Hello all! I'm thinking about dusting off my Warlock and re-entering Norrath after being away from the game for a little over a year due to my old gaming rig blowing up. It's been a nice unintended break from the game, but I've missed many of my old friends. How is the new expansion?
That's a useful refresher Sigrdrifa, thanks! A big question of mine is how are the server pops? All my toons are on Maj'Dul server and I've always raided with my main. Are zone pops still decent for grouping and heroics? I'd like to get my main toon up to speed and raid-ready so I can join or re-join one of my old raiding guilds on hopefully Maj'Dul server.
Maj'Dul is probably the most populated server at the moment. There's plenty of PUGs, lots of raid groups, and even some raid alliances. I can't say how many of our traditional raid guilds are actually raiding yet, I know a lot of people have been having trouble getting equipped. It's that pesky Potency, followed by Fervor.
Ugh. I hate the potency again grind. Does the drop in potency affect PoP heroic zones? Please Developers not this in the next expansion.
Anything in your AA or Ascensions that boosted Potency now boosts fervor by a small amount instead. The new gear you get from Tishan's Lockbox or even experimented x5 mastercrafted Academic armor, weapons, and jewelry is light on Potency. There are Resolve requirements for heroics and raids, but not for solos. You're going to need to adorn things with white Potency adorns, orange adorns that add Potency where possible, use infusing (cash and/or crafted infusers, as well as dropped infusers). The TL;DR version is "get your Resolve to 1060 and Potency to 60K and the rest of the stats will come as you do more advanced instances".
Hehe, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Is Daybreak staying on top of things regarding issues, support, and game stability?
Yes and no, which is to say that their priorities of what to fix first aren't what I'd personally choose. Of course, if you believe the forums, the sky is falling, the world is coming to an end, every class is irredeemably broken and so forth. I will agree that shaman are in a bad way, and I don't like the direction they're going with them. Tanks have to pay a little more attention now in heroic zones. OTOH, I love playing my conjy and warlock. It's still a good idea to reboot your computer every now and then if you're zoning a lot. I haven't personally had a BSoD in a long while. We had some bumps after the current release as a few bugs reared their ugly heads when the material was being hit by many more players than in Beta, but I think for the most part we're pretty stable post-release now. You're honestly more likely to see problems with the Marketplace than with the game at the moment, I think. There's a Player Support forum here, where other players can try to help you with issues, but if we can't figure it out, the next step is to turn in a Support Ticket. The wiki has a new URL (one company bought up another) so you should probably bookmark that. There's been a bunch of people actively documenting stuff, so the wiki is reasonably up to date, excepting Chaos Descending Heroics, for which I haven't seen writeups yet.
Good info. Regarding expansion packs, which is the best bang for the buck? I've always purchased the collector's edition, but I'm looking at the super uber premium special pack and noticed it gives you a bump to ascension level 15 out of 20. Are ascension levels still a huge grind?
Much less than they used to be. There's no more having to go seek the trainer, get scrolls of Guided Ascension, etc. Now Ascension just levels as you do the sig line and missions.
