Spugnort's

Archive for July, 2008

Racial Abilities

• Arcane Torrent (Blood Elf) global cooldown removed.

Death Knight

• Death Knight spells that cost runes will now display the rune cooldowns on the spell buttons.

Mage

• Arcane Blast effect duration reduced to 3 seconds, and now increases damage by 15/30/45% instead of reducing cast time.
• Arcane Impact renamed Spell Impact and now affects Blast Wave, Fire Blast, Cone of Cold, and Ice Lance.
• Arcane Potency now applies when Presence of Mind is active, talent prerequisite changed to Presence of Mind.
• Conjured mana gems no longer disappear from your backpack after being logged out for more than 15 minutes. Higher ranks of Conjure Mana Gem will recharge an existing mana gem to maximum charges.
• Empowered Arcane Missiles renamed Arcane Empowerment and no longer increases mana cost. It now also increases damage caused by Arcane Blast. Read the rest of this entry »

Blizzard has just announced that they will be hosting Blizzcon 2008!

Blizzcon 2008 will be hosted at a convention center in Anaheim California on October 10th and 11th.  This time the convention center will be able to support up to 50% more visitors for Blizzcon.  Tickets will be $100 and are set go on sale August 11th.

For those of you who may not know what Blizzcon is here is a quick rundown of things you would expect to see there:

• You would get the chance to using gaming stations and play many of the upcoming betas, most likely to include; Starcraft 2, Wrath of the Lich King (Most Likely New and Upcoming Raid Dungeons), and possiblly some Diablo III coverage!
• You will hear the Game Developers give talks and presentations about upcoming plans for game releases and the like.
• There will definitely be a major gaming tournament set for this event too, you can count on that.
• Those who attend are usually given a large grab bag too, that includes many neat and valuable items for Blizzard Gamers.
• Last but not least Blizzard usually saves one big announcement for this event.

There is a confirmed project that Blizzard is currently working on they have not announced to the public at all yet.  This would be about the right time frame and the perfect setting for Blizzard to announce what this project is.

On the contrary, will Blizzard really want to release details from this before they even release WotLK?  It may be hard to keep an interest in so many developing projects all at once… as always with speculation… only time will tell!

The last interesting Tidbit is taht Blizzcon will be broadcasted through DirectTV on a Pay Per View channel.  With a customer base of 20 million plus this is a rather interesting idea, and we will have to wiat and see how successful it is.  I know I would much rather enjoy the sunny skies of Cali in October!

Well I found some HUGE news this morning on the WoW forums.  It was a thread started about the pains of the current talent respeccing system. 

The argument that was brought to light was comapring PvP to PvE.  They said for a raider to get the most out of raiding they have to be a certain spec, but they have off nights and may enoy to PvP…so they have to spend 50 gold to respec PvP in order to get the most out of it.  Then the next raid comes the following day and its another 50g down the drain for a respec again.

Its really time consuming to have to remember where every single talent point goes, and I know I usually go work it out on Wowhead before I put any points in.  One mistake and you just cost yourself another 50g for no reason at all. This also works both ways, if a Harcore PvPer were to try and get the most out of PvE they would also need to respec.

So in response to this “problem” Bornka (A Blizzard Community Poster) said this:

“We talked about this recently at the Worldwide Invitational actually. We are looking into allowing players to basically have two talent specs that they can switch between but we are still working out the exact details so we will have to wait and see exactly how it will function in-game.”

At first this sounds great, and to me it is fine, but there are drawbacks to this too!  If you take away the respeccing costs then there will be more gold in the economy and we will see a significant rise in prices over a short period of time… much like when the mass amounts of daily quests were introduced.  I know I am sick of paying 15-20 gold for Shards now…can you imagine 35g?

Don’t get me wrong I absolutely love the idea of being able to respec on the fly, and have a second talent spec waiting in the wings.  However there must be some sort of sunk cost associated with it.  Will they charge players 5,000g or more in order to have that switch on the fly talent spec?

Secondly, how will they restrict the changing of the talent specs?  Will you need to be in a major city to do it… will they allow you to simply switch in the middle of an instant or raid?  All things are left to ponder right now as Blizzard is being extremely vague about how this will work.

In the end I love this idea, and I really hope it can be implemented in a way that is proper for everyone involved in the game.  I trust that Blizzard will keep all these things in mind as they move forward with this great idea!

Blizzard released a new build for the WotLK beta which is now available for download.  Here is a list of the updates, to read the full patch notes click here.

Updates:

- New pet tab available using character screen.
- New Alchemy Passive Skill: Alchemical Blood (works with elixirs, currently broken for potions and flasks)
- Warrior: Pummel/Shield Bash are no longer affected by the global cooldown.
- Rogue: Energy regeneration has been changed , kick is no longer affected by   the global cooldown.
- New token tab available via character screen
- Monster frame is now displaying the hitpoints without using any addons.
- New runeforging enchant: Rune of Cinderglacier
- New flight path in Acherus: The Ebon Hold
- Wowhead talent calculators updated with the new beta build 8681.
- The Death Knight’s eyes now glow!
- New Calendar Feature
- All potions trigger the Potion Sickness effect on first use, you can no longer chain pots.
- You can buy the following epic rings in Dalaran:  Band of the Kirin Tor and Signet of the Kirin Tor
- Warrior (no talent changes).
- Shaman (no talent changes)
- Death Knight now have their own flying mount: Winged Steed of the Ebon Blade
- Barbershop is now available
- Hunter (no talent changes)
- Death Knight and Druid talent changes added.

I was doing my usual browse through the Blue posts found on the WoW forums, and stumbled across a very interesting “predicament”. Here is the Original Post from a concerned Beta player over the Death Knight Starting Zone quest lines.

Original Post by Orophino:

“I don’t want to give out all the cool parts of the death knight starting area. But at the same time I think people need to be aware of something.

Unless the quests change radically, I won’t be rolling a death knight in the expansion.

The problem is that the quests are unambiguously evil. And you have no option to make moral choices. What I’m talking about here isn’t the usual Warcraft. You are forced to steal, murder, and torture, and it is presented as such. The quest text goes out of it’s way to make sure you don’t misunderstand what’s going on.

There were several quests last night in beta where I almost decided not to continue. Specifically -

- The quest where I am forced to murder civilians who don’t fight back.
- The quest where I am forced to torture people to extract information.
- The quest where I am forced to murder my unarmed friend.

I understand that it’s called World of *Warcraft*. And I understand that for the last 3.5 years I’ve been slaughtering creatures who did nothing other than carry loot I wanted. But this seems to have been designed with the sole intent of making sure I’m evil. Well……. I’m not evil. If the bridge will explode if I don’t torture someone, then the bridge will explode. If the mission fails because I won’t murder civilians who don’t fight back, then the mission will fail. Read the rest of this entry »

Well the flying mount questline has become available to players in the Wrath of the Lich King Beta Test right now.  Its really a pretty simple questline, and not nearly as long and drawn out as I would have expected it to be.

First you will have to have met a few prerequisites found below:

1. You must be level 77.
2. You must have completed the entire quest line from Weslex Quickwrench, who is found in the Hemet Nessingwary camp.  By level 77 you will have most likely completed this quest line so its really no big deal.

Now you are ready to start the short questline to obtain your flying mount abilities for Northrend.

1. First talk to Professor Calvert found next to Weslex, she will offer you the quest “Aerial Surveilance“. Accept that quest.
2. Then you would fly to Lakeside landing.  Talk to Pilot Vic and take the next quest, which requires you to go into the lake to find the keys to the airplane. This quest is called “An Embarassing Incident“.
3. Get the keys and come back then he will have you take a flight with him, for the follow up quest “Reconaissance Flight“.  While in the plane he will get hit, then you will have to take control of the airplane and finish the flight.
4. Then you will be rewarded with Cold Terrain flying, which will allow you to use your flying mount in Northrend.

Sounds easy enough, but it really does suck that we will have to wait until level 77 to fly again.  I have gotten so used to flying, or even just hopping on my mount and going up in the air while being afk. I am not sure what running through mobs that will actually attack me is like anymore!

Oh well at least it won’t cost me 10K gold for another epic flying mount!

First, all I have to say about the new gems that have been released is….WOW. If these gems stay in their current state it will really change the game. The way you gear will be completely different, and certainly the value of gem slots will increase significantly.

As a disclaimer though, these gems have simply been scraped from the game files, and it is not at all apparent how difficult to obtain these gems will be. I mean if these are drops from the final dungeon of the game it changes my story a bit, however I would not expect that to be the case as Arthas’ dungeon is probably barely under construction.. if it is under construction at all.

So without further adieu I present to you some of the scraped game fles for the new Epic Gems in Wrath of the Lich King. Keep in mind these are just a few examples and not all of the gems…there are 72 epic gems in total right now.

For this example I decided to take all Physical Damage / Tanki9ng gems to keep the playing field even. First off you will notice a gem with expertise, FINALLY! There is also a straight 20 expertise gem, but for most players a mixed agiliy and expertise gem will be better as it gives you more versatility in gear. Read the rest of this entry »

Obviously Blizzard isn’t going to simply hand you a bunch of 24 slot bags just for buying the new expansion when it comes out. Instead they are finding other ways of doing a similar feature.

Mounts Now Learnable

No longer will you need to take up at least two bag slots with your mounts (one land and one flying). Lets not kid each other though, most of us carry around at least 4 mounts or more right now. I mean you never know when you might want to ride the Cenarion War Hippogryph instead of the Netherdrake; or when you might want to ride the Skeletal War Horse instead of the Black War Kodo.

In WotLK none of that will matter at all. You will learn all of your mounts along the way. Meaning you can “carry” all of them with you. Mounts will no longer be taking up bag space or in your bank space. They will be included on a new chracter tab that will allow you to summon the mount.

I know this is going to save me all of these bag slots on my main character:

1.Nether Drake
2.Nether Ray
3.Regular Epic Flyer
4.Cenarion War Hippogryph
5.Those silly Scarab Mounts from AQ40…in every color of course!
6.Black War Kodo
7.Black War Raptor
8.Regular Epic Land Mount
9.Big Giant Chicken (BE Mount)

So thats a total of 9 free bag slots…and they aren’t stopping there!

Summonable Vanity Pets Too!

Thats right players will be to carry every single vanity pet with them also without taking up a single bag or bank space. Now I wish I didn’t throw all of my vanity pets away…I am just always so pressed on back and bag space taht my wealth of epics seemed more important! Read the rest of this entry »

I tell you one thing about Wrath that I am really liking right now…Profession changes!  I am actually glad for once that my Druid and Warlock are both enchanters, now I get more than just ring enchants! Scrolls of enchantment are the saviour of the enchanting profession.

What are Scrolls of enchantment?

Scrolls of Enchantment are the future of enchanting…duh!  Now instead of having to find an enchanter while they are online, the enchanter can simply gather the materials and then craft the enchant.  The enchant will be in the form of a scroll that anyone will be able to use to enchant the specific item with that specific enchant.

What does this change?

Everything pretty much.  This means Enchanters will now be able take materials form them into scrolls of enchantment and then place them on the Auction House, mail them,etc.  In fact you will even be able to pass rare enchants through neutral auction houses to the opposing faction. 

This is truly an amazing change that will benefit everyone single person in the game, and not just benefit the enchanter. 

Then why didn’t Blizzard do this sooner?!?

I have no idea, it really doesn’t seem overly difficult to implement.  I really wish it had come sooner, but that is looking at the glass half empty.  I am a glass half full kind of guy, so I would rather be extremely happy that they do finally plan to implement it after talking about it sinc the launch of the Burning Crusade.

The day I sell my first enchant via a scroll will be a very happy day for me.

What other new things are out there for Enchanters?

Well you know those low level wands you were able to craft before.  It seems that they will finally create an epic maximum level wand for enchanters to craft.  I mean it only seems logical to me that enchanters should be able to make some really nice magical wands.

These are more great changes by Blizzard, and the more I hear about the expansion the more excited I get!  I can hardly wait for the release… hopefully I may get a Beta invite yet!

A few days late, but better late than never right! Thought I would post the full Age of Conan Patch notes for everyone to view while they are supposed to be working!

Also if you haven’t yet gotten a chance you should definitely check out Ashling’s AoC Powerleveling Guide. This guide will lay out the fastest path for every character from level 1 all the way to level 80. This is by far the best guide on the market, I even used it when I leveled my character. I was leveling so fast my own guild began to question if I was cheating…or if I had a chinese farmer playing my character while I was at work! So check out Ashling’s AoC Powerleveling Guide and start leveling faster than you ever thought possible!

Age of Conan Full Patch Notes 7-17-08

General Updates

The first set of these changes were generally aimed at what we termed ‘convenience’ fixes, things that have provided unneeded frustrations for players. Not the largest or most comprehensive changes by any means, but ones that we felt could have a direct influence on the general play experience.

• We have added more travel NPCs to the capital cities that allow travel to more locations in the game world.
• The price of the basic mounts has been reduced from 2 gold to 75 silver.
• The price of additional bags has been reduced by between 20% and 50%.
• It should no longer be possible to accidently sell your mount.
• A teleport item, the Totem of Origins is now dropping from boss encounters in group instances. You will be able to acquire it from locations throughout the game starting in the Black Castle. This totem teleports you to your home city once a day and can be used in addition to your path of Asura.
• It will be possible to get experience from ‘grey’ quests again.

Combat Changes Read the rest of this entry »