Battlegrounds, Why They Are Important

A lot of people overlook the importance of battlegrounds when trying to get better at a class. The truth is, almost all problems with your play style can be worked on without tanking arena rating. A lot of people underestimate the skill level of other players in battlegrounds but,

“it’s like walking into a subway in New York, you don’t know who you are going to meet” (Azzamat).

Let uneven match ups benefit you. If you can, this is probably the best way to get valuable practice. A lot of people in BG’s are only there to gear up alts, this is why having an uneven battle will benefit you more. Some common problems to focus on would be:

Healers:

1. Survivability vs. mana conservation: I know this was a big reason I went back into battlegrounds on my shaman. The situation Earth Shield vs. Water Shield. Obviously tanking with Earth Shield will give you a lot more survivability but you will eventually go oom. As a Paladins you can work on the same issue of timing your Diving Plee after their cooldowns.

2. Healing Multiple Targets: If you only play 2v2 this usually isn’t as important for you, but finding a cast rotation that will allow you to keep 2 targets up will usually help against lock teams.

Casters:

1. Doing damage while taking damage: A lot of casters have the problem of not being able to do any damage with melee on you. Learning to juke Kicks or Mind Freeze while still setting up your shatter combos or burst is important in arena. Just remember, you do less damage locked out then spamming instants.

2. Crowd control under pressure: In arena, most mage/lock combos rely on CC. If your main role is to CC you should still be able to control 1 target with DPS on you. Practice setting up teleports to get off a fear or sheeping focus targets after a blink.

Melee:

1. Being patient: For rogues, making sure you have almost full energy before the full kidney shot on the kill target. DK’s/Warriors build ruinic power or rage to use with your interrupt to provide a nice burst.

2. Don’t miss: If you are going to use the energy to kick or the rage to pummel. Make sure you don’t miss. If you are going to miss the interrupt it would be better to let the heal go through and get the next one.

Mana Regeneration Changes Confirmed

Finally all the speculation on the new mana  regeneration changes have been put to rest.

As we have suggested, we have become concerned that mana regeneration is currently too powerful, especially for healers. We want players to have to keep an eye on mana. We don’t want you to go out of mana every fight, but running out of mana should be a very real risk for sloppy playing or attempting content that you aren’t yet ready for. When mana regeneration is trivial then certain parts of the game break down – classes that offer Replenishment are devalued, stats that offer mana regeneration are devalued, and spells that are efficient are neglected in preference to spells with high throughput.

Here are a list of changes you are likely to see in 3.1. They will be available to try out on the PTR. Mana regeneration is somewhat technical, so please bear with us.

• Regeneration while not casting (outside of the “five second rule”) will be decreased. We think that (1) the ability to cast heal over time spells and then sit back and (2) benefitting from a clearcasting proc that also gets you out of the five second rule both provide too much mana regeneration, even over short time periods.
• To make this change, we are reducing mana regeneration granted by Spirit across the board. However we are also boosting the effects of talents such as Meditation that increase regeneration while casting. The net result should be that your regeneration while casting will stay about the same, but your not-casting regeneration will be reduced. This change will have little impact on dps casters, since they are basically always casting.
• The specific talents and abilities being boosted are: Arcane Meditation, Improved Spirit Tap, Intensity, Mage Armor, Meditation, Pyromaniac and Spirit Tap. Yes this makes these “mandatory” talents even more mandatory, if such a thing is possible.
• Since paladins rely less on Spirit as a mana-regeneration stat, we have to address them in other ways. We don’t want to change Illumination or Replenishment. However, we are going to increase the healing penalty on Divine Plea from 20% to 50%. Divine Plea was originally intended to help Protection and Retribution paladins stay full on mana. It should be a decision for Holy paladins, not something that is automatically used every cooldown.
• In addition, we are also changing the way Spiritual Attunement works. In situations with a large amount of outgoing raid damage, as well as in PvP, this passive ability was responsible for more mana regeneration than we would like. We want to keep the necessary benefit it grants to tanking Protection paladins, while making it less powerful for Holy paladins in PvP or raid encounters with a lot of group damage.
• We are also taking a close look at clearcasting procs themselves. One likely outcome is to change them to an Innervate-like surge of mana so that the net benefit is the same, but healers won’t shift to out-of-casting regeneration so often.
• We balance around the assumption that even 10-player groups have someone offering Replenishment. To make this even easier on players we are likely to offer this ability to additional classes, as well as make sure that existing sources of Replenishment are more equitable.
• These changes are ultimately being done to bring the different healing classes more in line with each other as well as to give the encounter team more leeway when designing encounters, who can balance with these new mana regeneration numbers in mind. In a world with infinite healer mana, the only way to challenge healers is with increasingly insane amount of raid damage, so that global cooldowns become the limiting factor since mana fails to be. An example is the Eredar Twins in late Sunwell. We weren’t necessarily happy with that model, and this change hopefully allows us to move towards giving healing a more deliberate and thoughtful pace rather than frenetic spam.

World of News Morons

Is this honesty how “normal” people view World of Warcraft players or other gamers?

This fine investigative “journalism” piece is nothing short of a joke. It’s hard to believe that this type of a story could even make air, let alone pretend to have any air of legitimacy to its relevancy to true gamer trends or factual basis. In any regard, I won’t ruin the video for you…watch and enjoy for yourself.

Ghostcrawler on Resilience

Brief blue post by Ghostcrawler regarding resilience.

I don’t think I have ever said “wait and see” though it gets quoted a lot, so maybe I did. I have always said that everyone pretty much agrees that resilience will make things better and the question is by how much.

Resilience is our primary reward for PvP gear. It is what keeps PvP gear from being uber in PvP gear and also discourages players from using PvE gear to PvP (more on this in a sec). Part of the Arena design is basically that if you win it gives you access to gear that lets you win more (that is actually the PvE design too if you think about it). If we give away resilience too readily, then the Arena rewards don’t feel as valuable.

We know a lot of players are wearing PvE gear right now in Arenas. That is happening for a couple of reasons:

First, they have that gear. We made the early raiding content very approachable, but we also gave players access to it long before the Arena season started. In early BC it felt like the PvP epic gear was far easier to get than the PvE epic gear, which sent a strange message to a lot of players from which not all have recovered. So in that respect it is nice to be able to say again that PvE is a valid path to epic gear. Unfortunately, we probably went too extreme in the other direction and now the “welfare epics” are from Naxx. (I also want to add that badges and Archavon are great sources for PvP gear without you having to PvP, and Strand and Wintergrasp give a lot of honor if you want to PvP but don’t want to Arena. There is also a lot of good starter PvP gear out there but it is blue and some players hate the thought of taking off their purple gear from a few seasons ago. But I digress.)

Second, when nobody has resilience gear, it allows for a strategy where you can just burst players down in a couple of GCDs. Since the attacks never take much damage, resilience isn’t highly valued. What will happen is that once some players start to get resilience, everyone will have to. Once the healer (to use an example) can’t be destryoed in a couple of GCDs, the attackers are in a very weak position from the rest of the healer’s team. It’s an arms race in essence. Once one person putson their survival gear, everyone has to.

Now I do realize in the past this wasn’t true of every spec, especially rogues, though we’ve tried to avoid that problem this time. I also realize that some players think they die too easily without resilience or will die too easily even with resilience. I’m not trying to wave away all of that feedback. The question was whether resilience was valuable (or perhaps even too valued) in PvP.

Source: Blizzard

Daily Blue Posts – Arena, SOTA, Class Changes

Last days worth of important blue posts, most of which speak specifically on changes for the next major content patch on the PTR, 3.0.8. Make sure to check out the complete patch 3.0.8 notes here.

PvP Related Blue Posts

Arena Burst Damage Balancing

We definitely hear you that you think Arena burst damage is too high and it’s too difficult to heal. You don’t need to keep shouting.

Gear Rewards for Arena

It’s certainly not a system for everyone. I personally don’t favor the arenas either, so I make the choice not to spend much time with them. I think the issue most people have is that the arenas provide the only source for the best PvP gear in the game. We are working on an improved system by which we can measure skill and contribution in battlegrounds so that more competitive rewards can be obtained via means other than the arena.

Strand of the Ancients Balancing

Actually SOTA originally did start with the factions randomly attacking or defending. But there were issues with it; it wasn’t quite as cut and clear as it seems in theory. It turned out it worked out a lot better if Horde were always starting in defense. So the way it is now was a somewhat temporary fix to that issue. If it’s really not working out so well, of course we’ll be looking into reinstating the random start.

Potential Vehicle Changes

We are talking about making PvP vehicles susceptible to all player damage spells. They would still be immune to roots and other forms of CC, but could be poisoned, cursed, etc. It’s wacky, but the way the classes have been designed it isn’t worth the balance issues just for flavor in this case.

PvE Related Blue Posts

Dungeon Difficulty

The content you’ve mentioned is all content that is meant to be an introduction to raiding in Lich King. It’s not meant to preclude people and set a false standard. That being said, we feel that the difficulty of the content is in line with the rewards. While you may find it to be a bit less difficult than you woud like, I assure you a great many others do not.

Class Specific Blue Posts

Druids

Feral Druid Tanking

You’re not making a terribly fair comparison here. Warriors can block etc., true, but Ferals have Barkskin, Survival Instinct, Demo Roar and Enraged Regen as defensive abilities. You have Swipe and Berserk (and the nice Maul glyph) for area threat generation (and I still see bears pulling with Hurricane too).

I do think it is a fair concern that you can spam nothing but Swipe, but to fix that for other tanks we put a cooldown on their AE ability to force them to hit something else. I’m not sure we want to do that for druids.

While you may think of yourself primarily as a bear, we still think of you as a druid. Druids have a lot of abilities. I have played a bear (a lot) and I know it’s already hard to fit all of your buttons on the default Blizzard action bars, even just considering the bear ones. Now I’m not going to suggest you Innervate or use Rebirth or Regrowth while tanking, but at the same time, even bear MTs do sometimes use those abilities. They still count as abilities. When you pick a tanking druid, you are still a druid. We don’t want any class to have 300 spells just because they can use them in very different scenarios. Make sense?

Armor Trinket Changes

There will probably always be a best in slot item. The difference is that Offering was insanely better than the alternatives, to the point at which you either sucked without it or were OP with it. Greatness is a nice trinket, but can you do your job without it? Absolutely. We’re talking about degree of best in slot here.

Feral Gear Itemization

I agree with that overall, and it is something we’re working on. By the same token however it is very easy to take your argument and say “There will always be a best in slot item. I will always want that item. Therefore choice is always an illusion.

Druid Forms Note

We are working on an update to druid forms. It is long overdue. But we want to do it right, which means it takes time. The Ravenlord and Epic Flight Form models are the level of quality we are shooting for. We’d even love to add some customization, but we can’t promise that.

Hunters

Major Hunter Issues

I would agree that some of them fall into the quality of life or minor annoyance category. While those are still good things for us to look at (and sometimes great things since they can often be fixed pretty easily) it leads to a long list, which you even called a manifesto. An outside reader might conclude every aspect of the hunter class is broken (which is not true) or that hunters need all of those changes to be Arena viable or fun. I’m not asking you to cull out the minor suggestions, but you do want to make sure we see the ones you really, really want us to see.

On combining Viper and Cheetah, I would be concerned that you are accepting a penalty (decreased damage) that isn’t really a penalty. When you want to run away, you want to run away. Think of the PvE implications of removing the daze. Even think of the PvP ones. When you want to fight, you fight, and when you want to escape, you escape. Now consider a Cheetah where you take extra damage if you run – now that is an actual decision. You might get away, but you also might get clobbered. (This isn’t a change we are making – I’m just trying to show you how we think. Hitting a situational button should generally be a decision, not something you would always do in a given situation.)

We’re not interested in giving hunters stealth of any sort at this time. Even the Shadowmeld-like functionality is supposed to be handled by Feign Death.

We’re also pretty unlikely to remove the minimum range on hunter ranged attacks. Casters don’t have them, but casters are also very unlikely to stand there and keep casting when you close to melee with them. We don’t want to see hunters ever ignore or shrug off melee who are attacking them. Attacking them back is a different story, as long as we could guarantee the hunter felt like they had to attack their attacker and not just keep shooting whoever they were shooting.

Shamans

Elemental Damage

1. Yes, it is too low on live.

2. I can’t speak towards the PTR specifically. It takes awhile to create a build, so they are often a few days (or longer) behind our changes. I can say that in our internal testing all of the changes together gave Elemental something like a 10 to 12% dps increase for Naxx 25 geared characters in full raid buffs. Elemental dps should be very close to Balance druid dps, which we used as the standard we wanted to reach.

We discussed several of the concerns that have come up over the last few days and ran some additional tests, but we are still satisfied with the numbers produced by the new changes.

Spirit Walk

Spirit Walk is supposed to break roots and snares on the wolves and the shaman. I know we’ve had a bug on that. I’ll need to do some research to know if it’s fixed.

Warlocks

Major Issues and Changes

Bevelton, the reason you’re not seeing changes yet is for exactly the reason you suggest. We don’t want to tweak a few numbers here and there. We are taking a comprehensive look at all three trees of warlocks and then we plan to unleash all of the changes at once. The downside of this approach is that the work takes longer to complete.

I know there are a dozen threads swearing that THE PROBLEMS ARE OBVIOUS and THE SOLUTIONS ARE OBVIOUS and DEMAND CHANGE NOW!1!!. What should be obvious is that we don’t think the situation is that cut and dried. I did post fairly recently (within a month or two perhaps) on what we thought the major warlock issues were. Players seem to have a hard time finding it or perhaps they are just impatient.

We don’t consdier things like tweaking glyphs and changing Ritual of Summoning as major changes to the class. We don’t expect to see a huge difference in how you play the game. They are just small quality of life issues. The Felhunter glyph was just a bad glyph — a trivial amount of dps. It was a relatively easy thing to fix.

Best Haircut of Azeroth Contest Winner!

Congratulations to this year’s best haircut of Azeroth….Cream! Cream’s stylish night elf chick clearly WoW’d..pun intended, the Zug Gaming voters and after a close race Cream came away with 25% of the total votes! For his entry Cream is receiving a free 60-day World of Warcraft game card in addition to his own copy of Zuggy’s Gold Mastery Guide.

Not only will he have a few extra IRL gold, but he’ll now have more in-game gold than he knows what to do with!

Additionally, congratulations to our 2 runners up. In 2nd place, we have Kostas aka Korasidis, with his pink haired Mohawk. And last, but certainly not least, we have Chir Sung with his unique looking undead stylings. For their accomplishments and excellent hair stylings both Kostas and Chir Sung will also be receiving a free copy of Zuggy’s Gold Mastery Guide, including free updates for life!

Thanks everyone who participated in this year’s Best Haircut of Azeroth Contest. While the weekend down time was certainly an unexpected hitch in the road, I don’t think it derailed this year’s contest too much. Once again, congratulations to our winners and to all the players who submitted their haircut screenshots…you’re all winners in my book!

Note to winners: I’ll be sending out emails tomorrow afternoon regarding your prizes.

Cream – Victor and Esteemed Zug Gaming Champion

Kostas – 2nd Place

Chir Sung – 3rd Place

Final Voting Results

WoW’s 4th Year Anniversary!

Today, November 23rd, 2008 is the official 4 year anniversary of World of Warcraft! There have been a lot of really great times in the last 4 years of WoW. From the early rocky days of Molten Core to the beautifully designed and executed updated Naxxramas and Northrend. World of Warcraft has come a long way in 4 years and I can only expect it to continue to improve in the years to come.

In celebration of the occassion Blizzard has added a new achievement into the game called, WoW’s 4th Anniversary, to complete this achievement you simply have to log your character in at any point during the day…today, 11/23/08. So make sure you log all your characters on today!

For completing the achievement you get a free baby blizzard bear.

With that said…Happy 4 years of WoW!

Wrath of the Lich King Wrap Up Post

The time has finally come, we are now just a few short hours away from the greatest expansion World of Warcraft has ever seen. I know I can’t hit all the changes in this wrap up, but I’ll do my best to hit all the major additions, changes, and other note worthy points regarding the WotLK.

WotLK Preparations

• What should I do get ready?
• Make the Most Gold in WotLK

General

• WotLK Mounts
• Flying Mounts in Northrend
• Profession Bonuses and Perks
• Dual Specs Feature
• New WotLK Enchants
• Updated Horde and Alliance Racials
• WotLK Titles
• Profession Daily Quests Token System
• WotLK Spellpower Change

Classes

• Death Knight abilities
• Death Knight FAQ

Patch Information

• Patch 3.0.3 Info
• Upcoming WotLK Patches

Achievements

• Achievement System Details
• PvP Achievements – Part 1
• PvP Achievements – Part 2

Videos

• WotLK Cinematic Intro
• Engineering Motorcycle Mount Video
• WotLK Exploration Video

PvE

• Heroic Dungeon Loot List

PvP

• WotLK Honor Gear Prices
• WotLK PvP Changes
• Wintergrasp Boss Drops
• Season 5 Honor Gear
• Season 5 Arena Armor

Guides

• Knights of the Ebon Blade Reputation Guide
• Jewelcrafting: Gem Perfection
• WotLK Enchanting Guide
• WotLK Enchanting Scrolls
• WotLK Alchemy Items
• Inscription Shoulder Enchants
• Inscription: Glyphs Compiled

note: more to come later

Zug Gaming Club – Gold Tips, Strategy, Hints, Info and More!

Hey guys, just wanted to announce that I’m finally starting the Zug Gaming Club back up again! I started the Zug Gaming Club several months ago, but unfortunately other obligations and projects ended up putting the club on the back burner…so my apologies for the hiatus.

With the WotLK expansion right around the corner I figured this would be the perfect time to start things back up again.

What’s in the Zug Gaming Club?

• Gold Farming Tips
• Important Breaking News
• Leveling Hints
• Club Members Only Events
• Special Guides and Strategies
• Much much more!

How Can I Join the Zug Gaming Club?

Joining the Zug Gaming Club is easy, simply sign up using the form below. Every time there is a new piece of information, tip, or hint you’ll be informed automatically via email.

Your Name:
Your E-Mail:

Arena Season 5 Start Date Announced

Season 4 Ends, Season 5 Start Date Announced

We wanted to remind everyone that Arena season 4 is coming to a close. During next Tuesday’s maintenance, all arena teams, as well as ratings, will be wiped and arena charter NPCs disabled. Thus, arena points will, unfortunately, not be rewarded for rated games played this week.

The next Arena season will begin on December 16th, and once that happens players at level 70 will be able to participate in rated matches against level 70 opponents and gain Arena points for item purchases but will not count towards the end of season rewards. At the same time, level 80 players will be able to compete in rated arena matches where they can gain arena points which can be used to purchase level 80 arena gear, as well as compete for end-of-season rewards. Additionally, players at level 70 will continue to be able to play skirmish Arena matches against other level 70 opponents even after Wrath of the Lich King launches. It’s also important to note that two new skirmish brackets (71-75, 76-80) will be available for players who wish to hone their Arena skills while leveling in Northrend.

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