BETA - Stop the Presses

WARNING!!!! Priests duck and cover... Downranking is no longer and option!!!!

Ok the sky isn't falling, but I'll be interested to see what the world is going to do. With the latest round of changes Blizzard has sent out, it seems that the world that we knew is no longer applicable. Lets look at some of the more recent changes:

1. You now get a type of Potion Sickness for the length of a combat meaning that you can't chain pot to make it through a fight. So long fights where you don't have enough mana you CAN'T pot early and Pot often. One shot in every combat... so mana or health or protection... take your pick.
2. They changed how mana on spells work. A level 1 Frostbolt is going to cost the same as your lvl 12 so... there's no point in downranking. With this change you pretty much have to be casting at max level or you are wasting your time.

At this point it looks like the world will be rewritten a bit here. So anyone can tank anything and downranking isn't an option. It looks like a whole host of new strategies and optimization will be required.

I logged in last night and downloaded the latest patch. I was completely surprised to see that I went from being only 300,000 XP away from leveling to being 1.3 Million points away. Blizzard really amped up the xp requirements. So I'm back tracking to Howling Fjord with my main to check out the quests there. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Under the past XP requirements it felt like everyone would be at lvl 80 in about two weeks and then we'd be all grinding in Naxx. I don't mind at all if its going to take me a month or two to get from 70 to 80. It just means I get to enjoy all of the cool quest lines along the way.

Hold onto your hats.... it looks like WotLK will be a fun ride... and as always expect things to completely change before the expansion comes out.

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.

Humor in the "Itch"

Love it or hate it, Wrath of the Lich King is everywhere. Some people are dying to see it and would sell their first born child to get into the beta. Other people are just going to wait and see what's happening when it comes out. Regardless of your approach I wanted to share with you something.

Humor in Blizzards WoW has always been pervasive. Either verbal puns or plays on words just rule their quest lines. That and visual jokes have always been Blizzards forte. Anyone who doesn't agree obviously wasn't paying attention or just doesn't understand American pop culture.

You can rest assured that in the "Itch" that the humor is back. Without further ado, here's some of the fun ones I've found.

	The D.E.H.T.A has some great puns. Who wouldn't want to slay this guy.... Just look at his name.
	Of course look at this guy.... If I were wearing that someone would kill me too.
	You know every hunter in the game is going to want this. Who wouldn't want their own GEHTA Blaster!!!!
	I love the achievement system... its loaded with humor too. Click on the picture and look at the DEHTA achievement title.
	Ok I stumbled on this one completely by accident. I didn't even see it when I was in the building proving you have to look everywhere. I took a screenshot of a fight I was doing and reviewing the screenshot I found this little gem. Have I told you I love you Blizzard???

WotLK Beta News - Rise of the Rogues and Druids

It never fails. Rogues and Druids have a very love hate relationship. Druids hate that they are toned down rogues. Rogues hate that druids might take their gear. We have a ton of fun being druids, but the reality is that in Burning crusade, feral druids only advantage is that they can tank AND melee DPS. So you can keep a pocket tank that isn't completely useless as DPS, but not as good as a primary DPS.

Our buffs to the raid are valuable, but odds are high that you've got a resto druid to manage that. Leader of the Pack is a nice buff, but one of the major down falls Druids suffer is that in the later 25 man content there is no compelling reason why you NEED a lot of tanks. Very few fights need more than 1-2 tanks. You'll need to bring a pally and a warrior probably so Druids can easily be shelved in many cases. Our DPS Does not scale well in T6. We can keep pace in T5, but we really drop off in T6 and Sunwell.

Pure Energy
WARNING**** WARNING**** BETA NEWS*** READ AT YOUR OWN PERIL**** GUARANTEED TO BE DIFFERENT BY GA*****
OK I'm very impressed by a neat little change that occurred. Energy as we know it today has a Tick. Basically you will regenerate energy every time a Tick occurs. Under the current method you regain 20 energy every 2 seconds. Under the new system which became active in the last beta release, you get 1 energy every 0.1 seconds. What this translates to is a constant energy regen. How many times have rogues and druids been stuck staring at the bar screaming, "COME ON!!! ONE MORE TICK!!!!" as they maddly mash the button needed. Now you should be able to use your energy sooner and more efficiently.

It looks pretty neat to stare up at your energy bar and watching it constantly gaining in energy. For druids this is an amazing change. I'll do a write up in more detail later, but some of the current beta talents make energy usage much more efficient. I'll put up a post later to outline what the new talents could mean to solo, PVP and Raiding play.

Mana Regen
It sounds like to me based on the discussions in General chat that Mana regen may be going to a similar system as energy for regeneration. I haven't been able to verify this yet. My hunter is dutifully waiting for me to start on Howling Fjord. I want to finish up the Borean Tundra first with my druid before I swap back and forth too much, but keep an eye out for it. I know some of our blogging hunters out there want to know.... Yes EVERYONE has a devilsaur and its kind of obnoxious... personally I'm aiming to tame a Mammoth if I can.

More to Come
I found a lot of neat stuff last night in the beta. I don't want to ruin the story for a bunch of people, but I've been capturing a bunch of screenshots for use. Once I can figure out how to use GIMP to trim them and resize them I'll put up some of the neat what I would deem "easter eggs" that blizzard has scattered around and just some nice pictures I enjoyed. Either way, the stability of the servers after the last beta patch is encouraging. There are still issues (last night I had connection issues, but the world server wasn't crashing), but it seems a lot more stable than the initial release.

Into The Nexus - Instances in Wrath of the Lich King

First of all, the beauty of being a tank is that generally speaking someone... somewhere needs a tank. Watch general chat close enough and someone is going to spam "LF1M for X instance, need Tank." Its just the nature of the beast lately. I'm not sure why, but tanks are in short supply. Even in the beta they are in short supply.

This last weekend I was able to sneak into the Nexus for my first peak at a WotLK instance. Now let me list my qualifications here so people are aware of my background.

1. Full T4 set of gear.
2. Currently I need NO tanking gear from any T4 instance.
3. Tanked, Hydross adds and A'lar in T5 content.
4. DPS'd in SSC, TK and Mt. Hyjal

I'm not the most experienced in tanking the higher level content per se, but, I've got an extensive background in tanking. I come at it from a druid's perspective, so I'm used to tanking lots of mobs and getting my rage from that and thus hitting the mobs harder and more often.

Lets break this down by the important parts.

Architecture

Beautiful. The architecture reminds me a druidic base with a very frosty frozen core. Snow falls and drifts around. The floors are iridescent and glow. There are frozen trees, and lots of nice little touches. One section includes a wide open area with lots of glow effects and spinning vortexes. Its all very well done. The zone feels cohesive and flows very nicely from one area to another.

Trash Mobs

For a KZ or beyond equipped tank, the trash is a joke. Hell we had clothies pulling mobs and not dieing. The mobs don't hit particularly hard, but threat is a huge issue. Something right now is all messed up in the mechanics of druid tanks. The threat generation wasn't there. Granted we didn't have Omen to watch, but wow... what a nightmare keeping mobs corralled. Luckily like I said, the mobs weren't dangerous to the group so it wasn't a big deal if one or two got away from me.

Boss Fights
I realize that this is the intro instance for WotLK, but wow... the bosses just seemed kind of meh... Its still early in the beta, but the first bosses in Ramparts were always a bit challenging. There were lots of strategies to use and the end boss just felt difficult at level. I'm way overgeared, but still... they all felt like very standard tank and spanks. Don't get me wrong. Some of them were interesting. One summoned huge crystals that spiked upward. One summoned rifts that you need to destroy. Another basically pulled the Black Stalkers' trick on speed.. (imagine the entire raid being constantly thrown through the air at a high rate of speed.)

From Ebon Hold to the Borean Tundra

First off, let me explain.... Blizzard maintains their reputation based on the extensive hard work of the people who beta test their products. For those of you who are used to the way their products are when they go GA (general availability), beta testing is a whole new world. The beta's only been open for a bit, and its some days very very frustrating. Its definitely not for the faint of heart.

1. Early stages of a beta are riddled with crashes. This isn't a bad thing. It means that Blizzard gets to see what happens to their code when the rubber meets the road and real players are doing dumb things.
2. Not all of the features are live. Not all of the professions etc are fully implemented yet.... so you may have your pet profession and NO way to play with it yet.
3. People get bitchy... sorry but its a fact. There are lots of people out there who have no idea what it means to beta test and they seem SURPRISED when the world server goes down.

Now let me say, Blizzard is still a bright ray of sunshine.... there is a very nice thing they did to make sure you have lots of things to do. The Deathknight area is VERY stable. I have yet to see it crash. So while you are waiting for the reboot of the world server, you can sit down for a nice cup of tea with the Lich King and talk about the state of the world. So here we go... on to....

Ebon Hold
First of all, let me preface this.... I'm NOT a fan of dark classes. Its a personal hang up of mine. I WON'T play a warlock. The reason is because I have problems playing what I deem "evil" characters. Like I said, its a personal hang up of mine. So that taints my experience some... however, that being said, I'm a raid leader and I need to understand how deathknights are going to play out in the expansion. So here we go.

First of all, Blizzard is going to get some major kudos here. The technologies that they leveraged to get it all to work are amazing. They used something similar to Bashir's Landing up in BEM. You know the quests for Mana Cells where you pop into a different phase? They basically did that by about x10. I don't want to ruin the story. Its an amazingly well done story. From that perspective this really takes me back to the Old world content where they had some very well done story chains. You start out with one view of the world. Periodically, they progress the story and you "shift" perspectives on the world. Typically this is done by forcing you to turn in a quest at Ebon Hold. When you return, the world has moved into the next phase. Suddenly you are in a different phase. All of the people are in different spots, the buildings may be destroyed or other things. However behind the scenes people are still working seamlessly on the original content. There are no load screens. Nothing at all... its extremely well done and implemented.

Ebon Hold is beautiful. The architecture is very well done. Its a multi tier floating fortress really. However you have to periodically come back here for the rest of your career to train and to reforge your runes on swords. So you'll get to see it a lot.

Now for the mechanics of the deathknight let me say, I'm not a big fan of how it is today. Now bear in mind it will change potentially a LOT between now and later so I'll periodically go back and do it all over again for a new perspective. You basically have runes and runic energy. Runes work kind of like energy (sort of). You get two frost, two blood and two pestilence runes. Certain abilities use certain amounts/types of runes and they rebuild over time. Runic Power (not to be confused with Runes) functions like Rage... you build it up over time and certain spells take runic power to cast. So as you can imagine you now have to watch both things... what a PITA. You start off with a small number of spells so its really not all that great of a start. You only have about four or five abilities and they are all completely weak because you don't have any talent points. Talent points get fixed shortly and as you progress the story line, but overall its annoying from my perspective... you are supposed to be this big powerful deathknight who can keel over and die easily because you have no abilities.... but the story... the story alone makes it worth going through.

The Shores of the Borean Tundra
I copied my Druid over. She's my main... while I know some people indicated they wouldn't want to bring their main, I really wanted to see what the new gear was like and how the respec would affect my DPS. First of all, the DPS went THROUGH THE ROOF!!! I'm a feral druid and they got some serious DPS love in the current state of the expansion... note that's going to be nerfed before the expansion goes live so you have nothing to fear... I'll be a tame kitty before you see me in game again... Secondly I'm expecting to see that the HP goes up dramatically in the expansion again. Bear druids with 40k hp don't seem that unreasonable to me at this point. I've seen several quest rewards with something like 45stamina or 60stamina... so now I'm pondering if I should keep my KZ/ZA and badge gear... OK my badge gear staff.... you'll pry it out of my COLD DEAD HANDS!!!!

First of all the boat ride in wasn't bad. Stormwind harbor was very cool. You get to see a steamtank and a lot of very nice architecture. The boat ride is nice and smooth and as you come in to the harbor, you immediately get that feeling of being on the front lines of the war. Its rather BCish, but without the large unkillable mass of demons. You see conscription lines and a hold that's being built still. Its really kind of neat. At this point I'm at Valiance Keep in the Borean Tundra. They quickly get you indoctrinated with the Scourge menace and you really see right out of the gate.

Now let me say BRAVO to Blizzard for the graphics touches they've done. Now none of them struck me as being excessively dramatic, but there were so MANY subtle ones that made the world really alive. One of the first quest leads you up to these peasants and I must have spent 10 minutes pondering what the hell was wrong with them.... then it dawned on me.... they weren't human models 1 and 2... one guy had a beer gut. Another guy was skinny as a rail.... the women and men looked different than any models I'd seen before. Suddenly the NPCs felt alive. I liked interacting with them. I wanted to help them out. There are tons of little touches that throw you for a loop as you try to figure out what's different. The textures are very nice. My wife commented how the textures were much prettier and looked great.

Quest wise most of them have felt pretty straight forward. Run here, kill that, etc. Some of them have involved more complex tasks, but this is the warm up... I can feel it. I just got my first quest to go to the gnomish air port so I suspect I'll be seeing that vehicle combat up in Northrend very soon. I haven't had a chance to dip my toes into an instance yet. its been a crazy week and I haven't had the time to dedicate to instance yet.