Since I am a Diablo 3 (CE) owner and had never created a WoW account, Blizzard decided to entice me with a free WoW Battle Chest. I'm definitely going to install it and try it out for 30 days, but I was wondering if there was anything I should make sure I do or see to get the most out of my time there. I plan on hanging out on Ysera with the Bomb Squad there, but was curious about the RAF and Resurrection Scroll topics that I keep running into. Will I miss anything of great value in the leveling game by not having the latter two expansions?

Thanks!

(Apologies if I should have put this on the vanilla WoW boards, rather than the Mists of Pandaria boards.)

@natnit said:

Since I am a Diablo 3 (CE) owner and had never created a WoW account, Blizzard decided to entice me with a free WoW Battle Chest. I'm definitely going to install it and try it out for 30 days, but I was wondering if there was anything I should make sure I do or see to get the most out of my time there. I plan on hanging out on Ysera with the Bomb Squad there, but was curious about the RAF and Resurrection Scroll topics that I keep running into. Will I miss anything of great value in the leveling game by not having the latter two expansions?

Thanks!

(Apologies if I should have put this on the vanilla WoW boards, rather than the Mists of Pandaria boards.)

Not having Cata or Mists means you wont be able to make a Monk which is a really fun class and won't be able to level past 80. So eventually you will have to pick them up, that said you can wait till you hit 80 unless you really really really want to make a Monk.

Yeah, as @sarge1445: said, you're pretty much fine until you hit 80 (unless you want to make a Monk, but there are like 10 other classes for you to try out first).

Not having the later expansions will not be much of an issue, unless you are set on having one of the associated races/classes.

Though I'd recommend month to month unless you have gone at least 2-3 months of subscription time and still like it. If you do not have any established friendships with other people in the game, the mechanics are poor (basically garbage) and it really takes social ties to overlook that. Ideally any time leveling will only be done while actively chatting with multiple other people (it is a great IM client + side game for me).

Enjoy the leveling experience from 1-80? Make sure you do that, I guess. If you happen to have a lot of free time and manage to do that within 30 days, you might as well pick up the other two expansions and keep going.

burn it

Make sure you do BRD, Karazhan, and Sunwell Plateau as they are respectively the best 5 man, the best small raid, and the best large raid ever created.

@Fredchuckdave said:

Make sure you do BRD, Karazhan, and Sunwell Plateau as they are respectively the best 5 man, the best small raid, and the best large raid ever created.

BRD was and still is garbage, Kara is amazing and Sunwell is meh. He really need to do BWL now that was a badass raid

@sarge1445: BRD is perfection, Sunwell is vastly superior to every other raid since there really is no down spot and every fight is a huge challenge but if I had to hazard a guess you didn't progress through it when it mattered. BRD is basically Karazhan just with vanilla mechanics; tons of bosses tons of different mechanics (though a bit more tank and spanky) plus chests and shirt loot and lava shortcuts and there's a damn raid inside the instance. BWL is a step up from MC, but not very good at all relative to Naxx 40 or Sunwell/Kael/Vashj/Archimonde/Illidan/Magtheridon; Vael's humorous mechanic and bank bombing aside.

@sarge1445 said:

@Fredchuckdave said:

Make sure you do BRD, Karazhan, and Sunwell Plateau as they are respectively the best 5 man, the best small raid, and the best large raid ever created.

BRD was and still is garbage, Kara is amazing and Sunwell is meh. He really need to do BWL now that was a badass raid

Pardon me while I vomit. Other than Karazhan you are basically uh.... wrong. BRD is the one dungeon you could go to and learn everything you need to know to be decent at the game. How to pull, use los, proper add control, large range of basic boss mechanics, lots of different mob types, etc etc. Unlike modern 5 mans it isn't a one trick pony.

Either way @Phorn is who you should listen to. Burn it. Far better mmo's to play these days which newer mechanics, better graphics, and all around better design/gameplay.

Just have fun. WoW is huge and there are tons of things you can do. Just be sure to jump a lot.

@Karkarov said:

@sarge1445 said:

@Fredchuckdave said:

Make sure you do BRD, Karazhan, and Sunwell Plateau as they are respectively the best 5 man, the best small raid, and the best large raid ever created.

BRD was and still is garbage, Kara is amazing and Sunwell is meh. He really need to do BWL now that was a badass raid

Pardon me while I vomit. Other than Karazhan you are basically uh.... wrong. BRD is the one dungeon you could go to and learn everything you need to know to be decent at the game. How to pull, use los, proper add control, large range of basic boss mechanics, lots of different mob types, etc etc. Unlike modern 5 mans it isn't a one trick pony.

Either way @Phorn is who you should listen to. Burn it. Far better mmo's to play these days which newer mechanics, better graphics, and all around better design/gameplay.

It was also unreasonably long, near impossible to navigate, and had so much trash.

@Fredchuckdave said:

@sarge1445: BRD is perfection, Sunwell is vastly superior to every other raid since there really is no down spot and every fight is a huge challenge but if I had to hazard a guess you didn't progress through it when it mattered. BRD is basically Karazhan just with vanilla mechanics; tons of bosses tons of different mechanics (though a bit more tank and spanky) plus chests and shirt loot and lava shortcuts and there's a damn raid inside the instance. BWL is a step up from MC, but not very good at all relative to Naxx 40 or Sunwell/Kael/Vashj/Archimonde/Illidan/Magtheridon; Vael's humorous mechanic and bank bombing aside.

BRD is stupid long, has tons of trash, and ridiculous to navigate your first or even tenth time through. I do love me some Naxx 40 or otherwise. My favorite raids BWL, Ony, Naxx, ICC, Ulduar (though I never finished it :( owell), Black Temple, Hyjal, kara Least favorites MC, AQ, EOE, SSC. Most of the raids I like had this epic feeling to them especially when you got to the final encounter with BT having the best end to a raid ever.

@sarge1445 said:

It was also unreasonably long, near impossible to navigate, and had so much trash.

You weren't really supposed to do it all at one time. There were many different reasons to go into the place and lots of different routes through.

@sarge1445: To be fair, it was designed as an end-game 5-man back in vanilla.

I'm going to have to side with the "don't play it" side of this discussion, your time deserves more respect than going on fetch quests for forty hours as you grind your way to reach the endgame, where your rewards mainly stem from the time you invest rather than skillful playing.

Was a serious WoW-junkie in high school, ignorant to the abusive game mechanics in it until I watched a lecture by Johnathan Blow. I'm not going to make you sit through a two hour video as I did, but there's a reason they're giving you that battle chest out of the blue, that first hit is always free.

@Fredchuckdave said:

@sarge1445: BRD is perfection, Sunwell is vastly superior to every other raid since there really is no down spot and every fight is a huge challenge but if I had to hazard a guess you didn't progress through it when it mattered. BRD is basically Karazhan just with vanilla mechanics; tons of bosses tons of different mechanics (though a bit more tank and spanky) plus chests and shirt loot and lava shortcuts and there's a damn raid inside the instance. BWL is a step up from MC, but not very good at all relative to Naxx 40 or Sunwell/Kael/Vashj/Archimonde/Illidan/Magtheridon; Vael's humorous mechanic and bank bombing aside.

It's personal preference, but if you ask people who play WoW about the best raid experience you will get 8 out of 10 saying it's Ulduar. But I guess you stopped playing after TBC to experience that. That said, personally Sunwell was a filler end-of-expansion-life raid put together in a week time, with mostly hard DPS check bosses ane one-shot 20 mob trash packs which should hinder your fast progression - and nothing more. In TBC, Karazhan, SSC, BT & ZA were the best raid instances in my opinion, TK, MH, Gruul & Mag were again far off from the scale of the others.

All in all, I'd agree with the majority and say Ulduar was the best raid experience yet, closely followed by ICC and the old 60 Naxx. All Cataclysm raids were a complete failure in my book and the new Pandaria raids don't seem to be anything better, well maybe HoF is semi-decent but rest is just boring.

Biggest thing I can recommend is, when you hit level 15, do some dungeons with the dungeon finder tool. They are one of the better sources of gear/exp, and they are fun.

I also highly, highly (because I am crazy) recommend the Pet Battle System. Pokemon in WoW is pretty awesome.

@FMinus: Again you're almost certainly someone who didn't actually progress through Sunwell pre 3.0; ask any of the high end raiders and they'll tell you old school Sunwell was the best experience they had, and it was; good times. Ulduar is a competent instance for sure but it still has a lot of filler easy bosses en route to difficult ones. Also how is Sunwell filler? M'uru easily killed more guilds than any other boss ever, the whole instance was a server destroyer with several hundred guilds dying on each and every boss including about 20 of the top 30 guilds in the US; that's the hardest raid ever made period champ.

At least I wasn't dumb enough to throw a weird ass random statistic at you for no reason. Of the top 10 best raid encounters ever designed, 5 or 6 of them were in Sunwell which of course had 6 bosses.

Can even toss you a list if you like:

1. Kalecgos

2. Four Horsemen

3. Kael

4. KJ

5. M'uru

6. Yogg 0

7. Vashj

8. Eredar Twins

9. C'thun

10. Felmyst

@Opus said:

I'm going to have to side with the "don't play it" side of this discussion, your time deserves more respect than going on fetch quests for forty hours as you grind your way to reach the endgame, where your rewards mainly stem from the time you invest rather than skillful playing.

Was a serious WoW-junkie in high school, ignorant to the abusive game mechanics in it until I watched a lecture by Johnathan Blow. I'm not going to make you sit through a two hour video as I did, but there's a reason they're giving you that battle chest out of the blue, that first hit is always free.

HA!

Carry on.

@Opus said:

I'm going to have to side with the "don't play it" side of this discussion, your time deserves more respect than going on fetch quests for forty hours as you grind your way to reach the endgame, where your rewards mainly stem from the time you invest rather than skillful playing.

Was a serious WoW-junkie in high school, ignorant to the abusive game mechanics in it until I watched a lecture by Johnathan Blow. I'm not going to make you sit through a two hour video as I did, but there's a reason they're giving you that battle chest out of the blue, that first hit is always free.

send me the video I want to watch it

@Fredchuckdave said:

@FMinus: Again you're almost certainly someone who didn't actually progress through Sunwell pre 3.0; ask any of the high end raiders and they'll tell you old school Sunwell was the best experience they had, and it was; good times. Ulduar is a competent instance for sure but it still has a lot of filler easy bosses en route to difficult ones. Also how is Sunwell filler? M'uru easily killed more guilds than any other boss ever, the whole instance was a server destroyer with several hundred guilds dying on each and every boss including about 20 of the top 30 guilds in the US; that's the hardest raid ever made period champ.

At least I wasn't dumb enough to throw a weird ass random statistic at you for no reason. Of the top 10 best raid encounters ever designed, 5 or 6 of them were in Sunwell which of course had 6 bosses.

Can even toss you a list if you like:

1. Kalecgos

2. Four Horsemen

3. Kael

4. KJ

5. M'uru

6. Yogg 0

7. Vashj

8. Eredar Twins

9. C'thun

10. Felmyst

If difficulty is how you judge the quality of a raid boss then that's why we disagree. I like a some what difficult fight that feels epic. hence why illidan is probably stiill my favorite

@sarge1445: Here you go friend, time capsule to 2007: Youtube or mp3, I suggest the mp3 version, there are visual slides in his presentation, but they aren't necessary to know what he's talking about.

Note that I never said Warcraft is a bad game, reading my post again I feel that at face value one may feel that my original post dumps on the entire game and all of it's success; on the contrary World of Warcraft was, and still is, a revolution in video games, they give you a common goal to share with other human beings whom we would never meet within our brief lifespans. It's just that they have all this power, and choose to join the dark side for the sake of profit.

@Fredchuckdave said:

@FMinus: Again you're almost certainly someone who didn't actually progress through Sunwell pre 3.0; ask any of the high end raiders and they'll tell you old school Sunwell was the best experience they had, and it was; good times. Ulduar is a competent instance for sure but it still has a lot of filler easy bosses en route to difficult ones. Also how is Sunwell filler? M'uru easily killed more guilds than any other boss ever, the whole instance was a server destroyer with several hundred guilds dying on each and every boss including about 20 of the top 30 guilds in the US; that's the hardest raid ever made period champ.

At least I wasn't dumb enough to throw a weird ass random statistic at you for no reason. Of the top 10 best raid encounters ever designed, 5 or 6 of them were in Sunwell which of course had 6 bosses.

Can even toss you a list if you like:

1. Kalecgos

2. Four Horsemen

3. Kael

4. KJ

5. M'uru

6. Yogg 0

7. Vashj

8. Eredar Twins

9. C'thun

10. Felmyst

I'm not fighting you on your opinion, you have your own, I'm just stating mine.

Black Tempe patch released 22. May 2007, the raid instance which the whole expansion revolved around Illidan and the Black Temple (aka final raid boss of the expansion)

Sunwell patch released 25. March 2008, 8 months after the supposedly final raid instance with additional content for the non-raiders (daily quest zone & a 5 man instance)

without this patch there would be about 15 months until the patch 3.xx which initiated the Wrath of The Lich King code. And considering they didn't expect people to clear Black Temple and Mt. Hyjal in about a month or less, people got bored in about 5 months raiding BT and unsubbed, so they had to make a filler raid which had exactly nothing to do with the expansion what-so-ever up to that point. They made the raid instance insanely hard for everyone who wasn't fully decked out in T6 and T6 weaponry, and even those had a hard time, like you said. They tried to calm the mass exodus between Black Temple by releasing Zul'Aman (again a random troll instance nothing to do with the main story), but it didn't do much good, cause it felt like a 5 man dungeon to decked out guilds.

Also this is the reason why they gated the final instance of Wrath of the Lich King so people wouldn't clear it in like 2 weeks time, so they gated it for months - and even that wasn't enough so they had to introduce a new filler raid in the end known as Ruby Sanctum, which again same as Sunwell was insanely hard, even tho it was only one boss.

That said, the first cockblock in sunwell for us was Brutallus with his huge HP and the DPS required to take him down, Kalec went donw relatively fast, but Brutallus took us a week, since about 40% of our core raiders quit about 5 month into BT due to nothing new to do.

EDIT: For me and my guild, the hardest boss in TBC was Vashj, we wiped on her for about two weeks raiding really insane hours, cause we didn't have the gear for the DPS in the last phase, where the spore bats shat poop on the ground and soon the whole room was covered in pain.

Kalecgos isn't the hardest boss it's just the best designed, not a gear check but a skill check and pretty much the only skill check boss that gated a difficult instance. Brutallus is a very simple fight, challenge aside so it doesn't really wind up in the top 10 in any case. ANOTHER DAY! ANOTHER GLORIOUS BATTLE!

@FMinus said:

@Fredchuckdave said:

@FMinus: Again you're almost certainly someone who didn't actually progress through Sunwell pre 3.0; ask any of the high end raiders and they'll tell you old school Sunwell was the best experience they had, and it was; good times. Ulduar is a competent instance for sure but it still has a lot of filler easy bosses en route to difficult ones. Also how is Sunwell filler? M'uru easily killed more guilds than any other boss ever, the whole instance was a server destroyer with several hundred guilds dying on each and every boss including about 20 of the top 30 guilds in the US; that's the hardest raid ever made period champ.

At least I wasn't dumb enough to throw a weird ass random statistic at you for no reason. Of the top 10 best raid encounters ever designed, 5 or 6 of them were in Sunwell which of course had 6 bosses.

Can even toss you a list if you like:

1. Kalecgos

2. Four Horsemen

3. Kael

4. KJ

5. M'uru

6. Yogg 0

7. Vashj

8. Eredar Twins

9. C'thun

10. Felmyst

I'm not fighting you on your opinion, you have your own, I'm just stating mine.

Black Tempe patch released 22. May 2007, the raid instance which the whole expansion revolved around Illidan and the Black Temple (aka final raid boss of the expansion)

Sunwell patch released 25. March 2008, 8 months after the supposedly final raid instance with additional content for the non-raiders (daily quest zone & a 5 man instance)

without this patch there would be about 15 months until the patch 3.xx which initiated the Wrath of The Lich King code. And considering they didn't expect people to clear Black Temple and Mt. Hyjal in about a month or less, people got bored in about 5 months raiding BT and unsubbed, so they had to make a filler raid which had exactly nothing to do with the expansion what-so-ever up to that point. They made the raid instance insanely hard for everyone who wasn't fully decked out in T6 and T6 weaponry, and even those had a hard time, like you said. They tried to calm the mass exodus between Black Temple by releasing Zul'Aman (again a random troll instance nothing to do with the main story), but it didn't do much good, cause it felt like a 5 man dungeon to decked out guilds.

Also this is the reason why they gated the final instance of Wrath of the Lich King so people wouldn't clear it in like 2 weeks time, so they gated it for months - and even that wasn't enough so they had to introduce a new filler raid in the end known as Ruby Sanctum, which again same as Sunwell was insanely hard, even tho it was only one boss.

That said, the first cockblock in sunwell for us was Brutallus with his huge HP and the DPS required to take him down, Kalec went donw relatively fast, but Brutallus took us a week, since about 40% of our core raiders quit about 5 month into BT due to nothing new to do.

EDIT: For me and my guild, the hardest boss in TBC was Vashj, we wiped on her for about two weeks raiding really insane hours, cause we didn't have the gear for the DPS in the last phase, where the spore bats shat poop on the ground and soon the whole room was covered in pain.

God Vashj was a nightmare, also ICC imo is one of the most underrated raids ever.

Vashj was a challenge but not really that difficult relative to Kael unless you were Method and did it pre-nerf 3 months before anyone else. Actually Hex Lord is probably the hardest boss that was doable by relatively casual raiders but was mostly considering larger raids.