Topic: i've started playing world of warcraft again. it's been over a year since i last played.
squeegee started this discussion 10 years ago #51,738
there's a new expansion coming up and i might play, so i'm just doing some account maintenance. i subbed for a month, but i doubt i'll play much beyond maxing my shaman.
i'm toying with the idea of leveling something from scratch until i get bored with it. maybe, maybe not. probably not.
if anyone is interested in playing it's free till level 20 or something like that. don't even have to sub as far as i know. anyway, if you want to do something on wow i might be playing for a few weeks.
notes: this current expansion blows for max level content, they literally killed the community and it sucks. it's basically an always online single-player game. it's lame. the next expansion will, of course, abandon everything old and maybe they'll not fuck up and blizzard will have figured out a way to bring back community to the waning fan base. we'll see i guess.
but, the leveling 1-60 is pretty streamlined. it's nowhere near as difficult as it used to be to grind out levels, and the whole old world was refreshed and tuned a few years ago. i do miss a lot of things about vanilla wow, such as weapons expertise and multiple ability trees, but it does make a lot more sense now that a majority of the actual content is in expansion packs. getting through "vanilla" isn't the laborious chore it once was.
anyway. there's like a warcraft movie coming out and shit, did y'all hear about that?
i'm toying with the idea of leveling something from scratch until i get bored with it. maybe, maybe not. probably not.
if anyone is interested in playing it's free till level 20 or something like that. don't even have to sub as far as i know. anyway, if you want to do something on wow i might be playing for a few weeks.
notes: this current expansion blows for max level content, they literally killed the community and it sucks. it's basically an always online single-player game. it's lame. the next expansion will, of course, abandon everything old and maybe they'll not fuck up and blizzard will have figured out a way to bring back community to the waning fan base. we'll see i guess.
but, the leveling 1-60 is pretty streamlined. it's nowhere near as difficult as it used to be to grind out levels, and the whole old world was refreshed and tuned a few years ago. i do miss a lot of things about vanilla wow, such as weapons expertise and multiple ability trees, but it does make a lot more sense now that a majority of the actual content is in expansion packs. getting through "vanilla" isn't the laborious chore it once was.
anyway. there's like a warcraft movie coming out and shit, did y'all hear about that?
Anonymous B joined in and replied with this 10 years ago, 41 minutes later[^] [v] #671,096
Why? You turn into this.squeegee joined in and replied with this 10 years ago, 53 minutes later, 1 hour after the original post[^] [v] #671,122
@previous (B)
idk. kinda figure anyone who might want to play has by now. shot in the dark. but really they killed any reason to dedicate significant amounts of time to playing. the way vanilla worked was (time in = benefit out) but not anymore. they put most everything "farmable" behind a time gate, which makes grinding (spending insane time online) inefficient. it's more like a standard game, but it has literally hundreds of hours of unique content you can dive into. basically you play as long as it's fun and there's no incentive to playing when it's not fun.
it's vastly different from vanilla, and a lot of fun if you like rpgs. the barrier to entry is pretty low and ultimately it's very forgiving to new players that are years behind.
but it's kinda hard to level with friends, inevitably somone falls behind and catchup can be a chore. but 1 - 20 is like a mini story within the game, a starter arc that ends with a proper grouped dungeon crawl. it takes a couple of hours, so it can be done in an evening. basically you get a taste of everything the game is. if you like it you'll know by then. if not, you'll quit or have already quit.
anyway. for a f2p it's not a bad way to spend a few hours. subbing and buying expacks and all, meh, i kinda doubt new players have the desire to even get into it if they haven't.
idk. kinda figure anyone who might want to play has by now. shot in the dark. but really they killed any reason to dedicate significant amounts of time to playing. the way vanilla worked was (time in = benefit out) but not anymore. they put most everything "farmable" behind a time gate, which makes grinding (spending insane time online) inefficient. it's more like a standard game, but it has literally hundreds of hours of unique content you can dive into. basically you play as long as it's fun and there's no incentive to playing when it's not fun.
it's vastly different from vanilla, and a lot of fun if you like rpgs. the barrier to entry is pretty low and ultimately it's very forgiving to new players that are years behind.
but it's kinda hard to level with friends, inevitably somone falls behind and catchup can be a chore. but 1 - 20 is like a mini story within the game, a starter arc that ends with a proper grouped dungeon crawl. it takes a couple of hours, so it can be done in an evening. basically you get a taste of everything the game is. if you like it you'll know by then. if not, you'll quit or have already quit.
anyway. for a f2p it's not a bad way to spend a few hours. subbing and buying expacks and all, meh, i kinda doubt new players have the desire to even get into it if they haven't.
Cis scum squeegee joined in and replied with this 10 years ago, 9 hours later, 10 hours after the original post[^] [v] #671,164
@previous (squeegee)
19 visits, 1 (brief) reply
Why did you feel the need to write out another long winded post no one wanted to read?
19 visits, 1 (brief) reply
Why did you feel the need to write out another long winded post no one wanted to read?
FuckAlms !vX8K53rFBI joined in and replied with this 10 years ago, 1 hour later, 12 hours after the original post[^] [v] #671,192
squeegee replied with this 10 years ago, 10 minutes later, 12 hours after the original post[^] [v] #671,195
@671,164 (Cis scum squeegee)
you keep saying that i'm long winded like you think it's going to bother me. i think all it does is make you mad. keep trying though, and i'll keep writing tl;dr for you to "not read" ;)
you keep saying that i'm long winded like you think it's going to bother me. i think all it does is make you mad. keep trying though, and i'll keep writing tl;dr for you to "not read" ;)
Cis scum squeegee replied with this 10 years ago, 4 minutes later, 12 hours after the original post[^] [v] #671,198
@671,192 (FuckAlms !vX8K53rFBI)
> implying you are a human being and not a collection of tired memes
> implying you are a human being and not a collection of tired memes
FuckAlms !vX8K53rFBI replied with this 10 years ago, 14 minutes later, 12 hours after the original post[^] [v] #671,202
squeegee replied with this 10 years ago, 17 minutes later, 12 hours after the original post[^] [v] #671,204
@previous (FuckAlms !vX8K53rFBI)
not sure i've ever made anyone this mad over the internet before. so, who wants to hear some WoW anecdotes? i have some good ones. bit on the long side, but boy are they uninteresting. should i start with anecdotes about vanilla or just jump right into how expacks have killed the core game?
not sure i've ever made anyone this mad over the internet before. so, who wants to hear some WoW anecdotes? i have some good ones. bit on the long side, but boy are they uninteresting. should i start with anecdotes about vanilla or just jump right into how expacks have killed the core game?
RWBY Rhubarb? !!iNo3FkiZx joined in and replied with this 10 years ago, 8 minutes later, 12 hours after the original post[^] [v] #671,208
@previous (squeegee)
I want to see some anecdotes about vanilla, first. You should set the scene before going into the expacks.
I want to see some anecdotes about vanilla, first. You should set the scene before going into the expacks.
(Edited 8 seconds later.)
FuckAlms !vX8K53rFBI replied with this 10 years ago, 18 minutes later, 13 hours after the original post[^] [v] #671,211
@previous (RWBY Rhubarb? !!iNo3FkiZx)
I agree. I'm not very familiar with WoW so some more setup would be helpful.
I agree. I'm not very familiar with WoW so some more setup would be helpful.
squeegee replied with this 10 years ago, 1 hour later, 14 hours after the original post[^] [v] #671,218
@671,208 (RWBY Rhubarb? !!iNo3FkiZx)
@previous (FuckAlms !vX8K53rFBI)
can do. just wait till you hear about when i switched my rogue from maces to daggers back when weapon expertise was a thing.
@previous (FuckAlms !vX8K53rFBI)
can do. just wait till you hear about when i switched my rogue from maces to daggers back when weapon expertise was a thing.
squeegee (OP) replied with this 10 years ago, 7 hours later, 22 hours after the original post[^] [v] #671,440
@671,211 (FuckAlms !vX8K53rFBI)
back when i first started playing the game was very, very different. the game was much harder, because once you start down a path, say, warrior, it was very difficult to get off of that path and become, say, a different kind of warrior. there were game mechanics that simply made it hard, and in doing so they made "choice" have real meaning. these days a lot of that choice is made inconsequential. i'll give an example:
my first character was a rogue. rogues are a stealth based class that output very high amounts of damage, but have little defensive capabilities. there are 3 types for every class, rogue types are: assassination, combat, and subtlety. each type performs differently, and has unique abilities. assassination rogues do very high single target damage using poisons and daggers. combat rogues are more like street muggers than assassins. combat rogues use maces, swords, fist weapons, daggers, basically anything they want, and they deal very high multi-target damage. subtlety rogues use bleeds, stuns, and lots of special abilities to vanish and appear behind targets.
mostly combat rogues were used for leveling. the multi-target damage was awesome for taking on bunches of bad guys while solo questing. assassination was a raiding spec, meaning that the single target damage was most useful to a group as a "boss burner." Subtlety was a player vs. player arena spec that was awesome in battlefields and just PvP in general. but, that means that if you're a combat rogue then raiding will be hard, and if you're an assassination rogue then leveling will be hard. but, switching between specs wasn't always easy, there was a cost involved that was substantial, but also weapon expertise would limit your choices. if you've always played combat and never used daggers (the weakest weapons) then you can't switch to assassination until you level your dagger experience. basically, low experience means you miss with them.
now, what i did was stupid. i leveled as assassination. i always used daggers (a requirement of the type) which meant that my wepon expertise in daggers was maxed, but i'd never even touched a sword, a mace or a fist weapon. this is important, because about halfway through the second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, blizzard changed all of the classes in an attempt to make every class viable for any type of gameplay, be it PvE, PvP, or raiding. (arguably they failed at that challenge for years, only recently really making anything viable.) They even tuned raid encounters around the new class specs.
suddenly my guild needed a raidable combat rogue. since i sat "first chair" for my class i was called on to make it happen. unfortunately for me, i'd never used a sword or a mace. at least not in like 70 levels. so my weapon expertise for top tier combat weapons was like 22 out of i think 500. i would just swing and miss all day long with a sword. not very viable for a damage class. to fix the problem i needed to spend a large chunk of time using swords and maces -almost as much time as i'd already spent using daggers. fucking 70 levels worth... AND i could only gain XP off of current level stuff, so no going into an easy area and going AFK while my rogue swings at some low level elite. nope, had to swing and miss against shit that would just fucking kill me. and since i couldn't hit shit, well, i was dying a lot and not making much progress. at the rate i was going (and not counting diminishing returns on levels) i was looking at a tremendous amount of time frustrated and bored.
so, i hired a healer. one of my guild mates agreed to follow me and do nothing but heal me. it was great! for me anyway. i just passively attacked an elite that self healed (i.e. he'd never die under passive attacks alone) and let my healer keep me alive. i didn't do shit for like an hour, but every few seconds my healer was healing me and turning into a tree and, like, actually having to do a bunch of shit to keep me alive and himself full of mana. slowly, but steadily all the +1's added up to 500 and i had capped my hit rate. with swords.
then we did maces.
then we did fists :)
all told it took like 3 hours and cost me 1500 gold (which the guild eventually floated) so it didn't really cost ME anything. but, it would have taken me like weeks or i just wouldn't have done it at all and let someone else step up as the combat rogue. but, now they don't have individual weapon expertise anymore. they got rid of it and further abstracted expertise as what they call "Mastery" now, and it's just a stat. a secondary stat, too. these days switching classes costs nothing. you can do it on a whim. in a lot of ways that sucks, but i understand blizzards need to make the game easier/more accessible but it really trivializes a lot of the choice that you have in the game. it used to matter that one was an assassination rogue, now all that matters is that you're a rogue. kind of the same for the other classes. i've seen people switch from healer to tank in the middle of a dungeon and not need to change gear. it used to be that the choice to be a healer precluded you from also being a tank. not without great trouble did you switch, and only people who'd spent inordinate amounts of time leveling everything gearing properly could even pull it off. community was built from needing many, many people to fill all the roles. now everything tries to be a jack-of-all-trades and the individual players need to rely on fewer and fewer people to progress through the content. even rogues have a small magical self heal that runs entirely contrary to the class. fuck blinding an enemy and using a first aid bandage (the old, hard way) just spam heal!
back in wrath i couldn't go more than a few days without seeking out another player to perform some task i couldn't do. need something enchanted? need a blacksmith to craft a shield? need a tailor to make a bag? need an alchemist to make some pots? need a prot pally to run heroics? these were all things that players would do, and all required a deliberate choice to be that thing. nowadays all that can be done in your garrison, and there's nothing special about pally tanks anymore. you just go to your garrison jewelry shop and have them make whatever you want. i have hardly interacted with anyone in this expansion, and even running dungeons feels more like playing with AI. no one talks, no one knows each other, no one is even on the same server anymore. you just queue in the Group Finder and get whisked away into instant action like call of duty or something. everyone just charges off and chugs right through everything without pause. but i'm as guilty as everyone else. people say hi and i struggle to want to talk back. i'll play with them for ten minutes and then never see them again, there's just not much incentive to build relationships anymore.
it's a very different game now. but, Legion will be different too. hopefully they kill garrisons. i've heard about something like "class halls," or "profession halls" or something to that effect, but i don't know if garrisons will exist as they do in this expansion. whatever they do hopefully it brings players together in one area instead of splitting everyone up by themselves in their own lonely castle with fuck-all reason to need one another. they don't need to go back to when weapon expertise and other esoteric stats that prevented people from having choices, but it would be nice if they gave us all a little less ability to be 100% self sufficient. people used to have to run 4 or 5 characters to have the self sufficiency of one garrison. it's just... sad.
i raided with an old priest back in the day and he used to talk about vanilla, which i never played in vanilla, i joined at the beginning of Wrath and played through all the content, but i missed all the endgame content that went on in vanilla for years. he was deep into that shit. farming for resist gear to do Ahn'Qiraj 40 man. took months. everything about vanilla just sounds like a drag for the sake of being a drag. but, choices were super meaningful and achievements were real accomplishments. i'm sure the golden days are over, i just really hope blizzard does something to help players engage one another as a community in Legion.
back when i first started playing the game was very, very different. the game was much harder, because once you start down a path, say, warrior, it was very difficult to get off of that path and become, say, a different kind of warrior. there were game mechanics that simply made it hard, and in doing so they made "choice" have real meaning. these days a lot of that choice is made inconsequential. i'll give an example:
my first character was a rogue. rogues are a stealth based class that output very high amounts of damage, but have little defensive capabilities. there are 3 types for every class, rogue types are: assassination, combat, and subtlety. each type performs differently, and has unique abilities. assassination rogues do very high single target damage using poisons and daggers. combat rogues are more like street muggers than assassins. combat rogues use maces, swords, fist weapons, daggers, basically anything they want, and they deal very high multi-target damage. subtlety rogues use bleeds, stuns, and lots of special abilities to vanish and appear behind targets.
mostly combat rogues were used for leveling. the multi-target damage was awesome for taking on bunches of bad guys while solo questing. assassination was a raiding spec, meaning that the single target damage was most useful to a group as a "boss burner." Subtlety was a player vs. player arena spec that was awesome in battlefields and just PvP in general. but, that means that if you're a combat rogue then raiding will be hard, and if you're an assassination rogue then leveling will be hard. but, switching between specs wasn't always easy, there was a cost involved that was substantial, but also weapon expertise would limit your choices. if you've always played combat and never used daggers (the weakest weapons) then you can't switch to assassination until you level your dagger experience. basically, low experience means you miss with them.
now, what i did was stupid. i leveled as assassination. i always used daggers (a requirement of the type) which meant that my wepon expertise in daggers was maxed, but i'd never even touched a sword, a mace or a fist weapon. this is important, because about halfway through the second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, blizzard changed all of the classes in an attempt to make every class viable for any type of gameplay, be it PvE, PvP, or raiding. (arguably they failed at that challenge for years, only recently really making anything viable.) They even tuned raid encounters around the new class specs.
suddenly my guild needed a raidable combat rogue. since i sat "first chair" for my class i was called on to make it happen. unfortunately for me, i'd never used a sword or a mace. at least not in like 70 levels. so my weapon expertise for top tier combat weapons was like 22 out of i think 500. i would just swing and miss all day long with a sword. not very viable for a damage class. to fix the problem i needed to spend a large chunk of time using swords and maces -almost as much time as i'd already spent using daggers. fucking 70 levels worth... AND i could only gain XP off of current level stuff, so no going into an easy area and going AFK while my rogue swings at some low level elite. nope, had to swing and miss against shit that would just fucking kill me. and since i couldn't hit shit, well, i was dying a lot and not making much progress. at the rate i was going (and not counting diminishing returns on levels) i was looking at a tremendous amount of time frustrated and bored.
so, i hired a healer. one of my guild mates agreed to follow me and do nothing but heal me. it was great! for me anyway. i just passively attacked an elite that self healed (i.e. he'd never die under passive attacks alone) and let my healer keep me alive. i didn't do shit for like an hour, but every few seconds my healer was healing me and turning into a tree and, like, actually having to do a bunch of shit to keep me alive and himself full of mana. slowly, but steadily all the +1's added up to 500 and i had capped my hit rate. with swords.
then we did maces.
then we did fists :)
all told it took like 3 hours and cost me 1500 gold (which the guild eventually floated) so it didn't really cost ME anything. but, it would have taken me like weeks or i just wouldn't have done it at all and let someone else step up as the combat rogue. but, now they don't have individual weapon expertise anymore. they got rid of it and further abstracted expertise as what they call "Mastery" now, and it's just a stat. a secondary stat, too. these days switching classes costs nothing. you can do it on a whim. in a lot of ways that sucks, but i understand blizzards need to make the game easier/more accessible but it really trivializes a lot of the choice that you have in the game. it used to matter that one was an assassination rogue, now all that matters is that you're a rogue. kind of the same for the other classes. i've seen people switch from healer to tank in the middle of a dungeon and not need to change gear. it used to be that the choice to be a healer precluded you from also being a tank. not without great trouble did you switch, and only people who'd spent inordinate amounts of time leveling everything gearing properly could even pull it off. community was built from needing many, many people to fill all the roles. now everything tries to be a jack-of-all-trades and the individual players need to rely on fewer and fewer people to progress through the content. even rogues have a small magical self heal that runs entirely contrary to the class. fuck blinding an enemy and using a first aid bandage (the old, hard way) just spam heal!
back in wrath i couldn't go more than a few days without seeking out another player to perform some task i couldn't do. need something enchanted? need a blacksmith to craft a shield? need a tailor to make a bag? need an alchemist to make some pots? need a prot pally to run heroics? these were all things that players would do, and all required a deliberate choice to be that thing. nowadays all that can be done in your garrison, and there's nothing special about pally tanks anymore. you just go to your garrison jewelry shop and have them make whatever you want. i have hardly interacted with anyone in this expansion, and even running dungeons feels more like playing with AI. no one talks, no one knows each other, no one is even on the same server anymore. you just queue in the Group Finder and get whisked away into instant action like call of duty or something. everyone just charges off and chugs right through everything without pause. but i'm as guilty as everyone else. people say hi and i struggle to want to talk back. i'll play with them for ten minutes and then never see them again, there's just not much incentive to build relationships anymore.
it's a very different game now. but, Legion will be different too. hopefully they kill garrisons. i've heard about something like "class halls," or "profession halls" or something to that effect, but i don't know if garrisons will exist as they do in this expansion. whatever they do hopefully it brings players together in one area instead of splitting everyone up by themselves in their own lonely castle with fuck-all reason to need one another. they don't need to go back to when weapon expertise and other esoteric stats that prevented people from having choices, but it would be nice if they gave us all a little less ability to be 100% self sufficient. people used to have to run 4 or 5 characters to have the self sufficiency of one garrison. it's just... sad.
i raided with an old priest back in the day and he used to talk about vanilla, which i never played in vanilla, i joined at the beginning of Wrath and played through all the content, but i missed all the endgame content that went on in vanilla for years. he was deep into that shit. farming for resist gear to do Ahn'Qiraj 40 man. took months. everything about vanilla just sounds like a drag for the sake of being a drag. but, choices were super meaningful and achievements were real accomplishments. i'm sure the golden days are over, i just really hope blizzard does something to help players engage one another as a community in Legion.
squeegee (OP) double-posted this 10 years ago, 31 minutes later, 22 hours after the original post[^] [v] #671,453
i could go on...FuckAlms !vX8K53rFBI replied with this 10 years ago, 21 minutes later, 22 hours after the original post[^] [v] #671,463
Syntax joined in and replied with this 10 years ago, 5 minutes later, 23 hours after the original post[^] [v] #671,464
@previous (FuckAlms !vX8K53rFBI)
I did not read this topic until now - AND Wot do I C?
I remember putting her up on TC - Of course only cause of that unique necklace.
I did not read this topic until now - AND Wot do I C?
I remember putting her up on TC - Of course only cause of that unique necklace.
squeegee (OP) replied with this 10 years ago, 1 hour later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #671,479
@671,463 (FuckAlms !vX8K53rFBI)
well, my rogue was my main. in wow circles your main is your furthest progressed character, or a favorite, it's just whatever people play first or would raid first. i loved playing my rogue. i've mentioned elsewhere that i have an affinity for female rogues from fantasy writing and i've enjoyed playing it more than most any class. leveling was hard and i made a lot of mistakes along the way, but eventually i got to be pretty good.
questing in WoW, imho, is perfect for 2 classes: Paladins and Rogues. for every other class i question character motivation. why the fuck would some woodlands Hunter be fighting to save the world? since everyone basically does the same quests not much is tuned to classes. there's not really a story line for Priests that is different from Warriors. you're all asked to go out and murder thousands upon thousands of people and steal whatever the quest giver desires. sure, it's all for a cause, but it's all really, really suited to a suit of armor save-the-world type hero class, such as Paladins. the whole game is just perfect for anyone who wants to level a knight in shining armor.
or a rogue. all quests have rewards, and rogues (by in-game flavor text even) work for whoever has coin. as i leveled i didn't really even read all of the quest flavor text and lore. usually i didn't even know what i was looking for. i'd pick quests based on how much money it payed and what kind of loot i could get from it. i skipped whole zones because the rewards were better elsewhere. that was one of the truly great things about old world (vanilla), there were 6 starting zones that branched out into 2 major quest lines that lead to 2 completely different end games for both alliance and horde. start to finish you could level 4 characters across 2 factions and not play identical content between them. there was a fair amount of overlap, but much of it was unique to the faction and certainly unique to each major quest chain. with an abundance of places to go to level you were never without meaningful choices. for my rogue, that meant i didn't follow the story much beyond immediate reward.
playing as a rogue when i did was a really great experience. i leveled at the peak of player concurrency, so all i'd have to do was hang out around a dungeon and some group would run by and pick me up. it wasn't as hard back then to engage with people, but i avoided it in a lot of ways because i was playing a rogue. rogues are meant to be played solo, and the game mechanics did not disappoint. using stealth to bypass entire buildings of enemies to sneak up to the mini-boss and solo that fucker (mini bosses were 3 player recommended fights). you'd get the kill, get all the loot, then get the fuck out quietly. it was also a great way to die frequently, but some of the most fun i've ever had playing a game was spent playing my rogue. distracting guards, vanishing with smoke bombs, murdering for money, pick pocketing literally every humanoid with pockets, Blizzard really, really nailed rogues in their game.
even combat rogues. they were like street hooligans with bats and hammers. no stealth, no distraction, just run up to some fuckers and beat the ever living shit out of them... and then steal their wallets and jewelry. same as before, doing for the money, but more like hiring a reckless thug than a discrete assassin.
i didn't really ever feel that the other classes really meshed with the gameplay and story quite as well as it does for rogues and paladins. i mean it really only works for rogues if you willfully ignore the "whys" of the quest and just go after the gold. otherwise it's like, "i'm a thief, and a killer who walks in the shadows, why am i standing in front of the king and having my name declared to the kingdom as a hero?" a rogue wouldn't do that. a rogue would take the reward and vanish without anyone knowing her name. and since the king always spoke to "you, hero" rather than by name it was really rather fitting that i literally could take the reward and vanish without anyone knowing my name. rogue was just utterly perfect.
for paladins though it's all just perfect, you're a gleaming (literally) heroic pillar for all of azeroth to admire. (unless you're Arthas, but that's a nother story.) but i never got into paladins, tbh. i got one to 12 and was just bored with it. the class is much different now, it may be fun (warriors used to sucks donkey balls, but now warriors are fun as fuck if you can handle it) but it never grew on me. i did get the name Don Quixote and so he's quite literally an old man wearing heirloom armor standing in front of a windmill in elwynn forest. he's a level 12, so he has hardly any abilities, and as a companion the best i could do is a bi-pedal Panda dressed in clothes (sancho panda. get it?) he doesn't have a horse since that's a level 20 thing, but he'll never feel rested since he's not currently logged out in a city. that's how much i dislike paladins is that i keep him around.
oh, yeah, and i guess i have 2 paladins actually. one is preparing to battle a windmill and the other is my banker. she's a level 1. so, like back in the day a level one banker with a guild vault was a vanity item that has great utility. first of all level 1s are kinda hardish to get into the city. just takes time, but most people bring a level 5-10 because it's easier to level to 5 and safely walk into stormwind than it is to try and go there as a level 1. also guild vaults are expensive since you need people to sign up for your guild in order to found one. no one wants to be in your shitty guild anyway (not that you want them there) so getting ten people to sign up ends up being costly, pay people enough gold and they'll do it then bail out afterwards and leave you with your giant vault.
basically each character has limited bag space and bank space, you can't hold on to everything. if you're wanting more then you use a banker character and you mail your extra junk to them and you manage it (sell to a vendor for little quick cash, or put on the auction house and sell to a player for rare stuff) later when you're not in the middle of something. having a guild vault gave you up to 6 extra bank vaults, basically. a huge amount of space. enough for a whole guild of people, actually. and it was rather expensive to not only get, but maintain, the extra vaults each cost more and more gold. so it was an expensive vanity item - and it also takes up a character slot on your whole account. my banker toon never killed anyone or earned a single point of experience, but she's got a whole vault and about 25k gold with a few thousand worth of obsolete crafting materials to hock. not rich by any stretch, but kinda cool. she works for all my characters as a kind of broker.
well, my rogue was my main. in wow circles your main is your furthest progressed character, or a favorite, it's just whatever people play first or would raid first. i loved playing my rogue. i've mentioned elsewhere that i have an affinity for female rogues from fantasy writing and i've enjoyed playing it more than most any class. leveling was hard and i made a lot of mistakes along the way, but eventually i got to be pretty good.
questing in WoW, imho, is perfect for 2 classes: Paladins and Rogues. for every other class i question character motivation. why the fuck would some woodlands Hunter be fighting to save the world? since everyone basically does the same quests not much is tuned to classes. there's not really a story line for Priests that is different from Warriors. you're all asked to go out and murder thousands upon thousands of people and steal whatever the quest giver desires. sure, it's all for a cause, but it's all really, really suited to a suit of armor save-the-world type hero class, such as Paladins. the whole game is just perfect for anyone who wants to level a knight in shining armor.
or a rogue. all quests have rewards, and rogues (by in-game flavor text even) work for whoever has coin. as i leveled i didn't really even read all of the quest flavor text and lore. usually i didn't even know what i was looking for. i'd pick quests based on how much money it payed and what kind of loot i could get from it. i skipped whole zones because the rewards were better elsewhere. that was one of the truly great things about old world (vanilla), there were 6 starting zones that branched out into 2 major quest lines that lead to 2 completely different end games for both alliance and horde. start to finish you could level 4 characters across 2 factions and not play identical content between them. there was a fair amount of overlap, but much of it was unique to the faction and certainly unique to each major quest chain. with an abundance of places to go to level you were never without meaningful choices. for my rogue, that meant i didn't follow the story much beyond immediate reward.
playing as a rogue when i did was a really great experience. i leveled at the peak of player concurrency, so all i'd have to do was hang out around a dungeon and some group would run by and pick me up. it wasn't as hard back then to engage with people, but i avoided it in a lot of ways because i was playing a rogue. rogues are meant to be played solo, and the game mechanics did not disappoint. using stealth to bypass entire buildings of enemies to sneak up to the mini-boss and solo that fucker (mini bosses were 3 player recommended fights). you'd get the kill, get all the loot, then get the fuck out quietly. it was also a great way to die frequently, but some of the most fun i've ever had playing a game was spent playing my rogue. distracting guards, vanishing with smoke bombs, murdering for money, pick pocketing literally every humanoid with pockets, Blizzard really, really nailed rogues in their game.
even combat rogues. they were like street hooligans with bats and hammers. no stealth, no distraction, just run up to some fuckers and beat the ever living shit out of them... and then steal their wallets and jewelry. same as before, doing for the money, but more like hiring a reckless thug than a discrete assassin.
i didn't really ever feel that the other classes really meshed with the gameplay and story quite as well as it does for rogues and paladins. i mean it really only works for rogues if you willfully ignore the "whys" of the quest and just go after the gold. otherwise it's like, "i'm a thief, and a killer who walks in the shadows, why am i standing in front of the king and having my name declared to the kingdom as a hero?" a rogue wouldn't do that. a rogue would take the reward and vanish without anyone knowing her name. and since the king always spoke to "you, hero" rather than by name it was really rather fitting that i literally could take the reward and vanish without anyone knowing my name. rogue was just utterly perfect.
for paladins though it's all just perfect, you're a gleaming (literally) heroic pillar for all of azeroth to admire. (unless you're Arthas, but that's a nother story.) but i never got into paladins, tbh. i got one to 12 and was just bored with it. the class is much different now, it may be fun (warriors used to sucks donkey balls, but now warriors are fun as fuck if you can handle it) but it never grew on me. i did get the name Don Quixote and so he's quite literally an old man wearing heirloom armor standing in front of a windmill in elwynn forest. he's a level 12, so he has hardly any abilities, and as a companion the best i could do is a bi-pedal Panda dressed in clothes (sancho panda. get it?) he doesn't have a horse since that's a level 20 thing, but he'll never feel rested since he's not currently logged out in a city. that's how much i dislike paladins is that i keep him around.
oh, yeah, and i guess i have 2 paladins actually. one is preparing to battle a windmill and the other is my banker. she's a level 1. so, like back in the day a level one banker with a guild vault was a vanity item that has great utility. first of all level 1s are kinda hardish to get into the city. just takes time, but most people bring a level 5-10 because it's easier to level to 5 and safely walk into stormwind than it is to try and go there as a level 1. also guild vaults are expensive since you need people to sign up for your guild in order to found one. no one wants to be in your shitty guild anyway (not that you want them there) so getting ten people to sign up ends up being costly, pay people enough gold and they'll do it then bail out afterwards and leave you with your giant vault.
basically each character has limited bag space and bank space, you can't hold on to everything. if you're wanting more then you use a banker character and you mail your extra junk to them and you manage it (sell to a vendor for little quick cash, or put on the auction house and sell to a player for rare stuff) later when you're not in the middle of something. having a guild vault gave you up to 6 extra bank vaults, basically. a huge amount of space. enough for a whole guild of people, actually. and it was rather expensive to not only get, but maintain, the extra vaults each cost more and more gold. so it was an expensive vanity item - and it also takes up a character slot on your whole account. my banker toon never killed anyone or earned a single point of experience, but she's got a whole vault and about 25k gold with a few thousand worth of obsolete crafting materials to hock. not rich by any stretch, but kinda cool. she works for all my characters as a kind of broker.
Cis scum squeegee replied with this 10 years ago, 15 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #671,481
squeegee (OP) replied with this 10 years ago, 11 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #671,482
@previous (Cis scum squeegee)you sound like your mother, but i'll tell you what i told her, "i know exactly what i'm doing, bitch."
she loved it. maybe it runs in the family?
squeegee (OP) double-posted this 10 years ago, 2 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #671,483
i could talk about the coolest most impressive thing i ever saw another player do in WoW, and how it influenced me as a player, but, idk...Cis scum squeegee replied with this 10 years ago, 25 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #671,487
squeegee (OP) replied with this 10 years ago, 3 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #671,488
kook !!mCVqftDha joined in and replied with this 10 years ago, 4 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #671,489
Cis scum squeegee replied with this 10 years ago, 7 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #671,491
squeegee (OP) replied with this 10 years ago, 14 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #671,493
@671,489 (kook !!mCVqftDha)
he can't name anything specific because he's grasping at vague straws in a desperate attempt to find a way to insult me. it's kinda cute that i have a fan. like the woman that killed Salena or the guy that shot Dimebag Darrell. it's probably just attention seeking is all.
he can't name anything specific because he's grasping at vague straws in a desperate attempt to find a way to insult me. it's kinda cute that i have a fan. like the woman that killed Salena or the guy that shot Dimebag Darrell. it's probably just attention seeking is all.
(Edited 2 minutes later.)
kook !!mCVqftDha replied with this 10 years ago, 30 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #671,498
kook !!mCVqftDha double-posted this 10 years ago, 48 seconds later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #671,499
Cis scum squeegee replied with this 10 years ago, 49 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #671,504
@671,493 (squeegee)
Why are you accusing me of desperation? You're a grown man who felt like he needed mom jokes and personal attacks because I said you were long winded.
You are long winded. It's ok.
@previous (kook !!mCVqftDha)
I was hoping you'd die in your sleep you diabetic downsie.
Why are you accusing me of desperation? You're a grown man who felt like he needed mom jokes and personal attacks because I said you were long winded.
You are long winded. It's ok.
@previous (kook !!mCVqftDha)
I was hoping you'd die in your sleep you diabetic downsie.
RWBY Rhubarb? !!iNo3FkiZx replied with this 10 years ago, 8 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #671,505
@671,483 (squeegee)
Yes. Please, continue.
@previous (Cis scum squeegee)
Do you have a positive opinion of anybody on this website?
Yes. Please, continue.
@previous (Cis scum squeegee)
Do you have a positive opinion of anybody on this website?
Cis scum squeegee replied with this 10 years ago, 18 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #671,515
@previous (RWBY Rhubarb? !!iNo3FkiZx)
Sure!
People I don't like: fuckalms, kook, that angry nonceboy anon and other assorted TC trailer trash
People I don't curr about because they're dreadfully dull: you, squeegee, sheila
People I do like: marky mark, Becky, Lillian, Juanita, anon h, anon z-12, and our favorite bathroom mirror selfie taking minor marrying methhead
Sure!
People I don't like: fuckalms, kook, that angry nonceboy anon and other assorted TC trailer trash
People I don't curr about because they're dreadfully dull: you, squeegee, sheila
People I do like: marky mark, Becky, Lillian, Juanita, anon h, anon z-12, and our favorite bathroom mirror selfie taking minor marrying methhead
RWBY Rhubarb? !!iNo3FkiZx replied with this 10 years ago, 8 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #671,517
squeegee (OP) replied with this 10 years ago, 29 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #671,528
@671,504 (Cis scum squeegee)
are you questioning my personal attack and then calling someone a diabetic downsie? now you're hypocritically grasping at straws. for someone who thinks i'm dreadfully dull you sure seem to spend a lot of time in my threads trying to engage me in one way or another. i wonder why you're so mad.
are you questioning my personal attack and then calling someone a diabetic downsie? now you're hypocritically grasping at straws. for someone who thinks i'm dreadfully dull you sure seem to spend a lot of time in my threads trying to engage me in one way or another. i wonder why you're so mad.
squeegee (OP) double-posted this 10 years ago, 18 seconds later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #671,529
@671,499 (kook !!mCVqftDha)
i can talk a bit about raiding if you like. raiding is probably the most famous part of world of warcraft. it's all end-game content, stuff you do at max level. as you're progressing through the quests and leveling you do have an opportunity to run 5-man dungeons which are like mini-raids. they both require the same basic setup, just with different numbers of players. the setup requires Tanks, DPS, and Healers. tanks are paladins and warriors and Death Knights. DPS (damage per second) are any class that does damage, and each class has at least one damage dealing spec. healers, of course, heal people. 5 man always takes 1 tank, 1 healer, 3 damage dealers. raids can require as many as 3 tanks, 6 healers, and the rest DPS.
there are tanks, off tanks, raid healers, main healers, single target dps, aoe (area of effect) dps, melee dps, ranged dps, and a variety of talents from each class that aid with everything from healing to buffing damage and even controlling large crowds of additional enemies that may flood the encounter. most fights break down into things like gear checks (making sure everyone in the raid has sufficient gear, otherwise the boss will kill too many people to succeed) or DPS race (another kind of gear check to make sure DPS can bring the heat before an enrage effect wipes the encounter) or a mechanical fight with unusual hurdles to deal with.
raids (and even 5 man dungeons) almost all have multiple bosses. there's of course a whole story about the places, but i was usually just there for some epic loots. after the first couple of fights, the gear checks and dps races it's on to the difficult mechanical encounters.
it's very difficult to organize 20 players (let alone 40 in vanilla) who all know what they are doing. raiding was very hard exactly because 1 player fucking up is enough to wipe the whole group. especially when the content is current and people are fighting to progress to the next boss fights. the hardest part, tbh, was actually getting 20 people to all be at the same place at the same time. we were lucky to have the almost 10 regular players that we had. out of a 200 man guild, 10 regulars was the best we could do when i was raiding. same story in any guild. it's a game, so it's a low priority for everyone. but, it did make it hard to progress unless you were in a progression guild with a strict schedule. miss a raid and you're bumped for an alternate indefinitely.
most boss encounters went pretty simply, but it's asking 20 people to all work to achieve basically a choreographed fight. everyone has to know what they're doing, what the encounter expects of them, and how to respond to ongoing "stuff." a boss fight would start with the Tank (or tanks) picking up the boss and any companion bosses. Tanks have abilities to hold "aggro", which just means they keep the boss focused on hitting them and not any other raiders. the tanks hold onto the boss and maintain aggro while the healers spam heal the tanks to keep them alive. bosses deal massive damage, and can kill a tank in a few hits, so healers need to be on the ball otherwise it's a wipe. as the healer is healing the tanks and the tanks are holding the boss, all the rest of the raid deal damage to the boss. bosses have enormous amounts of health, and fights can go on for many minutes, especially when there are many mechanics involved.
as the healers heal the tanks and the tanks hold the boss and the DPS do as much damage as they can, the boss can to things too. sometimes they'll spawn "adds", or additional enemies that can run rampant through a raid and kill everyone. depending on the fight, either an off tank picks up the adds, or some DPS splits off to do crowd control, or everyone turns to focus on the adds while the boss is made immune to damage by the presence of the adds. there are hundreds of mechanics that can be used in a boss fight. a wave of lava flows across the floor and everyone has to run to the high ground, two bosses need to be tanked away from each other and DPS'd down independently, meteors fall to the ground and ignite more and more area with fire until everyone burns to death. raids can be complicated and fun. some were a bore.
raiding in wrath of the lich king was the last of the hardest raids. blizzard introduced an automated cross-server raid-finder that makes grouping up a snap. you don't really need a guild anymore to raid. it's nice in some ways, it's way less frustrating to get a raid and once you get one if the group sucks you can just quit and requeue. back in the day you toughed it out or gave up for the week and tried again after the lockout was over. but also wrath of the lich king had some awesomely hard fights. ultimately my guild downed everything but the lich king himself, we progressed to the 12 minute mark in that fight (it's about a 20 minute fight with many, many, many mechanics that change with each phase of the fight.) out of three phases we finished 1 and were almost through the second phase when the guild disbanded. the raid group fell apart and i quit the game for about a year and a half. never really raided again. and i always felt like the next sets of raids were just easy compared to even the dps races in WotLK. the lich king fight was absolutely insane.
interestingly enough the guild Paragon got world first LK kill and they cheated to do it. their rogue (ha) was using (i think they were called) saronite bombs made by engineers to boost their DPS (standard at the time for rogues, tbh) and they found out that if you timed it perfectly you could use a saronite bomb to bug the map in a way that prevented a cliff from collapsing and that completely nullified a very major boss mechanic that would pick players up and try to drop them over the cliff. since the cliff didn't fall, the mechanic was trivialized. (it was one of the hardest to deal with next to black holes actually) Paragon got their world first taken away from them if i remember correctly, but they did try to claim they thought the bug was intended even though there was no other way to stop the collapse and saronite bombs were only marginally useful for anyone but a spreadsheeting rogue.
i haven't raided at all in this expansion, doubt i will, there will be no challenge at this point. might do it to see the story line, but honestly i don't even really know what's going on. some kind of time travel parallel dimension stuff. i don't care. i've heard the raids are a lot of fun, so i might do it to see what "fun raids" are like these days.
oh, and i eventually did get the lich king kill, but it was over a year late and i was well over leveled. did the fights with just 3 other people and didn't really need them for the most part. it was cool to finally see it for real, i guess, but man, it was a real bummer the way it went down.
i can talk a bit about raiding if you like. raiding is probably the most famous part of world of warcraft. it's all end-game content, stuff you do at max level. as you're progressing through the quests and leveling you do have an opportunity to run 5-man dungeons which are like mini-raids. they both require the same basic setup, just with different numbers of players. the setup requires Tanks, DPS, and Healers. tanks are paladins and warriors and Death Knights. DPS (damage per second) are any class that does damage, and each class has at least one damage dealing spec. healers, of course, heal people. 5 man always takes 1 tank, 1 healer, 3 damage dealers. raids can require as many as 3 tanks, 6 healers, and the rest DPS.
there are tanks, off tanks, raid healers, main healers, single target dps, aoe (area of effect) dps, melee dps, ranged dps, and a variety of talents from each class that aid with everything from healing to buffing damage and even controlling large crowds of additional enemies that may flood the encounter. most fights break down into things like gear checks (making sure everyone in the raid has sufficient gear, otherwise the boss will kill too many people to succeed) or DPS race (another kind of gear check to make sure DPS can bring the heat before an enrage effect wipes the encounter) or a mechanical fight with unusual hurdles to deal with.
raids (and even 5 man dungeons) almost all have multiple bosses. there's of course a whole story about the places, but i was usually just there for some epic loots. after the first couple of fights, the gear checks and dps races it's on to the difficult mechanical encounters.
it's very difficult to organize 20 players (let alone 40 in vanilla) who all know what they are doing. raiding was very hard exactly because 1 player fucking up is enough to wipe the whole group. especially when the content is current and people are fighting to progress to the next boss fights. the hardest part, tbh, was actually getting 20 people to all be at the same place at the same time. we were lucky to have the almost 10 regular players that we had. out of a 200 man guild, 10 regulars was the best we could do when i was raiding. same story in any guild. it's a game, so it's a low priority for everyone. but, it did make it hard to progress unless you were in a progression guild with a strict schedule. miss a raid and you're bumped for an alternate indefinitely.
most boss encounters went pretty simply, but it's asking 20 people to all work to achieve basically a choreographed fight. everyone has to know what they're doing, what the encounter expects of them, and how to respond to ongoing "stuff." a boss fight would start with the Tank (or tanks) picking up the boss and any companion bosses. Tanks have abilities to hold "aggro", which just means they keep the boss focused on hitting them and not any other raiders. the tanks hold onto the boss and maintain aggro while the healers spam heal the tanks to keep them alive. bosses deal massive damage, and can kill a tank in a few hits, so healers need to be on the ball otherwise it's a wipe. as the healer is healing the tanks and the tanks are holding the boss, all the rest of the raid deal damage to the boss. bosses have enormous amounts of health, and fights can go on for many minutes, especially when there are many mechanics involved.
as the healers heal the tanks and the tanks hold the boss and the DPS do as much damage as they can, the boss can to things too. sometimes they'll spawn "adds", or additional enemies that can run rampant through a raid and kill everyone. depending on the fight, either an off tank picks up the adds, or some DPS splits off to do crowd control, or everyone turns to focus on the adds while the boss is made immune to damage by the presence of the adds. there are hundreds of mechanics that can be used in a boss fight. a wave of lava flows across the floor and everyone has to run to the high ground, two bosses need to be tanked away from each other and DPS'd down independently, meteors fall to the ground and ignite more and more area with fire until everyone burns to death. raids can be complicated and fun. some were a bore.
raiding in wrath of the lich king was the last of the hardest raids. blizzard introduced an automated cross-server raid-finder that makes grouping up a snap. you don't really need a guild anymore to raid. it's nice in some ways, it's way less frustrating to get a raid and once you get one if the group sucks you can just quit and requeue. back in the day you toughed it out or gave up for the week and tried again after the lockout was over. but also wrath of the lich king had some awesomely hard fights. ultimately my guild downed everything but the lich king himself, we progressed to the 12 minute mark in that fight (it's about a 20 minute fight with many, many, many mechanics that change with each phase of the fight.) out of three phases we finished 1 and were almost through the second phase when the guild disbanded. the raid group fell apart and i quit the game for about a year and a half. never really raided again. and i always felt like the next sets of raids were just easy compared to even the dps races in WotLK. the lich king fight was absolutely insane.
interestingly enough the guild Paragon got world first LK kill and they cheated to do it. their rogue (ha) was using (i think they were called) saronite bombs made by engineers to boost their DPS (standard at the time for rogues, tbh) and they found out that if you timed it perfectly you could use a saronite bomb to bug the map in a way that prevented a cliff from collapsing and that completely nullified a very major boss mechanic that would pick players up and try to drop them over the cliff. since the cliff didn't fall, the mechanic was trivialized. (it was one of the hardest to deal with next to black holes actually) Paragon got their world first taken away from them if i remember correctly, but they did try to claim they thought the bug was intended even though there was no other way to stop the collapse and saronite bombs were only marginally useful for anyone but a spreadsheeting rogue.
i haven't raided at all in this expansion, doubt i will, there will be no challenge at this point. might do it to see the story line, but honestly i don't even really know what's going on. some kind of time travel parallel dimension stuff. i don't care. i've heard the raids are a lot of fun, so i might do it to see what "fun raids" are like these days.
oh, and i eventually did get the lich king kill, but it was over a year late and i was well over leveled. did the fights with just 3 other people and didn't really need them for the most part. it was cool to finally see it for real, i guess, but man, it was a real bummer the way it went down.
Anonymous D replied with this 10 years ago, 29 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #671,532
@671,528 (squeegee)
Kook has diabetes and an IQ that would preclude her from being executed if she didn't live in Florida, that's not a personal attack.
Kook has diabetes and an IQ that would preclude her from being executed if she didn't live in Florida, that's not a personal attack.
RWBY Rhubarb? !!iNo3FkiZx replied with this 10 years ago, 6 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #671,533
@671,528 (squeegee)
I think he has an admiration for you, and wants to be like you. The telltale sign is that he constantly adopts your name.
I think he has an admiration for you, and wants to be like you. The telltale sign is that he constantly adopts your name.
squeegee replied with this 10 years ago, 3 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #671,534
@previous (RWBY Rhubarb? !!iNo3FkiZx)
It's true, I hope to be as blissfully boring as the real squeegee someday.
It's true, I hope to be as blissfully boring as the real squeegee someday.
squeegee (OP) replied with this 10 years ago, 28 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #671,537
squeegee (OP) double-posted this 10 years ago, 16 seconds later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #671,538
@671,505 (RWBY Rhubarb? !!iNo3FkiZx)
i was pretty early in my leveling through vanilla content and it was getting to be a drag. i was something like level 30, and it was hitting home how much longer each level was taking and that level 30 wasn't even close to being at the halfway point. i was hanging out in stormwind one night going through some upgrades in the Auction House and everything was super expensive and i was just getting to the point where nothing was feeling like progression and everything seemed to be way, way out of reach. it might've been one of the last times i logged into the game, but as i was leaving the AH the Local Defense chat started scrolling, there was an attack happening at the front gate.
at the time there were 40 man PvP raids that you could do for achievements. you'd basically create a 40 man raid and attack your enemy faction's main city and kill the king. for this you'd get an achievement and a rare mount. it was also very hard because any player that wants can jump in to defend or help attack. it was common for these kinds of raids to happen on weekends, but not on random week nights. this was something else.
i headed for the gate and found a single female blood elf shaman (a horde faction, enemy) slaughtering everyone on the bridge. she was fast. ran circles around everyone. she carried two axes that glowed with fire and hacked people to death as she simultaneously caused earthquakes, threw lightning bolts, healed herself with water, and set everyone around her on fire. level capped players threw themselves at her trying to stop her from making it to the heart of the city, but it was no use. she'd throw totems on the ground that would turn the dirt to lava and summoned spectral wolves that attacked by her side. there were player skeletons everywhere and townfolk dropped like flies. all the guards were dead, and she headed to the auction house and slaughtered all of the auctioneers and then to the bank where she killed all the bankers. it was brutal. she spared no one.
it would take an hour for all of the townsfolk to respawn. during that time the only access to the AH was through Iron Forge. people had to go way out of their way to even drop loot in the bank. it was spectacular. after the shaman had killed every important NPC in town she fought her way inside of the town dungeon where she could safely escape. she killed easily 30 guards, all elites, and took on more than one at a time -and players- more than once. i got close enough that i was able to inspect her gear. full PvP set earned from rated battlegrounds with a raid viable melee DPS spec.
i'd seen some good PvP before, but this player was on a whole nother level. and as a class shaman looked ridiculously cool. you just kind of explode with elemental damage and when you combine it with lots of mobility it looks like an axe wielding storm of fire and lightning and explosions and wolves. i was pretty impressed by the whole thing, it lasted all of 5 minutes or so start to finish. but i felt like after seeing that that i hadn't really seen anything yet, and that kinda drove home how much different the game play will be with each new ability earned. i think things stopped looking like a rush to the end-game, which is what i was doing, trying to get to the "new good stuff." instead i just started enjoying the game for what it is (it is questing and questing and questing) and just enjoy it as long as it's fun. i figured i'd see some more really cool stuff along the way, and all of the sudden i started having fun again.
(not to mention i started using addons that acted like a guidebook for questing, it highlighted your map to show where to go and other stuff that's all actually just part of the game now. it helped make quests less nebulous.)
i did eventually roll a shaman as an alt. it's absolutely at least my second favorite class, it's also one of my very few close to max level characters. i've never actually had it maxed during an expansion though, priority has always been on my rogue because she's the shit. but atm i'm having way more fun with my shaman than my rogue. my rogue feels tired, or maybe it's that i'm tired of always stealthing around and going slow and careful. facerolling entire villages of mobs with a hurricane of fire charged maces and thunder has been great fun. i'll have my shaman maxed by the time i unsub for the summer, so i'll have a choice of what i plan to main through Legion. i've heard they are turning rogues into some kind of pirate themed bastardization that i might fund fundamentally insulting to the class.
my rogue might literally be an admiral of the bloodsail pirates (it's a long story, but goblins have been attacking me on sight for like 5 years, there are whole cities i can't go into without being murdered by goblins) but i'll be damned if my rogue will actually turn into one. i've also heard that shaman are not fundamentally going to change, so there's a strong chance that if i do play i'll main my shaman and use my rogue to provide support.
i was pretty early in my leveling through vanilla content and it was getting to be a drag. i was something like level 30, and it was hitting home how much longer each level was taking and that level 30 wasn't even close to being at the halfway point. i was hanging out in stormwind one night going through some upgrades in the Auction House and everything was super expensive and i was just getting to the point where nothing was feeling like progression and everything seemed to be way, way out of reach. it might've been one of the last times i logged into the game, but as i was leaving the AH the Local Defense chat started scrolling, there was an attack happening at the front gate.
at the time there were 40 man PvP raids that you could do for achievements. you'd basically create a 40 man raid and attack your enemy faction's main city and kill the king. for this you'd get an achievement and a rare mount. it was also very hard because any player that wants can jump in to defend or help attack. it was common for these kinds of raids to happen on weekends, but not on random week nights. this was something else.
i headed for the gate and found a single female blood elf shaman (a horde faction, enemy) slaughtering everyone on the bridge. she was fast. ran circles around everyone. she carried two axes that glowed with fire and hacked people to death as she simultaneously caused earthquakes, threw lightning bolts, healed herself with water, and set everyone around her on fire. level capped players threw themselves at her trying to stop her from making it to the heart of the city, but it was no use. she'd throw totems on the ground that would turn the dirt to lava and summoned spectral wolves that attacked by her side. there were player skeletons everywhere and townfolk dropped like flies. all the guards were dead, and she headed to the auction house and slaughtered all of the auctioneers and then to the bank where she killed all the bankers. it was brutal. she spared no one.
it would take an hour for all of the townsfolk to respawn. during that time the only access to the AH was through Iron Forge. people had to go way out of their way to even drop loot in the bank. it was spectacular. after the shaman had killed every important NPC in town she fought her way inside of the town dungeon where she could safely escape. she killed easily 30 guards, all elites, and took on more than one at a time -and players- more than once. i got close enough that i was able to inspect her gear. full PvP set earned from rated battlegrounds with a raid viable melee DPS spec.
i'd seen some good PvP before, but this player was on a whole nother level. and as a class shaman looked ridiculously cool. you just kind of explode with elemental damage and when you combine it with lots of mobility it looks like an axe wielding storm of fire and lightning and explosions and wolves. i was pretty impressed by the whole thing, it lasted all of 5 minutes or so start to finish. but i felt like after seeing that that i hadn't really seen anything yet, and that kinda drove home how much different the game play will be with each new ability earned. i think things stopped looking like a rush to the end-game, which is what i was doing, trying to get to the "new good stuff." instead i just started enjoying the game for what it is (it is questing and questing and questing) and just enjoy it as long as it's fun. i figured i'd see some more really cool stuff along the way, and all of the sudden i started having fun again.
(not to mention i started using addons that acted like a guidebook for questing, it highlighted your map to show where to go and other stuff that's all actually just part of the game now. it helped make quests less nebulous.)
i did eventually roll a shaman as an alt. it's absolutely at least my second favorite class, it's also one of my very few close to max level characters. i've never actually had it maxed during an expansion though, priority has always been on my rogue because she's the shit. but atm i'm having way more fun with my shaman than my rogue. my rogue feels tired, or maybe it's that i'm tired of always stealthing around and going slow and careful. facerolling entire villages of mobs with a hurricane of fire charged maces and thunder has been great fun. i'll have my shaman maxed by the time i unsub for the summer, so i'll have a choice of what i plan to main through Legion. i've heard they are turning rogues into some kind of pirate themed bastardization that i might fund fundamentally insulting to the class.
my rogue might literally be an admiral of the bloodsail pirates (it's a long story, but goblins have been attacking me on sight for like 5 years, there are whole cities i can't go into without being murdered by goblins) but i'll be damned if my rogue will actually turn into one. i've also heard that shaman are not fundamentally going to change, so there's a strong chance that if i do play i'll main my shaman and use my rogue to provide support.
kook !!mCVqftDha replied with this 10 years ago, 7 hours later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #671,584
Handel !XFpaTU3A5E joined in and replied with this 10 years ago, 22 hours later, 2 days after the original post[^] [v] #671,789
@OP
What sever & faction is your main?
I'm jumping back in once Legion launches would be great to play with a Minichanner!
What sever & faction is your main?
I'm jumping back in once Legion launches would be great to play with a Minichanner!
squeegee replied with this 10 years ago, 13 minutes later, 2 days after the original post[^] [v] #671,790
squeegee double-posted this 10 years ago, 3 hours later, 2 days after the original post[^] [v] #671,826
@671,789 (Handel !XFpaTU3A5E)
also korialstrasz is a low pop server these days, i haven't seen it at high since wotlk. it's also a pve server. if you're interested we could hop on a high pop pvp realm or something harder unless you're just into pve.
also korialstrasz is a low pop server these days, i haven't seen it at high since wotlk. it's also a pve server. if you're interested we could hop on a high pop pvp realm or something harder unless you're just into pve.
FuckAlms !vX8K53rFBI replied with this 10 years ago, 7 hours later, 2 days after the original post[^] [v] #672,026
squeegee (OP) replied with this 10 years ago, 1 hour later, 2 days after the original post[^] [v] #672,062
@previous (FuckAlms !vX8K53rFBI)
i'll tell you about my tank. i leveled him as Horde side, he was a Tauren (basically a bipedal buffalo thing). i leveled him as horde because i didn't want to be tempted to send him a bunch of gold and heirlooms, i wanted to just level the old fashioned way and make use of the Dungeon Group tool to finish out zone quests. I'd never leveled a horde toon beyond about level 12. (basically levels 1-10 happen in a race specific starter zone with a small story arc unique to your race. i played all races with unique starter zones to about level 10-12 and as soon as it got to the first main branch where all the starter quests converge i'd usually delete the toon. just wanted to see them.)
So the plan with the warrior was to see the horde side quest zones and see what differences there were between the two factions. I never really liked the Horde aesthetic, but the horde races have some of the best race-specific abilities. Tauren can [Stomp] which stuns all enemies around you for a few seconds. it's perfect for tanking, and you can use it pretty often. usually racial abilities aren't, like, super abilities, but some are way more useful than others for end-game stuff or PvP.
I'd also always wanted to try tanking. i'd been told i'd be good at warrior tanks specifically based on how i raided my rogue. i hated paladins and death knights were a joke at the time for tanking. when i first started playing the warrior the class was kinda unique among all other classes. Warriors have a Rage mechanic, where you build up rage (like a meter from 0 - 100) and when you have enough rage you can spend it to perform special abilities. most abilities for all classes work on a global-cooldown, meaning that when you use an ability there is a 1 second delay before you can use another ability or cast a spell, etc. that means that at any time your GCD will allow you to cast an ability you may have a choice between multiple abilities. Warriors were known as a priority class, and that means that every GCD you want to use whatever ability has the higher priority as it becomes available.
ultimately this is known as a rotation. an attack rotation, ability rotation, whatever you want to call it. all classes have a rotation.
assassination rogues looks like this: ambush, mutilate, mutilate, envenom, mut, mut, env, vanish, amb, mut, mut, env, etc. and it comes across as 122322341223223
combat looks like this: ambush, revealing strike, slice and dice, sinister strike, ss, ss, ss, ss, eviscerate, ss, ss, ss, ss, ss, slice and dice or eviscerate based on priority. it comes across as 123444445444443or5444443or5. (disclaimer - i don't use a keyboard to play wow, i use a logitech G13 which is perfect for mmos. it has assignable keys that can auto-spam if you want. you can make one key go 122322341223223 if you want. it's a must have for any serious PvP player too.)
for warrior tanks it's was a bit more like the combat rogue but with something like 6 abilities to prioritize each gcd. some abilities get spent and take 30 seconds before you can use them again, others just a few seconds or even as little as the one second Global Cool Down. you'd use a series of shouts and stomps to enrage the enemy while at the same time doing damage. a Protection Warrior, aka tank, generates extra threat against enemies making them attack you and not the more legitimate threat of weak DPS right behind them. DPS generates threat as they fuck up the boss, so it's a race between DPS and Tanks to generate the highest level of threat, because DPS brings the heat which in turn brings the threat. the goal of the tank is to sound more threatening and look more threatening to the bosses. (it's kind of funny, i think, because i always imagined the tank just screaming, "fuck you you cunt! i'll kill you" and making a bunch of aggressive poses at the boss. i guess that's kind of literally what you're doing, some of your abilities are in fact shouts.)
but more than just knowing how to prioritize your rotation, tanks need to know the content enough they can explain everyone's role in dungeons. content is different, boss encounters are all unique. and a tank needs to know the fight and everyone's role. the same is not necessarily true for DPS or heals. unusual mechanics aside, if a tank doesn't know what he's doing in a fight he's likely to get [Cleaved] or any number of attacks that can outright kill you if you don't use your damage mitigation cooldowns or work the environment properly. tanks holding a boss wrong will always wipe a fight. it's kinda hard to wipe a party as DPS, you can certainly do it, but most fights aren't DPS races with enrage timers (you being dead and not doing damage kills everyone) and can be done if you just rinse/repeat the mechanics properly. making a fight go smoothly, that's really a tanks primary job.
tanking can be hard. when content is new and people aren't equipping late-game uber-gear the fights are a challenge for everyone. but it is (well, used to be at least) very rewarding.it certainly still can be, tanks are always in demand, even bad ones. it's generally perceived to be the hardest role to fill so most people opt to play Warriors as a DPS class instead of a Tank. You're almost always the group leader, and back in the day you'd usually also get Loot Master and hand out the gear (or steal it all if you were a real dick) so the role came with some juicy extras usually. most people have a very high opinion of tanks as well, maybe it's because they are forced into the "first-into-the-fight" role and gain unwarranted respect as a leader or maybe it's because tanks generally were experts at the game, but most players tended to not question tanks until they start fucking up. that led to quite a few funny circumstances when i was first started learning to tank.
warriors were (at the time) the premier single target tank, but they performed less well than paladins did with groups. to successfully tanks a group a warrior tank needed to be highly mobile and switch targets frequently to build aggro on mobs that were getting away from you. modern day players have a very hard time using "focus-my focus' focus" macros and things like that so DPS were usually just attacking things randomly which build aggro on everything and can be very challenging to deal with. (a pally can just drop [consecrate] on the ground as an area-of-effect and they're done) pretty frequently i'd lose some trash mobs and people would get killed. it was totally my fault, every time, i was either flustered and spammed the wrong thing or i just missed it and didn't even know it was happening. (raid awareness has always been the hardest thing for me, there's just so much shit going on.) but, inevitably before i could cop to it and apologize for sucking the healer would usually start taking responsibility and every time that would happen i'd just [backspace][backspace][backspace] and say, "you need to get your head in the game, heals."
i do have a love for healers. they are the real un-sung heros of WoW. not only is it mind numbingly boring (imho) but it's also the most fucking stressful thing you can do in the entirety of video games to heal a 20-40 man raid. even dungeons are a nightmare. i think i have PTSD from healing dungeons with my shaman. pretty much everything i've said so far only applies to DPS and Tanks. Heals is entirely different. no one (not even a tank) can fuck things up more than a healer can fuck things up. they have all the real power, and even though they don't control the pacing the way a tank does, the Healer is the single most important person you bring with you. they are also as frazzled as air-traffic controllers and can snap without warning and become a broken shell of a player. when an encounter wipes Tanks just get pissed at everyone for not knowing the fights. DPS get embarrassed for not having raid-awareness and dying, but healers are the ones who watch the whole thing crumble before their eyes. you can see 3 steps ahead of everyone where the fight is going. you're the first to know the fight is over. it's like being in a car crash in slow-motion and seeing it coming and watching all the crumple zones crunch and glass break and there's nothing you can do but watch as the whole thing falls apart around you. if you picture yourself in a city full of building and they all start toppling because you're not hitting buttons fast enough or in the right order and... yeah. i can't even describe how traumatic healing was for me.
ah, it's exactly like having 4 children running around in an incredibly dangerous house full of spikes and vicious dogs and you can't stop the children from doing anything, all you can do is turn them in another direction. it's not fun.
i'll tell you about my tank. i leveled him as Horde side, he was a Tauren (basically a bipedal buffalo thing). i leveled him as horde because i didn't want to be tempted to send him a bunch of gold and heirlooms, i wanted to just level the old fashioned way and make use of the Dungeon Group tool to finish out zone quests. I'd never leveled a horde toon beyond about level 12. (basically levels 1-10 happen in a race specific starter zone with a small story arc unique to your race. i played all races with unique starter zones to about level 10-12 and as soon as it got to the first main branch where all the starter quests converge i'd usually delete the toon. just wanted to see them.)
So the plan with the warrior was to see the horde side quest zones and see what differences there were between the two factions. I never really liked the Horde aesthetic, but the horde races have some of the best race-specific abilities. Tauren can [Stomp] which stuns all enemies around you for a few seconds. it's perfect for tanking, and you can use it pretty often. usually racial abilities aren't, like, super abilities, but some are way more useful than others for end-game stuff or PvP.
I'd also always wanted to try tanking. i'd been told i'd be good at warrior tanks specifically based on how i raided my rogue. i hated paladins and death knights were a joke at the time for tanking. when i first started playing the warrior the class was kinda unique among all other classes. Warriors have a Rage mechanic, where you build up rage (like a meter from 0 - 100) and when you have enough rage you can spend it to perform special abilities. most abilities for all classes work on a global-cooldown, meaning that when you use an ability there is a 1 second delay before you can use another ability or cast a spell, etc. that means that at any time your GCD will allow you to cast an ability you may have a choice between multiple abilities. Warriors were known as a priority class, and that means that every GCD you want to use whatever ability has the higher priority as it becomes available.
ultimately this is known as a rotation. an attack rotation, ability rotation, whatever you want to call it. all classes have a rotation.
assassination rogues looks like this: ambush, mutilate, mutilate, envenom, mut, mut, env, vanish, amb, mut, mut, env, etc. and it comes across as 122322341223223
combat looks like this: ambush, revealing strike, slice and dice, sinister strike, ss, ss, ss, ss, eviscerate, ss, ss, ss, ss, ss, slice and dice or eviscerate based on priority. it comes across as 123444445444443or5444443or5. (disclaimer - i don't use a keyboard to play wow, i use a logitech G13 which is perfect for mmos. it has assignable keys that can auto-spam if you want. you can make one key go 122322341223223 if you want. it's a must have for any serious PvP player too.)
for warrior tanks it's was a bit more like the combat rogue but with something like 6 abilities to prioritize each gcd. some abilities get spent and take 30 seconds before you can use them again, others just a few seconds or even as little as the one second Global Cool Down. you'd use a series of shouts and stomps to enrage the enemy while at the same time doing damage. a Protection Warrior, aka tank, generates extra threat against enemies making them attack you and not the more legitimate threat of weak DPS right behind them. DPS generates threat as they fuck up the boss, so it's a race between DPS and Tanks to generate the highest level of threat, because DPS brings the heat which in turn brings the threat. the goal of the tank is to sound more threatening and look more threatening to the bosses. (it's kind of funny, i think, because i always imagined the tank just screaming, "fuck you you cunt! i'll kill you" and making a bunch of aggressive poses at the boss. i guess that's kind of literally what you're doing, some of your abilities are in fact shouts.)
but more than just knowing how to prioritize your rotation, tanks need to know the content enough they can explain everyone's role in dungeons. content is different, boss encounters are all unique. and a tank needs to know the fight and everyone's role. the same is not necessarily true for DPS or heals. unusual mechanics aside, if a tank doesn't know what he's doing in a fight he's likely to get [Cleaved] or any number of attacks that can outright kill you if you don't use your damage mitigation cooldowns or work the environment properly. tanks holding a boss wrong will always wipe a fight. it's kinda hard to wipe a party as DPS, you can certainly do it, but most fights aren't DPS races with enrage timers (you being dead and not doing damage kills everyone) and can be done if you just rinse/repeat the mechanics properly. making a fight go smoothly, that's really a tanks primary job.
tanking can be hard. when content is new and people aren't equipping late-game uber-gear the fights are a challenge for everyone. but it is (well, used to be at least) very rewarding.it certainly still can be, tanks are always in demand, even bad ones. it's generally perceived to be the hardest role to fill so most people opt to play Warriors as a DPS class instead of a Tank. You're almost always the group leader, and back in the day you'd usually also get Loot Master and hand out the gear (or steal it all if you were a real dick) so the role came with some juicy extras usually. most people have a very high opinion of tanks as well, maybe it's because they are forced into the "first-into-the-fight" role and gain unwarranted respect as a leader or maybe it's because tanks generally were experts at the game, but most players tended to not question tanks until they start fucking up. that led to quite a few funny circumstances when i was first started learning to tank.
warriors were (at the time) the premier single target tank, but they performed less well than paladins did with groups. to successfully tanks a group a warrior tank needed to be highly mobile and switch targets frequently to build aggro on mobs that were getting away from you. modern day players have a very hard time using "focus-my focus' focus" macros and things like that so DPS were usually just attacking things randomly which build aggro on everything and can be very challenging to deal with. (a pally can just drop [consecrate] on the ground as an area-of-effect and they're done) pretty frequently i'd lose some trash mobs and people would get killed. it was totally my fault, every time, i was either flustered and spammed the wrong thing or i just missed it and didn't even know it was happening. (raid awareness has always been the hardest thing for me, there's just so much shit going on.) but, inevitably before i could cop to it and apologize for sucking the healer would usually start taking responsibility and every time that would happen i'd just [backspace][backspace][backspace] and say, "you need to get your head in the game, heals."
i do have a love for healers. they are the real un-sung heros of WoW. not only is it mind numbingly boring (imho) but it's also the most fucking stressful thing you can do in the entirety of video games to heal a 20-40 man raid. even dungeons are a nightmare. i think i have PTSD from healing dungeons with my shaman. pretty much everything i've said so far only applies to DPS and Tanks. Heals is entirely different. no one (not even a tank) can fuck things up more than a healer can fuck things up. they have all the real power, and even though they don't control the pacing the way a tank does, the Healer is the single most important person you bring with you. they are also as frazzled as air-traffic controllers and can snap without warning and become a broken shell of a player. when an encounter wipes Tanks just get pissed at everyone for not knowing the fights. DPS get embarrassed for not having raid-awareness and dying, but healers are the ones who watch the whole thing crumble before their eyes. you can see 3 steps ahead of everyone where the fight is going. you're the first to know the fight is over. it's like being in a car crash in slow-motion and seeing it coming and watching all the crumple zones crunch and glass break and there's nothing you can do but watch as the whole thing falls apart around you. if you picture yourself in a city full of building and they all start toppling because you're not hitting buttons fast enough or in the right order and... yeah. i can't even describe how traumatic healing was for me.
ah, it's exactly like having 4 children running around in an incredibly dangerous house full of spikes and vicious dogs and you can't stop the children from doing anything, all you can do is turn them in another direction. it's not fun.
(Edited 8 minutes later.)
buttons joined in and replied with this 10 years ago, 1 hour later, 3 days after the original post[^] [v] #672,067
squeegee (OP) replied with this 10 years ago, 21 minutes later, 3 days after the original post[^] [v] #672,069
@previous (buttons)
damn, i would add an edit to the part talking about the warriors rotation.
warriors didn't really have a rotation. they had priorities so instead of a nice, neat rotation that you would repeat over and over tanks had random rotations with a standard opener. usually you'd [charge] an enemy or [heroic leap] to them or use [heroic toss] or you'd do them all if you're gathering up multiples. after that you'd use [Shield Slam], [Thunder Clap], [execute] and a variety of shouts and stances and whatever else makes sense at the time. so you might open with a pretty standard 123 type opener, but at times it could easily be 321. and you'd usually not repeat the opener over and over. so one fight might look like 2314253261251342163 and another might start the same but have different post-opener priorities - 21342564621356723621 or something like that.
the same is true for warrior DPS as well. they don't have a hard-fast rotation like other classes either. didn't used to anyway, it may have changed over the last few years i guess. and there will definitely be new abilities i don't even know about. [dragon shout] was a level 90 ability in mists of pandaria that i used as both DPS and Tank.
Warrior DPS is fucking really good too. all warriors wear plate, and the armor makes a huge difference. my rogue is squishy in leather. my shaman much more resilient in mail. but plate wearing classes (warriors, paladins) could resist a fuck load of physical damage. so they are awesome for pvp (though they do have their weaknesses). warrior DPS specs deal a very high amount of damage too. especially against multiple targets.
warriors are very hard to master, but they are also easy to use. you can do nothing but spam [shield strike] and be a pretty successful tank and do great damage as DPS by just using [whirlwind] every minute and keeping auto attack on target. but, played right you can rev the damage like you'd rev the engine. pop abilities at the right times for damage multipliers and you're doing 70% more damage overall. they aren't the easiest class to start with, but they are probably one of the more survivable and that give you a nice margin for learning.
i think probably paladins are the easiest to start with and get good with. you'd get you best tanking ability [consecrate] at like level 18 or something real early, but warriors didn't get [shield slam] until like level 50. tanking under 50 with a warrior was hard fucking work, but paladins could easily tank by the first dungeon crawl. i more easily tanked for a fail group with my shaman in sunken temple at 45 than i tanked the same instance with a prot warrior without the most important tanking ability you get. (tanking with a non tank class, like an Enhancement Shaman, was just stupid. i could tank all the trash and a couple of the lowly bosses, but i was reincarnating mid fight and mostly just trying to kite the boss while dps attacked it. losing threat was a problem. but, losing threat was a problem for sub-50 warriors too.
after 50 though, a warrior tank is suddenly very formidable.
that all did change an expansion or two ago. i don't recall. what blizzard did in their attempt to make all specs equally viable for anything was give every class their "premier class/spec ability" up front. rogues now could then start with [mutilate] and leveling assassination was totally as easy as leveling combat. warriors got [shield slam] and early game tanking was made way, way easier. not sure how easy leveling a Protection Warrior is nowadays. he was the first to hit 100 when this latest expansion dropped almost 2 years ago and i haven't really played him since then. lots could be different. but, i don't really care to take him out of mothballs at the moment. he just sits in his garrison and makes weapons and upgrades for my shaman and my rogue.
damn, i would add an edit to the part talking about the warriors rotation.
warriors didn't really have a rotation. they had priorities so instead of a nice, neat rotation that you would repeat over and over tanks had random rotations with a standard opener. usually you'd [charge] an enemy or [heroic leap] to them or use [heroic toss] or you'd do them all if you're gathering up multiples. after that you'd use [Shield Slam], [Thunder Clap], [execute] and a variety of shouts and stances and whatever else makes sense at the time. so you might open with a pretty standard 123 type opener, but at times it could easily be 321. and you'd usually not repeat the opener over and over. so one fight might look like 2314253261251342163 and another might start the same but have different post-opener priorities - 21342564621356723621 or something like that.
the same is true for warrior DPS as well. they don't have a hard-fast rotation like other classes either. didn't used to anyway, it may have changed over the last few years i guess. and there will definitely be new abilities i don't even know about. [dragon shout] was a level 90 ability in mists of pandaria that i used as both DPS and Tank.
Warrior DPS is fucking really good too. all warriors wear plate, and the armor makes a huge difference. my rogue is squishy in leather. my shaman much more resilient in mail. but plate wearing classes (warriors, paladins) could resist a fuck load of physical damage. so they are awesome for pvp (though they do have their weaknesses). warrior DPS specs deal a very high amount of damage too. especially against multiple targets.
warriors are very hard to master, but they are also easy to use. you can do nothing but spam [shield strike] and be a pretty successful tank and do great damage as DPS by just using [whirlwind] every minute and keeping auto attack on target. but, played right you can rev the damage like you'd rev the engine. pop abilities at the right times for damage multipliers and you're doing 70% more damage overall. they aren't the easiest class to start with, but they are probably one of the more survivable and that give you a nice margin for learning.
i think probably paladins are the easiest to start with and get good with. you'd get you best tanking ability [consecrate] at like level 18 or something real early, but warriors didn't get [shield slam] until like level 50. tanking under 50 with a warrior was hard fucking work, but paladins could easily tank by the first dungeon crawl. i more easily tanked for a fail group with my shaman in sunken temple at 45 than i tanked the same instance with a prot warrior without the most important tanking ability you get. (tanking with a non tank class, like an Enhancement Shaman, was just stupid. i could tank all the trash and a couple of the lowly bosses, but i was reincarnating mid fight and mostly just trying to kite the boss while dps attacked it. losing threat was a problem. but, losing threat was a problem for sub-50 warriors too.
after 50 though, a warrior tank is suddenly very formidable.
that all did change an expansion or two ago. i don't recall. what blizzard did in their attempt to make all specs equally viable for anything was give every class their "premier class/spec ability" up front. rogues now could then start with [mutilate] and leveling assassination was totally as easy as leveling combat. warriors got [shield slam] and early game tanking was made way, way easier. not sure how easy leveling a Protection Warrior is nowadays. he was the first to hit 100 when this latest expansion dropped almost 2 years ago and i haven't really played him since then. lots could be different. but, i don't really care to take him out of mothballs at the moment. he just sits in his garrison and makes weapons and upgrades for my shaman and my rogue.
squeegee (OP) double-posted this 10 years ago, 5 minutes later, 3 days after the original post[^] [v] #672,070
buttons joined in and replied with this 10 years ago, 1 hour later, 3 days after the original post[^] [v] #672,075
@previous (squeegee)
this is literally the first time I've even said anything about the word count on your posts.
and saying it's as long as the Robert Amsterdam propaganda mill copypasta could even be taken as a compliment
this is literally the first time I've even said anything about the word count on your posts.
and saying it's as long as the Robert Amsterdam propaganda mill copypasta could even be taken as a compliment
buttons double-posted this 10 years ago, 43 seconds later, 3 days after the original post[^] [v] #672,076
more positive squeegee (OP) replied with this 10 years ago, 1 week later, 2 weeks after the original post[^] [v] #679,825
@previous (buttons)
well, i'm a few weeks into the expansion and i'm pretty much done with everything i wanted to do. i've got 3 max level characters and i'm just finishing out their professions and playing the little mini-games for gold because there's not much left to do to prepare for another expansions. it's soooo late at this point that trying to gear-up to run heroic/mythic difficulty raids is kinda silly. everyone is so geared now they won't even take less-geared players and honestly i'd just drag everyone down. people who run heroic/mythic tend to at least know the fights (they've done them 30 times probably) and i don't even know how many bosses there are let alone how to fight them.
i've been raiding my shaman on normal difficulty and am just about half-way through the end game content. with all the "welfare epics" they're giving as drops in Tanaan Jungle it wasn't hard to get geared. i could stop gearing up if i wanted, i'm good to raid any normal mode content. i pretty much figured this would happen, blizzard started introducing "catch-up" mechanics back in WotLK that allowed players to skip the weeks or months of farming (or lockouts) that previously regulated the speed at which a player can progress. without a governor (or the introduction of a catch-up mechanic) it's super, super easy to get up to speed with everyone else. it's still "not easy" to gear for heroics (you don't just fall ass backward into heroic gear) but it's not as hard as it was. i doubt i'll get full mythic, kinda not even interested in the gear chase at this point, but all lockouts/regulators are in effect for mythic gear so there might just not be enough time between now and august 8th to catch 16 mythic drops.
i am starting to accumulate a bit of wealth though. garrisons are good for 1 thing, making gold. it's free gold too. or very low cost at least. the gold trickles in, but atm i'm pulling about 1500 gold a day and i'm not really even trying. basically you can recruit "followers" and send them out to do quests and they bring you the loot. some quests loot gold, and if you recruit treasure hunters exclusively then they act as a gold multiplier. a reward of 100g can easily be tripled and you can run several a day. eventually you can send a 10 man raid team of treasure hunting followers and bring in thousands. lots, and lots, and lots of people hit the gold cap with garrisons. so many blizzard is raising it 10x i think. some in game items will end up costing a million gold in legion (rare mounts, etc. the most expensive one currently is 150,000g). i'm sitting at around 50k, but most of that has been carried forward from back in the day when having 10k gold actually meant something. it sounds like quest rewards in legion will be in the neighborhood of 800g, so honestly even if i spent a ton of time and effort making as much gold as i can it will be devalued as soon as legion hits. i can't hit the gold cap in 3 months without maximum effort (but it can be done) but i've never liked chasing loot as and end-game. it's boring and being rich makes too much of the game frivolous which makes a lot of it annoying.
so i think i'm getting pretty close to being done with it until legion. after i finish raiding my shaman i can't think of much else i want to do. the only other thing i've been interested in is leveling up a tailor. i might've done that too if overwatch hadn'a hooked me. as it is i'll probably be done raiding just in time to switch over to that for a while. which is fine, imo this current expansion is overall pretty weak. the best part has been Tanaan Jungle. i wish the whole fucking game was like that zone, it's awesome. everything is a group quest and everything is difficult. it reminds me of the golden days when shit was hard, yo. but it lacks content. i'd already done everything in just a few days except for the dumb "lock-out" repeatable shit you have to do over and over and over and over -but only once a day- to farm junk for weeks on end.
well, i'm a few weeks into the expansion and i'm pretty much done with everything i wanted to do. i've got 3 max level characters and i'm just finishing out their professions and playing the little mini-games for gold because there's not much left to do to prepare for another expansions. it's soooo late at this point that trying to gear-up to run heroic/mythic difficulty raids is kinda silly. everyone is so geared now they won't even take less-geared players and honestly i'd just drag everyone down. people who run heroic/mythic tend to at least know the fights (they've done them 30 times probably) and i don't even know how many bosses there are let alone how to fight them.
i've been raiding my shaman on normal difficulty and am just about half-way through the end game content. with all the "welfare epics" they're giving as drops in Tanaan Jungle it wasn't hard to get geared. i could stop gearing up if i wanted, i'm good to raid any normal mode content. i pretty much figured this would happen, blizzard started introducing "catch-up" mechanics back in WotLK that allowed players to skip the weeks or months of farming (or lockouts) that previously regulated the speed at which a player can progress. without a governor (or the introduction of a catch-up mechanic) it's super, super easy to get up to speed with everyone else. it's still "not easy" to gear for heroics (you don't just fall ass backward into heroic gear) but it's not as hard as it was. i doubt i'll get full mythic, kinda not even interested in the gear chase at this point, but all lockouts/regulators are in effect for mythic gear so there might just not be enough time between now and august 8th to catch 16 mythic drops.
i am starting to accumulate a bit of wealth though. garrisons are good for 1 thing, making gold. it's free gold too. or very low cost at least. the gold trickles in, but atm i'm pulling about 1500 gold a day and i'm not really even trying. basically you can recruit "followers" and send them out to do quests and they bring you the loot. some quests loot gold, and if you recruit treasure hunters exclusively then they act as a gold multiplier. a reward of 100g can easily be tripled and you can run several a day. eventually you can send a 10 man raid team of treasure hunting followers and bring in thousands. lots, and lots, and lots of people hit the gold cap with garrisons. so many blizzard is raising it 10x i think. some in game items will end up costing a million gold in legion (rare mounts, etc. the most expensive one currently is 150,000g). i'm sitting at around 50k, but most of that has been carried forward from back in the day when having 10k gold actually meant something. it sounds like quest rewards in legion will be in the neighborhood of 800g, so honestly even if i spent a ton of time and effort making as much gold as i can it will be devalued as soon as legion hits. i can't hit the gold cap in 3 months without maximum effort (but it can be done) but i've never liked chasing loot as and end-game. it's boring and being rich makes too much of the game frivolous which makes a lot of it annoying.
so i think i'm getting pretty close to being done with it until legion. after i finish raiding my shaman i can't think of much else i want to do. the only other thing i've been interested in is leveling up a tailor. i might've done that too if overwatch hadn'a hooked me. as it is i'll probably be done raiding just in time to switch over to that for a while. which is fine, imo this current expansion is overall pretty weak. the best part has been Tanaan Jungle. i wish the whole fucking game was like that zone, it's awesome. everything is a group quest and everything is difficult. it reminds me of the golden days when shit was hard, yo. but it lacks content. i'd already done everything in just a few days except for the dumb "lock-out" repeatable shit you have to do over and over and over and over -but only once a day- to farm junk for weeks on end.
button replied with this 10 years ago, 19 minutes later, 2 weeks after the original post[^] [v] #679,835
FuckAlms !vX8K53rFBI replied with this 10 years ago, 2 hours later, 2 weeks after the original post[^] [v] #679,916
I really like this thread.more positive squeegee (OP) replied with this 10 years ago, 43 minutes later, 2 weeks after the original post[^] [v] #679,967
@679,835 (button)
ha, don't get me started on back stories. with so much game to play it makes you wonder what motivates your character to keep going. you start wondering where your character came from, and what their lives were like that made them decide to leave home and travel the world non-stop. what ultimately drives them. the RP is so strong in this game because these questions are left open and completely up for you to figure out. my rogue is definitely the one most fleshed out in my mind. lots of time to think when you're playing, and i played her the most.
she was super weak in the very beginning. i had no clue what i was doing, and didn't know where my character came from except she was from stormwind. no parents that i could find, but there was an orphanage. i figured she probably grew up an orphan and became a street rat who pick pocketed and stole what she needed. seemed natural that a rogue would have that kind of a start. after the war with the horde, when stormwind was originally destroyed everyone moved to Lorderon in the west. after the war was over the Undead Scourge spreads to Lorderon, killing much of the population, and those who escaped escaped back to a rebuilt stormwind. but, i dont' think she's from lorderon, i think she's from orphaned from Northfold manor when the Horde destroyed Stromgarde Keep during the Third War. not far from there, tucked deep in the alterac mountains is Ravenholdt -the assassins guild, basically. led by lord ravenholdt he continues to fight the undead invaders who currently inhabit the ruins of Stromgarde. but, he escaped the horde invasion that destroyed Stromgard by helping refugees flee to Lorderon. so i think my rogue was a child at northfold manor and fled with lord Ravenholdt to Lorderon where she grew up. there she learned to be a skinner and a leather worker and a thief. after the scourge invasion came to lorderon a Paladin named Arthas (hero from wow 1 - 3 basically) came to lorderon and killed everyone he even suspected of being infected. he decimated the whole city, killing almost everyone in his "cleansing." thinking the threat was stemmed Arthas turned his sights north and went to Northrend to attack the leader of the Scourge army who would corrupt Arthas and merge with him giving him unlimited power and transforming him into -the Lich King-
but, like so many others my rogue escaped and fled to Stormwind, now rebuilt and having ceded many lands to the horde or surrendered them to the undead. that's where the game starts Lore Wise. with my rogue registering just outside of stormwind in what's basically a refugee camp. but, she doesn't stay, she does a few odd jobs then leaves. probably because she thinks the place will just be destroyed like every other home. she made her way to Ironforge by stealing and learned to kill. i was fucking terrible, which meant she was too. it was hard, so she learned to sneak and started to act like a rogue. not knowing much about her past (having lost her parents and history) she ended up not far from Ravenholdt where the assasins guild took note. since there was evidently some special interest paid to my character it seemed fitting that lord Ravenholdt (who became my Rogue Trainer) might know who she is.
and under the tutelage of lord ravenholdt i spent much time training killing undead, which is hard for rogues because stuns don't effect undead. so it all seemed very fitting that my rogues home was around Stromgarde and that her parents were killed by Arthas in Lorderon. it worked with everything i was being asked to do anyway. killing ogres and undead and eventually following Arthas to northrend to face him as the Lich King. the undead pretty much fucked up her entire life and Arthas killed her parents, so, i can understand the desire to kill him personally. but, the opportunity to do that wouldn't happen for quite a while. along the way she continued to travel from place to place, rob them blind, and assassinate a few fellows. after much personal enrichment at the expense of others and quite a few killings (goblins still kill her on site for what she did to Booty Bay) the opportunity came to join the fleet headed to northrend to take on the undead. there she joined up with a group of 19 others to attempt a decapitation strike against the Lich King himself.
unfortunately she failed and was blinded during the battle. broken and defeated the group fell apart as others finished the job. my rogue would never get her revenge. she would continue to wander azeroth, and even fought during the Cataclysm and killed Deathwing. She helped push back the Horde in Pandaria and got to meet talking pandas. never got to see one though.
she helped secure a foothold in Draenor when Garrosh escaped Pandaria and went into a parallel dimension and into the past... she built a garrison and helped build an army for the big push into Tanaan Jungle, but she's tired. and she's not a fucking general. she's a rogue, and she's old. she's saved azeroth more than once and sacrificed her eyes in a hopeless personal quest for vengeance. she's tired of revenge, and she's tired of fighting for endless causes she has no stake in. "the Burning Legion." my rogue doesn't give 2 shits about orcs except a racist attitude since they had a hand in the wars that lost the alliance Stromgarde.
other "heros" can fight the burning legion. heros with a reason to fight. like my Dranei Shaman who grew up on a space ship fleeing from the Burning Legion who obliterated Draenor, corrupted the Orcs, and turned it into Outland. growing up on a spaceship she was delighted by elemental stuff on Azeroth and became a shaman and learned to control the elements. shamanism originated on Draenor with the Orcs, so i think my shaman is going to have some kind of score to settle with the old gods.
ha, don't get me started on back stories. with so much game to play it makes you wonder what motivates your character to keep going. you start wondering where your character came from, and what their lives were like that made them decide to leave home and travel the world non-stop. what ultimately drives them. the RP is so strong in this game because these questions are left open and completely up for you to figure out. my rogue is definitely the one most fleshed out in my mind. lots of time to think when you're playing, and i played her the most.
she was super weak in the very beginning. i had no clue what i was doing, and didn't know where my character came from except she was from stormwind. no parents that i could find, but there was an orphanage. i figured she probably grew up an orphan and became a street rat who pick pocketed and stole what she needed. seemed natural that a rogue would have that kind of a start. after the war with the horde, when stormwind was originally destroyed everyone moved to Lorderon in the west. after the war was over the Undead Scourge spreads to Lorderon, killing much of the population, and those who escaped escaped back to a rebuilt stormwind. but, i dont' think she's from lorderon, i think she's from orphaned from Northfold manor when the Horde destroyed Stromgarde Keep during the Third War. not far from there, tucked deep in the alterac mountains is Ravenholdt -the assassins guild, basically. led by lord ravenholdt he continues to fight the undead invaders who currently inhabit the ruins of Stromgarde. but, he escaped the horde invasion that destroyed Stromgard by helping refugees flee to Lorderon. so i think my rogue was a child at northfold manor and fled with lord Ravenholdt to Lorderon where she grew up. there she learned to be a skinner and a leather worker and a thief. after the scourge invasion came to lorderon a Paladin named Arthas (hero from wow 1 - 3 basically) came to lorderon and killed everyone he even suspected of being infected. he decimated the whole city, killing almost everyone in his "cleansing." thinking the threat was stemmed Arthas turned his sights north and went to Northrend to attack the leader of the Scourge army who would corrupt Arthas and merge with him giving him unlimited power and transforming him into -the Lich King-
but, like so many others my rogue escaped and fled to Stormwind, now rebuilt and having ceded many lands to the horde or surrendered them to the undead. that's where the game starts Lore Wise. with my rogue registering just outside of stormwind in what's basically a refugee camp. but, she doesn't stay, she does a few odd jobs then leaves. probably because she thinks the place will just be destroyed like every other home. she made her way to Ironforge by stealing and learned to kill. i was fucking terrible, which meant she was too. it was hard, so she learned to sneak and started to act like a rogue. not knowing much about her past (having lost her parents and history) she ended up not far from Ravenholdt where the assasins guild took note. since there was evidently some special interest paid to my character it seemed fitting that lord Ravenholdt (who became my Rogue Trainer) might know who she is.
and under the tutelage of lord ravenholdt i spent much time training killing undead, which is hard for rogues because stuns don't effect undead. so it all seemed very fitting that my rogues home was around Stromgarde and that her parents were killed by Arthas in Lorderon. it worked with everything i was being asked to do anyway. killing ogres and undead and eventually following Arthas to northrend to face him as the Lich King. the undead pretty much fucked up her entire life and Arthas killed her parents, so, i can understand the desire to kill him personally. but, the opportunity to do that wouldn't happen for quite a while. along the way she continued to travel from place to place, rob them blind, and assassinate a few fellows. after much personal enrichment at the expense of others and quite a few killings (goblins still kill her on site for what she did to Booty Bay) the opportunity came to join the fleet headed to northrend to take on the undead. there she joined up with a group of 19 others to attempt a decapitation strike against the Lich King himself.
unfortunately she failed and was blinded during the battle. broken and defeated the group fell apart as others finished the job. my rogue would never get her revenge. she would continue to wander azeroth, and even fought during the Cataclysm and killed Deathwing. She helped push back the Horde in Pandaria and got to meet talking pandas. never got to see one though.
she helped secure a foothold in Draenor when Garrosh escaped Pandaria and went into a parallel dimension and into the past... she built a garrison and helped build an army for the big push into Tanaan Jungle, but she's tired. and she's not a fucking general. she's a rogue, and she's old. she's saved azeroth more than once and sacrificed her eyes in a hopeless personal quest for vengeance. she's tired of revenge, and she's tired of fighting for endless causes she has no stake in. "the Burning Legion." my rogue doesn't give 2 shits about orcs except a racist attitude since they had a hand in the wars that lost the alliance Stromgarde.
other "heros" can fight the burning legion. heros with a reason to fight. like my Dranei Shaman who grew up on a space ship fleeing from the Burning Legion who obliterated Draenor, corrupted the Orcs, and turned it into Outland. growing up on a spaceship she was delighted by elemental stuff on Azeroth and became a shaman and learned to control the elements. shamanism originated on Draenor with the Orcs, so i think my shaman is going to have some kind of score to settle with the old gods.
(Edited 44 seconds later.)
Dodongo !ZQvsveEcD6 joined in and replied with this 10 years ago, 3 hours later, 2 weeks after the original post[^] [v] #680,083
@671,096 (B)
I wish I was that guy. He's got enough money to buy all that weird novelty/medical shit. And wouldn't it be sweet to not have to get up to pee, poo, refill your beverage, or get a small snack?
I wish I was that guy. He's got enough money to buy all that weird novelty/medical shit. And wouldn't it be sweet to not have to get up to pee, poo, refill your beverage, or get a small snack?
more positive squeegee (OP) replied with this 10 years ago, 2 hours later, 2 weeks after the original post[^] [v] #680,099
i was slightly wrong. Arthas cleansed Stratholme, which was the largest city of the Kingdom of Lorderon, during the third war. So during the second war there was an orcish invasion that was decimating Stromgarde. people began to flee to the cities in the east, but one by one the cities fell to the undead scourge which led to the third war. So my rogue was from the highlands area, maybe from around Northfold Manor which was a big farm and stables. maybe from Stromgarde itself. it was a huge city and the strongest human kingdom back in the day, but it had been in decline for generations. so my rogues family fled the orc invasion, but her father was killed somehow. probably by filthy orcs. lord ravenholdt helped her and her mother (among others) escape to Stratholme, the furthest large city east of the fighting. so my rogue was basically raised on the streets while her mother worked trying to support them and her siblings. after the second war there was a truce, and Stromgarde was ceded to the Horde. a few years later during the third war with the undead Arthas attempted to save all of Lorderon by "cleansing" the city Stratholm which was diseased with plague. my rogue would have gotten pretty good at sneaking around to steal and she managed to avoid being killed by the Mad Prince Arthas when her mother sacrificed herself to save her. after escaping with her brothers they went west to Andorhal which eventually fell to the Scourge Plague as well. both her brothers died, and my rogue finally fled to Stormwind way in the south with the rest of the refugees from the kingdom of Lorderon. she was too old to be placed in the orphanage, so instead was put to work running deliveries around the trade district, catching cats and killing rats. she quickly left stormwind. she had no home, no family, no roots she knew of and she didn't want to be around any more big cities when the plague is going around. she'd bounce around for a while before finding direction, a reason for vengeance, and ultimately a pursue a fruitless encounter with the person she felt was responsible for all her suffering.
which is sad even though she did go on to save the world a couple of times after that; she didn't get her retribution.
but...
then there's my shaman. she was pretty much working for my rogue providing jewelry crafting materials from low level areas. i figure they would have met when my rogue was 60-70 and my shaman was new. that would have been right about the time, in lore, for the Draenei spaceship to crash on azeroth. probably more like the low level shaman was being exploited by my banker toon to enrich my rogue who was leveling jewelry crafting.
the draenei were escaping from planet draenor which was being attacked by an evil Titan. so, in the beginning there was chaos and order. chaos takes the form of Void Lords and order takes the form of Elementals and Titans. Titans work to keep harmony, so that stuff like planets can form from elementals. Void Lords try to destroy order by creating the "Old Gods" which corrupt the works of the titans and can destroy planets. Azeroth is just one of many world crafted from elementals by the Titans, and the titan creations (drawrves, elves, trolls, humans, tauren, etc.) exist to protect the world from destruction by the Old Gods. many of the old gods were imprisoned, but the fighting was constant. one of the Titans, Sargeras, became disillusioned and decides to join the side of chaos and begins to kill all the titans, release the Old Gods, and begin destroying worlds and their elementals. Sargeras eventually came across draenor and corrupted the Orcs who lived there. the orcs were sent to fight the Draenei (who fled) and were instead sent to Azeroth through the Dark portal. An Orc Shaman by the name Ner'zhul failed when invading Azeroth (the first war) and was ripped apart by Sargeras and his soul was tormented until it was clad in armor and frozen under a glacier to lead the undead scourge as their King (he would eventually merge with Arthas to form the Lich King.)
So pretty much the whole events of my rogues story are pretty heavily dependent on Sargeras as actually being behind the whole thing. and he was really trying to catch the draenei anyway. he just wants to destroy azeroth, but the Draenei he wants to enslave to the Burning Legion. so it all goes back to Sargeras but really he's probably corrupted by the Old Gods. So i think my rogue can have some catharsis in that the real individual behind all her suffering is still out there and that even though she's old and blind and warming the bench she can still provide support to my shaman who will have a more personal link to the upcoming content. she didn't kill the man responsible for killing her mother and brother, but at least she can help my shaman kill the individual who orchestrated the whole thing.
which is sad even though she did go on to save the world a couple of times after that; she didn't get her retribution.
but...
then there's my shaman. she was pretty much working for my rogue providing jewelry crafting materials from low level areas. i figure they would have met when my rogue was 60-70 and my shaman was new. that would have been right about the time, in lore, for the Draenei spaceship to crash on azeroth. probably more like the low level shaman was being exploited by my banker toon to enrich my rogue who was leveling jewelry crafting.
the draenei were escaping from planet draenor which was being attacked by an evil Titan. so, in the beginning there was chaos and order. chaos takes the form of Void Lords and order takes the form of Elementals and Titans. Titans work to keep harmony, so that stuff like planets can form from elementals. Void Lords try to destroy order by creating the "Old Gods" which corrupt the works of the titans and can destroy planets. Azeroth is just one of many world crafted from elementals by the Titans, and the titan creations (drawrves, elves, trolls, humans, tauren, etc.) exist to protect the world from destruction by the Old Gods. many of the old gods were imprisoned, but the fighting was constant. one of the Titans, Sargeras, became disillusioned and decides to join the side of chaos and begins to kill all the titans, release the Old Gods, and begin destroying worlds and their elementals. Sargeras eventually came across draenor and corrupted the Orcs who lived there. the orcs were sent to fight the Draenei (who fled) and were instead sent to Azeroth through the Dark portal. An Orc Shaman by the name Ner'zhul failed when invading Azeroth (the first war) and was ripped apart by Sargeras and his soul was tormented until it was clad in armor and frozen under a glacier to lead the undead scourge as their King (he would eventually merge with Arthas to form the Lich King.)
So pretty much the whole events of my rogues story are pretty heavily dependent on Sargeras as actually being behind the whole thing. and he was really trying to catch the draenei anyway. he just wants to destroy azeroth, but the Draenei he wants to enslave to the Burning Legion. so it all goes back to Sargeras but really he's probably corrupted by the Old Gods. So i think my rogue can have some catharsis in that the real individual behind all her suffering is still out there and that even though she's old and blind and warming the bench she can still provide support to my shaman who will have a more personal link to the upcoming content. she didn't kill the man responsible for killing her mother and brother, but at least she can help my shaman kill the individual who orchestrated the whole thing.
(Edited 5 minutes later.)
more positive squeegee (OP) double-posted this 10 years ago, 10 hours later, 2 weeks after the original post[^] [v] #680,284
i should really flesh out my shaman's backstory. all i really know is she was on board the Exodar when it crash landed on Azeroth, but she was too young to take part in any of the Burning Crusade. but, she most likely would have at least seen the destruction of her home planet when it was ripped apart and became Outland. tbh as i played her i never really felt like she was really all that motivated to be doing anything. so i think her watching the destruction of draenor had some effect on her. and then being cooped up in a space ship for years. since planets are held together by harmonious elementals, she would have seen her world corrupted by old gods and the elementals went bat shit crazy and couldn't hold it together anymore. she was probably raised in the shamanistic tradition, so it would probably have been hard for her to see her elders struggle to maintain control over the elements, and ultimately the elementals turning on the Draenei and letting the world fall to pieces.
so she lost her connection to the planet and the elementals and was whisked off in a spaceship which is large and sterile and certainly doesn't have any elementals to be friends with. while on the Exodar she abandoned her traditions and passed the time learning how to make jewelry. but after the Exodar crashed on Azeroth (which is full of healthy and harmonious elementals) she was able to explore shamanism again and commune with the elementals. this made her very happy, and her wanderlust is driven by her desire to find companionship with elementals. she wants to learn from them all, and help protect them from the same fate that befell Draenor elementals.
something like that. dunno about her family, another orphan story seems redundant. i'll probably come up with more details when i'm playing her through Legion.
so she lost her connection to the planet and the elementals and was whisked off in a spaceship which is large and sterile and certainly doesn't have any elementals to be friends with. while on the Exodar she abandoned her traditions and passed the time learning how to make jewelry. but after the Exodar crashed on Azeroth (which is full of healthy and harmonious elementals) she was able to explore shamanism again and commune with the elementals. this made her very happy, and her wanderlust is driven by her desire to find companionship with elementals. she wants to learn from them all, and help protect them from the same fate that befell Draenor elementals.
something like that. dunno about her family, another orphan story seems redundant. i'll probably come up with more details when i'm playing her through Legion.
squeegee (OP) triple-posted this 10 years ago, 3 months later, 3 months after the original post[^] [v] #710,305
so i've been asked a few times to revisit this thread and give an update, so i got good and stoned for this.
i had subbed for a month, then dropped for a month, and then just resubbed the other day for the pre-patch content (which is fucking awesome). just before i quit i finished leveling up my shaman and my rogue and had done everything i cared to do. i never really ended up raiding much. i did the first raid, Highmaul, but never ended up doing the others. i'd gotten a bad ass set of asymmetrical pauldrons for my shaman and decided that that was an end game reward i could be satisfied with. good looking shoulder items are hard to find, and asymmetrical ones are the most rare by a long shot. i wasn't really feeling the gear chase anyway, so to find something really cool was enough to scratch that itch.
i partially geared my rogue, but blizzard has made huge changes to the class and obliterated one of the specialties and replaced it with a pirate themed specialization. rogue gear will get tossed out and replaced in full with new gear from the prepatch event. right now level 700 gear is being tossed around like there's a broken pinata and i was going to have to raid my ass off for weeks to even approach that. so i said fuck it and took her fishing.
i went back to Pandaria and spent some time building reputation with the Anglers. for gaining "exalted" with that faction i got to buy a fishing raft. i know that sounds kinda pedestrian, but a fishing boat is pretty fabulous. Pandaria is, imho, the most beautiful expansion to date. every expansion and even vanilla have their share of beautiful zones, but all of Pandaria is just gorgeous. so my rogue got her fishing done, and then once my month was up i just played Overwatch for a while.
pre-patch content just dropped the other day though, so i'm back in. everything is different. rogues are changes, shaman are changed, everything is changed. i don't understand my shaman at all anymore. core abilities are different. all her combos and cool downs are changed. so i've got to relearn shaman. i was having a lot of fun with her there at the end, and like 3 of the things i liked to use the most are just gone now. :|
it's not unusual for blizzard to radically change classes in expansions, it's an ongoing effort to make all the classes and specialties viable, fun, and balanced. they introduced a new hero class as well, the Demon Hunter, which brings in new mechanics so every class and specialty got a design pass.
the Demon Hunter is pretty much a free max level character. it's pretty fun, you only have to level from 98 to 100 to gain all your abilities and then you're free to go do whatever you want. it can be a tank, or it can just deal damage. it's got mobility with it's double jump and glide ability. it'll probably be strong as fuck.
the pre-patch event is pretty awesome. the Burning Legion are kinda like Space Demons that've been antagonizing the universe for a long fucking time and they're ultimately behind the Orcs invasion of Azeroth in Warcraft 1 and were antagonists in the Burning Crusade and Warlords of Draenor expansions. after having their plans foiled time and time again the burning legion are once again come to Azeroth to seek it's destruction.
World events are springing up all over the place. demon invasions with hundreds of enemies and hundreds of players all defending the zone. it's really interesting, actually, because everything scales to level. i can defend invasions with my level 100 shaman or fight the same bosses with my level 25 priest. level 100s fighting side by side with level 15 players to defend Westfall from space demons. it's pretty fun too!
but it does get kinda old pretty fast. invasions happen every 4 hours in 4 different locations. you get a ton of loot from it, so repeating them over and over isn't really the point anyway. you do get decked out with a full kit of ilevel 700 gear though, and it can be upgraded to 725 if you're a masochist. interesting though i did figure out that doing an invasion with a low level character will earn you a fuckload of points and a bunch of super fast levels and really insanely high spec'd gear. i went from level 12 to 16 in about 7 minutes. hit level 21 with a second invasion, i do believe. they're super close to the main cities, so it kinda seems like it's a super fast way to get a bunch of leveling done.
i started running up a priest. i'm always resistant to casters, but i'm finding that Discipline Priests use quite a lot of instant abilites so they've got good mobility. in dungeons i'm finding that i mostly apply a shield to players who are about to take damage, flash heal anyone not a tank, curse all enemies, and smite them. the other specialties seem a bit more healing centric. let them take damage, cast to heal them up. all your time is spent healing. but Disc Priest let's me do proactive shielding rather than healing which means i can save my casting time for dealing damage and applying curses. and since most heals and shields are instants i can get right back to cursing and smiting. it's fun!
and my priest is a tailor too, so i'll finally have someone to use all the cloth i've accumulated in my bank vault.
the full expansion drops on the 30th i do believe. several weeks left of some pretty insane leveling gains it would seem.
i had subbed for a month, then dropped for a month, and then just resubbed the other day for the pre-patch content (which is fucking awesome). just before i quit i finished leveling up my shaman and my rogue and had done everything i cared to do. i never really ended up raiding much. i did the first raid, Highmaul, but never ended up doing the others. i'd gotten a bad ass set of asymmetrical pauldrons for my shaman and decided that that was an end game reward i could be satisfied with. good looking shoulder items are hard to find, and asymmetrical ones are the most rare by a long shot. i wasn't really feeling the gear chase anyway, so to find something really cool was enough to scratch that itch.
i partially geared my rogue, but blizzard has made huge changes to the class and obliterated one of the specialties and replaced it with a pirate themed specialization. rogue gear will get tossed out and replaced in full with new gear from the prepatch event. right now level 700 gear is being tossed around like there's a broken pinata and i was going to have to raid my ass off for weeks to even approach that. so i said fuck it and took her fishing.
i went back to Pandaria and spent some time building reputation with the Anglers. for gaining "exalted" with that faction i got to buy a fishing raft. i know that sounds kinda pedestrian, but a fishing boat is pretty fabulous. Pandaria is, imho, the most beautiful expansion to date. every expansion and even vanilla have their share of beautiful zones, but all of Pandaria is just gorgeous. so my rogue got her fishing done, and then once my month was up i just played Overwatch for a while.
pre-patch content just dropped the other day though, so i'm back in. everything is different. rogues are changes, shaman are changed, everything is changed. i don't understand my shaman at all anymore. core abilities are different. all her combos and cool downs are changed. so i've got to relearn shaman. i was having a lot of fun with her there at the end, and like 3 of the things i liked to use the most are just gone now. :|
it's not unusual for blizzard to radically change classes in expansions, it's an ongoing effort to make all the classes and specialties viable, fun, and balanced. they introduced a new hero class as well, the Demon Hunter, which brings in new mechanics so every class and specialty got a design pass.
the Demon Hunter is pretty much a free max level character. it's pretty fun, you only have to level from 98 to 100 to gain all your abilities and then you're free to go do whatever you want. it can be a tank, or it can just deal damage. it's got mobility with it's double jump and glide ability. it'll probably be strong as fuck.
the pre-patch event is pretty awesome. the Burning Legion are kinda like Space Demons that've been antagonizing the universe for a long fucking time and they're ultimately behind the Orcs invasion of Azeroth in Warcraft 1 and were antagonists in the Burning Crusade and Warlords of Draenor expansions. after having their plans foiled time and time again the burning legion are once again come to Azeroth to seek it's destruction.
World events are springing up all over the place. demon invasions with hundreds of enemies and hundreds of players all defending the zone. it's really interesting, actually, because everything scales to level. i can defend invasions with my level 100 shaman or fight the same bosses with my level 25 priest. level 100s fighting side by side with level 15 players to defend Westfall from space demons. it's pretty fun too!
but it does get kinda old pretty fast. invasions happen every 4 hours in 4 different locations. you get a ton of loot from it, so repeating them over and over isn't really the point anyway. you do get decked out with a full kit of ilevel 700 gear though, and it can be upgraded to 725 if you're a masochist. interesting though i did figure out that doing an invasion with a low level character will earn you a fuckload of points and a bunch of super fast levels and really insanely high spec'd gear. i went from level 12 to 16 in about 7 minutes. hit level 21 with a second invasion, i do believe. they're super close to the main cities, so it kinda seems like it's a super fast way to get a bunch of leveling done.
i started running up a priest. i'm always resistant to casters, but i'm finding that Discipline Priests use quite a lot of instant abilites so they've got good mobility. in dungeons i'm finding that i mostly apply a shield to players who are about to take damage, flash heal anyone not a tank, curse all enemies, and smite them. the other specialties seem a bit more healing centric. let them take damage, cast to heal them up. all your time is spent healing. but Disc Priest let's me do proactive shielding rather than healing which means i can save my casting time for dealing damage and applying curses. and since most heals and shields are instants i can get right back to cursing and smiting. it's fun!
and my priest is a tailor too, so i'll finally have someone to use all the cloth i've accumulated in my bank vault.
the full expansion drops on the 30th i do believe. several weeks left of some pretty insane leveling gains it would seem.
(Edited 47 seconds later.)
squeegee (OP) quadruple-posted this 10 years ago, 2 days later, 3 months after the original post[^] [v] #711,018
oh neat, so hunters got a huge overhaul too. basically every class (rogue, paladin, priest, etc) has 3 specializations. for example, the hunter class has specializations called Beastmaster, Marksman, and Survival. (hunters fight with a combat pet such as a wolf or a bear as well as ranged weapons) prior to the Legion class change the Marksman and Survival specializations were pretty similar. I'd only ever leveled a hunter up to 25, it's a fun class but back when i played you had to carry arrows and shot which took up inventory. if you ran out you were just fucked. you also had to carry a quiver which took up an entire bag slot. eventually they got rid of quivers and then later ammunition all together. the trade off was pretty terrible, bag space for arrows, and there was enough annoying stuff to do (feed your pet) that i left him in the wilderness to never rest again. it wasn't enough to really even get a good handle on the class, but i understood the specs at least.
beastmaster gave you perks which made your pet stronger, and it allowed you to capture and train elite beasts and other pets marksman and survival hunters couldn't even capture. as a player you'd still stand back with a gun or a bow and provide passive DPS from range, but the majority of your damage was going to be coming from a massively buffed pet.
Marksman hunters and Survival hunters were for the most part indistinguishable. in raids i never knew which was which. i think marksman had an explosive shot you could sometimes see but that was pretty much the only clue which spec a hunter was rolling if they weren't a beastmaster. it was a little disappointing too when i was leveling the class, because at the time hunters all carried double axes, maces, swords or daggers as well as a ranged weapon but they never used them. pretty much the extra weapons were carried for their stats (+12 agility, etc) rather than their utility.
back in the day i really wished that Survival was a melee class using polearms. a fucking spear hunter. they'd still use pets (the hallmark of the class) but fight at melee range. surprisingly that's exactly what the new Survival spec is all about. my lowly level 25 hunter even got a free epic polearm in the mail to make up for hunters not owning any melee weapons anymore. (back in Cataclysm they removed the "stat sticks" leaving no slot for hunters to carry anything other than a gun or a bow.)
it's pretty fun too, i ran my hunter over to the farmlands in Westfall where a demon invasion was happening and i took his new polearm and his undead wolf "sweetie" to try out the "melee hunter." you've got one a couple of ranged attacks which do little dps and have a timer, but they can be used to pick and pull mobs. you can also harpoon which will grapple an enemy and pull you into melee range. it doesn't do damage, but it a nice mobility utility which melee dps need. his attacks are pretty straight forward. not sure what the proper rotation is, but it's basically one attack you can repeat whenever, and 4 or so that are on short timers (6-9 seconds) or longer cooldowns (3 minute). pretty basic melee stuff. everything is an instant ability and you just spam them in order. positioning is the most important thing for melee DPS anyway, your rotation should be on muscle memory so you can focus on staying positioned well and moving.
Survival is a pretty standard melee rotation with the addition of pet management, so it'll likely be a step up in difficulty from other melee DPS classes such as rogues, ret pallys and enh shaman but only because you'll have to maintain awareness of what your pet is doing and manage it accordingly.
marksman looks mostly like it did before, but i think took some abilities from the old survival spec. they pruned old shitty abilities a long time ago with other classes and merged them around (such as rogues who all got shadowstep which was in the Subtlety spec before) so it's not without precedent. but it remains as the Ranged DPS hunter who fights with a bow and gun and tanks with his bear. beastmaster is, as it always has been, centered around hugely buffed rare pets.
beastmaster gave you perks which made your pet stronger, and it allowed you to capture and train elite beasts and other pets marksman and survival hunters couldn't even capture. as a player you'd still stand back with a gun or a bow and provide passive DPS from range, but the majority of your damage was going to be coming from a massively buffed pet.
Marksman hunters and Survival hunters were for the most part indistinguishable. in raids i never knew which was which. i think marksman had an explosive shot you could sometimes see but that was pretty much the only clue which spec a hunter was rolling if they weren't a beastmaster. it was a little disappointing too when i was leveling the class, because at the time hunters all carried double axes, maces, swords or daggers as well as a ranged weapon but they never used them. pretty much the extra weapons were carried for their stats (+12 agility, etc) rather than their utility.
back in the day i really wished that Survival was a melee class using polearms. a fucking spear hunter. they'd still use pets (the hallmark of the class) but fight at melee range. surprisingly that's exactly what the new Survival spec is all about. my lowly level 25 hunter even got a free epic polearm in the mail to make up for hunters not owning any melee weapons anymore. (back in Cataclysm they removed the "stat sticks" leaving no slot for hunters to carry anything other than a gun or a bow.)
it's pretty fun too, i ran my hunter over to the farmlands in Westfall where a demon invasion was happening and i took his new polearm and his undead wolf "sweetie" to try out the "melee hunter." you've got one a couple of ranged attacks which do little dps and have a timer, but they can be used to pick and pull mobs. you can also harpoon which will grapple an enemy and pull you into melee range. it doesn't do damage, but it a nice mobility utility which melee dps need. his attacks are pretty straight forward. not sure what the proper rotation is, but it's basically one attack you can repeat whenever, and 4 or so that are on short timers (6-9 seconds) or longer cooldowns (3 minute). pretty basic melee stuff. everything is an instant ability and you just spam them in order. positioning is the most important thing for melee DPS anyway, your rotation should be on muscle memory so you can focus on staying positioned well and moving.
Survival is a pretty standard melee rotation with the addition of pet management, so it'll likely be a step up in difficulty from other melee DPS classes such as rogues, ret pallys and enh shaman but only because you'll have to maintain awareness of what your pet is doing and manage it accordingly.
marksman looks mostly like it did before, but i think took some abilities from the old survival spec. they pruned old shitty abilities a long time ago with other classes and merged them around (such as rogues who all got shadowstep which was in the Subtlety spec before) so it's not without precedent. but it remains as the Ranged DPS hunter who fights with a bow and gun and tanks with his bear. beastmaster is, as it always has been, centered around hugely buffed rare pets.
Anonymous M joined in and replied with this 10 years ago, 6 hours later, 3 months after the original post[^] [v] #711,078
do go onsqueegee (OP) replied with this 10 years ago, 1 day later, 3 months after the original post[^] [v] #711,233
@previous (M)well sure thing, handsome stranger.
i'll talk some about healing. healing is just flat-out stressful. i think i mentioned it before, but healing feels exactly like being in a slow motion car accident. i dunno how many of you've been in a big wreck, or experienced that moment before the wreck happens right as you realize it's coming and you brace for impact or otherwise have even a second or two to respond. it feels like that moment drags out and takes forever. you keep expecting the hit, and it doesn't come immediately; experiencing that moment is what it feels like to be a healer in WoW.
you have player health bars right in front of you, you're kinda focused on them, and you see each and every dent they take. usually things go fine, damage comes is as expected and in amounts that are manageable and in quantities that aren't overwhelming. until it doesn't. and it can be anyone's fault why things go south, maybe the tank pulls too much, maybe a DPS aggros adds. maybe everyone forgets they have a healer and i get turned into a toad for 5 seconds and can't help. whatever happens, i see it. before anyone else knows there's a problem, i'm doing damage control. and you can absolutely see the death spiral happening many moments before everyone is dead and when it starts there's panic.
i blow cooldowns, try to shield everyone taking damage so i can focus on keeping the tank up. but it takes constant casting and the tank is still losing health. other players take damage and there's little i can do about it, if i heal them the tank dies and we all die. i make the choice as to who i allow to be killed. i watch them drop one by one, try to intervene if there's a moment to spare, i try to keep as many of them up and fighting as i can. but the war of attrition i'm fighting with their health pool fails because too many heals got tossed around to too many careless DPS. the tank goes down. DPS drop like flies, at this point i'm done healing and switched to damage trying to kill the boss in the last few seconds, but it's pointless. we all die, and the tank says, "the fuck heals?"
(Edited 15 seconds later.)
FuckAlms !vX8K53rFBI replied with this 10 years ago, 1 hour later, 3 months after the original post[^] [v] #711,247
@previous (squeegee)
I've never actually been in a wreck, but I've been witness so something sort of like that in dreams.
One time I dreamed that I was on the highway and we were approaching this semi, and some dumbass had packed the entire contents of his house onto this semi. It wasn't an enclosed semi though, it was a fucking flatbed and it must have been stacked like 30ft high. No tarps over stuff either, just a few thin ropes.
So we're coming up on him and as we move to the left lane, I can see the shit swaying back and forth. He barrels through an underpass and grazes the top of his load off, taking out the ropes. It only took a second or two, but it seemed like ten. At first, the stuff that didn't go tumbling off in his wake just continues to rock back towards us. Then he hits a rock or something and the bed jolts slightly and I can see things beginning to separate. Then it happens. As we pass the cab, I'm turning my head and the whole mountain just cascades off the side of the bed and scatters across the road behind us.
I've never actually been in a wreck, but I've been witness so something sort of like that in dreams.
One time I dreamed that I was on the highway and we were approaching this semi, and some dumbass had packed the entire contents of his house onto this semi. It wasn't an enclosed semi though, it was a fucking flatbed and it must have been stacked like 30ft high. No tarps over stuff either, just a few thin ropes.
So we're coming up on him and as we move to the left lane, I can see the shit swaying back and forth. He barrels through an underpass and grazes the top of his load off, taking out the ropes. It only took a second or two, but it seemed like ten. At first, the stuff that didn't go tumbling off in his wake just continues to rock back towards us. Then he hits a rock or something and the bed jolts slightly and I can see things beginning to separate. Then it happens. As we pass the cab, I'm turning my head and the whole mountain just cascades off the side of the bed and scatters across the road behind us.
squeegee (OP) replied with this 10 years ago, 8 minutes later, 3 months after the original post[^] [v] #711,250
@previous (FuckAlms !vX8K53rFBI)yes. what you describe is exactly what it feels like to heal successfully in World of Warcraft. even when no one dies every encounter is a close call.
FuckAlms !vX8K53rFBI replied with this 10 years ago, 8 hours later, 3 months after the original post[^] [v] #711,269
@previous (squeegee)
On an unrelated note, can I get a zip of your Charlie Sheen reaction images? For science, of course.
On an unrelated note, can I get a zip of your Charlie Sheen reaction images? For science, of course.
squeegee (OP) replied with this 10 years ago, 1 week later, 4 months after the original post[^] [v] #714,279
@previous (FuckAlms !vX8K53rFBI)
i don't have a whole bunch anymore, actually. they exist on an old HD i replaced. not sure if it'll still work.
i don't have a whole bunch anymore, actually. they exist on an old HD i replaced. not sure if it'll still work.
squeegee (OP) double-posted this 10 years ago, 27 minutes later, 4 months after the original post[^] [v] #714,287
finally got my healer up to the level cap. almost exclusively through invasions. i did maybe a dozen dungeon runs if even that many. i quit with questing at around level 11 then switched over to camping the pre-patch events. by far -by a very, very long shot- this is my fastest character to have leveled. i only have a few characters to compare it to time-wise, my rogue and my warrior. my rogue was first and took the longest, taking me something like 20 days to level to the cap at the time. (i'm actually making a guess, i just know that i took my sweet ass time and didn't use catch-up mechanics very much so the leveling experience was as close to "standard" as there existed a standard way of doing things.)my next "standard leveled" character is my warrior, i took him from level 1 - 90 last expansion and then did 90 - 100 + endgame. i believe i did 1 - 90 in something like 7-8 days. i didn't use any xp boosts and i didn't spam dungeons, i'd level through zones and only do dungeons i had quests for, and i'd only run them once until i beat them. no farming for xp or items. just a pure story line play through.
i can't really compare my shaman, since i boosted her from 74 - 90 with a free character boost that came with the last xpac. i believe she was sitting at 74 with 7 days played time when i boosted her.
but my priest. my priest dinged 100 in her 57th hour... hour. it's ridiculous. of course i used every catch up mechanic available to me. she ran 3 heirlooms for a 30% xp boost, i spammed high xp events, and i used xp potions for an extra 20% boost as soon as i could get my hands on some. it was pretty fun, too. only really getting repetitive towards the end. the last 15 levels were a bit of a slog, but, at even 3-4 levels per hour it was still insanely faster than questing (more like 5 hours per level.)
(i also totally forgot there are screen shots)
squeegee (OP) triple-posted this 10 years ago, 7 minutes later, 4 months after the original post[^] [v] #714,299
i remembered screenshots at level 23. here's my priest riding down to defend the dwarven city Kharanos in Dun Morough from invading demons. her mount, a Pinto Horse, originally belonged to my rogue. this was right after i had her join my alt-leveling Trade Guild, the East Kalimdor Trading Co., and i was able to use a bunch of old stuff left behind by my rogue when she left for a Raiding Guild to go and kill the Lich King back in the day.squeegee (OP) quadruple-posted this 10 years ago, 1 minute later, 4 months after the original post[^] [v] #714,302
it's a fucking slow ass horse too. i imagine it's old as fuck or something, but really i just can't unlock fast riding till 40. anyway. that back there is a demon.squeegee (OP) quintuple-posted this 10 years ago, 1 minute later, 4 months after the original post[^] [v] #714,305
they get pretty bigsqueegee (OP) sextuple-posted this 10 years ago, 3 minutes later, 4 months after the original post[^] [v] #714,307
there's mini bosses all over the place, and then a big boss at the end. some of them were pretty easy, others were impossible to figure out. more than one boss fight had some kind of one-shot ability that would wipe me every time and i'd end up dead most of the time. all i figured out were which bosses to hit once and then run the fuck away from.squeegee (OP) septuple-posted this 10 years ago, 4 minutes later, 4 months after the original post[^] [v] #714,310
this bitch put some kind of countdown timer on you, 15 seconds, and basically it said, "if this timer expires you will receive massive, massive damage." i tried every dispel i had, nothing worked. it always expired and it would 1 shot me. not amount of health or shielding was enough. couldn't even run away. even if she died before the timer expired, it'd still kill me. so she was one i'd hit once at the beginning of the fight and then run from so i'd never get cursed.squeegee (OP) octuple-posted this 10 years ago, 6 minutes later, 4 months after the original post[^] [v] #714,315
i tried getting screenshots that showed how many players were around during invasions. it was nuts. lots of people would just fly into the zone and go AFK. you'd get the rewards, but no XP (perfect for lazy 100s) so the skies were always full. i couldn't fly till level 60, but once i could then i'd "follow the pack" and hunt mini-bosses. 50 of us or more would mount up and fly in a huge flock of players and dive bomb bosses. it was a lot of fun. riding was just too slow to keep up, so as a non-flyer we'd all mount up on horse back and start assaulting ground structures the Demons were spawning nearby. so there's kind of a ground invasion component and an air assault component to it. but definitely the more fun thing to do was fly.
squeegee (OP) nonuple-posted this 10 years ago, 6 minutes later, 4 months after the original post[^] [v] #714,317
even the Griffons are busier than usual. the Invasions were spread out all over the world, and sometimes traveling long distances was required. Griffons are taxis in WoW, and usually used by low level players moving between zones. but for the last 3 weeks pretty much every route coming in and out of major cities was bustling.it's been great. i haven't seen players in huge groups like this in years.
squeegee (OP) decuple-posted this 10 years ago, 20 minutes later, 4 months after the original post[^] [v] #714,329
today will i guess be the last day for pre-patch events. Legion launches sometime over night. i just barely squeaked her in, but she's as fully geared as i'm really capable of gearing her in such a short time. her iLevel is 700, about the same as my shaman and rogue. it's all gear dropped from invasion loot boxes or gear from pre-patch quest chains. the one exception is her off-hand item, the lantern, which was purchased with PvP tokens. i literally had to kill 400 horde players in a giant PvP brawl. took 2 hours. but it's an iLevel 710 lantern, so it was a good trade off. and it finished off the gear chase for her, so it was actually a very nice find. plus it's functional, it does produce a glow and light up a small area. there's not really any dark places that you'd need a light, but it's the coolest offhand i think i've seen in game so far. usually it's like a book or something.pictured: the Cathedral in Stormwind, for all your priestly needs
(Edited 54 seconds later.)
squeegee (OP) undecuple-posted this 10 years ago, 26 minutes later, 4 months after the original post[^] [v] #714,338
one thing i haven't done is finish ret-conning my priest's backstory, but i'm 100% sure that there is a family resemblance to my rogue, Daylas, who if you'll remember had siblings who supposedly died from the plague. i imagined them as brothers, but i think a younger sister is fine to retcon. So, Daylas escapes from a dying Lorderon after having lost her father to Orcs, her mother to a Mad Price, her older brother to the undead plague. she and her younger sister escape with the last surviving refugees, when her younger sister gets sick. the plague is incurable, so as soon as she was ill daylas was separated from her and sent on to Stormwind with the refugees. initially refusing, she was told her sister died in the night and body cremated, so as to get her to leave. she eventually does, and heads off on her original story line with nothing else retconned in. as far as she knows her entire family was killed and there's no reason to expect to see them ever again. she goes off to become a murderous thieving rogue who ends up being blinded by the Lich King in a vain attempt at revenge, and now mostly fights as a gladiator for prize money in arenas all over the world and has divested herself of any responsibility she previously felt to "save the world." PvP loot is better anyway.
but look at the family resemblance. there's little doubt that she does indeed have family, even if she has no idea.
(Edited 1 minute later.)
squeegee (OP) duodecuple-posted this 10 years ago, 1 hour later, 4 months after the original post[^] [v] #714,358
an interesting bit of lore that i read about paladins is that their strength comes from their zeal. in other words their belief in their power makes them as strong as they believe themselves to be. paladins and priests draw their power from the Light, but in different ways. a priest worships the light, and makes a plea for help or prays for their enemies to be smited. but a paladin doesn't worship the light, a paladin believes the light will give them power. and the stronger their faith, the stronger their blessing will be.
Naomilhelina was taken to the priests at the refugee camp after being separated from daylas. everyone believed she would die, and become undead. they would literally kill her first. but, a low level paladin was there. he wasn't particularly good at being a paladin, didn't have the faith nor conviction needed to really be great, but he couldn't let them kill her without trying something. as he was attempting to purge the sickness he was greatly moved. probably she said something to him that made him reach down within himself and find a great reserve of faith that he didn't know was there. for a moment he had unmatched levels of faith, and in his zeal -knowing he was going to cure her- he actually purged the plague from her body.
this would've been big news. the plague was curable. but no one believed it. after escorting her to stormwind (weeks after daylas' arrival) the priests took the Paladin and Naomil to see some "important dudes" but all of them dismissed it as a lie. afterall, they were the strongest priests and paladins in stormwind and they couldn't cure it, so how could some low level scrub do it? Tirion Fordridge though, he'd know it was true. he'd know that at times the light can grant perfect power, and when called upon with enough zeal anything is possible. but, it's not within everyone to have so much faith. the Paladin is asked to repeat the miracle to prove he wasn't lying, and all of the questioning of his faith made him question it himself. despite Tirion's attempts to bolster his resolve, the Paladin was never able to cure any other plague victim.
Tirion came to his defense, and announced that he had indeed cured the girl, as there is no denying who she is nor the diagnosis, nor all the witnesses. but, he did say that it appeared to be a singular gift that she was saved, and then tasked the paladin with her care and upbringing, since the light obviously had plans for them both.
Naomil develops a reverence for the light, and ends up becoming a priest who worships the light and uses it to help others. but she never found her sister. After initially being taken to the orphanage, Daylas was too old and put to work with other refugees around the city learning trades and trying to support themselves. that's where she learned to be a thief, of course. those days were very hard. little money, no food even if you had money. Daylas left the city with little indication of where she went. her trail grew cold as soon as she left the gate.
it would be years before one of Daylas' associates meets Naomil (who looks strangely like a younger Daylas) and tells her where she can look. look to Northrend.
so yeah. since i've only had 57 hours with this character that's the best i can come up with. but it fits exactly what i'm doing. i put Naomil in Daylas' old trade guild. that's how she met her associates. but daylas left and they only know where she was headed, so naomil leaves stormwind to look for clues about Daylas, and she visits places along the way (places i need to go to buy something anyway, for example) that have to do with the East Kalimdor Trading Co. (Naomil is a tailor and needed a bunch of Northrend Frostweave, see) and from there she'd learn that daylas wound up in Draenor and eventually on to the Broken Shores for Legion prepatch.
so right now Naomil is right on her heels. i'd imagine there'd be an eventual meeting, but wide strokes are more important than gritty detail. anyway, Naomil's story is pretty much the quest for backstory, which is pretty much what i've been doing the last 57 hours myself. so it all fits nicely i think, and it grew from what i've actually been doing. kinda like how i forced Daylas to leave the East Kalimdor Trading Co. because i couldn't stop myself from embezzling from her cut as Errandgirl the Banker alt. i imagine they parted on bad terms since Daylas cleared the vault of anything valuable and took most of the money. fucking thief.
but errand girl was literally embezzling thousands of gold and using it to prop up several alts helping to build her Trade Guild into something Daylas never wanted to be a part of. but now Errandgirl is pretty rich and at one time had the market cornered on both Fish Feasts and Amber Gem Stones. she felt pretty guilty about taking advantage of Daylas to build her wealth, so when she became aware of Naomil she immediately thought she'd found a way to pay Daylas back. so she gave lots of support, everything from money to materials. no expense has been spared (except the 4500 gold for Fastest Riding. that's a privilege) in her professional training (tailoring and enchanting) and she's not really looking for a return on that money either, since she's already pretty rich and comfortable. she just wants to make amends, so it's important to her that Naomil reconnect with her past. it motivates her to do things, like give away a bunch of valuables and gold.
neat and tidy. and there's also a pandaran panda in there somewhere too, he was Daylas' pet. but those guys are like sentient with complex emotions and expressive personalities and can talk to you. so i figured she saved him from slavery (since she bought him) and would've just set him free, but he instead follows her around as an expression of gratitude for saving his life. he was completely worthless in combat, would give away your location in PvP, but would stand in front of a boss and do karate moves at his general direction. he was fucking hilarious. he followed her all through Cataclysm and Pandaria, and i like to think they parted ways after saving his home from evil, and he stayed to reconnect with his own past and find a life among his own people while Daylas continued her weary fight in Draenor far, far away. Naomil eventually met him, i think. i dunno.
that's about as detailed as i've managed so far. but yeah. and i mean, i'm surprised. i don't know about you, but, all these years and i never knew Daylas even had a sister. let alone a priest. that's like the exact opposite of daylas. i'm not sure Naomil has even killed a single human, i'm like 99% sure she's only killed a few beasts and a great number of demons. which is fine for a priest. otherwise she heals people. Daylas has killed untold numbers of humans. at times more than were even required.
well, i guess naomil did kill 400 players playing humanoid characters... so her hand's aren't entirely blood free. but really she was mostly just healing friendlies and praying for the light to Smite their foes. so. it's not like she garroted anyone or stabbed people in the neck with double daggers. which is what daylas does. all the time. for sport.
but also Daylas had very little support, what support she had actually stole from her, and she spent most of her time solo. she'd only seek out groups when it served her substantially, and she'd abandon them as soon as they became a slight liability. Daylas didn't even want to need people, and when she joined a raid guild out of need, she eventually learned to want to need them. she liked them. but, it fucked her. hard. she 100% lost her chance to get her sweet, sweet vengeance because she let friendship and reliance on others get in the way.
she let her defeat and blinding by the Lich King be a constant reminder to not make the same mistake again. so she serves only herself now. it's interesting that her sister would end up so different. she wants to connect with something, and often seeks out groups. she knows she's only 1/5th as strong as she can be when she's alone. Daylas may not need others, but Naomil does. very different motivations.
Naomilhelina was taken to the priests at the refugee camp after being separated from daylas. everyone believed she would die, and become undead. they would literally kill her first. but, a low level paladin was there. he wasn't particularly good at being a paladin, didn't have the faith nor conviction needed to really be great, but he couldn't let them kill her without trying something. as he was attempting to purge the sickness he was greatly moved. probably she said something to him that made him reach down within himself and find a great reserve of faith that he didn't know was there. for a moment he had unmatched levels of faith, and in his zeal -knowing he was going to cure her- he actually purged the plague from her body.
this would've been big news. the plague was curable. but no one believed it. after escorting her to stormwind (weeks after daylas' arrival) the priests took the Paladin and Naomil to see some "important dudes" but all of them dismissed it as a lie. afterall, they were the strongest priests and paladins in stormwind and they couldn't cure it, so how could some low level scrub do it? Tirion Fordridge though, he'd know it was true. he'd know that at times the light can grant perfect power, and when called upon with enough zeal anything is possible. but, it's not within everyone to have so much faith. the Paladin is asked to repeat the miracle to prove he wasn't lying, and all of the questioning of his faith made him question it himself. despite Tirion's attempts to bolster his resolve, the Paladin was never able to cure any other plague victim.
Tirion came to his defense, and announced that he had indeed cured the girl, as there is no denying who she is nor the diagnosis, nor all the witnesses. but, he did say that it appeared to be a singular gift that she was saved, and then tasked the paladin with her care and upbringing, since the light obviously had plans for them both.
Naomil develops a reverence for the light, and ends up becoming a priest who worships the light and uses it to help others. but she never found her sister. After initially being taken to the orphanage, Daylas was too old and put to work with other refugees around the city learning trades and trying to support themselves. that's where she learned to be a thief, of course. those days were very hard. little money, no food even if you had money. Daylas left the city with little indication of where she went. her trail grew cold as soon as she left the gate.
it would be years before one of Daylas' associates meets Naomil (who looks strangely like a younger Daylas) and tells her where she can look. look to Northrend.
so yeah. since i've only had 57 hours with this character that's the best i can come up with. but it fits exactly what i'm doing. i put Naomil in Daylas' old trade guild. that's how she met her associates. but daylas left and they only know where she was headed, so naomil leaves stormwind to look for clues about Daylas, and she visits places along the way (places i need to go to buy something anyway, for example) that have to do with the East Kalimdor Trading Co. (Naomil is a tailor and needed a bunch of Northrend Frostweave, see) and from there she'd learn that daylas wound up in Draenor and eventually on to the Broken Shores for Legion prepatch.
so right now Naomil is right on her heels. i'd imagine there'd be an eventual meeting, but wide strokes are more important than gritty detail. anyway, Naomil's story is pretty much the quest for backstory, which is pretty much what i've been doing the last 57 hours myself. so it all fits nicely i think, and it grew from what i've actually been doing. kinda like how i forced Daylas to leave the East Kalimdor Trading Co. because i couldn't stop myself from embezzling from her cut as Errandgirl the Banker alt. i imagine they parted on bad terms since Daylas cleared the vault of anything valuable and took most of the money. fucking thief.
but errand girl was literally embezzling thousands of gold and using it to prop up several alts helping to build her Trade Guild into something Daylas never wanted to be a part of. but now Errandgirl is pretty rich and at one time had the market cornered on both Fish Feasts and Amber Gem Stones. she felt pretty guilty about taking advantage of Daylas to build her wealth, so when she became aware of Naomil she immediately thought she'd found a way to pay Daylas back. so she gave lots of support, everything from money to materials. no expense has been spared (except the 4500 gold for Fastest Riding. that's a privilege) in her professional training (tailoring and enchanting) and she's not really looking for a return on that money either, since she's already pretty rich and comfortable. she just wants to make amends, so it's important to her that Naomil reconnect with her past. it motivates her to do things, like give away a bunch of valuables and gold.
neat and tidy. and there's also a pandaran panda in there somewhere too, he was Daylas' pet. but those guys are like sentient with complex emotions and expressive personalities and can talk to you. so i figured she saved him from slavery (since she bought him) and would've just set him free, but he instead follows her around as an expression of gratitude for saving his life. he was completely worthless in combat, would give away your location in PvP, but would stand in front of a boss and do karate moves at his general direction. he was fucking hilarious. he followed her all through Cataclysm and Pandaria, and i like to think they parted ways after saving his home from evil, and he stayed to reconnect with his own past and find a life among his own people while Daylas continued her weary fight in Draenor far, far away. Naomil eventually met him, i think. i dunno.
that's about as detailed as i've managed so far. but yeah. and i mean, i'm surprised. i don't know about you, but, all these years and i never knew Daylas even had a sister. let alone a priest. that's like the exact opposite of daylas. i'm not sure Naomil has even killed a single human, i'm like 99% sure she's only killed a few beasts and a great number of demons. which is fine for a priest. otherwise she heals people. Daylas has killed untold numbers of humans. at times more than were even required.
well, i guess naomil did kill 400 players playing humanoid characters... so her hand's aren't entirely blood free. but really she was mostly just healing friendlies and praying for the light to Smite their foes. so. it's not like she garroted anyone or stabbed people in the neck with double daggers. which is what daylas does. all the time. for sport.
but also Daylas had very little support, what support she had actually stole from her, and she spent most of her time solo. she'd only seek out groups when it served her substantially, and she'd abandon them as soon as they became a slight liability. Daylas didn't even want to need people, and when she joined a raid guild out of need, she eventually learned to want to need them. she liked them. but, it fucked her. hard. she 100% lost her chance to get her sweet, sweet vengeance because she let friendship and reliance on others get in the way.
she let her defeat and blinding by the Lich King be a constant reminder to not make the same mistake again. so she serves only herself now. it's interesting that her sister would end up so different. she wants to connect with something, and often seeks out groups. she knows she's only 1/5th as strong as she can be when she's alone. Daylas may not need others, but Naomil does. very different motivations.
(Edited 2 minutes later.)
FuckAlms !vX8K53rFBI replied with this 10 years ago, 52 minutes later, 4 months after the original post[^] [v] #714,372
squeegee (OP) replied with this 10 years ago, 1 hour later, 4 months after the original post[^] [v] #714,408
@previous (FuckAlms !vX8K53rFBI)
she's actually pretty geared for a lvl 1. she could have more armor, but it's her enchantments that make her strong. everything that can be enchanted IS enchanted, and it was all high end enchants back in WotLK. she carries a diamond tipped staff that is enchanted with +175 agility or something like that. it's technically an off class weapon and enchant, but it's the extravagance of having an expensive enchanted cosmetic item that makes it a novelty. she also wears a tuxedo under her Guild Tabard, it's enchanted too, another frivolous extravagance.
pretty much all she does is walk between the bank, the auction house, the mailbox, and a couple of nearby vendors.
she's actually pretty geared for a lvl 1. she could have more armor, but it's her enchantments that make her strong. everything that can be enchanted IS enchanted, and it was all high end enchants back in WotLK. she carries a diamond tipped staff that is enchanted with +175 agility or something like that. it's technically an off class weapon and enchant, but it's the extravagance of having an expensive enchanted cosmetic item that makes it a novelty. she also wears a tuxedo under her Guild Tabard, it's enchanted too, another frivolous extravagance.
pretty much all she does is walk between the bank, the auction house, the mailbox, and a couple of nearby vendors.
squeegee (OP) double-posted this 10 years ago, 14 minutes later, 4 months after the original post[^] [v] #714,414
i successfully became a dreadlord earlier. lol. it was awesome.
it spreads like a disease. first you get cursed. when that happens you lose all of your ordinary abilities and gain demon ones. but only part demon, you still look human or whatever. one of your abilities is to curse other players, another is to turn into a giant dreadlord demon and wreck the city. but you have to curse 9 other people first. after you curse someone, you're turned hostile and guards attack you for 15 seconds. if you survive, you can do it again. if not, you lose the curse.
after cursing 9 players you can turn into a 100ft tall demon Dreadlord with like like 100 million health and attack the city. i've been cursed a few times, but never got all 9 curses off before being killed by guards or players.
i went to the center of town, right by the bank and the auction house, and turned into a huge monster. i had 4 abilities. one is to swipe everyone and deal massive AoE damage. another is to make spikes come out of the ground under people's feet. another is to eject a huge poison cloud, and another spawns circles that move around on the ground and make people inside go to sleep. the controller i use gives me zero downtime between spells, so i ended up spawning an absolute fuckload of the sleep circles. i survived almost the full minute i had as a dreadlord, but the circles stayed spawned for another minute. it was funny as fuck, there were easily 30 of them floating all over the area (they're pretty big too) and no one could even move. probably not the most devastating attack on SW, since i used so many sleep spells rather than spikes, but it had to have been one of the more annoying. usually you can just avoid them.
it spreads like a disease. first you get cursed. when that happens you lose all of your ordinary abilities and gain demon ones. but only part demon, you still look human or whatever. one of your abilities is to curse other players, another is to turn into a giant dreadlord demon and wreck the city. but you have to curse 9 other people first. after you curse someone, you're turned hostile and guards attack you for 15 seconds. if you survive, you can do it again. if not, you lose the curse.
after cursing 9 players you can turn into a 100ft tall demon Dreadlord with like like 100 million health and attack the city. i've been cursed a few times, but never got all 9 curses off before being killed by guards or players.
i went to the center of town, right by the bank and the auction house, and turned into a huge monster. i had 4 abilities. one is to swipe everyone and deal massive AoE damage. another is to make spikes come out of the ground under people's feet. another is to eject a huge poison cloud, and another spawns circles that move around on the ground and make people inside go to sleep. the controller i use gives me zero downtime between spells, so i ended up spawning an absolute fuckload of the sleep circles. i survived almost the full minute i had as a dreadlord, but the circles stayed spawned for another minute. it was funny as fuck, there were easily 30 of them floating all over the area (they're pretty big too) and no one could even move. probably not the most devastating attack on SW, since i used so many sleep spells rather than spikes, but it had to have been one of the more annoying. usually you can just avoid them.
squeegee (OP) triple-posted this 10 years ago, 2 minutes later, 4 months after the original post[^] [v] #714,418
i should've screen shotted, but i was busy. here's the aftermath of a better attack than mine.squeegee replied with this 10 years ago, 5 hours later, 4 months after the original post[^] [v] #714,497
oh this expansion is fun
the new thing is "class halls." the rogue hall is a secret meeting room in a sewer with entrances behind bookshelves. my rogue fell in with a shadowy group of murderous thugs and thieving scum. i chose the new outlaw spec and did the quest line for new "artifact weapons" which are cutlasses, daggers, or poison daggers. outlaws get the cutlasses.
pretty fun little chain to get those, we'll be spending points upgrading them instead of chasing new weapons all the time. kinda different.
haven't messed with professions yet. just class related quests, which are a breath of fresh air. i can already tell that each class is getting it's own private story arc. very fun. i've already gotten one stealth/assasination job. there will hopefully be a lot more.
the new thing is "class halls." the rogue hall is a secret meeting room in a sewer with entrances behind bookshelves. my rogue fell in with a shadowy group of murderous thugs and thieving scum. i chose the new outlaw spec and did the quest line for new "artifact weapons" which are cutlasses, daggers, or poison daggers. outlaws get the cutlasses.
pretty fun little chain to get those, we'll be spending points upgrading them instead of chasing new weapons all the time. kinda different.
haven't messed with professions yet. just class related quests, which are a breath of fresh air. i can already tell that each class is getting it's own private story arc. very fun. i've already gotten one stealth/assasination job. there will hopefully be a lot more.
squeegee (OP) replied with this 10 years ago, 1 day later, 4 months after the original post[^] [v] #714,859
this was what was happening in Stormwind in the moments leading up to the patch. there were way more people than this, i was surrounded by flocks of people on all sides. on the ground, and in the air.squeegee (OP) double-posted this 10 years ago, 5 minutes later, 4 months after the original post[^] [v] #714,860
i ran my shaman through first to get her legendary artifact weapon, Doomhammer. this hammer was carried by Thrall, chief of the horde, until he became a pussy and got married and had an ugly child. Now the elements refuse to imbue it with power (he might've also killed Garrosh, his best friend with it, but i think it has more to do with his ugly ass child.) Thrall, after nearly being killed by the legion and losing the hammer, sends my shaman to the Elemental Plane of Deepholm to find and recover it. after wielding it and showing a mastery over it that even Thrall could not match, the hammer becomes your prize. Thrall believes he's lost his shamanistic connection to the elements, and needs time to meditate and search his feelings. like a little bitch.bitch i got your hammer
(Edited 54 seconds later.)
squeegee (OP) triple-posted this 10 years ago, 4 minutes later, 4 months after the original post[^] [v] #714,861
it's pretty cool. it comes with a "use" ability, a one minute cooldown that boosts all damage by a huge amount. it also looks pretty neat and mirrors itself as a lava hammer in the off-hand.squeegee (OP) quadruple-posted this 10 years ago, 3 minutes later, 4 months after the original post[^] [v] #714,862
my rogue got a pair of pirate cutlasses called the Dreadblades. they also have a "use" ability which fully charged [Run-Through] with every [Sabre Slash] which gives you a massive damage boost that can be further amplified by stacking other cooldowns on top of it. i crit for over 200k in a fight last night. shit is nuts.squeegee (OP) quintuple-posted this 10 years ago, 1 minute later, 4 months after the original post[^] [v] #714,864
my priest got the prettiest weapon. it's a staff. it also has a "use" ability, but i forgot what it does. something big, i'd imagine. probably a boost of some kind on cooldown.(Edited 25 seconds later.)
squeegee (OP) sextuple-posted this 10 years ago, 3 minutes later, 4 months after the original post[^] [v] #714,866
i'm guessing we won't be seeing many other weapons in this expansion. i keep finding them, but nothing is even close to the legendary weapons. looks like we'll be empowering them and upgrading them as we go, and they'll have more abilities as we unlock it. this is vastly different than other expansions. instead of characters gaining more abilities, your weapons gain them. it's weird, but it's been fun so far.
really it's 6 in one hand half a dozen in the other, so
really it's 6 in one hand half a dozen in the other, so
squeegee (OP) septuple-posted this 10 years ago, 2 minutes later, 4 months after the original post[^] [v] #714,867
it's also pretty nice looking, the zones are dense and thick with stuff. nice aesthetics toosqueegee (OP) octuple-posted this 10 years ago, 1 minute later, 4 months after the original post[^] [v] #714,869
squeegee (OP) nonuple-posted this 10 years ago, 41 seconds later, 4 months after the original post[^] [v] #714,871
squeegee (OP) decuple-posted this 10 years ago, 1 minute later, 4 months after the original post[^] [v] #714,872
the floating mage city of Dalaran was moved from Northrend to the Broken Shore. everyone is happy to be back there. Dalaran was "home" in WotLK, so it's nice to return there and have something to do.squeegee (OP) undecuple-posted this 10 years ago, 1 day later, 4 months after the original post[^] [v] #715,257
here's Dalaran from above. it's actually pretty big, includes a whole underworld, 2 banks, a prison, and lots of shops.squeegee (OP) duodecuple-posted this 10 years ago, 16 minutes later, 4 months after the original post[^] [v] #715,259
so far i like Azhara the best. i figured i'd be annoyed by it since it's half flooded and full of Naga (my rogue fucking hates the god damned Naga. she's really very racist and bigoted towards anyone but Humans and the Dranei it seems) but it's really beautifuledit: my priest is in Azhara on a professional endeavor rather than anything for the war effort. she's tracking down a tailor to take back to Dalaran. even though i've got her technically questing in another zone, this is the most open world i've ever seen WoW.
(Edited 2 minutes later.)
squeegee (OP) tridecuple-posted this 10 years ago, 9 minutes later, 4 months after the original post[^] [v] #715,260
i mean there's even unicorns here. you know who loved that? my priest. she thought they were majestic. you know who hated that? yeah, my rogue. she killed a bunch of them for their meat and sold their [damaged hide] to filthy goblins. my shaman wasn't impressed because even after properly skinning them they still didn't have above average hides.(Edited 2 minutes later.)
squeegee (OP) quattuodecuple-posted this 10 years ago, 1 minute later, 4 months after the original post[^] [v] #715,261
and i remembered how to turn the UI off for pictures, so i'll be trying to do that from now onsqueegee (OP) sexadecuple-posted this 10 years ago, 3 days later, 4 months after the original post[^] [v] #716,376
i decided to go ahead and grab my second artifact on my Priest. the artifact is a dagger meant for Shadow priests. Shadow priests are dedicated damage dealers. Their spells are mostly offensive, and spell damage "revs up" over time. the longer you're attacking, the more damage you do. Interestingly Shadow Priests draw their power from insanity, and several spells increase your insanity which allows you to cast more powerful spells. i don't really understand the spec at all. it takes many hours of practice and adjustment to really feel comfortable with a class, and even longer to really master it. Shadow priest is also one of the more difficult rotations in the game. it's another Priority class, so there's no fixed attack rotation. you are often making a choice between how to spend insanity and maximizing DPS is all about making the correct choice every time. my priest is 102, so there's still plenty of time to learn the spec, but really i was only after the dagger.
it talks to you. and it's not your friend. perfect for an insane priest.
to get it i had to travel to the Eastern Kingdoms, past the Ruins of Lorderon. (if you'll rememeber this was the area from which both my rogue and my priest gain their backstory.) if i'm not mistaken this is the childhood home of Prince Arthas who would later become known as the Lich King. after digging through ruins and finding some clues about the daggers location, my priest finds a temple built inside a cavern with an entrance deep beneath a lake.
squeegee (OP) sedecuple-posted this 10 years ago, 6 minutes later, 4 months after the original post[^] [v] #716,377
the dagger came paired with a tome carried in the off-hand. the book, it appears, is a journal of "crazy shit this dagger says," kept by the dagger's ownersGreen !BEERiVqJJw joined in and replied with this 10 years ago, 18 hours later, 4 months after the original post[^] [v] #716,590
Anonymous O joined in and replied with this 10 years ago, 2 minutes later, 4 months after the original post[^] [v] #716,591
squeegee (OP) replied with this 10 years ago, 5 days later, 4 months after the original post[^] [v] #718,294
let's do this. i've decided to go ahead and main my priest. she's 106 now. i played a bunch over labor day weekend and took a bit of a break this week. Launch was fucking awesome. really, best launch i've seen in years. the rollover went perfectly, and so far the content seems to be deep and plentiful. patches are scheduled to deliver new content frequently, so hopefully Legion will hold my attention a bit longer that Warlords of Boredom. (it had so much potential, but it went downhill from the point i realized it was an alternate-timeline that once defeated would... make the whole thing utterly meaningless... the big joke is that it was just a mass hallucination or your characters fever dream, rather than a real event with an actual impact on the world. anyway...)I've played 4 characters now, rogue, shaman, priest and then warrior, and have gotten at least one relic weapon each. the most fun, i think maybe by a long shot, is my Outlaw Rogue. she has some really fun abilities, but Assasination is super basic. strong, but basic. and it hasn't changed much in years. and much less fun abilities, imo. my combat rogue is constantly whipping out pistols and blunderbusses in the middle of sword combos, has a grappling hook to reach impossible places, and has a huge assortment of melee and ranged finishers that leave the other two specs looking pretty gutted. they are very much melee only and rely on distance closing abilities to make up for a lack of ranged attacks. outlaw is a blast, though. and decent as hell in PvP arenas.
my shaman is still interesting, but Enhancement is very different from before. it's very, very strong, and i totally believe it'll be up there with rogue damage by the end. incredibly high, spiky damage. super bursty. relies heavily on cooldowns. she's my fastest killer atm, even if my rogue does better on sustained fights. for leveling i'm pretty much just charging through and crushing things in huge groups like a tornado of fire and lightning and stone obliterating everything on contact. my shaman can do some fucking work.
but both shaman and rogues are faceroll classes compared to discipline priest. but, my priest is probably my easiest character to level. she, uh, can't die. i've figured her out, and now she can't die. it feels super weird to pull damn near everything and not even worry about it. in fact, the more i pull, the easier she stays alive. i'm tanking multiple world elites with a damn healer. Discipline Priests, as the name would suggest i guess, heal by way of imposing discipline. abilites such as [Smite] and [Penance] deal damage to an enemy target and return a portion of that damage back as health to friendly targets effected by [Atonement] which is an applied buff by the priest. apply atonement, smite target, kill them, heal you. it's pretty awesome.
it's slow though. it does take longer to kill things, but, i can pretty much kill anything that i can overheal.
in dungeons my rogue and my shaman do what they do, and it's a face roll. don't stand in fire, maintain range, focus on nailing rotation.
but in dungeons my priest is the more difficult character. not only does a discipline priest have to do everything a ranged DPS would do, but also have to target switch more frequently than even a Holy Priest since you have to go target both friendly and unfriendly units. Shaman healing is all about group healing and making huge saves with big burst Heals, so you can practically just target yourself and spam heals and run around so everyone gets splashed.
dungeons are certainly getting easier now that i've run them a few times. i can anticipate what i'll need to do, so i'm not killing my groups anymore. i'm sure it'll happen again, there are a bunch of dungeons i don't know anything about but at least now i'm giving everyone a fighting chance. it's certainly more challenging than tanking. still, that boils down to having good pacing and clearing the dungeon in a logical way that is obvious to everyone (bad tanks try to sneak past stuff to save time and it'll all get pulled by accident and kill someone/everyone.) tanking in a dungeon is kinda like just leveling with followers... know your limits. tanking and DPS don't really bring anything to the party that is vastly different from what they normally do while leveling. healing though has a whole extra dimension that is only even practicable while in a group. there is nothing in the leveling experience that really emulates the "healing a party of people dying as fast as you can heal them" thing. it's one thing to put some heals in your DPS rotation while leveling, it's a whole nother thing to provide healing to 4 additional targets.
the challenge is not without reward, though. disc priest is one of the few classes that will benefit from both the DPS and Healer Loot Tables. kit for mages and warlocks work just dandy. getting gear won't be hard, especially since queue times for healing dungeons is 1-2 minutes vs. upwards of an hour. tanks are even queuing longer than heals. it really is a healing paradise atm.
squeegee (OP) double-posted this 10 years ago, 4 days later, 4 months after the original post[^] [v] #719,374
i've been doing a lot of fishing on my rogue, i found out the other day that there's a legendary fishing pole. it even has a skill tree and you empower it with Rare Fish that you fish up all over the place. it's awesome. it's also pretty hard to get. to acquire it you have to collect 18 different rare fish. to catch a rare fish you have to be using special bait, and the bait itself must be fished from schools of fish using a Bait attracting Lure. the baits themselves are a 1% drop chance while fishing in Open Water. Fishing from Schools improves your odds, as well as using the Bait attracting lure. after catching the special bait, you then use it to fish for Rares which themselves are about a 10-20% drop. Baits last 2 minutes. It happened a couple of times that i caught a bait, and then didn't get a rare, but usually fishing with Bait guaranteed at least one. Each zone has 3 rare fish to catch, so completing the achievement takes many hours of fishing with all the traveling around. i did already finish the achievement, but i can't get the Quest Chain to get the Artifact Fishing Pole till my rogue is level capped. but the hard part is done, now i just have to finish leveling her up and that pole will be mine.
It's actually really fucking sweet. fishing is the only profession to get an artifact too. similar to Artifact Weapons, you can empower the fishing pole with power that unlocks additional perks and abilities like water walking, turning into a fast swimming fish, and fishing for Blood of Sargeras (a super expensive crafting reagent). it also has a bunch of passive buffs to things like fishing skill and improves drop rates for rares and desirable fish. it can also be used as a weapon and reduces your threat radius making fishing in dangerous places much safer.
squeegee (OP) triple-posted this 10 years ago, 1 minute later, 4 months after the original post[^] [v] #719,375
it's probably the most exciting thing for me in this expansion, tbh. i've always loved fishing in WoW (at first i thought it was stupid and a waste of time, then i found it to be super relaxing and enjoyable) and have a nice handful of fishing equipment (fishing hat, epic pole, small raft, fishing spear, boots, gloves, tackle box, ride-able turtle, and magic baits) so the Artifact fishing pole is, like, a must have. i'm really more excited over fishing than raiding! but only really on my rogue, she's my fisherman.and like i've said before, she's pretty much retired from the "hero" game. after she was blinded by the Lich King and wandering in the aftermath of the Cataclysm she regained her sight, of sorts, and now spends most of her time killing in Pit fights and gladiator arenas. when she's not doing that, she's going on fishing expeditions all over the world to collect achievements and get more fishing gear. and fishing is exactly what she was doing at the end of the last expansion. I was finishing up (still am) a reputation grind in Pandaria (the reward is a fishing chair with an umbrella that even works on the fishing raft) so that Nat Pagle will sometimes come and give me beers and encouragement while i'm fishing.
so my rogue is fishing, and my priest is gearing up to raid, and my shaman is now cooling her heels till my rogue has her Fishing gear. and i still have no idea what happened between my rogue and my priest, at this point they will have obviously met. they live in the same town, and know a few of the same people. like Khadgar, who knows about their relation to one another. not sure how they would've handled it, my rogue was under the impression her family was dead, so, it would be a big surprise. and Big Sister Rogue would probably not meet her younger sister's expectations, she's cold and distant and avoids attachment to people. probably not the reunion she was hoping for. and now what happened is my rogue is saying "fuck everything" and doing as she pleases without any concern for current events, but her younger sister has now been tapped to follow in her footsteps and try progression raiding.
remember, this behavior is exactly what led to my rogue being blinded by the Lich King and killing all her friends (literally we all stopped being friends cause nerds get hurt feelings, so they might as well have died in ICC) and now Naomil is joining with a band of heroes to try exactly the same thing. not sure how my rogue will feel about that. maybe she won't care, but i like to think that even if she doesn't now, that eventually she'll find out what her sister is up to and try and put a stop to it. but, my healer is getting to be quite popular around my guilds and she's growing more indebted to them every day. yesterday i had the GM of two guilds give me around 45k worth of gear to help me get my gear score up to raid. one piece was a 30k gold pair of pants. TBH i have like 60k between all my characters, so 30k is still quite a lot of fucking gold. oh, 40k is worth 20 bucks, you can buy gold from blizzard now basically. so these GMs pretty much just gave me like 20 real dollars.
anyway, such is the life of a healer. it's always been the most in-demand role in WoW.
(Edited 2 minutes later.)