Breakfast Topic: Initiate epic character reboot procedure in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...

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Standing outside the Caverns of Time, ready to go forth and disrupt your past. What would you do if you could do it all over again? Looking back with what you know now about the game compared to what you knew then, would you make the same choices? I started playing during The Burning Crusade but before a lot of the experience cutting from 0 to 60. I started with a druid on a normal realm because, being a newb, I thought "normal" meant you could get away with doing a little bit of everything, PVP or RP, whenever the mood struck.

Boy, was I wrong.

Personally, then, I would keep my character choices as they were (yay, druids!), but I would roll on a different server type (changing from normal to RP). Why not just reroll or pay to move now to a RP server? Because I'd have to spend $250 to move my entire crafter's network or cave in and finally rely on the AH with only one toon -- and then I'd miss my gadget-wielding maniac warlock gnome, and the rest of my army of alts would sit abandoned, collecting dust. Lonely. Not to mention the friends and family I'd leave behind.

What about your faction of choice? Horde vs. Alliance was a practical choice for me, since that's where my friend was who introduced me to the game.

So if you had that giant reset button and could slap your past self on the back of the head before doing something you regretted, what would you do? Or would you do nothing? Tags: facebookfeed, game-discussion, gamer-discussion, world-of-warcraft-discussion, world-of-warcraft-topics, wow-discussion, wow-hot-topics, wow-issues, wow-topics

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Breakfast Topic: Patch 4.2 is upon us

Finally, patch 4.2 is upon us. Azeroth has undergone many changes since Cataclysm launched, and finally, we are getting the first new "tier" patch for this expansion. Suffice to say, I am very excited. Patch 4.2 represents to me many turning points for World of Warcraft that are putting it back on the path to cohesiveness. Cataclysm's launch was a success, and we were wowed by the features and the set pieces, but patch 4.2 feels like the first time we are getting to see new content that encapsulates the drive and cohesiveness of the Cataclysm motif.

Patch 4.2 brings with it many new features. Players will be able to enter the Firelands, Ragnaros' domain, for a whole slew of new daily quests and player-specific progression. Seven new raid bosses await intrepid raiders, valor point gear will be knocked down to justice level, and the previous tier of content is becoming more accessible to raiders new and old. Loads of new companion pets and mounts await players willing to aid the Avengers of Hyjal's cause. Lucky raiders will also take part in an epic quest to forge the newest legendary item in WoW, Dragonwrath, Tarecgosa's Rest.

I am especially interested and excited for the Molten Front and Regrowth daily hubs that are being introduced for max-level players in Hyjal, as the druids and sentinels break into Ragnaros' home turf, the Firelands, and lay siege for their survival. These dailies and daily hubs represent a philosophy that I love in MMOs -- your personal progression should matter just as much as the progression of the whole. You, individually, will be working with major lore characters and factions to put together the Hyjal offensive, and your decisions get to open up new quest areas and gear vendors in an order that you choose. Putting this type of control back in the players' hands feels like a Burning Crusade move, and I'm a man who loved him some Burning Crusade.

What are you looking forward to when we get to log into patch 4.2? What's your first move in the face of invasion from the Firelands? Tags: facebookfeed, fire-lands, firelands, game-discussion, gamer-discussion, molten-front, patch-4.2, ragnaros, regrowth, staghelm, the-regrowth, world-of-warcraft-discussion, world-of-warcraft-patch-4.2, world-of-warcraft-topics, wow-discussion, wow-hot-topics, wow-issues, wow-patch, wow-patch-4.2, wow-patch-4.2-news, wow-patch-news, wow-topics

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Breakfast Topic: Borrowing features from other games

This Breakfast Topic has been brought to you by Seed, the AOL guest writer program that brings your words to WoW Insider's pages.

We've all cheated on WoW before. Whether it was Warhammer or Free Realms, we've all come back to the game. While Blizzard does a lot of things right, once in awhile, we play another game, see something cool, and ask ourselves, "Why doesn't Blizz do that?"

We've all seen talk about an appearance tab, where players can, for example, wear their Christmas clothing for looks while actually having the stats of their raid gear -- the only real difference is the looks. Rift recently announced this feature, so with any luck, much like with guild quests/challenges, the Blizz team will feel like borrowing this as well.

Housing's another idea that gets tossed around. It was actually being worked on in alpha, but Blizz decided not to go with it. In other games like EverQuest 2, player housing is also what makes towns. Why not allow players to use some space in capital cities and outposts to house their guilds?

In a similar vein, I'd love to see some world PVP that can be captured only by guilds. Darkfall's player housing is linked with a conquest system in which players get to keep their houses but the conquering guild gets some cash for their guild bank and their name in lights. Every, say, six hours, a town gets "hot." Imagine if guilds could "capture" Crossroads and have their guild advertised as its protector or take over a rival guild's home town to start some world PVP guild wars?

What features from other games would you like to see in WoW? Player-owned ships? Terraforming? Factionless PVP servers? Tags: facebookfeed, game-discussion, gamer-discussion, world-of-warcraft-discussion, world-of-warcraft-topics, wow-discussion, wow-hot-topics, wow-issues, wow-topics

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Breakfast Topic: Where do you play WoW?

Throughout the day, I can be found hunched over my computers in my office working here and elsewhere, finding the latest WoW news to be brought forward to the community (and occasionally saying screw it to everything and running an afternoon heroic).

But at night, it's a different story. I like to be around my fiancée, hanging out and watching some TV, and so on ... But I also like to be doing mindless things in game to power up my toons -- questing, fishing, gathering ... the usual. Archaeology is numbingly boring to me unless I have something else on (I recently rewatched all of Cosmos while going from 1 to 525 in archaeology). And for that mindless playing, it's all about loading up WoW on my laptop and sitting on my ridiculously comfortable chair.

For serious gameplay, however, it's back into the office for me (also sitting on a ridiculously comfortable chair). I'm not a fan of raiding on a laptop unless absolutely necessary.

So where do you, dear reader, play WoW? Sit out in the living room with the missus (or mister), or do you go in your (wo)man cave and yell for Hot Pockets? Tags: facebookfeed, game-discussion, gamer-discussion, world-of-warcraft-discussion, world-of-warcraft-topics, wow-discussion, wow-hot-topics, wow-issues, wow-topics

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Breakfast Topic: Are you an Azerothian prankster?

This Breakfast Topic has been brought to you by Seed, the AOL guest writer program that brings your words to WoW Insider's pages.

Back in the good ol' days, our guild was much smaller and tight-knit. We had enough for a solid 25-man raid, with a handful others who just liked to call us "home." Some guildies knew each other in real life or were roommates who liked to have fun and play pranks on each other. While I glad to not be a part of it, I did enjoy hearing the creativity they came up with, especially when it involved something in game.

The most memorable prank was back in the golden days of yore, back when mounts were items in your bag, guns and bows took ammunition, and gold wasn't fished in fountains. Someone logged onto a low-level alt and commented the character wasn't where he had left him. He shortly discovered that he had no gear, no gold for a flight path, no hearthstone, no mount, was nowhere near a bank, and had to run through high-level mobs to get anywhere remotely close to bank access. Watching him discover all these atrocities one at a time made for a very entertaining evening.

With authenticators bringing heightened account security and Blizzard making items such as mounts "learned," pranks such as this are hard to recreate. This just means pranksters have to be more creative.

Do you and your friends pull fast ones on each other? What epic in-game tales and pranks were you in on or have you heard about?

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Breakfast Topic: How do you let off steam?

This Breakfast Topic has been brought to you by Seed, the AOL guest writer program that brings your words to WoW Insider's pages.

We've all had those nights. Whether it's an obnoxious PUG from the Dungeon Finder, a string of losses in battlegrounds or the arena, a comment setting off a drama storm in guild chat, or a night of wiping on a raid boss you should have on farm ... Every once in a while, you're going to have an incident in the game that will put you in a bad mood.

We had a few of these this week. Our normal 10-man raid group had been stirred up by some people not being able to raid, and we had to take some newer players to kill Cho'gall who didn't know the fight. After three or four wipes on a boss that we typically kill in one shot, it became clear that it wasn't going to happen. Our fill-in tanks were undergeared, we didn't have strong enough AOE to deal with adds, and single-target damage on the boss was lacking. It also only took three or four wipes for our disc priest to start getting snippy in Vent, and he's usually such a joy to talk to anyway. /sarcasm

By the time we had disbanded for the night, I'd gotten pretty worked up myself, and I needed to blow some steam before logging and going to bed. So what's a blood elf to do when he's ticked off? I switched over to my night elf druid and took to the skies. Above the rooftops of Stormwind, I picked a direction, turned off my interface, and just let the proverbial wind carry me away. I soared over Ironforge, Stranglethorn Vale, Swamp of Sorrows, and all the way up to Tirisfal Glades. Over mountains and cliffs, down between the trees of the jungle, and skimming along the waters of the coast, just taking in the sights and sounds of Azeroth and taking my mind off the frustrating night of wipes and personality clashes in Vent. Eventually, I made my way through the dark portal and over to Nagrand and Blade's Edge before finally landing in Shattrath and logging for the night, much more relaxed than I had been 20 minutes earlier.

Frustration is a reality of any activity that requires interaction with other people, and WoW is no different. Whether you're hardcore or casual, someone at some point is going to push your buttons. So what do you do about it? Do you gather a few friends and steamroll a raid boss from a previous expansion? Do you queue up for a random unrated battleground and devastate the opposing team? Or do you just wander around?

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