Posted on August 31st, 2009 by admin
All the World’s a Stage, and all the orcs and humans merely players. They have their stories and their characters; and one player in his time plays many roles.
As you know, the Cataclysm is going to bring major changes to the whole world of Azeroth. There will only be 5 new zones for leveling above 80 and one new zone for each new race — the rest of the work they’re doing involves changing the old zones, bringing them up to the standards of zones in The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, adding new quests that are more appropriate to the current timeline, and completely rebuilding the areas that just didn’t work so well.
You are also probably aware that this is a much-needed improvement. The 1 – 60 leveling process (except for the draenei or blood elf starting areas) has long been fraught with serious flaws. Going through it the first time wasn’t so bad, since exploring everything felt so new, but doing it the third and fourth times meant sheer boredom. I remember many times going to a zone, completing many or all of the quests there, and
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Posted on August 24th, 2009 by admin
Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers’ Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership.
If you’re a regular reader of this column, you know that my biggest pet peeve with WoW is how little support guilds have received from Blizzard over the years. As I’ve said before, guilds are the backbone of any MMO. They facilitate all the group content that developers spend millions to produce — the content that keeps people interested in the game and separates an MMO from your average single-player experience.
Without officers who sacrifice time and energy to organize and lead their guilds, no MMO can succeed. I am, of course, biased, but I believe that officers deserve more support than they typically get from MMO developers, especially in WoW. Finally, Blizzard has unveiled plans to deliver not just an improved guild interface, but an entire leveling and achievement system for guilds, complete with talents.
In Cataclysm, the face of Azeroth is not the only thing that will be reshaped. Guilds will be completely different entities compared to what they
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Posted on August 17th, 2009 by admin
All the World’s a Stage, and all the orcs and humans merely players. They have their stories and their characters; and one man in his time plays many roles.
Long time readers of “All the World’s a Stage” may remember that I wrote an earlier series of three articles, called “WoW is a Work of Art,” which I viewed as a kind of launch pad for this column about roleplaying. The first article talked about how when my mom came down with a very serious form of brain cancer, I had to put other things in my life on hold in order to come back to the US and take care of her. I was happy to do this, of course — it was an honor to be able to be there for my mother when she needed me, but I won’t pretend it was very much fun. Cancer is a terrible disease that wreaks havoc on one’s body and emotions all in one big punch. Roleplaying in WoW was one of the social activities I could do for fun at that time, a little world I could enjoy without actually having to leave my home and the loved one that I was caring for.
Last weekend, the life of my mother was
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Posted on August 13th, 2009 by admin
Our podcast is kicking off the weekend today at a special time — I’m heading off to Gen Con this weekend, so we’re recording the show live this afternoon at 1pm Eastern. Along for the ride will be Lesley Smith and The T, and we might even have another special guest or two in the mix — tune in and find out. We’ll be chatting about all of the biggest news of the past week in Warcraft, including the leaks about the new expansion, Cataclysm, Icecrown and how big it’ll be, what to expect at BlizzCon next week, and the return of a certain black dragon.
Plus, we’ll answer your emails, so feel free to send anything you’d like us to talk about to theshow@wow.com, and you might even hear it on today’s show. It all kicks off this afternoon at Friday, Aug 14 at 1:00 AM in your time zone GMT+8 over on our Ustream page, or, as always, you can find the embedded stream after the break below. See you there!
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Posted on August 10th, 2009 by admin
Totem Talk is WoW.com’s column for all things shamanistic, and this week Matthew Rossi talks about the 3.2 changes and how he forgot to train the new Totem interface spells, leading to him having to plunk his way through Ulduar dropping them one at a time like a caveman. Amazingly, there actually are cavemen shamans in the game.
If there’s one thing I absolutely don’t miss in Ulduar, it’s the Troggs. I’ll admit to being a little surprised that I haven’t run into any, but as far as I’m concerned that’s just fine.
So, yeah, this week I forgot to train my new Call of the Elements, Call of the Ancestors, and Call of the Spirits spells. Since I’d been on the PTR and knew that I was supposed to train them I find this especially hilarious in retrospect, although I didn’t find it nearly as funny at the time. There was some swearing, I won’t pretend otherwise. Also, if you’re a leveling shaman make sure to check the trainers as you hit 30, 40 and 50 to make sure you pick them up, as they’re terribly useful even for the
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Posted on August 7th, 2009 by admin
All right — patch 3.2 has been out for a few days now, and I would say that most people who are interested have had a chance to go in and run the brand new 5-man instance. Of course it’s not the only change in the patch (far from it), but it’s the one I was most looking forward to, and unlike the raid instances, it’s all in there and doable, ready for our judgment. So what did we think?
I tried it yesterday, and my first impression was “underwhelmed.” I definitely don’t feel that way about 3.2 as a whole, but the instance itself seems less than impressive, a one-room fight with almost as many boring moments as there are exciting ones. The fights themselves are actually pretty commonplace for a Heroic — the jousting fight is probably the least-liked among the playerbase (seriously, whoever really loves the jousting mechanic over at Blizzard needs to take a good long look in the mirror for some self reflection), while the best is of course the Argent Confessor, who summons a random figure from our “past memories” to fight. I got
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Posted on August 4th, 2009 by admin
World of WarCrafts spotlights art and creativity by WoW players, including fan art, cooking, comics, cosplay, music and fan fiction. Show us how you express yourself by contacting our tips line (attention: World of WarCrafts) — not-for-profit work only, please.
Yes, it’s another T-shirt update – because c’mon, people, who doesn’t love to wear T-shirts? Stages of Dunemaul-US sent us her version of Sugarrat’s popular bleach T-shirt, modeled by an especially cute Hordie-to-be. (“She doesn’t play yet, though occasionally she talks in guild chat and yells at noobs in Vent,” Stages says.)
We like this version because it uses fabric paint instead of bleach (for those of you still leery of the whole bleach idea), which also makes it ideal for light-colored fabrics that wouldn’t be well suited to the bleach method.
Stages plots out the path for a perfect fabric-painted WoW insignia shirt. She’s created an easy-to-print Horde insignia, or you can find or make your own design. Follow her complete instructions, after the break.
The mats
Most
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