Recent Posts

1

Theorycrafting and Class Discussion / Re: Bfanomics

« Last post by Piralyn on Today at 06:49:07 AM »

* Enchanters can make glove enchants to speed up crafting.  Glove enchants to speed up skinning, herbalism, and mining in BfA zones also exist to parallel the ones for Legion zones.

Worth noting that these barely require any mats. Like 1-2 greens should be enough dust for these.

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Outside Azeroth - General Chatter / Re: Battle for Azeroth

« Last post by Piralyn on Today at 06:44:53 AM »

It seemed like the launch went pretty well for most of us here in low-population-server land, with some disconnects but no major play interruptions for the people I heard from (except maybe one).  Some high-population servers had more serious problems, and some players (no one I know) got hit with a bug where they didn't get the Heart of Azeroth and had to ticket for it.  So, overall not as smooth as Legion, but not as bad as Warlords.

Yeah, I was pleasantly surprised and willing to admit I was wrong since I doomsayered the whole Monday afternoon launch thing. I was also pre-logged in, so that might bias my experience a bit. Sounds like some realms were down most of the afternoon/evening, which would obviously be a pretty terrible experience--but a handful being dead while most seemed to be running (relatively) smoothly is way better than I expected with the original announcement.

I wasn't around for Legion's actual launch since I came back a week or two in, but I remember Warlords being a shitshow for like two weeks or something absurd, so good on them for pulling off a simultaneously worldwide launch relatively well, I think.

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Outside Azeroth - General Chatter / Re: Battle for Azeroth

« Last post by Snique on Today at 05:47:55 AM »

Safety tip: if you're starting a new character into BfA don't turn on War Mode until you get back from the initial quest in Siithus. Lots of horde camping the portal point and flight points in Uldum to gank people as they come through.

That mini-chain sends you right back to Stormwind at the end so you can still turn on war mode before going to the starter city.

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Trade and Crafting / Professions and crafting in BfA

« Last post by Snique on Today at 05:46:07 AM »

So far I've started two characters, four professions. As expected, world resource nodes are highly used and harder to find, but gathering seems more interesting. Skinning in particular seems improved as you get multiple kinds of things (including what I expect are cooking resources) from skinning. And Engineering looks like it's getting some of its fun toys back, including bombs. Mostly these are useless in PvP but I've found them highly useful for melee characters to pull with - I used tons of land sharks and rockets for this in past expansions. We'll see what the blast radii are.

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Outside Azeroth - General Chatter / Re: Battle for Azeroth

« Last post by Snique on Today at 05:40:34 AM »

I and several guildmates had characters get stuck at the start of new areas. At a guess I'd say it's a phasing problem, or possibly whatever server was holding the version of the areas we were in (it happened nearly simultaneously in two different starting zones that we observed). It was the classic "server lag" problem where you can chat in /g but anything you /say doesn't appear, can't interact with NPCs and as soon as you cast a spell or trigger an ability you get locked.

I force-quit the client, and the launcher immediately downloaded a patch. I tried again after that completed and the character got "world server is down" on trying to log in, so I quit again, got ANOTHER patch, waited for that to finish and still couldn't get back to that character so I switched to an alt (still in Dalaran) and that worked. I was able to move that alt through the beginning to the starter city and then swapped back to the first character, which was finally freed up.

So I lost something like half an hour, about two hours after I started playing. I think it's a smart move of them to release on a Monday, with everyone knowing that Tuesday AM there will be maintenance. This gives them a window for putting out needed patches and emergency fixes while the community isn't complaining about extra downtime.

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Outside Azeroth - General Chatter / Re: Battle for Azeroth

« Last post by Marco on August 13, 2018, 09:06:12 PM »

It seemed like the launch went pretty well for most of us here in low-population-server land, with some disconnects but no major play interruptions for the people I heard from (except maybe one).  Some high-population servers had more serious problems, and some players (no one I know) got hit with a bug where they didn't get the Heart of Azeroth and had to ticket for it.  So, overall not as smooth as Legion, but not as bad as Warlords.

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Outside Azeroth - General Chatter / Re: Your Thoughts On Legion?

« Last post by Winston on August 13, 2018, 02:51:11 AM »

From my perspective as someone who interacted with the expansion without doing any significant instancing:

Pre-flying, I found all the "terrain folding" to be frustrating. With every expansion since Mists, the terrain has become increasingly crinklier. For me, leveling in Legion was the most tedious of all the expansions so far, because of the mounted traveling. When flying became available, life became easier and I even began to enjoy world quests in Suramar.

Then came Argus. Bleh. There's no form of rapid travel to many points on that map, and a lot of world questing became a matter of finding the right path to get to the right tunnel to find the right mob.

Even some of the order halls were inflicted with terrain folding. The warrior and monk guild halls were easy enough to navigate, but finding things in the warlock, druid, and rogue guild halls could be an exercise in frustration. I also disliked that the druid guild hall took up significant geographical space that non-druids couldn't penetrate, meaning that there were some world quests that required long detours.

For these reasons, I'm a firm member of the "Anti-gated flying club" (Tweed is the one who chairs the meetings). In the expansions prior to WoD, all you had to do was reach max level and pay the fee. Now, even if you've leveled up, you have to wait until the Overlords of Blizzard decide that you've seen enough of their tedious world design before you can escape it.

At least the druid and death knight order halls allowed you to fly in them. That was some minor relief.

I agree with the general tone of the comments about professions. I particularly disliked that all the professions required instancing in order to gain the most useful items, and for the armor-crafting professions it wasn't even worth doing that. This is the first expansion for which at most only one of my toons reached max level in crafting.

The story told in Legion seemed to meander all over the place. In Mists, we discovered this new race, Anduin matured, and the big bad was Garrosh all the way through. In Legion, first there was an excuse to get us to Suramar, then an excuse to get us to the Broken Shore, then an excuse to get us to Argus, and it wasn't clear until the end that Sargeras would be the big bad. I thought it was sloppy plotting, at least compared to BC or Wrath.

I hope BfA can do better, but since it's the expansion that's made me give up pet collecting I fear it will not, at least for me.

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Outside Azeroth - General Chatter / Re: WoW is dying!

« Last post by Marco on August 12, 2018, 08:58:52 PM »

wowhead's site director says "We're already up 1-2 million users compared to the equivalent Legion pre-patch period".  That probably says more about wowhead's market share for news versus mmo-champion's than about people playing WoW, or maybe about people being interested in the story even if they don't play the game.  (Also there's no baseline; is 1-2 million users a 20% increase?  A 5% increase?)  But it's still a positive sign.

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Outside Azeroth - General Chatter / Re: Your Thoughts On Legion?

« Last post by Snique on August 12, 2018, 04:56:01 PM »

I think it's pretty clear that the implementation of AP was awful. Non-pooled, non-stackable items that you had to remember to switch specs for was just awful. I like it conceptually and am looking forward to seeing this xpac's version of it.

Although I never got above M16 (and that rarely) I enjoyed Mythics and the extra challenge plus the weekly loot box. I almost always got an upgrade from that, long after I stopped getting upgrades in raid. I was initially sad that sets are going away but looking at it, I only use set gear on one alt anyway, so that's no real loss to me.

Professions... ugh. I'll say it again - Wildstar was kind of the pinnacle of crafting, for me. But it requires a full system and a willingness to do cosmetics bigtime. I think player housing is a prereq for that, but Blizz seems unwilling to go that way. I thought class halls were a big improvement on garrisons, but player housing is still better. I wouldn't mind if gear crafting was cosmetics, personal buff items (like the equivalent of runes), and utility items (outdoor or pve items like mount speed, gliders, etc). So long as Blizz put actual thought into it.

Story... this expansion had a lot of it. I thought it was mixed. Suramar annoyed the f**k out of me, mostly due to layout before I got flying. I also got annoyed by the fact that EVERYONE wanted me to solve their problems. Like, seriously, you can't even get rid of some squirrels without me? How did you survive this long being so helpless? The main line, though, was generally quite good. I'd agree from that perspective this alone would make BfA the #2 expansion in m view.

I think a number of the story bits were "we're going to get rid of old characters that have been hanging around for a while to clear the decks for new charactgers" - yeah, OK, stories need to evolve. But that leaves me wondering about the characters that are still hanging around. Like, where are Khadgar and Velen now? is the Army of the Light occupying Argus forever, a la US troops in South Korea or something?

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Outside Azeroth - General Chatter / Re: Finished playing...

« Last post by Marco on August 12, 2018, 02:24:54 PM »

Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, for now.  I did the campaign and just about all of the side quests on normal, as well as the claptrap DLC and a small amount of the holodome DLC.  The formula for these games is getting kind of stale for me, which is sad because I loved the series initially.  The writing was okay and the voice acting was good as always, but nothing really stood out as amazing--certainly nothing like the Tiny Tina DLC from B2.