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Dev Watercooler: Content for the casual 85
The newest Dev Watercooler column gives King Crab a break and instead lets us peek into the mind of Dave "Fargo" Kosak, lead quest designer for World of Warcraft. You might remember Fargo from Flintlocke's Guide to Azeroth and GameSpy days. Fargo's Dev Watercooler is all about experiencing World of Warcraft as a non-raider and what Blizzard's expectations are for level 85s who aren't bashing down Ragnaros' door. One of the weirdest statements that I have to make to many people who are new to the MMO genre is that "the game begins at 85." While we know that isn't factually correct, since there are 85 levels of content previous to hitting the magic number, it still makes sense from a "never-ending world" point of view. There is no end, so the game begins at the "current" end. Fargo makes the case that all players are entitled to an epic storyline, engaging content, and a feeling of continual power growth. The new patch 4.2 Firelands daily quest hubs in the Molten Front and the Regrowth are tailor-made to hit these points and provide a personal, continuing experience for players who don't participate in the raid game. With dailies being randomized and your personal tree growing at your own pace, players are rewarded based on their efforts alone. Personally, I like this direction for solo questing experiences. The Molten Front and the Regrowth seem like better, more advanced, and more evolved versions of the reputation grinds we were previously chugging away at to open up gear and other rewards, but with less of a "watch a bar go up" mentality. Here, we have engaging choices and rotating sets of random tasks that keep us coming back for more, all the while physically changing the world around us. Now we just need to care about the cause. I think Firelands is going to push us a good way forward in that regard. Check out Fargo's first contribution to the Dev Watercooler series, after the jump.
How far have you progressed in Cataclysm?
The other day, I logged on to an old realm of mine to chat for a bit with a few friends and old guildmates. (I do this periodically, since I'm not a big fan of using Real ID for anyone other than very close friends.) Whenever I'm there, I casually poke around on a character that was once my prized raiding toon in early Wrath of the Lich King. "Poking around" consists of organizing my bank and doing about three to five quests. I figure it would be nice to have another 85 that I could play casually, but I lose interest in it too quickly. Anyway, at some point in the middle of a conversation with a mage friend, I said, "At a rate of three quests per night that I actually log in, I should be 85 in two years." "It really gives you some perspective on how much you have to play this game, doesn't it?" he responded. I hadn't been serious about the statement I made, but it made me think about the hours I had to play to get to 85 on my main. It occurred to me that if you only play WoW for an hour or so every few days, it would probably take a couple months to get to level 85 from 80, and that's only if you're completely focused each time you log in. This got me wondering how far into Cataclysm everyone else is. %Poll-60657%
Lichborne: The basics of leveling your death knight from 80 to 85
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. Find out why playing World of Warcraft's first hero class is every bit as heroic as you might imagine. With the land now shattered and Deathwing looming large in the sky, we're rushing inevitably toward the Cataclysm, and with it, new content and new levels to surmount. I know that many of us are probably working on our troll druid and gnome priest alts for the moment, but I am also certain that most of us will be headed right back to our death knights on Dec. 7. With that in mind, this week we'll take a quick look at the basic stuff you'll need to know to make it through the leveling process.
Shifting Perspectives: Patch 4.0.3a and the road to 85
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This week, we write ourselves a cheat sheet to haul ass to level 85. Last week, I promised I'd take a look at individual articles' popularity after the "Why (or why not) to play a druid" series finished, and here it is. In order of most to least popular: Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a worgen druid Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a night elf druid Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a tauren druid Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a troll druid I'll look at the numbers again a few months to see if they steady a bit; the troll article hasn't been up for as long as its night elf counterpart, so I wouldn't have expected it to be competitive regardless. I will say that the Alliance druids enjoy a significant pageview advantage over their Horde counterparts, and that doesn't give me hope that future population numbers will equalize. I wrote a lot of today's article because I'm lazy as sin and wanted a quick reference guide available. Past the cut you'll find information for bear and cat druids on hit caps, reputation grinds, the numbers you should have before stepping into heroics, reforging, and a host of other things that would otherwise have required me to get off my butt and Google something. Resto players, I haven't forgotten about you! Your version will go live later this week. By the way, the above video is a quick look at healing one of the earliest pulls in heroic Grim Batol. I was sorting through my beta videos and realized I'd forgotten to upload it for the worgen lore article.
Raid Rx: Healing a level 80 dungeon vs. a level 85 dungeon
Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand pooh-bah of World of Matticus and a founder of No Stock UI, a WoW blog for all things UI-, macro- and addon-related. If you're looking for more healing advice, check out the Plus Heal community. Everyone enjoying the post-patch so far? If I didn't know any better, I'd say some of you decided to try out a few new healing classes. I know the first thing Joe (our resident resto shaman columnist) did was switch to a dwarf shaman. Alas, I know he is still deeply saddened over the lack of keg totems. I'm assuming there is a shipload of players who decided to create a tauren paladin, eh? I decided to start a night elf mage. Stuck with taking out Nightsabers. Nice to see some things never change, right? Anyway, in today's post, I want to shed a bit of insight about 5-man healing. The other week, I wrote about differences between 10-man and 25-man raid healing. I completely left out 5-man healing because I felt that was better left for a followup post. Unfortunately, I don't have any polished videos that demonstrate the 5-man healing environment. They're all on an older hard drive. I just purchased a beast of a computer which will allow me to record more cool stuff in the future (and I really want to try to produce additional healing videos).
Arcane Brilliance: Things I've learned while dying in Cataclysm heroics, mage edition
It's time again for Arcane Brilliance, weekly mage column of choice for dress-wearing, warlock-hating Frostbolt slingers the world over. Also, fans of the short musical films of Journey, Short Imagined Monologues, and the sublime, video game-based synth and fretwork amalgams of Sixto Sounds. Seriously, listen to this one. Holy crap. So over the past few days, I've found myself a broken corpse lying in a spreading puddle of my own bodily fluids a bit more frequently than I'm used to. The reason for this is simple: heroics. No, not the ones on the live servers -- where you can throw together a random group consisting of a ret pally tank, a six-year-old playing a hunter his mom bought him on eBay the day before, a feral druid healer who for some reason came into the instance suffering from nine more minutes of resurrection sickness, a mouth-breathing rogue who may or may not be a serial killer, and an AFK shaman farming badges while auto-following the healer -- and still blast through the place. I'm talking about heroics in the Cataclysm beta. They're absolutely brutal, guys. Now, granted -- it's still early. The testing process for these beauties is still in its infancy. We're tackling them using premade characters with talent builds we threw together by looking at the talents and thinking, "This looks nice." We're wearing gear that's barely entry-level for heroics (if we're lucky) and using spell rotations that we're basically making up on the fly. We're going into instances we've never seen before, doing boss fights nobody knows the mechanics for, and dealing with crippling, often game-breaking bugs. These places simply aren't finished, not by a long shot. But then again, that's why we have a beta. We go in, throw our soft, cloth-clad bodies against the long claws of some horrifying beast or another, use the final droplets of our blood to scrawl feedback for the developers ("Landmines ... everywhere ... can't feel ... legs ... fading to black ... tell warlocks ... hate them ... so ... much ... "), and then come back for another round. Blizzard takes the data it gathers from our gruesome deaths and uses it to construct a better game. Still, there is much we can learn -- even in this unfinished state -- from the first incarnations of these heroics. Join me after the jump, won't you?
Encrypted Text: Top new, useful Cataclysm rogue abilities
Every Wednesday, Chase Christian of Encrypted Text invites you to enter the world of shadows, as we explore the secrets and mechanics of the rogue class. This week, we discuss the new abilities that we'll see as we level up in the upcoming expansion. As I've mentioned several times before, rogues are often thought of as the "cooldown class." We've got a plethora of abilities, with nearly one (or two) for every situation. We're then regulated via cooldowns attached to each abilities, limiting how often we can use them. This gives the rogue class incredible potency in short fights, when our cooldowns are able to be used in quick succession. However, we have often stumbled in longer encounters, when our cooldowns are only active for a small percentage of the overall fight. Blizzard has been working on resolving this by reducing both the potency and the cooldown of a few of our moves, like Sprint, to give us more flexibility. The DPS model for rogues hasn't change at all since The Burning Crusade. The only real addition was the creation of Mutilate and Envenom, which have been staples for rogues for years now. While Fan of Knives was a fun addition at level 80, its use on anything but trash has been limited at best. It's unsurprising that even though we're receiving three new abilities in Cataclysm versus BC's two, they're still all cooldown abilities. However, our new spells are actually incredibly fun and useful. They also take some skill to use properly, which is something that the rogue class needs desperately to get back to. Using your abilities wisely should yield a large reward -- and with that thought, I will now introduce the 2010 graduates of the Rogue Ability Academy.
Arcane Brilliance: What Cataclysm will mean to Mages, part 2
Welcome to the latest edition of Arcane Brilliance, the weekly Mage column and internet meeting place for IHATEWARLOCKS. If you can't remember what that acronym stands for, you can check last week's column, about two paragraphs from the end. If you can't be bothered, it doesn't matter. The name says it all, really. When I was growing up, way back at the dawn of time, in the late eighties, I didn't have access to a lot of games. It wasn't like it is now, where I have an unplayed backlog of quality electronic entertainment so deep my house reeks of shrinkwrap and unfulfilled potential. No, back then, I remember saving my pennies for an entire summer with an eye on getting a new game, then going to the game store and having a choice between Lufia and 7th Saga. I chose 7th Saga (mostly because you could be a robot in that one), and even though time hasn't been particularly kind to that game, it still holds a special place in my heart. You know why? Because I played it. I played the crap out of it, and when I finished it, I started over and played it again. And the next time I saved up enough money for another game, or tricked a relative into buying one for me, I snagged Lufia, and repeated the process. With the really great games--the Chrono Triggers, the Secrets of Mana, the Shining Forces--I played them so many times I came to the point where my fondest wish was that I could discover a way to excise them from my brain...to selectively forget I'd ever played them so I could plug them back in and experience their unique joys afresh. Yes, back in the late eighties and early nineties, we were pretty starved for games. But the ones we had, we loved. What does this have to do with anything? Nothing really, just thought I'd share. Ok fine. Read on, I promise I'll find a flimsy way to tie it in to the actual subject of this week's column.
