Patch 5.3 interview with Ghostcrawler
Mystery of the Unborn Val'kyr
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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsThe Queue: I was right edition
by Mathew McCurley 
Oct 30th 2010 at 2:00PM
Welp. Pack your bags, ladies and gentlemen, I was right. Straight from the woman herself. Victory dance.
Cetha asked:
Has there been any mention on the size of the download if you get the digital copy of Cata? I'm trying to figure out if it would just be easier to get the discs and install it than to try and download another 16GB of info again, which didn't go so well the last time.
After doing the little trick to grab the pre-download preorder data, I checked to see the amount of data actually coming in. It was somewhere around 700mb, so I'm assuming that much plus whatever they patch in after the game goes gold.
Bourne asked:
How do I go about finding a girlfriend who also plays WoW?
Trade chat.
Moghar asked:
A lore question. I just finished reading Arthas: Rise of the Lich King, and despite the fact that 90% of the novel is retelling the story of Warcraft 3, in the epilogue, Arthas backstabbed Ner'Zhul and ... that's it ... Does this mean that Arthas is (was) the one calling the shots for the Scourge all these years of WoW?
Yes, Arthas took complete control and ended Ner'Zhul's influence. The Arthas side of the Lich King won out completely, and Ner'Zhul's story is over.
steelvoltage asked:
I heard a rumor that Blizzard is going to make it so epic (purple) items are much rarer. Is this true?
Second, there's been a lot of talk going around that instances are going to be so much harder and you will need to learn to crowd control. I played during vanilla and The Burning Crusade so I know how to do that. It wasn't hard, you just had to pay attention. However, I remember when Wrath launched, heroic dungeons were hard then too. Would it be safe to say that they are going to be "hard" because of epic quality gear not going to being readily available, or is it because Blizzard is making them more a challenge gameplay-wise? Will we be steamrolling over the dungeons in a year or so just as we are now?
Gear is a huge factor in difficulty, and as we progress through the expansion, heroics and dungeons will become easier just by virtue of better gear. That will always happen. However, as to your first question, while epics are becoming rarer and really only available in the first tier of raiding and up, the heroic blues you get will still be heroic-quality loot. Their color is just changing to give the purple color meaning again.
As for whether dungeons and heroics are harder because of gear or mechanics, it's a lot of both. The mechanics are more difficult and less forgiving, as well as the fact that crowd control and really paying attention are vital. Pickup groups will have a rougher time, I'd say. So yeah, things are getting harder, and people are going to have to relearn a lot of what was forgotten during the Wrath of the Lich King days. Heroic dungeons were difficult in Wrath when we first tackled them, but the AoE mentality combined with the lack of crowd control and more forgiving scenarios made it so plowing through the content went from hard to easy in too few steps.
Have questions about the World of Warcraft? The WoW Insider crew is here with The Queue, our daily Q&A column. Leave your questions in the comments, and we'll do our best to answer 'em!Filed under: The Queue
Reader Comments (Page 5 of 9)
Jawn Oct 30th 2010 2:23PM
"It wasn't hard, you just had to pay attention. "
Thing is, you misunderestimate (yes, i did that on purpose) the capacity or willingness of many players to pay attention. That will probably be the hardest thing, is getting people to pay attention.
(Personally, i don't think it's a 'capability' issue, as much as it is a 'willingness' issue.)
Artificial Oct 30th 2010 6:55PM
tl;dr
Boocat Oct 30th 2010 2:24PM
I love the fact that Purple wil have meaning again. IMO, in WotLK all gear that you buy should have been all Blues and anything that drops of the bosses should be all Purple.
matt Oct 30th 2010 5:16PM
you do realize that you will be able to purchase t11 raid gear by grinding heroics once 4.1 drops. Purple means raiding, but only for the first patch of the expansion. Which is exactly as it should be. Who wants to run a guildie's alt through old raids in order to get them in to a empty spot in your roster??
Boobah Oct 30th 2010 6:39PM
You're going to be able to purchase t11 gear from running you daily heroics as soon as you can make it to 85. Admittedly, you can't go for the hours on end grind-a-thon (or at least, one certainly hopes you don't have quite that much trouble once you're diving into the heroics.), but it's no less a grind for all that.
Jack Miles Oct 30th 2010 2:25PM
"How do I go about finding a girlfriend who also plays WoW?
Trade chat."
That was mean.
tamillerkt Oct 30th 2010 2:32PM
Re: finding girlfriend/boyfriend who plays WoW
CL is no good. Not enough WoW players bother looking through it and combing through all the spambots. For women, the amount of skeezy guys is overwhelming.
Meetup.com might find you some people, but it seems that only a very small fraction of WoW players think to look there.
Other gamer/geek dating websites look good on the outside but don't have enough people actually using them.
Conclusion: wowinsider should set something up for this, since this is where all the WoW players ARE going. :)
Vogie Oct 30th 2010 3:16PM
Easiest way to find a GF who plays wow is to not look for that specifically.
Before I met the woman who would eventually become my wife, she played the Final Fantasy MMO. We met, and when she found out that I played a MMORPG, she wanted to play too. It isn't because she played WoW specifically that we clicked in that sense, but because she's generally interested in that vague sort of thing.
That's what you need to look for - general interest. Once general interest is established, you should show that you're committed to something, and that goes both ways. I'm not a person with a lot of free time, so I really only play WoW, with a bit of TF2 for the LAN parties my friends & I would put on, as well as some other oldschool Blizzard games... and I've been playing for a while, I enjoy it, and I've never "cheated" on WoW with another similar game.
That sounds really dumb, but it makes sense when you think about it. A person is a continuous creature, so if the girl you find is generally interested in WoW, but doesn't really commit to it, the likelyhood that your relationship will pass "general interest" is fairly slim. And it's not just WoW...
If a person jumps around to whatever piques their interest at the moment, in all aspects of their life, then the likelyhood that they will commit to a Long-term game like WoW is basically zero. You don't log in at level 85 and roflpwn teh lootz, you have to work to get your character up, invest time in getting gear. Just like you won't find a girl who, when bought a cup of coffee, will instantly become your wife of several years.
Showing her that you're willing to work on something, even a pile of polygons on a California-based server, for a long time means something to women.
Did my wife play with me since I got her that battlechest for the Christmas after we had met? Yes. Sure, she took time off for the first couple months of Grad school, but she came back once the holidays starting coming. She isn't much by way of a hardcore player - She sticks to her 2 toons, a 74 enh shaman with a 56 mage trailing, but it helps that I'm an Altoholic that can play alongside any toon she did have. She enjoys the solo aspect of the game, while I'm sold on the group aspects - dungeoning & raiding - but that doesn't mean we enjoy those "wow dates" less.
Iano Oct 30th 2010 4:12PM
First, Find good girl. Good Girl > Wow Girl.
I found miy wife before I started playing WoW- she's someone I knew since Grade School, we went on a few dates and never really hit it off- then I went abroad for a while, came back, and WHAM!
:)
She's my dear sweetheart. I asked her once if she'd try WoW with me if I ever did, so I wouldn't get TOO addicted, and so we could try it together and see if we enjoyed it. A couple months later, we got trial accounts. When it expired, we decided to try for a month (well, I did, she was interested but not enamored). Then it let me do a Burning Crusade Trial- She experimented with Draenei, and the rest is history. She's awesome. She's been way more into it than me most of the time, getting into the third-from-the-top raiding guild on our server and dragging me into raiding (I had sworn not to get involved, for addiction fears again. X) )
Find good girl. Date good girl. Explore interests of good girl. Do not make WoW prerequisite, and never, NEVER make her feel that WoW is more important to you than her, especially in the beginning of a relationship- I've seen tons of girls poisoned against it forever for this reason.
I guess the crux of my advice is to go meet girls, go on dates, and put WoW on the backburner while you do this. Invite Girl to play with you eventually.
As for characteristics to look for- any video games. Agreed with above poster there- if she enjoys video games, she'll probably enjoy playing WoW with you. My wife really like Mario brothers, and I thought, "Does that even count as a video game in this sense?!" XD (Note: DID NOT SAY IT :) ) But it has translated into something sexy and awesome. :)
MikeLive Oct 30th 2010 4:51PM
My girlfriend oddly doesn't play WoW (yet, she owns a copy just hasn't activated it yet, likely will once The Shattering drops), but she's a huge D&D nerd so it's all good :)
Jorges Oct 30th 2010 5:13PM
Like some have already said, find a good girl first. It doesn't really matter if she plays or not. You can interest her later, and she will at least try out the game. Since she really likes you there's a very high chance that she like the game too, and she'll hook up.
But if she doesn't, don't force it into her. You also have to be the good guy and like her the way she is.
Me? I found myself a pretty little rocker girl. Met her in Myspace 5 years ago. Last 27th it was our 3rd anniversary together. And yes, she plays the game. She has a hunter and she is a pretty good raider. I couldn't be happier :)
dodgeballer2005 Oct 30th 2010 5:15PM
If you want to get a girlfriend, let them know who's boss. Fire them up with a little chit-chat. Then soon enough you'll have them eating outta your hands.
Jack Miles Oct 30th 2010 2:28PM
An easy way to keep heroics hard after people gear up is to not force raiders to go there for their badges. That does make it difficult getting a group late game, but I suppose the LFG tool will take care of that, and the time everyone's had by then to learn the mechanics will take care of the problems (some of the problems) with pugs.
Luckily, they plan to make it so the cap for points can be reached through raiding alone, so dungeons will only be visited by people gear-appropriate.
Vogie Oct 30th 2010 3:24PM
I disagree. If that was the case, then Raiders would slowly run out of things to do. Heroics are an easy way to get around that.
What would be easier still is to reuse old content for badge runners. After one gets the Cataclysm version of "Champion of the frozen wastes" (i.e., the I did it all achievement) and has a High enough GS, I think they should open up Epic/Legendary/Insane mode instances. Epic instances drop no loot above blue-quality, but more badges, and are scaled-up-to-87-elite versions of any instance, from AC to ZF, that is chosen randomly, and you only get one Epic instance a day.
That would be FUN.
MikeLive Oct 30th 2010 4:57PM
I had a similar idea to this before. Heroic Mode of all 5-mans should scale to the level cap and drop badges and money appropriate, but not any different loot than the level cap they were designed for. Doing your first Heroic of the day would only be amongst current expansion dungeons, but any further should be randomly selected out of everything in the game. Older raids should also be split up and scaled and appear in the same manner, keeping the content relevant (they would still be accessible in original form - supposing they weren't repurposed like Zul'Gurub anyway - by physically going there).
Tabasa Oct 30th 2010 5:17PM
Taking that in a slightly different direction, it'd be nice to see "sliding scale" of difficulty for dungeons.
As in, you have the heroic version the first tier. Once the raiding tier has gone up, it adds a third difficulty level. Repeat each tier.
It doesn't even need to be anything more complicated than just upping mob health and damage a bit more each difficulty "level". I'd honestly love to see this even without any additional reward involved, but it could toss a few extra point in for bosses each level, I suppose.
Muse Oct 30th 2010 6:06PM
This is sort of what they've done. Someone who raids every Cata raid is going to hit their "cap" for points for the week, giving them no reason to go to the heroics, while people who aren't raiding will have a much higher margin to reach the cap.
Bronwyn Oct 30th 2010 7:42PM
I disagree, part of the point of having these rewards for running heroics is to keep raiders wanting to actually keep doing the dungeons, especially since it can be really difficult to gear up new characters if no one is running the content. It's like the problem you used to have if you missed a tier of raiding; you need gear to get current, but you can't find groups for the stuff you need gear from.
Lochlorien Oct 30th 2010 2:32PM
Since patch.4.0.1 was released and druids lost their tree forms, being a 30 sec buff now. How do you explain Applebough? He's always in tree form sitting in Dalaran selling fruit. Shouldn't his tree form have the same cool downs and duration as the rest of us?
razion Oct 30th 2010 2:35PM
Dalaran isn't so racist as to not allow Ents to sell their goods in their glorious city. Ents need to make a living, too!