Be Excellent To Each Other

Holy crap this is a change and a half

My first thoughts are positive TBH, there's nothing worse as a tank than doing a perfectly elegant pull only to have it immediately fucked by a fire mage critting for 65K against the wrong target and a dimwit hunter going mental against the right one before you've established any serious threat.

#blog">http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/3300854#blog

Interesting! I expect my life as a hunter is going to be come even easier...

Oh, hit L60 today. I can fly!

Ahhhh Outland truly one of the most majestic regions of the game IMO.

Blizzard themselves have admitted it was wildly incohesive and didn't make any sense at all, but fuck me it looks and sounds good.

As for the tanking change, I'm really chuffed as tanking on my DK was getting a bit painful in some randoms, as we need to pull, get our diseases down, spread them, and then start on serious single target threat, psycho DPS-ers could make life very hard, especially on mechanics-heavy fights.

Not like a warrior where I can just charge in, rend and thunderclap and then spam devastate and cleave.

Oh shit.

Christ, that took ages!
Now to make my guy. Hmm.

That dragon thing was pretty cool. I think I'll be one of them.

I couldn't be a dragon

I'm an undead chick with big hair called "IWasAmy". I am surprised by the lack of races to choose from. Is there more in the real game?

I think there are a dozen races if you get all the addons.

What server did you pick?

The one you said a while ago. Began with 'D'.

Got to level five, or something. I didn't think it was that much fun, to be honest.

Hmmm, where to start

First off, it's true to say that WoW simply doesn't click with some folks, and that's all there is to it, it is a unique game and the way it all hangs together ultimately won't be everyone's cup of tea - and that's fine.

However, playing out to Level 5 isn't going to show you even a tiny, minuscule fraction of what the game has to offer, and it's not uncommon for a 'first hour's play' reaction to the game to be a little bit 'Erm, WTF, this is boring and stupid.' A mate of mine who's now been playing the game for 3 1/12 years (same as me) denounced it as a 'hitting crappy looking wolves on the head simulator' after his first encounter with it, before giving it another crack of the whip a month or so later and that time around falling for its charms.

Several points to remember:

1) At the start of the game your character is rubbish. This is intentional. You're Level 1, whatever your chosen class you only have a handful of abilities and they're all a bit feeble. All your gear is shite ('gear' is a catch-all terms for your clothes, armour, weapons, trinkets etc), and you're really quite squishy so can be killed with irritating ease.

2) On top of that, the game world is small when you're low level. You'll be put into a very limited 'hand holding' starting area, this is designed to show you the ropes and start to introduce a few of game's key concepts. For some this breaks the 'MMORPG' aspect of the game, because you're pretty much channelled through a series of tightly defined activities and missions. Do be aware that there's absolutely nothing stopping you running off in completely the 'wrong' direction and straight out into the big bad world, but as a low level character everything will be able to kill you on sight and there won't be anything for you to do that's level-appropriate.

3) The first few levels, the first few hours, are not what this game is. WoW is so huge, so sprawling, there is just so fucking much to do that there's no other way for Blizzard to do it at the start, and even now in its 'friendlier than ever' incarnation, it's still quite often massively confusing and daunting. (See GY's multiple posts to this thread asking how stuff works.)

4) As you pass through the first few hours, you should notice everything starts to get better. At Level 10 you'll be invited to choose a class specialisation, so for example if you're a warrior you get to choose to be ARMS, FURY, or PROTECTION, and you'll get your first talent point to spend in the respective tree. This is when the character really starts to become 'yours' and you can start to build him around how you want to play. On top of that, every even-numbered level from (IIRC) Level 4 onwards, you can go to your class trainer and he'll start to teach you new abilities that you can stick onto your action bar and start to enhance the options available to you in any given situation.

5) Enjoy the world as you explore it. The quality of the writing in WoW is massively variable, but when the quests and storylines are at their best, they're everything from funny to poignant to sad to uplifting - it's a rich, beautifully crafted world, take some time to soak it in.

6) Similarly (and I'm sure your PC is up to this Grim...), max the game out graphically, make sure you've got the sound and music turned on - it's not going to give Crysis any sleepless nights in terms of its graphics engine, but I honestly think WoW is the prettiest game I've ever played thanks to the sheer majesty of the artwork style and characters, it's no secret that Blizzard are reckoned to employ some of the best artists in the world. Again, you're not going to be able to fully appreciate this from the starting zone.

7) WoW is a social game. It makes such a massive difference if you're playing the game with friends. Now I don't mean that you're literally playing with them all the time, but in the same way that when you're logged into XBox Live or Steam, you'll have your friends lists, you'll have messages, you'll get info about what your friends are up to, you'll have the option to play together if you want to. WoW works in the same way, if you've got IRL friends on the same server as you, that's a huge brucey bonus, but just being in a guild is a huge brucey bonus. For example whenever I log into the game there's almost always going to be a guildy or two on, quite possibly someone I know IRL. On a good night there might be 10+ of us all online, with various stuff being discussed in the guild chat channel.

On top of that, friends and guildies can help you out, and you can help them out, with awkward quests, or your professions, or checking your bank to see if you've got an item they need for something - all that stuff.

8 ) Instances/dungeons (the words are interchangeable). From Level 15 onwards you can use the dungeon finder and start running the 5-man instances, I've done a mega-post to GY a few pages back about this. They're a big part of the game and massively removed from what you'll be used to when out doing your normal solo questing.

viewtopic.php?p=581653#p581653

Instances are awesome, especially when you're running them with friends and/or guildies. We ran a couple of heroics last night, all five of us were 'well oiled' to say the least (it was after midnight and we were too drunk to play Bad Company 2 competently), all on Mumble talking all manner of crap to each other, and we were fucking dreadful, we took an hour to get through an instance that's doable in about twenty minutes with a good random group, but we all had an absolute blast. At one point one of the guys started playing his banjo (a real one in his house) to get our spirits up after a particularly ridiculously awful wipe, singing some kind of bluegrass version of 'I Will Survive' - I was crying tears of laughter. No other game can do this.

9) There are many 'games within the game' when it comes to WoW. There's the massively significant economy aspect of it (which is basically locked out in the free trial as no auction house), there are the professions (of which there are many), there's PvP (player versus player) if you fancy a crack at that (PvP is whole subset of the game - 100 player battlegrounds are quite an experience). There's a whole world of entirely optional stuff, some people like collecting vanity pets, some people like getting weird and wonderful achievements, some people like maxing out all the secondary professions, some people never give them a second's thought.

Some folks like running through all the old raid content with Level 85 characters, so you might get four of five 85s and blast through the old 40-man raids from vanilla WoW, or kill Illidan in the Black Temple (a Burning Crusdade 25-man raid) - all the old game is still there, Blizzard don't 'turn it off', so it's all still there to explore.

10) As you level up through the game, you get more and more awesome. You get loads of abilities, you get mounts (ground mounts to start with then flying mounts), you get kick-ass gear and you can take on packs of enemies (level-appropriate) of a size that would have been unthinkable early on. Depending on your class you can tank or heal or DPS (damage deal) in instances, at the end game there's the option of 10 or 25 man raids, the more you understand the game and your character, the more there is to see and do.

It's like learning a whole new language, and once you become fluent in it there's a quite wonderful experience to be had. Conversely, whilst it's all new and alien, even with the huge amounts of hand-holding that the games does now, it can be confusing and somewhat underwhelming, unfortunately that's the nature of the MMO beast I think.

Even with that wall of text there's loads of things I've forgotten or haven't mentioned, my main point would be, don't make a final judgement on the game at Level 5, it'd be like going to Disneyland, paying your entry fee, walking through the turnstiles and then before you've even so much as looked at anything, declaring that Disneyland is rubbish with nothing to do, and that you're going home.

Finally, I can't emphasise enough how WoW works so much better if you've got the social aspect of it to enjoy, ideally IRL friends who are on your server (or at least on Real ID to chat with), but even better in a guild with some decent folks in it. Obviously the dream combination is a guild that's got some of your IRL friends in it (that's the situation in my guild), in all honesty if it weren't for the social aspect of WoW I feel I'd enjoy it quite a bit less.

Just hit L65 with Grobbler. My highest ever character!

What race did you choose, Grim...? Level 5 would still have you in the little starting "playpen", wouldn't it? Did you get to a major city? That's where things took a turn from "meh" to "holy fuck!" for me. When you start to see how large and varied the game world is, and how you can basically walk from one end of it to the other without a loading screen (barring switching continents or going into instances), you can't help but be impressed.

edit: Ah, Undead. I've never been Undead so I dunno what the starting areas are like. I always preferred Alliance any way. The cities are much cooler.

You guys are alliance right? Can I faction switch these days? Once I get Grobbler up to 85, I might transfer over and join up if you don't mind. My current guild are ok, but cliquey, and i'm not in the clique yet...

Yeah you'd be more than welcome dude

Our guild is called 'Manx', Alliance side on Frostwhisper.

Website is here but I really need to pull my finger out and update it - http://manx.enjin.com/

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/guild/frostwhisper/Manx/ - Armory says we have 120 members but nearly all of those are alts (lots of us have multiple characters), I've just had a look at the guild activity log and we've had about 16 or 17 'unique people' playing in the last seven days, we've also got a couple of folks on a break at the moment who've said they'll be back once the summer's over.

We're nearly all in the same boat (married with children and jobs) so often times there'll be no one online in the daytime or early evening, weekend daytimes are quiet too unless the weather's shit, we tend to get a few on from around 7pm onwards. Mostly blokes of course but we do have a couple of lasses too.

Really friendly bunch of people, nearly all the members live or have lived on the IOM, or otherwise have IOM connections (lots of us know each other IRL). We don't do any kind of active recruitment as we like the nice cosy feel the guild has now, we did discuss opening up membership to get us on a solid raiding footing but ultimately decided we'd rather just keep it chilled out and social, and do the Cata raids once they've been nerfed into the ground This is also the reason we're still only Guild Level 17, it's easy to just let anyone in to whore the Guild Levelling system but again, we decided we'd rather keep the guild's feel intact.

We've got a Mumble server and if we're running instances we'll usually all get our headsets on and have a natter too. (We also use it when we're playing BC2 or DiRT3 or whatever.)

For me it's a very important aspect of the game, when I rolled my char on Draenor it just felt weird because there was only you to talk to, no guild chat, none of the familiar names in the guild window or guildy achievements coming up and all that sort of thing. WoW is such a massive world that in a strange sort of way it can start to feel a bit lonely sometimes - having friends and guildies in there with you makes a massive difference. (If you're on a bastard of a quest that can't be soloed, or you're levelling an alt and want a quick blast through an old dungeon to finish quests or get an item or whatever - it's so nice to be able to call out in guild chat and ask for a hand, and have some properly tooled-up 85 turning up and kicking huge amounts of ass on your behalf. Similarly if someone asks out in guild chat for something I'll always help them out.)

One thing though Trooper, Blizzard are gonna sting you for a realm transfer AND a faction switch, which IIRC are £15 and £20 (can't remember which costs what), and that's going to be per character. But if you can swallow that bitter pill you'd be very welcome to join us

Grobbler is L75 now, 4.5 days played.

Do I get epic flying? I'm about 300g away from it at the moment (3.5k gold) but that would wipe me out. Is it worth it? I think I would rather spend my money on heirlooms for my Priest and Warrior to level with...

You don't buy heirlooms with gold, you buy them with Justice Points, which are earned for completing dungeons and killing dungeon bosses at L80-L85. (You do earn JPs from L70 onwards but at a massively reduced rate. They only really come on stream properly from L80 onwards and then more so at L85.)

The quickest way to get a character heirloomed up is to get an 85 heroic geared and then spam the hell out of heroics. Heirloom items are account bound and never become soulbound, so you can use them multiple times on multiple characters.

If your guild has the L18 perk you get an extra 10% JP bonus for everything that yields them.

Epic flying is nice to have but pretty situational, depends how much travelling around the world you do that isn't covered by flight points and portals.

There are heirlooms available for gold purchase from guild vendors. Head and Back IIRC? About 3k for the both I think.
Also, you can get Shoulder(?) heirlooms from PvP honor.

Oh yeah I forgot about the guild heirloom items, didn't realise they were that expensive TBH, I had it in my mind that the back piece was only about 600G? Not sure about the head piece.

Long term the heirloom items will probably serve your account better than epic flying on one character.

Is there an Undead David Dickenson you show these off to in game?

No. But that would be excellent.

Grobbler just hit L85 Just under 7 days played, with a fair bit of faffing around timewise.

Now what?

FYI - no money, no Warcraft. I will return one day, just not today, or tomorrow, etc.

So, what has been going on...
Grobbler, my L85 hunter is doing daily quests for reputation (now at exalted for Hyjal, Therazane next). Running through Cata zones that he missed during levelling for fun and gold (finishing off the 84-85 zone), and pvp-ing. I was going to get him all the best pvp gear, but hunters are pretty crap in pvp at the moment, no real burst damage, and no defence. So i'm just using him to get enough honor to send the pvp heirlooms to my L44 priest Moolly.
Moolly priest did a few instances over the weekend to get him up from L42, and now has a couple of heirlooms courtesy of my hunter (the guild ones). To be honest, I much prefer playing him, as I feel like i'm actually making a difference, so I think i'll concentrate on him for a while. I'll most likely level him by just running random instances and pvp, which will cause me a nightmare at the later levels, as I won't know how to kill anyone when it's time to quest

Blizzcon this weekend.

New expansion announced, pandas as a playable race, new monk class, new Pokemon style game for all your pets, current talents are being completely revamped to give more options and configurations, to try and avoid the cookie cutter builds.
Plus if you commit to a 12 month contract, rather than a monthly rolling contract as most people are currently on, you get a free mount and a free copy of Diablo 3 when it is released

...pandas?

Fuck yeah, pandas. For too long pandas have been ignored in video games. Marginalised in favour of fucking hegdehogs, bandicoots, or other weak assed, wanky mammals that in real life would get shit out of anything halfway cool.

Pandas? Sign me up!

It does have the feel of an April Fools joke, but apparently they're serious.

/I'LL EAT YOUR FUCKING FACE YOU CUNT. AFTER I'VE EATEN THAT FUCKING BLUE HEDGEHOG.

It's pandas' heyday:

BRING IT, BITCH

I'm still not sure why Sonic won an 'Outstanding Contribution' award at the Golden Joystick awards this year. It should have been a 'Die, already, you blue bastard' award.

Kung-Fu Pandas!

It's going to be awesome.

I signed up for the 12 months of WoW so I get Diablo 3 for free too.

WoW still ticks more boxes than any other game for my money.

Vaguely tempted to buy SWTOR and give that a go for a month.

Our guild split into two for SWTOR, and for the first few weeks it looked like SWTOR might 'win', however as the weeks rolled by more and more folks came back to WoW, citing SWTOR's dreadful lack of a meaningful endgame, incredibly linear storylines, lack of exploration, lack of zone variety, lack of quest variety, a multitude of bugs and glitches, total lack of addons and game features (threat meter, damage counter, shit AH UI etc), really aggressive instancing of the main game world (like Age of Conan did) and oooohhhhh, the list goes on.

One chap went as far as to describe it as a single-player game with a guild chat feature.

My overall impression is that it's worth levelling a character to 50 once, and that's probably about it, and that's not something I'm prepared to spend £45 on, especially since it'd probably take me two-three months to get there so maybe £30 of subs on top of that.

I'm going to give it at least one major expansion before I have a crack at it, by which time it'll hopefully be cheaper as well.

TBH I'm still having an absolute blast with WoW, I rolled a Tauren Paladin who I've levelled entirely in instances from L15 (when you can queue for Ragefire Chasm), he's currently L75 and I've enjoyed it every step of the way, never tanked as a pally before - which is a mark of WoW's depth and breadth, I've been playing the game for getting on for four years and there's still a load of stuff that I simply haven't tried yet.

I have kinda stopped with WoW for the time being. BF3 is taking up my time when I feel like gaming.

I started an undead to see the new storyline, and wanted a melee pvp character, so went with a warrior. Over the course of few weeks I played her more and more, and am now at L71, mainly by pvp for over 50% of the time. I was playing as Arms for ages, as that is the supposed "best" pvp spec, yet at about L40 I swapped to Prot, just to see...
Absolutely hilarious So much more fun than Arms, in that I can actually stay alive long enough to make some tactical decisions, and if I find a friendly healer i'm pretty much unstoppable.

Might log back in today actually, I want to get her to L85 and do some proper PvP, but it just takes so bloody long to get there.

Oh I dunno, they're reduced the XP requirements to get from 70 to 80 by 25%, and if you just get your head down and blast through quests the levels can come quickly.

As a prot warrior your other PvE option is to use the LFG dungeon finder and level as a tank in instances up to 80. As a tank you'll basically get insta-queues the whole way.

That's how I'm doing my prot pally and it's a blast Haven't done one single quest in Northrend

(Also, in a recent patch they've put all the dungeon quests for all the Northrend instances inside the dungeons themselves, so you don't need to do any lead-in quests, quest chains, find NPCs out in the world etc to pick up the quests, there's just an NPC inside the door in each instance who'll give you all the quests for that instance. These give a nice XP boost and of course lots of lovely gear, on top of the fact that all the bosses in instances drop nice blues too of course.)

Aye, but the problem with tanking instances, is that I haven't actually done any instances post L50 on any characters really. Jumping in as a tank wouldn't make me very popular

Just make a macro that says 'new to tanking please be patient' (or words to that effect) and send it to the party at the start of the instance. That's all I did when I started tanking on my DK and in the main I found people were understanding and helpful.

As long as you're properly geared and specced for the role, and you know the basics of how to get and hold aggro, you should be alright. All the Northrend instances have been somewhat nerfed, and it's not like you'll be doing heroics.

It's a while since I've played on my warrior (I left him on Frostwhisper when we all migrated to Doomhammer), but your basic pull IIRC is Charge > Rend > Thunderclap, and make sure you have the points in the talent whereby a thunderclap spreads the bleed effect of rend to all nearby targets.

Here are the action bars and talents off my warrior, who's L71 as well by coincidence! Just get all your defensive cooldowns clustered together, and take note of all abilities and attacks that affect multiple targets, as the key to tanking outside of heroics and raids is basically AoE threat generation. (So cleave is a great one as it hits three targets, on single target fights just stack devastate etc, Shockwave is a brilliant AoE stun and so on, you can work it all out from reading the tooltips.)

Pretty insane SCROLL OF RESURRECTION offer on at the moment.

You can send a scroll to any WoW account that was inactive on the 4th March or earlier, the person who accepts it gets:

1) Their WoW licence upgraded to Cataclysm, even if it's right down at Vanilla at the moment. (That's potentially a £50 freebie.)

2) They can choose any one of their characters to get instantly boosted to Level 80, complete with a full set of 20 slot bags, 500 gold, and a set of Cataclysm starter gear.

3) They get a free realm and faction switch on that character if they want it. (Normal cost £35).

I sent one to Mrs SA (she stopped playing the game over 18 months ago and has no intention of returning), got her account boosted up to Cataclysm (it was down at Wrath level), and popped one of her hunters over to our realm, boosted it to 80, and then just gave the account to a guy at work who's wanting to get back into the game.

Job done, it's saved him about £60, and he's back in the game with us.

Obviously the generosity of this offer has nothing to do with the fact that the game has lost two million paying subscribers during the Cataclysm expansion, although they've still got over 10 million subscribers so it's not dead yet.

Oh yes and I get a super-cool spectral wing rider mount for getting a player back into the game.

hmm interesting May have to have bimble around Azeroth again, to see what has changed

If you want a scroll of resurrection sending your way, just give me a shout.

If you've not played the game for a while, it's definitely worth taking another look IMO. It's a massively different (and massively better) game to what it was when I started playing it 3 1/2 years ago.

Reasonably interesting hands-on preview at Eurogamer today, although it does go on a bit in places without really saying much:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012- ... n-promises

Still enjoying the game myself, not done anything with my 85s for weeks but my tanking pally is now 83 and I'll be getting him up to 85 in due course.

Decent session on Saturday night with a couple of IRL mates who are also guildies, we're all levelling characters up at the same time and rate, so we spent three (increasingly drunken) hours smashing through the Cataclysm instances - as a social experience it's really hard to beat WoW IMO.

Can't grab the direct link now, but hardcore fans might find the latest post on http://www.iamcal.com interesting.

Oh, here we are: http://insanitytracker.com/

I'm a proper WoW geek, but there's no way on earth I'd go for the Insane title.

http://www.cracked.com/article_18907_th ... ments.html

Proper WoW geeks clearly not only get the title, but then make a website to see who else did

That's the second 'not-very-good' Cracked article I've read lately. "HAR HAR HAR WoW PLAYERS ARE ALL FAT VIRGIN NERDS WITH NO FRIENDS"

Isn't the author (Christina H) a keen gamer and WoW player herself though? I got the vibe that it was a sort of 'poking fun at herself' article rather than a 'being nasty about other people' article.

I'd love to know what she looks like, I believe she's half-Asian, and she likes games, I bet she's well sexy.

I'm not fat

I have friends!

(subs please check)