How come no other bloggers are posting anything?
You can’t all be home playing… can you? Bah! Why do I have to be stuck here by myself? Where is the solidarity? Where is the community?
You all can rot! The servers are probably down anyway.
I bet the game sucks anyway. It would serve you all right for me being stuck here… alone…
*wimper*
Hello? Anyone?
/cry
I am sorry Bliz. I did not mean it…I am sure it is great. Please have the servers up when I get home.
Played a few hours this morning before work. It IS awesome! NO problems. Started both new zones with different chars. Flying over SW is really amazing. And even though this isn’t really relevant anymore…you can fly from anywhere in Dal, too.
It’s just so cool to be able to rise up in places you never could before…
The underwater stuff is absolutely beautiful. The cut scene getting there was awesomesauce. Must do that again!
So looking forward to our after-work play session
Incidentally, Bristal, your posts get flagged every single time as spam. Every time.
Love the cut scenes and the use of implied story moving you from place to place instead of just a magic portal. Did a quest in Booty Bay last week and I got stuned by a bomb and they fished me out of the harbor. I woke up in a bed in the Inn DAYS later even though it only seemed like a moment had gone by.
Cut scenes are great. I remember some friends playing Final Fantasy in a doom many many years ago. Someone would call out that a cut scene was up and we would run down the hall so we could watch it. I get that momentary thrill in game now when one comes on.
I’m not logged in the game, though I’d sure love to be. No…I’m at work. *siiiigh* I installed Cataclysm last night after I got it from the Gamestop and logged in (amazingly) long enough to turn in all the quests my priest had saved up for XP. Oddly, the first few didn’t give XP, but after a few minutes I was getting XP for quests. Wierd. I got to log in for all of 5 minutes this morning before I went off to work, long enough to get the priest to Vash’whatsis. Then of course, I realized I didn’t train Azeroth flying. D’oh!
Bah I haven’t even installed it yet.
I am so unprepared.
I’m hoping by friday I get to play.
I keep telling myself that things will slow down and relax in the real life, but I think I’m just whispering sweet nothings to myself and it’s all BS.
You’ll probably enjoy it more then. The first two zones are insanely crowded right now. By the weekend the power levelers should be gone and hopefully it’ll be easier to find the quest givers (right now they hide under huge piles of dragons, griffins, mammoths, and other mounts).
I too will wait until the weekend before I install Catclysm.
I purchased Burning Crusade 4 or 5 days after it came out, and Wrath of the Lich King at a midnight release. I remember my first few steps in Outlands to be far more enjoyable than my few first few in Northrend.
The wife and I logged on our level 39 bear and enhancement shaman and three-manned Dire Maul East and Scholomance with a restoration druid.
Dire Maul East was very easy and does not provide much of a challenge. We’ll likely two-man it with our next pair.
Scholomance at level 40 was a fun challenge for a non-heriloom 3-man group. Although the party did not suffer any death, we were quite low on health a number of times. My wife was especially happy because she had to throw emergency heals on many occasions. We finished all seven quests and we were rather surprised how little experience they now give.
We will likely attempt Dire Maul West and Razorfen Downs tonight.
Have you noticed any of those old world runs being harder? I have only run a few since patch 403 dropped but I had a suspicion they had upped boss HP. Not sure though. It is hard to say. I have stopped using Heirlooms for anything under 60 so everything is a bit harder. Not necessarily ‘harder’ but stuff does die slower.
We did the first two of the new instances last night with an all guild group. Man it was nice to have challenging content again. We wiped plenty. I would not be trying to 3 man those any time soon. Then again I will not think of pugging them anytime soon either. Sure was refreshingly fun to have a group of solid folks that were all in vent and all knew ‘don’t stand in fire’ type stuff. There are some tricky encounters in there.
I look forward to seeing the rest of the ‘tweaked’ old world runs. So far I have only done SM graveyard, and Gnomer.
@Reversion
We did not find bosses particularly difficult to 3-man but they are more difficult than in the recent past. They do appear to have received a significant amount of extra health points.
Trash is another matter. It was not a problem in Dire Maul East as we were able to pull small groups at a time.
Scholomance was much fun because of the larger pulls and high number of adds who show up during several enocunters. It was a very serious challenge for us and we’ve been three-manning instances for years! I loved it.
We will attempt to four-man the new instances because we are stubborn and just love undermanning instances. We’re lucky our groups are quite popular and have plenty of volunteers willing to join us. We do expect (and hope) we will suffer many wipes while we develop new strategies for undermanning the new content.
***
I did run a few heroics when I tried pulling a large number of groups in heroics like you guys do all the time but it was not for me. I like to control pulls and regain control when something unexpected happens. Creating chaos by pulling 3 or 4 groups just went against my natural restore order tendencies.
***
One funny note from last night. The loudest self-proclaimed “I will be left behind in Cataclysm because I am such a slow leveller” member was already level 83 before I log on last night.
One thing that was super handy with our groups is that in our five, we had one off-tank and one off-healer, so if we needed a few more heals on a pull there was that option and at least once having the other tank-possible character helped (on one boss, we had him go and taunt him at a certain time to give us an easy way to work the “gimmick”). And once when Reversion dropped, Logarithm picked up aggro and we didn’t wipe. That sort of thing.
Sometimes playing band leader for controlled chaos is a lot of fun. Did a run recently with a just dinged 80 warrior in regular PoS. I got a party with an average dps of well over 4k. Keeping agro was INSANEly hard but one of the most fun things I have done in the game. But, on the flip side I, like you, really love the challenge of running things with the so called ‘less than optional’ party where you have to use strategy and control to get through fights and where you have a small tight group that CAN use strategy. You guys will have no big problems with the new ones. The biggest issue was the tank taking very large hits. We had not replaced many pieces of our ICC gear yet but were not expecting the hits to be quite that hard. One trash pack dropped me in an instant. But, after I died, Ana was able to keep the party up. So there are just some nasty burst of damage. If you know they are coming, and you learn that fast, and have a solid healer and maybe some offheals, (and you do) then you should be fine. I don’t recall many DPS race fights. If we had ground a few more quests and gotten more gear it would have been even easier. Not that it was all that ‘easy’ but we got it done. If you are not ICC geared (I forget if you raid) just make sure you have mostly all new gear. Even the first quest greens are a replacement (and huge stam upgrade) for everything high end ICC gear. You will know you still need a few pieces pretty fast if the trash hits too hard. And boy did it hit hard.
I definitely think they have not broken the ‘3-4 manability’ with the new runs.
We were using some CC in there but it was not strictly needed. Of course it helped but most of the time it was not needed.
We will definitely be taking guildies for a while. There are some interesting new mechanics that I really don’t feel like explaining to puggers. Both runs had a lot of fun and interesting mechanics. But like I said, I don’t think I saw anything that was fundamentally not 3-manable.
Have fun! Let us know how it goes!
I was here :). Didnt get my copy till mid- afternoon. I will say that while it’s fun to see real, new quests, and have the thrill of levelling a main again after all this time, it was lessened somewhat by talking to people or responding to people and getting only crikets in two guilds…. I feel like a social person in an antisocial world. I sense some serious dual-boxing in the near future just so i have someone to talk to
Too many people leveling, not enough talking! You should have been in vent.
Yeah, lots of us were in Vent last night. Even Fyuria made a comment during our Heroic AN run last night saying you guys sure are quiet, but we were all in Vent chatting away. If people are quiet in gchat, I usually assume it’s because they are all in Vent, which is usually the case.
I was already getting eye strain reading all that quest text. You can’t expect me to read guild chat too! :P