kologarm raid extension

According to Eyonix, players will be able to extend their lock out period for an additional amount of time equal to the original duration of the lock. This means that players will get an additional 24 hours for heroic 5 mans and 7 days for raids like Naxxramas or Ulduar. Also players will be able to extend their lock out period more than once (since he didn’t say a maximum, I’m guessing that this means there’s no limit). Eyonix also answered another issue players were wondering about. The option to extend the lockout is the player’s decision and not the party/raid leader. This means that raid leaders won’t be able to extend the lockout of your run even if you don’t want to. So I wasn’t 100% correct when I predicted that maybe players would normally have their lockout reset as normal then have to be saved all over again if they join an extended run. Close but since players have the decision to extend it themselves I was still wrong.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

When you think about it, it makes a little bit of sense since they already lowered the prerequisite level to use flying mounts to level 60. Getting Cold Weather Flying at level 68 is just Blizzard being consistent. I’m talking about the new item found in the patch 3.2 PTR called Tome of Cold Weather Flight.

Cold Weather Flying

According to CM Zarhym, the Tome of Cold Weather Flight is an heirloom item level 80 players can buy their alts for 1,000 gold who are on the same server, faction and account to give them Cold Weather Fliyng. This is a one use thing so it’s really meant to facilitate the ability of players to fly in Northrend at such a relatively low level. Players normally can’t have access to the Cold Weather Flying trainer in either Dalaran or Sholazar Basin at that level.

This begs the question though. I understand allowing the use of flying mounts at an earlier level for the Outlands. The Burning Crusade is an old expansion whose content is pretty much just sped through to reach Northrend. But Wrath of the Lich King is still ongoing and I even remember one of the blue posters saying that it’s still a relatively young expansion. So why make Cold Weather Flying almost pointless so soon? Wasn’t it put there so that players won’t just fly over content? In TBC, even alts had to wait for level 70 to get a flying mount.

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Item Comparison

This is a feature that already is available through addons like Rating Buster and perhaps it’s better than the built in one coming. But such is usually the case with these built in features. For example the built in threat meter can’t compare to the kind of threat info you get from Omen Threat Meter. The fact that it’s built in though means all players will have access to it and could save players from having to download so many addons if they’re satisfied with it. For people who don’t really download addons, this brings another level of convenience to the game.

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Oracles

Thanks to MMO Champion, we can see what this Children’s Week in Northrend will be like. What I can say is that it’s nothing really great. It’s just like what you’d expect for Children’s week but it’s something new and it has a different flavor so I guess we’re willing to take that. The fact that it’s going to award a pet after completion is reason enough for some people to participate.

Unlike the Children’s Week of Azeroth and Outlands, it seems like it won’t be an Alliance/Horde thing. The orphans that you will be showing around will be either a Curious Oracle Hatchling or a Curious Wolvar Pup, obviously from the Oracles/Frenzyheart rivalry going on in the Sholazar Basin. I’m guessing that the orphan you show around depends on what which faction you’re aligned with but of course I could be wrong. After all if you haven’t aligned yourself with one of the factions yet, what then?

The quest chain to show around the orphan in Northrend starts in the Orphanage area that will be added when patch 3.2 comes out. The quest has you visiting the Winterfin Retreat where King Mrgl-Mrgl is in the Borean Tundra, the Bronze Dragonshrine in Dragonblight, Grizzlemaw in Grizzly Hills, Queen Alexstrasza in Wyrmrest Temple in Dragonblight, Hemet Nesingwary in Sholazar Basin and then purchasing a paper zeppelin from the Wonderworks in Dalaran. After finishing the chain, you get a pet oracle/wolvar in the mail.

As you can see it’s nothing really that great but it’s pretty much what you’d expect for a Children’s Week celebration.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

warlock shadowbolt

In the mage Q&A, the devs mentioned that they’re planning to make mages and warlocks feel less similar and that since they’re happy with where mages stand right now from a design perspective, warlocks will be the class that would be drifting away. Ghostcrawler said that the soul shard system is the area they want to make a few changes to achieve this goal. Right now shards are more for maintenance and thus take a back seat to the actual warlock game play. Shards are used to summon the minions, healthstones, summoning portals and other things that are “cool” but necessarily totally needed. They want to change that. They want to make using shards a core mechanic and that using a shard would provide a combat boost instead of used for just minor things. They want shard usage to be a big deal! [maybe things like a trinket like ability costing a shard to increase spell power or things similar to that? That would be so cool if it were].

The devs also want to make pet usage and abilities more interesting. Some pet abilities just aren’t used that much anymore (imp fire shield) and some pets aren’t very interesting to use like the voidwalker. They want us to make interesting decisions when deciding which pet to use for a certain scenario. They also feel like it’s time to improve pet survivability especially in PvP. They said that they’re going to address this by slowly going to make pets scale with all stats, starting with spell penetration and resilience.

They also recognize that warlocks have a problem with threat management especially since other classes can reduce their threat by just spending a couple of points in one talent while locks have to spend a lot on talents that even belong to different trees. They’ll have to figure out a way to solve this problem without moving around the talents too much. A partial solution is lowering the cooldown of Soulshatter to 3 minutes. Talents that affect the range of certain spells also suffer from the same problem as the threat reducing ones and thus are in the same boat.

Here’s a list of other things that were discussed in the Q&A and are being considered for implementation (meaning they’re still just thinking about it, okay).

1. More burst damage for Affliction warlocks through Haunt and Pandemic

2. Hellfire doesn’t have much of a niche and could get cut in the future.

3. Green fire! Instead of giving it to all fire spells, they might just make a new spell have it.

4. Class specific flying mount

5. Being able to customize or change the appearance of the warlock pets.

Looks like warlocks have quite a bit of interesting and cool things to look forward to going forward and I wish the devs some luck and success in trying to address the issues mentioned in this feature.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

faction switching

According to CM Nethaera, while cross faction transfers are going to be allowed, inter-faction race switching will not be allowed. This is a bit shocking for me since logically switching races within your faction is a smaller step than crossing over to the other faction. I remember reading their justification (can’t seem to find it anymore) went something like this. Making a mistake on faction choice is a more forgivable mistake than a mistake on racial choice.

It’s definitely sad that we won’t be able to switch races between our faction. I know several people who would have wanted to change races. Even I was thinking of changing my Blood Elf warlock to an Orc. Who knows though? If they’re allowing faction switching already, it just might take a little time before they give in to inter-faction race switching.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

argent tournament grounds

This move is quite creative in my opinion because it gives players a certain element that the Sunwell badge gear gave players back in TBC but not giving the whole thing outright. As we know, the Sunwell badge gear did give players a way to bridge the gap between the lower content and the higher content but it also was a bit too much since players could just farm the dungeons for gear as good as the raiders who worked so hard to get theirs. The new idea with Emblem of Triumph gives players a chance to bridge the content gap but at a harder climb and a slower pace. This also allows 5 man dungeon content to become more relevant again. I’m guessing that this is what CM Zarhym was talking about when he announced that new things were in store for the emblem system .

MMO Champion gives us some info from the PTR about more of these new things. According to them, instead of having several tokens corresponding to a certain gear slot, the tier 9 gear system (item level 245) is going to be a one token for any gear slot system. According to them, item level 232 and 245 tier 9 emblem gear can be bought with Emblems of Triumph.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

Kologarn raid extension

As we all know, raids currently have a lockout period of one week where the raid timer resets every Tuesday. This means that every Tuesday, players can get fresh runs for their raids. But this also means that if you’ve been working on some raid progression during the week, it will reset every Tuesday whether you like it or not. At least that’s how it is and by patch 3.2 that will change. Imagine the frustration of a guild working to get to Yogg-Saron for a whole week and by the time you get to him, the raid is tired and sleepy and forced to call it a night but the next day the timer resets!

We still don’t know the details about this feature but all we know is that the option to extend the lockout period is there for us by patch 3.2. We still don’t know how this will affect the members of the raid when the lockout gets extended. Imagine the chaos if the raid leader wants to extend but others want a fresh run. imagine a PuG group leader extending the lockout and thus saving the other members for another week unnecessarily. If I had to guess, to prevent situations like this members of a raid will have their timers reset as usual and if they want to join an extended run they’ll have to get saved all over again.

We’ll just have to find out later on exactly how this works but it’s already safe to say that it’s nice that this option will be available to us in the next content patch.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

faction switching

According to CM Nethaera, this service is going to be made available because of several requests by the players mostly because they have characters that are on opposite factions from their friends. I’m curious how they will be able to reconcile all the factors that go with a faction transfer. How are they going to deal with reputation levels for example? Let’s say you’re a Human priest who’s exalted with Stormwind and Ironforge, how will that translate when you become an Blood Elf priest?

Another thing I want to touch on is this. Providing a faction transfer service should mean that you can choose what race you want to become in the opposite faction (unless of course you’re a druid or a horde shaman who wants to go to the Alliance or an Alliance paladin who wants to go to the Horde). It would really suck if you get assigned a race instead of choosing one yourself. That would lead to more problems. So assuming that you can choose your race when you switch factions and since we already have a service that can switch your character’s gender, wouldn’t it only be logical that this service should extend to switching races within your faction? Race switching within your faction is a smaller leap than a faction switch. If such is the case, then I know that a lot of people who would like to avail of the service because they’re tired of being a certain race.

What do you think will happen, more Alliance switching to Horde or more Horde switching to Alliance?

Post from: WOW Obsessed

argent tournament grounds

The 5 man dungeon is quite interesting and in fact at this point it intrigues me more than the raid encounters. First of all, all the bosses players encounter are not strangers since they’re right there in the Tournament Grounds. According to the achievement Heroic: Trial of the Champion from MMO Champion [Alliance|Horde], players will face the champions of each race for your faction while also fighting the Black Knight (him again!), Eadric the Pure (the guy who gives the Threat From Above Quest) and Argent Confessor Paletress. I’m guessing that the Black Knight is the only one we really kill while the other two we just defeat in combat since they’re with the Argent Crusade. The Confessor encounter is interesting since we get to experience memories of famous encounters in World of Warcraft such as Van Cleef, Nefarian, Prince Malchezaar, lady Vashj, Heigan, Cyanigosa and even Hogger!!! This is based on the achievement <strong>Argent Confessor and some data mining MMO Champion did. Now since the preview given to us by Blizzard said there will only be 3 encounters and there are 5 champions + 3 more bosses, I’m not sure how these fights will be. Perhaps one champion, the Black Knight and Eadric for the three and then the Confessor will be a 4th heroic only boss?

Speaking of achievements, there’s one that looks pretty funny called I’ve Had Worse but I’m not sure how paladins and shamans would take it. Go to the achievement link above to read the whole text since it’s too long but part of it involves not having a Shaman or a Paladin in the group. Something tells me this is Blizzard’s attempt to have some laughs and it’s really not going to be part of the live version of the patch but who knows.

I don’t have much to say about the raid dungeon based on what MMO Champion found out. All I can say is this. It seems like based on the achievements shown in MMO Champion, players have 50 attempts per lockout period to finish the whole thing and will get achievements for players with 25, 45 and 50 attempts left at the end. this is the new tribute system where players will get better loot depending on how many attempts they have left after the last boss is defeated. While the last boss is still labeled Final Boss in the PTR files, some data mining done and the achievement The Traitor King suggests that Azjol-Nerub wasn’t the last we’ve seen of Anub’arak.

So patch 3.2’s Crusader’s Coliseum looks pretty nice and maybe better than I expected. Hopefully Blizzard is right about this being an epic and lore filled encounter.

Post from: WOW Obsessed