Posts with tag upgrade

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What do you do with thousands of Valor points when you already have all the gear that you can buy from the Valor vendors? Coming in with patch 5.1, one of the cool things is the ability to upgrade your own gear. In previous expansions, we'd reach a point where we'd have tons of Valor or Justice points and nothing to buy. Head on over to visit the local ethereals in the major capital cities and look for the item upgrade NPC.

The process for upgrading items is simple. Drag the item you wish to upgrade over to the item slot, then hit the upgrade button. Only items that are 458 ilvl or higher can be upgraded. Blue quality items can be upgraded once for an 8 item level increase for 1500 Justice or Honor points. Epic quality items can be upgraded twice with a 4 item level increase per upgrade for 750 Valor or Conquest points.

Once an item is upgraded, there's no way to get them refunded. Choose them wisely! If you're not sure what to upgrade first, I would suggest focusing on your weapons and trinkets. For most classes, you should notice a slight increase in your character's performance.

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Mists of Pandaria is here! The level cap has been raised to 90, many players have returned to Azeroth, and pet battles are taking the world by storm. Keep an eye out for all of the latest news, and check out our comprehensive guide to Mists of Pandaria for everything you'll ever need to know.

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You can now pre-order the Cataclysm digital download and Blizzard has released a relevant FAQ. As Mike Morhaime announced at BlizzCon, it is possible to pre-order and download the expansion prior to release and therefore be able to play immediately after launch, servers permitting. Logging into the game after pre-ordering will set your account up to start background downloading Cataclysm data as soon as it is available. Unfortunately, while you may pre-order the physical collector's edition from non-Blizzard sources, the only digital download option is the standard version.

So it looks like I'll be installing my collector's edition while digital download people are dealing with rolling restarts and emergency maintenance. Oh yes, I went there.

The full Cataclysm digital pre-sale FAQ is after the break.

WoW's fifth anniversary and the interviews surrounding it have ended up providing us with some previously-unknown tidbits of information -- which is a good thing, especially when it comes to stuff we've been wanting to hear about for a long time.

This particular tidbit comes from the Warcry network interview with J. Allen Brack and Samwise Didier about the game's anniversary, and it's about a subject near and dear to our constantly-complaining hearts: new character models. They might even be coming in Cataclysm.

Says Brack:

"Even though things would be better with new (character) models, we'd probably spark a lot of player outrage. So we've talked about giving players a choice between the classic models or the new ones, but it might not be something we want to take on at the same time as we remake Azeroth."

That's pretty big news.

Wrath is almost all wrapped up, and while we didn't know much about it before the expansion, we've all certainly experienced the token system that Blizzard implemented as they went along, where early instances drop one kind of badge/token, and then the newer instances offer up new tokens, which can then be exchanged back for the older ones and their rewards. Now that we see the big picture at the end of the expansion, it's pretty ingenious, actually, and it even allows Blizzard to beef up other parts of the game, as they did with the rewards in the new Dungeon system.

Not that he needs to, but Bornakk steps up on the forums to justify exactly this kind of tiered system. Players complain that Ulduar is "useless" now that you can obtain its badges from lots of different places, but Bornakk says this system is definitely preferable to what Blizzard did in vanilla and BC, which was requiring new raiders to run through all of the old content before seeing the new and shiny stuff. They don't want the old content to sit useless (and it's not -- lots of guilds are still running Ulduar and even Naxx for the hard modes and achievements), but after the high-end raiders have their fun, it's important to get everyone else up to speed as well.

Rawr is a great third-party app (it's open source, and doesn't interface with the game at all) that's designed to help you figure out everything you need to know about your character, including how to best buff, enchant, and gem up your gear and set up your stats for whatever you'd like to do. It started out as an app strictly for tanking druids, but recently, it's grown to include pretty much all classes and stats. Our good friends at sister site Download Squad just recently found out about it, and they've got a nice basic writeup posted that serves as a good overview if you've never used the app before.

They also mention that the app just got another update, to version 2.2.25, and all of the release notes are posted over on their site. They're also looking for help -- if you're a C# developer, or know one who can work on their rogue and hunter models, be sure to let them know. Since the program is open source, anybody who knows the code can jump in and add their own features, or fine-tune the class choices, which then helps out everyone who uses the software. Rawr is definitely an excellent resource for anyone looking to get their gear perfected -- it's a free download for Windows on their site right now.

Update: Since this post was written, the app has been updated to 2.2.27. That was fast!

Not all shields are for blocking. If you're a Shaman or a Pally, this caster shield is probably droolworthy.

Name: Wisdom's Hold (Wowhead, Thottbot, WoWDB)
Type: Epic Shield
Armor: 8130, 227 Block
Attributes:

• +70 Stamina, +48 Intellect, which means lots of HP and Mana for you.
• Improves crit strike by 40, haste by 47, and spell power by 75. Nice set of bonuses there, too.
• And a blue socket, with a socket bonus of +5 spell power. It's a slight upgrade over Voice of Reason, the other big caster shield near endgame, but enough of an upgrade that you want this one if you can get it.

Insider Trader is your inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.

Patch 3.1 is looming ever closer, and things are about to change in a big way. Today I'll be discussing how the patch is going to affect your professions, and how you can take advantage of this by maximizing your profits on the Auction House.

Players have become increasingly bored with raiding because the content that was released with the expansion pack, Wrath of the Lich King, was too quickly conquered. Across the board, players are showing up to raids on an inconsistent basis, and many people now spend much of their time on the Public Test Realm playing through Ulduar.

This has contributed to falling prices on the Auction House for raiding materials and consumables, because not only have many people stopped raiding, many others have decided to save their gold and raid without being buffed to the gills.

What should you do in these tight times? Aside from the things for which you are currently saving, the patch will bring with it a 1000g bill to learn how to dual spec, costs to fund raid wipes, bring new consumables, and enchant and gem new gear.

By learning what to sell and purchase and when, you can minimize your post-patch costs and make some gold while you're at it.

DIII.net has a great writeup of everything Blizzard has said so far about the new Battle.net features, and while most of the information applies more to Diablo III and Starcraft II, there's some good tidbits in there for WoW fans as well. Battle.net is Blizzard's oldest online service -- it predates WoW by a few years and was notably used to play Warcraft 3, Diablo 2 and Starcraft online. It's making a return with a revamp for the release of Starcraft II, and in addition to the previously mentioned ability Battle.net will give playes to track achievements across all Blizzard games, the system will have a much more social feel than the previous incarnation of the service.

Player accounts, avatars, icons, and friend lists are all planned, and odds are that services like the Armory and even the WoW sign in may be tied to your Battle.net account in some way. Tournaments and rankings will be included (though it remains to be seen how this might be implemented in World of Warcraft), and Battle.net will even offer players the ability to save and share replays of Starcraft II games, and other e-sport-like features.

That last feature would be a perfect fit for WoW's Arenas, of course, but as much as players would like to be able to spectate Arena matches, odds are that there would have to be a lot of behind-the-scenes coding done on Blizzard's side. Starcraft is being built from the ground up to record matches, of course, but WoW's Arena system doesn't have that ability built in, and putting it in might be more work than Blizzard wants to do on that one area of the game. No word yet on when we might get the new Battle.net (odds are it'll come out right around the Starcraft II release, whenever that is), but from the look of it, Blizzard has big plans to expand the social networks they've built into World of Warcraft towards all of their properties.

WoW Rookie is brought to our readers to help our newest players get acclimated to the game. Make sure you send a note to WoW Insider if you have suggestions for what new players need to know.

Having the right weapon can make a world of difference in a players leveling experience. Last time on WoW Rookie, we looked at the types of weapons that each class can use and where to train the skill for them. Now just because you can use a weapon, doesn't mean you should. This week we'll examine what to look for in a weapon.

It's pretty important to keep your hands full. You have a four weapon slots at the bottom of your character sheet: Main Hand, Off Hand, Ranged, and Ammunition. Two handed weapons take up both the main hand and off hand slots. The off hand may hold a weapon if your class can dual weild, a shield, or an off hand item that either adds to your attributes or looks cool (such as Bouquet of Red Roses or a Dark Iron Tankard.) I recommend something useful when adventuring, though it's fun to see what folks come up with when roaming the city.

Susana of Hyjal speculates about something I've thought about a few times before -- just what exactly are Blizzard's internal development tools like? Most games that have mapmakers can churn out new maps pretty rapidly, but we've had the same BG maps for years now, and only one or two per year since then. And even the created maps aren't fixed easily, apparently -- a few map tweaks on WSG would probably fix the turtling problem, but Blizzard instead is tweaking the rules to fix things. Just what is Blizzard using to make their game that they take so long with development?

To be fair, the rules here are a little more complicated than most first-person shooters (since you can do a lot more than just shoot at each other), so obviously the maps would presumably be a little more complicated as well. But in the age when players have access to the Neverwinter Nights toolset and even the Forge on Halo 3, surely it's a little crazy that Blizzard takes months to release one map, when other great games can pump out whole packs of them in the same time.

Now, this is WoW Insider, so it's ok if you're a Blizzard apologist. It's fine for you to say "Blizzard has the biggest game in the world not despite the fact that they're so slow, but because of it," and it's fine for you to be a fanboy/girl and say you'd rather wait three years for a Blizzard-quality Arathi Basin than play a whole "Hidden Fronts" pack. And the truth is that when Blizzard does release content, they don't disappoint. But we're still left wondering just why, after doing this for so long and having so much practice at it, it still takes them so long to do it.

Using my Quel I raided happily until Burning Crusade came out. Being such a stickler, I used it for tanking all the way to 70, and only replaced it with Grom'tor's Charge. To this day its still sitting in my bank. I've recently taken it out and gave it some use in the early trash in The Eye. I found that its actually not that bad of a weapon still. Granted it doesn't proc as often as it used to, and its stats are not that great compared to Mallet of the Tides. Happily however, it still kept the threat up against all those over zealous DPS'ers.

Having all that fun with my Quel again got me thinking... is there any chance for an upgrade? There have been rumors that there will be an upgrade quest, but nothing substantive yet from the mouth of Blizzard. Until someone in Blue posts on the official forums and makes all of us warriors happy, for the time being we'll have to just get along with dreaming for an upgrade quest. And maybe, just maybe, someone from Blizzard will see this and decide that Wrath of the Lich King needs another feature.

Do you have other cherished items that you dream about Blizzard updating?

There's yet more Patch 2.3 news, this time for people who have been having problems with sound ever since the sound upgrades in 2.2. As Cicero noted from his experience on the test realms, "all my sound problems were gone. I can hear myself cast again, no more clipped sounds..."

Those of you who have been suffering unduly may wish to go to the test realms and try it out. I haven't been able to do so myself due to some computer limitations, but I wonder if our readers who have visited the test realms can comment on any differences they can hear.

Are things really as good as Cicero says?

A query on the forums for what the longest questline in the game might be brings up this amazing page over on WoW Wiki-- a great collection of "long, exceptional, or hidden questlines" in the World of Warcraft. We've covered pretty much all of these quests before (including this cool compendium of quests you've got to do if you haven't done yet at 70), but this is a great and well-written guide to (mostly) higher level quests that have to be done to be believed.

As for the actual longest questline, it appears to be the "Fallen Hero of the Horde" line (that Alliance can do as well)-- it starts around level 50, and rolls all the way around the world and up to level 60. But I actually agree with some of the other posters in that thread-- while Fallen Hero is actually a great quest, the longest, most annoying questline in the game is probably the Dungeon Set 2 quests (also known as the Tier 0.5) armor. Back in the days of 60, Blizzard wanted to give players a way to obtain Epic armor without raiding, so they invented a long, grueling questline (with multiple branching paths) that would let you upgrade your first set (Tier 0) armor, piece by piece, into an Epic, eight piece set. I never made it any farther than the bracers, although I know for a fact that lots of folks got the whole thing done (and this was after completing the eight piece Tier 0 set in the first place). As long as the Fallen Hero questline is, I believe the Tier 0.5 questline wins, if only because it seems so much longer.