Posts with tag speculation

It's that time again. We're at the end of an expansion life cycle, BlizzCon is just days away, and everyone is wondering "what's next?" We're browsing forums, looking at obscure sites in different languages, hunting for any hint of new information to sate our relentless appetites. For some people, the speculating is just as fun as finding out what the next expansion will actually turn out to be.

Rumors and fake leaks seem to pop up on a weekly basis. The latest trend among the rumormongers is to take pictures of their so-called leaks with a cellphone and run it through Instagram to give it more credibility. It sure looks a lot more real when you can't pore over the pixels to see just how good or bad their photoshop skills are.

Reddit user rpdj made an interesting post on /r/wow demonstrating how in a few simple steps he created the above image of a new playable race, the Terrorguard. Looks pretty convincing, doesn't it?

For all you BlizzCon attendees and Virtual Ticket holders who may have been dallying over whether or not to buy any con merch, there are now a load of new items to tempt your wallet, and a few popular existing items have been restocked. The new options include several Diablo-themed skateboard decks, a truly precious Zergling T-shirt, and the Blizzard 2013 Key Art T-shirt.

The Key Art is particularly interesting, for a few reasons. First of all, it's been released prior to the convention itself. In previous years the Key Art has been withheld because it was totally spoiler-riffic -- think BlizzCon 2011, where it featured a panda, and thus wasn't released until after the announcement of Mists of Pandaria. This year's art, however, features front-and-center one very angry-looking Garrosh Hellscream (or what we assume is Garrosh Hellscream). Considering the Diablo and Starcraft art portions both reference known upcoming releases: Diablo: Reaper of Souls, and Starcraft II: Legacy of the Void, I think it's safe to say that the Key Art confirms that WoW's next chapter will feature as BlizzCon's main attraction. But beyond that, we don't really know. It honestly raises more questions than it answers, and makes me even more intrigued to find out what Blizzard has next in store for World of Warcraft.

---

Please note that this article is 100% speculation!

Many people have wondered whether Blizzard may add a fourth spec to the existing classes in the next expansion. They've talked about a tanking spec for warlocks, a ranged DPS spec for paladins, a healing spec for mages, etc. It would be an amazing addition to the game for patch 6.0, and I would fully support it. However, fourth specs also seem highly unlikely.

Blizzard would have to implement and then continually balance 10-11 more specs (depending on whether druids get a fifth). That's a big kodo to rein in. It's almost like adding three new classes to the game.

We only have a sample size of one, but Blizzard chose not to add another class in the expansion following Wrath's death knight. It wouldn't surprise me if they chose not to during the next expansion, either. With declining subs, if they aren't adding another new class in the next expansion, they need to add a flashy new feature to our existing classes.

The next expansion has to get players excited about playing our classes. One new spell per class won't cut it. Talent trees are probably staying the way they are. Blizzard seems hesitant to add tri-spec, and I'm not sure tri-spec is a good thing for WoW anyway.

What could this new feature be? The radical new system I'm proposing would not just energize players -- it could also solve one of the game's longstanding problems. I'm going to call it dual class dual spec, or DCDS for short.

Corgis, why corgis? asks forum poster Pikkuhukka, after stumbling across the above image from MMO Champion. Well, why not? the rest of us impatiently reply. Oh, and there's the corgi meme, in case you're not familiar with it. A corgi pet has been on the wish list of many WoW players for a good long time now, months at least! If this image truly reflects a new pet to come in 5.4 or another future patch, then I am certain there will indeed be much rejoicing. I mean, the Winter Veil corgi was a good start, but it's just not the same!

What would you do for a corgi pet, if anything? Would you buy it on the Blizzard store? Would you run dungeons with another 100 random players like you did for the Perky Pug? Would you camp its spawn point? Would you just not care? And hey, Blizzard, since you've clearly got a model for adorable dogs with stubby legs, may I suggest the Swedish Vallhund for your next offering, pretty please?

---

---

---

Once they added the note about Alleria Windrunner and Turalyon to the various loading screens I actually turned to a friend and said "Okay, now they're just mocking me." Seriously, I've written KYL's about both of these characters, they're among my favorite from WCII, and I want to know what happened to them. They have a kid wandering around Outland! Where did they go?

This isn't exclusive to them, either. Before Cataclysm I was one of those people who constantly rode up to the Greymane Wall in Silverpine and tried to get around it even though I knew there wasn't anything there yet. When I read in the World of Warcraft magazine that the Dark Trolls had died at the hands of the Twilight's Hammer cult invading Hyjal, I was very annoyed that I'd never see them in game. I still want to get to go down into Azjol-Nerub more fully, I'm still waiting to go to Kul Tiras (and frankly I wish I'd thought to include a Kul Tiras raid in yesterday's raid speculations) and man, I need to know what happened to Neptulon. There are lots of Warcraft lore and story threads left completely unresolved. A lot of them wouldn't make any sense to be revealed in Mists of Pandaria, but luckily speculation isn't limited by the current reality.

Welcome to unfounded speculation country.

Since we're starting to hear little tidbids about patch 5.2 already why not just sit down and completely make up the flimsiest possible pretext about what potential new raids we might see in patch 5.2? We've already been mercilessly teased by the folks at Blizzard about it, who made many a WoW player from the Wrath days quiver with the following statement.

Zarhym: Just to add to that really quickly, I was sitting in on interviews with Ion (Hazzikostas) yesterday, and he kind of mentioned that we look back fondly on raids like Ulduar, in terms of scale -- so if that's any indication on where we might be going ...

Now, I have no more actual information than that to share with you. But why let that stop us? Let's sit down and play Wouldn't that be cool? and see if we can come up with any contenders for a big, sweeping Ulduar style raid for patch 5.2. What are our best contenders?

A new round of datamining has uncovered an interesting string and spell in the new code pushed with recent updates to the beta -- specifically, a reference to a placeholder for a Mists of Pandaria collector's edition mount. Here's the string/spell change, courtesy of MMO-Champion:

[PH] MoP CE Mount - [PH] Summons and dismisses a ???. This mount changes depending on your Riding skill and location.

Traditionally, collector's editions of World of Warcraft expansions included a pet, usually a whelp that resembles a key figure or theme of the expansion. The original collector's edition of WoW included three pets, the Zergling, the panda cub, and the mini Diablo. No collector's edition has ever shipped with a mount before.

Here's the kicker: There is also a string and spell in the new build for a collector's edition pet as well, which means more stuff packed in to this next release's premium package.

Does upping the ante on cool in-game stuff, from pets to mounts, put the collector's edition of Mists of Pandaria closer to your shelf? As a consummate purchaser of Blizzard collector's editions, I will be shelling out the cash notwithstanding. However, it would be nice to see a bevy of new rewards in the collector's editions other than just the whelps. They will, however, be excellent editions to my Pet Battle Army. What do you think the collector's edition mount could be?

---

It's open warfare between Alliance and Horde in Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft's next expansion. Jump into five new levels with new talents and class mechanics, try the new monk class, and create a pandaren character to ally with either Horde or Alliance. Look for expansion basics in our Mists FAQ, or dig into our spring press event coverage for more details!

---

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

Epic gems will come in patch 4.3. They'll not be prospectable from Pyrite or anything else -- instead they will drop from geodes on raid bosses. This may not be the final design, but it's what Blizzard has decided so far. The people who need the gems most are going to be the source for the uncut gems, and the quantity available will be very low.

Every time I've talked about this before, I've hedged my bets that Blizzard might drastically change the design for epic gems compared to the last expansion. As things turn out, it did, and we're going back to a design reminiscent of epic gems in The Burning Crusade, which were mostly available to raiders. Everyone who stockpiled Pyrite now has to decide what to do with it.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

The recipes that drop from trash in Firelands have had their drop rate nerfed in a recent hotfix:

Hot fixes notes

The rate at which crafting recipes drop has been greatly reduced.

source

This makes sense from a design perspective; these patterns take some pretty rare boss drops to be made and produce gear on par with normal mode Firelands boss gear drops. On most realms, everyone who is getting the recipes is trying to sell them -- at first, for a lot; however, I've been picking them up for a tenth of what they were being listed for yesterday.

One of the interesting artifacts of this system before the nerf was that the people most likely to get the recipe were people farming reputation by doing trash runs. The people most likely to be able to craft the items were the ones in the more organized and progression-minded raiding groups. Now that the drop rate has been reduced, in a few weeks when more guilds are making it farther into the instance, it's possible that more recipes will drop into the laps of raiding guilds than trash PUGs.

Click past the jump for a list of the recipes that are affected.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

Books of Glyph Mastery are currently needed by scribes in order to learn all the glyphs in the game. While they will eventually no longer be needed, they will always be useful. Even when Blizzard gets around to letting you research all the glyphs without them, those research recipes are both on a one-day cooldown, and the books can be used to continue learning. These books are an excellent candidate for "flipping" for a few reasons. Let's look into why and how to flip them.

Bad for the market?

Speculative flipping is not bad for the market. First, when people say "bad for the market," they mean "bad for people who need to buy glyph books." While flippers seem to be making money from nothing, they're actually making money from risk. They buy up excess stock in times of plenty and sell it in times of scarcity, and this protects book buyers from having to deal with a nearly empty auction house as often. All flippers do is make it so that when a couple of new scribes start buying books by the wheelbarrow and completely empty the AH, they won't have to wait for more stock to trickle in from people leveling through Northrend.

The professions dev Q&A is a sleepy little document that reads like it was written by and for farmers -- but buried between questions about fishing and archeology, a few relevant pre-announcements can be found. Notably:

Quote:

Will you provide a way to speed up the acquiring of glyphs usually acquired through research and glyph books? Glyph books (Book of Glyph Mastery) are hard to come by now that people spend so little time in WotLK content.

Yes. We will be changing the discovery spells so they can teach all possible glyphs, and the books will simply provide a no-cooldown method to do the same thing.

source

Glyph books made all kinds of sense in Wrath, when they were obtainable anywhere by anyone. Now that they're only dropping for people as they level, the supply has plummeted. New scribes are having their short hairs held over the fire by the people who will end up paying too much for their glyphs, so I suppose it's a probably fair, but Blizzard is changing it.

Coming soon, new scribes will be able to finish learning their glyph books by research alone, and books will only be an added bonus. This will reduce the price for them, as cheap scribes who are willing to wait will no longer be snatching up any inexpensive books they find.

If you have any of these books that you're trying to flip for a profit, use them or sell them quickly, before the mat is pulled from under you. Take heart; I still have at least six Tomes of Polymorph: Turtle in a storage guild bank somewhere that I took a bath on. That's all part of the fun of speculation, and it makes wins feel better.

---

Maximize your profits with more advice from Gold Capped as well as the author's Call to Auction podcast. Do you have questions about selling, reselling and building your financial empire on the auction house? Basil is taking your questions at basil@wowinsider.com.

---