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Thompson

Cataclysm

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They kinda had it long before Warhammer with the world pvp events.

Yeah, but no one did those because the WoW community refuses to do something en masse unless there are some super fantastic rewards - other than just having fun.

I think the only one that I ever saw work out real well was... Halaa? I don't remember the name. It was in the area with all the floating islands... oh god I forgot this, too. In Burning Crusade. You know what I'm talking about.

Anyway, I didn't play WOTLK enough to know if there was anything like that, aside from the big main "world" PvP thing that you had to fly up to and was basically just a glorified, secluded battleground.

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Yeah, but no one did those because the WoW community refuses to do something en masse unless there are some super fantastic rewards - other than just having fun.

I think the only one that I ever saw work out real well was... Halaa? I don't remember the name. It was in the area with all the floating islands... oh god I forgot this, too. In Burning Crusade. You know what I'm talking about.

Anyway, I didn't play WOTLK enough to know if there was anything like that, aside from the big main "world" PvP thing that you had to fly up to and was basically just a glorified, secluded battleground.

the last death knight quest was a big group thing that you didn't need to form group for. Same with the forsaken city battle...thing. Whatever the hell their home city is called. Both in wotlk.

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the last death knight quest was a big group thing that you didn't need to form group for. Same with the forsaken city battle...thing. Whatever the hell their home city is called. Both in wotlk.

Yeah, but those both fall victim to phasing, which just means it's a one-off thing. And you don't even need a group for them, if I recall correctly. They're entirely possible to solo.

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Yeah, but no one did those because the WoW community refuses to do something en masse unless there are some super fantastic rewards - other than just having fun.

I think the only one that I ever saw work out real well was... Halaa? I don't remember the name. It was in the area with all the floating islands... oh god I forgot this, too. In Burning Crusade. You know what I'm talking about.

Anyway, I didn't play WOTLK enough to know if there was anything like that, aside from the big main "world" PvP thing that you had to fly up to and was basically just a glorified, secluded battleground.

Personally I believe it has to do with design, you can't blame the community for those first PVP events because they were in the most remote locations in the world. Even if they had decent rewards, it'd be difficult to encourage people to do it. They were added just before Naxx, so it's arguable that halaa might have been designed before them and they were added as an afterthought into the game to test out the mechanics of persisting world pvp information.

The TM rewards look significant, and given it's been a hotbed for PVP since release, it should see some traffic. It should be fun.

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Well, the Silithus and EPL PvP crap were both victim to poor design. They were utter shit, even on the two occasions where people actually bothered to go out there. The objectives were too spread out so it just became a game of musical chairs, only you couldn't actually see the other people playing.

But it was also a problem of lack of incentive. Very few people who play the game are willing to do anything unless there is a tangible reward, and once they get it, they're out. Exception, for whatever reason: raiding. For the longest time, Blizzard was doing its darndest to discourage open-world PvP. They still are, but it's much better than it has been.

Either way, this is a tangent and detracts from my main point: too much focus on soloing!

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Either way, this is a tangent and detracts from my main point: too much focus on soloing!
To that in particular I point to the dungeon guide queueing system. If you play a tank class you will literally never have to wait to get into a dungeon and level up with other people, you could easily level from 15-80 without leaving a major city. Healers queue pretty quickly as well, and DPS are able to blend dungeons with regular questing.

I'm not sure I would want more in the world implicit raid questing, but I do really love the game when an expansion is released and the entire server is invading new lands as if it were a world event.

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I consider the dungeon queuing system a point in my favor, actually. It's even cross-server, now, isn't it? "Here, go play with a bunch of random people who you may never see again."

That is just a horrible idea if your goal is to promote group play.

I mean, it's nice for the casual player or people on servers with not enough people or whatever, but it does nothing to alleviate my concerns and does everything to promote the idea of you standing all on your own and not having to depend on the people you'll actually see every day.

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I consider the dungeon queuing system a point in my favor, actually. It's even cross-server, now, isn't it? "Here, go play with a bunch of random people who you may never see again."

That is just a horrible idea if your goal is to promote group play.

I mean, it's nice for the casual player or people on servers with not enough people or whatever, but it does nothing to alleviate my concerns and does everything to promote the idea of you standing all on your own and not having to depend on the people you'll actually see every day.

The dungeon finder just gets you badges and money and that's all it will do.

If you want to get to the highest level content in the game you need to raid, and if you want to raid you need to work as a team.

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Twig I'm just now realizing you said you didn't play WotLK enough to know if there was something like Halaa. I was assuming you knew about Wintergrasp, which is basically the next step in that direction. It's a zone in the middle of Northrend with a fortress, 4 workshops, and 3 towers. Every 2 1/2 hours or so there's a battle for the fortress, and whoever ends up winning will gain control of a Raid instance in the fort called "Vault of Archavon".

VoA is a massive incentive, because every major patch they will add a new boss that's relatively easy which drops highest level tier loot (non-heroic). Also, you get a crazy amount of honor from the quests that you complete by participating in the raid (destroy a tower, win wintergrasp, kill 10 alliance, destroy 3 siege vehicles). They balance the teams by proportionally buffing the members of the faction with fewer people in the zone, so that on server with major faction imbalances it's still a relatively fair fight. They added a pooling system in a recent patch that restricted the zone to 200 players per faction during the battle because some servers were having huge lag problems when 2,000 people showed up to fight, but other than that I'd say it's a much more organic experience than a battleground. Any player that choses to join the battle will be automatically put into a raid (there will typically be two per faction), and will share quest objectives as other members take out towers and enemy players. There's also a ranking and siege weapon system to breach the fortress, but that's less fun than it should be.

Other incentives for participating include StoneKeeper shards, which are rewarded from WG quests as well as from bosses in dungeons killed while you control the zone (like the towers in BC). Which can be used as currency for some PVP and heirloom gear as well as turned into honor which can be used for purchasing gems. If you're a hardcore PVP player, it's the best way to get honor, if you're a raider you'll want to do it often for some easy gems, and if you're casual you'll want to control the zone so you can get an easy PUG raid for VoA which will get you great gear. The zone is a bit like elemental plateau, in that the best elementals are scattered around. And when weekly quests are given for killing elementals (or players) of a given type, you can run into some interesting fights.

I never played Warhammer online, but does that sound similar to the world PVP group events? WAR and WotLK were released in Sept and Nov of 2008 respectively, so I'm not sure if it could be inspired by that system, maybe there will be some more influences from WAR in the TM PVP zone.

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You keep mentioning a Tarren Mill PvP zone in cataclysm, but I'm pretty sure there isn't one.

The equivalent of Wintergrasp in the new expansion is an island called Tol Barad, which has the same fight over a fortress to gain control of a zone thing and additional daily quests (frequently compared to the Isle of Quel'Danas).

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Wow you're absolutely right, for some reason I thought it was in Tarren Mill.

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Wow you're absolutely right, for some reason I thought it was in Tarren Mill.

For some reason that sounded right to me too, maybe something PvP related is happening there... not sure.

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Twig I'm just now realizing you said you didn't play WotLK enough to know if there was something like Halaa. I was assuming you knew about Wintergrasp, which is basically the next step in that direction. It's a zone in the middle of Northrend with a fortress, 4 workshops, and 3 towers. Every 2 1/2 hours or so there's a battle for the fortress, and whoever ends up winning will gain control of a Raid instance in the fort called "Vault of Archavon".

I brought up the big glorified battleground earlier. Wintergrasp was cool, but far too secluded. You couldn't just jump into it any time like with Halaa, you actually had to make an effort to go there.

When I said "something like Halaa", I was talking more along the lines of something that is constantly accessible as you're questing in that area. Also, to clarify, I did play WOTLK for about four months. That is considerably less than I played TBC or vanilla, though, and I don't trust myself to remember if there was anything like Halaa that people actually did.

But also, yes, it is similar to the public quest system in Warhammer in the way it works. It's just, as I said, for too secluded.

The dungeon finder just gets you badges and money and that's all it will do.

If you want to get to the highest level content in the game you need to raid, and if you want to raid you need to work as a team.

I have already mentioned that raiding is an exception, as are other instanced crap like arena. End-game raiding is totally different from when you're just leveling up. It's also on a completely different level in terms of dedication, and requires commitment that not everyone can actually give. Like me. I tried raiding in WOTLK and gave up because I just didn't have the time.

But that's a different matter entirely.

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I brought up the big glorified battleground earlier. Wintergrasp was cool, but far too secluded. You couldn't just jump into it any time like with Halaa, you actually had to make an effort to go there.

When I said "something like Halaa", I was talking more along the lines of something that is constantly accessible as you're questing in that area. Also, to clarify, I did play WOTLK for about four months. That is considerably less than I played TBC or vanilla, though, and I don't trust myself to remember if there was anything like Halaa that people actually did.

But also, yes, it is similar to the public quest system in Warhammer in the way it works. It's just, as I said, for too secluded.

I have already mentioned that raiding is an exception, as are other instanced crap like arena. End-game raiding is totally different from when you're just leveling up. It's also on a completely different level in terms of dedication, and requires commitment that not everyone can actually give. Like me. I tried raiding in WOTLK and gave up because I just didn't have the time.

But that's a different matter entirely.

a portal to wintergrasp opened in the main wotlk city everytime a battle was going to happen. As for the tarren mill stuff, I don't know how it was on other servers but it was frequently a world pvp hotbed for some reason on mine. It scares me that I remember this shit.

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a portal to wintergrasp opened in the main wotlk city everytime a battle was going to happen.

Which requires you to be in Dalaran or however it's spelled. To be fair, that's where most end-game people tend to hang out, so that's fine, but if you're just leveling up, or not into raiding and all that jazz, or out questing, etc...

Meh. Once again I find myself at odds with the majority of WoW players and so I will step out of this thread.

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Right now I'm running my ass off to try to do all the low-level quests and instances from vanilla WoW one last time before the whole thing is replaced. It's an amazing accomplishment to see how much content is in those continents. JEEEEEEESUS. It just doesn't end!

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Ah, yes. I shall miss killing those 10 boars for farmer Cobb. The time we spent together was short, but his endearing wife and his charming personality will make them unforgettable. Farewell ye Olde World of Warcraft! Farewell family Cobb!

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Unfortunately i'm bargo'd.

I don't even know whether to make a joke about it which would imply a certain quality of it. Now I know how Nick felt.

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It's not like it's not leaked everywhere else on the internet. mmo-champion is nothing but non-stop cataclysm spoilers

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Yea, but he still ok'd on an agreement not to talk about it, so you know. Thompson is a man of honour! :tup: (At least in a public forum, he is :mock:)

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Yesterday I did (yes, in one day): Black Morass, Sunken Temple, Zul'Gurub, Upper Blackrock Spire and half of Molten Core. Up for today: the other half of Molten Core, and probably actually getting some work done!

You'd better believe I'll see all content before it's wiped!

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So the pre-Cataclysm major patch is out 4.01. Stat points are simplified, mastery has been introuced. Classes talent trees and spells are massively different (and arguably much better across the board). Badge currency has been normalized so that you can grind out top tier loot from badges you get from heroic dungeons. And a bunch more stuff I can't even keep track of:

http://wow.joystiq.com/2010/10/12/patch-4-0-1-information-roundup/

If you want to warm up and kill off Lich King before he's deprecated, now's a good time to jump back in.

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So far I'm liking the new patch! My Death Knight's ghoul pet can now transform into a big monstrosity, there's a great more focus on Death Coil as a resource mechanic and all runic power spells are cheaper. Good stuff.

Today I got the Loremaster achievement for the entire old world and did the first pre-Icecrown Citadel dungeons (Forge of Souls and Pit of Saron). I'm also feverishly trying to level my Inscription but it's incredibly slow and tedious. I have to persist though, if I want to be able to do my thang in Cataclysm.

All in all, a bucket of fun! :tup:

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I'm really enjoying 4.0 as well. I'm really torn as to who will be my main and 1st alt in Cata!

If any of you play druid, shammy or priest as caster or healer i'd love to hear how you are finding the classes. I'm looking at one of those to be my caster/healer alt. They each seem to have some fun stuff going on mechanics-wise. I really like chacra at the moment, it just seems like a great "oh shit there is xxxx type of damage incoming!" button. Disco of course got the wonderful PW: Barrier and the very interesting atonement/smite spec. Shammy seems a little tame compared, but they get spiritwalker at 85 which is pretty. Unfortunatly, my druid is currently feral/feral so i haven't been able to try any caster stuff on him for having zero caster gear. Shadow and ele i've tried but i don't know enough to really know what i'm doing.

As for main i'm torn between by shiny new warrior tank and my current main druid tank. I was blown away by the fun warriors have tanking (never guessed it from the whiners in my guild) with all the shiny buttons. I know druids get all their forms and whatnots, but when sindragosa is hitting you it isn't easy to access all the fun stuff locked away. for DS i really liked kitty before 4.0. ain't tryed it since and not much chance to try a dps warrior spec either so any opinions are welcome.

I'm not really looking for OP toons ever. i asked this same qustion on my guild forums and got back "omg moonkins are pwning dps atm" which made me sad. So, if you have any opintions on what is fun, what is not and where wonderful intricies arise in playstyle with any of these classes and specs i'd love to hear them!

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