The calm after the storm

I really like the new patch, I come to think it's def. one of the best patches that has seen the realms (at least for me anyway).

I've been doing some serious emblem farming since it went live and now after a couple of days I bascially got all emblem stuff which I can consider an upgrade and apart from HoR (H) I got everything down with my main group.

Yeah, and just today I was thinking - that's bascially it until the expansion.

I am really curious how Blizz is gonna keep the large playerbase happy until the next expansion which is still far off.
Raiders do still have ICC but but unless they really stretch it I don't see it lasting for very long.

For the non-raiders things don't look that bright. Sure you can do the occasional pug and get your frost emblems but from a sole multiboxer perspective that is not really an option.

On the other hand I was watching some TV tonight and thought, hey, I rather farm some emblems then watching more of this crap ;)

Lol the CLAM after the storm... that gives a new meaning to that phrase :)

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Originally Posted by Oatboat

Lol the CLAM after the storm... that gives a new meaning to that phrase :)

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LoL, I'm glad I'm not the only one who caught that.

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I am really curious how Blizz is gonna keep the large playerbase happy until the next expansion which is still far off.
Raiders do still have ICC but but unless they really stretch it I don't see it lasting for very long.

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While you're mostly correct, do not forget that as a multiboxer, you can do things 5 - 10x faster than a solo player (in the larger scope of things).

But ya.. I'll be working on new team members a lot.

They are definatly following through with what they missed in Burning Crusade. They are giving easy access to all the content and not hiding it away except for the high end raid guilds. I expect random pug raids w/o week long lockouts next. Maybe a 24h-72h debuff is all.

I'm just going to be working on new teams and farming up shards/emblems to buy all needed heirloom items for teams to come since I don't have RAF for new teams

Well, they are spacing the opening of the new wings in ICC a bit more than ToC, and with the relative low number of tries on big bosses that will keep the high end guilds busy a bit, as well as mid end raiders.

But for most people it looks like it will just be a endless frost badge farm :P With my current low play time this actually works out just fine, would like to max my second team and be ready for Cataclysm in terms of some more maxed tradeskills and a big gold supply.

Any "educated" guesses on Cataclysm release date? March?

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Originally Posted by Perrigrin

Well, they are spacing the opening of the new wings in ICC a bit more than ToC, and with the relative low number of tries on big bosses that will keep the high end guilds busy a bit, as well as mid end raiders.

But for most people it looks like it will just be a endless frost badge farm :P With my current low play time this actually works out just fine, would like to max my second team and be ready for Cataclysm in terms of some more maxed tradeskills and a big gold supply.

Any "educated" guesses on Cataclysm release date? March?

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I'm willing to bet late summer to November-ish myself.

Eh.. the patch is okay, but WoW is more of a grind today that it ever was.
You have two choices:
An honor grind for easy epics.
A badge/emblem grind for easy epics.

If a proper dungeon finder system were created back in vanilla WoW, there never would have been a need for badges/emblems. You could find a group at any time to run content you needed drops from. Remove the cooldown on raid content for using the dungeon find system, and remove badges/emblems entirely. People who need gear can run dungeons with others and roll on it.. the whole emblem system just for showing up is ridiculous, especially when emblem gear is better than the gear you'd find as drops in the instances you're farming for emblems! Emblem gear should be there to fill holes of truly shitty gear you haven't found an upgrade for, not to deck out your entire character in the best non-raid gear.

Add in the dailies grind for easy gold.. with each expansion & patch, all they seem to do is dumb this game down to the lowest common denominator. I'm ready for WoW2 - start from the beginning again and hopefully learn from their mistakes. I can't wait for a new game by someone other than Blizzard that actually is better than WoW.. too many hopeful attempts have been failures over the years to really be better: AoC, LotRO, Warhammer, Aion..

"The CLAM after the storm..."

I opened the thread thinking there was a new hunter pet announced for underwater areas... :P

And then the OP went and edited their typo :p

I don't think Wotlk is such a bad grind, BC was far worse. All those attunement quest, heroics which bascially took ages. People just didn't know different at the time so probably everyone went along with it.

Maybe my only complaint, after Blizz allowed people to reach their gear limits a lot faster, they should have added a new timesink to the game apart from PvE or PvP.

I am not talking about housing (don't think that would work well) but just give players another option to expand their characters.

I think the "grind" is in the eye of the beholder! I came back to WoW from Aion and the grind there is mind numbing....

I quit WoW the day Wrath dropped. I was waiting in line at midnight to buy wrath and said... "screw it, I'm done." I didn't play anything for months then started playing the Aion closed beta in late June. Aion was fun for a while but when the quests died out after the mid twenties, grinding the same mobs/instances over and over became the only way to level. When I came back to WoW a couple of weeks ago, it was refreshing. Aion, for all that it is not, gave me perspective. I'm sure, because I've heard over and over, that there are games with a far worse grind than Aion. So I don't think that Aion's grind is the ultimate grind. However, nothing about WoW seems like a grind. This is why I'm playing again, and I'm happy.