by Dan O’Halloran

Nov 7th, 2008

The Countdown to Wrath Giveaways continue with a 60-day pre-paid game card.

To enter, leave a comment on this post before Saturday, November 8, 2008 at 6pm ET. One winner will be chosen randomly and will receive a World of Warcraft 60-day pre-paid game card (valued at $30). You must be at least 18 to enter and a legal resident of the United States or non-Quebec resident of Canada. You can only enter once. Click here for complete Official Rules.

This will be the last giveaway for today, but we have plenty more coming between now and the Wrath launch so be sure to check back at WoW Insider often!

According to a tersely worded article, Chinese WoW gold farmers were arrested:

Chengdu’s Shuangliu county has arrested two virtual item and currency traders, surnamed Li and Zhang, focused on tapping out The9’s (Nasdaq: NCTY) licensed MMORPG World of Warcraft (WoW), reports Chengdu Evening News. Police arrested the pair after Li reported Zhang for unfair revenue distribution. Going into business last August, the gold miners accumulated more than 20 employees with 20 computers to generate RMB 1.6 million in seven months of dealing.

It remains to be seen if this was done at the behest of Blizzard but it’s a positive step in the right direction.

Several classes and specs have gotten “knockback” abilities as part of patch 3.02 and the game’s transition to Wrath of the Lich King, and I’ve had fun watching these skills be deployed in battlegrounds to extensive and quite possibly evil use. It’s pretty funny watching an elemental Shaman defend AB’s lumber mill now, and the AV bridge? Even funnier.

And yet…as I laughed, I started to cry inside, because I knew that these skills would also be deployed in 5-man groups and raids to much less amusing effect. And man, it’s a real burden being right so often.

Now, 95% of the people I’ve pugged with since the patch went live have intuitively understood that skills like Typhoon, Blast Wave, and Thunderstorm are really intended for PvP and soloing use, and haven’t used them at all. But there is that 5% that hauls them out at every available opportunity (or, if you’re a mage in Alex Ziebart’s guild, set up a specific Blast Wave rotation guaranteeing that the mobs will never be within 10 yards of the tanks, ever). Which, at least for the purpose of doing actual DPS, mystifies me. None of the skills, far as I can tell, are part of a Shaman, Mage, or Moonkin high-DPS rotation, so I can only assume that the player is simply using them for fun. Fun? Fun? We don’t have fun in my groups. Or at least, we sure aren’t by the 15th time a pull gets knocked out of position and a stray mob attracts the attention of another mob pack. This is, dare I say it, Not Fun.

It is fairly annoying to see mobs you’re trying to build aggro on suddenly not be within range. Or, if you’re a tankadin, outside of Consecration. Or, if you’ll melee DPS, finding yourself trying to hit something that isn’t there anymore. But I think my worst experience so far has been a pugged heroic Magisters’ Terrace with a boomkin who was madly fond of Typhoon. As we all know from rather painful experience, the instance requires very careful pulling of caster mobs, line-of-sighting them around corners to force them to move into one position where they can all be tanked, and…huh? What just happened to my elegant little pull? Two melee mobs would come back to me; the three ranged mobs would stay ranged (as ranged mobs tend to do), but not within melee range of the others or themselves.

Ever seen a frantic bear? Not a pretty sight. I ran around like the proverbial chicken, taking additional damage from the melee mobs as my side and rear were exposed, trying to LOS the scattered caster mobs and realizing that I couldn’t reposition the pull in such a way to get all of them to move again. “Patrol!” said the moonkin cheerfully.

I have literally never kicked a player from one of my 5-mans, but I came closer to doing it that night than I ever have. We finally succeeded in getting our boomkin to quit using Typhoon, but I’m sure our rogue’s nerves were shot for the night, and mine were in the same state. After an ugly series of pulls clearing constantly-moving Sunwell trash, knockbacks have also been officially banned from my guild’s raids, and other guilds on my server have enacted the same rule. Sort of. “Actually, I find it rather useful just to have an umbrella policy for these situations,” said a guild leader friend of mine. “Annoy me and you’re gone.”

Save a tank’s sanity. Be kind to your melee DPS. PvE knockbacks: JUST SAY NO.

I am well aware that the riding crop is undergoing a lot of changes, so I’ll spare the usual tripe I might be tempted to dispense along the lines of “riding crops are broke baaaaw!”

Here’s what I’ve gathered. The crop will be used as a consumable enchant to make a mount permanently go 10% faster thus eliminating the need to switch trinkets. Sure, no problem. Just make a riding for each mount I own, especially since the Pets tab makes managing multiple mounts easy and … okay, not so easy since creating one requires a primal might which when Wrath comes out will essentially become a defunct commodity. After all, who wants to be a level 80 farming the Elemental Plateau? Thus I must ask, are there any plans to alter the material requirements for the riding crop, especially since it will become a consumable item?

I know it’s a main city for the expansion. I know that it’s against blizzard’s design philosophy to add class trainers to a main city.

However, I cannot help but feel Dalaran is incomplete if mages can’t learn magic there. Sure, they can learn to teleport and make portals to Dalaran itself, but the city is one of, if not the greatest bastion of Magical Knowledge and -learning- in the lore. It’s a given the developers want players to return to previous content. Even then, they tend to return at every level at most unless they find things they want to place on the Auction House.

Is anyone else somewhat disappointed by the lack of mage trainers in Dalaran? I’d settle at that, but it’d be even better if other class trainers were allowed as well.

High above the Deadwing pass, Medivh conducted his research in his secluded tower. The village of Darkshire sat far to the east as the closest civilized place to Karazhan, but none from the village dare enter the cursed place, even Medivhs two servants feared the power the building itself held, and resorted to extreme measures to avoid images of the past, and future.

The towers original purpose, creator and even former occupants is unknown to us, as the player characters, and the citizens of Azeroth, even the wise Mages of Dalran. It is, however, commonly agreed upon that all of Azeroths leylines some how lead, or maybe even originate at the site the tower was build upon.

Karazhan was implemented into the World of Warcraft as the Burning Crusades first raid instance, but what will become of it when Wrath of the Lich King arrives? Will we leave it behind as we did so many other raid instances?

The easy answer is yes, move on, maybe go back with a group of 3 or 4 people to get revenge on the bosses that gave you such high repair bills.

But when you think about it, could we really be done with Karazhan? Many places of it still lie unexplored, such as the crypt located a few yards south of the tower, and even lower Karazhan, where Khadgar and Gorrona had there famed battle with the Last Guardian.

But the main tower itself is still a very important place, it holds endless magical power, and knowledge of demons. The books in the library alone hold more arcane secrets than anywhere else on azeroth. Spirits of once powerfull mages lurk around every corner.

In Wrath of the Lich King, Malygos, and his blue dragonflight declare war on all mortal spell casters.

The dragons are ripping up the leylines, and redirecting them to there home in Coldarra. Realistically, could they ignore Karazhan? The spot where all leylines congregate? Could they leave the priceless magical artifacts contained there to fall into the hands of mortals? Could they ignore the high ranking members of the kirin tor, Malygos’ prime enimey in the war, stationed there, studying the arcane secrets Medivh horded for himself? Can Malygos forgive the Tower itself for the part it played in the death and corruption of a powerful member of his flight, who was likely his friend?

I highly doubt it. Logically, Karazhan would be one of the Dragonflights first targets. They would try to rid the place of Mages and Demons, and conceal the secrets held there from mortal eyes forever.

To further look into it, Malygos reasoning for his war on the mortal spellcasters, is to keep the Burning Legion out of Azeroth. It was the War of the Ancients and Azshara’s summoning of Sargeres through the Well of Eternity that led Malygos down the path of insanity. Even Kel’thuzad has stated that Medivhs knowledge of demons alone was more than any mortal was ever able to accumulate.

To this day karazhan is the home to the Man’ari Eredar, a race that the position of the highest ranking members of the burning legion is reserved for, Prince Malchezaar. It is unknown to us why or how Malchezaar got to karazhan, or how he obtained artifacts once thought lost, such as the mighty Hellscreams axe, gorehowl. If the magics of Karazhan were used to summon him in the same way Sargeres was summoned through the Well of Eternity, Kiljaeden through the Sunwell, and Archimond through Dalran(from Medivhs own book of spells might i add), then it is nigh impossible that Karazhan will be left alone.

To leave such a place untouched would be nearly suicidal for the blue dragonflights campaign.

So what i would like to know, are we going to see any updates to Karazhan about this? Maybe an updated raid instance to keep the blue dragonflight from accomplishing this? Maybe even some answers about the towers early history? I know i cant be the only one curious about this.

Will lower Karazhan(for those of you who dont know, a ‘mirror’ image of kara, upside down) be visited? What about the crypt? Home to perhaps some of World of Warcrafts most horrific sights, such as the room of upsidedown sinners.

Is Medivh in fact, still active in one of these places, as the raven flying around the Ivory Tower leads us to believe?

Maybe Malygos will flee to Kara after being defeated in The Nexus, drawing its power for himself, so he can have a final showdown with the Mages of Kirin Tor, similar to Kael’thas relocation to the Magister’s terris after being defeated in Tempest Keep?

Can Malygos really be defeated? Surely such acts would have devastating results on Azeroth.

Sorry for the wall of text, but would love to hear opinions about this, maybe even a blue response?

Edit: Hey guys, sorry i havent updated this yet, had to adjust to being back in school and all that. Anyways, I finaly finished reading both the last gaurdian and cycle of hatred. While they didnt necisaryily -answer- questions i had, they definatly strengthed not only my theorys stated above, but added to my unstated theorys that I had left out for lack of backup.

Also im quoteing Lighthammers responce in my main post because he brings up quite a few points that i missed.

A more important detail that was left COMPLETELY untouched in WoW was the fact the DEADMINES run into Karazhan. The Deadmines is ultimately where Medivh was slain by Khadgar. Certain magical forces DID reshape the world a bit post Karazhan (this was something stated before WoW was made public so no need to say it was a convenient change >.>). It would be neat to see this some how incorporated into Karazhan.

Karazhan still has looming questions I think its only fair to answer:

#1.) Why was a Eredar in Karazhan and the final boss?

#2.) Why were Etherals in Karazhan?

#3.) Why was a Titan in Karazhan?

#4.) What will the Blue Dragon Flight due with the power still inside Karazhan? It must be neutralized by their decree!

#5.) How is Duskwood still being effected by Karazhan?

#6.) Where is Medivh today?

Okay, so now for my updates.

(Further Karazhan speculation)

I recently ran through a cleared out Karazhan serching for some answers. One thing in specific i was looking for was the door into lower Karazhan. It is suppose to look like an ordinary wall, but we should be able to find it because Morose was killed by Medivh right at the entrance. Thats how Lothar and Khadgar discovered the door, because moroses blood was splatered on the floor as if something had pushed his corpse aside. So judgeing by Karazhans current state, they dont have a good house cleaning service. The blood would still be there today in Warcraft logic, because the blod of King Terenes is still in the loderon throne room. When I couldnt find the door, i was lead to believe that there are areas of Karazhan that we dont yet have access to.

Something that did spark my interest however, was a locked door labled ‘The seargents quarters’. I dont know if this door is openable to rogues, or what is inside it, but if anyone has some information it would be appriciated.

The dwarf statue before Curator also baffles me. Medivh held no love for dwarfs or any other mortal creatures, and yet theres a statue erected of one? I think that perhaps this hints at Karazhans orgins. Though we cant be certin that of anything, it hints that Karazhan was created sometime between the years -2,500 and -230 BCE (before common erra. common erra begins at the start of WCI.) The statue appears to be that of a Dark Iron Dwarf.

Other ‘decerations’ of interest include portrites of generic stormwind children modles, A knight and a fighter with no features leading him to be believed to be anyone. There are four generic stone heads located all over that i cant place to names ethier, and 2 tapestrys, one appears to be the Magus, while the other is the Magna Agewynn.

(Also a note of pure comedy, there are two skeletons in the guest chamber that are equiped with the dagger and poison vile that drop off of Romulo and Julianne)

Even Medivh didnt know of Karazhans orgins. He liked to tell himself that Karazhan exsisted only because he would one day take up residence there. But what if that means it exsisted for all gaurdians to take up residence? I got to thinking about this when Aegywnn told Jania about how when one of the order members died in her time as gaurdian, she took it upon herself to orginize his library, and it took 3 weeks. What if she kept and brought this library to Karazhan? After all, It took Khadgar about the same amount of time to orginize the library there. No, i dont really have any more back up info on this, its just a hunch. But plausuable seeing as the history of the individual gaurdians is sketchy at best.

I also payed another visit to the Crypts. It is interesting to note that the Polymorph trick worked on live servers, but not on the beta server. Its as chilling as ever, I’d say room for about 4 bosses, and alot of trash. Skelletons line a large catacomb, leading into a room where theres about 12 individual unmarked tombs, behind doors labled Dodad_wroughtirondoor1/2

The future of Karazhan is currently unknown, but the possibilitys are endless. I would love to hear someone at blizzards opinions on this, even if they just said ‘You’ll see’ or ‘Interesting ideas’

Any acknowledgment to the fact that Karazhan isn’t done would be nice!

I am currently running, and working on other heavy lore related threads, opinions on those would be appreciated as well!

The main issue in this case is mechanical.

Blizzard uses a static texture map system. That is, each individual “look” of armor is an individual texture file, even the ones that look very close in color, like the Arena gear and the Tier gear.

The current game engine doesn’t have the ability to “tint” things.

Additionally, many textures would end up looking much flatter if tinted, a lot of contrast would be lost. (While this is something that can be corrected for, it is one of the reasons that Blizzard has listed for not allowing dyes).

Far worse to my eye, is the fact that it would add a considerable amount of graphic bloat to game, as you’d suddenly need 5 to 10 times the number of armor texture files, even just to allow some basic color variations to be available.

On the social side… yes, hot pink armor would be very “popular” and would have a detrimental impact on the look and feel of the game.

This was supposed to go up before the servers did, but as you probably already know, Patch 3.0.2 wasn’t quite what we all expected. Now that servers are starting to go back up online, I can better write up this handy guide for the brave new world. Let’s try to get as much of this right as possible. If you were as excited as I am — and you should be — you probably logged on as soon as your Realm went up, picked out all those cool talents you’ve been drooling over these past months, and went off reveling in your newfound power.

Good for you. Even though Patch 3.0.2 had a few hiccups, most of the important class changes made it through. I had to delete a lot of my macros and change a few. For one thing, Judgement and a Seal can no longer be cast within the same macro. This is because Seals aren’t consumed by Judgements anymore, so they now share the same GCD. If you have macros for your Blessings of Freedom, Protection, and Sacrifice, you should edit them to cast Hands instead of Blessings. Lots of little things. I’ll probably talk about that in The Light and How to Swing It. For now, we’ll take a look at the talent trees and how we’ll settle into the 3.0.2 world.

Holy
A lot of people have been saying that Holy sucks now. Let me quash that idea before it gets blown out of proportion. Yes, Holy didn’t get as much love as Protection or Retribution and yes, it still needs a little more tweaking. The developers admitted as much during the past weekend at BlizzCon. That said, Holy can heal incredibly well, better than any other class with single targets. Blizzard has said that they’re looking into mobility and multiple targets, but even then Holy in its current state has a few tricks up its sleeve.

On the first tier, we get buffs right away as Spiritual Focus is moved up with a change in wording to reflect the new pushback mechanics. If we’re looking at healing, we definitely want five points in that. There’s the new Seals of the Pure, which is really a greatly buffed Improved Seal of Righteousness. While it’s a greatly buffed talent, it’s important to note that virtually all the Seals got a massive coefficient nerf. We can skip this one for now.

More buffs come in the form of a more accessible Healing Light, which was moved up unchanged to the second tier from the third. Divine Intellect was moved down from the first tier but now grants a 15% Intellect bonus. Both talents are essential for a healing build, so we’re spending eight points here. Divine Intellect will yield dividends later on. Unyielding Faith was also moved up to this tier, reworked to reduce the durations of Fear and Disorient effects instead of conferring resistance. Two points here if you want to PvP.

Aura Mastery on tier three wasn’t buffed in itself, but now becomes a more useful talent because of the change to Auras making it a raidwide effect. For a mere one point, it’s an excellent investment. Improved Lay on Hands on the same tier had it’s armor bonus buffed to 50%, and the base spell was improved greatly, as well. With a mere 20 minute cooldown and no longer draining any mana, it becomes a clutch spell in any situation. We’ll drop two points here because a no-strings-attached uh-oh button every 16 minutes is freakishly awesome. Illumination was moved up to tier three, making it more accessible with the same effect. This is effectively a buff and five points here is mandatory.

On tier four we have Improved Concentration Aura and Improved Blessing of Wisdom. My rule of thumb is if I PvP more, I’d take three points in the former. For raiding, I prefer Improved Blessing of Wisdom because it’s more useful and I hate having my Blessings overwritten by someone else. Why not take both? Because we want to conserve points going deeper into the tree but we’ll need to open up the next tiers.

Divine Favor is the next mandatory spell, resting on tier five. Paladin healing relies on crit and this is the one controlled crit we’ve got. Speaking of crits, there’s Sanctified Light right beside Divine Favor, and we’ll want to put three points here, too. We’ll skip Blessed Hands and Pure of Heart on this tier although both are excellent PvP abilities. See how things tend to bloat if you try too many things at once?

We’ll take a second to note that Pure of Heart has been changed to duration reduction, which is in line with the move away from resistance. This means halved durations on Curse of Tongues or Exhaustion. Sounds cool, right? Well, no. Not really. Those curses don’t have a cooldown. A good Warlock will have them right back on you as soon as they wear off. We don’t need reduced durations on Diseases because we can Cleanse them, anyway. I mean, thanks for the mechanics change, Blizzard, but it doesn’t really do us any good.

Haven’t done a Mace in a while, and there are surprisingly few melee maces floating around nowadays. Since Shamans can’t wield swords, most of the really high end maces have spellpower on them. But here’s one that’s meant for cracking heads.

Name: Swiftsteel Bludgeon (Wowhead, Thottbot, WoWDigger)
Type: Epic One-hand Mace
Damage/Speed: 105-196 / 1.50 (100.3 DPS)
Abilities:

·         Improves hit rating by 19, improves haste by 27, and increases attack power by 40.

·         This isn’t a weapon at the top of anybody’s game (especially with the nerf to maces wielded by Rogues in 3.0.2). But it is good as a stopgap, especially for Fury Warriors in the offhand slot trying to spam Execute and needing a fast weapon to do so (at 1.50, this is definitely a fast weapon).

·         But don’t get too angry, commenters — there are definitely plenty of other weapons to use at this level and above. The only reason you’d really jump on this one is if you’re melee DPS in need of a nice Epic mace in Black Temple, and you’re not first in line to grab any of the really great ones that come from the bosses. Not everybody gets to wield Warglaives or the Syphon, not right away.

How to Get It: Drops from Black Temple trash, and seriously, have you been in there after the patch yet? It’s a free-for-all. Blizzard’s big solution to having no one see the endgame was to nerf it to oblivion before Wrath so everyone could get in there and get all of the Epic looting out of their system.

So round up 24 friends (you’ll still need to be at least a little epic before you go in there, don’t skimp on the SSC and TK runs), head into BT, and loot the place for all it’s worth. Eventually, this one will drop, and if you’re a melee-er who needs a mace, win the roll and it’s yours. Of course, you can expect it to be replaced in Northrend eventually, but who cares? An epic is an epic, right?

Getting Rid of It: Disenchants into a Void Crystal, sells for 14g 1s 84c. Too bad you can’t melt it down — putting all your money into swiftsteel might actually be a pretty good idea in this economy.

saying something CANNOT go live when you havne’t expereinced it yet is not really what testing is about.

Sometimes, Blizzard makes bad decisions. Doesn’t happen often, but it does happen.

I very rarely get mad about something. However, after potion-chugging for the entire time I’ve played this game, being told I can’t potion chug means that I’m upset, because we weren’t actually given anything in their place, and raiding is so dependent on them.

You can’t rely on having someone in a 10-man raid (or even a 25-man) that can judge wisdom as a “fix” for not having reliable pots. That pigeon-holes what raid makeup you can have, if you have to rely on a particular set of other class’ buffs to be able to have enough mana to get through the fight. Don’t have a shadow priest, paladin judgment, shaman totems? Oh well, no raid for you.

For 5-man instances, pots have never been a problem. Long-term, this change could cause lots of issues, and we can’t even test the changes in raid instances until after it’s too late to get it changed back.