Category Archives: General Warcraft

General Update

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Judging by the activity on this blog, you’d think I hardly play wow these days, but that would not be correct ! I have been playing quite a bit. My DK Morphhoof is now lvl 80 and collecting pvp and some tanking gear. I need to get some rep here and these to get some more def stuff, but he’s well on the way. My warlock has been jumping into AV every now and then and has now reached L73.

My other L80s have been doing the argent tournament dailies in order to get some needed gold for the alts mentioned above and some gear upgrades and gems. I also got some heirloom items for future alts, I have a priest and a mage all ready to go now.

morpha_wg1

We have also been running TOC a few times, on normal mode. Some nice gear dropped and it’s a fun instance to do. Even though it has jousting ;).

All in all I am again very much enjoying WoW again. Looking forward to 3.3 that will bring the start of the end of Nortrend !

Thoughts on Cataclysm

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This wouldn’t be much of a WoW blog if I would ignore the big news of the past few weeks, the recently announced expansion pack Cataclysm. I am not going to repeat here everything you can read on every other news site. Just a few thoughts :).

First of all, I am very happy it’s not just another 10 levels and a new continent. Ofcourse that would have sold well, would have probably been not too hard to make, and would have kept most people happy. I would have bought that one, probably enjoyed it as well, but what is coming now, is nothing like that. I agree with Randy of The Instance podcast, that this is as close to WoW 2.0 as we’re going to get. The whole old world will be redone ! We’ll be able to fly all over the old world as well. This must have been a tremendous amount of work.

The new leveling experience will be nice as well. The old stuff has been around now, since 2004 (or early 2005 for us Europeans), and it’s getting a bit old in the tooth. Especially taking into account, that Blizzard now has gotten much better at creating quests, areas, etc. Look at the Bloodelf or Death Knight starter areas and you know what I mean. For some reason a Goblin Hunter sounds very appealing to me. I already got a hunter, but wouldn’t mind leveling another one in the new content. They’re such a fun class to level. A troll druid sounds like fun as well though. Apparently they’ll get their own bear and cat graphics.

The new addition to the Horde !

The new addition to the Horde !

I don’t play alliance and the new werewolf class doesn’t sound very appealing to me. Maybe i’ll check out their starter area sometime, and see what the fuzz is all about. Not really looking forward to seeing dozens of DK Worgens on the field though…

All of the other new stuff sounds great as well, guild leveling (hopefully also interesting for small guilds), Path of the Titans (sort of an extension of the talent system, from what I understand), new battleground etc etc.

So isn’t there anything you dislike about this expansion pack ?
Well, I am not too fond of Tauren Priests and especially Paladins, which seems very out of character for a tauren. But I doubt we’ll see a lot of them…

Check out wow-insider for all the news at http://www.wow.com/cataclysm/.
Also you might want to listen to the Instance’s Blizzcon coverage at http://www.myextralife.com/wow/.

The making of wow

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A very nice article appeared on Eurogamer about the start of wow.

World of Warcraft first popped into public view in September, 2001. Blizzard executive Bill Roper had flown into London to make an announcement at the ECTS trade show. Anticipation was high. The already legendary studio had revealed its (as yet unreleased) strategy game Warcraft III at ECTS two years previously, and the announcement of a new Blizzard game was a big deal. Even then, the studio was known for doing few games, very slowly – and very, very well. The smart money was on a sequel to its other strategy hit, StarCraft.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/the-making-of-world-of-warcraft-article

Upcoming Mount Changes

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The 3.2 World of Warcraft patch will bring some pretty big changes to mounts !

From wowinsider :

The highlights are as follows:

  • Regular land mounts trainable at level 20 (was 30)
  • Epic land mounts trainable at level 40 (was 60)
  • Regular flying mounts trainable at level 60 (was 70)
  • Regular flying mounts speed increased to a 150% gain (was 60%)

The costs for all the training and mount purchases has been decreased outright, with the exception of the artisan riding skill (epic flying mounts). For all mount costs, faction discounts now apply.

As you can see, Blizzard is trying to make it even more easier to level up yet another alt ;).

Nice analysis on Player vs. Developer. Which is an excellent blog by the way. Just found out about it, by listening to Shut Up We’re Talking.

Argent Dawn Tournament Pays Off

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It certainly pays off to become a champion at the Argent Dawn camp. First of all you get access to four not very hard daily quests that pay almost 25g each time you do them. I skip the dueling nowadays usually, as I got very bored with it.

You can also exchange 10g for standing of the faction you’re championing for. Furthermore there are some nice items for sale that you can buy with the champion points you get for each daily. One daily, a group one gives 2 tokens even ! And there is almost always a group doing that one, and it takes only a few minutes.

Morpheus now has the purple spell dagger a great combo with Prison Manifest in the off hand. Morphea could have gone for the gun, but I am not sure it’s better than the Nesingwary Gun I am using at the moment. It’s got some extra stats on it though, I might just get it to try it out. For now I settled for the necklace.

The Argent Hippogryph is very cool, but at 250 tokens a bit out of my reach !

Argent Dawn Tournament

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Patch 3.1 is now live since wednesday and it’s been a lot of fun ! Morpheus now has a dual-spec (the 1000g hurt a bit though) and is now Boomkin and part time healer. Only got one glyph so far, didn’t really care much for most of them. The innervate one looked interesting, but I don’t use it that often and it was a bit expensive, so I only got the glyph of Rejuvanination.

I really like the new Argent Dawn camp in Icecrown. Though it’s true what Randy said on the wow-instance podcast, it’s a bit odd with the war going on to set up something frivolous as this ;). But I guess even knights during a war needs a bit of relaxation and entertainment.

Morph Taking knight lessons
Tournament Grounds
Promoted to valiant
Aspirant

[Show slideshow]

Morph is now a Valiant. Hope to be a champion in a few days. Morphea has entered for Oggrimar is well on her way as well. Beating the other valiants in the practise ring is kind of tough at first but if you watch the video linked below, you should get the hang of it after a bit of practise. I managed to get the lance a lot achievement after two days :).

I have to say that some of the dailies are designed rather poorly. One involves killing a single named mob (who drops like a fly btw), which is ofcourse always a bad idea for a daily. Only ran into a bit of a ‘who can tag him first’ contest once so far, but this is never a good idea. Then you have to fly all over the map to present the thing you looted to some princes who’s trapped in ice. The other variant of this quest is somewhat less of a timewaste and has you picking flowers.

The funniest one is kissing frogs to find a fair maiden though ;). And the two dailies for the goblins are odd as well. The chip of the block one isn’t too bad, but cutting trees for a druid kind of hurts, especially in a magical forest.

Links:

Blizzard changes addon policies

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There was quite some drama amongst WoW – Addon fans over the revised addon policies the past few days ! The most important one is that Blizz no longer wants people making money off their addons. Word has it, that carbonite’s Quest / Levelup addon was the main instigator for Blizzard to change this policy. I never tried it, but it had become adware, which Blizzard (and with all due respect that was expected to happen) didn’t want to allow.

Links:
New addon policy
Addon devs respond
Addons and rights – Tobold
Official forum thread

WoW Patch 3.1

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As you all know by now, patch 3.1 will be a big one. Bringing a new Raid Instance, class changes and dual speccing !

Patch 3.1 will represent one of the most significant content patches to World of Warcraft to date. Major modifications to class specializations via the new dual spec feature will bring about significant game play changes for many classes, while the introduction of the Ulduar raid will open up a new and more difficult tier of raiding.

Wowinsider has a guide to documented and undocumented changes. Ofcourse it’s still early and a lot of things can still change:

http://www.wowinsider.com/guide-to-patch-3-1/

Four Year Anniversary

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Wow, I can’t believe that a few weeks ago, it was Wow’s 4th anniversary ! I remember my first steps as a young tauren in the world of Azeroth :). And my first scary trip to crossroads ! I had a great time those first few months in wow, everything was new and exciting ;).

Also thanks to Edge, Vixx and Banish, whereever you guys are at the moment, with whom I had a great time and all those from Starblade back then.

At the moment, I am just doing a few dailies every now and then and an (heroic) instance. Haven’t played that much lately, the ‘newness’ of WOTLK is starting to wear off… I still have a lock and a deathknight to level, but to go through either outlands or northrend again at this moment, isn’t very appealing. I will wait a while ’till it isn’t so fresh anymore !

Banish and Morph

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Getting new rides at 40 !