News and Opinion

General news and opinion about WoW.

Idea: Release Mists with No Raids?

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I can’t take credit for this idea. All I remember is someone tweeted me the link to a forum post on a prominent WoW community and I can’t for the life of me remember which thread/poster/tweeter it was. If you’ve seen the thread before somewhere and you got the link handy, do me a favour and link it in the comments.

This is why you should never trust memory. Or at least, never trust mine.

The basic premise is to launch Mists without accessible raid instances right away. You can still PvP, do heroic instances, and all the other end game stuff available.

But don’t open up raids right away.

Why would you do this?

Because it helps even the playing field across the board for raid progression. At the start of expansions, the most progressive guilds tend to be the ones that hit cap immediately and get into raids as soon as they can. Let’s make it a little more interesting. Open raids up after week 2 of release. This gives time for players that can’t take the 72 hours off straight from work or school to level to max at a more forgiving pace.

Then when the raids do become available, there’ll be a little more competition for assorted boss firsts for server and world.

Would make things livelier, that’s for sure. It wouldn’t be the first time some form of artificial gated content was implemented.

Yeah? Naw? Wanna get in there ASAP and leave everyone else in the dust or do you favour a fair start for as many players as possible?

EDIT: ntzolev saw it here first – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGx92MoaWEA

New Priest Glyphs implemented: Val’kyr, Lightspring, Levitate, and Confession

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Morning everyone. New beta build finally made the new glyphs purchasable from Flaskataur, Esquire. Here’s some screenies for you to enjoy.

The title picture above shows the Glyph of the Val’kyr. It’s that minor one that changes the appearance of Spirit of Redemption. I know some of you think it’s bad form to encourage people to die to get a new aesthetic perspective.

But seriously, it’s a minor glyph. Get over it. It’s not going to affect any self-respecting Priest’s performance. Anyone that wants to die repeatedly and enjoy their new death form can just jump off cliffs if they want to see it in action. There’s other things to pick apart.

Like Power Word: Shield getting buffed to 187% of spell coefficient (Buff from 87%).

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That’s the new Levitate glyph (Click through it for full size). It leaves the trail of clouds on your character as you float around.

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Here’s the Confession glyph. You can’t see it, but it shows up in the chat window. Every 30 minutes, you can cast Confession (new spell) and the character confesses… something. In my case, I forgot the Sunwell.

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And lastly, here’s the Lightspring glyph in action. Can’t interact with the Lightwell directly. Ticks of around 10000+.

You know, I can’t confirm this right now, but it seemed as if I was receiving multiple Lightwell charges automatically whenever I constantly remained below 50%.

Black Markets in Pandaria!

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Just saw news of this. There’s a Black Market in the game.

They sell really expensive, random stuff. Apparently the Black Market has stuff like:

  • Tier 3 gear
  • Mounts like Ashes of Alar
  • Pets
  • Really rare, hard to find crafting recipes

In other Priest changes:

I will now use Glyph of Lightspring instead. Nice addition! No more having to forcibly remind people to click the damn Lightwell!

Glyph of Val’kyr is now going to be on my number one list of minor glyphs to add to my Priest. I am pleased!

Et toi? (And you?)

Introducing the Conquest Gaming League (Pet battles!)

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Conquest Gaming League

With pet battles on the horizon, it’s only fair to create a competitive environment where the best pet breeders and trainers can go to test their skills. I wanted to create something for the guild to participate in and have fun with. One thing I’ve always wanted to do was set up my own online league. It would be complete with full pre-season, regular season, and playoffs.

You can check out the league site here. It’s not completely finished or operational yet. If you mouse over some of the links, you can see what the layouts and such will look like when it’s in full swing.

The vision

Nothing’s set in stone yet, but here’s what I have going in with. Each season begins with 2 weeks of preseason followed by 8 weeks of regular season. At the mid season mark, move ups may be considered. Playoffs will begin shortly after regular season play concludes. The top 8 players with the most points at the end of the season will advance to playoffs. Each week will consist of two matches on different days against different opponents for a total of 16 matches for the regular season.

Each match will be a pet battles duel consisting of a best of 3 series between two opponents. Each playoff match will be a duel consisting of a best of 5.

Currently, there are no level or pet restrictions. That may change though as we move closer to release. You can switch pets as needed in between individual matches.

The league may consist of multiple tiers depending on how much player interest there is (Like an Open and Invite division, for instance). Already, there’s a number of questions going on through my head about to handle things like disconnects and such.  I hope Blizzard includes a way to track match records against players.

Other games?

The guild has a massive interest in both Starcraft 2 and League of Legends. Right now, I’ve got divisions open for those but they’re going to be for the guild and guild friends only for now. I’m hoping to do a full test run of the system by starting with a month long SC2 1v1 league season. Want to make sure I have a handle on everything okay both from the administrative and front ends. Ultimately, players will be able to report their own matches, upload screenshots/replay files for results, and so forth.

(I’ll have to find me some Starcraft 2 guinea pigs though to help supplement the players).

Will it work cross server and faction?

It should.

Pets are eventually going to be account bound. Theoretically, I could create a level 1 character on any server and any faction to duel the host player.

Prizes?

Probably not right away. The league’s going to start off in a closed environment first available to guildies and friends. After that, once things stabilize, I may open up registration.

Although, I did toy with the idea of playing for the Conquest Cup. … Which would be a jock strap, heh.

Anyway, still more work to do. I’m hoping everything all comes together and works out.

So, interested?

Spirit Shell Change: Burst Bubble Spam!

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Spirit Shell: For the next 15 sec, your Heal, Flash Heal, Greater Heal, and Prayer of Healing no longer heal but instead create absorption shields that last 15 sec.

Cool! Not less than half a day since I posted that we were expecting Spirit Shell changes, they went and changed up the design of it entirely. In terms of absorb values, my guess is that they’re going to be a 1:1 value. So if you heal for 10000, you’ll be creating shields for 10000.

Instead of a spell that directly creates a shield, they’ve given us an ability that turns most of our healing spells into shield spells. Interesting design change. Can’t wait to try it in action. At least we now have a clear toggle between the times when we need to restore health and the times to create shields. Nifty ability though because even if the raid is at near full health, Disc priests can easily toggle Spirit Shell on and blanket the raid with shields and add that extra health buffer to everyone.

I suppose this is one way to shield spam the raid!

And as promised, Rapture removes the cooldown on Power Word: Shield.