Posted on July 30th, 2009 by admin
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com’s daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Adam Holisky will be your host today.
There is no cow level.
Repeat that three times.
But if I was designing WoW I’d make sure there’d be some kind of cow level. After all who doesn’t want to slaughter some bovines from hell?
Osul asked…
“What’s a good reputation to grind for a newly 80 Ret Paladin?”
First get up to friendly with the Ebon Blade so you can get the Tabard of the Ebon Blade and start championing them in normal and heroic dungeons. Ebon Blade rep will give you the head enchant Arcanum of Torment. There are also a few dailies (and a lot of rep) out in the Shadow Vault, but you have to follow the Ice Crown quest chain until you get there. Only take a couple hours of playing though to open them up.
While you’re championing the Ebon Blade, you can also be grinding Sons of Hodir rep for your shoulder enchant. If you’re not an inscriptionist (or scribe if you prefer to want to complain on
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Posted on July 27th, 2009 by admin
Rayless on the General Forums asks a question that I’ve always wondered about but never poked into; how exactly does phasing work? If you’ve leveled through the Death Knight starting area, done the Wrath Gate questline, or quested in Icecrown (and you should really do all three), you’ve had the opportunity to see Blizzard’s most intricate phasing in action. However, Zarhym and Crygil are pretty cryptic on how it’s done, and it’s up to players to fill in the details.
In a nutshell, phasing is all about the information that’s sent (or not sent) to your computer by the game server; Blizzard can toy with anything that’s not client-side, affecting which buildings and NPCs you can “see” but not affecting the game’s basic geography. I was surprised to discover that phasing has technically been in the game since launch — ghosts and stealth are a form of phasing, as are (I would assume) the ghosts of Caer Darrow — but the hugely elaborate set pieces of Wrath are simply a more complicated evolution of the same
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Posted on July 23rd, 2009 by admin
The timing of Elizabeth’s tip for Lament of the Highborne by katethegreat19 could not have been more fortuitous for me. For the first time, my fiancee and I have created and actually played Horde for more than a few levels. It was only yesterday that she encountered the in-game version of Sylvanas’ song. While we’ve both certainly seen the videos before now, this is the first time we’ve seen it in game. And there’s just something about having done the quest, and seeing the performance happen “live” in Undercity that’s just a little special.
That’s why I was pretty happy to see this video in the tip line. The video is not earth shattering, and I’ll admit I debated with myself whether or not I could actually put it on Moviewatch. However, the musical work katethegreat19 put into the video was so amazing to me that I felt it overcame the lackluster visual portion of the piece. She basically recreated all the singing and acoustic pieces herself.
Don’t get me wrong. The author found a lot of great art on Deviantart and pieced it
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Posted on July 16th, 2009 by admin
As I’m sure you all know, the Patch 3.2 background downloader has appeared, that fabled herald, signaling that a new patch will finally be appearing on live servers. The PTR has been heaving, bosses have been tested, Druids are rejoicing at their fresh new forms and even more Druid lore has been revealed. Can you feel the electricity in the air yet? The crackle of an-ti-ci-pation (Rocky Horror anyone?) as the patch drip-feeds into your computer? Exciting, huh?
Except it’s never as easy as that, there’s usually a gap between the appearance of the downloader and the patch actually going live. It’s normally a couple of weeks but, well, when do you think it’s going to be? We’ve guesstimated when it might drop in terms of months but the downloader is a sure sign that Patch 3.2 will be hitting Soon (TM). As usual we’re probably not going to know for sure until the patch actually hits or we get confirmation from a Blue in the wee small hours of a Tuesday morning, but that doesn’t stop a little healthy speculation now, does it?
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Posted on July 13th, 2009 by admin
Yes, our friend Medros of All Things Azeroth joined us on the podcast last week for an extra long show, and what we can say? There was just tons of things to talk about. Medros, Turpster, our own Lesley Smith and I answered your emails (including updates on faction changes as well as the big response we got from fans of Ensidia last week), and talked about the most popular stories from the World of Warcraft. Of course we didn’t need the chat channel to remind us of the Worgen pet issue (though they reminded us anyway), we talked about Tom Chilton’s interview and the chance that WoW may one day go “free to play,” and we talked about Bind to Account items twice: how they’ll work with faction changes in the future, and what items like the Tome of Cold Weather Flight tell us about Blizzard’s plans for the future.
Lots of laughs were had, and hopefully we gave out some insight as well. Enjoy the show, and we’ll see you next week. I’ll still be out of town, so we’re not quite sure when it’ll be broadcasting live yet, but stay tuned
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Posted on July 10th, 2009 by admin
I’m finding myself really fascinated with loot systems lately — the old DKP is pretty good, but even that has drama, and it seems like there’s a lot of interesting ideas going around about how to evenly and fairly distribute loot amongst a group of people. OutDPS has a writeup about a loot system called SWAPS. Instead of sending “points” off into the void, you actually “give” your spent points to everyone else in the raid. You start out with 1,000 free points (though those are distributed over time, to prevent new players from having tons of points early on) and then when an item comes up, everyone bids on it: the highest bid gets the item and the points they bid are spread around to the rest of the raiders. In other words, if someone in a 10-man raid bids 500 points and wins an item, those 500 points are distributed evenly amongst the other nine raiders. While the winner loses the 500 points they spent, everyone else gets a bonus 56 points. The person winning the item “pays” for the privilege of taking it by beefing up everyone
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Posted on July 7th, 2009 by admin
That hot time of the year, the Midsummer Fire Festival, has now ended. Once again the denizens of Azeroth go about their humdrum lives without any brilliant fires and spirited naked flame-ladies dancing to and fro on the bridges of Ironforge. Life is boring. The Ice Stone Has Melted.
But alas, not for I and my tabard! After a good half day of solid grinding I trekked my Paladin throughout the dunes of Kalimdor and the lush forests of the Eastern Kingdom, extinguishing the flames of the bastard Horde and honoring those of the blessed Alliance. All was done well, so say we all.
It didn’t take long though for me to realize that I didn’t want to do this on more than my main. However I found myself exerting as
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Posted on July 2nd, 2009 by admin
Today’s WoW Moviewatch is a little bit of a repeat, but in an odd way. Shadowline1990’s A Death Knight’s Tale – The Battle for Light’s Hope Chapel Cinematic Movie is another revisit version of the Death Knight closing cinematics. You might recognize Shadowline1990 as the guy who made The Culling of Stratholme – a WoW Cinematic Movie. This movie is, admittedly, more of the same idea.
Shadowline1990 took pieces of the in-game animations and voiceovers, and tried to make it into a more compelling cinematic experience. Shadowline1990 isn’t the first person to do this with the Death Knight storyline, though, and he’s very upfront to say he gives credit to Invisusira for having given the story this treatment first.
I’m not sure if Shadowline1990 knocked A Death Knight’s tale out of the park the same way he did The Culling of Stratholme. While I think he did a (generally) good job with it, it didn’t scream to me the same way Culling did. The video is attractive and well pieced together. The final product feels a little too-full.
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