You Say Zul’Aman, I Say Zula, Mon

This is what the entrance to Zul’Aman looks like after the World of Warcraft instance servers crash, burn and are resurrected:

Zul'Aman Entrance, post-server crash

Very crowded with pissed off players.

What you can’t see are all the dead people still running back into the zone to fetch their bodies after logging in. You also can’t see the two Alliance guys who were PVP flagged and tried to escape the newly-flagging Horde by running back into Zul’Aman, but failed … and died … and we all had a good laugh. They had even /yelled HEPL!! a few times, which made their predicament all the more hilarious.

So, Patch 2.3 went live yesterday, and is scheduled for a hotfix this morning. No doubt they’re fixing that little shaman problem … y’know, where shaman Tier 6 armor was free. Quoting Drysc:

We’re aware that the Shaman Tier 6 restoration set currently does not have a cost requirement on it and we’re working to resolve this as soon as possible.

We will be going to great lengths to remove the items already purchased, and tracking them down if they’ve been moved or converted in any way. Do not enchant or socket a gem into the items as they will be deleted when the item is.

Hopefully, they’ll squash a few more bugs along the way.

In addition to all the threads about the changes to Global Cooldown, Alterac Valley, guild bank startup costs, and etc., I found this nutball’s forum announcement that he intends to level 9 characters, one of each class, to level 70 before the release of the next expansion: 1 through 70, 9 Times before WOTLK! His characters, as of a few days ago, were all in their early to late 20s, so … he’s got a ways to go.

As crazy as that is, come to find out, there’s other crazy people with similar crazy ideas. Like Reply #118 on page 6, by Strongboar of the Dunemaul server:

I’m doing kinda the same thing currently I have 7 characters I play 1 of them a day then move on to the next. I have 4 horde and 3 alliance on 2 different pvp servers to switch it up a bit. In the past I’ve tried this and I rushed into it way to quickly and burned myself out so I’ve parental controlled my time on my account to try to prevent from losing interest in this game to quickly.

And Adrena of the Fenris realm (Reply #109 on page 6):

Each character also has 2 professions (+ cooking on my hunter), and get this.. I’m going to max fishing on all of them 🙂

!!!

(I better not see any of them fishing Blackwind Lake for Mr. Pinchy.)

World of Warcraft comes equipped with so many barriers already, I didn’t realize that some players would INVENT their own barriers … for fun. They probably don’t even consider them barriers — I’ll bet they call them challenges.

That’s just nuts.

BONUS: A forum thread collecting the undocumented patch changes. The thread author has some catch up to do on editing the original post, so you’ll have to read through the later pages for now.

11 thoughts on “You Say Zul’Aman, I Say Zula, Mon

  1. Free t6, how did I miss this? You know they’ll never be able/willing to track it all down. I’d have so been in on this…

  2. Maxing fishing on multiple characters is insane. One is bad enough as it is. My Magical Crawdad Box is my badge of honor. Of course now that holy priests got all this uber-spell-dmg I can actually go kill some stuff vs. fishing all the time.

  3. Holy priest are able to do some damage now? Where did that come from? I didn’t see that from the release notes. Thought Blizz only care about reducing our powers instead of increasing them (that is their rep).

    Fishing is not too bad as long as you are not doing that on your time lol.

  4. @wowpanda

    From the patch notes:

    Healing: Almost all items and enchantments that provide bonus healing now also provide a smaller number (approximately 1/3) of bonus spell damage. There are a few items and enchantments where this was not possible, such as random-stat items and Zul’Gurub enchantments, but this is now the case on virtually all other items.

    In my case, my priest has about 1830 +healing, which is currently translating to around 698ish spell dmg, without the need to don a patchwork set of dps gear. Smite baby, smite.

  5. So where does ZA fit on the difficulty scale?

    I assume it’s harder than Kara, but is it now the “next” raid instance you take your 10 man raid to after Kara, or do you have to bulk up to 25 raiders to get the gear to survive in the new 10 man raid?

    I’m not sure how I feel about the Heroic key requirements honestly. Sure it makes it a lot easier to get geared up from the position I’m in…. But it’s also likely to encourage many people to do Heroic dungeons who are just not ready for them. Leading to an overall downgrading of the experience from a few wipes per run to a wipe every 5 minutes. Like yesterday, when some idiot thought the solution to the tank shortage we were experiencing was to bring in a fury / arms warrior with 9k hp to be our tank. (My connection got extremely unstable all of the sudden when the idiot shaman announced that.)

  6. chicogrande, I am still in a bad shape. Because I don’t that much time to play, so my gears are all +heal and +dmg to make sure I can play solo. I will check my toon again to make sure.

    And this is to Dearic. Agreed. I am still far from heroic stuff, just regular stuff is giving me enough headaches. Good thing Blizzard is making the pre 60 quests solo able. They should do the same to TBC. So far dungeon runs has been huge money sinks for me.

  7. wowpanda: I’m in the middle of leveling a mid 20’s pally, and I can assure you that despite all the hype, there are quite a few low level quests that didn’t get dumbed down.

    Generally, ones with multiple elite mobs (Dun Mordor) for example are now all non elite, but single targets (like Mord’lam) are all still elite and bitchy.

  8. @Daeric

    If you have had Kara on farm for some time (and you are mostly if not fully Kara equipped) then there’s a good chance you’ll at least get bear and eagle down. I would suspect that most guilds farming Kara should have 3-4 bosses farmed by Christmas.

  9. Welp, I have already leveled 9 characters to 60 about two months BEFORE patch 2.3 hit. Heh. My levels currently :

    70 70 70 66 63 62 61 61 61

    Althras, Beltek, Ordanil, Xastar, Mizar, Xalastar, Xiona, Swaard, Lenick – all on Suramar US server.

    I guess I lose out on the speeded up leveling thing eh? I fully intend to have 9 70s before WotLK. 🙂

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