3.3 Live !

Let the phat lewtz rain from the sky!!!
http://www.wowhead.com/?new-items=3.3#level-232:50+1

So the 5 man IceCrown Citadel, regular is ilvl 219, and heroic is ilvl 232 (10 man equiv) Didn't get to run it last night, did 25 TOC, VOA.

Watched that BFF Report review of PTR 3.3, funny and makes it look interesting. http://www.zam.com/bffreport.html?bffreport=05

See myself farming reg/heroic ICC for the next coming weeks on my 3x 80's.

Liking the new built in QuestHelper. Not liking that I can't figure out how to move it in the UI. Xperl target window missing, manual update of alpha release. BugCatcher maxing until the other half of my addons get updated.


thoughts of the mass edification of WoW 12 yr old?

The four of you still playing talk amongst yourselves.

good stuff

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Jake Rivers - Senex Legio
Get off my Lawn alliance

I thought about checking it out, but the idea of popping zombie heads with a shotgun was far more attractive.

No other MMORPG out there worth playing atm, unfortunately =/ I'd play more single-player games, but I'd still miss online gameplay and hanging out with guildies. Aion and Champions were both lolworthy, maybe Givin can lemme know if I missed something else bad =p

New patch seems more solid than the TOC patch was(not that THAT was hard to do). Haven't seen the rest of ICC, so I can't really compare it to the Ulduar patch yet. The LFG system has been serving my alts pretty well, especially if I play late at night when my schedule is hectic. Healer/tank queues are instant as you'd expect, while dps takes a few minutes to find a group. So long as the group isn't a complete and total fuckup, I've had some serious laughs seeing how bad people are. The Ret pally who insisted on a Mana Tide totem between every pull, the warlock who couldn't bust past the 1.5k dps threshold, the mage who asked for mana breaks every pull. I think I've been lucky in most of my groups have had core members who don't completely suck. Unfortunately the dungeons are still fairly easy anyway, though a couple of the bosses have some fun mechanics.

The first 2 bosses in ICC were pretty much run of the mill. We managed to kill 3 out of the 4 bosses the first night, while just barely not nailing Saurfang before people had to go. The airship battle is pretty damned fun with the jetpacks. Saurfang battle is interesting, though it's mostly a dps race. Trash is just about right between bosses.

^
this

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The new Dungeon Finder tool is easily the best thing about the Wrath of the Lich King expansion cycle. It's something other games need to copy.

Beyond that, it feels like a typical WoW patch to me. More of the same and a mini reset on gear levels due to higher level gear being obtainable by running heroics.

I agree completely.

I love the LFG tool. The only bitch I have is that more people need to play tanks because on my mage it's a 10 minute queue and on my druid tank it's literally instant.

The dungeon finder is amazing and yes should be copied by everyone, no matter how terrible their mmo is.

However everything else is pretty meh. One week of excitement and easy upgrades.

Back to your regularly scheduled boredom.

The main problem with the LFG tool is that you can't queue for a dungeon, raid and BG all at the same time, which is stupid. I can give a little on BG/dungeon simultaneous queue, but if you're in a raid LFG tool, you may be in that all day. To have to avoid running dungeons while you're queued for a PUG raid on your own server is silly.

Or better yet, when you log in, you should get a popup screen inviting you to 28 different activities (plus you should get a free mount for logging in).

actually that is a offer for a free max level toon with all the current top end raid gear, a free mount, or a vanity pet just for logging in.

Sadly, most people that play WoW would still take the vanity pet.

I would definitely take the vanity pet. What's the fun in having a current top end raid gear toon that you didn't earn?

Or am I missing something?

If you're missing something, don't worry. Blizzard will give it to you in next patch.

Sheesh you guys sure are bitter and jaded lol.

Lowest common denominator gotcha down? WoW was never a game, it's a business. Don't try and go all nostalgia either, it got easier with each patch from day 1.

EQ did it too. The biggest stand out example that I remember is Uqua, but instead of just making it easier in a hotfix they made you keep paying your bill until they were ready to scale it down. Also who doesn't miss paying $30 bucks every 6 months for an expansion? $75 dollars for a single character transfer? Sign me up!

Enjoy what you pay for, play WoW for yourself instead of worrying about what the casuals can get. If you don't want to play because you are bored and don't like the game that's one thing, but bitching about how easy it is to get things and do things just seems silly and whiny when 90% of the player base is (coming from our perspective) completely retarded and doesn't understand how to play the game "right".

I understand why they do what they do, I just don't like it (which explains why I don't play the game). I bet killing Firemaw will be loads of fun when they re-tune BWL next year and call it 'new' content. I sure hope you saved your Ony cloak! Supression room, go go go!!!

I did, in fact, save my Ony cloak!

I see what you mean as well, and it bothers me to a point but I also see it from their point of view. They are playing on the nostalgia factor for the old players and allowing the new players to get to experience the content for more than just an achievement.

Who is to say these places will still be available after Cataclysm?

I think the Cataclysm is potentially a great idea.

Sigh.. I wanted to quit, I really did. But the wife went out of town for a week, and strip clubs weren't an option since I had the kids, so... I had to!

There seems to be a lot of DC and video issues with this patch. Tons of threads covering both issues.

Last night on Ony everyone on the raid's framerate dropped to like 5. Was funny because all of the sudden everyone on vent is yelling "wtf!!"

For me since the patch every single boss fight I was on was like watching a video on an old cellphone cam. Major video lag with mods disabled and all video settings to the lowest. Had a few others with the same issue. The most recent drivers are like 11/29/09

I've no experienced the random DC thing but we had several people in guild last night just getting dropped left and right.

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Larreth Wolfsong (long retired)
Lanys T'vyl, Everquest

Zinky, Lvl 60 Warlock
Thunderhorn, WoW

Lots more people in the game during new content releases, and the servers can handle the additional load as well as they always could. If you're somewhere like Shattrath it's smooth sailing.

Just finished mopping up the prince council and Queen on 10-man. The prince council fight is horribly tuned and some are saying he's hitting HARDER on 10-man than he is on 25-man, so I'm betting it will be nerfed pretty damned soon. Who knows, maybe they'll stick to their guns and not nerf anything until the Icecrown buffs take full effect. As it stands right now, both prince council and Queen are pretty enjoyable fights just because there's at least a tad bit of challenge. Healing has to be pretty spot on for the Queen fight for sure with all the aoe going around.

Sad how badly they nerfed Lady Deathwhisper. I was in a pug with my alt that wiped to the first boss 4-5 times, then we just one-shot Lady. Glad I got to experience some fun pre-nerf at least. I feel like my guild is racing against time to fight encounters before they get nerfed just so we can get some enjoyment out of the fights.

Fairly sad state of the game, wish there was something else out there worth playing.

I've enjoyed 3.3 content so far.

My guild is far from cutting edge progression-wise, but they are a good group of people that are a lot of fun to raid with.

Right now we hit a small snag on Rotface. Festergut was pretty simplistic...just a DPS encounter for the most part, and we got through that quickly.

Rotface however seems to be causing us issues and I'm not really sure why. To me it seems simple enough. You get Mutated infection you run out away from the raid and towards the kited blob, get cleansed, and blob merges.

If he slime sprays, you run through him to the tank side, then back once it's done.

Big blob goes boom, you move to a safe quadrant until explosion aftermath completes.

I didn't at any point feel that it was that difficult to understand or maneuver through...but apparently others do. We had multiple big oozes in the middle fo the raid (apparently from people being cleansed too early, or never leaving when infected...no cleansing totems were down) and our kiter kept dying. Our kiter was a Paladin, so maybe that was the issue. I've heard DKs are primed for that role, but ours really struggled with it...guess just not his forte.

Anyways..didn't mean to blab on about something 90% don't care about (I know..too late, lol) just enjoying the game, liking Icecrown, and looking forward to beating this guy.

Elemynt

Paladins are awesome for big ooze kiting. Just drop consecrates and kite them through and such.

If the oozes are spawning under him it sounds like just an issue of people not moving out quick enough. You can usually cleanse it off pretty quickly assuming people are fast at moving.

Most of the 10-man versions are absolute cakewalks. My guild's 2 10-man crews pretty much facerolled through all of the encounters, but then when we tried Putricide 25-man we kept wiping over and over. Got him to 11 percent last night. Seems to require more coordination(less room, more to manage, etc), and also dps needs to be fairly high across the board with no deaths. Unfortunately for us 1 or 2 premature deaths seems to indicate a wipe on him =/

Yeah we're on Rotface at the moment. We seemed to have lost a lot of the better players over the past few months and we're recruiting to fill some holes. With that, we've been taking more casual "friends of raiders" and such and it's been brutal. For me, I recommend having someone actually use vent to tell individual players when to run out to get cleansed. You shouldn't have to, but it may help get over the hump. For us, we have a system where we wipe over and over and then once we get a successful kill, we one-shot every single attempt after that. Weird.

I am enjoying ICC so far. Good challenge for casual guilds. i've found that I can scale back my expectations as I get older to where "casual guild" doesn't bother me as much as it used to.. Well, it doesn't bother me at all anymore. I guess Blizzard's master plan is working out.

Rotface is a total noob awareness check...I was in a pug and I had to call out the slime spray move throughs on vent...fucking ridiculous. It got to the point where I had to preemptive call it like 2 seconds before due to vent lag and reaction times...


Sad

Arthas dies talking to his fathers spirit. No king reigns forever. "Only cool spot in the whole thing" He tells Tirion there must always be a Lich King to control the scourge because somehow they are more dangerous running around at random than when under his control. Tirion picks up the helm to become the new lich king. Highlord Bolvar reborn comes out of nowhere and makes him give him place the helm on his head. Charmander Bolvar reseals the frozen throne and instead of ice eyes he has EVIL FIRE EYES@!@!@!@@!

Shit ending.

Not surprising. Lore was never really WoW's strong suit, aside from giving it enough aesthetics to work with. Predictable and cliche abound.

I can't fathom why they haven't put in some "I want to skip the pageantry" for stuff like CoT and Saurfang. I've just about had it hearing about what "Dranosh" means in orcish.

They're patching in a "skip the pageantry" for CoT soon, apparently.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

Yeah, not like the ending was going to be a surprise or anything. Blizzard isn't known for their big twist endings or deep plots. Arthas is a bad guy, we go and mess him up, he dies. Game over.

I'm more interested in what happens to the Scourge itself. Is Bolvar gonna control them and make them nice all of a sudden now? Gonna have Scourge gardeners tending to our lawns and stuff? Big Orc unions forming because cheap undead labor "took our jerbs"?

Well, what happened before Arthas took up Frostmourne? Wasn't it just a ragtag band of cultists and the Scourge was mainly controlled by demons?

control of the scourge came from ner'zhul, who in turn was controlled by the demons but had plots for his freedom.

illidan cracked the frozen throne which contained nerzhul's essence, which weakened him.

when arthas came to the throne to help, he put on the helmet and merged with nerzhul.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]