Oyayu

With the midnight launch looming ever closer, so comes the final posts in this series… I had a little trouble remembering what else I was going to write about, Felpe was really helpful and said I should write how I am looking forward to him. He redeemed himself moments later by reminding me about this…

Dual Spec System

This is something that really interests me, especially since making the decision to level my Priest into WotLK. 

One of the main issues with levelling a healer or a tank is that it used to leave you gimped in other ways - i.e. virtually removed your ability to solo anything in a timely manner. Blizzard have introduced a bunch of things to help this, including combining +damage and +healing into “spell power” - excellent news for both DPS and healery casters, I suppose.

The dual spec system will allow people to switch between their raid spec, and their solo spec, or their PvP, or whatever (hopefully) without having to go through the hassle and expense of a respec. How this is implemented is yet to be revealed, as I think blizzard have to carefully consider the implications of this… However they do impliment it though should at least somewhat lighten the burden on being a tank or a healer.

Not only will it increase peoples productivity while out of raids… If we are coming up to a boss who is highly resistant or immune to a certain magic school, people will be able to switch specs accordingly. If we have a fight where an off-tank is not nessesary, we immediately get another DPS to help out….

Needless to say, this feature is very exciting… I look forward to seeing it added to the game ASAP!

A bit of a no brainer this one…

Northrend

Now, besides the fact we are going to have a whole new continent to explore get lost in, Northrend opens up all kinds of story-expanding situations that obviously push on the Warcraft timeline. I don’t consider myself a Lore buff at all, infact the little amount I do know stems entirelly from playing the Warcraft games - and all memory of these is a little rusty after multiple years of playing MMOs… Despite this, the progression of the Warcraft story is quite an exciting prospect.

The Lich King, while somewhat interesting, doesn’t capture my attention as much as the side-story that’s going to be occuring, that is the Blue Dragonflight, and more specifically the fact Malygos is going to die. Malygos is going to be the first of the Dragon Aspects to die, although it’s unclear if anymore will be dying after this.

Now, I could rant on about how it seems to wrong to let something thats been awarded power by “the gods” to die, but it seems a little futile, as I don’t really know what will be coming after this… It just seems to me that if they’re killing off such a powerful being it should be done in a little more of a dramatic setting than that of a side-story in someone elses expansion! Also, I was under the impression that Malygos’ sanity was returning, so why then are we busting in on Coldarra and kicking his face in? I only hope he puts up a good fight.

I digressed slightly yet again, but anyway… Northrend is certainly going to open up the next stage in the Warcraft story, I’m just not quite sure where the story is heading just yet… And killing off someone like Malygos so soon may well prove to cause them issues in the future.

I appear to be getting multiple hits a day from people searching for how to find their Zhevra mount reward from the refer-a-friend feature.

Now, part of me wants to mock you all for being too retarded to remember, or unable to work out for yourself… Another part of me wants to be helpful and tell you how to find it.

I decided I shall do both.

You retard.

Go onto your account management, click on the refer-a-friend link, claim your rewards. Easy isn’t it.

New Armour Sets

I’m a loot whore. I know it, Everyone knows it. I’m fine with it… I like new and shiny things, and WotLK has many many new and shiny things for me to whore myself over. This excites me greatly.

Now, Blizzard has indeed failed me slightly in the past, firstly I played a Hunter in TBC and the Hunter armour, while “okay”, just didn’t really cut it in comparison to some of the other classes visually… But on the other hand maybe I just spent too long looking at it, hard to say really. Secondly, they totally cheaped out on me by just recolouring the PvE armour to make PvP sets. 

Thankfully though, it seems one of my two gripes is solved, with Blizzard promising that PvE and PvP will look distinctive this time around! Not that I actually intend on doing any PvP, seeing as it’s totally bloody broken… I mean, it’s about time Blizzard stopped trying to balance the entire game around 5v5 arenas to sell the piece of crap as an eSport, it’s getting a little tiring. Especially when they are continuously nerfing PvE abilities into the ground in order to “balance” the PvP content.

I digressed again slightly towards the end… But hooray for new loot!

With Wrath of the Lich King coming around, I’m going to write a short series of blog posts each highlighting a reason I am looking forward to the incoming expansion.

They are in no specific order, and if I wasn’t so lazy there would probably have been a 10 day countdown, unfortunately I don’t nearly have enough concentration for 10 whole blog posts in 10 whole days… That would just be impossible. So this is the next best thing… With that said, here’s point number one!

Normal / Heroic Raids

The basis of this is, you can do the raid on normal mode, which is 10 man, or you can do it on heroic, which is 25 man. In the 25 man version you have slightly better quality loot.

This is a highly anticipated feature for me… Despite being in a highly awesome guild, there are still people I dislike. A lot. The chance to go with 10 of my “preferred” guildies is much appreciated if we don’t quite make the 25 sign-ups, we can simply switch to taking two 10 man groups.

This will also encourage smaller raids to go raiding, I may be slightly elitist in my attitude to raiding, however Karazhan opened my eyes to the wonders of having smaller raid groups… Long gone are the days of 40 man Molten Core raids.

Declaring your guilds progression level would be slightly harder I suppose, one can only assume that the 25 mans will be significantly harder than the 10 mans… Or are they counted as seperate progression ladders? The mind boggles. 

Anyway, the option to have a 10 man version of the raid and a 25 man version interests me greatly, and is one of the features I am really looking forward to.

The expansion has done a pretty good job of creeping up on me. There’s about two weeks to go before World of Warcrafts second expansion is released, and I am at a total loss of what to do when it does arrive.

The first issue is what do I level? I currently have Druid, Rogue, Hunter and Paladin at 70, along with a 64 Priest in the works (more on her in a moment), a 61 Warrior and a 58 Warlock.

I am generally going to be considering what I will be doing at 80, which will invariably be raiding with Pretentious.

I can rule Rogue and Druid out almost instantly, Rogue isn’t going to appeal to me in the end-game PvE, although in PvP it is fun, so I may well level it to 80 at some point purely for that. Druid is alright, but if I was going to level a hybrid, it would be Paladin.

Hunter has been my main character through The Burning Crusade, she has some nice gear which would make levelling easy, and I consider myself to be good at playing the class. However I’m not sure where Hunter is going to fit in in WotLK, our CC is already under-used and I don’t see it becoming any more useful, our AoE has had a massive, massive buff which is awesome news - we are actually viable as AoE along with Warlock and Mages now, I hope someone reads this and takes note on that! However - do I want to do DPS again in WotLK after having done it the whole of TBC? I am unsure.

Paladin would be the next option - I quite enjoy tanking, and there’s always the option to DPS (lol… not after the nerf incoming…) or heal when the chance comes around. However the issue here is the ten man raids and Pretentious, there’s already a bunch of great tanks in the guild, and I don’t see myself getting a position as one of the main tanks.

The other option is what I am working on now, the Priest. Now, going all the way back to FFXI I have a long history of healing, so the idea isn’t new to me. I am not a big fan of Druid or Paladin healing either… Priest is the way to go. The issues here are, the Priest is currently 64, with no trade skills, and I am running out of time fast. I have two weeks to achieve the following:

• Get to level 70
• Level two skills to 375, probably Tailoring and Enchanting
• Level secondary skills, probably Fishing and Cooking… First Aid can wait til 80
• Convince people in the Guild I am a safe bet for healing at 80…

Now, the first is not a massive problem, I can do it with ease, probably this week. The rest is… I am on a very, very tight budget - infact I would say I have about 500g on the entire server right now, so powerlevelling my skills is not an option. This requires me to farm, a lot. I need more cloth than I can even think of right… I do know you need about 4000 Netherweave somewhere in there.

So, I am stuck… I can push on with the Priest, and potentially have a tradeskill-less fresh 70 for WotLK… Or I can go back to the drawing board!

The new achievements system has given the old raids a new lease of life it would seem, with PUGs heading down to Molten Core and Onyxia almost daily by the looks of things. I’ve been on a couple of these for the achievements and for fun, mostly with guildies.

Molten Core - this place wasn’t fun at 60, and it wasn’t fun at 70 either, however at least it was a good deal quicker.

AQ20… Just like being in Egypt. Mostly.

Onyxia… Many whelps, left side!

At least the old raids aren’t sitting there doing nothing anymore I guess!

Since the version 3 patch I have been playing some WoW to test out the various changes to all my favourite classes, and see what the future holds for the game.

As all WoW players will have realised, Retribution paladins got a massive boost (they’re getting nerfed again soon though, hooray for Blizzards decisiveness) so I decided to spec retribution and make the final push to getting my paladin to 70. My paladin jumped right in at 60 using the refer-a-friend system, so I’ve been prot my entire paladin career. Having never tried retribution before I can’t really give a comparison on how the two differ, but apparently the new one is (was) pretty good! In PvE in resulted in them actually being competative DPS in raids, good for them! However in PvP their damage was far too much burst damage to be considered balanced. So once again Blizzard have to nerf something they should have worked out during the PTR phase… Good job. I digress…

So my Paladin got through to 70 in relatively good time, and I had to consider the options. There is only a couple more weeks until WotLK hits, so gearing up properly would be entirelly a waste of time. I did however put some effort into doing a Karazhan run with the guild to pick up a few items, and practise by tanking a few instances. Overall protection is a lot better now, mana issues are all but gone, and threat generation is seemingly much better… Obviously trying to tank as a fresh 70 against T6 DPS is going to cause a few issues sometimes, but I was quite surprised just how well I held up.

As for the future, WotLK is coming around fast, so I need to decide what class I am going to be levelling primarily… That’s a post in itself however.

Here’s a screenshot of Ainia now, she looks alright considering she only got 70 a few days ago I think!

With Blizzcon well underway, there’s a bunch of WoW information out and about which has interested me slightly.

The main changes that have caught my eye are the ability to change between specs “at will” - but not in arenas or in combat, which is fine. A very very welcome change here, makes so many more things viable… Tanks will be able to have their DPS specs for soloing and boss fights where they are not required to tank, Healers will be able to have their DPS specs for soloing too. DPS will be able to switch between PvP and PvE specs. I must say this is a very welcome change, and one we chatted about a fair bit about in the past. Only time will tell how this works out in practise.

What this means for me is… Well… My Warrior might actually get levelled as I can now solo as fury and tank as prot, which is good. My Paladin can have a holy and prot spec as well… My Hunter can flit between Survival and BM at will too! All very welcome features to me…

Another change that has caught my eye is the exp from PvP, this interests me greatly too! No more twinks? Well, potentially… This makes me very happy. PvP might actually gain some form of use before level 70 (80…) now!

I’ll look through the rest of the information in more detail and try and pick up on anything else that’s coming, but so far, Blizzcon hasn’t really delivered anything near the amount of information I was expecting.