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Totem Talk: Patch 3.2.2 and you (if you're a shaman)
Totem Talk is the column for shamans. This week, Matthew Rossi continues looking at patch 3.2.2, this time with a more general view of the changes.One thing I did wrong yesterday was that I really did not focus enough on the changes to Flame Shock, Lava Burst and Shamanism. I was admittedly very angry with the loss of just about every anti-stealth tool in my toolkit (especially as I've been leveling my orc shaman in AV as Elemental this week as part of my promise to you guys while also considering faction changing my space goat to a tauren) but the very silver lining to the particular patch 3.2.2 cloud is the significant DPS increase for Elemental.Frankly, the duration increase on Flame Shock and the removal of Lava Burst's consuming the FS damage over time component, by themselves, would have resulted in a nice little DPS boost by freeing up a Glyph slot and extending the duration of the damage. (It also allows you to use other shocks and let FS tick off by itself rather than worrying about reapplying it). But when you combine this change with the significant increase in Shamanism's effect on Lightning Bolt and it now also working on Chain Lightning, what we have here is a very nice series of changes that help Elemental with those pesky scaling issues that have dogged the spec.I'll admit, even with the XP loss in Alterac Valley and the loss of all my anti-stealth I still can't help but love AV on my orc. As I've gone up in level I'm not getting as many of those pesky resists and then this came along and my damage went up nicely even in my hodgepodge of old epics and new greens.
WoW Patch 3.2.2: Impact on the Battlegrounds
Patch 3.2.2 has gone live and it has made a significant impact on World of Warcraft PvP. Most of the changes affect class balance, which greatly affect PvP, but there are some important changes to Battlegrounds, as well. One Battlegrounds-specific item in the patch notes is the way lower level characters can see daily Battlegrounds quests independent of quests for characters in different brackets. This means that players will always have a daily Battleground quest available, only that they will range from whatever Battlegrounds they are eligible to enter. This is great news for leveling players or even twinks who can gain Honor and a bit of gold. The change also moderately offsets the undocumented change to Alterac Valley Battleground experience gain. Zarhym explains it with a little more detail, saying that the bracket changes were responsible for the unexpected shift in experience gain. He also adds that overall, Battlegrounds experience gain should be improved across the board so playing, say, Warsong Gulch will be as rewarding as playing Alterac Valley.
Details on the Alterac Valley bracket changes
Earlier this evening we posted a list of in-game fixes, and we included in that list a bit about then-unannounced changes AV; namely that the brackets were moved around and the amount of XP gained by completing objectives was changed.Bornakk has since came out and clarified the changes a bit, and provided a bit more detail. Most interestingly is that this change was intended for Patch 3.3, and was accidently applied to Patch 3.2.2. I'm not really sure how such a significant change could accidently make it in, but there we have it. From Blizzard's mouth to your ears.It would make sense that the change be applied in Patch 3.3. Cross-server instances are coming in Patch 3.3, and that's going to help leveling a ton. Think of how easy things will be if you just want to chain run dungeons at 1 a.m. for a few hours. That speed and leveling agility would help offset the XP nerf contained in this sudden AV change. But as it stands, we'll have to wait a few months to allow for another quick level mechanism to be put in place.The other part of the change that was clarified is exactly what happened with the brackets.
Totem Talk: Return of the Orc
This week, Totem Talk talks about leveling a shaman through PvP. That's right, I said leveling a shaman through PvP. Matthew Rossi has discovered the joys of returning to the Horde this weekend with a level grinding AV blitz that even he doesn't really understand.Before we even get started: I'm working on a post about the change to Glyph of Flame Shock and the Earthen Power changes. It will be its own post, it probably won't be a Totem Talk all by itself. It's one of those "Enough to give it some focus, not enough for a full column" changes. For now, here's a relevant forum thread with blue feedback on the issue.Alterac Valley's transformation into The Great Level Grinding Gulch (apologies to Warsong Gulch) has had one significant benefit to my Horde shaman: it's gotten me to dust him off and start playing. What's even more amazing is, it's been fun to play an enhancement shaman in PvP again! I think I may have suffered some subtle form of head injury, but there it is. This experiment was initially inspired by my desire to get back to my Horde roots without repeating all the content in Northrend for a sixth time. You know, it's well designed, and I do expect I'll go run Zul'Drak again for the Ampitheatre quests, but I wanted a shortcut and Alterac Valley has provided one. At present I honestly think any leveling guide should recommend a daily dose of AV to help speed the process up.Oh, I die a lot. Pretty much any time I don't have Feral Spirit up, I die. I die if the Alliance Rogues sneeze on me, which they do often, and with great relish, often snickering at my Zul'Aman enhancement gear and my poor green offhand. It does its best! But even with all the dying (to the point where the Orc death animation is sort of soothing to me now and if I go too long without having two rogues making me the meat in a stabbing sandwich I sort of miss it) I'm sort of impressed with how much I can actually do as an underlevel, completely undergeared Shaman leveling up purely through AV.
Breakfast Topic: How has Battleground experience been working out for you?
Since we didn't have a WRUP this weekend, I'll go ahead and tell you what I did: leveled alts using Alterac Valley. Just a few hours of play, and the levels were flying past without a care, even with only about a 50% win rate. And those times we won fast? Hoo Boy. 100-150k experience for about 10 minutes of work is nothing to sneeze at.It might be possible that I could have leveled up quicker by loading up a few questing addons and buckling down, but I found PvPing a lot more fun and relaxing for some reason, and I don't think questing would have been all that much quicker.
Blizzard to focus on battlegrounds more
Ghostcrawler has posted a little paragraph on the forums, reaffirming something we've already heard from Blizzard: that in the past, they've spent more time on Arenas to the detriment of battlegrounds, and that battlegrounds are going to be gaining a little more focus in the future. They've already started, actually, with the Isle of Conquest in 3.2, but GC says there's even more on the table, and that future plans will be revealed at BlizzCon.He also brings up another good point, however: in terms of class balance, Arenas are a much more striking example of imbalances than battlegrounds are. Battlegrounds have all sorts of things going on, and so you don't get as good a picture of just how the different classes work with and against each other as you do in Arenas. And so, if you're a dev trying to figure out class balances, of course you'll spend more time looking at the Arena gameplay than the BGs. GC also says that the majority of issues in BGs tend to be map-based rather than class imbalances, which is really a whole other science. Not that BGs aren't relevant to how the classes work, just that there are many more variables in there than the relative vacuum chamber of Arenas.All good points. I'm a fan of battlegrounds much more than Arenas, but I don't particularly feel that Blizzard has ignored them necessarily. The real problem, to my mind, with BGs is simply how faction imbalanced they are: it seems like on every realm in every given BG, one side always seems to have the upper hand, for whatever reason. Sometimes it's a population problem, sometimes it's a map issue. But GC is right: those problems are more pressing than class balance in the BGs.
Tom Chilton talks about 3.2 and the future of World of Warcraft
Videogamer.com has a nice long interview with World of Warcraft Producer Tom Chilton about everything from patch 3.2 and the Argent Tournament to the future of the game at large. They caught up with him at the Warcraft Regional Finals 2009 tournament in Germany this past week, and in part one, he talks about the upcoming patch and what Blizzard is expecting to get out of it. He says the Isle of Conquest battleground is their most "epic-feeling" instanced PvP setting since Alterac Valley, and that they want it to feel nuts, with players fighting each other via air and land. He also mentions Arena, and says that it was originally designed to be "a fun side PvP activity" that they went a little overboard with during Burning Crusade. Finally, he talks about twinks, and says that neither Blizzard nor twinks, apparently, want to see other players crushed by those who have the time or money to max out their low level characters. Even twinks, says Chilton, want to see competition against each other, and the option to turn XP off will let them do that. I'm not sure I agree with that last one -- many twinks seem to beef their characters up just for the chance to lay waste to "normal" players, but Chilton says Blizzard believes otherwise.The second part of the interview is more general -- he talks a little bit about the next expansion (with the same speculation we've already heard: Gilneas, the Maelstrom, the Emerald Dream), and says that designing a race is tougher on artists, but designing a class is tougher on designers. He admits that because we had a new class in Wrath, it's unlikely we'll see another class so soon in the next expansion, but "not impossible" of course. And he does note that Blizzard tries to "pre-seed" the races before they use them as playable races, so if they are adding in races, chances are we've already seen them (which, you may note, wasn't strictly true with the Draenei in BC). Finally, he talks about the future of Blizzard's MMO in general, and says it's still wide open to them: they plan for the game to last for years, and what they do between now and then, whether that be more expansions, microtransactions, or even a free-to-play model, will have to depend on what they want to do at the time.Very interesting interview. Chilton doesn't really reveal anything, but you do get the sense that save for a very skeleton plan of one or two years in the future, Blizzard is really playing it fast and loose with World of Warcraft. Even he admits that the game may look very different, depending on how things go, in another four years from now.
Patch 3.2 bringing Strand of the Ancients coin toss
We mentioned this issue a while back -- since it was introduced to the game, Strand of the Ancients has started Alliance on attack first, and that's caused problems. Due to the way the map is set up (a back-and-forth attack and defend map), the team that starts attacking has an advantage in terms of farming honor -- they only have to play until the other team loses rather than having to keep up a defense the whole time. That means shorter battlegrounds for the Alliance, which means more honor overall for them.The problem was that Blizzard couldn't just flip a switch to randomize the battleground's spawn points: they were hard-coded into the moving ships that players appear on, so it took much more coding to use a coin-flip start. However Zarhym now confirms that the coin flip is coming to SotA. And though he didn't say when in the original post, the Patch 3.2 notes tell us that it's coming in that patch.Hopefully Blizzard will have learned their lesson for the Isle of Conquest -- although since it's closer to Alterac Valley from what we've heard, we probably won't have that asymmetrical issue, and both sides will be able to start with just as many advantages and disadvantages as the other.Patch 3.2 will bring about a new 5, 10, and 25 man instance to WoW, and usher in a new 40-man battleground called the Isle of Conquest. WoW.com will have you covered every step of the way, from extensive PTR coverage through the official live release. Check out WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.2 for all the latest!
Zarhym talks about the Isle of Conquest battleground
So one of the things we have coming our way in patch 3.2 will be the new Isle of Conquest battleground. Unfortunately, we don't know much more about it than the name, but that has not stopped everyone from speculating on what it could bring, whether it be a combination of some of the old mechanics from previous battlegrounds (Much like Eye of the Storm was a combination of Arathi Basin and Warsong Gulch) or completely new ideas. There's been hints it's more like Alterac Valley than other old battlegrounds, but for now, we're waiting impatiently for the PTR in the hopes of getting a real look.Zarhym chimed in on one of these threads a couple days ago, and while he mostly told people they'd have to wait and see, one reply he did give suggests a sneak peek into what the battleground could be: "If "conquest" means the ability to catapult or parachute players behind enemy lines, then yes."Ok, so it's not much, but it's there. There will be Catapults, and we will be flinging players in them! I know one of my favorite things to do in Alterac Valley back when it lasted hours was to sneak behind enemy lines to capture objectives or gather Frostwolf Hides and the like. Of course, I could do this because I played a stealthing Druid. Non-stealthers generally did not have the ability to sneak past all the PCs and NPCs blocking their way. But the idea of sending paratrooping special forces in to complete small objectives or even just flank the enemy is just plain sort of cool, if it ends up working out like that.Beyond that, Zarhym also hinted that the Battleground revamp is coming along, but of course, once again, he had no information to offer. Will we see it in Patch 3.2? Hopefully, the PTR will come up soon and we'll know more for sure.
The Queue: Acronymification, FWIW
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.The last few editions of The Queue had a lot about tanking, and deciding which Heroic is the best Heroic to tank your first time around. Adam said Utgarde Pinnacle was a good training ground, and his opinion was thoroughly stomped upon for being wrong. I have to say, though... Utgarde Pinnacle was my first Wrath heroic as a tank and it worked pretty well. I did a lot of tanking in The Burning Crusade so maybe I'm a little different since I already knew what I was doing, but it wasn't nearly as bad as it's made out to be. Mobs in Utgarde Pinnacle hit really hard, and it taught me to get back into the habit of using my cooldowns properly and not relying completely on my healer to keep me standing.I won't say Adam was right, but I also won't say he was wrong. Heroic Utgarde Pinnacle and Heroic CoT: Stratholme are the two dungeons that taught me the most about tanking. Teaching myself to remember to use my own cooldowns and mitigation abilities, learning how to pace a group and keep them moving, relearning how to handle different types of mobs. They were a challenge, oh yes, but that's why I learned so much from them. Easier heroics like Violet Hold didn't teach me to do much because you basically nap through the thing. Then again, I am sort of a 'trial by fire' kind of guy. I need to die a few times to figure out whether I'm capable of something or not.CallMeIrd asked.."Are they going to change or remove the School of Hard Knocks achievements? It's pretty much impossible for a lot of players to achieve."
Children's Week ruins Battlegrounds
I'm sorry Blizzard, but I'm with the whiners on this one. The School of Hard Knocks is so badly designed that it's ruining, instead of enhancing, the Battleground experience. Take, for example, the requirement to return a flag in Warsong Gulch. First of all, the requirement is that the player return the flag personally as opposed to being in the vicinity of a flag return. This means that all ten players on one side are angling to return the flag... which is great in theory but in practice encourages entire teams to wait inside the base hoping to get the Achievement. This results in extended stalemates that don't actually encourage what needs to be done, which is to capture the flag.In Alterac Valley, we have forty players and four capturable towers or bunkers. Sure, the opposing faction can defend the towers/bunkers allowing it to be recaptured, but the whole business of racing to capture one -- again, personally -- turns every Alterac Valley into a race. This means lesser chances of defended towers. Realistically, if players tagged and defended until the objective burned down, only 10% of the team would be able to accomplish the Achievement requirement in every match. I'm sorry to tell all those who are allergic to PvP that you'll actually have to play quite a number of Alterac Valley matches just to get this one. Unfortunately for me, on my Battlegroup, playing Horde-side AV is like pulling teeth.
A closer look at the School of Hard Knocks
Let's take a look at the Children's Week PvP achievement School of Hard Knocks and the resources you'll need to accomplish it.If you want to get your Violet Proto-Drake and fly around at 310% speed, you're going to need to do this achievement. Reports are mixed on how easy or hard this achievement is. Some folks are saying it's done quickly and easily with a good group, others are banging their heads against the desk and spewing curse words at Blizzard.But just like everything, if you research and take an educated look at these achievements, they become more understandable and easier. That's not to say the achievement will become trivial, but it'll at least become more manageable.The achievement is broken down, complete with tips, after the break.
The OverAchiever: Guide to Children's Week achievements
All right, folks, we've got another sub-achievement needed for What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been (and thus the 310% speed Violet Proto-Drake) on our hands here. I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that most of the achievements for Children's Week are fairly straightforward, and should be easy (and even fun) to complete. Appropriately enough for a mini-holiday, most of the achievements are simple, amusing, and not too time-consuming. The bad news is that one of the achievements may be a huge headache to get done, and unlike Noblegarden, your character has to be at least 75 in order to get all of the achievements needed for the year-long meta. Children's Week runs from Friday, May 1st at midnight through Thursday, May 7th at 11:59 PM. Got your kiddo? Let's get cracking.EDIT: This article's been revised and updated to reflect new information and the hotfixes that have gone live since initial publication. All information herein should be accurate as of 11:30 AM EST Saturday May 2nd.
The OverAchiever: Master of Alterac Valley
It's Alterac Valley weekend once again, and although you can't currently use the Alterac Valley Marks of Honor for anything other than old world rewards right now, the Battleground still remains one of the best places to farm Honor. In case you're hitting up the frozen valley this weekend, here's a handy guide that should help you through the Achievements you need to get Master of Alterac Valley. Alterac Valley VeteranWin 100 games. I don't know about you, but I personally don't enjoy Alterac Valley enough to slog through the number of games required to win 100 times. That's probably because of my Battlegroup, where I find myself losing more than I win. Like all veteran Achievements, this really is just a matter of time, and the only real problem is finding yourself on the losing faction -- which tends to be a trend in many Battlegroups unlike other maps, which are largely symmetrical. Alterac Valley is asymmetrical, so a Battlegroup with a faction that knows how to take advantage of the asymmetry will tend to win most of the time. I'll peg this one at hard, and I think some of you will agree.Difficulty: HardAlterac Grave RobberThis is ridiculously easy because it doesn't require you to actually capture or convert the flag, just tag it. During the course of one game, there'll be many opportunities for you to do so. Snowfall Graveyard, the uncontrolled graveyard at the start of the game, is an excellent target that can be taken over and over.Difficulty: Easy
The Queue: Praying for the PTR
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.Good afternoon, WoW Insider! I'm feeling pretty good today, how about you? Why am I feeling so good? The idea of the PTR potentially going up in the next couple of days is giving me a bit of a rush. Seeing all of the new stuff is one of the big things that excites me about MMOs, and of course passing that info on to you guys. Let's hope it goes up sometime soon, because it will rule.Firestride asked...What should I do if I get into an AV raid that is intent on zerging, and going up against an opponent who is also zerging, only better at it?
The Queue: A curse upon you, interlopers
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft.Another Tuesday, another maintenance. As much as I'd like to write something amusing here to entertain you on your slow, boring day, I've got nothin'. Bone dry. I'm like the freaking Shimmering Flats here. Well, you know, like the north parts. Not the south parts with that little lake. Just the dry stuff, people. ...Oh, screw it.Jamesisgreat asked...Now I've hit level 80 and am looking at all the loot available to me as a feral druid, I've spotted a few of the PvP pieces that you can purchase with just honor. So my question is - where's the best place to grind honor nowadays? AV? Wintergrasp? Elsewhere?
The Queue: Shameless
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft.In today's episode of The Queue, I give our Facebook page another shameless plug. Have you seen it? Yes? Good! Let's move on, then.Jonny Dale asked...I seem to remember a post on where to find all the +hit rating gear for casters, but I can't find this anywhere on WoWInsider search or Google. Anyone care to help?
The Queue: High Elves, great race or greatest race?
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. I have to admit, there were one idea brought up in the comments yesterday that I'm completely in support of: Kael'thas returning as a Lich. Hell. Yes. Not aligned with the Scourge, but self-fueled and up to his own machinations again. Kael'thas has been one of my favorite villains, watching his fall into desperation through WCIII and The Burning Crusade. Lich Kael would own so hard.That's enough of that, though. On with the questions!Leprakahn asked... I remember reading during Wrath beta that at the end of inscription scribes were going to get a 7th glyph slot, what happened to that? Did it get scrapped completely or will it come with a later patch?
[1:Local]: Perspectives on WoW past, present and future
Reader comments – ahh, yes, the juicy goodness following a meaty post. [1.Local] ducks past the swinging doors to see what readers have been chatting about in the back room over the past week. Be sure to dive into the comments area of each thread (not this one!) and add your own thoughts – unlike your mama, we like us some hot, fresh backtalk. We don't miss that at allThis Breakfast Topic, which looked back at the little annoyances we're not sorry have gone the way of the dodo, included plenty of nostalgia for the epic-length Alterac Valleys of old. Players claimed to have hated them back then – but they seem to miss them now that they're a thing of the past. A number of readers pegged a different annoyance that early WoW players remember with chagrin. "One of the things I remember with the least amount of fondness is unconnected flight paths," noted lightningjynx. "There wasn't the clicking a destination halfway across the world and going to do something productive while you waited. No, you had to stare at your character flying to get anywhere in a reasonable amount of time, unless you had all the flight path times memorized and played that way." "Wow, yeah, I had forgotten about that," agreed MadScientist17. "Had to try to remember which flight points went where." We agree, too – but ultimately, we think Veil has the pointiest point: "Definitely don't miss old Andorhal. That place was an f'ing death trap."
A plea on behalf of frustrated tanks everywhere
Several classes and specs have gotten "knockback" abilities as part of patch 3.02 and the game's transition to Wrath of the Lich King, and I've had fun watching these skills be deployed in battlegrounds to extensive and quite possibly evil use. It's pretty funny watching an elemental Shaman defend AB's lumber mill now, and the AV bridge? Even funnier. And yet...as I laughed, I started to cry inside, because I knew that these skills would also be deployed in 5-man groups and raids to much less amusing effect. And man, it's a real burden being right so often.
