Trinkets to Whines... There and Beta again

I had the blessed time to spend three solid hours playing last night on the beta. I’m finding myself more and more amazed by the effort that blizzard is throwing into the beta. Lets start with some of my latest discoveries.

Pain and Anguish with Trinkets

Ok for feral druids and any melee dps person dual wielding, give serious consideration to using the Death Knight’s Anguish. I was completely under whelmed when I first saw it. I didn’t figure it would be that great, but hey I’m terrible about using the “on use” abilities on trinkets so I thought I’d replace one of my tried and true trinkets.

First of all, let me say this thing procs all the time. I’ve seen it proc several times per minute and while it may not be nice at lvl 80, 150 Critical Strike Rating is nothing to sneeze at. This basically equates to bumping my crit rating at lvl 73 from ~35% to almost 43%. That’s almost 8% crit rating several times a minute.

Now wait you say!!!! It says it has a chance to proc and stack. How on earth would you proc it all the way up to 10. Ok well bear in mind that feral druids have the lowest attack speed of any melee dps. This means I have 1.0 attack speed and building a full stack including, Mongoose, 1.0 Attacks and Mangles makes it really easy to build up to 10 stacks fast. Then it will last for a bit too. So overall this low level trinket does amazing things.

A great example for you, last night I logged not one, but three separate finishing moves with Ferocious bite OVER 6.3k damage. This was in part due to this trinket which amped my crit rating so high. I’ve never gotten decent crits on Ferocious bites before and last night I logged 3 crits of what I’d almost deem “obscene” proportions.

Engineer’s Cry No More

Ok its my own personal whine here…. If it’s an item you must have for a quest, why would do people feel it necessary to rake people over the coals? There is a quest in Borean Tundra that requires you to get an item that only Engineer’s can make (hair trigger for those of you looking to make a buck right out of the gates in WotLK). This is all well and good except that on the beta the people are RAPING people on price. One listing this morning was at 1500g for a single hair trigger. Now maybe it’s just me, but for something that needs the equivalent of a single bar of fel iron and a single mote of fire, doesn’t 1500g just seem excessive? Hell I wouldn’t pay 200g when I saw them listed at 200g either. I’ve got the dang mats, but hell if I’m paying someone excessive sums of money to buy what has to be one of the cheapest things to make in WotLK.

Grats to the engineers who make it out of the gate first and can make their fortune early. I’m betting the first few days will suck for hair triggers. After that, you will probably be able to buy them cheap. Personally, I’m planning on giving my friendly neighborhood engineer in guild whatever they want to make me one….

Beauty and the Dragonblight

Dragonblight is an Amazing zone. This is probably the first zone that’s almost entirely snowy. Ok there are a few areas that aren’t as snowy, but still its predominantly snowy. The zone though is really well laid out. There are a ton of little quest hubs where you can do sequences of quests all in one area. Now unlike in Burning Crusade though you don’t really gain much from running all over the place getting all of the quests. Quests tend to revolve around a series of smaller quest hubs except for the quests that take you to the next hub. So you are just as well off sitting in a hub doing the 5-10 quests right there and then moving on to the next hub. There is a lot less overlap where you run back and kill the same mob for two or three different people from different quest hubs.

There is one section dedicated to learning the plight of the Tuskaar for the Alliance. In this one you get exposed to their common enemies in the Dragonblight as well as finding out more about their very shamanistic belief system. The zone progresses to include an area for druids and their quest hubs. Again you get to see a ton of new types of quests which tend to have more of a progressive story. Item drops which kick off quests of their own are common. It’s a very nice way of progressing the story.

In the center of a zone is the true Dragonblight. This area has a huge tower dedicated to a dragon alliance. This is the quest hub I’m currently working from. You get to experience some of the new war machine mechanics which are fantastic. The initial quests involving war machines or the like didn’t impress me. They felt unpolished. The further I’ve gotten the more I really like the dynamic of what they are trying to accomplish.

Speed of Development

I’m assuming that this will be toned down, but for the moment the speed of leveling seems pretty insanely fast. It could be that I had full rest xp, but I’m now probably about half way through dragonblight. I started the night with basically zero xp into lvl 73. After 3 hours of play I was up to 1.0 million xp out of 1.3 million xp required. That’s an insanely high xp rate.