One of the more amusing things that polarizes WoW players is the various capital cities. Everyone has a favorite, very few people are ever neutral. Some of my friends like Ironforge for its simplicity, it’s all laid out in a circle. Some like Stormwind for the truly city-like appearance. Some even like Darnassus because they have a thing for purple. Some of my friends wish we played Horde so we could have Orgrimmar, because I guess they need more spikes in their life or something. Me? I’m a Stormwind (and Silvermoon City) kind of guy, but Dalaran has stole my heart. Plenty of people hate Dalaran too, though.

Everyone just wants different things out of their cities. I like cities with tons of flavor, with a very city feel. Stormwind feels like people really live there, despite how small it is. Dalaran most definitely feels like a city of mages, and there’s a ton of flavor and neat stuff to look at there. The fact that every single person who gives you directions in Dalaran has a name is crazy neat. The little daily event at 9 PM where you get to help turn on the lights is amazingly cool for how simple it is.

How about all of you, what’s your favorite? What do you like about it, or dislike about the others? What would your ideal capital have, if you’re not very fond of any of them?

by Alex Ziebart

Nov 7th, 2008

Only six-ish days of Ask a Beta Tester left! Whatever will we do!? Well, we’ll go on with our lives probably. I mean, we’ll have Wrath of the Lich King. Who cares?

ahmed ahmed asked…

Have you heard anything about ghosts being able to go through mountains in WotLK, so they can reach their destinations faster? My friend told me that is what is going to happen, and I hope that it will go live!

Nope, that’s not the case, sorry. However, in some zones (Icecrown, Storm Peaks) you get to ride a ghostly gryphon when you’re dead, so you can fly to your corpse. Both of those zones have a huge emphasis on mountainside base camps and tall cliffs and places you can only get by flying, so the gryphon is very nice. No running through mountains though.

Erika asked…

When LK comes out are we going to have to build up the starting areas like we did with the SSO or Can I chill a few days on an alt while I let everybody start their DK and stuff?

No, we don’t have to do anything like that in the Northrend starter zones. The quest hubs and all of that are already there. The only thing slightly similar is in Icecrown. Through world phasing, you help the Argent Crusade and Knights of the Ebon Blade take bits and pieces of territory from the Scourge. That’s purely single-player (or group) content though, it doesn’t require work from the server as a whole.

Sielanas asked…

How easy is it to obtain the new gems? What should we prospect early and are there any mining nodes that have better frequency of getting a freebie?

It’s about the same as The Burning Crusade as far as rarity. Blue quality gems will be a little harder to get than green ones, both from mining and prospecting. And like The Burning Crusade, high quality nodes will likely have a better droprate on gems than the lower quality ones. When you’re leveling Jewelcrafting you’ll probably be prospecting Cobalt a lot early on, but once you’ve moved past it you won’t bother with it much ever again, much like Fel Iron in TBC. Saronite is probably the way to go.

LordV asked……

I’m not sure if this has been asked or answered yet but here goes! Mages can head to Dalaran at level 71. I was wondering if there are any level restrictions on the Teleport and or Portal spells or can mages learn said spells as soon as they arrive?

You get to learn the Teleport spell as soon as you hit Dalaran. The Portal spell, however, you learn at level 74. So the level most of us are finally able to go to Dalaran ourselves for the first time, you’re able to start bringing your friends up no matter their level.

Marathan asked…

Some time ago, there was a talk about new player character models for Wrath - and even some bugged pictures. So the question is, are they going live? Are we finally going to get improved graphics on our characters?

There weren’t any new models in the beta, but there were ‘new’ skins. And you don’t want them to go live. Trust me. They were horrible. Imagine you have a plastic bag. And you put the end of a vacuum inside of it, and sucked out all of the air. The bag would get all shriveled and pulled in on itself. That’s what the ‘new’ Human Female skins looked like. Deflated and shriveled.

Gnomes and Tauren also suffered from these weird skins. It was as if a gorilla grabbed two handfuls of face, yanked them off, squished the face about between their fingers, and slapped it back on haphazardly.

You did not want these skins. They were abominations unto the Light. People who liked them need to be burned at the stake, because surely they are agents of evil here to sew discord, sorrow, and teh ugliez.

“No, no this won’t do at all,” Braiglam said. “You must go back to my brother and tell him to reconsider.”
“But I’ve already been there and back three times,” Lomthalion argued.
“The fourth time will resolve all,” Braiglam replied. “Hopefully.”
Lomthalion stared down at his feet. He’d thought being a hero meant using his sword for good, not wearing out the soles of his shoes. As he turned away to make yet another trip to Braiglam’s brother, he wondered why the two didn’t just use their towns’ postal systems and leave him out of it.

As game worlds become more and more advanced, they also grow larger and larger. The by-product of this improvement is the long distances that must be traveled between locations. For some reason, with this increase in world size, there is not a corresponding improvement in traveling systems. Indeed, there seems to be almost a perverse joy in sending players on quests that involve running back and forth between two distant points with no other objective but carrying a bickering message between a pair of NPCs.

We’ll begin the analysis of this problem by doing a study of an older set of single-player RPGs in comparison with a relatively new MMO. First series we’ll look at the Baldur’s Gate series. While these games are eight and 10 years old and are not MMOs, they provide an excellent example of the positive evolution of world travel. In comparison, we’ll look at Lord of the Rings Online because it is one of the most recent fantasy MMOs with a fairly large player base. Admittedly, it draws much of its mechanics from previous games like World of Warcraft, and it still suffers from the same shortcomings.

The geographical layout of Baldur’s Gate was a series of about two dozen rectangular maps screens that abutted each other. The player’s party initially could only travel between screens by traversing the map to the edge it wanted to cross and then move to the next screen. Once a map screen was discovered, however, the party could return there simply by traveling to the edge of any map. This world layout is very similar in concept to the zoned MMO (except, of course, for the faster travel BG had to old areas). Indeed, as per our previous discussion on the Dangerous Wilderness, BG I had various encounter locations on each map that would end in fights for the player. While not random and often not respawning, these encounters are similar in their basic nature to those of MMOs. To make an analogy, many of these battles are comparable to the old “random encounter tables” of classic tabletop games. The system functions but it can be very tedious, as well. In order to experience the full content of BG, every part of the map had to be explored. The repetition of this on every map became tedious.

In contrast, Baldur’s Gate II map screens were not necessarily geographically adjacent. From the thriving Docks District of Athkatla, one could travel immediately to the distant Trademeet without having to traverse the remainder of the city or even the wilderness areas in between. This instantaneous transit made the game much more user friendly without eliminating the random encounters associated with travel. From time to time as the player jumped from zone to zone, combat would interrupt the journey as a group of bandits or a swarm of spiders descended on the party.

Looking at LOTRO, we see that it (and all MMOs) follow the same basic format as BG. If you want to get from Point A to Point B, you have to hoof it. The base reason is that, obviously, MMOs involve complete geographical areas and so usually can’t incorporate the jumps of BG II (although LOTRO does make you jump all the way from the Grey Mountains to the Shire, skipping everything in between). But even so, why must the primary travel method throughout the game involve wearing out the soles of shoes? I know that the panoramic scenery of modern games are incredible, and have no doubt that the designers are justifiably very proud of the worlds they’ve created, but do we have to slag through it every time we want to run to and from a town?

In a broad sense, the methodology of BG II is unfeasible in MMOs and is undesirable because players want to be able to travel anywhere. However, BG II does imply a methodology that was much more heavily incorporated in Turbine’s earlier MMO, Asheron’s Call, than is used in LOTRO, the ability to jump easily from one part of the world to another. The AC world had an extensive portal network that tied regions together. Knowledge of portal routes made travel quick, easy and relatively painless (except for the dead bodies of newbies who couldn’t survive the Subway jump). Recent MMOs like LOTRO and WoW have Stable and Flight Masters that allow for faster travel between settlements. While graphically and stylistically appealing, this innovation has actually made travel more time consuming and tedious. Unlike AC’s instantaneous portals, travel by mount is only marginally faster than travel on foot, the only benefit being that you don’t have to steer. I don’t know how many times I’ve set my character on auto-pilot then left the computer for five to 10 minutes while the journey takes place. Players can purchase mounts, of course, but are slower and have to be directed. There also is a quick travel mechanism that takes you instantly between locations, usually at increased cost or with level restrictions. But why is the very tool that removes this tedium so rare?

Ironically, LOTRO and WoW both saved one class much of the monotony of its travel system. The Hunter and Mage classes, respectively, can instantly jump to a large number of towns without a cooldown timer and without a prolonged delay. This is a great idea, but why give it to only one class? With the exception of the hunter’s Desperate Flight, these skills don’t give the class any tactical ability that would directly affect a combat situation. So, since it’s only purpose is to make gameplay easier, it is incomprehensible to me why this should be limited only to a fraction of players.

Ultimately, the solution to the Long Road question is quite simple: Make quick trip travel readily available and practical to use. The possible ways to implement this are multifaceted, whether it be the classic portal routes of AC, purchased trips from stable masters like in WoW and LOTRO, or the quick trips available to the mage and hunter classes. The recall ability that WoW and LOTRO provide back to inns and milestones are handy, but the hour timer serves no valuable purpose (especially when the Mage and Hunter classes suffer no such penalty).

The only place where quick travel becomes a tactical problem is in the case of PvP play and certain epic quests where a quick retreat can drastically change the combat situation or disrupt the nature of the quest. But the solutions here are also simple. Any or all of the below would resolve the issue:
1) Provide a lengthy and easily interrupted wind-up time of 20-30 seconds for all quick travel.
2) Prohibit quick travel if you are within a certain distance of an enemy (be they NCP or PC).
3) Tag certain dungeons, caves, fortresses (or even regions) where quick travel is not possible.

Ultimately, the limited travel systems in most MMOs force players to spend a frustratingly large amount of time running to and from locations with no other ambition but to get as quickly as possible from point A to point B. There is no reason games can’t institute systems to minimize this tedium in ways that won’t damage the value of the wildernesses they’ve created or the combat systems that the games use.

Yes, the Reaper, like 40 man raiding, has basically gone the way of the dodo. But with the coming of the Arcanite Ripper and even more references in Wrath, you kids today might not realize that there was once a weapon that everybody simultaneously loved and feared.

Name: Arcanite Reaper (Wowhead, Thottbot, Wowwiki)
Type: Rare (yes, it’s not even Epic) Two-Hand Axe
Damage/Speed: 153-256/3.80 (53.8 DPS)
Abilities:

·         +13 Stamina (this was before resilience was introduced to the game), +62 Attack Power (which is still substantial, but back then was phenomenal)

·         And the main reason the Reaper was so nuts was because of it’s slow attack, but high damage. Back in the day, before things got all normalized, Mortal Strike was the shiznit. It was an instant attack based on weapon damage, and since this weapon’s damage was so high, pushed forward by the Attack Power bonus, Warriors basically owned PvP back around early level 60 times. In fact, you might even be able to trace the current population of Warriors back to this weapon alone, and for that reason, it’s earned not only a place in Warriors’ hearts, but in Blizzard’s culture as well.

·         I should also mention Shaman and Windfury weapon here, because back before all the changes were made to Windfury, and even before Shammies could dual wield, one Shaman with Windfury and this weapon could one-shot almost anyone. Nowadays, everything’s mitigated, with nerfs and resilience and all the changes to endgame and Arena PvP. But back then, the Arcanite Reaper ruled the roost.

·         Which explains why it’s everywhere — the Arcanite Ripper is a direct rip, if you will, off the old weapon, and brought many a tear to a Warrior’s eye when it returned to the game as a guitar. The skin has also been reused a few times, as with the Spinal Reaper. And in the next expansion, there’ll be an heirloom item bound to account called the Bloodied Arcanite Reaper, so all of your two-handed melee characters can relive the old days as they level up.

·         Oh, and take a close look at that summoned Felguard running towards you while the Warlock’s DoTs are ripping you apart — he’s carrying an old Arcanite Reaper as well.

How to Get It: Here’s another reason why the Reaper was such a big deal — not only was it the best weapon to have for any class that wielded two-hand melee and counted on Attack Power, but it was craftable and BoE, so pretty much anyone who wanted one could get one. The plans drop from Bannok Grimaxe, a rare spawn found in Lower Blackrock Spire, which is actually an instance that’s getting some traffic nowadays with not one but two vanity pets and an achievement in there. You can probably solo to him without too much trouble, but the drop is the problem — it’s only around 6%, so you’ve got to be lucky.

But maybe you can find a Blacksmith with the plans already — in that case, you’ll need 20 Arcanite Bars, six Enchanted Leathers (made by an Enchanter from a Rugged Leather and a Lesser Eternal Essence), and two Dense Grinding Stones. Not a tall order, actually (yet another reason why this weapon was so popular). Melt it all together, and voila, you’ve got a classic weapon. Won’t do much good these days, as mechanics and upgrades have rendered the once great Reaper into a not very attractive blue. But don’t tell any grizzled old Warriors that — they’ll make you remember the old days whether you like it or not.

Getting Rid of It: Sells to vendors for 6g 57s 36c. Disenchants into a Large Brilliant Shard. Has killed more Mages than you’ll ever meet, consarnit!

If blizzard is planning to make all tanking classes the same, all healing classes the same, and all DPS classes the same, can you please remove all classes and replace them with one DPS class, one tank class, and one healer class.

I feel at a disadvantage doing equal DPS to a druid for example who can tank DPS and heal at maximum efficiency. If a fight requires 10 healers and the next fight requires 8 healers, two of the healing classes can respec DPS. If one fight requires 10 DPS and another requires 8 DPS warlocks mages and hunters cannot respec. Either sit them out for a healer or don’t bring them at all. This way people wont get angry when forced to sit out for a fight.

I think having classes able to fill multiple roles of the holy trinity setup will make rogues hunters mages and warlocks extinct.

I’m worried in particular because I have a mage and a warlock. if I am forced to change to a hybrid I will have to level up and start from scratch (which I would not want to do again).

Blizzard can you please tell us what is your intention for the pure DPS classes? If we’re replaceable by more flexible classes what are we supposed to do? Can you give rogues, hunters, mages, and warlocks healing trees so we can compete?

I’m glad you had to look up the definition of razing and share it with us.

Listen to the sound files. Both indicate the Horde/Alliance win and push the Scourge forces back, then chase them to Northrend. Where they then show their audacity to retaliate against the Lich King.

Unless you can cite a blue post indicating they are actually completely re-desinging these cities I think it should just fall down to a misleading choice of wording.

Well the term raze does imply on some level that the city(Orgrimmar) was destroyed, or at least a portion was destroyed.

Garrosh Hellscream specifically states that the RAZING of Orgrimmar was more then an attack on the Orcs. It just implied that The Scourge left a really heavy mark on the Horde as a whole.

If it was anything less then that the wording should be corrected.

Perhaps Stormwind didn’t suffer the same fate.

* OG_LichKing_OrgrimmarAttack01.wav

* SW_LichKing_StormwindAttack01.wav

* SW_LichKing_StormwindDefeat01.wav

Notice there’s none named OrgrimmarDefeat01.wav

There is no sound file for when the Horde defeats the Scourge, just one for when the Alliance does.

From the zeal of the Horde forces in Northrend I’d assume/hope that something of that magnitude did transpire though.

my main concern is the outragous prices.

C’mon people its not like you are gonna get to keep that 20,000 gold you are trying to charge for a blue uncut gem. content is here for testing. put your stuff up for cheap let ppl buy it. get the testing in.

ive leveled blacksmithing up just about to the cap and so far the highest ive charged for somthing is around 30g. i simply double the suggested bid price the AH gives me. everything sells. ppl get to test stuff… the game moves on.

i know i know, gold means nothing spend a ton. strangly the people making the huge buyout prices are usually the ones that dont have the money to spen on AH. oh the irony. anyways. lets try to back off the insain prices shall we?

ps. if gold means so little… why do you wanna end beta with such a large amount?

Seems that any flightpaths that go through Hinterland will crash your client with an Assertion error. You will NOT be able to continue playing with that toon for 2 reasons:

- GMs can not reset you at the moment

- A Hotfix or new patch is needed to fix this

So far I have 2 characters I can’t play with. If you gate to Ebon hold, DO NOT repeat DO NOT fly to IF or Stormwind if you are in Ebon Hold or EP as you will crash your client and not be able to log back in.

Hearthstone back to Northrend instead. Hopefully a fix will be pushed soon but it could take some time so be aware of this issue.

EDIT: posted it in general instead of Mac support because people unaware of this issue on Mac have a much better chance to hear about it that way.

New spells! New talents! New…confusion. We posted a number of new talent guides (don’t see yours? It’s coming soon!) as well as the Skill Mastery series to give you the information you need to respec your toon(s) come pach day. But having logged on last night, I still had to walk many guildies through their talent choices. They weren’t sure what specs work and which don’t anymore. There is a certain amount of information overload going on for many players right now.

Is there anything you are unsure of with your new builds? What talent information are you looking for that you haven’t found yet? Is there a talent, skill or spell whose function is unclear? Leave your answer here and we’ll try to clear it up for you

Hallow’s End is scheduled to begin in a few hours, and you know we loves us some candy. There’s been a big change to the Achievement needed to get the “Hallowed” title (it’s actually gotten a lot easier), the Headless Horseman has a new loot table, and — well, it’s been a year since we’ve seen it anyway, so here’s a round-up of WoW Insider’s articles on Hallow’s End. As an FYI, we’re also expecting patch 3.03 to hit alongside Hallow’s End, and it should contain a number of bug fixes for problems that have cropped up since 3.02 hit Tuesday and some class tweaks. With that said, nobody’s 100% certain of what’s actually going to go live, so check back; we should have more information this weekend.

Read on for a guide to the holiday quests, the new Achievement related to the holiday, and some fun stuff you can do ingame til November 1st!

EDIT (11:50 pm EST): we’ve confirmed a few changes to the holiday with some readers on the EU realms, and I’ve updated the post.

Quests

·         Call the Headless Horseman, which allows you to summon the holiday boss once per day per person in Scarlet Monastery graveyard. If you’ve never done the Headless Horseman before, don’t worry; he’s pretty straightforward, and we have a video guide here if you want a look at the fight. Wowwiki also has a nice write-up on strategy for him here. UPDATE: we’ve heard from commenter z3rb and another reader on the EU realms that this year it looks like each player will get TWO summons, and not just one. We’re still waiting to confirm this on the U.S. and Oceanic servers as the event hasn’t gone live here yet, but for now plan on having 10 attempts at the Horseman per 5-man group (assuming no one in the group has summoned him previously that day). And yes, the mount is dropping! UPDATE: more people have chimed in and let us know that the two-summon deal is the likely result of being able to kill him for the first time with a quest given, and the second time (for the daily) with your regular summon. It’s unlikely to be a multi-day thing. Ah well.

·         Masked Orphan Matron/Costumed Orphan Matron: Commoners in major cities will give you a quest to speak to orphan matrons in Brill, Falconwing Square, or Razor Hill (Horde), or Azure Watch, Goldshire, or Kharanos (Alliance). The matrons will give you a quest called Fire Training (Horde) or Fire Brigade Practice to practice dousing nearby fires with buckets of water. Once you’ve finished that, you can participate in Stop the Fires! (Horde) or Stop the Fires! (Alliance), which will occur simultaneously in all three of your faction’s villages every four hours.

·         Trick-or-Treating for Orphans: Commoners will also direct you to the orphanages in either Orgrimmar or Stormwind for Hallow’s End Treats for Spoops (Horde) or Hallow’s End Treats for Jesper (Alliance). These are pretty easy quests that just require you to visit your faction’s major cities in order to pick up special candy for your youngster, and will also grant you some pretty nice faction rep.

·         The biggest difference between the two factions’ quests? You’ll either engage in some mischief on behalf of the Forsaken, or gate-crash a party if you’re Alliance. For the Horde, you can pick up Rotten Eggs and Stinking Up Southshore from Darkcaller Yanka, an NPC outside of Undercity. For the Alliance, you can pick up The Power of Pine and Crashing the Wickerman Festival from Sergeant Hartman in Southshore.

Hallow’s End Achievement grants title

Some of these quests are actually Achievements in disguise, and for that you’ll want our comprehensive guide to the steps you need to take for the meta-Achievement “Hallowed Be Thy Name,” which will award you the title “The Hallowed.”

Please note that there’s been a big, and very welcome, update to this since that article went live; Blizzard has removed A Mask For All Occasions as a prerequisite to Hallowed Be Thy Name, I assume after realizing that collecting all 20 masks was next to impossible. So the two most difficult quests you’ll need to worry about for this Achievement will be getting transformed by all the different wands, and getting the Sinister Squashling pet and Hallowed Helm. Still tough, but a lot more doable than trying to defy the statistical odds behind the mask drops.

Other Halloween goodies

And, while these aren’t quests, don’t forget to trick-or-treat at innkeepers all over Azeroth and Outland for various goodies and neat tricks like pumpkin heads, masks, and magic wands. Don’t forget to visit the Wickerman Festival, done at 8:00 pm server time outside of Undercity each night of Hallow’s End. We also have a few more things for you:

·         Not getting lucky with the Sinister Squashling drop rate ingame? Make your own!

·         A machinima trailer for Hallow’s End fun from WoW Moviewatch.

·         The Headless Horseman may drop a new — and permanent — mount this year!

·         16-slot and 18-slot bags are random world and instance drops during the holiday. While the Pumpkin 16-slot bags take the place of existing 16-slot bags on mobs’ loot tables, the 18-slot Jack O’Lantern is an addition.

·         Lots of spooky black cats will be appearing in cities as well. No stepping on them unless you want Bad Luck, and I think we can all agree that the drop rate on the Sinister Squashling is already bad enough to risk making it worse.

Enjoy your candy, and good luck!