Posts with tag blue-post

One of the most intriguing non-story tidbits to come out of the recent flood of patch 4.3 news is the fact that tier 13 will not be purchasable with valor points. If you want your tier 13 set, you will have to raid for it. Zarhym has clarified how this will all work in a forum post. Here's the juicy stuff:

• All pieces will drop from multi-class set tokens. Ten-man raids will see a slight buff to drop rates to compensate for the lack of purchasable tier pieces.
• Valor point gear will feature a wider array of gear for a wider array of slots, meant both for people who are having trouble with token drops and for people who don't raid at all.
• There will be three tier 13 sets for each class: Looking For Raid level, normal level, and heroic level. Each will have a different item level, but you'll be able to mix and match pieces from all three sets for your set bonuses as needed.

For the complete text of Zarhym's post, check after the break.

Players have remarked on the changing difficulty and accessibility of WoW (as well as the MMO genre in general) over the years. What once was a raiding environment based on the grueling EverQuest model has evolved into a new type of accessible/challenging hybrid. One of these discussion posts on the forums has been addressed by Bashiok, who gave quite the answer to players who long for the days of grueling grinds and oppressive content.

Several players and Community Manager Lylirra shared some discussion today on the official World of Warcraft forums about the cooldowns of novelty items crafted through the archaeology profession.

In the thread, the original poster suggested that the cooldowns of certain novelty items were too long in comparison to others and that Blizzard should consider fixing the discrepancies. The poster used Pendant of the Scarab Storm and Bones of Transformation as an example, noting that both items have a vanity effect that lasts 20 seconds but a cooldown difference of 90 minutes.

Lylirra responded, explaining that the cooldowns, though seemingly random, were chosen with specific issues in mind. She explains that with the Pendant of the Scarab Storm specifically, developers were concerned that the item's effect might strain certain players' computers.

Archaeology Items' Cooldowns

The current cooldown was chosen deliberately, but I can see why you might think otherwise (100 minutes is kind of strange for a cooldown time).

Anyway, summoning a harem of scarabs can be pretty taxing on some systems, so there were some initial concerns about putting the pendant on a short cooldown. Based on the feedback we've received, though, we're looking into reducing it. We agree that the effect is pretty cool and would be nice to use it more frequently.

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Personally, a little lore logic behind the items might be nice as well. How is it that my character can summon a god every 3 minutes, but it takes 10 minutes to round up some sassy dwarven ladies?

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Community Manager Zarhym's list of Cataclysm hotfixes has received yet another update Dec. 27. I have to admit, my heart skipped a beat when I first saw today's list. Is that a Tol Barad fix? Be still, my beating heart! Has Blizzard finally -- Wait. Never mind. The fix won't really fix anything. Still, maybe it's a sign Blizzard's noticed how broken the zone is. Here's the fix, along with a few other interesting changes:

• Winning as an attacker in Tol Barad now rewards players with 1,800 honor points, up from 180. Winning as a defender still rewards players with 180 honor points.
• Vashj'ir archaeology dig sites no longer unlock for players. They felt too punishing without additional benefits compared to low-level sites and were much more difficult to obtain artifacts in due to the way Vashj'ir navigation works.
• Gyreworms, Enormous Gyreworms, and Gorged Gyreworms no longer drop money or elite-level loot.

For a complete list of the latest hotfixes, check after the break.

Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street has posted the blog post I think most of us have been waiting for ever since Cataclysm went live. It features a summary of where the dev team sees the PvE and PvP games at this point, including some analysis of various classes and specs, and some planned changes for those specs that are underperforming and overperforming.

In PvE, Ghostcrawler mentions that Blizzard is mostly happy with the tank classes and notes that while healers do have it a bit hard, this is intentional. Heroics are meant to be a challenge. As for DPS, he offered that some classes, such as arcane mages and marksman and beast mastery hunters, are too low in their damage, while others, such as shadow priests and fire and frost mages, are being watched closely before final judgment is made on their numbers.

In PvP, Ghostcrawler says Blizzard is satisfied with the decreased emphasis on healing prevention and burst damage. Crowd control and dispel mechanics, especially offensive dispels, may see some PvP nerfs, and priests will specifically be getting some PvP buffs.

Stats also got some mention. A lot of stats are being neglected by some classes, and the dev team wants to fix this. Mastery will be either buffed or completely revamped for many specs, such as unholy death knights and retribution paladins. Haste may be made to scale with more attacks, such as Lacerate, Slam, and Steady Shot, in order to make the stat more desirable to certain specs.

Check after the break for the complete text of Ghostcrawler's post, including a list of specifically planned (but not finalized) class changes for future patches.

Hey everyone, having fun in those heroics yet? In my own personal (PUG) experiences, things go wrong far more often than they go right. While healer longevity is a major issue, effective crowd control and threat management is growing to be another. Some tanks are just ill-equipped to handle generating threat on supercharged mobs, and some DPSers are just unable to understand the basic rules of threat -- or ignore those rules entirely.

Perhaps it's timely, then, that Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street posted a blog entry about Blizzard's philosophy with regard to threat. The piece is something of a follow up to his previous blog entry on Vengeance and threat. A few of the key takeaways of his latest post include:

Threat Needs to Matter

"We don't think it's too much to ask for DPS and healers to wait a couple of GCDs for the tank to get the enemy under control ..."

"... if someone is nuking or cleaving a random target on a group pull instead of assisting the tank, that's not the tank's fault."

"... overall, we'd like to present threat better since we're asking you to take it seriously in the PvE game."

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The post, "Threat Needs to Matter," is worth reading regardless of whether you're a tank or not. The full text is after the break.

Here's a bit of sad news for all WoW players not lucky enough to live on the west coast: Blizzard CM Bashiok has announced that the official Cataclysm start time for all North American servers will be Dec. 7 at midnight PST. This will include servers on other time zones. So, sorry eastern time people. You may be able to pick up your copies of the game at midnight EST, but you'll have to wait a few hours for the west coast to catch up before you play.

The full announcement is as follows:

Bashiok

Wondering exactly what time you'll be able to begin playing your goblin or worgen or making your way to level 85? On all North American realms, World of Warcraft players who upgrade to Cataclysm will be able to begin experiencing the new content at 12 a.m. Pacific Standard Time (3 a.m. Eastern Standard Time) on December 7, whether they purchase the digital download through Battle.net or buy a physical retail boxed version in stores. Players will not be able to access Cataclysm expansion content prior to 12 a.m. PST, regardless of how they upgrade or what time zone they're located in.

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World of Warcraft: Cataclysm will destroy Azeroth as we know it; nothing will be the same! In WoW Insider's Guide to Cataclysm, you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion (available Dec. 7, 2010), from brand new races to revamped quests and zones. Visit our Cataclysm news category for the most recent posts having to do with the Cataclysm expansion.

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Fear not, my fellow druids; your feral analysis post is going live later tonight, and resto sometime tomorrow. Daniel Whitcomb and I have been talking about the incoming changes to the spec, and particularly the decision to change the tree of life from a constant form into a cooldown. I honestly didn't know how to feel about it at first. But before we get to that, Ghostcrawler stayed up hellaciously late last night to answer questions from druid players about the Cataclysm changes currently planned, and we've collected all of them here for you.

A lot of us lore nerds have been wanting it for a long time, and now we have it: An official place to discuss the lore of the Warcraft universe. Of course, it's technically called the Story Forum, and one of the blue stickies on the forum suggests that this forum is meant to focus on "the publishing division" of Blizzard's creative development (i.e., the novels and manga). Then again, the forum's main welcome sticky states that the forum is for discussing the stories of Warcraft "as told in-game and through the novels, manga, comics, and short stories that Blizzard publishes." So in theory the exact nature of the forum could be considered a bit iffy.

Still, I'm going to go ahead and go by the welcome message and declare it a lore forum. No longer will we have to go searching through pages and pages of flames, rants, and class balance whines to find the lore-based flames, rants, and Garrosh vs. Varian debate threads. Nethaera also revealed that the publishing division plans to look at the Forum discussions to get an idea of what people like and don't like about Warcraft's stories, so if you've been writing an epic rant about Med'an or Rhonin, you may finally have the outlet you've always wanted. You can find the forum here.

If you need extra ammunition before jumping into the discussion yourself, be sure to check out our lore guide, as well as past entries of our Know Your Lore column.

After the jump, you can check out the forum welcome message, as well as some additional words from Nethaera on Blizzard's Creative Development Team and lore resources.

A heads-up for our Mac users, although there's a good chance you've already been painfully aware of this if you play on one of the affected systems -- patch 3.3.3 has been causing major issues for some PowerPC and Tiger users, which have (hopefully) been fixed by the mini-patch 3.3.3a.

S4d1K -- 3.3.3 Known Issues for Mac players

We are aware of 2 critical bugs that are affecting users with specific configurations.

#1 PowerPC G4/G5 users get disconnected after login.

#2 Users with a MacBook Pro GeForce 8600M and 10.4.11 crashes after entering the world.

We are very sorry and we are working on these issues and hope to fix them as soon as possible.


UPDATE 5:10pm:
We have a fix for both issues but it will require a client patch. We don't have an ETA for now.

UPDATE 3/24 12:15pm:
We are currently testing a patch. We want to make sure that we do not break the game for another group of people. We are doing everything to release this patch as soon as possible.

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The patch in question is (we think) 3.3.3a. With the patch, many of the affected users are now reporting that WoW is playable again, but while monitoring the official thread on the issue, it's apparent that a lot of players are still having problems. We had several people drop comments on Adam's earlier post on the mini-patch -- did 3.3.3a work for you?

Each day WoW.com will take you through all the blue posts and other Blizzard news from around the internet. From Ghostcrawler's latest posts to the lowdown on StarCraft II and Diablo III, we'll keep you informed.

Bornakk -- PvP to PvE Realm Conversion: Darrowmere

As part of our continued efforts to balance the World of Warcraft player population across all realms, we will be converting one of our lower-population PvP realms – Darrowmere -- to a Normal PvE realm. For players on Darrowmere, we will be offering Free Character Moves to alternate PvP realms both before and for several weeks after the conversion takes place. This will allow us to continue to support healthy communities on the realms and help new players transition easily into the community.

The conversion will take place on Tuesday, March 9, with the Character Moves opening on March 3 and lasting until April 6. Upon being converted to Normal PvE, Darrowmere will be given the "New Players" flag to ensure an influx of players over the coming weeks.

The following are the destination realms for Free Character Moves off of Darrowmere:
Alterac Mountains of the Nightfall battlegroup is an Eastern time zone realm
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/board.html?sid=1&forumId=68891

Auchindoun of the Retaliation battlegroup is an Eastern time zone realm
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/board.html?forumId=75725&sid=1

Malorne of the Vengeance battlegroup is a Central time zone realm
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/board.html?forumId=11378&sid=1

Vashj of the Whirlwind battlegroup is a Pacific time zone realm
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/board.html?forumId=36015&sid=1

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Each day WoW.com will take you through all the blue posts and other Blizzard news from around the internet. From Ghostcrawler's latest posts to the lowdown on StarCraft II and Diablo III, we'll keep you informed.

For a complete roundup of all the blue posts related to the major Cataclysm stat and system changes, check out our Daily Blues: Special Cataclysm Report.

Rolling Restarts Tuesday

We will be performing rolling restarts on Tuesday, March 2, beginning at 5:00 AM PST for all US realms and 12:00 AM PST for Oceanic realms. Downtime for each realm is expected to be minimal.

Thank you for your patience.

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Ghostcrawler

Ghostcrawler has been known to say he doesn't like his quotes being taken out of context, but in this case, how could I resist?

Ghostcrawler -- MW2?

I was pwned. Headshot.

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Now on to the real stuff...

Ghostcrawler -- Healer's stressful job

But the stress is why it's fun!

Here is the best advice I can give someone who feels overwhelmed. Your job isn't to keep everyone at 100%. Your job is to keep anyone from hitting 0%. If someone's hurt, but stable, then they may not need your attention right away. You're the medic, so you need to practice triage. There will be enough breaks to get those folks who aren't at 100% back up there at some point.

This is the part where focusing on unit frames to the exclusion of all else can get you in trouble. As you start to really learn the fights, you tend to get a feeling for when the damage is coming. If the boss is going to do a big AE pulse soon, then try and get everyone up quickly. If the hunter pulled aggro and got hit, but has since feigned, then she's probably okay for a bit.

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Each day WoW.com will take you through all the blue posts and other Blizzard news from around the internet. From Ghostcrawler's latest posts to the latest news on StarCraft II and Diablo III, we'll keep you informed.

Welcome to a new daily column at WoW.com! In this column we'll rounding up all the blue posts and other Blizzard news and quotes from around the internet. We'll be publishing this every night, and as long as Blizzard is posting, you'll hear it here at the end of the day, in a nice and handy post.

While the column will be 90% WoW, 10% of it or so will also be about other Blizzard games. We realize a whole lot of you (nearly all of you?) are at least passively interested in StarCraft II and other Blizzard games, and we hope we can keep you apprised as necessary about all that news as well.

Ghostcrawler

Ghostcrawler -- Immolate

The intent of the Immolate buff was to buff Destro.

This is one of those situations where you can't just say that Immolate is used by Demo so it buffs Demo too. It does. But it buffs Destro a lot more because Destro gets so much more benefit from Fire spells.

If you think this is not the case, please provide us some evidence using math, simulations, target dummy parses or whatever.

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Ghostcrawler -- Cataclysm Gear Changes Information

We're working on a large forum post to go step by step with how some of the existing gear will be changing.

Overall, we want everyone's damage, healing and tanking to stay about the same, but given that talent trees are changing at the same time as gear, it's going to take some adjustment.

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