World of Warcraft

I can't really speak for today's raiders but I know back in Wrath my raiding guild really only actually raided one night a week and we managed to down heroic Lich King. It was mostly those competing for world firsts that needed to sink incredible amounts of time into the game every time a new raid came out, but the rest of us could get away with pretty casual play.

Outside of that all I really had to do was show up, as somebody else in the guild covered things needed for raiding like consumables. I'm pretty sure that guy actually replaced sleep with herbalism in his daily routine.

Of course if one wants to, there is certainly enough there to sink 6 hours a day into and that's exactly what I did back then =P

I heard they're bringing back Karazhan in the new expansion.
I did so much Karazhan back in the days.

Hm, interesting question for someone who has never played WoW before starting up 9-10 years in or however long it's been now... I'd have to think about it a bit.

I think honestly though, there's not much to say, if you have played any online game complete with character creator/classes etc, it's pretty much like all of them.

I mean quite honestly, if you have played a Dragon Age game, then you are 80% of the way there. The only difference is that the actual World of Warcraft is much, much bigger and probably isn't quite laid out super succinctly... more buttons and such... that said... when WoW is good I think it's a more accessible and engaging RPG than the two most recent Dragon Age games at least, even though I like parts of DA2, so any Bioware fan shouldn't have trouble jumping in and playing it.

If you have a decently modern computer, I would suggest immediately cranking all the graphics settings to max, it shouldn't be an issue because WoW on the lowest settings looks quite old, but fortunately with everything maxed out it's pretty spiffy and isn't actually super hard to achieve. 

Anyway on the subject of Wrath, possibly the best cinematic, IMO.

Blizzard drastically reduced time you needed for raid preparation by restricting how many self buffs you could have. In vanilla it took hours to farm all the foods, elixirs, flasks, juju from winterspring and other stuff like that. Level 60 Naxxramas was called "potion quest", because all those things were mandatory for everyone. Three hours long raid could easily require 8 hours of farming, top guilds even had "paid" help to farm all of those. Mages had to log in at least a hour earlier to conjure all the water for other casters, highest tier was 4 pieces/10 second cast and you needed several hundreds. They usually complained, that they are a little more than coffeemakers. Not to mention components for group buffs, priests easily spent several times more on those than tanks on repairs. Stuff like that took a lot of time, but everything got eventually much user friendlier. WotLK was easy mode, considering.

Now would be a good time to start. Once you buy the base set of the game (which is only $20 USD) you also get every expansion up to Warlords of Draenor, leaving Legion as the only expansion you need to actually purchase, since it is the newest one. And, once you buy Legion, you get a 1-time free character boost to level 100 so you can immediately start doing Legion-level content. 2 classes in the game (death knight and demon hunter) start out at higher levels than the others due to them being hero classes, so I advise against boosting them. Other than this, it's really just a matter of choosing a class that you enjoy and building your character. Once Legion arrives, you'll be allowed to have 12 characters on a single server (and I think it's like 60 total characters you can have on your entire account across different servers). If you're just starting out I recommend playing on a PvE server, not a PvP server, since on PvP servers it is possible for you to get ganked and killed by people out in the world while you're minding your own business.

My personal main is an Orc death knight, been playing him ever since Wrath of the Lich King released (which is when death knights were released). As of Legion, there are warriors, rogues, mages, druids, paladins, priests, warlocks, hunters, death knights, monks, and demon hunters as playable classes. They all have their pros and cons. Of them all, mages, hunters, and rogues can only ever DPS, they have no tank or healing specializations. Each class has 3 specializations that gives them a different play style compared to each other spec. Like, spellcasters like mages will be casting spells in each of their specs, but their abilities will be different, you'll be prioritizing different stats, and wearing different gear as a Fire mage than a Frost mage.

No problem. If you're based in the US and you end up getting the game, I mostly play on Mal'Ganis, but I have characters on Kil'jaeden and Anub'arak as well (those are servers, the servers for this game are named after characters and locations important in the lore).

And I just noticed that when I was listing off the classes up above that I forgot about shamans. Oh well, Blizzard forgot about them too :^)

I think linking armory would be easier.


us.battle.net/wow/en/character/malganis/Kromkosh/simple
us.battle.net/wow/en/character/malganis/Solumastus/simple

I have more, but these are the ones I plan on spending the most time with.

I caved in. Just bought Legion and started downloading. Haven't played in three years, so this will be interesting. I played quite a lot some years ago (I started around the time Lich King came out). Was never big on raiding. I had extreme amounts of social anxiety at the time. So I mostly just played with friends. Maybe I'll get into raiding too this time around.
I have missed WoW a lot, so really looking forward to start playing again!

I'm enjoying the PvE stuff quite a bit too right now. Got my Shaman to 110 yesterday(1 down, 11 more to go =P). I like that the world quests which replaces dailies stack up over 3 days, so I can let them stack up and don't feel like I missed anything if I get too busy with RL one day to log in for very long.

Although some of the Warden kill quests have been pretty rough even as Enhancement with excellent self heals. I couldn't imagine doing them on my Fury Warrior which not only has horrid self healing, but 20% more damage taken while enraged.

They do the raid finder now if you simply want to see the raids and story attached to them. Historically the difficulty has been somewhere between very easy and brain dead, so I suspect that trend will continue for Legion as well.

I'm also loving the lore, even if they're going a little George RR Martin on the characters.

The Warden quests are supposed to be done with groups, since the targets have buffs that increase their health and damage by 50, 100, and 200%. I main an Unholy DK (probably the second-best solo class behind BM hunter), and soloing the Warden targets is nigh-impossible if they have the 100 or 200% buffs. Even with 1.7 million health they melee hit me for around 1/4 my total health, about the best I can do is put up my DoT, get a few quick hits in, and kite the target while my pet kills it.