Hate is such a strong word. I really just wanted to play off of “10 Thing I Hate About You,” really.

Here are some opinions of mine on this fantastic expansion in the World of Warcraft.

• Queues

I’m already sick of them and I’m only seeing 10-15 minute queues once and awhile. I am aware, however, of the hour long waits other people have to endure and I can only give my sympathy. It isn’t very surprising, though, seeing how many people stopped playing Burning Crusade with the intention to return for Wrath. Of course, that doesn’t make it any less of a pain in the ass.

• Death Knights

They are everywhere. There’s even one Death Knight in my guild who has more levels than I do! I hated seeing more than half of my active guildmates leveling Death Knights. I’d like to raid, thanks. Now get your mains to 80!! I’ll admit, I have a 58 Death Knight. I wanted to check it out and I got through the special content only DKs can see and then I started working on leveling mining. I don’t intend to actually play my DK outside of being a gatherer. However, I do enjoy the possibility of transferring my DK to a R.A.F. account to see if A) I can pass half its levels on to one of my other toons and B) so I can summon Rusco to Ebon Hold for the flight path. >.>

• Poop

Seriously? Do we really need graphically enhanced excrement? Do we need any poop based quests anymore? I’d like to have been done with it, in all seriousness.

• Server lag

I had the worst lag ever last night, and it wasn’t just me. Everyone around me was having the same visual problems, but oddly enough chat worked fine. Stubborn as I am, I kept playing despite the serious issues. At least it didn’t kill me, except for when I took a risk and tried to use my parachute cloak…

• Competing for quests

I haven’t had it so bad, really. I started in Fjord (fighting against some Vrykul folk) and mostly finished there but when I got to Boring Tundra it became more clear where people were questing. And really, why would you pick the worst best place to level?  I do have to say that I’ve never met so many nice people before this expansion. I’ve never pugged quests before, but I’ve been doing it left and right. It’s amazing. Nine times out of ten I’ll group up with people for a single mob kill. I’m loving it.

• Gear upgrades

I’m actually seeing quest greens coming close to my gear or being better than my gear. It’s disheartening but I’ll live. It isn’t as bad as the Burning Crusade, but then again I wasn’t 60 when that came out either. I did find it odd I found a F.A.P. (feral attack power) staff as a quest reward despite ghostcrawler’s ongoing report of how they plan to remove FAP (that’s so wrong… I blame think tank). I could have sworn they said they were taking it out before they released the game, then again they also said they weren’t removing old FAP stats (but wouldn’t that be new?). Either way, I’m enjoying the new gear and the enhanced graphics as well. Kind of wish I was wearing more of it, but I’d rather have my stats than win a beauty pageant.

• Flight Paths

There are so many of them! It’s awesome, though. I’ve been to most of Northrend already, just to get flight paths. They also take forever, which has always been an issue. 7+ minutes to go from Fjord to Borean Tundra. There are plenty of great non-flight path flights though. I’m loving that part of the quests; the ones that send you out on crappy engineer planes that might just explode any second – or even being able to fly on a dragon! Which isn’t new, but doesn’t damper my joy either.

• PvP

So there are portals in Dalaran, one for each PvP zone there is. I’ve only used the one to Wintergrasp … which was bizarre. I did get to mine some nodes, which wasn’t expected. But we got pwned and then at the end of the battle, I wake up yards away from the main compound… and with no clue on how to get back to the “real” world. So what I do is, I ran into the now horde controlled zone and took a portal home. I noticed there were more portals while failing to defend that circular thingy in center of the place. I don’t know. I really had no clue what I was doing. It took me awhile to even learn how I could obtain vehicles. PvP is a whole new ballgame I guess. Wintergrasp was cool, though. It reminds me of Unreal Tournament.

• Instances

I’ve only been to UK once and that’s it for Outland so far. I’m 73, too. I’m interested in going to the instances, but I never use LFG and guildmates rarely ask for anything outside of low level BC dungeons. I really look forward to raiding, though. Definitely excited about that. People might have cleared everything already, but I’m looking forward to doing it myself.

• Level 80s

We can all them taunt for their apparent lack of lives, but we don’t know them or their ways. I know lots of people who took time out of work to play, which isn’t something everyone could do. Really, the people who only play to raid are the ones that are already 80 and take no real thrill in leveling as intended (whatever that is). I’m sure it’s a bit of a rush for people to be server first or what have you, but I’m quite content about taking my time no matter how much I look forward to raiding again.

P.S. I had fun with colors. :B

Thanks to the Echoes of Doom, druids have been given a lot more options with tanking. A crazy amount of options. It’s almost as if we were like other tanks! It’s great news, of course. It makes being a druid-tank less of a problem and much more interesting. However, I’ve only found a few places with info on all these changes so I took it upon myself to gather as much info as I could as a reference for myself and others.

For reference, my talents look like this: 0/51/10
- I did not go for Omen of Clarity. I find Berserk incredibly useful and want to have it for fear based bosses and pvp. Omen of Clarity will be the first talent I pick up at 71, but for now Berserk is way too precious for what I do.

Things that are important to keep in mind:

• Growl is a 30 yard radius, meaning don’t bother with feral charge just use growl. Why? Using feral charge doesn’t put you top of the aggro table, but growl does. It also brings the mob to you, rather than you to it. It keeps melee from having to run around, too, if you’re tanking multiple targets.

• Entangling Roots works in doors, so you can pull with crowd control and leave a little ticking dot for bonus aggro.
  - Also, nature’s grasp is a standard ability now and it can be used while in bear form.

• Berserk, if you went for it over OoC, allows you to get out of fear or prevent it from happening. It also removes the cooldown to mangle and increases the target amount up to three, too bad it’s only good for 15 seconds every 3 minutes.

• Infected Wounds works on bosses, you might not need to put all three points into this talent but it’s not a bad idea. The reduced movement speed helps keep runners close-by and the decreased attack speed means less overall damage.

• Potions and Healthstones can now be imbibed while shapeshifted, so no excuse to not use a potion. I pulled off a tight win against a warlock in Arathi Basin because of this. It also means popping special, short duration potions if needed.

• Quoted from BBB: “Frenzied Regeneration now heals over time based on your max health at the time it is cast, healing .3% of max health per point of Rage, at the rate of 10 Rage per second for 10 seconds. So, 3% of max health per second for 10 seconds. Survival Instincts boosts your max health temporarily by 30%. So I pop Survival Instincts to bring my health in Bear from 18,000 to 23,400… and then pop Frenzied Regeneration which heals over time based on a max health of 23,400, or 702 health per second, 7020 health total. They go together like Rum and Coke. If I were to just pop Frenzied Regen without SI, it would heal for 540 per second, instead. Hey, a difference of 1620 health is a Potion all by itself when things are tight!”

• Enchantments: Druids now benefit from more enchantments, however the question is: Does it matter? Turns out, it’s still a close call between mongoose and major agility but Karthis and Elitist Jerks have given us fair reason to use mongoose as our primary tanking weapon enchant.

• Glyphs: The whole list can be found [here]. Glyph of Maul, which allows Maul to hit 1 additional target, and Glyph of Frenzied Regeneration, which allows healing effects on you to be 20% more powerful while frenzied regeneration is active, are the only two real major glyphs for tanking. Glyph of Rebirth might be good so you can pop people back to full health during any momentary downtime while tanking (or while you’re tanking, it can happen). For minors: Glyph of Growl increases chance to work by 8%, Glyph of Mangle increases the duration by 6 seconds, and Glyph of Challenging Roar reduces the cooldown by 30 seconds.

• We no longer need to worry about having defense gear so long as we have Survival of the Fittest maxed out. (Yes!! That makes us crit immune) What does this mean for our gear? We still need +dodge to avoid being hit, still need +hit (cap: 142) and +expertise (cap: 93)  to avoid having our attacks parried or dodged, still need more +armor (cap: 35,880) and of course +stamina for even more health (especially useful against caster bosses). We don’t need defense gems either, which allows for socketing more health (or whatever you’re lacking in). That isn’t to say drop all defense gear, it might still be good and useful, but there’s new options.

• There is, of course, the potential to not max out survival of the fittest and keep some defense gear and gain an extra talent point to put somewhere… however I’m too lazy to do the work on that atm.

Is there anything important I’m missing?

I’m not downing on Engineering, but it’s not much optimal for druids compared to the other crafting professions. I’ll probably pick it up one one of my alts, if just to build my own hog, so I won’t get rid of it all together.

I’ll be getting Leatherworking, that’s for sure, as there’s always good stuff with that profession and I hear Alchemy has a sweet buff. I’ve got my shaman and hunter for gathering skills. Despite the benefits of having those gathering skills Rusco won’t be picking those up. I’d rather the BOP gear, to be honest.

I’ll wait a little while longer to see what I find out about future options. But I’ll be sad to see Engineering go, if/when it does. I’ve always had it since my warlock back in ’06.

But we’ll see. Only time will tell.

As I’ve mentioned in the past I, not so ironically, play a Hunter. I’ve had alts come and go but Bananarchy, my adorable huntress, has always been #2 to my Druid. I guess you could go so far as to call her my main alt? I think I might know more about hunters than I do druids, but then again druids have six potential roles for me to cover and hunters have… well, I’ll give ‘em three. (tank, melee dps, ranged dps, heal, solo, and pvp)

I also read a billion rss feeds, of which a million are Druid based (we need our own tree for pete’s sake) and only five are Hunter (although after seeing pike’s blogroll that’ll change asap that has changed). So it’s a lot to read and feel confident in my druid abilities wheras there are few but grand hunter blogs. Clearly, by this, druids are too complicated.

I find it really interesting that there are so many Druids with Hunter alts. I have to wonder if it’s because of play style, concept of character, or something else entirely.

Druids and Hunters certainly have an attachment to nature. It goes back to rangers and druids of D&D, which both use nature based spells and abilities. I generally play druids in tabletop rpg campaigns, for various reasons but one is the nature aspect. Do other Druids play druids for a similar reason, and if so do they also have a Hunter alt the same way?

There’s also the play style. Druids that level feral are used to being able to take hits and deal out dps without fear of being squishy. Hunters get the same feel as they shoot from afar and their pet takes the hits (which is awesome: “tame” a beast of the wild and force it to take a beating while you kill from a distance). Is it because it’s more of the same play style with different abilities?

Or maybe it’s something greater. I’m not sure them, but I know I do it so I can look at hot animal butt.

It gives me something to do other than stand in a major city while I hope to find people to help finish my epic flight quest. I do have two alts I’m paying attention to (a 24 shaman and a 31 hunter) but quest grinding gets boring fast (also, I haven’t logged into them since last Tuesday…) and I’m having fun.

I’m borderline OCD. Back when I was a Guild Officer earlier this year, a system had been created to organize guild member notes. Well, as soon as I caught wind of that everyone was set up. Any variation? Corrected. One of my friends changed a few every so often on purpose, just to piss me off (the bastard) but I’d change it back anyway. That’s how crazy I was. It shouldn’t be too hard to understand, then, that I’m taking time to complete as many achievements as I’m capable of.

Right now I’m working on the world explorer. I finished the “Tricks and Treats of Kalimdor” at the same time as “Explore Kalimdor” last night. I was actually embarrassed when I had to explore Teldrassil… I’m a bad night elf. I’d love to be the first World Explorer, but I won’t be getting the expansion early enough I’m sure.

Speaking of Explorer, that’s another reason why I love this new system. You get rewards for doing silly things. Sure, they’re generally mundane but this is a video game! It’s mundane in and of itself. Titles, tabards, pets, mounts. It’s fantastic.

My guild is also enjoying the guild announce feature. I’m reading how some people are annoyed by it (just turn it off…), but I think it’s great! There’s nothing wrong with letting everyone you’ve done something memorable. It also gets people talking or cheering you on as you complete one part of a larger achievement.

It’s also incredibly overwhelming. I need to redo a ton of old world instances, increase my rep with every faction (a personal goal now with reward), obtain 69 more mounts and 38 more vanity pets, kill all horde major faction leaders (like that’s gonna happen) and a ton more. I may or may not go for the number of quests completed. That’s specific effort, at least exploration or killing lowbie bosses takes minimal brain functions. Who knows, maybe I’ll do it for the gold because those mounts are going to cost me.

I’m a fan of the solo content this provides. I don’t see as much group action as I’d like, so to have stuff to do while I’m on my own is well appreciated.

It’s also really great seeing dead Horde in Stormwind and Darkshore trying to get their achievements taken care of. I think Alliance has it easy when it comes to exploration.

It’s exciting to see people doing the achievements. It’s like giving us losers who aren’t crazy enough, or able, to raid full time something to do to pass the time and enjoy ourselves.

In other news, I do have an epic quality Druid Bear post in the works. It’s been building up since last Wednesday or Thursday. But it’s more work than I expected and taking longer. Maybe I should do installments? Who knows, we’ll see.

I co-host with Railvas once again. Still looking for more feedback. It’s only my second episode ever, but self critiqueing can only do so much.

(image courtesy of sparktography)

Hm… not quite what I was looking for. Nevermind.

Blog Azeroth’s Shared Topic of the Week is… “What will I be doing in the first day or three after wrath hits.”

What will I be doing? Well, besides buying the game and installing it, I guess, a lot.

I’ll head off to Stormwind and go to Northrend, check out the place and start leveling. I’m hoping others will be doing the same and we’ll group together and finish quests faster. Check out the instances and just see how far I can get in the first few days.

I kind of don’t want to rush things, but at the same time, I want to see what it’s like being at the top of the chain early into the expansion. When BC came out, I was a lowly 40. By the time I was 60, I was grouping with my buddy’s shaman. (fyi, I’m alliance)

Don’t be confused, I’m not expecting to be 80 in the first week. I’m just excited I’ll be one of the big boys early on instead of a year or more later when everything’s been touched and people have gone through an instance a million times.

Or.
I could take it slow and be more prepared for level 80. Find out the awesome drops, made or otherwise, and be epiced out 10 seconds after dinging.

Probably not. I really do want to be one of the older 80s. Only time will tell, however.

No, I haven’t learned to stop going there. Instead, I learned the meaning of DKP.

You must be wondering to yourself, “Rusco, how would you learn the meaning of DKP in an awful 5-man instance like MrT?”

Well, it came about into hour 3 of this run. But first, some setup.

When we first started the run I was bear tanking with a tree healer and a ret pally, mage and priest were dpsing. We had the usual occurrence of wiping early on and our mage dropped (well, removed, but I wasn’t lead and he was being rude and pissed off the GL) before pulling a group and wiping us again. Lovely. Another case of Jerks in WoW.

Pull in a new mage and picked back up. Had plenty of deaths, 2 full repairs even, and had replaced the new mage and the priest with a warlock and yet another mage. We get to Priestess Delrissa, but can’t get her down. So we swap the pally for a rogue.

This is the three hour mark I was talking about. Thus far, it was a bumpy ride but we were all content and not very fussy. Unfortunately for me, it doesn’t stay that way.

Anyway, only one wipe and then she goes down like a cheap whore (or is that not appropriate for my audience… wait, do I have an audience yet?). We loot her and out pops Shard of Contempt. Well hot damn, finally something drops that I can use! I’ve taken out this chick only a few times, but she never gives me what I can take (uh, 3 of 4 trinkets). Unfortunately, the rogue wants it as well and already rolled need for it. I roll as well and lose. I congratulate him and then realize, I’ve been here three freakin hours!! He’s here for five minutes and gets exactly what he showed up for.

So DKP. The more you kill bosses, the more points you get. The more points you get, the more you can bid on loot. Newbies can’t outbid you. Newbies can’t outbid you because they haven’t been around as long as you. I wish we had DKP in that 5-man…

—
Just to cover my ass and explain why I was in MrT for 4 hours, the druid healer and I were determined to finish after two repair bills because what would it be worth in the end if we gave up, 3 hours and 2 badges? There wasn’t any good loot either, however I did get the caster mace off of Kael’thas but I haven’t gone boomkin since the beginning of the year. I did almost get recruited into the druid and warlock’s guild, I met like five of their guildies in that run. But they raid at 11pm for me, which is horrific because they’re cool beans and two of their members liked me enough to want me to join.

Interestingly enough, I considered applying to them back when I left GBB earlier this year but I never thought they’d want me so I didn’t inspect them enough. Huh. For now, I’m sticking tight. I actually have a Karazhan run planned for Friday that already has a few signed up. My attempt at earlier raids, 4pm. It’ll be nice to see a Kara run finished in one sitting and at a healthy time of day.

Recriut a friend or Give us more money (Gumm for short)
Ok, so Blizzard comes out with a new way to try and get more accounts active in the most popular mmo ever. Yea, it’s shady. They want money. But we’re in a world where we try our best to make as much money as possible. As much as I’d like people to just do things out of the good of their heart, it doesn’t happen as often as it should.

Phelps has nothing on me…
Do I think it rushes the leveling process, skipping over key lessons about the classes and moving through old-world content in order to get to outland and eventually northrend? Of course. However, there were (and still are) level 70 noobs that never even had the xp boost of 20-60, let alone the triple xp. So if you’re that worried about people not learning their class, just keep in mind it might not be the leveling speed that’s causing the problem. If people *really* want to learn about their class, there are blogs, guides, and forums for them to learn on top of personal experience. There’s plenty of time to learn your class through personal experience. No one goes hopping into a huge raid as soon as they’re max level, at least not on their first character.

Also, you have to be grouped with your friend for the 3x xp to work. Ideally, you’re not an idiot and you can actually help your friend learn their class during this process. There’s so much I could talk about when dealing with learning you class… so I won’t now. But lemme tell you, this faster leveling thing “is a symptom. You’re not curing the disease.”

Ride ‘em, cowboy!
Ok, so the mount… I guess is to pull in the new people obsessed with collecting all the mounts? I don’t see it as a huge reward, other than gloating to people you either bought a second account or knew people that weren’t already playing WoW. And it doesn’t even look “cool” or “hip.” In all honesty, it’s kind of disappointing. But at least it’s something, right? Incentive to get people to purchase 60 days of Warcraft.

I leveled naked… yea, that’s it…
What happens when you really power level an alt? They arrive at level 59 just like before. This sucks. Seriously. You never played this character other than to level 30ish, or even worse if you leveled two 60s on the second account and gave 50+ free levels to a level 1, and now you’re waaaay undergeared and probably have no clue how to play your class. This is what really screws you over. Not that triple xp, bull. My only hope is you use a class like the mage or something you’ve played long enough to know how to properly play. Because you’ve got a lot of work to do on this new character. This might be the worst part of this promotion.

Refer myself…
Thus far, I’ve assumed people are going to use this program as a way to get friends in the game. However, as everyone and their mother is aware, it has epic dual/multi boxing benefits. As stated before, I plan on taking advantage of this myself. (revised plan to come) I’m not so sure Blizzard was thinking to themselves, “Hey self, why not create a controversial program to get current subscribers to create more accounts!” I think they’re aware of the advantages to doing this, and I wouldn’t be totally surprised if they actually did create the RAF program to suck in more money from current subscribers, but I have some amount of faith they’re not that shady.

Things to keep in mind:

• The connection the two accounts have only last 90 days.
• The free levels can only be given to characters under level 60 and can only be granted by characters under 60.
• The whole summon your friend once an hour, only works as long as the toon being summoned is 59 or under.
• Death Knights can get bonus levels and do take up a character slot.
• You’re friend is not automatically added to your f-list (thank you random question in RAF FAQ)
• I have not seen anywhere that you *need* the Burning Crusade expansion for this to work, only pick it up if you want the new races and starting zones. You lose the benefits once you hit 60 anyway.
• This deal isn’t going to last forever, but Blizzard hasn’t released when they’re pulling the promo yet.
• If you really want your mount, use time cards since they apply immediately and credit cards are processed after the first free 30 days.

This is only gonna cost a couple Rupees, right?
So, you’re gonna pick up a second account for this? Ok. But don’t go charging in before knowing how much this is gonna cost you.

I’ll repeat myself to save you the trouble; The benefits only last 90 days. There’s not reason for you to keep the second account unless you plan on dual boxing forever, and that’s cool. But this here post is about the G.u.m.m. program, not How You WoW.

$20 – Need to purchase an account. Covers the first 30 days of wow.
-$15 – You’re original account gets a discount of 30 free days
$30 – Gotta pay for 60 days to get that mount and finish up the 90 days of linked time.
$25 – Per character you transfer back to your main account.

Let us just assume you take 90 days to level 1 pair of characters to 59, which means you’d only need to transfer 1 character over. It would cost you $60 on top of your $15 a month just to get you two 59s and roughly 30 free levels. Is $60 worth having two, maybe three new high level characters? Maybe not. But alting isn’t for everyone anyways. It really comes down to whether or not it’s worth spending the time to get new characters up to 70 for wrath of the litch king.

Me?
If I was smart, I wouldn’t be playing this game. But it’s a hobby and good hobbies are usually worth spending the extra cash on. I’d love to try something new, dual boxing, on top of playing new classes. But if you don’t think it’s worth the time, let alone the cost, then don’t bother. Go about your business and leave the people who like experimenting alone to experiment. And/or find “friends” to level with. I play WoW with 30+ people I know from college, so it’s pretty hard for me to find fresh meat to try this program with. But maybe you have better luck.

Other opinions:
I was reading some other bloggers opinions on the RAF program and Tal of Another Alt mentioned that not all countries can even make use of this program. How unneccesary is that??? I’m not sure why this is the case, but I hope this is only temperary.
Sources and links: (I’m a nerd or something, apparently…)

Blizzard Support: Recruit-A-Friend FAQ – (duh…)
Another Alt – (Even if Tal knew 500 people that wanted in to Warcraft, he wouldn’t get any benefits)
Blog Azeroth – (reason for this post)
Double Bubble – (maor links)
TyphoonAndrew – (Good opinions)
Unbearably HOT – (interesting take on how to take advantage of this program)
Metal Up Your WoW – (omg, i could write a whole post responding to his guildmates hate on him. oh, and he’s the one who possed the idea for the shared topic)
Be Nameless – (made me realize how retarded the free level benefit is more like a hinderance)

P.S.

No promises this isn’t filled with gramatical issues or utter nonsense. I went over it the best I could, but damn if that’s not a lot of text. Sorry. =/