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So, I logged on this morning and was amazed at the new levels of depth they've added to WoW with the new expansion: The port of Stormwind is open (and looks amazing), the achievements are up and running, meaning you can get fun titles even if you don't have 30 hours/week to raid, and you can re-do your character's appearance. I'm glad they rolled this out 1 month before Lich King comes out, because it'll give us all a chance to feel things out before we hit Northrend.

I like the achievements a lot. I'm currently working on a title of 'The Explorer', which means I have to visit EVERYWHERE. I've done the eastern kingdoms completely, so now I'm moving on to Kalimdor and I'll finish off Outland before Wrath comes out.

I'm not so sure about Inscription, though, it just seems like an unnecessary modification of enchantment. Of course, the patch was only online for about 4 hours before I saw guys with max ranks selling their wares.

looking nice so far, apart from the fact Draenor (EU) seem to be crashing every 30 min or so, I've even started Inscription on my warrior.

How does the exploration title work, though? Do you need to re-explore everything? What happens if you explored most of the world already. Does that count toward your net exploration?

Yes. You know when you enter a zone and it says Discovered: Stranglethorn Vale? That's what it bases this achievement on. If your map is showing, you've got it.

Boyish-Tigerlilly wrote:How does the exploration title work, though? Do you need to re-explore everything? What happens if you explored most of the world already. Does that count toward your net exploration?

Yes, your net counts for you. Basically your map is scanned, anything not showing counts against you. I've found several place in classic I thought I had been, but alas had not.

It is a pretty nice patch, servers still seem to be a little unstable in the EU, crashing a lot and a fair amount of people are complaining of High Latency.
But I do like Blizzards method of rolling out patches like this well before the expansion is due (as they did with TBC i believe) so people get a chance to get used to their new talents and everything, the people making the UI mods all get a chance to update ready for the game coming out in a month.

Really enjoying frost and fire on my mage, both have huge damage potential, nothing like scoring 2 huge fireball crits, swiftly followed by a pyroblast crit. And resto druids, which everyone thought was getting nerfed (lol) are still just as powerful in pvp and pve, been playing mine and its just insane how good my heals are doing now.

Achievements thing is a mixed bag, but I do have all my old school stuff credited thankfully (after 3 tickets to GMs to get them), and I just blew like 10k gold on getting 50 mounts for the Albino Drake.

US servers were getting a lot of crashes at first, too, but they seem to have gotten most of the bugs worked out. I made a killing at the AH with herbs - some of those early scribes paid through the nose for their herbs. Glyphs are sort of like enchantment, but it's for your spells, not your gear.

I was annoyed at having to re-fill the talent trees and re-train my higher level character due to the time factor but I can live with it

I think 3/4 of my guild took to base-jumping off Thunderbluff and Scyer Tier to get the "Going Down?" achievement.

Damm them! Now I feel compelled to re-activate my account! damm them all to hell!

New talent changes are... interesting.

I went 51/10 disc/holy on my priest, and it's a helluva lot more fun than pushing the GHeal button. Unfortunately, since my Recount is busted, I have no idea how well I'm doing numbers-wise. My healing assignments are staying alive, so that must count for something.

I have a fresh 70 enhancement shammah as well. I saw the str/agil change coming a while ago, so I started gearing up similar to a hunter (as opposed to stacking strength). Saw a 300 change in AP post-patch. It's not much, I know, since I'm still in quest rewards and greens and 3-pc Felstalker, but it shows you how huge the stats change is.

I'm liking the achievements thing. The Jenkins title seems to be the title de jour these days. I'm waiting for the Halloween event to get here, myself.

Fights HUGELY nerfed. Like, zomg. I missed patch day, but our guild went into BT and downed Naj'entus, Supremus, Shade of Akama, Bloodboil (guild first) and Teron Gorefiend on the first night. Last night we went back and beat up Reliquary of Souls and Mother Shahraz for two more guild firsts and it was stupidly easy.

Is your guild being spammed with the achievement notices, too?

Ligier wrote:Is your guild being spammed with the achievement notices, too?

Oh, yeah - it's nice to know everyone's grooming has improved (Shave and a Haircut) but it's getting tedious

Broomstick wrote:Oh, yeah - it's nice to know everyone's grooming has improved (Shave and a Haircut) but it's getting tedious

One of our guildes wasn't in the raid (too much DPS signed on ftl) and we were tracking his progress throughout the world based on the "so-and-so has explored such-and-such" Achievements

Broomstick wrote:

Ligier wrote:Is your guild being spammed with the achievement notices, too?

Oh, yeah - it's nice to know everyone's grooming has improved (Shave and a Haircut) but it's getting tedious

You can turn that off, thank god, guild kept logging in with their various alts, keep spamming me every few seconds, no if I can just turn it off in general... I don't care who got a hair cut, really

I'm enjoying it so far. The mount collection is a big money sink for my main, which I guess is a good motivation to do dailies again. Not doing the exploration achievements till the weekend rolls around.

Only thing I dislike is that I feel like a noob cause I don't really know how my talents stack up any more, if it will work in a raid or not, etc.

On the whole "Going Down" achievement, my little level 37 pally earned it by accident, trying to travel from UC to Org. Turns out that the Kalimdor world server was down, so off we fly and suddenly the zeppelin vanishes! Ahhh! I bubble and survive, and am promptly rewarded with the achievement, then begin to rez the huge pile of bodies around me, because I'm a nice guy.

It is done, I'm back in, and hoping that the achievements thingie helps me visit all the dungeons I couldn't visit before due to a critical lack of people interested in doing them (BRD and up).

I'm loving it. Of course, I'm a Retribution Paladin, so I'm enjoying my time of being a nigh-unstoppable killing machine. And if Blizzard curbstomps the spec like they did before The Burning Crusade (which I get the feeling that they'll try to avoid, because of what happened with The Burning Crusade), it'll make me not feel as bad to spend time with the Death Knight I'll roll when the full expansion comes out.

Minischoles wrote:Achievements thing is a mixed bag, but I do have all my old school stuff credited thankfully (after 3 tickets to GMs to get them), and I just blew like 10k gold on getting 50 mounts for the Albino Drake.

What old school achievements did you get that you didn't have a way of proving you'd done? Thanks for clogging the GM queue, it's not like there aren't people unable to play because their characters are stuck in crashed zones or anything.

You're supposed to just go and do the old school achievements if you didn't have the foresight to keep a drop from the boss.

Its insane how much herbs are going for. Peacebloom is going for 50 silver APIECE. Its madness, I cleared out a lot of my herb bag. I got 'Explored Eastern Kingdoms' and 'Explored Outland', now I'll be working on Kalimdor, but the Horde territories are gonna be a little tricky.

I look forward to seeing all the profession-specific quests, I'm enjoying doing all the cooking ones, so I can't wait to see what there is for alchemy.

GuppyShark wrote:

Minischoles wrote:Achievements thing is a mixed bag, but I do have all my old school stuff credited thankfully (after 3 tickets to GMs to get them), and I just blew like 10k gold on getting 50 mounts for the Albino Drake.

What old school achievements did you get that you didn't have a way of proving you'd done? Thanks for clogging the GM queue, it's not like there aren't people unable to play because their characters are stuck in crashed zones or anything.

You're supposed to just go and do the old school achievements if you didn't have the foresight to keep a drop from the boss.

Yeah because keeping gear i got years ago is so easy. I mean its not like i'm a druid who is currently sitting on:
3 sets of resto gear (pvp, pve and pve haste)
2 sets of moonkin gear (pvp and pve)
5 sets of feral gear (pvp, pve, fire, frost, nature)
as well as my shadow resistance gear.
Add in any reagents i need for buffing, consumables for whatever spec i'm currently needed as for the guild and at any given time i've probably got about 3-6 free bag spaces, and none in my bank. So please, tell me i'm selfish for wanting recognition for all the raiding I did pre-tbc on my druid.

Captain Chewbacca wrote:Its insane how much herbs are going for. Peacebloom is going for 50 silver APIECE. Its madness, I cleared out a lot of my herb bag.

Yeah, luckily ever since WOTLK was announced i've been grinding herbs in pretty much any spare time I have, had to even create a gbank for my bank char purely to house it all. Offloaded it all the last few days and nights. Mageroyal going for 65g and Fadeleaf for 100g a stack were pretty good times, and seeing stuff like Sungrass and Golden Sansam going for between 150g and 200g made me warm inside and glad I wasted all those hours grinding around in Azeroth for them.

So the Achievements are pretty much an attempt to quickly emulate the Tome of Knowledge from WAR?

Minischoles wrote:So please, tell me i'm selfish for wanting recognition for all the raiding I did pre-tbc on my druid.

Close.

You're selfish for wanting recognition fro all the raiding you did pre-TBC on your druid while the GMs were dealing with server instability.

How did you do it, by the way? Get an item restore on some final boss drop?

Back on the broader topic, the changes have made Sunwell easy even for raids well behind the curve. My raid downed Kalecgos and Brutallus on our first time in the instance, and we only killed Illidan for the first time a few weeks ago.

Let's see the patch was poorly implemented, causing an overabundence of cascade failures with things from stability to fucking mounts and pets going missing.

On the plus side they made the Retadin into something I may play for a week, and raiding became so easy that my guild downed the last parts of Sunwell, with one shot on M'uru, and two on Kil'jaeden. No Legendary bow, but meh.

Sorry, since this is my last month this wasn't enough to make me leave Warhammer.

I also think its cool that all the old raid achievements are making people go and re-do stuff. I actually saw some guy organize a 40-man PICKUP RAID for Al-Quiraj. I would've gone if I wasn't on my way out the door, but its really cool that folks are going around to do that sutff.

Footnote: You'd think I would have gotten SOMETHING for killing a world dragon, but there's no recognition for that

GuppyShark wrote:

Minischoles wrote:So please, tell me i'm selfish for wanting recognition for all the raiding I did pre-tbc on my druid.

Close.

You're selfish for wanting recognition fro all the raiding you did pre-TBC on your druid while the GMs were dealing with server instability.

How did you do it, by the way? Get an item restore on some final boss drop?

Back on the broader topic, the changes have made Sunwell easy even for raids well behind the curve. My raid downed Kalecgos and Brutallus on our first time in the instance, and we only killed Illidan for the first time a few weeks ago.

I got a few item restores, and a few just through the sheer fact I have the rep with the respective factions to have cleared those places multiple times. Some I have to redo (working on getting a guild group together to go do AQ40 now) but thats not too hard.

And yeah, raiding is ridiculously easy now. I still don't see the logic behind the HP nerf, they were saying its because of the potion sickness, yet with personal and raid DPS going through the roof these bosses would die pretty fast anyway. Went into BT yesterday and pretty much stomped through the entire thing in under 2 hours, and I finally got to tank Illidan (yay for no more shears). Gonna try and go Sunwell tonight (if the server is stable enough) and see how we do, we'll probably finally get our KJ kill but i don't think that there will be any sense of accomplishment in it. I mean pre nerf, i really loved every new boss kill, but if its as nerfed as BT currently is not sure whether its really worth it anymore.

CaptainChewbacca wrote:I also think its cool that all the old raid achievements are making people go and re-do stuff. I actually saw some guy organize a 40-man PICKUP RAID for Al-Quiraj.

Thunderlord server has had at least three of those that I'm aware of. It makes doing the old instances worthwhile, which is good for those of us who missed them the first time around and would like to see them at least once.