ghetto-hearth
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The Queue: Meow now
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. Adam Holisky will be your host today. The above picture took me all of five minutes to put together. Super Troopers is a great movie, and I encourage you all to go watch it today. But finish reading WoW Insider first, and in particular finish reading The Queue to understand the reference. How many times can Alex say Mountain Dew? The answer is a lot. Update: Go and read Massively's take on the coming Mountain Dew. It's quite good.037 asked..."Now that you can queue for battlegrounds from anywhere, are we looking at the new ghetto hearth?"
Traveling in patch 3.1
Patch 3.1 will be changing how we all get around. Travel is usually a bit of a touchy subject, but there are some huge improvements on the way. If you love Kirin'Tor bling, you'll be happy to note that their transportation rings are getting an upgrade. Should you purchase one, you get a free teleport to Dalaran once every hour. The Hearthstone that you've carried with you since you day one, unless you deleted it and had to bribe an Innkeeper for a new one, is changing radically. The cooldown is being reduced from one hour to half an hour. This was done partially to appease the whining over nerf to ghetto hearthing. Ghetto Hearthing is/was the process of dropping your group while in a dungeon and waiting one minute for a free hearth, provided your hearthstone was on a cooldown. In 3.1, you will no longer be able to do this. Fortunately, you can still use the method to get yourself out of a dungeon. Ghetto hearthing will be less of a hearth and more of a shifting of your virtual person to the nearest graveyard, alive and well. This will stop people from doing things like entering Ragefire Chasm while grouped, dropping, and getting a free hearth.
Hearthstones down to 30 minute cooldown in patch 3.1
Alright, so they killed ghetto hearthing. Blizzard never intended the instance boot system to be used as means to travel back to one's home city while Hearthstones were on cooldown, so they're setting things right in Patch 3.1 by making it port players to the nearest graveyard, instead. Naturally, this sparked outrage amongst the instance-abusing community and some players demanded Blizzard to make up for the loss of one of the most frequently used means of travel.Eyonix was quick to shut down these arguments in a long thread but eventually capitulated to the will of the masses, announcing that Hearthstones would be usable every 30 minutes when Patch 3.1 goes live. Eyonix still doesn't quite understand what the fuss is all about, though, and points to mage portals, Dalaran portals, and good old mount riding as acceptable means of getting from point A to point B. He even dismisses the complaints as QQ at one point. That said, it looks like some QQ has won the day for now. Enjoy your 30 minute hearthstones, everyone. Patch 3.1 brings us Ulduar, dual specs, significant changes to all the classes, and more! We've got you covered from top to bottom with our Guide to Patch 3.1.
No more ghetto-hearthing in patch 3.1
Looks like ghetto-hearthing is going the way of wall-jumping once patch 3.1 hits. No longer will we be able to hearth out of an instance, hop through the Dalaran portal to Stormwind or Orgrimmar, then be back in Northrend again in time for the next instance. From now on, we're gonna have to take the boat just like Blizz always wanted us to.For those who are unfamiliar, ghetto-hearthing (or ninja-hearthing) is when a player joins a group, enters an instance, and then leaves the group again. Up until now, doing so would cause the player to be teleported to their hearthstone location after 60 seconds -- even if their hearthstone was on cooldown! However, as the above screenshot from the 3.1 PTR shows, it looks like that will no longer be possible.So goodbye ghetto-hearth. It was fun while it lasted. And hey, if I'm ever in the mage district of Stormwind, and I need to get to Elwynn Forest in a jiffy, I'll look you up. Patch 3.1 brings us Ulduar, dual specs, significant changes to all the classes, and more! We've got you covered from top to bottom with our Guide to Patch 3.1.
Breakfast topic: Why didn't you tell me...?
Every time we log into WoW, we find ourselves greeted with trivial, non-helpful bits of information. We learn quite a bit on our own and sometimes from helpful players. These little gems do little to actually help learn the nuances of the game. There have been countless times I've been taken by surprise, causing wasted time and sometimes costly repair bills. Here are some of the things I had to learn on my own, the hard way, that I wish someone would have told me:* You don't have to wait for a portal, summon, or level 74 to get to Dalaran. Battle ports* work just fine, but you do have to get connecting flight points to make it useful.* If you wait until 74 to go to Dalaran, don't run there to get the flight point. There is a quest that takes you there. If you do run to the Crystal Song Forest to get there you, will find yourself looking forlornly at a teleportation device that is no help to you at all.* On the subject of teleportation, If you're Horde, you should really save the Goblin Transponder that you use to port from Booty Bay to Gnomeregan. It can help for raiding Ironforge.* Beware of the Animal Blood debuff in Borean Tundra. You will be killed on sight if you go into the D.E.H.T.A. Encampment if you have that debuff. It took me two deaths to figure out why I couldn't turn my quests in.* I'm relatively new to tanking, until about a month ago I clicked to set my marks. I had no idea that you can hotkey your lucky charms.I'm sure there are still many nuances of the game I still don't know. Share your wisdom, what's something you wish you'd been told?
Breakfast Topic: Noob moments
I've been playing WoW, and writing for WoW Insider, for quite a while now. So it came as something of a surprise to me to learn that I could hearth, after a fashion, when my hearthstone was on cooldown. You see, on a post of mine a couple of weeks ago, someone introduced me to the concept of "ghetto hearthing": get in a group with any random person, zone into an instance, and drop group. 60 seconds or so later, you're automatically teleported back to your hearth point. The beauty of this is that Stormwind and Orgrimmar both have instances in them, so it provides very easy travel from those cities back to Outland, for those trips to respec or check the AH. Anyway, when I finally understood that I could hearth back from Stormwind any time just by popping into the Stockade, I felt like a big noob for having waited out all those cooldowns for the past year or two. Have you had any big noob moments recently?
