The Sky Golem looks awesome, can't wait. Engineering is such an awesome profession, minus the times your belt kills you and wipes your raid.

Is this game dying out yet?

No. They're releasing more content than they ever have before and at a faster pace than they have before.

Their subscription numbers have fallen according to last quarter's earnings call, but they still have ~8 million subscribers I think.

So I'm 90, now what? It seems like I need some faction rep to use my valor points, any suggestions? TYVM.

Go to Isle of Thunder. Grind Dailies. Do LFR.

Don't bother with any of the other rep, as it is inferior gear, and will just give you a headache, more than anything.

what server did you get your character on? thinking of ****ing with this again

we should do some heroics or bgs or something with poggers
could be fun
my priest is 89 atm
I have a 90 warr but bored of him, never liked tanking as much as healing

You

I like you

HEALERS UNITE!

silman#6769 if anyone wants to add me
horde on dreadmaul is my main (priest) but I have various other on various servers

We finally downed Megaera!

Now I'm going to rant a bit.

There's a thread on MMO-Champion discussing the difficulty of Throne of Thunder as a whole, and more specifically the non-linearity of difficulty of bosses as you progress through the raid. There are a lot of voices in there from a pretty diverse crowd. There are the usual few that say that even Heroics are faceroll and that anyone who isn't clearing Heroics or dies to mechanics sucks at the game and should cancel their subscription etc. There are those who say it's just about right difficulty-wise. And there are those that say that it's too difficult.

I don't know where I fall among those. Probably somewhere between the "about right" crowd and the "too difficult" crowd. I think it depends a lot on the group that you raid with. If you have 10 people that learn quickly and can handle mechanics reliably, you're probably going to make good progress through ToT. If you have solid tanks, solid healers, and solid DPS you've probably killed Lei Shen by now and are making your way through Heroics. But if you have 8 people that learn quickly and can handle mechanics reliably, you're probably a lot like our group that spent over 2 months downing 1 boss and wiping on boss #2. Look at the number of Jin'rokh kills we have vs. the number of Horridon kills we have.



Something's not right there. Now, to 8 of the people in our group, Horridon wasn't particularly hard. We have a good core group with good DPS, Tanks that don't die very much (the MT anyway), and Healers that find ways to keep us alive. But 1 or 2 of our DPS insisted on getting the buff from Double Swipe. We finally replaced 1 of them because they were just not cut out for raiding - wouldn't move out of fire, never seemed to learn from mistakes, consistently low DPS etc. There are a lot of groups like ours. That's a lot of people spending a lot of time raiding getting very frustrated.

And this is the part where I flame-bait myself. I don't think it should matter if you have 2 bad players. Over the course of 9 weeks, you should be able to stumble your way in to a kill of the freaking 2nd boss of a 12 boss raid even if you're carrying a couple of people. I do think that there should be a point where you can't continue to carry people - but I'd like it to be more than 15 minutes in to the first night of raiding for the week. If we can't carry those players through Durumu and we hit a hard progression wall there, I'm fine with that. That's enough to give us a little variety in our raiding. It'll fill a couple of hours before we have to pass the time by taking bets as to what's going to kill the Hunter - Sand Trap or Double Swipe.

There are 12 encounters to ramp up the difficulty, or if you don't want to call it difficulty then call it coordination-check, awareness-check, group-continuity check, whatever. Add in Heroics and you're on step 2 of 25. Steps isn't a great model because it implies linearity. Shouldn't progression difficulty look more like an exponential graph? It increases slowly at first, and the farther along you go, the harder it's going to be. Boss 6 is harder than Boss 2 - makes sense, right? Then as you keep going, the increases in difficulty become a little larger with each step. This is countered by the gear you've been farming for weeks. The jump from Qon to Consorts should rightfully be larger than the jump from Jin'rokh to Horridon. You've got 10 bosses worth of gear to help fill that gap when you come back for the next week's attempts. gets harder as you go along, and once you get to Heroics and that's where the difficulty really ramps up. That's where you get to the exponential looking part of the exponential graph.

So what does the graph really look like? I don't know. I've spent the last 4 months trying to get through the first half of the raid. I know that at the beginning it feels logarithmic. In reality it's probably more like a stock market graph. It has peaks and valleys and probably is going to end up higher than where it started.

And that's where Flex comes in. Flex raid is Blizzard's solution to this exact rant, and that thread on MMO-Champion.

I had a weird (bug?) thing happen when I joined a cross-realm raid group to do sha of anger. I was part of the raid group, I could see all the other raid members on my minimap, but couldn't see them ingame, nor could I see the sha. I was clearly still on my own server (even though it popped up the thing saying "joining this group will put you on another server" anyone seen this before or know how to fix it? I tried relogging and leaving raid and getting reinv but neither helped.

Leaving the instance and going back in usually fixes it. Otherwise, submit a ticket imo

not in instance, for worldbosses.

It seems to work for everyone else using oQ
le sigh

submitted ticket anyway

This is pretty startling to me considering they still had over 12 million last time I played. And they lost something like 1.3 million subs in Q1 of 2013.

I'm tempted every day to bite the bullet, buy the xpac and dive back in. I'm just afraid I'm rejoining a dying game at this point.

Is there legitimately 3-4 months worth of fun (at about 2-3 hours playtime per day) in the latest xpac? I have subbed, cancelled and resubbed many times over the years, but the last two times it only took me about 3-4 months before I got burned out yet again. If I can get that much playtime out of the new xpac, I will feel as though I got my money's worth on the xpac + sub.

tbh, you probably won't really notice the game dying, unless you want to raid or do arenas/rbgs. Then you'll realize that it's pointless not being on a high pop realm and want to stop playing.

If you enjoy doing solo content, though (Dailies, Pet Battles, technically LFR, etc.) then yeah, there probably is enough fun for you. Otherwise, not really, imo.

Started playing again Was lvl 85 but quickly level 87 aleady. Still pretty fun IMO.

Anyone here play on Frostmourne? Probably a long shot since it is an Oceanic server but thought I'd try.

How long iyo before servers start merging? Or is that already happening?

I would think that going from just over 13 million subs to just over 8 million would necessitate some merging to keep things going.

And yeah, I want to raid! I've never really raided much at all and that's actually the part of the game I never have gotten to fully experience. Maybe they'll start discounting character transfers.

I've also never done a single arena but it always seemed like it would be cool.

They're already starting to essentially merge servers I think, with the virtual realm stuff that's coming soon. It's probably a little different than actual merges, but I haven't looked into it at all so I wouldn't know the details.

Transfers were just 50% off not that long ago (think I posted about it ITT), so I wouldn't count on them being discounted again anytime soon.

I'm pretty sure you'll also be able to do arenas cross realm too, so that should be nice

They basically are realm merging with the virtual realm stuff. Realms across your battle group will basically be CRZ with shared auction houses and ability to raid. Don't know when they're planning on implementing it tho

Cool I will read up on virtual realms.

I almost would like to resub just to work the auction house again. I spent countless hours standing in the Dalaran AH back in the day just buying and selling.

Also it looks like you get a free transfer if you go back to the game via scroll of resurrection, that's kind of cool.

I feel like virtual realms will murder the ah game for a lot of people. Unless there's a huge bot banwave, that's gonna be a goddamn nightmare for a lot of people. I thought competing with 6 bots I could identify on illidan was bad, ****, I can't imagine doing it with x many bots across x many servers. /shudder

Oh yeah, AH will be absolutely crushed. I can already see thousands of players quitting because of it