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Cataclysm: Justice and valor point drop rates revealed
Blizzard recently announced the justice and valor point amounts for all types of raid and heroic content for Cataclysm. Justice and valor points are replacing the current badge/emblem system, allowing players to purchase items and gear for points. When a new tier of raid content is launched, valor points become justice points, reducing the emblem clutter that had been so rampant in Wrath of the Lich King. Hit the jump for the official blue post.
Patch 3.3 PTR: New LFG interface
In the latest build of the PTR, Blizzard has included the new Looking for Group interface they've got in the works. As they had announced in at BlizzCon, the recent fix for the "Additional Instances" errors that were plaguing us a few months ago also adds the ability for them to allow cross-realm LFG. A new feature usually means a new interface and the trend proves true. It incorporates a lot of the long asked for features as well as removes several older features from the panel. They've taken the current system that allows you to select your available roles (healer, tank, or dps) as well as select if you're willing to lead the instance. One thing that should help out is the ability to earn emblems as well as gold for doing just a completely random pug each day. While some of you might be groaning at this thought, they are willing to reimburse you for the inconvenience with 68G for completing a random level 80 heroic. This money scales based on how much of your party is random and how much is premade. The less random your party is the lower the cash return. It's still early in the PTR and several features, like the ability to use the LFG panel to look for a raid, don't appear to be completely finished yet. I've included a gallery of what the new interface looks like thus far. %Gallery-76169% Patch 3.3 is the last major patch of Wrath of the Lich King. With the new Icecrown Citadel 5-man dungeons and 10/25-man raid arriving soon, patch 3.3 will deal the final blow to the Arthas. WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.3 will keep you updated with all the latest patch news.
Addon Spotlight: Daily Quest Viewer
Addon Spotlight takes a look at the little bits of Lua and XML that make our interfaces special. From bar mods to unit frames and beyond, if it goes in your Addons folder, we'll cover it here. Daily Quest Viewer is my favorite kind of addon: it solves one problem well. It tells you what today's daily quests are, enabling you to stop pestering your guild (or the trade channel) for information. My guild has developed a policy of putting the daily dungeon and daily heroic in the message of the day, but that only works if an officer has managed to check the dailies and update the message.
The Queue: Future raids and more on daily quests
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.Be warned that today's edition of The Queue contains some light spoilers at the very end, regarding the Death Knight intro quests as well as some quests in Icecrown. To avoid spoilers, stop reading a little before the end, but you're safe until then. Thiosion asked...What instances other than Ulduar and Icecrown are (is?) Blizzard suspected to be working on?
The heroic less traveled
Branch raised an observation today -- it can be difficult getting groups for instances which aren't the daily Heroic. Of course, in the same post, he claims he gets offers from characters who aren't quite heroic enough for Heroics. The problem seems to really be that he can't get groups that meet his standards for the Heroics he wants to do.Bornakk first offers that he thinks experience plays a role here. Until you've experienced the content, you're probably going to be intimidated by it. In my opinion, you may have to enjoy some time with PUGs to get that experience.The thread winds up with what I'd expected in the first place -- the issue is more about which instance offers the most badges for your time. The fate and future of badges has been a hot topic. Bornakk definitely acknowledges that we run Heroics for badges instead of loot. Since Blizzcast indicated changes to badge loot in Wrath of the Lich King, it'll be interesting to see what happens to Heroic badges come expansion time.
Repetitive heroic dailies
I've enjoyed the heroic daily quests recently added to WoW. In addition to the new badge rewards, they give me a reason to run five-player dungeons again, which is really one of my favorite parts of the game. While some of the quests have led to frustrating situations where the group is trying to learn the strategy for a heroic dungeon that none of us have attempted before, most of my experiences have been good ones.One downside of the random nature of the quests is the fact that the same dungeon can be selected several days in a row. On my main server, Auchenai Crypts has been selected three times over the last four days. This dungeon was considerably nerfed in the last patch, but some of the encounters are still annoying and many of my guildmates have expressed their growing distaste for the instance.Have you had much repetition in the new daily quests on your server?
