WoW: Pandaria

For a value of viable that involves making the healer do a lot more work because you're squishy as fuck, yes.

The difference between me tanking in tank and me tanking in DPS mode was a 25 minute clear versus a 10 minute clear of Hellfire Ramparts, because of how goddamn terrible most DPS were. I would always ask the healer, but they would almost invariably say "a faster clear is worth more effort".

I tanked a good portion of ZF in cloth. As a ret pally. Chain pulling. Low level instances can be tanked by undergeared mages these days. Hell, I use to see fury warriors tank ramparts while leveling healers, and I hardly noticed until I looked at recount for the boss fights.

LFD at 58-64 is kind of odd.

You've got people getting used to the DK class (and often to tanking itself) as well as DPS who are often underpowered as they put together a proper TBC set (excluding heirlooms obv).

By the later Auchindoun instances things have equalised a little, but the variability in group ability in Ramps/BF/Slave Pens/Underbog can be a fun killer.

Maybe they're old-school and recently came back? Frost was the DK tank spec when the class was introduced if I remember correctly.

Actually, all three trees had viable tanking builds, although Blood was considered the "optimal" spec. They changed it in Cata to make Blood an exclusive tank spec and the other two trees dps.

Watch a player level a human warlock from level 1 to 90 in an hour (time lapsed).

Takes him about 15 minutes to get to 60 (or at least head to Outland), about another 10 minutes to get to 70, about 10 minutes more to hit 80, less than 10 minutes after that to get to 85, and then the remaining 15+ to hit 90. Assuming it's the same timescale throughout, that's pretty interesting. About the same amount of time to go 1-60 as it takes to go 85-90.

Ok so I quit for oh about a year- then a few months before Pandaria dropped I grabbed a 60 day time card to ramp up my gear and such to get ready for panda-time. Then 3 weeks ago I finally caved and grabbed it.

I am just absolutely loving it so far. I love my Panda monk- seems like a great new class. My DK is sitting at about 87.5 so far in Pandaria and I have to say, this beats BC for my new favorite land. Just gorgeous rolling hills and farmlands, very silly and fun characters (ok I know a panda saying "Git er done" is stupid but it is kinda funny) and between the way the do the questing, the farming, the cooking, pet battles, collecting and all the cool new engineer swag, I am enjoying the heck out of it. I cannot wait to hit 90 so I can start seriously working on my farm and seriously working towards the cash I need to make my rocket ship mount- and speaking of mounts-the new flying dragons are sweet-

BC was good but with the problems with Wrath and the disappointment of Cata really held me back from grabbing Pandaria. All I can say now is, shit, I am hooked again. And yes, I did my farming at work on my laptop before everyone got here this morning.

Mists is gorgeous and it captures the rolling mountains of southern China. Blizzard did a great job of making Pandaria feel more lived in than the rest of Azeroth (eg. we see villagers doing day to day work).

Probably the best spot for this:

Seems legit.

I’ve been playing a lot lately. In between leveling a monk (extremely easy with heirloom gear and guild bonuses) and running old raids for battle pets and transmog gear I’m slowly going through the faction dailies. I’m still only at the low end of LFR gear (467 ilevel) but at least I can run the first two raid trios. Selling off blues and extra battle pets has netted me around 30K so far this expansion, which I’ve blown on the Lich King mammoth and Dalaran teleportation ring. I love how the mount is bind on account, so my leveling alts have access to a repair vendor at all times. I’d get the fancy Pandaria version of that mammoth but it’s 108K, which is a little much. Anyway, still having a lot of fun with it.

Sorry, it's true! #dinomount pic.twitter.com/dujgelVw

— WoW Insider (@WoWInsider) February 19, 2013

I just hope there's a way to get that dino mount that doesn't involve rare raid drops / killing rare mobs. Cause I've never seen one of those things drop anything good. (My inner 6 year old neeeeeds a triceratops, favorite childhood dinosaur.)

My poor Panda is just sitting at 25-ish since I am having so much fun with my 90 DK right now- but yeah heirlooms and guild bonus just makes him level like a madman, er bear.

There is an island full of elites that drop dinosaur bones. 9999 dinosaur bones can get you a white direhorn mount.

I am absolutely not kidding.

No way - that has to be a total lie. There is no way anyone I would ever do anything so messed up..ever ever ever (/lived in the Netherwing cave for 2 months collecting eggs).

Elites? Really? Ugh. /lfg boned

I hope you get more than 1 bones per kill, elite isn't too bad at higher level now.

As far as I know, that quest is for a raptor mount, not the direhorn. And to be fair, so far on the PTR each elite can drop up to 9 bones. So yeah, it'll still be a grind to get the mount, but that's not exactly new territory for WoW.

YEEEEEEEeeeeaaaaaahhhhh, only 1000+kills..

On the plus side, they finally gonna buff Ret Pally DPS, finally Wing + Holy Avenger is going to be on the same cooldown, the old 3/2 cooldown is lame, not mentioning Ret Pally dps sucks.

It's for this quest to get this mount, which I don't think is nearly impressive enough to require all that work.

Bring me up to speed on the account wide pets thing. I have a character that has the PvZ Sunflower - does this mean now all my characters can use Sunflower? AT the same time or do you have to swap her around? What happens if I delete the original character who acquired Sunflower - does she stay in the pool? What if I delete all my characters at once (It's happened.)

And I can trade pets, now, like trading other stuff? Mail them, even? So I can go and win a Sunflower and then mail her to my mom?

Yes, all your characters on all realms will have any pet you've ever learned. Same goes for mounts! Pets can be given names, which will persist across your characters as well. If you decide to do pet battles, they'll keep the same levels across characters too. So you can pet battle while your alt is leveling with your same team.

Some pets are tradeable (by putting them into a "crate") and others are not. If I recall right the Sunflower cannot be crated.

Thanks - I'll double check that.

so as someone that collected pets up to the cataclysm expansion, over 100 at that time. Does that mean I now have some extremely rare pets that I can sell to other people?

I also still have the raptor mount from Zul'Gurub. Is that that the mount you folks are talking about?

You can trade pets that you get as drops or rewards, but not ones you capture during pet battles. This morning I picked up a duplicate pet off a boss in Molten Core (I solo the old instances to try and complete my collection of pets, and you can have three of each type), so I crated it and put it on the AH. Prices are all over the map, from the common world event reward pets selling as low as 10g to the rare drops from AQ40 selling well into the thousands. I sold a sprite darter hatchling for 2700g the other day.

Or you could just buy it from a vendor.
Exalted rep, admittedly, but as long as the rep is structured like the 5.1 factions rather than the base MoP ones that's not so onerous.

If I only have a laser gun... panda riding dinosaur using laser guns....

As I mentioned earlier, that's not the mount attached to the 9999 bones quest. That one's actually cool, while the one for grinding all those elites is just a raptor using the same model that's been in the game since release except with a different texture. I suppose the coolness of the mount is probably irrelevant to the type of people willing to collect 9999 bones anyway.

White raptor you say? It'll be time-consuming to obtain because of this. After all, we don't want whiny idiots causing a scene "to diminish the achievements of our veteran players".

Here you go: Gyro-Balanced Khorium Destroyer.

Help a brother out. I started reading this thred, and then I glanced over at the unopened copy of Mists I happened to have lying around. So I succumbed and resubbed.
Now I'm not sure what to do. I have a 56 Hunter and a 61 Death Knight, my guild is abandoned, they've changed the game completely and I haven't played for years except for a month of Cataclysm...

So what should I do first? Anybody here on a Euro sever?
I'm going o regret his, aren't I?

The Magic 8 Ball says...Likely.

I'm a Day 1 WoW player and have been WoW-free for many years. Although returning sounds appealing to me, I just don't think I have it in me to come back up to speed after such a long absence. Plus, I'd rather not have it monopolize my time, as it did in the past.

With the addition of LFR, I feel like I can play WOW very casually, and it helps I'm in the same guild as my coworkers.

I got my pally to 90 after MOP, then I stopped, now I'm starting again, maybe like 3-4 hours a week at most.

OK, take your death knight, respec him with one of the DPS specs, and start doing BC LFD runs. Do not do BC quests, they are slow and boring for the most part compared to Wrath and post-wrath content. The quests that are tied to the dungeons actually start inside the dungeons now. Don't worry about your gear, whatever you had at 61 when you quit will be fine to start doing BC dungeon runs. If you get bored with the dungeons, then sure go to do some quest content to mix it up.

Once you hit 68, go to Northrend and do Wrath quests and Wrath LFD runs. At 80, go to one of the two starting Cataclysm zones and repeat -- or skip LFD if you find the Cataclysm content fun. I enjoyed it the first time. I guess that's true of the Wrath content too. At 85, go to Pandaria. Let us know when you hit 90. :)

If you really want a guild, it shouldn't be too hard to find one doing recruitment in the capital cities.

This is all assuming you like PvE content, not PvP. I have no idea what the PvP advancement strategy is these days.

Purely PvE.
Which btw was one of the two acronyms I understood. I'd love to do BC LFD... if I knew what it was.

BC = Burning Crusade. (i.e. all content in the Outlands)

LFD = Looking For Dungeon. It's an in-game tool you can use to auto-find groups to run dungeons with.

Pvp is this. If you are under 60 do not pvp unless you have all heirlooms period. At 60 you can queue up and get roflstomped for some reasonably cheap legacy gear. That at least gives you a fighting chance, near 70 you grab the old arena gear. Last I knew it was at area 57.

Similar process for 70-80. Get a full set of arena gear, so on so forth til 90 at which point you are kinda screwed til 5.2 launches with the whole tiered pvp sets routine.

...
Looking for Dungeon is a button near your character/settings bla bla bar. It is a circle thingy. Open it and chose a role, in your case for the DK would be DPS(the sword). Healer will be auto unclickable. I think at 61 you can end up in Blood furnace or Ramparts but expect ramparts more than anything. The queue will try to put you in an instance at least one time .. for getting quests, after that it just waits til you reach the next level break to put you in new dungeons again.
What that means in the short term is from 58->62 its almost all ramparts runs, then you get an odd blood furnace followed by underbog runs til you tear your hair out, then slave pens.
You rarely see the third and forth dungeons because Burning crusade content was setup that the third dungeon was for almost lvl cap, and the last for grinding honor to get the heroic key. (usually a quest involved in them back then too for that).

It is worth it to note that 3 out of 4 times in anything past hellfire citadel if your group wipes half will drop if not all of them. They have not "easy moded" the rez point. The run in the marsh is brutal, most can't find their way back.

Got my Cloud Serpent this weekend. 1/2 way to exalted with the Tillers and I just found out Scenarios are mini-dungeons and use the LFG--- Plus Panda-land continues to just look wonderful. Bliz did a great job with the expansion and I am really enjoying the heck out of this game.

My biggest problems with Pandaria are that you have to put so much time in to complete all the factions (which is changing in 5.2 a bit), and that the difficulty jumps between LFR, Normal, and Heroic raids are not linear. For the first part it means sinking all your time into one character, making getting a second geared nearly impossible if you're unable to play all day every day. For the second, the difficulty difference between LFR and Normal is *huge* compared to that of Normal and Heroic. It made raiding with the guild I'm in unfun. I still go because it'll make it that much more difficult for them to proceed (aka replacing one of the top players with someone of lesser gear/ability), but it's very frustrating.