Everyone is stoked about the new talent trees in the upcoming expansion. There are an extreme amount of new abilities that come into context, creating a whole new field of strategies. WotLK will certainly shift the way we play not only in PvP, but PvE as well.

If you haven’t checked out the new talent points then get your butt over to Blizzard’s website and be amazed.

Rogue beta talents

Of all the characters out there, I am glad to say rogues look insanely sick. I think they are finally getting the true buff they deserve in certain aspects. Now don’t get me wrong, rogues already have a great advantage in the PvP world. But it is pretty basic; stunlock and hemo.

Rogues in PvP only have 1 of 2 choices. That is, go 20/41 assassination/hemo or go combat fists and pray you have a good priest (2v2 only). But what about the good old days when rogues use to deal that large burst of DPS via ambush? We still have a high DPS rate right now, but it is more of a consistent damage rather than a good burst. This being due to the resilience gear making such talents like ambush and backstab basically useless.

As we look at the different talent trees for the rogue, what is blizzard trying to tell us? Look at the subtlety tree, here is where it really excited me the most; Waylay and Slaughter from the Shadows. Nothing but pure ambush/backstab buffs.

With those two buffs, ambush rogues finally have their place back in the WoW society of what they should be; assassins striking from out of the shadows with a vicious dagger. What really pulls it all together is the shadow dance. This is the main feature that blizzard sticks out saying, ‘Hey, ambush rogues are back in the game.”

If you realize what shadow dance does, then there is no other substitution then using ambush between stealths. Using garrote over and over will be a vigorous waste, while cheap shot would be pointless with diminishing returns. This talent point was made directly for multiple ambush uses; anything else is not even an option.

Even though ambush rogues are very rare right now, I still play the spec (as well as every other spec). Using a 2k AP unbuffed rogue will crit SS ambushes at around 4-5.5k points of damage. If you add resilience into the picture you can lose up to about 1k of damage depending on the resilience rating.

I hit S3 warriors around 3k of SS ambush damage; it’s really only a chip in their side with their massive 13k hps+ and daunting plate armor. Now let’s bring blade dance into the picture. I can open up with a 3k ambush through SS, then I trigger blade dance. This gives me 3 extra opportunity attacks to use ambush at will, with 2.5k points of damage per strike. Do the math, even with resilience gear the warrior will be down over 10k of damage within a short period of time. And the best part; there will be no stun locking, which in turn procs second wind.

This is still assuming that I can get all 3 strikes from the blade dance off. Who knows what factors will be brought in, such as rend or a lock’s magic spell causing a dot on the rogue, disabling stealth. Then again, this should happen so fast that a warrior shouldn’t be able to do anything but /beg.  As soon as he turns around the blade dance should be set in motion, confusing him and hopefully creating outright terror. I would definitely panic if I got hit like that.

Now another scenario; let’s assume a decently geared mage but with NO resilience is attacked by this set up. Rouges with 2k AP can SS ambush crit mages for 5k damage easy (resilience drops this down to 3.5-4k). Using blade dance, a mage will be dead in seconds if they do not think fast by using frost nova, blinking out, or ice block (POM polymorph FTW). What other choice do they have? Any character is automatically thrown into the defensive while the rogue can have their way with them and be in total domination of the battle. That is, after all, the whole idea of a rogue; getting the opportunity attack.

The real questions are: How will this all play out at level 80? How much AP will rogues have that level? Is resilience going to destroy their DD (direct damage) like it has now?

All I can say is, I am very excited to find out.

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54 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

We really do a lot of research when writing articles here at DYS.  Sometimes the information we would like to add to an article just doesn’t exist, which means that the facts have to come from in-game analysis.  As you can probably figure, that can take a lot of time.

I recently had the idea based on a comment on the article about how soon will you be replacing gear after WotLK on a peice about farming honor gear.  It turns out there really isn’t a succinct guide for that anywhere so I have been forced to grind it out myself to put it into a readable and reasonably usable formulation for our readers.  And it’s going to take me a month of working at it a few hours a day.  You see, I just won’t put anything up here unless I’m certain that it is as factual and accurate as I can possibly make it before you read it.

In this vein, there used to be a really neat tool at Alakazam where you could look at all the different builds for all the classes and see what was the most popular.  When they changed their site format it just dissapeared, completely killing a terrific article I had already written.  Since that time, I have been searching for something that gives the same info, but to no avail.  However, I found something that comes pretty close.

So today I just wanted to introduce you to a neat little blog site you’ve probably never heard of.  I found it while browsing through the Wow wiki via a relatively obscure link on a build page, and it has maybe 90% of the info I used to use.  It may come in handy from time to time for you if you like big lists of facts like I do.

The site is Armory Musings and can be found at this address: http://okoloth.blogspot.com/ This guy has written a spider script that mines information from the WoW armory, and it can really show you some nifty stats on just about everything you could ever want to know about what players really use in the game.

On the first page, you will see a series of updates (with a LOT of scrolling) that show the balance of characters on every single realm by class.  While interesting, it’s not all that useful most of the time.  The real data is in the specific class links at the top of the page.

You can click on any of the class names here to take you to a class-specific page with a whole lot of useful data on your class of choice.  Let’s look at some of the information on the druid page.

You will see that he will break down the entire class by spec, and even give you the average stats that each spec has.  It should give you an idea how you rank according to the overall averages for your class at level 70.

Next, he shows you some averages for some other specific information from the character pane including mele, defense and spell stats so you can see how your toon stacks up against all the other 70’s on all realms.  He even has stats for the most popular professions and even profession combinations for all the classes listed.

But the part I really thought was cool was the next, and largest section.  The big list will show you the top 5 gear choices for all level 70’s broken down by builds.  He has even included the wowhead tooltip so you can hover each one and get the game tooltip, or you can click the link to go to wowhead and figure out where to go and get all this great loot.

Wondering what your Balance druid should be wearing on your wrist? Here is what the data says:

14% [Bracers of the White Stag]

followed by:

10% [Shattrath Wraps]
9% [Windhawk Bracers]
5% [Veteran's Wyrmhide Bracers]
5% [Mana Infused Wristguards]

So you can look at the choices thousands of other druids have made to determine what is easiest to get, and what may just be by far the best choice.  You can see that this might be extremely useful if this is an alt, or if you just haven’t played long enough to know what all the best gear choices may be.  So both noobs and pros should find this information really valuable.  (You’ll have to excuse me if I didn’t include all the HTML for the tooltips and links - that’s why I’m pointing you to the site!)

And if you’ve ever wondered exactly what gems you should be putting in all those sockets, there’s even a breakdown of the 5 most popular gem choices, which I found fascinating as well.

Again, he breaks this down according to base talent builds, which should take any guesswork out of selecting the right gems for your build choice.

Overall, I love the information at armory musings.  There are other things I would like to see added to the data.  And, of course, a blog format makes it pretty difficult to present these types of tables, so the presentation is a little sketchy at times.  But overall it will be a site I visit fairly often when I start working on end-game spec and gear for all those new toons I have hitting 70 with the refer a friend program.  I sure don’t want a pro inspecting my gear and giving me the loser chant.

You should be able to tweak your overall knowledge of any class in the game at armory musings based on great breakdowns of an absolute avalanche of data directly from the armory.  It’s a great resource to use and a tool that just might help you put the final touches on your toon of any class to go Dominate!

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22 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

In preparation for WotLK, you should certainly consider powerleveling herbalism.  For at least the first few months, herbs are going to be selling like hotcakes at the AH, and as of now we really can’t tell which particular flavors are going to be the biggest sellers.

We already recommended that you start buying up all of the herbs you can get your hands on at the AH and then sitting on them until the xpac, but those will be gone in very short order no matter how many of them you are able to collect now.

The only way to make sure that you can make the big bucks long after the initial push, and especially after prices stabilize is to add herbalism to one of your toons, or at least max out that skill just in case.

Now, I normally don’t go in for farming much, but there may be so much gold to be made with this one that it will actually make it worth your while for a few months.  I still keep one toon around with mining as a profession feed, and you may want to do the same with herbalism.

So overall this is going to be pretty short and sweet. What we’re going to try to do is give you the best areas for major Herb farming. This will be especially helpful if you’ve picked up herbalism as a higher level character and need to rush back through the lower levels in newbie zones.

As you go through this guide, remember that when doing circuits of an area, try to travel in a zigzag pattern. The more of an area you cover, the better your farming will be overall. Also, when you get to the higher level herbs, don’t skip the lower level stuff just because you don’t get skill ups for it. Part of the way nodes spawn is related to how many empty nodes there are in the area. The more nodes you pick, the more new nodes will spawn in the general area. You can actually speed things up by picking everything that pops up on your map. Besides, you can either sell the mats you don’t need at the ah or turn them into potions to use or sell if you are doing Alchemy.

1 – 50: Silverleaf and Peacebloom

• Alliance:
  • Dolanaar
  • Dun Murogh
  • Elwynn Forrest
  • Azuremyst Isle
• Horde:
  • Mulgore
  • Tirisfal Glades
  • Eversong Woods
  • Durotar

51 – 70: Mageroyal & Earthroot

• Alliance
  • Westfall Coast
  • Gol’Bolar Quarry, Dun Morogh
• Horde
  • Northwest Badlands

71 – 100: Briarthorn

• Alliance
  • Darkshore
  • Twilight Grove, Duskwood
  • Eastern shore of Loch Modan
  • Lakeshire, Redridge Mountains
• Horde
  • All of Northern Barrens
  • Southern Silverpine Forrest

101 – 115: Bruiseweed

• Alliance
  • Western Ashenvale
  • East of Loch Modan
  • Stonewatch Keep, Redridge Mountains
• Horde
  • Ramparts North to Splintertree post in Ashenvale
  • Stonetalon Mountains
  • Southern Barrens

116 – 125: Wild Steelbloom

• Alliance
  • Stonetalon Peak
• Horde
  • Southern Barrens
  • From Great Lift to Highperch in Thousand Needles
• Both
  • Outer edges of Arathi Highlands
  • Nek’mani Wellspring in Stranglethorn Vale
  • Zuuldaia Ruins, Stranglethorn Vale

By this time, both Alliance and Horde will be farming similar areas, so we’ll just lump them all together and you can look for herbs as you travel. Also, the higher levels have more scattered spawn points, so you’ll need to do complete circuits of each of these areas to find all the nodes.

126 – 160: Kingsblood

• Ashenvale
• Charred Vale, Stonetalon Mountains
• Wetlands
• Hillsbrad Foothills
• Misty Reed Swamp, Swamp of Sorrows

161 – 185: Fadeleaf

• Swamp of Sorrows

186 – 205: Khadgar’s Whisker

• Hinterlands
• Eastern Arathi Highlands
• Swamp of Sorrows

206 – 230: Firebloom

• Searing Gorge
• Blasted Lands
• Tanaris

231 – 250: Sungrass

• Felwood
• Feralas
• Forlorn Ridge, Azshara

251 – 270: Gromsblood

• Felwood
• Mannoroc Coven, Desolace
• Blasted Lands

271 – 290: Dreamfoil

• Un’Goro Crater
• Azshara

290 – 300: Plaguebloom

• Western Plaguelands
• Eastern Plaguelands

300 – 330: Felwood

331 – 350+: Zangarmarsh

350 – 375: Shadowmoon, or continue Zangarmarsh

As a level 70, you could easily do this in just a few hours. Also, if you are power leveling, be sure to watch where the herbs overlap, you could very easily go from 225 – 350 in Felwood alone, and maybe pick up a few Felcloth while you’re at it. Zangarmarsh is also just packed with herbs, so once you get there, there’s no real reason to leave, unless you just get bored of looking at giant mushrooms.

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22 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

Not too long ago, it was saying something pretty impressive if you had a level 70 of every class.  But now, anyone can have 10 toons at 70 with a lot less sweat.  Really, you can reasonably develop 10-12 level 70 characters in less time than you can possibly imagine.  It’s so easy, and I’m kicking myself for not seeing it sooner.  But I really can’t be too hard on myself since this wasn’t even possible until about a month ago when Blizz introduced the Refer-a-Friend program.

We did an article about that, but I just didn’t look into it all that much at the time.  You see, I already have 3 accounts and several 70’s so I just didn’t see what a big benefit it was until a couple of days ago.  So stop whatever you are doing with your toons and read this very carefully before you do another minute of leveling.

My wife and I are working on several sets of toons in preparation for the expansion.  I certainly wanted to have one of each class at 70 ready to take into the new content so that I wasn’t stuck having to push several classes all the way from level 1-80.  That just doesn’t sound like a good time.

Based on our beta testing, you could also stop at level 68 and do just fine in WotLK if you wanted to.  I took my shadow priest to Northrend at 68 with middlin gear and it was no sweat.  So if you could just get a full set of toons to level 68 you could have a good jump start on most folks.

But leveling 4 sets of 2 plus one just doesn’t sound like fun to me - or probably anyone else.  Especially if you are relatively new to the game, this can seem like a simply impossible task.  But with the RaF (refer a friend) in effect, you will just not believe how easy it can be.

I’m even going to approach this from the perspective of “you don’t even have any friends who play.”  You don’t have to actually refer a new person to the game.  I referred myself using the RaF link and started a new account that linked to one of my old accounts.  I even transferred several toons from another account to the new referral account!  It’s just like starting any new account, but you get all the experience buffs and other benefits to go with it.  It’s just too easy to pass up.

So I put it to the test a bit yesterday.  Triple experience is something you just have to see for yourself to believe.  In one session at level 30, my wife and I completed 8 quests in Thousand Needles.  Those 8 quests would normally take you from halfway through level 29 to just about level 30.  But by the time we had done those (total played time about 45 minutes) we had both dinged 32 and were over 50% to 33.  It’s just stupid fast.

So that made me put pen to paper on the other big benefit from the RaF deal.  For every 2 levels you gain on your RaF account, you can give 1 free level-up to a toon on your Main account.  That means each toon that hits level 60 has 30 levels to grant to another toon under level 60.

From what I can tell so far, when playing with two linked accounts, you should reasonably be able to hit 60 in half the time it would normally take you to do it solo.  So if you are smart about it, you can have 4 level 60’s (2 on the referred account and 2 on the main account) in the same amount of time it would take you to hit 60 on one toon by yourself.

At the end of that period of time, your 2 level 60 toons on the RAF account would have 60 free levels to give!  So you just pop a new toon onto your main account, meet your RAF toons and BOOM - one free toon at 60 with ZERO days played time.

Well, that was so easy, let’s just lather, rinse and repeat.  Push another two toons to 60, and get another free 60.  By this time you have 10 level 60 toons ready to go into outlands whenever you like.  That’s one of each class, plus an extra paladin or something so you don’t have to worry about respeccing him all the time.

If you are working on your first 70, you can just start another account and whack out one of every other class faster than it took you to hit 70 the first time.  It’s really unbelievable how well this works.

If you are even just a little smarter, you can figure out how to actually hit 60 on 4 of those toons and only have to play 50 levels.  Play the toons that are going to get the “Free” levels up to level 10, and there’s 20 other free levels to give to the “main” toons.  If you play the RaF toons to level 5 before you begin the main toons, and save the free level ups until later, you will only have to play your main toons to about level 54 or so and then just ding them to 60.

And check this out for another nifty little time-saver.  I have grown to prefer the Blood-elf starting area up to level 20.  But if I want a Tauren druid, that means a hideous run that takes about 20 minutes.  Not with RaF.  I can just start a Blood Elf Toon, pop my new Tauren in the game, have the Blood Elf invite the Tauren to a group, and then summon them to Sunstrider Isle in 5 seconds.  No fuss, no muss - it’s brilliant.

If your computer can handle it, you can just double box this the whole way.  Just log into both accounts, set one toon to follow and then minimize so it doesn’t chew up your graphics processing power.  You can play both toons all by yourself and still get the triple experience.  That also means you can skip all of the quests where you have to gather 10 of something and only do the ones where you kill 10 of whatever mobs.  This way, you’re not having to switch back and forth to loot drops between screens.

So, the way to take maximum advantage of the RAF program is to create the new account with the instructions at the wow website.  Activate the account to full BC status and then get to work.  Run two toons on your main account to level 10 and then just let them sit.  Run 4 toons on your RaF account to level 4 and then double box (or actually play with a friend on your main or RaF account) with the toons on your main account.  Just save all the free level-ups until you hit 60 on your RaF toons, and then pop everything else on your main to 60.

It’s sweet, sweet, sweet.  Use the RaF program to build all those toons you’ve always wanted, and when the WotLK comes out - you’ll be ready to REALLY Dominate - with any class you like.  Good luck, and we’ll see you in Northrend!

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60 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

It really never ceases to amaze me what people will buy on the AH.  Even funnier is what people try to sell (like all the hundreds of stacks of vendor trash grey items you see all the time), but that’s another article for another time.

This is just a quickie today, since I can only embellish so much on this particular tip.  But you should be able to add an extra 50-100 gold every single week doing this, even though it’s only going to take you about 30 seconds.

We’ve done an article or two in the past about some rare limited supply recipes that can make you some pretty good coin.  But just recently I stumbled onto another set of recipes that is neither rare, nor limited, and it makes me more gold now than all of those other ones ever did.

Which seems like the dumbest thing in the world to me.  Why in the world would anyone pay a 400-500% markup when they can just go grab it themselves in about 2 minutes.  When I tell you which ones they are you are simply not going to believe it.

I found these completely by accident.  I was working up tailoring for my Shadow Priest and my Wife’s Warlock a couple of months ago and popped into Shattrath to get the higher end cloth recipes from the vendors in the Lower City.

As I did, I noticed the AADV price tooltip for one of them and it made me think (for one of the first times ever with AADV info) “That just CAN’T be right.”  It told me that the recipe for Imbued Netherweave Bag was worth 29gold on that server.  You have to be kidding me right?  People CAN’T be spending 30g on a 3g item.

But the historical data was just too strong, so I bought a few of those, as well as a couple of each of the “bolt of” recipes from the specialists there at the tailoring cluster to do a little test.  (I know the screenshot above shows my priest tooltip as only seeing 2 of these over 2 days, but the same numbers were true in the hundreds on my banker who has much more accurate data in the tooltip).

So that was 2 each of:

• Imbued Netherweave Bag
• Pattern: Bolt of Imbued Netherweave
• Pattern: Primal Mooncloth
• Pattern: Primal Mooncloth Bag
• Pattern: Spellcloth
• Pattern: Shadowcloth

For a total of 51 gold 60 silver.  I mailed it all to my banker to run at the auction that weekend.  Again, it’s just silly how well these things sold.  All in all, those 12 patterns sold in less than 24 hours for over 165 gold.  An average of 13g 75s each.  Some went for around 7g and the Primal Mooncloth Bag fetched nearly 30.

I just don’t see why a level 65+ toon (who is already in outlands anyway) wouldn’t just pop into Shattrath and grab these things.  Do they not know where to find them?  It certainly couldn’t be any easier.

The really nice thing about these recipes is that you could start selling these as soon as you were able to collect about 10 gold.  For me that is normally around level 10 or so.  Just get a mage to port you to Shatt, set your hearth there and grab as many of these as you can and then reinvest the gold for a few days.  Boom, you could have over 200 g by the time you hit level 20.

That sure would make it easy to get your mount at 30 right?  I checked this out on five different servers, and there always seems to be at least a 100-150% markup for all of these recipes.  That means that this should work on almost any server.

So again, you find all of these recipes in the lower city of Shattrath, in that vendor area in the south part of the city.  There are 4 cloth sellers there; Adrion Darkspinner, Gidge Spellweaver, Nasmara Moonsong, and Eiin at 66.3,68.3  Here they are all standing around just waiting for you to show up.

I have found that I can normally sell about 5-10 of each of these recipes every week.  I certainly would never have guessed that they would be in such high demand considering they are so easy to get.  But you just never know about people - especially the lazy level 70’s out there with more gold than sense.

Oh well, if it wasn’t for silly shoppers, I certainly wouldn’t make nearly as much gold, and so I sure don’t care if they ever find out.  Good luck with these, it’s just one more little tool you can add to your ability to Dominate on the ah.

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36 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

What a difference a day makes.  Thursday evening, I was rocking along with my Battleground runs and getting ready to work with Gavin on some other character testing in the Beta when a nice little storm blew in.  One bad lightning strike later and I was dead in the water.  My hard drive was fried.  So there I sat trying to figure out some way to salvage not only the evening, but also nearly 6 months worth of work.

You see, I had made the mistake of not backing up all of the articles, ebooks and guides I had written.  Like a dummy I had succumbed to this strange notion windows has of putting everything in the My Documents folder.  I long ago got tired of fighting the ghost of Wild Bill Gates and just let it do whatever it wanted.  Big mistake.

Needless to say, when you are looking at the blue screen of death and know that somewhere on your hard drive is nearly 1,000 hours of work that would be virtually impossible to duplicate your pucker factor increases into the millions.  After fiddling with the recovery console for about 12 hours I was finally able to fix the master boot record of the hard drive and get back to ground zero, but I really thought I was looking at a couple thousand dollars in data recovery fees.  Just goes to show you what a little frantic Googling can do for you.

The whole ordeal taught me a few valuable lessons, and something about WoW that might come in handy for all of you at some point in time.  But let’s cover the just plain computer “don’t let this happen to you” stuff very quickly.  If you never felt the need to use a UPS (Uninterrupted Power Supply) and a decent backup program, get both right this second.  You can find backup utilities for free, or if you prefer something really slick you can always use Acronis.

Seriously, even if you don’t think you have anything you can’t afford to lose on your computer, you’re probably fooling yourself.  At the very minimum, get another hard drive and at least save your contact lists, music, and the other stuff you use all the time to the alternate drive at least once a month.  You don’t really even need a backup program, they just make it easier.

Anyway, on to the WoW issue.  I HAD saved WoW on one of my SATA drives, so at least I didn’t have to go through a bagillion hours of downloading the whole thing from scratch.  But since I didn’t have another computer that could run the SATA drive I only had one option left - my wife’s laptop.

No problem, i figured.  She uses all the same mods and a Fang gamepad just like I do, so I can just pop on and keep up the BG runs.  Well, not so much.  I had failed to remember that we had only set up HER account to mirror mine, but when I logged into MY accounts on her machine, it was just a mess.

Nothing was in the right place, the keybindings were nonexistent, all the bars and mods were in all the wrong places - it was basically impossible to play and do much of anything except run around.  Well, I’m not one of those honor mooches, so I didn’t saddle my team with a total loser that couldn’t contribute.  Since I was already nearly screaming over losing everything on my machine, I sure didn’t feel like spending an hour getting everything right from scratch on her machine just to run a few AV’s.

But there is an easy way to do just that.  I have a little USB drive so today I popped it in and copied a few things from MY WoW folder to it and in about two minutes I had everything set up on that laptop to run exactly the way it does on my machine.  It’s really simple if you know what to copy, and I’m about to show you what files to grab so that you can make WoW work on any machine that has WoW installed without ever missing a beat.

Here’s a screenshot from inside my WoW folder.  The two folders we will be working with are the Interface folder and the WTF folder.  Real simple with the Interface - if you want to copy all your addons to another computer just copy the entire folder.  We have to root around in the WTF just a bit.

Inside WTF you will find two things, a folder named Account, and a file named Config.  Open the Account File and you should see a folder for each one of your WoW accounts.  At this point all you have to do is copy each account file you want to put on the new machine.  Since that’s just almost too easy, let’s take it a step further.

If you ever run into a situation where something tragic happens (like it did to me) and you need to repair something one realm at a time you can also copy settings from one realm to another within each account.  Inside each account folder, you will see something like this:

On this account, I only have toons on the Fenris realm, but if I had toons on more than one realm, then you would also have a folder for each realm.  Certain settings are saved by realm, so if you’ve been playing for months on one realm and have everything just the way you like it, you can also transfer all of those settings to toons on a new realm without having to go through the process of doing it all manually in-game.  This is especially handy if you transfer a toon to another realm or account.

From the account folder, just copy the bindings-cache, Saved Variables folder and SavedVariables.LUA files if you need to put them on another account.  (There are two SavedVariables files shown here, but one is a BAK or backup file, WoW will automatically create a new one so there’s no need to copy that one)

When you open the realm folder, in this case Fenris, you will see a folder for every character on that realm (and even for toons you used to have that you may have deleted - just can delete those if you like to cut down on clutter).  To copy settings specific for one toon to another toon, just copy everything INSIDE one of those toon folders and paste it to the new toon folder on any account or realm.

So to recap here in case I lost anyone.  To move ALL of you settings to another machine, copy the Interface folder and paste it to the WoW folder on the new machine.  (If someone is using a different set of mods on the other machine that they want to keep, be sure to copy THEIR Interface folder first and put it somewhere they can find to replace your copy with theirs again later).  Then in the \World of Wacraft\WTF\Account folder, copy any account folders and paste those into the WTF folder on the new machine.

If you need to copy settings to another account folder on your own machine for whatever reason, the files to copy from the \WTF\Account\*ACCOUNT NAME*\*Realm Name* are:

1. Saved Variables Folder

2. SavedVariables.LUA

3. bindings-cache

4. Entire contents from inside \WTF\Account\*ACCOUNT NAME*\*Realm Name*\*Toon Name*

So to copy the settings for your Toon “Ubergoober” on the “Flobbit” realm on your account “Dominators” you would click the WTF folder, the Account folder, the Dominators folder and from there copy the first three files listed above.  Then you would click the Flobbit folder and finally click the Ubergoober folder and copy everything in that folder.  Once you have all the files, you would reverse that process to add those settings to another toon on any account or realm you like.

It would be pretty neat to have a little program to automate this process, but I doubt I can talk Gavin into writing the thing - it’s not like we don’t have enough to do already.  It’s not really complicated once you know what to copy from which folders, and you can always come back to this article as a referrence.

So in the end, my (near) loss made me take a close look at exactly how to move my settings, and now you know how to do it too.  Good luck, and may lightening NEVER Dominate YOUR hard drive!

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16 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

I’ve spent the vast majority of my WoW experience doing PvE.  To be completely honest, I’ve never really liked PvP.  For those of you who are Blizz fans, it all started in D2.  I was a huge Diablo fan, but PvP just escaped me.  I had a whole pile of 90’s and did maybe a billion solo hell Baal runs, so I knew what I was doing - I just didn’t enjoy all the crud that comes with PvP.

It takes a certain mentality to really enjoy killing people.  Mobs are one thing, fighting another human being is quite another.  Maybe I’m just not the ruthless type.  Although you would think if you can learn how to do one really well, then why would the other be tough?  Well, I finally decided that it was a huge hole in my game and it had to be fixed.  Oh, and it was making Gavin mad that I sucked at it.

So for those of you who are pros at PvP this may be a little boring and you might want to move on to another post.  But we all had to start somewhere with everything and you might actually find a bit of humor here if you can cast your mind back to when you were just beginning your PvP experience.  Plus, you might actually be able to help those people who are just starting out by adding comments on the beginner bits instead of doing what most good PvPer’s do - laugh at people.

That one thing - the punk factor, kept me out of PvP.  I simply hate being laughed at, spit on, and all of the other ego trip idiot things people do when they win.  More than likely they are losers who never won at anything else in their lives so they feel some uncontrollable urge to rub it in when they actually succeed at something.

As a result, PvP can be pretty intimidating at first.  So these observations may be just the boost you need to get started if you’ve been putting it off and “concentrating” on your raiding or leveling.  Well don’t wait any longer, you’ve got to just jump into the fray and take your lumps as a rookie.

Right off the bat, understand that you’re going to have to grow a little thicker skin to be able to swallow PvP, especially at first.  The jerk factor doesn’t stop with the guys on the other side.  You’re going to be the victim of a fair amount of ridicule from members of your own teams as well.  Which is a real shame.  No one actually knows how to play team sports any more.

So you’re really going into Battlegrounds and world raids with a bunch of individuals doing their own thing.  Because of that, sometimes you’re going to lose even though you could have won, and all those individuals are going to blame each other, and you, and your mom, and your sister and anyone, in fact, but themselves.  If they are so smart, why aren’t they organizing pre-mades?  Oh well, you just have to live with it.

You’re also going to feel virtually naked your first few Battlegrounds.  So much of the success quotient in PvP is in your gear.  And you’re not going to have the right kind of gear until you’ve done your share of PvP, so it’s a circular referrence.  How do you get a LOT better in PvP situations?  Get good PvP gear.  How do you get good PvP gear?  Play a lot of PvP.  So you can see you have to go through the rookie blues for a while until you can start collecting some honor gear.

That was the whole point for me in starting my PvP grind - to grab at least the full current set of gear before the WotLK debut.  And I figured it sure wouldn’t hurt me to get a few hundred battlegrounds under my belt to try to get up to speed on the whole concept.  So I hopped in about 50 games last week as a trial by fire.

Despite getting whacked a good number of times by players who simply had more skill and a lot better gear, it’s really not too bad after about the 20th game.  It took me about 5 games to even have an idea what was happening, and then another 5 to figure out what maybe I should be doing besides just tagging along and killing what I could and trying not to just be dumb.  So after 10 games I felt better.

Then I could really try to participate and help do my part to win the matches.  Easier said than done.  My first 20 games on my hunter went really badly because I am simply the wrong spec and forgot to take that into account before I went in.

My Shadow Priest did a whole lot better, even though he just hit 70 and has virtually nothing but crafted gear from tailoring.  I made sure to do a little more research and respec to a PvP friendly build as well.  So I did the full holiday weekend of EOTS games, about 20 in WSG, and a few AB just to check it out.  The encouraging part?  If you’re pretty good at PvE, you can figure out the PvP stuff faster than it looks like those first few games.

You learn pretty quickly which classes are going to give you fits, and you can either avoid them or just know you’re probably about to take a beating.  But that also means that there are some classes you will normally best if you play your cards right and you’ll know how to spot them and hunt them down to take them right out of the fight.

The biggest difference between PvE and PvP is really just the speed of the game.  PvP is really a case of Fast and Furious.  But after a while you will feel yourself getting a LOT quicker with not only your spells and skills, but just moving around the battle fields.  As you process information faster and learn to spot certain things it makes a big difference in how well you will do.

But the real point I wanted to make here (after a little rambling) was that maybe the one thing that will give you some sense of pride as you begin the PvP gear grind is to be a team player.  As I mentioned before, you’re going to be playing with a lot of punks, but that doesn’t excuse you from doing the right thing.  You can often be more valuable to the entire battle not just by whacking people but by doing other, more subtle, things that will not show up in the end-of-battle list of kills and damage/healing done.

Just a “for instance,” as a shadow priest.  Since the SP is not a big killer with a gob of life I can’t really mount a 1 man assault on a captured tower and wait for reinforcements.  But I did find that I could slow down about 4 enemy players chasing a flag carrier.  In that way, just the two of us could do something faster than if we had grouped up five guys to try to take and control the mid field.  When the flag gets picked up, there will often be a big chase scene, and most of the time no one will stop to gank the little SP running along with the group.  So I had the freedom to dot, flay and get some blackouts in on several enemy players, basically letting my flag guy get out scot free.

Now, realize that once the flag got out of reach I was dead meat.  But that’s sometimes the whole point of being a team player.  Go ahead and mount that 2 man assault you know is going to fail if it will buy your team time to grab some other tower.  Run away from situations when you’re going to die anyway and try to get that one druid to chase you to give your group an advantage.  Look for any way you can to create annoyances for the other team and give your team the best shot at winning - even if it means not scoring any personal points in the game.  Take one for the team in other words.  Sometimes you will help more by taking a death and occupying a few enemy toons until reinforcements arrive than if you waited for help first.  While you are waiting they might have time to get a zerg up for one of your towers.

And more than anything, just realize that you’re going to win some, and you’re certainly going to lose some.  You can’t let it make you mad or yell at the other folks in the group.  You’re going to get into those games that are pre-mades for the other faction and you’ll be toast from the start.  When the other team is REALLY a team, you’re going to have a hard time winning as a PUG cluster.

But maybe the best example of how satisfying it can be was an epic comeback I was privileged to be a part of in one EOTS round.  When the bubble dropped, there were only 6 of us in the game.  It was a rout from the very beginning.  At one point, we were down 1,200 to 150.  Then the team numbers rounded out and at full strength, we charged back for the win by just 50 points.  It was one of the most satisfying victories I’ve ever had playing WoW.  Just as good as the first instance Boss drop and definitely as good as that first Gruul or Vashj kill.

Now I can begin to see why people do a lot of PvP.  It can be really fun.  Sure, there is a grind involved - it wouldn’t be fun if it wasn’t difficult in a lot of ways.  So I look forward to having my first full set of PvP gear here in the next few weeks, and seeing just how different it is on the other side of the pile of purples than it was when I started.  I plan on keeping the old gear as a reference point and running a few games with the old gear and then the full set of new gear just to see how big a difference it makes with the same skill set.  Should be a fascinating journey as well.

So, all you folks that have been lolly-gagging around doing all PvE, it’s time to hop into some battlegrounds and get your feet seriously wet.  Or, you can follow me straight off into the deep end.  I guarantee, it won’t be long before you will start to Dominate!

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40 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

You already know how to play the game.  But you know you could get better.  You picked the PvP server on purpose to give yourself a challenge.  But it’s starting to get old.  I seems like everywhere you go you’re getting sand kicked in your face.  You win some, you lose some, and sometimes - you just get pwnd.

You think it might be just the fact that they have you out-geared.  But then another dude comes along and whips the guy who just ate your lunch, and made it look easy.  You know there’s a secret to it, but you’ve just never figured out what it is.

Well we’re about to tell you a little secret we use to Dominate every area of the game.

Being a great player is all about reaction times. Now, there is something to be said for being proactive, but there are just so many situations that require you to SEE what’s happening in the game and then USE the right spell or action.  When you get so fast you can respond to everything going on around you and have time to spare - that’s when you start making them react to you, and that’s when you begin to dominate.  Sure, you have to know WHAT to do and WHEN to do it, but you have to think fast, recognize fast, and cast fast.

When you get so fast you are waiting on the global cooldown for your next THREE spells, now we’re talking being ahead of the competition.  That’s when you can just yawn while you rip someone’s head off.

Rookie professional athletes talk about having to get used to the “speed of the game.”  Pros are just bigger, better, stronger, and way faster.  But that doesn’t mean you’re stuck with being a 100 pound WoW weakling forever.

Now, there is something to the gear issue.  You really WILL get your head knocked off in arena matches if you have vastly inferior gear.  Which brings up an interesting point: how do you get the gear to dominate if you can’t dominate enough to get the gear?

You Need An Edge

A little boost so that you’re not stuck grinding it out in the battlegrounds forever for season 1 welfare epix.  And even though we’re talking about PvP a lot here, it will make an even bigger difference in PvE.  You’ll be the first person people come to to start their groups.  The MVP of your raid and guild.

One of the best ways to get your speed kicked into warp gear is to use macros.  Have you ever looked at the poor schmucks on the forums trying to find a macro?  Unless you’re a whiz at that sort of thing, writing your own toon specific macros is probably going to end in frustration.  It did for me.  There are just way too many variables to give you a set of macros you can put on your 1-9 keys that will cover every situation.

But there is another way, and it’s simpler, easier, and far superior to macros and mods alone.  The Fang gaming pad can put you in the driver’s seat, and turbocharge your play speed.

We process things in the game visually.  We can’t really smell the ganker coming over the hill behind us, and unless you dropped serious bucks on sound cards and headphones you won’t hear them either.  So we rely on what we can see.

The best way to improve your reaction times is practice.  See what your opponent is doing and then counter that move.  It all starts when you’re a poor little level 1 lowbie.  You learn to react to a limited number of things mobs throw at you.  By the time you reach 70 you have a pretty good feel for what to do in a lot of situations, but you’ve just run out of simple ways of using what you know.

That’s where the Fang will become your best friend.  With this little weapon, you can put every single skill in your book at your fingertips.  After just a few hours practicing, your fingers will be hitting all the right keys so much faster than before it will amaze you.

The Fang has 36 programmable keys that you can hotkey to the action bars in WoW.  It also has the traditional movement keys right in the center including the strafe functions, but with bigger, better feeling buttons that really make moving better than it’s ever been.

How does it help?  You’ve probably heard some jerk elitist dork say “get rid of all that clutter on your screen, learn 2 play!”  I guarantee you there was a time (like 3 years ago) when he didn’t play without looking either.  So don’t listen to the turds.  Get you a mod like bartender and put ALL of your spells out where you can see them and then link them to the fang and your 1-0 keys - then get ready to rumble!

Next, just go out and work through some tough situations.  Do things that you have found difficult in the past.  Fight elite mobs, take on 5 mobs, go to a heroic instance, do some battlegrounds - in other words, Practice!

You will find that you will naturally group together certain types of actions on the fang in little clusters.  Now your right thumb becomes a lethal weapon against rogues - your pinky dots folks to death, and your middle finger?  Well you’re starting to see the point.

With the right tool and a little practice, your game will make a quantum leap in speed.  You will be able to see not only what the game is about to do to you, but make the keystroke NOW!  You’ll already have your counter spell in motion and the offensive spell ready before they knew what hit them.

Now, you can choose to spend a couple of hundred hours learning to be the best macro programmer you can be, good luck with that.  For those of you who DO use power macros - imagine having 36 situation specific macros to use!  We’re not knocking macros, but they are only useful if you can trigger them easily.

There is simply no better way to trigger skills and macros faster and with fewer keystrokes than a Fang.

Sure, you can do without it.  You can figure out how to to toggle 4 actions bars worth of buttons with four different keystroke modifiers and just use your right hand to click 2 or three buttons, but WHY?  That’s like walking around the block to get to the store across the street.

The easier you make it on yourself, the faster you will play.  Make it easy on yourself to Dominate and grab a Fang.

Use it for a month and you’ll never be able to live without it.  How much will that set you back?  About 30 cents an hour - and forever after that it’s absolutely free.  So what do you think?  Is it worth three dimes to absolutely spank everything in sight for an hour?  You’ll never miss a few bucks, but once you play with a Fang we guarantee you’ll know what you’ve been missing.

All you have to do is click the picture to check one out or grab one right away.  It’s time for you to Dominate.

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34 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

In a word, “bad.”  These guys are tough, strong, plate wearing, killing machines.  It’s almost unfair to every other class in the game.  You could think of them as Warlock/Mage/Warrior/Rogues.  Warcraft’s first hero class is simply Dominating.

Lawbringer and I both got our beta keys the other night and began our run through the beta.  Now, no WotLK run would be quite the same without at least giving all the other classes a shot.  The new talent tabs are just too tempting and we certainly want to keep everyone up to date on how the traditional classes will fare - but playing a Death Knight is awesome.

Let me just say Blizzard did not disappoint, especially in the starting area.  For those of you who have strong moral biases, you might find the quest line dialogue a bit dark and disturbing at first.  Aligning yourself with the most evil guy in the game, Arthas, and some of the quest objectives are pretty grim.  But there is a bit of redemption in the end.

I don’t want to give too much away, but if you can get past the basic premise of slaughtering people without qualm for a couple of hours, you’re going to have a ton of fun with your first Death Knight.

Let’s start with the bits that relate to game mechanics before we get to the DK’s themselves.  Blizzard did some things with the starting area that are really brilliant.  The quest lines are linked very well, and guide you through the starting zone in a very linear fashion.  You don’t have to run all over the place, so your first three levels go very fast.  You can reasonably do 55-57 in under 3 hours even your first time through.

As you begin, you notice a few things different about quest mechanics for the DK.  Quest tools are quite often placed on a special action bar that takes a little getting used to.  When you do the mount quest, there is a special button you need to press to turn in the quest, which can be confusing for about 15 seconds while you wonder what in the heck you have to do to get the yellow turn in question mark from the NPC.  But once you get conditioned to pay attention to these special action buttons, it actually makes it easier than ever to figure out exactly what you’re supposed to be doing.

Next, you get to do a whole pile of really nifty quest types.  You loot, kill, strafe, bomb, cannoneer, hide in two different costumes, pillage, crush and steal your way through a wide variety of things that are just plain fun.  Yes, the text is evil and a bit disturbing at times, but the chains are anything but dull.

The biggest change is that all of the quest loops are instanced.  It’s a little hard to describe.  Think of the DK starting area as five different zones, even though they are all in the same place.  Once you complete the first set of quests, everything in the zone changes for you.  The mobs are different, the NPC’s have moved, and the action shifts to the new quest line - but only for you and everyone else who is in that set of quests.  It’s fabulous.  You don’t have to run to a completely new area to do new content, the content just changes depending on your progression.

It’s wierd at first, since the zone chat will have people asking about the first quest line while you are in the exact same spot working on something completely different and you can’t see them even though they may be only a few yards away.  But it’s nice that there aren’t a half a billion other DK’s competing for the same mobs and NPC’s since they can be seperated into five different instances of the same area.

By instancing the quest lines, Blizz solved the problem of congestion, as well as making the story line much more engaging.  There is a terrific flow to the story and it will make the question of “why are we all going to Northrend?” make a lot more sense.

As for the DK, I really don’t even know where to start.  There’s enough new information in just a few hours of play to do 20 articles about these dudes.  And so much of the initial experience raises even more questions than answers about how they fit into the overall scheme of PvE, PVP, and raiding.  But I’ll give you some sweet little observations this time around.

DK’s operate on the Runic Power system instead of mana, rage or energy.  But Runic Power works a bit like all of them.  Like rage, you gain runic power by mele strikes.  Like mana, you use runic power to cast some spells, although certain spells generate runic power.  It is actually difficult to run out of runic power if you are fighting pretty regularly.  That’s where the DK class has an advantage over all the other systems.

If you are low on RP, you aren’t in trouble, and you don’t have to stop using spells.  You can just cast a few spells, which do damage to mobs and even healing to yourself to get more runic power and then it’s back to busting heads.  It’s a little like life tap for a lock, except you gain power without losing anything in the process.  Talk about a dominating advantage.  It’s hard to say anything but WOW once you see it in action for yourself.  You begin to feel invincible.

But runes go beyond the power bar.  You also have two each of blood, frost and unholy runes as well as a fourth proc rune called a death rune.  These runes are seperate from the power system and have a more traditional cooldown system.  Talents in all three trees buff these runes with things like instant cooldowns on critical strikes and other things that will take a lot more play to figure out completely, but I don’t think it will be ferociously complex.

As for the other little tidbits that are completly unique to the DK’s, the starting city is a huge floating ziggurat above the far eastern borders of the Eastern PLagulands, and it is really super cool.  Check out our shot of the Ebon Hold below.

To get you geared and talented up before you leave the starting area, most of the quests have a nice blue item and bonus talent points as rewards.  By the time you finish the starting area, you have a complete set of blues and 49 talent points in your tree of choice, as well as four runeforge spells to put on your weapon/weapons.

It’s too early for me to tell just how well a DK will tank and DPS.  I can see them being very hard to defeat in arenas, but I can’t see them being a true MT based on what we see from the talent trees alone.  I’m not so sure they will be able to out-DPS a well geared lock or mage, and even though many of their diseases heal them, they may still need a healer from time to time.  It’s just too early to tell.

I don’t think they make every other class unnecessary by any means, but so many of their talents point to raid resistances, buffs and damage increases that I can certainly see a 5 man group wanting one DK from each tree for an instance run.  I’m sure the WoW comminuty and DYS will work out all the details for how the DK class really fits into the grand scheme of things soon - I mean, that’s our job right?

So even though I don’t have time, space or all the knowledge yet to tell you everything there is to know about playing a DK you can be certain that you will be impressed.  The starting zone is unique, the game mechanics smooth and entertaining, and the class is nearly ridiculously powered.  You get great gear and talents uber fast, and it doesn’t take forever to get ready to roll in outlands and beyond.

My advice, get WotLK the first day out and we’ll certainly get you ready ahead of time to go out on your deathcharger and Dominate!

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53 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

Yesterday I started a little argument with one of our faithful readers and posters James M.  Don’t take it personally James, and I certainly appreciate your feedback, it makes me really research hard to back up my points.

The original statement I made is that most of your gear from tBC is already obsolete since WotLK will be out in a few months and you’ll be replacing almost all of your gear in a few levels anyway.  That certainly was the case in tBC, and I expected nothing different from the next expansion.

To make myself perfectly clear, I probably should restate the position a little more carefully (again, thanks to James).  It’s not that you will NEED to replace T5 gear with greens because the greens in the 71-73 zones are better, but you probably shouldn’t START trying to get geared up for the expansion if you aren’t already because the gear you will get in Northrend will be ALMOST as good anyway.  If you already have 4 out of five of your T5 set, and a guild running the right stuff to get the last bit, then go for it.  But if you have several toons at 70 that aren’t in high-end raid gear, now is certainly too late to worry about the grind of getting top end gear.

Now, Blizzard has certainly made every effort to make the gear from tBC raids more viable in WotLK than pre-BC gear was in tBC, but there is also a bigger difference between level 75 and level 70 toons and gear than there is between level 60 and 55.  The reason is that as you rise in levels, the gains from gear contribute a more significant percentage of your base skills than at lower levels.  I don’t have time in this article to go into a lot of detail on that, but every level gain is a more significant leap than the last one.  By the time you get to 75 you will be fighting mobs that will just be a LOT stronger and tougher.  Therefore, the gear has to scale faster to keep the game playable solo without having to go back and do 25 man raids from the previous patch.

Just so you all know I’m not pulling this idea out of some mental dork zone, let me give you a good example of what I mean.  The following picture is of the T5 hunter shoulders from the Rift Stalker set.  To get these shoulders you have to be able to go to Tempest Keep, a 25 man raid dungeon.  These are a 54%  drop and in a 25 man raid you can reasonably expect at least 3-5 folks to be rolling for these.  That reduces YOUR chance of getting the roll to below 10% per run, meaning you may need to make 5 full runs to have a reasonable shot at them.  Sound hard yet?

I would imagine that no more than 5% of the nearly 40,000 people who read DYS on a regular basis (or only about 2,000) have even sniffed the prospect of getting into a run on TK.  I would wager that the real number of people at DYS who have had a legitimate shot at these is in the low hundreds.  So saying that T5 will be ok until level 78 is making a HUGE assumption that there are just lots of people who have been able to build their complete T5 sets.  If you look at the guild progressions on any given server, there are normally less than 5 guilds from each faction that have even made it to TK even today.  That means it’s a pretty safe bet that only a few dozen guys on each server have completed even the T5 set, much less the T6 stuff.  It’s that rare.

(Uber Dominate Your Server congratulations to those of you who have completed full sets!  If you’re one of those guys you might pop your armory link into the comments)

Here they are:

Now, my original intent was to show that you will be able to get almost similar gear SOLO in Northrend fairly quickly and easily, so if you’re just beginning to collect T5 stuff, you probably just don’t have time and it might be a waste of time unless you already almost have all the set bits.

For one little quest in the Dragonblight zone at level 72 you can choose these green shoulders as a reward:

Ok, so no sockets, no intellect, and no hit rating, but if you CAN’T get your T5 shoulders before WotLK, these should do you just fine.  Going solo, the extra 19 stamina, 4 agility and 10 AP will almost make up for the loss of Intellect - especially for BM hunters.

Let’s look at a couple of others a little higher up the level ladder at level 73 and 74:

Besides that, these choices would also be a decent fit for a Shaman depending on spec.  If you have multiple toons, you probably have not had time to get a whole pile of epics for all of them.

Not good enough to show you what I mean yet?  Ok let’s try weapons, those are a different type of thing, so let’s stick with hunter weapons and look at some good bows from tBC compared to some simple solo quest rewards from WotLK.  I’m just going to assume you all know or can find out how difficult it is to get the epic bows I’m showing here, the greens and blues that follow each tBC bow is from WotLK level 75 or lower solo quest reward.

So I think you’re beginning to catch on to what I mean.  You can certainly go to Northrend in your T5 gear and not worry about having to completely replace everything in two or three levels, but if you’re not uber geared there’s no need to worry about it much.  In many cases, even good epic weapons will be replaced pretty quick.  Armor seems to have a bigger gap but there’s one more thing we haven’t talked about yet that may make the armor argument completely disappear.

We have not yet seen the gear drops for Northrend instances!  If they are as good as tBC instance drops, you may certainly expect to find gear that rivals T5 and T6 at level 72-73 Boss loot tables, we just don’t have a way of looking at those yet on wowhead.  I could probably have made even better cases for T5 armor vs. Northrend early instance drops if there was more information on WotLK items, but there simply is not enough to choose from as of yet.

One interesting thing about WotLK drops is that there are a lot of items that come with random enchantments.  Not that that is any different from the other two sections of the game so far, it’s just that we haven’t seen all the random enchantment drops yet so the names for all those possibilities don’t yet exist.  All of those Booger Beater Longbow (of the bandit, of the fletcher, of the whale and that sort of thing) all we have is the pre-name without all the suffixes yet.  The random chant stuff may be the best fit for many specialty builds.

So if you don’t like the armor comparisons above (I admit I wish I had more to choose from but it made the point anyway - triple stat greens are not really going to happen) just wait until you see the boss drops from the first few Northrend instances.  If a couple of level 73 greens have decent stats you can bet that the blues from Boss drops will be even sweeter.

The whole point of the original discussion with James was not to bust your hump to try to finish up tBC raids for gear (and certainly not for rep) since you will be able to find comparable gear in WotLK relatively easily and quickly, and you are certainly going to want to save the rep grind for the new factions unless you are REALLY close to hitting exhalted with someone.  It may not always be BETTER than tBC epics, but it will be close, and for leveling that’s good enough.

Besides, just like we’ve been saying all along with tBC, the really fun stuff will be the NEXT end-game content, so go quick to 80 and then start collecting your gear for the serious raids at the end of the WotLK.  If you think the T5 and T6 stuff is good, you will be beside yourself looking at T7 and T8.  When that stuff starts popping up we’ll certainly let you know.

The nice thing is that you’re not going to have to wait long for a final verdict on this topic.  Gavin and I both got our Beta keys last night, so we’re about to find out how fast we both replace all our gear during testing.  We’ll be sure to keep you posted about our progress.

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48 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post