Spugnort's

Archive for January, 2009

Ok, so we were a tad over-leveled, but heading into AQ40 with 4 people was interesting. The point in doing so was to collect some additional mounts while working on the World of Warcraft 50 mount achievement. While it really isn’t possible to get past the first boss with only 4 people due to the fact that during the encounter 3 people will get mind-controlled, the trash leading up to the boss respawns fairly quickly and can easily be killed with 2 or more level 80 players. We farmed up several of the AQ40 specific mounts in very little time.

Here’s a screen shot of us on some of our shiny new AQ40 bug mounts. It’s too bad you can’t use them outside of the instance, they actually make pretty cool mounts.

Our party make up consisted of 2 resto druids, a warrior tank and a hunter. There wasn’t a whole lot of healing required, so the druids spent most of the time casting damage spells. We made a few attempts at the first boss but failed each time when the boss would spawn 2 clones of him self and mind-control 3 of our 4 party members. We had more than enough damage and healing to take the boss down – but once 3 of us were forced to turn on the 4th, it didn’t go so well.

I later went back with my hunter and a friend’s resto druid. Killing 40 man monsters with 2 people is a little slow, but can easily be accomplished at our level. If you were the appropriate class and geared properly, the AQ40 trash could pretty easily be solo’d.

After we had our fun collecting the AQ40 mounts, we headed over to AQ20 and easily cleared the instance to get the achievement with just the 4 of us. Took us less than 1/2 an hour to clear an instance that I remember spending multiple raid nights working on with a group of 20. Big fun

~Spug

Patch 3.0.8 is scheduled to hit live servers at the end of maintenance today.  Here is a list of the most up to date patch notes available.

General

• Players may now create death knights on any realm once they reach level 55.
• Bonus Armor: The mechanics for items with bonus armor on them has changed (any cloth, leather, mail, or plate items with extra armor, or any other items with any armor). Bonus armor beyond the base armor of an item will no longer be multiplied by any talents or by the bonuses of Bear Form, Dire Bear Form, or Frost Presence.
• Racial restrictions on mounts have now been lifted. Night Elves on mechanostriders? Tauren on raptors? You’re not seeing things.
• Racial Resistances: These can now be mitigated against by gaining additional chance to hit.
• Tapping: All player spells which cause a creature to become aggressive to you will now also immediately cause the creature to be tapped.
• All Silence spells now have diminishing returns. This includes: Arcane Torrent, Garrote silence effect, Improved Counterspell effect, Improved Kick effect, Silence, Gag Order, Silencing Shot, Spell Lock, and Strangulate.
• Dispel Resist talents have changed to protect only beneficial spells and damage over time effects.
• Shield Wall, Barkskin, Guardian Spirit, and Divine Protection are now off the Global Cooldown.
• A new mailbox is now available at the Crows Tavern in the Dalaran Sewers.
• We have added over 60 new graveyards to Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms.
• The run speed in spirit form has been increased by 50%. Night Elves in Wisp form will now move at a bonus 75% speed.
• Reputation rewarded for killing mobs will no longer automatically deprecate. This means trivial mobs will continue to give out their full amounts of reputation on kill for the majority of cases in the game (level 70 creatures in Stratholme, for example, will continue to award the full amount of rep to level 80 players seeking to boost their Argent Dawn faction).
• World of Warcraft now supports 3-D imaging. Visit http://www.nvidia.com/object/GeForce_3D_Vision_Main.html for more information.

Achievements

• The Loremaster of Kalimdor Achievement has had its quest amount reduced.
• The Perma-Peddle Achievement is no longer a part of the “Fool for Love” meta-achievement.
• The Winds of the North (Horde) has had its requirements changed. This achievement is now earned by getting Exalted with the Alliance Vanguard or Horde Expedition.

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Content

• The Deathclaw Cold Ones that assault the High Elf Chapter 22 hub will no longer attack players.

Quests and Public Quests

• Betrayal from Within: Adjusted the waypoints on this quest so that they correctly lead players to the Bastion Stair entrance.
• Broken Core: Fixed an issue which was preventing Squig Herder players from completing this quest because they could not choose a reward.
• Eyes of the Spy: Fixed an issue with the Raven Caller quest item which sometimes allowed more than one raven to be summoned.
• Bitter Blood: This quest will now reward players with an appropriate amount of experience for its level.

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While battles to take and defend the fortresses in WAR raged on without any major hiccups, Mark Jacobs admits there is still room for improvement. Below is an excerpt of a statement he made last week detailing some of the changes which will be coming very soon (the first has already been made).

“First, the team will tweak the settings for the Fortress Lords to make sure that their power is in line with the current numbers of players expected to participate in the siege. Second, the team will continue working on optimizing the code’s performance in large-scale battles so we can increase the population cap over the next few weeks. Third, the team is looking at additional tweaking of the pop cap to ensure that it is where it needs to be in order to allow these battles to be as well-balanced (from a design perspective) as they can be. In the end, it is up to the players to decide to defend and/or attack a fortress but it is our job to make sure that the pop cap is set properly to ensure that the maximum number of defenders/attackers that can *choose* to participate is set up so that if the population hits max cap (and assuming that both sides are equally powerful), neither side has an advantage over the other. Most importantly, the team will also be looking at moving the fortress areas out to their own zones to allow an even a greater of number of players to participate, while also maintaining a high level of performance. While they are doing that, they will also be looking at ways to enhance the fortress areas to take advantage of having their own dedicated zone. This might also allow us to get slightly lower-level players into the action, either directly in the fortress sieges, and/or in supporting roles around the main action. However, we won’t move the sieges into their own zones unless we are sure that we can get either some design and/or performance improvements by doing so.”

We think this part of the game is great and we would love to see it have its own special place to shine. We will definitely be keeping an eye on this!

General

• Players may now create death knights on any realm once they reach level 55.
• Bonus Armor: The mechanics for items with bonus armor on them has changed (any cloth, leather, mail, or plate items with extra armor, or any other items with any armor). Bonus armor beyond the base armor of an item will no longer be multiplied by any talents or by the bonuses of Bear Form, Dire Bear Form, or Frost Presence.
• Racial restrictions on mounts have now been lifted.
• Tapping: All player spells which cause a creature to become aggressive to you will now also immediately cause the creature to be tapped.
• A new mailbox is now available at the Crows Tavern in the Dalaran Sewers.
• We have added over 60 new graveyards to Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms.
• The run speed in spirit form has been increased by 50%. Night Elves in Wisp form will now move at 75% speed.

Achievements

• Achievement: The Loremaster of Kalimdor Achievement has had its quest amount reduced.
• The Winds of the North has had its requirements changed. This achievement is now earned by getting Exalted with the Alliance Vanguard or Horde Expedition.

PvP
Arenas

• All rage and runic power are set to 0 when an Arena begins and the preparation period is over.

Battlegrounds
Lake Wintergrasp

• Wintergrasp Commendation can now also be purchased for the low low price of 9 Wintergrasp Mark of Honor. Players can visit their respective Wintergrasp vendors and put those Marks of Honor to use!
• Elementals should now always despawn when the battle begins.
• Wintergrasp now extends further south so that more revenants can be reached.
• There are now three ranks in Wintergrasp: Recruit, Corporal, and First Lieutenant.
• Players will be eligible for participation rewards after two honorable kills.
• Players will receive increased honor with increased rank.
• Players will receive additional Marks of Honor at Corporal or higher rank.
• Players will receive corporal rank at 5 honorable kills instead of two.

Strand of the Ancients

• Antipersonnel Turrets will now gain vehicle immunities, use falloff damage, and damage increased to 4000 + 200 per level to compensate for falloff.
• Seaforium charges have been moved closer to the graveyards on the 2nd tier.

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