Merus

There's an aspect to Omen I don't feel was properly addressed: the default UI can be made to show threat relative to the bosses' target. For a damage dealer, that's really all the information they need to know. I haven't been able to get Omen to show threat for multiple mobs at once -- assuming it can't, there really isn't much of a reason to run with Omen if all you need to know is when your threat's getting a tad high.

The problem with this argument is that Blizzard has had six years to understand and polish their game. There's six years of development here, driven by player feedback. If you make a game which is very much like WoW, and release it, you're not going to be as polished by definition. WoW was very shaky out of the gate, itself. I want to emphasise: the MMOs people are holding up as the Great White Hope -- Rift, TELA, TOR, Guild Wars 2 -- all of these games are going to have issues of some kind when they come out. It's part and parcel of building an MMO.

And so everyone's going to go "this is terrible" and WoW is still there, not going anywhere, with the network effects that come from having lots of players. Launch is the time when you have the best chance to make a good impression, and being a less-good version of WoW is not the way to go about it.

The only way a new MMO can possibly have a chance is to be *different* from WoW. It may not be as polished a game, players will think, but it offers something I can't get anywhere else. That way, players are likely to stick around for long enough for the development team to shore up the most glaring weaknesses, and, if they quit in disgust, more likely to give the game another go later on.

My sense is that we're "supposed" to be doing things as a guild group, and that questing and guild achievements were only supposed to be a bonus to the bread-and-butter of playing with your guild.

I'm a warlock, but I shall be sure to run heroics to get up that killcount. It's the least I can do to give you mages some joy before it's time for the felhunter to come back out.

I was under the impression that sub-level-300 armour dissolved into essence while weapons dissolved into dust, and post-300 it was the other way around.

I'm going to go through Hyjal (I did Vashj'ir) to confirm.

No; you can train Illustrious straight away.

However, end-game recipes are given out in Twilight Highlands, and you need to complete a quest chain to unlock it. This chain is only offered to characters of level 84+. Gathering, though, should be fine.

Looks like it's still putting content from wow.com on there. All those duplicates go to AOL's new Groupon knock-off.

Yes, but has it been made less soul destroying? Some Timbermaw dailies would be very welcome.

I get Postcards from Azeroth when I turn all the settings up too high.

Considering that basically everything changed, the fact that 4.0.1 was playable is actually sort of impressive. Every single class was radically redesigned, the game engine had major new features bolted on, the battle system was rebuilt, bosses and battlegrounds had items change, currencies shifted and disappeared...