The Gnomeregan reclamation was something of a sham. They didn't want to remove the instance or make a new capital out of it, so the gnomes only retook the surface. The event ended in the main boss detonating another radiation bomb.
I tried off-spec healing on my druid at low levels in Deadmines. It did not go well. I think it just depends, I'm not a very good healer anyway.
My experience in vanilla (supported by my lolexperience healing two dungeons yesterday) was that an offspec healer is perfectly fine under normal circumstances, but has fewer tools available to cope with shit hitting the fan.
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"Trans Am Jesus" is "what hanged me"
Dual spec now only costs 10g but still requires level 40 I think. So until then there is no reason to have a pure healing spec as it is a pain in the ass to level resto/holy.
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The best way to make America great is to lower the standards!
Dual spec is purchasable at level 30 now. I remember being confused because somewhere in-game it still said lvl 40, at least a week ago, but it's there at 30. The 10g thing I have mixed feelings about. On the one hand, it feels like it trivializes all the work I had to do on my earlier characters for that and for the more expensive riding skills. On the other hand, I still make and level a lot of alts, so complaining that it's easier now seems a bit silly.
I've been leveling my main really lazily, getting all the meta-quest achieves for each zone before moving on, and in the case of Hyjal completely finishing the quest line as it is very fun and interesting. Some of the counters for those achievements are bugged right now, like the one for Vashj'ir. It said I was still 15 short, then it didn't count one, then it counted one three times, then two quests later it dinged and said I was done. At any rate I finally finished with that zone, unique and interesting but I got tired of it surprisingly quickly, and made my way to Deepholm, which I have enjoyed nearly as much as Hyjal so far. If Uldum and Twilight Highlands are close to as good then I will be quite pleased overall with the new content.
Still some bugs though, aside from faulty achievement trackers. I tried to run Stonecore last night but received an 'instance not found' error message, then got disconnected repeatedly on further attempts to enter the instance.
FWIW, after watching the new forums send real names (in theory, just your own when you're logged in) over unencrypted HTTP, I sent my note to privacy@ asking them to delete my personal information. My accounts are gone -- they cannot be restored by any means. But! When Blizzard decides that their new privacy policy is that privacy sucks, they won't have my data to leak. At least in theory.
__________________ Hear me / and if I close my mind in fear / please pry it open See me / and if my face becomes sincere / beware Hold me / and when I start to come undone / stitch me together Save me / and when you see me strut / remind me of what left this outlaw torn
The overall emphasis seems to have shifted to interesting story and fun quests, rather than challenging gameplay.
So, I almost made a crack here about how maybe they should include some interesting stories or fun quests if that's going to be their focus, but I restrained myself, and I am now going to give them some props for The Day That Deathwing Came. It's definitely a new school quest, in that you get a crapload of experience (srsly, like a quarter of a level if you do it when it's level appropriate) for watching some cutscenes, but it's entertaining and reflects the quirky side of the Blizzard setting very well. You get sent out to find a group that has wandered off from the town in the Badlands and, instead of needing to be rescued, the three of them turn out to be just sitting around a campfire drinking. The entire "quest" is listening to them tell stories of their own heroism when Deathwing attacked the Badlands. Having just completed that horrible chain where you ride a non-interactive caravan around the Plaguelands and listen to a couple of Paladins act out a bad buddy movie between steps, it was extremely refreshing. Also, it has my all time favorite quest objective:
Punch Deathwing in the Face 0/1
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"Trans Am Jesus" is "what hanged me"
Interesting side note: I asked them to nuke my personal information from their systems. Within a week, I'd gotten an apparently real "account locked for suspicious activity" message sent to an email address they theoretically shouldn't even have anymore.
The obvious paranoid explanation is that someone at Blizzard has realized that a list of accounts that are known to be not in use would be a marketable thing.
__________________ Hear me / and if I close my mind in fear / please pry it open See me / and if my face becomes sincere / beware Hold me / and when I start to come undone / stitch me together Save me / and when you see me strut / remind me of what left this outlaw torn
Na, I get dozens of those a week, many of which look very legit, though most of them are as full of spelling/grammar mistakes as you'd expect. First few almost fooled me but now I largely ignore them. Either the spammers have the cooperation of someone on the inside or they're spoofing the from address, because they all show up as from the official emails that would send real ones.
No, seriously. Real message from Blizzard. I know how to recognize phishes. This isn't one. It's actually sent from the machines Blizzard uses to send their mailings. The forward and reverse DNS match and are in a domain actually used by Blizzard. The only links in the message are legitimate links to battle.net. I'm not going off the from address; I know how to read headers. (I run my own mail server. I do a lot of this stuff.)
So either Blizzard always sends these while nuking an account, or by an amazing coincidence, at a time when I don't even have a single WoW install, someone just now magically invented my battle.net login name (which is not an email address that is used for anything else, ever), guessed the password, and somehow bypassed the authenticator.
My suspicion is that someone working for Blizzard has found a sideline in selling known-dead accounts to gold spammers.
__________________ Hear me / and if I close my mind in fear / please pry it open See me / and if my face becomes sincere / beware Hold me / and when I start to come undone / stitch me together Save me / and when you see me strut / remind me of what left this outlaw torn
Answer: Yes, it was sent by Blizzard. The system that sends out the "locked due to suspicious activity" messages has no concept of suspicious activity as contrasted with other reasons; it does this whenever any account is locked for any reason whatsoever.
__________________ Hear me / and if I close my mind in fear / please pry it open See me / and if my face becomes sincere / beware Hold me / and when I start to come undone / stitch me together Save me / and when you see me strut / remind me of what left this outlaw torn
I probably still have a stack of those lying around somewhere.
__________________ Hear me / and if I close my mind in fear / please pry it open See me / and if my face becomes sincere / beware Hold me / and when I start to come undone / stitch me together Save me / and when you see me strut / remind me of what left this outlaw torn
I think that may be the best Rift advertisement I've ever seen.
__________________ Hear me / and if I close my mind in fear / please pry it open See me / and if my face becomes sincere / beware Hold me / and when I start to come undone / stitch me together Save me / and when you see me strut / remind me of what left this outlaw torn
Pretty sure. The pandaren were in WC3, so it's not as though they're totally new.
But... The utter gutting of the talent system? That is one of the most anti-interesting character advancement choices I've ever seen. And the announcement that they're copying Instant Adventure (from rift) almost exactly, only it'll take them at least another year to ship it? Yeah, not encouraging.
The big take-home for me is that Blizzard is scared -- they're losing customers rapidly, they're not getting them back, and they've got nothing.
Which, frankly... Well, there's a lot of schadenfreude in here for many of us who got screwed over when Blizzard turned evil. I remember when Blizzard was a really cool company. It was a while ago.
__________________ Hear me / and if I close my mind in fear / please pry it open See me / and if my face becomes sincere / beware Hold me / and when I start to come undone / stitch me together Save me / and when you see me strut / remind me of what left this outlaw torn
Yeah! But! It's PANDAS doing KUNG FU! How can it go wrong! I'm interested - for both the pandas and the kung fu - but probably not enough to pay money for them.
I've wanted a monk class in the game since day 1 (I'm super-excited about them putting it in Diablo 3), so I might check that out. Kinda wondering if it's a second Hero class or a basic one, and kinda hoping it's the former.
They might get me back for a few months, to do all the stuff I originally played the game for (exploring stuff and hitting things), but I doubt it would hold me for long. Soon I would be through it all and it would become about gear grinding and raid drama, and I would move on again.
From what I've read, the Monk is a regular class, not a hero class.
I dunno about the latest talent overhaul. I see what they're still trying to do, continuing off their attempt in the Cataclysm overhaul, which is make each class/spec combo a defined unit that they can plan around, while still allowing some customization at the margins, but meh. They claim they're trying to eliminate cookie cutter builds, but what is looks like they're actually doing is making sure every build is identical in every way that matters and letting players tinker with some inconsequential details so it feels like they have the ability to customize.
The bundled deal with Diablo III is sort of an interesting move. I don't think I'm going to have gaming time for Diablo but, if I intended to buy it, I wouldn't mind using the deal to get some WoW time to try out the new things that I sort of wanted to try but was too meh about to bother activating my sub again.
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"Trans Am Jesus" is "what hanged me"
Between the D3 deal, the death of talents, and the addition of what sounds like an attempt to imitate Chronicles and Instant Adventure... Blizzard has clearly started dividing the world into "things where we think we can compete with rift" and "things where we have to make sure we aren't trying to compete with rift". And also accepting big write-offs to keep their sub numbers up.
I've heard that, contrary to all rational expectations, WoW has been marginally profitable at best for a while; operating costs getting higher, etcetera, and subscribers in Asia still paying almost nothing.
__________________ Hear me / and if I close my mind in fear / please pry it open See me / and if my face becomes sincere / beware Hold me / and when I start to come undone / stitch me together Save me / and when you see me strut / remind me of what left this outlaw torn
Re: World of Warcraft and the Latter-Day Geek
but still requires level 40 I think. So until then there is no reason to have a pure healing spec as it is a pain in the ass to level resto/holy.
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