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Spellpower

it’s a good idea and all but isn’t it going to mess up loot?

Pre-BC and BC

tanks - own gear

melee dps - own gear

spell casters - own gear

healers - own gear

looking at wrath

tanks - own gear

melee dps - own gear

spell casters and healers - share gear

I think spell power was a good idea but in the went it will hurt alot of raid content and people will complain about the loot process

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Northrend Kaput?

Hmm, did Northrend go kaput?

I was starting a duel w/ an Initiate (altho, I was INSIDE ebon hold - oops?) and then the game locked up and booted me to login… now I can’t connect to Northrend (but Lich King works)

“New High Score? What does that mean? Did I break it?”

(hopefully my duel didn’t do it… and it’s either “just me”, or something else)

-T

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Skill Mastery: Bloodsurge

While a lot of debate goes back and forth about how much damage Fury is doing in Wrath, and how fun the tree is, there’s one fury talent that is unabashedly awesome in my opinion: Bloodsurge. Bloodsurge is a pure delight to use, and is a perfect example of synergy in action: the Fury tree stacking a boost to critical hit with the new Rampage (which we will also be spotlighting, never fear) which causes your Bloodthirsts to crit, which gives you an instant cast Slam with a high chance to crit as well.

It’s quite possibly my favorite Fury ability (yes, even more so than Titan’s Grip, which I am currently back in love with - I know you were all pulling for us crazy kids to make it) just for the fun of hearing the swoosh-bang on a BT crit. That sound means hit the slam button for extra damage! It’s like getting all cherries on the slot machine, but without having to sit with all those people feeding quarters into the boxes with that desperate, hardened stare. Those folks scare me. I get the sense they’d like an instant cast slam as well, so as to easily steal my quarters.

Bloodsurge has a few minor quibbles: the short duration of the buff after the bloodthirst crit means you have to pay attention and hit slam as soon as possible, and with the GCD and rage issues being what they are, it is possible to miss out on a slam for one reason or another. I generally don’t find rage to be that big a problem with fury at this point (my fury warrior on Beta is but level 73, though). Also, while fury has Rampage to help with crit synergy, Bloodsurge is still an ability at the mercy of the RNG: if you don’t crit on that Bloodthirst then you won’t be using Slam for another six seconds. This is also not that horrible a setback, to be honest, but it is there.

Also, man, it’s annoying when you kill a mob with a crit bloodthirst and there’s nothing around to slam.

Bloodsurge rewards attentive play. If you’re sitting back and pushing your rotation while eating a sandwich, Bloodsurge isn’t going to help you digest, because the swoosh-bang going off will make you scramble to hit the keybinding for slam. It seems to be an ability designed to make fury more interactive and so far, I’m really enjoying it. I’d probably extend the cooldown by one second: I don’t want to remove the hit slam now feeling of the ability, but I do want to make the GCD less likely to lock out a slam on me.

With Bloodsurge in fury, it made sense to move Improved Slam to arms. You’re not going to miss this talent if you’re fury, and if you have it, a .5 second slam doesn’t matter: you’re going to do instant slams and those points are going elsewhere anyway. IS was part of the arms rotation as it stood, so this move helps both specs.

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BlizzCon 2008: The first day of mayhem

The crowds have been let in to the main convention center floor, and it is an absolute mad house of Blizzard fun here. BlizzCon 2008 has started in earnest, with a full day of panels and gaming ahead. Knowing Blizzard, it should be truly epic.

If you weren’t able to join us here at the Anaheim Convention Center, have no fear. As the day progresses, we’ll share many of the sights of BlizzCon 2008, straight from the front lines. So if you’re hungry for more of what’s going on here, be sure to check back, as we’ll be updating the gallery throughout the day!

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Ornate vs Stormhide & other crafted PVP gear    

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1H vs. 2H enchants, discrepencies   

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 Ask a Beta Tester: Raid zones, plot, and more on phasing

I decided to do something a little different with the image above for today’s Ask a Beta Tester. Instead of beating you over the head with another of my awesome Dalaran screenshots, I’ve plugged in some music you can listen to while you read, if you’d like. Just hit play, and get in a Wrath kind of mood.

Milkgas asked quite a few question, but many of them involve story spoilers that I don’t think readers would appreciate seeing in this particular column. What I don’t answer, you can truck over to Ask a Lore Nerd and I’ll squeeze them in on the bottom behind my usual “spoilers be here, yarrrr” line. We can definitely hit a few of them though.

Has there been any hints in the quest text of either the Uldum or the Karazhan Basement as a raid or dungeon in this expansion or the next?

Nothing that I’ve seen! We’ll have Ulduar as a raid zone in Northrend, so to me that seems like a definite no on Uldum. I don’t think they would put two Titan raids in one expansion, unless Uldum turned out to be a 5 man dungeon. We’ve seen nothing about the rest of Karazhan.

Ive noticed some undead blood / high elf models in the beta, is there any evidence of us having to fight an undead Kael’thas?

No.

Are there any keys necessary to access raids or dungeons? One of which I noticed was the drop from Sapphiron to access the Eye of Eternity.

That’s the only one we know about so far.

In Warcraft III there were eight dreadlords sent to keep Arthas in check. Six are dead, all but Mephistroph and Varimathras. Is there any hint of Mephistroph in Northrend?

Not that I’ve seen or heard.

Is the Scarlet Crusade still determined to flight the plague? If so why do they have a base off the coast of Icecrown, surley the Lich King would have pushed them back if they were so close.

The Lich King has the following factions on his tail: The Horde, the Alliance, the Argent Crusade, the Knights of the Ebon Blade, the Scarlet Onslaught, and a few others which I shall not name here. Arthas pissed off a lot of people. Even the Lich King needs to pick and choose his battles. There are other factors involved as well, but I will avoid bringing them up here. There is a ton going on in Icecrown, story-wise.

uncaringbear asked…

What happened to the new dances? Weren’t we supposed to be getting some sort of a dance studio to make our own customized dances?

I never heard of the customized dances thing, I thought that we were just getting new dances. Either way, there’s been no sign of it. I think they scrapped it, or put it off to the side for awhile.

Chris asked…

Will titles like Champion of the Naaru and Hand of A’dal be disapearing with patch 3.0 or when the actual expansion hits? My guild only needs to kill Kael…

I am pretty sure that the ability to gain those titles goes away in 3.0.2, same with the Amani War Bear. They’re very similar. Specific challenges for the current game, yadda yadda. If one was trivialized by 3.0.2 then the others likely are as well.

Talia asked…

You’ve mentioned, regarding the new phasing system, riding through a zone “empty of mobs” because you’ve already quested through it. Does this phasing idea hold for all mobs, or only special/quest related ones? Does this, then, have the obvious implications for helping friends with quests you’ve already done? What about farming/grinding?

Not every quest changes how you see the world. It’s reserved for very, very big quests. Let me lay out two hypothetical quests to try and give examples.

1.      Kill ten boars.

2.      Assist Tirion Fordring and Darion Mograine in assaulting a Scourge stronghold.

The first one won’t change anything. There will still be boars. The second one is a pretty big deal. When you finish that quest, those mobs will probably be gone from that stronghold. In fact, it will probably be populated by the Argent Crusade or the Ebon Blade instead, probably with new quests.

In most cases, yes, this does prevent you from going back and helping your friends with older quests in these areas. You’ll see one another on the mini-map, but you can’t interact. You won’t see eachother in the game world. However, there aren’t many group quests that cause these phase changes, or come in between phase changes. They tend to be towards the end, or at the very end of a series of phases. It shouldn’t be a very big problem. There’s only one quest chain that went against that, but the quests were for 2 or 3 people and not 5. It might be a little harder to find groups for those quests, but not impossible.

Also, most places that change over like this aren’t really places you would want to farm. You won’t make an entire zone unpopulated this way, just pockets of it.

Derec asked…

Are there any quests that send you back to Outland?

Yes, I’ve seen a number of them. They’re usually short, though. To go talk to some person, or something like that. There are plenty that send you to Kalimdor/Eastern Kingdoms as well.

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Stepping away from +threat

Threat is at the heart of tanking. However, it’s totally hidden from the player, and many players don’t understand it well or at all. A thumbnail sketch: every point of damage you do causes 1 threat. Every point of healing you do causes 0.5 threat (unless you’re a paladin, in which case it’s 0.25 for reasons I’ve never fully understood). This is base threat; many classes have threat modifiers. Rogues, for instance, have an innate 30% reduction to threat. Warriors and Druids get 30% improved threat in their tanking modes (Defensive Stance/Dire Bear Form); this will be raised to 45% in LK, I believe. Paladins get 90% extra threat for their Holy damage from Righteous Fury.

Then there are various tanking skills which have special threat modifiers. Sunder Armor is one that has been around forever; it wouldn’t cause much threat inherently, but it’s got extra threat built in. Lacerate and Revenge are other examples.

In short, the way Blizzard has traditionally made tanking work – made sure the tanks are causing more threat than everyone else, so the mobs will attack them – is by keeping their damage low, but raising their threat with threat-increasing auras and threat-boosted abilities. This is not the tack they’re taking in LK, based on some trends that have been emerging in blue posts over the last month or two. For instance, Ghostcrawler: “We’d like to get away more from +threat abilities for all classes if we can.”

The threat auras are here to stay, but instead of focusing on adding extra threat to various abilities, they seem to just be boosting tank damage. This is pretty brilliant, if you think about it for a second. Tanks have always complained about low damage output, when soloing or for off-tanks that are not needed to tank at some particular instant. Also, threat-enhanced abilities are mysterious: we never see threat numbers (unless you use addons like Omen), and so it can be hard to keep track of what’s going on.

But we do see how much damage we’re doing, in the combat log or in floating combat text. So why not boost tank damage to (say) 80% of a DPS class’s damage? The threat modification auras will boost that 80% damage to 116% threat, again as compared to a DPS class. This will let the tanks stay on top of the threat list, without having to work with too many unnatural +threat abilities. They can just stick to trying to hit things as hard as possible, and rely on their +threat stances/forms/presences/buffs to keep the big ugly guy focused on them. And finally they’ll be contributing some serious damage to the raid, and should be able to solo decently. In fact, Prot is currently the highest-DPS Warrior spec in the beta, but that should be considered a bug, and Ghostcrawler has said they’ll be rebalancing. Still, expect tank DPS to be very much higher than it currently is.

Finally, this could help simplify itemization. To gain more threat as a tank, just pick up some stats that help DPS (AP, crit, hit, etc.). It’s been that way in BC to a certain extent, but the unique mechanics of tanks have given some stats, like Expertise, more weight than they usually have. Of course, many tanking items are still going to be unsuitable for DPS classes due to the presence of mitigation stats like extra armor, defense, shield block, etc., so this won’t help with Blizzard’s apparent goal to homogenize itemization, but it will mean tanking items, and tanking talents, can help tanks do more damage everywhere.

Edit: I would like to clarify that some of the above is speculation and extrapolation based on what Blizzard has said and what I’ve observed in the beta so far. All I know for sure is that they want to “get away more from +threat abilities,” raise tank DPS, and simplify itemization.

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