World of Warcraft Strategies

Dialogue between Arthas and his father

2010-07-26T13:55:00.000-07:00

You can hear the dialogue between Arthas and his father before he dies in the throne room located in Undercity.

How to do it:

Go to the throne room located in Undercity.
Lower the music in the sound settings, and increase the ambient sound to max.
You should now hear hear Arthas and his father talking with some ghosty voice before he died.

Blizzard – World of Warcraft Movie “Still Happening”

2010-07-24T12:07:00.000-07:00

Beside its slow production progress, vice president of creative development, Chris Metzen said that the progress on the World of Warcraftmovie has slowed, but it’s still happening. At a merchandising panel, Metzen said director Sam Raimi is still “very, very passionate” about making the movie.

He later continues to state that, once the screenplay treatment is finished, “hopefully it’ll start moving very quickly, very soon.” Metzen and the rest of the panelists also talked about the next lore-based novel to be released — it’s called The Shattering, and will set up a lot of the events leading up to the Cataclysm expansion.

Metzen cautioned the game’s fans that there are “dark times ahead” for Azeroth with the return of Deathwing and quakes destroying large parts of the game world. “It’s going to get rough out there for a while,” he admitted, reports Joystiq. “But there’s a plan. The great heroes always rise to the top.”

Make a fortune off twinks with little investment when cataclysm hits

2010-07-21T11:49:00.001-07:00

I've been twinking/playing the AH for quite a long time, and in my experience, there is no better market to corner in the AH than the twinking economy. Why do you ask? First of all, low item levels means low deposits, so if your stuff doesnt sell first time around, its all good. However, the main reason why its so amazing, is because its the only market where you can FREQUENTLY find INSANE bargains because people frankly dont know what they have.

I cant tell you how many times I've bought Wranglers wristbands of power/stam/monkey for 25s (worth 1kg to the right twink) or 9/9 pathfinder hats for a couple gold. Heck, I got my one and only shadowfang for under 100g and sold for over 5k. It happens all the time when you know what to look for.

When cata hits, 2 major things will change in the world of twinking. First of all, twinking will be coming back in full force. Right now, twinks have to migrate to their brackets home BG in order to get exp off games. (19 & 49 ruin, 29 reckoning, 39 nightfall in the US) With the BG merger in cata, twinks will be able to play with other twinks from every bg, so the numbers will shoot through the roof hence driving prices up. The second major change (where the real $$$ come in) is that they're changing a ton of the lower level items and making many currently "noob" items BIS. As long as you know what to buy and hold on to, you'll make an EPIC TON OF GOLD come cata with very little investment.

Without further adieu, this is what you need to get your hands on:

19's:

Razor's Edge (currently very inexpensive)
Darkweave Breeches (not best profit margin, but buy if you see cheap)
Gloves of the Fang
Feet of the Lynx (everyone is going to want these)
Bronze Band of Force (crafted, but will likely be bis for a couple classes)
Mindthrust Bracers

29's:

Enduring Cap (this will also 100x in value)
Silver-Lined Belt (currently incredibly inexpensive will be bis)
Glowing Magical Bracelets
Resilient Cap (currently worth nothing, will be amazing for a TON of classes)
Shadow Hood (craftable, but about to become awesome for fc twinks)
Resilient Robe (currently worthless green, about to get huge boost)
Magician's Mantle
Tribal Worg Helm (this will 100x in value)
Forest Tracker Epaulets (already expensive, so not best profit margin, but buy if cheap)
Claw of the Shadowmancer (rogues are getting nerfed, but this will be better than torturing poker come cata)

Not too sure about the 39 & 49 changes just yet, but I'll look into it, and I'll be updating this thread any time I see new gold opportunities in the twinking market, or further changes to items pertinent to twinking.

Hope you enjoyed the guide, and happy gold making

Gotta hand it to the gold sellers, at least they're creative

2010-07-19T13:51:00.000-07:00

It seems like they were using a combination of dual boxing and teleport hacks. They were in Stormwind then shortly appeared in Ironforge. They alternated between the floor and floating in the air. This only happened about 10 minutes ago, but I'm sure all the characters are long deleted.

It goes without saying that you shouldn't visit the web address in the picture as it's a gold sellers website and there will potentially be nastyware there waiting to hijack your wow account.

BlizzChat Developer Chat on Twitter

2010-07-19T08:15:00.000-07:00

BlizzChat Developer Chat on Twitter - Answers to Real ID questions; New Battle.net!

Mastery System

Q: Can you provide some clarity on the 3rd Mastery that is affected item stats?
A. We recognized the earlier implementation of Mastery in the beta was confusing. Mastery is no longer directly associated with a talent tree, but is instead a passive effect learned from a trainer at a later level. That passive effect will now grant the third Mastery bonus you formerly saw in the talent tree pane. The passive effect will have a base value, and then Mastery rating will increase that effect further. The other two Mastery bonuses previously listed at the top of the talent tree pane have been removed, but, in some cases, have been reimplemented as passive specialization bonuses. Currently, in the beta, you cannot see any of the Masteries, as they need to be reimplemented after the talent tree redesign.

Q: Will there be a "hard cap" for Mastery rating (to avoid having 101% chance of getting a critical block, for example)?
A, In the course of finalizing all of the Masteries for the various talent specializations, we will make sure that, in the expected gear a player can acquire from the final Cataclysm raid tiers, the player will not crash into a "hard cap" unless they go out of their way to stack Mastery more than is reasonable. This may require redesigning some of the Masteries as the rest of the class designs are finalized.

Q: Are we going to be able to view the Mastery talent previews for Cataclysm soon as we can currently?
A. With the talent tree redesign, all the Masteries need to be re-implemented, and, in some cases, redesigned. This will require at least a couple of weeks before they will be available on beta.

Q: How will pets scale with Mastery their masters' Mastery?
A. The talent specializations that rely heavily on pets (Beast Mastery and Demonology, for example) have a Mastery that makes Mastery rating also increase pet damage. Other specializations that have pets, but whose pets do not benefit from Mastery, will have their Masteries balanced accordingly, taking into account that pets will not benefit from them.

Q. How do the mastery bonuses work now that they don't show up on the talent interface anymore?
A. The mastery bonuses will be trainable passive bonuses somewhere around level 75. Each talent specialization will have a different Mastery available on the trainer with a base potency with 0 Mastery Rating. The character sheet interface will have additional information on the additional potency gained from Mastery Rating.

Classes: General

Q: What is the conversion rate for intellect to spell power for Cataclysm? Will it differ with each class?
A. Each point of intellect grants one point of spell power, excepting the first 10 points. This is vaguely similar to attack power, where each point of strength or agility gives two attack power, excepting the first 10 points.

We realize this slightly reduces the spell power per budget on items, so we also increased the amount of spell power granted by caster weapons, and that increase entirely makes up for the deficit. Those weapons will continue to have spell power as well as intellect, and the amount of spell power will be significantly larger than in 3.3.5.

Q. I PvP a lot in the 10-19 bracket. What are some cool new abilities we'll see at level 10 in Warsong Gulch?
A. Since all players will be getting a signature ability, such as Mortal Strike, Summon Water Elemental, and Mangle for picking a talent tree at level 10, I think there will be a lot of new abilities seen in the 10-19 Warsong Gulch that we never saw before.

Q. Will the ability to run while shooting effect PvP or PvE battles more? What was the initial intention of the new ability?
A. With how encounters are today, damage-dealing while on the move is increasingly becoming important. You’ll see in a lot of classes we specifically are giving new ways for players to still do damage while on the move. That said, your damage while standing still casting or on a target in melee range should always be optimal.

Q. Are there plans to give more procs to some classes to make the rotations a little more interesting?
A. Sure, we want all specializations to have interesting rotations. There is a point though when you can be overwhelmed by the amount of procs going on and the gameplay becomes erratic and not very fun. So it’s a constant balance between the two.

Q: How much of an impact will the new medium glyphs have on the fun factor of choices in the new 31-point talent trees?
A. We hope it adds a lot. Part of the problem is that if there is, say, a Glyph of Mutilate, you feel like you have to take that as an Assassination rogue over anything else. The Medium glyphs are designed to let you customize your character a little more. They are the glyphs you would take if Mutilate didn’t exist.

Incidentally, the new tiers are called Prime, Major, and Minor. Majors are the new Mediums. Glyph of Mutilate would be a Prime.

Q: What about some class specific quests for Cataclysm? I enjoyed them in the early levels of WoW!

A: It’s very expensive to create class-specific raids given the literally thousands of new quests we are already adding for Cataclysm; however, we are going to have class-specific dungeon quests for everyone at levels 20 and 50. These won’t be as involved as, say, the old Benediction quest line, but they will give you a way to get some blue loot that isn’t otherwise available.

Q. Are all characters getting 5% stun/fear reduction baseline since they are no longer talents?
A. We would rather adjust the crowd control durations to appropriate levels. Currently some crowd-control effects are so easy to get out of that only really layered (using crowd control effects of different diminishing returns) really matters. We don’t want all of PvP to be kiting each other around with instant nukes and heals. Knowing what average durations are (rather than having some classes with duration reducers and some without) will let us judge the baseline better. We think players are individually just looking at their own trees now and thinking that they were made less powerful without realizing how across-the-board all the changes are.

Talents: General

Q: It was said that players would be allowed to choose based on their play style. Do you believe fewer talents will accomplish this?

A. The talents that we are pruning are typically things like extra strength or coefficient boosts to spells. It’s hard to have a different play style based on talents like that. We are trying to keep the talents that really change gameplay. A Retribution paladin that feels like he can help out healing on 5-player dungeon runs might take the two-point talent to improve healing. A Protection warrior who tanks a lot of 5-player dungeons might want talents that help with AoE pulls, while one that is a raid off-tank might want, say, Safeguard and Vigilance instead.

Q: Is your goal to not have players have a separate talent specialization solely for PvP? If so, please elaborate on how you plan to accomplish that?
A. We are removing many of the PvP talents, as well as trying to make some of the PvP talents a little more useful for PvE (for example, a talent that currently procs on taking critical damage could instead proc on taking any damage, including AoE damage, as well). While we recognize that very competitive players might still want unique talent builds for PvP vs. PvE, the hope is that more players might be able to use the same specialization more often for multiple aspects of the game.

Q: With the new 31-point tree system, how will players use dual-specialization? Do we get to choose a new tree when we first use our secondary specialization (off-spec)?
A. You can use dual-specialization for a different specialization in beta, if you choose, much as you can today. We are going to lower the level at which you can use dual-specialization, as well as the cost for purchasing it, because we recognize that using Dungeon Finder while leveling is likely to be popular.

Q: How will a brand new players know what a good leveling specialization is? Are they expected to know what site to visit and read up?
A. We hope that most talent builds are decent for leveling. Giving players a good ability at level 10 definitely helps with this. We are trying to avoid the traps of bad talents by just removing them altogether (Unbridled Wrath, RIP).

Q. Will we see these talent changes in Wrath of the Lich King, before the release of Cataclysm, like we did with the last expansion?
A. Yes.

Q. Why not make each tier a 3-point system instead of 5 to advance?
A. We considered this and decided against it.

Q. Still "un-fun" talents in the 3-point trees like Spirit Tap. Are damage-dealing specialization mana regeneration talents that may feel mandatory staying in game?
A. Spirit Tap and other purely “leveling talents” are being re-evaluated.

Q. Is your goal to not having to use a talent specialization solely for PvP? If so, please elaborate on how you plan to accomplish that?
A. This is almost impossible to “fix.” With the nature of talents min/max will always be possible. That said, we’re trying to move away from having purely PvP or purely PvE talents as much as possible, which will make the pure PvP specializations less painful to play in PvE and vice versa.

Q. Will we be seeing more talents that reward use of rarely used spells (i.e. Destruction now opens with Soul Fire, barely used before)?
A. Talents like this are intended to be used as openers for PvE, or for target-swapping in PvE and PvP. There are a lot of encounters where you have to kill newly spawned monsters as soon as possible, which these talents are great for. Or, when you need to change targets in PvP on a high health mob, boom instant critical with Improved Feral Charge, Careful Aim, or haste with Improved Soul Fire.

Q. Can we expect more fun talents and maybe even shiny new abilities in further iterations of the new talent trees?
A. Yes, the current beta trees are still very much works in progress. As paladins in particular will see shortly, that ongoing work certainly can include fun talents and shiny new abilities.

Q: Any plan to make "Crit Immunity" passive from choosing a tank tree instead of spending talents on it?
A. No, and you can blame the druids. We want a tanking specialization in Bear Form to feel different from a DPS specialization in Cat Form, otherwise it doesn’t feel fair to other classes when the Feral druid can do everything with the same talent specialization. We try to put crit immunity in talents you would normally take.

Q: Do you expect anyone, alts or new players, to level as a healer specialization? Do you think locking them to Holy or Restoration early is bad?
A. We expect leveling with as DPS will probably always be more efficient, just because killing things is faster than surviving longer while you kill things. Furthermore, we don’t want the healing specializations to be as good at killing things or the DPS specialization not to have a role. We do, however, think we can make leveling as a healer more enjoyable than it is today. Also, it will be a lot easier to use Dungeon Finder to level as a healer.

Q: What class are you currently most happy with how the talents are currently set up? Is there one you feel needs more work?
A. They all need more work!

Q. Some of the new talent trees for healers seem to emphasize a style of "mana regeneration by dealing damage." Is that intentional? If so, why?
A. Yes. In almost any situation, there are periods where heals are not urgently needed 100% of the time. Today, you probably just cast heals anyway in case someone takes damage, since mana doesn’t matter much. But if mana did matter, the “right” thing to do would be to do nothing. Talents such as Telluric Currents provide an active way to recharge mana while contributing damage.

Q. If every specialization is intended to take their 31-point talent, why is it not baseline at the level you could acquire it?
A. Those talents are a good “brass ring” to work towards. They often change your character pretty dramatically when you get them, so it’s a fun moment. There is definitely an interesting philosophical discussion about talent trees and how many talents should be mandatory vs. optional. Some players would like a model where everything is on equal footing with everything else. Others want to make sure there are some safe decisions so that they don’t have to do tons of theory-crafting research every time they talent their character. We are trying to shoot for something in the middle where we have some expectation for how a particular spec will play (for example, we don’t want to have to develop and support the non-Chaos Bolt Destruction rotation) but players can still decide if say Blitz is something their Arms warrior will use or not.

Q. In general, do you expect mana-saving talents to be something all players take, or are they designed to be optional utility?
A. For healers, we expect players will take most of these talents (maybe not the ones related to taking damage or dealing damage though). For non-healers, we make sure all of them have reasonably reliable ways to restore mana, but these often come with the potential for damage-dealing loss. In that vein, the mana-saving talents can be thought of as damage-dealing talents, and nukers can take them if they think they impact their bottom line. After all, we all know that the only thing that matters at the end of the day is who won the meters.

Q. Have some of the old talents been made into new glyphs?
A. Usually when we cut a talent it’s because we thought it was a bad talent, but we might bring some talents that were so situational to fit in the new model back as glyphs. We are still designing glyphs. Players shouldn’t necessarily assume that any of their current glyphs are going to still be around. Some will, but many are changing.

Q. With the 31-point tree, many talents still cost two or three points. Is this going to be changed, as it basically increases their cost?
A. For the most part, yes. There are some overpowered talents that don’t need the boost, but many of the others will have their effects increased.

Death Knight
Q. It seems that our DPS with Runic Empowerment is very random, will that be changed?
A. Runic Empowerment is being changed to a trained ability so that all specializations can access it without feeling forced to, since we see it as a core part of death knight gameplay in Cataclysm. The way the talent is engineered, it should never disrupt your rotation, but rather give you bonus resources layered on top of your rotation. The proc rate is high enough that the actual variability in procs over time shouldn’t be excessive.

Q. Death knights are the only tanks without a stun, which is pretty key for a few things, like adds on Heroic Lich King. Any plans to give them one?
A. There’s a video of a death knight solo-tanking 10-player Heroic Lich King. Impressive stuff. But just like stuns are incredibly good on Lich King, there are a number of fights where mechanics like Death Grip, or the ability to pre-drop a Death and Decay to pick up spawning adds, are incredibly useful. That’s part of class and encounter diversity.

Q. Is there a plan to support dual-wield tanking for death knights (something like Threat of Thassarian versus Might of Frozen Wastes)?
A. It will be technically possible to dual wield and tank, but it will not be optimal threat-wise.

Q. Dark Simulacrum for death knight has a pretty long cooldown. What's the reasoning behind that exactly? (just curious)
A. It’s been reduced to 1 minute in the latest build, but it’s also an extremely powerful ability with which we expect players to pull off fun and scary things.

Q. Do you plan to give the Unholy tree a more centralized focus, instead of split between Scourge Strike, diseases, ghoul, auto-attack, Anti-Magic Shell?
A. In a sense, that IS a centralized focus. Unholy death knights are about diseases and Unholy pets. Frost is about icy attacks and runic power. Blood is about tanking and self-healing.

Q. Death knight tanks in Cataclysm seem to be gaining a lot of defensive buttons. As a death knight I love it, but will those numbers be changing soon?
A. It’s possible that some of it may need to be scaled back, but we like the cooldown aspect of death knight tanking and would like to preserve it.

Q. Since implementing and receiving feedback on the new death knight rune system, have you made any changes to it you can reveal to us?
A. It still needs a lot of iteration. We don’t want there to be significant “dead time” in death knight rotations. Also, the Runic Empowerment ability has some bugs with displaying the current state of available runes, which complicate the situation. Look for more death knight changes in the near future.

Q. What is the intent and thoughts on changing the rune cost of Scourge Strike?
A. In Wrath of the Lich King, it is closer to being a clone of Obliterate with a slightly different feel than we’d like. We want to change that. We’re also very aware of the rotational problems inherent in decoupling the Unholy and Frost runes. Rest assured, our solution will not be expecting you to Icy Touch alongside each Scourge Strike.

Q. Is there any intent to bring back the On A Pale Horse talent for Death Knights, possibly in a different tree?
A. Yes, On a Pale Horse is back as a sub-specialization-accessible Frost talent in our latest internal build.

Druid

Q: Moonkin: What are your plans for Eclipse, and why does it infect so many of our talents? What are your plans to make Moonkin fun?
A. The model we are trying now lets Solar and Lunar Eclipse procs last for about 45 seconds, and each spell of the appropriate type that you cast moves the bar back closer to the middle again. The buff is canceled by reaching the middle. This should let Moonkin "hold" the buff for short periods of time when they need to move or get out of the fire.

Q. Skull Bash has a 1-minute cooldown. Is it supposed to be that way, or can we expect it to be lowered to the likes of Shield Bash?
A. The base cooldown is 60 seconds to keep the ability from being used by Balance and Restoration druids to layer too much crowd control. A Feral tree talent reduces the cooldown to 10 seconds, putting it in line with Kick and other similar interrupt abilities.

Q. Why was the Feral druid's mana reduction cost removed from King of the Jungle? And what happened to two combo points on critical strikes?
A. These are data errors that will be corrected. Neither is intended to be cut.

Q. Druids were always a "jack of all trades, but master of none" and usually mocked when specializing. Will new talents change this?
A. In my own raids, I find druids of all 3 specializations that excel at their chosen specialization. So, I don’t understand your question.

Q. Druids now get Swiftmend at level 10 for being Restoration, but it is a talent in the tree. What is the plan there?
A. This was a data error that has since been corrected.

Q. What's the deal with Typhoon? Is it going back into talents or will it be a standard druid spell?
A. Typhoon is now back in the tree. Sorry about that.

Q: Last time I checked feral druid tree, there were only 5 points in the first tier which means NO choices. Is that getting fixed?
A. Yes.

Q. Last time I checked the Feral druid tree, there were only 5 points in the first tier which means NO choices. Is that getting fixed?
A. Still working on early Feral.

Q: Will Arcane spells do more damage with higher Lunar power on the scale? And will more Mastery increase that bonus damage?
A. Currently, the plan is for Mastery to increase the damage bonus of Eclipse (both Lunar and Solar).

Q. Is Moonfire designed to be a damage-over-time spell with an instant cast nuke, or the other way around?
A. Both. We want the instant nuke to be more meaningful in Cataclysm, especially on the move.

Q: Cat and Bear builds are only off by about 3 talent points. Why not just consolidate fully at that point?
A. This is definitely one of our concerns. We don’t want a player to be able to have an optimal DPS specialization in Cat Form and be able to tank. We will definitely engineer the Feral tree such that being a viable tank, or even off-tank, will have some cost in terms of lost DPS while in Cat Form. The druid talent trees currently in beta are very rough and need more polish.

Q. Will druids finally get shapeshifting on a separate global cooldown like hunter aspects & warrior stances?
A. We have no plans to remove shapeshifting from the global cooldown. Shapeshifting can be used to escape Root and Polymorph mechanics, and so cannot have no global cooldown.

Hunter

Q. Concerning Marksmanship hunters, why is the PvP talent Resistance is Futile a prerequisite for PvE talent Marked for Death?
A. In an upcoming build it won’t be a prerequisite, and we want to change it to proc a free Kill Command instead of an instant critical.

Q. How are you trying to separate the play styles of the hunter specializations? What makes Cobra Shot feel different from Steady Shot?
A. Cobra Shot is ideal for Beast Mastery and Survival hunters because they don’t really have any other way of keeping Serpent Sting up (Cobra Shot extends Serpent Sting’s duration), and also for Survival because it is “Elemental” damage. It's also useful in PvP or in some other niche situations, say, when a creature is immune to physical damage. Now you have a solution.

Q. Will Hunters be able to pet-tank through cata (even if just beast masters)?
A. What, you didn’t see that video where some guy tanked Marowgar with his Gorilla?

Q. What is the design choice behind the focus recharge in Aspect of Fox, is it meant to replace Viper?
A. Aspect of the Fox is intended to be used for mobile damage or kiting. There is still some tuning to be done on Focus and this aspect, but that is the design goal.

Mage
Q. Will mages get pets for Arcane and Fire specializations at any time?
A. No.

Q. Will each Mage talent tree be on a level PvE and PvP footing, or do you plan to make them bias to specific modes?
A. The idea is to make them have equal footing. If that doesn’t work out, then we would prefer for one specialization to not be completely dead. But we want, for example, for players to choose Frost because they like Frost.

Paladin

Q: What is the goal when re-designing the paladin class? How do you plan to change rotations, talents, etc?
A. All of the paladin specializations will make use of a new resource called Holy Power. Holy Power accumulates from using Crusader Strike, Holy Shock, and some other talents. Holy Power can be consumed to augment a variety of abilities, including:

An instant mana-free heal: Word of Glory

A buff to increase holy damage done: Inquisition
A massive physical melee attack for Retribution paladins: Templar’s Verdict
Holy Shield’s duration is now extended by Holy Power
Divine Storm’s damage is now increased by Holy Power

We also introduced several new heals for Holy Paladins including Healing Hands (an AoE heal-over-time that is applied to all players standing near the paladin), Light of Dawn (a cone heal with a 30-yard range), as well as a new heal called Divine Light, which is similar to a priest's Greater Heal, and the new instant heal mentioned above, Word of Glory.

Q: Can you give us a sneak peek at one or two of the new Retribution abilities or talents?
A. Templar’s Verdict: An instant weapon attack that causes a percentage of weapon damage. Consumes all applications of Holy Power to increase damage dealt:

1 Holy Power: 55% Weapon Damage
2 Holy Power: 125% Weapon Damage
3 Holy Power: 225% Weapon Damage

Word of Glory: Consumes all Holy Power to heal a friendly target for a specific amount per application of Holy Power (0 mana cost, 0 cooldown, instant cast).

Q: If Judgement of Wisdom is being removed from the game, are paladins getting a new Judgement so we don't all have to use Judgement of Light?
A. There will only be one Judgement spell. This spell places a single debuff on the target with the effects currently associated with Judgement of Light and Judgement of Justice. The Judgement of Wisdom effect has been retired completely.

Q: Are the improved aura talents going away? They were still present in beta.
A. If you mean talents like Improved Devotion Aura, then those are gone. We still have talents that, say, increase healing on targets of your auras. Improved Concentration Aura still exists. In general, though, you shouldn’t have to worry about having raid buffs of different power competing with each other.

Q. Are Protection Paladins still going to refresh Divine Plea on melee hit (via a talent or trained ability)?
A. Yes.

Q. Any thought to having Retribution paladins use spell power plate to help put Holy paladins on equal footing as other healers?
A. We think Retribution paladins needs to use strength plate. Changing this would require a lot of funky solutions, such as how we handle Crusader Strike damage, and trying to control Retribution from being too powerful a healer. We realize it’s odd to itemize spell power plate for one specialization, but we think all of the solutions to this issue are worse than just living with it.

Priest

Q. Power Infusion: not in beta talents. Coming back, or gone for good?
A. If it’s not in your build, that’s a bug! It’ll be back.

Q. A lot of Shadow priests' talents seem mandatory. Any chance for a trimmed down tree? We feel like we need to pick all of them.
A. Some changes are underway for Shadow priest trees.

Q: Will Leap of Faith get some sort of secondary buff? Pulling a high aggro target to a clothie healer seems dangerous
A. This ability is intended to save party and raid members from imminent danger,such as pulling someone out of a fire that would otherwise kill them. It does not need a secondary buff.

Q. Will Holy priests get some fun talents, like Evangelism and Archangel in the Discipline tree? At the moment it will be expensive for Holy to take those.
A. While we still have a ways to go in design on the talents, we want Holy to be able to also do an Archangel sub-specialization if they wish. In some ways it may be stronger than the Discipline main specialization version.

Q. Where do you see priests fitting in the healing world? They seem very 'jack of all, master of none' with the new trees.
A. It’s difficult to judge healer strength right now, as all spells are still going to be tweaked with good mana cost/healing amounts. We will say we want both priest healing specializations to be unique, powerful and fun.

Q. Please talk about Lightwell. There has been much wailing about it on priest forums. Are you intent on keeping it in?
A. Lightwell is complicated because it deals very much with the healing philosophy we’re trying to resurrect in Cataclysm. Remember when your raid would make a conscious effort to survive before doing damage, would bring stacks of bandages and use them throughout the fight to save their healers mana? Lightwell is very strong – if not overpowered – in that environment.

Q. I'm excited about the Smite mechanic in Disc. Are you going to do anything about hit so that mechanic can be effective?
A. We had a talent to give you a bunch of spell hit in a beta build, but spell hit on your offensive spells is a hard sell in the new talent model. But yes, we want to do something about spell hit for the Discipline Archangel specialization, possibly move up Twisting Faith to a tier that Discipline can obtain it in Shadow (so your spirit would convert to hit as Discipline/Shadow sub-specialization).

Q. Why is Vampiric Touch being changed back after the 3.0 Replenishment revamp?
A. Talents like these are still in development flux. Players should expect most abilities to stay generally the same as they are today. For example, when revamping the trees we changed some ranks of talents down from five points to three, and didn’t re-balance the talent for three points. Most five-pointers that become three-pointers will be as strong as they were when they were five-pointers.

Rogue

Q. How do you optimize the sub-specialization choices for an Assassination rogue? Some needed talents are not reachable in the current trees.
A. Right now you have to spend too many talent points to get all the “essential” Assassination talents. You end up taking pretty much the entire bottom half of the tree. In the next build, things have been streamlined a little so that you should be able to credibly take spend 31 points there.

Q. Recuperate makes me feel like a tiny unkillable god of death. ...you aren't going to nerf this are you?
A. Wait, but it doesn’t make you hit harder, so how can it be overpowered?

Q. The Combat tree seems really lackluster; i was taking talents like +armor and Recuperate to fill up my tree. Any plans to buff it?
A. If you were able to spend all 41 points on nothing but increasing your damage, we’d consider that a failure in our current design, because those would be the only choices. But with “utility”; talents there’s no clear answer -- some rogues, even serious raiding min/max types, might have preferred to be able to use Sprint more often rather than taking Reinforced Leather, for example. In the end, we’ll make sure you’re able to do the damage you need to do, in order to have fun and feel competitive in all aspects of the game.

Q. What's the plan to give Subtlety some pressure versus plate? A slow-ticking Rupture isn't going to cut it. Shadow damage during Dance?
A. That’s an interesting idea. Subtlety is probably going to end up as the lowest-damage of the three rogue specializations to make up for its superior mobility, but that doesn’t mean it's harmless, either. And no, Rupture isn’t intended to be the PvP solution to that situation.

Q. How does Smoke Bomb help me take on a Frost mage? Isn't Blizzard a pretty trivial counter to keep me in combat?
A. Keep you in combat, perhaps. But Frostbolt you? Polymorph you to stop you from killing the stunned healer that you just shrouded in smoke? Nope!

Shaman

Q. How does Deep Healing work? Will it heal severely less at high health that it is difficult to keep a target at a safe level of health?

A. No, view it as a perk that boosts your heals when that extra healing is most needed. It’s a class-specific bonus, so healing overall won’t be balanced around the expectation that Deep Healing applies.

Q. Are there any plans of making totems utility only (e.g. Earthbind, Grounding) and turning buff totems into auras or cast buffs?
A. Not at this time. We’re aware of the concerns regarding the use of buff totems among some shaman, but the positional aspect is something that we consider inherent to the nature of totems. By increasing totem durations, consolidating some buff totems, and introducing the multi-drop totem spells in Wrath of the Lich King, we’ve attempted to mitigate as much of the inconvenience as possible, while preserving the core gameplay of paying attention to where totems are being dropped.

Q. With Elemental Fury becoming a passive for Elemental shaman, will Enhancement be seeing more physical based damage?
A. Spells like Lava Burst and shocks will always be a big part of Enhancement’s damage, but yes, we’d like weapon attacks like Stormstrike and Lava Lash to be a larger part of Enhancement Shamans’ damage in Cataclysm. N.B.: Mental Quickness is getting a boost to help compensate for the loss of Elemental Fury.

Q. Will Spirit Link make a return after all? Ghostcrawler mentioned he'd like to bring it back, but no sighting of it yet.
A. Anything’s possible, but at this point it isn’t looking good for our beloved talent…. If we changed it to be an absorb or a different sort of mechanic, then it wouldn’t be the iconic Spirit Link that we all remember from Warcraft III. But that core damage-sharing mechanic poses major design and balance challenges (e.g. does a rogue really want to start taking damage suddenly because the shaman in his group decided to link him to the tank?).

Q. With the new implemented Lava Surge, will Chain Lightning become useful for multiple mobs only?
A. It always has had, and will continue to have, some niche use as a gap-filler against single targets when Lava Burst has around a second left on its cooldown. Lava Surge won’t always proc, but it’s likely to be more of a multi-target ability, yes.

Q. Do you consider Primal Wisdom or Shamanistic Rage "required" so Enhancement shaman won't run out of mana? Is running out of mana intended to be a danger?
A. Yes, once high-level Enhancement shaman have all their abilities and are using them in sequence, Primal Wisdom will be required to sustain a rotation. We’d like to let shaman use Shamanistic Rage for survival or emergency situations, rather than assuming rotational use for mana.

Warlock

Q. What are you planning for Doomguard and Infernal? That Demonology talent is quite... strange.
A. Look now, they are now… Diamonds. I mean, guardians. The Doomguard does strong ranged damage and the Infernal is good for area-of-effect damage. They're shared cooldowns, so it's your choice which you want to use. 10-minute cooldown. No more stones or figurines!

Q. Any plans to alleviate Affliction's target-switching woes? Bane of Havoc used to be in reach of all specializations. Now it's only for Destruction.
A. Maaaybe.

Q. You've stated warlock trees have a way to go. Any plans you'd like to share? Early Demonology in specific seems really boring.
A. The first two tiers of all specializations are intended to be what we call “scaling talents,” or general percentage modifiers on abilities. Consider them entry-level talents -- easy to understand for newer players and good sub-specialization candidates. That said, a lot of early Demonology talents have changed in an upcoming build.

Q. Can Master Summoner become default for all warlocks? 6-second cast time is long enough for a pet.
A. But how often are you summoning a pet? You can also use a shard to summon one instantly. We want killing a warlock's pet in PvP to be a meaningful investment of time and effort, and likewise we want summoning/resurrecting your pet to be a meaningful investment of time and effort.

Q. Can we finally have Soul Link baseline, or at least give each tree its own defense mechanic so that we aren't forced into Demonology for PvP?
A. It is a possibility, we’re still talking about it.

Q. How will the Demon Soul talent work? Is it like a replacement for Demonology's Metamorphosis, another cooldown to pop, or...?
A. While Demonology has potentially two (with Metamorphosis and Demonic Empowerment), warlocks in general usually don’t have a power-up ability they can cast for burst damage in PvP or PvE. This is what it is intended to be.

Warrior

Q: What do you think warriors will be more unique for in PvP now that Mortal Strike is available to other classes and reduced to 20%?
A. We don’t think warriors need a unique ability that is so awesome that you just have to have a warrior on your Arena team. That is bad mojo for all the other classes. We do want warriors to be useful in PvP, however. One ability we are trying out for Arms is "Throwdown," which lets them knock an opponent to the ground for five seconds. Since it’s usable in Battle Stance, they can also use it as a Pummel in a pinch.

Q: You mentioned Disarming Glare isn't likely to make it. Could you expand on this a bit?
A. We cut it in exchange for the Throwdown talent above.

Q: Hi, it's me Rend! I'm sort of terrible, but if tanks are having to use me in Cataclysm, may I be a good ability now?!
A. Get back to the back of the bus, Rend.
In all seriousness, though, we don’t want Rend to be the answer to Protection warrior threat. It isn’t going to keep mobs glued to you. We do think we have room to boost its damage though, even for warriors with a DPS specialization. One change we’ve made is letting it do a tick of damage immediately, so that you see and feel damage right on the application instead of waiting for the first tick.

Q: Why does Fury have two 31-point talents? Wouldn't it be simpler to merge them so one doesn't have to re-specialize when new weapons drop?
A. We view swapping from two-handed to one-handed weapons as more of a play style choice than swapping from mace to axe because the axe has more DPS. You are rarely going to be in a situation where a boss drops two one-handed weapons that are superior to your two-handed weapon.
We expect the player to decide which type of dual wielder they are and collect weapons and gear that fit that type.

Q: How is Heroic Leap working so far? Is it progressing better than your last attempt at putting it in-game?
A. We’re pretty happy with it so far. The version we have right now lets the warrior target where they want to leap, so they can use it as an escape tool as well. We all know paladins would never retreat from a battle, but warriors have been known to do so.

Q: Will Whirlwind still be a part of a Fury warrior's rotation on single mobs or will it be multi-mobs only?
A. Multiple mobs only.

Q: Concussion Blow is rarely used these days outside of PvP. Any plans for it? Will you unlink it from Vigilance?
A. It’s pretty useful on Mr. Lich King….

Q: Are Fury Warriors still going to see a new attack to fill the loss of Whirlwind? Any insight?
A. Yes! It’s called Raging Blow (at least for the moment), because we wanted to distance is a little from the old Enraged Assault. It's Fury-only and can only be used when Enraged, but does not consume the Enrage. It does indeed strike with both weapons (including the animation).

Q. Slam's design is pretty archaic and not very fun. Is there any chance of Slam becoming an instant-attack baseline ability?

A. We think it makes the ability feel different. Slam as an instant attack isn’t very different from some of the other attacks. As it’s designed though, Fury shouldn’t use Slam at all without procs and Arms should only use it with the Improved Slam talent. We tried (briefly) making Slam a low-level ability, but weren’t happy with it.

Q. Will rend (sigh) be refreshed by Thunderclap on all targets used with Blood and Thunder?
A. Yes. The idea is that you Rend once and then Thunder Clap from then on. We still hope it’s an optional talent, not the only way warriors can AoE tank.

Non-Class/Talent Questions

Q: What are your thoughts on there being guild housing as a possible guild leveling reward?
A. Our design dilemma with guild housing relates to what players might do in a guild house. If you generally hang out there, and have vendors and banks and Auction House access, then you stay there all the time and it makes the cities feel pretty dead. In a game with instanced dungeons and now phases, we are reluctant to provide more reasons for players to not see other players. It’s a social game! If we can come up with a good role for guild houses then we’ll definitely do them in the future.

Q: Any word on that cosmetic Tree of Life Form glyph? Some players are sad to lose Tree of Life Form completely.
A. The only new glyph we are ready to announce right now is the Glyph of Divine Shield, which reduces the cast time of your Hearthstone whenever Divine Shield is active.

Q: So, Worgen get top hats, and that's awesome. Are there any plans to give Goblins something cool? Maybe those sunglasses?
A. Quadruple pigtails maybe?

Q: Will WoW ever get a new weapon type?
A. Tauren will be able to dual-wield gnomes on a stick.

Q: I don't care about Real ID, new talent points, or ponies, but I must have a double rainbow in a city so all can bask in its glory!
A. Due to company policy, I’m afraid we must reserve all rainbows for our friends working on Diablo III.

Q: Let's talk fashion. Any chance we could get a tophat AND monocle to display at the same time?
A. Why, yes. Indubitably. Tut-tut, my good chap and cheerio!

Q: Are there any plans to add Ghostcrawler in-game as a critter or elite crab?
A. Ghostcrawler would be very emo were he to gaze down from his Throne of Lies and behold the mass crustacean slaughter that would result in having more manifestations of his persona in the game.

Q. Will there be account-wide Achievements? If so, can we expect to see things like vanity gifts for having multiple characters?
A. It’s an idea we definitely want to do, but it’s pretty challenging technically, so it’s not on the immediate horizon. We can’t promise anything obviously, but I wouldn’t feel the need to get difficult Achievements on more than one character on the same account.

Q. With each expansion boss mechanics become more and more complex. Don't you think that bosses will be overcomplicated soon?
A. We have a lot of players who have been killing bosses for six years now. We think we need to keep it fresh for them. Having normal vs. Hard modes is our way of making sure the complexity doesn’t make those fights inaccessible for some players.

Q: What size shoes does Ghostcrawler wear?
A. I generally go barefoot on the yacht. Around on the office, I am often carried on gnome palanquin, so shoes are not required.

Answers to Common Community Questions About Real ID™

Since the launch of the Real ID™ system in World of Warcraft®, we’ve received a number of questions from the community about our plans for the service, features like StarCraft® II’s Facebook® integration, and how we see Real ID evolving in the future. We've been keeping tabs on the conversations on our forums, social media sites, and fansites, and have compiled some of the most common questions to answer for you here. We hope you find this information helpful, and we look forward to hearing your feedback and continuing the conversation in the thread below.

Q: Do you have any plans to allow players to not show their real name to friends of friends while using the Real ID system?
A: As with any new feature we add to our games, we've been evaluating how Real ID has been used since its release to identify new functionality that would help improve our players’ experience. The in-game Real ID “friends of friends” list is designed to give players a convenient way to populate their Real ID friends list with other players they know and trust in real life, allowing them to quickly and easily send Real ID friend requests to these people without having to enter their Battle.net® account names. However, we recognize that some players would prefer not to be displayed on friends lists in this fashion, so we plan to include an option that will allow players to opt out of appearing on their Real ID friends’ “friends of friends” lists. We're anticipating this feature to be available for StarCraft II shortly after release of the game, and World of Warcraft at around the same time -- we’ll have more information for you in the coming weeks.

Q: What are your plans for Facebook integration?
A: With regard to Facebook, our goal is to help Blizzard gamers on Battle.net more easily connect to their real-life friends and family. For the launch of StarCraft II, we are introducing an optional Facebook friend finder feature to help achieve this goal. The friend finder enables players who decide to use it to easily populate their Battle.net friends list by sending Real ID friend requests to the people on their Facebook friends list who have Battle.net accounts. We hope players will find this feature convenient, but it's completely optional. In the long term, we hope to give players who use Facebook some fun, and also optional, ways to share what they're doing in Blizzard games with their friends, similar to the optional World of Warcraft Armory integration now available, but we don’t have any specific plans to share at present.

Q: How does the friend finder in StarCraft II work? What's sent to Facebook?
A: When you use the Add a Friend feature in StarCraft II, one of the options you’ll see is to search your Facebook friends list for people who also have Battle.net accounts in order to quickly send them Real ID friend requests. When you click this button, you'll be asked to enter your Facebook login information, and you’ll then see a list of your Facebook friends who also have Battle.net accounts. You’ll then have the option to send any of these Facebook friends a Real ID friend request in-game. (Keep in mind that for someone to appear on the list, their Battle.net account email address must match their Facebook email address. In addition, you’ll see the names of any Facebook friends who have registered Battle.net accounts, regardless of whether they have Blizzard games attached to their account or just, for example, created the Battle.net account to make a purchase on the online Blizzard Store.)

It’s important to note that Blizzard Entertainment does not share any personal information with Facebook as part of this process. Keep in mind that as with other Real ID features such as the “friends of friends” list, our goal with the friend finder feature is to create convenient options to help players easily find people they know in real life on Battle.net without having to remember email addresses or account names. We hope players will find the feature easy to use and convenient.

Q: How can I prevent World of Warcraft add-ons from accessing Real ID first and last names without my knowledge?
A: As always, we recommend that you get your UI add-ons through reliable sources. It’s important to note that without installing a UI add-on specifically designed to retrieve that information, there’s no risk of it being accessed. On our end, we’re looking into the issue and are at work on some changes that we can make to help protect against these types of add-ons. We’ll provide further details as soon as we have more information to share.

Q: Are you secretly trying to build a social gaming platform with the new Battle.net?
A: It’s no secret -- as we’ve discussed openly since we first started sharing our plans about the new Battle.net, one of our goals is for it to serve as a social gaming service for Blizzard gamers. This was a deliberate and open design decision, driven 100% by the desire to create an even better online experience for our players by giving them powerful tools to compete with and stay connected to their real-life friends and family.

Q: If my account was compromised, what information about my Real ID friends would a hacker have access to?
A: We take account security very seriously, and we offer a number of ways to help players keep their account secure, including the Battle.net Authenticator and the free Battle.net Mobile Authenticator app, available for a wide range of mobile devices. Aside from your friends’ first and last names, no other personal information is shared through the in-game Real ID system.

Q: What’s a StarCraft II "character code"?
A: When you first log in to StarCraft II, you’re prompted to choose a single character name. This is the only name you’ll use on Battle.net, and it’s tied to your StarCraft II license. In order to allow players to select any name they wish regardless of whether another player is already using the same name, we then generate and assign a three-digit character code that uniquely identifies the player. When posting on the forums of the new StarCraft II community site, players will be posting using their StarCraft II character name and character code.

Q: Will the new StarCraft II forum posting name format (character name + character code) carry over into the forum communities of other Blizzard games?
A: Following our recent decision to no longer use real first and last names on Blizzard forums, we’re still evaluating how we’ll move forward with our other forums. Our ultimate goal is still to promote constructive conversations and improve the overall forum experience for our players, and we think increasing accountability is an important part of achieving that. StarCraft II already uses a character name and character code combo in-game, which serves as a unique player identifier and fits well with our goal for the forums. World of Warcraft handles player identification differently, so we still need to determine whether adding a character code system like in StarCraft II is the best solution. Ultimately, we want to come up with a system that makes sense for each community and fits our long-term vision for the forums.

Q: Are there any plans to change the in-game Real ID system so that players will have the option to display an assigned user name instead of their real names?
A: The Real ID system is designed to help real-life friends and family who decide to use it keep in touch with each other across Blizzard games, and our goal in using real names is to ensure that players will be able to maintain long-term, meaningful relationships on the service for years to come. One way it helps make that happen is by eliminating the need to remember who, for example, "Thrall123" really is when you see him or her pop up on your friends list again after months -- or years -- of being offline. Ultimately, we think this is the best way to ensure players who use Real ID are able stay connected with the people they enjoy playing with most in the long-term, and we don’t currently have any plans to change the system so it can be used with character names or alternate handles instead. That said, Battle.net is a living, breathing service that we will continue to evolve over time as we evaluate how players are using it and identify new ways to improve the experience.

Q: What plans are there to improve moderation since the use of real names on the forums has been changed?
A: Our new community sites’ forums, beginning with the StarCraft II site, will have an improved moderation system as well as a post-rating system which will help our players promote the conversations they find the most constructive, as well as help forum moderators identify quality discussions. This, coupled with the unique StarCraft II character name and code, will help us to create a more positive atmosphere based on community interaction and accountability.

World of Warcraft Cataclysm Beta Patch Notes - Build #12479

2010-07-15T13:36:00.000-07:00

Patch notes listed here are not comprehensive and will be changed throughout the testing process.

General

The Alliance starting experience for Worgen is available. Venture through the cursed lands of Gilneas to discover your true path! Currently the female worgen character is not available for testing.
The Horde starting experience for Goblin is available. Beginning on the Isle of Kezan in a goblin paradise, players will face a treacherous road ahead!
The level cap for all characters is 83.
Players may use our Character Copy feature for copying existing characters to beta realms, or may choose from high-level pre-made template characters.

Zones

Mount Hyjal and Vashj'ir, two new level 78-82 zones, are available for testing. Deepholm, a new level 82-83 zone is available for testing. Players may find their way to these zones by speaking with temporary teleportation NPCs located in any major city.
The level ranges of Gilneas and the The Lost Isles are in the process of being adjusted slightly. Creature, quest, and quest reward levels are all being altered so that players finish questing in these zones roughly by level 12. Further fine tuning will continue in future content updates.
Several zones have had quest maps integrated.
- Eastern Kingdoms
  - Arathi Highlands, Blasted Lands, The Cape of Stranglethorn, Dun Morogh, Duskwood, Elwynn Forest, Hinterlands, Loch Modan, Northern Stranglethorn, Northshire, Redridge Mountains, Tirisfal Glades, Western Plaguelands and Westfall are ready for testing.
- Kalimdor
  - Most zones in Kalimdor are available for testing, though work continues on polishing the quest experience and flow, as well as zone aesthetics.

Dungeons & Raids

Teleportation NPCs in Stormwind, Orgrimmar, and Dalaran can transport players to any available new dungeons, including players who are ghosts.
Blackrock Caverns, a new level 79-81 five-player dungeon, is available for testing.
Throne of the Tides, a new level 79-81 five-player dungeon, is partially available for testing.

Classes: General

Ammo has been removed from the game.
The character levels at which classes gain new spells and abilities have changed.
The glyph system is in the process of being altered. Existing glyphs may not be fully supported or functional.
Many item and class stats have been changed or removed.
Rage has been normalized.
Spells and abilities no longer have multiple ranks and now scale with character level.
A first pass on new talent trees has been implemented.
- Each specialization has been reduced to a 31-point talent tree.
- Players will now get a total of 41 talent points to spend.
- 31 points must be spent in the primary specialization tree before any points can be placed in additional trees.
- Players will be asked to choose a specialization at level 10. Doing so will result in the unlocking of a spell or ability unique to that specialization, as well as one or more passive bonuses.
- While this is a first pass on all of the talent trees, death knight, druid, paladin, warlock, Arcane mage, and Assassination rogue trees are not as far along as other specializations.
- More information regarding our plans for talent trees can be found on our Cataclysm forum.

Death Knight

A dedicated tanking tree has been implemented.
The way in which runes recharge has changed.

Druid

A new Eclipse mechanic has been added for druids. The feature is functional, but the interface art is still a work in-progress.

Hunter

Five pets can now be stored with the hunter at all times. Any one of these five pets can be summoned via the Call Pet ability.
Focus has replaced mana as a new resource.
Hunters now start with a pet at level 1.
The Stable will now store 20 pets. If a pet is moved into the Stable, its talents are wiped.

Paladin

We are in the process of overhauling many paladin talents, spells and abilities. Expect updates in upcoming patches.

Warlock

Soul Shards have been removed from the game as items. Instead, they now exist as a resource system necessary for using, or altering the mechanics of certain spells.

User Interface

The ability to use third-party addons has been temporarily disabled for the test environment.
The Arena Teams pane has been improved.
Auto-quests have been added to the game. Players will automatically be given an auto-quest by entering specific areas in the game world. This alert will appear distinctly in the Objectives pane via the Advanced Quest Tracking feature. These quests will still be given to players with full Quest Logs, but will count toward the 25 total allotted quests if the log is not full.
The Character pane has been redesigned. Character stats can now be shown or hidden via the Show All Details/Hide All Details button on the bottom left. When shown, all character stats will be visible in a window to the right of the pane. Stat sections can be reorganized by clicking and dragging them up or down the pane.
The Professions panes now have more filtering and search functionality, as well as buttons to easily link recipes in the chat frame.
Many of the yellow System Messages that would display in the chat frame when leveling up have been removed.
New text animations now alert players as they level up, also providing information on when new talents, spells and abilities are available.
Professions and Class Trainers windows have been altered to more clearly display available and upcoming purchases.
The Spellbook interface has been improved for greater ease-of-use and visual appeal.

Graphics

Experimental support for DX11 (can be enabled by passing ‘-d3d11’ on the command line or adding SET gxApi "d3d11" to the Config.WTF file).
OpenGL Hardware Cursor support (can be enabled on the Video Resolution Panel).
Improved water and lava rendering system (enabled by the Liquid Detail slider on the Video Effects Panel)
- 0 = Classic Water
- 1 = New Water (fake reflections)
- 2 = New Water (ocean has real reflection for terrain)
These values are likely to change during Beta.
Dynamic Sunshafts effect (enabled by the Sunshafts option on the Video Effects Panel).

Known Issues

Selecting high Liquid Detail when using Geforce 6 & 7 series video cards will currently prevent lava and water from rendering properly. You can temporarily restore liquid to the world by reducing the Liquid Detail setting via the Video Effects Panel, or by typing “waterDetail 0” in your Config.WTF file.

The Point of RealID and How to Stop It.

2010-07-08T09:49:00.000-07:00

The Point of RealID and How to Stop It by pokute

If you want to stop RealID, you'd have to first understand the reasoning behind its implementation. Activizzard is not the least bit concerned about consumer privacy nor trolls. What it does care about is money, mountains and mountains of it.

Blizzard's strategy in at least the last five years have been in large part trying to recreate their success with Starcraft in South Korea in other regions (most notably China and United States). China's a bit off topic, so I'll skip it. Starcraft took the form of competitive sports in South Korea, so Blizzard tried to push WoW arena as a competitive sport when WoW attained the popularity potential in the US. Even Blizzcon is marketed as a pop culture spectacle instead of the usual "convention-style" marketing.

What Blizzard didn't anticipate fully was just how deep the cultural trench against video games is (it being a thing for young boys to play in America and nothing more despite all evidence to the contrary). Even though millions of Americans were playing WoW, not enough were openly discussing and mindlessly praising WoW to truly bring it into the mainstream, often due to players' fears they would be looked down upon, or even jeopardizing their social life and careers.

The point behind constructing battle.net 2.0 was to bring all of their customers under one banner, and the next step would be to firmly plant that banner in social networks. While this may seem like your typical superfluous Facebook integration, the key difference is that Activizzard understands how social networks work.

While some of us may idealize social networks as tools for making new friends and sharing new experiences, the reality is much more... stupid. The main mass of that social networking ball that determines its current obsessions and direction are composed of pathologically vain and codependent individuals, basically people who love to think themselves as leaders when they are followers in every way. This group generally operates on two primordial principles

us versus them
monkey-see-monkey-do

By bringing the big three Blizzard franchises of Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo under BNet 2.0, Activizzard has created, without a doubt, the critical mass of players needed to generate the initial wave of buzz. All that is left is to ensure the visibility of this massive following.

Now THIS is where RealID comes into play. Activizzard is planning to make it virtually impossible for you to hide the fact that you're playing on BNet 2.0. By publically outing its entire player base, the goal is to blur the us versus them boundary on Blizzard games. Imagine as people who wistfully shook their heads at video games suddenly find their relatives, friends, trusted employees, colleagues, and bosses to all be playing on this newfangled "BNet2" thing. With sustained releases of Starcraft 2 followed by WoW: Cataclysm, then SC2 Part 2, then probably Diablo 3 and so on, Activizzard can keep BNet tag alive and kicking on social networks for years to come. As the appearance that "everybody's on BNet" spreads, monkey-see-monkey-do will kick in without fail.

There was a submission a while back about some Facebook user defending Farmville as "not a video game" so "it's okay to play." While this may seem like hypocritical nonsense to anyone who's not a blithering idiot, it is also the type of blind cultural acceptance Activizzard hopes to engender for BNet 2.0.

I must admit that I didn't check into whether or not that particular post was true or made up, but from my experiences on social networks, I find the story quite believable. In fact, I would say it is incredibly common to find arguments and individuals of this caliber on Facebook. Unfortunately for us, these are also the people that BNet 2.0 aims to bring into the fold.

I know some of you will feel this sounds like a conspiracy theory. All I can say to that is that brilliant pieces of mass marketing often do sound like that.

So what does this mean for people who want to stop RealID? Well, you better start working very hard on a massive scare compaign against BNet 2.0 for Activizzard's new target market. Quitting the game, angry e-mails, posting on forums and news aggregate sites will make no difference. Only a successful first strike on BNet's reputation on Facebook will give Activizzard pause. Even then, I'm not sure how long it'd be before they sneak RealID right back in. They've already made firm investments in this endeavor.

Source

Rumor: Blizzard had no say in Real ID changes, employees as pissed about it as we are

2010-07-08T08:31:00.001-07:00

From the wow forums:

Got in touch with my ex-flatmate, whose sister works as a GM for Blizzard, to see what the internal buzz on this was. Apparently, at the moment the employees are largely as pissed as the players, and she stated that despite attempts to keep it hushed, it has become known that the big creative players within Blizzard are pretty much as unhappy about this as we are. Everybody has been told they are not free to comment on this situation outside of specially prepared statements.

It's still going ahead, however (and here's where in-house rumours and hearsay really start coming into play): from what they've picked up, the Blizzard leads have been told in no uncertain terms that the non-gameplay-related direction of the game is working to a different blueprint now. GC and company are free to play with shiny new talent trees all they like, for example, but for the first time the decisions regarding Battle.net implementation, Real ID, and plans for the general acquisition of new players for the business are no longer in Blizzard's own hands, and that's not going down too well.

Source: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=25712374700&sid=1&pageNo=1792#35821

Players Outrage At Blizzard Forums Incoming Change

2010-07-07T04:55:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Blizzard announced that all forums posts will eventually be done using your real first name and last name. This has caused a huge outrage among players as many fear for ID theft, account security, and even for their life!

Here's the blizzard post:

Recently, we introduced our new Real ID feature -www.battle.net/realid/ , a new way to stay connected with your friends on the new Battle.net. Today, we wanted to give you a heads up about our plans for Real ID on our official forums, discuss the design philosophy behind the changes we’re making, and give you a first look at some of the new features we’re adding to the forums to help improve the quality of conversations and make the forums an even more enjoyable place for players to visit.

For more details read more in this thread- Battle.net - English Forums -> Battle.net Update: Upcoming Changes to Forums

This thread that was only posted today has already received well over 152 pages of comments! Many of them are of outrage and some of agreement. Here's some of the points made over the thread.

It will reduce trolling and flaming
At the moment all you need to change someone's password is their email and first and last name, and now Blizzard is just handing them out!
ID theft
The fact that the internet is meant to be anonymous and separate from real life
Many players play the game to get away from the real world but this brings them closer to it

The very first post in the thread is one such example of the outrage:

Okay this is a TERRIBLE idea. I've been the victim of identify theft once before and so I am VERY private online now, I use NOTHING but aliases, I will not pay for anything that can't be done through PayPal, etc. Now you're wanting to put my REAL NAME on PUBLIC FORUMS?! I wouldn't mind making us select our main character to always have displayed so no1 can troll anymore, but JESUS! I know alot of people are going to just simply STOP using the forums when you do this, you're not bringing us together, you're making us all too afraid to interect with eachother out of fear of identity theft and the like. So now people who want to add me to their friend list will have my login Email, my real name, etc... ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!

I use realid, I like realid, I don't hand it out to anyone I don't know or trust, just like my real name. Hell, there are people and classmates in my real life that only know me by 'Dagoth' because I don't hand out my real name to just anyone.

What about people who play this game that might be in witness protection or worse?

I'm in witness protection for testifying in a trial that sent a man to death, and his family swore to send me to my death too, so I will be deleting every single post I've ever made in FEAR for MY VERY LIFE.

Thank you blizzard for possibly putting my life in danger, thank you SO VERY MUCH.

(leaving this post to delete last the day before these changes hit, so blizz maybe sees it and realize that they have made a grave mistake.)

please Please PLEASE don't do this! I guarantee you'll be tearing apart your community more than bringing us together. If this change goes through, it better not be retroactive to all previous posts, otherwise you better delete all previous posts ever made.

Edit: my first 'First!' in over 6 years! lol

Edit 2: after reading the actual link /RANT

Oh and Edit 3: Is anyone starting to get a really nervous 'Star Wars Galaxies' vibe from Blizzard now? I'd really hate to have to jump ship from all the Blizzard games I love so much because they start to implement incompetent changes that drive everyone away.

Many players of World of Warcraft are starting to wonder what is wrong with Blizzard, as they seem to keep making choices without any regard for player input! Many players consider Blizzard making the game worse and worse. Hopefully cataclysm will fix this.

To see the thread you can look here : Battle.net Update: Upcoming Changes to Forums
This change is bound to affect the World of Warcraft forums greatly, as many will stop posting all together, and use other non-official forums instead. The forums will probably decline greatly in activity once this change is implemented.

If Blizzard keeps making changes the players don't like what will happen? What is your opinion on this change and how do you think this will affect the MMO world?

Sources:
Upcoming Changes to Forums
Battle.net Upcoming Changes to Forums

Landro's Gift = infinite sellable mounts: Spectral Tigers, X-51 Rockets, and Bears

2010-07-06T05:53:00.000-07:00

Ages ago I read of how some patches would sometimes reroll container contents, so while I cannot find the original post, this is an extension and explanation of what I have done with that information.

The newest TCG Loot Cards contain a card called Landro's Gift which can be redeemed for Landro's Gift Box in game: Landro's Gift Box

Do not auto loot them as you will destroy the container, you can take out items you want down to one to keep the container intact. Then if you server or faction transfer, they will be rerolled to provide more or different items. A few times the tier one loot in them did not change but they spawned extra mounts. I have tested it over ten times (spent over $300 now I guess) to make sure this is repeatable and constant.

Each box will contain one old tier one loot and the possibility of only one mount and only the ones on this list:

Reins of the Swift Spectral Tiger
Reins of the Spectral Tiger
X-51 Nether-Rocket X-TREME
X-51 Nether-Rocket
Big Battle Bear
Riding Turtle - You can't sell this as it's BoP

Other things of note:
You will not see a mount that you already know!
This will work on any level character, so you could have a level 10 server swapping all the time with an inventory and bank full of boxes and they will still have the chance to receive any mount without the level or riding ability to use it.

Also, all the mounts are unique, so once you pull one from a box you will need to pass it to an alt before you can see another one if it appears in a box. With containers, if multiple contain unique items you will not see the item if it exists in your inventory. So you can check all the boxes without removing anything and see what your stock of mounts is.

This also works for any other container you have. I received the Malygos mount from Cache of the Ley-Guardian, a Bear from the Hyldnir Spoils, and the Drake from the Oracle eggs.

You can continue to do this as long as your wallet and account can handle it to get all the mounts you like for whatever reason you want them.

TL : DR VERSION:
Get Landro's Gift boxes, don't auto loot them to pull out mounts, server or faction change that character, repeat.

Cataclysm Beta Highlights!

2010-07-05T11:03:00.000-07:00

BlizzCon beta codes appear to be working for Cataclysm, meaning if you have one that's unused, you should be able to redeem it at http://www.worldofwa...eta-signup.html. Thanks to one of our readers for the tip on this, originating from this post on the EU forums. Keep in mind this is only for codes currently unused; if you used it in the past to get into TBC or WotLK betas then it can't be redeemed again

TOP HATS

Do I really need to say more? Cataclysm is introducing the best item ever: the top hat. [Lord Walden's Top Hat] is a quest reward during the Worgen starting experience, which sadly is Bind on Pickup. Still, you'll be the talk of the town with this marvellous piece of equipment.

Garrosh Hellscream's New Model

While you've probably already seen this elsewhere based on modelviewer screenshots, there's something to be said about seeing a new character model within the game for the first time -- especially where it belongs. This is Garrosh Hellscream's new model, rightly staking claim to the throne within Grommash Hold in Orgrimmar.

Cataclysm User Interface Changes!

It's A Town-In-A-Box

Goblin ingenuity at its finest -- they've managed to fit an entire town in a box. This quest hub is phased in after completing the initial, smaller island in The Lost Isles. You ride a rocket over to the larger island and must set off a pile of explosives to open the Town-In-A-Box.

Mechanical Sharks, WITH FREAKIN' LASERS

The title should say it all. A quest where you pilot a mechanical shark with a laser, to kill another shark. How amazing is that?

Cataclysm Beta Class Changes!

Below you can find all of the class previews for World of Warcraft: Cataclysm. These previews took place in early April, 2010 and shed light on new spells being introduced, talent tree changes, the mastery details for each talent tree, and any new or changed mechanics for the class.

Death Knight
Druid
Hunter
Mage
Paladin
Priest
Rogue
Shaman
Warlock
Warrior

500g-1000g and 2,000,000+ XP per hour as mage

2010-07-04T11:33:00.000-07:00

The Ultimate Mage Exploiteer is back!

Todays Exploit: Killing Cultists in Corp'Rethar!

They come in packs of 54 and are immune to slows, have 37,800 health, and run faster than you.

How to: Without the quest 'Tirions Gambit' this goes somewhat slowly. Just pull the packs, living bomb everything in sight, and keep running. Blink keeps your distance just enough to outpace them. Ignite and talents should keep your mana at 100%. The only important thing to know is after they group up tightly if you're hit once you're dead. Kaput. This nets about 1,000,000 XP per hour for grouped, unrested XP.

How to: With the quest 'Tirions Gambit', this goes very quickly. Pull the end of both sides as normal, but let the spawned Ebon Knights take agro. As they do, or a few seconds before they do, put down a flamestrike, Mirror Image, and start blizzarding. You gain 100% XP and 100% loot. My friend gained 2500 XP per kill at 71 and 2800 XP per kill at 72, so the closer to 80 you are you should be getting better XP (guessing about 5k, which would put it at 8,000,000 XP per hour rested, ungrouped). I've also got about 500g from the drops, and we were both looting, so I would say 1000g or so ungrouped.

If you're powerleveling someone else, I've found that having them hover in the air works (about 1/2 a bar per pull unrested, grouped).

Enjoy it while it lasts!

Ancient Greece Reference at Azure Watch in Azuremyst Isle

2010-06-30T05:03:00.000-07:00

This was just a interesting find that I came across while leveling my Draenei Paladin. While looking at map I saw a place called "Odesyus' Landing" reference to great hero Odysseus. I thought nothing more of it, maybe just coincidence. While turning in a quest at Azure Watch I looked at the Quest givers name. It was "Menelaous", King of Spartas name was Menelaus. Seeing this I roamed around the watch post. Inside the inn theres a Innkeeper that goes by the name of "Chellen", take away the "C" and you have Hellen. Beloved Queen of Sparta. Funny enough my characters name was Apolloslight.

And I just found the Hero himself "Admiral Odesyus"

2 Chain Lightning Exploits for shaman

2010-06-28T01:34:00.000-07:00

1st exploit: Chain Lightning's chain between 2 enemies does not count as an aoe and does normal damage to "AoE immune" mobs such as Saurfang, Faction Champions

2nd and the cool exploit:
Lightning Overload:
When you cast an Chain Lightning, you have a 33% chance to cast another chain lightning as no mana cost, half damage and no threat.
Lightning Overload can NOT proc on an Lightning Overload
unless:

This is a Normal Chain Lightning
It casts on a mob and chains to another mob and then to another mob

BUT when Chain Lightning chains to a new target, it counts as a NEW chain Lightning and therefore making it possible to proc Lightning overload, like this:

But of course, its a 33% chance on a 33% chance = 4% (without Glyph) for it to proc on a Chained Chain Lightning on a Lightning Overloaded Chain Lightning...

If you are extremely luck and have the glyph, it can look something like:

The addon "ShamanFriend" can track how many times your chain lightning procs a Lightning Overload

Evade mobs with ease

2010-06-25T06:28:00.000-07:00

I found this trick which makes the mobs run away from you much MUCH faster. Like if you are being chased, and you need to shake the mobs away from you, you can:

LEFT-CLICK so you can control your camera without moving your character
Don't move your camera
Spam A and D so you turn slightly left and right all the time
???
PROFIT!

The mobs tries to calculate where you can trying to run to, like if you run left, the mobs will turn a little more left so they can meet you up when you turn or something!
When you spam A and D, the mobs calculate a little late and lags from left to right!

Serverside: you'll see yourself move a little to left and right, nothing more.
Clientside: everybody, including players, sees that you are lagging, first moving to left, then "teleports" to the right.

When you are running through a pack for 4 mobs WITHOUT this bug, you'll get hit approx 7-10 times before you are out of range from them.

WITH this bug, you can get away from the mobs, in a about 1-2 hits

Macro that to your G15 or G13 for increased effect

Cataclysm exploration: temple behind Uldum

2010-06-19T03:43:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the lack of updates on the blog lately, but I have spend most of my time by the computer reading and watching movies about Biowares upcomming MMORPG Star Wars: The old Republic. This morning I did some Cataclysm exploration though. And man did I find some great stuff.

Ladies and gentle men. I present to you: the temple behind Uldum:

And for those of you that haven't seen it, here is a screenshot of the Maelstorm.. Breathtaking stuff that I will post videos of on the facebook page later this weekend.

Yet another gold guide

2010-06-18T07:45:00.000-07:00

Your end game items doesn't sell good on AH? Tired of fight when you farm? Wanna know how ppl make lots of gold? You are in right place !

I skilled up almost every profession in wow and find out that some items sell better than end game items and i will show you how to find them - farm them and sell them
--------------------------------------------
How to read :
{not} = you don't need any profession for it
{miner} = as a miner
--------------------------------------------
1- addons
you will need:

Trashcan ++ Retail players skip this one
Auto Destroy
MultiAuction
BetterInbox
QuickSplit
Scrap

The addons do not change your interface much so you wont feel changes after install but read the info to learn what they do before i say it !
--------------------------------------------
2- in game
you need bags , big bags and empty

are the bags I'm talking about and if you can

it have vendors on it that works Great with scrap addon or any vendor companion
--------------------------------------------

3- information
You need to know what people need and when so you need to learn how to work with Wowhead: Good news, everyone! that serve perfectly as Wowhead: Good news, everyone! to you
--------------------------------------------

4- example
i know Jewelcrafting better than any other profession so open it from link . You know you need mining for jewelcrafting right? What you can see is every item that you can make with it , what it needs and in witch skill.
by clicking link you can earn every single info that you need about them. Things are different in different servers so you better to learn the way I'm doing this and not do exactly as i do. Anything that i skip means either they are not good to farm , sell or skill up. lets start !

{miner}
first item that looks good to farm is Copper Bar they are not that rare but you cant find many miners to go for them so search in AH for price first but if they don't sell well you can always make Bronze Bar that is a little rare . don't say "we knew it" still too soon to close the page .

{miner}
Silver Bar is rarest metal in the wow hard to find but sells good .
{not}
Large Fang can be sold some times but not always having some of them on AH have a chance to make few golds .
{miner}
Mithril Bar is what that can make you lots of gold (more than saronite)
{miner}{not}
Citrine as you can see its used in many recopies .
{not}
Flask of Mojo and Aquamarine my favorite items to farm along Silk Cloth and Mageweave Cloth and many other items in Zul'Farrak and maybe you don't believe but it was my main source of gold for a while ! few runs and lots of things to sell !
{miner}{not}
Huge Emerald and Large Opal are mined along the Thorium Bar very good selling items .
and since here gems rule in skilling so mining and farming in outlands is all about gems and cloth's .
lemme show you a little trick for outlands.

You can buy Purified Draenic Water all over the outlands for 3 silver and sell them for some gold in AH they don't sell a lot but its fun to scam people who don't know how to wowhead like this.
--------------------------------------------

5- collecting
now you know all about what item to collect lets go to how to collect section fast you have 3 addon for this. for example go to Zul'Farrak and configure you addons:

1- Trashcan ++ Retail players skip this one dosent need configure and will automatically delete every gray item to free your bags for better items .
2- Auto Destroy type /ad to open this addon thick its enable and hit the current zone key (it will get your location) set item level to 99 (max) and if you want it delete items by quality there is 2 slider for it .

Note if you want it to delete some item when you loot it just Alt+click on that item in your bags to add it in delete list .

3- Scrap if you have a merchant with you you can skip addon 2 and simply sell everything you don't need . to add items in its list for "1 click to sell" open merchant's window and drag that item to bag icon that it added to merchants . and after that by clicking that bag it will sell all of items in list in a sec .

Now put your loot on auto loot and go pwn some troll . by end of the run you will have lots of item for sale.

--------------------------------------------

6- selling
now take your bags to any AH and open it Ka-BooM there is a 4th tab in AH yes its your new AH addon: MultiAuction that can sell all items in your bags in 1 min or less ! Just select a pricing option and a price then Alt+click on your items in bag then select a time and hit the key ...

--------------------------------------------

7- Gold
Now time has been passed and you have mail ! lots of mail !! don't worry go to mail and enjoy your new mail addon BetterInbox that allow you to take your items , gold or both what ever you are comfortable with .
--------------------------------------------

note : there are many addons that do similar works for you use whatever that you are comfortable with
note : there is no guaranty to sell everything you farm but you got lots of items to sell and you can take your chance so go for it again .
note : i didn't told any price ? well i sell everything for 99 gold doesn't matter what ! prices are up to you and your choose .
note : maybe - maybe - maybe i make some mini guide for other professions and i will ink them here.

Blue Drake farming for tanks - the not-so-random random

2010-06-17T07:47:00.000-07:00

If you want the blue drake from the random heroic oculus run, but you're tired of queueing for a random and never getting oculus, this can help you focus your time. It allows you to be sure that you are going into a heroic oculus group using the random dungeon queue.

Requirements: 1) You must be a tank 2) You must have access to a level 80 healer on a 2nd account

By now you may be able to see where I am going with this. Below is an explanation of the process.

Log into both accounts, 1 tank who wants the drake, 1 healer.
With the healer, queue for a specific dungeon, Heroic Oculus.
When the LFG icon on the minimap shows 1 healer and 3 dps, begin queueing for a random heroic on your tank.

4) If the queue pops on your tank but not on your healer (and it will), click leave queue on the tank and again queue for the random.
5) When it appears as though both the healer and tank's queues have popped simultaneously, click Enter Dungeon on the healer. Wait a moment and see if the tank in the group remains a question mark. Once you are convinced that the tank you are waiting for is yourself, click Enter Dungeon on the tank and !viola! you are in a random heroic oculus on purpose.

Then just leave the group on your healer and find another healer for the group.

Note a variation of tank queueing for oculus and healer queueing for a random might work as well, in fact it might work even better. I have yet to test this however. I doubt you could get this to work while queueing as DPS

EDIT: The scroll bar for editing is broken, so I have to put the edit here. If as in the end of this post it becomes clear that your tank and healer are not about to enter the same dungeon, you can ALT F4 on your healer BEFORE you enter the dungeon, wait about 1 minute, and start queueing again without penalty.

Also, this is not 100% foolproof obviously. There are false alarms, i.e. both queues popping simultaneously even though they are two different dungeons. But even then, your healer ends up getting the debuff as they leave oculus, not your tank. So if you're lucky and have multiple healers on different accounts this would be 'merely a setback!'

Cataclysm: Druid, Priest, Rogue and Shaman Talent Trees

2010-06-11T04:38:00.000-07:00

For those of you who have missed this, Blizzard has released some work-in-progress talent trees to fan-sites for the Druid, Priest, Rogue and Shaman classes. Below are some of the pictures, click the link below for a larger sized image.

Visit this awesome page to use the interactive system set up by wowhead. Otherwise, if you would just like to visit the descriptions of items by themselves, check out this link (incgamers).

It will be interesting to see what further changes will occur and how other classes will be effected.

The Road To Icecrown - A Guide for new 80s

2010-06-06T10:56:00.000-07:00

I know that even with the mass amount of high end raiders on the facebook page, and readers of this blog, but there is still many people out there that are recently 80 but not geared for ICC and several players leveling up as well. So I thought I’d write a guide at how to get geared for ICC as quickly as possible.

You may already know a lot of what’s in this guide, but spend a few minutes (while in queue for a heroic, perhaps?) and you might pick a thing or two up.

Corrections, comments, suggestions, and requests for more information warmly welcomed.

GearScore. What is it and how useful is it?

GearScore is an add-on that assigns a value to items. Theoretically, the better item gets the better score. When a player tells you they have 5000GS, they are referring to the total value of all their items.

Many criticize the add-on, including myself, for being overly simplistic. The ‘lower’ item is not always going to be the worst item (namely with trinkets): use it with caution. It is, however, useful as a general guide in comparing items and players, and useful as a basis on whether you are in the range of gear for a particular instance or not.

If you haven’t already realized it, you’re going to have to increase your GS to get into PUG raids. For this reason, a lot of this guide is focused on increasing your GearScore, which feels dirty as we should really be talking about stats, but GearScore is what the kids look for these days.

When forming a raid, no one cares about your stats anymore, they only want to know your GS. That is why I seem to talk a lot about improving your GS in this guide, even though I don’t like the add-on all that much. But remember: GS will get you into a raid, but you need the stats to perform well!

The other thing I want to point out for the newer 80s out there is Item Level. You want to make sure you have this turned on, as it is a great basis of telling what item is in a higher "tier" if you aren't as great at reading specific stats. Go into Interface settings, Display, and check the box that says "Show Item Levels". Now when you mouse over an item in your inventory (or someone else's) it will display the Item level on it as well, Example would be "Item Level 232" which is T9.

Item Level Guide
200- T7
213- T7.5
219- T8
226- T8.5
232- T9
245- T9.5
251- T10
264- T10.5
277- T10.5 Heroic

THERE ARE OTHER ITEM LEVELS IN THE GAME AS WELL, FOR CERTAIN HEROIC MODES AS WELL, BUT THAT CHART SHOULD GIVE YOU THE BASIS ON WHAT EACH ITEM LEVEL IS EQUIVILLENT TO. Also note that an item level 232 for example, is not necessarily part of the T9 SET.. it is just of an equivillent item level

TALENT BUILDS
I simply dont have the time or in-depth knowledge to list a perfect spec for every class and every role out there in the game today. But what I am going to do is link a site for each class below that has a lot of wonderful information on the speccing and glyphing of each corresponding class.

Clicking the links below will take you to my favorite page for each of the following classes.

WARRIOR BUILD GUIDE
PALADIN BUILD GUIDE
HUNTER BUILD GUIDE
ROGUE BUILD GUIDE
PRIEST BUILD GUIDE
DEATH KNIGHT BUILD GUIDE 1
DEATH KNIGHT BUILD GUIDE 2
SHAMAN BUILD GUIDE
MAGE BUILD GUIDE
WARLOCK BUILD GUIDE
DRUID BUILD GUIDE

Know Your Rotation
Prior to level 80, you can get away with simply casting whatever spell or ability seems good to you and that is all fine and great for leveling, But for raiding you need to establish a "Rotation" which is a sequence of spells or abilities that you use over and over again in order to maximize DPS output. This is mostly crucial for DPS classes, and tanks use them as well. Healers aren't so much into the rotation as they use whatever spell they need to get the proper amount of healing and mana use for the situation.

The sites about that I have provided you for guides on class specific builds have the rotation listed with the build as well. Make sure you are using the proper rotation for the spec you have chosen, failing to use a rotation will get you kicked from a pug faster than you can say "clicker", because your DPS output will suffer greatly. KNOW YOUR ROTATION, USE IT and enjoy your chart topping dps.

PRO TIP!!
Hit your spell cast (or melee attack) button about 1/2 second before it is off global cooldown...this will increase DPS a bit as it compensates for latency

Bind your Keys
You may have gotten away with clicking your abilities prior to level 80, and many people still do at level 80. However, it requires a much greater deal of effort in most cases to use the mouse to conduct your rotation over and over.

The best way to combat this is to go into your "Key Bindings" settings panel in WoW, within there it will give you the option to chose which keyboard button uses which square on the action bar (and therefore the corresponding spell). This is going to make your life 10000% simpler during a raid. For example on my death knight all I have to do to put out chart-topping DPS is hit 1,2,3,3,4,5,4,3,3,3,3 and repeat. That would be a lot of mouse moving and clicking if I didn't have my keys bound. So it is my advice that you do this as soon as you start raiding to prevent tendinitis lol.

Getting the Achievement
The other frustration new 80s encounter when trying to get into raids is that they don’t have the achievement. Here are some ways around that…

1. Guild. If – and only if – you have exhausted all means of gearing yourself up WITHOUT OTHERS CARRYING YOU, and the only way to progress with gear is to get that damn achievement, ask the guild. They might organize a run, or we might join PUGs with you (a raid is going to be more likely to take a lower geared player if they get a higher geared player to make up for it).

2. Be Brave and Ask. YouTube has many video guides, with which you can learn how to fight a particular raid. If you can tell a raid leader that you know the fights, they might be nice and include you.

3. The Ol’ Switcheroo. This is a bit naughty, but it’s what I did ^^. Fact: 90% of people are idiots. So many raid leaders don’t even check achievements when they ask you to link them. So just link the blank achievement and wait for your invite. I figure, if the raid leader is enough of an idiot not to check achievements, he’s fair game. Note: it will be awkward when you earn the achievement in the raid. This method may, however, get you onto a few ignore lists.

4. Also a bit devious (but people deserve it for requiring GS and achievements rather than skill IMO). Overachiever, or Allene's Fake Achievement are both add-ons that I have used. What you do is you link a blank achievement with a command behind it (For AFA it would be /AFA [The Fall Of Naxxrammas] 2009-01-19, or whatever date you want in there). There is other add-ons out there as well and most of them can be found at curse.com

Gearing Up

Hit Rating – The most valuable stat for ALL dps classes

Completely uninformed players ignore hit when, in fact, hit rating is THE MOST IMPORTANT STAT FOR ALL DPS CLASSES. Don’t even try to argue with me on this point, because you’re wrong.

Hit rating reduces your chance to miss. At level 80, 32.79 hit reduces your chance to miss by 1%. Several classes have abilities and talents which also reduce their chance to miss.

You NEED to reach hit cap, which is when you have sufficient hit rating that your attacks will never miss.

By the time you’re raiding ICC, you’re going to want most or all your hit rating coming from gear as gear is the most efficient source of hit. While you’re gearing up, though, you can use gems and enchants to improve your hit rating.

Of course, once you’ve reached hit cap, additional hit does absolutely nothing for you.

The following is the hit rating required to never miss against a level 83 (i.e. a raid level boss):

Warrior
262.32
(163.95 with 3/3 precision)

Paladin
262.32
(131.16 with 2/2 enlightened judgment)

Hunter
262.32
(163.95 with 3/3 focused aim)

Rogue
262.32
(98.37 with 5/5 precision)

Priest
445.94
(367.25 with 3/3 shadow focus)
(367.25 with misery)
(288.55 with 3/3 shadow focus and misery)

Death Knight
262.32
(163.95 with 3/3 nerves of cold steal when dual wielding)

Death Coil, Icy Touch, Howling Blast
445.91
(Dont try to get capped in this, but for Dual Wield frost Knights you want to have a bit more hit than with a 2 handed weapon)

Shaman
Spells: 445.94
(367.25 with 3/3 elemental precision)

Melee: 262.32
(65.58 with dual wield specialization when dual wielding)

Mage
445.94
(367.25 with 3/3 precision)
(267.25 for arcane only with 3/3 arcane focus)
(288.55 for arcane only with arcane focus and precision)

Warlock
445.94
(367.25 with 3/3 suppression)

Druid
Spell: 445.94
(341.02 with 2/2 balance of power)
(367.25 with improved faerie fire)
(262.32 with 2/2 balance of power and improved faerie fire)

Melee: 262.32

On the subject of Hit rating, a player will still miss against raid bosses (melee, and I think hunters) but a caster will not. It is probably worth mentioning that those hit caps are the "yellow" hit caps, and only ensure that your abilities can't miss. It is probably also worth mentioning that missing and being dodged/parried are different.

Another point on hit, might be to include what you need to reach with/without the Draeni hit buff and/or Misery or the Improved Faerie Fire.

For rogues, they also care about spell hit, as their poisons do not use melee hit values, but spell, so for a Mut rogue they actually want 315 hit (assuming 5/5 precision) so that their poisons (which they spec into) never miss. For a combat rogue, spell hit is slightly less valuable, but is still better than any other stat until you are approacing the ArP hard cap which requires at least full 264, and thus is not relevant for this guide. That said, combat rogues too should be trying for the spell cap, but they (as well as DK's) get full bonuses for their "spells" from the other hit buffs:

Extra buffs or debuffs Specials Poisons White
None 99 315 722
Imp FF or Misery 99 237 722
Imp FF or Misery & Heroic Presence (draenei) 66 210 689
(all assuming 5/5 precision).

The white hit cap is clearly not worth reaching, and all the modeling supports this, but at least for rogues the poison hit cap is super important, and deserves mention."

Tier Sets – Get Tier 9 (or 10!) as a priority before ICC

Tier sets are amazing as they give set bonuses. These set bonuses are very valuable. For example, when ICC came out, a lot of people didn’t even replace their teir9 items with tier10 until they had enough for at least the 2-item bonus.

5 items make up a set, but you only need 4 of them to get the bonuses. My recommendation is to have at least 4 of them equipped always, even if you have another item with better stats, as the bonuses are so sexy.

Get your tier 9 as a priority before entering ICC.

The Pre-Raid Grind – Part One of Gearing Up

The first part of gearing up is farming heroics. It sucks horribly. But once it’s done, it’s done.

Every day you should do the following heroics, as the gear that drops in them is quite good: TOC, FoS, PoS, and HoR. Then just do random heroics for the triumphs.

Triumphs can be converted down to lesser emblems, if necessary, to buy additional items: 1 Triumph = 1 Conquest = 1 Valor = 1 Heroism. With these emblems, you can buy the following equipment to ‘fill in the blanks’ of your pre-raid gear:

Head – Triumph (tier vendor)
Neck - Conquest
Shoulder – Triumphs (tier vendor)
Back - Valor
Chest – Triumph (tier vendor)
Wrist - Valor
Hands – Triumph (tier vendor)
Waist - Conquest
Legs – Triumph (tier vendor)
Feet - Valor
Ring1 - Triumph
Ring2 - Valor
Trinket 1 - Triumph
Trinket2 - Triumph
Main Hand – Sorry, nothing available from emblems. Find the best you can in a heroic (hint: ICC drops the battered hilt which starts a pro quest, but it’s very rare)!
Off Hand - Heroism
Ranged - Triumph

Between the heroics I’ve listed above and the gear that can be bought with emblems, you should be able to hit about 4.5k GearScore. Look at what drops in the heroics I listed, and also what is available to your class for which emblems, decide what the best pre-raid item you can get is… and go get it!

WowWiki has information on what drops in the heroics I listed, and you can go look at what the vendors offer in Dalaran. Spend a few minutes, have a think, make a shopping list.

Phase two: Starter Raids – ToC, Onyxia, and the others

So, you’ve gotten absolutely every last item you can from farming triumphs and running the better heroics. You now have around 4.7k GS and are sufficiently geared to raid TOC and Onyxia, which is where the real upgrades are. Keep doing these, week in and week out, until you reach about 5k GS.

Get into other raids, if you can, as well. Naxx, Ulduar, OS, and EoE will most likely all contain upgrades (even though they may only be minor upgrades). WowWiki is an easy to use source of information about what loot drops where. Unfortunately, people tend to neglect these ‘other’ raids nowadays. If an item increases your GS by 20, that’s still going to make it easier to get into a PUG.

YouTube has many guides on the bosses you will encounter in all raids, and I recommend highly watching these videos before attempting a boss for the first time.

Importantly, you are now sufficiently gear to not have a hard time getting invited to the Weekly Raid Quests, which will grant you additional Frost emblems, putting you on the road to tier 10 items.

Phase three: ICC!

So you’ve reach 5k GS! Grats! There are probably still upgrades in ToC and Onyxia for you, and keep trying to get them, but start trying to join ICC raids now as well to accelerate your gear up.

RAIDING GUILDS
One of the best ways to get a good experience in endgame content is to join a raiding guild. There is many of these out there ranging from more casual players all the way up to committed heroic mode core guilds. It is in your best interest to try and get into a raid guild if you have the time and you plan to make raiding a more serious endeavor. Here are some hints on how to get yourself into a raiding guild and move up to a core spot as quickly as possible.

- Many of these guilds require you to apply on their website in order to join. When applying for a guild on the site it is important to use proper grammar and act somewhat "professional" as this gives them the confirmation that you will act in a mature and collected way in their vent server as well as guild chat.

- A good place to start out in your quest to find a raiding guild is to go to the official World of Warcraft Realm forums.. located HERE. Many guilds advertise here and also should have a link to their guild page on it as well.

-Make sure that when you have an application pending you have your character gemmed and enchanted properly, and that you are logging out every night with your main spec (the one you plan to raid with) activated and your main spec gear on your character. The reason for this is that whatever gear you log out wearing is the gear that the recruiter will see when you looks into the armory link you have provided.

- Most guilds are more than happy to assist the "right" player in obtaining better base gear to fulfill their raiding needs. That being said however it is important to have the correct gems and enchantments on any piece of gear you are wearing on the armory (even if it's a crappy piece). This shows that you know your class role and how to gear it properly, but just haven't had the opportunity to obtain the proper piece of gear yet, and they will be much more likely to help you do this.

-When you join a raiding guild you are almost certainly going to be put into a "trial" or "standby" rank. Guilds do this for a couple of reasons. First reason being that they may not have a spot in their core group for you just yet, second reason being that they want to monitor you for a week or two to make sure you are the man for the job. During this trial period it is absolutely crucial that you show up to any raids that you sign up for, and also make sure that you spend some time running heroics and raids with them whenever you are online and you see a guildie looking for someone to join their group for a pug or whatever. This will give you a good standing with the members and they will be more likely to give you a good word if an officer asks them how you are performing.

-Always show up to any raid with the proper flasks and consumables (buff food, potions, elixirs, etc). This shows that you are willing to go that extra mile and get the maximum output from your character whenever possible.

-Know your role and know the fights. A raid leader is going to be more likely to keep you on the team if you aren't constantly asking questions about the fight that could easily be answered by using your resources. That isn't to say it's not ok to ask questions, but beforehand you should have done a substantial amount of research on your own. Tankspot.com, wow.zuggaming.com, and youtube.com are excellent places to go to learn about each boss fight. Watch a video of each fight more than once, and read about it as well- this will give you the upper edge when raiding and make you look like a pro.

Learning More

This guide is obviously very general and is only intended to take you up to the gates of ICC.

Advanced information can be found in the class forums of ElitistJerks.com. In these forums, you will find guides detailing advanced mechanics of your class. A thorough understanding of your class is necessary to maximize performance. Intuition and experience is valuable, but some math-craft and theory-craft give you an edge over other players.

Further, you can learn a lot about boss encounters in raids to prepare for ICC (and other raids) on YouTube or on the Tankspot forums.

Add-ons
THE WHITE NAME OF EACH ADDON IS A LINK TO ITS DOWNLOAD PAGE, AND TO GET MORE INFORMATION

REQUIRED ADDONS
Deadly Boss Mods gives you warnings when bosses use special abilities or when something funky is going on
Omen: lets you know how much threat you are generating, so that the boss doesn’t attack you
GearScore:I am not the biggest fan of this add-on, but the fact is that everyone’s using it, so you should be able to tell someone your GearScore if asked. This add-on will tell you what it is.
AtlasLoot enhanced: A great add-on for knowing what gear drops in what instance, a must have for finding upgrades in my opinion.

ADDITIONAL ADDONS THAT MIGHT HELP
Pally Power: Awesome add-on for paladins to get buffs sorted out
Bartender: This is a helpful add-on for most classes if you have problems with, or don't care for the stock UI. This add-on allows you to move any of your action bars to anyplace you want anywhere on the screen, it also makes them a bit more compact and adds some other very helpful options. It takes a while to set up properly but can be well worth it in the end for many players.
Grid: A great add-on for healers that includes status indicators for health, mana, incoming heals, aggro/threat, buffs and debuffs, range, and ready checks- as well as many different indicators, including: center text, center icon, frame border, frame opacity, and colored squares in each of the four corners.
Carbonite- Provides a number of very helpful things in game. Detailed maps of every zone and instance in the game, information on completing quests, a small map that appears on your screen that you can move around (I usually remove this during raids though) and many other things as well.
Outfitter- Provides simple, 1-click wardrobe changes. This can come in very handy for people that have 2 different specs that they raid with (IE a druid who has a healing set and a tanking set). You can also program it to automatically change your outfit whenever you change specs, or go into a different stance or presence.
Allene's Fake Achievement- I am listing this add-on ONLY for its proper use in my opinion, which is to help you get into pug raids when you have sufficient gear and you know the fights inside and out. Some PUG raid leaders out there are absolutely ridiculous when it comes to requiring an overly high GearScore and an achievement for anyone and any raid. This can also be handy if you have done something on a main character but simply haven't done it yet on your alt. NEVER USE THIS ON GUIDIES- its bad policy

There are many many more add-ons out there, but those are the basics and its best to run those when starting out, but also don't get carried away and run too many add-ons either as they can become confusing as well as cause lag in the long run- and that isn't what you should be focusing on during your first raids!

If you have any more suggestions for additional Add-Ons that should be listed here please let me know. I am not that pro on the add-on department as I only use a couple of them myself (the ones listed primarily)

I really hope you have all enjoyed my guide, I know many of you are much more advances than this and much of this could be considered common sense, but you would be surprised how many players out there don't understand much of this information.

Good Luck And Happy Gaming!

30.000 Gold in 40 hours as Rogue

2010-06-06T05:22:00.000-07:00

Requirements:

Level 75-80 Rogue
MOLL-E (Portable mailbox, not essential but required for maximum gold making.)
Lust for repetetive work

Rogue Glyphs:

Glyph of Pick lock
Glyph of Pick pocket

Good talents to use:

Master of deception (full)
Camouflage (full)

The guide:
Basically what you do is pick pocket ever mob in the Lower Blackrock spire for lockboxes. Theese lockboxes are used for ravenholdt rep, and are therefore essential for people who are going for the "insane" title. Obviously dont rush yourself into doing this. You will need to find someone who is going for the title, and is interested in paying you per lockbox. In the video, the player is receiving 13g per lockbox, therefor he would theoretically make 30k in 40 hours. You and i both know this is very server dependant, so keep an eye on your trade chat and the realm forum for people who are buying lockboxes! The video guide will show you exactly how it is done.

Here is the macro used for pickpocketing the mobs:
/console set targetnearestdistance 10
/cleartarget
/targetenemy [target=target, noexists]
/cast pick pocket

And a video:

Cataclysm: Twin Peaks Battleground

2010-06-04T07:29:00.000-07:00

Blizzard has released information regarding a new battleground which we will see in Cataclysm known as: The Twin Peaks.

What are the twin peaks you ask? Let me elaborate further.

Originally Posted by Blizzard

Located within the Twilight Highlands, the Twin Peaks remains a crucial point of high ground for staging effective and debilitating attacks against the black dragonflight and the Twilight's Hammer, who dominate this foreboding environment. And now, two previous occupants of the nearby city of Grim Batol vie once again for control of the peaks' defenses. The Wildhammer clan, architects and original owners of the once-great fortress city, maintains some operations in forested outposts of the highlands. The Wildhammers now call upon heroes of the Alliance to help claim the peaks and fend off the Dragonmaw orcs. The Dragonmaw clan, having spent years working to enslave red dragons, once again provides strategic importance to the Horde. As the Dragonmaw and Wildhammers fight for territory they once called home, the Alliance and Horde carry out the struggle to control the Twin Peaks.

TL;DR version:

...

Anyways, this new battleground is going to be a capture-the-flag-style battleground (similar to Warsong Gulch). The basic concepts of Warsong will also apply here (ie. flags are located in the enemies base, they can be returned and first to 3 wins).

The terrain will be built in an asymmetrical manner so that one side doesn't have advantages over the other and from what I can tell it will look similar to this:

Originally Posted by Blizzard

Although the Wildhammer and Dragonmaw bases are virtually identical, the terrain surrounding each base is not. Players will need to work to control an asymmetrical field where the mountain peaks are divided by a valley river. A single bridge over the river serves as a choke point in the center of the map; although deep, the river can be crossed. On either side of the river sits an outpost where temporary character enhancements can be claimed. In addition, tree stumps and rocks throughout the valley create strategic points for you to use line of sight to your advantage. To prevent absolute domination by one faction through its control of the enemy graveyard, the Horde and Alliance players resurrected in Twin Peaks will spawn from one of two graveyards per faction.

I will be honest in saying that I look forward to examining the complexity of each base as they are both told to be completely different instead of how WG kept them almost exactly the same. The Wildhammer Longhouse is the Alliance stronghold and is built into the mountain with three entrances. While the Dragonmaw Clan Compound to the south will act as the Horde base and is built on top of a large body of water with two entrances.

All in all I think that this new battleground will keep the fun 'capture the flag' concept alive while also adding a few much needed changes to keep players interested.

Originally Posted by Blizzard

Those who seek to control Twin Peaks will face an intense battle. The lands surrounding this ever-troubled location are key strategic strongholds of Deathwing and all of his followers. The Twilight Highlands are as rich with history as they are fraught with disaster and tragedy. Will the Dragonmaw clan, reinforced by Garrosh's Horde, take control? Or will it be the Wildhammer dwarves, reunited with their Ironforge brethren and accepted into the Alliance, who seize the peaks?

Here are some screenshots of what the place looks like:

Source

Female Worgen

2010-06-02T12:19:00.000-07:00

Here are some screen-shots and movie footage of the Female Worgen in the upcoming Cataclysm release.

Some Textures:

Isle of conquest, getting into allis base once again

2010-05-31T11:24:00.000-07:00

his is to get into the allis base before you get their gate down,

Step 1: You need to have control on the hanger, once you are on your airship you must jump on the allis base.
Step 2: Once you land on the allis base go to the front of their base(still on top) Look at the left side and you should see this.

Step 3: Nudge your self into the corner where the large beem runs down and connects to the other beam.

Step 4: once your in the corner, you must do the mount glitch, what you do is cast your mount then jump inward and you should fall right though the floor. Its quite easy.

Once inside there you may kill the boss before the gates are down.

...Hope this is useful to someone ive been trying to find something to give to this site. im always using it and was hoping i can help it

500g-1000g and 2,000,000+ XP per hour as mage

2010-05-31T11:20:00.000-07:00

The Ultimate Mage Etrick is back!

Todays Exploit: Killing Cultists in Corp'Rethar!

They come in packs of 54 and are immune to slows, have 37,800 health, and run faster than you.

How to: Without the quest 'Tirions Gambit' this goes somewhat slowly. Just pull the packs, living bomb everything in sight, and keep running. Blink keeps your distance just enough to outpace them. Ignite and talents should keep your mana at 100%. The only important thing to know is after they group up tightly if you're hit once you're dead. Kaput. This nets about 1,000,000 XP per hour for grouped, unrested XP.

How to: With the quest 'Tirions Gambit', this goes very quickly. Pull the end of both sides as normal, but let the spawned Ebon Knights take agro. As they do, or a few seconds before they do, put down a flamestrike, Mirror Image, and start blizzarding. You gain 100% XP and 100% loot. My friend gained 2500 XP per kill at 71 and 2800 XP per kill at 72, so the closer to 80 you are you should be getting better XP (guessing about 5k, which would put it at 8,000,000 XP per hour rested, ungrouped). I've also got about 500g from the drops, and we were both looting, so I would say 1000g or so ungrouped.

If you're powerleveling someone else, I've found that having them hover in the air works (about 1/2 a bar per pull unrested, grouped).

Enjoy it while it lasts!