Posts with tag cataclysm

One of the most common complaints surrounding Cataclysm is the extremely linear nature of questing, both in the 1-to-60 experience and from 80 to 85. For levels 1 to 60, this linear nature almost works for me, largely because presumably new players heading through this content would like to do so as efficiently as possible. With a multitude of zones to choose from, the replay experience with Cataclysm isn't too bad -- particularly because it's really not that hard to level from 1 to 60 at the moment. And that's especially nice for new players trying to get the hang of the game.

However, when you hit level 80, there is one distinct path to follow to level 85, and each zone in that path has been carefully laid out. Quests are divided into hubs, and each hub must be completed in order to move on to the next. If you're taking an alt through these areas, you must replay through the same set of hubs and the same set of quests. If you're replaying several alts, this gets incredibly tiresome incredibly quickly.

Thankfully, we're about to say goodbye to that leveling model. Let's look at Mists, shall we? No spoilers, I promise!

Wrath of the Lich King ended on kind of a sour note for me, largely because I didn't get to participate in my guild's one and only 25-man heroic Lich King kill before Cataclysm launched. Part of the rankle was for personal reasons, but part of it was also that for me, that kill would have ended the expansion. Never mind that we didn't kill Halion on heroic -- that was filler content, as far as I was concerned. Wrath of the Lich King was all about the Lich King and seeing him die.

But really, it goes back farther than that. In vanilla, I had no idea what an expansion really was; my MMOG experience was limited to WoW, for the most part, with a brief dabble in City of Heroes. So terms like expansions didn't make any sense to me until a friend explained what it meant: a new game was coming, building off the game I was already playing. No, I didn't have to purchase it if I didn't want to, but I wouldn't be able to see any of the new stuff if I didn't. And then my friend showed me just a sampling of all the cool stuff to be seen in The Burning Crusade. A beta invite later, and I was thoroughly hooked.

But there wasn't an end to vanilla for me. One day, I was playing vanilla WoW; the next, I was tromping through the Dark Portal and headed to Outland.

The last of the leader short stories is now available on the official Warcraft website, and it was worth waiting for. Velen: Prophet's Lesson, written by Marc Hutcheson, focuses on Prophet Velen and Anduin Wyrnn, who began studying with Velen in the novel Wolfheart. Also featured is Vindicator Maraad, who not only made his appearance in game on the Alliance ship on Icecrown but has been featured in many other Warcraft products as well. Maraad isn't just a random draenei -- he's also Garona's uncle and has made an appearance in DC Unlimited's series of action figures.

Prophet's Lesson appears to take place just after the Cataclysm as the mortals of Azeroth struggle to recover from the devastation and put an end to Deathwing. The worgen are officially Alliance and Anduin is studying with Velen, so this definitely puts it after Wolfheart in the time line, but Anduin also mentions the rift between himself and his father, which means the story likely takes place before Varian Wrynn: Blood of our Fathers. In Prophet's Lesson, Anduin is studying with Velen as well as helping the draenei take care of sudden group of guests that grows larger by the day, human refugees from the Cataclysm who seek Velen's guidance.

Velen, however, is seeing no one but Prince Anduin -- and this hasn't gone unnoticed by the draenei who are no longer allowed to seek audience with the Prophet. But Anduin has one very pointed question for Prophet Velen: Why didn't he warn the world about the Cataclysm?

Hutcheson did a masterful job with Velen's character, shedding a little light (no pun intended) on what exactly the draenei have been up to during Cataclysm. You can read the full story on Blizzard's newly revamped Expanded Universe site.

The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how -- but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft.

What do we know about Mists of Pandaria? We've been told that the major conflict highlighted in this expansion will be between Alliance and Horde. We've also been told that this will be one of the bloodiest wars since the days of Warcraft II. We've been told that there will be consequences for our actions, and we were told when the expansion was announced at BlizzCon that the pandaren have something to teach us. So what's up with that? And what's up with the crazy map making a reappearance?

That's the funny thing -- it's all interconnected, possibly. Today we're going on a Tinfoil Hat trip through Mists of Pandaria to talk about my favorite crazy map, some theories on Azeroth, and why exactly Garrosh needs to be removed.

Today's Know Your Lore is a Tinfoil Hat edition, meaning the following is a look into what has gone before with pure speculation on how it happened and what is to come as a result. These speculations are merely theories and shouldn't be taken as fact or official lore.

Likely one of the most contentious things to come out of the Mists of Pandaria press event was the news that we do indeed have a final boss for the expansion -- and it's the current leader of the Horde, Garrosh Hellscream. Garrosh has been a figure in lore since The Burning Crusade led Horde players to Nagrand and introduced the younger Hellscream, an orc who had been raised thinking his father was the reason the orc race had been through so much suffering. This depressed him to the point that we players actually stepped up and took care of many of the problems surrounding the Mag'har village in an attempt to cheer him up.

But his true salvation came in the form of Warchief Thrall, who was not only gratified to find his grandmother alive and the name his mother and father intended for him, but happy to find the living descendant of one of his closest friends as well. It was Thrall's words that finally broke the stupor of shame and depression that Garrosh had been living with for his entire life. And it was Thrall who took Hellscream under his wing, away from Garadar and to a land he'd never before set eyes upon: Azeroth.

Is your guild level 25? Surprise, most guilds are -- or at least most guilds that have been up and running since the first days of Cataclysm are. The higher-end guilds or guilds with plenty of members pushed the leveling cap every week and managed to hit level 25 in a fairly short amount of time. Others with plenty of members followed soon after. In fact, as long as your guildmates were running dungeons on a daily basis and maybe indulging in some PvP or raiding, it was pretty easy to hit that daily cap.

However, there are plenty of guilds out there that were established later in the expansion, guilds with fewer members. And those members may be awfully tired of running the same heroics over and over by this point. At the beginning of the expansion, running those instances was all well and good -- they were new, interesting, and perhaps most importantly, they contained gear upgrades for just about anyone. However, we're at the end of the expansion. Most people have seen the heroics far too many times to count, not everyone is raiding, and there's a lot less activity from players in general. It's typical for that end-of-expansion lull to occur.

But when you're trying to get a guild to level 25, it's awfully hard to do when there's a daily XP limit in place. Is it perhaps time to remove the daily cap and let guilds level as they will?

If you're anywhere near as addicted to transmogrification as I am, you've likely been collecting gear and creating multiple sets ever since the feature was introduced. Likely, your bank is full of sets, and your void storage may very well be full of sets too. In the last post of the Cataclysm post-mortem series, Ghostcrawler (lead systems designer Greg Street) talked about what worked with the expansion as well as what didn't -- and transmogrification was firmly on the amazing feature list. According to Ghostcrawler, it opened an entirely new avenue of gameplay, and more and more players are jumping into old dungeons and raids looking for the perfect look for their characters.

But what transmogrification has really accomplished is that it's given us a way to customize our characters in a unique and profound way. Let's face it -- the character creation screen in WoW doesn't exactly have a ton of options to choose from. No matter how unique you think your character looks, in a game with millions of people playing, there are likely millions of players out there with exactly the same hairstyle and face choices. And with tier sets becoming so prevalent, particularly in Cataclysm, all the characters had started looking like carbon copies of each other.

Transmogrification allows players to get that thing that they've been after since the early days of WoW -- a distinct and unique look for their characters.

It's always the same. Just when I get everything all sorted out neatly, a new piece of upgrade gear drops. If I win the gear, the next half-hour or so after raid is spent digging up gems, cutting them to the appropriate cut, then nabbing enchant mats and making sure the item is enchanted properly. And after all that is done and I put the gear on, I log out and back into the game so that the armory updates. Then I alt-tab out of the game and pull up my reforge site du jour (rogues, Shadowcraft is an amazing, amazing thing), put the window on my second monitor, tab back into the game and reforge it all.

And hopefully when I'm done with all of that, I'll have precisely enough hit to cap without going over, and all of that useless crit will be a thing of the past. It's not a hugely complicated process, but it is a process -- one that I repeat with each new piece of gear I obtain. I generally get far more out of reforging than I ever did with simple gemming and enchanting from the Wrath era. However, I also understand all these different stats and which ones are good, something a new player might not be aware of.

So is the reforging process a hit with this expansion or a miss?