Girls of Elune

Healers rejoice!  Apparently it takes a whole expansion to fix the weapon enchant glow effect on [Gavel of Naaru Blessings].  This is my own personal opinion but this mace is quite UGLY by itself.  The stats are great but it looked really funky. 

When I first purchased it I immediately wanted to get the +healing enchant to hopefully make it a little more pleasing to my eyes.  Unfortunately the glow effect was missing!  Blizzard said it was a known bug and that it would be fixed.  Next patch came and went… bug not fixed!  Blizzard completely forgot about it!  Silly them!

Fortunately Blizzard knows how delicate healers are so they made sure the glow bug was fixed in Wrath of the Lich King.  It might even be fixed in the next patch 3.0.  Its the least they can do after the nasty Lifebloom nerf .

Hi ho!  So I’m taking note of all the little changes/bells and whistles of the upcoming expansion, The Wrath of the Lich King.  One of the first things I noticed when I entered beta (because I was lagging so much all I can see was the ground) was that we have shadows! 

Currently in live our shadow consist of a generic dark circle underneath our feet.  In Wrath our shadow actually looks like a real shadow with the outline of our bodies.  It changes as we move and I think it moves depending on the time of day and position of the sun.  I’m not sure though.

Not only do players and npcs have shadows but structures and buildings also cast their own shadow.  Its very neat and adds depth and realism to the game graphics.  Hmm… there should be an emote to make hand puppets.

Theres a harbor in Stormwind!  One of the neat things is that the harbor not only connects to Northrend but also to Auberdine.  No longer will low-level Night Elves and Dreanei players have to make the looooong and deadly journey through Wetlands to reach  Ironforge and Stormwind.

The ships that take you to Northrend were redesigned to be much bigger and cooler.  You can even stay mounted while on them.  However that may be a bug. 

If you like a really grand entrance into Northrend I recommend heading to Menethil Harbor and taking that ship to Howling Fjord.  Hmm… I’m not sure but there might be some sort of irony in that statement.  Menethil Harbor.  Menethil.  Arthus Menethil.  The Lich King.  Grand Entrance.  Huh? Huh?

Anyway, if you want an entrance thats just convenient then totally use Stormwind Harbor.  Borean Tundra may not have that grand of an entrance but its port station, Valiance Keep, is very lively and well designed.  It also makes you feel like you’re really back at home on Azeroth.

Hi everyone!  So theres a lot of information flying around about the next expansion, Wrath of the Lich King.  Blizzard lifted the Non-Disclosure Agreement so beta testers are free to talk about the expansion without any repercussions.  Well I wanted to touch upon the little things in the game that may get overlooked by major sites like World of Raids and Mmo-champion.

For my first post I’d like to introduce everyone to the new throne room of Stormwind Castle…

So how did King Varian Wrynn return?  I dunno!  The WoW comic book that was published over the summer apparently connects the dots from The Missing Diplomat questline to his return.  If you’re cheap like me you can always head over to Wowwiki and read a summery about his adventures in the comic.  It actually sounds pretty interesting so I may crack open my piggy bank and buy it, hehe.

Anywho, as you can see from the picture King Wrynn stands on the new shiney and very liony throne with his very polite son by his side.  Lady Prestor is no longer there which, now that I think about it, she shouldn’t have been there in TBC expansion because she was already revealed to be evil.  The previous human leader, Bolvar Fordragon, is also gone.  Where did he go?  Dunno but rumor has it hes in Northrend.

One last thing I wanted to point out is that if you’re a Death Knight you will find that the city guards don’t really like you and the king will justify you’re alliance with the… Alliance.  Its a good way to get the guards to stop throwing rotten food at you.  I swear some of the mean things they say should be reportable!

Just when I thought all hope was lost I get an email from Blizzard inviting me to test out the next expansion,  Wrath of the Lich King! 

Theres so much I want to do!  I definately want to role a deathknight.  I hear they are pretty heroic.  I also want to copy over my resto druid.  But do I stay resto or go feral?  maybe balance?  I definately want to stay resto but unless I find someone to go exploring with me it will be hard to do even solo quests. 

I’ll figure something out.  I have a million other things on my mind.  I also want to copy over my hunter and test out the new pet abilities.  Maybe I’ll play a premade priest for Florise.  She loves ALL the amazing buffs shadow priests are getting *cough*sarcasm*cough. 

Look out world (of warcraft)… here I come!

Well at least I think my trinket graphic effect is. A few weeks back I was lucky enough to pick up [The Skull of Gul'dan]. Most, if not all, casters want this thing. I was already pretty high on haste so the benefit from it was really great. Sometimes I can’t even fit spells in where they are supposed to go during it. Oh and pop this thing with a heroism and WOW! Needless to say I love it. I have it tied to a macro so it casts as soon as it’s 2 minute cooldown is up.

Now it also came with another neat benefit. The graphic! This is without a doubt the coolest trinket graphic I know of. Check out these pics of a before and after popping it:

So after defeating/saving Kalecgos in Sunwell Plateau I became intrigued to learn more about the character.  There is a manga style graphic novel called Warcraft: The Sunwell Trilogy that ties directly to the Sunwell Plateau raid dungeon.  Some may call it a prequal. 

I went ahead and bought myself a copy, I got the Unltimate Edition because I spoil myself sometimes and it wasn’t too expensive anyways.  The art in this comic book is amazing!  I especially liked the artist rendition of Sylvanas.  It was kinda weird that she didn’t talk at all.  In fact, a lot of the characters didn’t really have a lot of depth to them.  The story overall was average.  I can’t say enough how fantastic the art was though.

Like a good WoW fanatic I looked up all of the characters from the graphic novel at Wowwiki.com. To my surprise there are a lot of characters ingame.  Even the villian who I thought died in the book is in the game.  (Warning: spoiler in previous sentence.  Oops!)

Something really cool I found was two of the heroes in the Sunwell Trilogy are hanging out in Netherstorm!  Tyrygosa, or Tyri, is a blue dragon disguised as a high elf and Jorad Mace is a human paladin with a grudge against Arthas.  They offer a quest chain which I’m in the middle of doing right now.  Its very cool how Blizzard incorporated characters and storylines from their books to World of Warcraft.

Well if you’re interested in doing the quest chain, it actually starts from an Ethereal named Wind Trader Marid.  You will eventually meet Tyri through a very clever introduction which had me scratching my head for a while, but you’ll figure it out ;p .

I probably reported you for swearing in battleground chat.  Its a new favorite pasttime of mine.  Since Alliance generally don’t do well in pvp I found something fun to do while dying over and over.  I especially get a kick out of reporting all the know-it-alls that think they are so much better than everyone else that they curse them out without any regards to possible children playing the game.  Keep it up!

I’m in the home stretch!  My one goal thats been on my imaginary to-do list since before TBC has been to get a Stormwind horse mount and an Ironforge ram mount.  Since I play a night elf, the only way to get these mounts is to be exalted with SW and IF faction.

Well I got exalted with SW a few months ago and really enjoying my horsey.  Now I have my sights on the IF ram!  Yes, yes… I know I can get the battleground mounts a lot easier just by turning in all those extra tokens sitting in my bank.  But thats no fun!  Theres a sense of accomplishment when hitting exalted with a faction, especially these old world factions that are grueling to grind. 

After doing as many quests I can find related to Ironforge, I can only continue gaining rep by handing in stacks of runecloth for a repeatable quest.  Heres the breakdown as of right now:

13559/21000 = 7441 more rep = 100 quest turn ins = 2000 runecloth

First off, sorry for the absence. I’ve been working on moving our guild’s website and got sucked into the problems that arise doing that. Never fear though, Jazzy has been quite good at beating me over the head to post. Well here you go.

I want to share with you some findings on something near and dear to me: Vampiric Touch. Currently VT returns 5% of my damage done as mana back to my party. Most everyone loves this. In fact, put two shadowpriests with around 1400 damage in the same party and the theory goes that they will never run out of mana. I can speak from experience that this is pretty much the case. That being said, VT is a wonderful spell and a staple of any shadowpriest’s casting rotation.

Well now that things are changing it looks like Blizzard has taken a look at VT as well. Yep, you guessed it, like the past 3 years we are getting another nerf. It looks like VT is going from 5% to 2% mana return. Now I know the 3% reduction does seem like a lot but trust me it’s huge. For a class spec that already has to justify it’s role in raids, it’s tough when your utility takes a hit and nothing is done on the dps side. Well as people were mulling over what this means to us an interesting blue post emerged:

I think these are very valid questions.

We haven’t finished our discussions on this issue yet, so I can’t provide much of an update.

I do think there are alternatives to having more non-stacking buffs. For example, we could give each DK tree an ability (or abilities if that’s what it takes) so awesome that the Enhancement shammies are the ones who have to fight for a raid spot. We could try to give each of the 30 talent trees in the game some amazing buff or debuff for the raid and hope that there aren’t 5 specs with buffs so crappy that they just don’t get to raid.

We could also just declare that 5 specs are PvP only and assume raids are built with the other 25.

I don’t think anyone would argue (except maybe the shammies) that having 5 or 6 of one class in a 25-player raid is good thing for a game with 10 classes. If you are a raid leader, I would definitely not assume that your Naxx and Ulduar raids will have the same composition as your BT and Sunwell raids* — even ignoring the DK and looking at other changes might suggest that’s a bad idea.

One more thing to keep in mind during these discussions: almost every party buff applies to the raid now. That simple change alone means that raiding compositions could end up very different. Do you need 3 shadow priests if they provide mana for the whole raid? Do you need more than one enhancement
shaman?

Now as people have been talking about, some shaman and pally buffs/abilities are moving to a raid wide style. Here it seems to mention that perhaps VT could also go raid wide. Now that would change things a bit! Yes it would still be 2% but now you wouldn’t have a group saying “can we get a sp in our group” or wondering whether to put the sp in a caster group or a healer group. Very interesting indeed. I don’t believe the tooltip has changed yet on the beta realm but I’d be interested in hearing for you if anyone has confirmed this or when or if it may happen.

Now if they just make Vampiric Embrace raid wide for healing……