World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King | Wrath | Wotlk

WoW Insider interviews Tom Chilton on Patch 3.1

2009-05-05T09:57:00.000-07:00

Now this is by no means the first time we've interviewed World of Warcraft's Lead Developer Tom Chilton (aka Kalgan) but we though with the recent release of Patch 3.1, this would be the perfect time to sit down with him and get the 411 on Blizzard's plans for their latest patch.

WoW Insider: Blizzard seem to be treating each major patch as more of a mini expansion, what are the reasons for this?

Tom Chilton: I would say the biggest reason is because we're always pushing ourselves to do as much as we can in every patch. We're never really satisfied with what we have in the patch versus what we didn't have. Maybe the developers get a little out of control - but in a good way as that's good for players. More than anything else we want to make sure that in a patch we have content for everyone.

We feel like one of the things we didn't do so well in the past was to deliver content for everyone, we would deliver content for different parts of the player base at any given time like a 25-person raid or a 10-person raid or here's a new battleground, back in the day of Arathi Basin. However we didn't really hit everyone at the same time so we're trying harder to do that while at the same time maintain our pace of Expansions ... our blindingly rapid pace of Expansions.

Why did you decide to implement the Argent Tournament?

The Argent Tournament we saw primarily as a more Azerothian style event. We've got a lot of world events, like in-game holidays, at this point but we're going to continue to improve those and refine them and we will add more of them over time. But we wanted to spend a little more time doing something which was a little more Azeroth.

So we built the Argent Tournament and we knew that with a lot of our world events, we wanted them to be very solo friendly, very casual player friendly but we didn't want it to feel like another set of daily quests that were the same as any other daily quests people where already doing. We wanted to make sure the activity felt a little bit different and kind of new and fresh so that was one of the reasons behind doing the Argent Tournament the way we did and it's part of how we came to the idea of doing jousting in-game.

Does the Tournament have a role to play in Wrath or it is just a bit of fun in Icecrown?

Well it's certainly going to be carried on in 3.2 as we continue to expand the Argent Tournament. How much farther it goes beyond that is hard to say at this point.

How do you maintain a balance between changing long-standing game play mechanics (for example reducing hearthstone cooldown to 30 minutes or adding dual specs) and not giving the players everything they want?

Well, we have this very thick skin, maintained over a very long period of time! I guess in some ways our design philosophies have become less hard core over time or at least we're finding ways to figure out what 'hard core' really means versus when it's just annoying. There are a lot of things about world travel and talents ... philosophies which we've decided are just not friendly enough to the player.

When we developed them, we were being more friendly to the player than any other game out there and we felt like, you know, it's probably even more restrictive than it needs to be. The hearthstone decision itself, part of that is because for a long time in the game there's been a bug called ghetto-hearthing where you can effectively hearthstone by going into an instance and leave the party.

Well. we were fixing that and as a side effect of our ability to queue for battlegrounds from anywhere, because it needs to return you to the place you where when you came out of the battleground, so the logic the instances use to decide where to put you when you come out is smarter than it used to be. It seemed like it was almost by virtue that we got that bug fixed but we felt like players were really used to being able to go to Dalaran or Stormwind or wherever their hearthstone is set a lot more often than we originally anticipated. We wanted to make sure that the game suddenly didn't feel a lot more cumbersome because of that bug fix.

What can you say about patch 3.2 and beyond?

Well, I guess I can tell you there's a battleground and some more stuff in the Argent Crusade! I would say the biggest thing would actually be the [additional content coming to the] Argent Tournament itself so that would be one of those things to look towards. Also, inevitably, there's going to be Icecrown Citadel and the confrontation with Arthas further down the line.

Why has it taken so long to implement something so simple as having mounts swim in water? Is this linked to some thing bigger or just a much-needed fix.

Yeah, that's another one of those evolving kind of philosophies, but we also got some extra time to animate those mounts so it looks like they're actually able to swim. We always found it really kind of annoying that you'd run through a puddle of water that was knee-deep and be dismounted. I think it's one of those polish things that probably would have been better if the game had always been like that, but now was the time for us to be able to do it.

Are you still working on the new dances and druid forms promised way back?

Yep, we still have animators working away on that.

Are you surprised by the success of Wrath and the popularity of new content, like the Death Knight class and Wintergrasp?

I guess yes and no. The expansion, as a whole, we all had a really good feeling about right from the start. We felt like, you know, it was a great package that it was going to be really feature rich. We had high expectations for ourselves and it would be unfair to say that we didn't expect it to do well.

At the same time, it's humbling how strong a response it's gotten from the fans. Also I'm very pleased to how the introduction to the new class has gone. There was a lot of concern, both internally and by the player base, that adding a new class could potentially mess up the game and we tried to make sure we were diligent about paying attention to things which could lead to problems for the game.

I guess my feelings about Wintergrasp is more mixed, I think that in some ways it is extremely cool and it has gotten us some of that feel that we wanted out of world PvP. On the downside, it's so difficult for us to design around an unknown number of players so part of the disappointment is that we're still struggling to support the number of players that participate.

At times, during prime time on the bigger servers, it can really slow down quite a bit and we don't feel like that's an acceptable play environment situation.

In the wake of the success of Death Knights, are you going consider introducing more Hero classes?

It's definitely very possible that we'll do that in the future. Certainly we view that Death Knights have been a success. We do feel that there's still a limited number of classes we can introduce to the game before the classes start becoming more of the same. We're being very careful not to go too far too quickly, we want to make sure we pace ourselves and that we make really smart choices about when and how we do that.

Why introduce dual specs? How do you think these will change one player's versatility?

Well, I guess never say never, I mean a couple of years ago, I couldn't imagine we'd ever do dual spec. We always wanted the talents to feel like very meaningful choices to players and that there wouldn't be infinite flexibility, at least not without a cost. At the same time, the way the game has involved and players participate in multiple area of the end-game and the way in which those end-games are totally different, we're talking about raiding versus PvP or solo daily quest farming and being the healer in your raid. All those different ways in which people play the game, it really just got to the point where we felt like it was a necessity. It wasn't something we could turn a blind eye toward anymore.

As far as tri-spec goes, I hope not! From a design perspective, just because I still want to maintain as much integrity as I can regarding how having a spec and choosing what you're going to do is important. Also the UI gets more and more cumbersome and the game gets more complex. Again, from a design standpoint, the game begins to feel like you have three specs, why not just have all the talents? Once you have everything, it stops being about character customization, which is what it was always intended to be.

Is there a feature in another MMO that you admire and would like to see in WoW?

Sure! Right now, for example, we don't have a housing system. Other MMOs have it and it's a system that we've talked about since before the launch of the original WoW. We've talked about housing and how we'd do it and how it might work for at least five years.

Is it something you're actively working on?

No, we're not working on right now, but it's incredibly complex to do right and we're not sure yet if it's going to be the right thing for WoW in the long run. It has major implications for the game itself and again I wouldn't go out of my way and say never but it's not on the immediately of things to do.

Well thanks for taking the time to chat to us.

My pleasure.

Mutant turtles are greater than boys in spandex

2009-05-05T09:53:00.000-07:00

On this Monday morning I have come to realize one important thing: a picture is worth a thousand words.

Clearly, TMNT > Power Rangers. For shame Alex, for shame!

Romir asked...

"I just switched my off spec for my Death Knight to a tank spec. However I've never really tanked before, what would be the best heroic to go into to learn to tank? I have an uncrittable set I got from raids/off-spec rolls. I know most of the dungeons, I just need practice. Which would be best to start in?"

Please don't start in a heroic. You want to take baby steps. First, go out to someplace and see that you can successfully control multiple mobs. Make sure that you have the basic mechanics down. After you're confident you can keep things focused on you, then head into a low-80 non-heroic instance. Hell, you might even consider doing a few rounds of regular Violet Hold. Get to know what it's like to be a tank and have four other members not pay any attention to what you need to do.

After you've done some easy 80 tanking instances, head into regular CoT: Strat. Don't worry about doing a speed run in regular, just try to keep a brisk pace and don't die. You'll be challenged the first few times to keep the mobs away from your healer – but that's part of the game.

Once you have regular CoT: Strat under your belt to the point where you can run through it lightning fast, run your first heroic. Something like Utgarde Keep or Utgarde Pinnacle is good for a new tank. It's important to go with a guild group to your first few heroics, because you're going to wipe a lot as a new tank – no matter your gear.

Overall, just be calm and stay alert. You'll do great!

Popesicle asked...

"Is it possible to change our guild's name?"

Nope. Asking or expecting that this feature would be implemented is like expecting sliced bread out of a bag of bread.

A bunch of you asked...

"Where are the Wolvar and oracle orphans as data-mined by MMO Champion? Did they make an appearance anywhere?"

We haven't seen them, and have no idea where you can get them. As far as we can tell, no one else does either. Remember that data-mined data is just that, it's not necessarily a reflection of what is available in game.

Peacebone asked...

"Is there any particular reason why Blizzard and Wildstorm think we want to read about Varian every month in the Warcraft comics? When can I expect for the comics to become... you know... good?"

While I don't think the Blizzard based comic books are the pinnacle of comics, I don't think they're necessarily bad either. And as for why they keep talking about Varian, well, that's because you keep buying them.

(PS Alex: I'm not in Switzerland, I'm in Amsterdam.)

Guide: BBB's tips for a new tank

2009-05-05T09:50:00.000-07:00

Starting to tank is scary. During BC I leveled from 40 through 69 as a Balance Druid, and then discovered that a tank couldn't be pugged for love or money once you hit the later portion of Outland on my realm. I'd picked up some feral gear along the way and decided to give tanking a shot, but then spent my first afternoon in the trenches being a nervous wreck after losing aggro to impatient DPS, aggroing extra mobs by charging into pulls instead of LOSing them, and taking a ridiculous amount of damage. The feeling of being constantly judged by your group members isn't a pleasant sensation, but more maddening was the knowledge that certain things beyond your control -- mob stuns, lazy or trigger-happy DPS, an inattentive healer, or something as simple as a missed Mangle -- could make you look worse than you actually were.

That's why I like a recent blog post by our own Big Bear Butt on "Tips for the New Tank," which addresses not only that but also a number of pitfalls to which new tanks are prone. I particularly agree with his assertion that you should never start a boss event assuming that everyone in the group is on the same page, because someone who's not sure what they're doing can and often will cause issues for you without realizing it. It's a great guide for a new tank that gives a nod to the "feeling judged" syndrome mentioned here, and with so many players returning to their tanking trees or trying Death Knights in Wrath, I recommend it for anyone interested in the job.

We won't see many more class changes in Wrath of the Lich King

2009-05-05T09:47:00.000-07:00

So here's some news that'll probably make you feel good if you're okay with your class and just want to grab consistent set of talent specs and go at it, but may get you a little down if you still dislike where your class is. Ghostcrawler said yesterday that he believes there won't be many drastic class changes. In fact, he says, most of the 3.1 class changes were meant to compensate for or tinker with the changes made in 3.0 or to further tweak the classes that got the largest amount of overhaul.

On the plus side, these means that hopefully the current 3.1 talent builds are more or less set, so you don't have to worry too much about respecing based on major changes to class. On the other hand, if you don't like where your class or favorite talent tree is right now, you may be in trouble.

That said, Ghostcrawler hasn't ruled out further changes, and has all but said that there will probably be numbers adjustments. So what we can probably take from this is, at the least, that the basic mechanics and rotations for every class and talent spec are more or less set, at least until someone theorycrafts something different. This also hopefully means that they can focus on adding more content for us to use all our class mechanics on in future patches.

But for now, I hope you like what you have, because it may be all you're getting.

A Patch 3.1 talent build cookie platter for Death Knights

2009-04-27T10:05:00.000-07:00

So now that Patch 3.1 is underway, the basic cookie cutter tank and DPS builds have begun emerging. Any imagine nerfs really have slown us down in any major way, and with dual specs in, we're doing better than ever on the whole versatility front. In recognition of this, let's give it to you straight, no chaser. Here's a handful of cookie cutter DPS and Tank builds for each tree to get you on the right path to DPS or tanking dominance in Patch 3.1, or both if you've dropped that 1000 gold. All of these builds also included recommended glyphs at the link as well.

DPS

Unholy: This 0/10/61 DPS build is one of the top competitors for DPS and the one I'm personally sporting. While it may seem like sacrilige not to head into the Blood tree, the Unholy tree does enough shadow damage that Black Ice's new shadow damage multiplier wins out. In addition, having 130 runic power comes in handy when you're trying to unleash a Gargoyle and still have enough leftover for Unholy Blight and a couple Death Coils. In this build, you get Frost Fever and Blood Plague up, then keep the Scourge and Blood Strikes coming for as long as your glyphs keep refreshing the diseases, adding your runic power dumps as needful. One note of caution on this build: You'll be flying without Subversion, so you'll want to make sure you're aware of the extra threat.

Blood: Blood was the redheaded stepchild of the Death Knight trees in 3.0 as far as imagined effectiveness went, but that really shouldn't be true in 3.1 Blood easily keeps pace with Unholy in the DPS department. Here's one of the more popular Blood/Unholy builds. This build focuses a good amount on heavy-hitting physical damage, so armor penetration becomes surprisingly useful in this build. Army of the Dead in the Unholy tree makes the disposable Ghoul a little more effective. The rotation should be more or less like Unholy, but use Death Strike for your Frost/Unholy rune strie, replace Gargoyle with Dancing Rune Weapon, and replace Blood Strike with Heart Strike. If you're afraid of losing AE potential with this build, remember that Blood Boil can hit undiseased targets now, and Blood talents have some pretty hefty buffs to that ability.

Frost: Frost, especially 2-handed Frost, continues to be somewhat of the dark horse DPS build. Not many Death Knights consider it, but it still manages to do very respectable DPS. 2-handed Frost DPS sometimes seems to me like it could be called the class' best kept secret. This build is one the favorites for solid 2-handed Frost DPS. You'll actually focus on churning out Obliterates with this build. Save the Howling Blasts for AE DPS or Rime procs - which you'll have a decent amount of, since you'll be using obliterate as fast as you can churn out the runes for it. You'll be using Frost Strike for your rune dumps, of course. This build also includes Improved Icy Talons for a little grouping love.

Tanking

Frost: Frost remains the stereotypical tank build, as it seems a lot of people failed to get the message that Blizzard abandoned the Frost is tank thing back before the Wrath Beta. That said, it's definitely a more than passable tank tree. Here's a Frost Build to try out when tanking. Howling Blast is here to help with AE threat grabbing, and it goes into the Unholy far enough to grab some extra help for Death and Decay. It's worth noting that a lot of people like grabbing Bladed Armor for extra threat in this build. If you do this, it'll probably best to take the points out of 2-handed weapon specialization and Acclimation.

Unholy: I'm still an Unholy fiend myself, so this is the tank build I'm using too. Even with repeated nerfs to Bone Shield, Unholy remains a very respectable tank tree. Try this build on for size. It focuses primarily on picking up all the delicious magic absorption and threat goodies in the Unholy Tree, leaving Blood and Frost for the first tier defensive abilities. Improved Icy Touch counts here too, the extra slow means fewer hits against you. Like Frost above, a lot of people like to take Bladed Armor for the extra threat. If you decide to go that route, Taking points out of Virulence and reducing Wandering Plague to 1 point is probably your best bet.

Blood: Yes, the Blood Tree can tank. For a while, a lot of Death Knights swore by a Blood build to tank 3-drake Sartharion. But even though Sarth is yesterday's news, you can still get some very respectable mileage from Blood Tanking. This build gives you the all of basic defensive cooldowns and abilities of the Blood Tree, a lot of strong physical-based single target threat, and some AE threat in the form of Heart Strike, Bloody Strikes, and Morbidity.

But where is Dual Wielding?

Dual Wielding is still sort of a playstyle in flux right now, but some Death Knights are still plugging along looking for ways to use it in 3.1. This thread on Elitist Jerks suggests a few ideas, but most of them assume you have some pretty sweet raid gear and are on track to get more.

Myself, I'd wait for 3.2 to try dual wielding again, once we see what the devs have in store. Some people are claiming it should be as simple as converting weapon strikes to hit with both weapons. I'm pretty sure this would be the exact wrong way to go about it, since it would immediately remove the major reason 2-handers have even been able to stay head of dual wielding in the first place. Without the weapon strike edge, Death Knight 2-handers stand a very good chance of going the way of Enhancement Shaman 2-handers.

But anyhow, 3.2 is a ways away. For now, Take any combination of the builds I have linked above, and go forth and conquer. New class or nerfed class or whatever, Death Knights are still plenty enjoyable in 3.1, and they're even more enjoyable with a good build.

Varian Wrynn is Right

2009-04-27T09:54:00.000-07:00

Among WoW players these days, it seems to be a popular opinion that King Varian Wrynn is a narrow minded short-sighted bigot who will lead the Alliance to ruin. This is an easy opinion to have, since he does show a considerable amount of anger at times when dealing with the Horde, and it's long been the general opinion that "no-one is truly evil" in the Horde and Alliance conflict. This is even the opinion of some of my fellow writers.

Here's my problem with this: The underlying causes of Varian Wrynn's anger are all unconditionally justified. Varian Wrynn is not angry at the Horde because of a series of misunderstandings and misinterpretations. He's been witness to or victim of multiple wrongdoings and atrocities perpetuated by the Horde time and time again, both the new Horde and the Old. Most, if not all of these times, the wrongdoings have been the result of outright maliciousness on the part of the Horde or its members, and in the case the so-called "peaceful" New Horde, there's been no sign whatsoever that Thrall is punishing or disciplining the perpetrators of these acts, and at the least, it is clear that he is not properly dealing with the consequences.

Regarding the First Fall of Stormwind

The first fall of Stormwind occurred when Varian Wrynn was a young man. So this was Varian's first encounter with the Orcs. Now mind you, this Orcish Horde had no justification for the war. They were not being driven from land, they were not starving or lost, nor were they addressing some ancient affront by the Human race. No, these Orcs were foreign invaders from another dimension

Consider, also, how they eventually razed Stormwind. They were able to do so by way of Garona, a Half-Orc assassin acting on behalf of the Horde. So Varian not only saw that the Orcish Army was a mindlessly violent army bent on the destruction of the human race, but that the one Orc who might have been different, the one Orc who appeared to have befriended humanity and proven that not how all Orcs were mindless beasts, betrayed them and proved herself an enemy to humanity by murdering Varian's beloved Father.

Horde apologists will tell you that Garona was acting under mind control. There's two problems with this. First, Varian has no real way of knowing Garona was mind-controlled at the time. All he knows is that an Orc gained the trust and friendship of his father, then used it to betray and murder him, causing the downfall of his kingdom and very nearly the downfall of all humanity. Secondly, Garona was still under the control of the Shadow Council, which was at the time solely an Orcish organization and the de facto leadership of the Horde. Either way, it was the Horde who killed his father and nearly wiped out his people.

On Varian's loss of his second father and Humanity's loss of their greatest Hero

Now, consider the aftermath of this incident. It was Anduin Lothar who saved what remained of Stormwind's people after the razing. He spirited Varian away to Lordaeron along with the rest of the survivors. Once in Stormwind, he replaced Llane as Varian's father figure and mentor, and worked with King Tereneas to establish the Alliance, the force that became the only hope of humans, dwarves, and elves against the Orcish Horde.

And yet, Anduin Lothar was killed in cold blood by the Orcs during their attempt to finish what they had started at Stormwind, killed by Orgrim Doomhammer himself.

Horde Apologists will argue that Orgrim Doomhammer was not under the influence of the Burning Legion, and that he was doing it in self-defense, but again, there's problems with those who insist on this. First, while Orgrim was a friend of Durotan and supposedly had heeded his warning that Blackhand and Gul'dan did not have the Horde's best interests in mind, he still allowed Gul'dan to live, employed his necromancers and the Death Knights in battle, and continued the Horde's genocidal campaign against the the Humans. This all strongly implies that Orgrim was more interested in his own personal power, or at least the dominance of the Orcs, rather than doing what was right.

Regardless, whether Orgrim was under the control of the Burning Legion or not, he was still acting as an enemy of the Alliance. In addition, while the forces of the Alliance did have the Horde pinned down at Blackrock Spire, there was no attempt by Doomhammer to parlay. Instead, he went out to kill.

A Note should be made here that in the original events of Warcraft II, Lothar came to Blackrock under a flag of truce to offer terms of surrender to Orgrim, but was ambushed and killed in Cold Blood by Orgrim's order. A retcon changed this to put Lothar and Orgrim in single combat, but the basic crimes of Orgrim remain, and later depictions of the battle (for example, in the d20 Warcraft games player's guides) have left the circumstances of the single combat murky enough that an ambush or deliberate drawing out of Lothar on the part of Orgrim may have still happened.

Regardless of the exact cause of Lothar's death, the point remains that Orgrim, no matter what his ultimate loyalties, continued the genocidal campaign of the Horde upon the Humans, Dwarves, and High Elves, and killed Anduin Lothar in the process. The Horde killed Humanity's greatest hero and Varian's mentor and second father during an unjust war of genocide against Varian's people, the people he was sworn to protect as King. Thus, the injustices perpetrated against Varian by the Horde continue to stack to unbelievable, unwieldy heights.

On the formation of the New Horde and their attitude toward the Alliance

Horde apologists will argue that all of these problems are the Old Horde, and that the New Horde should be treated as a new, separate entity. Once again, there are very definite problems with this view. Not only are most of the Orcs that make up the current Horde the same Orcs who were the rank and file and leaders of the Old Horde, the fact remains that the New Horde is still using many of the trappings and philosophies of the Old Horde, and is more and more committing new violent acts of their own.

To start with, on the most basic of levels, Thrall continues to use symbology and symbols for the Horde that are, in Human experience, most clearly and basically connected with the Old Horde that was attempting to wipe out the free peoples of Azeroth.

The very title "Warchief" is said to be an ancient title of the Orcs. However, current lore suggests that the title had fallen out of use, and was only taken up again by Rend Blackhand as a tool by Gul'dan to unite the clans as an army of darkness and death. Orgrim Doomhammer took over the title, but continued to use it as the head of a genocidal army. Thrall now claims the title, but the fact remains that, ancestral ties or not, it has been most recently used as a tool of the Burning Legion, only very vaguely tied in to the heritage of an old line of Warchiefs that may or may not have existed, a history that Thrall, as of yet, shows few signs of trying to uncover. When Thrall uses the title Warchief, it is most clearly being used to evoke the power and authority of Orgrim Doomhammer.

Yes, Thrall and the Horde still revere Orgrim Doomhammer, the bloody Warchief who killed Anduin Lothar, the savior of humanity. He is considered a Hero, so much that Thrall wears his armor and carries his hammer - the same Hammer that killed Lothar, or one very similar to it. Thrall calls for peace while wearing the armor and weapon of an Orc who very nearly destroyed Humanity, ostensibly to honor him. In addition, he calls his capital, the symbol of the power and might of the new Horde, Orgrimmar. It's not very hard to see why a human, dwarf, or High Elf might find this symbology a bit insulting, and wonder why the "New" Horde is so eager to honor the Orc who committed some of the worst atrocities of the "Old" Horde. It's even worse for Varian, considering how close he was to Lothar, who was murdered by Orgrim.

Orgrim certainly isn't the only one to be honored like this either. Many of the main generals and architects of the Human, Dwarven, and High Elven genocide are now revered and honored by the Horde, with little to no attempts made to acknowledge their faults and the very real war crimes they committed against the Alliance. Grom Hellscream was one of the first to drink the Demon's blood offered by Gul'dan and commited many atrocities against the Draenei, against humans in the second war, and against Night Elves later.. Kargath Bladefist likewise has had multiple landmarks and fortresses named in his honor, and when he was killed in Outland after revealing himself to be a continued servant of demonic powers, Nazgrel (Another war criminal of the "Old" Horde) spoke of him with respect and honor.

If you are trying to break away from the example of the Old Horde, embracing so much of it seems like a very counter-intuitive way of doing it, and Varian, having at least seen the way Orgrim himself is honored, has a right to at least be made uncomfortable by this.

The state of the Horde and the Alliance

2009-04-27T08:50:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, when the World of Warcraft was all shiny and new, things were simple: the Horde hated the Alliance and they, in turn, despised the Horde. It was a simpler time, but this wasn't just some game mechanic to facilitate PvP and hours of ganking, oh no, it was integral to the lore of Azeroth.

Now, it's also worth remembering that there's no black and white in Azeroth either. The Horde aren't evil for just being the Horde, neither are the Alliance all pure as newly fallen snow. Each faction has done its fair share of pure and evil acts depending on the actions of individual heroes and the motivations of their leaders.

But now we're post patch 3.1, it's time to rexamine the state of relations between the two factions. Times have changed quite drastically since we first entered Azeroth and the addition of The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King have only made things much more complicated. The Wrath Gate cinematic gave us some glimpse of how the two factions are getting on in the continually evolving lore of Azeroth. While the recent trailer for the Secrets of Ulduar offered an even more promising glimpse at the deterioration of that tenuous peace.

For the most part this is mutual, but the real culprit behind everything is King Varian Wynn. Yes, the human king hates the Orcs (and by extension the Horde) and, to be honest, who can blame him? Abducted, bespelled and sold into slavery as part of a grand plot by the dragoness Onyxia he (as the gladiator Lo'Gosh) found himself without his memories in Orgrimmar.

Now returned to his throne room in Stormwind, he is a changed man. Bitter and battleworn, his attitude only gets worse once the Alliance loses its greatest living legend Bolvar Fordragon during the battle of the Wrath Gate.

So last night, I finally got around to completing the Wrath Gate questline and witnessed for myself how much Varian is letting his hatred rule his head. He blames the Horde and Thrall personally for the death of Bolvar despite the fact that it was a renegade faction of the Forsaken under the orders of Grand Apothocary Putress which caused the massacre. For now, at least, he seems so blinded by hate that he is unable or unwilling to make that distinction:

"I've waited a long time for this, Thrall. For every time I was thrown into one of your damned arenas... for every time I killed a green-skinned aberration like you... I could only think of one thing. What our world could be without you and your twisted Horde..."

At the same time, the Horde are not all innocence and light either. Thrall's right-hand orc Garrosh Hellscream is just as bad. While he doesn't so much hate humans, he does lust for power seeing himself as the next Warchief and believes Thrall's weakness is his willingness to entertain humans like Jaina Proudmore (who I'm sure Thrall has a crush on).

So with 3.1, we got our first proper look at how the Alliance and Horde are coping post-Wrath Gate and it's not pretty. Varian seems to be swallowed by grief and fury while Thrall is receptive to Jaina's suggestions simply because she has always been a mediator between the factions.

You'd think such a dangerous situation as the resurgence of the Old God Yogg-Saron might unite these enemies against a common foe. Perhaps in the past this could have been true but now, neither side is willing to be co-operative. The trailer, as well as setting up 3.1, also features a promising sub-plot focusing on how the the two sides are beginning to turn completely against each other. I think it's only a matter of time before Blizzard bring this whole mess to a head and Varian and Garrosh face off.

We've already seen from the trailer that this is part of an on-going storyline, but I suspect it's not just a justification for war. There's a promise of something larger than just one king's grudge and perhaps we will discover an answer in the next patch or expansion.

The OverAchiever: Starting Glory of the Hero

2009-04-20T10:30:00.000-07:00

Time for some thrilling heroics. -- Jayne, "The Train Job"

When I look at the Dalaran landing pad, I see fewer red proto-drakes than I should be. This pains me, dear readers. The 5-man heroic achievements are a lot of fun, if admittedly time consuming, and they force you to think on your feet and wring the most out of your character's abilities. Plus - it's a proto-drake. If you didn't get a 10-man or 25-man drake before 3.1 hit, you're out of luck there. Odds are good that you're still waiting for a green one to hatch out of the worthless egg that snake-oil salesman from the Oracles sells you, some jerk is camping the Time-Lost spawn 24/7, and the worst DPS in your Pinnacle PuG was the guy who won the blue drake off of Skadi, right right?

A lot of the WoW population has been at 80 for a while now and has some quality gear under their belts, much of it obtainable without setting foot in a raid. You should be able to pull off all of the 5-man heroic achievements in decent blues with a good group. I highly recommend trying to run with a stable set of players and -- if at all possible -- at least one Shaman. This is more true if your group is still gearing up and needs the damage boost provided by Bloodlust/Heroism.

I thought initially about organizing these from the easiest to the hardest, but I think it's ultimately less confusing to list them dungeon by dungeon. We'll address each dungeon alphabetically, so let's get started with Ahn'kahet:

As a quick note, these guides are being written from the perspective of a player who is usually playing a Druid tank (and occasionally healer). I'll try to point out if I know of alternate strategies for different groups or tanks, but I certainly don't know them all. If there's a strategy you've successfully managed that I don't mention here, please drop a note in the comments.

AHN'KAHET: THE OLD KINGDOM

This is one of the harder heroics overall, but the achievements here range from very easy to fairly difficult. As such, it's a good heroic to use as a diagnostic tool; the individual achievements here will allow you to figure out if you've got the tank quality, healing throughput, and DPS firepower to get through the meta-achievement. If you can manage all of the achievements here, you should be able to manage everything else.

A Bloodlust will help a lot on the final boss and, depending on your group composition, may also help on the first.

Respect Your Elders

As you're probably aware by now, the Ahn'kahar Guardians which spawn periodically during this encounter render the boss and his titchy little adds immune to all damage. Ordinarily you handle this by killing the Guardian (they have about 35K health) and then going back to DPSing the boss and AoEing the adds, but here you're going to have to come up with a way of keeping the Guardians occupied elsewhere. The immunity effect is canceled once you get them out of range, which I believe is roughly 40-50 yards. You know the somewhat elongated room in which you'll find Nadox? Its length is a rough guide to the distance you need to maintain between Nadox and the Guardians in order to keep the latter from granting the former total immunity.

You'll need:

Tank
Off-tank (DPS DK, Warrior, or Paladin is fine)
Healer
Off-healer if needed (hybrid DPS is fine)
DPS

If your tank is very well-geared, you can usually pull this off without an offhealer. I've also had a group successfully use DPS Shamans as Guardian tanks here, but any sufficiently hardy class that can heal itself could probably manage it. Most strategies suggest having your off-tank pick up Nadox and your real tank pick up the Guardians because Nadox's melee is very weak but damage from the Guardians really starts adding up.

Now, I used to do this all in Nadox's room, but commenters in the Wowhead thread on this achievement noted a much better way to do it that I'll be using in the future. As you clear to the boss, take the path to your left, and clear all of the trash you find in the hallway immediately preceding Nadox's room. Have your off-tank aggro him, pull him out of the room down the stairs to the left, and tank him at the farthest end of the hallway you just cleared (if this doesn't make any sense, the commenter Caylie on the Wowhead thread provides pictures). Your DPS and healer stay here as well and just nuke down the boss. If you're situated correctly, Nadox will never go immune.

Your real tank will sit at the stairs and wait for Guardians to hatch. Because they'll make a beeline for your healer, they'll head down the stairs toward Nadox and you can pick them up very easily and keep them tanked here. You may need an off-healer to toss you a few heals because you will be well out of range of the real healer. However, if you're sitting on some decent gear, blowing a few cooldowns and a health pot is usually sufficient if your DPS is competent and Nadox dies quickly.

The Party's Over

Fairly simple. The most obvious way to do this is just to have someone drop group and leave the instance, but apparently you can also have someone drop group, wait for the rest of the group to start DPSing the boss, and then participate as you normally would. The person who drops group doesn't get the achievement but can still help on the kill. Weird.

Volunteer Work

If your tank and healer are well-geared, this isn't tough. Jedoga's damage will increase substantially when her "sacrifice" isn't nuked down, but it's really nothing that a few cooldowns -- or, failing that, a lot of healing -- can't handle. If your tank is still having difficulty living through this, try to have an off-healer in the group who can help out a bit. If that still doesn't work, you can attempt to rotate taunts on Jedoga across her platform -- but with diminishing returns on taunts in 3.1, I think it's safe to say that you should treat this as a tank/healer gear check more than anything else.

Volazj's Quick Demise

This achievement is significantly easier with a Protection Warrior tank, as they can Spell Reflect Volazj's Mind Flay and cause a ton of damage to him, but it's still doable with any class of tank provided they don't threat-cap their DPS.

This achievement becomes fairly straightforward once you realize that the real boss isn't Volazj but rather your Insanity adds. Volazj himself will actually die quickly to competent DPS; it's the adds for whom you need to be blowing cooldowns and potion timers. With a Bloodlust/Heroism and good DPS, you will probably find yourself triggering both Insanities at the same time. If your group has the capacity to deal with these adds within 30-40 seconds, congratulations -- you can do this achievement with time to spare. If you can't, time to start tinkering with group composition or some of the more punk ways of managing this achievement. The good news is that there are a lot of ways to manage this (the Wowhead comment thread lists most of them), from Warlock summons to Army of the Dead to Divine Intervention to having your healer suicide straight off the pull or just come as DPS. The bad news is that none of these will compensate if you just can't pump out the damage you need.

My groups tend to go for the straight burn method, using Bloodlust at the start of the fight and triggering both Insanities at the same time. Using Army of the Dead going into the Insanity phase is extremely helpful if you have a Death Knight, as is stacking your group on top of each other to minimize time spent getting to ranged adds for your melee DPS/tank. Blow all of your serious survival and DPS cooldowns on the adds and get back to killing Volazj posthaste. If you manage this, you should have plenty of time to kill Volazj before the 2-minute mark. The fastest I've managed it is 52 seconds; the slowest has been 1 minute and 27 seconds, so I tend to favor this over more gimmicky techniques because there is room for error or slower/less bursty DPS.

Wotlk News: Patch 3.1 lesser-known changes

2009-04-20T10:28:00.000-07:00

Sure, you know about dual spec, the Argent Tournament, and Ulduar. But patch 3.1 was a patch of many changes, and some of them seem to have flown under most people's radar. Here are a few changes that have been surprising some people recently, judging by the tips we've been getting.

Siphon Life is no longer a separate spell. The talent now adds a self-healing effect to your Corruption, as well as boosting the damage on Corruption, Seed of Corruption, and Unstable Affliction.

Emblems are now automatically distributed to everyone upon the first person looting them, similar to gold. This means no more forgotten emblems, and no more rush to the corpse as everyone goes to get theirs. It will also make loot chests much less unpleasant.

Many spells with ground effects, such as Rain of Fire, Blizzard, and Death and Decay, are not showing the same as they used to. This is because there is a new video effects option, "Show Projected Textures," which controls whether things like the rune circles from RoF/Blizz/DnD are rendered on your client. It also appears to control my framerate in 25-man raids.

The 10% experience bonus from heirloom shoulders now applies to quest experience as well as experience gained from killing mobs.

Is there anything else that took you by surprise in patch 3.1?

Wotlk Article: Emalon the Storm Watcher

2009-04-20T10:17:00.000-07:00

So ends the age of the weekly loot piñata. The Wintergrasp raid instance, somewhat inappropriately called the Vault of Archavon, has a new tenant who isn't quite the pushover Archavon the Stone Watcher has been since the launch of Wrath of the Lich King. The Vault of Archavon was essentially every Level 80 player's weekly lottery and near guaranteed shot at Emblems. It was the most compelling reason to capture Wintergrasp as the raid was only available to the faction in control of the zone. Enter Emalon the Storm Watcher, a new raid boss with Patch 3.1 who drops Ulduar and Season 6 loot. Emalon's difficulty is ramped up considerably from Archavon and -- if initial forays are any indication -- hard enough to give seasoned raiders like our own Matt Low an aneurysm.

Unlike his meek neighbor Archavon, Emalon actually requires a bit of strategy and situational awareness. He also comes with four bodyguards, the Tempest Minions, who are integral to the fight. As can probably be inferred from his name and his crew, Emalon the Storm Watcher's primary source of damage is lightning, or Nature damage. It won't be necessary to stack resistance, just an understanding of the fight, his abilities, and knowing what to do and avoid. You can visit Emalon by turning into a corridor on the right just before heading into Archavon.

Emalon abilities
Chain Lightning - Sort of like a Bizarro version of the Shaman spell of the same name, the first target will take no damage while targets after the third jump can be one-shot. Think of a boss version of the Lightning Constructs in the Halls of Stone.
Lightning Nova - Emalon borrows another ability, this time from Loken in the Halls of Lightning. Emalon's version has a five-second cast time, which should be enough time for melee to run the hell away. It has a 20 yard range and should be relatively easy to evade.

Tempest Minion abilities
Overcharged - Emalon chooses one Tempest Minion to Overcharge, which heals that minion to full health. It's a buff that increases its damage dealt by 20% as well as enlarging it. This buff will stack periodically at about 2 second intervals and once it reaches 10 stacks, the Tempest Minion will overload and explode, dealing ridiculous damage in an extremely wide radius that will wipe the raid.
Lightning Nova - In Heroic version, Tempest Minions will also cast a version of Lightning Nova that's weaker than Emalon's but stronger than Loken's. They cast this every 20 seconds.

What to do
The general idea is to get some generous spacing amongst the raid to minimize Chain Lightning damage. Ranged DPS work really well for this fight because they can generally avoid Lightning Novas and switch to an Overcharged Tempest Minion without having to reposition themselves. Melee DPS will have to work a little harder as they keep DPSing Emalon, avoiding the novas, and moving to an Overcharged minion throughout the fight.

There are only two phases to this fight and there is no enrage timer. One tank is required for Emalon and another for the adds, of which there will constantly be four. Whenever a Tempest Minion is killed, Emalon will spawn another one at his location, which means the off-tank should be ready to taunt it to prevent it going after other raid members. Because the off-tank is constantly on the adds, she is generally the one able to spot the Overcharged Tempest Minion the earliest and should be the one to mark it. All DPS should switch (use an /assist macro if you need to) to the minion and kill it before it wipes the raid, which puts low-DPS raids at an extreme disadvantage.

It's essentially shuttling between these two phases and getting into the rhythm of things. If all players -- particularly melee DPS -- manage to stay alive every Lightning Nova cast, and the raid downs Tempest Minions in a timely fashion, Emalon should be a manageable fight.

The loot
Normal mode Emalon drops two pieces of loot and Emblems of Valor. He can drop the hands, legs, or chest pieces of Tier 8 (which drop in 10-man Ulduar) and Deadly Gladiator non-set pieces such as the cloak, boots, bracers, rings, and amulets. This gives Emalon a considerably more complex loot table than Archavon. In Heroic mode, he drops four items which can be the hands, legs, or chest pieces of Tier 8.5 (from 25-man Ulduar) or an assortment of Furious Gladiator items, and a pair of Emblems of Conquest. Emalon can drop legs and gloves from the Arena Season 6 sets, as well as any of the non-set pieces making the 25-man loot table even more expansive than the Normal mode. Fortunately, PvP non-set items are not class-specific, which should give players a better chance at winning something. Good luck and have fun storming the ~~castle~~ vault!

Observations from running a Naxx-25 PuG

2009-04-09T09:30:00.000-07:00

I'm very "up" on PuGs. I started my career as a PuG tank and met a lot of great players that way, many of whom I still raid with today. I've always been a stout supporter of throwing caution to the wind and joining LFG for an afternoon to see where it'll take you; it's been my experience that random players on your realm can and often will surprise you.

Once you master the art of the 5-person PuG, the ultimate risk is a raid PuG. One-shot the instance, or spend the night wiping? You won't know until you try.

I used to run Hyjal PuG's in late Burning Crusade and got to be the person in charge of arranging healers on Anetheron, explaining where to die on Azgalor, and uttering a hollow laugh at suggestions on whether or not Archimonde was in the cards (answer: hell no). I wasn't around for my guild's Naxx run one of these past weeks, and a few guildies were interested in gearing up their alts, so we thought -- PuG a 25-man Naxx? Why not?

1. Sending an open invite for tanks, healers, and DPS into the trade channel provides a pretty instructive look at what people are most interested in playing and gearing right now.

My totally unscientific take on things; it's a lot easier to PuG a tank now than it was in BC, healers are still scarcer than hens' teeth (but this will get easier if they know your run has a good track record), and -- as predicted -- everyone and his brother has a Death Knight. I could easily have filled every non-healer slot with a Death Knight, and wound up running 3 Death Knight tanks and 3 Death Knight DPS. For the forseeable future, I think you can realistically expect the Vanquisher token to be a complete nightmare.

2. Trying to explain Heigan to new raiders apparently sounds like you're reciting The Decameron as translated from Esperanto into Farsi and back again.

I think a 20 minute, 27 second kill says it all, although I await the legion of commenters certain to pop up and say, "You think that's bad?"

Tip: send people here, don't pull until everyone's seen it, assign an experienced "dancer" a raid icon, and tell people to stick to this person like glue on phase 2. I made the mistake of assigning this icon to one of our DK off-tanks, who assured me he knew the fight. It turns out he really didn't, and I spent each phase 1 bawling, "Move now! OK forward! More! More! Stop right there! Great! OK, forward! Back a little bit! Stop right there!" until I went hoarse.

3. On that note, who's tanking for you still matters a lot.

Tanks invariably set the pace of the run, and if they've never seen a fight before, you'll wind up having to spend a lot more time before each boss pull explaining what they have to do. Try to run with at least one tank who's familiar with the fights, even if they're not the best-geared. They are still likely to outperform a better-geared tank who stares blankly when you ask them in which direction they'll be kiting Grobbulus, and if you're really lucky, they'll coach the other tanks on what to do while you're handling other problems.

4. Take the number of healers you'd need for a basic, competent raid. All set? Now add another one.

Good healing -- or, in its absence, a lot of healing -- can hide some of your raid's inexperience with the encounters, and if you're pugging a 25-man run, it'll also help tremendously once you hit fights like Heigan, Grobbulus, Gothik, and Sapphiron. There comes a point at which you start to hit diminishing returns on this -- i.e. there's no point overloading your raid with healers if you won't survive Patchwerk and Thaddius -- but a full complement of 7 healers would have been a godsend at times.

5. Get Failbot and configure it to send information to you or the raid leadership.

Failbot is a tiny mod that will let you know instantly if someone's crossed charges on Thaddius, has two left feet on Heigan, or has an uncanny attraction to void zones on Kel'Thuzad (among other things). No matter how good you are as a raid leader, you still have to do your job in raids on top of trying to watch how things are going elsewhere. If you're not using Failbot, try to use and/or configure other mods to give you fast, simple information on how players and the raid are doing overall. If someone is clearly having problems on a particular fight and you know they're new to raiding, you won't lose anything by messaging them privately and asking them if they have any questions before you reach the next boss.

6. There's no perfect loot system for a PuG raid, but consistency is important.

/Roll subjects you to the tyranny of RNG and how lucky -- or not -- players are on a given night. Loot council is stupid when, by pugging, you've tacitly admitted you can't rustle up enough of your own players. Telling players to talk amongst themselves to figure who needs an upgrade most is just asking for trouble, and I'm equally uncomfortable with a third party trying to make that call. While the stars might align on any given night and one of these systems might result in a perfect set of drops going to the most deserving and grateful players -- don't count on it.

We wound up using Master Looter and a version of /roll that gave greater priority to main spec, main-toon players over alts and off-specs, and greater priority to players who hadn't previously won anything during the run. 22 out of 25 players ultimately left with upgrades, and in a lot of cases, multiple upgrades and even some offspec gear. I didn't get any serious complaints and people seemed happy with the arrangement, but it was occasionally very hard master-looting a piece to someone who I felt wasn't as deserving as a more hard-working player.

Whatever loot system you're using, announce it before the run begins, and stick with it. You may not like the individual outcome all the time, but one of the most frequent complaints we get on the site is that a PuG group or raid decided to change the loot rules on the fly. If your pugged raiders didn't like the loot rules, they didn't have to come, and there's nothing that says you have to like the individual outcome of each decision as long as you're consistently enforcing the process by which they're made. Having to master-loot a tier piece to a 700 DPS player over his healer comrade just because they have equal priority and the former won the roll will make you want to pull your hair out, but that was the system you all agreed on before you started, and as any lawyer could tell you, hard cases make bad law.

Master-looting a piece to a more "deserving" player is a great way to get the entire raid to think you're a dishonest prick (and they'd be right). Incidentally, it's also a fantastic way to end up on Guildwatch.

Guessing on the patch 3.1 release

2009-04-09T09:19:00.000-07:00

bridges_squares wants to know, and we're getting really, really close, so let's finally go out on that limb, shaky as it may be: when's the patch coming out? Turpster predicted it would be this past Tuesday on the WoW Insider Show last week (since Noblegarden and the equipment manager got delayed, he figured they wanted to hurry for a release), but obviously no dice on that one. And on the other end of things, April 26th is the date we're told Noblegarden will start, so it's a pretty good guess we'll see the patch by then.

If you follow that line of reasoning, that just leaves the next two Tuesdays, April 14th and 21st. And since we had rolling restarts last week, it seems like maintenance this week will bring us the patch on Tuesday, the 14th. But of course there are other factors in here: the PTR should go down before the patch comes up, and since the PTR it still up, we be waiting until the 21st. Also, just because Blizzard said Noblegarden on the 26th doesn't mean they won't delay it again, so we may still see the patch on the 28th or after that. And Tuesdays are usually when the live realms get patched (Fridays are usually when the patch the PTR, in my experience), but technically they could do it anytime, right?

So let's do a poll. I'm going to go with Tuesday the 21st (since there's no sign of the PTR going down yet), but when do you think patch 3.1 will drop? And no, "when it's ready" is not an option -- we'll just assume (hopefully correctly) Blizzard will make sure of that anyway.

Tom Chilton on what's coming in patch 3.1

2009-04-09T09:16:00.000-07:00

Our old friend Jessica Citizen has an interview up with Blizzard's Lead Game Designer on World of Warcraft, Mr. Tom Chilton. When Jeff Kaplan shipped off to other pastures in Blizzard to work on the new MMO, Chilton says he took over Kaplan's meetings, so right now, he is the flag leading the big ship of WoW. In the interview, he talks a bit about dual specs -- the system was originally planned to go in with the Lich King expansion, but it had to be pushed back to 3.1. And Chilton says he's already expecting to answer questions about triple specs at this year's BlizzCon, but of course, there's a balance there, as there has to be some choice on the part of the player as to what they decide to specialize in.

He also talks about the Argent Tournament and Ulduar -- the Tournament, he says, will be a boon to solo players and players who enjoy daily questing, with the jousting minigame mixing things up a bit. And Ulduar's hard modes, as we've heard before, will bring raiding back to the difficulty that players expect. Chilton fesses up to an error that GC hinted at yesterday -- Blizzard nerfed PvP items at the same time that they made raiding more accessible, and the result is that people flocked to PvE while ignoring most of the PvP options. "We kind of over-solved the problem," he says.

In the end, he calls 3.1 "the most ambitious content patch we've ever done for World of Warcraft." We'll have to see -- given that Noblegarden should show up with the new patch, it ought to be implemented by at least April 26th.

Wotlk Article: Quantifying Wrath's success

2009-03-17T08:33:00.000-07:00

The Egotistical Priest has a good series of posts up attempting to somehow quantify whether Wrath has been an overall success or not. Of course, it's definitely a financial success, but has the game's second expansion delivered what both players and Blizzard expected it to? Vonya sets out to find out in what has turned into a three part post: you can find parts one and two on the site now, and part three is set to come out tomorrow.

So far, the answer is yes: while the area of Tradeskills is noted as less than a success (it seems to me, too, that tradeskills had more variety and options in Burning Crusade than their current state in Wrath, though that might be because we're only partway through the expansion cycle), everything else is noted as a win for Blizzard: they've really beefed up questing, balance has been intriguing since Wrath (and even if one class has rubbed you wrong, consider how many players came running back with the expansion patch to re-try their class), and of course, Achievements have (predictably) brought the game to new levels of addiction and given players of all kinds new things to do.

Vonya still plans to tackle instancing and raiding as the other two criteria for Wrath's success (and there are probably a few other ways you could test it -- lore? setting?), but by the reasoning so far, Wrath is a win no matter how you slice it. Blizzard has outdone themselves with the second expansion -- the only question is where they'll go from here.

Lichborne: The Rise of Blood in 3.1

2009-03-17T08:26:00.000-07:00

The Blood tree often gets a bad rap among those not in the know. It's a decent leveling tree, but it's generally considered not to have the tanking power or AoE DPS Potential of Unholy or Frost. By all indications, that has changed in 3.1, especially in the latest patch. Not only have many key Blood talents and skills received key buffs or changes, but the very nature of Armor Penetration has changed, with the 25% benefit buff making Blood's mostly physical damage dealing style well suited to take advantage of the change. This is quite a shift from just before 3.1, when many were afraid disease-less Blood would be wiped out and leave the tree with no viable hassle-free DPS specs.

Blood DPS

Blood DPS can now safely use Death Strike as their standard Frost/Unholy Rune dump thanks to the buff baseline buffs and the new Improved Death Strike talent, which in alone solves a lot of Blood DPS problems, since you're no longer locked into 13 points of Frost for Annihilation. This allows heading into the Unholy Tree, where one can pick up major useful talents such as Morbidity, Epidemic, and Master of Ghouls, resulting a build that might look a little like this. This build benefits from grabbing extra strength, Death Coil damage, disease duration, and spell hit in Unholy, which would be near impossible if Blood still had to grab Annihilation. Since Death Coil will be your main RP dump and you'll be shooting off free Death Coils due to sudden doom, you'll want the damage and the extra chance for them to hit.

Some people have been a bit concerned that the Tier 8 4-piece bonus doesn't cover Death Strike, but don't expect Blood to fall behind too much because of that, because it does apply to Heart Strikes. That's really the secret of the build. Death Strikes are just there to generate Death Runes for Heart Strikes -- or, if you're AEing large groups, Blood Boil.

The two major disadvantages kept by Blood DPS are needing to babysit the Ghoul (since you won't be able to afford Night of the Dead) and the tightness of their rotation, needing to spend as many runes as possible on Heart Strike before Frost Fever and Blood Plague fall off. The former problem - is the perma-ghoul worth it for Blood DPS when it will die so easily - is probably one that will need some further exploration, and the latter shouldn't be as much of a problem thanks to a few points spent in Epidemic and Death Strike not removing diseases like Obliterate did without Annihilation. Overall, if Blood goes live looking close to how it does now, it should be a very tempting tree for DPS.

Blood Tanking

One of Blood Tanking's major weaknesses has always been that it's the weakest AE tree. That is pretty much gone as a problem is 3.1. The new disease-less Blood Boil is actually working remarkably well as a snap AE aggro tool, enough so that you shouldn't really need to worry about heading 21 points into Unholy to grab Unholy Blight. A Tank build like this should work pretty well both for survivability and threat. If you have a Frost DPSer in your raid who can cast Improved Icy Touch, all the better, you just freed up 3 points.

Also nice for Blood Tanks is the new buff to Scent of Blood. The latest iteration gives 10 runic power per a charge and can be activated by dodging, parrying, or simply by taking damage. Preliminary tests on the PTR are placing it at almost always up in multi-mob situations, and up enough to provide 2-3 runic power per second on average on single target fights.

This should make it a lot easier for Blood Death Knights to keep chaining Rune Strike and cement their place as solid single-target aggro holders. Of course, Scent of Blood is also conveniently low enough in the tree that Frost and Unholy tanks can take it, but Blood will probably still find it the easiest to take, as they'll probably have 3 spare points on the way to getting Will of the Necropolis and Heart Strike easily.

Speaking of Heart Strike...

There are some Death Knights who are asking for a new secondary effective to Heart Strike now that Blood Boil is an effective AE damage and threat tool. There's certainly a good argument for the cleave being less useful than it once was, but it's also useful to keep in mind that it wouldn't be the first time Blizzard has left a strike without a useful secondary ability, such as when they removed the HoT removal from Plague Strike.

Overall, even with that less useful secondary mechanic, Heart Strike is still a very fine damage dealer. Blood is a tree that's currently headed into 3.1 stronger than ever, and if you haven't taken a look at it lately, you might want to strongly consider a second one now. I'm probably going to keep on with Unholy, but at the same time, all that health recovery and a Dancing Rune Weapon churning out Blood Boils is just looking way too juicy for words..

More new Jewelcrafting recipes found on the 3.1 PTR

2009-03-15T09:31:00.000-07:00

Here's another nice set of tradeskill updates to show up on the 3.1 PTR recently, as Kaliope points out: New Jewelcrafting recipes.

First up, Shifting Twilight Opal will now finally exist in game. This purple gem should be a great possible choice for tanks looking to fill out a metagem or slot bonus requirement, especially. It's available from Tiffany Cartier in Dalaran.

The other new recipes are actually nice and conveniently straight from the trainer. There's 2 blue rings and 2 blue amulets, one each of caster and melee stats, with plenty of stamina and resilience:

Emerald Choker

Sky Sapphire Amulet

Runed Mana Band

Scarlet Signet

They do require large amounts of blue gems to craft, but Kaliope notes that some of those gems, specifically Forest Emeralds and Sky Sapphires, are rather low profit anyway, and that this jewelry is likely to be in demand among players looking to break into the Arena at the start of the new season that's coming with 3.1. The new recipes are also all in prime position to be valid skillup paths, with the Shifting Twilight Opal learnable at 390 skill and the new PvP jewelry learnable at 420 skill. got you covered from top to bottom with our Guide to Patch 3.1.

Chinese WoW provider The9 faces bankruptcy in wake of Wrath woes

2009-03-15T09:23:00.000-07:00

We told you a few days back that Wrath of the Lich King has had a tough time getting approved in China due to the government's strict censorship laws, but now there's even more bad news for Chinese WoW players. As Sister site Massively reports, The9 has told JLM Pacific Epoch that they will face bankruptcy if the expansion is not green-lighted soon. The Government agency responsible for the decision says that they must balance the needs of the9 with the need to root out "unhealthy" content from the game.

The9 has actually already paid for the game itself, having secured the Chinese licensing rights for a hefty fee back in April 2008. Add to that the upkeep cost of many of the most powerful supercomputers in China, and rumors that many Chinese WoW players have either quit or moved on to Taiwanese accounts for their Wrath fix, and it's easy to see why they're is getting a bit cash starved. If the9 goes under, it's difficult to say whether Wrath can be salvaged in China, but we'll keep you posted whatever happens.

Fishers in 3.1,New mounts for Horde

2009-03-15T09:18:00.000-07:00

One of the complaints heard from the Horde is that they have fewer buyable mounts than the Alliance side, making it intrinsically harder for them to gain the 100 mount achievement. 3.1 will see some steps taken to amend that gap, as the Horde will now be able to purchase a Black Wolf, a White Kodo, and a Black Skeletal Horse.

Some Horde are still not satisfied, saying that at least one of those mounts should be Epic to truly equalize numbers, but for now, there's at least more easy mounts to get toward the Red Dragonhawk (Which is honestly a lot cooler looking than the silly blue one Alliance get, seriously).

Rumors have also been persisting over the past few days that the Horde will finally be getting an Un'goro Ravasaur as a counterpart to the Winterspring Frostsaber for Alliance. This has been compounded by the discovery of a Venomhide Ravasaur mount and a Ravasaur related quest in the 3.1 PTR files. However, Mor'vek himself seems to be unaccessible, and Zarhym has recently gone on record as saying there will not be a Ravasaur Mount in 3.1. It seems, though, that they're at least working toward the idea. Maybe we'll see one in 3.2.

Here's one more bonus to accompany that whole mounts can swim thing in 3.1: An actual swimming mount. In 3.1, Fishers will be able to fish up a new mount from Northrend fishing schools. As to the identity of the mount, a Coralsheel Turtle mount has been spotted in the 3.1 PTR files, and Zarhym has confirmed that it's the real deal. Between this and the aforementioned fishing dailies, it is a very nice time to be a fisher in 3.1.

If nothing else, between this and the tournament, it looks like we'll be seeing a few more Dragonhawks flying around. Good luck, mount collectors!

Cooking and clams get more convenient changes in patch 3.1

2009-03-15T09:14:00.000-07:00

The patch notes for the 3.1 PTR have recently been updated, and they have quite a few nice updates and a few things that should make things more convenient for cooks everywhere. We were promised cooking would be easier in 3.1, and these patch notes definitely deliver on that promise. Let's check out the changes (compiled courtesy of MMO-Champion), which include even easier campfires and those 2 promised recipes:
* A new recipe has been added to cooking trainers for making Black Jelly, using several Borean Man 'O War as ingredients. While it looks disgusting, it restores more health and mana than the highest level food.
* Flint and Tinder is no longer necessary for creating a campfire. You're just that resourceful!
* Ingredients such as Spices, Apples, and the like have been removed from most cooking recipes.
* Players no longer need to complete the Clamlette Surprise quest to gain Artisan cooking. The quest now offers the unique recipe, Clamlette Magnifique. If you already completed the quest, you can visit Dirge Quickcleave in Gadgetzan to learn this recipe (for free).
* Several Northrend recipes were given greater skill up ranges to make it easier to reach 450 cooking skill.
* You no longer need to learn cooking from books. The trainers have finally done their reading and are able to teach you the same thing.

Streamlining the way we learn the cooking skill seems to be one of the themes of these changes. Not only do we no longer have to do the quest for Clamette Surprise to learn Artisan cooking, but even the cookbooks are a thing of the past. It's at least one or two less hoops to jump for, and very nice for newbies and alts, letting them focus on leveling and questing instead of running halfway around the world for a basic skill.

Of course, most dedicated cooks are still going to want to do the Clamette Surprise quest, since it gives a new cooking recipe, Clamlette Magnifique. One more option to level cooking is always good, plus it means less trouble for chefs in trying to smuggle recipes between factions to get Chef de Cuisine. And hey, that's not the only decent Clam related news in this patch. They've finally managed to fix that silly clam stacking bug. Loot recovered from a clam, whether you were mounted or not, will automatically stack coming out of the shell. That was definitely an annoying bug, and this fix will a godsend for my Murloc slaughtering sprees.

In more straight up convenient changes, Northrend cooks will find it easier to skill up. Not only will we be getting a new recipe for the Borean Man O War (Mmmm, delicious, delicious Black Jelly), but we'll be seeing existing Northrend recipes gaining greater skillup ranges. Hopefully this no more grinding of annoying feasts. Not that I won't still grind em. Small Feasts are hilarious.

Finally, Flint and Tinder is no longer needed for campfires at all. I suppose if we're resourceful enough to find wood for a campfire anywhere, we should be able to find two sticks or rocks to bang together for a spark, right? Of course, I didn't have a problem with needing it anyway. I always kept my pocket knife around.

Extra non-meat or fish ingredients for food is also apparently going away for many recipes. Of course, this is a trend that's been around for a while, as many Outland and Northrend needed no spices either. Of course, it's likely Northern Spices are sticking around. What else are we going to use all these Dalaran Cooking Rewards for?

Is Wrath too easy, or are we just better?

2009-03-11T07:17:00.000-07:00

In the eternal question of whether Wrath of the Lich King is too easy, Our Girl Friday posits an answer that I've often wondered about myself. Is it really that WotLK is so gosh-darned easy, or could the issue actually be that maybe, just maybe, the players have gotten better?

The wealth of knowledge about the nuts-and-bolts of theorycraft has never been more available. New players and old veterans alike have resources like WoW Insider, Wowhead, WoWwiki, or that juggernaut of theorycraft, Elitist Jerks. There are strategy videos, stategy manuals, and even a few strategy comics. The forums themselves have never been more informative, especially when you consider Ghostcrawler laying down wisdom all over the place. The information about how to play is out there for the taking.

And, c'mon. It's been about half a decade and near 12 million subscribers. Once you've done Nethekurse or Zereketh, you should know that you're not supposed to stand in pink, black, or red circles. Really, just don't stand in stuff. Is that really such a deep and meaningful skill that you have to relearn "Don't stand in stuff!" for Kel'Thuzad? So, if the Wrath raids aren't demanding a gear-based progression (meaning, it's all a gear check), then we should entertain the idea that we've gotten pretty good at not standing in stuff. That's certainly not the only raiding skill, but I'm using it as an indication that we're meeting the basic "skill" requirements.

Of course, even Ghostcrawler has acknowledged that Naxxramas is somewhat the new welfare epics. We know that Ulduar's going to be noticeably more "difficult." But until then, we could probably accept that the current accessibility of content owes some part to us getting better as players.

Human Females trade faces on the PTR

2009-02-26T09:27:00.001-08:00

One of the more mysterious bugs currently on the PTR is the fact that Human Females (maybe others, but none I've noticed) transferred over to the PTR are having their faces swapped around. In the picture above, you can see that my Paladin has two different faces. The one on the left is from Live servers, the one on the Right is from the patch 3.1 test realm. It isn't happening to all characters, oddly. Just some of them. My Priest, who is also a Human Female, transferred just fine and has the same face she always does. Which happens to be the face my Paladin has on the PTR now. Funky.

It's a known issue, and I'm sure it'll go away long before this patch ever hits live realms, but it's a very curious bug. It was likely caused by something quite mundane, but it makes me wonder if they were working on something that caused faces to shift out of the numerical order they had before. Adding new skins, perhaps? Updating old ones? Maybe, maybe not.

Oh me, oh my. Blizzard sure gets up to some weird stuff. Right now they are holding a theme park contest. Illustrate your own original Blizzard Entert

2009-02-26T09:21:00.000-08:00

When the first set of 3.1 patch notes popped up, many Death Knights were surprised to see that their auras were being reworked into something that, well, just isn't an aura at all.

Instead, the effects are being rolled into talents so that, if talented, the Death Knight herself still gains the benefit, but does not extend it to party or raid members.

Although they will now be called, for example, Improved Blood Presence, the benefits will be applied regardless of the presence assumed by the character.

I have to admit that my first reaction to the change was a negative one. It feels weird to me switching from a Holy Paladin to a character that simply does not have a comparable range of buffs and auras to offer.

That's when my roomie and addict of WoW forums and websites, piped in with the why. Today, Ghostcrawler gives an official explanation.

Unholy Aura, which grants a 15% movement speed increase, was slowly "becoming mandatory as a raid buff." The ability is not only handy for long corpse runs, as well as fights where movement speed and reaction time are critical, but it seriously impacts the overall damage done by the meleeing crowd.

Melee characters spend an annoying amount of time backing out of range because of AoE or ground effects, running around the mobs to always stay behind them, following after a mobile tank, and the like. This disrupts their damage, and because this has always been the case, classes and encounters are balanced assuming that this is still going on.

Ghostcrawler also mentions that Blizzard "considered giving it to other classes" but, as you can imagine, that "would just be accepting all players moving faster all the time." If that were the case, many boot enchants would have to be reworked, and in fact, it would likely just be easier to increase everyone's base speed and call it a day.

So why not simply change Unholy Aura? Frost Aura was, to quote GC, "kind of lame", and I'd have to agree. Overall, "the [dk aura] mechanic was just a little awkward and hard to explain."

After all, it is a unique aura system. Paladins can toss up any aura, regardless of spec, while a raid would have to insist on an Unholy Death Knight for the speed boost benefit. Allowing this to continue would be contrary to the direction that Blizz has been taking raiding. They don't want any class and spec combo to get an automatic, necessitated, raid invitation.

Considering that Blizzard is also working to make Blood and Frost specs more appealing to entice more of the Death Knight population to let go of their Unholy ways, this change will not only be fairer to every class that wants a shot at a raid spot, it will also allow Death Knights to be accepted regardless of spec.

WoW Patch 3.1 PTR Druid changes

2009-02-24T08:14:00.001-08:00

All right, Druids. I've been rolled out of bed to come look at the new PTR test notes, because apparently this is a big deal or something. As far as I'm concerned, all important business can wait until a reasonable hour in the morning, like 3 PM, but because this site is run by crazy people here I am.

So let's go skim the patch notes quickly -- /flick flick flick -- and try to answer the most important question first:

Is Tauren cat form still in the game?

/flick flick

Yes.

Man, %*#$ this patch.

Leaving aside this EGREGIOUS OMISSION, we're going to take a look at the preliminary Druid changes in patch 3.1 past the cut here, and courtesy of Michael Sacco and some data-mining gnomes, we also have the Druid Tier 8 shoulder graphic, which is pretty cool and reminds me a lot of Tier 5. I'm also seeing some undocumented changes in the game files off MMO Champion, but I'll have to examine those later today. I haven't been able to get on the PTR yet, so I can't confirm whether these changes have actually gone live on the test realm.

NOT ACTUALLY A DRUID CHANGE BUT IT AFFECTS DRUIDS MORE THAN ANY OTHER CLASS

Death Knights: Plague Strike and Blood Plague no longer remove HoT's. Plague Strike's damage increased quite a bit to compensate.

Bwa ha ha! Eat it, you miserable, overpopulated, overpowered walking corpses!

Oh God, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. I need to stop setting off interclass warfare like that. Someone might get hurt.

Anyway. What else is here...

ABOLISH POISON: Now ticks every 3 seconds, up from every 2. Now lasts 12 seconds, up from 8.

Eh. My first thought when reading this was that this isn't going to make combat versus Rogues or Hunters more pleasant, but not having to reapply this as frequently is a pretty big plus. Rogues aren't doing so hot in arena right now. In a move that has shocked the world, Hunters are, for some unaccountable reason. Not that you'd catch me dead in arena nowadays. Or alive either.

Proceeding to the Balance tree --

OWLKIN FRENZY: Owlkin Frenzy is now properly considered an Enrage effect. Now also does not trigger from spell hits, only physical ranged and melee attacks.

With respect to PvE, Owlkin Frenzy was always an iffy talent at best, but one in which 1 or 2 points might be worth your time if you didn't need to pick up raid utility talents. There's sufficient raid damage in important Wrath encounters (e.g. Malygos, Kel'Thuzad, Sapphiron, Grobbulus) that the occasional proc would ultimately provide a damage boost, though not a large one. Because nearly all raid damage is magic-based, the 3.1 change basically shuts OF down for good as a PvE talent.

With that said, it always found its best use in PvP anyhow, and in that respect it's definitely a nerf to Moonkin viability versus casters. However, procs off physical damage have been preserved, and at the moment that's where most of the damage is coming from in arena. I confess, though -- I've never PvP'd as a Moonkin. Thoughts?

That's the only confirmed talent change for Balance so far, so let's head to Feral --

NEW TALENT -- PRIMAL GORE: Grants the periodic damage from your Rake, Lacerate and Rip abilities the ability to critically hit.

Blizzard's been asked about allowing DoT's and HoT's to crit previously. If I'm recalling correctly, they've said that when classic WoW went live, they didn't have the ability to program it, but since then it's an idea they've bounced back and forth a lot, athough it's not necessarily simple to implement from either an itemization or class design perspective.

This looks pretty amazing on the outside (and depending on the proc rate, might very well be), but fair warning: don't be surprised if the damage modifier on Ferocious Bite gets nerfed in order to compensate. Ghostcrawler's mentioned recently that they're concerned about Cat burst in PvP (which is a very valid concern between Rend and Tear -- to which Primal Gore is currently linked -- and Feral Aggression) and were looking for ways to increase Cat sustained damage while reducing burst. Granting Rip and Rake the ability to crit is kind of an elegant solution to this problem, as both are necessary bleeds in the Cat high-DPS rotation.

Oh, and before I forget, this also affects Lacerate, which should be a very welcome damage/threat buff for bears. A 5-stack of Lacerate right now should be ticking for somewhere in the region of 700-1K depending on your gear, gems, and enchants, and a crit on this would be lovely.

SAVAGE ROAR: Now considered an Enrage effect.

Hrm. Enrage effects can be dispelled by Hunters' Tranquilizing Shot. Food for thought.

Restoration is getting a few more confirmed changes so I split the post into two parts. Also, Druid Tier 8 shoulders on the next page!

WoW Patch 3.1 PTR Warlock changes

2009-02-24T08:11:00.000-08:00

Blizzard said that they'd be introducing a lot of changes for the Warlock class in Patch 3.1, and if the incomplete patch notes are any indication, it looks like they're following through on that promise. You can read through the patch notes, but the Warlock changes are incredibly interesting. There are a lot of them, so let's go through them one by one and I'll weigh in with my thoughts on whether the changes are good, bad, or badass. Let's start with the baseline changes.

Curse of the Elements (Rank 5) - Increased to 13% spell damage, up from 10%.
It appears that the effects of Malediction has been rolled into the highest rank of this spell -- which means raiding Warlocks regardless of spec no longer have an excuse not to throw it up during a boss fight. Of course, this also means the Warlocks in the raid will have to talk amongst themselves as to who gets that assignment. It's like the Scorpid Sting of Hunters. It's a fantastic debuff, but it doesn't show up on the damage meters.

Curse of Recklessness - Removed
One of the least utilized curses, if only because there are better armor reduction effects which don't actually help your enemies. The good news is that the armor reduction has been rolled into the next spell...

Curse of Weakness - Now also reduces the armor of the target by 5%.
Warlock curses aside from Curse of Agony are generally utility spells, and this one has just been improved. I'm still wondering where the flee prevention fits in now that Curse of Recklessness is gone, though. We'll see if Blizzard addresses that through another ability.

More changes after the jump...

Enslave Demon - Spell haste penalty reduced by 10%, Melee haste penalty reduced by 10%. Warlocks have an increased 10% spell hit chance with this spell.
Not terribly useful now that the Infernal and Doom Guard no longer need to be enslaved, this change rolls the Demonology talent Improved Enslave Demon into the baseline spell. Will there be demons in Ulduar? A Warlock can only dream.

Fire Shield (Imp) - You can now cast this ability on raid members, rather than party members.
Mandatory change now that most buffs are raid-wide.

Ritual of Summoning - The summoning of the initial portal is now instant cast, down from 5 seconds.
This is one of those 'quality of life' changes Blizzard talked about. Considering the spell doesn't even summon anyone (it just summons a portal), I'm thankful for this tiny change.

AFFLICTION

Eradication - Redesigned. When you deal damage with Corruption, you have a 2/4/6% chance to gain the Eradication effect. The Eradication effect increases the critical strike chance of your Shadow Bolt spell by 30%. Each critical strike reduces the critical strike bonus by 10%. Lasts 30 sec.
I can't do the math on this yet, but this looks like a good change that firmly cements Shadow Bolts in Affliction's spell repertoire. Just like the old Eradication, though, the first point in this talent is worth more than the next two, which only increase the chance to proc the effect.

Haunt - Now only increases your shadow damage-over-time on the target. (No longer includes non-Shadow damage over time spells.)
I think this is Blizzard's way of telling Affliction 'locks to remove Immolate from their rotation. A definite nerf.

Malediction - No longer increases the effect of Curse of the Elements.
Because the bonus effect was rolled into the highest rank of the baseline spell, Malediction is now just a vanilla increase in spell power. It's a buff to the class, a nerf to the spec. There are now better talents to spend three points on.

Pandemic - This talent has been reduced to a 1-point talent, now grants your Corruption and Unstable Affliction the capability to critically hit.
This should work identically to three points in the old Pandemic. A pretty good change that frees up two points.

Shadow Embrace - Now only increases the damage done by your shadow damage periodic spells.
The writing's on the wall: stop using Immolate. It's a destruction spell. This seems to be one of Blizzard's methods of 'simplifying Affliction's rotation'. A nerf to the talent.

Siphon Life - The Siphon Life spell has been removed. Siphon Life now causes your Corruption spell to instantly heal you for 40% of the damage done.
Again, this is one of Blizzard's ways of simplifying Affliction's complicated repertoire. However, this looks to me like a DPS reduction as it no longer drains life from the target. This is good for multi-target situations, however, allowing us to cast Corruption in succession for both damage and healing. It's a buff to Corruption but the talent itself no longer offers a DPS boost. This, along with the disincentive to cast Immolate, should reduce the debuffs Affliction Warlocks need to apply to a more manageable four (aside from Shadow Embrace) -- Haunt, Corruption, Unstable Affliction, and a curse.

Suppression - Now increases spell hit for all of your spells.
This is a great change, which means Affliction 'locks no longer have to go up Destruction just for Cataclysm. It's also on the first tier, which means all specs have access to it.

Before we move on, it's important to note that the DoT effect of Immolate is improved with the redesigned Aftermath, which is still low enough in the Destruction tree for Affliction Warlocks to get. Conceivably, the rotations can still include Immolate, but doesn't benefit from bonus effects as much as it used to.

WoW Patch 3.1 PTR Death Knight Changes

2009-02-24T08:08:00.000-08:00

As expected, we got a pretty long list of changes for Death Knights. The frost tree has received some extensive and actually somewhat shocking reshuffling, and there's a few other unexpected but interesting changes. It's good to be mindful that these changes are still in flux. We'll probably see more changes and perhaps some reversion of these changes depending on what happens. It's worth noting that MMO Champion currently has undocumented changes and a completely different 3.1 DK Talent tree up that doesn't even match the one suggested in the patch notes, so we can't say for sure if the patch notes are already outdated. But for now, we're going to focus on the patch changes for the most part. So, let's dive right in.

General Death Knight Changes

Blood Boil's damage increased to make up for Pestilence no longer doing damage.

Blood Boil now does some damage to undiseased targets and extra damage to diseased targets. Its radius has been decreased.

Blood Plague: Now lasts 15 seconds untalented.

Death Pact: This heal cannot be a critical.

Frost Fever: Now lasts 15 seconds untalented.

Pestilence does no damage and has only one rank.

Plague Strike and Blood Plague no longer remove hots. Plague Strike's damage increased quite a bit to compensate.

Raise Ally has a >15 min cooldown to keep it out of Arena.

Raise Dead: Duration lowered to 60 sec. and cooldown lowered to 3 min. The cooldown on this ability now begins when the pet dies rather than when it is summoned.Rune of Cinderglacier now procs per minute instead of a 5% chance.

Rune of Razorfrost now affects Frost damage done by the DK only, but stacks up to 10%.

Strangulate no longer does damage and has been reduced to 1 rank.

To start with, we have some basic but expected PvP nerfs, such as removing the damage from Strangulate and the HoT removal from Plague Strike. These are probably to be expected, and if nothing else, were probably needed because of the swapping of talents in the Frost Tree. The bumping up of Duration on Blood Plague and Frost Fever should make tight rotations a little less punishing and allow for more freedom to fit in a runic dump before reapplying disease or apply one last Frost/Unholy rune attack before diseases drop. The enforced cooldown on Ghouls is definitely a bit annoying. It may be a PvP nerf, to allow teams a bit of breathing room against a Death Knight by killing his Ghoul.

Talents

BLOOD

Blood Aura: Replaced with Improved Blood Presence. This allows the Death Knight to keep the healing from damage done bonus of Blood Presence in any presence, and increases healing received while in Blood Presence.

Blood-Gorged now grants armor penetration instead of expertise.

Bloody Strikes now increases Blood Boil damage instead of Pestilence.

Bloodworms now heal more.

Dancing Rune Weapon: Fixed a bug making it trigger an unusual number of effects from the weapon equipped by the Death Knight. In addition, it will now only echo Death Knight spells whose primary purpose is dealing damage. Also corrected a bug making the effect last 8 seconds longer than intended.

Scent of Blood will now proc on a dodge, parry or taking damage, and internal cooldown lowered to 10 from 20 sec.

Sudden Doom now procs a free Death Coil instead of requiring you to push the button. Ranks reduced from 5 to 3.

For all the talk of buffing Blood, there wasn't much to get really excited over in this current push of the patch notes. Bloodworms heal more, which is at least good news to grinding Blood Death Knights. MMO-Champion is claiming Blood Gorged actually gives 10% Armor Penetration. As long as that isn't 10% after other armor reducing effects, that may end up being an overall buff, or at least a somewhat fair tradeoff for the lost 5 expertise. Dancing Rune Weapon will have likely lost the ability to summon an extra Ghoul or the like as well.

Blood Aura's change is a bit disappointing in that it's lost a lot of its utility. It appears to work only for the Death Knight now by granting them Blood Presence healing in all Presences, plus some extra healing in Blood Presence. This, again, might work out well for grinders, but a smart DPS Death Knight in a raid situation probably isn't going to be taking enough damage for this to be worth it, especially if he's in Unholy Presence for the rune cooldowns.

Since the Aura talents (Much like the also switched to self only Razorice debuff) don't really have a cousin from any other class, Blizzard probably felt they needed to switch them to single target avoid making Death Knights with Auras seem mandatory for any fights. This is understandable, but I'm not quite sure they're all the way there yet as far as these new presence buffs. The Blood Aura replacement specifically just doesn't seem to give the right amount of utility to the Death Knight to make them worth using.

It's also worth noting that MMO-Champion is reporting that Blood and Heart Strike now do slightly less base weapon damage, but do a percentage more damage per disease on the target. So yeah, there's a strong chance we'll be saying goodbye to diseaseless Blood. If these changes are also an overall damage buff, which they may well be depending on how the extra percentage of damage is applied, it could mean Blood is looking stronger than it might by glancing at the patch notes.

Still, overall, I'd expect more Blood buffs to be coming on the PTR.

FROST
F

The following talents have moved in the Frost tree: Runic Power Mastery, Glacier Rot, Killing Machine, Chilblains, and Endless Winter.

Black Ice now grants 2/4/6/8/10% Shadow damage in addition to the Frost damage.

Black Ice: Frost Damage bonus lowered to 4/8/12/16/20%

Blood of the North is 3 ranks instead of 5 for the same effect.

Chillblains: Now a 15/30/50% movement speed debuff (up from 30%). Moved to position currently occupied by Glacier Rot.

Endless Winter: Moved to position currently occupied by Chillblains.

Frost Aura: Replaced with Improved Frost Presence. Allows the Death Knight to keep the health bonus of Frost Presence in any presence, and decreases magic damage taken while in Frost Presence.

Glacier Rot: Third rank added, and damage bonus increased to 7/13/20. Moved to position currently occupied by Endless Winter.

Howling Blast: Swapped positions with Hungering Cold in the talent tree (HB is now at 51, and HC is now at 31). In addition, the damage bonus for targets with Frost Fever is now only 20%.

Icy Talons - This talent how has a new icon.

Runic Power Mastery down to 2 ranks.

With Black Ice buffed to include Shadow Damage and Glacier Rot moved further down the tree, Frost suddenly seems like a much, much more alluring secondary tree for Blood and Frost Knights. Chillblains being both buffed and moved to the first tier seems a bit overdoing it considering how hard it is to escape from a Death Knight already, but perhaps it is Blizzard's way of compensating for the removal of HoT removal from Plague Strike. If it sticks, though, it will be nice for Blood Death Knights when paired with the Glyph of Blood Strike, especially.

Still, MMO Champion lists Runic Power Mastery as moving to tier 1, and I find that much more likely. That should be a tempting choice for Blood and Unholy Death Knights alike, making it easier to squeeze out one more Death Coil or keep Unholy Blight and Gargoyle up at the same time.

If 32/39 wasn't already down for the count, 3.1's going to send it screaming into oblivion with the moving of Howling Blast to the 51 point slot. This seems like a pretty smart move for sure. Hungering Cold was always a lackluster 51 point talent, but seems to be reasonably well powered for 31 points. We'll have to see now if 51 point dual wield frost can still hold out and deliver reasonable damage. At least it will still be able to grab Necrosis and Blood Caked Blade from the Unholy tree - but even that may not be quite as helpful. More on that later.

The new Frost Aura replacement is probably a bit better off than the new Improved Blood Presence, at least for tanks, with the extra magic absorption. It really depends on how much damage it decreases. I don't expect many DPS Frost to take it though. What I do expect to see is a lot of DPS Frost Death Knights testing out the new Razorice to see if the extra Frost Damage outweights the extra strength from Fallen Crusader.

UNHOLY

Blood-caked Blade: Now has a 3 second cooldown on the effect.

Desecration: This talent now has a 100% chance to be triggered. Additional points in the talent increase the damage bonus and snare magnitude instead of increasing the chance.

Epidemic: Epidemic now has 3 ranks (adding an additional 3 sec of disease duration). Magic Suppression is 3 ranks (down from 5) for 2/4/6% magic damage reduction.

Master of Ghouls: Now also reduces the cooldown on Raise Dead by 60 sec.

Necrosis: Can now only be triggered by main hand attacks.

New talent: Improved Death Strike. Increases Death Strike damage by 10/20.

Night of the Dead: Redesigned to grant a flat reduction on cooldown to Raise Dead and Army of the Dead instead of a reduction from using abilities.

Outbreak bonus for Scourge Strike lowered to 10/20/30%.

Scourge Strike: Damage increased.

Unholy Aura: Replaced with Improved Unholy Presence. Allows the Deathknight to keep the movement speed bonus of Unholy Presence in any presence, and increases rune regeneration rate while in Unholy Presence.

Unholy Blight and Gargoyle have swapped places in the Unholy tree. Gargoyle is the new Unholy 51 talent.

The removal of so much chance and hoop jumping on the part of Desecration and Night of the Dead is definitely appreciated, and should make Death Knight DPS a bit more convenient. I was somewhat surprised to see Scourge Strike Damage increased. Scourge Strike is a very solid skill that already does lots of solid damage, and I wonder if this heralds a declassification of Ebon Plaguebringer as a disease or another nerf. This is especially amazing considering that MMO-Champion is reporting that Outbreak now increases Scourge Strike damage.

Now that Epidemic is only 1 second per talent point, I think we'll see more Death Knights skip it altogether and count of Glyph of Scourge Strike and the new baseline 15 second duration to help them out. There's probably better way to spend your points.

The Gargoyle rebuff will have to be tested, but I'm certainly excited, and I'm looking forward to trying an Unholy/Frost

Also tucked into the notes are a couple of definite dual wielding nerfs. Necrosis doing main-hand damage only means the damage will remain unchanged for 2-handers but will drop significantly for dual wielders. You may still see some people trying a 51 Frost/20 Unholy dual wield build, but as things stand now, 3.1 is the era of 2-hander dominance for sure.

The Improved Unholy Presence talent will mean your raid members will be wanting to grab Tuskarr's Vitality, but an Unholy DPSer may find they like this new version plenty well. We'll have to see more numbers, but with many tight rune rotations already prefering Unholy Presence even for PvE, we could see Improved Unholy Presence providing a significant damage boost, allowing the use of more strikes per a disease cycle.

MMO-Champion also claims that Shadow of Death will be removed from the game altogether and replaced with a Ghoul buff called Ghoul Frenzy that provides 25% haste and a 30% of max hp HoT over 15 seconds. With the changes to Raise Dead meaning an enforced 2 minute cooldown if your Ghoul dies unexpectedly, having that extra heal will be very helpful to an Unholy Knight who makes their Ghoul a meaningful part of their DPS, especially when combined with a few Death Coils.

Overall, I think we haven't seen the last of the Death Knight changes. Right now, 32/39 has probably been laid to rest for good, but Unholy 2-hand DPS probably reigns supreme even more so than usual, and Frost 2-handed DPS probably still looks pretty solid too. Blood, it's too early to tell, but I expect additional buffs to that tree, and possibly some rollbacks of the Scourge Strike buffs in Unholy.

Hang on tight, 3.1's liable to be a wild ride. Let's get on there and test and see what happens.

WoW Patch 3.1 PTR Warrior changes

2009-02-24T08:05:00.000-08:00

I want you to try and remain calm, okay? I know as warriors you're crazy excited for all the twists and turns for the class on the PTR. While I can't hit all of the highlights, I can give you a taste.

Warrior

ARMS

Blood Frenzy improved to 2/4% increased damage.

Heroic Throw missile speed increased.

And we're done.

Now's a good time to remind everyone that these patch notes are not in any way, shape or form complete, and that there will almost certainly be more changes. We've already seen posts from Ghostcrawler indicating that a lot more than this was in the works, so we can consider these changes just preliminary.

So why just roll these two out for warriors? Both are good changes, it's true, but when some classes are seeing major overhauls these look rather paltry. What's going on?

It seems that Arms is a major focus for the dev team for 3.1, for one thing. It makes sense that they might want to roll those changes out more slowly, especially if they're more major changes to the spec than we might otherwise expect. Changing arms without buffing fury accidentally has been stated to be a big priority to them so far so we'll see how that shakes out.

In addition, they're still discussing how to make the new stance system work. Since they haven't decided how that's going to work, it's not surprising that we don't see it rolled out on this patch.

For warriors this is a very preliminary patch, all told. Sunder hasn't been changed, the changes to rage generation through shields don't seem to be there (I didn't see them under the priest notes either) so I'm fairly sure we're going to see a lot more for warriors when all is said and done here. The PTR is dropping in stages this time, we have to keep that in mind.

Edited to Add: MMO-Champion has posted some undocumented changes to warriors.

Wrecking Crew (Tier 10) now states that it no longer stacks with enrage.

Titan's Grip (Tier 11) now reduces physical damage you deal by 10%.

Sunder Armor now reduces target's armor by 4% per application. Stacks up to 5. (Previously reduced armor by a set amount)

Clearly the Titan`s Grip change is a substantial lowering of fury`s DPS potential.
We've got you covered from top to bottom with our Guide to Patch 3.1

WoW Patch 3.1 PTR Shaman changes

2009-02-24T08:04:00.000-08:00

Well, there's some interesting new stuff happening in the latest patch notes for the 3.1 PTR. Like what, you ask? Well, here's a sample from what's coming for enhancement:

New Talent: Frozen Power: Increases the damage done by your Frostbrand Weapon if it is enchanted on your main-hand weapon by 10/20%, and your Frost Shock has a 50/100% chance to root the target in Ice for 5 sec. when used on targets at or further than 15 yards from you.

Spirit Weapons: Now reduces all threat generated by 30%, not just physical attacks.

Stormstrike charges have been increased by 2, and cooldown reduced by 2 sec.

And that's hardly all, folks. Let's take a look at the complete list of changes and discuss them behind the jump.

We'll go line by line with the notes and discuss the changes as we go.

Bloodlust/Heroism: Cooldown reduced to 5 minutes, but Sated and Exhausted now last 10 minutes.

This is a nerf to raids with more than one shaman who were using Bloodlust/Heroism every five minutes. Now, they'll only be using it every ten, and moreover, only one shaman will be necessary to use it. I don't really understand why they shortened the cooldown if they were going to extend the debuff... are they anticipating raids rotating in a whole new DPS group and are okay with that? If not, why have the cooldown come up a full five minutes before the ability can be used again? It seems arbitrary, but it's possible I'm missing something awesome here.

Poison Cleansing Totem and Disease Cleansing Totem have been merged into "Cleansing Totem." Cleansing Totem pulses every 3 sec, down from 5.

Nothing but awesome here. More pulses and only one totem for both effects is purely good.

ENHANCEMENT

Lava Lash now has a new icon.

New Talent: Frozen Power: Increases the damage done by your Frostbrand Weapon if it is enchanted on your main-hand weapon by 10/20%, and your Frost Shock has a 50/100% chance to root the target in Ice for 5 sec. when used on targets at or further than 15 yards from you.

The new icon thing is pretty done to death as a shaman joke, so I'll just ignore that. The new talent, though, is fascinating. I don't expect it will lead to any Frostbrand builds for PvE, but for kiting and snaring in PvP it will have some nice applications. Of course, if anyone remembers the Vashj fight, you'll never know when this could have PvE applications as well.

Spirit Weapons: Now reduces all threat generated by 30%, not just physical attacks.

Stormstrike charges have been increased by 2, and cooldown reduced by 2 sec.

Improved Stormstrike re-designed: When you Stormstrike, you have a 50/100% chance to immediately grant you 20% of your base mana.

Spirit Weapons change is pure good. Enhancement DPS became much more balanced between physical and magic with the launch of Wrath, so changing Spirit Weapons to reduce both kinds of threat is a good move. The effect of Improved Stormstrike just got rolled into regular Stormstrike, so I have a hard time seeing that as bad, and the new Imp SS sounds like it will be a positive boon to mana regen. All in all, hard to be unhappy with any of that.

Toughness: No longer increases your armor. Instead, this talent now increases your total Stamina by 2/4/6/8/10%.

Unleashed Rage - Reduced to 3 points, down from 5. Each point now also increases your total Agility by 1/2/3%.

The Toughness change may or may not help with shaman health in PvP. The Unleashed Rage changes bring it into line with similar abilities and gives shamans a reason to have it beyond the raid buffing aspect.

ELEMENTAL

New Talent: Booming Echoes- Reduces the cooldown of your Flame Shock and Frost Shock spells by an additional 1/2 sec., and increases the direct damage done by your Flame Shock and Frost Shock spells by an additional 10/20%.

Nothing much to hate here, it's a buff. It should encourage elemental to work those spells into their rotations more, especially in PvP if the new enhancement talent Frozen Power is accessible to elemental shamans.

RESTORATION

Ancestral Awakening: This talent now accounts for your ineffective healing, rather than effective.

Cleanse Spirit now has a new icon.

Riptide: This spell has a new icon.

We will once again ignore the new icons. The Ancestral Awakening change confused me until smarter healers than I explained that it means that Ancestral Awakening will now heal for 30% of the amount healed including any overheal. This is a buff, because if you top off the tank with a massive critical overheal, the Ancestral Awakening proc won't heal someone who is almost dead for an intensely trivial amount anymore.

So far, some interesting changes for shamans all told. It's definitely obvious that PvP on shamans is getting some tuning, and also some damage and mana efficiency issues are also being addressed. The threat reduction from Spirit Weapons is also very, very good news. The nerf to Bloodlust/Heroism frankly baffles me. It's bad and it's done in a very strange manner. We'll have to see, but I call that change the one big nerf in an otherwise excellent patch for shamans.

Since this is the PTR, I suggest you get on there and test and feed back as much as you can, shamans. All of this can change, so don't take any of it as set in stone.

WoW Patch 3.1 PTR Holy and Disc Priest changes

2009-02-24T08:02:00.000-08:00

A lot of changes are being introduced for both types of healing Priests in the upcoming 3.1 patch. Some of them are expected and others are unexpected! As always, check out the full PTR notes (which are most likely incomplete).

The promised changes to increase Holy's PvP ability don't seem to be here yet. I rubbed my eyes when I saw it because this wasn't the Holy tree I remembered.

As an overall grade, I'd say there are some serious buffs being doled out for healing Priests. Our Area of Effect heals have been ramped up!

Some notable highlights? Rapture has some new additions to it (It grants energy, rage, mana, or runic power to the target when it is removed). Prayer of Healing is no longer restricted to the Priests current party. Renew get's some extra nice bonuses in the form of an instant-application aspect and an overall spellpower bonus.

Keep reading! Disc and Holy changes are after the break!

Changes

Abolish Disease: Now cleanses a disease every 3 sec, down from 5. Duration reduced from 20 seconds, down to 12 sec.
This will help Priests against Death Knights who like to unload every conceivable disease onto us. Will help during the Heigan encounter, too!

Devouring Plague: This spell now has a new icon.

Divine Spirit is now trainable at level 31.
This will remove Divine Spirit and Improved Divine Spirit from the talent trees.

Holy Nova: Mana cost reduced approximately 20%.
Good change! This makes Holy Nova a much more attractive party wide healing spell. Not sure how it will compare to Prayer of Healing and Circle of Healing yet. The Glyph of Holy Nova heals for an additional 40%.

Hymn of Hope: This spell has been removed.
No more 8 seconds of standing still. This means we lose an avenue of mana regeneration. Surely there will be other talents that increase our mana return?

Improved Holy Concentration removed.
So we're left with Holy Concentration now.

Prayer of Healing: This spell now heals the target's party, rather than being limited to just your direct party.
No longer need to stagger Priests across various groups. Since Prayer of Healing is no longer restricted to the Priest's current party, flexibility of the spell goes up.

Shadowfiend: Health scaling increased. Now receives 30% of the master's spell power. Mana return increased to 5%, up from 4%. The Shadowfiend now receives mana when its melee attacks land, rather than when it deals damage. Movement speed normalized to player movement speed. Tooltip revised.
Sweet! Now it might be able to live long enough to actually restore mana instead of being one or two shot! This should lead to a net increase. Our mana restored goes up when the Shadowfiend hits a target. Doesn't matter if it gets blocked or parried, it seems. Another 1% increase in mana return should help.

Discipline

Divine Aegis - Divine Aegis effects will now stack, however the amount absorbed cannot exceed 125*level (of the target).
Nice. A buff to Divine Aegis. Even though Divine Aegis will continue to stack, there's now a ceiling. Seems like the magic number is 10000 for level 80 characters. I can stack Divine Aegis many times on a tank. Each application will absorb 30% of the amount heal. Each time Divine Aegis lands, that number will continue to go up until it reaches 10000.

Grace: Duration increased to 15 seconds, but now is only limited to one target.
I guess we're definitely sticking to tank healing for a while.

Improved Power: Word Fortitude - Now also increases your total Stamina by 2/4%.
Seems like the Priest itself gets an extra 4% overall stamina.

New Talent: Soul Warding: Reduces the cooldown of your Power Word: Shield ability by 4 sec., and reduces the mana cost of your Power Word: Shield by 30%.
Interesting new talent! This essentially removes the cooldown timer on Power Word: Shield! The Weakened Soul debuff will still remain. The lowered mana cost is good.

Penance: Damage increased approximately 30%.This spell can now be cast on yourself.
Forget the damage increase, the fact that Priests can cast this on themselves is pure gold. I wonder what the animation will look like.

Power Infusion: This effect now has a new spell effect and sound.

Reflective Shield:This talent has been removed.

Unbreakable Will:Increased from 3/6/9/12/15% to 6/12/18/24/30%.

Rapture: When Power Word: Shield is absorbed or dispelled, you gain 1.5/2/2.5% of total mana back. Your target has a 33/66/100% chance to energize your shielded target with 2% mana, 8 rage, 16 energy, or 32 runic power.
Taken from the new talent calculator that MMO Champion has provided. This is a big buff. Hopefully this just might silence the tanks who keep asking us not to shield them so they can gain more rage.

Enlightenment: Increases your total spirit by 2/4/6% and increases your spell haste by 2/4/6%.
It's a switch from Stamina to spell haste. Good change. I guess I won't be tanking as much.

Improved Flash Heal: Reduces the mana cost of your Flash Heal by 15%, and increases the critical effect chance of your Flash Heal by 10% on friendly targets at or below 50%.
Nice addition! With the Glyph of Flash Heal, this reduces the overall mana cost of Flash Heal by 25%. The critical chance increase should help save lives, too.

Meditation: Allows 17/33/50% of your mana regeneration to continue while casting.
Expected due to the Spirit nerfs. Holy Priests may not be dancing as much anymore.

Holy

Circle of Healing: Healing increased by approximately 40%.
To help make up for the cooldown nerf, they introduce a healing increase.

Holy Concentration re-designed: Mana regeneration is increased by 16/32/50% for 8 sec after you critically heal with Flash Heal, Greater Heal, Binding Heal or Renew.
Start stacking a lot of crit. It might be possible to get it so that Holy Concentration is almost always active.

New Talent: Empowered Renew: Your Renew spell gains an additional 5/10/15% of your bonus healing effects, and your Renew will instantly heal the target for 5/10/15% of the total periodic effect.
So Renew gains an instant heal component when you cast it. Not only that, it's all overall effect is increased even more. Renew finally gets some love!

Serendipity re-designed: When you heal with Binding Heal or Flash Heal, the cast time of your next Greater Heal or Prayer of Healing spell is reduced by 6/12/20%. Stacks up to 3 times. Lasts 20 sec.
Trying to make healing more fun and less monotonous. I might not go out of my way to set off Serendipity, but it's an interesting change. Will need more time to test it out in game.

Test of Faith: No longer increases critical effect chance of your heals, but healing done on targets lower than 50% health is increased from 2/4/6 to 4/8/12%.
No more crits but the healing is increased on targets below half life.

These patch notes are incomplete and can chance at any time!

So yes, not all of these changes or additions will make it to the final cut. But for the time being, they're here and in the patch. Let's see how they'll perform first.
from top to bottom with our Guide to Patch 3.1

WoW Patch 3.1 PTR Shadow Priest changes

2009-02-24T07:59:00.000-08:00

The PTR patch notes have hit, and while we don't have the entire spread of changes yet (they'll be coming in waves), we do have a lot of pretty good material to look at. Personally, I think the Shadow Priest changes are pretty great this time around. PvP Shadow Priests might feel a little disappointed, but PvE Priests should be fairly happy with how things are going so far.

Even PvP received a few good buffs, but while it's a step in the right direction, it simply isn't enough. It feels as if they're trying to approach some of the big issues carefully, when they really do need to go in there and start making pretty sweeping changes to the PvP-centric talents of the Shadow Priest. A lot needs to change to make the Shadow Priest relevant in PvP again without strapping a Warlock to their hip at all times.

Enough of that, though. Let's look into the changes, shall we?

Shadowfiend: Health scaling increased. Now receives 30% of the master's spell power. Mana return increased to 5%, up from 4%. The Shadowfiend now receives mana when its melee attacks land, rather than when it deals damage. Movement speed normalized to player movement speed. Tooltip revised.

Well, Shadowfiend needs serious buffs in some situations, and while this will help a bit, I think it's too little. One of the big issues with Shadowfiend is that it's so easily juked in PvP. Absorption shields on the enemy won't totally hose you anymore (since the attack just needs to land, not do damage) and that's a good thing, but it's still going to be able to be kited around. It needs to move faster than players, not as fast as players. Against someone who's playing smart, the Priest simply won't get a mana return from the Fiend.

It's not going to do its job in PvP until that happens, period. It's a little better, but still not so good.

PvE, the bugger might be a lot more reliable if that HP buff is substantial. Having him die to random things makes me facepalm each and every time, there's no reason he should be able to die at all, so if they can prevent the gibs I'm perfectly happy with him. It also looks like he'll be doing more damage, so that should be neat.

Blackout: This talent has been removed.

This doesn't come as a shock, we saw it coming. It's a bit lame since it was one of our best 'defenses' for so long, but RNG stuns going away is not at all something that blows us away.

Darkness: This talent is now in Tier 1, moved up from Tier 6.

I'm somewhat surprised they put this talent so high up in the tree, opposite Spirit Tap. I can't really see a problem with its placement, to be completely honest, but it feels weird to me for some reason I can't explain. That placement does make potential split/tri-specs a bit more appealing. You know, the specs that are primarily healing but go Shadow through Mind Flay? Those specs might get a little juice out of this placement (though they'd likely ignore it for Spirit Tap), but otherwise it shouldn't bother anything at all. Which is likely the point.

Devouring Plague has a new icon.

Greatest change they've made to the game in the last 5 years. Hands down.

Dispersion: Now clears all snare and movement impairing effects and makes you immune to them while dispersed.

This had to happen, and I'm glad to see they did it. Dispersion wasn't truly an escape maneuver, it was more of a delaying maneuver. Live six more seconds, hope someone rescues you. This should give Dispersion a little more usefulness, and when combined with Improved Shadowform's Fade effect, it should prove difficult to keep a Shadow Priest in melee range. Well, hopefully. The whole 'cooldowns' bit might rain all over that parade.

Shadowform: Bonus damage from critical strike chance removed and replaced by the ability of those periodic damage spells to generate critical strikes.

Ladies and gentlemen, it's official. DoTs can now crit. Do you hear that sound? That melody?

That's angels singing.

Silence: Range increased to 30 yards.

It's about freaking time.

Vampiric Embrace duration increased to 5 minutes, up from 1 minute. PvP duration is now 60 seconds. Cooldown removed.

I don't really grasp why it needs to remain at 1 minute in PvP, but oh well. No cooldown is good. Longer PvE duration is good. I support this change.

New Talent: Improved Devouring Plague (Shadow): Increases the periodic damage done by your Devouring Plague by 5/10/15%, and when you cast Devouring Plague you instantly deal damage equal to 5/10/15% of its total periodic effect.

A straight buff to the spell through this talent, that's pretty nice. It's also very interesting to see this talent give the DoT a direct damage component. I might be mistaken, but I think patch 3.1 is the first time we're seeing that sort of modification to HoTs and DoTs via talents. Our Holy brethren see a similar treatment with Empowered Renew. Hopefully it works out and they explore more of it, it's a pretty nice way to give DoTs an extra little kick. It also makes reapplying all of your DoTs a bit less boring, because it gets the damage rolling again right away.

My big concern with the addition of this talent? Previously, a PvE build totally ignored Blackout, picked up Spirit Tap and Improved Spirit Tap, and worked down the tree. Now a PvE build will be picking up the Spirit Taps, then Darkness, and then start working down the tree. That's going to be more talents spent in the tree than we were previously, and most Shadow builds barely scraped together enough points to pick up Meditation in the Discipline tree for our mana regen.

Now, will this be a problem? Potentially, but perhaps not. My Shadow Priest doesn't run out of mana at all at this point, but I have Meditation. Does Meditation make that big of a difference? Will the buffs to the Shadowfiend make up for a potential loss of Meditation's mana regen? Or will we need to gloss over some of our DPS talents to get those points into the Discipline tree?

I suspect that we'll be fine passing over Meditation. Hopefully Improved Spirit Tap, Replenishment, and the Shadowfiend buffs will keep us in the green. We'll find out sooner or later.

There are a few other changes coming for Priests in patch 3.1 that aren't aimed directly at the Shadow tree, but will help us out a bit anyway. Divine Spirit, as we've mentioned before, is becoming baseline. Every Priest will get the first rank at level 31. It won't be the fancy improved Divine Spirit for us Shadow Priests, but additional Spirit always rules and we'll be able to buff it ourselves now.

Improved Fortitude is getting a secondary effect as well, it's going to grant the Priest an additional 4% stamina with two points in the talent. Priests can always use a bit more survivability, both in PvE and PvP, so if they're going to add on some extra health to a talent I was investing in anyway, I'm really not going to complain. from top to bottom with our Guide to Patch 3.1

Warlock's guide to gearing for Naxx

2009-02-24T07:52:00.000-08:00

Wrath of the Lich King has created a new standard for sheer volume of content available to players as soon as they hit max level. And with content, comes gear! Reputation grinds such as the Argent Crusade and the Kirin Tor can be completed in only a few days, even if you schedule time to deal with things like 'real life'. Crafted gear is mostly bind on equip now, making it much more accessible. Several heroics, such as Utgarde Keep, Violet Hold, and Nexus, are easy enough that a DPS can usually slip into them shortly after hitting 80 without slowing their group down. Even the 10- and 25-man versions of Obsidian Sanctum and Vault of Archavon, are frequently cleared by pick-up-groups.

Head slot items for warlocks are pretty much limited to three right now. My current favorite is The Argent Skullcap, attained through a rather simple quest-chain in Icecrown. The high amount of hit rating makes getting that all-important 446 much simpler, and it's far easier and cheaper to get than either of the other two pre-Naxx headpieces. Though if you're a tailor The Hat of Wintry Doom may serve as a skill-up for you. And if the Forgotten Shadow Hood happens to drop in Heroic Culling of Stratholme, it's also a good choice. However, that 446 hit rating has to come from somewhere, and I've rarely seen any piece of gear with as much as The Argent Skullcap has.

There are a few nice neck pieces pre-Naxx that are good to keep an eye out for. Emeline's Locket is my personal favorite, for the hit rating and the gem slot, but if you manage to get into a Heroic Culling of Strat run (which you really should try to do almost as soon as you hit 80. Heroic isn't much more difficult than normal so long as the group isn't attempting a timed run,) then the Necromancer's Amulet is a good alternative. Of course, if you happen to get lucky in 10-man Obsidian Sanctum, then the Circle of Arcane Streams blows them both out of the water!

Shoulder pieces are slim-pickings, but if you look carefully you can find a gem or two. The Runecaster's Mantle is a random drop in Heroic Utgarde Keep, and I don't know if I've ever been there without seeing it drop at least once -- sometimes twice! The Mantle of Deceit is my personal favorite pre-Naxx piece, and has a very good chance to drop off of Mal'Ganis in Heroic Culling of Stratholme. The Dark Runic Mantle, a frequent trash drop in either version of Halls of Stone, is also an excellent choice.

Back pieces are dismally difficult to acquire early on. Even after running Naxx several times I've yet to upgrade from the level 78 Cape of Seething Steam out of Halls of Lightning. And by all rights, there isn't much in the way of level 80 capes even after you get into Naxx. My advice here is to figure out your preferred method of acquiring the Deathchill Cloak (crafting, purchasing, begging friends...) and start working on getting it. But you'll likely be well into Naxx before you've got your hands on that particular purple. I myself still have about 100 quests left to do before the trainer will teach it to me.

For a chest piece, the Ebonweave Robe is my favorite by far, both because of the massive hit rating, and because it got me a skill-up for my tailoring. However, the mat requirements on this one are steep, and I must admit that I had a Naxx run or two under my belt before I got hold of this piece. The Robes of Crackling Flame are an excellent alternative, despite the somewhat taboo presence of Mana-Per-5. Given how quickly reputation gains occur if players consistently wear a single tabard, most will probably get exalted with at least one if not two before they head to their first Naxx run. Easier still are the Water-Drenched Robe from Heroic Violet Hold, which are more than adequate for Naxx.

Best wrist piece grab before getting in LFG for Naxxramas is the Azure Cloth Binding, off the last boss in Heroic Violet Hold. It has an almost 1-in-4 chance to drop, so your odds are pretty good if you can head in there every day. Lady Luck likes to play coy sometimes though, and if she's not being very kind to you then just ask your favorite tailor to make you a pair of Black Duskweave Wristwraps They'll suffice for getting started in Naxx.

Best way to stylishly keep your hands warm while in Northrend is with a good pair of Ebonweave Gloves. They're much cheaper than the Ebonweave Robe, so if you've got a tailoring friend, the hit rating on the gloves is really astounding. That doesn't mean, though, that the cost is insubstantial. So, if you'd rather go a more economic rout, Heroic Culling of Stratholme again has something to offer us with the Gloves of Distorted Time, which drop off of the third boss.

In my humble opinion, the Plush Sash of Guzbah for your waist should be the first piece of badge gear acquired by any warlock. If you've already spent your badges on something else, though, or just don't have the 40-badges to spend, there are good alternatives. The Belt of Unified Souls drops off the first boss, Meathook, in Heroic Culling of Stratholme. And for those willing to farm up some tailoring mats, the Deep Frozen Cord is an excellent piece.

Wearing pants is important, at least that's what the judge told me, and there are several good choices to pick from. The last boss in Heroic Utgarde Keep drops the Breeches of the Caller. Or, if you prefer straight up stats to gem slots, the Black Duskweave Leggings are easily acquired from your neighborhood tailor for a modest fee. The titanic spell power offered by the Opposed Stasis Leggings is also a good alternative.

Feet pieces are some of the more difficult to find in these days. If you rushed to get Wyrmrest Accord reputation for that sexy mount, then the Sandals of Crimson Fury are your best bet. If the dragons weren't your first choice for reputation grinding, however, then the Cleric's Linen Shoes out of Heroic Nexus have a very decent chance to drop off of the faction contingent boss.

Rings are a tricky business, since you need two of them and most are unique-equip. It's also one of the easiest slots to find an epic for. Personally, when I was gearing up for Naxx the first thing I grabbed was the Signet of Hopeful Light from being exalted with the Argent Crusade. But then, I have a freakish compulsion to get exalted with any Argent faction – probably rooted in subconscious guilt over my demonic ways. There are also some good choices in heroics, with the Band of Guile and Annhylde's Ring dropping from Heroic Culling of Stratholme and Heroic Utgarde Keep respectively. And of course, for people who know a friendly jewelcrafter, the Ring of Northern Terrors is a pretty sweet blue.

Trinkets are a lot like rings; the fact that you need two of them makes it a little more work to fill both slots, and there are fewer choices out there for trinkets than there are for rings. The Sundial of the Exiled will likely last you through Naxx and beyond if you've got the badges to spend on it. The Mark of the War Prisoner from Heroic Violet Hold, or the Tome of Arcane Phenomena from normal Oculus are both fine choices -- though the Cannoneer's Fuselighter from questing in Icecrown served me well until I upgraded it in 25-man Naxx.

Your best bet for a wand is the Wand of the San'layn off of the first boss in Heroic Utgarde Keep. It's one of the best wands available prior to Naxx, and it's exceedingly simple to get. However, if you've had bad luck with drops, or just can't stand Utgarde Keep, Iceshrieker's Touch from questing in Storm Peaks is a viable alternative.

Quest gear is the order of the day if you're looking for a weapon of any kind at the preparatory stage. The Chilly Slobberknocker from Amphitheater of Anguish and the Stave of Youthful Sorrow from Tirion's Gambit are roughly equivalent, depending on how you plan to itemize. And if the third boss in Heroic Culling of Stratholme happens to drop the Sempiternal Staff it's a good upgrade to the Slobberknocker if you've managed to find hit rating somewhere else. In the case that you've already got a one-hander you really can't let go of, then Telestra's Journal off of Telestra in Heroic Nexus is a great piece. Check out page 37 for a juicy bit about her crush on Rhonin.

And that's the skinny on pre-Naxx gear for warlocks. Keep in mind this is intended as a brief rundown of good preparatory gear for each slot, and that I've largely omitted any gear that can only be attained through instances I consider difficult for a freshly minted 80. This is just a guide for those looking to replace a particularly low-level piece of gear, or who are trying to get into raiding for the first time. That said, if you manage to deck yourself out in gear from this list, then Kel'Thuzad will be shaking in his chains once you step into Naxx with a bone to pick.

Raiding: How easy is too easy?

2009-02-22T07:31:00.000-08:00

Karthas, a feral Druid from the Garona-US server, wrote a thought-provoking treatise on the current end-game on his blog a few days ago. Of course, he's hardly the first to declare the current end-game far too easy, but he brings a very interesting angle to the discussion -- namely that of the casual.

He interviews various casual raid guild leaders in his piece. These are guild leaders who, back in Burning Crusade, mostly ran Karazhan and maybe dabbled a bit in Zul'aman. They certainly were far behind the curve. But they had a dedicated core of 10 raiders who got together, faced the challenges, and overcame them. But now, even these casuals are saying that the end-game is just too easy.

One guild leader interviewed is finding that some of their raiders have gotten all the loot they need from Naxxramas and maxed out Northrend Achievements and Reputations, and, for lack of anything to do, are not logging on for days or simply letting their subscriptions lapse altogether, leaving their guild leader to make the painful decision once Ulduar comes to either refuse to give them their raid slots back or kick out their replacements.

Another guild leader is just beginning Naxxramas, but whereas in BC there was a sense of excitement and challenge at starting Karazhan and Zul'aman, the guild leader says now that Naxxramas fills a bit like a glorified PuG, one more dungeon you run for badges and loot, rather than an epic challenge like BC-era raids.

Karthas ends by insisting that Ulduar won't solve any problems. "Hard Mode" doesn't really create any new content. Most guilds won't try the Hard Mode, and the few that will will still burn out on running the same content over and over again, even if they can bump the difficulty on certain fights.

Of course, these stories are anecdotal, so it's hard to say how true they are overall, but it's though provoking all the same, especially to hear traditionally "hardcore" complaints coming from casual guilds. I'm still pretty in love with Wrath, but I know I'm quickly running out of things to do and finding myself hoping 3.1 has more content than just Ulduar to keep me busy. I also have to wonder if simply dressing the same encounter in a new set of clothes by insisting raids deliberately handicap themselves or fight counter-intuitively and calling it "hard mode" will really keep anyone's interest in the long run.

The comments on the blog actually bring up good points as well. One commenter believes that 2.4 actually put dungeon accessibility where it needed to be by removing attunements and creating badge and craftable gear that was just below raid power level. They just started too late, then overcompensated in Wrath by lowering difficulty too much.

It seems like the argument comes down to a few basic questions: Is the End-Game too easy? Is there too little content? And finally, are "hard mode" achievements with better loot a valid end-game mechanic, or simply a way to mask the fact that the end-game content is too easy and too sparse?

Zapping in the North

2009-02-22T07:22:00.000-08:00

Engineers have plenty of fun tricks up their sleeves, and that includes a hip, quirky means of gathering. Specifically, they ride around on fancy machines zapping clouds into Crystallized elements, at least in the far North.

Such elements are used in crafting, or combined in stacks of ten to form Eternal elements, which are also a common reagent in patterns and schematics.

Both forms of these elements sell for handsome sums on the Auction House, and can be stockpiled for one's own needs, such as updating item enchants.

Gear Up
Being an Engineer does have its benefits, but free gear certainly isn't one of them. In fact, one might even go so far as to say that an Engineer's gear is more expensive than your average crafted item, especially if we discount Blacksmithing.

The most important piece of equipment that you will need is the Zapthrottle Mote Extractor. The schematic can be obtained from completing the quest, The Zapthrottle Mote Extractor! which is acquired in Zangarmarsh. Horde players will have to head to Zabra'jin and seek out Mack Diver outside of the village fence. Alliance players will need to visit Telredor and speak with K. Lee Smallfry.

Once you've learned this schematic, you should avoid switching from Goblin to Gnomish Engineering and vice versa, as you will lose your knowledge of how to make this item, and as the schematic comes from a quest and is bind on pick-up, you will never be able to craft it again.

Fortunately, the item itself is bind on equip, and you could commission another Engineer to make one for you. If you've already made one, changing specializations will not delete it, but you'll have to be careful not to accidentally delete it yourself.

As for the art of tracking these clouds on your mini-map, the old days of feeling confined to wear certain pairs of goggles when farming are over. All you need to do now is attach some Spynoculars to your current belt and voila! The best part is, when you upgrade your belt, you can just attach a new pair.

Unlike the other Engineering item enhancements, this does not override the other enhancement that is possible for your belt, the Eternal Belt Buckle. You are free to add the socket and the Spynoculars to the same belt.

Clouds: Locations and Crystallized Elements
There are three types of gas clouds in Northrend, and each spawn in specific locations and will grant you certain Crystallized elements, but not others.

Arctic Clouds can be found in both the Howling Fjord and Dragonblight. These pale wanderers will grant you Crystallized Air and Crystallized Water.

Cinder Clouds produce Crystallized Fire when zapped. Head out to the Savage Thicket in Sholazar Basin, or to the Obsidian Dragonshrine in North Western Dragonblight to hunt for these clouds.

Steam Clouds are commonly farmed in the Geyser Fields and Scalding Pools of the Borean Tundra, although they too can be found in Sholazar Basin. When zapped, they yield Crystallized Fire and Crystallized Water.

Addons
While being able to track current spawns on your mini-map is handy, wouldn't it be even nicer if you could track all of the spawns you've found in the past, or even plan out your gathering flight plan ahead of time?

Lately, I've been hooked on Gatherer. It is simple to use and requires little to no configuration. It tracks spawns of herbs and other nodes that I've gathered, allowing me to locate areas with more spawn points. Unfortunately, it won't help you out with your gas cloud needs.

Especially if you have a gathering profession alongside your Engineering, you might be better off going with Cartographer Routes. It will not only remember nodes, it will also allow you to plan your route ahead of time, ensuring that you get the most loot for your time spent.

Lisa Poisso pointed out that this addon essentially grants you "connect-the-dot gathering." You would be able to plan out a path that would take you through the areas that have gas clouds while ensuring that you pass the most (for example) mining nodes on the way there and during your search.

This addon, unlike Gatherer, is not plug-and-play. Fortunately, we've written up a great overview including some of the benefits that the addon offers, as well as a link to an excellent guide that will walk you through configuration step by step.

The only catch is that since its creation, it has branched off from Cartographer to become its own stand-alone addon called Routes, although it still works with Cartographer quite nicely. Because of this, some of the information regarding downloads and plugins will be outdated. The information about using and personalizing the addon should still provide insight into the current process.

Arena players say they can't compete with Death Knights

2009-02-22T07:20:00.000-08:00

A Korean Arena team named Kill e A has dropped out of the upcoming Extreme Masters tournament and claimed that they just can't compete with Death Knights in the Arenas. "Due to recent balance changes resulting from the 3.0.9 patch, we believe that it is no longer possible for the Mage and Rogue character classes to remain competitive in a high-level PvP setting," says the statement posted on the ESL's site. They go on to say that "our testing has shown that it is now impossible for other classes to compete effectively with the Death Knight." Since they don't have a DK player and their team's strategy is based around using a Mage and Rogue, they're out, and another team from SK Gaming is in. The SK Gaming team will be running with a DK, and they say they're certain they won't be the only ones.

And Kill e A isn't the only team dealing with the power of the Death Knight. Gotfrag has an interview up with Rumay "Hafu" Wang of Fnatic/Orz, winners of two big tournaments last year. She too says Death Knights are a force to be reckoned with, though the recent changes might bring them down a notch. Plague Strike, as even the NPC Death Knights say, is a Lifebloom-killer, and Hafu says that as a Resto Druid in the Arenas, she can't match them.

Blizzard will definitely be watching during the upcoming Arena tournament -- if Death Knights are as overpowered as these players claim they are, we might see some PvP-based nerfs in their future.

Wrath delayed in China

2009-02-18T06:30:00.000-08:00

As excited as the Chinese community may be with the imminence of Wrath of the Lich King -- it was on the covers of most gaming magazines in the past months -- WoW players in China are going to have to wait just a bit longer for the latest expansion. According to a report, World of Warcraft China distributor The9 plan to delay the release of the expansion until March or April after initial plans to launch on February 19.

The delay would be due to a "policy supervision" and it's likely that the launch will come after the National People's Congress (NPC) and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), both of which happen on the first week of March. The report also said that the game's fame -- as well as recent bad press about Blizzard -- was also to blame, subjecting it to greater scrutiny.

Some rumors state that The9 is delaying the release of the game in order to speed up negotiations with Blizzard, who wish to have more control over server groups and other issues. Both companies are also reportedly in disagreement over monetary issues, although The9 denied the news. The9 President Xiaowei Chen has stated in the past that the contract would be renewed in June.

The9 may release WotLK to China on February 19th

2009-02-11T09:04:00.000-08:00

Rumor has it that The9, the company that runs World of Warcraft in China, will be releasing the game's latest expansion there a week and a day from today, on February 19th, after holding a press conference a day earlier. We just recently got sent a question here at WoW Insider asking why the US and EU kills were often called "world firsts," and this is why: China usually gets expansion content much later than the other regions of the game do.

But recently, Blizzard mentioned that they were aiming to release the content closer together, and this appears to be a result of that: it's still not simultaneous, obviously, but a few months is better than a year or so. Apparently 17173.com has heard that China will be getting Wrath of the Lich King next week, so if that does happen, we can look for the first Chinese level 80 and the first Chinese clears of Naxx and the other endgame raids soon after that.

Engineering's BFG edition

2009-02-11T09:01:00.000-08:00

Alex is out loading up his backpacks with all his gear, hopping on his Traveler's Tundra Mammoth and walking across Azeroth for a couple days. So until he's back to us full time I'm going to take a few more days this week of "Da Queue." Be sure to leave us your questions as a comment, or if you want to remain anonymous (because really, besides "Why can't Paladins tank?" there is no such thing as a dumb question) you can send us a tip on our tip line. Enough talk! Let us Queue!

Ava asked...

"Any word on when they're going to make engineers not useless in 3.1..."

Well... I gather the saving grace came today when Blizzard announced the removal of consumable ammunition won't be happening in 3.1. So you have a little longer to make things and sell them for a nice profit.

I think Engineering has always been a niche specialty. Obviously in BC it became a tad over powered with some of the helmets it could make, and of course there was the de-facto tanking gun up until the release of the Sunwell. Now it still has some of those features, but it's not as predominate as it once was.

But this is by design too.

Blizzard doesn't want the professions to be something that are so great they are essentially required for a given class. Remember Leatherworking in BC? Everyone who was a hard core Sunwell raider had to have Leatherworking for drums. It was really really really dumb to have Priests respec to Leatherworking just to get a continuous drum rotation going on. Blizzard knows this, and at BlizzCon last October Ghostcrawler made mention several times that they never want to return to that horror.

And truth be told, Engineering now is at least more useful/fun than it was four years ago.

Nicole asked...

"I've found that the Death Knight class is a fantastic way to explore the other faction and I was just wondering if you this was a popular thing to do?"

I really can't answer for other players, but I can defiantly speak for myself. I've got a 69 Blood Elf Death Knight that I've been having fun with now and then. All my mains are Alliance side (and yes, I've even got an Alliance Death Knight going on my second account), but my Hordie is quite fun to play.

I'm looking forward to running through the Wrath Gate quest line Horde side in a few levels, since I've done the Alliance one so many times now I practically have it memorized. It's also been fun to see the different angles on events as I leveled my way through Outland and into Northrend.

Are Death Knights autowin in PvP?

2009-02-11T08:59:00.000-08:00

Here's a question I'm sure a lot of players have asked themselves when faced against those dreaded Death Knights. Critical QQ wrote an interesting post in his blog theorizing that the side with the most number of Death Knights will win. Think Ret Paladin during the first week or so of Patch 3.0. He posits that Death Knights are such a powerful PvP class that they tend to turn the tide of a battle. To a degree, it's actually true. The very first Arena Master was a Death Knight.

The blog post plays out several scenarios where Death Knights make a difference but doesn't get into too much detail. But the point he makes is clear, and some of you might have actually felt it whenever you played some Battlegrounds -- whichever side has the most Death Knights wins. I've never actually stopped to figure out the ratio of Death Knights in all my Battlegrounds games, but there's no question a Death Knight is a force to be reckoned with in PvP. But are they unbeatable?

The obvious answer, of course, is no. But they sure are damn hard to put down. Blizzard was aware of this and severely nerfed Unholy in Patch 3.0.8, cutting down the duration of Anti-Magic Zone, lowering the mitigation of Bone Shield and Icebound Fortitude, and putting an unnecessarily long cooldown on Shadow of Death as well as removed it from Arena play. The last change was needed, but the 15 minute cooldown is probably too long considering Blizzard also nerfed the duration to 25 seconds. They also toned down the class' burst damage somewhat, including the amazing Gargoyle talent.

The non-healer healing class
So how come Death Knights are still extremely powerful in PvP despite the mitigation nerfs? Have you ever fought a Death Knight and wondered to yourself why your health keeps getting low while theirs is getting high even after you've hit them with everything you've got? Something that's been overlooked for the most part in the spate of recent balance changes is the sheer awesomeness of Death Knight self-healing. Mitigation on separate cooldowns and a variety of self-heals make Death Knights one of the most resilient classes in the game.

As a baseline ability, Death Knights have Death Strike, a melee strike that heals them as long as they have stacks of diseases on their target. Once Death Knights have set up, it becomes very difficult to stop them because they'll wear you down while they pump themselves up. Then there's Death Pact, the legacy Warcraft III ability, that sacrifices an undead minion such as a ghoul or gargoyle in exchange for health. Note that Death Pact works off maximum health and not current health, which means it's an excellent ability to use when their pet is about to die.

Blood has access to Rune Tap, as well, which when improved can heal them for 20% of their health every 30 seconds. Prior to the nerf, the most popular PvP builds were a mix of Blood and Unholy which had access to frightening healing as well as mitigation. Blood / Unholy Death Knights will use either Scourge Strike or Death Strike depending on whether they need healing. Because both strikes use Unholy and Frost runes, this leaves a Blood rune or two for Rune Tap at a moment's notice. That's not even the best part. Rune Tap is off the GCD. Insane? Sure it is.

While not a popular build for PvP, some pick up talents like Bloodworms, Blood Aura, and Vampiric Blood, which add to self-healing. Vendetta is awesome for a continous grind -- not just for mobs, but in Battlegrounds PvP or Wintergrasp. Sure they'll need to land the killing blow to proc it, but they're Death Knights. Killing blows are second nature to them.

Now, although Unholy is still the PvP tree, it's now more common to complement it with Frost all the way up to Killing Machine. Players speccing Frost / Unholy pick up Lichborne along the way, which is an incredible anti-CC ability on a three minute cooldown. Aside from breaking Charm, Fear, and Sleep effects, it provides immunity to it for 15 seconds. Guess what? Just like Rune Tap, Lichborne is off the GCD, as well. Here's another Death Knight trick -- when under the effects of Lichborne, they can heal themselves with Death Coil. So you can add that to the list of effective self-heals.

Understand that these heals can tick for a lot. Death Strike can crit, which sometimes results in heals upwards of 5,000 hp. This means that while they're dealing damage, they're healing themselves at the same time. Because Unholy Presence cuts the GCD by .5 seconds, Death Knights can blow two Death Strikes in quick succession to heal themselves for a considerable amount. If they have a lot of diseases stacked, that's a lot of healing. Ten seconds later, they'll be able to do it again.

The best (or worst, if you're up against a Death Knight) part is, all of these heals are instant. None of them have a cast time. Rune Tap is an instant heal off the GCD on a thirty second cooldown. Death Strike is a heal that is part of an attack, usable twice in succession every ten seconds. Death Pact is instant on a three minute timer. Bloodworms just happen. All Death Knights will have access to Death Strike and Death Pact, while the others are talents. Instant, uninterruptible self-healing on one of the most devastating DPS classes is equal to PvP godhood.

Death Grip wormhole is a bad, bad thing

2009-02-10T09:15:00.000-08:00

As much as we enjoyed watching what is arguably the most phenomenally fun bug ever, it should come as no surprise to anyone that exploiting it is a very bad thing. In particular, GMs have been alerted to the bug and are on a keen watch for players who attempt to do it. After Elizabeth Harper's experimentation -- all done in the name of journalistic investigation, we promise -- resident killer Rogue Chase Christian attempted it, too. He was very swiftly messaged by a Game Master informing him that he would be banned if he ever did it again.

The boys over at DeathKnight.info confirm the same thing, not only because it is under close watch by GMs, but because it has serious repercussions for players who are 'pulled' into the wormhole. Players with the temerity to try it out have reported getting stuck in limbo and had to submit tickets to get their characters unstuck. No doubt a deluge of tickets describing suspiciously similar circumstances was more than enough to raise alarms over at Blizzard. So while we enjoyed showing that video of the Death Grip bug, we hope you didn't follow such bad examples. I mean, you didn't, right? Of course not. Good boys and girls.

PvE Enchantments for Death Knights

2009-02-08T09:28:00.000-08:00

Fresh on the heels of last week's gemming guide, we have an enchanting guide. Like gemming, enchanting is an easy way to go the extra mile to get your gear the best it can be so you can properly keep aggro without dying and/or top the damage meters in your next Naxxramas raid. Since there's so few enchants available, it's a lot less complicated than gemming too. DPS will just want hit to the cap and attack power (Sorry, there's not many strength enchants), while tanks will want defense to 540 and stamina.

It's also worth noting that almost every slot with an enchant has a weaker version and a more powerful version. Although it's usually frowned upon to go weak when can go strong, in the case of enchants, it's probably okay at the entry level to go with the weaker version of an enchant. The more powerful ones generally take Abyss Crystals and the like, and may be a bit steep. In addition, there's a few other quirks and special enchantments to watch out for. Let's take a look, by slot, at some of the best choices for enchanting for both DPS and Tanking.

Weapon

Runeforging is better than enchanting, just to get that out of the way. There's no use wasting shards and dust on a weapon enchant when a better one is just a Death Gate away. As far as which to get, though, let's look at the options.

For DPS, it's very hard to go wrong by just applying Rune of the Fallen Crusader. The health will help soak up environmental damage, and strength will translate to AP, which will translate to spellpower, which means a large overall boost to your damage. Even better is the fact that it scales, meaning the better your gear gets, the better the proc gets. If you're running a Howling Blast build, you might get away with Razorice, but otherwise, there shouldn't be any question in your mind that Fallen Crusader fits the bill.

Tanking has a choice between two enchants: Rune of Swordshattering and Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle. If you haven't hit the 540 skill defense cap, take the gargoyle, no ifs, ands, or buts. Once you get past 540, there's some small amount of debate over which enchantment works best. 4% parry is a very nice chunk of avoidance. On the other hand, the 2% stamina on the gargoyle rune is still pretty nice, it works from all directions (whereas parry works only from the front) and even past 540 defense, you do get some avoidance. In general, if you feel like your stamina is a little low, or you want to unload some stamina for threat on your armor, you can use Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle to pick up some of the slack. Otherwise, that 4% parry will probably prove superior if you can keep your enemies in front of you.

Head

For your head, DPS will want to pick up the Arcanum of Torment from the Knights of the Ebon Blade. For Tanking, you'll need revered Argent Crusade reputation for the Arcanum of the Stalwart Protector. It's a nice and straightforward choice, which is always cool.

Shoulders

Much like the head, here's another straightforward choice. Grind Sons of Hodir reputation, and at honored you can grab the Lesser Inscriptions of the Axe or the Pinnacle, depending on your role. At exalted, grab the Greater versions. Of course, you can also level inscription and skip the whole mess altogether, but otherwise, it's definitely worth the grind.

Chest

For tanking, you can grab some quick and easy defense via the Greater Defense enchantment. DPS or tanks who don't need defense can grab Super Stats, or if they have the gold to spare, the more powerful Powerful Stats.

Bracer

For tanks, Major Stamina is amazing if you have the gold to spare. It's steep though, so if you can't afford it, you can probably get by with Greater Stats until you get more gold or some bracers worthy of Major Stamina. Of course, if you're desperate for a last few points of defense, you can track down a Burning Crusade era enchanter with the Major Defense enchant.

For DPS, you'll want to track down either Greater Assault or Striking, depending on how much gold you want to spare.

Gloves

Tanks will probably want to go for Armsman. The Eternal Earths really aren't that hard to come by, especially if you're a miner, and 2% threat and a bit of extra avoidance is hard to beat. Of course, if you're absolutely secure in your ability to keep threat, you could always grab Expertise to get closer to pushing parries and dodges off the table.

For DPS, you can use Precision to fill some of your hit rating needs. If you're fine on hit rating, go for Greater Assault or the more powerful (and still relatively affordable) Crusher for the attack power.

Belt

There's no enchantments for belts per se, but be sure to grab an Eternal Belt Buckle. It's perfect for, say, a Bold Scarlet Ruby if you're DPS, or a Solid Sky Sapphire if you're a Tank.

Legs

You'll need to seek out a leatherworker here. The epic leg armor used to be a clear choice, but now that it requires Frozen Orbs, you may want to just stick to the blue-quality stuff until you get Naxxramas level legs depending on your cash flow. For Tanks, you'll want epic Frosthide Leg Armor, or the cheaper Jormungar Leg Armor. Both provide plenty of stamina and some added agility for bonus avoidance. For DPS, you have the Icescale Leg Armor or the cheaper Nerubian Leg Armor.

Boots

Tanks here can pick up a nice chunk of health with a Greater Vitality enchant here. Of course, if you don't have Unholy Aura, you may also want to consider Tuskarr's Vitality. A bit of extra speed can help in wrangling and positioning mobs more than you might expect.

DPS can grab Icewalker here for a quick and easy hit rating boost. If you've hit 8% hit though, you're better off going for the attack power enchants. Greater Assault isn't too steep in price, but you can also get the Assault enchant for even cheaper.

Patch 3.1 Musings

2009-02-08T09:21:00.000-08:00

In case you've been stranded on a remote island for the past week with nothing but a volleyball for company and only just made it back to civilization, put a shirt on, shave your beard and brace yourself: we finally got some solid patch 3.1 info. I know, it totally makes that week of eating coconuts and talking to yourself worthwhile, right?

We've been waiting for this patch almost since day one of Wrath, with its tantalizing promises of Ulduar and dual specs, and now Blizzard has given us a lot more details. There will a huge amount of class changes, and Mages will not be left out of the mix. The announced changes are intriguing, even if they are infuriatingly vague. We're definitely getting some new stuff, some buffs, some nerfs, some buff-nerfs...but as to the specifics, who knows, really? Pending more detail, we're going to have to take our best educated guesses as to what all of this means. Follow me after the jump for as much unsubstantiated conclusion-jumping as you can handle.

Let's begin with a general change that is designed to mainly impact healers, but will also affect all casters, Mages being no exception.

Mana Regeneration

The whole concept here is that healers in general currently seem to have never-ending mana pools. Blizzard's answer to this problem is to nerf 5-second-rule spirit-based regeneration across the board. They want to limit the regen gained by certain classes when not casting, and I can understand the concern. For the most part, this will not affect Mages much, since we're casting almost constantly in fights anyway. The place where it would have become a concern for us is in relation to spirit-based spells and talents that allow a certain percentage of mana regen to continue while casting--spells like Mage Armor, Arcane Meditation, and Pyromaniac. For raiding Arcane, Fire, and Frostfire Mages, those spells and talents are almost mandatory, and to have the stat they're based on become less effective would significantly hurt our already fragile mana regen capabilities.

To counterbalance the negative impact such a change would have on DPS casters, Blizzard is buffing those talents and spells by some unspecified amount. They assert that the net effect will leave our mana regen about the same. I hope they're right, but will reserve judgment until the patch hits the PTR and I can test it out for myself. I can imagine this will need to be tweaked a few times before things work the way we need them to.

As a Mage with a Holy Paladin as a main alt, I feel the healer nerf keenly. Pallies are getting their own special nerf, since they don't rely on spirit for mana regen the way other healing classes do, but their nerf sounds as if it will be every bit as painful as everyone else's. Still, I can understand the reasoning behind the nerfs overall. Healing does need to be limited by a need for mana conservation, and by so limiting it, the game developers do give themselves a little more leeway in how they design boss encounters in the future. The way it stands currently, the only way for them to make boss fights challenging for healers is to give the bosses massive burst damage capabilities--to essentially try to out-burst the heals. Speaking as someone who has healed those kinds of encounters, trying to catch up to massive bursts of damage, especially of the AoE variety, sucks. I'd much rather have bosses deal damage I can keep up with, but have to watch my mana expenditure more closely. I'm optimistic that this change will be a positive one after all is said and done.

The problem is that as a Mage, it really sucks to get drawn into a change that is designed around a mechanic we have nothing to do with. I like the idea Blizzard has come up with to counterbalance it, but am skeptical about how well it will even out in practice. Until we get some hard numbers and/or actual testing, I await this change with significant trepidation.

Replenishment

Going hand in hand with the sweeping mana regen changes, 3.1 will also apparently be bring Mages their first taste of a replenishment-ish ability. This yet-unspecified ability will be replacing Improved Water Elemental. It will supposedly be similar the ways Shadow Priests gain their mana back. What does that mean, exactly? Your guess, my friends, is as good as mine. I have so very many questions about this. I will present them below, in a handy, bulleted format.

Since you say it will replace Improved Mana Water Elemental, I would assume this is going to be a talent. Will it be physically taking Improved Water Elemental's place in the Frost tree?

If it is, indeed, Frost only, is this a way to make Frost Mages more raid viable?

Is this going to be a passive talent, or will it be on-use, and have a cooldown, or require channelling or some other awkward mechanic?

Will using it cut into Frost Mages' already sub-par DPS in any way? If so, no thanks.

Will it provide more mana than the Water Elemental does now? Boy, I hope so.

Will there be any changes to the normal Water Elemental? My fingers are crossed for more DPS, and/or possibly making our big blue buddies permanent pets. I know those are probably both pipe dreams, but they're nice pipe dreams.

Free respeccs? Please?

I'm not even a Frost Mage and I have all of those questions, and more that I'll probably think of in the coming days. I'm sure those of you who are specced Frost can think of a great deal more. I look forward to some clarification, and hope it comes sooner rather than later.

PvE Shatter Combos

Mmmm. This could end up being a very intriguing patch for Frost Mages, when all is said and done. This change, more than any other, has the potential to be very sexy indeed. Shatter combos have been one of the defining characteristics for Frost Mages for a very long time, but the mechanic has until now been mostly limited to PvP scenarios. PvE Frost-Magery has for some time consisted largely of spamming Frostbolt and nailing the occasional Brain Freeze proc, then finishing up well below Fire Mages on the damage meters.

Patch 3.1 may change a great deal of that. The only information we have at this point is that Blizzard is "working on a way to give Frost Mages Ice Lance 'Shatter combos' in PvE". Again, so many questions, and not enough bullets with which to list them. I'll try anyway:

How?

What?

How?

Ok, so that list wasn't actually very long at all. Also, It got a little repetitive there by the end. For a three-item list, I'm going to look at that as some kind of achievement. I want a title or a tabard or something.

The possibilities here are limitless. Ice Lance is a very fun spell, but is currently only really viable in PvP. adding it into a PvE rotation built around Shatter procs would add a level of interactivity to Frost PvE that has been sorely lacking for a good long while now. It would also add a level of DPS that has also been sorely lacking, and I can't think of any change that would be more welcomed by Frost Mages, short of being able to wear plate or kill Warlocks with their minds or something. I can't wait to see how exactly this is implemented, and I'm sure a lot of you can't either.

Fire PvP Survivability

Adding to our growing list of vague, possibly entirely-full-of-crap promises that sound really good on paper, we get this little nugget. Blizzard is "working on more survivability for Fire spec in PvP." There is absolutely no possible way for that quote to contain less actual information. None.

Fire desperately needs some more ways to not get killed in PvP. That's been the case since always. There simply isn't another class/spec in the game that dies as quickly and easily as a Fire Mage, and it isn't even a close contest. There are multiple ways for this to improve. We just have to hope Blizzard picks a viable one.

My personal suggestion? Give Scorch or Fire Blast a knockback (attached to a fire talent), and make Blazing Speed more dependable. I wouldn't be opposed to having Blazing Speed proc a lot more often. It's quite simply never been a good enough talent, and wouldn't be overpowered even with a 50% proc rate, in my incredibly biased opinion. Fire Mages are so infinitely killable in so many ways, why not let them run fast and escape from snares and such all the time? That'd at least give them a fighting chance.

Spirit = Useful?

"We Are working on making Spirit a more useful and interesting stat for all Mages."

Uh-huh.

This would be good, I guess? We already have spirit slathered all over a lot of our gear anyway, it'd be nice to have it be more worthwhile. At the same time, though, I have to wonder if making it "more useful and interesting" might make spirit a stat we have to start stacking again. I hope not. Between gearing for hit rating, crit, spellpower, haste, and intellect, spirit would be just one more thing to have to worry about.

What I'd like to see here is some additions to talents like Student of the Mind or Arcane Mind that give some kind of haste or spellpower benefit from the amount of spirit you have. Adding a similar benefit to talents in the Fire and Frost trees (possibly to currently under-utilized talents) would make spirit far more useful to each kind of Mage, and give us a few more speccing options. I'd like to see spirit become a stat you can choose to stack and spec for, rather than yet another mandatory stat. In any case, I look forward to discovering Blizzard's defenition of the words "useful" and "interesting."

Holy crap, the PTR is going to be fun.

Sartharion sings the blues

2009-02-08T09:19:00.001-08:00

Once you start throwing multiple drakes into the mix, I love the Sartharion encounter. It's very frantic, and takes everyone performing. What I don't love is how hard it is to see the shadow fissures that spawn in the encounter when there's a lot going on. Red on red is awful, and then when you throw a Death Knight's Death and Decay into the mix if you're using one? It's pretty much an orgy of red, and you can't really tell which red is from what source.

I quite literally leapt for joy when Daelo, lead encounter designer, mentioned that they'll be turning blue in a future patch. It's a minor tweak to the encounter, but it will seriously help those moments when you have a void zone beneath a Death and Decay and you have a tank who is tanking loads of whelps and elementals which are already obscuring their vision. The hardest part of the fight isn't the movements, the hardest part is being able to see.

This does make me wonder what they'll do with future, similar things. The terrain alone makes the void zones hard to see during Sartharion, but the largest issue (I think) is Death and Decay. It's big, fluffy, and extremely red. Will they simply not be able to use red ground effects anymore? My raid doesn't do it, but there are raids out there that forbid Death Knights from using Death and Decay for the specific reason that it hides AOEs beneath it, so I have to wonder if there's a better solution to the problem than changing colors without removing the 'cool factor' of the DnD particle effect.

What 3.1 means for PvP

2009-02-07T09:16:00.000-08:00

Wow. Have you caught your breath yet? Patch 3.1 looks like it's going to be a massive one, with the promise of Ulduar and now a preview of some of the upcoming class changes. Things are to change quite a bit. While a lot of the changes apply to PvE, Blizzard seems to be sticking true to its lofty ambition of balancing both the PvE experience right along with PvP. Even the biggest change across the board, intended for PvE, will be felt in PvP.

The massive mana regeneration changes should have a palpable impact, particularly in Arenas, because once you get past the burst and Resilience begins to stack up, it becomes a healer's game. It becomes a game of endurance and a matter of burning through the opposing team's healers' mana pool. The nerf to Spirit's contribution to mana regeneration is huge -- one of the prominent trinkets in professional Arena play in 2008 was the Earring of Soulful Meditation because of its on-use Spirit bonus.

We'll have to see exactly how harsh the changes will be, but hopefully these changes are a step towards tuning down healer dominance in high rated Arena play. One proposed change is the increased heal penalty for Divine Plea, which is one of the tools that have propelled Holy Paladins to the top of Arena rankings. However, Blizzard notes that certain mana regeneration talents will be buffed, so these changes might balance out, anyway. Let's take a look at the impact of different class changes after the jump.

Death Knight
The swap of Unholy Blight and Summon Gargoyle is an interesting one because Unholy PvP builds skip Unholy Blight to begin with. Even with the nerf to the extremely powerful Gargoyle in Patch 3.0.8, Unholy Death Knights continued to pick up the talent, partly because it was high enough in the tree, and partly because it still gave a considerable damage boost. Patch 3.1 will buff Gargoyles again, which means Unholy Death Knights will have to commit deep into the tree to pick up one of the more powerful burst talents available. Hopefully, with the removal of Shadow of Death from Arenas, Blizzard can lower or remove the cooldown, or not make it a requirement for Master of Ghouls.

Although Unholy remains the most popular PvP build, Blood is an increasingly popular tree, and gets some notable boosts in Patch 3.1. Sudden Doom is a great passive damage boost for Blood in PvE, but can gives frightening burst potential in PvP. One curious change is the revision of Blood Gorged to grant Armor Penetration instead of Expertise. Pending some foreseeable changes to Armor Penetration in Patch 3.1, this looks more to benefit PvP right now.

There are proposed changes to the Frost tree that we'll have to see to determine if it becomes more popular for PvP. Right now, there are some pretty good Blood / Frost builds that work around Hungering Cold, one of the best peels in the game and works like a Mage's Shatter-combo with Howling Blast. So that more builds can pick it up, Endless Winter will be moved up to the top of the tree, hopefully along with Chillblains. This means Death Knights, who are already hard enough to get away from in PvP, will be even harder to shake off.

Druid
One of the changes made across the board was the revision of Armor Penetration to work of percentages rather than a fixed amount. Similar to the change in mana draining mechanics, this change is intended to balance out armor reducing abilities. This means Faerie Fire will work better against plate and no longer as hurtful against cloth. Tree Druids can now cast Thorns, but more importantly, Nature's Grasp. This should contribute somewhat to survivability and self-peeling.

The passive talent Savage Defense, even though it's clearly intended for more Druid tank mitigation, will help desperate Druids everywhere -- who pop into bear form when their number's almost up -- provided they crit enough. The change to Survival Instincts, now usable by Moonkin, makes no sense at all. I guess it's nice, but Balance Druids go up the Restoration tree for supplemental talents, not Feral, even for PvP. Overall, none of the announced changes to Druids so far have significant impact in PvP. We have yet to see Feral and Balance achieve the same representation that Restoration -- overwhelmingly the dominant spec -- has in Arena play. I fully expect Blizzard to announce some changes in that direction in the coming weeks.

Hunter
No more ammunition. That's huge. Hunters are probably the only class that incurs costs when doing some simple PvP such as dueling. The removal of ammunition allows the enjoyment of Battlegrounds without the added cost of replenishing bullets or arrows. The change to Piercing Shots to induce a bleed effect rather than armor penetration is something of a PvP nerf damage-wise, but raises sustained PvE damage. On the other hand, a bleed effect is just the thing to keep Rogues visible.

The rework to Sniper Training is a PvP nerf, if anything, because Hunters almost never stand still in the necessarily mobile PvP environment. Aside from fights such as Patchwerk or Instructor Razuvius, I can't imagine the talent being useful for PvE, either. It was insanely powerful in the Battlegrounds, but the change makes the talent even more skippable. I'm excited to see what "additional trap functionality" will be added to Survival, specially the promised 41-point talent spot currently occupied by Trap Mastery. If anything, those promise to be good -- or creative -- for PvP.

Ulduar will be 64 harder

2009-02-07T09:15:00.000-08:00

Pushed by players to answer just how hard Ulduar really is, EU CM Wyrxian has an answer: 64. Apparently, the instance will be 64 harder than the current Wrath instances. In other news, the recent patch 3.1 changes will make playing the game about 75 more fun, and the ammunition change alone will put Hunters 23 higher than they've been in the past. More news as we get it.

Joking aside, obviously Wryxian says Ulduar will be harder, but it's not easy to put a number on difficulty. He says "it has to be experienced to understand." Blizzard has already said that they want to change things like mana regeneration to be less frantic and more strategic, so it'll be interesting to see just what kinds of mechanics appear in Ulduar -- odds are the difficulty probably won't be of the "Bosses that hit really, really hard" variety, but rather that we'll see more situations where the raid's attention is divided x number of ways. Maybe 64?

At any rate, the PTR should be up soon, if not tonight considering all of the reveals Blizzard has done this week, and then we'll have a better idea of what the next raid has in store for us.

Mage class changes in patch 3.1

2009-02-07T08:38:00.000-08:00

While other classes have been getting some insane changes (no more consumable ammo for Hunter? Huh?), the Mage class was left with little information.

The only major change that really came out in the last day was that there will be a replenishment like talent added, taking the place of Improved Water Elemental. The overall effect will be similar to what Shadow Priests do with their mana regen.

Some of the other things, which we are assuming have been intentionally left vague, include changes to make spirit a more "useful and interesting" statistic for Mages, and increasing a Fire Mage's survivability. There is also a blurb about giving Frost Mages an Ice Lance "Shatter Combo" in PvE encounters.

So if you're like everyone else and scratching your head, asking where are all the more detailed changes... don't panic! We're sure there's a ton more to come.

Big changes for Hunters in patch 3.1

2009-02-07T08:33:00.000-08:00

No more quivers, no more pouches, no more bullets to make us slouches. Ok, so I'm terrible at poetry, but you get the picture. This has been on a lot of Hunters' wish lists for a long time, but it's finally here. No more ammo.

Or rather, ammo will be an item more like a relic or a wand that modifies our ranged weapon damage without being consumed. Engineers, that means you better make hay while the sun shines. Soon, we'll be buying our last crate of Mammoth Cutters ever.

This is far from the only changed announced tonight -- or this morning, depending on where you are. Let's look at them all one by one.

Consumable ammunition has been removed from the game. Arrows and bullets no longer stack, but are not consumed. Ranged attack speed bonus gained from quivers and ammo bags will be preserved in a different capacity.

So this is the big one, no question about it. Finally, we get a whole new bag slot (I forsee a lot of Onyxia soloing by Hunters in the near future), bigger bank accounts, and no more running back to Dalaran or Shattrath to replenish Ammo unless we really want to. Overall, this is a massive boon. The big question is where the quiver haste will come from. The easiest way would be to transfer it to the ammo, but then it would also buff the ranged attack speed of Warriors and Rogues, which is probably why we also shouldn't expect to see relic-like bonuses on ammo, unless they're very specific to Hunter skills only.

A new tier of hunter pet talents have been added. In particular, this allows Beastmaster hunters to improve their damage per second (DPS) with their 51 point talent.

This is probably the safest way to buff Beastmastery without accidentally buffing Survival and Marksmanship. By making an extra set of pet skills and putting them at the bottom of the tree, where it will be difficult for anyone but a Beastmaster to scrape together the points for them, they're not only buffing Beastmasters alone, but encouraging the use of the 51 point talent instead of the 50/21 hybrid builds that got Beastmasters in trouble in the first place.

It is interesting to note here that Ghostcrawler implied that we'd be getting Beastmastery buffs before 3.1, so whether they're holding off until 3.1 now or are adding this in addition to other tweaks remains to be seen.

Hunting Party – this talent has been reduced to 3 ranks and also grants a passive bonus to the hunter.

Replenishment has been getting a lot of press lately, what with Ghostcrawlers declaration that it is mandatory and will likely be more so once the mana regen changes make it live, so it's not too surprising that they're making it easier and more compelling to take all at once for Survival Hunters. It may also be part of their work to "equalize" various buff varieties between classes.

Piercing Shots – this talent has been changed. Your Aimed, Steady and Chimera Shots cause the target to bleed for 10/20/30% of damage dealt for 8 sec.

Adding a bleed that ignores armor is a very nice sizable buff over the 6% quasi armor penetration on Steady and Aimed Shots the current version brings. It also provides some nice synergy with Feral Druids and Hunger for Blood Rogues.

Sniper Training – this talent has been changed. After standing still for 6 sec, you gain a 2/4/6% damage bonus to Steady, Aimed and Explosive Shot.

Well, I suppose it'll be nice for Patchwerk. This may be meant to be a slight PvP nerf, but even in PvE, what with so many raid-level fights needing movement, it may end up being an additional nerf. Of course, it may be more useful in 5-mans, allowing you to stand closer in tight areas or to avoid patrols and still gain the talent's benefits. Overall, I think the jury's still out on exactly where this change stands.

We are also looking to add additional trap functionality to Survival.

This will probably come mostly in the long promised revamp for Trap Mastery, and to make up for possible further nerfs to TnT and Explosive Shot. It's something we've been expecting for ages, but it's nice to at least see they haven't forgotten.

They may still have more up their sleeve for Hunters, of course. The Ammo is a major change, and may be what Ghostcrawler meant when he talked about those earth-shaking changes, but it felt like he meant something bigger still. We may hear about it as we get closer to 3.1, or they may have quietly discarded it. Either way, I'm at least expecting some Beastmastery hot fixes and perhaps another Survival Explosive Shot nerf besides the stealth one they threw in a few days ago. Stay Tuned to WoW Insider. We'll let you know what goes down.

Death Knight class change analysis for patch 3.1

2009-02-07T08:30:00.000-08:00

The next round of class changes for 3.1 has gone up, and Death Knights, of course, got a blurb of their own. The changes are probably slightly less sweeping than some other classes, but interesting all the same. Ghostcrawler's word on Death Knights lately has been that they're probably a bit high on DPS, and that they want to encourage more people to spec Blood and Frost over the overwhelmingly popular Unholy. I'm not sure these changes in particular did that, but one thing they did do is give a couple of nice potential buffs to Death Knight tanks. Let's look at them one by one.

Gargoyle and Unholy Blight have swapped talent positions. Gargoyle's damage has increased and runic power cost per time has decreased.

So this first change actually looks a lot like the change a lot of people suggested back when Summon Gargoyle was first up on the nerf block. Just switch the talent points and leave Gargoyle untouched. I honestly doubt we'll see the Gargoyle return completely to the highest damage of its heyday, but hopefully it's a sizable rebuff. This change should do a lot toward putting 2-hand Unholy back up to par with dual wield frost/unholy builds. Of course, on the same token, Howling Blast builds will probably enjoy having an AE runic dump as well. It should be interesting see which spec benefits the most from this switch.

Pestilence – this spell no longer causes damage but just spreads diseases. Blood Boil is intended to be the general area attack, and has been changed to be castable on targets with no diseases on them, but does extra damage if diseases are present.

While I'm not sure that anyone predicted this outright, it's not a hard change to see either. Being able to both spread our diseases and cause massive damage was probably a bit much. In the end, it may be a slight nerf to AE damage, but not by much. Blood Boil will pick up most of the slack, and we'll just have use a couple extra cooldowns and wait for our blood runes to refresh before doing massive damage.

Unbreakable Armor now absorbs a flat amount of damage that increases as your armor increases. It no longer boosts armor.

This could be nice if only because it means magic damage absorption as well as physical absorption. This also theoretically could make it a valid button to hit for a DPS DK taking environmental damage or even a PvP DK being focus fired, depending on the amount of absorption it grants. It's difficult to say too much more without solid numbers, but on the whole, I think I'm calling this a very likely buff to Frost DKs in general, and definitely to Frost Tanks.

The Frost tree has been shuffled. Among other things, PvP talents such as Endless Winter are closer to the top of the tree where Blood and Unholy death knights can access them.

Blizzard has said they want to let all trees participate in PvP among all classes, so while putting things like Endless Winter and Chillblains lower on the Frost tree might do that, I wonder why they're focused on PvP gains so much. While I've often wished I could feasibly grab things like chillblains and endless winter in an Unholy PvP build, I'm unsure we really need them. It's hard enough to escape from a Death Knight as it is.

On the PvE side, though, I've long though Frost could use some shuffling. One thing I am hoping is that Glacier Rot moves further down the tree. That skill mostly buffs deep frost talents, and yet it's nearly unavoidable if you're a Blood or Unholy DK trying to get the first tier or two of frost.

Sudden Doom – this talent now procs a Death Coil rather than requiring an additional button click. It works similarly to shamans' Lightning Overload.

This is a nice change that frees up your attention so you can focus on optimizing your rune spending without wasting a global cooldown on a random Death Coil. I think it's a positive change overall that should help Blood Death Knight DPSers keep their rotations tight and efficient.

Magic Suppression and Blood of the North have been reduced to 3 ranks for the same benefit.

Getting Magic Suppression or Blood of the North is always a bit of a struggle for Blood and Unholy Tanks, since it usually means giving up access to Lichborne or Improved Icy Touch in Frost or useful but not absolutely mandatory talents like Bladed Armor or Wandering Plague. Freeing up 2 extra talent points should actually make tank builds look a bit more elegant.

Blood Gorged now grants armor penetration instead of expertise.

This may be the most perplexing change. Armor Penetration, to put it lightly, sucks. While Blood Death Knights do do the most physical damage of the Death Knight trees on average, Armor Penetration is still not exactly desirable anymore. However, with the changes to Sunder Armor and Faerie Fire already announced, it may be that Armor Penetration is due for a larger overhaul that will make this change look better. It's also possible that Tier 8 Death Knight gear will have so much expertise on it, they're afraid of Blood DPS DKs hitting the expertise dodge cap too easily. We'll have to sit tight on this one, I think, before we can make a better judgement.

If all else fails, remember, these changes aren't comprehensive or final. We're likely still in for quite a ride on the way to 3.1 going live. Look forward to continuing coverage here on WoW Insider.

Changes coming to Paladins in patch 3.1

2009-02-07T08:26:00.000-08:00

As I'm sure you've seen already, Eyonix dropped more class changes, Paladins being amongst this latest batch. Not many Holy changes, only minor Ret changes, but a whole crapload of Protection changes. Delicious, delicious Protection changes. A lot of the Protection changes serve a dual purpose- the changes are pretty good steps toward making Protection Paladins PvP-viable like Protection Warriors are becoming, but those same changes make the tree even stronger in PvE than it already is. It's beautiful.

Blessing of Kings – this spell is now a base ability trainable by all paladins.

This is very, very awesome. It's a wonder this didn't happen earlier, actually. I think many of us expected this to happen back in the Wrath beta, but instead it was turned into a 5 point talent in the Protection tree. The unanswered question is whether or not we'll get the full 5 talent points baseline, or if we'll still need to spent talent points to improve it. Personally, I'm going to assume we'll get the 10% BoK baseline, it's the only way this would even remotely make sense.

Assuming we are getting the 10% version, this is a great change. At the very least, it's going to open up 5 talent points for a large number of Paladins, and that alone is good news. It also means that there will probably be a brand new Tier 1 talent in the Protection tree come patch 3.1, so it'll be fun to see what shows up there.

Exorcism – this spell now causes damage to all types of enemy targets. However, it always critical strikes undead or demon targets. This change should make sure paladin damage doesn't drop when going from Naxxramas to later tiers of content.

This is another change that I think we all expected. The 100% chance to crit on Undead and Demons is something I didn't expect, but making Exorcism work on all mob types was a necessary change. For Naxxramas, it can be assumed that a Ret Paladin is fighting Undead most of the time, meaning that their DPS numbers are artificially inflated there. It had to be taken into consideration for balance purposes, because it's pretty much an entire tier of content. Changing it so they can cast it on all targets is much easier to balance, and is something that definitely had to be done for Ulduar. Glad to see they're doing it.

Shield of the Templar now causes your Avenger's Shield and Shield of the Righteousness to silence targets for 3 sec. The old damage bonus of this talent has been folded into Holy Shield, Avenger's Shield, and Shield of the Righteousness.

Hooray Protection buffs! It's my personal favorite Paladin spec, despite my grievances with it. I love seeing new toys, and this qualifies. This is a flat 30% baseline buff to Holy Shield, Avenger's Shield, and Shield of the Righteousness. That's pretty sweet. Freebies are nice! The new effect is what really excites me, though. One of the big Protection weaknesses when tanking 5-mans is a lack of interrupts that aren't also stuns, so handling casters without LOS to use was a real pain. This will make things much easier, especially when pulling. You won't need to throw your shield, then hide around a corner and pray some nublet DPS doesn't unload before they reach you. You can just simply pull. The silence will be a great tool for tanking 5-mans.

Ardent Defender, Improved Hammer of Justice, One-Handed Weapon Specialization and more have had their ranks reduced.

I'm sort of neutral on this change by itself, but it means that we're probably going to be seeing some new, replacement talents to make up for the point loss. This change by itself is pretty neat, I guess. I'm more excited to see what fills the void.

Guarded by the Light – no longer reduces the mana cost of shield spells, but now has a 50/100% chance to refresh Divine Plea duration.

This has the potential to be totally awesome, but it's sort of... half explained. What, exactly, has a 100% chance to refresh the Divine Plea duration? That's sort of an important part of this equation!

I'm going to assume it's going to be something like Shield of Righteousness has a 100% chance to refresh Divine Plea's duration with 2 talent points. If that (or something similar) is the case, that's going to be incredible. Protection will more or less be able to keep Divine Plea rolling forever in combat, which will be an absolutely huge buff. Next to dealing with Casters, a Protection Paladin's biggest weakness is trying to off-tank. When the Paladin isn't directly being attacked, it's incredibly hard to keep their mana pool up. Now? Not so much. Rolling a Divine Plea forever might not keep a Paladin's mana pool topped off if they're going all out on threat gen, but it's going to do a lot to help the situation.

Judgements of the Just – now also reduces the cooldown of Hammer of Justice by 10/20 seconds and increases the duration of the Seal of Justice stun effect by 0.5/1 second.

This is pretty wild, if the aforementioned Improved Hammer of Justice change doesn't gut that talent. If it keeps its current effect (only with fewer talent points to sink), this would give a Protection Paladin a 6 second stun on a 10 second cooldown? I don't want to do that whole gift horse spiel, but this change seems to be a bit much. I expect it'll be toned down shortly after patch 3.1 hits the PTR. 10 second cooldown Hammer of Justice combined with these newly improved Seal of Justice stuns? What's up, tank with stunlock capabilities? I think it's a safe bet that Improved Hammer of Justice will lose some of its effect when it has its talent count lowered, to keep some of that absurdity out of the hands of Retribution Paladins. I bet we'll end up seeing a 20 second cooldown on HoJ for Prot when all is said and done, and not 10.

Overall, I really like this news so far. I suspect our Holy brethren will feel a little left out because there really isn't much of anything here except for no longer needing to sink talents into Blessing of Kings. Then again, the BoK replacement should probably be something Holy-friendly for those Paladins that go 17 into Prot for Divine Guardian. So the BoK change probably doesn't free up much at all for those Paladins.

I'm cautiously optimistic here. Some of these changes sound way too good to be true, and others just have some crucial information missing. I wouldn't be so hot on the Guarded by the Light change if Divine Plea's duration is refreshed when you cast, oh... Divine Intervention. I would love it if Shield of Righteousness triggered it, though. Those are important details, even if we can make some safe assumptions about it.

Cautious optimism, ladies and gents. Cautious optimism.

Guide to Rogue stats for new raiders

2009-01-21T10:10:00.000-08:00

Wrath's first true raid instances come in the form of a level 60 raid instance put in the microwave for 20 levels and served with a side of dragons. Don't get me wrong; I love the retouched Naxxramas. I never got to experience all of the fights against Kel'Thuzad's minions before they relocated to Northrend, so being able to re-enter the citadel of death and slay some undead is a welcome opportunity.

If you search for "naxx 60 rogue gear guide" I'm sure you'll find a bunch of articles that recommend you sport at least 8/8 Bloodfang and maybe a weapon or two from Ahn'Qiraj. Times have changed, and so have the gear requirements. There are a few magic numbers that every Rogue wants to shoot for. After the cut I'll detail these vital stats and explain why they're so important to us.

Key Stats:
Gear designed for assassins like us can have a variety of stats. Haste rating and armor penetration are among the fringe stats that are simple DPS increases without any sort of "cap" to achieve. Agility and its base components of attack power and critical strike rating are always awesome; but again there is no magic bullet when balancing these numbers. The two stats that you WILL want to focus on when you choose your gear for Naxx are hit rating and expertise rating.

As has been the case since level 1, increasing your chance to hit (or inversely reducing your chance to miss) are the purest ways for a Rogue to increase his or her damage. Hit and expertise scale with every other stat, making them the obvious candidates for gems and enchants until you've reached their caps. Let's talk about the current hit caps that a Rogue will face.

Hit rating:
While Adrine of Cenarion Circle has compiled a great (and thankfully stickied) post containing all of the hit cap numbers for Rogues at 80, I'll go over the key values from that thread. Any Rogue PvE build must contain Precision. Every value that I give for the rest of this article will assume that you have 5/5 Precision in your build, regardless of whether you are HaT, Combat, or HfB Mutilate.

A raiding Rogue with Precision will be shooting for 99 hit rating as a bare minimum from gear (66 if you're playing with a Draenei). This is ensures that all of your yellow (special) attacks will hit (provided you are also at the expertise cap) and is easily achieved with a few +hit gems and possibly a precision enchant to your gloves. Reaching the Yellow Hit Cap (YHC) is crucial for maintaining your rotations.

The next hit cap that a Rogue will shoot for is 315 hit rating (237 with a Moonkin or Shadowpriest, and 210 with a Draenei as well). This is referred to as the Poison Hit Cap (PHC). At this point, bosses will no longer be able to resist your poisons, which is another huge DPS increase. Hit rating now works on both melee attacks as well as spells (which our poisons are considered to be). Reaching the PHC should be your primary focus once you've reached the YHC and the Expertise Cap (EC).

White Hit Cap:
The White Hit Cap (WHC) was a stat that Rogues would previously shoot for in vanilla WoW and TBC, specifically due to the fact that such a large portion of a Combat Rogue's damage came from white (auto) attacks. Now that Mutilate and HaT are in vogue, as well as the fact that poisons now make up a significant portion of our damage, reaching the WHC is not only irrelevant: it's nearly impossible without gimping your other offensive stats.

Expertise rating:
Expertise reduces your target's chance to dodge or parry your attacks. While I have been heralding this as an amazingly underrated stat, raiding Rogues have been ensuring that they reach its cap, the EC. Bosses can still dodge attacks coming from behind them, and so by removing their chance to dodge from behind, you again ensure that all of your attacks land as planned. The amount needed to remove a boss' chance to dodge from behind is 26 Expertise, or 214 Expertise Rating (Humans will have slightly reduced amounts required). This should be your first priority once reaching the YHC.

Putting it together:
To summarize, a Rogue's priority for stat caps should be: YHC (minimum to even run a raid or heroic), EC (well-rounded Rogue), and finally the PHC (raider status). After reaching all of these plateaus, it becomes time to start gemming for pure DPS stats and focusing on increasing your attack power and critical strike chance. Until you reach the EC, your gems and enchants should all be hit or expertise (where applicable). The value of hit rating and expertise rating trump all other stats before you reach the YHC and EC.

While reaching some of these stats may seem difficult, there are a few key items that will allow you to reach these caps very quickly. For example, combining the BoE Chain Gang Legguards and the easily acquired Sphere of Red Dragon's Blood (I talked about this earlier), you've already reached the YHC from just two items. Similarly, the BoE crafted Trollwoven Spaulders and Girdle will get you well over 25% of the way to the EC and are very nice pieces of gear in their own right. I'm still using mine!

Theorycraft it anyway:
While the advice given in this column will apply to most Rogues and most pieces of gear, there are still a few caveats. If you are upgrading from a level 75 blue stacked with hit rating to a level 80 epic with no hit rating whatsoever, it still may be beneficial to wear the epic anyway. While below the YHC/EC/PHC the value of hit and expertise are very high; but sometimes not high enough to offset the difference between a blue and an epic. Put both pieces into a spreadsheet and see which comes out with a greater damage increase.

Conclusion:
You may be seeing a lot of our brothers and sisters of the shadows advertising in Dalaran that they are "hit capped" and looking for a raid. In reality, as it's impossible to reach the WHC realistically, they're likely talking about the YHC or the PHC; and which tier they're at makes a big difference. Once you've reached the YHC and EC, you'll be ready to raid full time. Next week I'll be covering the gear that you can use to reach these caps and to ensure you are prepared for Kel'thuzad and his acolytes.

Gearing your Balance Druid at 80

2009-01-21T10:05:00.002-08:00

Greetings, fellow Druids, and welcome to another installment on Wrath gear at 80, and this week it's the boomkins' turn. Next week I'm going to tackle Bear gear at 80; Dan O'Halloran will take care of our Cat colleagues.

As a number of people have observed, it's tougher to get +hit-capped pre-raid in leather as opposed to cloth, so you're going to find an awful lot of cloth on the list. I realize this represents a new and exciting development in the history of moonkin itemization. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. That's French for "We're screwed."

Supplementary reading:

Elitist Jerks' threads on Balance trinkets, Moonkin DPS spreadsheet, general issues, and Balance talents and specs.

Gray Matter on necessary stats at 80 and raiding moonkin gear.

As a note here concerning the recent news on Improved Faerie Fire (in a nutshell, you'll get the 3% crit no matter whose FF is up on a target, even a feral's), Gray Matter on why the talent's worth taking, and Macbook on the raid circumstances in which it might not be.

As with our previous entry on pre-raid Restoration gear at 80, these guides assume that you do not presently have access to either 10-man or 25-man raids.

If you've read the Restoration piece, you'll be familiar with how I'm organizing gear for these guides, but for the sake of reference:

Best overall: If there's one piece that's just better than anything else you can get, I'll have it listed here. Most of these will cost you Emblems of Heroism or a truckload of gold, however.

Best drop/s: Self-explanatory, the best (typically heroic) 5-man drops you can get.

Best quest piece: Also self-explanatory, but fair warning -- if you're looking to get most of your pieces outside of 5-mans, many of the quests rewarding the best pieces are linked to dungeons (usually normal) or group quests.

Best faction piece: If a quartermaster offers a usable piece, it'll be here. You'll get convenience at the cost of having to deal with pieces that are usually a dog's breakfast of caster stats, though.

Runner-up: This is kind of a catch-all term for good, usable, or even excellent pieces you can get by other means. If there's a blue or epic BoE piece floating around the AH, or a workhorse 5-man drop you can also use, it'll be here. Some of the pieces in the runner-up slot may seem odd for inclusion there (e.g. epics like raid BoE's), but as far as I'm concerned, if it's going to cost you a metric ton of gold to get them, they are firmly optional. You do not need to be equipped in full epics to raid as long as you're not lazy about enchants and gems.

Enchant: Just in case you have any gold left after gearing up. You won't, but it's nice to dream!

With respect to item weight, I'm prioritizing +hit, then +spellpower, +haste, then +crit, in accordance with balance theorycraft concerning maximum-DPS builds.

HEAD

Best drop: Battlemap Hide Helm, off Prince Keleseth in heroic Utgarde Keep.

Best quest piece: Cowl of the Vindictive Captive, from the quest Vengeance Be Mine! in Utgarde Pinnacle if you're hit-capped. If you're not, use The Argent Skullcap, from the quest The Crusaders' Pinnacle.

Best faction piece: Helm of the Majestic Stag, available at honored with the Kirin Tor. This is really not a Balance piece, but it's the only helm you'll be able to get from a faction if all else fails.

Runner-up: Hat of Wintry Doom, a BoE piece from Tailoring.

Enchant: Arcanum of Burning Mysteries, available at revered with the Kirin Tor.

Meta: Chaotic Skyflare Diamond. Some prefer the Ember Skyflare, however.

NECK

Best overall: Encircling Burnished Gold Chains, available for 25 emblems of heroism.

Best drop: Necklace of Taldaram, from Prince Taldaram in heroic Old Kingdom.

Best quest piece: Emeline's Locket, from the quest The Admiral Revealed in Icecrown.

Best faction piece: n/a. You're out of luck here.

Runner-up: Titanium Spellshock Necklace, a Jewelcrafting BoE.

SHOULDERS

Best drop: Spaulders of Krystallus, from Krystallus in heroic Halls of Stone.

Best quest piece: Mantle of the Flesh Giant, from the quest The Flesh Giant Champion in Icecrown. If you prefer +crit to +haste, use Shoulderpads of the Adventurer, from the quest Halls of Stone in (where else?) Halls of Stone.

Best faction piece: n/a. Another dead slot.

Runner-up: Dark Runic Mantle, a BoE drop from heroic Halls of Stone, or Purehorn Spaulders, a Leatherworking BoE.

Enchant: Greater Inscription of the Storm, available at exalted with the Sons of Hodir, unless you're a level 400+ Inscriptionist and have access to Master's Inscription of the Storm.

Garona's return to Azeroth

2009-01-21T10:05:00.001-08:00

Apparently DC first announced this last October, but it's the first I've heard of it: Garona Halforcen is coming back to World of Warcraft. Garona has been a fan favorite character ever since the early RTS games -- she's a half-orc Rogue who originally assassinated King Llane of the Alliance (under one of Medivh's spells and working unintentionally for the Shadow Council). But she's been MIA for a while -- until now. DC's next World of Warcraft comic, number 18, has Garona reappearing in Azeroth, supposedly working with the Twilight's Hammer, and possibly even secretly aligned with the Scourge.

Not necessarily an auspicious re-entrance, but with Garona, just like Jack Bauer, you never know who she's really working for or why. Blizzard has always made it clear that they were going to have her appear in World of Warcraft -- early in the beta, she was actually the leader of the Rogue Ravenholdt faction, though she was later removed from the manor there. The DC comic drops on April 15, and it wouldn't be a surprise to finally see everyone's favorite half-orc rogue in the game sometime after that.

How Patch 3.0.8 will change PvP

2009-01-21T09:56:00.000-08:00

When Patch 3.0.8 kicks in today, which some people speculate, World of Warcraft PvP is going to change quite a bit. Class balance changes are going to take effect, particularly to Death Knights who are downright incredible right now. While some people couldn't care less about PvP nowadays, specially in the pursuit of epics -- you're better off going into Naxxramas, the new source of welfare epics -- others have a newfound love for it, thanks to the incredibly fun Wintergrasp. The changes aren't massive, but they are balancing ones and will be better for the game overall.

The most obvious PvP changes will be to Wintergrasp, where a number of things were changed to improve gameplay. The first major change is the way Wintergrasp Marks of Honor, currently useless, will become usable to purchase Wintergrasp Commendations as well as new epic items. This is a great thing which further encourages participation in the battle for Lake Wintergrasp itself. There are also impactful changes to the game mechanics that should see control of the zone shift more often and greatly favors offense. Let's take a look at those changes after the jump.

Wintergrasp PvP vehicles have had their health increased.

Wintergrasp Tower cannons have had their health increased.

The Wintergrasp Fortress Exterior walls have had their health increased.

The Fortress Keep door now has had its health decreased.

The Orb is now instantly clickable.

Elementals should now always despawn when the battle begins.

Wintergrasp now extends further south so that more revenants can be reached.

There are now three ranks in Wintergrasp: Recruit, Corporal, and First Lieutenant.

Players will be eligible for participation rewards after two honorable kills.

Players will receive increased honor with increased rank.

Players will receive additional Marks of Honor at Corporal or higher rank.

Players will receive corporal rank at 5 honorable kills instead of two.

Tenacity effect has been lowered. Now improving your health, healing, and health regen by 18% (Old - 25%) and increasing your damage dealt by 14%. (Old - 18%)

The changes work both ways, with the health increase to vehicles, cannons, and exterior walls more or less evened out for offense or defense. On the other hand, the drastic change is to the weakening of the Fortress Keep door and how the Titan Relic (the Orb) is instantly clickable, similar to the one in Strand of the Ancients. This is huge. This pretty much guarantees that the game is won as soon as the Keep doors are broken through, and that's become easier, as well. It will no longer be possible to stall the game by AoEing the inner sanctum and preventing the ten-second tag.

The Wintergrasp game timer was hotfixed a few weeks back to last only thirty minutes, down from the original forty. This put pressure on the offense, making it somewhat easier for defenders to retain control Wintergrasp. Obviously, the zone is intended to change sides frequently, which Patch 3.0.8 seems to guarantee. The danger I see is that if it gets to the point that Wintergrasp Fortress becomes indefensible, players will stop playing and only zone in during offense, where they're guaranteed a win. Fewer people will bother to defend because nobody wants to fight a losing battle.

Speaking of losing battles, why was Tenacity nerfed? I don't understand that at all. Tenacity is fine. The players complaining about Tenacity are the ones who try to solo players with like ten stacks of Tenacity. The idea is to gang up on a player with Tenacity because you have the numbers. Use your crowd control. A player with 60,000 hp won't be able to do anything if he's stunned or feared. At any rate, that change doesn't help the cause of defense, whom I suspect will have lower numbers thanks to the ease by which offense can win the game now.

The revision of ranks means that players must actually participate in the battle in order to get the full benefits. As soon as you get into a game, start killing. It's that simple. The earlier you get into a game, the more Honor you'll accrue as the bonus Honor is considerable at higher ranks. The removal of elementals at the start of a match is a sensible one, since they simply get in the way, specially that bugged water elemental on top of the Broken Ring Graveyard.

Small things such as the change to the Essence of Wintergrasp icon, making it easier to differentiate from Replenishment, for example, are simple changes that let us know that Blizzard truly pays attention to detail. The buff will also correctly apply (or disappear) when control of the zone changes while players are inside an instance.

Overall these are interesting changes to Wintergrasp, mostly geared towards faster gameplay and frequent change of control. The tower buffs I mentioned in my guide to the battle of Wintergrasp should kick in, so we should see more fighting in the Southern part of the map and Wintergrasp Ranger should actually be achievable now. Now if only players would actually stay mounted...

layin' it old school

2009-01-21T09:52:00.000-08:00

Upcoming Raids
Zul'Gurub (Farm)
Ahn'Qiraj (20) (Farm)
Molten Core (10/10 Farm)
Blackwing Lair (2/8)
Onyxia (Farm)
Azuregos (Farm)

ZG (Farm)? Blackwing Lair (2/8)?! LOL wut?!? We've written before about players who love to chow down on some good, old-fashioned retro WoW content, avidly mixing original instances with the latest hotness from Wrath. Heralds of Yore from Smolderthorn takes that idea to the next level: not only do they specialize in old-school content, they do it as intended – at level 60.

Why would a guild put two entire game expansions on /ignore? Hearken back to the days of "vanilla WoW" with 15 Minutes of Fame and Heralds of Yore, after the break.

Main character Blotter
Guild Heralds of Yore
Server Smolderthorn
WoW player since 2006
Games played pre-WoW Warcraft, Starcraft, Age of Empires, Guild Wars
Games played besides WoW There are other games?

15 Minutes of Fame: Blotter, tell us about the appeal of focusing on legacy content. What's the draw?
Blotter: To me, the expansions that were released by Blizzard in no way met my expectations that I had for them. First and foremost, PvP (which is one of my favorite aspects of WoW) is a lot worse off. The implementation of resilience ratings has ruined PvP, in my opinion. To me, it seems Blizzard has increased everything too much: higher levels, bigger crits, bigger health, bigger mana, etc., etc. I think they should have left us at level 60 and released more and more content.

Also, the instances are much nicer at 60. AQ is one of my favorite places in the entire World of Warcraft. I do not feel The Burning Crusade or Wrath of the Lich King have delivered as creative of content. Hell, Naxxramas was so great Molten Core right after it came out, they were lucky to clear the Firelords. The game has become a little too watered down.

So how long has HoY been raiding level 60 content?
HoY started as Nova in September 2007 and became Heralds Of Yore in November 2007. A small break was taken when patch 3.0 released, due to people going inactive (from us) for their once-again bigger crits and more health.

So do HoY members have BC and Wrath installed -- or is that strictly forbidden?
You have to be on a non-BC account. It keeps people from leveling up from raids, shows that the member is actually serious about raiding pre-BC content and is just an all-around safeguard to not have people level. It is hard to tell if people aren't on vanilla accounts. We go on the honor system.

Are most of your members already familiar with the legacy content?
I would say around 80% of all HoY members raided level 60 content pre-BC. We do have a few people joining who have not experienced pre-BC before, and we also have members who have only experienced pre-BC content. Currently, we run about 25 people in 40-man raids. We struggle with many of the encounters, though, due to low numbers.

Have you yourself played through BC content? What about Wrath?
Yes, I have extensively played BC and Wrath. I did not quit playing these expansions after a few short weeks. I was in a top raiding guild on my server and had everything going for me, at 80 especially -- I just did not enjoy the experience.

Do you see a faster learning curve in raids because most players have more WoW and overall gaming experience than when this early content was first being played?
I do. Also, the new talents and DPS increases make the fights easier to do with fewer numbers. That helps us a lot.

Now that Naxx-40 is no longer available, what will be your ultimate achievement? The Temple of Ahn'Qiraj?
We are currently progressing through Blackwing Lair, so I guess that is our short-term goal -- but for long-term, yes, it is AQ-40. Even though we no longer have Naxx to raid, AQ-40 and BWL are still plenty of great pre-BC content.

I can only hope that one day a pre-BC server is opened, so I can once again enter the fortress of the great lich Kel'thuzad. And if you know anyone at Blizzard, can you please send them a nasty note saying Blotter wants Naxx back! I think it was a huge mistake to eliminate content that they put in the game at 60. It is a stupid move to make something, then move it to Northrend. This eliminated such a large chunk of the game they developed. For what reason? In my opinion, pure laziness, greediness -- or both. But it does leave a void for retro raiders like myself, knowing that I can never wear my Frostfire, but I can see 80s running in it all day.

Do any of your players have access to BC- or Wrath-era items?
BC and Wrath items are not allowed in our raids. When you enter PvP Battlegrounds or do PuGs, you can wear whatever you want. During raids, though, all gear must be pre-BC. Enchant rules have become rather lax due to the gold many members have spent on their enchants, but players are encouraged to use all pre-BC enchants on all items they receive in HoY raids.

How can interested players best get in touch to find out more?
You can visit our web site or you can watch the BC content video I made. It will show you the epicness of pre-BC content!

Late last night as we prepared this feature for posting, we received a last, brief missive from Blotter: "Broodlord Lashlayer down!" Grats, guys, and may your raid groups fill with a full 40.

World of Warcraft 3.0.8 Patch Notes

2009-01-20T08:05:00.000-08:00

We've got the patch notes for the official version of patch 3.0.8 after the break. Patch 3.0.8 will be the first patch to the game after Blizzard's record breaking second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King.

In addition to the patch notes, we have a full page dedicated to the various in-depth analyses we've done of the changes. In the next few days stay tuned for more updates as the patch is processed.

Take a look after the break for everything that is and isn't there. And remember that while there are a few bugs in the patch we already know about, there are likely to be more. We'll get all the latest news about the patch up as it happens.

Updated at 5:12 a.m. EST: For those of you asking for confirmation, the following is the opening announcement from the EU version of WoW: "Weekly Maintenance, 21/01. This Wednesday there will be an extended maintenance to apply patch 3.0.8. Please note that all European realms will be offline from 3:00 until 11:00, Paris time (CET)."

Enjoy the patch!

World of Warcraft Client Patch 3.0.8

The latest test realm patch notes can always be found at http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/test-realm-patchnotes.html

The latest patch notes can always be found at http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/

General

Players may now create death knights on any realm once they reach level 55.

Bonus Armor: The mechanics for items with bonus armor on them has changed (any cloth, leather, mail, or plate items with extra armor, or any other items with any armor). Bonus armor beyond the base armor of an item will no longer be multiplied by any talents or by the bonuses of Bear Form, Dire Bear Form, or Frost Presence.

Racial restrictions on mounts have now been lifted. Night Elves on mechanostriders? Tauren on raptors? You're not seeing things.

Racial Resistances: These can now be mitigated against by gaining additional chance to hit.

Tapping: All player spells which cause a creature to become aggressive to you will now also immediately cause the creature to be tapped.

All Silence spells now have diminishing returns. This includes: Arcane Torrent, Garrote silence effect, Improved Counterspell effect, Improved Kick effect, Silence, Gag Order, Silencing Shot, Spell Lock, and Strangulate.

Dispel Resist talents have changed to protect only beneficial spells and damage over time effects.

Shield Wall, Barkskin, Guardian Spirit, and Divine Protection are now off the Global Cooldown.

A new mailbox is now available at the Crows Tavern in the Dalaran Sewers.

We have added over 60 new graveyards to Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms.

The run speed in spirit form has been increased by 50%. Night Elves in Wisp form will now move at a bonus 75% speed.

Reputation rewarded for killing mobs will no longer automatically deprecate. This means trivial mobs will continue to give out their full amounts of reputation on kill for the majority of cases in the game (level 70 creatures in Stratholme, for example, will continue to award the full amount of rep to level 80 players seeking to boost their Argent Dawn faction).

World of Warcraft now supports 3-D imaging. Visit http://www.nvidia.com/object/GeForce_3D_Vision_Main.html for more information.

Achievements

The Loremaster of Kalimdor Achievement has had its quest amount reduced.

The Perma-Peddle Achievement is no longer a part of the "Fool for Love" meta-achievement.

The Winds of the North (Horde) has had its requirements changed. This achievement is now earned by getting Exalted with the Alliance Vanguard or Horde Expedition.

PvP

Vehicles can now be affected by most player spells, except CC, snares and roots.

Arenas
- Arena rating requirements for all Deadly Gladiator's Arena items have been reduced by 100.
- All rage and runic power are set to 0 when an Arena begins and the preparation period is over.
- Ring of Valor: The small pillars will now rise immediately once the arena begins.

Battlegrounds
- Lake Wintergrasp
  - Wintergrasp Commendations can now also be purchased for the low low price of 9 Wintergrasp Marks of Honor. Players can visit their respective Wintergrasp vendors and put those Marks of Honor to use!
  - Wintergrasp PvP vehicles have had their health increased.
  - Wintergrasp Tower cannons have had their health increased.
  - The Wintergrasp Fortress Exterior walls have had their health increased.
  - The Fortress Keep door now has had its health decreased.
  - The Orb is now instantly clickable.
  - Elementals should now always despawn when the battle begins.
  - Wintergrasp now extends further south so that more revenants can be reached.
  - There are now three ranks in Wintergrasp: Recruit, Corporal, and First Lieutenant.
  - Players will be eligible for participation rewards after two honorable kills.
  - Players will receive increased honor with increased rank.
  - Players will receive additional Marks of Honor at Corporal or higher rank.
  - Players will receive corporal rank at 5 honorable kills instead of two.
- Strand of the Ancients
  - Antipersonnel Turrets will now gain vehicle immunities, use falloff damage, and damage increased to 4000 + 200 per level to compensate for falloff.
  - The Strand of the Ancients Demolisher has had its health increased.
  - The Strand of the Ancients tower cannon has had its health increased.
  - Seaforium charges have been moved closer to the graveyards on the 2nd tier.
Death Knights
- All multi-rune abilities generate 15 runic power.
- Anti-Magic Shell: The cooldown has been lowered to 45 sec from 60 sec.
- Anti-Magic Zone: This ability's duration has been cut to 10 seconds.
- Blood Aura now grants 2/4% instead of 1/2% healing.
- Blood Presence now grants 2/4% instead of 1/2% healing.
- Bloody Strikes will receive extra bonus damage from Pestilence.
- Bone Shield: The mitigation has been reduced from 40% to 20%.
- Corpse Explosion: Damage increased substantially, added 5 sec. cooldown, and changed cost to 40 runic power.
- Dark Command: Range increased to 30 yards.
- Death Pact now grants 40% instead of 20% healing.
- Frost Presence: The bonus armor has been increased from 60 to 80% and magic damage reduction increased from 5 to 15%.
- Heart Strike no longer has a haste debuff but will now be able to strike two targets.
- Horn of Winter now has no cost and grants 10 runic power in addition to its stat buff, but has a 20 second cooldown.
- Howling Blast: Cooldown removed.
- Icebound Fortitude now reduces damage by 20% instead of 50%. The amount of damage reduced increases with bonus Defense (to about 35% for 540 Defense, but can go higher).
- Killing Machine: Instead of a chance to be triggered on critical strike, this talent now has a chance to be triggered on each swing based on the swing time of the weapon (slow weapons more likely, fast weapons less likely).
- Mark of Blood: The total amount of healing this can grant is now capped based on a percentage of standard creature health at the target's level.
- Night of the Dead now grants 40/70% passive area spell avoidance to your pet in addition to its current effects.
- Outbreak will no longer receive bonus damage from pestilence. The bonus from Plague Strike and Blood Boil has been increased slightly.
- Pestilence no longer has a 10 seconds cooldown.
- Raise Dead has now been split into two spells:
  - Raise Dead now raises a ghoul or pet ghoul (if talented). Requires corpse dust if no humanoid corpse is nearby.
  - Raise Ally now raises a fallen party member as a ghoul and has no reagent. Available at level 72. This should now last for 4 minutes.
- Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle (two-handed only) now grants 25 Defense and 2% Stamina.
- Rune Strike: Damage decreased from 200% to 150% but threat increased to 150% from 100%.
- Shadow of Death: The duration has been changed from 45 seconds to 25 secondsseconds and now has a 15 minute cooldown.
- Summon Gargoyle: Damage dealt by the Gargoyle reduced by approximately 20% and maximum duration cut to 30 seconds.
- Unholy Blight had had its cost reduced from 60 to 40 runic power.
- Wandering Plague will now properly reset after being castand now considers the resilience of the target in determining its chance to be triggered.
- Vampiric Blood (DK) changed from 20% health / 50% healing to 15 % health / 35% healing.
- Will of the Necropolis will now reduce the damage of any attack that takes the DK below 35% health by 5 /10/15% instead of boosting armor when wounded. It no longer affects the cooldown of Anti-Magic Shell and retains the current damage reduction bonus.
Druids
- Aquatic Form is now available from druid trainers at level 16.
- Celestial Focus (Balance) no longer includes Starfall.
- Feral Attack Power: All weapons now have the potential to grant feral attack power based on their dps (as compared to the best superior-quality weapons available at level 60). Players will see their existing feral weapons grant roughly the same attack power as they did before (+/- 2 or so), but many new weapons will be options for the feral druid. Some feral weapons have had strength converted to attack power to be more appealing to other classes able to equip them. All druids will see the amount of feral attack power granted by an item in the item tooltip, if it grants any, but other players will not see that information.
- Remove Curse and Abolish Poison can now be used in Moonkin form.
- Genesis: Now works with Tranquility and Hurricane.
- Growl: Range increased to 30 yards.
- King of the Jungle - The Bear effect is now physical, and thus cannot be dispelled.
- Moonglow: This talent now also benefits Nourish.
- Nature's Grace - Now also effects Revive.
- Nourish: Wild Growth applied to a target now increases the healing done by this spell by 20% like other heal over time effects.
- Polearms: Now trainable by Druids.
- Primal Tenacity: Now reduces the cost of Bear Form, Cat Form, and Dire Bear Form by 17/33/50% in addition to its previous effects.
- Protector of the Pack: No longer changes value based on party size.
- Savage Roar: The buff now persists outside of Cat Form but only provides its benefits while in Cat Form.
- Starfall: Instead of canceling shapeshifting, now cancels on shapeshifting into an animal form.
- Survival of the Fittest: This talent now grants 22/44/66% bonus armor in Bear Form and Dire Bear Form in addition to all of its previous effects.
- Swipe: Swipe (Cat) has now been added at level 71, dealing 260% weapon damage, costs 50 energy with no cooldown. All talents affecting the Bear Form version affect the Cat Form one as well.
- Wild Growth now has a 6 second cooldown.
Hunters
- Hunter Aspects are now off the Global Cooldown again. They still have a shared 1 second cooldown.
- All Hunter pet abilities with a cooldown of 30 seconds or more are no longer on the global cooldown.
- Arcane Shot: Mana cost lowered to match the cost of Steady Shot.
- Aspect of the Wild - This aspect is now raid-wide.
- Call of the Wild: The benefit from this pet talent now applies to only the Hunter and their own pet.
- Deterrence: Design changed to grant 100% parry and 100% chance to "deflect" spells coming from the front, but prevents the Hunter from attacking. Lasts 5 seconds and has a 90 second cooldown.
- Explosive Shot: Damage increased substantially, and additional scaling added to compensate Survival Hunters for the decrease in power of Steady Shot. No longer deals damage to secondary targets.
- Ferocious Inspiration: This talent now also increase the damage the Hunter does with Arcane Shot by 3/6/9%.
- Improved Tracking(Survival): This talent has been slightly re-designed. Now reads: While tracking Beasts, Demons, Dragonkin, Elementals, Giants, Humanoids and Undead, all ranged damage done to those types is increased by 1/2/3/4/5%.
- Kill Shot – Cooldown reduced to 15 seconds, down from 35 sec.
- Kindred Spirits: This talent now grants only 3/6/9/12/15% pet damage.
- Lock and Load: Now has a 30 second cooldown.
- Readiness: No longer resets the cooldown on Bestial Wrath.
- Steady Shot: Now gains 10% of attack power as damage instead of 20%.
- Serpent's Swiftness: This talent now grants only 2/4/6/8/10% bonus attack speed to pet. The hunter attack speed bonus is unchanged.
- Tranquilizing Shot (Hunter): Cooldown increased to 8 sec, up from 6. Mana cost reduced to 8%, down from 12%.
- Unleashed Fury: This talent now grants only 3/6/9/12/15% pet damage.
- Viper Sting: Now drains a percentage of maximum mana.
- Volley: The damage has been reduced on all ranks by approximately 30% (including attack power scaling).
- Pets
  - All Hunter pet abilities with a cooldown of 30 seconds or more are no longer on the global cooldown.
  - The coefficient of Rake (Cat) and Scorpid Poison (Scorpid) has been lowered.
  - Rake: This hunter pet ability has had its damage adjusted to prevent unreasonable scaling with attack power.
  - Scorpid Poison: No longer stacks. The damage has been adjusted to prevent unreasonable scaling with attack power.
  - Spirit Strike (hunter pet ability) now has an initial attack (which can crit) and then a single dot. Damage overall is higher.
Mages
- Arcane Blast: This ability has been significantly changed. Arcane Blast now increases the damage of the next Arcane spell by 15%. However, using Arcane Blast itself does not consume the charge itself. Each time you cast Arcane Blast, the damage of Arcane spells is increased by 15% and the mana cost of Arcane Blast is increased by 200%. This effect stacks up to 3 times and lasts 10 seconds or until any Arcane damage spell except Arcane Blast is cast.
- Arcane Flows: Now also reduces the cooldown of Evocation by 1m/2m.
- Elemental Precision: Renamed to Precision and now works on all spells.
- Evocation: Cooldown reduced to 4 min.
- Improved Blizzard: The snaring effect has been reduced to 25/40/50%.
- Incanter's Absorption: The amount of spell damage a Mage can gain from this ability is now capped at 5% of the mage's health.
- Mirror Image: The Mirror Image Polymorph ability now has a range of 8 yards. In addition, Mirror Images will no longer have excessive threat values assigned to them when they are created.
- Slow Fall is now castable on others.
- Torment the Weak: Now works with Arcane Blast and does bonus damage against targets afflicted with any type of slow (such as the combat slow from Thunder Clap).
Paladins
- Avenging Wrath: Divine Shield, Divine Protection, and Avenging Wrath cannot be used within 30 seconds of each other anymore. Forbearance removed from Avenging Wrath.
- Divine Protection: The penalty has been removed.
- Divine Shield: The penalty has been changed so that all damage done is reduced by 50% in place of an attack speed penalty.
- Hand of Reckoning(NEW): Available on trainers at level 16. It's a 30 yard range taunt that causes Holy damage.
- Judgements of the Pure: This Holy talent now increases the damage done by Seals and Judgements.
- Judgement of Wisdom: Now returns a percentage of base mana instead of a percentage of max mana.
- Sacred Duty: Interaction with Divine Shield and Divine Protection removed, but stamina bonus increased.
Priests
- Abolish Disease and Cure Disease can now be cast while in Shadowform.
- Holy: Circle of Healing now has a 6 second cooldown.
- Levitate is now castable on others.
- Mana Burn: Now burns a percentage of maximum mana.
- Shadow
  - Shadowform: You can now shift into Shadowform while mounted or sitting.
  - Vampiric Embrace- Mana cost of this spell has been removed.
Rogues
- Cheap Shot: This ability no longer has diminishing returns against anything other than itself.
- Fan of Knives: The cooldown has been removed. In addition, now deals 150% of weapon damage when used while daggers are equipped.
- Feint: Rank 8 now reduces the damage taken from area of effect attacks by 50% for 6 seconds in addition to its existing effects.
- Kidney Shot: This ability now has diminishing returns against all other stuns.
Shaman
- All shaman talent points have been refunded. Please visit your trainer to learn spells and abilities.
- Fire Nova Totem: Now no longer generates threat.
- Healing Way: Now only one application is required to reach full benefit. No longer stacks.
- Improved Water Shield: Lesser Healing Wave now has a reduced chance to trigger this talent.
- Magma Totem: The damage and scaling has been increased and no longer generates threat.
- Mental Quickness and Static Shock have switched positions in the talent tree.
- Mental Quickness: Reduces the mana cost of instant cast Shaman spells by 2/4/6% and increases spell power by an amount equal to 10/20/30% of your attack power.
- Searing Totem (Rank 4) now does the proper damage for its rank.
- Tremor Totem's duration has been increased from 2 minutes to 5 minutes.
- Elemental
  - Elemental Oath: In addition to existing effects, now increases spell damage done by the Shaman by 5/10% while Elemental Focus Clearcasting is active.
  - Elemental Mastery: Redesigned. Now increases the Shaman's critical strike chance by 20% for 30 seconds. Cooldown remains at 3 minutes.
  - Elemental Shields: This talent has been removed. It has now been merged with Elemental Warding.
  - Elemental Warding: Now reduces all damage taken by 2/4/6%. Changed from only reducing Nature, Fire and Frost by 4/7/10%.
  - New Talent: Shamanism-Your Lightning Bolt spell gains an additional 2/4/6/8/10% and your Lava Burst gains an additional 4/8/12/16/20% of your bonus damage effects.
  - Storm, Earth and Fire: This talent has been moved up in the tree, and it's talent points have been reduced to 3 down from 5. Wind Shock is also included in the range increase (with Earth Shock). The damage bonus to Flame Shock has been increased, up from 10/20/30/40/50 to 20/40/60.
  - Unrelenting Storm: point cost reduced to 3, down from 5. Now does 4/8/12%
Warlocks
- Curse of Agony will now scale better when used with the Glyph of Curse of Agony. Ticks beyond the original duration will do 33% more damage than the ticks that preceded them. i.e. 74 -> 145 -> 217 -> 290.
- Demon Armor and Demon Skin: Armor increased by approximately 120%.
- Demonic Circle: The teleport now clears all snare effects.
- Drain Mana: Now drains a percentage of maximum mana.
- Emberstorm: Now works with Conflagrate.
- Ritual of Summoning: Will now create a summoning portal object which can be re-used for multiple summons for 5 minutes.
Warriors
- Bloodthirst: Charges have been decreased to 3, but the effect has been raised to 1% per charge.
- Fury: Bloodsurge: Now has a chance to trigger from any hit with Heroic Strike, Bloodthirst, or Whirlwind.
- Fury:Titan's Grip: The hit chance penalty has been removed.
- Sudden Death: The amount of rage spent on an Execute while Sudden Death is active is now capped at 30 rage. Improved Execute and the Glyph of Execute will still increase the damage done by increasing the amount of rage able to be converted into damage.
- Taunt: Range increased to 30 yards.
Professions
- Alchemy
  - All flasks no longer require an alchemy lab to create.
  - The Cooldown on Transmute: Titanium has been reduced to 1 day, and the materials required have been simplified.
  - Reduced the cooldown on Northrend Alchemy Research from 7 days to 3 days.
  - The chance to discover a Northrend transmutation has been increased.
  - Changed the Crazy Alchemist Potion so it always gives health and mana. It also grants the benefit of another random potion effect.
  - Potion of Nightmares functionality changed. You can now move to interrupt the effect, and damage taken is no longer increased while you are under the effects of this potion.
  - Added a new recipe for Ethereal Oil to grand master alchemy trainers.
  - You can now discover a recipe for the Elixir of Water Walking with Northrend Alchemy Research.
- Blacksmithing
  - Reduced the spell power on the Titansteel Guardian to bring it in line with its item level.
  - Increased the material requirements to make high level frost resistance gear created with blacksmithing.
  - Increased the materials required to make several recipes that require cobalt.
  - Added a new recipe for shield reinforcements that increases the block value of shields.
- Cooking
  - A recipe has been added for Kungaloosh. You can learn this recipe from an NPC in the Dalaran sewers once you have completed the quest 'The Taste Test' in Sholazar Basin.
  - A recipe for the incredible Fish Feast can now be purchased for Dalaran Cooking Awards.
  - Succulent Orca Stew and Shoveltusk Soup have been removed from the requirements for any cooking achievements as they will not be added to the game.
  - A new recipe for Worg Tartare is now available for purchase with Dalaran Cooking Awards. This delicacy imbues hit rating and Stamina upon those brave enough to eat it.
- Enchanting
  - Many high level enchantment recipes have had the amount of Infinite Dust and Greater Cosmic Essence requirements significantly reduced, but with Dream Shards being added to them.
  - Increased the Fire damage inflicted by the Icebreaker weapon enchantment.
  - Reduced the armor penalty granted by the Berserking weapon enchantment.
  - Increased the amount of healing from the Lifeward enchantment.
  - Increased the amount of damage caused by the Icebreaker enchantment.
  - Added a new recipe to enchant bracers with Stamina. You can buy this recipe from Vanessa Sellers in Dalaran.
- Engineering
  - Engineers may now be able to properly engineer Centrifuge Constructs.
  - Reduced the cooldown and increased the duration of the effect for Hyperspeed Accelerators.
  - Added a new recipe for epic plate spell power goggles.
  - Weakness Spectralizers are now usable by druids.
  - The Saronite Bomb recipe now creates a lot more bombs for the same material cost. While this breakthrough was discovered by goblins, all engineers can take advantage of it.
  - Gnomish Lightning Generator has had its cast time and cooldown reduced.
  - The engineering Scrapbot can now repair.
- Inscription
  - Jessica Sellers, a new vendor in the Dalaran inscription shop, will sell most inscription inks for the cost of one Ink of the Sea. She also sells Snowfall Ink for multiple Inks of the Sea.
  - A new recipe for Glyph of Arcane Blast has been added to Master and Grand Master Inscription trainers.
- Jewelcrafting
  - Added a new recipe to convert a frozen orb and some green quality gems into several superior quality gems.
  - Reduced the spell power granted by the use effect of the Figurine – Twilight Serpent, but reduced the cooldown significantly.
- Leatherworking
  - Iceborne Belt pattern skill up range has been increased to the correct range.
  - The epic leg armor patches now require a Frozen Orb in addition to their other materials.
- Mining
  - Mining veins and deposits no longer require multiple hits to receive all the ore. Players will receive around the same amount of ore, stone, and gems they would have received from multiple hits.
  - Weakened Giants and Iron Rune Sentinels can now be correctly mined.
- Skinning
  - Increased the critical strike rating granted by ranks 5 and 6 of Master of Anatomy.
  - Carrion Fleshstrippers are now skinnable.
- Tailoring
  - Reduced the cloth required to make a Bolt of Imbued Frostweave.
  - Simplified the materials required for Shining Spellthread and Azure Spellthread.
  - Reduced the eternals required to make Brilliant Spellthread and Sapphire Spellthread, but increased the number of Iceweb Spider Silk.
  - Greatly reduced the materials required to make the self-only tailoring leg enchants (Master's Spellthread and Sanctified Spellthread), but these recipes no longer grant any skill gains.
  - Reduced the training cost for the normal Flying Carpet.
  - Ebonweave now requires the tailor to be in the Maw of Neltharion in Dragonblight to creating it.
  - Spellweave now requires the tailor to be at the Azure Dragonshrine in Dragonblight when creating it.
Quests
- The quest, "Scare the Guano Out of Them!" now only requires 10 Darkclaw Guano, down from 15. Also, only the character that scared the bat, or their party, may now loot the guano.
- Shoveltusk Meat obtained during the quest; "Shoveltusk Soup Again?" is now correctly flagged as a quest item with no sell price.
- During the quest, "Scalps!" you can no longer use Ahunae's Knife to scalp kills that you aren't tapped to.
- The path followed by the Har'koa's Kitten during the quest, "I Sense a Disturbance" has been improved.
- Westguard Sergeants, Winterhoof Braves, and Ethereal Frostworgs should no longer attempt to attack their opposite faction counterparts unless the character controlling them is first attacked.
- Westguard Sergeant and Winterhoof Brave demoralizing shouts will now only affect the Winterskorn Vrykul and worgs at Skorn.
- Various fixes to the Queen Angerboda event during the quest, "The Slumbering King".
- The daily quest, "Shoot 'Em Up" now only requires 15 Jotunheim Proto-Drakes to be shot down, down from 20. As well, the harpoon now only costs 5 energy to shoot, down from 10.
Dungeons and Raids
- The Obsidian Sanctum
  - Players will now be affected by Twilight Residue when they leave the Twilight Realm. Twilight Residue grants immunity to Fire and Shadow damage for a few seconds.
User Interface
- Chat frames can now be made "Noninteractive". When in this state, they will ignore all clicks.
- Various filters can now be applied to Achievements.
- A special UI for chatting with GMs has been added.
- For additional notes on Lua and XML changes please visit the UI & Macros forum.
Items
- Emblems of Heroism can now be purchased at a 1 to 1 rate using Emblems of Valor.
- The Darkmoon Faire exotic vendors have been updated with new items.
- Amberglow Signet now correctly grants Hit Rating.
- Deadly Gladiator's Refuge has had its 4 piece set bonus changed. It now reduces the cooldown of Swiftmend by 2 seconds.
- Deadly Gladiator's Staff has had the Agility and Critical strike rating restored to ratios consistent with other instances of the Gladiator's Staff.
- Dreamwalker Battlegear: The Rip bonus is now 4 seconds instead of 3.
- Druid Feral Tier 7 Set: The 4 piece bonus now also decreases the cooldown on Tiger's Fury by 3 seconds.
- Druid Restoration Tier 7 Set: The Rejuvenation bonus has been changed to affect Lifebloom instead.
- Gifts and Pledges of Adoration for the capital cities are now soulbound.
- The Flag of Ownership now has only a 60s cooldown to match the 60s duration of the flag.
- The following crafted weapons have had their stats adjusted to properly reflect their intended power:
  - Corroded Saronite Edge, Corroded Saronite Woundbringer, Cudgel of Saronite Justice, Furious Saronite Beatstick, Saronite Spellblade, Saronite Shiv, Savage Cobalt Slicer, Notched Cobalt War Axe, Sturdy Cobalt Quickblade, Cobalt Tenderizer
- Living Lashers can now properly be skinned with Herbalism.
- Players can now open clams while riding a vehicle, sitting, mounted, stealthed, and invisible.
- Reduced the stats on the Savage Cobalt Slicer to match the weapon's level.
- Some low-level rogue pvp gloves were accidentally omitted from the patch 3.0.3 update. This has been rectified.
- Some neglected creatures in Icecrown have found the contents of their pockets.
- Totem of Hex now correctly grants 165 spell power to Chain Lightning and Lightning Bolt, up from 85.
- The white Polar Bear mount is now the proper (larger) size.
- Glyphs
  - Glyph of Conflagrate now makes it so your Conflagrate spell no longer consumes the Immolate or Shadowflame spell from the target.
  - Glyph of Death and Decay has been changed to grant 20% additional damage instead of its current effect.
  - Glyph of Hammer of Justice: Now increases range by 5 yards instead of increasing stun duration.
  - Glyph of Invisibility duration has been increased.
  - Glyph of Deterrence: Now -10 seconds instead of -20.
  - Glyph of Holy Light now affects friendly targets in a larger radius.
  - Glyph of Horn of Winter now increases the duration by 60 sec.
  - Glyph of Spirit of Redemption: Now increases the duration of the effect by a fixed amount of 6 seconds.
  - Glyph of turn evil now also increases the cooldown of your turn evil spell by 8 sec.
World Environment
- Incapacitating Shout now has an 8 second duration.
- Conquered Soul of the Blightcallers are no longer AE immune.
- Corrected a raid emote in Violet Hold to display the proper creature name.
- Corrected a redundant aura tooltip for Locust Swarm in Naxxramas.
- Several creatures in the Construct Quarter of Naxxramas did not have Heroic values for hit points and damage.
- Storm Peaks, Grom'arsh Crash Site - Peon Gakra is now an innkeeper and the zeppelin hull, an inn.
Bug Fixes

Fixed a bug with a Wild Mustard plant that was under the ground in Dalaran.

Racials
- Berserking: Can now be used properly while under the affects of Hand of Protection.
- Heroic Presence: Now works properly in Ghost Wolf Form.
- Shadowmeld: This ability will now properly restore threat when it is cancelled. In addition, it will correctly remove a player from combat if it is active when that player is the last person left alive that the creature hates. This ability is now also unusable while affected by Faerie Fire.
- Will of the Forsaken: Using this ability while disoriented would trigger it's cooldown to no affect; it is no longer useable while disoriented.

Classes
- Death Knights
  - Blood Aura Will now always do the correct amount of healing, based on the actual damage taken of the target.
  - Blood Caked Blade: Now does the proper damage amount when triggered by an off-hand weapon.
  - Bloody Strikes: The tooltip for this talent now has correct values.
  - Butchery: Will now always grant 20 runic power, regardless of the creature type killed.
  - Chains of Ice: This ability is no longer able to land on death knights who have Anti-Magic Shell active.
  - Crypt Fever: It is no longer possible to have a duration longer than the disease which caused it. Will also no longer incorrectly increase Death and Decay damage.
  - Corpse Explosion: Fixed a bug where how much Runic Power the Death Knight had was affecting the damage done, and also increased the damage substantially.
  - Dancing Rune Blade: The weapon no longer echoes the Raise Dead and Army of the Dead spells. In addition it will now more closely match the master's damage and will cast Rune Strike when its master does.
  - Death Chill: The effect from this talent will no longer be consumed if Killing Machine is active.
  - Death Pact: This will no longer cause guards to attack the Death Knight.
  - Desecration: will no longer break stealth.
  - Ebon Plague: It is no longer possible to have a duration longer than the disease which caused it. It will no longer stack with Crypt Fever used by another character.
  - Frost Fever: This talent now works properly when spell reflected.
  - Gnaw: This ghoul ability is now able to be set on autocast.
  - Icy Clutch: This will now be applied properly in all cases to targets that gain Frost Fever via the Pestilence ability.
  - Mark of Blood now works correctly with periodic damage.
  - Pestilence: The diseases will now spread correctly even when the damage from Pestilence kills the primary target.
  - Raise Dead no longer puts you in combat when you cast this spell.
  - Shadow of Death: This ability will no longer cause tracking abilities to become inactive when the death knight becomes a ghoul.
  - Tundra Stalker (Rank 1) will now work properly on Death and Decay.
  - Unholy Blight: Will no longer cause spell pushback.
- Druids
  - Bear Form: This ability will now grant the correct attack power per level for levels 71-80.
  - Entangling Roots: When determining if a new Entangling Roots should overwrite an old one, and will now calculate the correct damage modifiers for the creature type of the target.
  - Maim: Tooltip adjusted to match the duration the ability has always had.
  - Opening: Opening doors and objects should no longer cause shapeshifted forms to be cancelled.
  - Rake: The initial damage from this ability is now properly considered bleed damage, and will be increased by Mangle and Trauma.
  - Savage Fury - Mangle (Bear) damage was being increased by a higher percentage than intended. This has been fixed, and in result Mangle (Bear) should see roughly a 16% damage reduction. Also fixed a bug with Savage Fury where the Rake bleed effect was not being increased.
  - Starfall will no longer cause nearby creatures to become hostile for no apparent reason while the Druid is affected by fear effects. In addition, it will no longer pick ambient creatures as targets.
  - Survival Instincts: The extra health from this ability now persists in all forms, but the ability can only be activated in Cat Form, Bear Form, or Dire Bear Form. This prevents the health gain from occurring multiple times if constantly shapeshifting.
  - Swiftmend: Riptide will no longer cause this ability to light up, and this ability will no longer sometimes consume Earthliving off the target.
- Hunters
  - Aspects: All aspects now have a 1 second global cooldown.
  - Aspect of the Beast: Will now increase Hunter pet attack power by the correct amount.
  - Aspect of the Viper: Beast Lore, Scare Beast, and Tame Beast will no longer trigger mana regeneration from this ability.
  - Call of the Wild: Now only works on the pet and their own master.
  - Carrion Feeder: No longer causes extremely large amounts of threat when the pet gains happiness.
  - Chimera Shot: The secondary effects of this shot will now still be triggered even when the target dies from the ability's damage.
  - Cower: Now longer shares a cooldown with Growl, but has its own separate cooldown.
  - Dust Cloud: This pet ability will now be cast by the pet at the target instead of while they are moving toward the target.
  - Marked for Death: Now works properly for Steady Shot and Glyph of Steady Shot.
  - Master's Call: Now makes the pet immune to roots and snares for the duration as well, allowing the pet to break roots on the target even when the pet is rooted.
  - Nether Shock: Pets will now correctly use this ability on all targets, not just mana users.
  - Noxious Stings: When this talent triggers Wyvern Sting, the Wyvern Sting will now last the proper duration.
  - Owl's Focus: Free abilities will no longer consume this effect.
  - Prowl: This ability will no longer sometimes turn autocast on by itself.
  - Sniper Training: Now increases the damage of Aimed Shot by the correct amount.
  - Spirit Strike: This pet ability's duration and period have both been reduced to 6 seconds.
  - Spore Cloud: This ability will now work properly.
  - Swipe: The tooltip has been adjusted.
  - Tracking: Entering an arena no longer disables tracking types.
  - Fixed a bug that allowed Viper's Sting to target death knights. They are now invalid targets.
- Mages
  - Arcane Missiles: This spell now only has one chance to trigger Arcane Concentration.
  - Brain Freeze: This talent can now be triggered by Blizzard.
  - Burnout: This talent will now properly charge the mage additional mana when Living Bomb causes a critical strike.
  - Fingers of Frost: This talent can now trigger properly from Frost Armor.
  - Frost Nova: Will now properly overwrite the effect of Shattered Barrier and of Frostbite.
  - Icy Veins: The spell pushback reduction from this talent now works on Frostfire Bolt.
  - Improved Scorch: This talent no longer triggers effects that trigger on casting a spell.
  - Incanter's Absorption: This talent will now work properly when the mage is sitting.
  - Living Bomb: Now triggers Ignite when it causes a critical strike. In addition, the final explosion will now still occur even if the mage is affected by a crowd control effect.
  - Molten Fury: This talent will now interact correctly with Torment the Weak.
  - Precision: Frostfire Bolt will no longer receive double the intended benefit from this talent.
  - Spell Power: Now affects the critical strike chance of Blizzard.
- Paladins
  - Devotion aura: When mixing two different ranks of this ability in a party, players will no longer sometimes see a spurious second copy of the buff.
  - Hand of Freedom: Now works properly against the froststorm Breath Hunter pet ability.
  - Judgement of Blood, Judgement of Command, and Judgement of the Martyr will now gain the correct damage modifiers for the creature type of the target.
  - Judgement of Light: The tooltip has been corrected to remove the implication that it only works on melee attacks.
  - Judgement of the Wise: The amount of mana gained has been corrected to match the tooltip.
  - Pure of Heart: This talent will no longer cause Curse of Agony to do more damage than intended.
  - Repentance: Avenger's Shield no longer breaks Repentance, but unfortunately, Seal of Vengeance and Corruption damage will break it again. This will be corrected in a future patch.
  - Righteous Vengeance: This talent will now calculate its damage correctly when the damage is absorbed. In addition this ability will no longer cause excessive damage when refreshed on targets with damage reduction effects active.
  - Seal of Command: The tooltip has been adjusted to show the damage gained from spell power.
  - Shield of Righteousness now properly shares a cooldown for both ranks.
- Priest
  - Dispersion: This ability can no longer be cast while affected by Cyclone; doing so consumed the cooldown to no effect.
  - Guardian Spirit: It is no longer possible for simultaneous killing blows to trigger the heal from this ability multiple times.
  - Improved Holy Concentration: The tooltip has been rewritten to indicate that this talent reduces cast time rather than providing haste.
  - Mind Flay: Fixed a bug with targeting where you would not deal damage if not facing the target while channeling. Also corrected an issue where the damage from this ability was slightly delayed.
  - Prayer of Mending: Will now only benefit from the healing talents of the priest who cast the original spell.
  - Rapture: This talent will now correctly return mana for Power Word: Shield based on the caster's mana poll instead of the target's mana pool.
  - Shadow Weaving: Shadow Word: Death: Will now only apply one copy of this buff per cast.
  - Shadow Word: Pain now will gain the correct damage modifiers for the creature type of the target.
  - Surge of Light: Prayer of Mending will no longer sometimes cause Surge of Light to trigger on Priests who do not have that talent.
  - Twisted Faith: This talent will no longer sometimes cause Shadow Word: Pain to fail due to a more powerful spell being in effect.
- Rogues
  - Envenom: The tooltip values have been corrected to be accurate.
  - Fan of Knives: All poisons will now trigger correctly when used with this ability.
  - Honor Among Thieves: The bug where stacking multiple rogues with this talent caused them all to gain additional combo points has been fixed. In addition, it no longer cancels eating and drinking if a party member gains a critical strike while it is active.
  - Killing Spree: This ability no longer breaks stealth if it fails due to all targets being out of range.
  - Mutilate: this ability will no longer give poisons on the off-hand weapon two chances to be triggered.
  - Turn the Tables: This talent no longer generates threat when it triggers.
- Shaman
  - Chain Heal: This spell will now give an invalid target error message if the primary target is a totem.
  - Earth Shield: Now correctly uses the Shaman's own spell critical strike chance to determine the chance of a critical heal.
  - Elemental Shields was reducing flat physical damage, not a percentage. Now properly reduced by a percentage.
  - Lava Lash - Fixed a bug which allowed you to use the ability even if you had a shield in offhand. Now requires a 1hand axe, fist or dagger to be able to be used.
  - Fixed a bug where Thunderstorm (Elemental) was knocking back 15 yards, instead of 20. It should now roughly knockback the correct length of 20 yards.
  - Magma Totem: Fixed a bug that capped the damage of this ability at too low of a level.
  - Resistance Totems: Players will no longer see two copies of these buffs when two shamans cast the totems simultaneously.
  - Spirit Walk: This Feral Spirit ability will now properly clear roots and snares from the Shaman master.
  - Stoneclaw Totem: The tooltip has been revised to indicate the damage absorb shield also works on the Stoneclaw Totem itself.
- Warlock
  - Warlock Pets: Some pets were not properly classified to receive correct creature scaling for Wrath of the Lich King. Their health and damage done will now be higher.
  - Corruption will now gain the correct damage modifiers for the creature type of the target.
  - Create Healthstone: Attempting to create a healthstone when you already have one no longer consumes mana or triggers the cooldown of this ability.
  - Demonic Circle: Teleport: the button for this ability will now darken when the Warlock is out of range of the Demonic Circle and will light up when the Warlock is in range.
  - Demon Power Scaling: Spell power gained from spirit via the Fel Armor ability will now properly affect the scaling of spell power and attack power on summoned demons.
  - Drain Mana: This spell will no longer cancel when the target's mana poll is low or the caster's mana poll is full. It also now generates a very small amount of threat instead of no threat.
  - Everlasting Affliction: Will now calculate correct damage values for Corruption when it is refreshed in all cases.
  - Haunt: Will now gain correct damage modifiers for the creature type of the target. In addition, this ability is now limited to a single target as intended. This also now works properly when refreshed on its current target.
  - Mana Feed: This talent will no longer sometimes fire for warlocks who do not have the talent.
  - Master Conjuror: Tooltip revised to indicate it does not increase the damage bonuses of Firestones or Spellstones.
  - Metamorphosis: The bonus armor effect from this ability will now calculate properly and interact correctly with armor buffs and debuffs.
  - Ritual of Doom: A Doomguard summoned with this spell will now scale properly from its master's stats.
  - Shadow Embrace: This ability will now create a separate debuff stack for each Warlock with the talent, and each warlock will benefit properly from his or her own debuff.
  - Soul Siphon: Will now gain the correct damage modifiers for the creature type of the target.
  - Unstable Affliction: Will now gain the correct damage modifiers for the creature type of the target.
- Warrior
  - Bladestorm: Fixed a bug where sometimes stuns and roots would not be removed properly when this ability is used.
  - Damage Shield: Rank 1 of this ability now works properly.
  - Heroic Throw no longer triggers the snare from Mage Frost Armor.

PvP
- The Wintergrasp Aura should now properly update in all instances, transferring the buff when the zone control changes.
- Arena: Dalaran Sewer: The Flush effect which pushes players out will now also remove the ability to use Demonic Circles summoned during the arena start time.

Items

Idol of the Emerald Queen: This idol was providing greater healing than implied by its tooltip. It has been reduced to correct value.

Glyph of Ambush: This glyph will now interact correctly with Initiative when Ambush is used outside of combat range.

Glyph of Charge: The stun from Charge will now work properly when Charge is used with the extra range from this glyph.

Glyph of Corpse Explosion: Additional explosions from this glyph will no longer consume Unholy Runes.

Glyph of Rejuvenation: The heal from this glyph is now properly considered a periodic heal.

Gronstalker Set: The Aspect of Viper bonus from this set has been changed to work correctly with the redesigned Aspect of the Viper.

Mana Potions: Warriors and Death Knights now receive a correct error message when attempting to use mana potions.

Scrolls: Buffs from scrolls can now only be overwritten by more powerful scrolls.

Soul Preserver: This item will now interact correctly with Desperate Prayer, Lay on Hands, Riptide, and Wild Growth.

Minor bugs to appear in patch 3.0.8

2009-01-20T07:48:00.000-08:00

Eyonix posted a note about a few minor bugs that will appear when patch 3.0.8 goes live:

Ritual of Summoning can only be used once every two minutes.

Human females have animation errors when shooting a ranged weapon or using two-handed weapons.

Remember that with 3.0.8 Ritual of Summoning will be changed to create a summoning stone. The Warlock will cast Ritual of Summoning, which will drop the stone, which can then be used to summon other party/raid members. We are assuming that it's the actual casting of the spell to summon the stone that can only be used once every two minutes, and not the actual summoning of people.

We'll get some video of the animation errors up on WoW Insider as soon as we can, I'm sure there's some potentially funny stuff there.

And don't bother asking if 3.0.8 is coming tomorrow. While we think it's definitely possible, god only knows what Blizzard will actually do. I give it a 80/20 chance that it drops tomorrow morning.

The state of the Mage

2009-01-18T01:30:00.000-08:00

My formative years fell mainly within the late-80's and early 90's, back when Double Dare and Saved by the Bell were a daily afternoon ritual and it was perfectly acceptable to show up to school wearing parachute pants and looking like Brian Austin Green from 90210 (I'd be careful about clicking that last youtube link, the video contained therein quite literally made my brain bleed). My family was...um...frugal, so school shopping was always an exercise in humility.

"But Mom, all the other kids are wearing Bugle Boy and Jordache, why can't I?"

"Everybody else will have a sweet Trapper Keeper, why do I have to get this crappy notebook?"

"My friends get to play Crystalis and Life Force, why am I stuck with Destination Earthstar?"

I know that last one isn't at all related to education, but even while school shopping, my mind was on games. A lot of my best memories involve the Playchoice 10 display at Montgomery Ward.

All of these questions and many more elicited the same response:

"Chris, you shouldn't worry about what other kids have. You can't compare yourself to other people."

Oh Mom, how wrong you were. How very, very wrong.

In World of Warcraft, the late stages of the game revolve around how your class compares to those around you. Your raiding value is determined by how much healing you can muster, how many other classes and specs can out-DPS you, or how well you can hold aggro and mitigate damage. PvP is essentially a caste system so rigid and brutal India would be proud of it. So now that we've had the Lich King around for a solid two months and the classes have begun to settle into their roles, how do Mages stack up? Where do we rate? Can we walk down the cool kids' (Death Knights) hallway? Or are we the nerds, staying in the library at lunch to avoid getting beaten up because we bring Dragonlance novels and issues of Nintendo Power to school? Join me after the jump and we'll discuss where Mages stand.

Raiding

We'll begin with the PvE side of the game. The current end-game raid content is relatively forgiving, so there isn't the same sort of elitist shunning of sub-par DPS classes and specs that went on toward the end of The Burning Crusade. Still, it's already clear which of the various damage dealers you actively want in your raid and which you think twice about bringing along.

There are now four serviceable raiding specs for Mages, and the best of those, from a pure DPS output perspective, is the Frostfire Bolt spec. Arcane Brilliance's guide to this spec specifically and others can be found here and here. There are several variations of this particular build floating around, but all of them involve speccing specifically around maximizing the damage output of Frostfire Bolt, and then spamming it almost exclusively in boss fights. Well-geared Mages with this spec tend to finish fights near the top of DPS meters, usually competitive with Moonkin and Shadow Priests, but well below Warlocks. This is a favorable change from The Burning Crusade, where we'd often find ourselves below Hunters, Rogues, Warriors, Hunter pets, Warlock Imps, Shadowfiends, AFK gold farmers who weren't even in the instance, Mechanical Yetis, Compact Harvest Reapers, and our own Water Elementals. It's good to feel competitive again.

Fire/Arcane builds with Torment the Weak can sometimes out-damage elementalist specs, but only if there happens to be a deep Arcane Mage in the group willing to keep Slow up on the target for the duration of the fight Otherwise, Fire Mages fall well short of the damage output of FFB specs, though they are still capable of generating very solid DPS.

Arcane Mages currently finish fights just above Frost Mages, but this is due to change with the release of patch 3.0.8. The main issue Arcane Mages face right now is managing their mana pools in longer fights, and changes like a shortened cooldown for Evocation--which can be talented down to two minutes after the patch hits--should help to resolve that problem. Arcane DPS is already high (when they have mana), and the new version of Arcane Blast and change to Torment the Weak will only improve that DPS. Damage output aside, in the category of raw, unadulterated fun, Arcane is without peer.

As always, the black sheep of PvE DPS remains the Frost Mage. Still, even Frost Mages are better off now than they were in the previous expansion in comparison to other classes. Though they rank below the other three PvE specs in viability, skilled Frost Mages can hold their own against most hybrid classes, and even some pure DPS classes like Hunters and Rogues. Blizzard appears content to leave Frost as the so-called PvP spec for now, and though that is a sad, sorry state of affairs, no changes are on the horizon.

The relative value of Mages as a class in PvE is higher than it has been since the final days of vanilla WoW. We still bring the single most reliable CC spell in the game to the table (though almost every other class now has their own version of it), and our role as vending/portal machines is still as in-demand as it ever was. We're not yet where a lot of us feel we should be, but we're moving in the right direction. Personally, I won't settle for Mages being anywhere short of the absolute top of the chart, but for now I'm encouraged.

PvP

The options for killing other players in this game are now many and varied. From simple duels outside Orgrimmar to epic siege warfare in Wintergrasp to the structured battleground combat of Arathi Basin to the intense, match-up driven deathmatches of the Arena system, we can now battle each other in almost any manner we prefer.

In previous iterations of this game, Mages had two choices in PvP. Choice number one was "spec Frost." Choice number two was "die a swift and horrible death." While Frost is still absolutely the spec of choice for pure PvP butt-kickery, many are learning to fear and respect the power of a skilled Arcane Mage. Or at least they're learning to accuse us of face-rolling for the win, or to launch silly and vindictive "nerf Mages" campaigns on the official forums. Either way, they're learning something. Sort of.

Well-geared and skilled Frost Mages are still the kings of survivability in PvP settings, though that specific skillset isn't as valuable as it once was, given today's burst-damage-centered Arena combat. Thankfully, the control and burst damage capabilities the Frost tree offers are still quite formidable, especially with the stun of Deep Freeze in the mix. Frost Mages can still match up well in most fights, though Death Knights, Druids, and Rogues are still lethal foes.

Arcane Mages excel at burst damage and mobility, and Arcane Barrage is the single greatest PvP tool in their arsenal, enabling them to move and burst with unmatched efficiency. Instant Invisibility, high spell resistances, and Improved Blink provide a heightened sense of slipperiness that Mages have never had before. Slow is still an incredibly powerful control tool. Arcane Mages are better suited to the open warfare found in Wintergrasp or the various battlegrounds than they are to Arena combat, due to the relative ease with which they are killed in close quarters.

Fire Mages are still low man on the totem pole when it comes to PvP, due to their need to stand still and cast and their low survivability. Like those with Fire builds, Frostfire Mages can pump out impressive DPS if left alone, but take too long to cast to be truly viable in the hectic realm of PvP.

All of this is well and good, but the most important question for me personally is this: how do we stack up against Warlocks?

The answer--and I firmly believe my nightly prayers for the past two years are primarily responsible for this--is pretty well. Arcane Mages especially can generally pump down a Warlock in time to avoid the nasty, curse-ridden deaths we used to endure so often. Mirror Image is a powerful tool against Locks as well, and should be used early in the fight, to spread the Warlock's initial DoTs around to multiple targets and confuse the pet. It's incredibly nice to finally feel superior to the class I've hated for so long and in so many creatively and disturbingly violent ways. You'd almost expect, now that I no longer get killed by Warlocks on a regular basis, that some of my dislike would fade. You'd be wrong. If anything, my vitriol--and the almost religious fervor with which I express it--has increased. I hate Warlocks with a vigor that extends far beyond the boundaries of mere competitive vengefulness. Although...my hate for Death Knights is starting to move into a similar category.

The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Raiding Gear Pt. II

2009-01-18T01:27:00.000-08:00

We got half-way through our available raid content last time we talked about raiding gear. Since the next big topic I intend to cover is stances and their current implementation, and since this column is a day late, I decided to finish up the topic before moving into one as controversial as stance penalties. This week we'll talk about armor, rings, trinkets and necklaces for both tanks and DPS in Naxxramas (or Naxxaramas, as my subconscious insists on misspelling it) and then we'll discuss Malygos and what booty he has in store for warriors if there's room.

Before we get going, I wanted to point out that in the most recent PTR patch notes, the change to Sudden Death (where no more than 30 rage is used on a Sudden Death execute) has been implemented, but there is as yet no change to Deep Wounds. This doesn't mean there won't be one, but for now it's not part of the notes, so it's possible any such change won't take place in time for 3.0.8 depending on when that happens. (Basically, if the patch happens this week we're probably clear until 3.1.)

To be honest, I don't like the reasoning for the change, that Deep Wounds damage is too high because it is damage unmitigated by armor, especially since (as many prot warriors reminded me in the column where I first mentioned it) it's used as a source of constant threat by a lot of tanking warriors. Since Deep Wounds puts a DoT on anyone the warrior crits, and tanks have a high crit chance with abilities like Incite, it's not hard for a warrior tank to get Deep Wounds up on a lot of mobs at once and thus keep ticking threat on them even when focusing on other mobs. Any change to Deep Wounds needs to keep this use of the talent in mind. (I went and specced prot for a heroic Utgarde run the other day just to try it out, and it's fantastic threat. It even seems to work when Thunder Clap crits.) We'll definitely be watching how this all plays out.

On to gear!

Naxxramas continued

We covered weapon drops in Naxx last time, so now we'll talk about everything else. There's a lot of everything else in Naxx, as it is where the majority of your gear is coming from in raids at the moment. I mean, there's one boss in Obsidian Sanctum (which can be made to drop slightly more gear if you do it the hard way) and one boss in the Eye of Eternity, and fifteen boss encounters in Naxx. It stands to reason the majority of your gear is here.

There's quite a bit of plate in Naxx, even after we discount all that awful stuff with *yeuch* spell power on it. Since Gluth has a chance to drop anything except gear from Kel or Sapph, he's kind of a 'one-stop shop' post for characters looking to gear up in Naxx. In Naxxramas 10 the tanking plate of interest includes the Abomination Shoulderblades off of Gluth and Patchwerk, the Gauntlets of the Master off of Gluth and Faerlina, the Legplates of Inescapable Death off of Gluth and Loatheb, the Minion Bracers off of darn near every mob in the instance (you know, the minions), the Plague-Impervious Boots off of, you guessed it, Noth the Plaguebringer and yes, Gluth again. The Thane's Tainted Greathelm (a very sweet hat with a meta socket) is available from the Four Horsemen chest and yes, Gluth also drops one. And Instructor Razuvious (and here comes Gluth again, I swear that dog eill eat anything) drops the Waistguard of the Tutor, a very hot tanking belt. Finally, Sapphiron (and not Gluth, just in case I've trained you too well) drops the Massive Skeletal Ribcage.

As for DPS gear in normal Naxx, Gluth vomits up a fair share of that too. Bad dog! I'm just going to mention when he doesn't drop a piece from now on and save us all some time. The Bracers of Lost Sentiments from Faerlina lack in crit, but provide solid hit, expertise and strength for your DPS warrior. The Chestplate of the Risen Soldier has crit, haste, and of course strength, it comes from Noth. The Gauntlets of Combined Strength from Patchwerk are, frankly, a little underwhelming. Gothik, however, drops a heck of a sweet belt for DPS. Sapphiron (and only Sapph, remember) drops the Helm of the Unsubmissive, with a meta socket, a blue socket, hit and haste rating. Finally, Grobbulus drops the Leggings of Innumerable Barbs, which have too many barbs to count apparently. I'm kind of lazy so I just take their word for it.

There are two DPS and one tanking ring of interest in 10 man Naxx - the Deflection Band is a solid tanking piece, the Circle of Death is ideal for DPS warriors, and the Sealing Ring of Grobbulus will serve a DPS warrior. (Strength is generally better than AP for a warrior, due to buffs that scale stats.) Our necklace options are the Amulet of Autopsy from Heigan and the Medallion of the Disgraced from just about everyone for tanks, and the Collar of Dissolution from Anub'Rekhan and Gem of Imprisoned Vassals from head dead man Kel'Thuzad himself. Finally, our DPS will be looking to acquire Loatheb's Shadow if they feel low on crit, while tanks will be giving the Repelling Charge from Thaddius their attention.

In addition to all this, four of the five tokens warriors (and hunters and shamans, of course) can use to purchase their set pieces drop in Naxxramas. Gluth has a chance to drop any piece save for the one Kel'Thuzad drops, the Helm of the Lost Protector. The Chestguard of the Lost Protector is found in the Four Horsemen's chest, Thaddius drops the legs, and Loatheb the spaulders. These can be turned in for either DPS or Tanking options.

This covers 10 man Naxx drops, but what about heroic, you may ask? Well, even if you didn't that's what we're covering next. As before, if it doesn't drop from KT or Sapph, it can also drop from Gluth.

For tanks, we have an assortment of options from heroic Naxx. There's quite a selection here, in fact: the Ablative Chitin Girdle and Bindings of the Hapless Prey from Maexxna, the Fleshless Girdle from Patchwerk, the Bracers of the Unholy Knight from Razuvious, the Breastplate of Tormented Rage from Heigan the Unclean, the Burdened Shoulderplates and Helm of Vital Protection from Gothik (that's a very well rounded hat, too), the Inexorable Sabatons (more strength than stamina on a tanking piece, interesting - with the str and SBV these are clearly threat boots) and Pauldrons of Unnatural Death off of Anub'Rekhan, the Callous-Hearted Gauntlets off of Faerlina, the Chestguard of the Exhausted off of Grobbulus, the Gauntelts of the Disobedient from Noth, the Greaves of Turbulence from Loatheb, the Sabatons of Endurance from Thaddius, and finally the Platehelm of the Great Wyrm from Sapphiron and only Sapphiron. As you can see, the potential for several sets optimized for threat or survival exists in the gear available to tanks in Naxx 25.

DPS need not fear a paucity of gear for their interests, however. It's there, hoo boy is it there. If you're low on expertise Faerlina has the Bracers of the Tyrant for you, while if you'd rather have crit then Gothik has the Bracers of Unrelenting Attack. Maexxna drops the Undiminished Battleplate, a solid hit/expertise chest. while Sapphiron drops the astonishing Breastplate of Frozen Pain. Faerlina drops the Fire-Scorched Greathelm (which you've sene in several screenshots of my warrior, I love this hat) while the Shoulderguards of the Undaunted drop off of trash (in my experience they drop a lot in the Military Quarter). Instructor Razuvious drops the Girdle of Razuvious, as well as the Legplates of Double Strikes. Patchwerk is the source for the Crude Discolored Battlegrips with solid hit and crit. Grobbulus drops the Girdle of Chivalry, Heigan the Iron-Spring Jumpers, and Thaddius the Riveted Abomination Leggings. Anub'Rekhan drops some of the best DPS boots I've yet seen, while Noth drops Armor Pen Shoulders and there's a BoE set of gloves from the Four Horsemen.

There's a variety of rings for warriors in Naxx. First I'm going to mention is the BoE Signet of Edward the Odd. The proc makes it interesting to me, as I'd like to try and build a dedicated haste set and see how valuable I think it is now. Still, this ring is hardly a must have for warriors compared to Ruthlessness or even the Strong-Handed Ring. The Sand-Worn Band is of definite interest to a tanking warrior, but if you're doing fine on defense and the druid tanks have it already Gatekeeper merits your attention as well. That is some solid dodge and hit right there.

Heritage, a solid tanking neck, is apparently dropped by up to five bosses in Naxx. The other tanking option in Naxx 25, Boundless Ambition, only drops from Kel'Thuzad. And the DPS option, Fool's Trial, drops off of the same bosses as Heritage, while Sapphiron drops the Icy Blast Amulet.

Trinkets from Naxx 25 for tanks are the Defender's Code (more of a druid trinket but still usable for a warrior) from a variety of bosses and the Rune of Repulsion (repeat that previous sentence but with Death Knight instead of Druid) from Sapphiron. DPS trinkets are the Bandit's Insignia from Sapphiron and Grim Toll, also from a variety of bosses. I really like that Grim Toll myself. Even with the change to armor pen to a rating that's a lot of armor ignored and the hit is solid.

Finally, the same four tokens for the Valorous tier set drop as did the Heroes tokens in 10 man Naxx. Same bosses and everything, for both DPS and Tanking options.

Okay, that's pretty much Naxx in as small a nutshell as I could manage. Next week we'll either finish this with a look at Malygos and Emblem gear or we'll talk stances and pick this up the week after.

Patch 3.0.8 and the portent of good things

2009-01-18T01:21:00.000-08:00

So the patch didn't go through this week. It's alright, though. I guess we can wait another week or so for Patch 3.0.8, which seems to be getting heftier as the weeks go by. It's a patch that promises to be a pretty good one for Warlocks, and even then it's not the complete change. Ghostcrawler has said they're looking at improving Warlock DPS and survivability in the future, which means we'll probably be in a rough spot until 3.0.8 or -- later down the line -- 3.1 hits.

Not excitingly, most of Patch 3.0.8 consists of bug fixes, so there won't be any major changes to gameplay or dramatic shifts in the way we do things. The biggest change is arguably in the way Ritual of Summoning works, which will save us Soul Shards the way Soulwells changed how we handed out candy. The new mechanic creates a sort of summoning object -- currently some sort of infernal flasher who opens up his cloak -- that works almost exactly like an instance summoning stone. This is great for raids, but not so hot for parties when you just want to summon one person. It has a cooldown of two minutes (down from the originally planned five).

The other really big thing is the new tagging -- or tapping, as Blizzard likes to call it -- mechanics. In Patch 3.0.8, "all player spells which cause a creature to become aggressive to you will now also immediately cause the creature to be tapped." This means no more annoying Hunters stealing our mobs with a stupid Arcane Shot before our Corruption has had a chance to tick. No class benefits from this change more than Warlocks, so while it has practically no application in raids and dungeons, it's been a long time coming for the common grind.

The good news is that the simple bug fixes actually improve our DPS somewhat. It's not huge, but after mind-numbing tests on the PTR, I'm breaking out about 200-300 more DPS on the same spec with the same gear than on live for Affliction. I gave 0 /41 /30 a shot, too, but I wasn't properly Glyphed for it and wasn't comfortable with Conflagrate Incinerate spam. On the other hand, other Warlocks testing -- and swore by -- the same build were getting better results on the PTR, as well. Overall, the Patch looks decent for the class and we'll be seeing more buffs than nerfs in general.

Yes, there'll be nerfs, as well, although not to Demonology as originally indicated by the Patch notes. Debuffs in general will be affected, thanks to the change in dispel mechanics, which removes Fear (among other crowd control spells such as Seduction) from the umbrella of dispel protection. The change effectively nerfs debuff classes such as Death Knights and Warlocks but buffs dispelling classes such as Paladins. The change also mostly applies to PvP -- where Warlocks already suffer -- but we're getting some buffs in that department, too.

The most important one is that Demonic Circle should now remove all snare effects, which should improve our survivability quite a bit. Not sure if this means stuns, too, although the wording doesn't seem to indicate that. For all intents and purposes, though, it should ideally work similar to Mages' Blink as a means of escape. Also important on the PvP front is how Demon Armor and Demon Skin have had their armor increased by about 120%, with the former granting 2100 bonus Armor, up from 950 on live. Just how much these changes will improve our survivability in Arenas or PvP in general remains to be seen, but it's definitely an improvement. As a side note, the Demonic Circle trick will no longer work in Dalaran Sewer Arena (which for many of us was the only thing that let us last the match for longer than 20 seconds).

Drain Mana was reworked to drain a percentage of maximum mana instead of a set amount, so there's now only one rank of the spell (it'll disappear from your bars, took me a while to find this on my Spellbook). This change helps low-mana specs like Retribution and Enhancement, but also means we can actually put a dent in a Mage's kajillion-mana pool. That should be sweet. It also now generates a small amount of threat, which means Blizzard should probably get on improving Soul Shatter.

Glyph of Conflagrate has changed to no longer consume Immolate or Shadowflame, making it work more like Glyph of Flame Shock. Curse of Agony will scale better with Glyph of Curse of Agony, with each subsequent tick beyond the original duration dealing 33% more damage than the previous one. This should provide a decent DPS increase and should remind us all not to clip our DoTs.

Finally, the other big change is the fix to demon scaling. Summoned demons will now have higher health and deal more damage, and scales properly with Fel Armor, amounting to about a non-scientifically tested 30% more on my Felhunter on a dummy. It's actually smaller than it sounds, considering that it contributes only about 150 DPS on live. That's not much, but it should scale better in a raid environment.

Overall, Patch 3.0.8 is going to be a good one for us. But the real good news is that Blizzard is working hard on making bigger, more impactful changes for the next major patch, Patch 3.1. Ghostcrawler has already called on the Warlock community to contribute, asking which spells don't deserve a slot on our bars. They have their own plans for the class, but want to "make informed decisions", which is a good sign. I know the changes can't come soon enough, but true fixes will take time.

Changes we can look forward to is a major revision to the Soul Shard mechanic, one which Ghostcrawler promises to be "very cool." I hope that cool in his definition includes easing up the requirements for spells like Shadowburn, Soul Fire, and Soulshatter. If those spells didn't empty our Abyssal Bags like Homer Simpson wipes out a box of donuts, I guarantee that they'd find their way to more rotations.

Affliction is way fun, although many of the Warlocks I've spoken to on the PTR are swearing off the spec because it makes their eyes bleed. Blizzard's looking at that, too, with options on making durations more uniform or reducing the number of spells to cast. My take, personally, is that Haunt should refresh more DoTs than just Corruption, which should ease up the Affliction priority cast cycle considerably. There's probably the danger of making Haunt a little overpowered, but I know that casting it now takes highest priority because it saves me one GCD and because of Shadow Embrace. It's mandatory enough as it is when going deep Affliction, so making it a lynchpin spell just makes sense to me.

The last great thing I'm excited about is a promised change to demons. While we shouldn't expect demon DPS to rival those of Hunter pets, Demonology is one spec that should receive massive returns from demons. Considering deep Demonology is sub-standard for raiding -- 0 /41 /30 being the best Demonology spec right now -- Blizzard is looking at improving the Voidwalker, Succubus, and even the new and improved Infernal and Doomguard. A true utility spec with competitive DPS would be a welcome change, indeed. All told, Patch 3.0.8 is merely something we'll need to get by until we get to good stuff.

An Insight to a Death Knight

2009-01-18T00:19:00.001-08:00

Most of the time when you hear a blood curdling scream followed by a froosh type sound, your guaranteed to have just heard a Death Knight casting his or her mount, and are likely to see them gallop through with no care to fence, gate or gnome they knock over in the process.

But what really makes a Death Knight? Is it that icy glare? The deep soulless voice? Or does it go deeper than this?

When starting a Death Knight there comes a mission that you have to kill a survivor in the jail; Now up to this point you have been slaughtering everything from cows to peasants that run directly at you (for some reason), without a care in the world, then this gets dropped in your lap and you think ‘cool more death!’. But as you reach the person you intended to kill, they recognise you, uttering the lines:-

Ellen Stanbridge says: Come to finish the job, have you?
Ellen Stanbridge
says: I'd like to stand for.....
Ellen Stanbridge says: {Name}
Ellen
Stanbridge says: {Name}, I'd recognize that face anywhere.... What..... What
have they done to you, ?
Ellen Stanbridge says: You don't remember me, do
you? Blasted Scourge.... They've tried to drain you of everything that made you
a righteous force of reckoning. Every last ounce of good... Everything that made
you a human!
Ellen Stanbridge says: Think, {Name}. Think back. Try and
remember the hills and valleys of Elwynn, where you were born. Remember the
splendor of life, {brother/sister}. You were a champion of the Alliance once!
This isn't you.
Ellen Stanbridge says: Listen to me, {Name}. You must fight
against the Lich King's control. He is a monster that wants to see this world -
our world - in ruin. Don't let him use you to accomplish his goals. You were
once a hero and you can be again. Fight, damn you! Fight his control!

Knight Commander Plaguefist yells: What's going in there? What's taking so long,
{Name}?

Ellen Stanbridge says: There... There's no more time for me. I'm
done for. Finish me off, {Name}. Do it or they'll kill us both. {Name} ...
Remember Elwynn. This world is worth saving...

Although this is different for each race, the effect would be the same. Now I got wondering about my Death Knight after that little speech; who was my Death Knight before he became what he now is? Did he have a family, were they alive, did he have any friends, how old actually was I, had I died during the second war fighting Arthas or did I die fighting beside him before he lost his mind?

With all these thoughts I set out to see if it was possible to understand the Death Knight more, as an actual character, even a person, so I had a long think about what just feels right with my Death Knight, that natural sense of what you should be doing.

With that I cast my Dread Steed, found Elwynn on the map and set off to find my place in the world………

Warrior and DK threat bug hotfixed

2009-01-15T04:30:00.000-08:00

My own Death Knight is not quite up to raid tanking yet; I've got a few more levels to go on that one. However, some players have noticed that DK threat, especially on single targets, seems a bit low - significantly lower than the other three tank classes, to the extent that the tanks were having trouble keeping threat against high DPS.

It turns out that there was a slightly complicated bug involving Frost Presence, the foundation of DK tanking. It went like this:

Some aspects of Frost Presence don't go away when you die, and some do (this is the bug).

The threat boost, however, does go away when you die.

When you res and come back without changing presences, the game doesn't reapply Frost Presence, because it sees that you already have some of the effects of it.

However, you still don't have the threat boost.

So potentially, DKs who die and come back without switching to another presence (Blood or Unholy) and then back to Frost were missing out on the 45% threat that Frost Presence brings. This has been hotfixed now, so there is no further need to worry about it. If you saw your DK threat go up a lot yesterday, that's probably why.

Ghostcrawler adds that "it is likely" that Defensive Stance was also being affected by this bug, although I haven't seen any prot warriors complaining about their threat since 3.0 hit.

GamerDNA and Massively explore Death Knight demographics

2009-01-15T04:21:00.000-08:00

Our friends at Massively and GamerDNA are at it again -- they're digging into their database of players, this time to determine some Death Knight demographics. They want to know what kinds of players are picking up the new Hero class. Unfortunately, their sample size is super small -- only 500, according to Sanya Weathers, which seems way too tiny to determine anything about the Death Knight class at large. But we'll go with it anyway, and see what we can get.

As you can see above, Blood Elves and Humans dominate the race choice in our little group, which seems about right, considering that those are the two most popular races overall. Death Knight players in this study generally tend to have reported themselves as male in real life. And GamerDNA also lays their Death Knights up against the Bartle test and while WoW players trend pretty well to the norm, Death Knights go way more towards the "Killer" and to a lesser extent the "Explorer" end of the scales.

So according to this little survey (and we'll remind you that this is 500 people, so there are plenty of exceptions out there), the average Death Knight is male, chooses whatever race is most familiar to them, and wants to go kill and do damage rather than worry about socializing or achieving. In other words, lots and lots of former Ret Paladins. It'll be interesting to see how this changes over time -- lots of these players are interested in the newest thing, obviously, since they've switched their mains to a new class at the first chance, but as things settle down and more people head back to get new alts, maybe we'll see a different crowd coming out of Acherus.

Heroics as a fresh 80: Don't be that guy

2009-01-15T03:12:00.002-08:00

Back in the beginning of Burning Crusade, when heroic instances were originally introduced, you had to get to Revered standing with a dungeon's associated faction to buy a key that would let you into heroic mode. Later, that requirement was relaxed to Honored. This was taken one step further in Wrath of the Lich King, where there is, technically, no requirement to enter a heroic besides being level 80.

However, this doesn't mean you're ready for heroics (and Naxxramas-10, which is about the same difficulty) the moment you ding 80 and go train. This is something I found out on my own first 80, when I scratched and clawed my way through healing a heroic Old Kingdom in mid-70s dungeon and quest gear (we never did get the last boss down). I was told that I was rather undergeared for heroics, and to go do some normal-mode level 80 dungeons first (Halls of Lightning, Utgarde Pinnacle, Oculus, Culling of Stratholme).

This was some of the best advice I ever got in WoW. I ran each of the L80 normal-mode dungeons once, and my gear level improved by about 50% in the space of a day or two. There are some extremely serviceable quest rewards in all of these dungeons, not to mention drops and rep gains. There is also some excellent crafted gear out there, if you have some any spare change or mats kicking around. And from that moment on I wasn't that guy trying to tank heroics with 20,000 HP, or the DPS doing 1,000 in Naxxramas. Please, don't be that guy: run some normal-mode level 80s, and maybe pick up a bit of crafted gear or rep rewards, before you try to do heroics or raids.

Roll a Death Knight anywhere in 3.0.8

2009-01-15T03:12:00.001-08:00

Oh, you poor unfortunate souls! Forced by the cruel silver hand of fate to roll a Death Knight only on realms on which you already have a level 55 character. You've cried out in pain as the lashes of this restriction struck you, and through the anguish you've yelled "Yo Blizz! Lemme roll my DK anywhere, aight?"

Word. Big Blue's got your back.

Starting with the launch of 3.0.8, you'll be able to roll a new Death Knight on any realm as long as you have a level 55 character somewhere. The normal restrictions for character creation are still in place, though--can't make an opposite-faction DK on a PVP server, can't roll a DK on a server closed to transfers unless you've got a 55 there already, etc. All fair!

Before you ask why this feature wasn't implemented from the get-go, remember that it wasn't even very long ago that the developers were deciding "how is dk formed?" (though they did say that the restriction would be lifted soon after Wrath launched).

So fret not, ye oppressed. Soon, your chains (of ice) will be broken.

3.0.8 for Priests

2009-01-12T08:02:00.000-08:00

I thought we'd be getting the 3.0.8 patch last week. I guess I need a new magic 8 ball. Hopefully it will come out this week instead. In any case, here's several of the big changes you can expect along with a list of bug fixes. Mind you, most of these aren't game or class breaking type changes.

At least, not to me. You may feel otherwise.

Holy

Circle of Healing has a 6 second cooldown

Yep. I've wrote about this at length. We shouldn't be surprised at that.

Discipline

Silent Resolve now reduces the chance your helpful spells and damage over time effects will be dispelled by 10/20/30%. (Old - Affected all spells)

You can more in detail about the Silent Resolve changes in Daniel's post regarding Dispel resistances and their changes. But in a nutshell, Fear will not be protected with Silent Resolve whereas Renew or Shadow Word: Pain will continue to be.

Shadow

You can now cast Cure Disease and Abolish Disease while in Shadowform.

This will help out on certain cleanse happy fights. A great example of this would be on Heigan. Raid leaders can now task Paladins, Shamans, and Priests of both specs to help cleanse, if necessary.

Shadowform: You can now shift into Shadowform while mounted or sitting.

Vampiric Embrace: Mana cost of this spell has been removed.

The Shadow brothers can switch to their dark forms at any time. Hooray for increased flexibility. It's also nice to see VE being free.
Glyphs

Glyph of Spirit Redemption - Increases the duration of Spirit of Redemption by 6 seconds. (Old - All heals cast while Spirit of Redemption is active have a 20% chance to increase the remaining duration of Spirit of Redemption by 4sec.

Heh, this might make a few Priests feel all sad panda like. There's an interesting PvP spec for Priests that involves stretching down to Spirit of Redemption. The theory is that if the Priest dies, there is a chance that the Priest can continue to heal non-stop with this glyph active and keep their partners alive.

With this change, that strategy will no longer be possible.

Bug Fixes

This patch introduces some bug fixes for Priests.

Dispersion: This ability can no longer be cast while affected by Cyclone; doing so consumed the cooldown to no effect.

Guardian Spirit: It is no longer possible for simultaneous killing blows to trigger the heal from this ability multiple times.

Improved Holy Concentration: The tooltip has been rewritten to indicate that this talent reduces cast time rather than providing haste.

Mind Flay - Fixed a bug with targeting where you would not deal damage if not facing the target while channeling. Also corrected an issue where the damage from this ability was slightly delayed.

Prayer of Mending: Will now only benefit from the healing talents of the priest who cast the original spell.

Rapture: This talent will now correctly return mana for Power Word: Shield based on the caster's mana poll instead of the target's mana pool.

Shadow Weaving: Shadow Word: Death: Will now only apply one copy of this buff per cast.

Shadow Word: Pain now will gain the correct damage modifiers for the creature type of the target.

Surge of Light: Prayer of Mending will no longer sometimes cause Surge of Light to trigger on Priests who do not have that talent.

That last bug was an interesting one. I wondered why I'd get a Surge of Light proc when I was full Discipline. I guess that's going the way of the dodo.

The fix to Rapture will help us a lot. When shielding Warriors or Feral Druids, it was disappointing to see minor gains in mana until I read about this bug. Nice to see that's been fixed!

So when I was asked on Twitter if this patch will change Priests to become worth playing again, there wasn't much I could add. If Wrath wasn't enough to make you play a Priest, then this patch isn't going to change your mind much. We will still be renowned for our versatility and ability to adapt.

Lil' Game Hunter achievement now set to 75 pets

2009-01-12T07:36:00.000-08:00

In patch 3.0.8 there is a new achievement call the Lil' Game Hunter, which you get upon collecting a very large number of pets. The achievement gets you the pet pictured above, a little fawn. He's cute, and hopefully won't stop in his tracks when he sees my motorcycle's headlight.

Previously the achievement required getting a total of 100 vanity pets, however that total has now been lowered to 75. That is much more accessible for people to achieve, and really requires just a little bit of farming and AH watching. Definitely within the grasp of more people than when it was 100, which would have required more-or-less getting your hands on some super rare pets and/or ebayed TCG loot cards (a subject which some feel is borderline ethical).

Click on the above image to get a better view of the fawn, and start collecting now!

I plan on taking him for a walk through Elwynn Forest when I get him.

For help with tracking your non-combat pet collection, head on over to the most excellent Warcraftpets.com.

Fix for unintentional instance lockouts in the works

2009-01-10T09:30:00.000-08:00

One of the more annoying things that has come about in Wrath of the Lich King is the ease at which you can be saved to an instance. It used to be that you were saved to a heroic or raid instance whenever you killed a boss or got loot.

Now if you more or less step in the place, you end up being saved to it.

This can cause a problem if someone in your group forgot that they already ran the instance or raid during the lockout period (a day for heroic instances, a week for all current raids). That person loads an already completed version of the instance. The place has all the trash, all the quirks, except for the bosses. You'll spend a half hour clearing to the first boss, only to discover that he's not there – he's already been killed. And oops, you're saved to the instance too.

"Epic fail," as has been yelled out on my vent when this happens.

And it does happen to the best of us.

But luckily, Ghostcrawler commented today that this is something Blizzard is aware of and they're looking into ways to fix it.

I can hear the cheers from the heroic running crowd now.

Hopefully this is something they'll get out soon. A common suggestion is having a dialog box pop up asking "Are you sure you want to be saved to this instance?" or "This instance already has people saved to it, are you sure you want to continue?"

A solution like that would just be a matter of doing a search of raid IDs amongst the group entering and doing a few other simple comparisons. While I'm sure there are a ton of other considerations to make, the ease at which people seem to be able to come up with ideas to fix this problem is promising that a solution isn't too far off.

Patch 3.0.8 makes death less sudden

2009-01-10T09:26:00.000-08:00

If you're paying attention to the saga of Warriors and patch 3.0.8 on the PTR, you saw the following exciting patch notes, which I will reproduce in their entirety from here.

Warriors
- Bloodthirst: Charges have been decreased to 3, but the effect has been raised to 1% per charge.
- Fury: Bloodsurge: Now has a chance to trigger from any hit with Heroic Strike, Bloodthirst, or Whirlwind.
- Fury:Titan's Grip: The hit chance penalty has been removed.
- Taunt: Range increased to 30 yards.

While these are not a lot of changes, on the whole they seem fairly positive, yes? Well, what's not in the patch notes is of some concern to DPS warriors. Namely, the incoming nerfs to Deep Wounds and Sudden Death, two warrior talents in the arms tree. The Deep Wounds nerf is aimed at balancing fury warriors since their damage should be going up with the change to Bloodsurge and Titan's Grip. Since there hasn't been an announcement of how much Deep Wounds is going to be changed, all we know is that the DPS will decrease. The Sudden Death change, however, is at least simple enough, in that when a Sudden Death execute lights up, it will only use up to 30 rage.

Interestingly, I specced arms last night for Malygos before I heard about these changes and played around with the spec, and even though I prefer fury for DPS I already feel bad for arms losing those big SD executes. I've read and understood the argument that it's too bursty and I hope that Blizzard is sincere in their desire to buff arms somewhere else to make up for it, but to my eyes the real losers here are PvP warriors who are already having trouble killing anything in PvP since aside from big random crits there's not really any way for a warrior to match the insane burst of the current PvP game.

It's possible to see the SD change as a PvE buff, depending on your gear. Based on my last night experience, I didn't really have any trouble getting rage as arms (indeed, my main difficulty was in understanding what I was supposed to do with all of the rage I had when I didn't have an execute handy to dump it, since I'm so used to fury) but if you were having trouble with rage then not losing all of it could actually be a DPS increase. I can't say there's any upside to the change for PvP

Since I finally did some Wintergrasp the other day (you wore me down, what can I say) I actually feel like my raiding PvE spec is more viable for the frenetic mass of combat in that place than, say a dedicated Arms PvP spec, and that just seems wrong and bad to me. I guess I had fun, but not enough to really want to go back, I just did it mostly to help get the Alliance the zone so I could raid Archavon.

The Deep Wounds change is aimed at scaling: as warrior gear gets better, the damage that ability deals will just keep going up and up and up. I understand it, even if it's not really making me happy (a lot of my damage is Deep Wounds) but I'm hoping the changes to Bloodsurge will help make up the difference. It really depends on how often it goes off once the change goes live. Right now, since BT is on a 5 second cooldown you end up waiting to see if you're going to get a Slam every five seconds, either you do or you don't (as crit rates approach 50% in raids) so hopefully it will be much less of a plodding "did I crit BT, no, ah well" experience and more a steady chance to fit an instant slam into the ability. I've always loved Bloodsurge and would very much like it to live up to its potential as the Sword and Board of Fury.

The new Glyphs coming in are pretty solid for the most part. I'm of course looking forward to the Whirlwind and Cleave changes. I use cleave a lot on trash (it's useless on a boss, of course, you're better off HSing for your rage dump when there's only one mob to hit) so the chance for cleave to chain to three makes the points I spend in Imp Cleave feel more useful to me. This is an older list from MMO Champion (things come in and go out, like the 2h DK tanking weapons, so if this doesn't actually turn up in live I apologize) but it's interesting.

Glyph of Bloodrage - Reduces the health cost of your Bloodrage ability by 100%. (Up from 50%)

Glyph of Cleaving - Increases the number of targets your Cleave hits by 1. (Old - Reduces the rage cost of Cleave by 5.)

Glyph of Mortal Strike - Increases the damage of your Mortal Strike ability by 10%. (No longer reduces the healing penalty)

Glyph of Bloodthirst - Increases the healing you receive from your Bloodthirst ability by 100%. (Up from 20%)

Glyph of Whirlwind - Reduces the cooldown of your Whirlwind by 2 sec. (Old - Increases the number of targets your Whirlwind ability hits by 1.)

Glyph of Victory Rush - Your Victory Rush ability has a 30% increased critical strike chance against targets above 70% health. (Old - 90% health)

Glyph of Rending - Increases the duration of your Rend ability by 6 sec. (Up from 3 sec)

For arms, that MS glyph is a nice change for PvP warriors (who were probably loath to take it before and lose the healing penalty) and the Glyph of Rending will help you get more chances to proc Overpower. The Bloodthirst glyph will be good for soloing but I doubt any PvE warriors who have progressed past five man content would take it. Victory Rush is simply not a terribly important ability for instancing/raiding, but for soloing its a very nice change and might have some utility for PvP.

Overall it's kind of a mixed bag. If you'd asked me a week ago I would have said that 3.0.8 was nothing but positive for warriors, if in a small way (compared to the vast revamps some classes are seeing) but now I'm on the fence. I really don't like the SD change and am unhappy (if somewhat willing to wait and see how it actually affects our DPS) with the Deep Wounds change, but I'm very happy with the glyphs and the change to bloodsurge. Yay for uncertainty, I guess.

Completing I've Toured the Fjord

2009-01-08T09:05:00.000-08:00

Every week The Overachiever gives advice, walkthroughs and guides on completing your latest Achievement obssession.

Welcome to the inaugural edition of The Overachiever. We're here to help you to finish off the Achievements on your list. And, apparently talk about ourselves in the third person. We're crazy like that.

Today's column covers the Howling Fjord quest achievement "I've Toured the Fjord" and will help you find those last missing quests to rack up the 130 (Alliance) or 105 (Horde) needed. This is one of the prerequisites for the Loremaster of Northrend Achievement (A/H) which itself is a prereq for uber-Achievement The Loremaster (A/H) which grants a title (you guessed it, "Loremaster") and a spiffy tabard with a quest exclamation on it.

You should know that there is no way to tell what quests you have completed in a zone and which one's you haven't. You can only open your Achievements window (Y key) and see how many you've done. Most likely you have hit all the quest hubs for your faction and are just a few shy of earning the Achievement. Or maybe you've completed all you can find, but are clearly missing some major cluster of quests. Here's what to do.

Step 1: Check out the excellent list of Howling Fjord quests split up by faction and quest hub on WoWWiki. Note the Neutral faction quests at the bottom of the list. If you are stuck at around 80 quests, head to the Ancient Lift on the west coast. A tuskarr there starts a chain of about 20 or so.

Alternately, go to WoWHead's Howling Fjord page, where you can set their map to show you quest giver locations for your faction (see image at the top of this post for an example.) Mouse over the pins to see which quests those quest givers hand out or click on them to go to the WoWHead page for that NPC.

Step 2: Generally you will come across these drops while running all the other quests, but in case you missed any, here are the items dropped from mobs that start quests.

Gjalerbron Attack Plans (A/H) - Drops from mobs in Gjalerbron in the northwest snowy mountains of the zone. Starts a 2 chain quest with the second one requiring one more player to complete.

It's a Scourge Device (A/H) - A scourge device drops from the mobs around the pulsing purple crystals dotting the Chillmere Coast in the far northwest. Starts a 2 chain quest that can be soloed easily.

Stop the Ascension! (A/H) - While you are merrily slaying the crazed Vrykul of Skorn in the north of the zone, one of them will probably drop a Vrykul Scroll of Ascension. Click on it and head up to the top of the village next to the big bonfire to summon the crazed ghost boss Vrykul scary dude.

Step 3: Still one or two short? Here's a few quest givers that are easy to miss.

Old Icefin sits on a small island off the Chillmere Coast. He gives out the very sad Trident of the Son quest.

If you are Horde, head a little southeast of Nifflevar to pick up two quests:

The Enemy's Legacy from Scribe Seguine

Against Nifflevar from Ranger Captain Areiel

Remember that daily quests in the zone don't count towards this Achievement.

Finally, if you are having a tough time completing quests, consider AddOns that provide in-game help with finding quest objectives like QuestHelper or Carbonite Quest. As long as we are on the subject, don't forget to check out our Achievement AddOns Guide.

Other Achievements in this zone:

Friend or Fowl?

Explore Howling Fjord