July 29th, 2008
When I first picked up the game back in 2005, I was a bit disappointed that health and mana potions had a two minute cooldown. But this was because I was used to all that potion popping you could do in Diablo 2. Eventually, I got used to the fact that potions had a cooldown.
As a person who raids Karazhan quite frequently I know how important potions are, especially health and mana potions. It’s the reason why my alchemist mage is a Potion Master. Being a healer on my holy specced paladin, I’ve encountered many times when (in spite of being pretty mana efficient as a pally) I’ve ran out of mana even after previously popping a mana potion sometime earlier during a boss fight. Casters are also probably no different, finding the need to pop more than one mana potion during a fight a lot.
This is the reason why the latest addition to the beta testing called Potion Sickness will be an absolute pain in the rear if ever it makes it to Live. Potion Sickness gives you a debuff with no duration that says “Unable to consume potions until you rest out of combat for a short duration”. This means that players will be restricted to one potion of any kind per boss and that really makes it a living hell for raiders even with the skill resource regenerating abilities that several classes will have in the expansion.
Down with Potion Sickness!
Update: Potion Sickness has been removed in Beta build 8770 source
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By Angelo -- 3 comments
July 28th, 2008
A few days ago, CM Wryxian from the WoW-EU Community Site announced that social pets and mounts will no longer take up space in your bags. Instead, players will be able to “learn” them much like a spell and can access them from their own tab. This announcement was quite a pleasant surprise especially for players who are lacking bag or bank space but still want to collect social pets and mounts.
Apparently, the story doesn’t end with just mounts and social pets. Lead designer Jeff Kaplan (Tigole) mentioned in the official forums that Heroic badges and BG tokens will also have their own storage. Currently, my badges of justice and my BG tokens take up 5 slots in my bank, which is pretty much a lot of space that could be used for other things. If you take away all my social pets and mounts, that’s even more. You could say, I really love this change for the expansion since I’ll have a lot more space in my bank and bags for more stuff!
Thank you Blizzard!
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By Angelo -- 0 comments
July 28th, 2008
Entering Northrend for the first time should feel a bit strange because you won’t be able to use your flying mount right away. So you don’t just fly past a lot of the content, Blizzard won’t allow you to use your flying mount until level 77. Apparently, instead of just hitting 77 and flying away on your mount, there’s a quest chain everyone has to do to unlock your flying mount usage for Northrend. Getting this quest chain done gives you the skill Cold Weather Flying, which actually kinda makes sense since your flying mount has to learn how to fly in the freezing and icy weather of Northrend.
The following is how the quest chain goes as posted in MMO Champion:
# Level up to 77.
# Speak to Weslex Quickwrench in Nesingwary Base Camp and do his questline if you didn’t do it yet, at this point you probably already completed it while leveling.
# Once the Spirit of Gnomeregan is repaired, speak to Professor Calvert and accept the quest.
# Go to Lakeslide Landing near River’s Heart and talk to Pilot Vic here.
# The first quest he gives is a short quest to find his keys in the lake next to him.
# The 2nd quest will let you go in a reconnaissance flight with Pilot Vic. After defending your airplane against undead attackers you will eventually have to control it after one of the shot hits Pilot Vic. Go back to the Lakeslide Landing and …
# Enjoy your flying mount !
Since this is a quest chain, I assume that doing it will also give some experience and maybe even some gold. From the looks of it, it’s going to be really easy to do so this is really a way to put some fun into getting to use your flying mount again.
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By Angelo -- 2 comments
July 26th, 2008
A guild mate of mine posted a link to a very interesting web site in our guild forums and I just want to share it. The website is called Be Imba! and it analyzes gear for level 70 players using information that the Armory shows.
I wrote about the WoW Heroes website a while back, which at first glance is very similar to the Be Imba! website. They both check your gear and look at things like enchanted items and socketed items. They both show which raid dungeons would be easy or hard for you to do with your current gear. But that’s pretty much where the similarity ends. WoW Heroes is more of a display of your gear and the potential improvements you can have. Basically it’s the Armory with a little something extra.
Be Imba! not only shows what raid dungeons would be easy or hard for you to do but also shows you where your immediate improvements for gear can be found. It also grades how PvE viable both your gear and your talent spec are and even alerts you in case you’re looking at a person’s profile and he/she may have PvP gear on. It also shows if your spec is good for PvP, PvE or grinding (although there seems to be a problem with this, as it listed my raiding holy pally spec as PvP>PvE>Grinding).
The thing that sucks about this website is that it relies on a queue system for the queries and many times you can end up at the bottom of a really long queue or not get in at all since there are too many queries. Nevertheless it’s still something you might want to check out even just for the fun factor of seeing what the website will say about your characters.
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By Angelo -- 0 comments
July 25th, 2008
Being at the beta stage of the development of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, the talent trees that were released are in no way final. Changes from minor tweaks to complete scrapping or adding of talents were expected to be made. Because of this, it’s really the best practice to reserve judgment of these talents for until the final versions come out. A few changes were made to the talents of Arcane Mages, Enhancement Shaman and Retribution Paladins, as listed by World of Raids. You can see the latest WoTLK talent tree calculators here.
Shaman: Enhancement
Maelstrom Weapon now makes any spell instant cast when stacked to 5, not just Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning or Lava Burst. New tooltip: When you critically hit with a melee weapon, you reduce the cast time of your next spell by 4/8/12/16/20%. Stacks up to 5 times. Lasts 15 seconds.
Paladin: Retribution
Vindication now gives a 20% debuff for 2 talent points instead of 15% for 3. New tooltip: Gives the Paladin’s damaging attacks a chance to reduce the target’s attributes by 10/20% for 15 sec.
Pursuit of Justice reduced to 2 talent points. New tooltip: Reduces the chance you’ll be hit by spells by 1/2% and increases movement and mounted movement speed by 8/15%. This does not stack with other movement speed increasing effects.
Mage: Arcane
Arcane Potency (tier 6) no longer requires 5 points in Arcane Concentration (tier 2), but 1 point in Presence of Mind.
Student of Mind (tier 9) moved to Tier 3.
Potent Spirit (tier 8) replaced with Mind Mastery. New tooltip: Increases spell damage by up to 5/10/15/20/25% of your total intellect.
Netherwind Presence (tier 10) moved to Tier 9 to replace Student of Mind. The talent has also been reworked to give 6% passive haste. New tooltip: Increases your spell haste by 2/4/6%.
Missile Barrage (tier 10) new talent to replace Netherwind Presence’s instant casts with faster Arcane Missiles. Tooltip: Gives your Arcane Barrage, Fireball, Frostbolt and Frostfire Bolt spells a 3/6/9/12/15% chance to reduce the channeled duration of the next Arcane Missiles spell to 1.5 secs and fire missiles every .3 sec.
New change still currently unlisted at World of Raids: The talent Arcane Impact has been renamed Spell Impact and now also affects Blast Wave, Fireblast, Cone of Cold, and Ice Lance in addition to Arcane Blast and Arcane Explosion.
As the talents continue to get tested we should continue to see more tweaks and changes here and there. I can’t wait to see if there are more cool changes to the classes and specs I play coming soon.
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By Angelo -- 0 comments
July 24th, 2008
After the new talent trees for the Wrath of the Lich King expansion came out, it’s become quite the opinion that Feral is the “lamest” of the three druid trees in the sense that Balance and Restoration got awesome talent additions while Feral didn’t impress that much. As if that wasn’t bad enough, feral druids were hit with some bad news once again! Blizzard poster Koraa gives the latest word about the mysterious Dire Cat form that was announced in the World Wide Invitational (WWI) a while back.
We have no plans to implement a “Dire Cat” form at this time. “Dire Bear” exists for the sole purpose of upgrading the Feral Druid’s armor value to match the Warrior/Paladin etc. (Druids get no shield)
We do, however, intend to allow Druids to be able to use items and enchants with procs in forms, which I believe will work in the next beta build (don’t hold me to it though).
I think what Kalgan meant was that we intend to do different texture variances for Druid forms, including Cat form. Which is true, though not sure how soon we’re going to get that. They may come from a repeatable quest, or through inscription.
Source
While this affects all druids, this obviously affects feral druids the most who were expecting it to an improvement over the current cat form mechanics. Of course since it was so mysterious, there really isn’t much of a surprise that all cat form is getting is an aesthetic change.
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By Angelo -- 0 comments
July 23rd, 2008
I have a friend who tried her best to get as many mounts as she could in the game. She has the racial mount, a few pvp mounts, the talbuk mount and a few others. I also know quite a few people are absolute nuts about getting social pets. Well the latest announcement made by CM Wryxian from WoW EU should make all mount and pet collectors rejoice!
We’re pleased to announce a convenient upgrade to the way that mounts and vanity pets are handled in Wrath of the Lich King.
Players will be able to “learn” a mount or non-combat pet much like learning a spell, recipe, or new ability, and these creatures will then show up on a new Pet tab within the Character Info section of the interface. Players will be able to access and preview their learned mounts and vanity pets through this tab.
Once learned, the pet icon or mount icon will no longer appear in bag spaces or bank spaces. This inventory space will be made available once again for other adventuring needs. Pets can still be set to hotkeys by dragging them to the hotkey bar, much like any other spell or ability. source
The thing about collecting mounts and social pets is the fact that all that collecting currently takes space in your bags or your bank. With this change in the expansion, players will be able to continue collecting without the guilt of knowing it’s going to take up precious space.
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By Angelo -- 1 comment
July 22nd, 2008
As the weeks pass, more and more information about the much anticipated Wrath of the Lich King expansion are being revealed. Now that all the classes finally got to see what their talent trees will look like as of this point of the development of the expansion, it’s time for some more information about other aspects of the game to reveal themselves.
The most interesting thing that just came out would probably be the info on the WoTLK dungeons which includes things like screen shots and loot tables. While checking out the loot, you’ll notice that they already implemented the change to spell damage and healing gear, wherein the stat is replaced by +spell power. This way, players can use the same gear for both caster dps and healing with just a switch in talent points.
Another interesting piece of information that just came out is the list of many Scrolls of Enchantment that will be included in the game. Basically this is the implementation of the announcement Blizzard made a while back that enchanters will be able to trade their enchants as items that they can put in the auction house or sell directly to people. This way enchanters can finallygive their alts enchants, something that they currently cannot do with the current enchanting system.
As an aside, lead designer Jeff Kaplan (Tigole) confirmed that leveling from 60-70 will be faster come expansion, something that was quite expected considering that Blizzard implemented the change to make leveling from 20-60 faster some time after the Burning crusade expansion came out.
Stay tuned for more new stuff for the Wrath of the Lich King!
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By Angelo -- 0 comments
July 21st, 2008
My frustrations concerning the paladin holy tree for the WoTLK expansion got me planning ahead. I’m already leveling up my druid so that I can have it ready to be a healer just in case nothing changes for the better for my dear paladin. I figured that if things will go well with the paladin eventually, then my druid could be a Moonkin and blast some face.
This little project of mine got me planning ahead so I went browsing at the MMO Champion’s list of spells for the expansion. While I found a lot of the spells quite interesting, one thing caught my eye. For a moment I thought I was seeing things and had to make a double take. It’s this entry right here:
Revive (rank 7) level 80:
Returns the spirit to the body, restoring a dead target to life with 1800 health and 1365 mana. Cannot be cast when in combat.
10 sec cast, 72% of base mana, 30 yd range
It’s an out of combat rez! It’s something that druids have been asking for since a long time ago (maybe even since the game came out). The really neat thing is that druids will get their first rank of Revive at level 12, according to MMO Champion. The argument against an OOC rez was that druids already have the battle rez Rebirth. Of course we know that it’s no substitute for a real rez spell.
Now that druids finally have an OOC rez and a nice crowd control spell now that Entangling Roots can be used both indoors and outdoors, this gives Moonkins and Resto druids (especially with the new talents for both Balance and Resto) so much more group utility that it almost makes it it so much harder to not bring them to a group. This would definitely cause a lot of whines from other classes but I see it as a nice move that will benefit everyone more than cause any harm. Imagine, no more running back just because your only healer was a druid and couldn’t rez you.
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By Angelo -- 3 comments
July 18th, 2008
As the rest of the classes got a look at their cool new WoTLK talents, hunters and paladins were made to wait quite a while. But at last, they’re finally here, again thanks to Wowhead. The paladin trees got quite a bit of a shake up, which probably was one of the reasons why it look longer to come out.
Click here to see the WoTLK Hunter talents.
I’d have to say that the new hunter talents look really nice. I don’t play one but I understand enough about them to say that the new stuff will make a lot of hunters drool. Survival hunters will drool on the Hunting party talent, making them quite useful in raids by regenerating mana, rage, energy and runic power. This also helps their mana pool problems. Marksmanship’s Chimera Shot will allow the hunter to be a bit more versatile, consuming various stings to fit the situation needed. BM’s Aspect Mastery also improves on the hunter’s need for the situation by buffing the various aspects the hunter could use.
Click here to see the WoTLK Paladin talents.
The Paladin talents got quite a shakeup, especially for the holy and protection trees. Imp conc aura is now in the holy tree while divine strength is in prot. Various talents have shifted tiers within their trees too. I noticed a lot of focus on Judgements for the holy tree, which is strange because it’s something I don’t normally use a whole lot as a Holy Paladin. Beacon of light is quite interesting since it heals the whole raid but not for much considering it’s a small amount spread over 15 seconds.
Retribution’s most interesting new talents are probably Conviction and Divine Storm. With all the focus on the Judgements for the holy tree, some people are already speculating on going holy/ret for conviction since it’s assumed the increased crit chance will also apply to heals. Divine Storm is interesting since it not only affects more than one target but also heals the 3 raid members for 20% of the damage.
Protection’s most talked about talent in Divine Guardian, which is useful for paladins of any spec but most especially for tankadins and healadins. 15% of all damage taken by the raid within 30 yards redirected to the paladin while his/her bubble (divine shield) is up has a lot of applications and has a lot of paladins drooling over this talent. I can see this as one of the talents that will entice paladins to spec into the Protection tree, aside from Blessing of Kings.
Click here to see the WoTLK talent trees of all classes from Wowhead.
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By Angelo -- 1 comment
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