Last week during our 25 man Naxx run, we had to wait for one of our healers to get his PC issue dealt with so we were left really bored out of our minds for quite some time. There were were chatting and jumping around and doing all sorts of things until our attention was drawn by someone in vent shouting “what the heck are you doing?!” as we noticed the macro spam of “____ has prepared a small feast” (of course I left the name blank since the player might not want his character name mentioned). He replied “spelling my name”. Guess if you have a lot of feasts and you’re bored, you can do something like this!

The official PTR patch notes for patch 3.1 have just been updated (as usual the latest PTR patch notes can be found here) and if you sift through the walls of text, you’ll find some nice changes coming to make out gaming experience a lot better. We know about the dual spec feature where we’ll be able to toggle between two specs at the push of a button anytime we’re out of combat. Because of this, changes to the UI have been added that will help the talent switching to be much easier like an equipment manager to help us switch our gear between specs and a new addition to the talent tab so we can play around with our spec like a talent calculator before finally saving it as your real spec.

There’s another pretty cool change to the UI included in the patch notes that will help us when doing heroics and raids.

Players first entering any dungeon that will result in a lock-out timer will be warned if they are going to be saved to the instance. This warning will include an option to port to the nearest graveyard before being saved.

It’s a nice change to help those people who join groups that they thought were fresh runs but in reality are not and end up getting saved to a run they didn’t really want to join. Persoanlly it hasn’t happened to me yet but I’m sure some of you have and I bet you were pissed when it happened.

Another nice change coming isn’t really a big deal but it will help those forgetful types or especially emblems that you have to get off chests so you have to wait for people to finish looting theirs before you can get yours.

Badges and Emblems looted off of any dungeon bosses by a member of the party or raid will automatically be given to all eligible party or raid members. Party or raid members must still be inside the instance to receive Badges or Emblems.

One new feature I’m quite curious about is this one:

A new Color Blind option is available under the Interface panel.

I’m not color blind but it should be quite interesting to see how this would look like to us non color blind people. Of course kudos to Blizzard for finally adding this feature to help all the color blind folk enjoy the game. I’m all for helping everyone with a disability since I actually play with pretty poor vision myself.

So as you can see, the next patch is more than just new content and class changes. As I said in a previous post, patch 3.1 just might be looked back at as one of the great WoW patches. With these changes coming and a whole lot more, all the more I think it will be.

Vendors in WoW and pretty much any RPG anyone plays, MMO or not, tend to be strange people if you apply what they do in real life. I know it’s just a game and it would make things a lot harder for players if they act like real businessmen and actually think about how everything thy do would affect their livelihood. I’m talking about the fact that the buy anything we, the players, sell them from strange ooze to rotten carcasses to anything under the sun. This is obviously a nice way for players to make some money.

Selling all these useless stuff to vendors is one thing when you think about how ridiculous this sounds if they were real life transactions but this following item also makes you wonder a bit. I’m talking about the Solid Gold Coin you’ll be able to get from the new fishing dailies that will come out in patch 3.1. Through the fishing dailies, you’ll be able to get some vendor trash that sell for a wide range of gold and the Solid Gold Coin is one of them. When you vendor it, it sells for well, one gold. Of course in the game, you’re trading an item that has no use for you for some real useful gold. But if you were to think about this transaction as a real life one, it’s pretty funny to think that effectively you’re just trading coins of exactly the same value. It’s like me giving you a five dollar bill and you giving me one too. It kinda makes me giggle!

I was scanning through some of my old screen shots and I actually stumbled upon some that I took from the vanilla WoW days. A few days ago a few in-game friends of mine whom I met in TBC were talking about vanilla WoW raiding experiences and we ended up talking about our various Molten Core experiences. Because of this I decided to write up about something quite related to this that some of us guildies were talking about a few months ago and just remembered now.

As many of you might know, there’s a quest you get at Blackwatch in Icecrown called “By Fire Be Purged” which has you burning festering corpses with a torch. It’s an obvious reference to the most famous line said by the fire lord Ragnaros, last boss in Molten Core, In fact some of you might have gotten such a kick out of this that you might have made a “By fire be purged!” macro while doing the quest.

Few months back when we were all pretty new to the expansion, I pointed out this quest in guild chat and one of them actually asked “what about die insect?”. At first i didn’t know what he was talking about then I remembered that “Die, Insect!” is also one of Ragnaros’ famous lines, which he says when he kills someone in the raid. Now that I think about it, it probably would have made a great quest title for this expansion. Considering we have a lot of insect type creatures in this expansion, especially the nerubians found in Borean Tundra, Dragonblight, Azjol’nerub and even the Arachnid quarter in Naxxramas among other places. I’m quite surprised Blizzard didn’t take advantage of this nice opportunity to use this line as a quest title, given it’s also a famous reference.

The Noblegarden world event is still a while away but there’s some cool news about it already from the PTR. The PTR has shown a change to the in game calendar where the currently one day event has been extended to a whole week.

This is great news especially for those people who are fond of participating in the game’s world events. This is a great change for me since to this date, I haven’t experienced what this world event is like and I’ve been playing this game since early 2005. As you probably know, Noblegarden is the game’s way of celebrating Easter and it’s really unfortunate that up until now, Noblegarden only lasts one day. Perhaps a lot of you are in the same boat as me. Easter is a time when all Christians celebrate the rising of the Lord and thus it’s a very important time. As a Catholic, I never get to see Noblegarden since I’m always out with family every year to celebrate the occasion. That’s why the extension to one week is a very nice and welcome change since not only will I be able to finally see this event but I can have a lot of time to enjoy it!

I don’t know exactly why but it was only just the other day when I thought about upgrading my netherweave bags to frostweave bags. I’m really glad I did because that’s 4 extra slots per bag I changed and it really made quite a difference, making me go from scrounging around for extra bag space to having so much that I can actually pick up more stuff that I don’t need and just vendor them for cash.

One thing I noticed while having the frostweave bags made is that it’s the first “regular” bag that requires more than just the cloth and the thread needed to make it. By “regular”, I mean that it’s just the normal bag that can be made with the kind of cloth you’re using just like the runcloth bag, mageweave bag, netherweave bag and not special bags with more slots for the level than normal like mooncloth bags and imbued netherweave bags. Before the frostweave bag, these “special” bags were the only ones that needed more than the cloth and the thread, involving a special kind of cloth made by including some enchanting mats and a special place to make it like mana loom or moonwell.

The frostweave bag is sort of a meeting in the middle since it requires some infinite dusts to make but not a special place or device to make it. This way it’s a bit harder to make than the netherweave bag but not too hard that you won’t use them. What I’m wondering is the reasoning for making this change. All regular bags to this point use just the thread and cloth and suddenly they make it harder for the expansion. I thought that by making it BoE just like the netherweave bags before them, it already has the balancing it needs so it won’t just be traded to other people after you outgrow them. Now it just makes it q bit of a pain in the rear especially for those tailor/enchanters who might want to save their infinite dusts for other things. I know that infinite dusts are common if you’re you’re an enchanter but if you’re not and don’t have a pocket enchanter, it’s a minor inconvenience.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not really complaining to the point that I want it changed or that it’s too hard to get done. It’s really more of a surprise to me that the bags require the dusts and past “regular” bags didn’t.

It’s still two months too early before we get to see the Children’s Week world event but already there’s some news about it that came out. In the latest build of patch 3.1 in the PTR, the achievement “Once An Orphan…” has been removed from the game. This achievement involves you killing players with their orphans out, hence completing the phrase “once an orphan, always an orphan”. If you think about it, it is quite mean especially since Children’s Week is supposed to be celebrating the event to make these orphans feel loved and happy, not to be mean. Just like the removed troll /silly about killing two dwarves in reference to the song Smoke Two Joints and thus quite inapproriate, this too feels right to be removed from the game.

Blizzard has been known to insert a lot of humor into their games and this can be very much seen in World of Warcraft. It can be a pop culture reference or just something plain funny. What’s amazing is that these touches of humor can tend to not jump at you unless it really hits you one day. The two pictures below are examples of such at least in my case.

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I first noticed this just the other day while boarding a zeppelin from Warsong Hold to Orgrimmar but this partiluar one is the zep that ferries you between Tirisfal Glades and Vengeance Landing. Somehow I assumed that these zeps were no different than the other goblin zeps so I never really paid attention to this. Maybe also since I use to Dalaran portals to get to the major cities and hearth back, I don’t use these zeps very often so I didn’t notice it. Finding out that these zeps are actually powered by a female goblin on a stationary bike is just plain hilarious!

This one I never noticed at all until someone told me about it about a month ago. We’ve used our carrots on a stick to make our mounts go faster but it’s definitely funny to see a whole boat powered by a giant turtle chasing a carrot on a stick.

Who knows? Maybe sometime in the future we’ll see transportation powered by perhaps a mammoth and a driver using a riding crop or something! Do you have any other ideas for hilarious transportation like this?

Lately, the hearthstone was the subject of a few changes coming in patch 3.1. The other day, it was revealed that the practice of “ghetto hearthing” will be obsolete when the patch goes live. Ghetto hearthing is the term given to the practice of taking advantage of a mechanic where if you leave your group while inside a dungeon, you will be teleported to your hearth location even if your hearthstone cooldown isn’t up yet. In the next patch, doing so will instead teleport you to the nearest graveyard.

A lot of were complaining about this change since a lot of people took advantage of ghetto hearthing whenever they could. In fact a lot of people complained hard enough that when CM Eyonix brought the issue to the devs, he came back with the announcement that the hearthstone cooldown will be reduced to 30 minutes in the next patch instead of the current one hour.

I’ve got to say that while the change is definitely welcome, I certainly see the point Eyonix was making in his posts in the thread in the forum. First of all, ghetto hearthing was yet another one of those mechanics that was abused yet unintended. As he says, that’s what the fast mounts, mage portals, and all these things are for. If it’s a matter of getting to a place where you can get the rested status, there’s an inn in every zone. If you’re in such a hurry to log off, an inn shouldn’t be so far away to make the removal of ghetto hearthing a big problem, especially in zones with several inns like Dragonblight. If it’s Dalaran you want to get to, take the necessary boat/flight paths like everyone else. Don’t be lazy! This game was designed so that you’d have to travel so if you can’t handle this, you’re playing the wrong game. Now that the hearthstone cooldown was reduced, this should make getting around even easier but I’d bet a lot of whiners will still be complaining about not being able to ghetto hearth anymore.

Here’s the official Ulduar preview video from the WoW site! Looking at the video makes me think the place looks so cool and in fact it looks cooler than both Halls of Stone and Halls of Lightning. It looks like it’s going to be a really big place though but since it’s a raid dungeon, that’s kinda understandable. You can download the video here.