Posts with tag featured

Virtually every player eagerly embraced the advent of facts, figures, and formulae driving the game when they first began to trickle through to the player base some years ago. We scoured forums, fan sites, and data-driven websites like Wowhead. A way to tell which gear worked best for your character? Sweet. Community managers and devs who actually explained and discussed game mechanics? Utterly amazing. It was a brave new world and an entirely new way to play. Gone were the days when players murmured longingly of eloquently named pieces whose names evoked the epic locations they came from. Now, it was all about tiers. We argued endlessly over the correct numerical sequencing of armor sets –- remember the etymological debate over "Dungeon 2" vs. "Tier 0.5"?

A little bit of knowledge about how to tinker under the hood is absolutely a positive and helpful thing. Today, we expect free access to ability and spell mechanics and a point-by-point road map to gearing up. But at some point, overachievers that we humans are, so many numbers can make the game feel more like a checklist of benchmarks than a storied progression of fantastic encounters and arcane gear.

Whether or not all the analysis gets under your skin, it's easy to see how this emphasis on precision and analysis evolved. The question is, do you think that this is merely a subjective matter of roleplay immersion in the fantasy aspect of World of Warcraft, or do you think the attitude actually reduces the game in spirit and heart? Do the vistas and horizons of Azeroth ever seem uncomfortably closer when every step is paved with a formula pointing to your destination? Where do we stand on the balance scale of pre-analyzing and measuring how the numbers stack up vs. gaining a feel from experience for how things work in the world of Azeroth?

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Work Warning: Lots of cursing and vaguely adult themes. A touch on the adult side.

Ian Beckman is a man who delivers. Whether it's a surprising range of comedic voice acting or solid graphics that deliver the funny, his machinima always serves up more than a few laughs. Guards 3 continues to lampoon COPS in this wild World of Warcraft.

I like how the small vignette turns into a larger story, and I'll admit the final bit was my favorite. Whether that's because I harbor my own angst about the king, or just because it was the most straightforward joke, the utter defeat of the villain serves as warning to anyone who gets a name wrong.

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Interested in the wide world of machinima? We have new movies every weekday here on WoW Moviewatch! Have suggestions for machinima we ought to feature? Toss us an email at moviewatch@wowinsider.com.

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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.

Tricks of the Trade is a strange ability for rogues. Why would we sacrifice our own damage (by spending energy) to boost the damage of someone else? Aldriana and Pathal have both spoken out against TotT's misguided benevolence and its boring mechanics. Rather than being a situationally-useful ability that we pull out when the time is right, TotT has become a set-and-forget chore that we just auto-cast on the second-highest DPS in raid.

Lore issues aside, Tricks of the Trade is a pretty good ability. Used properly, it can greatly accelerate the rate that tanks pick up aggro, which makes dungeons and raids just a bit easier. While it's a DPS loss for the rogue casting TotT, it's a net gain for the raid's DPS, and that's a sacrifice that we'll have to make. It's also incredibly potent in PvP; granting an ally a 15% damage boost is a pretty big deal.

Another entry from the archives of mega-submitter Taedran of Guilty as Charged on Silvermoon (US-A). I'm not entirely sure what has caused the rivers of Uldum to run red with blood, nor why the sky suddenly resembles the favorite poster of college girls everywhere, Van Gogh's The Starry Night. But I'm pretty sure that hallucinogens are somehow involved. Which, unless you are a devotee of certain American Indian religions, is officially Not Cool with the government. Please turn yourself in at the nearest police station.

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Want to see your own screenshot here? Send it to aroundazeroth@wowinsider.com. We strongly prefer full-sized pictures with no UI or names showing. Include "Azeroth" in the subject line to ensure your submission dodges email spam filters; if you'd like to be credited, also include your name, guild and realm.

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• In the Chess Event over in Karazhan, the delay between moves for enemy chess pieces has been increased.
• Out in the Battlefield: Barrens, map markers for caravans that have been destroyed ought to be properly removed from the world map. In addition, overturned caravans should now despawn properly.
• In scenarios, the issue causing shape-shifted players to not shape-shift back into the correct race has been fixed.

I space out how often I talk about The Adventures of Tinkerbottom because, while it's cool, there are too many videos to keep up here. But the interactive video just reached a major milestone: Tinkerbottom now must suffer a consequence.

If you've not been following along, the premise is fairly simple. The videos focus on Tinkerbottom and the choices he faces. Commenters basically vote or suggest what his action will be. It's like a crowdsourced Which Way book with a video component. All in all, it's a pretty interesting experiment and definitely worth your time to check out.

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Interested in the wide world of machinima? We have new movies every weekday here on WoW Moviewatch! Have suggestions for machinima we ought to feature? Toss us an email at moviewatch@wowinsider.com.

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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.

Garrosh Hellscream is many things. He's brash, headstrong, arrogant, concerned for his people, determined to deliver the whole of Azeroth into their dominion no matter what anyone thinks about it, but one thing is clear. He's not Gul'dan. For all the grief I like to give Horde players (mainly because it's easy to rile Horde players up, I know, I raided as Horde for all of Cataclysm and a good chunk of Mists) It's true that on the surface, the Horde of today has changed greatly from the Horde Gul'dan created.

The Horde as it exists today is the spiritual successor of the Horde that Orgrim Doomhammer created when he seized power. Was Doomhammer a kindly, soft spoken orc who loved kittens and rainbows? No. No he was not. He was an orc who had come to power as the right hand of Blackhand the Destroyer, a hunter and a warrior who had spent his entire life in combat. He was strong, devoted to his people, and absolutely committed to an orc victory no matter the odds. In a way, minus Garrosh's bluster and bravado, the orc he most resembles from the history of the old Horde is Orgrim Doomhammer.

"As I was leveling herbalism in Westfall, I noticed something unusual," writes submitter Jkal of Alexstrasza (US-A). "A white, glowing blur would zoom across the landscape about five feet up in the air. I couldn't target it and it was fast. It was like nothing I'd seen before in game. It would always head towards Longshore and disappear. I think I got a picture. But I still don't know what it is. Sure looks like a UFO to me. This one was stationary when I found it. It just slowly blinked out as I stood there watching."

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Want to see your own screenshot here? Send it to aroundazeroth@wowinsider.com. We strongly prefer full-sized pictures with no UI or names showing. Include "Azeroth" in the subject line to ensure your submission dodges email spam filters; if you'd like to be credited, also include your name, guild and realm.

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We recently explored how you felt about alternate characters, whether you believe they should represent true alternatives to your first character or whether they should remain secondary to a more fully developed main. Either way, there's no stuffing rapid leveling back into the bag. WoW's current leveling design pushes players forward relentlessly, whether they're experienced gamers or not. The problem is that today's leveling pace already outstrips zone content, quest lines, gearing -- you name it. Should Blizzard apply the brakes to base XP while still permitting seasoned WoW players to choose to move more rapidly?

Consider this: What if the leveling experience weren't tuned to catapult players so quickly through and past leveling zones and dungeons? What if the pace were a little looser, giving new players more time to soak up the leveling game itself -– and then at the same time, the current XP boosts were spread across tools designed for experienced players who choose to hop, skip, and jump their way to 90?

The precedents are there -- just look at the heirloom armor system. Today, you can buy Grand Commendations to boost various reputations for your characters once you've played through them once. And remember when everyone was buying the Tome of Cold Weather Flight for their alts? The tools are already in place. From leveling XP to reputation gains to player convenience, the helping hand of a level-capped main character is key.

Do you think WoW's leveling experience should remain something to be played through quickly and efficiently, even for brand new players, or do you think there's merit to allowing that part of the game to move at a more deliberate pace? Would you support more mechanics that give experienced players a way to speed up leveling for their alts, preserving a slower pace for new players and players who enjoy slower leveling? If you like a strong emphasis on mechanics like heirlooms and commendations, should those tools be simple, affordable purchases for any level 90 player, or should they take some time, effort, or money to earn?

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If World of Warcraft had but one holiday, it would be Patch Day: the glorious Tuesday (or Wednesday) in which the WoW servers go down for maintenance but come back online brimming with new, unexplored content. If you're new to World of Warcraft, or MMOs in general, you may not entirely understand all the fuss the community makes over patches. So just what is a patch? Why are they so important? And how can you get your hands on one? We'll do our best to explain.

What is a WoW patch?
Did you know we're playing version 5 of World of Warcraft right now? It's true: Version 1.1 was World of Warcraft's launch client and every expansion since has bumped the version number up a full number, while each patch release is a decimal place. The original game went up to patch 1.12 (the 1.1 launch client and 11 patches after), Burning Crusade (2.0) had a scant 4 patches, Wrath of the Lich King (3.0) had 3, Cataclysm (4.0) had 3, and Mists of Pandaria (5.0) is about to see the release of its 3rd patch, patch 5.3. These days, patches are coming more quickly than ever and we have no idea how many patches to expect before the next expansion arrives.

Work Warning: Minutely blue humor found herein.

It's been a while since we've seen a new video from Nixxiom (also known as SilverlinedPro). That makes this delicious bit of machinima even more tasty. With a somewhat painful look on those first seconds of a Tauren roleplayer's life, Not All Roleplay is Serious - Episode 7: NOOB demonstrates only the finest irony of a beginning roleplayer. Watch your flags!

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Interested in the wide world of machinima? We have new movies every weekday here on WoW Moviewatch! Have suggestions for machinima we ought to feature? Toss us an email at moviewatch@wowinsider.com.

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