails’ reference, because the zones are very one-plot-only. However, I’m curious what the alternative would be to make it less boring for alts? My guess is that for many, by your 3rd toon or so, you are no longer questing for ‘story’, you are questing simply to get to 85. Hence, you are going to follow the most “optimal” questing path, regardless of how many paths might exist (see the popularity of quest guides pre-Cata). Blizzard seems to have acknowledged this by making each zone have one overarching plotline so you get your story/plot fix on your first trip through and your future toons can just blast their way through.

5284

That’s not always my motivation, though. I like to play new characters to do new abilities and whatnot. I think the LK areas had the best balance of story, but also have hubs that you could move around or shuffle around/skip ahead.

You can’t skip around in Cata areas for the most part, and it’s really frustrating.

5285

First step would be to make those cutscenes skippable after having them watched once.
I watched the Uldum ones on my first alt and was already tapping my fingers at the desk waiting for them to finish to let me PLAY again.

5286

They are skippable. Pressing esc brings up a dialog box asking if you want to skip, though it doesn’t seem to work 100% of the time when going through a cutscene is what triggers the quest objective completion.

And metta, if you’re 81 and the dungeon finder isn’t letting you queue for Cataclysm dungeons, something’s wrong. The only requirement for the normal instances is your level. You used to have to have visited the dungeon entrances in order to queue for them, but this last patch was supposed to change that.

5287

I see the dungeons listed but there’s a padlock next to them. When I mouse over the padlock I get a message telling me I need a gear rating of 230-something, and my gear’s average is 220-something.

5288

That’s incorrect, there is an ilvl requirement on the Cata dungeons as well, I have had a couple of characters run into it.

I’ve also run into a couple of instances where skipping the cutscenes has bugged me out and/or killed me.

5289

Hardmode Chim down, finally!

We didn’t have a totally clean fight (2 deaths), but we did have a perfect transition into P2, and that’s what made the difference.

5290

So out of curiosity, when are you “done” with the expansion? Do you have guild related RP storylines that you’re working out, and only when they’ve played out do you move on? (Also I’m curious as to why you bought Cata in the first place if you planned on only playing in LK for a good long while yet.)

Warcraft strikes me as a bit of an odd place to roleplay what with all the built-in anachronisms and pop culture references, but, y’know, more power to ya! Way back when, when I had time, I’d have been intrigued enough to come look you up.

5291

This and that:

*Our guild <Winter> will move on once we’ve helped bring down Arthas/The Lich King. We’ll only do it once, then we’ll be called to The Cataclysm. Our guild decided to all start over from level 1, and for all of us to choose a race and class we’d never RP’d before. We were prisoners, held for the usual bum-fluffery: murder, theft, weapon smuggling, etc, but when war came again to Kalimdor, Thrall turned out his prisons. Anyone with martial experience was given a squad to lead, anyone who could swing a weapon or cast a rapture was made into a squad. We quickly bonded, and as soon as we saw an opportunity to, uh, release ourselves on our own recognizance, we did. Now we work helping to train the Horde forces, which allows us to help ourselves to trinkets, here and there. Some of us would like to get out for good, and others not so much.

The small folk have a saying: “He’s killed more men than Winter”. Only after meeting one of us does it become clear they aren’t referring to the season.

*There is lots of new content between level 1 and level 60 (or 58, depending on when you choose to graduate to Outland).

*My character doesn’t recognise the pop culture references or anachronisms. They’re just another language alien to his culture, harsh and jarring in his ear.

5292

I hated it so hard that I couldn’t even bother myself to get out of it and had to start a different alt. That place is the opposite of anywhere that I want to ever spend any time. It’s dull and gray and rainy…not really the way that I want to start out my adventures. There’s nothing particularly interesting or inventive about the quests or zones - it’s just WoW Goes Goth, and I find that monumentally uninteresting. That was my problem with it, anyway.

On another note, does it feel like there ought to be five more levels in this expansion to anybody else? I’ve finished all quests in Vashj’ir and Hyjal and I’ve only got one level to go to hit the cap (I expect I’ll ding sometime during Uldum, without ever having done quest one in Deepholm or Twilight Highlands), at which point I will be dramatically, horrendously undergeared for any sort of raid or heroic content. I’ll still be doing all the quests in all the other zones, so by the time I get around to trying to do a random heroic I expect that I’ll have quest-end blues, but still I feel like I’m running out of room to grow early.

5293

That was definitely a neat questline, but the rest of the zone is otherwise forgettable.

5294

Considering I’ve already leveled 6 toons to 85, yes. I also have a (mostly) end game raid geared toon and I think I’m done. Perhaps leveling those alts burned me out, but I find that I burned out much quicker in Cata then I did in WOTLK. Perhaps I’ll be back in another 8 months, hopefully not.

5295

I think the idea is that you don’t have to complete all the quests and can jump straight into level 85 normals (but not heroics).

The quest rewards will leave you badly undergeared for heroic content anyway if you do no normals at all, although you will get some decent rep gear.

5296

The idea was that hyjal/vashj’ir were a choice - one or the other. Doing both throws it out of whack, XP-wise.

5297

But you get a top hat. Top hats solve many woes.

On another note, does it feel like there ought to be five more levels in this expansion to anybody else? I’ve finished all quests in Vashj’ir and Hyjal and I’ve only got one level to go to hit the cap (I expect I’ll ding sometime during Uldum, without ever having done quest one in Deepholm or Twilight Highlands), at which point I will be dramatically, horrendously undergeared for any sort of raid or heroic content.

Well…

a) You did some fucked up pathway. The standard path (and the game drives you this way quite effectively) is one of either Vash or Hyjal followed by Deepholm (at least for a bit) or Uldum (if you run a lot of dungeons), followed by TH. My DK, who is in a guild with a 10% XP bonus, always had rested XP, and ran one dungeon per play session, made it through Hyjal, all of Uldum, and about 1/4 of TH before hitting 85. Admittedly I tend to play my alts on slow weekend days so that was 4-5 sessions. If you play 2 hour sessions and run one dungeon per session it will be a lot more shifted toward dungeon XP.

If you do the higher level zones (Uldum, TH) you will get, from the quest lines, some decent blue gear. Throw in some dungeons (esp. at 85) and you start approaching gearing levels for heroics. And you really need to do dungeons probably at least a couple of times per before you try them on heroic. (To be fair, you’re also reasonably behind the curve at this point, which means your average dungeon group won’t need quite as much training to simply get through a normal, much less a heroic.)

b) You say “I only have one level left” as if level 84 looks anything like the levels before it. I haven’t counted, but I’d estimate that level 84 needs close to the total experience you got in all levels previously, combined. It’s a huge, long level.

I’ll still be doing all the quests in all the other zones, so by the time I get around to trying to do a random heroic I expect that I’ll have quest-end blues, but still I feel like I’m running out of room to grow early.

A lot more of the actual growth is in reps/dailies these days. No normal dungeon drops anything over ilvl 333. Heroics begin to get “regularly doable” (not the ROFLstomps they were in LK, but reliable) when a good portion of the party is average ilvl 340 or so. This skews for familiarity/quality of player, but is probably a decent-ish rule of thumb. At the point where everyone is average ilvl of 340, there’s a pretty decent chance you have enough resources amongst the whole group to just power through a slightly muffed fight attempt.

The growth model is a lot more top-heavy this time around, especially with the 10 man raids and the like.

5298

Truth. I do miss the top hat. Technically Tofudog is still alive and kicking in some tower halfway through the smashing of Gilead…maybe I’ll have to go back and pick him up on a sick day or something. I need another alt to do the lower level Darnassus content anyway.

I did, and I did it on purpose, but I didn’t expect it to have this much impact. I knew that I was going to need to get rep with all the factions anyway, so I figured that the best way to do that would be to just do the quest chains to get up to maybe Revered and a half to cut down on the daily/shirt grind before I could buy my faction epics.

As for 85’s XP requirements…that I actually am braced for, but looking at the rate at which the little blue bar at the bottom of the screen is filling up, the quests I’ve done and things I’ve killed in Uldum have already grabbed me about 15% and I’m nowhere near finished with the zone (complaint: Either stop making the damn ground yellow, Blizzard, or start making the quest exclamation marks a higher contrast color with whatever background you’re viewing them against. Same goes for sparkles on environmental crap I’m supposed to fondle.), so I’m assuming at this point that I’ll ding before I move on to Deepholm. The weird thing is that every other zone before Cataclysm I played in pretty much the way I’m apparently supposed to do this one - I’d hop in, do a few quests to get friendly with whoever lived there, and then go somewhere else. The new linear quest structure seems to be tapping into my Scanned Every Planet to Depleted Status drive. I guess I’m just weird that way.

5299

If you’re willing to do a little Auction House trolling, it’s easy to buy some greens to push your level up so they get unlocked (in the worst case, you can get some PVP gear with resilience on it, because that stuff is moderately easy for crafters to make). I have a Death Knight that hit 80 and went and bought four or five pieces of gear so he’s able to queue for the first two cata dungeons (which is all you’re eligible for at 80). And if you’re patient, it doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg.

5300

Holy cow, you’re not kidding. I thought the Cata zones were the coolest things ever until I recently started leveling my DK alt through them. (He’s my 3rd alt to go from 80 to 85) Getting him through the Cata content is more of a chore than leveling him through the WotLK content.

I still think the pre-60 content is super-awesome though, even though it’s a similar experience. I’m not sure why those zones are fun, while the 80-85 stuff is tedious, but… they are.