Posts Tagged ‘Wrath of the Lich King’

Ghostcrawler

We’re doing our Cataclysm preview on the death knight changes later this week, but we knew one change risked overshadowing all the others, so we figured we’d go ahead and drop the proverbial Blood bomb today.

In Cataclysm, death knights will have a dedicated tanking tree, much like the other three tank classes. That tree will be Blood.

We’ll go into more detail in the upcoming preview, but we wanted to take the opportunity to explain the reasoning for such a big change.

Why the about face? We actually thought the “tri tank” experiment worked out okay. We suspected there would always be a “best” tanking tree, because that’s the way these things shake out, but we hoped it would be close enough that many players could tank with their favorite tree. When we tried out this design for Wrath of the Lich King, we were using it as a test case to see if we wanted to do similar things with the warrior and paladin talent trees.

 
A lot has happened since that time. We introduced the dual-spec feature, allowing players to have a tanking spec and dps spec that they could switch between. We introduced Dungeon Finder, which makes it easier to find players who want to tank, and even let players level up using a dedicated tank spec. In Cataclysm, we are introducing the concept of passive talent tree bonuses and we think that feature is a lot stronger when the talent tree has a particular focus (such as damage, tanking or healing). For example, it’s safer to give more passive damage to a tanking tree than we can a dps tree. Above all, we were just spending a lot of effort trying to balance three trees (though it was really six trees, since each tree was trying to do two things).

It started to feel unfair to the other tank classes that we had to spend so much effort tweaking three types of DK tanks, and it even started to feel unfair to the DK that we couldn’t focus their tanking experience. One bit of feedback that really struck home was the DK players who said, essentially, “I look at the Protection tree and I’m jealous of all of the cool tools they have to help their tanking. As a DK, I have to pick and choose tanking talents from within a sea of dps talents.” Rather than have a strong focus, the trees felt a little watered down because they were trying to do so much. With Frost as a dual-wield, spell and runic power focused tree, Unholy as a disease and minion focused tree, and Blood as a self-healing, defensive cooldown, tanking tree, we think the focus of each tree is a lot clearer and cooler.

In Cataclysm, Blood will be the death knight version of a Protection tree. It will have passive talent tree bonuses that reflect tanking. It will have tools, such as a Demo Shout equivalent, necessary for tanking. Several of the more fun tanking talents from Frost and Unholy will be moved into Blood. We will be able to revise (or even remove) clunky mechanics like Rune Strike and focus on letting DKs generate threat with their normal Blood tanking rotation.

This is major change, and we understand it will be met with some disappointment from players who really liked the flexibility, those who appreciated the unorthodox talent tree design, or those few of you who really liked Blood dps. Nevertheless, we are convinced that this is the right change for the game.

More exciting death knight news coming up soon in the preview.

It looks like Patch 3.2 is going live today. I’m oddly looking forward to it, and frankly that means something since I haven’t been real thrilled with most of Wrath of the Lich King at all. The new druid forms will be out for Cat and Bear which is cool, even though I am disappointed with the fact that I can’t get rid of the ass ugly horns.

The new raid instance isn’t really of that much interest to me. The whole story around the Argent Tournament just seems off. How in the world can the Lich King be so powerful and fearsome that the Horde and Alliance can get together and set up a Ren Fair on his front lawn. Then there is the fact that some of the encounters actually include the horrible jousting that the tournament has been known for.

Amradorn hit level 75 last night while doing a few lower 70′s quests in Howling Fjord. I have from time to time gone back to lower Northrend zones to do a few quests when wanting to take it a little easier after work some nights. I think my next goal is to finish as many of the Grizzly Hills and Dragonblight quests that I can so that I can hit level 76 by the weekend. That will give me all weekend to hit 77 which will finially allow me to start flying again.

At that point I’ll be heading farther north to see what quests I can get in Storm Peaks and Ice Crown. Level 80 doesn’t feel that far off.

I’m sitting at work right now as I type this post. Since is only 2:16 pm I should be measuring the new plastic parts that the company I work for will be producing for an appliance manufacturing company. But I can’t concentrate. Wrath has it’s hold on me.

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It’s finially here, well almost. Wrath goes live tonight at midnight. While it doesn’t look like i’ll be getting my collector’s edition copy in the mail from Amazon until monday, I will probably be hitting Wal-mart over the weekend to pick up a regular copy for my secondary account and thus be playing this weekend. That will give me a little bit of time to either work on Moebius and gather some Northrend herbs for Am or start Norikor, my Deathknight.

Looking forward to seeing you all in Northrend.

Well I’ve been playing Beta quite a bit since I got my invite. Lots of lag and lots of crashes. Last weekend it was pretty much unplayable for long stretches of time. As of tonight right now Amradorn is level 72. I’ve done a ton of quests in both Howling Fjord and Borean Tundra and I have to say that I’m extremely ramped up about Wrath.

Release date and picture gallery after the break. Note that there are spoilers in the screenshots.

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I’d like you to meet Norikor. While waiting for Amradorn to copy over to the beta server I decided to make a Deathknight. Norikor is a name I picked out a long time ago when I first started playing Everquest. I had a Froglick Cleric named Norikor Swampsurfer.

This guy is a long way from a Froglick or a cleric. He is full of hate. Having died at the hands of the Scourge only to be resurected by the Lich King to do their bidding. He has killed hundreds in the name of the Scourge.

But no more. He has broken the bonds and declared himself a free Tauren once again. His only thoughts now are satisfy his lust for revenge.

First off, as you can see by the title, I got a beta invite. More on that in a moment.

To start off with I know its been a little while since I posted. Work as kept me really busy lately and it has just taken all the wind out of my sails. But that has all changed now.

After working late last night and coming home, having missed a raid =(, I checked my email and to my great surprise and excitement, I got a beta invite.

It has taken hours of downloading the client and about 4 patches but here I am, getting ready to log in. I can’t begin to express how excited I am about getting the invite. I’m currently waiting for Amradorn to be copied over so I will most likly start off by trying out the Deathknight. As I progress I’ll post how things are going and what my impressions are.

The raiding beast sits dazed for a moment and confused. The rolled up newspaper that Blizzard smacked it on the nose with lays on the ground at its feet, shreaded and torn. Its emotions are mixxed and its anger is building. Will it pounce and destroy the hand that smacked it or will it take the scolding and learn to be tamed? Only the beast knows

Blizzard appears to be trying to stop raid stacking by making many buffs raid wide buffs but in exchange they are making a lot of them not stack based on an elaborare catagory system. I have to agree with Phea at resto4life when she says that she believes that the result will be opositie to what Blizzard is hoping to achieve.

The principle is right, but the method seems off to me. I guess we will have to wait until Naxx 2.0 to see how it plays out.

This appears to be the hot topic of the day.

WoW Insider

World of Raids

Last night I went back to Stratholme for more mount farming (no I haven’t gotten it yet) and this time I changed things up a bit. I decided that instead of just going for the Undead side bosses I would clear all the trash. I still died three times but it was actually a lot of fun, and seeing the Baron die again was very rewarding personally, even if he is being stingy about the mount.

MMO Champion has some interesting tidbits about the upcoming 3.02 patch and some speculation on when it will hit the PTR. Blue posts in the EU forums show that the PTR forums have been cleaned out which usually means the PTR is just around the corner. I could really see it hiting as early as Thursday (8/28) or Friday (8/29) so as to give everyone all of Labor day weekend to download and get into the PTR.

Since I have yet to get a beta key this time around I will definately be trying my best to get onto the PTR with Amradorn and check out what ever new features Blizzard sees fit to let us try out. I expect the PTR to be up for some time, with 3.02 going live in late September and Wrath finially going Live In early November.