warlock shadowbolt

In the mage Q&A, the devs mentioned that they’re planning to make mages and warlocks feel less similar and that since they’re happy with where mages stand right now from a design perspective, warlocks will be the class that would be drifting away. Ghostcrawler said that the soul shard system is the area they want to make a few changes to achieve this goal. Right now shards are more for maintenance and thus take a back seat to the actual warlock game play. Shards are used to summon the minions, healthstones, summoning portals and other things that are “cool” but necessarily totally needed. They want to change that. They want to make using shards a core mechanic and that using a shard would provide a combat boost instead of used for just minor things. They want shard usage to be a big deal! [maybe things like a trinket like ability costing a shard to increase spell power or things similar to that? That would be so cool if it were].

The devs also want to make pet usage and abilities more interesting. Some pet abilities just aren’t used that much anymore (imp fire shield) and some pets aren’t very interesting to use like the voidwalker. They want us to make interesting decisions when deciding which pet to use for a certain scenario. They also feel like it’s time to improve pet survivability especially in PvP. They said that they’re going to address this by slowly going to make pets scale with all stats, starting with spell penetration and resilience.

They also recognize that warlocks have a problem with threat management especially since other classes can reduce their threat by just spending a couple of points in one talent while locks have to spend a lot on talents that even belong to different trees. They’ll have to figure out a way to solve this problem without moving around the talents too much. A partial solution is lowering the cooldown of Soulshatter to 3 minutes. Talents that affect the range of certain spells also suffer from the same problem as the threat reducing ones and thus are in the same boat.

Here’s a list of other things that were discussed in the Q&A and are being considered for implementation (meaning they’re still just thinking about it, okay).

1. More burst damage for Affliction warlocks through Haunt and Pandemic

2. Hellfire doesn’t have much of a niche and could get cut in the future.

3. Green fire! Instead of giving it to all fire spells, they might just make a new spell have it.

4. Class specific flying mount

5. Being able to customize or change the appearance of the warlock pets.

Looks like warlocks have quite a bit of interesting and cool things to look forward to going forward and I wish the devs some luck and success in trying to address the issues mentioned in this feature.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

faction switching

According to CM Nethaera, while cross faction transfers are going to be allowed, inter-faction race switching will not be allowed. This is a bit shocking for me since logically switching races within your faction is a smaller step than crossing over to the other faction. I remember reading their justification (can’t seem to find it anymore) went something like this. Making a mistake on faction choice is a more forgivable mistake than a mistake on racial choice.

It’s definitely sad that we won’t be able to switch races between our faction. I know several people who would have wanted to change races. Even I was thinking of changing my Blood Elf warlock to an Orc. Who knows though? If they’re allowing faction switching already, it just might take a little time before they give in to inter-faction race switching.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

argent tournament grounds

This move is quite creative in my opinion because it gives players a certain element that the Sunwell badge gear gave players back in TBC but not giving the whole thing outright. As we know, the Sunwell badge gear did give players a way to bridge the gap between the lower content and the higher content but it also was a bit too much since players could just farm the dungeons for gear as good as the raiders who worked so hard to get theirs. The new idea with Emblem of Triumph gives players a chance to bridge the content gap but at a harder climb and a slower pace. This also allows 5 man dungeon content to become more relevant again. I’m guessing that this is what CM Zarhym was talking about when he announced that new things were in store for the emblem system .

MMO Champion gives us some info from the PTR about more of these new things. According to them, instead of having several tokens corresponding to a certain gear slot, the tier 9 gear system (item level 245) is going to be a one token for any gear slot system. According to them, item level 232 and 245 tier 9 emblem gear can be bought with Emblems of Triumph.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

Kologarn raid extension

As we all know, raids currently have a lockout period of one week where the raid timer resets every Tuesday. This means that every Tuesday, players can get fresh runs for their raids. But this also means that if you’ve been working on some raid progression during the week, it will reset every Tuesday whether you like it or not. At least that’s how it is and by patch 3.2 that will change. Imagine the frustration of a guild working to get to Yogg-Saron for a whole week and by the time you get to him, the raid is tired and sleepy and forced to call it a night but the next day the timer resets!

We still don’t know the details about this feature but all we know is that the option to extend the lockout period is there for us by patch 3.2. We still don’t know how this will affect the members of the raid when the lockout gets extended. Imagine the chaos if the raid leader wants to extend but others want a fresh run. imagine a PuG group leader extending the lockout and thus saving the other members for another week unnecessarily. If I had to guess, to prevent situations like this members of a raid will have their timers reset as usual and if they want to join an extended run they’ll have to get saved all over again.

We’ll just have to find out later on exactly how this works but it’s already safe to say that it’s nice that this option will be available to us in the next content patch.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

faction switching

According to CM Nethaera, this service is going to be made available because of several requests by the players mostly because they have characters that are on opposite factions from their friends. I’m curious how they will be able to reconcile all the factors that go with a faction transfer. How are they going to deal with reputation levels for example? Let’s say you’re a Human priest who’s exalted with Stormwind and Ironforge, how will that translate when you become an Blood Elf priest?

Another thing I want to touch on is this. Providing a faction transfer service should mean that you can choose what race you want to become in the opposite faction (unless of course you’re a druid or a horde shaman who wants to go to the Alliance or an Alliance paladin who wants to go to the Horde). It would really suck if you get assigned a race instead of choosing one yourself. That would lead to more problems. So assuming that you can choose your race when you switch factions and since we already have a service that can switch your character’s gender, wouldn’t it only be logical that this service should extend to switching races within your faction? Race switching within your faction is a smaller leap than a faction switch. If such is the case, then I know that a lot of people who would like to avail of the service because they’re tired of being a certain race.

What do you think will happen, more Alliance switching to Horde or more Horde switching to Alliance?

Post from: WOW Obsessed

argent tournament grounds

The 5 man dungeon is quite interesting and in fact at this point it intrigues me more than the raid encounters. First of all, all the bosses players encounter are not strangers since they’re right there in the Tournament Grounds. According to the achievement Heroic: Trial of the Champion from MMO Champion [Alliance|Horde], players will face the champions of each race for your faction while also fighting the Black Knight (him again!), Eadric the Pure (the guy who gives the Threat From Above Quest) and Argent Confessor Paletress. I’m guessing that the Black Knight is the only one we really kill while the other two we just defeat in combat since they’re with the Argent Crusade. The Confessor encounter is interesting since we get to experience memories of famous encounters in World of Warcraft such as Van Cleef, Nefarian, Prince Malchezaar, lady Vashj, Heigan, Cyanigosa and even Hogger!!! This is based on the achievement <strong>Argent Confessor and some data mining MMO Champion did. Now since the preview given to us by Blizzard said there will only be 3 encounters and there are 5 champions + 3 more bosses, I’m not sure how these fights will be. Perhaps one champion, the Black Knight and Eadric for the three and then the Confessor will be a 4th heroic only boss?

Speaking of achievements, there’s one that looks pretty funny called I’ve Had Worse but I’m not sure how paladins and shamans would take it. Go to the achievement link above to read the whole text since it’s too long but part of it involves not having a Shaman or a Paladin in the group. Something tells me this is Blizzard’s attempt to have some laughs and it’s really not going to be part of the live version of the patch but who knows.

I don’t have much to say about the raid dungeon based on what MMO Champion found out. All I can say is this. It seems like based on the achievements shown in MMO Champion, players have 50 attempts per lockout period to finish the whole thing and will get achievements for players with 25, 45 and 50 attempts left at the end. this is the new tribute system where players will get better loot depending on how many attempts they have left after the last boss is defeated. While the last boss is still labeled Final Boss in the PTR files, some data mining done and the achievement The Traitor King suggests that Azjol-Nerub wasn’t the last we’ve seen of Anub’arak.

So patch 3.2’s Crusader’s Coliseum looks pretty nice and maybe better than I expected. Hopefully Blizzard is right about this being an epic and lore filled encounter.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

no more looting mistakes

When you loot a BoP item, the following message comes with the item text: “You may trade this item with players that were eligible to loot this item for the next {time remaining}” as shown in this picture from MMO Champion. This means that you can’t trade BoP items to people who didn’t earn the right to receive such an item. So for example in a raid, you can only trade the item only to people in your raid who were part of the fight that dropped it. You can’t go shouting in Dalaran right after a boss kill and selling such an item to the highest bidder. This is obviously a move made to give players more power to do something about items that were part of a looting mistake. With this feature, players won’t need to hound the game masters as much.

Another thing this feature can consequently do is when someone “ninjas” an item you’ll be able to tell if looted it by mistake (since he can give it to the rightful winner of the roll) or if he’s really a ninja. This will make things a little more honest in terms of loot rolling. I tip my hat to the devs for putting in this feature in patch 3.2.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

death knight death and decay

If you’ve read the PTR patch notes for patch 3.2, you would have seen the change to Unholy Blight turning it from an AoE effect to a single target effect wherein every time you use death coil the target gets a 10 second DoT worth 30% of the Death Coil damage. This is one move they made so that Death Knights don’t have a huge advantage over the other melee classes at doing AoE damage.

The dual wielding issue was somewhat addressed by adding a talent in the Frost Tree called Threat of Thassarian for patch 3.2 which allows your strikes and Obliterate to also deal damage with the off hand weapon. Ghostcrawler mentioned that they might have to limit dual wielding as a viable option to just the Frost tree, because making all specs viable for PvP and Tanking doesn’t leave much room to work with if you add dual wielding to the equation for all trees.

Issues with Dancing Rune Weapon and Summon Gargoyle were addressed by making them cost a flat amount of runic power and will be out for a set amount of time rather than it relying on the amount of runic power the death knight has. There are also no plans to make two different sets of runeforge enchants available when switching specs through dual spec. They cite that ret pallies and prot pallies have to use two different weapons for the two roles and gems and enchants aren’t saved either. I guess this is a pretty unique problem for death knights since they can tank with a 2 hander but they just have to deal with it bby having to reforge the rune every time.

Ghostcrawler also mentioned something cool for the future involving bringing back the ghoul voices of the game. they had to take them out because they were using vendor voices and that seemed awkward. Hopefully when they bring the voices back it will come back much cooler than before.

So pretty much everything that they touched on that really mattered they already at least started to address in patch 3.2 and not much about plans for the more distant future. I guess depending on how you look at it, that could be a good thing or a bad thing.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

quest log

The new feature will allow players to see where the objective of the quest can be found on the map. To be more specific, the following will be available to assist players:

* A skull graphic will be placed on the map in the general area where creatures players must kill can be found.
* A glowing skull graphic will be placed on the map in the general area where creatures can be found that drop quest objects.
* A gear graphic will be placed on the map in the general area where players must loot objects found in the world.
* A chat bubble graphic will be placed on the map in the general area where players must interact with a specific NPC.
* X marks the spot on the map where players must reach, discover or explore a designated area.
* A yellow question mark graphic will show on the map to provide the location of a NPC whose quest the player has completed.

I never really had a quest helper addon but I used a coordinate mod to help me find things and people I need to find for quests and such. I would look up the coordinates in wowhead then look for it on my world map using the coordinate mod. Even with a coordinate mod, this takes time and sometimes the coordinates alone don’t help you find what you’re looking for right away. the kind of detailed assistance mentioned above will really help players do their quests, especially for those people who don’t use mods at all for quests.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

Eventide

But now I want to focus some of World Environment changes/additions that were added to this patch.

Northrend Children’s Week has arrived in Dalaran! Players can find out more by visiting the Eventide District.

Wow Children’s Week again?! But at least it’s finally also in Dalaran. Does this mean that if you missed doing some achievements in the past Children’s Week, you can do it when this goes live? If so then why didn’t they just release this for Children’s Week a few weeks ago? That would have made the event more meaningful especially for level 80’s. Are we getting death knight kiddie orphans? LOL

Portal areas in all major cities now offer a portal to the Blasted Lands near the Dark Portal.

I remember just recently that they said Orgimmar and Stormwind were going to have portals that lead directly to the Stair of Destiny, the first thing you see when you enter the Dark Portal. I guess they might have scratched that and made the portals available to all major cities that lead to the Blasted Lands near the Dark Portal. That’s a nice swap, walk just a bit further but you get to travel to the Outlands more easily with a portal in each city.

The local Postal Service has grown tired of walking so far each day to collect mail and has decided to install a large number of new mailboxes to Stormwind, Undercity, Darnassus and Orgrimmar.

More mailboxes is always nice. Silvermoon City (and I think Exodar) showed that having several mailboxes in a city is very convenient and that cities like Undercity that had only one mailbox can be a pain. The fact that Dalaran has a LOT of mailboxes is REALLY convenient since if you need to get something, you can get it right away. Nice move to add mailboxes in those cities.

Post from: WOW Obsessed