WOW Obsessed » Wrath of The Lich King

Unofficial Frozen Halls preview video

Angelo Fernandez — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 10:49:53 +0000

Before starting with the actual blog text, I just want to say something that might be obvious to you already. THE VIDEO BELOW CONTAINS SPOILERS so don’t play it if you don’t want it spoiling your fun. Not that that’s done with, we can start.

While still not certain, it’s very likely that patch 3.3 will be coming out on Tuesday. With it we’ll see the Icecrown Citadel dungeons, both the 5 man and the raid. Both will be the hardest of their type and thus giving the best level of gear that you can get. But these dungeons aren’t important just for the gear that they give but also for the story that comes with it. After all the two dungeons will tell us how the story of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion will end.

icecrown citadel

Both the Icecrown raid dungeon and the Frozen Halls 5 man have been in the PTR for quite a while now so anyone who’s managed to get into the it has probably already seen what both look like inside. But for those who haven’t and are itching to have a sneak peek at what lies inside, the guild Vodka has prepared a nice video of the Frozen Halls dungeon that captures how this place could be quite epic even for for a 5 man. If you read about his place before, you’d probably know already that the Frozen Halls is divided into the Forge of Souls, the Pit of Saron and the Halls of Reflection. Each wing has a separate lockout timer on heroic mode and must be done in order and the succeeding wing unlocked to proceed. The Frozen Halls has the heroes accompany either Jaina Proudmoore of Sylvanas Windrunner depending on your faction. The video below shows the Alliance side with Jaina at their side and shows quite a bit of story there, which should be slightly different if you’re Horde with Sylvanas there.

This should get you fired up to take on patch 3.3 when it comes out!

Post from: WOW Obsessed

Jeff Kaplan On Progressive Percentages

Angelo Fernandez — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 14:31:55 +0000

Ever since the start, questing was such an integral part of the World of Warcraft experience. Not only is it the best way to level up but it also helps the player be part of the story and lore of the game. There are many types of quests and they all cooperate to make the gaming experience more diverse. But I’m sure a lot of you will admit that you’ve had some kind frustration with the types of quests where you have to collect items that drop from a certain type mob.

We’ve heard the continuous complains about why that hoof doesn’t always drop from a certain animal mob or why liver doesn’t always drop from that boar and so on. This is even more true in the older days when some drop rates were really absurd (collecting raptor hearts for that quest in Arathi Highlands used to take over an hour of killing raptors).

mage loots quest item

Former WoW lead designer Jeff Kaplan (also known as Tigole), who is now working on another MMO for Blizzard, went out to talk about an interesting new mechanic that explains why we don’t really see such horrible incidents of drop rates for collection quests in the Wrath expansion. This new mechanic which we haven’t heard about until now is called Progressive Percentages.

In the past these quest items would have a fixed drop rate of 35%, causing both good and bad streaks. We all know these bad streaks aren’t fun at all. According to Kaplan, Progressive Percentages actually increases the percent chance the item will drop every time that mob is killed and eventually leading to 100% or a guaranteed drop. Another thing Blizzard did to help players when doing these types of quests is that they raised the base drop percentage to 45% from 35%.

This is really quite a revelation by Kaplan since it’s something we never ever heard of in the past from anyone. It certainly is great to know and it’s certainly nice to have some sort of explanation why we never really run into much problem when doing these collection quests in Wrath of the Lich King.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

New Battleground In The Works For WoTLK

Angelo Fernandez — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 20:00:36 +0000

I’m not a big PvP fan and in fact, except for one or two times checking out Wintergrasp, I actually haven’t done any PvP at all since the Wrath of the Lich King expansion came out. Nevertheless, something PvP related caught my attention just a few minutes ago after reading one of CM Zarhym’s responses in the official forums.

Zarhym was talking about how they never really expected Arenas to become the more central focus of PvP for players and also how BG’s, unlike Arenas, aren’t really a good measure of PvP skill. He’s quite right since you can get great gear even if you suck or even afk during battles (as long as you’re not reported) which is something you can’t do in the Arena Tournament especially since some pieces of Arena gear have rating minimum requirements.

dalaran bg area

While explaining that they want to essentially make BG’s more attractive for all PvPers and just just focused on the Arena Tournament, Zarhym actually mentioned something about a new Battleground in the works for Wrath of The Lich King!

A new BG! This is quite exciting news even for me, a non-PvP fan. I wonder if this has anything at all to do with the Argent Tournament that’s going to make its debut in patch 3.1? I wonder what kind of battle it will be. How will this impact the PvP rewards that are already out? A new battleground mark should affect the rewards and even the For Great Honor/Conceited Efforts daily quest. There’s so many questions!

Post from: WOW Obsessed