World of Warcraft: Shattering

[White Haven]

Not to put too fine a point on it, but did Garrosh actually do anything in the Northrend campaign, or did he just stand next to Thrall and trashtalk the Alliance in ToC?

[Civil War Man]

Not to put too fine a point on it, but did Garrosh actually do anything in the Northrend campaign, or did he just stand next to Thrall and trashtalk the Alliance in ToC?

He didn't really do a whole lot, but how much of the public actually knows that? The player characters have seen and done more than a swine herder in Orgrimmar or a vintner in Stormwind could even comprehend. Only the military participated in the offensive. And not the whole military, since you had to keep a defense force back home to protect against bandits or opportunistic attacks from the opposing faction. And even of the military that went to Northrend, only a very small force actually stepped foot in Icecrown Citadel, and the vast majority of that force was aligned with either the Argent Crusade or the Ebon Blade, two groups that are not allied with either the Horde or the Alliance.

As far as most Orc civilians are concerned, Garrosh was in charge of the Horde offensive in Northrend, therefore he must have been instrumental in taking down the Lich King. Same goes for human civilians and Varian, judging by the statue outside Stormwind Keep.

[Civil War Man]

Ghetto Edit: To add to the fact that most civilians would not know that Varian and Garrosh did not do much to advance the war against the Lich King, here's another thing to consider. The war, for those who were on the front lines, was pretty much a disaster. Both the Horde and Alliance sustained massive military losses for little to no appreciable gains, and on numerous occasions just barely staved off total destruction due to the actions of a single person or a small strike team. You tell the general population this, and the first question they'll ask is why their leaders threw away so many lives for nothing. So the leadership of the Alliance and the Horde manufacture some hero stories so they won't have to deal with a pissed off populace while trying to make up for their losses in Northrend in the fight against Deathwing.

[LadyTevar]

Squeee! Nitram bought me the Gryphon Hatchling, so now my Troll Druid has a baby gryphon galloping along behind her, trying to keep up

In other news, I've just been puttering around Orgrimmar, doing whatever quests come up. My troll has yet to even pick a profession, but I'm thinking about Herbalism for her. My Worgen has skinning and leather working both, which works well for her with the natural bonus Worgen get for skinning. I'm just not sure what else to take other than Herbalism for my druid.

Suggestions welcome.

[Ghost Rider]

With herbing, alchemy makes the direct usage of it. But since it is a gathering profession, you could tag another gathering profession if you just want to make money from it all.

[Highlord Laan]

I find it amusing that the central power of the Alliance seems to be shifting form Stormwind and the humans to Darnassus and the Night Elves. Stormwinds armies are getting the shit beat out of them, falling back on their fortifications, and struggling to fight against internal power (Defias, ect) while trying their damdest to hold onto their foreign conquests. Opposite of this are the Night Elves, who are ruining the horde's shit from Ashenvale to Feralas, with a single loss in Stonetalon, blunting the Forsaken invasion of Gilneas and evacuating a huge portion of it's populace.

In Feralas, we get to see some nasty implications for the horde on what will happen once the Night Elves start fielding groups of Sentinel-trained worgen commandos and shock troops.

Guess thats what happens when a braindead jackass that can't even grasp the importance of supply lines decided to pick a fight with a 10,000+ year old warrior civilization.

[Flagg]

I find it amusing that the central power of the Alliance seems to be shifting form Stormwind and the humans to Darnassus and the Night Elves. Stormwinds armies are getting the shit beat out of them, falling back on their fortifications, and struggling to fight against internal power (Defias, ect) while trying their damdest to hold onto their foreign conquests. Opposite of this are the Night Elves, who are ruining the horde's shit from Ashenvale to Feralas, with a single loss in Stonetalon, blunting the Forsaken invasion of Gilneas and evacuating a huge portion of it's populace.

In Feralas, we get to see some nasty implications for the horde on what will happen once the Night Elves start fielding groups of Sentinel-trained worgen commandos and shock troops.

Guess thats what happens when a braindead jackass that can't even grasp the importance of supply lines decided to pick a fight with a 10,000+ year old warrior civilization.

But really, who needs air support?

[CaptainChewbacca]

In a similar vein, its really bothering me how IRRELEVANT Ironforge has become in Cataclysm. Everything operates through Stormwind. The invasions launch from Stormwind, the portals link to stormwind, if it weren't for Greatfather Winter I wouldn't have gone to Ironforge this month.

Maybe its a sign of how bad the war is going with the Dark Irons, or how everything is in chaos with the loss (not death) of Magni, but it really bothers me.

On an unrelated note, I am now 'Over 9000'. W00t.

[Broomstick]

Rolled a goblin on another server because my usual Horde server character slots were maxed out. While I was charging around the starting areas I got invited to join a guild. This gets hilarious and I'm sure it will end in tears - for someone else.

Frankly, I couldn't give two hoots about that toon being in a guild, as I was mainly just interested in seeing the goblin starting levels. But the guy recruiting said that they were trying to max out guild membership and I thought, what the heck, no different than signing someone's guild charter so they could get a vanity guild or whatever, so I joined.

Two days later, the guild master is screeching that if you aren't active enough you'll get cut. OK.... I thought we were building membership but whatever, maybe they got what they wanted and now want to trim the rolls. Then it was "the guild bank is full, buy stuff at 75% of auction price!". Sure... except all the stuff in the g'bank was Cataclysm level and I have a level 15 toon. Whatever. So, anyhow, and hour later the guy trying to clean the bank out is having a meltdown because no one is buying. I pointed out the heavy recruiting of beginning levels not a week earlier and that the mats being sold were incompatible with them, not to mention a lack of gold for early toons. Also mentioned that other guilds offered g'bank sales at 50% of auction. Reply? "What? 75% isn't enough savings? They should be happy to get that discount!". Of course, this is also after the guild had the perk where any looting you do earns the g'bank money. Yes, everyone is also able to draw on guild funds for repairs, which was very nice, but hey, I could see why the sales weren't happening. Whatever.

The next time I sign on it's screeching about people not leveling fast enough.

The time after that, it's screeching about people not putting enough time in on a daily/weekly basis.

This morning I sign on the goblin and apparently I am no longer a member of the guild.

Can't say I'll miss 'em.

By the way - I much prefer the worgen starting levels to the goblins. Just personal preference, have not yet analyzed why I feel that way.

[White Haven]

The Gilneans steal Forsaken catapults and use them to hurl werewolves at Forsaken offshore naval assets. Somehow many things have trouble matching that.

[TheFeniX]

We've been farming HoO heroic the last couple of days for the "easy" 490 JP. But I've advanced to the point where I can run randoms and it isn't on me if we wipe. I'm just glad my DK is a jewelcrafter, otherwise gemming my pally would be hideously expensive as you can't get away with just slotting stamina gems in every empty slot.

Since healers can't spam fast heals for 2 hours anymore, I have to keep my damage intake as consistent as possible. But a lot of this shit is on the healers as well because the tank really needs to be pulling about 5k DPS and I can't do that when I'm busy burning heals on myself because the healer went out of mana 30 seconds into the boss fight. Many healers I've talked to haven't even considered reading up on a respec.

That and if the fucking DPS would stay out of the void zones, we'd all be a lot happier.

Tol Barad: is the system broken or am I missing something? I was in on a few with alliance attacking and we've taken it by forcing the horde to spread out and defend their towers. But over the last few days, they've been stacking at one capture point with maybe 1 or 2 players to ninja other towers. Since horde usually outnumber us, there's almost no counter. I did manage to pull off a flank and kill 3 healers (with the help of a 5-box player, haha!). We took the point, but without enough time to do anything else. And when you consider it would not have happened without a fucking 5-boxer single-targetting the shit out of each healer in turn, it wouldn't have worked without him.

I liked it when Wintergrasp gave the advantages to the attackers. It forces defenders to work harder and keeps the instances from getting locked to one faction.

[Molyneux]

Rolled a goblin on another server because my usual Horde server character slots were maxed out. While I was charging around the starting areas I got invited to join a guild. This gets hilarious and I'm sure it will end in tears - for someone else.

Frankly, I couldn't give two hoots about that toon being in a guild, as I was mainly just interested in seeing the goblin starting levels. But the guy recruiting said that they were trying to max out guild membership and I thought, what the heck, no different than signing someone's guild charter so they could get a vanity guild or whatever, so I joined.

Two days later, the guild master is screeching that if you aren't active enough you'll get cut. OK.... I thought we were building membership but whatever, maybe they got what they wanted and now want to trim the rolls. Then it was "the guild bank is full, buy stuff at 75% of auction price!". Sure... except all the stuff in the g'bank was Cataclysm level and I have a level 15 toon. Whatever. So, anyhow, and hour later the guy trying to clean the bank out is having a meltdown because no one is buying. I pointed out the heavy recruiting of beginning levels not a week earlier and that the mats being sold were incompatible with them, not to mention a lack of gold for early toons. Also mentioned that other guilds offered g'bank sales at 50% of auction. Reply? "What? 75% isn't enough savings? They should be happy to get that discount!". Of course, this is also after the guild had the perk where any looting you do earns the g'bank money. Yes, everyone is also able to draw on guild funds for repairs, which was very nice, but hey, I could see why the sales weren't happening. Whatever.

The next time I sign on it's screeching about people not leveling fast enough.

The time after that, it's screeching about people not putting enough time in on a daily/weekly basis.

This morning I sign on the goblin and apparently I am no longer a member of the guild.

Can't say I'll miss 'em.

By the way - I much prefer the worgen starting levels to the goblins. Just personal preference, have not yet analyzed why I feel that way.

Wait - the guild expected you to BUY things from the guild bank? That's bizarre. Every guild I've ever been in has functioned on a "take what you need, contribute what you can" basis, with withdrawal limits on each tab.

[Rahvin]

No kidding - my guild doesn't charge for anything. In fact, we go out of our way to get each other what we need to gear up - I was given nearly all the mats for my epic crafted chest piece the other day, just because we could. We just all try to make gearing up every individual, especially the raiders, a big community effort where everybody contributes what we can. The better geared we all are, the easier a time we'll collectively have in raids.

But then, my guild is really small, and focused on 10-player content. We start on Bastion of Twilight tonight...hope we're ready.

[CaptainChewbacca]

Tol Barad is buggy, broken, and frustrating. For some reason the horde can camp the alliance questgivers and our guards won't attack, but the guards on their bases can one-shot me. Does Blizzard just hate the alliance or what?

[Highlord Laan]

Tol Barad is buggy, broken, and frustrating. For some reason the horde can camp the alliance questgivers and our guards won't attack, but the guards on their bases can one-shot me. Does Blizzard just hate the alliance or what?

Weighing the work Horde got put into it, and the lackluster, barely-polished and poorly executed/half done Alliance experience, yes.

[TheFeniX]

Supposedly, to "Fix" Tol Barad, Blizzard is giving 180 for defending, but 1800 for successfully attacking. This has lead to the Horde on our server purposely not fighting back while defending and vice versa. I'd rather do WG, but I figure I'll just farm some honor and build a PVP set for my pally.

[Kuja]

Tol Barad is buggy, broken, and frustrating. For some reason the horde can camp the alliance questgivers and our guards won't attack, but the guards on their bases can one-shot me. Does Blizzard just hate the alliance or what?

Weighing the work Horde got put into it, and the lackluster, barely-polished and poorly executed/half done Alliance experience, yes.

Ever since BC came out it's quite clear that Blizzard was far more interested in pursuing Horde characters, storylines, and developments, while giving the Alliance either bare minimum or simply leaving them to rot. Cataclysm does not surprise me with the Alliance's treatment, though it does surprise me with just how abysmal said treatment has been.

[CaptainChewbacca]

Yeah, on my server there's now an unspoken agreement that nobody defends Tol Barad. It gets capped in under 2 minutes now.

[Serafina]

I must say, i am really positively impressed with the improvements they made to the early levels (i got myself a test account).

First, the spell/ability progression early on is really much better now. Getting cat form as a druid on level 8 really helps a lot with leveling. The same goes for a lot of important spells - not only makes it leveling faster, but also a lot less boring.

Second, the questlines have gotten a lot of improvement. You get several quests in the same area at the same time (like one for killing a leader, a second for killing mobs and a third for collecting something), the quests are generally less convoluted and they added some really nice, small things (like a guide for complicated caves, or an auto-teleport outside).

Third, talents have a lot of improvement early on - chosing your specialisation at level 10 has a nice impact. You no longer waste 10, 15 levels on small improvements that no one will notice.


That's just for the early levels - but to me, they actually managed to make the game fun again. Now, if they can do the same for the dungeons (just saw one so far) and the end-game content, i might actually stay.

[White Haven]

Heroic dungeon tuning, now that I've done them all, is very hit-or-miss. Many instances have one boss that is wildly out-of-line with the difficulty of the rest of the instance, and these bosses don't give any greater reward than the most trivial of them. All but one of them, however, are skippable, which is a small mercy. What does not work well, is the random group builder given that a number of the heroic fights punish certain group compositions for various reasons. The inclusion of group templates would be welcome, tuned to the instance being run. All mana-hungry caster DPS with no way to easily regain mana in a long fight? Let's not send them to Ammunae. All melee DPS? Corborus is a heinously bad idea.

Don't get me wrong, overall I love the new, difficult heroics. There are just a few rough edges.

[Broken]

Heroic dungeons really remind of their original release back in The Burning Crusade. Group make up plays a huge part in whether or not you can blown through a given dungeon or beat your head against a wall for hours. The difficulty seems fine and I enjoy a bit of a challenge for my daily heroic or two, its the need for recastable CC like polymorph that dooms certain parties.

[TheFeniX]

Shamans really are the kings of Heroics right now. Banish Elementals, Hex Humaniods, 5 second CD interrupts. Heroism may have lost some of it's shine since Mages got Time Warp, but polymorph is getting nerfed (man I hope it's only for PVP) and the mage's interrupts aren't as powerful as the shamans. I almost refuse to run a random without my buddy's Elemental Shaman. He has no issues running randoms by himself though as only the most idiotic of group will complain about his DPS (which is still pretty good considering). DKs are also underutilized. Mind Freeze and Strangulate share a separate Global CD, and mind freeze is back up in 10 seconds. If you're specced for it in frost (which you should be because it's a requirement for PvP), it costs no runic power and will not interrupt your rotation in any way.

But try relying on a Pug DK to use it for the sole purpose of interrupting Baron Ashbury's "Pain and Suffering" and get ready to run your healer out of mana.

My problem right now is, since I'm geared, specced, and gemmed for raiding, I cannot carry an under-geared healer through heroics anymore. Speccing for WoG and stacking evasion, rather than mitigation was great for farming a few bosses on heroic for gear and JP. But reworking all that for raiding means I need consistent heals throughout the fight, which is the way it supposed to be.

Still, we have our fun. We finished a guild run on Heroic Grim Batol last night. The third boss fight was awesome at the end:
Dragon phase is down to like 20%. An add spawns and targets me.
"Ok guys, hit the add..... guys, hit the add...... THE ADD, HIT THE FUCKING ADD"
I watch as it looms closer and closer but everyone was focused on the boss. Also, our healer was stacked on me.
::bubble and charge the add (opposite direction of the healer, but said healer moved with me). He explodes killing the healer::
Luckily, the boss went into phase 3 like right after and he only has like 800k HP total (less than 200k at the start of phase 3).

Erudax though...... Man he's a pain in the ass.

[White Haven]

The specific mention of 'PVP duration' in the patch notes for all the CC nerfs makes that quite clear, Fenix.

[Darth Yan]

You know Kujas comments are very similar to what zero punctuation expressed in their review (namely that blood elves have taken away the "hottest female" excuse, while giving the worgen a less cool backstory then the goblins)

[Civil War Man]

DKs are also underutilized. Mind Freeze and Strangulate share a separate Global CD, and mind freeze is back up in 10 seconds. If you're specced for it in frost (which you should be because it's a requirement for PvP), it costs no runic power and will not interrupt your rotation in any way.

While I am personally specced into Endless Winter, it is very much an optional talent. It's invaluable when on interrupt duty, but Frost has very little leeway when it comes to allocating talent points, so putting points in Endless Winter means taking them out of talents like Improved Blood Tap or major quality-of-life buffs like On a Pale Horse.

As for Strangulate, I recommend taking the glyph since it adds an extra 2 seconds to the silence if you can catch a caster mid-cast with it, which is more useful than a vast majority of the other Death Knight major glyphs (especially Glyph of Pillar of Frost, which takes an amazing ability and makes it objectively bad).