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Blood Pact: Truth, science and flying monsters
Blood Pact is your weekly warlock digest, brought to you by Dominic Hobbs. "We do what we must because we can. For the good of all of us, except the ones who are dead." -- GLaDOS Last week saw things in the world of WoW.com turn on their heads somewhat, with the Archmage Pants and myself trading columns for a week. A little back story might be in order. I was flicking through the forum for the Cataclysm mage changes ("Know your enemy" -- Sun Tzu) and found a lot of crying about spells being removed. For those who didn't read it, the feeling was that spells like Dampen Magic had "no clear role" in the game. Over 1,000 posts later, Ghostcrawler himself felt it necessary to step in and make a semi-retraction of the phrase to stem the flow of tears. This experience played right into a hypothesis I have that mages are credulous crybabies. I stress here that this is a hypothesis, a tentative explanation for an observation, little better than a guess. However, these things beg to be tested and elevated to the status of theory. And so a test was performed to study both the credulity and propensity for lacrimation of mages. I put forward that this test was entirely successful in validating the hypothesis and that further such studies should be performed to corroborate -- maybe I should ask someone for a research grant. Either way, I feel that we are well on the way to scientifically proving that mages are indeed credulous crybabies. This, my fellow warlocks, is how you come about facts. It has nothing to do with simply trusting the assertions of someone claiming a list of "facts" with no proper basis in reality. Especially when that someone is a mage.
The Queue: In which solidarity is shown
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Adam Holisky will be your host today. Fellow fatty Kevin Smith (we're part of a super exclusive club) was kicked off a Southwest Airlines plane this weekend. And while it has absolutely nothing to do with WoW, it certainly made me stop and cringe for a moment at the prospect of getting kicked off the plane as I'm on my way to BlizzCon. Of course I could take preventative measures to combat this inevitable passenger-eject-button-pushing, but I'm too busy eating my Pepperoni Pizza for breakfast, which is far better than Alex's Hawaiian Pizza. Nomnomnom. Ben asked... "Do you think the tension in Cataclysm will possibly lead to World of Warcraft: The Fourth War? It could be a very PVP centric expansion, with raid content involving major battles in war, lots of new battle grounds, y'know, the works."
The Queue: My Gimp
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Adam Holisky be your host today. Yesterday Alex posted a pretty picture. So I thought I'd retort with my Gimp. Now I need to go talk to Mr. Wallace... Bonc asked... "When we get cross server LFG, what will happen to VoA, for example if I dont have it on my server, can I go to another and get in there, does it go by raid leaders server?"
A trio of Mabinogi videos show off the "Ancient Secrets of Irinid"
Mabinogi was recently patched with a big content update called "Ancient Secrets of Irinid", which added an African themed zone called Courcle and flying mounts (including the legendary pelican) to the game. To help promote all of the new stuff on offer, Nexon has put out a trio of videos that highlight some of the biggest features from the patch. The one above shows a fairly hazardous river rafting trip, which is made much safer by a pretty powerful new Magic Shield skill, followed by some animal taming. Past the break, the second trailer looks at the new flying mounts -- though its hard to go past the pelican, there are others to choose -- as well as the Dash combat skill and the massive Giant Alligator boss. The third video starts out peacefully, with some Metallurgy and Fishing, but then things get decidedly more ferocious when the Giant Lion boss shows up to punt someone off the screen. It seems there's a delicate balance between some quiet exploring and getting your butt handed to you by over-sized animals in Courcle, but it's nice to have a choice.
Friday Night Gin: Your weekly Blue roundup
Good evening fine ladies and good gentlemen, I want to invite you to head over to your liquor cabinet, grab some of that fine gin and do with it what you will. I like mine without anything added, right at room temperature. Ghostcrawler prefers his with coffee. Once you're settled, come back to your computer and read up on the best of the blues and the ghostly-crab-crawler.Welcome to a new weekly column here at WoW.com. Each week we'll take a look at what Ghostcrawler and his cohorts at Blizzard have said about the game, highlighting all the important announcements and discussions.What Ghostcrawler says in particular is of great importance these days to WoW. A lot of the stuff he's talking about is reflective of the direction of the entire design team at WoW, and if you follow what he's saying you'll have a better understanding of where the game is headed.So after the break we'll wrap up what Ghostcrawler and the other blues had to say this week. This week's topic include: Battleground Focus, 5 Second Rule, On Class Representation Versus Actual Power, Going to heckle at BlizzCon?, Water Dungeon, Affliction Changes, Console WoW, Truth In Developer "Promises" About Change & An Angry Community, Amount Of Leveling, Phasing Technology, and Flying In Old Azeroth.
Breakfast Topic: On alts and patch planning
Patch 3.2 is looking more and more solid. There are still some bugs with the bosses in the Argent Coliseum, but those are being worked out and appear to be more of a technical thing than a design flaw. This leads us to think that patch 3.2 will be dropping relatively soon.So with that said, I've been wondering lately about my alts. In particular the four left between 60 and 70 who are sitting in Outland not doing anything in particular. I know that if I drop the gold on them and let them fly around I'll have much more incentive to play them through to 80, and perhaps even find a new class that I love (truth be told, I'm finding my 63 rogue quite a bit of fun to play lately).As I'm thinking of finishing my army of level 80 alts, I have to plan a little bit. Why should I level right now if within the next couple weeks I'm going to be able to fly around and do it all much faster? Wouldn't my time be better spent playing Fallout 3 working on WoW.com projects?
Patch 3.2 lowers casting time on flying mounts
As dear Wryxian announced earlier today, we're getting a new build on the PTR. The unofficial notes for this build are already making the rounds, and they're... not very interesting! Perhaps the most notable change is that the change to mount casting speed, previously only applied to ground mounts, now affects flying mounts as well.When the casting time change to ground mounts in Patch 3.2 was announced, Eliah Hecht, Michael Gray and I had a long debate about why they wouldn't have applied the change to flying mounts as well. We ended up coming to the conclusion that they were avoiding it for PvP reasons; only needing to be out of combat for a second and a half to mount up and zoom off to escape a fight that's not going your way would be a little... cheap. The outlier here was the Druid Flight Form, which is an instant cast spell. Everyone but Druids hate that though, right? It's pretty freaking annoying when you get into a scuffle, you gain the upper hand, and then the Druid just runs in circles like a headless boomkin spamming their flight button and hoping it eventually takes. So we figured that didn't count. It was a perfect example of why being able to fly away quickly was a bad thing.Boy, are our faces red. Flying mounts get the 1.5s cast time now as well. Sometimes trying to figure out Blizzard's reasoning doesn't really pay off. I'm not going to complain that much, though. I certainly appreciate being able to get into the air faster! Patch 3.2 will bring about a new 5, 10, and 25 man instance to WoW, and usher in a new 40-man battleground called the Isle of Conquest. WoW.com will have you covered every step of the way, from extensive PTR coverage through the official live release. Check out WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.2 for all the latest!
Need flying mounts? Mei Francis has you covered
Patch 3.1.2 brought it with the usual slew of undocumented changes, but here's one that appears to have flown under the radar for a while -- Mei Francis, Dalaran's exotic mount vendor, now sells basic Outland flying mounts (read: gryphons and wyverns) at both regular and epic speeds. This is great news for, well, anybody who doesn't want to go to Outland! I know that when my shaman hit 77 and I bought all of my flying skills, it was a pain to have to go to Shadowmoon Valley to buy my mount, so I can certainly appreciate the change. Of course, there are even more mount changes in store -- a 150% speed flyer at 60, for example -- so this is obviously part of the devs' mission to streamline the leveling and traveling process for players of all levels. A welcome and unexpected change for quality of leveling life -- that's what I like to see.
The Queue: The day the music died
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Adam Holisky will be your host today.Long long time ago...I can still rememberHow that music make me smile, Alex.And I knew if I had my chanceThat I could make those people danceAnd, maybe, they'd be happy for a while, Alex. Tim asked..."When discussing new content coming out, why does Blizzard always play so close to the chest? For example, the mount changes are due to be "in the next major content patch" which everyone knows is going to be patch 3.2, why don't they just say it?"
Have we already seen future mounts?
One of the things I never forgot in the run-up to patch 2.3 was seeing the photo above from MMO Champion. This was before the Cenarion War Hippogryph went live, and it was the faction's new (albeit expensive) reward for reaching exalted. Boubouille, as so often happens, datamined a bit more than what Blizzard actually permitted to go live, and the skin at the top left was what wound up being the Cenarion Expedition's flying mount. Sprinting for the CE quartermaster when the patch hit and discovering that that was the only model available (and that it couldn't walk) was a bit of a let-down, to the point where I decided to wait on buying the mount in the forlorn hopes that the other mount colors and animations would go live. Quoth the female Tauren, moo hoo hoo. Since then it's become apparent that the hippogryph at top right became the Argent Hippogryph (score!) and the one at bottom left is now the Silver Covenant Hippogryph. That some of the Tournament daily quests award Silver Covenant/Sunreaver reputation makes me suspicious that the hippogryph and Sunreaver dragonhawk are eventually going to be rep mounts. That still leaves two hippogryph skins "left over," and you've got wonder if they're going into the game -- and if so, in what capacity. EIther way, there aren't words to describe my happiness at not being consigned to the ugliness of a wyvern (the airborne version of Tauren cat form) forever. I'll grant that my main is a Druid so I had a ready escape anyway (and I thank thee daily, Blizzard, for thy boon of total win in the guise of swift flight form), but sometimes a girl likes options.
Flying in old-world Azeroth
One of players' most frequently asked questions since BC emerged has been when -- or if -- Blizzard plans to make flying mounts usable in classic Azeroth. It's an attractive proposition due to the sheer size of Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms, and how convenient it would be to take a fast flyer to places that aren't well-served by flight paths. CM's and developers have said that the programming and time required to "retrofit" the old world to be usable by flying mounts isn't worth it, and that they'd rather spend developmental resources on new content.A player who got irritated with all the begging -- and someone who I can only assume has access to GM powers on a private server -- decided to take an aerial tour of several zones in Azeroth in December 2007 to document the territory Blizzard would have to redesign in order to make flying mounts feasible. It's a really interesting look at how Blizzard exploited perspective and line-of-sight in order to make buildings and zones appear bigger and more built-up than they actually are, and there are a few places in the video that I haven't seen even on websites dedicated to the "secret places" of Azeroth. I'm not sure why this video hasn't popped up previously but it doesn't seem to be tagged or categorized in any way, so that might be why. Check it out; flying in Azeroth would be great to see these things, but there's no denying Blizz would have a lot of work to do.
Breakfast Topic: I can't show off my flying mount in Dalaran
So I had a pretty lucky run in the heroics last Friday night. In particular, I ran heroic Culling of Stratholme for the first time. Not only did we handily beat the Infinite Corruptor with a few moments to spare on the timer, but I won the roll on the Bronze Drake, much to some of my more veteran group mates' chagrins.I've been having a lot of fun with my buddy. It's pretty cool riding around the skies of Northrend and Outland on such a classic-feeling WoW mount, especially since I've been a fan of the bronze flight since helping them do some bug extermination back in the day. One thing does bother me a bit, though: It's pretty tough to show this dude off.
Slow Fall castable on others in 3.0.8
Christian caught this one in his last Arcane Brilliance column, but I figured the rest of us non-Mages might like to know as well: Slow Fall will be castable on others in patch 3.0.8. Very exciting -- while there are a few other Slow Fall buffs in the game (and lots of parachutes, from all the vehicles in Northrend), now all you need to jump down from a high point in the game is a friendly Mage. We expect to see a nice jump up in the number of Slow Fall videos. Which, come to think of it, we haven't seen that many of lately. Guess the whole "flying mounts" thing has made Slow Falling for long distances not so interesting.And while we're at it, before you say that you need Slow Fall to get the Going Down? achievement, you don't. First of all, it won't work, and secondly, there's a better way to do it: as you've probably heard by now, you can do it just by jumping off of the platform on the Scryers Tier in Shattrath onto the little canopy hanging over from the Lower City below. Everybody has their own place for that, of course, but that's the easiest. Still, it'll be nice to have Slow Fall for everyone -- we can throw it on the list with Levitate as a class ability that's been spread around a bit. Is it still too limited to include in game mechanics? Could we maybe have an instance boss in the future that we fight with while falling down a long mineshaft, or on a falling platform?
A WoW burnout's guide to Wrath of the Lich King, part 2
The phrase, "Ten more levels." certainly isn't new to the ears of long-time WoW players. Since these new zones are a part of Azeroth -- as opposed to a dimensional space-placed outcropping -- there shouldn't be the same disconnect that many players felt with The Burning Crusade zones.
Ask a Beta Tester: Attunements, achievements, more low level quests
Welcome to another edition of Ask a Beta Tester, wherein we all sit around, drink ale, smoke cigars, talk about our awesome hogs and then tear up the road of Dalaran, risking our lives with extreme stunts just for the thrill and the feeling of adrenaline flowing through our veins....Wait, that's not what we do at all. Swiss asked...I'm interested in the Low Level Quest Tracker. Does this replace other trackers such as Find Herbs or Find Minerals? Or does it stack with other tracking as well?It does not stack with other tracking, but you generally wouldn't need both at once. Turn it on in town, grab your quests, turn your other tracking back on when you leave. That'll be problematic for finding low level quests out in the wilds, but does your level 80 Death Knight need that Peacebloom while you're off looking for quests?Read on for more of your Wrath of the Lich King Beta questions!
Ask a Beta Tester: Scourge Strike, titles, and flying mounts
What you're seeing up above is a flaming quill in a well of frozen ink. Is it useful? No. It looks wicked awesome sitting in the Inscription trainers' shop, doesn't it? Heck yeah it does! We'll kick off today's Ask a Beta Tester with Askhill's question... Does Lake Wintergrasp seem dominated by only one class, or is it pretty even among the 80s? Unholy Death Knights are the current "overpowered spec of the day" (formerly the role of Ret Paladins) so there's tons of those rocking face right now. Beyond that it's pretty difficult to judge, since Blizzard hasn't balanced all of the numbers yet and few people are in Resilience gear. The only really memorable thing are the absolutely enormous Scourge Strike crits. By enormous I'm talking numbers anywhere from 10,000 to 16,000, and since it's Shadow damage, your armor isn't going to do a darn thing to help. Luckily, I was healbotting one of those Unholy Death Knights rather than being on the receiving end. Death Knights are bloody fantastic at keeping people off of Healers, by the way.yazah asked a couple of questions...Why does the Scarlet Crusade employ Death Knights in Northrend? Doesn't that seem unlikely since they were slaughtered by them back in Tyr's Hand?
How to fly through the cold winds of Northrend
Blizzard has stated that they'll be disallowing the use of flying mounts in Northrend for the first few levels in order for players to appreciate the geography and not miss anything in the latest expansion. Given the amount of work they've put in so far, and looking through the fantastic scenery, it seems like a fair charge. It's recently come to light that the 'attunement' process, which was under much speculation, will not be an attunement at all or cost any money.In fact, the ability or key to fly in Northrend, called Cold Weather Flying, is a reward from a quest chain obtained in Sholazar Basin at Level 77. The so-called attunement process for flying will actually even reward money, rather than cost anything. MMO Champion has screenshots of, and Wowhead has information on the ability and quest chain. It seems like the mad rush won't necessarily be to Level 80, but a first stop at the all-important Level 77.
Flying mounts and ruined PvP
Have flying mounts killed off world PvP in Outland? I'm on a PvE server, so I don't see it much anyway, but folks on a PvP server are complaining that whenever they find a good target and get close, the person just hops on their "carebear cloud" and flies away. Of course, "xxxx ruined PvP" is one of the most common types of QQ (although "xxxxx class is broken!" probably beats it), but is Blizzard protecting folks on flying mounts by letting them escape a fight too fast?Neth says no, of course -- she says that flying away from (or into) a fight is just another method PvPers have in their arsenal. And a few commenters in the thread make the point that I would: odds are that if someone is running away from you, it's not really a fair fight -- flying mounts may have ruined ganking, but they haven't ruined actual PvP.Of course, what people really want here is a way to attack someone in the sky, and fortunately, with Wrath of the Lich King, your prayers will be answered -- not only have we seen flying vehicles fighting in the air, but Blizzard has confirmed anti-air capabilities. If you're just looking for a gank, and are angry when that level 64 runs away from your kitted-out 70 Rogue, you're probably still going to be unhappy. But if you're looking for the fight to go up in the air when your opponent does, Northrend probably has what you need.
Northrend mount attunement will not be expensive
We've known for a little while now that our existing flying mounts will not be usable straight off the bat in Northrend. The reason for this is that they don't want us little level 70s hopping onto the frozen plains, mounting up, and zipping right off to Dalaran or Arthas or wherever; in short, they don't want us to skip content. After all, imagine if you had a flying mount at the beginning of Outland – you would've gone to Shattrath even sooner. We also know from the WWI Q&A live blog that there will be some kind of "attunement" process for getting our fliers working up there, which has jokingly been referred to as "mount mittens" (it's cold in Northrend, you know). What we haven't known is precisely when the mounts will be usable (though Ulduar's Halls of Stone, a level 77-79 dungeon, was said to require flying mounts), and whether the "mount mittens" (or whatever they actually implement) will be a tremendous gold sink. Today Bornakk puts as all at ease, by saying that flying mounts are currently set to be usable in Northrend at level 77, you will use the same mounts currently used in Outland, and it is not expected that "a large sum of gold" will be required (for another tier of mount skill or something). As always, this could change before the expansion goes live, but for now, it seems that we can look forward to not spending several thousand gold on griffin defrosting equipment.
Revisiting epic flyer costs
Drysc has written a book about epic flying mount costs on the forums -- there aren't many goldsinks left in the game, but that 5000g you've got to pay for an epic flying mount is still there for sure (just ask anyone who doesn't have one).He says that yes, the flying mount is definitely worth it (it makes playing the game much faster, since most of the time spent in the game is actually travel anyway), but also that actually obtaining an epic flyer was always meant to be optional -- only for players who want to "go the extra mile." Not sure how he can say both of those things at the same time, but there you go. He also says the main consideration in the cost wasn't any effect on the economy, but rather simply making sure that it took a certain amount of time for players to obtain all that gold -- they averaged how quickly players could pick up gold versus how long they wanted players to work for the mount, and arrived at 5000g.There is some (kind of) good news on the horizon for players who don't want to spend all that money, however. If and/or when Blizzard releases a higher riding skill, Drysc says they'll probably drop the price on this one. Of course, that doesn't really tell us anything concrete -- with the onset of siege vehicles, there may be all kinds of changes to how riding and driving works in the game. Until then, keep grinding, because apparently the only thing that will get you flying fast is a whole lot of gold.
