stella hates q’s
queue is noticeably better today, I think it’s the scourge event. broad swaths of the game are completely unplayable right now. was the event supposed to work this way or did they bork it? i skipped release/p1 in original wotlk so I dont actually remember. I remember the swine flu event, but nothing as annoying as this.
I’ve just been having my priest follow all my characters around in cities and spending a lot of time in silvermoon.
after losing the roll so many times i lost count, I finally got mongoose enchant as well as any other tbc enchant that’s a must have. i officially never have to set foot in kara again. hallelujah
i almost have all the professions leveled now. pretty much just need fishing/cooking on my druid. ideally id like 1 more alchemist but I’m not sure I will yet. i’m making a killing from prospecting thorium ore for some reason. like, literally printing gold.
I’m surprised I even was able to get my professions up so much. inscription was shockingly cheap, and I swear i’m making a profit with JC. I started with less than 100 gold iirc.
LOL server discord chat room, these degens lose massive amounts of gold to these ingame casinos that have like 20% juice, it’s nuts. “wanna roll 7k see if you break even?” had me dying. can you get banned for this? I never can find a clear answer
is there a worse profession than fishing holy fuck its been a million hours and im only 220
mining wasn’t even this bad, and it was preeeeetty bad.
only proffs that aren’t 350 now other than fishing are lw/bs but i consider those mostly worthless so I will not be doing them.
fishing/cooking is important to level most of all before release because there’s all these dailies you have to do. ugh. dailies. my nemesis
when the server populations calm down i may take a serious look at transferring to grobbulus, i checked out the vibes there and they do pass.
oh, I wasn’t posting this anywhere out of fear someone would steal it, but since no one here is on faerlina, I am basically printing money by prospecting thorium ore at this point. I have been doing it 3 days straight and only just now am I noticing the price of gems start to fall enough to where I’m backing off a bit. I’ve made a few thousand gold just clicking a few buttons every few hours. fucking jewelcrafting dude.
This will be bloggish and I apologize but I want to pause and reflect on this expansion for a moment.
The burning crusade is over in just a handful of days. hard to believe now. my journey has been absolutely wild - from messing around in vanilla on a mage on Remulos, somehow getting to level 50 before realizing it was an australian server, to re-rolling on Faerlina in may 2021 to boost a hunter with @RegretS who quit within a week. Then, end up joining a guild, immediately becoming co-gm, and re-rolled a druid because we were lacking good healers. Woops, there went my hunter, basically never touched him again.
That first guild in P1 was a big learning experience. Led my first raids through kara, ended up with 3 of them, and having to delegate raid leading of the third to someone I trusted, because at that time I didn’t have a third toon to use a lockout on. The other GM, who really had final say on everything because he formed the guild to begin with, decided to do a really stupid thing and change our loot system to DKP, but that combined with our lack of a solid 25 man raid (there was barely any 25 man content in p1, so I never prioritized it, I advised people to pug, which people hated) and the inexplicably long phase 1 which caused tons of people to quit en masse, and the guild fell apart when I just couldn’t carry it on my back anymore. Lots of lessons I didn’t learn there.
Next guild, piece of crap elysian. These guys I clicked a lot more with as friends, none of them were super amazingly good but neither was I. I got recruited by a real ass-kicker of a rascal of an officer named swig, and I loved his no-nonsense attitude when it came to slackers and whiners. However, this wasn’t popular with some folks, and he also tried to do way too much on his own, and he burned out right before p2 and I found myself taking his de-facto role in the leadership, and was minted as an officer.
Those days were really hard. P2 was crazy hard for dad guilds to begin with, and we just lost half our roster with swig, who was also our recruiter and main raid leader. so, i stepped up big time. We only got 10/10 right before the nerf, but I considered that a massive success. there were lots of big moves I negotiated at the time.
For instance, I had to make a really hard choice at one point - we had an AWESOME druid healer named nick, and he had 2 buds who weren’t amazing but not bad at all either, plus one was a shaman, which were always in need. Well, our raid nights didn’t work well for them. The thing was, they were the only ones the raid nights didn’t work for, and we could have switched for them, but doing so would cause us to lose another small guild we had absorbed, led by this decent warrior main tank and his friends, all of which were reliable raiders.
So I had to choose between our best healer (knowing full damn well I’d have to carry my ass off on healing if he left) and losing our main tank + what was our future co-gm and raid leader. ugh. i chose that tank, and I wish I didn’t, because that asshole still owes me $70 he never paid back.
well we progressed into p3 a lot thanks to me, IMO. Not only did I keep that raid alive, I farmed my ass off for enchanting mats (probably dumped 20k of mats I had farmed by myself into the g bank, which of course is why I’m so broke now), recruited, organized, learned all the encounters. It was actually going pretty well til we picked up this kiss ass new officer that came out of nowhere and tried to make raid decisions, despite never having played classic before and only like the last 2 expansion of retail - which, no judgment there, but he clearly knew nothing about the game and was pretty arrogant about it.
My decisions started taking a back seat and I started getting unhappy because at the same time, and I’m not drawing any conclusions here, but at the same time I stopped making decisions was when our entire raid went fucky. Then, to make up for lack of progress, they tried making people go past our stop time, and one night I refused, because we had already wasted 2 hours that night on stupid shit I told them not to do, and since I had hard switched to main tank by that point, that was the end of it. I never went back.
I STILL didn’t learn my lesson, because these same assholes recruited me into warmane to play with them there, I used the opportunity to learn DK. Bought a ton of gold and gave it to them pretty generously. One day they cleaned me out and kicked me from everything, out of nowhere, and one dude followed me around the game world for days (he still does if he can find me) just to harass me. Don’t know what i did.
i consider tbc a mixed success. didn’t do everything i wanted to do, but got to kill some bosses I never touched the first time around, got into BT like first week, etc. Never cared for ZA or sunwell so I skipped them. no regrets there.
NOW I am a new man. I have learned all my dumb lessons. I have my own guild now. They’re a quiet, small bunch so far, but this has a way better chance of being successful because I am making the decisions and I have already done my homework for this expansion, I know nearly every class in and out (except shaman), at least enough to design a well-oiled raid. I want two 10 man raid teams, hopefully the second consisting of a bunch of people’s alts so it’s mostly the same 5-7 guys every week.
other than spamming I’m just gonna organize my own pugs the first several weeks of p1 while I continue focusing on making gold, and recruit people from those. I hope my raid leadership and relaxed, confident attitude will convince people to hop on board. Things I need to work on are not losing my temper when people can’t listen to instruction. another thing I got a lot of feedback on while raid leading that people don’t like is the fact that I cuss a lot. I’m not usually angry when I do it. I used to work on a boat, and the stereotype of sailors swearing is absolutely true, and now I work in tech, where people also cuss a lot - for some reason though, people reaaaaaaaaallly hate it when the raid leader does it. like it’s not “professional” or something. mfer we’re cows in dresses trying to kill warcraft-vader. It’s fine.
Confirmed, I’m a casual. Microsoft buyout waiting room imo. Servers are infinity wait times and will be totally dead again in a month. Pilot is asleep at the wheel. Glad you are enjoying it.
I disagree. TBC is one of the WOAT wow expansions, I’ve decided finally, and it still had a pretty healthy population all the way through.
Wrath though is on another level - it’s an actually much more polished, fun, well designed game, and its nostalgia value is far higher than TBC. There aren’t going to be population issues - their biggest problem right now is they don’t have the server capacities to meet demand, and this is 3.5 weeks into a prepatch, where people would have typically ran out of stuff to do in a few days.
This one’s gonna be really big. In other words I think this particular version of the game is so good that even they can’t fuck it up. They already tried by removing RDF, which, in a blizz dev channel i somehow snuck into, the consensus seems to be that they will eventually reverse this.
queue’s are mostly gone on benediction. think there was a 20-30 minute one just for a short time during prime last night on a tuesday… im sure it will pick back up dramatically next week and stay relatively high for a few weeks though. i probably will try to not log off as much as i can next week.
we get queues still but usually only an hour or so
the loot announcements are going to stir some shit up…
starting in phase 2. all naxx 25 ilvl loot goes to naxx 10 and 25, and then all naxx 10 ilvl loots moves to heoric+ dungeons.
that’s great. who’d be mad about that? it’d make the post-nerf content really trivial, but I’m all about removing barriers for slower guilds to progress
I know the random dungeon finder thing has been beaten to death across the Internet, but man I just don’t get the hate for it. I’m just a dumb casual level that’ll never see most of the raid content, but doing random dungeons is one of the most fun parts of the game imo. Leveled up to 46 and haven’t set foot in a single dungeon, and I’d have done them all if I could click and queue. Heck, I’d be happy to walk to the entrance if necessary.
I get it’s a social game and yada yada wrecked the fabric of the community or something, but it doesn’t make sense to me.
LFR I can hear serious arguments for on both sides. For 5-man content, I always loved RDF.
there’s no real argument against it, pretty much all the most authorative content creators agree
I suspect it’s because rdf had issues and they didnt want to spend time fixing it.
Hope you’re right and that it comes out in the expansion. Spending an hour LFG spamming to panhandle 4 randos doesn’t really trigger my sense of nostalgia.
yeah. i dont get it either. even if you wanted to compromise and just take heroics out of the system, it seems way better than not having it at all. For 1-80 dungeons it should be a no brainer. NO ONE is going to black fathom depths or uldaman or sunken temple without dungeon finder…
i’ve recruited barely anyone and a fucking course one of my guys ninja loots like an entire hyjal GDKP last night, plus the fucking pot. Now it’s gonna blow up and I’m like hold on hold on I’ll kick him please don’t make it a big deal or drag my guild name through it
people tilt the everloving shit out of me. I am one of the main alchemists on my server i think, i am always selling whatever I can. it’s rarely ever been worth it, the margins are super tiny always, and the xmutes have always been dog shit and as soon as BT comes out flask prices nose dive, of course, because you get them for free from that raid pretty much.
anyway, flask prices have started to skyrocket probably because no one is doing BT and people are whining really bad about it, accusing alchemists of gouging - the price has gone back to about ~40-50g for a relentless assault, which is about what it used to cost before BT came out, compared to ~15-20g what it was when people were raiding a lot.
now they arent, prices go up, gee it’s a mystery why. simple supply and demand. but nah, gouging. ofc. Like have you tried not being poor?
I’m sitting here thinking “oh I can craft those, great” but it’s like 49g to craft and you can sell for barely break even, just like always with alchemy. The idiots on trade chat say it’s because the bots relisted all the herbs and gouged, but it isn’t the case, all the herbs are trading at their normal levels, that’s just literally what it has always cost to make a flask. lol.
played survival hunter basically all day yesterday. im totally maining hunter, this shit’s bonkers. the ability to just pop what is essentially a pally bubble and giggle and run/jump away while laying land mines behind you is so funny. my immo trap does like 3k damage over 9 seconds, my white hit melee crits for 2500 + mongoose bite can be like a 3500 damage smack in the face of a hapless clothy that thinks it’s a good idea to get close to me because hunters can’t shoot up close, or whatever their logic is. getting close to me is rarely a good idea, it’s like what I want you to do so I can lock and load proc off my trap.
wyv sting + scatter/freezing is crazy cc and allows me to fight multiple people at once quite easily. i have the herbalism active ability for a little bit of healing, really liking it. can’t wait to pilot this in arena, I feel unstoppable. I’m 12k hp, 400 resil, 35% crit, 2k AP unbuffed. I’m kind of sad expansion’s coming out tomorrow because I doubt i’ll ever feel this powerful again.
one thing that’s both good and bad is all my damage in this spec is magical. serpent sting is nature, explosive shot is fire, traps are fire, black arrow is shadow, arcane shot’s arcane (but i dont typically use it). this means armor pen’s less important and you can chuckle at plate wearers but it sucks becoming helpless to Anti magic shield.
I can tell there’s an extremely high skill ceiling to this spec and I expect at the gladiator level to see a few hunters just going to town. it’s a really weird playstyle. kind of feels like aff warlock a bit except way more mobile and tanky.
Man I forgot how much leveling mining to 300 for Outland sucks in classic. Got to 58, but mining was stuck in the mithril 225 or so zone. Always seem to out level the nodes in the 40s, and the XP boost probably hurt. Now I’m running circles around the Hinterlands with like 10 other idiots like me because I know that if I go through the dark portal I’ll never be able to mine anything ever again. Bleh. Probably have 5-10 hours of running in circles to go 235-300 if I had to guess. Probably just doing it wrong.
the mithril deadzone sucks so bad. i did hinterlands for it.
you arent doing it wrong its the worst prof grind in the game.
