Be Excellent To Each Other

A thoroughly deserved 10/10 at Eurogamer -

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2010- ... iew?page=1

Which helpfully says most of what I wanted to, but a few things are worth highlighting.

First up, this really is an MMO without the grind, if you've played WoW in the past, and I mean vanilla, Burning Crusade, or even Lich King - then you haven't played WoW, because Blizzard have rewritten the rules. It truly works as a game in its own right, it doesn't need to pad stuff out with endless grind or repetition, the game is now so big and so wonderfully put together, that it functions really well as an enjoyable and challenging ongoing experience - no longer are you asked to do the same thing thirty times over just to pass the time to the level cap.

Outland and Northrend were a massive improvement on vanilla, but Cataclysm takes it to a whole new level.

It still looks and sounds positively wonderful without requiring a nutcase PC to run (most laptops can make a decent job if it, any PC with a graphics card should be fine).

It's absolutely loaded with fun and humour, if you take the time to read the quest descriptions and speech, some of it is proper 'LOL' funny, although as with all Blizzard games, they do like the serious and dramatic stuff as well. (It even gets quite melancholy at times.)

As a solo experience game, it's entirely possible to play from Level 1 to 85 and never interact with other real people at all (although you'll want to buy and sell on the auction house), however, if you want to play 5-man instances or 10/25-man raids, you'll need to group up. This is best done in a friendly guild or you can simply use the dungeon finder groups. Quite a few 'normal' quests are designed to be more fun and/or require more than one player, a quick shout out in the 'General' channel will almost always yield someone to group up with just for a couple of quests.

(It's in instances and raids that the difficulty ramps up, normal 5-mans and raids can be tough, but 5-man heroics and heroic raids are in particular ruthlessly difficult but in an entirely fair way.)

PvP or PvE is down to a choice of realm when you roll your character, PvE means you can only fight players of the opposite faction by mutual consent, PvP pretty much makes the entire game a free-for-all, even if you're just out doing a bit of a peaceful questing.

It's never going to be everyone's cup of tea of course, but I think WoW gets a lot of stick from people who don't really know what it's about, have prejudices that make no sense, or played it five years ago to burnout and don't realise how much it's changed.

Me and my guild are on the realm of Frostwhisper (Alliance faction), which is a PvP server. Anyone fancies giving the game a try with a friendly face around feel free to give me a shout (a PM here to let me know would be the best bet).

I know there isn't much love for WoW here, but I think that's a genuine shame because BEEX is in a lot of ways a 'games forum' and most of you like games of various flavours, and I reckon WoW deserves to be given a chance.

10-day free trial here - https://eu.battle.net/account/creation/wow/signup/

(Works on PC and Mac.)

Love for wow you say? Why hello this thread

Doomhammer EU here alliance, I got me 6 80+ characters. My warlock is 85, DK 84 and after that it will be my druid who is at 83.

We just had a guild implosion over the summer. Guild A had a load of us leave to join Guild B, one of the people who joined with me became an officer in about a week as he is one of the best raid leaders in wow, he can take group of average players (who think they are better than they are) and make them kings slayers. Problems started when he had to go away from wow because of work for the summer and oop suddenly the so called "hardcore" players couldn't down shit. Most of the raiders left to join Guild C including the GM who took the guild bank when he left and put his lvl 1 alt in charge, but raid leader (lets call him "codine") came back for cata and got the GM to transfer all of his powers over. So now Codine and mana are going to give building the guild up again a go, at the moment it's casuals and a hell of a lot of alts never online.
I'm actually glad a couple of them are gone because they were grade A dicks and there was a big problem where if you came to raiding late the way the guild was run by the old GM meant that people were replacing and vendoring T10/11 level boss purples when the lower end of recount were still in T9, at least 3 of us were still using 200i trinkets when one DK in particular who I won't name (blynket) got a slight upgrade every single week. Basically they were lewt whores who couldn't give a fuck if you had shit gear so long as they could win recount and have a go at you for sucking. The aforementioned DK also had a big problem because he was frost and point blank refused to take any of the threat reduction talents as it would be a DPS loss (he also didn't take that frost raid buff talent) so unfortunately he also used to win omen as well.

As for cata. Two words. Harrison Jones.

ps, I can get this thread up to 100 pages all on my own

Also don't sign up via that link use http://www.wow-europe.com/en/info/faq/r ... riend.html you can do it on a trial as well, bonus being if you do get hooked in your referrer gets a mount and month's free game time, you also get insane leveling bonus' for the pair of you.

@NativityTradition you will find the links to send out RAF invites in your battlenet account.

Heh, the joys of guild politics.....

We run ours on the basis that everyone is based on the Isle of Man, or at least, is directly friends/family of one of our IOM based members.

That way we all have stuff in common to yak about in guild chat, and in a lot of cases, know each other and are good friends IRL - there are five of us who all work in the same place.

Most of us have had variable experiences with guilds in the past (they can get very cliquey and unbalanced/unfair down to the GM/officers and how dickish they are/aren't), so our current GM just posted on a local set of forums sounding out interest, and we've managed to get a really good group of people together. We can put together a decent 10-man, although we only got as far as Putricide in ICC but we still had people levelling/gearing at that point - but we're hoping to do full progression through Cat as a guild, however it's nice and chilled out, we only have three 85s at the moment, my tank is at 84, I'll probably ding 85 over the christmas holidays, and then make a start on my 80 hunter or pally. (I really should get round to finishing off my druid and mage too, who both got stuck at 71 for some reason.)

Oh well Decca, nice to see I at least have one other person to talk to about WoW

Today's screenshots demonstrate humour.

...

No, wait.

Eh?

That's not even remotely funny.

RIS?

Your all n00bs.

Anyway, over time, my daily screenshots will evolve into an excellent portrait of the wonder that is WoW - I just need time to get the story arc going.

Oh goodie judging other people's UIs ^_^

le gasp!! default! !!!

The only add-on I'm running at the moment is Auctioneer, (can't be without that!), everything else Blizzard appear to have incorporated quite nicely into the standard UI (Quest Helper and MSBT in particular). I'll probably have to specialise with a few add-ons again once we get into running 5-man heroics and/or raids, but certainly at the moment I'm getting by without.

Nice mount BTW, where does that one come from?

You get it from the DK ebon hold flight chap. When wrath hit it was unique in that it scaled with riding skill. Cost me 1kG when I bought it - not sure how much now.

Can't decide if I want to level my Druid now DK is 85, I''m worried about trying to heal with the kit I had and moonkin is just boring me senseless.


Edit:

BOOM

ohgodfixit

Thank fuck I stopped playing this.

Any particular reason? When was the last time you played? Vanilla/TBC/WOTLK?

That isn't a loaded or a sneering question in any way, I took a two month break myself before Cat was released because I wanted a change of 'gaming scenery' as it were, but since returning to WoW I've realised it is possible to play the game in a far more 'casual' way and still find time to play other games as well. I readily accept that WoW can become somewhat consuming if you let it.

Cat is probably the most laid-back and fun iteration of WoW yet, a million miles removed from the exacting and technical nature of the old vanilla zones, where every point on every stat could make a serious difference and thus needed to be chased up whatever the cost.

The hardcore technical stuff is still there (the 5-man heroics are ruthless compared to the Lich King variety), but the vast bulk of the game is far more chilled out and just there for the fun of it more than it's ever been IMO.

Grab your dick and double click PORN PORN PORN

I'm getting a bit too old and fat and listless for porn these days - and besides which modern commercial porn is pretty reprehensible, with all the face fucking and DPs, and ass to mouth and general abusiveness - so I can't watch that anyway.

A bit of a amateur from time to time maybe (you know, where the participants could believably be enjoying what it is they're actually doing).

All that said, watching 'A Serbian Film' has pretty much put me off porn, for reasons that would become obvious for anyone who watched it.

This is why I like WoW, it makes me happy without recourse to the increasingly unappealing world of sex. (Not that I don't like sex, but my days of 'rabbit relationships' are well behind me. (I kept a diary for a few months back in 2000, I had a scan through it a few weeks ago, me and Mrs AE were at it once or twice (or thrice!) on a daily basis - that's a week's quota now!))

Also, WoW is ace, just to maintain the topic.

Here I am informing Mrs AE that I need to get my pet cat out before we embark on some questing.

It's a sort-of related to WoW via a machinima video someone made for the Avenue Q song.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRgNOyCnbqg

Holy crap.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/vi ... f-Warcraft

Now can look even more of a belm playing this

One good thing about Cataclysm, the devs have realised that quests that are miles away from the quest giver are tedious as hell.

This is just a single quest in a single zone, it's unique in the game, so it's not like there's a big fuss made about it or anything.

In a Katamari style diversion, you are given a 'Fusion Core' to play with, and are tasked with killing 1000 Crazed Gnomes at the end of a particularly fun quest chain. (You just roll around and squash them, the squeals of pain and burning as the little gnomes stick to the ball of fiery death is amusing.)

In a nice nod to the inspiration, one of the quest rewards is called the 'Kata-Mary Crown'.

It's the screaming that makes it art.


Leveling my hunter right now and lolling at all the people who switched to BM - my survival hunter with a fox (ferocity) is doing hilariously well owing to the broken cooldown on Misdirection (there is currently no cooldown on Misdirection) all I do is hit that and mend pet when I'm out of focus, which is rare because the mobs are usually dead by then.

The fox is a "interesting" pet, I swear to god it runs off on it's own to chase untargetable butterflies and whatnot.


this may be a problem with it's tailspin hitting out of phase mobs though

Really tempted to dive back into WoW, but I stopped playing before even the first expansion came out because it ruined my life. Must resist.

Just another couple of things from the same zone (there are five new zones in the expansion alone, all of them containing this variety and pot pourri of stuff to do).

A basic RTS/tower defence mission (there have been a couple of riffs on this on the journey from 80 to 85), it's not exactly Starcraft but as a 5 minute novelty as part of a massive MMO, it's still impressive stuff - with a couple of unit classes to use and three or four moves usually.

(Also experienced, a Sea Horse dancing rhythm style reaction game (no really), a biplane fight over a desert with guided missiles and machine guns, using a mobile cannon turret to shoot down annoyed Ancient Colossi, and a million other 'let's chuck this in for a laugh' real fun style quests.)

Uldum as a zone is a total Raiders Of The Lost Ark homage, (screenshotted below is 'Harrison Jones' fighting with a burly bald German looking chap in front of a plane that duly cuts him to shreds), with characters based around Belloc and various crazy Germans, a variation on the Ark of the Covenant, and so on, including a deranged goblin who sends you on a mission called 'Fashionism' to collect smart uniforms from dead soldiers and suchlike - and whose pet turkey that he tries to save through a bizarre arcane ritual is called 'Gobbles' (we can joke about Goebbels and the Nazis now, I'm sure). (The turkey ends up roasted, unfortunately, and the crazy German screams 'NINE NINE NINE NINE' as he realises he got the number of idols required for the ritual wrong, it should have been nine, not eight - yeah I know groan-worthy but it's such a light-hearted zone I couldn't help but laugh at the audacious crapness of it, especially since this was close to the exciting finale of it all.)

I'd pretty much fallen out with WoW towards the end of the Lich King expansion, but with the new Cataclysm expansion, Blizzard have been incredibly bold and incredibly skilled in reinventing the entire levelling experience whilst still maintaining that awesomely challenging endgame with instances, heroics and then raids - with loads more to come over the course of this expansion.

Tremendous stuff

How have you not mentioned the Plants Vs. Zombies game they've added in?

Give it a try, if you've not played since Vanilla then you really can't even imagine how far Blizzard have brought the game on.

Questing and levelling isn't now just 'something you have to do' to get to the juicy endgame, it's entertaining and involving, gives decent gear rewards, lets you see the wonder of the game world itself, enjoy questing with others/guildies as required - and of course at Level 60 now you get the flying ability around the entire old game world, as they've retrospectively fitted it to the entire game - it's pretty weird when you fly around Loch Modan or The Barrens for the first time, remembering how it all used to be on foot without even a ground mount to help you out

Only trouble is, now they've re-done the whole of the old word, you reach a really fucking boring set of 20 levels when you move into Outland and then Northrend. I hear they've increased the experience gains from 70-80, but that doesn't stop you having to endure the most boring quests, zones and dungeons they've ever conceived. Yawn!

To be fair it's not that boring the first time and now you will have flight from 58?/60? it's a breeze.

If they've managed to make it "better", I'm really not interested. I just don't want to do it. I was hopelessly addicted.

You've had flight from 60 for a long, long while. Then you had to slog in Northrend until level 77 because the developers felt the need to stop people flying until they'd experience the content on foot at least once beforehand. But all of that didn't stop the zones and quests being incredibly dull.

I've had a try of Cataclysm on the free trial, and it's a massive, gigantic improvement. But there's now a definite drop in quality between leaving Azeroth at 60 and getting back at 80.

I'm not sure about that, you get flying in Outland at Level 60 which makes 60 to 68 a pretty quick affair, and I still think that Outland has some of the best zones in the game, when Blizzard clearly just went nuts with the improved game engine and graphics and simply chucked everything they could in. (And in the case of Nagrand and Zangarmarsh, I don't think a game has ever looked and sounded so beautiful - loads of great clips on YouTube for both, oh and Netherstorm as well of course, which is genuinely a thing of wonder.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxOsW1yUk2I - Zangarmarsh music, works a lot better when you're flying around the place though.

I do agree with you about Northrend, I thought it was a backward step from Outland the first time I played through it, and my opinion hasn't changed as I've levelled other chars up to 80. The questing is better in most of the core ways, but the 'feel' of the zones and the instances just aren't as wild as Outland managed, although Sholazar was excellent and Dragonblight opened up really nicely.

That said, XP required has been reduced by 25% from 70 to 80, add on the 20% from heirlooms and the 10% from guild perks if you have it - and you can get from 68 to 78/79 pretty quickly.

I'd say it's the most accomplished game in the world at the moment, its programmers, designers, artists, musicians, everyone involved has the confidence to know that they're at the top of their game - and it really shines through in every aspect of what the player is given to do - it's absolutely peerless IMO.

I can't login to my old account Tried recovering it and it "doesn't exist". Guess it has been nuked - inactive for years. Might download the trial on a new account... You bastards. I think I chucked my old physical copy as well. What's the cheapest way to get the full whack right up to Cataclysm? Is it advisable to start playing again from scratch with all of the expansions on, or should I start again with the vanilla game and add expansions as I level up?

The expansions will give you very little if you're starting from scratch, unless you want to play as the new races (Blood Elf/Draenei, Goblin/Worgen) and add significant cost unless you can get them all in a special pack or something. Give a free trial a go before laying down any cash.

Also: I didn't think Blizzard deleted accounts. Ever. Are you sure it's gone?

I've tried every email/username/password combination I could think of. I did it a couple of years ago as well and even went as far as emailing support with my address and stuff - thing is, I can't find the email and I can't remember what happened. I'm not bothered enough to email them again. Also, why is there absolutely no mention of the subscription anywhere on the site?

Weird. Are you sure you didn't dream the whole thing?

I certainly hope not. I must be getting the password wrong or something. I've emailed them - more out of curiosity than anything. I'd just like to have access to that old account - it has Warcraft III on it as well!

Yeah, see what emailing them does, as they're usually pretty helpful. It'll give you a bit of time to think about whether you really want to delve back into this, too.

Yeah I don't think I do, really.

Don't know if you have done this but they changed log ins last year - you have to register a http://eu.battle.net/en/ account then add your wow account to it now.

Yup, I had to do the whole battle.net shindig when I tried to get the game up and running last year, after not having played since TBC.

Just a stupid quest from this evening, a man getting his pants stolen, that simply had to be retrieved.

The thing is, this the LAST ZONE IN THE GAME, this is L84 stuff, pressing on to L85, and L85 is where the game gets hardcore, so this is just a step before that - but it still has no problem whatsoever with chucking in a small quest chain where you have to retrieve a man's underpants for him, from someone who turns out to be called 'The Pant Stealer' (not that the pant stealer was an easy bugger to take down).

The dude makes reference to the sack of grain that he's hiding his knackers in (in lieu of pants) as being a bit uncomfortable, in return for giving him his pants back, you get the sack of grain (which can be vendored for a handsome 25 gold), but comes with the tagline - 'You're so not eating this.'

There are some really hard fights in this zone, (The Twilight Highands), I've died a couple of times and come very close far more often than that, but it's nice that even when a game is properly giving you a challenging time, it can still just make you laugh as well.

I loved the Brann Bronzbeared "ah the slow walking thing, it gets them every time" line.

Jonarob : The last card you want in Top Trumps

Willpower: 0/10

Uldum was an epic zone in a million different ways, Brann and his slow walking was certainly one of them

I loved that deluded guy and his mad little sideshow as well, with his crap domesticated camels and silly little pygmies, and he was convinced he was going to become the best tourist attraction in the world

My WoW account was compromised the other night. Amusingly, whoever dun it did lots of mining, and filled my bags with 2500g worth of ore and gems, and maxed my mining skill before I got control back. Nice job, scumbag.

Hang on, WTF is wrong with blow jobs?

I had mine hacked a couple of years ago, and put the effort in to sort it out despite not having played for quite a while or having an active subscription. I get mocked for this by Miss Malabar quite regularly.

But she learned how to speak Klingon. So fuck her.

Have you not got an authenticator on the account?

My account got hacked earlier this year and they absolutely fucking cleaned it out, right down to vendoring all my epics just to get the gold for them. (They logged through every char, emptied the bank on each char, took all the gold, and vendored all the gear - which was a big sting on my ICC-geared 80s )

They didn't change the password so I logged in as normal after getting back from work not knowing what had happened, and saw all my characters in their underpants on the logon screen (at which point the penny dropped). Oh yeah, they cleaned out the guild bank too, as I'm an officer in the guild I have full bank rights.

Raised a GM ticket which got a response ingame within 30 minutes, the GM confirmed my account had been logged in from the USA, and within another 60 minutes I'd got everything back, all my items, all my gold, every last thing, and our guild master got everything they'd had out of the guild bank back too.

Can't fault their service on that one at all.

Needless to say the very next thing I did was stick an authenticator on the account, you can either buy the physical ones for a nominal fee, or get the freebie one for iPhone/Android. (They do it for a load of other mobiles as well but I think you have to pay 49p for them or something.)

http://eu.blizzard.com/store/details.xml?id=221003132

I use the Android authenticator myself, the physical ones can break which means faffing about with Support to get access to your account again. Takes an extra 15 seconds or so to login each time, but there isn't a single instance of an account being hacked that has an authenticator attached to do it, which is a nice layer of security to have.

It's odd really, my WoW account is far more secure than my online banking account, which just uses D.O.B. and random characters from a fixed password.