Posted on April 29th, 2009 by admin
Blizzard posted a list of hotfixes to Ulduar last night in their ongoing hotfix thread, almost all nerfs, and a notice that they were “making further difficult adjustments via hotfix” to Ignis, Razorscale, XT-002 Deconstructor, The Assembly of Iron, Kologarn, and Auriya, with changes to other encounters “highly likely” to occur once they’re done with these. In this case I read “making adjustments via hotfix” as “giving them a good whack with the nerf stick.”
The specific changes that they just announced for Ulduar:
The Ignis the Furnace Master encounter has received the following changes: The interrupt effect and duration of the damage from Flame Jets has been reduced, the damage from the Slag pot has been reduced, the number of Heat stacks needed to transform an Iron Construct into a Molten state has been reduced, the base melee damage done by Ignis has been reduced, and the damage bonus Ignis receives from Strength of the Creator has been slightly increased.
The Assault Bots on the Mimiron encounter will now attack faster; in turn, they will do less damage per hit.
The XT-002 Deconstructor encounter has received the following changes: The duration of Tympanic Trantrum has been reduced, the timer for XT-002 to hit
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Posted on April 28th, 2009 by admin
Sometimes you’d like to know that there are other MMOs out there, right? Our sister site Massively can provide you with everything you need to know about all MMOs, including WoW! Check out this roundup of the latest news from the wider MMO world.
Free Realms launches today
According to a post on the Free Realms forums wow goldfrom Jason “Pex” Ryan, Community Manager, the servers will be going down this morning at approximately 8:00 AM Pacific, and will remain offline all day today while they push their final patches and run internal tests. They note that they will also be deleting all beta Free Realms characters as well.
Guild Wars hits the 6 million milestone
Just in time for their fourth anniversary celebrations, ArenaNet have announced that Guild Wars has sold over six million copies. Coincidence? We think not but it’s still a remarkable milestone for this popular MMO. Remember that market leader World of Warcraft has 11.5 million players worldwide and is subscription based. Guild Wars meanwhile, is free-to-play (plus box costs) and only a few months younger than WoW.
LotRO two-year anniversary: Book 8 details announced
As our LotRO 2nd anniversary coverage continues, we’re pleased to bring you some of the latest news from a recent
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Posted on April 27th, 2009 by admin
The title seems self-explanatory; are you enjoying Noblegarden? How many people are participating on your server? Do you already have the achievements done, or are they a work-in-progress?
I have to admit I’m writing this expecting a lot of comments to come back noting that it’s pretty hard to get this holiday done when spawn points on the eggs are camped 24/7. For my part, I vastly underestimated how much of a nuisance that was going to be on the live realms. That aside, Noblegarden wow golddoes seem to be one of the more efficient holidays, particularly if you get lucky with item drops, and I think this is also the first time Blizzard’s made it possible to get all the achievement items you need as purchases in the event that Lady Luck spends the week being an indifferent mistress. The ability to buy achievement items certainly settles what was by far the biggest complaint concerning Love Is In the Air. For that holiday, your ability to complete the meta-achievement was ultimately determined by the RNG, to the point where Blizzard hotfixed the drop rate on a key achievement item after the forums went kaboom.
This time around, you don’t need to worry about that as long as you can get enough Noblegarden Chocolate. Time to knuckle down, plunk a frosty
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Posted on April 26th, 2009 by admin
Noblegarden 2009 should be going live on the European realms in a few hours and then start popping up on realms elsewhere over the next day. Because so much of the holiday has changed and we’ve fielded a lot of questions from players about what’s going on, we decided to write up a quick FAQ to the new (and vastly improved!) holiday.
Help! Where do I go to get started?
If you’re Alliance, head to Azure Watch, Dolanaar, Goldshire, or Kharanos.
If you’re Horde, head to Bloodhoof Village, Brill, Falconwing Square, or Razor Hill.
What am I supposed to do when I get there?
There will be questgivers in all of these towns who will give you a new daily, The Great Egg Hunt, and A Tisket, a Tasket, a Noblegarden Basket. The former will reward you with an item that will come in handy for an achievement (more on this in a little bit), but for both you’re going to want to get started hunting down eggs in and around these level-5 towns. Once you’ve finished these quests, in order to get Noblegarden achievements done, you’re going to need to be a dedicated egg hunter for a little while.
What do the Brightly Colored Eggs look like?
See the egg in the article’s picture above? They’re all variations on these colors and patterns and not
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Posted on April 24th, 2009 by admin
Scattered Shots is your weekly guide to improving your Hunter skills, brought to you by Jessica “Lassirra” Klein of The Hunter’s Mark, covering a variety of Huntery topics. Today, we’ll be taking a look at the new ranged weapons available from Ulduar.
With new raid instances comes new gear to covet, and Ulduar is no different. Normal and Heroic modes both have new guns and bows available to help give your shots that much more oomph, and today I’d like to take a closer look at these weapons wow goldto help you compare potential upgrades. Before we dive right into the new stuff, let’s do a quick recap of the older ranged weapons so we’ll have a point of reference to start from.
The Old
The Accursed Bow of the Elite is an iLevel 200 bow that drops from Instructor Razuvious in Normal Naxxramas. This is a 2.80 speed bow that provides 129.6 DPS, 28 Agility, 19 Stamina, 16 Hit Rating, 21 Haste Rating and 40 Attack Power.
The Nerubian Conquerer is an iLevel 213 gun that drops from Kel’Thuzad in Normal Naxxramas. This 2.90 speed grun provides 141.6 DPS, 31 Agility, 30 Stamina, 21 Crit Rating and 64 Attack Power.
Final Voyage, which drops from the Four Horsemen in Heroic Naxxramas, is an iLevel 213 crossbow. 2.80 speed, 141.6 DPS, 18
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Posted on April 15th, 2009 by admin
It’s been a long old twenty four hours but the US servers have had Patch 3.1 running life for a little while now. I can just imagine the thousands of people swamping Ulduar, the Argent Tournament and every class wow goldtrainer from Azuremyst to Thunderbluff will be stood on by thousands of toons trying to dual spec.
Now over the last few weeks Breakfast Topic has been, quite understandably, a little Patch 3.1-heavy. We’ve asked about your most anticipated feature, whether your guild is ready and where your toon will be when the realms restart (just in case you were wondering, Serisa is waiting outside Ulduar to see if the above happens on live as well).
So if you’re lucky, you’ve had a few hours to poke around and take a look, I want to know what your impressions are of The Secrets of Ulduar now that it’s gone live?
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Posted on April 14th, 2009 by admin
Once upon a time, Mundocani created Outfitter, and it was good, and lots of people used it, and there was general rejoicing. Then Blizzard released their new addon policy, prohibiting selling addons and asking for donations in-game, and many addon writers thought that was not so good. Mundocani pulled his addons from public distribution in protest, as did some other authors. This was sad, even if I did seize the moment to write about some other mods that did the job.
Now it has been brought to my attention (thanks, nadewow) that Mundocani is both continuing development on Outfitter and returning it to public distribution (i.e. Curse and WoW Interface). His stated reasoning for this latest move is that “Blizzard isn’t going to respond to the concerns raised by the community, which puts things at a stalemate,” and he doesn’t want to punish users for what he sees as Blizzard’s mistakes.
In short: Outfitter is coming back (this goes for GroupCalendar too, by the way). Yay! That news is especially welcome because we won’t be seeing the Blizzard Equipment Manager in 3.1 as we had expected to. While we wait for them to be posted back to the addon sites, you can get a copy of either mod at the author’s forums (registration required).
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Posted on April 13th, 2009 by admin
A good time was had as always on last weekend’s WoW Insider Show — Adam Holisky kindly stepped into the broadcasting booth with Turpster and I, and we answered some emails (including whether it’s OK to give cloth drops to leather wearers, as long as it’s an upgrade, and more on which tanking class is the best to take with you), and talked turkey on the biggest stories in the World of Warcraft. We chatted about what might be in store for the next content patch and expansion, what’s up with WoW’s numbers still going up, and what’s new with Wintergrasp in 3.1. We also had a straight-from-the-scene report about the PETA event — stay tuned for more about that later today.
And we got some interesting Ret Monkey pictures — the one to the right is by Hydralol of EU Magtheridon, and the other one in the gallery below is by Abbort from Hellscream. Both of these, and any other pictures that you can come up with of the Ret Monkey or any of us who work on the show can be eligible for our Fan Art contest, so enter that if you’d like.
Finally, we have rounded 6,000 followers on our Twitter account, and we’re headed to 9,000 — as we say on the show, it would be great if we could hit that by our 100th show, and combine
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Posted on April 12th, 2009 by admin
Each week Arcane Brilliance, a column about Mages, levels up. It gains 3 intellect, 2 stamina, 2 spirit, and 1 talent point. In case you were wondering, Arcane Brilliance has been leveling up every week for the past four years. That’s right: Arcane Brilliance is level 208. What has Arcane Brilliance been doing with all of those talent points, you ask? Arcane Brilliance is specced 63/75/60. And yes, Arcane Brilliance still gets pwned by Lichborne in the 201-210 pvp bracket.
Last week, we took our Mages job-hunting. We looked into Tailoring and Jewelcrafting, and explored the three gathering professions. This week, our job search takes us into slightly more magical territory, as we look at the potential benefits of Enchanting, Alchemy, and Inscription. All of these professions are similar, in that they begin with vowels.
Enchanting
This profession has always been a popular choice with Mages. Not only is it an inherently magical profession, fitting the whole wizardly aesthetic to a tee, but it has no associated gathering profession, meaning it makes for a nice, convenient pairing with Tailoring, the other traditional Mage profession choice. This profession is undergoing a number of changes in patch 3.1, one of which is of particular interest to our
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Posted on April 10th, 2009 by admin
The intertubes are abuzz with the new UI policy enacted by Blizzard a couple weeks ago. Not being able to charge for add-ons or solicit donations has caused quite a stir amongst some folks. Certain add-on authors are even going as far as to boycott their projects until Blizzard changes their policy.
ZAM networks, who runs the WoW information site Allakhazam, got a chance to sit down and talk with Connie Mableson, a lawyer specializing in Intellectual Property Law and Computer and Internet Law. You can read the full interview over at their site.
One of the highlights of the interview is that Connie thinks Blizzard will begin monetizing the UI. “Based on all the changes Blizzard is making, I believe the Blizzard business model is to “Monetize” UI Mods/add-ons by developing them in house and offering them for sale to players ”
Now I don’t necessarily agree with the end analysis, but her arguments are compelling and make sense.
It will be interesting in another year or so to see where this UI policy change lands us. We’ll have to wait and see!
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