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As we all know, Blizzard had lost a decent amount of subscriptions during the last year. As such, they are starting to bring out more big guns to help retain or bring back players. One such change is the new Scroll of Resurrection.

For those unfamiliar with the service, it was a way for an existing player to send out a invite to allow an old player the chance to sign on and play his old characters again for 7 days without a fee, and if he signs back up, will grant the existing player a free month of service. It was decent, but not something to really get excited about.

The NEW Scrolls of Resurrection include...

A free character boost to level 80 for the returning player.
A free upgrade to Cataclysm (If they don't already own it).
A free server transfer to the existing players realm.
A free faction transfer to the existing players faction.
And the normal 7 free days of play before you must resubscribe.

While not confirmed, it is also rumored that, much like the Touring Rocket, they will be adding a special flying Spectral Mount for the existing player for successfully getting the old player to resubscribe.

Have to say, that is not to shabby. If anyone wants to get back in the game down the line, just message me, I can throw out a scroll or two.

You, sir, are evil incarnate.

Is there a requirement for the level 80 boost? Or could I buy the game, quit playing immediately, then be invited back and go straight to level 80?

What about people like me, who haven't played in months (because I've got star wars to play!) but still pay the $15/month just because I'm too lazy to cancel?

Ravenpoe said:

What about people like me, who haven't played in months (because I've got star wars to play!) but still pay the $15/month just because I'm too lazy to cancel?

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Could you just send me $15 a month for nothing instead?

Or you could just cancel now cause if you don't end up qualifying it won't matter anyways...

This is a drug free zone.

Go peddle your wares 'cross 8 mile mother fucker!

I thought about resubbing when this came out for about a minute. I tried to get my authenticator reset to be ready, cause I got a new phone, and got the web page is under construction notice from the support site. That's all it took for me to remember it wasn't worth it. :-/

Doesn's the level 80 boost basically say "New players? Early game content? Hah!" ?

The Scroll is only usable to reactivate existing accounts, as far as I know. So new players wouldn't be able to use it.

doomdragon6 said:

Doesn's the level 80 boost basically say "New players? Early game content? Hah!" ?

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Like mentioned, it only allows the reactivation of existing accounts. If you don't have an account right now you would be unable to use the Scroll of Resurrection. The level 80 boost also must be applied to an existing character, so you can't just make a new character and be 80, you have to pick one that you played before you quit.

The whole thing is designed to be a way to get players that quit but are interested in coming back an ability to easily get back together with old friends that still play. One of the larger detriments to returning players is finding out all those cool people you play with decided to move to another server, or changed factions/servers, or are now weeks worth of leveling ahead of you, etc... This allows you to quickly and easily bypass those detriments, thus people who are on the fence are more likely to give it a chance again.

It's a marketing thing, obviously, but I ain't complaining. I have a few friends that are really interested in it.

ScytheRexx said:

A free character boost to level 80 for the returning player.
A free upgrade to Cataclysm (If they don't already own it).
A free server transfer to the existing players realm.
A free faction transfer to the existing players faction.
And the normal 7 free days of play before you must resubscribe.

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Holy desperation batman!

Necronic said:

Holy desparation batman!

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I don't know that I'd count them as truly desperate yet. Concerned, maybe worried, but more aware that there's a significant financial commitment required by a potential returning player, if their friends have moved servers, changed factions, or both. I'd see this as more of a motivator for people who started playing during the Vanilla WoW days, have a character that they really loved, that has a ton of gear and gold, that maybe made it through the end of BC or WotLK and then dropped out and they don't want to have to pay an arm and a leg to transfer that character to their friends' new server and faction; rather than for people like me, for whom characters and alts are a dime a dozen, who doesn't mind leveling back through the old content, who doesn't have any of the original nifty PvP titles and didn't raid Molten Core or Kara back when they were relevant. Or for people who want to get back into playing with their main and don't have the disposable income to throw around to pay for said transfers. I've paid for 3 server transfers and a faction change on my main, and my wife has paid for those same 3 server changes, and a guild move/faction change - but we had the money to do it.

12 million subscribers, lost 2million, large flows of customers no longer quitting, steady at 10million.... yep... desperation city!

2 million subscription losses was enough for them to lay off 600 people.

Oh definitely. However, be in "desperation mode"? Hardly.

Hm... I could finally get my druid up to level 80. I've made 2 druids and I've always gotten stalled at the outland content because I pretty much hated it other than some of the dungeons.

Hell, these days all you need to do to get through the outlands content is spec resto and run random dungeons until your eyes bleed - especially since you only need to get to level 68 before you can head off to Northrend. I've been very pleased at the fact that on my recent alts I didn't have to spend 2.5 damn levels in Netherstorm or Shadowmoon Valley. Healers are always in short supply.

Of course, given the choice between having to run dungeons until my eyes bleed or being able to resub and get a boost - I'd probably take the resub option.

16% loss of revenue is a pretty significant event for any company.

I actually think this is a good move in some ways, because I think that WoW has such a good job that they may have saturated the market to the point that it's easier for them to win back old players than to find new ones, but the real question is whether the old players coming back would even be able to recognize and enjoy WoW in its current state.

Edit: Not to say that the current state is bad, but it's more like when you go visit some place you haven't been in a long time. You have this image in your head that fuels your nostalgia, and then you get there and it's totally different, and your nostalgia is confused. And angry. And then you burn down the high-school.

Necronic said:

I actually think this is a good move in some ways, because I think that WoW has such a good job that they may have saturated the market to the point that it's easier for them to win back old players than to find new ones, but the real question is whether the old players coming back would even be able to recognize and enjoy WoW in its current state.

Edit: Not to say that the current state is bad, but it's more like when you go visit some place you haven't been in a long time. You have this image in your head that fuels your nostalgia, and then you get there and it's totally different, and your nostalgia is confused. And angry. And then you burn down the high-school

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That's a good point. I haven't even been playing since Vanilla WoW and I already miss my nostalgic view of the game from TBC days.

It reminds me immensly of MTG. I remember once, about 3 years ago, trying to get back into the game after having quit right around Ice Age. I was so completely confused as to what all this new stuff was that I just gave up.

Ugh, I hate trying to get back into MTG. Every couple of years it sounds fun, and then my wife and I go buy some starter decks and a few packs of cards, and have no fucking clue what the hell all these new additions are or what they do, and go back to playing for a couple weeks with our old, early 2000's tourney legal decks instead, and then lose interest because we know each others' moves with those decks.

Send me one of them codes you son of a bitch.

Same here. I'd be interested in checking out Cata.

I've been looking for a time sink.

Do NOT log in to your account before you get this. I logged on to my account to update my information and it invalidated me from the Scroll. Just a friendly warning.

If anyone has any scrolls, I'll take one. I'm more interested in the areas I haven't visited than the 80.

If anyone wants one just throw me a message with your battle.net e-mail, I will pass out as much as I am allowed.

So I finally got around to playing some last night (thanks ScytheRexx). Before I quit I had leveled a frost mage to 80, & had 5 other toons at lvl 70-71. Never raided or ran dungeons much (low tolerance for jackassery i.e. pickups) & no guild activity (bad play schedule). I popped into SW to get my flying license & immediately got a summons for a quest line. After 30 minutes of running around SW going "where the F*CK am I?" I ended up on a boat that appeared to end up crushed by a kraken. After waking up in a sunken boat I got told to go kill some stuff... OW OW OW! So apparently I now hit like a pussy & go down like a cheap hooker. It didn't help that the naga had charge that negated any of my freeze effects, but ouchie. I was reminded of the EQ days of PoP where yard trash started swinging for 1K all of a sudden.

Look forward to checking it out some more. Was mainly interested in the free Cata upgrade just to check out some of the old world changes/

I mentioned this in the other thread but I will mention it here for those that quit playing a long time ago. The SoR does not just give you free Cataclysm, it brings you up to the level to play Cataclysm. That means if you don't own WOTLK, you get that for free too.

I know I've said some of this before, but here goes. First, thanks to ScytheRexx for the scroll.

So I played an 80. It was about the same as playing a 1 but with more buttons to push, and different pictures on the screen. I always think WoW will be different, but every time they update it, they actually add more of what I don't like. Everything is so overbalanced that class and race don't seem to matter. Level doesn't seem to matter at all since the PVE world just scales up with you. The quests are still the same type. I rolled a Worgen and a goblin, and the starting areas were fun, but as soon as you get back out into the main world, its back to the same old grind.

I actually look back fondly on the first times I played this game, what, 7 years ago? I played an undead priest, and it took FOREVER to get to level 10. And that was cool. Those levels meant something. Now you get to 20 by sneezing, and a priest can kill as well as a warrior. I'd love to see Blizzard make those low levels meaningful again, but I guess the story has moved on. Part of it is me. The spooky mystery of being dropped into alive, moving 3D Azeroth is a kind of magic that only happens the first time you play, I guess. I'd also like to see Blizzard somehow vary the beginning part of the game. Not sure how they would do this, but

Redthirtyone: had the same experience. Oo I'm 80! Oh, just a naga! Oh, I'm dead in like two hits!

So yeah - found the problem. The first quest reward piece of gear that I got was a helm that was like +150 sta +150 int OVER what I was already wearing. Then I went to the AH & had a looksie at the gear there for sale. EVERYTHING I found was similar. +150 sta/int upgrades all over the place on green drops. The stats for gear TRIPLED or more in the 15 months that I was gone. I told my friend I didn't recall having 15K hp / 14K mana before I quit. Guess that shoulda been a tipoff.

I bought a few pieces of gear & got myself up around 22K hp / 19K mana & went hunting again. Much better. More dps & could take a few more hits.

Even without the gear stat jump, they did increase the damage of the monsters compared to the original design, which was supposed to let you even quest at 78 if you wanted. One of the reasons Cataclysm as been getting a lot of flak from fans is because they used it as an experiment to listen to the vocal minority that wanted more "difficult" content, from dungeons to quests, and it made it so everything dragged out a lot more then usually. One of the reasons WoW lost nearly 2 million players since Cataclysm released. MoP will not be so unforgiving on the curve and gear requirements for questing, or so I hear.

I like raids being harder, I hate stuff that I needed to PuG with alts being harder, because it just ended up pissing me off. (And really, Cata's idea of making dungeons harder was by making it harder on healers, which took forever to sink into the heads of stupid tanks and DPS, which also basically pissed me off more... until I outgeared the shit of heroics again)

Raids being hard is fine, though everyone likes that we now have LFR as a easier alternative.

The fact is people like choices, even those that may not find going to ElististJerks and crunching numbers as a necessarily part of the experience. They removed a lot of choices for those people in Cataclysm due to the agenda of a small minority of players like TotalBiscuit, and they ended up suffering a lot for it. The hardcore will always have normal raids and heroic raids, which even I know I will likely never be pulling off because I just don't care enough to min/max myself to the level progression guilds min/max themselves, and I am fine with that as long as I have heroics and battlegrounds with a decent reward structure that allows smooth progress, something I can take my main or alts into with a general idea that I will succeed rather then fail over and over. MoP is making this even better by making quest dailies give gear currency, including Valor Points, and as a person that likes a casual style of play I can't wait.

Man, did I hate the number crunch guilds. The one I was in always tried to gear my tankadin like a warrior. I could not get it through their thick sculls that I needed (at the time, I don't know how tankadins work since NR) both time to build aggro, and at least some int in my armor to keep steady aggro. I know with the changes to judgements, mana falls from the sky for my pally, who's now a healadin.

I broke down and decided to give it another shot. I'm taking a short break from Eve while I wait for a decent internet connection. The thought of losing ships I spent close to a bil on due to getting disconnected regularly didn't sound fun. So, I got an scroll from Dave. Sorry Scythe, I got antsy and asked Dave too. He beat you to the punch.

I made it through all the Vashj'Ir quests with my DK so far. I like the long quest lines and the feeling you're actually doing something in the world. It does wear you out though. There's little to no choice in what quests you can do, so you feel like you're being drug along. I was also incredibly disappointed there was no Nesingwary quest here. It seems like the perfect zone for it, and would give a nice distraction. All said, I did enjoy the zone. It's definitely different swimming all the time, but seems to work. One thing that felt strange was they never told you how to get out of the zone other than hearth. I just magically had an underwater flight path that lead to an above ground flight path. Not a big deal, since by 80 you should be able to figure it out, but it was just odd.

I used my free 80 for a new Dwarf Warrior. I love fury warriors, but I hate leveling them. My main is an Orc Warrior and I've always wanted a Dwarf one. I've just started going through the Hyjal quests with him. I thought they were talking about making levels harder to get? It feels like I'm leveling a lot faster than I did in Wrath. Maybe it's just that all the quests are so chained together it's easier to run through them. In a few days I have my DK a bar away from 83 and my warrior almost to 81.

I'm enjoying it so far. No idea how long I'll stick with it, but it's got my attention for now.

Leveling is stupid easy 80-85 and if you're in a guild even moreso thanks to the xp boost perks. My Rogue I boosted to 80 was halfway through 82 before I even finished Hyjal, and he's only done two dungeons. I think they just want people to hit 85 and be ready to jump right into MoP when it hits, as Blizz seems to be trying pretty hard to fix the various Cata blunders.

CynicismKills said:

Leveling is stupid easy 80-85 and if you're in a guild even moreso thanks to the xp boost perks. My Rogue I boosted to 80 was halfway through 82 before I even finished Hyjal, and he's only done two dungeons. I think they just want people to hit 85 and be ready to jump right into MoP when it hits, as Blizz seems to be trying pretty hard to fix the various Cata blunders.

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I actually feel that 84-85 drags out way more then a level should. It is a bit faster then 70-80, that is for sure, but the different between each levels experience requirements is pretty high, so while each level between 70-80 felt even, each level from 82-85 drags out more then the last.

This was needed for the most part since we only had 5 levels, but makes it hard for me to even want to level once it slows down. This is why only two of my hordies have reached 85, the rest just stagnant in the areas between 82-85, I just have no desire to slog through 50-100 quests just to level once. It's mostly a psychological thing, as those dings break up the grind.

To me the last level was always like that, every xpac. I think of it like checking the time right before you go home from work. That last hour always seems to take ten times as long.

CynicismKills said:

To me the last level was always like that, every xpac. I think of it like checking the time right before you go home from work. That last hour always seems to take ten times as long.

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Never like that for me, I actually found 77-80 to be fast compared to the middle, 74-77, though a lot of that was due to gaining Cold Weather Flying at the time.

79-80 I could easily make in less then 2 hours, 84-85 will take me at least a day of pure playing and constant quests. This was even before the experience nerf for 70-80, now I can do it in less then an hour if I really wanted.

Really, all you have to do is look at the numbers. The average quest in Hyjal gives 20-30k. The average quest in Twilight Highlands gives 45-60k. Now look at the required numbers, leaving out the middle since it's pretty much an average ramp with each level gaining a little over the last.

70-71 - 1,523,800
79-80 - 1,686,300

Each level ramps up a little bit each time from the lowest up to the highest. The total amount of experience required is a little over 15 million to go from 70-80.

Now look at the Cataclysm numbers.

80-81 - 1,686,300
81-82 - 2,121,500
82-83 - 4,004,000
83-84 - 5,203,400
84-85 - 9,165,100

That equals to a total amount of experience over 22 million, each one ramping up sometimes millions at a time, while the quest difference between the lowest to the highest zone was only 30k at the most.

Yes, you can level up pretty quickly, mostly due to the large amount of heirlooms and the linear quest flow making it easier for the average player to stay on the ball, but for a power player that usually knows all the questing spots, it ended up slowing me down greatly compared to what I had in WOTLK, that added with the linear nature of the quests made it twenty times more repetitive, since you had no choice but going Deepholme, Uldum, and Twilight Highlands in a row, all with the same quests in the same order most of the time.

I agree on 79-80, now that you have me thinking about it. Icecrown and Storm Peaks were quick and easy, and small too, which helped a lot. Twilight Highlands tends to be where I clean up 84-85, and even though I know the zone like the back of my hand now (6 85's altogether, working on a Rogue now) it still drags in places (I'm looking at you, Thunderbrew wedding).

I also have 6 85s, but four of them I leveled almost exclusively through PVP, as I can't stand going through the zones at this point in the game. Not after the first two times leveling, way to linear. My hope is that they reduce the required experience in MoP like they did for WOTLK once Cata hit, and for BC once WOTLK hit. I also hope that they allow us to enter the MoP continents at 84 rather then 85, though I won't hold my breath on that one.

MoP is already a sun in my leveling nightmare because they are increasing the zone count so that each level will have two locations you can quest in rather then one, and the questing hubs will be more varied and less linear.

I like the sound of MoP so far, which surprises me. I really thought I was done after the Firelands patch. I never got into WoW PvP for some reason, at least not since the introduction of arenas. I wish I had used my SoR level boost on a Mage or Priest instead of a Rogue though, got so many melee as it is...

ScytheRexx said:

I also have 6 85s, but four of them I leveled almost exclusively through PVP, as I can't stand going through the zones at this point in the game. Not after the first two times leveling, way to linear. My hope is that they reduce the required experience in MoP like they did for WOTLK once Cata hit, and for BC once WOTLK hit. I also hope that they allow us to enter the MoP continents at 84 rather then 85, though I won't hold my breath on that one.

MoP is already a sun in my leveling nightmare because they are increasing the zone count so that each level will have two locations you can quest in rather then one, and the questing hubs will be more varied and less linear.

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See I'm the opposite after my first grind to High Warlord I quit PVP almost completely other than for achievements or quick HP to JP conversions. I've leveled all of my 85s exclusively through PVE content. Dungeon leveling with a Tank is like "Want an 85 in a week of casual play?".

I read Ghostcrawlers post-Cata interview, and it sounds like they really understand what went wrong and are trying to fix it. It's another reason I signed back up. I want to be at 85 come MoP.

Yeah I'm really enjoying the Rogue, I think I might take him to 90 after I give Monk a shot.

So I've been using Tukui forever, and sadly the creator has quit the game, so it'll be defunct soon. Any recommendations for solid UI stuff? Hotbars and Character panels are the big ones for me, but any type of "package" UI like Tukui that looks minimal and clean would be superb.

Never really got into Tukui, while I did like the design, it felt overly minimalist. As a person that plays most of the time as a Clicker, I like my buttons to be a medium size. As for anything like it, do a search for "Tuk" on wowinterface and usually you can find a lot of similar offshoot versions of the UI, maybe find one that is supported. Otherwise just check out the compositions page.

One I hear is pretty good is LUI.

http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info14130-LUIv3.html

Back before I customized my UI using various mods (Dominos for the bars), I used a small one called TidyBar. It basically takes the original UI designs and shrinks it down so it's much easier to use. The three main bars are consolidated into the bottom center, side bars act like normal, and the menu/bag/etc buttons are in a little hidden box in the bottom right that pops out when you hover near it. I like it, since it does not try to look all space-age and keeps the wow aesthetic, I mostly stopped using it because it lacks the ability to customize.

http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info13505-TidyBar.html

If you want to build your own, I always recommend Dominos for the action bars. Unit panels are a little hard for me to recommend because I don't use any new ones, I just use the new built in tools to move around the existing panels, and even that is only really for organization, since I use TidyPlates for knowing my enemies health and HealBot for knowing my allies (and my own).

Personally I use Bartender (Action Bars) and XPERL (Unit Frames). Simple, easy to use and highly customizable.

Shegokigo said:

Personally I use Bartender (Action Bars) and XPERL (Unit Frames). Simple, easy to use and highly customizable.

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You and I use the same mods! We should be bffs.

I used a bunch of apps, the only one I would never want to be without is voodoo, which is why healing in swtor still makes me cry.

I don't think I've ever really found anything to be truly necessary aside from a threat monitor of some sort, coordinates when questing, Bartender, and my Nostromo. Even Healbot seemed a little over-the-top to me when I was (very briefly) raid healing Naxx back in early WotLK. Sure, there were plenty of things I had at one point or another, like FlightTime to tell me how much longer it was going to take for me to finish my flight from UC to Stranglethorn, or an XP calculator to tell me how many more kills I needed to my next level, or Scrolling Combat Text to augment the existing combat notifications, but I never found any of them to be downright necessities.

You know how I know I'm truly hooked on WoW? Even talking about which addons I use makes me want to go home and play some, even though I'm pretty much just killing time until my beta invite arrives (which may be a while yet, if Shego just got hers last week, and she's been around longer than I have by at least a couple years).

Beta is massively disappointing to me for a few reasons Gared and if I were you, I'd feel pretty good about not being in it yet.

#1 Monk is nowhere near ready for the big time. Missing entire talents, most of it's current abilities way out of whack (the very first AoE tanking ability it gets doesn't even create threat) and alot of animations are either missing or jerky. Monk is at least 5 updates away from being a real class.

#2 Panderan is maybe 60% ready. No voiced characters at all. Not a single Panderan npc in the game has a voice at the moment. There are missing animations, jerky animations and clipping animations. You can't even fully create/customize them yet. No racial mounts etc etc.

#3 The 1-10 Pandean island isn't complete. Some of the biggest cut scenes aren't implemented and all you get is "filler text" telling you what is supposed to be happening. Alot of the ambient sounds are missing and the good music is maybe 2 songs tops.

#4 500k people on 4 servers. I don't have to tell you the nightmare that's like at the moment.

#5 Even with all those people on 4 servers, there's next to none in the 18-80 level gap. So if you had plans on playing a monk from 1-85 and seeing how it grows, not only is the class not finished, you're going to be doing it solo.

-- I have no coment on the island of Panderia itself as I'm leaving ALL of that to be "fresh" for me when the xpac comes out, but I can imagine it's not fully ready either. So really Gared, you're missing more of a headache than fun at this point. A few builds from now though? When it's almost ready for release? That's when the Beta will be interesting to play.

Yes we are still in "Phase 1", you have to go in expecting to see a the bones for the most part, it will take some time before the real meat comes out.

Shegokigo said:

Beta is massively disappointing to me for a few reasons Gared and if I were you, I'd feel pretty good about not being in it yet.

#1 Monk is nowhere near ready for the big time. Missing entire talents, most of it's current abilities way out of whack (the very first AoE tanking ability it gets doesn't even create threat) and alot of animations are either missing or jerky. Monk is at least 5 updates away from being a real class.

#2 Panderan is maybe 60% ready. No voiced characters at all. Not a single Panderan npc in the game has a voice at the moment. There are missing animations, jerky animations and clipping animations. You can't even fully create/customize them yet. No racial mounts etc etc.

#3 The 1-10 Pandean island isn't complete. Some of the biggest cut scenes aren't implemented and all you get is "filler text" telling you what is supposed to be happening. Alot of the ambient sounds are missing and the good music is maybe 2 songs tops.

#4 500k people on 4 servers. I don't have to tell you the nightmare that's like at the moment.

#5 Even with all those people on 4 servers, there's next to none in the 18-80 level gap. So if you had plans on playing a monk from 1-85 and seeing how it grows, not only is the class not finished, you're going to be doing it solo.

-- I have no coment on the island of Panderia itself as I'm leaving ALL of that to be "fresh" for me when the xpac comes out, but I can imagine it's not fully ready either. So really Gared, you're missing more of a headache than fun at this point. A few builds from now though? When it's almost ready for release? That's when the Beta will be interesting to play.

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Oh, I'm sure. I'm not really complaining about not having my beta invite yet - I'm just bored of Cata and didn't get in to the D3 beta either, so I'm just killing time waiting for something to do in the meantime. I don't know that you could pay me enough to be involved in the beta this early on. I was in the WotLK beta pretty early and I remember the hell that was attempting to get DKs through their starting zone with a lot of the same issues.

Right now I am holding off on the beta till we get a bit more changes to talents through and things like pet battles. I only quested in the Jade Forest and am leaving the rest alone, just to have areas that will suprise me. I am focusing mostly on just general mechanic changes for my bug reports, I am sure some of the other 100s of thousands of players will be able to get the visual and zone bugs.

In the meantime, I decided to play my NE DK in the lower level battlegrounds. I must admit Shego, get a blood DK with a healer and you are nearly unstoppable in the middle brackets. Got 30 killing blows in one game, a new record for me (old record was 27 or so on my mage), though that was mostly because the Horde got cocky and kept rushing my position one after another without grouping together while the healer kept me topped off. Sadly the rest of my team was not so great, and we lost because no other bases could be held.

Oh I know what that's like. I was an ENH shaman when WF could proc off itself on a 2h weapon. I was also a Ret Paladin at the start of Wrath. However sadly, as I mentioned before, my WoW PVP days are behind me. Whenever I'm forced into PVP I use my rogue or Mage simply because I like popping in, killing a High Value target (healer/ccer etc) and getting out without dying.

You know, more and more often these days I find myself missing the old days of PvP in WoW; back when AV matches could take days (or at least hours) and people actually tried to do something other than rush through and kill the captain then head for the general. <sigh> ah, memory...

Old days of PVP for me were more fun (because I played the OP class) but also at the same time a nightmare. 3 solid months of 12+hrs of pure PVP just to hit High Warlord..... I had no life for sure. I have no idea how that girl stayed with me during that time. All it was from me was wakeup, game, sex, game, food, game, sleep repeat for over 90 days.

Shegokigo said:

Old days of PVP for me were more fun (because I played the OP class) but also at the same time a nightmare. 3 solid months of 12+hrs of pure PVP just to hit High Warlord..... I had no life for sure. I have no idea how that girl stayed with me during that time. All it was from me was wakeup, game, sex, game, food, game, sleep repeat for over 90 days.

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That, with a few hours each morning of search for jobs, retweak resume, submit resume pretty much sums up my unemployment - it just happened to come after they nerfed the fun out of PvP. I have all of these achievements that I'll never complete for PvP on my main, because who the hell is ever going to amass all of the loot drops for AV turn ins when a battle lasts all of about 12 minutes, and that's only if someone screws up and resets the general? And furthermore, who's actually having fun with a battle like that? The only thing you're proving is that your side can run in a straight line and get enough people to the NPC to keep the tank alive for the 20 or 30 seconds it takes to drop the boss. Give me a good old fashioned clusterfuck at the bridge any day.

The thing about it though was I *had* to play that many hours a day to keep up against the competition. You could lose your rank from week to week and to go up in rank you had to have more honor than anyonelse. On my server I was competing against Honor Farm bots and friends who took turns taking shifts on singular characters.

I eventually helped establish a political system for "granting" ranks. We were the "1%" and we controlled who got what rank what week. Sure some rogue person could try and shift it, but we controlled the top 5 ranks by having the most played characters at that time. My problem was I didn't trust anyone enough to know my personal details so I did all my grinding solo....

Gared said:

and people actually tried to do something other than rush through and kill the captain then head for the general. <sigh> ah, memory...

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AV is not really like that though, not as much as you think. It's more a mix now from the old slower days and the general race days before they added reinforcements.

Yes, the beginning is still a race to the general, but that is only because if the two factions hit eachother head-on, you may get stuck in a 40 minute back and forth slugathon that goes nowhere until one side or the other hits the reinforcement limit.

The rest of the game is about sending teams around and back to retake the towers, while making sure you have enough sitting in the towers to defend them from the enemy doing the same thing. Every tower that is alive adds both a guardian and health to the final boss, and only after at least two towers are down do you have any chance of actually killing the boss, thus why it's very important to retake your own towers while guarding the ones you attempt to destroy.

A lot of the PVP happens in this area, as groups move around while the major force prepares in the enemy base. It is rarely a pure race, unless you get a really sucky team, since the team that does the recap process is the one most likely to win. If you bum rush the boss and ignore towers you pretty much lose.

That may happen in the middle brackets where you are right now, but as recently as last fall I moved my main to a new server and faction and decided to take him from his blues and greens from questing to full purple healing PvP gear, and with the exception of 5 or 6 battles in AV, every. single. battle was either "kill the captain then demolish the general" or straight-out "zerg the general and fail."

Gared said:

That may happen in the middle brackets where you are right now, but as recently as last fall I moved my main to a new server and faction and decided to take him from his blues and greens from questing to full purple healing PvP gear, and with the exception of 5 or 6 battles in AV, every. single. battle was either "kill the captain then demolish the general" or straight-out "zerg the general and fail."

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Nope, I play my warrior, mage, and now druid pretty much entirely through PVP in the end game brackets, and unless it is a premade using AVenabler, you still have to handle the towers, otherwise you will wipe. Every other attempt ended with the tank dying, everyone else dying, and a graveyard jump all the way back to our base, at which point it would devolve into the bridge war or IBGY war, depending on which side wiped it.

Out of all the AVs I have played since the beginning of this year (hundreds) I have only had the zerg be successful once, and have never had the other team successfully zerg our general. This count both low brackets, mid brackets, high brackets, and endgame brackets.

Maybe I'm just stuck in a really shitty battlegroup then, because it seems like every stinkin' battle I'm in, half the people are screaming "zerg Van" or "zerg (Horde General)", another ten or so are all about dropping the captain and then running down to the general, and maybe 10 seem to grasp that if you don't drop some towers along the way, we're screwed - and then the other side wins while everyone bitches that we lost because we didn't follow their set of orders.

Edit: Though I'd have to say then that I've been stuck in two really shitty battlegroups, because my server transfer took me out of Emberstorm and dropped me in Cyclone, and there's little to no difference in behavior.

Edit redux: And now that I think of it, Reckoning wasn't much better.

Not sure, guess my battlegroups are weird ones then.

Retaliation and Bloodlust.

Guess who just got their BETA INVITE?

I'm not sure I want to do it, though, or just wait for release. I kinda want everything to be new and fresh when it finally comes out.

So, who has a scroll for me?

My research paper is probably going to be done a whole month ahead of schedule, which means I may actually have 2 months of summer.

Bowielee said:

So, who has a scroll for me?

My research paper is probably going to be done a whole month ahead of schedule, which means I may actually have 2 months of summer.

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pm me the email you use for WoW, and I'll send you one

Poe sneaks in for the steal!

I'm going to get that goddamn mount. I was never able to get the touring rocket before everyone on the planet already had an account.

It's cool man, I am just messing.

Though I still need to get that Wyvern someday (got the gryphon now). Sad the touring rocket is going to be removed soon, thankfully I got it a few months back by bribing a euro friend with my free copy of WoW (he had a EU account, but wanted to have an extra US account, which my copy provided.)

Cool, My Worgen Druid is now level 80. It should be fun playing through the cataclysm content (which I actually liked) with her. With my druids, I always got stuck on the outland stuff because I HATED that expansion.