Damn, I'd love to join you guys, but I'm just starting out and I'm swamped with my friends wanting to do PvE and PvP as Alliance/Horde respectively and don't think I'll have the time.

My friend said the server was overloaded last night, so he had no idea what went on. Supposedly Deathwing was doing random attacks on cities and owned a few people though, saw quite a few skeletons scattered around Orgrimmar

Is it me or does the Tier 11 gear for Warriors look terrible? My orc looks like some sort of ice elemental with that BS on I mean the mounts and weapons look cool, and the overall matching set is nice, but that helmet is FUGLY! Mages look sweet though.

here if you guys wanna see em

http://forum.myextralife.com/topic/3...-ugly-tier-11/

I'm on Ner'zhul for Horde and Kiljaeden for Alliance.

 

Mage T11 > *

 

No lie. Mages are so fun. I need to get my 80's out and level them, it's been a while...

 

wow my priest gear looks like shit.. thank god im shadow and you wont really see it anyway!

 

Hit 82 last night in Vortex Pinnacle.

Blackrock Caverns was ok. Nothing special. Pretty easy.

Vortex Pinncle I think is going to a gigantic pain in the ass on heroic. There are these star lookin things that have an arcane barrage machine gun. Only way to do it is to run in there and AoE them all down assuming the healer can keep everyone up.

So far I really like this expansion. I have not been to Vash yet, because I HATE trying to fight underwater as a caster. I know they have fixed it so that it is a "better" experience, but I cannot get the stigma out of my head that fighting under water has always been horrible in the previous game.

 

Vash is buggy as hell. They were having issues for a good part of the day on my server, and it just so happened I was in Dalaran after doing rep quests, and I hearthed to a cave in Vash, but right after I did, the server crashed. Logged in, hearth was on CD and I was still in Dalaran, but there weren't any mages AND for some reason I couldn't talk into any of the chat channels relogging didn't work.

 

does the new expansion change anything to the game besides content.

what i mean does it look nicer?

 

I don't think so.... but then again I have basically everything cranked down to low (can't stand choppy framerate)

There's some welcome changes though. They changed the questing system, so some quests just pop up randomly in your log, and some other changes. Expect your purples to be replaced by random green drops.

A negative is, well I didn't start playing til recently so it may be weird to me but you'll be questing with a ton of people, both horde and alliance. It's weird since the other faction leaves you alone for the most part but you'll get ganked more often than usual, but the opportunity to gank is there too.

 

im on a PvE server..

(i think thats what it is, the one where you have to turn on the mode before you can get ganked by horder if you're alliance)

 

but yea i remember when the 1st expansion came out, everyones IIRC tier 2 purples were replaced by random greens like they were trash

 

The water engine is completely redone and the water looks like actual water now. Looks 100 times better IMO.

Other than that, they made it so when you quest underwater (esp. in Vash) that once you make contact with the ground, you are actually on the ground. So you can sit down and eat or drink, which is NOT how it used to be. You would have to swim to the shore to eat or drink.

The did up the graphics so now there is an ultra setting, which makes things look a lot better. They also increased the distance of your viewing distance and also how far you can scroll out.

The new zones look amazing.

My only wish is that they do not scale down the size of DW when he is available to raid. That dude is HUGE.

 

I tried tanking in a normal instance (Stonecore) and man, what a pain in the ass. It seems like people completely forgot how to run dungeons.... yeah the difficulty is much higher so you can't just faceroll the whole thing but I was pulling mobs as small as I could but some people were idiots and kept pulling additional mobs and we wiped more times than I can remember (helm broke, a few other pieces were very close to breaking). Tried taking on the 3rd boss, the big stone guy that blocks the way.... every time I could handle tanking, but the healer would run out of mana and then the proverbial shit would hit the fan.



I'm getting much better at Battlegrounds at least. When I first started playing getting ganked would bum me out so much. I still remember, if an alliance ambushed me I'd freeze like "oh shit, what do I do?!?!"

But now with a little bit of hectic BG experience under my belt, I'm getting a little better. Doesn't hurt that my warrior happens to wears plate either. My heart rate still goes up a little when I'm about to charge into battle (pun intended)

I think arms warriors are probably a bit OP in PVP. 1v1 evenly matched gear-wise I usually come out on top, and I still don't completely know what's going on. Seriously, my warrior wears plate, has a long range stun, throwdown (5-second melee stun), a root (improved hamstring), AOE fear, spell interrupt....


call me a nerd, but if you couldn't tell, I think this game is freaking awesome.

 

People are not running dungeons for that exact reason. They are hard. If you are going to run the new dungeons, you need to do with people you can talk to on vent or hope and pray that you dont get put into a group with a bunch of wrath babies.

I say they are hard, but its not the instance that is hard. What makes it hard is that you have a ton of people that started playing when Wrath came out and dont know otherwise. They don't know about crowd control. All they know about is pull as much as you can and AoE them all down. All of the Wrath dungeons were a joke, even the heroic ones. Now they have gone back and did them the way the BC instances were.. Hard.

I don't know how long you have been playing but there were multiple heroics in BC that people just wouldn't do because they were so hard. Even with good gear, if people didnt know what to do, they would have a wipefest all day long.

Healers are also to blaime here. They learned in wrath that you could get away with just spamming your largest heal. You could do that all day long because mana was pretty much never an issue. Now Healers have to use their smallest heal and just keep people topped off.

If you are tanking, just make sure that you mark any ranged or healers that could be CC'd. If you can get your group to do that, then you shouldnt have a problem with your dungeon run.

 

how big are the raids? have they gone back to how it was originally, i think 40 man? or was it even bigger i cant even remember anymore.

 

No. They are done with raids that big (thank god). There are 10 and 25 man raids. What changed there is that they made them share the same lockout. So you can either do 10 or 25 in one week, BUT they made both sizes of raids drop the same gear with the except the 25 man drops 50% more gear.

Which I like. I really dislike 25 man raids. Too hard to organize and too much drama.

 

I gotta say I'm partially to blame here too, due to my lack of experience. I just started playing at the end of October, so I've probably been spoiled by the ease of the dungeons. For one run I had a godsend - a shaman that ran the instance a couple of times and did exactly what you did - marked the ranged NPCs. But they left because they had to go (or possibly cause we were wiping so much) and we we're screwed shortly after that.

Good advice though. I think I'm going to start running instances with more of my friends now instead of just jumping into random queues. I did notice that whenever I happened to be grouped up with people from the same guild, instances were usually cake.

 

I kind of miss those 40 man raids, kind of a sight seeing that many people.

 

they got rid of the 40 man raids back when BC came out.

 

Another thing that you have to keep in mind is that by the time that the Random Dungeon Finder came out, most people were in ICC gear. So all of the dungeons were easily facerolled through. Once we outgear all of the new dungeons with T11, these will probably be facerolled as well.

Most people right now are in quest and dungeon blues and greens, which is what the dungeons are tuned for. That's another reason why they are so "hard".

For what it is worth, we two manned the last boss in vortex pinnacle the other day from about 50% health left.. A dps shaman and a pally tank. The boss hit like a wet noodle. It was one of the mechanics that killed the healer and the other two dps.

You just have to take is slow as a tank. Mark the ranged for CC and keep an eye on the healers mana until they figure out how to heal again. I think there is only a couple of classes these days that can't CC. So you should be good to go if you are doing randoms. As a tank, I would make a macro for you to spam at the beginning of the dungeon that explains how things are going to go. CCing ranged, waiting for healer mana, etc.

 

Good advice, and yeah the bosses usually don't kill me, it's when massive amounts of adds come out of nowhere. At least these blues and greens are cheap to repair. Seems like its just experience though.... I usually DPS, and all I usually worry about is my threat meter. I try and help out with debuffs and CCs when I can. When I tank there's that, and I have to make sure some add isn't picking away at my healer, manage ALL threat instead of just who I'm attacking, make sure I'm not standing in some sort of AOE, focus on my health and healer's mana, etc. etc....

Luckily people understand for the most part.

 

Sigh. Been busy leveling, farming rep/gear since launch. Lol. My last activity here before today was before December 7th. At this point I'm already decked out in full heroic and justice point gear, and only thing left to do is grind out the last of the reputations for enchants and epics.

Anyways, from my perspective, Cata is overtuned for the "average" wow-player. For people who have been active in progression raid, its not too bad. I think healers got hit the worst - healers I've been raiding with for the past five years are saying that healing has changed tons and that mana management is an issue.

My guild and I managed to down a couple 25 man raid bosses this week, with people in quest greens/blues. Omnitron Defense Council downed, Halfus Wyrmbreaker downed, and Conclave of Wind at 15%. It feels good to be working on new progression content, instead of the same ICC25 for the previous 11 months.

 

Frost mages... any tips? Orc warrior here.

I'm about to respec my Prot Warrior from a tanking spec to a PvP spec, cause as hard hitting as Arms is, Prot just has more stuns, interrupts and closing abilities. Hell, I even did decent in PvP in a tanking spec. They never even polymorph me cause they don't need to, I can't even get close to getting them down to half as arms. Once I blow my cooldown on heroic leap (1min CD) and then Charge (20sec CD) I'm pretty much done if he still lives/escapes after that.

I've never played as a mage, what kind of CC/escape moves do they have, and what are their CDs if anyone knows? I know there's blink, frost nova, and frost armor or something but I'm not sure what the CD is on those.

any frost mages on Ner'zhul want to practice against me?