badge-of-justice
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Possible new Badge of Justice loot unlocked on the PTR
MMO-Champion has just posted a whole batch of loot that's just been unlocked on the test server. It seems no-one's found a vendor for it yet, but especially with some it still sporting "Sunwell Badge Loot" names, speculation right now would suggest it's part of the new tier 5 Badge of Justice gear we were promised by Drysc a bit back. Right now, one of the new daily quest givers at the Sun's Reach Armory named Smith Hauthaa implies that if you can help her get supplies, she will be able to sell you powerful weapons and armor. It looks like we'll need to do her daily quest "Making Ready" enough times to unlock the ability to buy the gear. There's definitely some sweet upgrades here. Casters who've not had any luck getting Prince Malchezzar to drop his dagger (and even those who have it) should be ecstatic for the Scryer's Blade of Focus, while the hunter in me is drooling over the Crossbow of Relentless Strikes. Haste and spell haste rating seems to figure quite prominently on the various types of armor, but there's also a good amount of hit rating as well. Some of the cloth pieces might even get some tailoring Shadow Priests and Affliction Warlocks to shed their Shadoweave sets. The search goes on for a vendor for all these goodies, but with any luck they'll be found soon. If this is the badge gear, and it is unlockable by finishing different levels of the daily quests at Quel'danas, I'd say it's another great mechanic by Blizzard, in that it's yet another thing that'll definitely bring the server together by giving a really excellent incentive to finish the race. In addition, the badge gear should not only let casuals who prefer to stick to clearing Karazhan and running Heroics have a definite avenue of improvement, but also let raiders who have been waiting forever for that one boss drop have a chance at picking themselves up some reasonable side-grades, especially now that they'll be able to get the badges they need from the 25-man raids themselves.
Badges of Justice topple the Black Temple
According to Drysc, the Sunwell Plateau will bring new badge loot to a vendor near you. Its too early to say what these items will be, but Drysc says the items are going to be Black Temple quality.This definitely has ups and downs. In my opinion, it really seems like the devs are eager to make their past dungeons obsolete. Dumping the old world raids with the launch of the Burning Crusade made a lot of sense, but rendering most of the pre-Sunwell content obsolete with badge gear within the same chapter of the game seems a little strange to me. Even if the vendor was in the raid zone itself, giving a wider selection of gear to those who have cleared Black Temple and Mount Hyjal, that would only lead to those with a plethora of badges paying for a raid ID for vendor access.Of course, this could be a very good thing for people sitting on many, many badges from Karazhan and are trying to gear up for Wrath of the Lich King levelling. Black Temple loot in exchange for a few Kara runs? Sure, I'll take that!
Breakfast Topic: Thanksgiving WoW Plans
With Thanksgiving holiday approaching quickly for American players, it means either 4 days of non-stop WoW playing or 4 days snowed in with talkative relatives and no Internet connection.For those of you planning to play WoW over the four day Thanksgiving weekend, what do you plan do accomplish with all that time? Rack up Honor Points? Level that new alt? Farm Zul'Aman for a bear mount? Grind towards one of the new flying mounts? You can vote in the poll or leave a comment below!%Poll-5957%
PTR patch notes for Friday, Nov 2
World of Raids is reporting lots of small fixes in the latest PTR build of Patch 2.3, but with a few surprises as well. There's a good amount of class changes along with some Badge of Justice loot tweaks and a new Hunter volley animation seen above.Highlights for the class changes include: Feral Druids getting their single target and group based taunts buffed by their +hit rating; Rogues getting Hemorrhage buff as well as a redesign of Shadowstep; and Priests receiving the Focused Will buff as well as Druids getting the Natural Perfection buff even buffer than we reported on earlier.Chest spawns in Hellfire Ramparts, Karazhan: Chess Event and The Mechanar will not be lootable by anyone absent for a significant amount of the boss fights near the chests. On the upside, Heroic Ramparts and Heroic Mechanar chests will contain a Badge of Justice for every member in the party and the Karazhan cache will contain two! I can tell what two Heroic dungeons are about to get very popular.Finally, special Engineered goggles are no longer necessary to see the gas clouds in Netherstorm for mote extraction. However, the goggles will now allow the gas clouds to be seen on the minimap in addition to whatever other tracking the player currently has up.With Patch 2.3 background loading this week, one can only hope Zul'Aman will be available for all of us to enjoy soon and Patch 2.4 introducing the Sunwell Plateau will be served up on the PTR right after.[Thanks Calypso!]
Insider Trader: A primal urge to roll for Primal Nethers
Each week, Lisa Poisso brings us Insider Trader -- your weekly inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.In the wake of the avalanche of item and crafting tweaks ushered in by patch 2.1, Insider Trader takes a look at the much-maligned Primal Nether. How do you get one? Do you even need one? Should you roll for one? And keep reading for an Insider Trader tip on a special tactic engineers -- yes, engineers! -- can use to get certain types of motes. But first things first: Primal Nethers. These glowing globules of crafting goodness have about a 5-10% chance of dropping from final bosses in non-heroic Burning Crusade instances, and they're a guaranteed drop from final bosses of heroic instances. Post-2.1, you can also purchase them for the bargain price of 10 Badges of Justice from G'eras in Shattrath City.
For great (Badge of) Justice!
The other night my guild stepped into a heroic instance for the first time. Now this isn't great news for those of you who already spend your weekend nights huggling Gruul, but it's a great accomplishment for us. Since we all have the Coilfang Resevoir key we started with Slave Pens, and I must say it was a joy to have challenge in that instance again. It felt like I had been given the instance back, as it were. If I were to walk into Slave Pens at the normal level I would feel little interest since it's tuned for 62-64. I finally understand the method behind the heroic dungeon concept, to allow level 70 players to have fun going to those dungeons again. But what I'd really like is heroic dungeon settings for the old instances in Azeroth. Can you imagine what Van Cleef would be like at level 70? It makes me giddy just to think of it. We only got as far as the first boss, and then the trash beat us to a complete pulp before exhaustion forced us to quit. I really was surprised how the tides shift with heroics. I have a hard time reconciling trash mobs who are impossible to kill and bosses who are manageable. Either way I am excited to have such a novel experience added to our game play. Whoever came up with the concept of heroic dungeons was brilliant. I have my first Badge of Justice, now. Only 112 to go.
PTR notes: new helms for Badges of Justice
G'eras, the Naaru who sells you things for Badges of Justice in Shattrath, now has eight new epic helms with meta slots in addition to his new Primal Nether trade-in. They cost 60 badges each. As you might expect, there are two helms for each type of armor, which makes it pretty easy to figure out which are for which classes. Of course, there being two cloth helms, the DPS clothies have to share one. Spec-wise, the hybrids' helms break down like this, as far as I can tell: Druid: Feral Shaman: Elemental Warrior: Protection Paladin: Holy All the helms have from 21 to 37 stamina on them too, which is nice -- I've noticed that the better gear my Priest gets, the less HP she has. All in all it looks like pretty good gear (although they need to work on meta gem itemization, but that's a separate issue). Screenshots of all the items after the cut. What do you think? Will you be shooting for one of these? (Pictured is the Rogue helm.)
