[Gothos]

get used to dying.

also, l2vanish.

[Flawed]

oh ive died many many times.

Also on the Vanish front. In the beginning I would flit from shadow to shadow sneaking the hell up on people and BAM jabity jab jab jab! they'd be done but its too slow. So now I walk around like im a Warrior and just run straight up to enemies and Jabity Jab Jab instead.

I'm already looking forward to my next character, ill take " Flawed " to level 80 first but I think ill flex a Warrior next. Get a massive shield and hide behind it.

Until then ill rely on good old Blade Flurry and Killing Spree

[Gothos]

if you want a warrior with a shield, be prepared to kill stuff a lot slower than on the rogue
and I do mean a LOT. not as bad as it used to be though.

[Flawed]

Oh! Well I cant have that. Ill have to experiment a bit then. It still says something for the game tho that I have another 5 odd Types of character I could pick and 5 odd different races too. Much to my Wife's miffness, I expect ill be playing it for some time to come.

If she kicks off again ill be like " Woman you have Eastenders! let me be while I Garrotte this unsuspecting Furlborg! "

* Said with ample shaking of Fist *

[Obdigore]

Flawed, if the wifey keeps after you, say 'fine, sit down, we will make you a character, and you can see why I like it so much' Make her a rogue, and the first time she gets to stealth, pickpocket, and then backstab someone, she will love it.

Also, if you have WOTLK, you need to make a DK. The DK starting area is the most fun I have had in the game outside of BC 25man raids.

[Aptorian]

Flawed, on Aug 26 2009, 12:17 PM, said:

oh ive died many many times.

Also on the Vanish front. In the beginning I would flit from shadow to shadow sneaking the hell up on people and BAM jabity jab jab jab! they'd be done but its too slow. So now I walk around like im a Warrior and just run straight up to enemies and Jabity Jab Jab instead.

I'm already looking forward to my next character, ill take " Flawed " to level 80 first but I think ill flex a Warrior next. Get a massive shield and hide behind it.

Until then ill rely on good old Blade Flurry and Killing Spree

I would suggest you try something different than another melee character, you'd be surprised how different the experience becomes when you for example chose a caster. I'd recommend the Mage or Warlock, although I don't know if those two classes have changed for the worse since I played them. For pure damage, nothing beats the fun I had with my fire mage, and in general I never had as much fun as I had playing with the Warlock. That character made PVE a blast, and for the first time I actually started enjoying PVP battles.

EDIT: Also, since it seems you are still a bit of a novice to the whole group thing, I'd wait with the Tank. Besides great healers, a great Tank is one of the rarest things I experienced when instancing. It's not often you come across a tank that knows what it's about. Wait untill you have the experience and knowledge about all the group strengths before trying the tank. It really is a more complicated affair than just running in and shield bashing the first trogg you meet.

This post has been edited by Aptorian: 26 August 2009 - 05:15 PM

[Gothos]

as flavor of the patch, paladin tanks are simply spectacular, while death knights went from being the star to being the underdog, with no good sides and numerous drawbacks...

the easiest toon I've leveled so far is my retribution paladin. a ret is simply increadibly easy and fast to level, the only times you'll die is if you afk in a hostile enviroment
plus, the damage... the automatic healing... AoE, bubbles, free mounts, what else would you want?!

oh, right, not being a pansy blood elf

[The Crow]

I started playing WoW during vanilla, roughly during the summer of 2005. I played a hunter all through vanilla, when TBC came I played my hunter up until SSC-ish, then I rerolled and played as one of few protection paladins all through the rest of TBC.
Always amusing to watch people complain about paladin tanking as it is now, they would've died if they had played it like it was in TBC.

When WOTLK came out I retired my paladin and leveled up a death-knight, which apart from the time spent leveling up has been strictly dualwield only. I stopped playing just before the 3.1 launch, so...what, almost 4 months ago I think.
Still, with Icecrown coming out soon(-ish), the new info about Cataclysm and stuff like that, I'm getting really tempted to go back and start playing again.

As for the arguments that WoW isn't worth the money, the time, the effort, it ain't fun etc.
Yes, WoW takes quite a lot of time if you intend to play it on a somewhat serious level. However, no game has ever offered me more fun than this one, not even close. I've tried Warhammer, AoC, Guild Wars, Eve Online and half a dozen other MMORPGS, and the only one that has made me come back after more than a week was Guild Wars, but even that one was just when I got tired of WoW for a while.

As I see it, there simply is not any MMORPG in the market right now that competes with WoW on any significant level. However, the question whether or not you want to spend the time and the money, that's another thing.

[cerveza_fiesta]

Well I've already dumped 5ish hours back into my Lvl60 old mage. His gear was pitiful, but turns out the first 5 quest gear items you get on hellfire peninsula basically surpass anything you got in vanilla. Got a few levels...actually just enough to get my ass out of fracking hellfire peninsula.

Being alliance on my server in that area means Honor Hold is under attack CONSTANTLY. Seriously. I did't log on once that the damn thing wasn't being continually wiped and camped by lvl80 hordes. Holy shit.

Ended up forgoing the questing and just grinding to get up high enough to go to zangamarsh. Much less horde concentration there. Hellfire was just annoying.

@Apt, Flawed

Mages are fun as hell, and I'm sure Warlocks are the same, but with pets (extra bonus). I'm heavily caster-slanted in RPGs mind, but the mages in WoW are some of the funnest I've played in any game. They are decent to solo if you go with a frost spec and are deadly fun in PvP with frost or fire spec. Arcane spec used to be fun for instancing since its much easier to keep aggro down when you're spamming arcane missiles and not critting 1500-2000 with every fireball. The downtime is hellish with arcane until you can get high enough in the arcane talent tree to get the mana conservation talents...however and I never was really able to get my mana drain under control no matter what I tried.

Frost on the other hand (something I ignored until restarting this mage) is very efficient for leveling. There's a couple of spells you can use in rotation and if you have the correct talents and glyphs, plus pull carefully, you can burn through whole areas of monsters without ever sitting down to drink or eat.

The main gameplay-wise advantage to the mage (and something I didn't realize until I tried playing a healer) is that they have teleport spells. That means you can port to ANY major city in the game on a whim (after about level 20). Once you're higher level, you can teleport your whole group back to the major cities. Makes huge flight path travel times a thing of the past. Plus you can polymorph enemies into sheep to help with crowd control during instances AND you can summon your own water and food. No need to level up cooking or buy food ever.

The main other caster I really want to try is a druid. People rave about them and I can see why. Best of all worlds, plus you can transform yourself into a bunch of different animals for different situations. Flight form sounds especially awesome. Maybe if I'm motivated enough on getting this mage to 80 I'll try a druid, but for now the mage is pretty fun.

[Gothos]

we cleared normal and heroic 10man circus today... while Anub'arak hardmode was somewhat cool (he hits as hard as Vezax on 25man, damn him), the others were just laughable... hardmodes? hardly. most of Ulduar is harder than that.

[cerveza_fiesta]

aaaaaah playing right now. Glorious satisfaction of addiction.

[cerveza_fiesta]

Outland is actually a really fun place to do leveling quests. I'm surprised. The graphics are better or something....dunno....the whole place just has a nice ambience. Especially Zangarmarsh. I like nargand too.

The thing I like most about Outland so far (first time through by the way) is that the quests aren't ALL "collect X of Y by killing Z". There's some bombing runs off the back of gryphons...a lot of "shut down this or that with this stuff I give you" and a bunch of "kill whatever bossguy" missions. In the end you have to kill stuff no matter what, but the way its approached makes it a little cooler somehow. Plus I've spent so much time away from this character and (luckily) left him in Ironforge for like a year so his extra-rested-XP bonus is just powering me through the levels. I've been dinging about once every 2 hours playtime of late.

Been following Jame's alliance leveling guide. Its actually really good, and if you go all the way through it you can get your exhalted (or near it) with pretty much all the factions. Of course I skip huge portions of it due to my high-xp rate but I'm not one to care much about faction ratings.

Getting a lot better with this frost mage too. He's fucking awesome for pulling 5+ mobs at a time. I just get a bunch chasing me, then pop my water elemental, get him to cast frost nova on all the guys chasing me, which gets them aggroed on him instead of me for a minute, then rain icy death on them with the ice AoE spell. When they break their freeze, I pop my own frost nova and repeat. All the while the water elemental is firing frostbolts into the bastards and they go down quick. A couple arcane blasts sometimes if I get overwhelmed but all in all complete pwnage on my part.

Gotta try it out a bit more on PvP. I still kinda suck when I run into hordes.

[Gothos]

I can succesfully pull 7-9 mobs of the same level on my retadin... takes some cooldowns but that spec is just really powerful. I could probably take on like 20-25 normal mobs at once on my DK tank, but I'm epic geared

and yes, outland marks some evolution in quest making - the quest concepts and tailoring them into what the engine can do is an ongoing process. it's even more visible in Northrend, and will probably be even better in Cataclysm.
what I liked in Outland was that it felt like a legitimate world with how the zones work together. it feels partially familliar, yet at the same time visibly alien.

[cerveza_fiesta]

the cool thing about the frost spec so far is that I don't even burn all my mana doing a five mob pull. I can do it like 2-3 times in a row if I use that evocation spell in between for a quick mana recharge. Plus there's the spell that resets all my cooldowns, which has a relatively short cooldown of its own, and the ice-barrier invincibility spell that has a cooldown equal to its duration.

Before when I used fire / arcane it was a single mob insta-slay over and over, but woe if I pulled 2 or god forbid 3 at a time. I'd just get overwhelmed and have to blink and run away.

This frost mage build totally changed leveling for me. I doubted it was that great before because I couldn't see pulling down mobs quick enough with a piddly frostbolt. Holy shit though. The no-downtime-ever aspect makes up for it in spades.

EDIT...the slowing effect combined with my water elemental even makes kiting elites a total breeze. Just great. I like being mage again.

This post has been edited by cerveza_fiesta: 03 September 2009 - 12:49 PM

[Gothos]

so, newsflash.
we've killed Algalon 25man (server 2nd), heroic Northrend Beasts 25 man (damn, Gormok hits like a fucking truck!) and heroic Lord Jaraxxus 25 man. progress! we've climbed to second place on progression on the server, and we're hungry for more the most retarted fight in the game (faction champions) awaits, and I'm not that keen on that one, but I really like the Val'kyr Twins... Anub'arak sucks, but nothing can be done about it - he has to go down.

also, [A Tribute to Skill (10 man)]

[cerveza_fiesta]

good job gothos

Im still hammering away at leveling my mage.

Pretty fun. Flying mounts are fucking incredible. I had no idea until I finally got one at 62. Can't wait to get the fast one. Luckily jewelcrafting (which I have up to about 400 now) is a very good moneymaker on my server. Not all of it, but some of the bloodstone cuts and meta cuts fetch upwards of 10-12G. Plus they're quick to make.

I'm pretty stoked to get to 80. I've never experienced end-game content before. I've always been playing catchup with the expansions until now.

[Gothos]

heh I had to wait to 70 for my flying I eventually got 5 chars with epic flying, it's worth every penny. less so now that the normal flyers got a speedup. my paladin (76 currently) got the normal flying and it works awesome with cold weather flying and crusader aura in northrend, makes leveling almost effortless (almost as much as the unlimited power of retribution spec).

as for JC, get it to 450, get some of the more popular epic cuts (20 str, 30 sta, 20 agi, that kind of stuff) and just watch the cash flow... you'll need some entry capital tho, since uncut epic gems cost quite a bit (130-180g each on my server, cut ones sell for 160-210). after getting several epic designs you can just sell dragon's eyes every day (you buy them for Dalaran Jewelcrafting Tokens, which you get from completing daily JC quests from Dalaran, starting lvl 65 - I wouldn't advise taking them at that level as a mage tho - my retri could manage killing mobs 5-6 levels above him but that's an imba solo spec)

[cerveza_fiesta]

Yeah, I only had a few epic cuts before I quit last time but they were very profitable. I find just questing about is actually a pretty good moneymaker too

Been following Jame's guide for Alliance in outland. Its pretty quick....and wicked fast now with the flying mount

Question about cold weather flying tho...do you need to get the swift flying mount and master riding skill first or can you purchase cold weather flying and just use the slow flyer while saving up for the master riding skill (the 5k gold one)

[Gothos]

you don't need the epic flying skill to get cold weather flying.
if you've got a max lvl character you can buy a Bind on Account book that teaches it as low as lvl 68... otherwise it's taught at Dalaran at lvl 77. it's just a flag for flying in Northrend - it goes into your general tab of your spellbook (like, say, Attack, Jewelcrafting, Parry etc), not a skill upgrade.

[cerveza_fiesta]

oh noes.....its gonna be hard to give up flying once I head out to NR.

Way too much fun for the mid 60's quests in outland. I find it makes for way more surgical questing...like you don't have to clear a huge mob of mobs just to get at whatever the quest goal is. Just drop in out of the sky, clear the 2-3 mobs around the objective and complete the quest.

I wish I had 5k gold right now to get the epic flyer.