Lvl 1 with a massive ARCANITE REAPER hoooooooo !

Welcome, welcome, welcome to the pinnacle of epicness which is my blog *cough*...Yes, just let me live in my own little world will ya !

Anyway, heirloom items ! For the people who aren't familiar with this relative new term i'm gonna quickly explain what it is.

Heirloom items are BoA items...confused yet? BoA stands for "Bind on Account", so basicly they are items you can send over to your alt/main on the same account but can't send it to a different account.

That's the basic knowledge you should have before reading any further. A while back (at the last blizzcon i reckon) blizzard announced they wanted to do something with items bound to one account so you can "give" your lower lvl alts otherwise BoP items. There was a lot speculation (and drama) about this, a couple ideas were that you could swap BoP items between characters on the same account or items  you could buy with a common shared valuta on one account where all the characters on that account could use that valuta.

And as usual it was somewhere in between :P 

You'll be able to collect tokens which you are able to spend on items, BoA items to be precise. Then you'll be able to send those tokens/items to your alt to kit him/her out from the start, so yeah, lvl 1 with arcanite reapers !

No, not really but it's gonna be very similar texturewise and statwise (at max lvl ofcourse).

I, for one, really like this especially because you can only upgrade that item (be it a piece of armor or a weapon) every 10 levels.  So at lvl1 you get the first version of the item and on lvl 10 you'll be able to upgrade its stats, which pretty much cancels out twinks .

It also doesn't take away from the use of instances because instanceblues will be better at some point than your BoA item, and ofcourse for the quests/xp.

I'll be keeping an eye on those BoA items and update you lot in the future how to obtain them and on what you can spend them.

-Dave out

Grand Theft Kodo

Hello there !

Sit down, grab a drink and join me in the madness that is Brewfest for a bit. It's been on live since the 20th but i just started to get into it yesterday, and i must admit it's still as fun as it was last year.

The barrelrun are made easier i reckon, correct me if i'm wrong but i spotted an additional basket of fruit alongside my path this year? Anyway, once you get the route straight you'll get a massive amount of tokens this way, it's really, really easy.

The barkingquest (which wasn 't bugged from the start this year \o/) is also very easy, once you barked at everything you can just hop off the ram and mount your normal mount and speed away to victory :P

Now, the new addition to brewfest: the additional boss in BRD. The setting and how you can get to him are very well done, you climb in a sort of drilldevice and dig yourself a way to the boss, which is extremely cool. The boss also has a short respawntimer when you kill him, so you don't have to reset the instance every time that way you can farm him as many times possible.

And i say possible, because to engage him in combat you need the daily quest for it.

The loot he drops is fairly good and is on par with some of the badgepieces (trinkets, dagger) and -as usual with a seasonal boss- he drops cool gimmicks.

For example you can get a trinket that summons a beermaiden that will aid you in combat, or you get an item that can create a portal directly into the Grimm Guzzler.

But the main loot is probably the mount, either a brewfest ram or a kodo that seem to have a small percentage of dropping. It was weird to log in IF and see a bucketload of people on kodo's, so the percentage is high enough to have this much of a saturation atleast :P

Anyway, that's it for this small post as college is awaiting my heroic return again.

-Dave out

Mount'o'mania

Goodmorning everyone

It seems we'll gonna get a bucketload of new mounts in the next expansion, there's even an achievement to collect 75 (!!!) mounts.

A few of them are ofcourse hard to get while others are relatively easy, going from downing certain bosses with a couple requirements to just paying a "small" fee (see yesterday's blogpost) for them.

Our friends at mmo-champion posted a nice little list of new mounts and their achievements.

As you can see there are a lot of new mountspells, but especially the new bear mount and the new engineeringmount look very promising. Especially since there are a lot of people who were rather disappointed when Blizzard announced they would remove the Amani War Bear from the timed event in ZA in patch 3.02. Now everyone has a chance to ride on a massive bear (i still think the Amani Bear looks cooler though, goggles on a bear is not my kind of thing...)

The engineering mount on the other hand will be BoE. Yes, you read that right, BoE. Everyone will be able to ride the Mechano Hog even if you're not an engineer !

It sounds great in theory, but there are alot of engineers who are rising up with a (imho) perfect valid statement. In TBC we had the helicopter , which was BoP, for engineers. It was sort of a reward for levelling engineering to the maximum, then you could make a helicopter and prove you have spent the time (and mostly money) to level engineering. 

Now everyone will have a Mechano-Hog, which takes away the charm of engineering as a lot of engineers were looking forward to ride around Azeroth showing off the new ride. But noooo, everyone will be able to do that now and therefor a lot of people are complaining. (Yes, the epeen got kicked in the eballs with this).

But for moneyhungry engineers (like me) this is great ! You'll be able to make mounts and put them on the AH for massive prices (especially during the first months) and they will sell. Mountcollectors will go nuts on them and people who want to complete their achievements will buy one aswel so there will be a rather large market for it. 

Let's just hope the mats aren't too expensive so i can make a huge profit to buy my Wooly Mammoth :P

-Dave out.

Moneysink ahoi !

Good day my lovely minions of the cookie kingdom !

It seems we'll be getting enough moneysinks in Wrath to spend our "hard" earned gold on. First and foremost there will be Cold Weather Flying (which is not that much in comparison to the rest ofcourse) which will cost around 950G. This new skill will allow you to fly with your flying mount in Northrend, do note this is only possible from lvl77 and upwards.

The second one will be the ring you can get from Dalaran for a whopping 8500G, this ring can quickly teleport you to Dalaran. You can compare it with the neckpiece you get from the BTattunement that allows you to teleport to BT (the one after you killed Illidan).

The next moneysink will be the multipassengermount, it will cost around 14500G and is by far the most expensive mount thusfar. It will allow you to transport 3 people (including yourself) and it's a giant, frigging mammoth ! I mean, what more do you want, you'll be riding with your friends on a bigasss elephant demolishing everything that crosses your path !

Ofcourse there are other moneysinks aswel in the form of levelling professions, which will be rather expensive at the start, especially if you buy everything from AH to speed it up.

So a piece of advice would be, get that gold now while it's easy by doing dailies, selling epic gems you bought with badges or just exploiting the AH and make a profit of lazy-dumb people.

-Dave out.

The lore and you.

Goodmorning/afternoon/evening/night/

As some of you might know i'm really interested in the story behind Warcraft, the lore as they call it. I've read most of the books (atleast the ones i was able to get a hold off, damn you proxis for not shipping 1 book i still don't have !) and are a frequent visitor of wowwiki to read up on major lorecharacters/events and items.
I think it's a very compelling and solid story that provides a decent backbone to the game(s) we play today. From Warcraft 1 throughout Wow the story has been further developped and explained and new stuff has been added. But not everything is as appreciated by the fanbase as Blizzard would've liked, especially when TBC was first launched / announced lore-addepts were up in arms about the Draenei and the Bloodelves because it wasn't "true" to the lore we have known for such a long time.
I can only imagine people needed a bit of time to accept the fact Blizzard wants to further develop their story as they probably have everything lined up for the coming expansion(s) and warcraft games. The same is happening again with this expansion where we will face 2 gigantic lore-characters in the form of Arthas/Lich King and Malygos and possible/maybe beat/kill them. Now, i do say this carefully as that is not known at all, we might just subdue them or they might flee from battle after we've reduced them to a pile of rubbish.
But nonetheless this is a catalyst for those lore-addepts to start up the QQ-train on the forums again, spouting random statements as "blizzard is destroying the lore" and "omg, we can't kill arthas for x and y reasons".
Let me say one thing: A mmo is all about progression, that counts for everything: skills, gear, professions, content and yes....storyline. So start accepting the fact the story won't be stuck in 1 certain phase forever, it will further develop and new faces will show up (for example the son of Grom Hellscream, Garosh)

So far my little rant

-Dave out

Achievements

Hello there, it's been a while but i've been busy PLAYING BETA. Yes, that's right, yours truly has a betakey /flex. So i was able to test out a few tidbits of the new Wrath of the Lich King and i can tell you this: it's very, very awesome.
But that's for a later post, first i wanted to review the new achievementsystem Blizzard has put in and its use.

So, what is an achievement? An achievement is something you get for doing something special, reaching a goal ingame. This could be discovering all of outlands or simply dinging 70.
The first thing that i noticed was that this system is very friendly towards all groups of the game, either to the hardcore players who want to achieve bosskils and to the casual players who are limited to their playtime and aren't able to raid all that much/far. This is very blizzlike tbh, they cater to the 2 major groups ingame to decrease the whining from the community.
For every achievement you get (you'll see it when you achieve something, it has a little animation and a fancy textured messagebox) you gain achievementpoints and an entry in the achievementpanel. This achievementpanel is also something new, it's a window where you have all the types of achievements you can get (raidachievement, exploration, dungeon, misc,...) and you also see what achievements you haven't completed yet, which sets a goal and gives you a direction what to do next.
Anyway, back to those achievementpoints. At this point in time there is not much use for those but they promised us to do something with the achievementpoints. I really wonder what it could be, although there are enough rumours on the internet about the use of those achievementpoints, nothing has been confirmed yet.

Now, this system seems like a good addition to the game and it looks like a system that satisfies the community....buuuut the wowcommunity wouldn't be the wowcommunity if it haven't found something to cry about.
"Cheap content", "Stolen from xbox live", "omg too much time to complete them all",....You can probably continue the list with multiple lines of "QQQQQQQ"
I don't think this is cheap content, it's not something that we've seen before and it's again a goalbased system. It will keep players busy in times when they are a bit bored (between raids, between battlegrounds,...) It's a little addition to the game that will be very good for the completionists in this game, who want to achieve everything possible (for them) in this game.
And when it's known what will be done with those achievementpoints it could be even more involved for other groups of players aswel.
Is it stolen from xbox live? C'mon, do you really think xbox live was the first system with achievements? Baldur's Gate had achievements for pete's sake.
Achievementsystems is a system that has been popular in the last wave of consoles (xbox live, playstation online) and it's not strange for Blizzard to jump on this bandwagon and implement an achievementsystem in their game. It will keep people playing and aiming for higher achievements, which should be the main goal in an mmorpg. Improving your character, testing the limits and achieving all you can while having loads of fun.

Wel, i did my achievement for the day *zzzziiinnggg* "Made a blogpost"

-Dave out

WWI Paris (3)

With the end of the friend and family alphastage of WotLK, the next expansion has entered closed beta stage...and as usual with closed beta everything gets leaked right away.
So i'm gonna quickly finish up these WWI Paris newspost and get on with the leaked betastuff, and yes this had to be done ages ago but i'm a lazy bastard.

Priest

• Divine Hymn will be a deep-holy talent protecting your party from attackers, any attacks done to you or your party will cause the attacker to be afflicted by sleep.
• The 51 point talent for Shadow Priests is Dispersion : You disperse into pure shadow energy, reducing all damage taken by -90%. You are unable to attack or cast spells, but you regenerate 6% health and mana every 1 sec for 6 seconds.
• Guardian Spirit - Calls upon a guardian spirit to heal and watch over the friendly target. The spirit heals the target for 642 every 2 sec, and also prevents the target from dying by sacrificing itself. Lasts 10 seconds.

-The first thing that popped up in my mind was :"This will be massive in pvp". But maybe i'm wrong, i started thinking about the pveimplications about this spell and it could be used in a slick way to save your partymembers from loose mobs. This is not really useable in raidinstances where damage is much higher, but in your normal 5 man clothies can survive a couple of hits from a loose mob. So, if a clothie would have aggro the priest could just put a Divine Hymn on his target and whenever the mob hits the target it will put to sleep, giving the clothie time to run away and the tank time to pick up the mob.
In addition it could also be a way to save the priest's life when fade fails, again only in a 5man as i don't see that happening in raids.

-So spriests get a sort of Evocation with an added protection for pvpsituations. Again a talent that will have an impact on both PVE and PVP. I wonder if it will be dispellable or interuptable even, we'll have to see how it works out. But i do like how it sounds now, a nice way to get manaback for the spriests seems like an usefull tool in raiding.

-Now, this is cool, you'll have a personal healing bitch following you around. As arousing that may sounds it actually sounds very usefull and amazing. Especially the sacrificing part, so whenever an enemy would give you a finishing blow, the spirit will sacrifice itself in order to buy you time to get yourself healed up/ run away.
And i especially like it when it mentioned "target", so it means it can be casted on people other than yourself, very, very interesting skill.

Mages

• Mages are getting a Frostfire bolt dealing Frost-Fire damage to make elementalists more viable.

Gratz mages, you got the short end of the stick when it comes to announcements on WWI. While frostfire bolt sounds exciting, we actually know nothing new about it apart from it will use 2 elements instead of 1, being frost and fire. That will have some impact, i'm sure but up until now we don't know what.
So, let's hope for more news in the next few weeks with the WotLK beta.

Next up are the shamans, but that'll have to wait until later....i'm getting hungry.


-Dave out

WWI: Paris (2)

Hunters !

Yes, hunters also get new stuff instead of being deleted from the game (popular suggestion, i swear) and this is what they presented us at the WWI in Paris.

Hunter

• All kind of pets will have their own talent tree. A tanking talent tree, a DPS talent tree, and an utility talent tree. Each kind of pet family will have its own talent tree and its own unique ability.
• The shot clipping will be removed from Steady Shot, you'll be able to use it without "interrupting" your autoshot. Hunters will be able to just smash their button.
• There are going to be new pets in WotLK.
• The skill points for each pets are being changed to the new "Pet talents" and will disappear.

-Pets with talenttrees huh, pretty awesome and together with the diversity in petskills a welcome change when it comes to pets. Because, let's face it, with all the normalisation they received in the past pets became pretty dull and similar. Let's hope stuff finally changes with these tweaks and they create a bit more diversity. This change is especially good for BMhunters ofcourse, who use their pet more than their own willy.
-Shot clipping removed. Good and bad.
Good: more damage for the hunters even for players who have never heard of this and therefor knew fuck all about shotclipping.
Bad: Imho if you knew about this and actually mastered it to avoid shot clipping, it really showed you knew your class and were able to differentiate from the typical huntard.
-Yay for new pets ! I'm not sure whether this means new types of pet (like cat, boar, ...) or just new models in these categories.
-Only logical if they would work with talenttrees to rename pet points to pet talent points.

So, hunters got some pretty nice stuff to look out for and i'm pretty sure this is only the tip of the iceberg because as you can see all these things mostly cater to BMhunters. There is little to nothing known what will be in the next expansion for survival and mms hunters.

WWI: Paris

OMG DIABLO 3 !

No, we're not going to talk about that game although i'm very excited about that announcement and looking forward to play it.
But Diablo 3 wasn't the only topic that was dealt with in Paris, they also shared quite a bit of WotLK info, some of it was very cool and exciting other stuff was....erhm...wel, crap.
The next few weeks will be very busy, i'll be talking about all the stuff that has been mentioned on the WWI and the stuff that's floating around the internet regarding the wotlk alpha and give you my opinion about the matter.

First things first, right after the announcement and the openingceremoy they held the Class Panel where people could ask questions about all the classes in the next expansion, including the much anticipated Deathknight.

Druid

• Entangling roots will be useable indoor.
• Nourish will be a new healing spell, healing for more hit points for each HoT effect on the target.
• There isn't any plan to change cyclone

Druids are finally getting what npc druids had all this time: Entangling roots that will work indoor. This means we have another form of CC for melee-oriented classes (it won't have much effect on casters) in instances and solocontent. A great (and long awaited) PVE change which will have a minor effect on pvp being entangling someone inside WSG flagbuildings....but who cares about battlegrounds anyway.
Yay ! A new healing spell that looks very, very interesting and promising. I wonder if the HoT effects only means druidHoT's or other HoTs aswel (renew). If it would be all HoT effects then it will be awesome for MT healing where the priests and druids usually put their HoT's on and let the singletarget healers do the rest.
Cyclone won't be changed. Wel, cool because as a paladin i hate cyclone with every fibre of my body and therefor should be removed from the game entirely :P . No serious, cyclone works fine as it is and i wouldn't know what they should change about it. It's rather imba in arena but what isn't these days *cough*

Pre-expansion burnout

Lately a lot of people quit the game or switched to another game until the new expansion is released and when you ask them why they mostly answer the same thing: "i was bored". Now this is not the first time this happened, just before TBC came out we saw the same thing.
Dailies don't seem to keep the people ingame (duh) and this burnout especially caters to 2 groups of people: On one side you have the casual player who doesn't raid, quest a bit and pvp when they are up for it. They jump ship because the lack of solo content that isn't repeatable, because -let's face it- when you done the dailies a couple times they might get boring quite fast for a lot of people. The other group are the hardcore raiders who are on the bleeding edge and killed everything that needs to be killed. They finished the game so there is nothing they haven't seen yet, so they either roll an alt and enjoy the game that way or pick up other games (especially the recently released Age of Conan is popular with the crowd)

What can be done to cater to this problem ? A very tough question if you ask me as i still enjoy the game and really think there is loads of content to enjoy. My biggest remedy against boredom is just rolling an alt and do some content i haven't done before (be it a new class, new race, new faction or just a new area to quest in), but i do realise not everyone likes to level.
But the biggest remedy is dimming down on your playtime and only do the things you enjoy the most. It's no use to sit idle in Shattrath or any other major city just to log out after 30 minutes realising you haven't done anything besides parading around on your mount and your bag full of epics. If you want to use WoW as an Instant Messenger, be my guest but it's not worth to pay for that as there are enough free alternative to talk to your friends (messenger, googletank, skype,...)
Something you could do is convince a couple of your friends to reroll with you (be it on a different server or just a fresh alt on your main realm) and level on a casual speed while having a blast with your friends.

And if all else fails and you still can't find any fun in the game, just put it down for a while and wait for the next expansion. There are tons of good games to play aside WoW, enjoy them aswel and don't tunnelvision yourself on one game.

-Dave out

The light: abandoned faith or still needed?

Hello and welcome on Dave likes cookies.

For the first post of this brand-spanking-new blog i'm going to tackle the problems of endgame paladins. (the fact my main is a paladin has nothing to do with it, i swear ! )
Are paladins needed in endgame raids apart for their ability to buff, cleanse and rez ? Recently i've seen examples where other healers are being selected for raids whereas paladins are not because of the nature of the instance. I'm talking about Sunwel Plateau in particular where there happens so much at the same time, where everyone takes a crapload of damage at the same time and where classes with raidheal abilities really shine. (priests, shaman and druids)
This has also been stated by numerous highend raidingguilds who are in the competition for world first. Recently Neg (a restoshaman from SKgaming) said the following:

"Paladins are the healers who really get left behind. They were the kings of healing in early Burning Crusade, but the most efficient way to use them in Sunwell is quite sadly having them outside of the raid buffing people."

Honestly i can only agree with said statement, sad as it is. The paladin's healingefficiency is just too low to be competitive with other healers in SWP. This isn't only the case in highend raiding but also in the newly implemented Magister's Terrace where groupdamage is also quite high and have to be healed rather quick, something paladins aren't able to do that well.
So my question is: "Will the paladins go back to what they were initially when we started raiding MC? Buff - and cleansebots with the additional heal here an there ? Or will Blizzard take a look at our healingcapabilities and improve it so we're a competitive healingclass in endgame raiding again?"
This won't be a question that will have an answer in the first few months, we'll just have to wait and see until WotLK is released and check out what new talents and spells paladins get. But for now we're pretty redundant and outclassed by other healers, which is a tad sad tbh. While paladins are great healers for lower bracket raidinstances where we excel at MThealing and throwing heals around because people aren't receiving that much raiddamage, we are being ditched when they hit SWP for restoshamans.
To conclude the first -fairly brief- topic of this new blog, i'd like to give a token of support to my fellow paladins and hope for the best in Wrath.

-Dave out