new bear art

Anyway, I finally decided to check out which form art I got for both Cat and Bear after seeing one of our guild leaders who plays a feral druid look different in his new bear form art. It really did seem strange to see him so different from what we’re used to. When I checked mine out, I was a bit disappointed to get one of the plainer looking and unexciting designs. That wasn’t the worst part. That huge stripe on my back looks really funny. It really did make the design stand out but in a strange way. In fact, just this morning one of my guild mates saw it and commented that I look like a bigger bear took a dump and wiped his butt on me.

Any of you thinking of or already changed their looks to change their cat and bear form art?

Post from: WOW Obsessed

argent tournament grounds

Crusader’s Coliseum

To be clear, the 5 man encounter is called Trial of the Champion. The raid encounter (both 10 and 25 man) is called Trial of the Crusader while the heroic mode of this encounter is called Trial of the Grand Crusader.

Trial of the Champion should roughly on par with other 5 man dungeons in WoTLK. The heroic mode rewards 1 Emblem of Conquest and 1 Champion’s seal per boss. Only the heroic mode will be included in the rotation of dungeon daily quests. Trial of the Crusader will award 2 Emblems of Triumph for each encounter.

There will be a jousting fight in one of the encounters in Trial of the Champion but gear won’t come into play here unlike in the “vehicle fights” in Oculus and Ulduar. It should be just like regular jousting in the Argent Tournament.

Since there are four different modes for Trial of the Crusader, you’ll be able to choose among the four just like you can choose between normal and heroic for other dungeons. This time there will be four choices.

To activate Trial of the Grand Crusader, at least one player in the group should have finished Trial of the Crusader. Activating is done by talking to an npc and everyone in the raid will automatically be doing the tribute run.

The Trial of the Crusader will have one encounter similar to Priestess Delrissa in Magisters’ Terrace. For those who aren’t familiar with it, it was basically a fight where 5 of you fight 5 of them in a sort of Arena Tournament fashion. Gives you that PvP feel inside a dungeon run.

Isle of Conquest

After some testing in the PTR, the devs decided to make a few changes to Isle of Conquest such as increasing keep walls health, lowering reinforcements for both sides, making cannons repairable and other things.

Blizzard’s ideal average time for completing Isle of Conquest (and other battlegrounds too in fact) is 20-30 minutes.

The Cobalt Mine and Oil Derrick will have an added bonus when captured. Capturing one will give a 15% bonus to all damage done by operated vehicles. Capturing both will give a 30% bonus.

Spawn killing or graveyard camping is a potential concern for Isle of Conquest. While making it back to the keep should allow players to dodge enemies, Blizzard might add graveyard portals for resurrecting at a different location if this really becomes a big problem.

While vehicle combat figures greatly in Isle of Conquest, the dev team feels that ground combat will also be a big part of the battleground. The above mentioned change about the Oil Derrick and the Cobalt Mine will make capturing them important and that requires ground combat to do.

Isle of Conquest marks of honor will be a part of the turn in quests. By adding an additional requirement, the rewards will also be increased.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

argent tournament grounds

Trial of the Champion (5-player) normal mode: Item level 200

Trial of the Champion (5-player) Heroic mode: Item level 213

Trial of the Crusader (10-player) normal mode: Item level 232

Trial of the Crusader (25-player) normal mode: Item level 245

Trial of the Grand Crusader (10-player) Heroic mode: Item level 245

Trial of the Grand Crusader (25-player) Heroic mode: Item level 258

In addition, successful tribute runs (Trial of the Grand Crusader only) will result in higher item level rewards from the tribute chest at the end.

The fact that you can get Naxx 10 quality gear from doing Trial of the Champion on normal mode is already huge especially since you can keep going back several times in a day because normal dungeons don’t have lockouts. And then you can get Naxx 25 quality gear from doing it in heroic mode!

Post from: WOW Obsessed

argent tournament grounds

CM Zarhym came up with a post in the forums earlier to mention a few things. He said that assuming you’re eligible for all the new daily quests in the Argent Tournament, the maximum number of Champion’s Seals a player can get in a day is 15. This means that you’re exalted with and championed all primary factions plus Sunreavers/Silver Covenant and Argent Crusade and also do the Trial of the Champion in heroic mode,

He also gave a listing of the costs for the new item rewards from the Argent Tournament:

Argent Crusader’s Tabard: 50 seals
Argent Pony Bridle (for your squire): 150 seals
Bind-on-Account chest pieces: 60 seals
Bind-on-Account weapons: 60-95 seals
Bind-on-Account trinkets: 75 seals
Argent Warhorse/Argent Charger (epic ground mounts): 100 seals
Quel’dorei Steed/Sunreaver Hawkstrider (epic ground mounts): 100 seals
Silver Covenant Hippogryph/Sunreaver Dragonhawk (epic flying mounts): 150 seals
Shimmering Wyrmling (pet): 40 seals

So even with potentially more Champion’s Seals that a player can get per day, it seems like it’s still could a while to get what you want especially if you want so many of these things.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

night elf hunter

Hunters are unique in that they are the only ranged damage dealers that rely on the mostly physical damage of their ranged weapon rather than spells. But what also makes them unique is the fact that they have pets and traps at their disposal. Despite being a ranged class, they still have some tools for melee combat. All of this makes the hunter design tricky. Ghostcrawler said that they want to improve on the interface involving pet control and improving what hunters do when they get in melee range of an opponent (more on these below).

Ammunition has always been a pain in the butt since the start for hunters. It’s expensive and when you run out of it, the hunter is pretty much useless. Eventually they want to push through with the mechanic that will allow non-consumable ammo wherein the haste benefit from the quiver/ammo pouch would be made up elsewhere. It seems like they need more time, probably another expansion, to implement this because of the problems it could do to data storage. For now they want to fix this problem by lowering the cost of ammo and also by changing the way ranged weapons scale so that hunter dps will still increase even if you didn’t have the best ammo.

As much as they still don’t want Hunters to be very good in melee combat, they want to give them a mechanic so that Hunters don’t always have to run away when they’re in melee range. They’re thinking of maybe a punishing attack on cooldown that hunters can execute while in melee range to give him something worth doing. Like other classes,they would like hunters to benefit more from haste. The only problem is that hunters are a very cooldown oriented class and haste doesn’t benefit that situation very much. They’ll about this problem more at Blizzcon.

Ghostcrawler mentioned that they would like to make a change that will help pet survivability in PvE. They think that AoE damage avoidance isn’t enough to help pets stay alive especially when dealing with bosses like Mimiron. the answer is to just not let certain things damage pets so they don’t die from something ridiculous because of the pet AI. Hunters already can heal and rez their pets and that’s enough. they also want to give pets more action bars because players currently have to switch certain abilities in and out. they want pet action bars to feel more like character action bars.

Lastly the devs are thinking about doing away with stables the way they are used now, making pet summoning more like warlocks in that they can switch pets anytime they want. If they do this, stables will be used more for storage of pets Hunters don’t really use but can’t part with.

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quest log

Unfortunately this Quest Helper feature will not be making it for Patch 3.2 as it was removed from the PTR. It’s a bit sad because this feature would really help a lot of players and hopefully stop noobish players from asking about a certain quest when reading the quest log would answer their question. I don’t mind helping people out but they should at least do everything they can to help themselves before asking other people’s help. This would also have given players who don’t use the help of coordinate mods more help in doing quests and finding things.

It’s only logical to think that the feature isn’t ready. The Equipment Manager feature was supposed to come out in patch 3.1 but came out in a minor patch after it because it wasn’t ready. I’m assuming the same happened for the Quest Helper. Anyway, it’s better for it to come out late but ready than to come out early but bugged.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

Warrior trainer

The devs think that one of the things that make the Warrior class interesting is the Rage mechanic, specifically the way rage can convert into damage which converts to rage and so on. It’s a design that they still haven’t been able to really balance. Another aspect that makes warriors interesting is the Stance system, which forces warriors to occasionally switch stances to gain certain benefits and access to certain abilities. They want Stances to be part of the decision making a Warrior has to go through and for him to adapt to a certain situation by switching to the right stance at the right time.

Ghostcralwer thinks that from a design perspective, they’re happiest with the Protection tree and that Fury and Arms need a bit of work. By this he means that Protection is now more flexible with less mandatory talents and more of the fun and useful talents. They’ve been wanting to do the same for both Arms and Fury but doing this now could mean nerfing their dps just to make them cooler and that’s something they don’t want to do. They also want to move further away from the idea that Arms is for PvP while Fury was for PvE because it’s too constraining for people who enjoy one over the other.

Just like how Death Knights can tank with any tree, the devs have been saying that they would like to give warriors at least two tanking trees someday. it certainly would be interesting to see Arms warriors tanking with a two-hander someday. In fact, to some extent I’ve seen it done already like when my level 80 warrior friend tanked regular Drak’theron Keep as Arms.

If you’re looking for a way to gauge your dps as a DPS warrior, Gjostcrawler mentioned that they should be comparable to other melee dps hybrids like Ret pallies, Enhancement shamans, Death Knights, Kitty druids. It used to be that warriors did more than that because they used to be exempted from the rule that pure dps classes do more damage than hybrids.

The devs see a problem with the way Rage is currently being generated. The way things are now, an overgeared warrior tank won’t generate as much rage because he won’t be taking enough damage to generate it and thus generating less threat. They feel that generating more rage through damage done is the way to go for the future but they still have to be careful because in this system, an undergeared warrior tank probably won’t generate as much threat. While we’re in the matter of rage generation and dealing damage, it’s worth mentioning that Blizzard feels like dps stats like Strength aren’t as useless as players might think when it comes to tanking. DPS stats are important for generating threat so they shouldn’t just stack the tanking stats like Avoidance and forget about stuff like Strength.

To see the whole Warrior Q&A you can click here.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

argent tournament grounds

Unfortunately this idea isn’t what you think. It’s not 20 sets of gear giving a unique design for all classes depending on your faction since there are 10 classes and 2 factions. According to CM Zarhym, the sets are designed per armor type per faction, with the classes just getting a different color. This means the Mage design looks like a recolored Warlock design and so on. This is why I’m a bit disappointed. There’s something wrong about Paladins looking like Death Knights, even if you say that the color scheme could make the set fit the class theme. Somehow I prefer having unique class designs even if I have to share it with the other faction.

World of Raids put together a preview of the tier 9 gear as seen from the PTR. It’s not complete yet but it’s almost all there at this point. You can see how the different classes look different per faction but look almost the same across armor types. At least even if the design per armor type are just different colors per class, you can say that the color scheme almost makes them look unique… almost.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

argent tournament grounds

The first bit of good news is that every single piece of loot that drops from the bosses in this 5 man dungeon is an epic quality item much like the gear that dropped from Magisters’ Terrace in The Burning Crusade expansion. This will give those alts or even those mains who still need some gear upgrades for certain slots. To think that this isn’t even the final 5 man dungeon that’s coming out for the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. Expect the same thing for the Icecrown Citadel 5 man, only with even better gear.

The other piece of good news is that all the gear that drops from this dungeon are Naxx quality with the regular difficulty bosses dropping Item Level 200 gear (similar to Naxx 10) and the heroic difficulty bosses dropping Item Level 213 gear (similar to Naxx 25). This is obviously a godsend again for those players who need to fill up some holes in their gear and also especially for those people who cannot or barely do any raids.

You can see a partial list of the Loot table for this dungeon from MMO Champion here. I’m already drooling at some of the things listed and to think it’s not even complete yet.

Post from: WOW Obsessed