It doesn't feel like the proper level anymore though, I feel like we crashed through a lvl 60 raid zone last night. We were another guild who was stuck face pounding on muru but we were making progress and probably would have killed him in time to get KJ down before wrath. Last night we probably could have 20 manned him... and the rest of the zone was a huge joke, we AOEed down the the trash and killed the bosses several minutes before enrage timers it was dumb.

I'm actually pretty angry about this nerf, we killed muru like he was nothing and I wasn't even excited about it because it didn't feel like we had accomplished anything. Sadly we only got to pull KJ 3 times cause of random afks and UI issues but there is no doubt in my mind he will die tomorrow with how quickly he was going down and he won't feel like an accomplishment either.

Oh well, at least I got to see muru in his glory days as a brick wall of DPS and skill tests. I truely do hope that they will make another instance that demands the same kind of skill as sunwell did, it would be a shame for something that perfectly built to never happen again.

Blizz has said there will be no more raids like sunwell in terms of difficulty again.

That statement by them is very open to interpretation. We have no idea what they mean by hard, they have said specifically there will be hard instances in LK, and that the difficulty will ramp up from tier to tier. By too hard they could have meant the jump from BT to SW, the difficulty in recruiting specific raid comps, or any number of things. We have no way of knowing what there will be until we get there.

I think that Blizzard won't make a zone quite so crazy with the personnel needs and fairly rigid comps. They have removed those with the new new buffing system and future dual specs (as our boomkin likes to say an AoE spec and single target spec). They will, however, make fights more demanding for individual awareness and smart play.

I would wager that Ice Crown will be harder then Sunwell purely because you won't be able to bring in your keyboard turning slow as molasses trialing beam across the middle of the raid backup healer or the really nice mage whose dps is 15% lower then average.

I have a hunch that they'll make raids fairly difficult, but also add an optional mechanic that makes it super challenging for the top guilds that gives extra loot and rewards.

See the speed run in Zul'aman, and the optional drakes in the new raid in LK.

All of these same statements were made with pre-nerf gruul, the ssc and tk attunement removals, and the tier 6 vial requirement removal (among others). Some people get caught on the edges of these nerfs, and that's never going to change. You either have to work extra hard to not put yourself in this situation, or learn to accept them.

Edit: They could have just released LK this past tuesday, and the only difference between then and 4 weeks from now is the names of the people that got caught almost killing a boss. This is just a compromise.

It seems that if you were in the process of completing the Hand of A'dal questline, you can still get the title from it. I was part of a Kael kill last night in which people got their final vial, turned it into Soridormi and were rewarded with the title. It looks like, rather than disable the ability to reward the title, Blizzard just added in a new quest that doesn't reward the title. Here's the old quest and here's the new quest.

I can; I have no drops from either boss but have been credited with the kills, I'd have to presume it was due to Vials of Eternity.

I haven’t seen an update recently so can anyone comment on whether or not they have received pets and mounts lost due to the patch? I have seen many reports here of losses which mirror those of me and my guild mates but haven't heard of anyone getting them back. Has anyone had anything returned other than the quest pets such as Miniwing?

In regards to two quests existing, is this also the case for the Black Temple attunement chain? Iirc you need both Hyjal and BT attunements in order to get the hand of a'dal title.

A couple things I noticed on my lvl 60 Shaman alt that I hadn't seen elsewhere:

1) The quest "Hellfire Fortifications" now gives an Insignia of the Alliance as a reward the first time you do it. This gives new alts a pretty easy way to get an insignia, which is especially nice since Death Knights get a free one from their starting quests.

EDIT: Actually, I just went over to HH on my hunter and found that he can also get the quest for the insignia, even though he has done the quest many times before. It will be nice to pick up the trinket since I have always been to cheap to spend honor on it (I don't do arena, and for BGs it is less of an issue).

2) The grand master jewelcrafting trainer in Honor Hold now trains the green cuts for 1 gold instead of selling them for 5 gold.

Has anyone fell victim to a loss of BoJ? The 400 I had stored in my bank were not added to my currency page only the ones in my back pack were counted.

Yes, there are two entries for A Distraction for Akama, Cudgel of Kardesh, and Trial of the Naaru: Magtheridon. If you had those quests in your log but uncompleted before the patch, you may still be able to get the Champion of the Naaru and Hand of A'dal title.

If that works and wowhead is accurate in that those quests are sharable, it should be possible to see a Death Knight "Hand of A'dal" in the coming months. Also, anyone with those quests uncompleted could, I imagine, end up making a bit of gold from people leveling up new in the expansion wanting to get old school titles.

I'd think by the nature of what the quest A Distraction for Akama is that you're not likely to find many people that have that particular quest AND have yet to finish it. The vials quest, sure. I know i have the old vials quest on several characters. What would prevent me from getting the Hand of A'dal title on those would be the other quest requirement.

I think they were saying that there wouldn't be any jumps in difficulty like Sunwell again. Basically all of Blizzard's raids have had bosses that were easily doable immediately after the previous instance was cleared. Sunwell, on the other hand, required upwards of months of Illidan farming to really get through the entire instance.

In raw terms, the strategies for the sunwell bosses aren't that difficult-the gear requirements are what makes the instance difficult much more than any given strategy.

I expect to see more bosses in the future that are relatively extreme about killing your raid if someone screws up on the fight mechanic, and part of the difficulty of Sunwell was the presence of far more such mechanics than previous TBC instances. What I don't expect to see are the level of gear and consumable checks - but on the flip side of that, they're removing the ability to abuse consumables like drums, and even potions. Not sure how that will play out with future fights like Muru and Vashj phase 2 though, add fights/phases tend to pretty inherently be balanced on a bit of a razor's edge - within some small range of dps output, it won't pile up on you, but won't leave room for sloppy execution or deaths. Less dps, and it becomes near impossible. More dps, in minor amounts gives some room for error, but in larger amounts lets you slaughter everything to the point of being trivial.

I do seriously think a large part of Blizzard saying they won't do something that difficult again was due to the extremes in both consumable use, to the point of profession changes raid wide, and massive raid comp switches between bosses - though slightly less extreme raid comp changes will be easier in the near future if you have a few tanks/healers with a dual dps spec. Somewhat ironic that they seem be willing to almost require raiders to be able to do cooking dailies for food buffs, but at least that doesn't lock out other professions.

Thats also there in acheivements. Glory of the Raider acheivement requires a 3 drake Obsidian kill, a flawless nax clear (0 deaths on bosses) and the 4 horsemen dying at the same time. Reward is a proto drake.

What Blizzard is doing to wrath is very good in terms of keeping both hardcore and casual raiders interested in the game. Let's assume Icecrown Citadel (assumed last instance of Wrath) is Sunwell difficulty. There will be so few players in can achieve it, players get burned out, and Blizzard loses money from burnt-out raiders (assuming they don't get more money off server transfers =x). At the same time, casuals are bored after they kill whatever because they can't get a raid to do Icecrown, quit the game, and Blizzard also loses money.

Now, lets look at the model of WoTLK as we know it. There are 10 man and 25 man progression which will keep the big-group raiders, and the clique-group raiders both interested in the game. The varying difficulty versus reward also allows guild to pick and choose what they want to do and will likely remain not bored until the next expansion, or game. When players go for server firsts, I don't really think they care about how fast second kill comes, whether it is 1 second or never. Similarly, hardcore raiders will still push for world/server firsts by doing the bosses the "easy" way, while after farming the bosses 2-3 times, they will be able to keep themselves more entertained and challenged by tackling the harder contents, while getting loot unobtainable using the normal means. By doing this, not only can they keep contents open to a much greater majority, but also can avoid nerfing contents to the degree that they did in TBC.

Well, they were arguably going into a good direction if they tuned 10 and 25 men stuff correctly. 10 men stuff should be casual and 25 men for more hardcore raiders. The problem is that on beta that is just not the case. 25 men NN is just easier then 10 men. The only fights that are somewhat difficult on 10 men are easier with a full raid simply due to class composition and having every tool avaible.
10 men Gluth without hunter/mage/PH warrior? Pretty annoying. 25 men Gluth with 2-3 mages, and 2-3 slowing traps plus earthbinds and multiple paladins/destro warlocks? Not all that challenging.

Trash in 25 men atm is tuned in a way that you really have to be fast to target a mob in order to get a single nuke in as stuff gets aoed down insanely fast. Doing lvl 70 raid content right now, aoeing through all trash feels terribly boring. It's kinda like doing karaz with 10 mid T6 geared people.

In general they are going the right way. Easy 10 men stuff, which also helps gearing new recruits/rerolls and then tough 25 men content. Let's just hope they will tune it correctly.

Another thing I don't quite understand is the timing on making old content easier. Pretty much nothing in SWP got a serious nurf. Only Muru got a sidekick by the nurfbat, but honestly, I think removing the spellpushback from the black beams was a bigger nurf then the -10% HP thing.
But SWP is rather old now, especially if you consider the expansion around the corner. Why didn't stuff get nurfed faster? Removing 10% of Brutallus' HP in June/July, adding 0.5s to conflags cast time in july, removing 20% HP off sentinels/blood elves in july/august and -15% off KJ's HP in August/September. Would doing something like that be so bad?
You could read about guilds detonating at some of those bosses left and right, I don't quite understand why they were left in their original form until 3.0. Guilds that really cared to do the original tough content had plenty of time to do so, imo it should be opened up for the following guilds faster.
Sure, it would be annoying for some gulids that have low raiding time but proceed at a steady pace and have a very deep roster without people quitting. But in the end in a game like this, I think those are the minority and overall keeping the encounters in their original state did more negative then positive things.

If guilds knew that stuff gets progressively easier, they could also plan with it. This is somewhat of a gross example, but that's how Vashj worked. It was killable, Method showed it and repeated their kill. Did my guild bother to try? No, it just wasn't content for us, we waited until it was made easier.
Obviously that's a bit extreme, but I am sure a lot of guilds that had massive problems over M'uru would have just pushed a lot less if they knew in X weeks it would be easier and they could just do it.
Something like that would probably lead to a few people being unhappy and leaving to more progressive guilds, but in the end those guys would do the same over too much wiping on a boss like that anyway and the rest of the gulid would not get frustrated over wiping for weeks on something.

Imho starting tough and then making content easier over time would be a good solution for everyone.

Hmm, I found a way to learn up to 450 Tailoring.

Check my armory.

375/450 Tailoring.

Clearly something they didn't think of, because quite a few patterns are orange so I could start levelling it up now - but I haven't as I am afraid they will find out and I will lose all those mats.

Anyone else found any other professions which you can level past 375?

I believe someone's already mentioned how to do this; if you were Exalted with Timbermaw Hold, you could get GM Tailoring there. It's since been removed.