Archive

BC Raid Areas

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on August 18, 2008
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 ”Raid Dungeons ne of the most compelling features of massively-multiplayer games is the near infinity of things to do in them - content to suit many different playing styles. ‘Raids’ are assaults by larger groups of players on powerful monsters or dungeons and in World of Warcraft can include everything from a group of lower level characters tackling a quest well above their level to the epic end-game, high-level attacks against god-like foes. We previously spoke with designer Jeffrey Kaplan, who has been heading up the world and raid design, to hear his thoughts on where raids are heading in World of Warcraft and how they’ll be implemented. lackwing Lair can be found at the very height of Blackrock Spire. It is there in the dark recesses of the mountain’s peak that Nefarian has begun to unfold the final stages of his plan to destroy Ragnaros once and for all and lead his army to undisputed supremacy over all the races of Azeroth. he Molten Core lies at the very bottom of Blackrock Depths. It is the heart of Blackrock Mountain and the exact spot where, long ago in a desperate bid to turn the tide of the dwarven civil war, Emperor Thaurissan summoned the elemental Firelord, Ragnaros, into the world. Though the fire lord is incapable of straying far from the blazing Core, it is believed that his elemental minions command the Dark Iron dwarves, who are in the midst of creating armies out of living stone. The burning lake where Ragnaros lies sleeping acts as a rift connecting to the plane of fire, allowing the malicious elementals to pass through. Chief among Ragnaros’ agents is Majordomo Executus - for this cunning elemental is the only one capable of calling the Firelord from his slumber. 40 Player limit loating above the Plaguelands, the necropolis known as Naxxramas serves as the seat of one of the Lich King’s most powerful officers, the dreaded lich Kel’Thuzad.

Horrors of the past and new terrors yet to be unleashed are gathering inside the necropolis as the Lich King’s servants prepare their assault. Soon the Scourge will march again… Learn more about the events that darkened the fate of Kel’Thuzad, and ultimately of all Azeroth, in Road to Damnation. wow gold ” People even stop playing the beta if they decided that they will play the release version of the game. One factor here is that playing the beta isn’t quite as pleasant as playing the release version: Betas by definition have more bugs, more server downtime, and in many cases frequent character wipes. Pretty much every beta does a character wipe a few days before release, so that in the release version you either start from level 1 again, or only get a few days head start if you pre-ordered the game. wow gold Why would I want to, lets say, level a copy of my level 70 character to 80 in the Wrath of the Lich King beta, if I’ll just have to level that same character again from 70 to 80 in the release. But there are some things you can take out of a beta into the release version, and these constitute another motivation to play the beta in the first place. One is knowledge about the game. cheap wow gold For example I used the WAR beta to decide what character class I want to play in the release version. As beta characters don’t last, it’s a good opportunity to make many alts and see how they play, and which ones you like. In games where you compete against other players, like in Football Manager Live, knowing how the game works gives you an advantage over the competition that doesn’t have that knowledge.
wow gold Another thing you can take out of the beta and into the release is social contacts. I met my current guild in the EQ2 beta, then played WoW with them, and am looking forward to play WAR with them as well. Learning how the game works and hooking up with people takes more time than just deciding whether you like the game, so if that is the motivation to play the beta, people stay somewhat longer. mp3 players But with some betas lasting several months, even those goals can be achieved long before the beta ends. So with many player’s motivation to play a beta running out long before the end of the beta, it isn’t surprising to see low beta server populations after a while. It would be wrong to conclude from that automatically that the game in question will not be successful. wow gold There are good reasons to *not* play the beta if you plan to buy the release version anyway. Nevertheless I have the impression that developers are sometimes too content.RELATED LINKS:

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My Dark Age of Camelot Experience

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 ”Rick from /random was surprised that Van Hemlock didn’t play Dark Age of Camelot. So in the interest of full disclosure, I’m going to tell you about my Dark Age of Camelot experience. Because I fully agree with Rick that one’s DAoC experience might well influence one’s impression of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. I did play Dark Age of Camelot when it came out in October 2001, but only for a few months. RvR had nothing to do with me joining or leaving DAoC. In fact, at the time the very idea that the endgame would be important didn’t even occur to me. I had played Everquest for 19 months, and my highest level character was level 42. There was some EQ guild drama, and a couple of unlucky deaths resulting in me not gaining a level for a month. Yes, hard to believe nowadays, but a death in EQ at that level could set you back a week’s worth of xp. I felt stuck, and DAoC offered a chance to see something new, and to level up again. After some experimentation with character classes, I chose the friar as my main character. Very cool class, combining standard priestly healing with extremely good-looking martial arts maneuvers, using a quarterstaff. I actually had other players stop and watch me fight, the moves were so cool. The PvE adventuring was great. What was also a big improvement over EQ was the tradeskill system, where you would level up by doing crafting quests, which not only rewarded you with skill points, but even earned you some money. Even the death penalty was less harsh than in EQ, you still lost experience points (and constitution) on every death after level 5, but didn’t have to do the naked corpse run any more. I hadn’t come alone, a couple of friends from EQ joined me in DAoC, and we founded our own guild, the “”Waldmeister”", with me as the guild leader.

wow gold I learned HTML and created my very first website for the guild, having a simple guild roster and some maps. The guild wasn’t big, and it was neither a raid nor a RvR guild, we just hung out together to have some fun. Among the members there were a girl and a young man who had met in the game, lived far apart from each other, but began to form an online relationship. wow gold Totally harmless, I don’t think there was any cybering involved. And while we weren’t really much into roleplaying either, somehow the idea of an online marriage came up. With me being a friar and guild leader, I ended up performing the ceremony in the big cathedral of Camelot, after which we moved into a tavern to party. buy wow gold That was pretty much the highlight of my DAoC experience, but unfortunately also the beginning of the end. First there was trouble at the marriage party, with one other guild member obviously jealous about all of the attention the “”couple”" received, and trying to grab some of that attention for himself by misbehaving. Words flew, matters escalated, and in the end I had to kick the guy out of the guild. But the trouble didn’t stop. wow gold It turned out that the father of the girl was also playing DAoC, and he didn’t approve of her having an online relationship. So what did he do. He deleted the girl’s character and forbade her to contact the boy or our guild again. mp3 players Lots of guild drama about this and some other events, and somehow my guild expected me to fix everything, which I of course couldn’t. I felt under immense stress, until I really didn’t enjoy playing any more, and quit the game.
Being a guild leader is a tough job, I don’t envy anyone doing it. So, as I said, RvR had nothing to do with me leaving Dark Age of Camelot, I quit because I had bitten off more than I could chew when founding my own guild. wow gold But what I had seen up to then in RvR didn’t really convince me either. You must remember that this was very early in the game, and the ruleset wasn’t the same as it was later.RELATED LINKS:

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Horizontal expansions to vertical games

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 ”Serial Ganker sid67 has a great post about horizontal expansions, the idea that you can add to a game by adding more stuff of the same level, as opposed to adding more levels. That inspired Cameron from Random Battle to compare WoW to Magic the Gathering, because in MtG all expansions are horizontal. Well observed. But then Magic the Gathering is a horizontal game, and World of Warcraft is a vertical one. There are no levels in Magic the Gathering. If you buy your first cards and play against an experienced player, you will most probably lose. But you don’t lose to him because he is level 70 and you are level 1. You lose because he has a wider selection of cards, and because he is more skilled than you through practice. You can even the card pool problem by playing in so-called “”limited”" events, where everyone gets random cards, and then winning or losing becomes a pure question of skill. Yes, playing more helps, but only because the more you play, the more you learn. You don’t have to grind anything to get to a specific point. The game itself is horizontal, you can explore it and get better at it, but you’ll never go up a level and start a combat with more cards or more life points than your opponent. Now we add a new expansion to Magic the Gathering. The cards are ideally exactly as powerful as the old ones. But they are somehow different, have new special abilities, and allow new combinations with the old cards. The fun of the expansion is to explore the new cards, learn everything about their use, and advance in skill by doing so. The expansion is horizontal in the sense that the new content doesn’t make the old content obsolete. But that doesn’t mean that there is no character progress, because you progress by learning, not by accumulating some level or artificial points. World of Warcraft is a vertical game: From level 1 to the level cap your power is mostly determined by your level, and not so much by your skill.

Even at the level cap you still go up in what I call meta-levels, by increasing your stats further through better gear. Increasing your chance of success by learning how to play the game better does happen, but the effect is relatively small compared to the effect of levels and gear. World of Warcraft, especially the soloing part, is trivially easy if you compare it directly with a game like Magic the Gathering. WoW being vertical makes it difficult to add completely horizontal expansions to it. You can add new races and new classes and new low-level zones to the game. But where a Magic the Gathering player can add some of the new cards of a horizontal expansion into his old deck, in World of Warcraft experiencing the new horizontal content means abandoning your old vertically advanced character. Blizzard wisely decided that you don’t have to delete an old character in some transformation quest that turns him into a Death Knight. But nevertheless on the day Wrath of the Lich King is released you will have to decide whether you level your existing level 70 character, or whether you play the new Death Knight. In Magic the Gathering new horizontal content adds to the old content; in WoW new horizontal content disrupts the old content. Of course in WoW new vertical content also disrupts old content, by making your old gear obsolete. wow gold This is in the nature of the game. You get to keep your old character, and get the chance to progress him further. But as progress is defined in this game as increasing your stats, your old methods of maximizing stats become obsolete. wow gold This is particularly harsh when you consider how much faster your power increases by levelling up compared to power increases by gathering epic gear.
You spent over a year of several raids a week to get a level 70 epic which is worse than a level 80 green item common drop or quest reward. And I don’t see a way around it. Imagine in Wrath of the Lich King there were no new levels. world of warcraft gold Northrend was a new continent for levels 1 to 70, with playable penguin and walrus man races, and new classes. What would people be supposed to do with their old level 70 characters. Be forced to keep playing the stale old content or abandon them. wow gold Play in the new level 70 zones and dungeons and only get gear that isn’t better than what they already have. There is no easy solution. Because the very gameplay of World of Warcraft consists of increasing your stats, a new expansion needs to offer more stat increases, or tell people to start over. mp3 player You can’t add a Magic the Gathering style horizontal expansion, because the progress in WoW isn’t horizontal. Some people already remarked that Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning is planned with a different style of expansion in mind than WoW. Again this is logical, because while WAR does have the levelling that WoW has, it doesn’t have the continued increase of stats through items at the level cap. The WAR endgame is a horizontal one, where you beat other players in PvP by better organization and better skill (or with the less nice way of simply outnumbering them). wow gold You can add new “”battlegrounds”" and endgame PvP objectives to WAR endlessly. For PvE even WAR can’t do anything but offering a reset with new races and classes.RELATED LINKS:

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Blizzard CEO- some WoW players did move to AoC

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on August 11, 2008
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“Blizzard’s CEO and co-founder Mike Morhaime has admitted that Funcom’s Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures has indeed made a dent on the population of World of Warcraft. However, it’s not as big as some would have expected. Morhaime said that “” Age of Conan released with some initial success. We did see some of our players leave, [but] about 40% of those players have returned to World of Warcraft.”" He added that in spite of this, WoW still has an advantage over anything in the market as being “”a product that has been continually enhanced, expanded and refined for almost four years now.”" We can’t argue with Morhaime’s reasoning: World of Warcraft does have a good four years of live testing and development over both Age of Conan, Warhammer Online, or any of the big name MMORPGs and it shows. To even stress this point further, it was revealed that the latest expansion for the game, Wrath of the Lich King, will be coming out between October and December. So the battle rages on with World of Warcraft fighting to retain its dominance in the MMORPG market. New law in Illinois to make it easier to cancel MMO subscriptions The power of the inconvenienced consumer is strange yet wonderful all the same. It seems that due to one consumer’s difficulty in canceling his MMO subscription, a new law has been passed in Illinois that essentially makes it illegal to have difficult unsubscription processes in MMORPGs. As the story goes, Alex Edwards wanted to unsubscribe from Square Enix’s Final Fantasy XI (PS2, PC, Xbox 360). The problem was that he couldn’t find a way to unsubscribe online, resulting in the Edwards family having to call up the game service provider and go on hold for an hour and 45 minutes just to cancel the game. While your usual story of game cancellation would usually end there, this one takes a political turn.

Alex Edwards’ father, Frank, just happens to be an Alderman in Springfield, Illinois who’s a good friend of the local State Rep., Raymond Poe. Rep. Poe (R) introduced a bill, known as HB4178 (and is viewable through this external link), which passed both the Illinois House and Senate in May, and was signed into law by Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D) on Tuesday. Here’s the important text of the new law: An Internet gaming service provider must give a consumer who is an Illinois resident the following: (1) a secure method at the Internet gaming service provider’s web site that the consumer may use to cancel the service, which method shall not require the consumer to make a telephone call or send U.S. Postal Service mail to effectuate the cancellation; and (2) instructions that the consumer may follow to cancel the service at the Internet gaming service provider’s web site. While this blogger personally doesn’t approve of legislation being passed simply because one guy is displeased with a process, however bothersome that process is, the law is a nice one for trying to protect the interests of MMO players who want to stop playing a game. wow gold The main problem will be seeing how this law gets implemented for certain MMOs, as we doubt this law can punish MMO companies operating outside the United States (or perhaps outside Illinois). Also, we’re wondering if console MMOs will be required by this law to have easily accessible cancellation options via the console’s onboard interface. In any event, we’ll see if any updates are forthcoming regarding this new bit of legislation. wow gold Stay tuned. ” ” About a day ago, Blizzard informed the residents of Wrath of the Lich King beta that their realms would be going down for some routine maintenance. The realms are back online, and now carry some pretty interesting changes that weren’t around in the previous build. Hunters in particular received two more stable slots, boosting their total capacity to five.
The two additional slots won’t come cheap though, costing 50 and 100 gold respectively. mp3 Here are the rest of the change notes to World of Warcraft’s WotLK beta build 8719: Interface You can now compare your achievements with other players. Screenshot It seems that the action icon now appears when you mouseover the target frame of a NPC. wow gold It doesn’t look like it’s implemented yet but we can assume that in the future, we will be able to left click the frame of the NPC instead of his model to prevent all the issues caused by players blocking NPCs. The Death Knight starting area now have its own loading screen. The first features of the threat meter have been added to the game. Your % of threat (based on the member of the party with the highest threat on the monster) is now displayed in the scrolling combat text. Your % of threat is now displayed in the tooltips of monsters. According to the first reports, buy wow gold the threat is just sent to the client without any encoding now, it will be very easy to build mods to display the exact threat of each member of the raid in the future. Hunter Two new stable slots are available for your pets ! The respective price for the 4th and 5th slots is 50 and 150 gold. Warlock Howl of Terror (Demon Form) cooldown has been increased from 40 seconds to 3 minutes. Professions Alchemy Alchemical Blood has been renamed to Mixology. wow gold World The lighting bug affecting most of the indoor zones is now fixed. A new “”battleground room”" is available in Dalaran ! Visibly missing from the notes are the planned changes to the Death Knight’s disease mechanics, implying that they might be taking effect at a later date. Check back with us again in case we receive any more news regarding this matter. ” .RELATED LINKS:

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More stable slots now available on Wrath Beta

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“You may recall a few days back that we told you about new stable slots coming with Wrath of the Lich King. It looks like Blizzard wasn’t just whistling dixie, because they’re in. When I was switching from my level 65 devilsaur to my beefier level 70 dire raven for a Nexus run over on the Beta server, I noticed that the stable boy was offering me two more stable slots! The stables slots costs 50 gold for the third one, and 150 gold for the fourth one, giving you a total of 4 slots. This means you have room for one pet from each talent tree, plus a spot for a specialized pet (such as a scorpid for PvP) or an exotic pet (and yes, devilsaurs will be exotic only) or two. Combine this with the abolishing of the need to tame pets simply to learn skills and auto leveling, and it continues to look like pet management should be easier, funner, and more efficient in Wrath. I actually found it a very enjoyable challenge to explore around, finding and taming new animals I could learn new skills from. That’s really the only reason I wanted more stable slots in the first place, so… /shrug I am happy we’re getting more though, since I’m hopeful that searching for new exotics will be just as fun I seem to have inadvertently created a microcosmic illustration of one of the great and eternal linguistic debates. On the one hand we have free-wheeling descriptive definition (for which Merriam-Webster is notorious) which simply seeks to catalog language in its native habitat. Yes, some people use “”funner”" to intensify “”fun,”" and some argue that the mere fact of this use, without any additional discussion of its grammatical “”correctness,”" is enough to make it a word and justify its place in a dictionary. Then on the other hand we have the excessively pedantic efforts to nitpick every infinitesimal rule ever written regarding “”proper”" usage, conveniently ignoring the fact that many of them contradict each other, and even more have fallen by the wayside with the natural evolution of language. I have no doubt that as the formal rules of the English language adapt to reflect usage, “”funner”" will become acceptable, but for now I defer to this rule of thumb: what would a newspaper editor say if you handed him a story containing the word.

I can guarantee you it would be corrected to read “”more fun.”" ” Honor Hold/Thrallmar (E) This is the other faction that is going to be very important to the leatherworking profession. Not only does it offer the Felstalker set, which will carry hunters and melee shaman pretty far, but it too offers leg armor kits. At friendly, you can begin with [Pattern: Felstalker Belt], and complete the set at merely honored, with [Pattern: Felstalker Bracers] and [Pattern: Felstalker Breastplate]. You will also be able to pick up [Pattern: Cobrahide Leg Armor] at honored. Again, this one is commonly possessed by many leatherworkers, and isn’t the version that raiders seek. wow gold At revered, you can pick up [Pattern: Netherscale Ammo Pouch], which is the gun equivalent of the Lower City quiver. Reaching exalted is where you’ll really start to make money, as you can purchase [Pattern: Nethercobra Leg Armor]. Many leatherworkers won’t bother to reach exalted, and again, leg kits are hot items. wow gold This grind is definitely worth the effort. Aldor/Scryers (E) The Aldor have quite a few leatherworking patterns, although the main difference between the two factions is going to be the armor kit. The Aldor offer bind on equip fire resistance gear, and so you can purchase the gear from the auction house if you need to. wow power leveling At honored, you can purchase [Pattern: Blastguard Belt] and [Pattern: Flamescale Belt]. At revered, you can nab the [Pattern: Flamescale Boots] and [Pattern: Blastguard Boots]. Rounding off the pseudo-set at exalted, you can get [Pattern: Flamescale Leggings] and [Pattern: Blastguard Pants]. mp3 players Why choose Aldor then. They offer [Pattern: Vindicator’s Armor Kit]. Yes, you can purchase these kits on the auction house, but without the pattern, you won’t be able to make and then sell them.
wow gold These are often used by tanks attempting to get defense capped, or as a means to remain defense capped while swapping for newer gear. As far as blue resistance gear goes, the Scryers offer the Enchanted Clefthoof and Enchanted Felscale pseudo-sets, carrying arcane resistance. Again, you will have to reach exalted to get all of the pieces, but you should aim to for these factions anyway. wow gold At revered, you’ll be able to purchase [Pattern: Magister’s Armor Kit], which may not be as marketable as Vindicator’s.RELATED LINKS:

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Yet more beta changes to Mages

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“As has become customary, a new build of the beta has rendered a lot of the Mage class changes I reported earlier today moot. Much of it is still relevant, but the new build has introduced some very substantial new talent re-workings. Blizzard continues to make good on their promise to “”polish”" the Mage class, and the results continue to be both good and bad, but always intriguing. A full list of the newest changes and my thoughts on some of them follow after the jump. Some of these are things we already knew about, but most are entirely new. Here’s the list in full: Arcane Fortitude moved to tier 2, increased to 3 ranks, now increases armor equal to 50/100/150% of Intellect. Arcane Subtlety now reduces the chance your spells will be dispelled by 15/35%, and no longer reduces the resistance of targets. Arctic Reach now also affects Deep Freeze. Blast Wave now knocks all affected targets back. Elemental Precision moved to tier 2. Empowered Fireball reduced to 3 ranks, now increases damage by 5/10/15% of spell power. Empowered Frostbolt reduced to 2 ranks, increases damage by 5/10% of spell power and increases critical hit chance by 2/4%. Flame Throwing moved to tier 3. Frost Channeling now reduces mana cost of all spells by 4/7/10%. Frost Warding now increases armor and resistances of Frost/Ice Armor by 25/50%, now gives Frost Ward and Fire Ward a 15/30/5 chance to negate damage caused and restore mana equal to damage caused by the warded spell. Ice Floes renamed Cold as Ice, now reduces cooldown of Cold Snap, Ice Barrier, Summon Water Elemental, and Deep Freeze by 10/20%. Improved Counterspell now always silences the target for 2/4 seconds. Improved Fire Blast moved to tier 1, reduced to 2 ranks, reduces the cooldown by 1/2 seconds. Improved Flamestrike moved to tier 2, renamed World in Flames, now increases the critical hit chance of Flamestrike, Blast Wave, Dragon’s Breath, Living Bomb, Blizzard, and Arcane Explosion by 2/4/6%.

Improved Frost Nova renamed Ice Floes, moved to tier 1, increased to 3 ranks, now reduces cooldown of Frost Nova, Cone of Cold, Ice Block, and Icy Veins by 7/14/20%. Magic Absorption reduced to 2 ranks, increases resistances by .5/1 point per level, and restores 1/3% of total mana on a resist. Master of Elements now affects all spell criticals. Mind Mastery reduced to 3/6/9/12/15%. Molten Shields now gives Fire Ward and Frost Ward spells a 15/30% chance to reflect the warded spell. Prismatic Cloak (Arcane)increased to 3 ranks for 1/2/3% and now also reduces the fade time of Invisibility by 1/2 seconds. Pyroblast cast time has been reduced to 5 seconds. wow gold Shatter no longer has a prerequisite.cane Fiery Payback now reduces the cast time of Pyroblast by 1.8/3.5 seconds when below 35% health and also increases it’s cooldown by 2.5/5 seconds. Mana cost on Arcane Barrage Rank 3 reduced from 610 to 592. Ice Floes is now a Tier 1 talent instead of Tier 6. wow gold The new description is: Reduces the cooldown of your Frost Nova, Cone of Cold, Ice Block and Icy Veins spells by 7%/14%/20%. Elemental Precision is now a Tier 2 talent instead of Tier 1. The new description is: Reduces the mana cost and chance targets resist your Frost and Fire spells by 1/2/3%. wow Before this patch it increased your chance to hit by 1/2/3%. Improved Frost Nova removed. Shatter no longer has Improved Frost Nova as prerequisite. wow gold New Talent: Cold as Ice: Reduces the cooldown of your Cold Snap, Ice Barrier, Deep Freeze and Summon Water Elemental spells by 10/20%. Requires 1 point in Cold Snap and 25 points in Frost Talents. Winter’s Chill talent reworked. mp3 player It is now a 3 point talent instead of 5 points and now gives your Frost damage spells a 33/66/100% chance to apply the Winter’s Chill effect which increases the chance Arcane, Fire and Frost Spells will critically hit the target by 2% for 15 sec.
Stacks up to 5 times. Shattered Barrier description changed to: Gives your Ice Barrier spell a 50/100% chance to freeze all enemies within 10 yds for 8 sec when it is destroyed. wow gold The first thing that really jumps out at me here is the change to Fiery Payback, which makes it impossible to spam a 1.5 second Pyroblast at less than 35% health.
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State of the Death Knight

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. Closed

“Unholy There’s some disagreement on how you might describe the Unholy tree — is it a tree of choices, or a tree of bloat. Especially with the proposed changes, Unholy is a tree with a lot of little talents at various tiers that may or may not actually be worth taking, such as Epidemic (especially since it will no longer include Ghoul diseases). But all those little choices do add up after a while, and it really seems like a few of them might need a bit of consolidation. One nice thing about the new changes is that it does seem like Unholy may get back some of the AE damage and AE tanking potential it lost when Death and Decay was nerfed in damage a few builds back. Morbidity (which is mislabeled on the current talent tree calculator) will reduce the cooldown on Death and Decay and the runic power cost of Death Coil. Being able to semi-spam Death and Decay again, assuming the cooldown reduction is significant, maybe make Unholy the tree of choice for AE Tanking too. You can also combine this with the talent Outbreak, which will increase the damage done by Pestilence and Blood Boil, giving the Unholy Death Knight even more damage and threat. Paladins shouldn’t worry too much though, the Death Knight still lags behind enough in innate mitigation and avoidance that a Paladin will be a superior AE tank. Bone Armor (which was understandably moved to later in the tree, and will keep the same functionality despite what the current talent calculator says) will help with that somewhat, but at only 4 hits worth of mitigation, it won’t really be able to pick up too much slack. Bone Armor is still a talent pretty much any deep Unholy Death Knight should consider taking though, if only for the increased 2% damage while DPSing.

One of the more distressing changes in Unholy is the addition of the baseline skill Degeneration as the deep Unholy 41-point talent Scourge Strike. This makes PvP Death Knights far too dependent on the Unholy tree, when they really do need deep Frost to have any chance of reliably PvPing. Chilblains, for example, is almost required for PvP to have a chance at keeping anyone in melee range. Of course, the other problem is that Scourge Strike really isn’t as powerful as it should be. Rather than completely preventing HoTs from ticking on an opponent as the tooltip would seem to suggest, it instead only converts a single HoT into a new disease — meaning that the healer can simply reapply their HoTs to the target and be done with it. In the end, it really needs to be made Baseline again and given the ability to block all HoTs, making it the Druid counter it should be. Finally, a few more Unholy talents desperately in need of a review didn’t get one. Anti-Magic Shell, for example, is supposed to be a reactive ability (a 3 second duration leaves it no time to be anything else), and yet takes an unholy rune that is likely to be on constant cooldown in many damage or threat-gaining rotations. Because of this, the associated talents in the Unholy tree are really not worth taking as much as they should be. The Ghoul created by Shadow of Death has no real survivability or power (almost any monster that kills you will kil your Ghoul in a few hits anyway, sometimes before you have a chance to so much as explode yourself), and is bugged so that you die at the end of a losing duel and become a Ghoul if you have the talent. However, you still have to take simply to get Master of Ghouls, which gives your pet a pet bar.
It’s an imperfect pet bar that does not include passive/aggressive/defense or stay/follow buttons, and never remembers how you arranged the hotkeys from Ghoul to Ghoul, at that. This pet bar really needs to be standardized and made baseline, while Master of Ghouls deserves a stronger effect. Since I’ve spent so many points to make my Ghoul a viable partner and part of my DPS rotation, I’d like to see Master of Ghouls help with that. Perhaps it can remove the need for Corpse Dust, or at the least allow Ghouls to be resurrected from undead and demon corpses as well as humanoid corpses. wow gold It seems wrong that such a unique and strong part of my DPS can cost me 50 silver every 4 minutes. Right now, I’m afraid the high cost of Corpse Dust (which should be cheaper regardless) combined with the removal of Infect and the low duration of the Ghoul even with talents will make the poor Ghoul little more than a gimmick in the long run. Frost Frost still remains the redheaded stepchild of the Death Knight trees in many ways. wow gold Since it requires a lot of freezing, it doesn’t play nice with DoT diseases, and the freezes and snares are hard to come by and unreliable at best, making crowd control a touchy job, and making any real attempt to snare and catch up with a fleeing enemy or pvp target not as easy it seems it should be. However, the latest changes look like they should help the make the Frost tree a bit more flexible and managable. For example, Howling Blast currently does triple damage to frozen targets. cheap wow gold In the next build it will instead do double damage to any target inflicted with Frost Fever - the new disease caused by Icy Touch. You can simply use Pestilence to spread Frost Fever to multiple mobs, and finish them off with a Howling Blast. You can also still use the old Hungering Cold combination if you wish, since Hungering Cold will also apply Frost Fever. wow gold Similarly, Chilblains and Tundra Stalker will now apply their effects to victims of Frost Fever, and a new talent called Endless Winter will cause Mind Freeze and Frost Strike to apply Frost Fever. Essentially, you can snare whole groups of mobs left and right with the right talents and do tons more damage without relying on freezing or specific effects. Frostbite is gone, but you can still consistently freeze people with Chains of Ice and Hungering Cold, leaving some synergy with Frost Mages still in place. mp3 players Frost Strike, which has been shifting back pretty constantly between “”on next strike”" and “”instant”" in an attempt to find its place, has recieved another relatively major change in the upcoming build: Now, it’s a runic power ability. It should be interesting to see how it fits in to the Death Knight’s rotation. At the least, it should be nice for a good shot of armor-ignoring damage, and as a good Frost Fever refresher with the Endless Winter talent. wow gold One change that I am still trying to decipher is the moving of Lichborne from the Unholy tree to the Frost tree.RELATED LINKS:

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Big bag blowout Part III

Published
by
admin
on August 11, 2008
in Uncategorized
. Closed

“ClosetGnome Almost a complete 180 from the design philosophy of Outfitter, ClosetGnome is a bare bones equipment set manager, but bare bones in a good way! The author intended ClosetGnome to be efficient with its resources, so those looking for a lightweight equipment manager will be in luck. On its own, ClosetGnome only allows you to make equipment sets and change into them with its minimap button, Fubar widget, or key binding. There is no automatic switching or other fancy features out of the box. For some this may be just the thing you want without all the extra frills, but for those wanting more, ClosetGnome’s author allows for its features to grow via enhancement addons or “”modules”". That’s right, addons for your addons. Honestly though it’s rather clever, sort of a buffet style of pick and choosing just the stuff you’ll use without all the extra stuff weighing you down. Here’s a breakdown of some of Closet Gnome’s third party modules. ClosetGnome_Banker - Adds store/retrieve functionality for your sets at the bank. ClosetGnome_BigWigs - Enables autoequipping specified sets for bosses. ClosetGnome_Mount - Saves you the trouble of equipping the carrot when mounting. ClosetGnome_OhNoes - Tries to save your repair costs when you’re about to die by unequipping your weapons. ClosetGnome_Switcher - Automatically switch sets based on your current form/stance. ClosetGnome_Zone - Assign sets to specific zones, like a casual set for Ironforge. ClosetGnome_HelmNCloak - Define Helm and Cloak display for ClosetGnome sets. After selecting the extra modules for ClosetGnome based on the extended functionality you want, it adds the extra features into its menu, allowing you to assign an outfit to the new conditionals. Through the use of these modules, ClosetGnome becomes a full featured inventory manager. However even with all the extra modules, Outfitter still has a few features over ClosetGnome, such as automatically generated outfits based on a certain stat.

For example, Outfitter can compose a set of fire resist gear by reading the stat off an item, automatically choosing the best in a slot. This is a pretty cool feature but it could be argued that by letting the addon make your set for you the selection process wouldn’t be able to handle all the variables that a person can. This feature could be added to ClosetGnome with a module, but none has been written yet. Overall ClosetGnome was easy to use and is a great alternative to Outfitter for minimalist players. Honorable Mention I didn’t quite have enough time and space to do a full review of ItemRack, and it’s quite similar in scope and features to Outfitter. It definitely deserves a mention though as it was a pioneer in the field of equipment set addons. It has just recently received a few updates and it seems that the author is once again working on it. One unique feature I like about ItemRack is when you mouse over slots on your character sheet. Items that are in your inventory for that slot appear, allowing easy switching. wow gold If ClosetGnome isn’t enough for you, and Outfitter isn’t your cup of tea give ItemRack a whirl. Bonus: If you’re looking to just manage trinkets, Trinket Menu has you covered. Made by the same author of ItemRack, they share the same look and feel. Trinket Menu allows you to set a queue of trinkets based on a priority that you set. wow gold It will then switch out your trinkets when out of combat based on cooldown status and priority. You can even override the queue for special occasions such as when you’re mounted. Conclusion Once again, we have no clear winner amongst these addons. buy wow gold Each go about managing your gear a little bit different than the other.
For those wanting every feature under the sun, I’d go with Outfitter. It’s feature packed and easy to set up. wow gold For those not needing all the extras, and want a pure equipment switching addon ala cart style, ClosestGnome is lean and mean. And somewhere in the middle of these two extremes is ItemRack. It’s got enough features to get you by, and its trigger system is flexible. mp3 players Also a small note, all three of these addons have a Fubar widget, which makes it easy toggling equipment sets. Well that wraps up the series on inventory addons. Next week I have a surprise topic planned which I think you’ll enjoy. wow gold It’s a little different for this column, but can still be considered part of the user interface and therefore up for scrutiny. See you then! “RELATED LINKS:

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Heals and heels

Published
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admin
on August 11, 2008
in Uncategorized
. Closed

“Decent healing is often a key factor in determining victory and defeat in a battle ground. Resto and Holy specced characters have quite the job set out for them. Druids, Paladins, Priests, and Shamans regularly face a healing quandary. Is it better to spend time and man healing another player or continuing to do as much damage as possible. Zanhart of Medivh believes that any character than can heal in the battlegrounds, should heal. He finds it particularly insulting when a player heals him or herself while comrades die around them. Some agreed with him that anyone who can heal should, but most people dissented. There were several themes to the responses: Paying a subscription fee allows any player the right to play however they like. DPSers in substandard gear are a waste of heals and mana. Non-healing specs often have such poor healing abilities that the battleground is better off with them continuing to dps. Some people just don’t find healing to be fun. The original poster defended his points by arguing about selfishness and the need for team work. It is very true that battlegrounds go smoother when everyone works together. It seems most prefer more glamorous DPS and capturing roles to mundane things like healing and defense. As a Mage who’s interested in teamwork, I’ll assume he drops a table without discussion every battleground. Oh wait, only level 36. I have a hard time not healing. I’ve played Holy Priest and Resto Shaman, usually topping the healing charts. On my Retadin, I simply can’t heal most of the time. Sure I’ll heal folks up at the end of a fight, drop a bubble when I can spare a cooldown or use my Lay on Hands in a clutch situations. I hate seeing my teammates health drop and being powerless to do much about it.

But my heals as Retribution specced are just dreadful. So why don’t I just switch her to Holy. Because I want to experience something that is not healing for a while. Healing is by far the most important aspect of the game. If your a healer, you essentially playing every class in the game. You enable a mage to continue casting his frost bolts or sheep, or the warrior to get his execute off. wow gold Imagine 3 people and a healer, that healer enables those 3 people to live, for 2 min longer which means 3×2 min of dps, cc and domination , especially when the other teams 4 people have no heals. Healing is by far more powerful then damage. The best healer in the game heals more then the best damage output in the game. This alone is evidence of the importance of healing. ” “A lot of changes have gone into Wrath of the Lich King since we last asked this question, so what do you think of Wrath thus far. wow gold Has some of your pessimism melted away. Has your optimism melted away. Just plain don’t care until you have the finished product in your hands. world of warcraft gold Personally, I’m mostly optimistic. Being in the beta is very exciting, and let me tell ya, the zones and quests are blowing my mind. Unfortunately, my preferred class/spec is not turning out to be as grand as the changes originally made it sound. wow gold Heck, they changed their mind about giving Mind Flay a 30 yard range. The short range on that thing still doesn’t make sense to, oh… anybody in the entire freaking world. mp3 player That’s alright though, I’m still having a ton of fun with my Shadow Priest and they’re not done with class changes quite yet, nowhere close.
I remain optimistic. Honestly, with eye candy like this, I’m not sure how you can be completely down in the dumps about the upcoming expansion. There’s way too many new things and far too much exciting content to throw a tantrum over pitfalls of my class right now. wow gold Maybe I’ll do that later, but for now I’m pretty darn happy. I honestly can say I do not really care about what the classes are getting, balance and all that crap.RELATED LINKS:

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Questioning the fate of 25 mans in Wrath

Published
by
admin
on August 4, 2008
in Uncategorized
. Closed

“With the barrage of Wrath of the Lich King news we’ve received recently, one little tidbit stuck out in the bad way. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very excited about quite a bit of it, this one thing in particular just struck me as odd. The mention of there being both 10 and 25 man versions of every raid zone is interesting, but makes me worry from a logistical point of view. I like the fact that it means more casual players can see the content, I like the fact that it means the content actually exists for the casual players. I wonder, though, what it will do to 25 man raiding. I can’t speak for all servers, but on my server(or more specifically my raid group) the gear that comes out of boss fights is just a way of progressing to the next boss. It is largely unimportant to us until we come across something like Brutallus, in which the gear is absolutely necessary to have to progress. Seeing the characters, bosses and the encounters is far and away the most important part of raiding. This may be my perception talking, but it seems interest in 25 man raids overall has gradually gone down with the introduction of arena gear and how easy it is to acquire badge loot. The draw of 25 mans is primarily to see things like Illidan and Kil’jaeden, and the gear is secondary. To make the same zones able to be accessed in an easier form seems to me that it would be just make the 25 man scene worse. Will the encounters differ between the 10 man and 25 man versions. Yes, probably. Most likely, even. However, it is still, overall, the same content. You can turn Ragnaros blue and make him cast Gravity Lapse and Polymorph and in the end, you’re still in Molten Core.

The fight is different, but he’s still Ragnaros and you’re still in the zone you were the other day or even earlier that day. The draw of gear has lessened dramatically over the course of The Burning Crusade, because raiding isn’t the only source of that gear. The draw of the content will fade, because even if the fights change you’re encountering the same guys in a setting that looks identical. Personally, I think unique content in the 25 man would be the only way to really make this work. Bosses you can’t see in the 10 man. Scenes or events you can’t see in the 10 man. Things other than gear that you can take out into the world and have an impact. Nothing says Blizzard isn’t doing this, it is simply something I feel is necessary. We don’t know either way, but I really hope we see something like this. Now, I won’t go as far as to say this is the end of raiding. I don’t think it is. If you’re going into Wrath with an established raid group that was successful in The Burning Crusade, you’ll do just fine. The impact will be on the recruiting end. If you lose an important member of your raid, replacing them will become much more difficult. The draw of 25 mans will be minimal. Heroic 5 man dungeons still have some draw because they only take 5 people and less than an hour of your time. wow gold A heroic raid is going to be a much larger time investment and it’s much more challenging to schedule and organize. Better gear and Badges of Justice 2.0 just aren’t going to be enough to fuel a raiding community. Unique content is going to be a must, or 25 mans are going to end up in a tight spot, I think. ” “In the recent explosion of news about Wrath of the Lich King, Ten Ton Hammer had an interview with Jeff Kaplan and Tom Chilton, where they asked some solid questions on why exactly we needed another tanking class. To quote the Ten Ton Hammer interview with Jeff Kaplan and Tom Chilton; Chilton: We’re kind of designing the Paladin tank to be the best AE tank, and we’re designing the Warrior to be the best sheer mitigation tank, and we’re designing the Death Knight to be the anti-spellcaster tank. From that statement, at least, you can see that the subject of a feral druid’s place in the end-game main tanking plan doesn’t even get a mention.
wow gold You might think that, as far as the designers are concerned, a feral druids’ future tanking viability is merely an afterthought. But that doesn’t mean that in the new expansion, all of the new Talents will only be buffing up the Balance and Resto trees. Oh, no. Not hardly. No, I have seen what is currently active for the new Talent trees up to level 80, and I can assure you, we may not be in the forefront of the developers’ minds when it comes to ‘cutting edge’ tanking, but we have NOT been forgotten. Follow along after the break to find out more! Currently, Druids, when specced fully into the Feral Talent tree, perform very well as a combination of melee DPS and tank. But with great DPS potential, comes the inevitable trade-off. mp3 While we can do pretty darn good against three mobs, we do not have the AOE multi-mob abilities of the Paladin. While we can soak up a ton of physical damage and laugh about it, we remain weak against spell damage. We have excellent mitigation and hit points, but we have limited means to endure massive spikes of damage or enraged bosses. wow gold This is not going to be changing much in the expansion. We will be getting new Talents that will help improve our current strengths, and they will also help fill in a few of the gaps in our key weaknesses. But we are not going to suddenly find our gameplay changing dramatically, as we did when Burning Crusade brought Patch 2.0. In the following discussion, I’m going to talk in general terms about the changes in the Feral Talent tree. buy wow gold We are in the very earliest days of the WotLK Alpha, and everything is subject to change by Blizzard without notice. But I think it’s still valuable to look at where things are now as a clue as to what we will see go live this winter. The first thing worth mentioning is that, In the Druid Feral Talent tree currently active in the Wrath of the Lich King Alpha, some abilities have been moved to different tiers. For example, Feral Charge has been moved much deeper into the Feral tree, requiring more of a commitment to Feral to obtain it’s sudden charge and spell interrupt. That seems to me to be a change based on PvP considerations, but it’s interesting to see that they have put that much thought into various possible PvP specs based on the new trees. Other currently existing Talents are gaining ‘Improved’ versions, that simply make them more efficient or desirable. wow gold Again, these tend to require a deep investment into the Feral tree. As an example of this kind of change, Mangle is getting an Improved version that requires more points be spent into it, but that will serve a dual purpose of reducing the Mangle cooldown when in bear form, or reducing Mangle’s Energy cost when in cat.RELATED LINKS:

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