Filed under: WoW Insider Business, Contests

Hey, amigos. You’ve only got fourteen and a half more hours to participate in this week’s Caption This contest. To participate, leave a caption for the above picture on the original post by 11:59 PM EST tonight!

Eligible winners (U.S. or non-Quebec Canadian residents above 13) will receive a 60-day gamecard for first place, and a choice of one of seven World of Warcraft action figures (see original post for details) goes to the runner-up. Remember to read the official rules for the contest here. The voting poll for the winner will be available Tuesday morning, just in time for our lovely maintenance period.

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Filed under: Rogue, Wrath of the Lich King

Rogues were one of the last classes to get new talent trees for LK; in general, it seems like they’ve been a bit behind during the beta. However, today another blue I’ve never heard of, by the name of Gamnin, dropped a lot of information about what’s in store for the most stabbity of classes. Here are the changes that jump out at me:

General:

• All reagents and tools (such as Thieves’ Tools and poison reagents) are being removed.
• Poison skill is being removed. Poisons can now be bought from vendors.
• Evasion, Sprint, and Vanish cooldowns reduced from 5 minutes to 3 minutes (2 minute with talents).
• Cloak of Shadows cooldown raised to 2 minutes (1 minute with Elusiveness).
• An unspecified new level 75 ability is coming, which will “add some much needed group utility.” The previous level 75 ability, Dismantle, will be trainable at level 20.

Continue reading Many Rogue changes incoming

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Quests, Leveling

Shellyw has a good question on the forums: what quests do you always skip? Blizzard is pretty good about the rewards system — even if a quest is a pain to get through, they’ll usually make the reward worth it. But there are quite a few quests in the game that just don’t have anything you want, and just aren’t worth the time putting into them.

Green Hills of Stranglethorn is mentioned early on in the thread, and I couldn’t agree more — any of those collecting quests I usually just give up on, as it’s usually easier to just sell the pages off inside that zone to someone who is actually doing the quest. I often skip a lot of group quests as well, especially while leveling. While the rewards for those are usually very good (and they’re often the end of long chains, which means both XP and items that come from them are great), it’s often tough to find a group, so they usually sit in my quest log until grey and then get abandoned.

And occasionally, especially when I need space in my quest log for newer quests, I just plain skip anything that doesn’t give an item that I need. If there’s a choice of quest rewards, and none of them fit my class or spec, I’ll just abandon the quest entirely to replace it with a quest that works better for me. What quests do you find skippable? How do you do triage on quests when your log fills up?

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Filed under: Enchanting, Items, Odds and ends, Phat Loot Phriday

See, this is (one reason why) everyone wants to be an Engineer. Why can’t us Leatherworkers get some sweet gear like this?

Name: Gadgetstorm Goggles (Wowhead, Thottbot, Wowdb)
Type: Epic Mail Headpiece
Armory: 726
Abilities:

• +28 Stamina
• A meta and blue socket, with a socket bonus of +5 spell damage and healing
• Requires Engineering 350 to wear — if you lose your Engineering skill for some reason, you won’t be able to wear these anymore. See “How to Get It” below.
• On equip: improves spell hit rating by 12, spell crit rating by 40, and increases damage and healing up to 55. Pretty sweet for a helm.
• Also on equip: shows the location of all gas clouds on the minimap, very useful if you’ve got a mote extractor (and if you’re Engineering at this level you should).
• And on use, allows you to see into the distance. This is similar to the Shaman Farseeing spell — only really useful in certain instances, but kind of a little added bonus to wearing the goggles.
• Very good gear for caster Shaman Engineers, which admittedly is a small group. But Blizzard catering to historically ignored gear specs like this is good to see.

How to Get It: You’ve got to be an Engineer to make and wear these — they are trainable from the regular Engineer trainer at around level 350, and you need to be 350 to actually make them. Total ingredient list is pretty steep: thirty Knothide Leather, 120 Adamantite ore, six Khorium ore, a Primal Fire, forty-eight Fel Iron ore, thirty-two Eternium ore, two Living Rubies, and one Primal Nether, which will run you a few hundred gold just picking them up off the AH. Not to mention the costs of actually leveling up Engineering, although there are tons of costs and advantages to leveling up any manufacturing profession anyway.

But get the skill, train the recipe, grab the mats, and the Goggles are yours. In my humble opinion, it’s one of the cooler-looking crafted helms out there, too. Assimilate or die!

Getting Rid of It: Sells to vendors for 5g 83s 63c, and of course with the Engineering requirement on it, it’s BoP. Does disenchant into a Void Crystal however. But it’d be an expensive Void Crystal.

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Filed under: Warrior, Patches, Analysis / Opinion, PvP, Instances, Expansions, Leveling, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors, Wrath of the Lich King

It took several days longer than I expected, in part due to there being one less zone than there would be live, but last night I managed to level my tauren warrior to 80 in a mix of blues and greens, all of his PvP epics and Karazhan gear having been finally replaced. Admittedly, in some cases I deliberately chose a sidegrade merely to be able to say that I’d changed my gear or to try and preserve my crit rate from level degradation, so it’s safe to say that if you have Kara epics or better they’ll certainly last you into level 74 – 75, but by 80 I had only one piece of gear from before the beta still intact. And that was a really nice trinket that I kept mostly for the proc.

I figure, with the new talents and abilities stated to be coming before Wrath, I should discuss my experiences to some degree.

Based on the leveling experience, I can tell you various things about gear and spec in Wrath that I would have felt premature talking about before now. However, since it would be spoilertastic, it will go behind the jump. Just imagine me flapping my giant white arms now. Also, while it’s not the subject of today’s post, I am kind of concerned that Battle Shout won’t stack with Blessing of Might anymore. That seems like a nerf. We’ll see how it plays out.

Continue reading The Care and Feeding of Warriors: The Climb to 80

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