Today has been a busy day around WoW Insider HQ (we actually have a virtual HQ where we sit around and work with each other; often we are served milk and cookies). So The Queue is coming to you a bit later than normal. We've seen the surprise announcement of BlizzCon 2009 come across our desk today, a good preview of Ulduar, PTR 3.1 testing information, and the opening of the arena tournament registration. Now all we need is the actual PTR to go live. Come on Ghostcrawler... you know you wanna push that live button...

Drew M. asked...

"Do heals crit?"

Yup! This is a good example of a basic question that if one person asks, probably a dozen more are wondering too. So no mean comments about Drew's question or you'll suffer the Wrath of the Adam King (I am a king, don't doubt my power, for reals).

Basically, everything that can cause damage or healing has a chance to induce a critical effect (save for a few heal-over-time and damage-over-time spells). Think of hitting a mob with a dagger. Occasionally you're going to get a critical strike and do a lot more damage. The same thing applies to healing. Whether or not the damage or heal will be critical depends on a roll of the virtual dice. If you roll a certain number, then the effect is critical. The magic numbers that make an effect critical are listed on the attack table, which you can modify by improving things like critical strike rating, hit rating, etc... Here's some good WoWWiki pages with additional information:

• Healing comparison
• Critical strike
• Spell critical strike
• Combat rating system
• Attack table
  

We'll look at covering attack tables in a more detailed future post.

Keith asked...

"Do you know what patch 3.3 will have for the Ashbringer story line?"

Unfortunately we don't. There's speculation that it will be concluded in 3.3, but we really don't know what's in the mind of Metzen and all his Blizzard colleagues. For all we know, the Ashbringer tale could be brought to an end in patch 3.1.

Alex asked...

"When you're saved to 25-man Naxxramas, are you also saved to the 10-man?"

Nope! You're free to do both the 10-man and 25-man versions during the same reset period (which runs from Tuesday to the following Monday). This may change for future instances, but I doubt it. Blizzard seems to really like the way 10-man and 25-man instances complement each other.

Raidoted asked...

"This may not be an easily answerable question, but does Blizzard plan on making Find Treasure useful again anytime soon? I know that there are no treasure chests in Northrend, and that's fine and all, but I can think of a few dailies where it would be nice to have that particular talent active, especially since it's a racial talent for us Dwarves!"

Probably not. Blizzard really homogenized the racial talents with Wrath of the Lich King, and I would expect them to do something that would give one race a supreme advantage in questing over another race. A Dwarf running around doing a quest twice as fast because of a racial advantage seems to be too much when you look at Blizzard's past design philosophies.

Also, I think chests have gone away forever. I really don't expect to see them back anytime soon. They were a semi-random element that just lead to people farming and botting them. And since botting is bad, well, so are chests then.

Tags: 10-man, 25-man, ashbringer, attack-table, crit, featured, find-treasure, healing, naxxramas, patch-3.1, patch-3.3, wow-find-treasure, wow-patch-3.1, wow-patch-3.3, wowwiki

Filed under: The Queue