World of Whorecraft: Battle for Asseroth

[J1M]

Unless you have rested experience it is actually faster to level via pet battles from 88-90. And they give something like 1% of a level.

 

[Caim]

There was a guy who leveled a Pandaren to 90 in the starting zone farming materials. Would it be feasible to get the last few levels like that, or does gathering stuff give a flat bonus instead of a percentage?

 

[Wilian]

Gathering XP is something like herb level vs. your level +/- x

 

[Manjuice Nutella]

Warlords Content

• There is a level 100 content area in every zone. It is similar to Timeless Isle, but also includes "chapter quests" that provide an ongoing story over several weeks.
• Reputations in Warlords won't reward as many epic items as before, but you can still earn reputation with various factions for some rewards. It won't be anything like the Mists of Pandaria reputation grinds.
• The Iron Horde will be the main enemy throughout the expansion, but they change somewhat throughout the expansion.
• There will be an increased Legion presence by the end of the expansion.

Future Plans

• Tanaan Jungle will be in a content patch. It contains the Grommash Hellscream raid, as well as some outdoor world content.
• At some point the team would like to add new character customization options, but right now they are working on making the new models similar to the old ones as closely as possible.
• Cosmetic class items are still on track, but won't be released with Warlords launch. They will most likely be released a few at a time throughout the expansion and beyond.

Timelines

• The alternative timeline is mostly being used to allow players to experience a setting they wouldn't normally be able to see in WoW.
• At some point in the future in another expansion they could explore the Ogre continent from Draenor.
• We won't see an alternative timeline version of Azeroth.

So what, it seems we're going to save Draenor this time around.

I may play it if the Potato price won't be too outrageous ous and I'll give a shit. Also the fact WoW became much less "no-lifey" with introductions of LFR and the like is really nice.

Alternative reality is usually a huge red flag, but the art direction is darn impressive, at least considering Blizzard.

 

[Metro]

Sneeze and you'll hit level 60. 58-68 in Outland isn't bad at all. Hellfire is an annoying zone but you can leave after about an hour or so of questing. Never mind queues, even for DPS, are fairly brisk and BC dungeons are linear and short. After that the railroading begins and you should have no problem with how Wrath, Cata, and MoP zones feed you tons of overlapping and scripted quests. Both Wrath and Cata were designed to allow you to skip one of the entry zones (Tundra/Fjord and Vashir/Hyjal). Can't remember with MoP as I didn't play it much (just on PTR/week-long trials) but I think it had one 'launching' zone then you could split off from there.

 

[shihonage]

There's a strong Frogger element in enemy placement and patrol routes in earlier WoW zones, which were fun to sneak around in, and get into those "oh shit" moments when you accidentally aggro 5 mobs, or seeing someone else running away from that shit and helping them survive...

Thus far, Nagrand was not grand. Most NPCs were hostile. Shadowmoon Valley was just more of Blizzard's depressing hell themes created by some adolescent interns. Yuck.

I'm in Howling Fjord now and it's sorta interesting I guess. They really nerfed difficulty in this game though, and the RADICAL new way they manage talents is... ugh... er... Diablo-ized?

I have WoW classic installed too (now at Rebirth), might get back to that instead.

 

[TedNugent]

Got Loremaster post-Cata and have Loremaster of Pandaria achieve.

Every single quest's writing is mediocre and skippable. The most outstanding quest zone in current scripting is in my opinion Eastern Plaguelands.

In Horde questing I would recommend Southern Barrens, Stonetalon Mountains, Silverpine Forest, Ashenvale, Thousand Needles, and finally Eastern and Western Plaguelands in 0-60 grind. In the 60-70 I would recommend doing all of the dungeons, Hellfire Peninsula, Horde Nagrand, and Shadowmoon Valley. Netherstorm was full of a lot of goblin filler but it gets interesting later.

In Northrend, start with Howling Fjord. Quest achieve for Borean Tundra says "Nothing Boring about Borean," but that's bullshit. It's the most boring quest zone outside of Winterspring. From there go to ZulDrak which I consider essential and then to Stormpeaks and Icecrown. The lower level questing in Storm Peaks is bad so you have to see it through to get to the legitimate content.

In Pandaria, you start in Jade Forest. The quest content there is worth it, but skip Valley of the Four Winds, it's just a bunch of farming quests and panda shit. From there, Dread Wastes is the best questing.

Beware, Pandaria is heavily dependent on reputation grinds before you can meet the gear requirements for raid content. Due to the way that raid tiering works in WoW, current preraid gearing prog in MoP goes level 90 > dungeon > heroic dungeon > "raid finder" tier 1 > Raid Finder tier 2 > Raid finder current tier > normal raid tier or "Flex" raid mode > heroic raid

Spoiler

Spoiler

Spoiler

Spoiler

Blizzard is giving out free level 90 boosts with preorder of WoD, and I would highly, highly recommend it. There is markedly little of value in quest progression, I assure you. I played nearly every quest in the game and there are only a few chains that I can vouch for, most of them are in either Silverpine Forest or Eastern Plaguelands. However even after you hit 90, the real grind/progression curve begins. There's a separate tier of progression associated with "pre-raid gearing," and it will compose at least half of what you end up doing. Good luck.

 

[shihonage]

It's kind of perverted that the main reason I'm interested in MMOs - questing with other players - has been completely neutered and made otherwise uninteresting.

Raids are not massively multiplayer in a sprawling immersive world - they're localized instances inside dungeons. If I had interest in that I would've just played Diablo3.

 

[TedNugent]

Their quest writers are really terrible and in my experience questing was a completely solo experience.

A few problems as far as the questing is concerned before I go on - the first issue is that dungeon finder queues have depopulated the game world to the point where it's rare to find other players questing in the same zone on any level of the grinding scale except for the first week of an expansion pack's release.

The second issue is that most of the questing areas branch - there are usually several questing zones per level bracket with huge amounts of overlap, so for instance one questing zone may be 21-24 whereas a neighboring quest zone may be 23-27.

The third issue is so-called "phasing," which is a technology that blizzard implemented to make quest chains affect the game world on the client side. Depending on your quest progress you may find that you are literally completely unable to interact with players or even see them in the game world due to them being in a different quest phase. You can only interact with people on the same phase of the quest as you - as a result, you rarely, if ever interact with other players in the game world.

You will usually find more players in a typical corridor in a dungeon than you will typically find in Jade Forest, the opening quest zone to Mists of Pandaria.

 

[Manjuice Nutella]

Blizzard is giving out free level 90 boosts with preorder of WoD, and I would highly, highly recommend it.

Wait, there's no boost without preorder? I thought it's a feature one way or another.

 

[J1M]

There was a guy who leveled a Pandaren to 90 in the starting zone farming materials. Would it be feasible to get the last few levels like that, or does gathering stuff give a flat bonus instead of a percentage?

Very reasonable, and you will probably make a pile of gold doing it. The primary problem you will encounter is that you cannot use a flying mount to do said gathering until you hit maximum level.

 

[Metro]

Blizzard is giving out free level 90 boosts with preorder of WoD, and I would highly, highly recommend it.

Wait, there's no boost without preorder? I thought it's a feature one way or another.

You thought they'd give it away for free? Lol, please.

 

[Manjuice Nutella]

Blizzard is giving out free level 90 boosts with preorder of WoD, and I would highly, highly recommend it.

Wait, there's no boost without preorder? I thought it's a feature one way or another.

You thought they'd give it away for free? Lol, please.

Well, the expansion does cost fucking $50 and since it's going to have a much shorter life cycle and they're scrapping stuff left and right, something's gotta give.

 

[Metro]

They've been saying shorter life cycle/faster turnaround on expansions since Wrath. It'll be the same pace just with less content and for a higher price.

 

[Caim]

Vanilla Map

Did they change the levels around for the areas? Because I do remember that for my Alliance Warrior in Cata 4.2 I had to do pretty much every questing zone in the Eastern Kingdoms north of Stormwind, the Swamp of Sorrows and the Blasted Lands in order to hit 60.

 

[catfood]

Vanilla Map

Did they change the levels around for the areas? Because I do remember that for my Alliance Warrior in Cata 4.2 I had to do pretty much every questing zone in the Eastern Kingdoms north of Stormwind, the Swamp of Sorrows and the Blasted Lands in order to hit 60.

Yes.

 

[Manjuice Nutella]

Hellscream, the short story prelude to WoD:

http://eu.battle.net/wow/game/lore/savage-world/hellscream/page-1

spoiler:

Spoiler

Garrosh is Gul'dan 2.0

 

[Metro]

Catacylsm's big 'feature' was a large redesign of the vanilla zones. Most of them got major changes, some dramatically so. And, yes, level flow was altered along with dungeons.

 

[TedNugent]

http://forums.na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?p=49463353#49463353

And it all comes out.

Context:

Spoiler

Originally Posted by Ghostcrawler
I can take a shot at it.

I was the lead systems designer on WoW. I managed about half the design department. My team was responsible for class design, combat, item design, encounters, and many of the features in the game like Dungeon Finder, Transmog and Achievements. As one of the leads on the team, I helped set the vision for the game as well. I was not the lead of WoW overall. I had much less to do with say world design, lore, quest design or anything business related. I didn't do very much implementation myself, because I didn't have the bandwidth to do it right, and because there were designers more qualified to do that. I was ultimately responsible for balance and that includes PvP, but I didn't make every change myself, and mostly I focused on removing barriers so other designers could do their jobs. I make that distinction because I don't mind being blamed for anything, but it does a disservice to a very large team to imagine one dude sitting on a throne spewing out edicts. Blizzard, like Riot, was very consensus based and focused on alignment.

Did I and my team make mistakes? Sure. Every game designer does. I'm pretty honest about admitting them, though it's tacky to throw colleagues under the bus, so I tend to stay away from areas where I had limited influence. I'm pretty happy with the work we did overall, and very proud of the team we were able to build.

Why am I spending all this effort to explain my role on another game? Because I don't want you or any other player to worry what my work on League means for the future of the game. While I think there are contributions I can make, I'm not interested in overhauling League by any stretch, and Riot would never let me get away with making dramatically bad choices that negatively affected our flagship, our only, product.

So, if I may, here are some distinctions between truth and rumor, offered in the spirit of getting to know me better.

1) I'm not super interested in compromising LoL design in the name of accessibility. Yes, League is obnoxiously hard to learn if you don't have a friend showing you the ropes. That sucks, but it's not worth stripping away the depth or potential for mastery for our core audience -- you guys -- in order to attract new players. That's not an approach every game can or should take, but it's the right call for League.

2) I never played a Frost mage in WoW, or any caster really. I played healers and melee. Frost was hard to balance in WoW because of the kit of control plus burst, and I'm fine taking flak for that. But it wasn't because I wanted to dominate in PvP with my character. I would have been fired for that. It was hard in general to balance combat and rewards for a game with both PvE and PvP components. It's very nice to be on a game that is emphatically competitive, team-based PvP.

3) I feel that melee in League need some love. Somehow that got turned into me hating melee. Thanks, internet. Pointing out flaws in something you want to fix and hating something are pretty far apart on the spectrum.

4) I don't balance League. We have a balance team that does that, and the strategy they employ is rigorous and grounded (but not dictated) by a lot of data-collection as well as public perception. Again, if you think we made a mistake in a design change or the lack of one, please hold me accountable. But you're better off having the discussion with one of the devs actually on the front lines there. They can explain the full context behind their decision-making process.

5) I care enormously about player feedback and trust. That is why I spend so much time reading forums, Reddit and Twitter (@occupygstreet). In fact, that is one of the things I love about Riot and why I wanted to come work here. Anyone from my WoW days will tell you, I hope, that even if they disagreed with a design, they appreciated the effort I made to explain our reasoning and hear out their concerns. And this is the TLDR really. I have always been very vocal in my communication with players. I didn't intend to be the spokesperson for WoW, but my name was recognizable by a lot of players, and when they wanted to complain about something, they wanted to focus on a name. Again, I can take it. But that doesn't mean I called every shot on WoW and neither do I for League.

6) I do like ponies, gin and long walks on the beach. That part is true.

I'd love to meet as many of you as possible, and in person is even better. I'm going to be at PAX Prime next week. Hope to see many of you there!

GLHF,
GC

PS when he says he never played a mage he's totally full of shit

 

[Wilian]

Sneeze and you'll hit level 60. 58-68 in Outland isn't bad at all. Hellfire is an annoying zone but you can leave after about an hour or so of questing. Never mind queues, even for DPS, are fairly brisk and BC dungeons are linear and short. After that the railroading begins and you should have no problem with how Wrath, Cata, and MoP zones feed you tons of overlapping and scripted quests. Both Wrath and Cata were designed to allow you to skip one of the entry zones (Tundra/Fjord and Vashir/Hyjal). Can't remember with MoP as I didn't play it much (just on PTR/week-long trials) but I think it had one 'launching' zone then you could split off from there.

Actually depending how you level you always have choice between 2 zones to move on in Wrath. In Cata you have choice at first but then it's linear shit until end. MoP doesn't let you even choose starting zone and it's linear shit from getgo.

 

[Manjuice Nutella]

Face it; most of the people who complain about "casuals" are obnoxious neckbeard losers who try to assign a sense of importance and "fulfillment" to something that has absolutely no inherent value in itself. Nobody in their right mind is going to send CVs and motivational letters to bind himself to showing up on Raid @7pm instead of going outside.

If you progressed through raid tiers without LFR, good for you. But a game like TBC, where ~2% of playerbase saw Illidan Stormrage at all is retarded by definition.

Also I'm not sure "streamlining" WoW and LoL is comparable at all. WoW is by definition much more engaging and "second life-y" time consuming to games of smaller format, like StarCraft.

 

[Manjuice Nutella]

Well, I guess Nzoth would be 4 if you count the body parts of what's his face in MoP. I guess with them setting up the Legion to return... again... that will be the next expansion so who knows when they'll get to Nzoth and Azshara -- they seem to go together since they put Nzoth somewhere in the one of the oceans.

 

[Metro]

Oh that's from the revamped Blackfathom Depths.

 

[Avellion]

So I am gathering up a list of things wrong with Mists of Pandaria to convince my friend not to waste his money (Friends don't let friends spend money on half assed expansion packs). Anything I am missing?

1. Farahlon was apparently cut entirely.
2. Tanaan Jungle was pushed back to patch content
3. No Capitols
4. No heirloom tab
5. No new Battleground or arena
6. New models while more detailed, lack the soul of the old models
7. No garrison customization, they are nothing but phased daily hubs, you cant even choose your garrison's location. Nowhere near as good as once advertised.
8. Blizzard has not enough resources to add PvP mounts, but enough resources to add plenty of store mounts.
9. Speaking of store mounts. Store mounts will be advertised ingame.
10. Special mounts which used to take a lot of effort to obtain (and thus came with a lot of prestige), can now be bought on the store... for ridiculous prices, draining any prestige they once had.
11. The store is pracitically pushed at you in game through the UI. Clicking on the link will introduces you to some outlandishly priced cosmetic items, such as 25 dollars for a mount. Meanwhile other companies charges less than half of what blizzard charges for one fucking mount for a pack that includes 16 new courses, 6 new characters and 8 new vehicles, while others charge you for 10 dollars for what is pretty much the best content in the game. And others would do the all previously mentioned things for free (Valve).
12. While more faces are promised, I wouldn't be surprised if the upcoming faces were just rushed in those I have seen are a lot like hte one face model they do have but with some minor differences, clearly just rushed out to shut up the fans.
13. Subscription Costs rise
14. Cash Shop on a sub fee game with grossly overpriced items
15. Each class has roughly 8 active skills to manage. Warriors and Deathknights in particular have been ruined by removing key skills.
16. One new talent tier added, in other words, 3 new talents per class and that is it.
17. Only 2 raiding tiers throughout the entire expansion pack, because blizzard wants to churn out content "faster".
18. The Legendary item will be a ring, which cant even be shown off in Orgrimmar or wherever. The item will also be a lot easier to obtain, so everyone will have it, and when everyone has the legendary item, it wont really be legendary.
19. Not every model will be updated at launch, blood elves will have to wait. Expect some ugly quality inconsistency real soon.
20. Blizzard is hemorrhaging talent, leaving an expansion pack to be designed solely by the greens who do not share the vision of hte original creators, just like what happened with Guild Wars 2.
21. Only 6 dungeons come at launch, each of them being really short, even for WoW standards.
22. Writing thus far has been horrible, Chris Metzen does it again.
23. Certain characters will be terribly handled,
    Spoiler

    Garrosh Hellscream dies in a quest where Green Gary Stu kills him by cheating in the duel
24. No new races or classes
25. No new professions
26. Word of mouth from beta testers has been negative.

 

[Cyberarmy]

There arenew battlegrounds? Deathmatch style ye'olde Tarren mill madness.