TLDR: Many of the partners Microsoft uses for support are suddenly going to fall under the classification of "foreign entities" with new federal guidance. When that happens, the current teams who work tickets for wow, may get decimated, and will take time to find new partners/staff. I expect that to go into effect next week.

So i will be the first to say this is going to be a bit of extrapolation on my part, but hear me out. I work in IT as i am sure many people who play this game do. My company is a partner and reseller of Microsoft cloud products, and as such we carry a unified/premier support contract with Microsoft. If you have worked with Microsoft support for the last X years, you probably noticed a trend that they have been offshoring more and more of their support. One of our clients had a major outage and I have been working a Critical support case with Microsoft support for the last few days.

At the end of today, the support tech we had been working with (who worked at a partner of microsoft who provided premier support) let is slip that with some recent change in federal guidelines, microoft had notified his company that they were being forced to stop using several of their partners they had been using because under the new guidelines they would be classified as foreign entities. His bosses were telling him to expect the support workload they had to quadruple or more starting next week, and he warned us that he expected wait times and response times to crater.

Now this is for Microsoft's super expensive support for their cloud technologies. Unified support contracts run 5-6 figures minimum. I dont see any way this doesn't also impact the support partners they are using to handle blizzard requests.

Extrapolating that out, i expect the little staff we have doing support right now is about to get gutted.

Used to play on US now I play on an EU server for the first time.

Gotta say, compared to what I'm used to from the US servers, nobody here really talks much in say, in generals, in party chats when questing/ doing dungeons, etc.

I guess it has to do with how not everyone might know english that well on European servers? Never realized that might make a huge difference in a game like this, but I guess yeah it makes sense.

What makes vanilla a great game is not the same for everyone. What to its core makes classic? and therefore can’t be changed. And what changes do you feel that have been tested but didn’t give you that classic feel? Think SoM and SoD inventions.

I will not go first as to not push this discussion in a direction.

I just got back into SoD after a long break, and I’m shocked at how bad PvP is now. I lost 12 ABs in a row, all 5 cap losses, all against a minimum of 6 pallies that one shot everyone. What the hell is going on?

Yooo r/classicwow, what do you guys think about these classes in P8? I think Ret is gonna be really rough.

Ret Paladin

• I believe they will suck in P8 for most of the phase. They got nerfed T2 set and are a lot weaker for progression now. With endgame P8 full BIS and an Ashbringer, they will be competitive. But how many players will really get that much gear?

Mage

• Their AoE will be so much better since Living Bomb explodes on mob death. Plus your balefire bolt for Fire spec will play a much bigger role since Pyroblast removes a stack. Don’t be surprised if Mages are top DPS in the phase.

Hunters

• Absurdly high damage and Multi Shot plays a much bigger role now. Also you get to use pets again. Feed that damn pet..

Warrior

• They got their AoE amped up with Phase 8, more Whirlwinds, an extra cleave target too. But they are best at short fights and cleave fights. I’m predicting Solistrasza and Reborn Council are cleave. Outside of maybe two fights, how many will have cleave? 

Warlocks

• Insane new haste with their T4 set means Fire Destruction is insane now. They also may very well carry the progression phase alongside Shadow Priests and Boomkins.

If you want to know how your class stacks up with thenew changes and tier sets, check out this huge P8 DPS tier list: https://youtu.be/GkQ5oGEIGVE

What class do you guys think will be #1 in Phase 8? Who will be in the trash heap?

I know TBC is a bit of a way off, and I'm hoping we get TBC era servers, but I've been doing a bit of theory crafting into TBC regarding professions. I never played on the TBC classic servers first time through, instead I stayed the classic vanilla servers, as I was a slow leveller who levelled some alts and hadn't experienced much vanilla raiding by the time TBC came around.

My plan (assuming they announce TBC era) is to run skinning+(herb or mining), and take my time in TBC questing, doing the dungeon runs first up to revered where this is benefitial for rep and then doing all the quests in the zones. I probably won't rush this so doing it with rested XP I imagine I'll hit 70 with still plenty of zones to complete.

I've planned out some endgame professions for some of my characters I want to create, and my plan would be to only switch to crafting professions once I've hit 70 and done most of the open world content.

But some professions, like tailoring, alchemy and engineering, can be useful at level 60, Tailoring and alchemy for the cooldowns, and engineering for the mote extractor.

In Classic I found the level 35 cooldowns for alchemy and tailoring a nice little money maker, particularly at times when I was busy with real life things and couldn't play much. Could just log in for 30 seconds and make some quick gold.

So for my characters that I want to have tailoring as an endgame profession, I figure I might as well switch to it at level 60, grab the specialisation for the double mats cooldown [1].

But then the question becomes, if I'm picking up tailoring at level 60, what gathering profession should I pair with it? Particularly if I'm going to be mainly doing the open world quests maybe with a few dungeons to maximise rep gain, and I don't want to focus on farming but I'm happy to pick nodes I see whilst questing/travelling.

It seems skinning is easy because I don't have to go out of my way. On the other hand, I plan to have a blacksmith, jewelcrafter, engineer and an alchemist at some point, so I will need ore and herbs, particularly ore as Blacksmithing really needs a lot of ore to level.

If the herb and ore nodes however are going to have a lot of competition from other players (particularly with the mega servers nowadays) and/or bots, perhaps it's better to go skinning and just buy the required herbs/ore, from the proceeds of selling the leather. On the other hand, if the price of leather is quite low and it's going to cost me a lot more to buy ore from the auction house, perhaps it's better to bite the bullet, go mining and gather my own ore incidentally whilst open world questing.

So for people who played TBC Classic, or are on Anniversary now, what's your suggestion if I'm only going to have one gathering profession whilst leveling in TBC, and I'm only going to do incidental gathering, not focused farming?

[1] I understand some Tailoring specialisations have tricky quests to complete, but I presume I could group up to solve that.

What the title says, my guild has been having a lot of issues with it. Multiple tanks get mc'd and then we start losing people and we wipe.

The current server-wide layering system creates a frustrating imbalance across Azeroth. While leveling zones like The Barrens or Desolace are practically deserted (where even 3 layers feel excessive), end-game zones are severely overcrowded.

This overcrowding particularly impacts valuable resource farming:

• Winterfall Firewater farmers competing in Winterspring
• Rich Thorium Veins in zones like Un'Goro and Winterspring
• High-level herbs like Plaguebloom and Black Lotus
• Valuable mob grinding spots for Essence of Water/Fire/Air

With everyone packed into the same few profitable zones, what should be enjoyable farming sessions turn into frustrating competition. A zone-specific layering system (allowing 10+ layers in high-traffic areas while reducing layers in quieter zones) would help distribute the population more effectively, making the experience more reminiscent of original Vanilla WoW where you'd regularly encounter others during leveling, without the current extreme overcrowding in farming zones.

with AB weekend going on is it still beneficial to do without a premade? or stick to AV?

I have an idea for a theme based guild and I want to gauge interest.

It is common knowledge Vanilla PvE is pretty easy strategy and gameplay wise, however it requires grinding and a gearcheck.

I never really raided Vanilla and I am annoyed by the tryharding requirements and am looking for a community driven adventerous experience.

So I had an idea.

What about a guild where DBM and watching boss tutorials is forbidden?

Instead, it is about playing the game as if it was year 2004, nobody knows anything, and we learn and progress as a guild together?

The guild would be for people who either never played Vanilla, who just want to chill and experience the lore, or for people who played Vanilla but want play the game as it was intended.

I was thinking about calling it <Virgins>, <Classic Virgins> or <Back to the Roots>.

Would there be any interest for this?

I am based in Europe so the server choice is either Thunderstrike or Spineshatter.

P.S. I am also interested in starting a Cataclysm version of the guild.

I asked this question on discord and was told that off hand weapon speed didn't really matter until TBC. I play mainly daggers but would be looking to play daggers for pve and swords for pvp.

Should I take the two R14 daggers at 2 sec weapon speed and am I selecting the correct swords? Or is it preferable to have two of the same type of sword?

Thanks for your time, folks o/

You can also Follow me here:

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@sleepyjoegaming

Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/sleepyjoegaming

I started to lead AV and have gotten it down to 7 mins win. You need to keep moving and work together and we can do it!

I've been farming greens in WF because of the huge mobs/camps and I've been having decent luck.

But I've been wondering if there are better places? I'm looking for a relatively low lvl area to farm greens. Around lvl 20 pref.

Onlyfangs raided and I didn't get dc'd? W Blizz?

So i have been playing wow classic for about 5 or 6 months on both HC and Dreamscythe. I'm now fully on dreamscythe and i have yet to hit lvl 60. I keep getting up into the 30's with each character and then starting an ALT. I just love playing every class and i really enjoy the first 20 or 30 levels every time. Does anyone else have this issue? Or is it just me? I'll never raid at this point...

hello! the vendor doesnt offer the quest for the three piece set. I am friendly with CC. I can see the quest in the npc tooltip via questie but there is no quest available. Is there a reputation minimum with cenarion circle?

I feel like I spent more time trying to find Mazzranache (a pink tall strider to those that don't know) to tame as my hunter pet than I did trying for a crusader enchant drop, and I've yet to encounter a single person in my dungeon groups to appreciate its joke name referencing an almost 50 year old move. So I'm enlisting you fine sirs and madams to validate my ego and time spent.

So what did I name my pink flamingo looking pet?

Johnwaters

Thank you I'll be here all week, two shows on Sunday, make sure to tip your bartender.

I’m starting to think some players have actually moved in at the tunnel entrance. Same names, same spots, just standing there day after day like it’s their new apartment.
At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if they started charging rent.

Seriously though, it’s getting really annoying. They don’t even try to hide it — full AFK from start to finish — and nothing seems to happen to them no matter how often they get reported.
Is Blizzard even looking at AFK reports these days?

I no-lifed it till the end of phase 2 and quit for some reason. Then because it was so long and I heard phase 7 was the end and there's no level caps anymore I figured it's already not worth going back in. But now that I rechecked it while thinking whether to join a classic hardcore realm again or not, I realize phase 8 is in the making and the game might continue for a while longer?

How are the classes nowadays? I mained a shadowpriest and was kickin' ass in the gnomer raid but I think I might retry another class this time around to see whats new

Alliance - Dreamscythe - Alterac Valley

As mentioned games on NA go longer than games on EU. Did a reasonable job of avoiding turtles. To answer some of the questions from previous days. I usually queue with one other play to avoid getting inserted into an in progress games. As for having a decent W/L ratio as alliance, I avoid playing from ~1pm server to 8pm server when the turtle prone horde tend to play and really slow the farm down.

Day 4 - 15W - 9L | 8.3 hours including queue times | 12,731 honor per hour

Day 3 - 13W - 9L | 7.5 hours including queue times | 13,011 honor per hour

Day 2 - 16W - 14L | 11.4 hours including queue times | 12,958 honor per hour

Day 1 - 17W - 13L | 9.7 hours including queue times | 14,738 honor per hour

Apparently Blizzard are not happy with their Season of Mastery fix to the exact same problem we’ve already had before, making high level herbs have a chance to drop Black Lotus.

So instead they are making Black Lotus drop 1-3 flowers like regular herb nodes.

Personally can’t wait for this to change absolutely nothing.

What if lieutenants only gave XP to players within a certain range.

The exact range can be discussed but I feel it would solve the afk problem outright.

"But what if I farm mid, then I won't get XP from lieutenants"

Correct! You get xp from HKs that the others playing the objectives do not get.