Wrath of the Lich King release date announced!
13th November 2008 - That means just a little less than two months! I'm sure you're all as excited as I am about this news, but I'll bet you aren't half as worried as I am.
Why worried? Well, because that means I have only two months to finish my Leveling Guides for Northrend and my Death Knight Leveling Guides. That means 6 guides :P Yes six, because I'll split the Northrend Leveling Guide in two chapters for each faction, just like I did for my Outland Leveling Guides.
So yea, I'm excited, worried and in need of time! That means I won't be able to write lenghty articles on the blog anymore, but I'll still post something everyday to keep you updated on my progress, it will just be more straightforward news. I hope you'll forgive me!
I'll also post little previews of my guides here to let you have a glimpse of how my work is taking shape.
I've set the release dates for all 6 guides, you can find them here on the wow-pro front page.
Now you must be wondering why I decided to set the release dates of my guides so close to the 13th November. The reason is simple: some other shady websites I won't name have been stealing my guides to try to make a quick buck on their page, they shamelessly copy/pasted my entire guides without my permission, without even giving credit to the author. That's still not too bad, because I generally get those sites taken down pretty quick by contacting their hosts.
The bigger problem is those other websites who take my guides and do little modifications here and there and then claim to have written it themselves, and it's extremely hard to get those sites to remove my guides from their pages, sometimes it's even impossible.
So that's why this time I'll be releasing my guides at the very last moment, that way, those sites won't have much time to steal my guides and will have to find another way, like writing the guide themselves (omg!) or rip off someone else...
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Hello Jame.
I'm very happy and excited for these news, I think that 2 months will pass very quickly. I think that I'll level another char as fast as I can, the problem is to choose the class... I would like to ask you but I cannot find a page where people can ask you anything.
I'll ask you here: in your opinion and experience, what would be the best choice between Druid, Warlock and Hunter? I know that those 3 classes are able to solo elites (along with frost mage, sometimes) but I really can't decide! I want to be able to solo most of quests (even though there aren't many group quests in your guides) or just have less problems than with other classes. This because I won't have much free time in the future, so I want to optimize the time :)
Thnaks for your patience while reading this, and good luck with your guides :).
That's a tough question :P All 3 can solo very well.
With good gear, the druid can solo mobs which can't be kited or feared because he can simply tank them, Hunters and Warlocks can use their pet to tank, but on hard hitting mobs, their pet will die much quicker than a feral bear.
Hunters and warlocks are on the other hand quite easy to level and to solo elites with, even with crappy gear (this is especially true for hunters).
So unless you already have a very well equipped feral druid, I'd say go for Warlock or Hunter. After that, it's down to preference. As long as a mob isn't immune to fear, a warlock can solo it, even if that mob hurts like hell.
For hunters it's the same as long as the mob isn't immune to movement impairing effects like frost trap, concussive shot or wing clip. It does take more skill though to kite well with a hunter than to fear stuff with a warlock :p
So in general I'd give an edge to warlocks when it comes to soloing elites.
On the other hand, when it's about farming and killing normal mobs quickly, hunters are better than warlocks.
I hope that's enough info for you to make your choice.
Thanks a lot for your answer, Jame.
I'll follow your advice :). Thanks again :D
I remember seeing one of your guides around on a different site, I'll be sure to report them to you/wow-pro from now on.
I'm also very glad you're going to have Northerend leveling guides by the time WoTLK comes out. Though people say that guides don't let you discover the game for yourself or whatnot, I've found that your guides make leveling much more fun.
I do have a question though, recently a couple of Addons have popped up that help with the leveling process by providing waypoints and such ingame. Would you ever consider doing something similar, or letting someone else do something similar, with your guides?
I've decided to pawn my beta key and let someone more worthy use it. I'm too busy grinding for season 2 daggers, mutilate is looking like the rogue leveling spec for 70-80, even surpassing combat.
Thanks for following my blog guys :)
@Andy: Yes, I'll probably work on an addon version of my guide in the future. This is a distant project though, because I first have to release a whole lot of guides in paper version :)
While I love you guides, I'm probably going to go into Northrend under my own recognisance the first time through.
There are two reasons. One: the joy of discovery. The first time you go into a zone there's a fun in working things out, seeing things etc, that goes away when you're just "go to B, pick up A".
Two: I've found running your guides reveals quests (and occasionally, areas) I had no idea even existed. I was sad when I ran through your horde leveling guide against recently, and saw you had taken out the Pirates in Arathi, as I discovered them through you.
That said, I'm interested to see how you trim your 60-70 leveling guides (for death knights, or otherwise) with regard to the reduced xp requirements.
I'm probably not gonna trim my Outland guides at all, and let people choose if they want to follow my Outland circuits until the end and go to Northrend at level 71 (or something like that).
I had to trim stuff in my old guides though, because if not, it would have mean a lot of grey quests :P
This is not the case for Outland though, so I'm not gonna remove any quests I think.
Would you be interested in someone working to make a version of your existing guides into an add-on?
I've looked at a couple of ones out there and the format is pretty simple.
I love your guides and it would be great to feed more back to you (yes I donated in the past too)
First of all, thank you for your awesome guides, Jame :)
If you wish to "port" your guide to add-on form without writing the add-on itself, I suggest checking out Tekkub's TourGuide add-on at WoWInterface, CurseGaming or Tekkub's own website. I'm not sure if there are other add-ons like it out there, but I liked using it to level a horde hunter to 55 a lot (just to create a Death Knight on that realm).
There would probably be a lot of work involved in translating the text versions we know to versions it can understand, but it's a very pratical form of guide (especially to people like me who don't have two monitors) and Tekkub even developed a recorder add-on to create guides as you play, so someone willing enough could simply use a regular guide and convert it to TourGuide format.
Hey Sh0dan, it's definitely something I plan to do in the future. I'll look into it thoroughly as soon as I'm done with my current projects (WotLK leveling guides, etc).
There already is a tourguide plugin for jame's guide! It was on the forums a couple months ago.
Just wanted to say I'm very excited to see the new guides-- your work has been SO helpful to me in the past because I hate having to level, and the ability to use your guides makes it as quick and painless as possible.
As a matter of fact, the speed that you make possible is enough that I find myself enjoying seeing how fast I can gain levels.
Thanks for your contributions to the community, and I can't wait for WotLK-ing with your advice.
Contact Andrew from above and have some help making your guide(s) complete with addons. You do so much that I know if I could help I would as well. Let some of us give back a little to you because we have benefited so much from your hard work.
@Andrew. If you read this, please contact me either by PM on wow-pro or by e-mail:
jame.wow.pro.blog@gmail.com
Thank you for providing these guides they will be very helpful. I recently wrote about preparing for Wotlk and decided to link to your site. Keep up the good work!
Would you consider releasing the remainder of your guides on the 12th, all at once? I understand your desire to avoid having them stolen, but at the current rate, the final 2 guides (77-78 and 78-80, or some breakdown of the final 3 levels) won't be released until after the launch date. I'll be taking that time off of work, and thus won't have my printer.
Those guides aren't written yet, so I can't release them earlier, or I would of course :)
Have you considered a different release format? I.e. PDF would be harder (but not of course impossible) to steal.
Are you kidding me ? pdf ?
like right click, save as, copy paste ?
I understand your frustrations James, it really sucks that people would do that :(