World of Warcraft

[Dis]

as for the size, yeah it's big. I think eq2 might have less loading screens. but I had terrible lag when I played that game at the launch. I didn't care for it much. Of course, I didn't care much for wow much at launch either.

The world is big. I had played morrowind, so I had a little taste of a large world. But this blows morrowind away.

It's still not as big as I'd like it. . But if it scaled to real world conditions, you'd have big empty areas with nothing in it. If you make it too big, population (of players) density gets too low. I don't like crowded areas, but I don't like being alone. I get lonely. . It's nice to find people to party with.

Already in wow, you can find zones with no one in them late at night. But some zones are more popular than others. I was in swamp of sorrows one night, and there was no one in it. Alliance or horde. I imagine it's not a popular zone. There aren't that many quests there anyways.

You have 2 large continents on the old world (pre expansion). Also the night elves have their own island (capitol city and level 1 - 10 area). The dranei have a couple islands as well (capitol and level 1-22 or so).

There are a couple areas that seem unreachable to me. That's why I was hoping you could take a flying mount in the old world, but it seems you can't. . Hydal shows as a name on the local map, but I don't know how to get to it. It's southwest of Winterspring. I think there's an areas north of Stormwind that seems inaccessible as well.

There are quite a few zones. I attempted to do nearly every quest for every zone for my orc hunter. That proved quite a challenge. I completely missed blasted lands. By the time I got there I was level 58 and too high a level. Usually they'll give you quests leading you to a new area, but I never got any quests for blasted lands. Not sure why.

Can't say I did every quest, some of the quest givers are in out of the way areas, and some are unavailable if you don't have skills in something.

Let's see if I can run through my order roughly from memory. Durotar, Barrens, Silverpine Forest, Stonetalon mountains, ashenvale, thousand needles, hilsbrad foothills, stranglethorn vale/booty bay, feralis, arathi highlands, swamp of sorrows, dustmellow marsh, tanaris, un goro crater, felwood, ashara, winterspring, silithis, east and western plaguelands, searing gorge, burning steppes. That's not nearly all the areas, many are alliance based. Like Wetlands, there aren't many horde quests there.

oh some kind of mountains by hilsbrad foothills, can't remember names. there are no horde cities there, just quest destinations.

didn't do much in burning steppes or silithis. I was 58 by this time and went to outlands.

[Dis]

The thing about grinding is it's a mixture of work and fun. I wouldn't do it if it weren't fun. But in some ways, it's also work. And there's a limit to how much I can do.

I can't see myself going for tier 7 epics or whatever they are called. I can't see myself farming 10000 gold for some item or whatever. I do want an epic flying mount though. . You also have to farm for rep in the higher levels. . I don't like doing this, but they have some cool items from what I'm told.

Killing is fun. . It's repetitive for sure, but I enjoy killing monsters. I enjoy tearing stuff apart. it's why I played diablo2. It had much less to do than this game. here you can take up professions, or just sit around and fish all day (though I don't know why anyone would do that ).

I play this game the same reason I play civ4. I love to conquer. Only this is on a smaller scale.

[FrostyBoy]

ha, I love to:

1. Leave a trail of dead things as far as the eye can see.
2. Pile dead things up in one spot.

I have never grinded btw, I just kill when I need to, maybe thats why it takes me forever to level up, but hey, I am playing it how I like it, I don't care whats at level 70, I care what I am doing right here, right now. (which is 33 at the mo, after 4 months of playing )

[Dis]

couple cool quests in the outlands.

one where you have a felhound, you kill a boar, the felhound eats the boar and then procedes to take a ****. And then you search through the droppings for a key. . I had to laugh at that quest. Disgusting, yet funny.

I also loved the bombing runs. You are allowed to fly on a wyvern and you drop bombs are targets. real easy and fun. So depsite my frustrations yesterday, I enjoyed those quests. But one quest really gave me a lot of trouble because of respawn rates and thick patrols. You only had 5 minutes to take this torch over and burn some buildings before the torch went out. But in hindsight, I had plenty of times. It only takes 15 seconds or less to kill most things. I had plenty of time. I always worry on timed quests, and rush and make mistakes. I died so many times and paid mulitple gold to repair my gear.

[FrostyBoy]

I thought you didnt have the expansion Dis?

It's good to see the expansion includes different kinds of quests, thats one of the arguments against RPG games - the quests are all the same.

[Blake]

I couldn't imagine doing the outlands with a weaker class. Perhaps the classes aren't weaker, but I don't play them well. I suck at classes that are equipment dependent like warriors and rogues. Because I never have any good equipment. Although hunters need good equipment as well, but they have a pet to balance things out.

Dis the hunter IS a weak class, the hunter is AWFUL when it comes to dealing with adds, the hunter is great against single targets but when the going gets tough... the hunter takes a dirt nap (even if it's not always permanent)

The survivability ranking goes like this:
Top: Rogue (vanish gg, sprint), Druid (prowl, dash, bear form), Paladin (bubble haha).
Good: Priest (shield, scream), Mage (blink nova), Shaman (totems, ghost wolf)
Not so Good: Warlock, Hunter
Abysmal: Warrior.

here you can take up professions, or just sit around and fish all day (though I don't know why anyone would do that ).

LOL, I fished a lot. I fished while waiting for my lazy guild to get their **** together before raids. I fished in Moonglade a fair bit being a Drood, getting special fish which I turned into buffs via high cooking.


I got into high end raiding content and HOLY DAMN was it boring, I was actually playing Black and White on my laptop, WHILE raiding with my Guild, sometimes even during the fights.
I also picked up a habit of falling asleep while raiding, at which point I'd droop forward and press down on the mouse button and my toon would blissfully run forward and die. I'd wake up to a resurrection bar and blame lag.

I quit shortly after making these observations about how bored I was.

However I'm actually tempted to come back for the BC, and just play for like one month, level a toon to 70, then sell the account. I'd like to play a bloodelf (possibly paladin) and I'd like to play a new druid because the talent changes are sexy (I'd probably like play the Druid to 50ish while gathering gear for an itemized class). I'm not sure if I will though, but exploring the new areas does sound tempting.

[Harovan]

Originally posted by Blake
I also picked up a habit of falling asleep while raiding, at which point I'd droop forward and press down on the mouse button and my toon would blissfully run forward and die. I'd wake up to a resurrection bar and blame lag.

A very familiar feeling.

When I played EQ2 I fell asleep during raids several times, mainly because I was on a US server and raids took place when it was 3-4 o'clock in the morning my time. That wasn't too important, though, since I played a paladin and hence wasn't tough enough to tank the really hard raid encounters (I tanked some of the easier ones). So I mainly played buffer (pre-combat), one of many damage dealers, and rez-bot (paladins had a pretty good in-combat rez), but if the latter happened, the raid was shot to **** anyway and I could always blame it on being interrupted by AoE waves or being hit by minions.

[Zero]

thx for that brief explanation on survival ranking tiers.

quick Q: which characters have easier time PvEing? PvPing?

[FrostyBoy]

Blake, how much experience have you had with Hunters exactly?

It's odd that you put Hunters so low on Survivability considering one of the talent columns for the Hunter is infact "survival" iirc.

Also, the hunter has a number of abilities to attack multiple enemies hard, so I don't agree with your conclusions.

[FrostyBoy]

Ok thats it, the final straw is coming. There are far too many patches and far far too much maintenance ****. The only time I can play WoW, is during these times and its pissing me off, wasting my money.

One more time and I am cancelling my subscription. Not that it matters upon the millions and millions of players they have, but still, this is not cool.

[Sparrowhawk]

LOL, I know what you mean, I expected to attempt to sign in this morning and get a message about my 2 week trial period expiring (I think it will expire at some point today) and instead get a message about the servers being down for maintenance.

I guess I can only laugh because I am not paying for it ........yet

/me

[Jon Miller]

they have maintenance every week

they were trying to change things so they didn't have that (Almost a yaer ago), but then it broke the servers real good

if your play time is Tuesday mornings, you are screwed

JM

[Blake]

Originally posted by Sn00py
Blake, how much experience have you had with Hunters exactly?

It's odd that you put Hunters so low on Survivability considering one of the talent columns for the Hunter is infact "survival" iirc.

From killing them on PvP servers, mainly. Survival hunters are however fairly good at staying alive - but survival seems to not work well with the strengths of the hunter, I mean you want strong range dps or a strong pet. That they need a talent tree called "Survival" indicates just how innately poor they are at it.

On my Druid I dueled a lot and I had some difficulty killing hunters, they were probably the second hardest fight after Warlocks, but I still killed hunters, either by bear raping them or abusing deadzone in caster form.

The fundamental problem is that once an enemy gets within melee range, the hunter is their *****. Deadzone is even worse. The only exception to this is Paladins (which have difficulty staying in the Hunter's face due to lack of snare/stun).

I did play one hunter on a PvP server to a fairly decent level and I was so ****ing tense and paranoid that it wasn't funny, the other thing is that players GODDAMN HATE HUNTERS, while a Druid or Paladin might be left to go in peace because it's just not worth killing (although I always made a good faith attempt to kill paladins), the hunter is considered far too deadly to be left alive, while also being relatively easy to kill with the right tactics. If you don't kill the hunter, it WILL kill you because all hunters are paranoid jerks who think everyone is out to get them and that they need to shoot first. I think that only Shamans are as hated (rogues are loathsome but you can't do anything about rogues ganking you, while hunters and shamans can be killed with extreme prejudice).

Obviously this isn't such a big issue on PvE servers, because survivability on a PvE server is a simple matter of avoiding encounters which are outside your comfort zone :P. Hunters are the ultimate linear gameplay character because they are simply good at killing one mob then killing the next mob and so on, taking on harder encounters is possible but is more frustrating than enjoyable (like you lose your pet and have to rez it and stuff).

[Blake]

Originally posted by Zero
thx for that brief explanation on survival ranking tiers.

quick Q: which characters have easier time PvEing? PvPing?

PvEing really doesn't matter, although the Warrior and Paladin are arguably the poorest since they tend to have the lowest DPS at least until they get slick items.

For PvP some classes are a lot better...
Druid is probably the most survivable, since they have great mobility and durability, kill speed is slightly lacking but not unbearably so.
Rogue has extremely excellent burst dps and general kill speed, awesome stuns and good escape abilities.
Shaman is an excellent PvP class particularly at lower levels, good mobility, excellent snares, great burst dps... one of the most capable dueling classes.
Priest is incredibly potent and it's only lacking is poor mobility. Priest have excellent survivability against melee classes since they can just send them running off in fear.

Other classes have their strengths - but I wouldn't necessarily say they have an easy time. Warlock and Hunter are very ez kills for Rogues (the sap + kill pet move is just embarrassing) and there are many rogues. Mage is pretty frail and has to drink a lot but does have good survivability other than being frail. Warrior is just plain bad unless very item'd up. Paladin is bad at killing things, so um, yeah - however Paladin is one of the few classes which may lead to a player simply give up trying to kill them and leave in disgust, although Paladin does have a "Summon Rogue" ability, if someone spends enough time trying to kill a Paladin, a rogue will turn up to help the paladin. Druids would be the same (being very hard to kill) but a Druid can literally disengage at any time they want while a Paladin has to stick it out until the other guy gets bored.

[Dis]

Originally posted by Sn00py
I thought you didnt have the expansion Dis?

It's good to see the expansion includes different kinds of quests, thats one of the arguments against RPG games - the quests are all the same.

I bought it online a couple weeks ago. direct download. The only downside is I don't get a pretty box and manual.