I worry that Blizz is lumping all thier eggs in one basket with this patch. They're stalling things which need immediate fixes (anti-melee mobs, trash respawns, epic reitemization, trade skill fixes) to be released at a much later date along with non-pressing content such as Black Temple (provided you need tempest keep/SSC lvl gear to compete in BT.

They always do that. For example, the Mage + Shaman talent revamps were in the same giant content patch as Naxx, along with dozens of other fixes.

Wow, I thought my suggestion of not turning in quests AFTER 68 until you hit 70 would be considered rough for people. You're suggesting a person run Blood Furnace from 60-66? Sure you'd have money when you went back, but you'd also be slicing your wrists.

Agreed on the wrist slicing. Also I don't see how you would get any more money, you need to be max level to get the exp->gold conversion.

Ramparts/Blood Furnace until you're honored (61/62 most likely) then do Hellfire in between Slave Pens/Underbog until honored (64/65, maybe 66). Then do Zangramarsh while grabbing Crypts and Halls runs until honored- once you hit that, finish out your questing in Terokkar/Nagrand.

At the end you'll be spitting distance to revered with HH/CE/LC, honored with Consortium, and geared with great gear to start the level 70 instances. Hell I started Shadow Labs at 68, Steam Vaults at 69 and finished my Kara key pieces the day I hit 70.... took another day to find a decent BM group to finish it.

At the end you've got a VERY well factioned and geared alt (great for professions!) and most of 3-4 zones left for questing gold.

If anything its REALLY nice to see they're not marching blindly forward in order to release Black Temple without thinking about other aspects of the game. I've been worried for a while that they're trying too hard to release Black Temple and that would be it until the next expansion.

Although it still feels far, far too early to release it given that not a soul has stepped into Hyjal yet.

I'd rather they'd stop introducing new content until the get the current content right :x

Raid content isn't perfect, but they did a damn fine job with five-man stuff. Reputations aren't an unbearable grind, the loot is solid and heroics (while needed better loot) offer a sense of progression.

I'd much rather see more accessible content in 2.1 rather than a raid instance not even the top raids will be ready for.

The idea is that you do BF to 66, do the HFP/ZM/Terokkar quests to 70, then have SMV/BEM/Netherstorm/Nagrand to gold grind quests.

Skyguard and Netherwing look like 2 new professions to grind. On my server, primal water sells for around 20+g per. I can easily farm around 5+ primal waters an hour in Skettis in addition to around 20-25g off vendor trash and some d/ed stuff from greens. However, I'm finding it harder and harder to bring myself to spend an hour farming these places.

It's /wrist then, or /wrist later when I'm wondering "Do I *really* want that epic mount?". The difference is in one case it's optional, and in the other case it isn't. Getting to 70 is non-optional (for the people we're talking about), and the epic mount is completely optional.

I really can't understand the people who repeatedly grind instances like BF. It just strikes me as a way to make yourself want to quit the game.

Personally, I had a ton of fun running BF and other low level 5-mans repeatedly with my small crew of RL friends. I guess we had already run a bunch of the quests on Beta and enjoyed the game at a slow pace that way, and we were ready to experience more of the level 70 content, /shrug. The extra gold, at the time, was an accidental convenience, but I don't regret it at all looking back now.

However, I know that if you don't have a set crew to run 5-mans with repeatedly and break the tedium over vent, this could be a recipe for a quick account cancellation. Different strokes I guess.

I think it's great that they're putting in new end game content for non-raiders/pvpers, but did it have to be Skettis? First the master's cellar and now Skettis, Blizzard just loves nurfing my favorite non-crowded farming places.

I could make 100g+/h as a mage pre expansion. I can make 100g a day just browsing the AH for 10 mins.
Farm scryer rep in eclipse point and you'll net over 150g/h if you disenchant all the greens you get.

God, all these "quick & easy" solutions to making money anger me...

Great, you just told the world that you can make 100g by spending 10mins on ah, well how the hell does that help the rest of us?

The fact of the matter remains that the moneydrain called raiding requires an income, and however you put it, this income means some sort of timeconsuming and mind-numbingly boring farming to ~99% of the playerbase.

Imo, justifying a boring and repetitive task in a video game, a hobby for recreation and _fun_, is simply impossible. You can say "its needed", you can say "thats how it is", you can say "use the system, dont fight it" and so on, but you cant justify it.

Name something else thats fun/hobbyish... say watching a movie, how bout you _had_ to pause the video for 10 mins pr hour, it would clearly diminish the experience.

well, every hobby has it downsides. Sports have injuries, boring warmups, etc etc :p
The people I was adressing to said it was impossible for them to get 5k gold for an epic mount.
I never said time and gold sink of raiding was justified, I just said gold is easy to get if you put a little bit effort in it. If you want to achieve something anywhere you have to sacrifice something else, that's how it works.

That's how I did it for my reroll. Since we had three rogues rerolling priest, druid and warrior we never ever had problems getting a group together (or having fun in the TS ). When we finished Zangarmarsh, we were about 66/67. We did Terrokar rather quickly and didn't farm the Krypts and the Toomb intensively. We compensated this by doing 4 or 5 Sethekk Halls runs which pushed our faction with the Lower City to honored. I reached 70 before finishing Nagrand, our priest took a little bit longer due to the fact that he was just level 58 when he went through the portal.
I might add that since reaching 70 on friday I already got three heroic keys.

Looking back at what most folks discussed at the start of BC regarding attunements, I must say that getting revered with all factions may be archieved within 1-2 weeks, which is pretty fast I guess. If you plan accordingly, at that time you will have sufficient gear and the attunement to get to Kara as well. Attunement might only become a problem in terms of later raid dungeons (aka SS and later, though I predict that even attuning a member to SS will be a breeze for most raiding guilds within 3-4 month.

If I ever get bored enough to level another character I will take the same route again, if it is possible.

Regarding the main topic: I am looking really forward to new quests, I like the quest design in BC quite a lot, many interesting twists and gimmicks. It offers also a new source of income for those who don't own their epic flyer yet (or who need to put larger investments into their stuff, gems don't come cheaply these days).

maybe the effort of $$ every month isnt enough. lets have customers clean toilettes before we let them see a the movie they paid for.

after playing X amount of time to be able to raid , people want to raid. not waste their time with cleaning up. dont know whats wrong with this idea. if endgame is raiding , why do players have to "waste" their (paid) time with farming ?

you can perfectly raid without having to farm, it will just take longer and you won't be able to beat everything. Just like you will be able to play a sport but you won't be good at it if you don't prepare well and put a lot of effort in it.

ofc you can. atm i think in wow the balance between time vs. risk vs. reward is way off and from my own experience players quitting left/right.

There is an imbalance and people are leaving, and hence we see hotfixes on stuff and you see posts that state that they are looking into things and that people's concerns are heard. R&J for example where originally Tigole said it wasn't overly hard. People quit left and right indeed and now there is some retuning.

But from what I hear the real issue is not so much that top end guilds haven't seen untuned/overtuned content all vanilla long, but rather that by the reset TBC introduced, a lot more people faced content that wasn't completely polished/tuned yet.

The polish was very good up until and I'd say including 5-man heroics and early Karazhan. Later Karazhan is still being modified (and certainly was post release) giving an indication that the shoeshine polish just hadn't gotten that far. But a lot of people ran around expecting comfortable and fairly tuned raiding and got surprised, because a lot hadn't see this before.

The consumables dilemma is exactly that. I don't think Blizz expected that potting would be widely disliked as much as it has been and now with the feedback it's being retuned. To be seen how exactly. It really does feel like Blizz wants to have consumables play some bigger roles in raiding than it has in most of vanilla still, reading the announced changes so far. For a lot of folks that never got to the heavy potting of late naxx, this will, it seems even with the changes, require some adjusting.