According to Blizzard poster Tailyda from customer support, only players who have been in a realm for more than 60 days are eligible to get realm first achievements. This is to prevent players from transferring to a realm and getting the achievement and preventing others who have been in the realm longer from getting it. It probably would seem foul for say an experienced guild to transfer to another realm with weaker progression and getting the realm first.

On another note, this change just made me realize something about Cataclysm and the new races. As it stands, Blizzard seems to be averse to allowing race changes to Goblin and Worgen right off the bat. The issue is really more realm firsts rather than anything else, although I would think that they would also like players to see the Worgen and Goblin starting ares for the story. But what if Blizzard applied a similar lockout for race changes for those race/class realm first achievements? This could be a potential solution for those players who would want to race switch to Goblin or Worgen right away. Give them a chance to play the race already with existing characters but they get locked out of realm firsts involving their being a Goblin or Worgen for a period of time.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

Fortunately there’s a way to get the short version of the introductions in Trial of the Champion as long as you’ve finished the dungeon once. My friends call it the “cut to the chase” feature, which is very welcome because those introductions are really long. Another dungeon that needs this is Culling of Stratholme, which has a pretty lengthy start with Arthas talking to Uther outside Stratholme. Unfortunately, a “cut to the chase” feature is not possible for this CoS. According to CM Eyonix, as much as they want to add a feature to bypass this there are technical restrictions that currently won’t allow this to happen. This should be a lesson to the developers for the future though. They should allow “cut to the chase” features from the start to all future dungeons so that players won’t need to wait after already having completed the dungeon before.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

CM Bornakk addresses the issue of faction imbalances in terms of their ability to defend. According to him when a faction is able to defend more, certain advantages are given to the faction on the offensive like the ability to use siege tanks faster. Also, on realms where one faction is able to defend while the other often doesn’t, the system gives bonuses to the faction that rarely succeeds at defending to help things out.

This would explain why sieges are happening much faster on occasion or why defenses suddenly get stronger. It’s not a bug or anything, it’s just part of the mechanics of the battle to help “weaker” faction.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

As you know, Wyrmrest Temple has ambassadors from the various dragonflights with Chromie the Bronze dragon being my favorite hehe. But after the death of Malygos and thus the end of the Nexus War, it seems like Wyrmrest is willing to accept the Blue dragons back. This is why they finally have an ambassador and he’s a familiar face too. Those of you who’ve done Magisters’ Terrace in TBC would know of the Blue dragon Kalecgos (who also goes by his “humanoid” name Kalec), who gives a quest in there. In the Sunwell Plateau raid dungeon he also helps in the defeat of Kil’jaeden. I mention the battered hilt because Kalecgos is involved in the quest chain of the Quel’delar forging, which the Battered Hilt starts.

This is just me sharing this interesting bit of info for people who may not have noticed its addition yet. If you have no reason to go to the Dragon Queen’s chamber in Wyrmrest, this is something that might not have crossed you path yet. It took a chance sighting in WoWwiki for this to come to my attention after all. It’s actually a nice touch that this move not only gives some kind of continuation of the Malygos story in this expansion while at the same time letting us see the great Kalecgos involved with the story once again. That leaves me with one thought though and that’s “I wonder where he’s been all this time…”

Post from: WOW Obsessed

The good news is that Blizzard the drop rate of the Battered Hilt since they felt the drop rate was too low. This means we’ll be seeing a lot more often when that happens. Another change they are going to implement concerns preventing epics from dropping from the Skeletal Slaves in the Pit of Saron wing. They didn’t want players to farm these mobs hoping for the Battered Hilt to drop. Perhaps groups were being slowed down too much doing this rather than just moving on with the rest of the dungeon. According to Zarhym, the update that this is included in has already been implemented.

Of course remember that the Battered Hilt can also be acquired by trading with other players. Check your auction house and it might be there for the taking if you’re willing to way the price!

Post from: WOW Obsessed

Yes it’s that time of the year again where we see more snowballs, mistletoe and reindeer. It’s time for Great Father Winter, his little gnome helpers and presents for everyone. It’s time for doing more Achievements which involve various things like doing quests, wearing Winter Veil Outfits, cooking Winter Veil treats and even some PvP.

Right now my feeling about this event is that it’s fun to have around because of the festive atmosphere but it doesn’t seem to be something I’d actively participate in. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice world event but when I look at the achievements I need to do to get the Merrymaker title it just looks like a lot of work. But I’m not much of an Achievements person anyway so I guess I’m the wrong guy to be talking about how hard these are to do. I could spend some time starting it up but I’ll probably have to wait for next year to finish it and not making much progress on it last year doesn’t help either.

To make things worse, there really isn’t anything new about this year’s Winter Veil so if you’re done getting the title this event isn’t really a big deal unless you have alts that still need it. I’m the sort of guy who wants something new every year for the events and the lack of such this year doesn’t really motivate me much. The only thing new is the Achievement BB King, involving enemy faction leaders. This is probably the worst “timing” of Winter Veil too (of course you really can’t change the timing but you know what I mean) because we probably still haven’t gotten over the novelty of patch 3.3 and what it brings us. Right now I’m more motivated to take part in patch 3.3 stuff rather but the thinking is Winter Veil will only be here a while and the patch is going to be here a while.

Here’s one thought about something new they could have added to the event. I read somewhere that the titan Hodir could possibly be the real Great Father Winter. With Hodir introduced in the game through Ulduar in this expansion, it would have been nice to have some kind of interaction with him for this event. I’m not talking about going into Ulduar but maybe a simple encounter with him somewhere. Since it’s already patch 3.3 and Ulduar is already a past story in this progression, it would justify seeing Hodir. Just an idea though.

How are you finding this year’s Winter Veil event?

Post from: WOW Obsessed

violet hold

I’m not talking about anything serious and for some people it may not even be a problem. But it certainly has been something I’ve noticed especially within the group of people I play with. The allure for epic gear is always strong and with the bosses in heroics dropping Emblems of Triumph now, gear that was difficult to get for a lot of people suddenly becomes much easier especially with the unlimited potential to run heroics. Of course the Emblem of Frost gear is better but you can only get two of those a day if all you do is run heroics.

I’ve noticed quite a number of people, including myself, spend a lot of time running heroics on main characters while alts are neglected. Before the patch came out, the group of friends I run heroics with would do the heroic daily on one set of characters and switch for round two on a different set of characters. In this sense, the old system gave more time for us to pay more attention to alts. Nowadays it’s more a case of running on mains until we feel like running no more. I consider my mage my primary alt and I haven’t touched him since before the patch came out!

I see this as a “problem” that probably will resolve itself when the “mains” manage to get all the gear they can from Triumph gear unless of course people switch attention to the alts to gear them up. Depending on how many alts a person is willing to gear up, this problem might be here for a while though. How have you managed your characters? Have you noticed the same kind of thing happening to you and your friends?

Post from: WOW Obsessed

If you think about it, all of us probably can think of at least one instance where we met someone for the first time while running a dungeon and that person is now someone you regularly run dungeons with. Maybe he or she is even in your guild right now. This is usually how guilds start up or grow into something special. So if you’ve been running these dungeons with these random people across all these servers and you think that person was good, wouldn’t it be great to be able to run more dungeons with that person on a regular basis? Right now that’s not possible. You just have to hope you bump into him or her again, which is quite unlikely considering how many people there are.

According to Blue poster Ancilorn of WoW Europe, the idea of cross realm friends is a feature that will be available when the new Battle.net comes out. He didn’t expound on that any further, perhaps because the details for the new Battle.net are still being ironed out. If Ancilorn meant that we could have a list of friends from other servers that we could potentially form premade groups with to do both dungeons and Battlegrounds, then that would really be very nice. It would be quite disappointing if we have the these cross realm friends on our list but are only there for communication purposes.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

As much as all these things are useful already, it seems like the Armory is stepping up a notch with some cool new features coming our way soon. I can’t find the announcement anymore but MMO Champion caught it before it was taken down. According to them, the announcement was dated January 1, 2010 so that’s probably when we should expect to see them out. Below are the features listed in the announcement caught by MMO Champion:

3D Model Viewer

Players will be able to view 3D Models of their characters on the WoW Armory and even play around with the camera view, play animations and for people logged in to the Armory account, even save a pose that visitors will be able to see. At least now we can not only display our gear for people to see but also what our characters look like!

Character Activity Feeds

The Character Activity feed will show a character’s most recent in-game actions in their Armory profile. This includes things like Achievements and item acquisitions. These feeds can also be used with any RSS reader you want to use.

Game Calendar Feeds

This new feature will allow players to export their in-game calendar to calendar applications like Google Calendar. This tool will be able to take up to 5 characters and will be synched automatically with the in-game calendar.

I guess we have to wait until these new features are officially announced to know more details but they look pretty good, don’t they?

Post from: WOW Obsessed

There already were a few other hotfixes announced and most of them involved other things like specific items or certain bugs to certain dungeon encounters. Those can be seen in a post by CM Crygil here. A few more recent hotfixes involving class abilities were announced by Ghostcrawler and probably have taken effect already. Rogues, Death Knights and Warlocks are the classes affected by the changes.

Rogues: Hunger for Blood now increases damage by 10% instead of 15%

Ghostcrawler mentions that they wanted to increase the damage of Assassination rogues but in doing so, they overdid it a bit. Hunger for Blood was the candidate for some nerfing since they buffed it before when they wanted to give the tree a damage boost. But now it’s been changed again to lower the damage to what they want it to be.

Death Knights: The shadow portion of Scourge Strike can no longer crit.

The Unholy talent Scourge Strike has a physical damage portion and shadow damage portion. Only the physical damage portion will be able to crit now. At first they wanted both to crit but that proved to be too bursty for PvP and gives too much sustained damage for raids.

Warlocks: Rolling Corruptions no longer use the initial haste value indefinitely

This problem sounds familiar and I actually thought this would have been fixed by now. This same thing became an issue for Druids rolling lifebloom indefinitely to maintain any buff that was used in the first cast like a healing increase trinket. Apparently it’s sort of the same issue for corruption and haste, leading to some high damage that Blizzard feels just isn’t right. With the hotfix, the hasted corruption should correct itself within a few ticks after it’s refreshed.

Post from: WOW Obsessed