Hola! Good day! 

TLDR version: Officially, I'm retiring from WoW.. most likely for good.. potentially until Cataclysm, we'll see.

Well, as some of you may have realized by now, I haven't logged in since mid June. During vacation, as I was enjoying a nice red stripe atop a rooftop bar in Charleston, I decided it was time to officially retire from WoW. I logged in from my phone (go android!) and canceled all payment for my account. In addition to having my work hours extended (7am start times whoo!), there are a bunch of things I wish to accomplish in my life by years end. It also did not help that game has gotten extremely redundant and entirely too easy. I found myself logging in for more of the social aspect rather then the content itself.

I could go on and on with how to make this game interesting again, but it's nothing I haven't posted previously. 

I'm not really going to go into saying goodbye and all that, since I'll be on the forums and plan on staying in touch with anyone who wishes.. PM me if you need any of my info. I would like to thank Nuitarin, Keisjaa, and Saedo for basically keeping Kitten Brigade alive during the mass exodus. Also would like to thank the others who consistently would show up and helped the raid keep going.

I think thats about it. I'm not going to do any shoutouts unless you really want one, lol. 

//Luke

~Ag/Agoney/Antiquite

http://www.paragon-wow.com/

Higly..highly recommend watching this video.. one of the best PvE movies I've watched, and an Epic encounter none the less. IMO download the torrent, youtube wont do it justice.

This is taken from MMO Champion. I disagree with it strongly, I'll post my thoughts a bit later but would like to see what people's opinions are.

http://www.mmo-champion.com/general-discussions-22/warcraft-raiding-has-...

Copied word for word.

There's a long-running meme that going to 25 man raids from 40, or
easy/hard modes or difficulty tuning has significantly nerfed raiding. 
This is simply untrue.  Raiding in vanilla WoW was, in most cases,
relatively simple from a mechanics perspective.  Molten Core and
Blackwing Lair, which are held up as guild-breaking raids, had boss
mechanics where the whole fight was as simple as "Run away when you are
the bomb," "Line of sight his ability," or "Tank him with your back to
the wall."  There are trash packs in ICC with more complicated
execution requirements than bosses from early raids. 

What's changed is this:

1.  Tuning -
It's very easy to make a boss a progression wall.  If boss X requires a
certain level of gear to beat and boss Y requires much better gear, or
special resist gear, then your guild has to farm V, W, and X for a
couple of months to beat Y.  Blizzard used to do this.  Ragnaros,
Huhuran and Vaelestrasz were originally hard gear checks, Rag and Huhu
required you to farm lots of resist gear, while Vael required very high
raid DPS, which meant a lot of guilds that were farming Rag had to farm
him a bunch more to be mathematically capable of beating the boss. 
Nefarian is another extreme example.  His shadow flame ability killed
anyone without a cloak made from Onyxia's scales.  But you had to farm
Ony every week for nearly a year to outfit everyone in your raid with a
cloak. 

This keeps people from completing an instance for a
period of weeks or months, and some people believe it's more "epic" if
an encounter is active for months before anyone beats it.  But this is
an artificial barrier.  And it's not fun at all when a raid boss drops
resist gear instead of something cool.

2. Guild stability - Unattractive
loot incentives in the old game made it much more difficult for guilds
to push progression.  Bosses dropped 3-4 loots for 40 people.  You
generally took about 5 players of each class.  There were no badges. 
And since the oldest raiders had been raiding outdated instances for
years to gear new raiders, and building massive amounts of DKP, they
got everything first.  That meant that, when you were pushing new
content, about fifteen people in the raid knew that, whatever exciting
might drop from that boss, they would not see it for at least four
months.  So many guilds struggled with attendance on progression nights
and were oversubscribed on farming down-tier content. 

There
were also no server transfers in vanilla.  If you lost a player, you
had to either poach somebody geared from another guild on your server
or gear up somebody new.  And new recruits would always be undergeared,
because there was no casual progression.  Between raids dropping about
half as much loot-per-player as they do now, and high raider turnover,
guilds never really farmed out an instance.  Guilds ran MC for years
because new people always needed the loot.  This bloated up the raid
week, making the game an onerous chore.  And if a key raider burned
out, the loss could set the guild back weeks.

Also, having 40
people instead of 25 made ready checks more difficult and
disconnect/afk problems more frequent and time consuming.  Originally
all buffs had to be single-cast.  There were no summoning stones, you
could not summon inside an instance, and warlock summons required a
shard for each use.  Just getting people to the instance took a long
time.

3.  Commitment - This is tied closely to the guild
stability issue; since there were no server transfers, it was difficult
to get a group of the best people in the world together to focus on
breaking an instance.  In many of the world-first screenshots, you'll
see timestamps of 3 AM on weeknights.  Before server transfers it was
much harder to put a guild together that could raid that long.  Some
guilds have leveled multiple alts of the same class and geared them up
into ICC to have more attempts per week at the limited-attempt bosses.
There was no way to put together a raid that would do something like
that in 2005; the world-first wasn't even the same kind of valuable
back then, because there wasn't the same kind of attention being paid
to top guilds' progress. 

Those encounters, except when they
were impossible to beat due to bugs or unattainable gear requirements,
probably would not have stood up as well to the kind of super-guilds
that exist today.

Raiding in Vanilla also required a lot more
time spent preparing outside the raid.  Since the gear available was
often barely sufficient, consumables were very important.  You could
have unlimited elixirs on top of a flask, and pop a potion every two
minutes in vanilla, and there were also special healing tubers in
Felwood that people farmed because they shared separate cooldowns with
potions, and crystals in Un'Goro to farm as well.  And people needed
enchanting oil for their weapons, sharpening stones, etc.

Ragnaros
originally required two greater fire protection potions per raider, per
attempt, and they were a pain to farm.  People who were fourth or fifth
in DKP for their class simply wouldn't do this kind of prep for the
encounters, so officers in many raid guilds often spent 20-30 hours a
week farming consumables for raids.  If there were no fish feast, how
many of your raiders do you think would show up without their buff food?

None of this stuff makes the encounters difficult from a mechanical standpoint.
Players in vanilla had fewer abilities and simpler rotations, and the
fights were generally as complicated as modern 5 man heroic bosses, up
until the last couple of bosses of AQ 40.

As it stands, the
presence of hard modes probably means that a normal mode encounter will
never be as difficult as the hardest stuff in original Naxx or Sunwell,
although Hard Mode Lich King may very well be the most challenging
encounter ever in the game.  But the "difficulty" of the old-world
raids came from them being unpleasant to play, unrewarding from a loot
perspective, and saddled with onerous consumable requirements.

Has anyone ever tried using this ethernet over power interface? I've seen in around now for quite some time, but dont know anyone whos actually usued it. How is it's reliability to say, wireless? Speed? etc.

http://blue.mmo-champion.com/12/21038229051-icecrown-citadel-raid-access...

After sitting here and re-reading that 500 times.. Im still confused.. but I'm pretty sure its the dumbest move ever. Maybe, a smart move from a business stand point, extend your content as far as possible, but I have my doubts from a playing stand point.

Let me start off by saying, I don't think the "gated" progression system is a bad thing for WoW, espeacially if it would help with the storyline, but the attempt system? Come on.. I haven't really raided much since about March/April, so I didnt really deal with the progression of Uld and more specifically TOCHM25. I did keep a good following on the events happening though..

I think the achievement system showed the worst it could be with TOC... All the achievements based on attempts left, no one dying etc.. all vanity when you think about it. With sooooooooo many RNG issues both ingame and out, it really makes zero sense why it was implemented. One of the best items in that link is that these achievements will not make it to ICC. This will make the game more fun overall.

Sooo, now, with this new system.. The attempts seem awfully low.. almost to the point that they make me worry how hard these encounters will be. 5 attempts for the first "critical" boss? Either this encounter is going to be really really easy... or it will be way too tuned. 5 attempts to test out strats.. 5 attempts to hope someone doesnt accidentally pull the boss and wipe the raid... or, Well, if you don't beat this boss within 5 attempts, you have issues!! While it is truly to early to know.. the concept just seems ridic.

So, what would I do.. I'm complaining but do I have any ideas to fix it? Well, of course! If there's going to be a gated system in place, at least make the normal modes of these fights difficult. No guild, not even the top level guilds should steam roll this content while it is in gated form. Make the pre-gate boss fight similar to Twin Eredar / Muru difficulty wise (or close to it).  This way you have something actually to work for, and are not worried about being blocked by some progress limiting mechanic.

Now, with the vanity "attempt remaining" achievements out, there is absolutely no reason to keep attempts in. I don't see the point of blizzard dictating how much or little a raid should be allowed to try fights. It seems like this will almost affect Casual guilds more then hardcore.

But of course... none of this has been implemented! It can all change!! The ideal situation: Keep Gates, make normal modes challenging to gear level and not roflstomps, and have decent/unique HMs that are not over tuned!

Like the title says, I'm building a new PC. I have really good computer knowledge etc, but I want to see what everyone would be with the following criteria, to ensure I build a proper system.

Basically, criteria is as follows:

$700 ish budget

4gigs ram

Don't need a case, HD, or an OS, or a burner.

Nvidia graphics (unless you can tell me why i should go ATI)

Pref Asus mobo

I'd be interested in seeing what you guys come up with. This will be for gaming, networking, video editing etc. It will more then likely be running Windows 7 (more then likely 64bit).