World of Warcraft

[BurnetRhoades]

Yeah, I enjoyed raiding 10M content, for the most part, with my little casual guild, but once you get into "real" raiding it's just a pain dealing with all the personalities and nonesense. Our problem was we were usually carrying at least two people who weren't very good, the mom + stepdad of the GM. It wasn't always possible to make up for their inability to react to stuff that would sometimes wipe us or if we were at a "gear check" boss where lack of DPS would lead to an enrage timer or too many debuff stacks on the tank and wipe things up.

Still, good times in Kara and ICC. The more gimmicky, mechanics heavy fights in Ulduar were, unfortunately too much by about half-way in to overcome the dead weight. They also weren't much help against Onyxia. I never could get it to really register with them that everything from spec to rotation to how to enchant their gear was already figured out and all they had to do was follow the instructions at places like elitistjerks.com and they'd automatically be twice as useful to the raid.

[BurnetRhoades]

If you have some time and some nostalgia about classic or Vanilla WoW, here's another two epic videos showcasing PvP, from back in the days of MC, BWL and AQ mostly...


...while most rogues were some flavor of 31 points into Assassination or 22 points Preparation Daggers, they were dagger rogues, depending on Backstab and control of their opponent, favoring burst crits to get them down. Not Grim. He had the gear and the aggression to go Combat and just pummel folks. He became maybe the most famous rogue worldwide besides Mute/Kishkumen (World of Roguecraft) and folks talked about him long after he quit playing.



...another Combat rogue, this time sporting one of two available "Legendary" melee weapons from Vanilla: Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker. It had a wicked proc. So wicked it was nerfed, multiple times. This thing was perhaps the only weapon in game to live up to the "legendary" status considering it was still considered a BiS (best in slot) tanking weapon through much of The Burning Crusade patch, ten levels and more than three tiers of content later. Caen pushed PvP videomaking in new artistic directions and with previously unseen subtlety and technical mastery.



...here's one of my favorites from The Burning Crusade patch. Here you see the height of the days when rogues had specific specs for specific weapons, when using the Combat tree. Mace spec was a killer through the early parts of the patch, giving a chance on hit to stun. The cries from other classes were legendary. Walle made one of the most entertaining videos showcasing this period, filled with world-PvP (my favorite, because the introduction of arena made for boring ass videos) and great music choices. Taking a cue from Unsouled, he went with a heavy dose of Tool.

[FrighT MasteR]

[BurnetRhoades]

This is another aspect of MMO gaming that's exclusive to WoW. Oh folks who play most other games make videos, of PvE and PvP, and even a few have tried to go pure narrative but the unique combination of design and animation present in WoW makes for productions the likes of which no other game can currently claim. Youtube and live streaming seems to have more or less taken over, and there seem to be fewer thematic and iconic productions post Lich King but stuff like Leeroy and the Serenity Now funeral bombing were the tip of the iceberg.

[IrishG3nt]

i can never really get into MMO...my concentration level blows...pretty sure im A.D.D.

would not stay onm y radar that long

[BurnetRhoades]

That's not necessarily a bad thing. They can easily consume all of your free time, and then some.

[BurnetRhoades]

Meet The Hunter

[FrighT MasteR]

[FrighT MasteR]

Here's an amusing clip of Vin Diesel playing WoW with Paul Walker. Always interesting to see actors taking time off to game just like the rest of us.

Post by Vin Diesel.

[BurnetRhoades]

That's pretty cool. You can tell Diesel was a fairly regular player for a while given he's on a Brewfest Ram, which was a very rare mount that you only get a chance a day for a few weeks in the Fall of every year. At 2010 this would have been during the close, maybe, of Wrath. Walker's character had blue or low-level epic leather shoulders from Wrath content it looks like, making him a troll rogue or druid but I"m gonna guess rogue because I don't see a staff/mace on his back like Diesel. Diesel's cloak looked like a Naxx design. I can't tell where his staff comes from since I never played a toon that used them until the following path.

I'm betting Diesel is playing a druid since shaman can use a 2H-er but it's not advisable. He might be a big fan of Unbreakable though and trying to keep the dream alive.

[FrighT MasteR]

I wonder how many times the guys logged on while on the set of some movie

[Darkgod]

Vin Diesel was a known Dungeons and Dragons player... someone was on the nerdist and said they play at his house once a week.

[DMHead777]

Yeah there's an interview from a few years back about him going into detail on D&D. Seems like a cool guy

[BurnetRhoades]

I got me some gametime last night after not playing since December. Right before I let my subscription run out I got one of the bindings to drop in Molten Core for Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker. Last night, getting a quick run in before reset in a couple days the second binding dropped, where normally you could expect at least 30+ runs before getting a second binding and hoping the first one didn't drop a second time.

ThunderfuryBlessedBladeoftheWindseeker.jpg

...now I just need ten Enchanted Elementium Ingots, which is the rub, since that means 100 bars of Arcanite. About 10K gold worth of mats if I'm careful on the AH. Still, this thing went about like my runs for the Baron's mount in Stratholme. I got the 1% chance to drop item on the 99th and then again on the 100th kill. I've run MC not quite that many times on three toons (paladin, deathknight, rogue) and this is the first time I've seen a binding drop though I've collected mats and crafted two precursors for Sulfuras, Hand of Ragnaros, the epic 2Her that eventually becomes the legendary after an exceedingly rare drop off killing Ragnaros himself at the end.

[FrighT MasteR]

I'm surprised those items are still so powerful after all these years

[BurnetRhoades]

They're not so much powerful as exclusive, still. I likely wouldn't equip them unless hanging out in a city or running lowbies through something. It's just the coolest looking 1H sword in game, still. It's badass how its proc causes the target to have a tornado whip around them too.


edit: whoah, I just took a closer look at that tooltip. There's definitely shenanigans there. I just grabbed the URL for the image and didn't look too closely. The actual sword is for lvl60 and definitely doesn't have sockets but it would be cool if Blizz finally allowed legendaries to be upgraded.

[CountOrlok]

This better have some hot, half-naked elf chicks.

[FrighT MasteR]

With Draenor coming out soon and looking pretty interesting, I decided to jump back into the game. Logged in as my 83 hunter and I'm confused as hell. Don't know where da F I am or WTF I'm doing. Last time I logged in was back in 2011. So many changes; everything's so overwhelming

[BurnetRhoades]

2011, so that's a couple expansions back. Some classes have had major changes and I believe hunters are one of the bigger mechanical changes. I have a level 60 hunter that I parked around the same time. I didn't play him after getting him to 60, out to Hellfire and a full set of Grand Marshall gear. I didn't play him at all through Pandaria. As a ranged class I ended up enjoying mage more, though I know hunter is a stronger class.

You would have played when things like glyphs were being introduced, but classes had real specs still. It used to be your "build" and your "spec" was the same thing, and the resulting talent tree defined your role, what sort of gear you would wear, etc. Now you just explicitly pick one of three specs (four if you're a druid) and this determines what spells are available to you and your "build" just gives you a series of optional spells or modifications to existing spells, which is more like the "prime" glyphs that were originally added to the game (prime, major, minor...now there's only major and minor). But you could have three different "specs" that used the exact same "build" now, with entirely different roles and base spells.

This is one of the most disappointing things about Blizzard's changes to the game. They say they wanted to get away from folks always migrating to "cookie cutter" builds or pressured to use them for maximum benefit. All they've really done is eliminate player-derived, theorycrafted "cookie cutter" builds for single, invisible, unalterable builds devised by Blizzard, one per specialization. Almost nothing that you can do with a talent spec now is truly game breaking or defining in the same way it was up through Wrath of the Lich King.

The upside is they've pruned a lot of redundant spells, freed up some action bar space (and loads of bag and bank space) and erred on the side of simplifying as much as possible, even down to fewer WoD gear will have gems, there are mostly simplified stats and fewer means to modify your gear besides cosmetically (transmogrification). Truthfully, the game mechanics team at Blizzard is the worst part of the entire thing though. But their goal is to make it so that if a piece of gear drops you have little or no reason to not just start wearing it if it's an item level upgrade. That hasn't been the case up until now, because until it was gemmed, enchanted and possibly reforged (which isn't in game anymore) it could result in a loss of performance even if it were a higher item level.

Oh, and since they have always sucked at creating thoughtful or well designed distributions of secondary stats for gear, for set bonuses on tier gear or dungeon sets or just the general available pool of gear at large, most of your gear once you get to WoD will have secondary stats based on a dice roll instead of their poor understanding of the mechanics of the game they helped design.

My suggestion is look at any of a number of readily available class guides so that you know what will be the most beneficial ways to gear your character. Wowhead has guides and for the new expansion as well. You'll be leveling through the rest of Cataclysm and most of Pandaria though. It should be pretty quiet for you if you can log in. Servers have been slammed, by returning players the likes of which Blizz hasn't seen since Wrath of the Lich King and a DDOS attack.


PS> oh, and you may not have noticed but there was a major "squish" applied to stats and damage, etc. I don't know what it looks like yet to alts but for lvl90 players patch 6.0 brought a major change to health and damage. Before WoD it was routine to see players running around with a million or more HP if they were in top tier gear. I was in midrange gear and my clothy mage had I think somewhere in the 500K-600K range and I could crit for 300K. I log in to the WoD patch and now the same toon has 72K HP and I'm critting for 30K or so. On the plus side, the damage scale isn't as bad if you're in lower level dungeons and raids. I went in to do some solo farming in Black Temple (lvl70 20man) and I was hitting for over 300K, one-shotting trash packs with AoE and just murdering all the bosses. They made running older content twice as easy to solo.

[FrighT MasteR]

Yeah, I'm definitely gonna have to read up on some of these Hunter guides. I think I'm just gonna resume where I left off and level my hunter to 90+. It is weird seeing how Bliz simplified all the skills and whatnot.