w797 – The Collection of Game Post

Filed under: Hunter, Analysis / Opinion, Interviews, Arena, The Colosseum

The Colosseum takes us inside the world of the Gladiator (Brutal, Vengeful, Merciless, and otherwise), to interview some of the top Arena fighters in the battlegroups. Our goal is to bring a better understanding of the strategy, makeup, and work that goes into dueling it out for fame, fortune, and Netherdrakes.

By popular request, the Colosseum tracked down one of the top Hunters in today’s Arena. Erratic, a member of the guild LiveToPug on the Thunderlord server, was happy to share his thoughts about the Arena today.

Erratic is a team member of Mostly Duelists. At the time of this writing, Mostly Duelists is the #1 ranked 5v5 team on the Vindication battlegroup. Erratic is also a member of the 3v3 Tardaphant, who has a 2000 rating.

Check out behind the cut to see what Erratic had to say.

Continue reading The Colosseum: Erratic of Thunderlord

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While checking out the beta forums for new information and patch details for the wiki, I ran across some information from Daelo, the Lead Encounter Designer for the expansion. Although beta players can see this already, I thought you all might like to see an updated status on the new instances coming out with the xpac. So, without further ado, read on for the latest in dungeon details:

CoT Stratholme (80) – Disabled due to bugs

Azjol-Nerub (72-74) – Disabled due to bugs

Halls of Lightning (80) – Halls of Lightning is currently disabled and cannot be reached. It will open up in a future beta patch.

The Nexus HEROIC (80) – The Nexus is the first implementation of a Heroic Difficulty dungeon in Wrath of the Lich King. The Nexus is located in Borean Tundra. You must be level 80 to enter but there are no other requirements currently.

Utgarde Keep (70-72) – Open for testing. Gundrak (76-78) – Gundrak is a level 76-78 dungeon at the northeast corner of Zul’drak. Some elements of the dungeon are not final such as loot, but they wanted to get this on the beta as early as possible to begin getting bug reports and feedback.

The Oculus (80) – Initially working but non-level 80 ghosts were unable to zone back in. This has been resolved. Level 75+ player ghosts can now zone back into the Oculus by moving to where the Orb of the Nexus is located.

The Nexus (71-73) – Overall damage toned down some for the mobs. However, for Ormorok the Tree-Shaper, his Crystal Spikes attack do no damage currently. Under investigation from the design team.

Halls of Stone (77-79) – Halls of Stone is a level 77-79 dungeon in northern Storm Peaks. Halls of Stone is currently disabled in this beta patch. It will return in a future beta patch.

Utgarde Pinnacle (80) – Yes, King Ymiron drops loot this beta patch!

Drak’Tharon Keep (74-76) – Open, however, during the last boss you may be unable to battle rez group members and may receive a “Your Target is Dead” error, forcing them to have to run back.

Ahn’kahet (73-75) – Ahn’kahet: The Old Kingdom is a level 73-75 dungeon in Dragonblight. Some elements of Ahn’kahet are not complete such as loot, but they wanted to get this to beta as early as possible to begin getting bug reports and feedback.

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Filed under: Paladin, Patches, Analysis / Opinion, (Paladin) The Light and How to Swing It, Wrath of the Lich King

It’s pretty exciting, isn’t it? Patch 3.0 is coming, well, “soon[TM]“ according to Blizzard. Considering that our favorite class hasn’t gotten a second pass, it might be a bit premature to talk about Paladin changes when the pre-Wrath patch finally hits. That said, it looks like more than a few new talents will make it at least into the PTRs more or less intact. Hopefully and changes we’ll see during our second pass will be tweaks to numbers and some mechanics refinements but hopefully no major changes.

Assuming that most of the changes push through, we should expect a completely different Paladin in the coming months. Even without taking the new talents into account, there are baseline changes that should make gameplay technically different. The most significant change, of course, is in the way Judgements work. This is the one change that will take some getting used to. First of all, there are now three Judgements and they activate the GCD. This means no more macros for Seals and Judgements, which is actually fine because of two things: first, Judgements no longer consume Seals; second, Seals now last for a micromanagement-light two minutes.

Continue reading The Light and How to Swing It: Paladin 3.0

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Lore, Wrath of the Lich King, Ask A Lore Nerd

Welcome to Ask a Lore Nerd, the column that answers your questions about the story and lore of the Warcraft universe. Click the Comments link below (or e-mail us!), ask your question, and blogger/columnist Alex Ziebart will answer your question in a future installment

Cowbane asked…

Is there a Heaven or Hell in any Warcraft lore? Or is the swirly clouds when you die about it.

That’s a good question, and my answer isn’t going to be very clear, because Warcraft itself isn’t clear on it. Warcraft used to be based much more heavily on Christian concepts. There was a Heaven and there was a Hell, there was God and Angels and all that jazz. It’s much more vague and nebulous now. It seems that the Twisting Nether is the current concept of Hell, but that might just mean it’s a really bad place and not somewhere that sinful dead people automatically go. I have no idea if there is still a Heaven, but the Priest quest for Benediction/Anathema has you escorting souls of Stratholme’s dead to the afterlife. So do they exist? Probably, yes. It is suggested that they definitely do exist. What are they like, exactly? We don’t know.

Continue reading Ask a Lore Nerd: Things that aren’t Deathwing

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Filed under: Horde, Trolls, Lore, Guides, RP, (Roleplaying) All the World’s a Stage

This installment of All the World’s a Stage is the third in a series of roleplaying guides in which we find out all the background information you need to roleplay a particular race or class well, without embarrassing yourself.

Trolls are based on the “wild savages” you’ve seen in the movies or on TV, from King Kong to Discovery channel. If you’ve seen people hunting with spears, walking around in the forest without many clothes on, or dancing around in costumes and face paint in some kind of ritual you’ve never heard of, you’ve seen the apparent inspiration for trolls in World of Warcraft. The culture of Warcraft trolls are a mishmash of all the different myths and rumors that have grown up about some of the earth’s indigenous peoples that live outside modern society: Strange voodoo beliefs and rituals? Check. Bloodthirsty headhunters with a taste for cannibalism? Check. Witch doctors, shrunken heads, human sacrifice, and rampant superstition? Check on all counts.

It’s important to note here that troll culture is based on the myths about some indigenous people, not on their reality. Cannibalism, for instance, has been rare among human societies, nearly always viewed as anathema, but among the trolls of Azeroth, it appears to be the rule rather than the exception. Unbiased study of the world’s primal religions has shown them to be far more sophisticated than early (and prejudiced) Western explorers ever imagined. Don’t listen to the Jamaican accent trolls have in the game and assume that trolls are based on real life Jamaicans. There is nowhere near the correlation here that we might find with the dwarves and the Scotts, or even the draenei and the Romanians that they sound like. Indeed, one could argue that the choice of a Jamaican accent to represent the trolls and their culture reveals a great deal of ignorance we Americans have regarding Caribbean islanders — but that’s a discussion I’ll not go into today.

Suffice it to say that as a member of the Darkspear tribe, the only tribe of trolls to join the Horde, your character living in a time of great change for your people. Your tribe is the first to embrace the more modern values promoted by Thrall, to take up the spiritual practices of shamanism, and to integrate itself with other races. Although the Darkspears have officially given up human sacrifice, cannibalism, and now tell you to “stay away from the voodoo,” these practices are all elements of religion and superstition that your character would have grown up with, and may find it hard to let go of completely.

Continue reading All the World’s a Stage: So you want to be a troll

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Filed under: Wrath of the Lich King

While it isn’t the most exciting, mind-blowing, game-changing addition to Dalaran thus far, I thought the addition of a cupcake vendor was pretty cool, especially now that they’ve itemized it. The vendor has some mundane found that are still pretty fun like Dalaran Brownies and Carrot Cupcakes, which are charming but not entirely what grabbed my attention.

What did grab my attention? She sells cakes! The Lovely Cake and Chocolate Celebration Cake are sold on this vendor, perhaps a little expensive (about 25g), but they work pretty neat. The cakes are used like Lightwells (Cakewell?), you lay them on the ground with a targeting circle and 5-10 of your friends can grab a slice. Maybe a Mage’s food table was a better comparison, but I prefer the idea of a cakewell.

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Filed under: Realm News, Realm Status, Blizzard, News items

European CM Vaneras made an interesting announcement just the other day: Four EU realms will be closing entirely with Patch 3.0. The EU realms Molten Core, Shadowmoon, Stonemaul, and Warsong will be closing up shop, and free character transfers will be offered to other, currently unannounced EU realms. The destination options will be announced within the next week.

Don’t worry, though. These realm closures have nothing to do with any dips in WoW’s popularity. It’s actually due to the launch of WoW’s Russian localization. A vast majority of the players on those particular realms were Russian players, and they migrated to the new Russian servers when they opened up, leaving most everyone else high and dry. The equipment these four servers run off of will likely just be used elsewhere, since Vaneras stated they’ll be prepped for Wrath of the Lich King’s launch after being taken down. Most likely they’ll need to launch a few more realms when Wrath rolls around, but it was just far easier to fold these four into larger communities at this point.

[ Thanks, Swarfy! ]

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Filed under: Priest, Talents, Wrath of the Lich King

Many Shadow Priests are not feeling very good about the state of the class in LK right now. Yes, buffs to DPS are promised. But a lot of our utility has tanked, from Shadow Weaving not affecting other players, to Vampiric Touch being dialed down and given to other classes, to Misery. It’s sad, but amusing that a talent named Misery would get nerfed this hard.

Currently, in live, Misery gives 1/2/3/4/5% increased spell damage for all players against targets affected by your Shadow Word: Pain, Mind Flay, and Vampiric Touch. Pretty sweet. As of the latest beta version, it’s +1/2/3% spell hit for all players against targets affected by the same spells. The reason this is especially bad (besides that the last two ranks of the talent were removed) is that most casters are hit-capped when they raid, which means that additional spell hit doesn’t help them at all.

So either players are going to start gearing assuming Misery will be up – which defeats Blizzard’s stated goal of making it so no class is truly essential for a raid – or Misery is going to be worthless most of the time (outside of leveling maybe). This seems like a good case of a broken talent, and so I have every hope that it will get addressed during the beta. But as of right now, Misery is pretty miserable indeed.

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Virtual selves, Wrath of the Lich King, Achievements

Blizzard promised us more titles and boy, it looks like they’re going to deliver. WotLK Information Wiki and MMO Champion have dug up some information on what appears to be a plethora of new titles. Unfortunately, most of the them are Feats of Strength that can only be obtained by one person ever per server. Daunting? Most certainly. But what are titles if they aren’t special?

First off, though, there are a handful of titles available to more than just one person. ‘Arena Master‘ is obtained by everyone who completes the Arena Achievements. It’s not quite a Feat of Strength, but there aren’t too many players who will obtain a Rating of 2200 in all three brackets. Of all the Achievements required to unlock the title, those three are about the toughest ones and if you’re capable of hitting 2200 in all three brackets, the rest should be cake.

One title that sounds pretty cool is ‘The Hallowed’, which is obtained by completing all 18 Hallow’s End Achievements, the hardest of which might just be obtaining the rare Sinister Squashling. Then there’s ‘The Diplomat’, which many players will already receive at the launch of Beta — it simply requires getting to Exalted with Timbermaw Hold, Sporeggar, and the Kurenai or Mag’har. Obsessive questers will eventually achieve ‘The Seeker’ after completing a whopping 3000 quests.

Finally, there’s the odd and quirky ‘Salty’ which can be obtained by completing all the Fishing Achievements. This is a pretty tough one that has some difficult feats like getting Mr. Pinchy, fishing up Gah’zranka in Zul’Gurub and The Lurker Below in Serpenshrine Cavern, and winning the Fishing extravaganza in Stranglethorn Vale. Pretty tough feats just to be called Salty! After the jump, we’ll take a look at all the titles that only one person can get.

[UPDATE] Tigole supposedly confirms the existence of an Ambassador <Name> title for players who achieve Exalted reputation with all 5 racial factions of the Horde and Alliance. It’s a nice little nod to old school players out there.

Continue reading [UPDATED] New titles for Wrath

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Filed under: Wrath of the Lich King, Inscription

Isn’t this fella cute? Sooo cute? Adorable!? No? He isn’t? Yeah, i don’t think so either. We’ll get back to these horrible abominations a little later, because Meethan asked…

Is Hunger For Blood, the 51 point Assassination talent, at all useful for solo leveling?

I asked a friend of mine about this since I don’t personally play a Rogue, and he says popular opinion is that Hunger for Blood is mostly going to be a PvP talent. Keeping the damage buff up constantly while questing isn’t worthwhile, and the debuff clearing it provides will be highly situational while soloing through Northrend. You can take it if you’re gung ho about Assassination, but you’d be better served picking up something else until you start PvPing often.

Drewcast asked…

Are there or will there be any Aldor vs. Scryer type factions?

Continue reading Ask a Beta Tester: Glyphs and gorlocs

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