Monday Random Beta Thoughts

- This will be spoiler free so you can feel safe if you are trying to keep from reading stuff.

- Although I have to ask how you manage to stay spoiler free while still reading anything wow related.

- It is almost impossible.

- I've given up a long time ago on trying to wait on information.

- Okay on to the beta and I've only got one real complaint with warlords thus far.

- They destroyed professions.

- There is little, if anything, I like about them.

- I was so happy to have the new crafting stash in out banks.

- Pay 100 gold to open a 98 slot bag you can put crafting materials in.

- Things now stack to 200.

- Awesome right?

- How about no.

- Making up an example here.

- Lets say it took you 1 herb to make a potion.

- Now it takes 10.

- Lets say when you picked an herb you got 1 herb.

- Now you get 10.

- You see what they did there?

- They increased what we collect by 10, increased what we use by 10, and effectively our old stacks of 20 were increased by 10 so we end up with a net result of being in the exact same place we were.

- I thought the idea of letting things stack higher was so we could take up less space.

- Not the same amount of space.

- And that is not even where the profession clusterfuck ends.

- Remember how they said you can craft stuff straight from your bank and you no longer need to carry around the crafting materials?

- Doesn't work for garrison work orders, which is where I find myself using the vast majority of my crafting materials.

- And lets talk about that space.

- I am not even level 100 yet and my crafting bag is completely full, yes, all 98 slots.

- The idea was to give us more space, not bog us down with massive amounts of materials so we are back where we started from, with no space.

- Blizzard once again proves they fail at math.

- You can not train professions in warlords either.

- If you want to get to level 700 you need to get a drop that allows you to do so.

- I got the drop for cooking, first aid, herbalism and fishing pretty quick, but I still have not gotten the archeology one, and I am 98, and I got the alchemy one too late that I can no longer learn it.

- I am guessing that archeology has not been added yet.

- I am guessing that the alchemy one is a bug that will not allow me to learn it because I already upgraded my garrison.

- I am sure that will be fixed before launch, as they say beta is beta.

- Would really be screwed up if you could only learn alchemy if you have a level 1 garrison.

- Just annoys me that there is always a question mark while in my garrison and no one to turn it in to.

- I thin that bugs me more than not being able to learn alchemy.

- I can;t go around having any quest undone.

- Even in beta.

- I put in a report on it of course, that is what I am on beta for.

- There are lots of beta bugs.

- There are horrible respawn timers.

- There are dreadful pathing issues.

- There are graphical glitches.

- There is everything you would expect from an early beta.

- Sadly this is a late beta.

- Biggest beta annoyance?

- Every time the server kicks everyone we log back in in stormwind.

- Son of a bitch, can't you just log me in back where I logged out.

- Once yesterday I spent 2 hours trying to complete one quest.

- Not because of bad spawn timers or hard to do questing.

- Because every time I worked my way back there the server went down and I came back in in sotrmwind and had to head all the way back to where I was.

- One interesting thing I noticed however.

- After getting logged off once while on a flight path and ending up in stormwind while still on the flight path mount and I could not get off of it or do anything else I decided to run back to where I was questing when I finally got it working.

- It was faster to run to the quest I was working on than it was to take a ground mount.

- Compare.

- Flight path vs ground mount in a place where I do not know the layout yet.

- Which should be faster?

- Ground mount was not only faster, it was much faster.

- Being I finally got on the beta I can say I figured out why there is no flying in warlords.

- The world is small.

- I am not talking small as in "not large" I am talking small as in I can get from one end of a zone to the other end in a minute or so at most on a ground mount, for every single zone.

- Normally you can not even transverse a zone that fast even on a flying mount.

- I think that might be reason number one that they do not want flying mounts in game.

- They do not want people to realize how small the world is.

- They failed.

- That first time I ran from where I zoned in to a quest in the middle of the next zone over faster than the flight path took me there I noticed how small the world was.

- Oh, back to gathering for a minute.

- WTF is with the fish on this planet.

- They gave us more bag space so they decided to give us 5 versions of every type of fish?

- Please blizzard, bag space is too much of a problem already, I do not need 5 versions of every type of fish out there.

- Heck there probably are more than 5 for all I know.

- Between the types of fish you catch, the bait you can use for them, and the "prepared" version of them there are too many to begin with.

- I do not even want to think about what other types there are.

- And I am not even counting the enormous or lunker ones I have not seen yet.

- So there are more.

- Gee thanks blizzard, more junk to clutter up my bags.

- Do we really need 5 or more of the same exact fish?

- No, we do not, thank you very much, remove that annoying bit of game play now before it goes live.

- And speaking about bag space.

- Toy box rocks, a really great addition.

- So I have one question about it.

- Why are none of the new toys allowed to go in there?

- Okay, a couple have, but my bags are already filled with toys that I can not put in my toy box.

- If I throw them away will I be able to get them again later as the mob is no longer a silver dragon mob to me?

- I think that is a fair question.

- And what is with all this awesome gear that drops off the silver dragon mobs that is soulbound.

- Make them BoA like the mists ones.

- Seriously, does my hunter need a shield, a mace, leather, cloth, etc.

- No, buy I might have some alts that could get use from it.

- Just creating vendor trash.

- The least you could do is make mobs drop class specific stuff.

- If I kill a silver dragon mob on my hunter and it is going to drop something soulbound it should be mail, with agility, or something else hunter can use.

- Not like it is needed while leveling.

- I am 98 now and still wearing my SoO gear, have not even replaced once piece yet.

- However I was tempted with 1 582 trinket with multi strike.

- Playing as survival right now and they need multi strike.

- I can not tell you how survival feels just yet for a few reasons.

- One is I have the 4 piece still, so it is not a real representation of how the class will play.

- Two there is some major input lag.

- I lead with a gliave toss and sometimes it takes 2 seconds for it, and every single shot after it, to go off.

- Can not really say if a class players fluid without being able to play fluid to begin with.

- Three, everything is different while leveling.

- I will say I miss kill shot while questing.

- Sure I never used it on normal mobs but I was so used to using it on the rares I often find myself hitting 7.

- That is where I had my kill shot.

- You would not think removing something like that would throw someone off but it has with me.

- I used to feel like "the mob is dead" when it got in kill shot range, now I feel like, this is still going to take a while.

- Even if there is no difference because kill shot hit like a wet noodle and explosive shot was actually a DPS increased over kill shot.

- There was something about seeing it light up that made you feel as if the fight was about over.

- I miss that, but I will get used to it.

- Or maybe I won't.

- Who knows if I will even play survival when I get to 100.

- Any spec is fine for leveling.

- Hunters rock no matter what flavor they are.

- And looking around the beta you can see that most people agree with that.

- I would say that 80% of the people I saw while questing where hunters.

- I saw Bendak from Eyes of the Beast over there.

- He was AFK or I would have stopped and said hello.

- Pet classes are so much fun to level.

- Outside of the horrible respawn rates which I am sure will get fixed, the questing seems to roll along nicely.

- Yes, we are getting to some of the good stuff here.

- There is a deeper story line you can follow and it flows okay.

- Yes, just okay, not very good but acceptable.

- But on beta it usually comes down to one of two things.

- Stuff spawns so fast you can not leave an area.

- You have to start backing out because as you are killing they are respawning.

- Or you run around for 10 minutes looking for mobs.

- Had one quest take me a half hour to complete.

- Mobs where that scarce.

- And there were only 2 or 3 other people in the area.

- I would hate to see that quest go live with that spawn rate and 100s of people trying to do it at the same time.

- The ones that are nicely balanced on the beta move by smoothly.

- There are quests you can pick up that are not story bound all over the place.

- Just while running around I came across quest markers all over.

- It was nice.

- Grab it if I want to, skip it if I don't.

- There are more than ample quests.

- You will not have an issue leveling even if you decide to skip some.

- The pop up event quests are not worth doing.

- Sure, they offer a nice chunk of gold and experience but every single one of them suffered from the same issue so far, at least that I have noticed.

- None of them have ample mobs.

- It is just another way of giving a quest without you picking it up from a quest giver.

- It seems like it gives a lot of experience but it really doesn't.

- They usually ask you to kill or collect 3 different sets of things, the same as you would get from 3 quests.

- So the fact it offers you triple what I quest would give you means nothing, because it is what three quests would be anyway.

- The one good thing about them is that you do not need to run back to turn them in.

- Got to love that.

- But I think you can easily skip them and let others fight over the spawns and come back for them later if you are like me and want to complete everything.

- The silver dragon mobs are the same.

- If it is in your way, kill it, but do not go out of your way for it.

- So far while some have dropped some cool things, none of them drop anything you need to level.

- They respawn fast.

- And some you can not attack right away, or at all it seems, so in the end going out of your way to find them will waste valuable leveling time.

- You can always go back and get them, they are always up.

- I missed a few and decided to stand there and wait for them to respawn.

- Less than one minute later they were back.

- So far I have only met one that gave me a hard time.

- And hard time is the understatement of the century.

- The guy WTF owned me.

- Not once but three times.

- And he was owning everyone else too.

- Eventually we got it down, me and 7 of my closest beta buddies, meaning 7 random people that happened to be trying to kill it at the same time as me.

- We had to zerg it, people saw me attack and they joined in.

- I died but because it was still in combat he stayed tagged.

- When I got back other had died, and we kept doing that, running back, dying, running back.

- I think I died 3 more times during the fight we downed it.

- It was not some simple silver dragon mob, it was a mini world boss.

- I think it was slightly over tuned.

- Heck, if I could not solo it, there is an issue with it.

- Some people in general were saying they soloed it.

- Not sure how, but maybe if they had lots of healing and were a tank.

- But the second it got its hands on me I was dead, and even if I lived, I was near death.

- Yeah, over tuned.

- Only died 2 other times while leveling.

- One because of jumping into trouble and being at low life.

- I was an idiot, should have disengaged to not take damage.

- But I did not factor in for the server lag and hit it when it looked like on time for me but was actually 2 seconds after I landed.

- Oops.

- The second to to major respawn lag.

- Was fighting 3 mobs and doing fine one second and the next second there were something in the realm of 15 mobs on me.

- I hit feign death as fast I could but the DoTs were on me already, I was dead and just had not realized it yet.

- Over all the leveling experience has been fun and not at all challenging on a hunter.

- But what would you expect, hunters are the best leveling class in the game.

- A friend on beta asked me, when did I get the heroic warforged belt, I do not remember winning that.

- I said, you didn't, your normal gear is now called heroic gear and your heroic gear is now called mythic gear.

- Now to garrisons.

- I must say it is not exactly what I expected, but then again I expected a lot.

- They are however interesting.

- Not exactly sure what the purpose are for them other than just keeping us busy.

- I like the follower missions, it is like a mini game.

- I just never have enough missions for all my followers.

- I never have any missions of the right level for my followers.

- And I rarely ever have a follower who excels at a particular mission.

- I guess in time that will happen.

- Just seems like busy work at the moment.

- I did get a few nice little toys from it.

- Including a neck piece that says if I wear it in the most mundane places I could find treasure.

- Not sure what it does yet, but I will wear it to get treasure if need be.

- Some of the followers surprised me.

- Like I would have never guessed Fiona, from the plaguelands, was a holy priest.

- And she has the ability lone wolf.

- Wolf... worgen... lol

- Come on, don't tell me I am the only one that found some humor in that.

- And I would have never guessed someone that travels with a caravan of people would be a lone wolf.

- And Nat Pagle is a marksmen hunter.

- I guess that makes some sense.

- He hunts fish.

- Guess we have another famous hunter to add to my list.

- Just wonder why I need to get to 700 fishing before he will join me.

- After all he is my best friend.

- My personal best friend.

- You would think that if he came through the portal he would be hanging with me from the get go.

- We have been tight for so many years, from buying bait from him, doing quests for him, since I was in my 30s level wise he and I have been tight.

- And now that I am some commander type, with my own mini stormwind, instead of joining me he wants me to be max level fishing first.

- Dude, we are both hunters, we are friends, I should not need to prove myself to you.

- No worries, when I get you I will station your ass at the fishing shack and you will live out your days there.

- First daily fishing quest for me?

- Go fish up something in forstfire ridge.

- Hey, did you see the colors all over this place, they are blue, hint hint.

- I needed to fish up the fish then use the fish then hope they dropped eggs when I used them.

- I fished up small ones, large ones, bait ones, and converted some to ones.

- Yeah, as I mentioned before, to many fish for just one type of fish.

- Once again, blizzard, fix this crap.

- There is absolutely no reason to have so many types of fish for all being one type of fish and clog up our bags with that crap.

- Speaking of clogging up bags.

- Toy boys is nice, but how come none of the new toys go in there?

- Did I mention that already?

- Well, it deserves being said again.

- It is a great question.

- The old alliance thing that turns you into a furbolg for 3 minutes and has a one minute cooldown goes in the toy box.

- Freaking awesome.

- I can now be a furbolg on all my characters, not just my main who still had it from the quest that is since removed.

- All furbolg, all the time.

- I did one quest where I was turned into an Arrakoa for a short time.

- I want to be an Arrakoa hunter.

- There animation for it looks great.

- And the rolls on their back make it look like they have a quiver.

- It is as if they were meant to be hunters.

- Too bad if they add them as a race they would not be hunters.

- I do not think I have ever seen one as a hunter.

- Doesn't mean it could not be done however.

- Back to garrisons, I really do like them.

- But I have to be the one that asks the question.

- If blizzard is all about getting people back in the world, why did they give us a place like garrison where we have no reason to go out in the world.

- I think I have spent more time on my garrision than I have leveling.

- I would have been 100 already if not for dilly dallying around in my garrison all the time.

- Even just riding around it I liked it.

- And I can stay mounted in my buildings.

- Well, they are my building and if I want to stay mounted I should be able to.

- My buildings, my rules.

- I am the king here.

- One more thing to bitch about.

- Orcs.

- Seriously, I am about as sick of orcs as I could be already.

- I can not imagine an entire expansion of this BS.

- Worst part is we are fighting orcs and the horde are orcs, so I have to pay attention before I go head first into a village.

- If could be the new enemy orcs, as in the bad guys of the expansion, or the old enemy orcs, which chould flag me and lead me to a quick death.

- I think that is the thing I like least about it.

- Just orcs everywhere.

- I am already sick of it and the expansion has not came out yet.

- But then again, I was already sick of it before I got on beta, so this just made it worse.

- They could have stood with mixing it up a bit more.

- Sure the orcs are the bad guys, but they could have added more side bad guys.

- Maybe someone that knows lore can explain something to me.

- How do the AU Draenei have anima golems from ToT?

- If they are from Draenor and never been to Azeroth, then they surely have never been to Pandria and by connection never been into ToT so where did they get them?

- They are not Draenei inventions, at least I did not think so.

- Did the blood elves bring them and give them to the AU Draenei, that is the only thing that would make sense to me.

- Maybe I missed something somewhere.

- Easy enough to miss I guess.

- Just do not see how they would have tech from something they have no possible way to have known about.

- If anything playing on the beta has not increased my desire to play the expansion.

- It has done the exact opposite.

- So far I do not see anything really interesting.

- But I am a sucker for mini games, so I will be building my garrison and maxing out all my followers.

- But one thing that REALLY pissed me off.

- To get one of the building I want for my garrison I need to PvP?

- Seriously blizzard, WTF is wrong with you.

- Did you not noticed that adding PvP into PvE content does not work?

- Did you learn absolutely nothing from the legendary quest line?

- This is one of the biggest F yous from blizzard to their players.

- If you want that building in your garrison, you need to PvP.

- And we are not talking just win a few battle grounds, we are talking 5,000 kills in Draenor.

- It is not like something you can knock out over a weekend.

- Change this now blizzard, before it goes live.

- If you insist in tying PvE content (garrisons) to PvP content, make it something simple that can be done over a weekend by people that do not even PvP.

- Make it 100 kills, not 5000.

- Seriously blizzard, don't be stupid with that crap again.

- I'll probably play next weekend again and get to 100 and then see what else the expansion has.

- I have made, and sent, a huge list of bugs to blizzard.

- And a huge list of suggestions.

- All in all, warlords looks good for a very early beta.

- But it sure does not look like something that is expected to be released in less than three months.

- And it sure as hell does not look like the people on the math team have a clue what they are doing, talking about the profession crap.

- Either way, there is still some time for them to change some of that stuff but I do not expect it.

- For some reason blizzard will never get math.

- Some people just can not understand some things.

- Blizzard will never understand math.

- And on the final note.

- I do not even want to think about doing all the archeology achievements without flying.

- I do not give a crap you want to hide how small the world is blizzard.

- Flying is required at max level to enjoy the game.

- Otherwise I might as well just sit in my garrison.

- In the end, flying is the only thing that would get my out of my garrison.

- Oh, and we have new home cities?

- Now I understand why they changed them.

- Might as well not waste too much time on them when no one is going to spend any time in them.

- Given the option, my garrison that has everything I need for the most part and NO trade chat, or a city that is crowded and with trade chat, my garrison wins, hands down.

- Have a great day.