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Profession revamp preview
Professions have been on the drawing board for changes for a good while, but until now Blizz have been very tight-lipped about what specific modifications they might be making. No more! Nethaera has posted a nice preview of changes that are being made to many professions for "the next content patch," i.e. 2.1 (The Black Temple). Before I go into detail, note that Neth said her post "does not contain all of the upcoming changes, but instead gives a brief look at what is to come," so bank on more surprises to come. Anyway, this round is mostly buffs and new recipes, with a major nerf to alchemy.Full post copied after the jump as usual, but here's the changes I found more interesting: Alchemy: Elixirs now stack in two categories, Battle (Offensive) and Guardian (Defensive) Elixirs. You can only have one of each type of Elixir up at a time. As a result Elixirs now stack with class abilities such as "Arcane Intellect." I totally called this (as did many others, I'm sure). The intended effect is obviously to reduce the maximum possible effect of consumables in raids and other such situations, and this will go a long way towards producing that effect, without hurting alchemists too much (in my opinion). Engineering: "Seaforium" now opens locked chests as well as locked doors. About time; having to skip locked chests if I didn't have a rogue in the party has been annoying. But will Powerful Seaforium Charges open the top-level locked chests, or are we going to see new seaforium? Engineering: 11 new epic goggles have been introduced at 350 engineering skill and are available from the trainer. They range from cloth to plate, and have a variety of stats to appeal to most talent specs. This is probably the biggest change to any profession. I've always loved the goggles Engineering had to offer, and now engineers have something epic to work towards. Exciting! Fishing: The fishing timer has been reduced from 30 to 20 seconds and it now takes less time to fish. Sweet! I always though 30 seconds was a bit too long. But on the down side, Fishing has been removed from Arathi Basin and Alterac Valley -- what, you mean I have to actually fight now?! Jewelcrafting: The jewelcrafting UI now has gems split up by color so it is easier to find gems of a specific color to create. This is long-overdue; Blizz's profession UIs are so primitive it's not even funny. I would recommend ATSW as a replacement, but it tends to crash my client sometimes. Now where's my gem category in the AH? Jewelcrafting: Jewelcrafters can make two new melee oriented meta gems. One is found randomly as a world drop and the other sold by the <Faction> reputation vendor. Definitely needed -- but what do they mean by <Faction>? Scryer or Aldor? HH or Thrallmar? Any faction? Jewelcrafting: New recipes have been added that use the Jaggal and Shadow Pearls. Time to stop vendoring those, I guess. Skinning: Skinning higher level creatures will give more leather; you will no longer get a single leather scrap. Good, it was getting silly. Read on for the full blue post.
Armory tools for guilds
I knew the Armory was a good thing. The actual Armory site is already useful enough, letting me check out party members' specs so I don't have to ask "are you imp sap," etc. But being as how this is the era of web tools, it's only natural that such a huge data source has given rise to a few tools for rearranging that data. We've already seen the awesome signature generator, but I think this is even better.A player going by Antiarc has written a few tools that pull data from the Armory on every character in your guild, and then give you some great tables you can sort in various ways. For instance, I can look at the character stats page and gloat over the fact that I'm the highest Spirit and +healing Priest in my guild, and then look over in the spec column and realize that's because all the other Priests are Shadow (besides one level 64). Or if I'm looking to get something crafted, I could call up the profession comparison page, and see who's put in the effort to get a Jewelcrafter up there. Finally, if I'm looking to see who can join me in some thrilling Heroics, or just who's got way too much time on their hands, I can check their standing with the various factions.Due to the fact that these scripts do pull down and process quite a bit of data, they take a while to run; but the results pages are static, so once you've generated your results you can share the link around and it'll load quickly. If you just want to see what the pages look like, please do use the preview pages to avoid undue server stress.By the way, if Antiarc's site goes down or just to spread the load around, there's a mirror here. Now go forth and compare![thanks, jbob, for sending this one in!]
WoW Moviewatch: World of Computercrash
Alright, I get ticked off when I'm playing video games just like anybody else, and there have been dozens of times that I wanted to pound my keyboard into a pulp & toss it out the window...but unlike you & me, this kid actually does it. I haven't seen this much unbridled rage since Howard Dean; I guess Ritalin hasn't made it to certain parts of Europe yet. Have some earplugs ready for this one...
