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WoW Archivist: Epics
WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? Who is etched into WoW's history? What secrets does the game still hold? Leveling through Draenor has been a blast, but as a player from classic WoW, a few things have struck me as incredibly strange. Triple-digit numbers in the guild panel. Sending NPCs to do quests on my behalf. And most of all, getting epic armor and weapons from solo leveling quests. Many players in classic WoW (and not just raiders) opposed making epics more available to players. They called Blizzard's evolving attitude a slippery slope. "What's next," they argued, "epics for doing solo quests?" They never actually imagined that would happen. In 2005 it would have been unthinkable. Eight years later, here we are. But it's all been by design -- an evolving design with many steps along the way. Let's look at how we got here, one random drop at a time. The few, the proud, the epic In early classic WoW, only one path allowed you to deck out your character in purple items: 40-player raiding. Other raiding didn't cut it. Bosses in the 15-player (later 10-player) Upper Blackrock Spire dropped rares. Even bosses in the 20-player raids, Zul'Gurub and Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj, dropped mostly rares when they first opened their instance portals. Only their end bosses consistently dropped epic loot. Outside of 40-man raids, a handful of bosses had a very small chance to drop an epic item. Emperor Thaurissan in Blackrock Depths had a tiny chance to drop Ironfoe. The "tribute run" chest from Dire Maul very rarely offered up Treant's Bane -- and I'll never forget the joy in my warrior friend's voice when it dropped for him, all those years ago. DM was also the source of the highly coveted tanking weapon Quel'Serrar, but the quest item to obtain it had an incredibly low drop rate. Back then, even the recipes to craft epics (such as the awesome Force Reactive Disk) could only be obtained from 40-player raids. Even if you were raiding with 39 of your closest online friends, earning purples was no picnic. With two drops per boss at first, odds of getting an item on any given run were slim. You could complete a full clear without a single drop for your class and spec. Each epic you equipped generally represented several weeks of endgame effort. When a player sauntered through Orgrimmar or Ironforge in head-to-toe purples, players knew this was a person who had spent many, many hours on that character.
WoW Archivist: Tier 0.5, the epic conclusion
WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? Who is etched into WoW's history? What secrets does the game still hold? Last time on WoW Archivist, we reviewed the first half of the Tier 0.5 quest line, including the controversial 45-minute Baron run in Stratholme. As we left off, the ghost of Anthion Harmon had asked us to assemble the pieces of Valthalak's medallion. He sent you into Blackrock Depths with an enchanted banner to challenge the gladiator Theldren. Laying down the law The next step required a 5-player group to enter the Ring of Law inside Blackrock Depths. As you are being sentenced, you summon the Banner of Provocation. Theldren and his team step in instead of the usual BRD bosses. Now you were in for a scrap, and it was a wildly different fight that any other in classic WoW. Theldren spawned with a mix of four teammates chosen from a pool of eight: Korv, a tauren shaman Va'jashni, a troll priest Rotfang, a gnoll rogue Snokh Blackspine, a quillboar fire mage Volida, an undead frost mage Malgen Longspear, a centaur hunter Rezznik, a goblin engineer Lefty, a gnome monk Yes, you read that last one right. Lefty even had an ability called Five Fat Finger Exploding Heart Technique. Theldren himself was a warrior. Each boss had a potent set of class abilities. For example, Korv had Earthbind Totem, Fire Nova Totem, Frost Shock, Lesser Healing Wave, and Purge. What made this fight so unique -- and so infuriating for many -- was that the NPCs had no traditional aggro table.
WoW Archivist: Tier 0.5 and the birth of modern dungeons
WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? Who is etched into WoW's history? What secrets does the game still hold? For a long time in classic WoW, nonraiders felt neglected. Dungeons were the only endgame PvE option for nonraiders. Back then, dungeons didn't have a 5-player limit. They could be "raided," even though they weren't considered raids. Blizzard added new raiding content on a regular basis, but the developers didn't release new dungeons after adding Dire Maul in patch 1.3, four months after the game's release. Until the launch of The Burning Crusade in early 2007, nonraiders ran the same dungeons for almost two years. Amidst a storm of complaints, Blizzard said they wanted to offer additional content for nonraiders. In patch 1.10, Blizzard delivered a new endgame quest line using existing dungeons. Comprised of 29 steps in all, this was one of the game's most elaborate -- and most punishing -- quest lines ever. Blizzard called it the "high-level armor set" quest line. Players called it Tier 0.5. To create it, Blizzard had to reimagine what WoW's dungeons should be. This quest line was removed, like many others, when Deathwing brought the Cataclysm. Let's walk through what once was, and explore how it gave rise to the modern dungeons we tackle today.
Dark Age of Camelot launches an update and answers player questions
If you've been playing Dark Age of Camelot for a while, odds are good that you've acquired a lot of things. You've got a set of Epic Armor, you've got tons of items clogging your bank, and you've got a pair of fuzzy bunny slippers that you don't remember buying but you now refuse to remove. The game's latest patch does not improve your slipper situation, but it does improve Epic Armor, add new Epic Weapons and Accessories, allow for remote bank access, and increase the stack limits on many items. So everything else gets better. Does that satisfy you? No? You want to know more about the future of the game? Well, then, you can feast your eyes on a new set of community answers from the development team addressing the future update plans for the game as well as which areas will not be seeing much improvement (throwing weapons, for instance, are pretty much up the creek). So there's plenty for DAoC fans to enjoy. However, no one enjoys those bunny slippers. Seriously. Wear armor like everyone else. [Thanks to Etaew for the tip!]
The Queue: I was right edition
Welcome back to The Queue, our daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Mathew McCurley will be your host today. Welp. Pack your bags, ladies and gentlemen, I was right. Straight from the woman herself. Victory dance. Cetha asked: Has there been any mention on the size of the download if you get the digital copy of Cata? I'm trying to figure out if it would just be easier to get the discs and install it than to try and download another 16GB of info again, which didn't go so well the last time.
Hi-Rez fleshes out their plans for Global Agenda, includes open world MMO zone
Last we heard, Hi-Rez Studios was considering adding more "open" mission areas around Dome City, giving players an open-world feel to their game. Well, Hi-Rez's Erez Goren stopped by the forums on Saturday to lay out the full plans for not only the areas outside of Dome City, but also for some new weapons appearing in the game, new maps in AvA, and new options to help agencies compete and hold ground in AvA. All of this is scheduled on a very ambitious timetable -- available by the end of March. If certain features become pushed back or delayed, Hi-Rez will also reconsider extending their current "free subscription" policy. However, it was surprising to find that the open-world areas mentioned in the last newsletter literally will be open world areas. Multiple mission teams and players will find themselves on one gigantic map, completing PvE and PvP objectives for experience and loot. Missions on these maps will be for a varied number of players, starting out at the solo player and going all the way up to a 10 man strikeforce. And, of course, some areas of the map will be "unsafe" and open for agents to beat on other agents. Now you too can gank in Global Agenda.
Finding a world epic-- and getting rid of it
This forum thread goes over something we've talked about here before-- the thrill of finding your first purple world drop. Yup, it's special when you kill what must be the thousandth lava spider you've ever killed, and suddenly you loot, and you're looking at one of the rarest items (if not the rarest) you've ever seen, and it's all yours, nary a group member in sight. It's a great feeling, but Drysc's comment (he found an Ardent Custodian, and accidentally bought a second one off the AH) made me think of what I've found is the dark side of finding a world drop: getting rid of it.Now, if you can use the item you find, more power to you-- my Priest was lucky enough to find a Holy Shroud at level 33, and she's still wearing it at level 40 (can't beat +healing on a lowbie item). But more often than not, a world drop is supposed to be your ticket to riches (and, hopefully, that mount you've been eyeing). The problem? As I've found, selling an epic on the AH isn't easy. Either you put it up and it sells in seconds (which means you likely sold it for too little), or you just can't get rid of thing, no matter what price you put it at. My Shaman was lucky enough to find a Dwarven Hand Cannon off a worm in Silithus. I tried to sell it for weeks at a couple hundred gold with no luck at all. Eventually I dropped the price to 100g, then 75g, then 50g. Eventually I begged a hunter to take it off my hands and got 45g for it. Still a nice chunk of change, but nowhere near epic mount money.And right now it's the Ace of Beasts I can't seem to lose. I was lucky enough to win a roll on it in UBRS, and none of the guildies needed it, so I figured it would help clear me the last 200g of my epic mount. But after listing it at 300g, then 200g, and now 150g, I haven't gotten so much as a nibble on it. You're going to say it's my fault for being too greedy, but I've seen the Beasts deck in full on my server for 500g before-- if I have to sell the Ace for 50g, I can't help but feel I'm getting ripped off.Coming across a terrifically rare item is a great feeling. But rarity, it seems, is only worth what people are willing to pay for it. Have you had epics you just can't seem to get rid of? And, in the end, how did you unload them?
