Posts with tag 2010

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Encrypted Text for assassination, combat and subtlety rogues. Chase Christian will be your guide to the world of shadows every Wednesday. Feel free to email me with any questions or article suggestions you'd like to see covered here, like how to sneak around wearing a gaudy sweater.

With 2010 fading fast, rogues apprehensively looked forward to Cataclysm and how it would shape 2011. We were the crowned kings of Icecrown Citadel, with armor penetration and attack power as our top stats and both assassination and combat battling for first place. Mutilate rogues still tied down by Hunger for Blood, and combat rogues were spamming Blade Flurry on cooldown for the attack speed increase.

Looking back, we have grown since Wrath. Each of the rogue specs has evolved and found a niche, and even subtlety can make a reasonable claim for a raid spot now. With the massive talent system revamp, the developers struggled initially to balance each spec against the others. Rogues entered into 2011 and Cataclysm with a whimper, as the loss of armor penetration and the conversion of attack power to agility was not as smooth as Blizzard would have hoped.

Bashiok has confirmed that Blizzard is anticipating emailing out BlizzCon ticket barcodes next week. If you were lucky enough to have bought BlizzCon tickets, watch your email and make sure nothing gets lodged in the spam filter.

Your BlizzCon ticket barcode is required, along with a photo ID, to get into the show and pick up your badge. It is important to print out the barcode before you leave for Anaheim and bring it with you for registration.

Bashiok -- Re: Emailed Blizzcon Tickets

None have gone out yet. We're anticipating them to begin going out early next week.

source

Robin Torres writes WoW, Casually for the player with limited playtime. Of course, you people with lots of playtime can read this too, but you may get annoyed by the fact that we are unashamed, even proud, of the fact that beating WoW isn't our highest priority. Take solace in the fact that your gear is better than ours, but if that doesn't work, remember that we outnumber you. Not that that's a threat, after all, we don't have time to do anything about it. But if WoW were a democracy, we'd win.

The problem with writing these year end posts for WoW is the tendency for Blizzard to make huge changes at the end of the year, altering everything. Whether it's a new expansion like Wrath of the Lich King or Patch 3.3, it's hard to remember what the game was like the previous 3/4 of the year. It's not that we didn't have a good time before the big year end events, but the game becomes so different, what we did before is irrelevant.

This year, hopefully by or during the summer, we'll be getting another expansion -- only this will literally change everything. It's like we'll be getting WoW II, only without having to give up our stuff/contacts/accounts and start fresh in a new game. So let's take a look backward and forward at some of the main aspects of the game as it affects those of us with limited playtime, like we were the two-faced god this month is named after.

It's a new year and that means another opportunity to play oracle and figure out what Blizzard's plans are for 2010. BlizzPlanet has gone ahead and tossed out some of their ideas on what will happen for BlizzCon this year, laying out their predictions and even speculating on the event date. As you might know, there was a bit of confusion stemming from supposed leaked information that pointed to BlizzCon 2010 happening in Las Vegas in July. That didn't go down so well with Blizzard, and the Las Vegas convention center later retracted its statements.

BlizzPlanet points out, quite logically, that Blizzard probably wasn't too thrilled with that. Even if they had planned to do it in Las Vegas, that kind of public relations misstep is a deal breaker. Besides, Eldorian from BlizzPlanet applies simple, sound logic to his sleuthing work and explains that examining the Anaheim Convention Center's Calendar of Events reveals an odd, blank date on the weekend of August 20-21, yet almost all the weekends of the venue are already booked. With Blizzard being the secretive bunch that they are, he figures those blank dates actually correspond with this year's BlizzCon event. It's a pretty cool theory. Read the rest of their predictions as well as a few of our own guesses after the jump.

Happy New Year everyone! 2009 is behind us and we now have 2010 to look forward to. This year, we'll be anticipating Cataclysm to come out (but after we take down Arthas). Speaking of goals, were you able to fulfill the personal achievements you set out in 2009? Maybe it was to go after the Violet Proto-Drake. Or it could've been to join a raiding guild and see end game content. Perhaps it was to kill Arthas (which none of us have done yet, to be fair).

For myself, I set out a goal to exceed 7000 achievement points. I managed to score about 7400.

Oh, another important resolution? I'm still playing the game and having fun on my priest! I didn't think I had it in me to go another year but I did! I still have that Inner Fire burning within me, I suppose.

Here's my list of resolutions for 2010:

• Take down Arthas (on Heroic difficulty)
• Get the Loremaster achievement
• Earn (and hold onto) more than 10000 gold
• Finish getting my druid to 80
• Start a pure DPS class and at least get it to 40 (Mage? Warlock?)

What about you? What do you resolve to do in 2010?

The World of Warcraft has always had amazing fan art. Looking through the fan art gallery, it's hard not to get blown away by the talent the community has and their passion for drawing Blizzard properties. This year, the folks in Irvine decided to celebrate all that talent and passion by holding a contest for the artistically-inclined. Zarhym invites artists over at the official forums to contribute to the Holiday Fan Art Calendar Contest.

The idea is to create a piece of World of Warcraft art that sets the tone for a particular month based on the in-game holidays. Artists can choose to depict scenes from or situations inspired by events from the Lunar Festival, Love Is in the Air, Noblegarden, Children's Week, Midsummer Fire Festival, Pirate's Day, Brewfest, Harvest Festival, Hallow's End, Day of the Dead, Pilgrim's Bounty, Feast of Winter Veil, all the way to New Year's Eve. Winners will be featured in the 2011 Official World of Warcraft Calendar as well as win a set of 2010 wall, daily, and mini calendars.

One grand prize winner will also get to take home a Wacom Cintiq 12WX, the pen-on-screen drawing tool that some of Blizzard's own artists use. Additionally, the grand prize winner will also have his or her work featured in the official World of Warcraft magazine. Deadline for submissions is on February 8, 2010. As always, be sure to read the fine print if you're eligible!

Activision-Blizzard held their second quarter conference call yesterday, and in addition to addressing the Starcraft II delay, both Mike Morhaime and Activision CEO Bobby Kotick shared some insight into what the revamped Battle.net will be like. The brand new system (which is currently up and working, albeit in a very skeleton form so far) will have "social networking features, cross-game communication, [and] unified account management," in addition to features that will let players "share experiences" with each other online (we'd presume that means things like screenshot galleries and leaderboards, but who knows?). Kotick also spoke up, and compared the service to that other popular online community, Xbox Live.

Blizzard is still saying the new Battle.net will come in conjunction with the new Starcraft, so we'll have to keep an eye out for them both in the first half of 2010. It'll be interesting to see what other features Blizzard adds in, and exactly what form features like "cross-game communication" take -- do they mean actual in-game messaging across games, or just status updates and messages on a social network? Kotick's comparison to Xbox Live raises some questions, too, as that's a much wider service than you'd think Battle.net would be. But then again, the guy's a CEO, and all CEOs have a tendency to overestimate exactly what their company is doing. Like most of Blizzard's upcoming releases, we'll have to wait and see on Battle.net.

In an official press release, Blizzard announced today that StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, the first installment of the Starcraft II trilogy, previously indicated to be released in the last quarter of this year, is delayed to the first half of 2010.

The release cited the massive amount of work necessary to overhaul Blizzard's online matchmaking service, Battle.net, as the main culprit for the delay. Since the new BNet will be part of every new Blizzard game from here on in -- including World of Warcraft, as players with BNet accounts have seen -- it's vital that the service be working properly before the game's release.

StarCraft II was never officially dated -- only an on-the-sly indication -- and multiple financial sites have reported the now-official release date as the first half of 2010 following this announcement and Activision-Blizzard's quarterly financial report.

What does this mean for the WoW player? Well, it means that if you were expecting the focus of BlizzCon, or one of the focuses of BlizzCon, to be a StarCraft II release date, you'd be incorrect.

Gives you pause when you consider what else they could be announcing instead, eh?

Patch 2.0.10 is now available for download. The patch notes look exactly like the last set of PTR notes, except without any mage nerf -- which I guess is to say they look exactly like the set of PTR notes before last. No word on whether the mage nerf was actually reversed or just inadvertently left out of the patch notes again, but stay posted. Full patch notes after the cut; let me know if you see a change I missed.

Update: That didn't take long. Looks like the mage nerf is in:

The chance Frozen effects are broken when the target is critically struck by a spell has been increased.

This should only affect Frozen targets that are hit with a spell crit; the Frozen effect can be broken by a spell crit from any player, not just the player that created the Frozen effect. However, please keep in mind that this is already how the game currently works. Only the chance of the Frozen effect being broken has been changed; the types of attacks that can break the Frozen effect will not be changed.

It is still possible to score Frostbolt followed by Ice Lance on a frozen target and get double crit, however the situation will still be closely monitored and may be adjusted in the future.

We have a couple items of note from Tseric as regards everyone's favorite hybrid classes that don't start with D. First off, Tseric defines a Paladin's role as:

A healing/tank hybrid. Every class needs some capacity to deal damage, as that is the primary component for the solo game, but Paladins have always placed fairly low on the damage spectrum.

Rogues define the baseline measurement and, on average, all classes fall below that baseline. Now, in certain cases some classes may exceed that baseline, whether they be a Mage in a particular raid encounter or a Fury Warrior having a good run in a BG, but on average that is the way damage is arranged.

Burst damage and big crits are harder to control and design from a development perspective, due to the number of random or unpredictable elements in any formula. Therefore, crit-based abilities and burst damage tends to see more fine tuning and tweaking than sustainable damage.

As far as tanking and healing, the Paladin has been given plenty of tools for healing and threat gain/management.

I didn't actually know that Rogues were meant to be top damage, though that makes sense given that they're the most likely class to take damage in a party situation (besides the tank, of course).

Here's an interesting bit of devil's advocacy for you. It seems that the best way to get what you want for your class is to hold a riot. Observe:

First, nerfs are announced to the priest class that hit Vampiric Embrace and Prayer of Mending hard.

Then, priests riot across the servers, as Blizzard promises to ban those involved.

But a few days later, priests profit, and un-nerfs appear in the patch.

The Inciter (Time for fun!) inside me says the evidence is clear: riots are how you get your way. Of course I'm sure that's not the message Blizzard wanted to send (has anyone heard of any major bans that went down because of the priest ingame and forum riots?), but, as Relmstein hints, the evidence kind of speaks for itself.

I should point out that priests didn't completely get what they want-- Vampiric Embrace, a staple of facemelting, is still getting a fairly harsh nerf, and PoM is still feeling that cooldown. But it's not nearly as bad, and while I'm sure Blizzard will claim the changes came down as a result of playtesting, it makes you wonder. I don't condone rioting or any kind of griefing, but as I said, this is devil's advocacy. Maybe the only conclusion Blizzard should take from this is simply to not release the patch notes (as they would say) until they're done.