Cataclysm: Beta Has Started
Written by Wildchild.
The World of Warcraft: Cataclysm beta test is live! Each week we will add new World of Warcraft: Cataclysm playtesters. To opt in for Blizzard Entertainment beta tests, you must create a beta profile using the Beta Profile Settings option located in the “Manage My Games” section of your Battle.net Account Management page.
Official Cataclysm site: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/cataclysm/
Please note that players selected via the opt-in system do not receive beta keys. Rather, your account will be flagged automatically and an email will be sent to you. Simply log in to your account by visiting http://battle.net when you receive a beta welcome notice and check your “Manage My Games” section to verify that the beta client is available for download. Be careful when reading emails claiming to be beta invites. Scam emails often use clickable links to gather your account information, so the safest practice is to go to http://battle.net to check on your beta invitation status. If you would like tips on how to arm yourself against phishing attempts, head over to the Battle.net Account Security page: http://us.battle.net/security/
You can find the Cataclysm Beta forums here (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/board.html?forumId=7555625&sid=2000). Keep in mind that these forums are open to the public, but only those invited into the test environment will be able to post. Check out the full announcement for the beta test, and stay tuned for more exciting news about World of Warcraft: Cataclysm.
Official press release: http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/press/pressreleases.html?100630
* We’re still in the process of selecting accounts and ensuring that they’re properly flagged for beta access. We’ve not yet sent out any invitation emails, though. So, you may want to check your registered email address periodically during the next 24 hours to see if you’ve been invited to the Cataclysm beta, or simply keep an eye on the “Manage My Games” section of your Battle.net Account Management page (https://us.battle.net/account). If you’ve been selected to participate, you’ll definitely be notified in one of those two areas.
Good luck!
- Invites are still in the process of being sent out and, as I noted yesterday, it make take around 24 hours for all the invitation emails to arrive. It’s not yet been a full day yet, so it’s best to give it some time and not abuse your F5 keys too much. Also, if you don’t receive an invite to the World of Warcraft: Cataclysm beta today, don’t despair! We do intend to send out more invites in the future.
- While 24 hours was simply an estimate, I do understand how easy it can be to lean towards a more literal interpretation. That’ll teach me.
- It’s important to keep in mind that we’re distributing World of Warcraft: Cataclysm beta invites the same way we distributed StarCraft II beta invites. Instead of sending out a beta code via email and requiring the user to flag their own account, we’re doing all of that for you. The invitation process is running, but it takes time to flag each account that’s eligible.
Players who opted in and were selected as recipients for this first round of beta invites will likely be informed through Battle.net Account Management sometime today, though, potentially before the invitation email arrives.
(Source)
Ruby Sanctum Now Open
Written by Wildchild.
As noted in the official patch 3.3.5 notes, ( http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/ ) the release of the Ruby Sanctum was briefly delayed to better align its availability across all regions.
We’re happy to announce that the wait is over, and the Ruby Sanctum is now open. To learn more about this exciting new raid dungeon, please visit the Ruby Sanctum preview page. http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/underdev/3p3/rubysanctum.xml
(Source)
Cataclysm: More info unveiled
Written by Wildchild.
Blizzard has arranged Press conference for their official fan sites a while ago. I’m gonna highlight just some of the changes, if you haven’t seen them already. If you wan’t to read more about it, hop over to the wowhead blog as the press coverage was written by Malgayne of wowhead, and it’s the source of this information.
Path of the Titans: Removed!
Blizzard has scrapped the entire Path of the Titans progression system. As it is, it may be coming back—but not likely.
Tom Chilton explained that Blizzard had spent a long time working on the Path of the Titans system, trying to balance making it complicated enough to be interesting, but simple enough to be understandable. At the end of the day, they realized that they had ripped it all down until it resembled an upgrade to the glyph system. Simultaneously, they felt that the Glyph system wasn’t as much of a game-changer in WotLK as they had originally wanted it to be, so they’ve decided instead to scrap the Path of the Titans concept, and instead focus on making the glyph system into the feature they had originally wanted.
Glyph System Changes
To accomplish this, they’ve added a new tier of glyphs: Medium Glyphs. Tom explained that in Wrath, people were really powergaming their glyph choices—that glyphs, like talents, had gotten to a point where everyone agreed on what the “best” glyphs were for each class and spec, and anyone who chose otherwise was dumb. With medium glyphs, they’re trying to break that system up a bit—major glyphs are still critical, but minor and medium glyphs have more flexibility.
There was also talk about making glyphs permanent rather than consumable—so that as soon as you used a glyph for the first time, it was added to your “list”, and thereafter you could rearrange your glyphs later on as you chose.
Guild Reputation
Firstly, the whole guild currency idea has been scrapped. The rewards that they had originally had in mind for that system, like special guild tabards and mounts (with your guild insignia on them and everything!) are now unlocked by guild achievements. Rather than buying them with guild currency, you buy them with simple gold—but which rewards you can buy is restricted by your guild reputation.
You farm guild rep by doing four things:
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Completing quests
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Doing rated Battlegrounds
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Killing raid bosses (to get credit, the raid that downs the boss must be mostly comprised of guild members—7/10 for 10-mans, and 20/25 for 25-mans)
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Earning guild achievements
Basically, you’ll be farming rep with your guild in exactly the same way you would farm any endgame rep—and the rewards will (presumably) be similar. A final decision hasn’t been made yet about how guild reputation will transfer (if at all) between alts, but they did say that leaving a guild won’t immediately wipe your guild reputation—though joining a new guild probably will.
Guild Achievements
Some examples of possible guild achievements were offered:
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10,000 total quests completed
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Having a max-rank of every profession
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Having an 85 of every class
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etc.
In addition, some of the existing achievements (like the classic raiding meta) are being converted into guild achievements, to give players a reason to go back and do them. This allows players to farm achievements to help their guild’s rank and their guild reputation, even if they already have them all.
As it stands now, guild achievements will be retained by the guild, even if all the members of the guild who were present when the achievement was earned have left the guild. The guild achievement pane actually lists the guild members who were present at the time the achievement was originally earned.
Guild Leveling
The whole guild talents idea has been scrapped as well. Tom Chilton talked for a while about the issues they faced—Can only the guild leader pick the talents? Do you have respecs? Who pays for them? How do you make all the players feel involved? Do you min-max builds, so that all guilds feel the same? Instead, they’ve altered it to a simpler system: each guild progresses normally from level 1 to level 25, and gains a new perk at each level—just like a character learning new spells. The guild menu will now show you what your existing perks are, and what the perks will be come the next guild level. No information was given about how exactly guilds would progress, but it’s easy to guess at possible methods—raiding, group pvp, guild achievements, etc.
New Guild Interface
Another thing I was frustrated not to be able to photograph, guilds now have a fully revamped interface with a lot of long-awaited features.
First of all, there’s a new guild landing page, with a news feed—something broadly similar to the character feed for individual characters on the Armory, but for the entire guild—listing recent successes in raiding, new characters hitting max level, etc. You can also flag items as “sticky”, in case you want to make sure the Message of the Day stays up there, or you’re exceptionally proud of a recent kill.
In addition, the guild roster is now filterable. You can now see the professions of your guild members from the guild menu—and sort players by profession. This enables you to do things like searching for a crafter in your guild who can make the item you need, so you can easily contact them—a HUGE time-saver.
Raids
10-Mans and 25-Mans
You guys already know that Blizzard is planning to consolidate 10-man and 25-man raiding into less of a difficulty setting and more of a playstyle choice. This means that 10-man and 25-man encounters will be designed to have roughly the same difficulty level, and will drop items from the same loot table. To compensate for the additional logistical hassle of getting 25 players online rather than 10, Blizzard will be giving out more loot per player in 25-mans—specifically, about 50% more. It was strongly hinted that this extra loot would come in the form of Emblems.
What they hadn’t announced previously is the ability to “downshift” your raid. Imagine if you do a 25-man run of a new instance, get about halfway through, and call it a night. The next day you get back together to do another run, but—big surprise—only 20 people show up. Well, now you can “downshift” your raid into two separate 10-man groups, and just keep right on going. The maximum number of 10-mans you can make out of one 25-man is three—meaning, if the remaining five guys show up the next day, they can swap down to a 10-man as well and keep right on going.
Blizzard is not allowing players to “upshift”. They explained that they felt this would cause a lot of pressure on guild to pull some really unpleasant maneuvers—for instance, stripping out the bottom 15 players to do some particularly difficult encounter, and then inviting them all back in for trash. They figured the legitimate use-cases for upshifting a raid were much more rare.
h2 id=”raids”>Raid Lockouts
Here’s another big change—they’ve added a great deal of flexibility to raid lockouts. Rather than being locked into a particular raid ID, you can now join any raid, as long as it doesn’t have any bosses up that you have already killed. Basically, as long as you’re not killing the same boss twice in one lockout period—you have total freedom.
For the end
There are more interesting information about cataclysm changes written there, mostly about new zones, changes of the old ones and some random, exciting info, like “There will be more Algalon-style encounters—ultra-hard optional bosses for hardcore players only” etc. Link to this press coverage can be found at the top of this post.
Huh. All i have to do now, is to mentally prepare for leveling (again), cause i really dislike it. I hope it will be fun as Blizzard promissed.
Cataclysm Preview: Grim Batol
Written by Wildchild.
During a bloody civil war among the three dwarven factions of Ironforge, the Bronzebeards ousted the Wildhammer and the Dark Iron clans from the ancient corridors of the mountain city. In the wake of the defeat, the Wildhammers ventured north and forged a new home, Grim Batol, in the mountains of what is now the Twilight Highlands. However, although they worked tirelessly to create a better future for themselves, the Dark Irons, who established the city of Thaurissan in the Redridge Mountains, could not move beyond the memory of their defeat. Consumed by the desire for revenge and desperate to control the entire dwarven region of Khaz Modan, the Dark Irons led a two-pronged assault on the Bronzebeards in Ironforge and the Wildhammers in Grim Batol. Despite their past differences, these two embattled rivals joined forces and drove the Dark Irons out of Khaz Modan, decimating the armies of the treacherous clan’s sorcerer-thane, Thaurissan. Yet victory carried grave consequences. Although Thaurissan’s wife and queen, Modgud, was slain during the attack on Grim Batol, her death tainted the mountain fortress. While the Bronzebeards rebuilt their glorious city of Ironforge, the Wildhammers felt forever changed by the horrors they witnessed at Grim Batol. They fled their cursed home and never returned.
Called to action by the red dragonflight in the Twilight Highlands, players will be charged with putting a decisive end to the foul machinations developing within Grim Batol. Learn more about this level-85 dungeon coming in World of Warcraft: Cataclysm.
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/cataclysm/features/grimbatol.html
* Just to clarify, it’s not vehicle combat at the beginning of the dungeon. The forces of the Twilight’s Hammer within Grim Batol are massive, so you’ll start the dungeon with a bombing run through the halls to thin their ranks. It’ll be a set flight path and will not involve aerial combat. This is only to get things started. This dungeon is not vehicle-driven at all.
(Source)
Fun: How to Win at Pugs and Gearscore
Written by Wildchild.
Since im posting fun video after such a long time, i’ll use the oportunity to post three videos that i saw in the past few days, and if i may say, all of them left positive impression on me. They all made me laugh! I’d say they were Awesome!:)
1. Jace Hall – I Play W.O.W
I might be a little late, just found this video (20 minutes ago ;s) and i had to share! I’m not a RAP fan, but this made me nod my head and giggle
2. Nub Tales ep. 2: Shadowmourne
This one is awesome
And last, but not least, the video that inspired this post:
3. How to Win at Pugs and Gearscore!
