Tag Archives: expansion

Goodbye Cataclysm!

Here we are. The last day of Cataclysm. Finally! I’m sure you guys know that I wasn’t Cataclysm’s greatest fan. I quit for 3 months and barely played for most of it. It wasn’t until I found Harvest Moon that I fell in love with the game all over again. From what I hear, Mists will change a lot of the things that I didn’t like and I am very excited to see what’s new.

But Cataclysm wasn’t all bad. The new 1-60 quests were really cool if you stuck around long enough to see them (very difficult with current levelling speeds) and I loved that you could actually just get instance quests from inside the instances rather than traipsing around Azeroth and doing hand stands just to get a couple of dungeon quests like before. I liked the new zones before they got tedious and samey. The Molten Front dailies were actually a lot of fun and the new mounts and pets across the board were awesome. I loved the new ZG and ZA instances, despite never getting my tiger mount. And the introduction of LFR was a great one for people like myself!

I’m looking forward to exploring Pandaria with the Moonies and have been taking a look at Shadow Priest things today. We have my talent spec and glyphs here. Pre-raid gear list, followed by an example of BiS and some playstyle tips. And this MMO-C post is going to be so useful to me! I double checked my stat weights on HowToPriest.com and yes, haste is still ahead of crit and mastery by a mile. Now to double check my priority system and enjoy the goodbye Cataclysm party tonight!

Farewell Cataclysm, you won’t be missed but thanks for all the fish! *watches countdown timer eagerly*

What did you like most about Cataclysm?

You Shouldn’t Need to Log Out for Mists!

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I keep seeing a lot of people saying that they won’t be playing on Monday night (Mists release) because they likely won’t be able to log back in. I feel I should share this particular blue post with you guys:

Source.
As soon as we activate the new expansion content on launch, players who already have a Mists of Pandaria license with the data installed will gain instant access. If you’re in the game when the clock strikes midnight, you don’t even have to logout!

So, what happens at midnight for those of us with Mists ready to go?

A yellow System Message will appear in your Chat Log telling you to visit Orgrimmar or Stormwind to start your travels.

Level-85 characters will receive a new quest, no matter where they are in the world, which will guide them to Varian or Garrosh for further orders. If you’re online at midnight you will receive the quest even if your Quest Log is full — or you can visit Varian or Garrosh to get started on your journey to Pandaria.

Level-85 players will notice their experience bars automatically change so that experience can once again be earned.

Players who are at the Character Creation screen at midnight will notice the button to create a pandaren character will be enabled. (Reminder: This also applies to players who don’t have a Mists of Pandaria license, as all races are now included with a base copy of World of Warcraft.)

Players who are at the Character Creation screen at midnight will notice the button to create a monk character will be enabled.

We’ve been very hard at work on this new technology with the goal of ensuring that players can enjoy a more stable and seamless transition into the next expansion than ever before. Our staff will be monitoring realm stability and gameplay issues around the clock, as we want to provide you with the best experience possible.

*Touch wood* we shouldn’t need to log out at all!

Panda Stuff That Has Finally Made Me Excited

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Note on Spoilers: I am discussing the upcoming Mists of Pandaria expansion in this post. I will use spoiler tags for any images I link to but if you don’t want to know anything until release, best avoid this post. And rest assured, I will always make sure to keep Jaedia’s Menagerie a spoiler safe zone to the best of my abilities!

So far I have been entirely underwhelmed regarding the Mists of Pandaria expansion. I never really cared much for the Panda folk myself and if Cataclysm taught me anything, it is that I’ve grown a little tired of World of Warcraft. I must admit that Harvest Moon has helped a lot with rekindling my passion for the game, but today the NDA has been lifted and my other half told me a few of the new things and I’m actually really excited about the upcoming expansion now. Going into it not only with a guild I love but also with things to look forward to is going to be great. There is so much information being released today that I can’t go into everything so do check out MMO Champion, though I imagine you already have, but here are a few of my own thoughts. I’ll do a click-through to make sure there’s nothing too spoilery on my main page.

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The (Possibly) Beginning of the End

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How do I begin this one. Well, for starters, I’m seeing people left, right, and centre deciding that WoW just isn’t fun anymore, so they quit or cut down their playing time severely. I want to look at the reasons why. A lot of us have become a group of people who equally love Cataclysm for how well designed it is, but for some reason, we can’t get past how suddenly bored we became after just a month or two.

Wrath Killed Our Spirit

You can’t deny that Wrath of the Lich King was a bit of a spirit killer. Everything was so easy, handed to us on a platter, that it very, very quickly became boring. A lot of us ignored that, got into PvP, levelling alts, playing the Auction House, checking out other servers, trying RP, anything just to find some fun in the game again. A lot of us managed to, a lot of us didn’t, and those who didn’t quit, perhaps coming back for Cataclysm. But in the process, our spirits were definitely slaughtered and left to die, leaving just this one little spark of hope that Cataclysm was just around the corner and didn’t it look amazing? Many of us were relying on Cataclysm to bring the fun back to WoW. And rightly so, it really should have.

Linearity Sought to Squash The Hope

The quests in Cataclysm, while they are absolutely fantastic – they really did make you feel as though your character was important, and there are some great storylines to follow, and it’s not all about “kill 10 boars, bring me their ears” and then toddling off to bring back boar heads after 50 kills and much rage about why the fuck don’t boars all have ears – but it’s not enough. We’ve levelled our mains to 85, perhaps gone back and completed Loremaster of Cataclysm, and then just.. meh. Some of us managed to level other alts, some of us couldn’t bear the thought of doing the exact same quests again so soon. However, the questing wasn’t exactly the deciding factor, it was a large part of it, but at this point we still had these new hard heroics and raids and Archaeology to look forward to.

Heroics Are Fun, But Only With The Right People (Who Can’t Always Be Online And Up For It)

Hard heroics were a great idea, for some of us they still are with the right group of people, but you can’t pug them and enjoy them. I’m not saying that they aren’t doable in a pug, I am saying that they aren’t enjoyable, if they are, it’s so rare it’s hardly worth looking for. It’s all of the people running about with the Wrath mindset that has completely spoiled pugging, not that pugging has ever been seen as a good thing. There are still elitist fucks running around in LFD, calling people names needlessly, insulting people for not doing something right, breaking any CC that might be up, trying to AoE everything down, that kind of thing, being generally angry and unpleasant to be around – except you can’t get away with it now. LFD has become worse than it was in Wrath. At least back when everything was AoE’d down in 10 minutes you didn’t have to talk to the twats who would belittle you for simply breathing funny. It wasn’t so fun, but it didn’t make us want to tear our hair out quite so much.

The Mould Simply Wasn’t Broken

Yeah, I’ve mentioned this before but from a personal perspective rather than a general one. The fact is that it wasn’t. We’ve tried Archaology, and raiding, and PvP, and all the usual suspects, but what’s different about any of it? Everything is a grind. Who wants to spend their gametime just constantly grinding and banging their heads against the keyboards? A few, sure, but not many. Fair enough if you can do it with friends and have a laugh while you do, but that’s not always the case. At least in Wrath, as much as it sucked towards the end, the mould was attemptedly broken. We had achievement points to play with – giving us new reasons to do a boss a little bit differently (and sure, grind), and vehicle fights, as much as a lot of people hated those, they were different, Blizzard attempted something new and that was good. What did we get this time? A few minigames and a pile of cutscenes, which in Uldum get so ridiculous you find yourself screaming for it all to just stop already. Blizzard have redone our levelling experience and made things a little more challenging, and it was fun for a couple of months, but what now?

Is This It Then?

Is World of Warcraft reaching the end of its’ cycle? People are quitting without really much reason. Sure, it’s boring, for all of the reasons I said above and then some, but a lot of people will tell you that Cataclysm is great, it’s just not for them. And sure, a lot of people are still having fun, especially people who started playing in Wrath. But it’s there, the apathy. Have we finally found a WoW-killer?

Thoughts on the Shinies

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It has been a week since 4.0.3a hit, aka when we all slept off a few years and woke up to Cow Paladins *shudder*. Yeah, okay, it was nice for a bit to imagine Cow Priests and Paladins but seeing them ingame? I don’t like them. They’re too weird. Plus, Dan keeps riding around on his Raptor and Cows on Raptors look ridiculous. Stupid cows. Anyway, I haven’t had chance to blog about the patch yet – not really, I’ve been kept busy with the 20 Days of Warcraft and playing WoW, would you believe. Besides, I think a week of playing the patch at least gives me a bit more to blog about.

omgomgomgsquee

The first day, I was surprised to see the servers come up pretty swiftly. I’d heard horror stories on Twitter of the American servers taking hours to finally come up, so seeing how prompt the EU servers were was a bit shocking, especially after such a big patch. So, I opened my game, and then the squeeing commenced. The first thing was “OMG new loading screen, so cool, and nowhere near as annoying as Cynagosa.” It was quickly pointed out to me that I meant Sindragosa, and in fact, not the blue dragon from Violet Hold.. shutup. Then I ran around Thunder Bluff looking at the new achievements, “OMG so much new stuff to do!” And was then told to get the fuck to Orgrimmar. Yessir.

Then I got to Orgrimmar and “omgomgomgomgomg” happened. After the initial running around in circles getting over-excited and exploring where they put everything and how the fuck do I navigate this silly new place it took me 4 years to find my way around the old one and omg the zeppelin towers are here now and there are lifts and oh good Eitrigg’s there and there’s a cow section?! Yeah, you get the drift. After all of that, I calmed down and did the first cooking and fishing dailies. Basically, I set my hearthstone to the Valley of Wisdom, aka where the cows dwell, and decided that I’m not so fond of new Orgrimmar. Yeah, sure, it’s new and shiny. Big. And I love that you can find auction houses, banks, mailboxes and everything you might need wherever you might be, but it’s so… HORDE. I like the pretty, you see. I like the Elves, and Ashenvale, and cute little non combat pets. Orgrimmar is so black and spikey. So, you can find me where the cows dwell from now on.

New Quests

I hadn’t quite got over the “omg squee” part of the day yet, but I figured I could go out and start grabbing the new pets and make a start on the new Loremaster achievements for each different zone. To begin with, as the Singing Sunflower is brilliant, I went to Hillsbrad Foothills. The zone had always sucked before, but that pet would be- woah Tarren Mill’s a bit different! That guy’s a big elite.. some of these quests are brilliant! I hadn’t seen it yet. I went around, amazed by Stagwiches (shutup, it made me laugh), giant yetis, and big Orcish elites, then realised I was nowhere near finished. Ran around a bit and really, I have never laughed so hard at a quest in my life – hell – I don’t think I’ve ever laughed at a quest before.

Yeah, that’s right, I’m a quest giver. What of it? I’m not going to say any more, but trust me, the image above doesn’t even scratch the surface. It’s just such a hilarious quest, if you’re Horde, go do Hillsbrad if you haven’t already. If you’re Alliance, level a Horde to 20 and go do Hillsbrad. It’s my favourite new zone so far.

Arathi Highlands wasn’t too different. The same quests, really, but there’s a new quest hub that gives you all of the quests in the beginning area so you don’t have to constantly run between one end of the zone to the other, they even send you to Faldir’s Cove now. It’s not great for people looking for new content, but for levelling it’s brilliant now.

Night Elf Mage

Yeah, okay, I went with it. I think Night Elf Mages look positively awesome. And no, I’m not being a hypocrite because I never said that Cow Paladins and Priests were a lore lol I just said I wasn’t a fan.

There are two good things about Night Elf Mages for me. First, I get to be a Mage. I have always loved the class, I just keep getting distracted by other things. It’s a pretty lame sounding excuse when I made my first Mage on the first day of the Burning Crusade release and she still hasn’t made it past 60, but it’s an honest one. The second, I get to be a Night Elf. See, before this patch, I didn’t bother reading quest text. I’m a pretty slow reader and when you want to level fast and get things done quickly, reading quest text severely slows me down. So I didn’t bother, I just read what I needed to do and followed the dots. Now, however, I don’t think I could not read the text, and levelling my Night Elf through the starting zone, I’ve realised how awesome Night Elves are. Lorewise, they are my favourite race now.

I think my only real complaint so far is that the levelling experience goes too fast, even without heirlooms. My Mage is level 28, sure, with heirlooms, but even so, I’m halfway through Darkshore, haven’t touched Ashenvale or Stonetalon Mountains yet, and everytime you enter an instance you seem to just level at some kind of ungodly speed… I’ve been told that they have nerfed instance experience but I worry, is it enough? I know that a lot of people like to speed level to reach end game, but a lot of people like to enjoy the levelling process as well. With all of the new quests and instance changes and such, it would be nice to be able to enjoy it without needing to turn off experience gains to do so. That being said, I’m definitely not complaining. I just wish I had more slots for all of the alts I’ll be levelling!