Your target is Dead

Over at http://www.printwarcraft.com you can create a poster of your warcraft characters ! I haven’t ordered one yet, but it’s a lot of fun to play around with the poster creator .

Patch 3.3 has been live now for about 2 weeks. And it sure has been a lot of fun ! I am rotating through my four level 80 characters and gearing them up a bit. To my surprise most groups work out very well. Usually a mix of better geared characters with a few people that are still in the process of gearing up.

Xmas 2009 Morphhoof and Borkun

The better geared 4k dps people sometimes have quite the attitude though (NOOBS GO GO GO FFS). The vote to kick option usually works fine though, I hope they enjoy the 15mins debuff ! I wonder about some of these people though. Yesterday a guy linked recount stats after two groups of trashmobs, NOOBS WE DONT HAVE 3k DPS ! And leaves… Apparently you need 3k dps to do heroics now . If he just would have gone along with the group he would have finished earlier than joining the queue again.

One flaw in the LFG system is people that go offline or are AFK in the first 15mins where you cannot kick someone. These people should automatically be removed from group after a minute or so. It can really slow things down, especially if they’re the healer or tank.

The three new instances are nice. Halls of Reflection is certainly a notch up in difficulty. I hate it when it’s the random dungeon, I have only finished it so far, when I queue up for HOR specifically. After the first wipe most people leave, or they cannot find the entrance to the dungeon. I really enjoyed Pit of Saron. The Krick and Ick fight is very funny (I’ll go for this one instead !) and I love the run through the tunnel. But I went into that place quite a few times to get my 2h Mace for my deathknight, so I’ve seen enough of it for now. My hunter will need it for the nice crossbow though. So is now running around with the gun that drops on normal mode from the end boss.

As Randy stated on one of the latest Instance shows, 3.3 has breathed new life into Wow. People seem to log on more, dive into dungeons, get some emblems and better gear. Everything seems to work out quite well. I kinda miss the guild runs though, but I am sure that will come back soon enough.

[Show as slideshow]

The Fall of the Lich King is coming to a WoW server near you today if you’re in the USA. If you’re in Europe like me, you can expect it tomorrow.

I am very much looking forward to the new instances and the new LFG tool. It should be easier to find groups and extra members for your instance party with cross server PUGs.

The Wow.com Patch 3.3 guide

Patchnotes on blizzard site

Thanks to the instance #167 !

Judging by the activity on this blog, you’d think I hardly play wow these days, but that would not be correct ! I have been playing quite a bit. My DK Morphhoof is now lvl 80 and collecting pvp and some tanking gear. I need to get some rep here and these to get some more def stuff, but he’s well on the way. My warlock has been jumping into AV every now and then and has now reached L73.

My other L80s have been doing the argent tournament dailies in order to get some needed gold for the alts mentioned above and some gear upgrades and gems. I also got some heirloom items for future alts, I have a priest and a mage all ready to go now.

We have also been running TOC a few times, on normal mode. Some nice gear dropped and it’s a fun instance to do. Even though it has jousting .

All in all I am again very much enjoying WoW again. Looking forward to 3.3 that will bring the start of the end of Nortrend !

This wouldn’t be much of a WoW blog if I would ignore the big news of the past few weeks, the recently announced expansion pack Cataclysm. I am not going to repeat here everything you can read on every other news site. Just a few thoughts .

First of all, I am very happy it’s not just another 10 levels and a new continent. Ofcourse that would have sold well, would have probably been not too hard to make, and would have kept most people happy. I would have bought that one, probably enjoyed it as well, but what is coming now, is nothing like that. I agree with Randy of The Instance podcast, that this is as close to WoW 2.0 as we’re going to get. The whole old world will be redone ! We’ll be able to fly all over the old world as well. This must have been a tremendous amount of work.

The new leveling experience will be nice as well. The old stuff has been around now, since 2004 (or early 2005 for us Europeans), and it’s getting a bit old in the tooth. Especially taking into account, that Blizzard now has gotten much better at creating quests, areas, etc. Look at the Bloodelf or Death Knight starter areas and you know what I mean. For some reason a Goblin Hunter sounds very appealing to me. I already got a hunter, but wouldn’t mind leveling another one in the new content. They’re such a fun class to level. A troll druid sounds like fun as well though. Apparently they’ll get their own bear and cat graphics.

The new addition to the Horde !

I don’t play alliance and the new werewolf class doesn’t sound very appealing to me. Maybe i’ll check out their starter area sometime, and see what the fuzz is all about. Not really looking forward to seeing dozens of DK Worgens on the field though…

All of the other new stuff sounds great as well, guild leveling (hopefully also interesting for small guilds), Path of the Titans (sort of an extension of the talent system, from what I understand), new battleground etc etc.

So isn’t there anything you dislike about this expansion pack ?
Well, I am not too fond of Tauren Priests and especially Paladins, which seems very out of character for a tauren. But I doubt we’ll see a lot of them…

Check out wow-insider for all the news at http://www.wow.com/cataclysm/.
Also you might want to listen to the Instance’s Blizzcon coverage at http://www.myextralife.com/wow/.

A very nice article appeared on Eurogamer about the start of wow.

World of Warcraft first popped into public view in September, 2001. Blizzard executive Bill Roper had flown into London to make an announcement at the ECTS trade show. Anticipation was high. The already legendary studio had revealed its (as yet unreleased) strategy game Warcraft III at ECTS two years previously, and the announcement of a new Blizzard game was a big deal. Even then, the studio was known for doing few games, very slowly – and very, very well. The smart money was on a sequel to its other strategy hit, StarCraft.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/the-making-of-world-of-warcraft-article

The 3.2 World of Warcraft patch will bring some pretty big changes to mounts !

From wowinsider :

The highlights are as follows:

• Regular land mounts trainable at level 20 (was 30)
• Epic land mounts trainable at level 40 (was 60)
• Regular flying mounts trainable at level 60 (was 70)
• Regular flying mounts speed increased to a 150% gain (was 60%)

The costs for all the training and mount purchases has been decreased outright, with the exception of the artisan riding skill (epic flying mounts). For all mount costs, faction discounts now apply.

As you can see, Blizzard is trying to make it even more easier to level up yet another alt .

Nice analysis on Player vs. Developer. Which is an excellent blog by the way. Just found out about it, by listening to Shut Up We’re Talking.

Noticed a new, at least to me, blog linked from wowinsider: AlteracVolley. It’s a very nice read ! It also has daily quest guides and achievement guides.

Wowblogging on wowinsider.

It certainly pays off to become a champion at the Argent Dawn camp. First of all you get access to four not very hard daily quests that pay almost 25g each time you do them. I skip the dueling nowadays usually, as I got very bored with it.

You can also exchange 10g for standing of the faction you’re championing for. Furthermore there are some nice items for sale that you can buy with the champion points you get for each daily. One daily, a group one gives 2 tokens even ! And there is almost always a group doing that one, and it takes only a few minutes.

Morpheus now has the purple spell dagger a great combo with Prison Manifest in the off hand. Morphea could have gone for the gun, but I am not sure it’s better than the Nesingwary Gun I am using at the moment. It’s got some extra stats on it though, I might just get it to try it out. For now I settled for the necklace.

The Argent Hippogryph is very cool, but at 250 tokens a bit out of my reach !