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World of Warcraft |OT8| CITIZENS OF DALARAN

A

arimanius

Member
CHC said:
I mean, Ravenholdt Manor would have been cool too but

a) how would you get there easily, other than a portal (which isn't very rogue-like)?

b) Ravenholdt is already the main dude in the rogue class hall anyway

c) the sewers don't feel gross and scummy like people worried - they feel like some hidden, bustling, whimsical underworld. I love the dead adventurer on the docks, the goblin reclining on the gold pile, and all the other little details.
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They really did make the rogue class hall awesome. All the little details and things really make it special.
 
R

Rhaknar

The Steam equivalent of the drunk friend who keeps offering to pay your tab all night.
Halo looks like it could be the Priest version of Barrage. Am I wrong? :/
 
A

Aeana

Member
Rhaknar said:
Halo looks like it could be the Priest version of Barrage. Am I wrong? :/
Click to expand...
Well, a priest with halo should be behind the group so they shouldn't be in range to hit things ahead of the group with it. But also, divine star is just a better talent to use for 5 mans anyway, halo will be more useful in raids
 
L

Lain

Member
Decided to spend some time doing a few draenor heroic achievements and between bad luck and some bugs it couldn't have been worse.
Went to Shadowmoon Valley, started doing What's Your Sign? which was going smoothly until the boss summoned a sacrifice while I was cleaning the runes, so she gained back some health back and it was enough to make me unable to kill her fast enough (I was doing it as prot): she started the new lunar phase as I killed her and so no achy.
I kept going, I killed the second boss, grabbed the 25 spiders and went to Bonemaw, made him suck the spiders after which he went down as part of his cycle and.... never came back up, leaving me locked on the platform. Noticed I could swim to the other side so went that way, cleaned to Ner'zhul, switched to ret, killed the 2 skeletons under 5 seconds from each other, killed Ner'zhul and... no achievement and no loot, he wasn't lootable at all, I guess because of Bonemaw. Felt just like a waste of time.
 
F

Frumix

Suffering From Success
I get declined as an 845 healer because I'm a monk and not a paladin so don't think too hard about it and try the next party, chances are they aren't breathing with their mouth.
 
R

Rhaknar

The Steam equivalent of the drunk friend who keeps offering to pay your tab all night.
Aeana said:
Well, a priest with halo should be behind the group so they shouldn't be in range to hit things ahead of the group with it. But also, divine star is just a better talent to use for 5 mans anyway, halo will be more useful in raids
Click to expand...
vocab said:
not even close.
Click to expand...

need to try it then. Halo out in the world seems like a bad idea so I imagined it in places like eye of azshara for example. I just started lvling the priest anyway.

Finished the monk campagin tho, that seemed faster than the hunter. I also discovered the talent that makes you have spinning orbs around you (I always saw monks with it but didnt know what it was) and im in love, it probably isnt viable but damn its so pretty. Monks are so pretty.

Monk new main, I can still change raids arent out :3 wait I dont raid, I can do whatever I want
 
J

jaundicejuice

Member
dimb said:
Having played Legion extensively and following the leveling path a few times, I actually think it's pretty weak. Blizzard did a good job with the late game systems, but the path there is just beyond slight and forgettable. Highmountain is probably just the epitome of this, a completely one note zone with no interesting dynamics that does less with its repeated themes than we've seen in Warcraft before. Revisiting the Cataclysm zones for some of the Shaman quests really shed light on how bland the Legion zones are. Warlords of Draenor had an extreme number of problems, but the locations were much more diverse, dynamic, and interesting to explore.

I feel that Blizzard should be held to a higher accountability level with Legion's leveling zones. They are spartan, uninteresting, lacking diversity, and have such an insignificant soundtrack backing them up. Legion's leveling is getting a pass because it's quick and painless, but the complexity, scope, and ambition is completely absent.
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dimb said:
Even if I feel that Gorgrond does not come together as a whole to deliver a very strong story, it does feel like a zone that hits the vibe right for exploring and adventuring. It is a really diverse zone that transitions between thick jungle, deep caves, rocky desert, and steaming hot springs. There is cool story stuff there, where you're teaming up with Rexxar to take on the Iron Horde as they exploit the resources of the land.

It also houses three very distinct dungeons and what is probably one of the best raids this game has ever seen. There are definitely Legion zones that I would consider a step down from it, even for all its inadequacies.

If you take Highmountain as a very general point of comparison, yeah, sure, the story flows better but what are the memorable quests and locations? Its feature is elevation, but it's actually a very flat zone when it comes to where players quest, as each hub plays out in a fairly unremarkable space. It's the "highest mountain" on Azeroth, but the ascension to the peak is just so dull compared to Kun-lai Summit. Even WoD's Nagrand felt like it made greater use of elevation with its climbs to peaks, and the hidden treasure locations that required glider runs to lower points.

The core of Warlords has really strong zones. Shadowmoon Valley, Spires of Arak, Frostfire Ridge are all great, with Nagrand ranking in as pretty good. Legion has four leveling zones and half of them are somewhere between not good and bad. As a whole it is the expansion that feels the least ambitious with its zone concepts and that's just a huge mark against it for me.
Click to expand...

While I likely won't replay Legion as many times as you or most in this thread will, I'll probably roll an alt or two at most, I just disagree vehemently. Particularly with the premise that Warlords of Draenor's zones were dynamic and interesting to explore.

While very beautiful--the WoW world art team seems like they are always on-point with some amazing work these days--Warlords zones felt dull and unimaginative compared to their more creative counter-parts from The Burning Crusade. It's more than just lacking the Twisting Nether as a skybox or having chunks of Outland floating off into space. They excised so many things that made Outland feel like a truly alien world. There is no comparable moment in Warlords to the first time you exit through that canyon and go from the desolate, wasted, ruins of Hellfire Peninsula and enter into the surreal and cerulean blue mushroom jungle of Zangarmarsh. In Warlords of Dreanor they made a very beautiful, pastoral, boring and entirely normal version of Outland. Which would have been fine if the quest design had been there to prop it up but that is arguably not the case with Warlords of Draenor.

It was a trip to see Shadowmoon Valley, the Temple of Karabour and even NPC's like Akama as they originally were but that's sort of the beginning and end of the nostalgia love letter to TBC. Frostfire Ridge, while looking like something out of the background of a Frank Fratzetta painting, looked nothing like Blade's Edge Mountain. I love Frostfire Ridge, I like it more than Shadowmoon Valley, it's a harsh but beautiful landscape, perfectly suited as the starting zone for the Horde. While there's some breathing space in Frostfire Ridge that isn't prevalent throughout all WoD zones, it's also heavily instanced and huge chunks of the west, a large part of the north and north-eastern part of the zone are unartfully partitioned off as garrison daily grind zones. Wasn't it fun doing archaeology in the western part of Frostfire Ridge where all those wolves are? Adventure! Although I say this knowing full well it's still a problem in Legion.

And, again, while being very beautiful, and being an interesting reimagining of the Arakkoa and their lore, Spires of Arak was one of the most heavily theme parked zones in WoD. There's very little in the way of exploring to do in Spires. So much of it is on rails. That's a complaint you can level at most of WoD's zones, heavily instanced and/or on-rails and with sections just partitioned off for awful end-game rep grinds/garrison campaign. You say that Gorgrond's landscape inspires exploration and adventuring and one of your screenshots is from The Pit. An area of the zone you could not explore while leveling and was the site of one of the many tedious garrison daily rep grinds. That entire northern-eastern chunk of Gorgrond is off-limits until you're at cap and doing the garrison campaign, garrison daily grinds or the start of Tanaan campaign to get your shipyard. The only thing there is to find is an unused but fully populated Laughing Skulls village nestled behind the Iron Docks and Blackrock Foundry just past the Grimrail Depot.

I get that you find the zones in WoD more aesthetically pleasing or visually dynamic, I agree it's all very lovely window dressing but, to be crass, it's like putting tits on a mule. Lipstick on a pig. A fine chandelier in a haunted house. Whatever idiom works for you.

The design elements that drive and reward exploration in WoD--the bonus objectives, the scenarios you can stumble across, the treasures, and the rares--feel like they were a beta for what's been implemented in Legion. In WoD treasures and rares were a neat idea that quickly become meaningless because they're mostly just pitiful amounts of garrison resources. Here's a couple of ogres guarding a massive treaure chest, what could be inside? Gold? Jewels? A cool weapon or piece of armor!? Nope, it's just 20 garrison resources. Sometimes you would get gear but more often than not, it's vendor trash and maybe a transmog at best. Rarely you would get a toy or a meaningful piece of gear. Pitiful amounts of garrison resources were what drove the rewards for exploring in Warlords. And often what you would fine would be effectively walled off areas you could not go into or just instances from fixed points of a campaign you had completed.

I got lost in Highmountain trying to find my way to the peak for a profession quest. I had to legitimately explore a mountain top, and on my jaunt around the mountain I found treasures, scenarios and fought rares that all provided something meaningful and almost as rewarding as the vista that greeted me from the very peak of Highmountain. That just flat out did not happen at any point in Warlords of Dreanor, or any of the older PVE content (predominantly Vanilla, TBC and WotLK) I've been through in my two years of playing WoW. Granted I have not done all of Mists of Pandaria's or Cataclysms PVE yet, those on my rainy day Sunday to-do list.

TLDR: Sorry for the wall of text but this is just something I feel we will not see eye to eye on.
 
R

Rhaknar

The Steam equivalent of the drunk friend who keeps offering to pay your tab all night.
I love 3 of the 4 zones (well 4 of the 5) but I agree that they dont seem connected at all. But I loathed most of the draenor zones so.

And im one of those silly bunnies that loves Suramar (I just did all of it a second time with the monk for example and had a blast)
 
S

scy

Member
I came into WoD really late (~May/June) so maybe it already had leveling catch-up mechanisms in place, or the whole "WoD is awful" mentality was absorbed in the content itself somehow, but I found most the zones pretty lacking once you left Gorgrond. Alternatively, maybe Gorgrond was just way too good of an area compared to how sparse Talador and Spires felt (and I never actually did Nagrand outside of @100 Pathfinder) which fed that feeling? Either way, zone quality felt like a decline once I left Frostfire and Gorgrond and it became more of fill bar, reach 100 when it came to caring too much about the zones themselves. And I actually liked the alternate Draenor setup.

jaundicejuice said:
I got lost in Highmountain trying to find my way to the peak for a profession quest. I had to legitimately explore a mountain top, and on my jaunt around the mountain I found treasures, scenarios and fought rares that all provided something meaningful and almost as rewarding as the vista that greeted me from the very peak of Highmountain.
Click to expand...

While I know this feeling (Mining, Blacksmithing quests), I'm not too sure if you ever go near that area otherwise so that may be a big part in making the zone feel as leveled off as it does. I did Highmountain as my second zone on my DK purely because of this quest chain and it was the most suffering in the game thus far and is entirely why I dislike Highmountain as a zone. At the same time, it's a memorable experience entirely of being so lost and bewildered at how the hell do I scale this stupid mountain.

I don't even know how I eventually made it but I remember taking the time afterwards to try and scale down "properly" to see if it was meant to be that much of a struggle and laughing so hard at the clearly marked off path leading to the top that I somehow overlooked in my climb.

Also, Highmountain has that Murky quest so there's that.

Frumix said:
I get declined as an 845 healer because I'm a monk and not a paladin so don't think too hard about it and try the next party, chances are they aren't breathing with their mouth.
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LF Healer, no AST pst
 
Robin64

Robin64

Member
Whos fucking stupid idea was it to put a digsite at the Temple of a Thousand Lights in Azsuna. That person needs a good slap.
 
T

Tenebrous

Member
How the hell do you get Rank 3 Starflower gathering?! This is impossible!

piratethingy said:
Suramar is one of my favorite zones of all time and I judge people that don't like it just a lil bit
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It's just a stretched out story zone without XP. Art aside, there's nothing special about it, I think.
 
M

MetroidPrimeRib

Banned
H

Haly

One day I realized that sadness is just another word for not enough coffee.
4iJUBps.png


This is quickly getting intractable.
 
J

jaundicejuice

Member
scy said:
While I know this feeling (Mining, Blacksmithing quests), I'm not too sure if you ever go near that area otherwise so that may be a big part in making the zone feel as leveled off as it does. I did Highmountain as my second zone on my DK purely because of this quest chain and it was the most suffering in the game thus far and is entirely why I dislike Highmountain as a zone. At the same time, it's a memorable experience entirely of being so lost and bewildered at how the hell do I scale this stupid mountain.

I don't even know how I eventually made it but I remember taking the time afterwards to try and scale down "properly" to see if it was meant to be that much of a struggle and laughing so hard at the clearly marked off path leading to the top that I somehow overlooked in my climb.

Also, Highmountain has that Murky quest so there's that.
Click to expand...

I love that one of the driving questions behind my questing experiences in both Highmountain and Stormheim has been: "How do I get there?" Now I know the path to the peak of Highmountain from Thundertotem. It's pretty straight forward to properly scale the mountain peak once you do. But when I was first trying to get to the peak I flew to a flightpath on the border in Stormheim and spent twenty to thirty minutes poking around the base of the peak trying to find my way up to the top. I got lost and wandered into cave system, ran across treasures, rares, scenarios, and eventually stumbled across the way to the peak and remembered what I was supposed to be doing. That's not been a typical WoW leveling experience while exploring older content, that's something an Elderscrolls game like Skyrim would offer. That's one of the reasons I love Legion and zones like Highmountain and Stormheim.
 
F

Fjordson

Member
I like that the enhancement artifact intro has me back in Deepholm. Forgot how cool this zone looks.

Edit: damn, the shammy class hall is pretty dope.
 
D

dimb

Bjergsen is the greatest midlane in the world
jaundicejuice said:
While very beautiful--the WoW world art team seems like they are always on-point with some amazing work these days--Warlords zones felt dull and unimaginative compared to their more creative counter-parts from The Burning Crusade. It's more than just lacking the Twisting Nether as a skybox or having chunks of Outland floating off into space. They excised so many things that made Outland feel like a truly alien world. There is no comparable moment in Warlords to the first time you exit through that canyon and go from the desolate, wasted, ruins of Hellfire Peninsula and enter into the surreal and cerulean blue mushroom jungle of Zangarmarsh. In Warlords of Dreanor they made a very beautiful, pastoral, boring and entirely normal version of Outland. Which would have been fine if the quest design had been there to prop it up but that is arguably not the case with Warlords of Draenor.
Click to expand...
Generally speaking, I would say that the alien nature of the Burning Crusade zones was pretty hit or miss. Hellfire Peninsula really did just feel like an extension of the Blasted Lands, and while I appreciate Zangarmarsh, it was a relief more than anything just to leave the hellish overpopulated PvP mess Blizzard made with Hellfire Peninsula during BC launch. Personally I probably got more out of finding the Zangaraa grotto in Talador with the base of operations Khadgar had set up there.
DtLlSd5.jpg
Click to expand...
I'm not really billing Draenor is some font of creativity, but they stretched themselves more than the Legion zones for me, which are mostly just Kalimdor 2.0. It feels disingenuous to me to write off the creativity of WoD when you had stuff like the really cool transition into Spires as you walk down the cliff with the beam disintegrating stuff from Skyreach, or you explore the really interesting draenei architecture.
LGD5tVP.jpg

usahYbA.jpg
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Personally there is just nothing quite like this in Legion. I am sort of just at a loss as to how someone can criticize this aspect of WoD but enjoy Legion when it's so often just Night Elven ruins or traditional Tauren villages.
jaundicejuice said:
And, again, while being very beautiful, and being an interesting reimagining of the Arakkoa and their lore, Spires of Arak was one of the most heavily theme parked zones in WoD. There's very little in the way of exploring to do in Spires. So much of it is on rails. That's a complaint you can level at most of WoD's zones, heavily instanced and/or on-rails and with sections just partitioned off for awful end-game rep grinds/garrison campaign. You say that Gorgrond's landscape inspires exploration and adventuring and one of your screenshots is from The Pit. An area of the zone you could not explore while leveling and was the site of one of the many tedious garrison daily rep grinds. That entire northern-eastern chunk of Gorgrond is off-limits until you're at cap and doing the garrison campaign, garrison daily grinds or the start of Tanaan campaign to get your shipyard. The only thing there is to find is an unused but fully populated Laughing Skulls village nestled behind the Iron Docks and Blackrock Foundry just past the Grimrail Depot.
Click to expand...
It is difficult for me to really find ire for fairly linear questing paths. That being said, Spires is fairly more freeform than I think is maybe recognized. The chain with the goblins on the southern end, the investigation into Admiral Taylor's garrison, and I think the revival of Terokk are independent chains that can be accessed at almost any time. Yes some of the paths are linear but you have a number of them to choose between.

I also feel that you are undercutting the pieces of Gorgrond available during the questing experience. It doesn't really matter if the player can not reach every location. You still have the zone culminate in a standoff in front of the Iron Docks, and BRF is still a set piece you see. I was using pictures like that to highlight the visual diversity inside the zone more than anything. I do not simply find these zones to be visually appealing. Legion has way more detail and coherence visually, but the quest lines, areas explored, and characters were by and large simply more memorable to me. The flow across many of Legion's zone simply doesn't impress me, and rarely do they feel like they climax to anything very meaningful, particularly when they use the dungeons as the final set piece. The lack of creativity in Legion seems to ingrain itself at the core of the story and what the player is doing often times. Azsuna, Val'sharah Highmountain both have you relentlessly chasing cheeseball villains who keep getting away for no reason. It's a huge problem.
jaundicejuice said:
The design elements that drive and reward exploration in WoD--the bonus objectives, the scenarios you can stumble across, the treasures, and the rares--feel like they were a beta for what's been implemented in Legion. In WoD treasures and rares were a neat idea that quickly become meaningless because they're mostly just pitiful amounts of garrison resources. Here's a couple of ogres guarding a massive treaure chest, what could be inside? Gold? Jewels? A cool weapon or piece of armor!? Nope, it's just 20 garrison resources. Sometimes you would get gear but more often than not, it's vendor trash and maybe a transmog at best. Rarely you would get a toy or a meaningful piece of gear. Pitiful amounts of garrison resources were what drove the rewards for exploring in Warlords. And often what you would fine would be effectively walled off areas you could not go into or just instances from fixed points of a campaign you had completed.
Click to expand...
I feel like there is a fundamental misunderstanding of Warlords if this is the perception. The dynamic daily system is not an evolution of the vignette/treasure system from WoD, and is instead an evolution of the Apexis Dailies, simply broken up into bite sized chunks spread across the world and given more dynamic rewards instead of operating on a single currency. The vignette/treasure system in WoD was incredible for leveling. The only equivalent to this system is the almost insultingly strewn around treasure chests in Legion. WoD's version had loads of unique items packed around the zones or unique little stories that would happen almost organically. This is a level of exploration and in world puzzle solving that WoD had that is completely absent in Legion.

In Spires of Arak you were finding notes of lost coin shipments on the shore and swimming out into the ocean to follow buoy markers that took you to treasure. Finding strange elixirs that revealed secret shadowy treasures at seperate unmarked shrines. Following the clues left by ghosts to find keys hidden in the environment near treasure chests. These were extremely rewarding. Early on you needed any garrison resources you could get, and they gave a substantial amount of experience and there was often a decent chunk of gold or a reasonable item you could find, including hidden followers scattered across the map. This small scale exploration added basic puzzle solving and brought me off the standard path in a way that does not happen in Legion. . These were not meant to be repeatable content, but flavor that greatly enhanced the leveling experience and promoted scouring the zone.

Your story about Highmountain just does not connect with me or my experiences at all. Finding treasures and taking out rares is honestly a huge waste of time in Legion because the AP gains are so inconsequential. Worse than the garrison resources because at least you needed to scrape those together early on to upgrade buildings, and the exp gains are trivial. The path up Highmountain was fairly straightforward and unremarkable with no flourish to its presentation. That it was unmarked and somewhat obtuse is pretty meaningless, and I say this as someone who had a class quest to kill a special worm at the top on my first journey up there, but the trip just felt like no big deal. You wander around and find the correct path and that's that. There is nothing special to the design, and the summit has nothing of value to offer other than being an end point once you find your way.
 
T

Tarazet

Member
MrPing1000 said:
Man, I'm resto shaman main and I cannot do the damn withered training as ele. Dro is killing me, not the withered but ME. Ele is awful. 3 times I've died to him now.
Click to expand...

You can stay in Resto. He killed me a few times as Enhancement before I tried going to him with a full pack of 30+ Withered, blowing Bloodlust, setting the Withered to berserk and kiting him (bear in mind if you go too far he will teleport to you and smack you down). If you do the chests early, it will usually take away your tank and caster and that means you won't have the damage to kill him easily. But if you have a large mass of angry zombies they will make quick work of him.

Also, if you get past him once, kill the easy spider boss after that and then just collect all the treasure chests available to you. If you can sneak past the giant and go up the stairs past the infinite spawning spiders, to get the 25% damage boost, the next run after that will be faceroll.
 
R

Rhaknar

The Steam equivalent of the drunk friend who keeps offering to pay your tab all night.
wow, the Destruction Artifact quest for Warlocks is all kinds of broken. Not only cant I finish it, but I cant even click the portal back to my class hall now (its the one in the udnerbelly right? I havent played lock sicne the first few days of the xpac)
 
P

Pendas

Banned
Doing the East side of Suramar is making me contemplate quitting this expansion. Who thought this kind of gameplay was a good idea?
 
C

CelticKnight

Member
Pendas said:
Doing the East side of Suramar is making me contemplate quitting this expansion. Who thought this kind of gameplay was a good idea?
Click to expand...

My sub expires in 3 days and I'm thinking about letting it lapse. Haven't enjoyed leveling in Legion and the Suramar/Nightfallen rep/Ancient Mana grind is the dull cherry on a underwhelming cake.
 
H

Haly

One day I realized that sadness is just another word for not enough coffee.
Cast from staff plz.

The TBC trailer has so much of it already.
 
S

Strimei

Member
Did the servers go down?

I just joined a group for the Stelleris thing in Suramar, I'm hung up casting slowfall, the wow website's not loading...
 
O

Orochinagis

Member
Strimei said:
Selling the wrists probably still makes a good bit. I made 4k off one I sold just last night.

(btw where can I get your avatar in full?)
Click to expand...

Here (Ragnaros) are selling at 1.5k so not much of gain, I trying to see enchanting but it quickly devaluates.

Here

Magnus said:
New animations are something I didn't realize I wanted and needed. Now give us spell casting ones!
Click to expand...

Casting with staffs really needs a rework casting instant spells with your makes sense but channeling spells or AoE spells needs a staff animation
 
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