Blizzcon Day 1 Wrap Up - Classes, Groups, UI and More!

General Blizzcon Announcements

• Blizzcon “Secret Project” Announcement Confirmed - Next Generation MMO, outside of WoW / SC / D3 universe
• Info on next 5 patches - patches 3.0.2, 3.0.3, 3.1, 3.2, and 3.3

Blizzcon Class Panels

Death Knight

• The original idea behind the rune system was a totally customizable rune pool (like, 6 Unholy runes) but “it sucked”. They changed it to what is it today (2 Runes of each type)
• Death Knights shouldn’t be played like a metronome and is intended to be an interactive and reactive class.
• As a death knight, your talent trees are a good way to define “your style, but not your role”. Devs want to bring this philosophy to other classes.

Druid

• Balance druids have been greatly improved and you shouldn’t see a lot of boomkins anymore. Their DPS is now on par with other DPS classes.
• Balance DPS looks pretty good now but developers are keeping an eye on the survivability
• Entangling roots was allowed indoor to give druids more crowd control ability in instances.
• Restoration were stuck in the HoT niche and were very limited in 5-mans or raids. Nourish is new flash heal-like spell added to solve this problem on single targets and Wild Growth was added to give them an AOE Heal.
• Druids were also given an OOC resurrection spell.
• Feral druids were decent at tanking and DPSing, but couldn’t master any of these fields. In WotLK you can take all the bear talents to become a very good main tank, or all the cat talents to have a very high DPS.
• Feral mana is a known issue, and developpers don’t want intellect on feral gear. This is being looked at

Hunter

• The hunter pet system was overhauled because it was “clumsy for new players”.
• The shot rataion has been cleaned to make things easier for hunters and make them less reliant on mods or macros.
• Freezing shot was introduced to make pulls faster without having to deploy your traps on the ground each time.

Mage

• Frostfire Bolt is a way to achieve an elemental tree with mages, they should be able to deal both fire and frost damage
• Mage DPS looks pretty good now, there are still a few mana issues getting fixed very soon
• Living Bomb base damage will most likely be increased and the spell mechanics might be modified slightly. Overall, the 51-points talent weren’t meant to be spammed and developers want them to be situational
• Frost and Fire looks pretty balanced now, but Arcane needs a few more tweaks. Arcane needs to be more “mobile”

Paladin

• Paladins were decent off-tanks but not great main tanks, this is fixed in WotLK. Paladins should focus on protection gear instead of spell power.
• Holy Paladins were good healers but couldn’t do much in encounters where players are required to move a lot, however they definitely don’t want them as a HoT class.
• Retribution paladins are supposed to deal a decent amount of DPS without running out of mana.
• Retributions paladins have to be in control of their damage and shouldn’t have to rely on lucky critical strikes to deal most of their damage

Priest

• The goal with Shadowpriest is to make them a DPS class, not just a mana battery.
• Discipline priests should be viable raid healer.
• Mind sear was introduced to give priests another viable DPS ability.
• Class-specific racial abilities were cool, but the idea became got “old” with time. That’s why racials have been revamped

Rogue

• AoE DPS was really needed and Fan of Knives was added to the game.
• Purchasable poisons and the buff of the dagger spec should help “reintroducing” them to the game.
• The goal is to have end-boss less immune to poisons and rogues less dependent of Windfury

Shaman

• Totems are now physical and harder to dispell, have more life and last longer.
• Hex was added to give Shamans more crowd control ability, Riptide to improve their healing, and Lava Burst their spell DPS.

Warlock

• Warlocks pets have been made more useful.
• The warlock rotation shouldn’t be restricted to a shadowbolt spam, that’s why Chaos Bolt was added.
• Affliction Tree is still too complicated and developpers are working on it. Developers definitely want it back as a raiding spec
• Pets should be easier to summon/switch and use.

Warrior

• Protection spec has been revamped to make it cooler to play, mitigation talents now take a lot less points and will let you invest in a few other nice tools.
• In TBC, Arms was PvP and Fury the PvE spec, this will change in WotLK : Battle Stance, Overpower, and Rend have been improved. New fun abilities have been introduced like Bladestorm and Sudden Death, Fury obviously have Titan’s Grip.

Group Discussions

• 30 specs but 25 raid slots
  • More viable specs and death knights, but no room
• Buffs felt out of control
  • Complex, inconsistent, stacking problems
  • Curse of Shadows – gg mages
  • Bloodlust rotations
  • Jimmy can’t come ? No WF ? Cancel the raid

• Buff and debuff overhaul
  • Most buffs affect the whole raid
  • Multiple ways to get the same benefit
  • But no stacking
  • Plenty of room to bring who you want
  • Bring the player, not the class

  • Everyone buffs, everyone does dps!

• Downplay consumables

  • Potion cooldown

• Gear and Skill >> Buffs and Pots

• Just bring good players

• More shared gear

  • e.g. Spell Power – healers might not need second gear sets

• Four main tank classes

  • Overlap niches

  • Healing and coordination >> threat

• Dual Specs are coming – more flexibility!

User Inteface Panel

Daily Blue and PTR Changes Wrap Up

The past few days have been a whirlwind of class changes and blue posts. Make sure you haven’t missed any of the past few days worth of updates.

Daily Blue Wrap Up

• Mage Mana Longevity Buffed
• Death Knight Changes
• Feral Druid Changes
• Hunter Arena WotLK Discussions
• Protection Paladin Buffs, Ret Paladin Nerfs
• Resto Shaman Changes and Spirit Wolves Buffed

Other Important Posts

• WotLK PvP Changes
• Patch 3.0.2 - Build 9038 Class Changes
• WotLK Profession Perks and Bonuses Summary
• WotLK Enchanting Guide

WotLK PvP Changes and Blue Posts

There’s been loads of changes in the past few days for WotLK, specifically related to PvP. Take a look at a few of the most recent blue posts and updates regarding pvp in the last 48 hours.

WotLK PvP Recap from Zug Gaming

• Berserker Rage Change
• Season 4 End Date
• Arena Match Making System Change
• Build 9014 Class Changes
• Honor Points will NOT Reset for WOTLK
• New Honor Items for Patch 3.0.2

PvP Developer Q & A

Why is it so hard to measure skill in a battleground and have rated BGs ?
I wish it were that simple. However, for a rating system to reasonably zero in on the skill of a single player in a game with teammates it takes a number of games approximately equal to ten times the number of players participating on that player’s team.

So for example, for a rating system to have all the information it needs to know to figure out how “good” of a battleground player you are in Alterac Valley, it needs to take about 400 games to do it (10 times the number of players on your team). Unfortunately, that’s without the additional complexities of being able to queue solo versus queueing as a group, etc.

It would be kind of annoying to have to play about 400 games of AV before the system could decide what items you’re eligible for. So, there are some complexities in creating a system to work around that problem (among others).

Archavon changes (Lake Wintergrasp Boss)
We don’t plan to change Archavon, as he needs to have compelling loot that isn’t something you can’t possibly get another way. However, I think it’s important to note that Archavon does not drop the helm or shoulder slots (or weapons), which are the hardest to obtain both in pve and pvp.

Why is PvP gear available for purchase for PvE tokens with no rating requirement ?
To put it simply, you can’t endlessly wipe on raid bosses and get these tokens. At some point, you have to succeed. Even then, the pvp gear you get from these tokens is 1 tier behind their pve value (ie: the ilevel 213 pve tokens from Nax 25 only get you “Hateful Gladiator” gear which is ilevel 200). It’s not possible to get the “best” pvp set items through pve.

Are there any plans of allowing us to attain PvE gear through honor/arena points?
For the most part (lack of tanking gear aside), if you have the highest-end pvp gear, you can do fairly well in a “tier behind” raid (ie: 10-man nax). So, for the most part that dynamic already exists.

WotLK Battlegrounds Changes

No Honor Points Increases for WotLK

Battlegrounds wins/losses and honorable kills will not award experience after the next patch, nor upon the release of Wrath of the Lich King. It could always happen somewhere down the road as we work to improve PvP progression, but there are no plans for changing this in the immediate future.

Battlegrounds Discussion with Tigole

Actually, we have been discussing new battlegrounds quite a bit lately. Wrath of the Lich King will feature Strand of the Ancients (attack/defend) as well as Wintergrasp (non-instanced, world PvP).

But past that, we are exploring ideas that would involve expanding our Battleground content in future patches and beyond. We believe we have some strong ideas for improving Battlegrounds and PvP as a whole in the game and we’re definitely going to focus on improvements in the future. Now, it’s very early to be talking about some of this stuff but I think it’s important for the community to know that it’s on our minds.

Our general thought is that we could provide more BG content over time. The BG content that we could provide could be of higher quality with a higher degree of accessibility. Overall, we’d like to have more content and variety. We also want the gameplay experience in the BGs to be better directed. We’re also exploring the concept of a complimentary “competitive” bg system as well. Over time, we’d like the focus of PvP to shift back to being more BG-centric and more focused on Horde versus Alliance — the core of our game.

We’re also planning on improving some Battleground and PvP features in general. For example, we want to give you the ability to queue for Battlegrounds from anywhere in the world. We’re also going to explore EXP gain through the PvP system as well as low level itemization to support that.

Please don’t take this post as a promise. This won’t be an overnight process. Not all of these things are set in stone and guaranteed to happen. It would take us a while to shift in this direction. But these are some of the current thoughts on the development team. I think it’s important for you guys to know some of our thought process in regards to PvP.

Oct. 1 WotLK Updates Wrap Up!

Well, pretty big day today with loads of changes across the forums, beta, and here at Zug Gaming. To make sure you didn’t miss anything I thought this occassion calls for my first WotLK wrap up post.

Honor Points Will NOT Reset In Expansion

Title pretty much sums this one up. Blizzard reversed their earlier decesion to reset honor / honor marks prior to expansion. Honor points will not be reset prior to the expansion.

Updated WotLK Glyphs

New / revised glyphs for all classes.

WotLK Beta Build 9014 Class Changes

Nothing major here, most of the changes are pretty minor and focus more on balancing. Never the less, some interested and positive adjustments to every class.

Arena Season 4 End Date / Patch 3.0.2 Launch Date

Season 4 will end October 14th, 2008, additional information regarding details and patch 3.0.2 speculation.

Major Warrior Buffs - Berserker Rage Change

Berserker rage change may be used in any stance now, confirmed by blue.

WoW Gold Tip - Jewelcrafting and Prospecting

Gold tip #6 from yours truly, check out the tutorial video regarding jewelcrafting, prospecting, and the auction house.

Top 7 Kick Ass WotLK Achievements

7. The Explorer

Tired of the generic pick up 5 of X, kill 10 of Y? Yeah…me too, which is why I’m pretty excited for the challenge of The Explorer! Those who think they are up to the challenge will become a regular Magellan as they sail the seas and explore every zone, every nook and cranny of all 4 continents. For accomplishing this feat you’ll be awarded with a new title, The Explorer.

6. Make Love, Not Warcraft

Even blizzard has a pretty good sense of humor every once and a while. All you have to do to complete this achievement is shoot off a quick /hug on a player you’ve just killed. Personally I think this will be one of the easiest achievements I’ll have to do, especially considering all the /gloat and /spit practice I’ve got in over the years.

5. Leading the Calvary

This achievement isn’t for the casual gamer, not by any stretch. To Lead the Calvary and ride above mere mortals on your Albino Drake you’ll have to acquire a staggering 50 mounts. That’s, right…50! Don’t worry though, you can use 60% ground mounts, 100% ground mounts, 60% flying mounts, and 100% flying mounts to reach that total. If you try to complete this in patch 3.0 you’ll be in for a tough grind, there’s only around 85 total mounts available for TBC, and this includes all rare / trading card mounts / arena drakes / other things you probably won’t have.

Once the Wrath of the Lich King is released there will be a host of new ground and flying mounts, making this achievement much easier.

4. Leroy Jenkins

What would this top list by without a mention of the legendary Leroy Jenkins. The video made popular shortly after WoW’s release and launched the legend of Leroy is now its own achievement! Succeed where Leroy failed and slay 50 dragon whelps in under 15 seconds in Upper Black Rock Spire.

If you haven’t seen the video make sure you check it out! Leroy Jenkins Video

3. Grand Caravan Mammoth

Nothing too complicated here…Obtain a Grand Caravan Mammoth from Mei Francis in Dalaran. No problem right? Or so you thought! Only professional Chinese farmers and Zuggy’s Gold Mastery Guide users will have any hope of completing this achievement (if they want to still have a life that is!).

The Grand Caravan Mammoth costs a mammoth…pun intended, 15,000g! Though it’s well worth the costs, you can carry up to 3 passengers on your mount, including vendors should you choose to invite them to hop on! I love this achievement because it’s the first true money sink that says nothing more than…

HEY LOOK AT ME! Anyone else ready for Mammoth trains in Orgrimmar?

2. Avast Ye, Admiral!

At long last all us bloodsail scallywags are getting our just deserves! This achievement isn’t one to be taken lightly, and for this reason it’s making my list. To complete this achievement and gain the title of Bloodsail Admiral you must get to friendly with the Bloodsail Buccaneers. Sounds easy enough, right? Not exactly, in order to get to friendly you’ll be killing thousands of booty bay goblins to increase your reputation, in doing so you’ll not only be tanking your booty bay reputation, but all Steamweedle Cartel factions. All the way to 0/36,000 hated with every faction of the Steamweedle Cartel.

This will prevent you from doing anything associated with goblins until you get your reputation back up. So, do ye think ye are up to thy challenge, matey!?

1. For the Horde! / For the Alliance!

Whether it’s raiding, battlegrounds or arena I love anything that brings people together for the purposes for domination, and domination is what these achievements are all about. In order to complete this achievement you must kill all 4 opposing faction leaders, a feat easier said than done. Most of these faction leaders will require a raid of at least 40 members.

Those who accept and complete this daunting challenge will be rewarded with a black war bear mount.

You’ve heard my top 7 now I want to hear yours! What achievements do you think should make the list?

The Tauren Chef Cookbook

Ever wished you could cook up some of your favorite WoW foods in the real world? Well, the wait is finally over, now you can!

Introducing the Tauren Chef Cookbook!

The tauren chef cookbook is the first and only World of Warcraft cookbook. Not to be confused with in-gaming cooking, we’re talking about a real world cookbook that teaches you the secrets of cooking the foods of WoW in your own kitchen at home! Greg over at AzerothCookbook.com was kind enough to send me a copy of his cookbook and I’ve got to say it’s impressive.

The Tauren Chef Cookbook is jammed full of delicious and easy to make recipes. There are over 150 pages covering literally everything you could possibly think of cooking up…from Soups and Stews, Breakfast and Breads, to Meats, Deserts, Appetizers and more!

Guinevere Mee, author of The Tauren Chef Cookbook (and Greg’s wife), does an exceptional job of explaining each recipe in detail. Each recipe begins with a brief description of the in-game food it’s based on, then Guinevere goes over the real world ingredients and instructions so you can get started fast.

When it comes to working in the kitchen I’m about as hopeless as it gets, but even as inept as I am I find the Tauren Chef Cookbook really a breeze to get started with. I tried out my first recipe last night for dinner, let me tell you…it was the best damn Dry Pork Ribs I’ve ever had. The ribs were tender and the dry rub had a great flavor.

They took a little while to bake, but the prep work was a breeze, leaving me more time for WoW, lol. In all seriousness though, these were absolutely delicious and super easy. I think this is the reason why I’ll really enjoy this cookbook.

Each recipe is more than just a list of ingredients and instructions. It’s like you’ve got your own personal cooking assistant helping you the whole way. Guinevere does a great job of explaining all the subtle nuances involved in each recipe and provides her tips and insights so that every recipe goes as smoothly and quickly as possible.

The Tauren Chef Cookbook is full of tasty and easy recipes. It’s a professional and high quality book that you’ll get scores of unique and deliciuos recipes from. So if you’re ready to bring some excitement back to your kitchen then make sure you check out The Tauren Chef Cookbook today!

Start Cooking With the Tauren Chef Now!

Updated Mounts and Mount Achievement for WOTLK

Now THAT is what I call a money-sink. A few new mounts in WOTLK have been revealed, one of them being the Reins of the Grand Caravan Mammoth. This is a 3-person mount that also carries vendors. That’s right – you no longer would have to go back to a vendor to sell things, since you have your own personal vendor on your mount. Now, the extent of what these vendors sell is unknown, but personally I’m hoping you can pick and choose which type of vendor you want. How nice would it be to have a reagent vendor at your beckon call? Or even your own personal repairer?  Although at 15,000g it seems like nigh impossible for anyone to get, that’s what everyone said about epic fliers.
In other news, a new achievement has been released for WOTLK. The reward of the Albino Drake is obtained by amassing a ridiculous 75 unique mounts. Yes, you heard right. I said 75. Personally, this seems absolutely ridiculous, although I know I’ll be personally shooting for it (eventually….). All I know is that this mount better be the coolest thing in the world, because it will be one of the rarest in the world.

Another interesting development has been brought up by users of the WOTLK Beta Forums. According to Solerius, it is impossible for Tauren to reach the 75 mount mark. Although, to be fair, I have heard from various sources that they plan to implement some sort of way for tauren to obtain this mount, although at this time these plans are unknown.

All in all, this just adds to the hype of WOTLK. With these kinds of money sinks and achievements, gamers all over the world will just have more and more things to obsess over and spend time trying to obtain. I’m especially excited for the Caravan Mammoth, it’s awesome that you will be able to transport low-leveled players around. Who knows, I may start charging for taxi rides all over Azeroth!

Commentary courtesy of Menagus of the Zug Gaming forums. Image from worldofraids.com.

Level 1 to 60 in 30 Hours!

No way! Impossible? That’s what I thought too, but thanks to Blizzard’s new refer a friend program I’ve leveled up my most recent alt with a few friends in just a 30 hours! It’s a pretty simple system, but I’ll review exactly how it works so you too can do this!

Setting Up Your Refer a Friend Account

1. First, you must send your friend a refer a friend invite link through your WoW account management window. They must accept this through the email they provide you and then download the World of Warcraft trial.
2. Next, you’ll want to go ahead and upgrade the trial account to a full account. Your friend can do this in his / her account management settings.
3. You can start leveling while the account is still a trial, but remember that trial accounts have very limited functionality (no mail, no trading, cannot send whispers except to people who are mutual friends).
4. Now you’re good to go and can start power leveling!

In order to make joining the game as easy as possible blizzard has created several new elements to help you during the 1 to 60 leveling process.

• You and your partner will gain triple experience on all mobs and quest turn ins while leveling up to 60. Note, you and your friend MUST be within 30 yards and within the same party to gain the triple experience. This triple experience buff is account wide and lasts for 90 days.
• You and your partner can summon each other (no assist required) once every hour anywhere in the world.

Heap On The Rewards!

You didn’t think the fun was going to stop with triple xp did you? Oh no! In addition to being able to level as many alts as you like, you as the referrer also get some additional bonuses for all your hard work in bringing your friend to WoW!

• 30 Days free WoW subscription
• Rare Zhevra mount (refer a friend program only)
• Cherry on the Cake: For every 2 levels your friend levels he / she can “gift” one of your other characters 1 level. Ex. My friend and I just hit 60 on our new alts, but I am going to have him gift another one of my alt characters from 30 to 60. Since he leveled 60 levels he received 30 levels to give as a gift. This gifting policy works for 90 days while your accounts are linked.

WotLK Northrend Daily Quests & Profession Token System

As many of you may have expected there are going to be a host of new daily quests in Northrend once wrath of the lich king releases. Just like with the burning crusade’s daily quests these will have a variety of awards, including:

• Reputation
• Gold
• Items
• Patterns
• New Token System

Daily Quests Token System for Professions

Now before we get into all these new daily quests let’s talk about the new token system. In order to really do anything with your professions up to this point you had to.

1. Grind reputation to buy patterns
2. Farm / purchase very rare patterns
3. Join a raiding guild and be fortunate enough to be given rare patterns

These were really the only ways you could get any long duration use out of your profession, but blizzard is chaging this random success factor quite a bit. In the expansion many professions will have daily quests associated with them, these daily quests will award you a specific token for that professions. These tokens may then be turned in for various patterns, formulas, schematics, etc.

Profession Daily Quests

A few of these new profession daily quests have already been revealed.

Cooking Daily Quests

Once you train grand master cooking you’ll get a set of base line cooking recipes, these recipes use a variety of fish and meat that you’ll get in Northrend. In addition to these baseline recipes you also have the option of acquiring the upgraded versions of these recipes.

You can get these improved cooking recipes by completing the cooking daily quest, which will award you 1 Dalaran Cooking Award. You can turn in 3 of these to get 1 new recipe.

Jewelcrafting Daily Quests

After completling the daily jewelcrafting quest you will be awarded 1 dalaran jewelcrafter’s trophy. These tokens may be turned in for various gems and designs.

• 1 Token = Uncut Jewelcrafter’s BoP Gem
• 2 Tokens = Low Level Designs
• 5 Tokens = High Level Designs
• 8 Tokens = Meta Designs

I really think this is a great change, it will create a very interesting dynamic as far as supply and demand are concerned with designs amongst jewelcrafters. I’m very interested to see how this system is adapted for the remainder of the professions, but overall I feel it’s a great and welcome change.

Other Daily Quests

Quite honestly, none of the other daily quests were really all that exciting. So far only a handful of the new Northren dailies have been implemented. Most of which are designed around the time honored formula of collecting X of some item or killing X of what ever mob, you know the drill. That said, the group of daily quests located around Venture Bay in the Grizzly Hills does look pretty awesome.

There are 4 total daily quests here, of which include objectives such as…

• Slaying Goblins
• Killing player’s the opposing faction
• Taking down the opposing faction’s captain

Ideally this area will become the location of some really good world PvP. Genreally when there’s gold + pvp glory in the same area it’s going to be good times for all. On top of the 15g you get for every quest here you also receive 10 venture coins for every quest. These coins be turned in for various PvP’ish items, check out the full list of venture coin item rewards here.

Arena Position and Line of Sight Strategy

If there’s one aspect of arena that is most overlooked it’s without a doubt the influence of position and line of sight. Understanding the correct positional requirements to successfully counter a team is extremely important, as just one minor error could easily lead to a quick loss. That said, once you’ve mastered the basics of your position and line of sight healing, both from offensive and defensive positions, you’ll improve your level of arena performance significantly.

While I’ve done a few strategies, guides and tutorials related to line of sight, I’ve largely ignored it. Though with this inaugural guide I’d like to re-open the strategy discussions on positional awareness and LoS strategy.

In the coming days and weeks I’ll be covering both offensive and defensive positional strategies for every arena. With the hope that in learning these positional awareness factors and strategies will allow you and your teammates the chance to really push yourselves to that next level and take a slice out of the arena ladder.

Line of Sight and Position Strategies

• General Line of Sight and Position Strategy
• Blade’s Edge Arena Line of Sight
• Nagrand Arena Line of Sight and Position

This list will be added to in the coming days and weeks.

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