WoW: Pandaria

So the dumb question is how do I queue for the second part of Mogu'shan Vaults?

I can't be arsed to log into the game, but it should be the entry under the first part. It's probably called "Vault of Mysteries" or some such.

Well, if you read the shitty novel, the horde had some cunning plan that they were launching a major attack on the alliance in Theramore. So naturally, Varian sent every single one of his top commanders to oversee the defense and counter attack. This was all part of Garrosh's cunning plan to lure the alliance into a trap. Then bam! One bomb wipes out ALL of the alliance top brass, and a significant portion of its armed forces. Yeah, it's as dumb as it sounds.

As for why Rhonin was there: after Krasus died (no, I don't know, either), he left Rhonin a bunch of prophecies. One of which is that Jaina would be Rhonins successor as leader of the Kirin Tor. So he heard about the attack and went to Theramore to protect Jaina, getting himself killed in the blast and ensuring Jaina would take over the Mage guild.

I feel a little bit dumber for a) having just typed that and b) actually knowing what happened.

The same way you queued for the first part. The only restriction is that you have to have already beaten every boss in the first part before it will allow you to queue for the second.

Ah. The dreaded "instantly kill them all" weapon. It was very considerate of the horde to wait to use this weapon until after Blizzard had time to make 3 Warcraft games and an MMO. Can you imagine what would have happened if the orcs had used that thing in the beginning of Warcraft 1?

No money hats for Blizzard is what.

But thankfully Blizzard's long nightmare of prosperity is over, and the horde has finally won their silly conflict. Just produce a dozen more of those "instantly kill them all" weapons, and they can get back to their true love: pig farming.

Ah but in order to use the bomb they needed the Focusing Iris (the super mega weapon from the dragon soul raid that had no in game explanation), which was kept under lock and key in Dalaran. Until the belfs of the Kirin Tor betrayed Rhonin and stole it. Jaina stole it back so the horde convienently cannot make more bombs.

They're not even trying anymore, are they?

"What's that? Come again? You think our plots are.... what was that last word? SORRY... I CAN'T HEAR YOU OVER THE SOUND OF ALL THE MONEY WE'RE MAKING!!"

Oh by the way, from a lore perspective the Kirin Tor are back in the alliance, which means any horde in Dalaran should be KoS. Also Dalaran isn't in Northrend anymore.

Edit to add: it should be noted that neither of those things are in game. This is what happens when you shunt all your story development to second-rate fantasy hacks.

IT WAS ALL A DREAM.

To be fair, the number of people who play WoW for its story is probably pretty low. Hell, what percentage of players do you reckon even read quest text?

Counter-arguement: Anything that kills off more of Knaak the Hack's Marty Stus is a Good Thing by default.

I have been tempted to take a stab at the Ironman challenge. I may even do an LP of it.

For those that may not know, the iron man challenge involves leveling to 90 without: grouping, potions, buffs, talents, class specializations, glyphs, flasks, bgs, dungeons, raids, gear above white quality, and not dying. My first attempt a few months ago got me to level 15 or so.

Are you allowed to do quests? I presume if a quest gives you a buff, you have to cancel it off, of course.

What about rested xp?

You're allowed quests and self buffs. Rested is okay too.

You also can't be in a guild with any XP boosts. I started the Ironman thing a while back and lasted about 2 hours before I realized it wasn't fun at all. Not to discourage anyone from trying it, but basically you take the tedium of normal leveling and then multiply that by about a million.

To be fair, it would probably be okay if I hadn't already leveled several characters through the entire game prior to trying it. But seeing the same content except slower just doesn't appeal to me. It's probably a bit easier since the Mists talent system revamp, though, seeing as how a ton of things that were previously talent choices have been rolled into the baseline abilities. I dunno, I might take another stab at it once I run out of things to do.

I don't think so. Most of those effects were rolled into class specializations, and Ironman never chooses a spec.

Most of them, yeah, but there are more abilities now that are shared between specs as well, so you'll get more stuff even without choosing a spec. It won't make Ironman a breeze or anything, but every little bit helps.

I guess. I'm thinking mostly of the two classes I've played seriously in MOP. Warlocks saw the bulk of their various attack spells shuffled into class specializations, particularly Agony, Doom, Soul Fire, and all of the AOE spells. Warriors would be almost unplayable, since they now rely heavily on their spec-specific attacks to build rage.

In Battlegrounds it seems like I'm CCed more often and longer than in past expansions. Maybe it's the built-in CC timers but I noticed I'm stunlocked to death more often -- warriors charge my hunter and the whack at me while I'm stunned. I'm feared a lot by spriests and warlocks. It's annoying that hunters' CCs just slow or if they do immobilize the CC can be broken with a poke...

Actually, it looks like you're right. I haven't looked at all the classes, but I didn't realize how many abilities you don't even get access to unless you choose your spec now. I don't know if the Ironman site is able to track everyone, but it would appear there's only a single legit level 90 Ironman character, a priest. The next closest is an 87 druid.

You have to approach Ironman like survival horror. That said I think not choosing a spec in the current system is a bit harsh, yet in the end it really doesn't matter.
I also suggest that you only start an Ironman when there is an event up, mostly because the dailies for events tend to be low level, and give extrodinary xp. You can double dip when an event and darkmoon are in town. Your goal is of course to get the heck to 20 as fast as possible since only Archeology gives anything like reasonable experience.

Well, archaeology is a secondary profession and as such disbarred, I thought.

Anyway, my reason for doing this isn't because I think it'll be fun, but because it will be painful, which is perfect for a Lets Play :D.

http://wowironman.com/rules

Are these the legitimate rules? Sounds like a damn nightmare. How do they know if someone helped you out?

I don't see why they limit you to white or grey items. That along with the no talent spec thing is a pretty artificial constraint. You should at least be able to use quest reward gear.

Quest reward gear wouldn't make it much of a challenge.

7. No food buffs or other external buffs (including buffs from items and other players)

When I use to play I would buff anyone around who needed a buff. This can't be the correct set of rules

8. No groups or assistance from other characters, even if not grouped

wtf??

Someone tell me these rules are bogus

The whole point is for it to be brutally difficult. And they don't know if someone helped you out, but they assume anyone trying to do something like this is going to be a good sport about it. There's no achievement or reward, you just do it if you want a challenge.

Thanks for the info, I thought it was an Achievement!

Well, my plan has hit a bit of a snag. My sub has lapsed. And I don't really feel too keen on re-upping just to torture myself. Ah well, maybe whenever I get the WoW urge again Ill consider it.

That's when I stopped playing. My subscription ended because my credit card changed. No warning, no nothing, just couldn't log in. I took that as a sign that they no longer wanted me to play their game. It was easy to let go.

Ghostcrawler on Twitter talking about the cross-realm zone mechanic:

Q: Do you feel like CRZ takes away the one advantage small pop servers had of less competition for rare spawns?
A: We don't really want small pop servers to have advantages though. We think larger pop servers are more fun.


Q: Meanwhile, I generally prefer an uncrowded zone for questing. What are the specific pros/cons to the dev team?
A: I don't think WoW can compete well as a single player game. Its strengths lie in other players.
However, I also believe that often those benefits are subtle enough that they aren't always obvious to players.

This is one of those instances where he's way out of touch with the actual game and how it's being played. While I agree that the endgame is a lot more fun with people and obviously dungeons require it, there are virtually zero benefits to having other people around while you're questing which is what the question was about. WoW pretty much is a single player game until you hit the level cap and it's been that way for a very long time. Questing on PvP servers are obviously very much affected by how many people are around, but in PvE it's almost always detrimental to encounter other players while doing your quests.

CRZ is the single worst thing to happen to WoW in ages. Competing for those 4 quest mobs in a kill 10 mobs quest with 3 other people is not, in any stretch of the imagination 'fun'. Trying to get a group together is similarly pointless "I was here first, you have to wait your turn!" is the attitude a lot of people have. My absolute favourite bit of CRZ shitfuckery is during the Darkmoon Faire. the faire ends at midnight server time. I play on a pacific-time server because I'm on the west coast. When I'm in a CRZ server, all of a sudden, I'm two hours ahead. So I can finish up the last of the necessary DMF stuff at 10:30pm, head out to Elwynn, which still has the DMF icon on the map, and won't be able to teleport to the island because all of a sudden I'm 2 hours ahead, and it's now 12:30 and DMF closed up shop 30 minutes ago. And then there's gathering. MoP mostly fixed the problem of fighting for nodes by making them absolutely everywhere and giving you an inventory item that lets you see even more nodes. The old world though? There's still places where you're going to be spending most of the day looking for that one ore spawn so you can level up your BS'ing without having to spend several hundred thousand gold on the AH.

The other nice thing is how unstable it all is, whenever you cross into a new zone there's a noticable 2-3 second delay where the entire game just kinda hangs as it loads you into a new server.

I've only had this happen a few times, but I dislike when I'm running up to kill a mob and it CRZs me to a new zone and the mob disappears.

I'm someone that enjoys having other people around, even if I'm soloing. It makes the world feel a bit more alive and not all interaction is completing quests or killing things together. But like always, sometimes other people cause problems too. As much as there's problems with CRZ, I think it is a good addition to the game. Though, I leveled on a low pop server with CRZ. The CRZ experience on a high pop server may be more aggravating.

I dislike it when I fly into a new zone and dismount randomly.

I played the original WoW when it came out, and a bit of the first expansion. I recently returned to playing when I found out a work friend plays.

CRZ is the worst "new" thing I've experienced. I don't mind them trying to make the worlds feel more full, but they need to tune some of the mob spawns if that is the case. There have been quite a few times a bunch of us have been standing around waiting for something to spawn.

It varies depending on which zone you're in. The respawn rate of named quest mobs tends to be really quick as well as granting credit to everyone who attacked them in the newer content. But if you're going through Outland or Northrend, unless they've fixed it recently those mobs are tied to the person who attacked them first and will only give kill credit to other people in the same group. Guild Wars 2 has completely spoiled me with this issue since everything everyone does counts and there's pretty much zero fighting over anything. You're always basically in one large group with everyone around you.

I've heard mixed things about this. Can I run the same LFR twice, and on the 2nd run use a charm to get a shot at loot even though I've already downed the boss? 5.2 is getting rid of the valor upgrade and I'd really like to get the staff from Terrace while I can still upgrade.

Yes, you can. I've done it.

I know you can use a charm on a boss you've already killed, but I'm not sure if you can do it if you already used a charm on that same boss that week. Which means there's no reason not to just use the charm the first time and get both rolls at once. I've never done LFR more than once in a week, so I'm not certain on this, but I can't confirm whether or not you can use a charm on the same boss more than once a week. I imagine you probably can't. Since you can hold 10 charms at once, someone could conceivably kill a boss 11 times and get a roll each time and I'd be really surprised if Blizzard allowed that. As far as I can tell, you get 2 rolls on each boss kill a week: one from the kill and one from the charm.