Missing help for World Explorers

This post by homestar over on WoW Ladies LJ reminds me of an issue we'd let drop by the wayside: where exactly is that help that World Explorers were supposed to get? Right now, as you move around the world trying to pick up the World Explorer achievement (and title), there's no real way to tell exactly what places you've explored and which you haven't. Obviously, the map colors in as you wander around, but it's not so granular that you can tell exactly where you need to go, so if there's only one small location you have to visit, as with homestar, you end up wandering around desperately trying to find that one little place you haven't hit yet.

The good news is that Blizzard already mentioned we would get help for this. The bad news is that it was over a year ago. Bornakk said that we'd have a way to tell on the map just where locations had been discovered and where they hadn't been seen yet, but since then we haven't really heard anything more about it. Obviously, a few things have been added to the maps, including quest icons, and instance maps have been added as well, but where's the Explorer help?

At this point. you have to think that Blizzard has moved on -- maybe whatever update Bornakk was hinting at did make it into the game and we just didn't notice it. But more likely, they couldn't figure out a good way to do this, didn't have a lot of call for it, and decided to spend the time on something else. Especially with the upcoming revamp of old maps, maybe we'll see maps that are a little more helpful in terms of getting the full Explorer achievement.

WoW Add-ons panel at Dragon*Con 2009

While at Dragon*Con this weekend, I was able to attend a World of Warcraft add-ons panel hosted by Cameron Knight, commonly known as ckknight, the developer of such add-ons as Cartographer, Pitbull, Chinchilla, and FuBar. As a day job, he is currently the Lead Developer for both Curseforge and WoWAce.com as well as working as an add-on developer liaison with Blizzard to make sure the major add-on developers get access to the Cataclysm beta. The questions during the session ranged from how to write add-ons, add-on recommendations for newcomers, and even funny bug reports and anecdotes. After the break is the summarized version of the panel.

Past, Present, and Future with ckknight

Cameron gave a little background on himself as an add-on developer. He has been programming since he was around nine years old. Around February of 2006, when he was around eighteen, he started playing World of Warcraft. At the time, he was using Titan Panel, but his computer only had 512mb of RAM and was having problems pushing the add-on package as well as the game itself. He decided to learn some Lua so that he could write alternatives to his favorite add-ons that were more lightweight. He wanted a clock add-on, so he wrote a little clock to sit in his UI. After that, he wanted something to track his experience and thus another small add-on was born. After a while, he had all of these little add-ons scattered across the screen, so he decided he needed some place to put them all and FuBar was born.

There are better alternatives to FuBar now, he admits, such as the LibDatabroker compatible add-ons. However, you can use add-ons like FuBar2Broker and Broker2FuBar to convert between the two if you are so inclined.

He's currently finishing up the documentation for Pitbull 4. He admits that versions one through three were a bit awkward at times, but promises that version four will be much easier and quicker to configure. As a follow-up, someone asked what his favorite project was and his response was Pitbull. Cameron said this was because his favorite project is almost always his current project.

Addons for Newbies and Lowbies

Several times during the panel, he was asked what add-on setup he recommended for newer players or for specific classes or specs. Throughout the panel he gave several different ways to approach the problem:
Use whatever your guild members use or tell you to use. This way you have people you know use it and can approach for help. Try an add-on package and try out the various features. Replace or upgrade components as you see fit until you get things where you are happy. Take each UI element individually and replace it. Start with your unit frames, then a bar mod, etc until you get things the way you want it. For those looking for more specific help, he does plug his own add-ons like Cartographer for mapping, Pitbull for unit frames, and such but does point out that if you don't like his products, then don't use them. Find something that works for you.

He also recommends that you pick up something like QuestHelper or TourGuide especially if you are still leveling your character. Bartender is his recommended button-bar manager. For figuring out item upgrades, RatingBuster is one he also likes, but prefers to use it in conjuction with Engravings. When it comes to gear swapping, he uses the built in Equipment Manager with the help of CrossDresser for keeping things organized. Lastly, Auctioneer is a good add-on for anyone to install.

He did point out one that I was unfamiliar with and it was the Addon Control Panel. It allows you to load and unload your various add-ons without logging out. This is helpful as it allows you to be able to turn off Auctioneer during raids or Omen during auction house browsing without needing to remember to log on and off constantly.

For healers, he is a big proponent of click-casting mods like Clique. While mice with an overabundance of extra buttons can't currently use more than five of them with add-ons like Clique, Blizzard is changing that in patch 3.2.2 to support up to thirty-one different mouse buttons. Also, using either a custom unit frames or raid frames add-on such as Pitbull or Grid is a must. While he equates Grid to playing whack-a-mole with healing, things such as HoTs don't display as well using it. As such, the player would be better off to use a unit frame in that situation.

Blizzard, the Add-on Community, and What Not To Do

Knight was able to have dinner with the Blizzard UI team during BlizzCon. He said that the Blizzard UI team viewpoint is the default UI should be as good as possible for the lowest common denominator. What that constitutes changes from patch to patch as they notice trends in the add-ons that people use. For example, automatically looting all items off of a target wasn't originally in the game. Because of that, there used to be an add-on that would do that for you before Blizzard added it to the UI. It is a cycle of life type of thing where features of certain add-ons get absorbed into the game as deemed appropriate.

Sometimes, this causes lots of work by the add-on developers to go down the drain. The developer of Omen used to spend hours figuring out the minutia of the threat mechanics in order for his add-on to work properly. Blizzard decided that basic threat announcements should be part of the game and thus causes all of that work to suddenly be obsolete. There is an upside to all of this. As Blizzard develops these new features for the UI, the scripting team then has to open up ways to access the backend of UI. This trickles down to the add-on developer community which means that Omen is now much more accurate and faster than ever before, because the game is doing most of the work on the backend.

As far as which patches affect the add-on community the most, 2.4 was the largest non-X.0 patch in the game. They were expecting 3.2.0 to be a similarly large patch with the quest helping functionality, but that feature was pulled at the last moment. Supposedly, there is some question if that incarnation of the feature will be added to the game or not as it didn't meet the critical Blizzard quality standard.

Part 2

Argent Tournament gains will not transfer between factions

Just a heads up for you faction transfers, though you've probably already realized this if you have made a transfer: many of your faction reputations will transfer over just fine, but not so for any Argent Tournament progress you've made. Argent Tournament reputation and gains will not transfer over if you change factions. Kisirani says that Blizzard couldn't think of a way to do it technically, and so (as we understand it), anyone who transfers factions will lose all of their current Argent Tournament standing, and have to make their way back up through the ranks to Champion. Many other reputations have changed just fine, and you can find a list of all the changes as you cross over from one faction to another on the faction change FAQ. You will bring items over with you -- any seals earned on one side are still valid on the other. But if you want to grind out more, you'll have to go through the ranks again.

Seems like a bummer for faction changers (especially those who didn't know about the problem before they did the transfer), but on the other hand, I don't believe Blizzard would have let this go if they had any way to fix it. Short of just granting ranks to all players who transfer, assuming they have no way to track where players were at in terms of which cities they'd champion-ed for, I don't know what other solution there would be.


Update: A little more information: you also lose all of your Silver Covenant or Sunreavers rep as well, so you'll have to re-earn that from the beginning, too. As players have said in the thread below, it's not a huge loss, but it's an annoyance for sure.

WoW Warriors Tanking: Some Thoughts

I make no pretense of being a raid tank nowadays: I mostly DPS in raids, and only switch to tank when we're down one for whatever reason (real life issues, connection problems) or a fight demands more than three tanks (Auriaya, sometimes Mimiron if cooldowns are a concern, psuedo-tanking the Faction Champions, adds on Anub'arak). Most of the tanking I do, I do in 5 mans and 10 mans where we just go with whoever is on. (I also do a fair amount of tanking on my DK alt, including 10 mans and 25 man PuG raids, but this is a Warrior column, not a "holy heck my DK is ridiculously OP" column.) However, recent discussions about tanking here at the WoW.com orbital defense platform HQ, combined with a recent very interesting thread on the forums with lots of Ghostcrawler input, have me thinking about where tanking is, and where it's going.

One of the things I see in tanking presently is that the general tendency inherited from Legacy content is at an all time high: tanking is currently two entirely separate games, one at the 5 man level and another at the raid level, and that tendency is exacerbating as raiding itself splits into 10 and 25 man (and their respective hard modes). At present, the 10 man raid experience is in fact undergoing a series of shifts that moves it away from the 5 man but also away from 25 man, simply due to the amount of responsibility that can and must be shared in each kind of raiding. In short (too freaking late, Rossi, too freaking late) 10 man raiding cannot afford the luxury of 25 man raiding's potential of tanking if it actually wants to kill anything.

At present, all four tanking classes can 'do something else' in a raid. Two of them can do anything that needs doing, be it DPS, heal or tank. One of those two can even DPS in either a melee or ranged role. The other two can only DPS or tank. Still, that means in any 25 man raid these classes are often expected to provide tanking if necessary (as I stated before, if a normal tank is unavailable or extra tanking is needed for a specific encounter). In a 10 man raid, however, if you already have your tanks, it can often be difficult to ask a third tank-capable player to do so due to the DPS and healing thresholds necessary to successfully complete an encounter. If you have 2 tanks, 2 healers and six DPS and the only other available potential tank is a resto druid healing your raid, it's simply inadvisable to ask him to switch unless you so completely outgear the encounter that a sing;e healer can heal it, and in that case you probably don't need a third tank anyway.

Basically, what we see happening here is that 10 mans combine the inflexibility of a 5 man run (since it is very rare that a 5 man will ask someone to off tank - all four tanking classes therefore must be capable of tanking whatever will be tanked be it trash packs of large size or a single boss) with the fight mechanics of larger, 25 man raids, especially once 10 man raids begin exploring hard mode raid content. This means that 10 man raids often have to deliberately be designed around the limitations of a 10 man group, and thus encounters have to lose complexity or stress the raid group beyond its depth of selection.

Meanwhile, at the 25 man level, raid tanking is more and more about two unrelated kinds of play itself. Trash between bosses is basically just a boring, autopilot experience for everyone involved as tanks grab as much threat as they can on as many mobs as possible and the DPS burns them down. Occasionally there will be trash pulls that require CC or discipline from the DPS such as the trash packs before XT-002 (let the tanks move the adds out of the big glowy shields please) or General Vezax, but these are infrequent, and even when there are specific mechanics (try to kill the statues at the same time or they go Supermode) they usually don't provide much in the way of real difficulty for the tanks. Either the DPS adapts or you pop some cooldowns.

Boss tanking, however, is more and more about conditionals. Some bosses hit very hard with a specific ability that requires more than one tank to eat the effect, like Meteor Fists or Auriaya's Sonic Screech. (In the case of Auriaya, on 10 man at least we just put the entire raid in front of her and split the damage that way, but on 25's since we often have four or even five tanks we just have them eat the damage and the raid stands behind her). Other bosses, like Gormok or Thorim have a specific attack that requires tank rotation to remove either by resetting or allowing it to tick off. Still other bosses just hit ridiculously hard with an ability (Sartharion with 3 drakes comes to mind) requiring a tank to use his cooldowns (and often, the cooldown abilities of his or her healers as well) to survive.

So we have a tanking game that is divided into two (and congealing into three) parts. We have five man dungeons, even heroic dungeons, wherein 1 tank per party will tank everything that is tanked, be it trash or bosses. In this milleu, even the hardest content currently available, any one of the four current tanking classes is capable and there is no significant perception of tanking inequity. Some players may prefer the Death Knight's ability to generate AoE threat or significant cooldowns (depending on their individual spec) while others might like seeing a warrior tank with their strong cooldowns and variety of unique options like Vigilance, Intervene, Heroic Throw (with a silence if talented), and Warbringer. Still others might prefer Druids or Paladins. In the end, the 5 man game is wide open and any tank can tank here just fine. More importantly, the player base is aware that any tank can tank here: there's no sense that some tanks are just leaps and bounds superior for tanking heroic Trial of the Champion, for instance.

Now, in raiding, we see a different situation. To discuss some of GC's points:

Typically one of three outcomes happens:

1) Players generally accept that tank class choice has little bearing on the fight.
2) Player suspect tank class choice has a small bearing on the fight, but it isn't usually worth the hassle of swapping out.
3) The typical way to do the fight is to swap out for the class that makes the fight much easier.

Ghostcrawler's second option, in my experience, is rare to the point of vanishing. There is no raiding guild that will hesitate to make a swap if they believe it will make a fight even 1% easier, especially if they're learning a fight for the first time. That leaves us with numbers 1 and 3 of his example.

There are a great many fights in Ulduar and Trial of the Crusader/Grand Crusader where we roll with the tanks we have instead of seeking some magical perfect tank that will make the fights easier. Part of that is, we generally have our dedicated tanks at a level of gear that makes them the clear choice for survivability and threat. Furthermore, those dedicated tanks are accustomed to the roles: they know the healers and the healers know them, there's no having to stop and explain what cooldowns which will be using or to go over what to expect in a fight. I would argue that it is easily the case that in the vast majority of cases, you'll not swap out a tank if you don't see a reason to. Inertia rules, and people will most likely want to remain in the roles they're accustomed to (with exceptions based on the occasional feeling of stagnation in a role or what have you.)

For Sartharion and for Vezax (to name just two encounters) it felt* this way with DKs. Enough* guilds seemed like they were swapping to DKs for those fights because they made the encounter just so much easier. In fact, they made a lot of fights easier, so the conventional wisdom seemed to be just tank everything with a DK. (As another example, the conventional wisdom in BC heroics and Mount Hyjal seemed to be to use a paladin tank because of their huge AE threat advantage.)

I wanted to emphasize this paragraph because it seems to me to be the crux of the matter: namely, that this is not a case where a tanking class has to have a massive advantage over others. I've now tanked Sarth+3 on both a DK and a warrior in 10's, and this is this patch, where DK's have lost a good deal of the insane cooldown flexibility they had previously. My healers stil prefer the DK over the warrior, because the DK can hold threat on both Sarth and a drake (as well as quite a few adds) and can cycle through several cooldowns to stay upright. This is despite my warrior's advantage in health and armor (my warrior is significantly better geared than my DK) and in fact, is despite the fact that the DK's advantage in both AoE threat and cooldowns is minimal at best.

New WoW Model Viewer available

Yes, I went out and made a screenshot of a Worgen with two wolf-headed fist weapons. I did this via the latest iteration of WoW Model Viewer, freshly updated this Saturday, September 5th to work for patch 3.2. While it has a posted warning use it at your own risk which I thought I should mention, I should also mention I've been using it for the past half an hour with no harm and no foul. I've even been able to play with Trial of the Crusader loot. Go behind the jump to see a Worgen dual-wielding a Justicebringer and Reckoning. Not that I'm obsess with Titan's Grip Worgen or anything. Okay, so I totally am. At any rate, so far as I can tell, this version of the Model Viewer is stable and working with all current models.

This update by Chuanhsing even fixed the issue I was having where all my models came out textureless. I have no idea what it was happening in the first place, but I'm glad to see it gone.


So for you aspiring (or even active) machinamists or even just folks like me who like to dress up their future Worgen character with various gear options (sadly, you still can't get them in armor) there's a new toy out there for you to play with. Yay for progress!

Go forth and do great, terrible, or just silly things, for at last you again have a tool to make it easier.

WoW Tags: braking, graphics, machinima, model, mpq, patch-3.2, viewer, wow-model-viewer, wow-mpq

WoW: GuildOx implements 10-man strict rankings

GuildOx sends an email to tell us that they've set up 10-man strict ratings on their guild progression website. They've always offered 10-man ratings, though a lot of guilds run both 10- and 25-man content, and it's not quite legit to stack the "10-man only" guilds up against the guilds who occasionally do 25-man content (and thus have chances at better gear, no matter how much of a difference it makes). Hence, enter the "10-man strict" ratings -- these are guilds who have not run any 25-man content, according to a set of criteria that GuildOx has put together?



What is that criteria? You won't be allowed to earn any Coliseum normal kills or Ulduar 25 hard-mode kills. You are still allowed to PuG those fights, though the limit is 10 players over time, or five in the same fight (in other words, if 10 players of your guild accomplish a kill in 25-man Coliseum, or five of them do it in the same raid, you're off the 10-man strict list). That's designed to make sure that the list stays as clean as possible. You'll have to watch recruits, too -- anyone who enters your guild with a certain achievement has it counted towards that total of 10 players as well. All the other info you need to know about the listings are over in their FAQ.

Players may find other ways around the limit (there is, of course, higher level gear now available from Emblems that 10-player guilds are still able to get), but for now, that's where GuildOx is putting the limit, so if you want to stay on the list, follow their rules. Good luck to all of the strictly 10-man guilds out there.

Hunter WOW Patch 3.2.2 Armor Penetration nerf

Well folks, we recently heard that Ghostcrawler announced the upcoming nerf to Armor Penetration in WoW Patch 3.2.2.

I'll be honest with you. I'm not sure why this is turning into such a big deal is to everyone. I'm not saying I don't understand the mechanics of the change. And I do see the impact to us Hunters, especially endgame raiding Marksman Hunters. But really, let's take a step back and look at the reasoning behind the change.

Ghostcrawler said that they implemented this change after noticing everyone was picking up Armor Pen at the expense of their core stats. Really? And somehow we're surprised that when a secondary stat becomes more important than a class' primary stat and it forced a nerf? It seems more of a correction in my opinion.

If you're a raiding Marks or Survival Hunter you should be focusing on picking up as much Agility (Attack Power if you're a Beast Master) as possible. Hence why in Cataclysm we're seeing things like Armor Penetration removed from the itemization.

Think about it this way. Imagine if someone out there found out that if you stacked Crit over Agility you could find 5% gain in DPS. Would that really make sense as a class mechanic? Sure, we'd all probably switch over for that gain, but could we really blame Blizzard for a change because we found a loophole in the game mechanics?

Now we can all debate if a 15% reduction is too much or not. (Finding that sweet spot is always difficult.) We do know that when Armor values were at 100% everyone laughed at stacking Armor Penetration. Even today it's not considered a stat worth considering until you're raiding the high end raids like the hard modes of Trial of the Crusader or at least Ulduar 25 man. But I think we can all agree that when stacking secondary stats outweigh the benefits of stacking our primary ones, then it's a problem that probably should be addressed.

Armor penetration being nerfed in 3.2.2

Ghostcrawler has announced that armor penetration (ArP) is being nerfed in the upcoming Patch 3.2.2. It's an early notice to players who plan on investing in armor penetration gems. Many raiding melee players (along with Marksman hunters apparently) have begun focusing exclusively on armor penetration without caring about other stats. While the mechanics of ArP can be complicated to understand, the basic understanding is the more ArP you have the more damage you deal. Heck, a Feral Druid in my guild has been known to pass on upgrades here and there primarily because it lacked ArP.

Again, this is mainly a nerf to PvE raiding but it could end up affecting PvP slightly as well. It's not expected to completely rock the arena world or anything. The worst thing that could happen is Priests (or other soft targets) like myself will survive a few seconds longer against melee heavy teams, or people like Rogues have it worse against Plate. I guess from my perspective it could be viewed as a buff!

Note that in Cataclysm, armor penetration will be removed as a stat as it has been deemed confusing in regards to its use.

12 Reasons why you don't want to play a Priest

Every once in a while, I get extremely bitter about being a Priest. For those of you that want to roll a Priest, let me introduce some second thoughts.

Healing is thankless. From 1-80, you're going to be expected to heal something. And those players you work with aren't going to care how you do it as long as you do it. After all, you'll be riding their backs as they're blowing up Snobolds or Gnolls or Murlocs or whatever mob that you've been assigned to kill 50 thousand times. It's a fair trade off since you're keeping them up while they're doing most of the work. That is, until you're stuck with 1 mob left and they disband the group leaving you hanging.

Leveling can be a nightmare. You up for some Smite spamming? Because that's what you're in for as you slowly head up the ranks. It's the only real offensive spell you have at your disposal during the early levels. At least, it's not until you pick up Mind Flay at level 20 that you get some extra diversity among spells. Mind Blast? Yeah, every few seconds. Shadow Word: Pain? Eh. Cool. I guess.

Glorified whack-a-mole. When you start healing, you tend to drown out other things and focus exclusively on your role. That's the point. It's a giant mini-game of triage. Actually, I'd even go one step further and say it's team whack-a-mole in a raid setting.

Buff, buff and buff. Power Word: Fortitude, Prayer of Spirit and Prayer of Shadow Protection. The last two are offered by other classes (Warlock's Fel Intelligence and a Paladin aura respectively), but there's no other buff that will stack with Fortitude. Everyone loves Fortitude and we're going to be depended on to hand out our buffs.

Some mind control required. I suppose Priests only have to do this once in their raiding careers. I think it's one too many. Mind control? Really? Do we have to? I've witnessed many Priests struggle with this spell in particular. Some players like myself have healed our entire WoW lives from 1-80 and have no concept of what to do when we commandeer another NPC.

Survivability is a question mark. For one thing, we wear cloth. Yeah, I suppose we have healing spells to compensate for the all the pain we're taking in, but really! Once glance by a mob or 3 and you're effectively down for the count! We're given enough time and mana to either heal or shoot stuff. It's not like we've got plate, leather or mail to help absorb this stuff! When we get punched, boy do we feel it.

First target. Hitting some battlegrounds or PvPing in general? If the opposition finds out you're a Priest, expect to attract some attention. It feels as if though there's a giant, neon, flashing "kill me now" sign floating above your head with an arrow pointing downwards. If you're Holy, good luck. At least with Discipline you're alive a few seconds longer.

Where's the damage? I can't attest to this myself, but maybe some Shadow Priests can weigh in here. It seems our Shadowy brothers and sisters are having a hard time with damage since the 3.2 patch debuted. Are you guys doing competitive damage with other classes and players? I look at various logs and it just doesn't look right. Alas, I'm not a Shadow Priest and can comment no further other.

Chain Heal. The days of Circle of Healing dominance is over. We step aside for our Brain Chain Healing friends, the Shaman. For the time being, Chain Heal is expected to see even more improvements. Don't misunderstand me, I'm not bitter at all. As an aside, between laser beams or pulses of light, I'd lean towards laser beams. It's like phasers versus photon torpedoes.

Confusing stats. Cataclysm isn't here yet. Regeneration has not been reduced down to one exclusive stat. We're stuck with Spirit or mp5. Do I want X mp5 or Y Spirit? What's greater than the other? All this math work required just to figure out how much is worth what! Then you've got to take the spec into account. Are you Holy? Are you Discipline? Because Holy actually cares about Spirit while Discipline doesn't. Get ready for some gear juggling and some decision making on gear when it does drop.

Power Infusion. No caster seems to notice it. It's as if every time I cast Power Infusion someone and ask them if they noticed a DPS increase, they respond with disbelief and confusion. "You power infused me? Really?"

Hang up the plow and the pitch fork. Don't expect to be doing much in the way of farming. I distinctly created an Elemental Shaman and a Ret Paladin just to help with that aspect of the game. It's difficult with the lack of survivability and such. What happens if we get challenged for a node? We may as well just fall over and die!

There you have it folks! Do not roll a Priest! They're far too vulnerable! Try having some fun as a Paladin instead! I hear their leveling game is much more enjoyable. I mean, they do wear plate. Alternatively, try playing a Warlock! True they wear cloth. But they can manhandle most mobs out there and then some. But Priests? Oh man, they're so hard to manage and maintain.

Note: With the exception of Shadow Priest damage (I do feel that it does look a bit low but maybe that's just me), all the points were made in jest.

WoW Cataclysm's new race/class combinations

As you know, the new race and class combinations coming up in the Cataclysm will open a whole new set of doors to people who want an alternative character choice that goes against the grain of their typical racial customs, to one degree or another. With the exception of a couple combinations that feel as though they should have been there from the beginning (such as blood elf warriors, which need no discussion here), each new possibility presents roleplayers with an opportunity to play an outcast of sorts, a character who has made a significant break from the traditions his or her race usually represent.

The lore behind each combination is not yet fully clear. We know tauren paladins will probably worship the sun and call themselves "Sunwalkers" for instance, but not much more than that. Some things are clear, though, and there's a lot to get the imagination going for those roleplayers who yearn to play something a little different.

Tauren paladins and priests

Here we have the most obvious departure from the traditions and culture of a race in WoW. Blood elves already had a somewhat convoluted path toward becoming paladins at first, but their story really played out throughout the unfolding of The Burning Crusade expansion, and eventually ended in a redemption that helped make their status as paladins seem much more reasonable. Still, even if you discounted all that, you could argue that the blood elves had once worshiped the light, so it made sense that they could come to do so again.

But the idea of tauren becoming followers of the Light seems absurd at first glance. The good thing is that we're pretty much certain that the tauren paladins will not be Light-worshippers as such, not in the same way that humans and draenei are. Rather, somehow a new perspective on their ancestral connection to nature will open for them a new sort of path that just happens to bear an uncanny resemblance to the paladins of the Light over on the Alliance side, much like priests of different races have different beliefs, yet share similar powers. Whatever it is will probably make sense for tauren paladins and priests alike, but will probably still be a sort of fringe culture for tauren, much like shamanism has been for draenei.

This option seems to be the craziest of the bunch at first glance, but when all is said and done, I suspect that tauren paladins and priests will be more connected and unified with the rest of tauren culture than we would expect by just looking at the WoW lore as it is today, before the Cataclysm strikes. Taking up sun-worship may be more like the dwarves discovering their ancient roots as special creations of the Titans than a true revolution in beliefs or values.

Dwarven shamans (and mages)

Speaking of dwarves, mages are one of those classes that they probably should have had from the beginning -- but shamans, on the other hand, may prove to be something more interesting. Shamans may not have all that much connection to the Titans as such, but they are very connected to the earth element, which the dwarves now know themselves to be born of. Some dwarves of the Wildhammer clan are already shamanistic to a large extent.

Nonetheless, shamanism is something new to the general population of dwarves. Whether or not dwarven culture as a whole embraces it, it will be something most dwarves are not very familiar with, and didn't experience much growing up. I imagine it would be like the relationship between city-dwellers and rural farmers, who may generally belong to the same nation and culture, but maintain very different lifestyles within it.

Troll druids

As Michael and Daniel have already noted, there is a precedent for trolls shapeshifting and taking on animal forms already there in WoW lore. What isn't there is any sort of relationship to the moon goddess Elune and her son Cenarius, which normally forms the foundation of druidic culture. The likely connection between the night elves and the worgen indicates that worgen will have some sort of relationship with Elune, but there's nothing hinting that trolls would have one in the game at this point.

I always thought that druidism came with its own set of beliefs related to Cenarius, as well as protective attitudes about nature that I haven't seen trolls express so far. Could it be that some of the darkspear trolls are turning away even more from their vicious and barbaric past, and following the tauren druids in more constructive efforts to heal the world?

On the other hand, Michael and Daniel were thinking that trolls own belief system related to the Loa spirits could give rise to the same basic set of abilities as Cenarius-based druids. If so, this would create a "two religions, one class" type of system we will probably see emerge with the tauren paladins and priests. If so, then troll druids wouldn't be so much of a departure from their culture at all.

Human and forsaken hunters

Human hunters are likely to enter the game without any extra introduction from the new lore of Cataclysm, except maybe a bit about how the great changes in the earth have forced them to use more hunter skills in order to survive in treacherous places. Still, human hunters have been around for a while now, and it only stands to reason that they should be available to players.

Forsaken hunters have likewise been around for a long time -- Sylvanas herself is a "dark ranger," but in this case there might be an extra focus on a new regimen of dark rangers in Sylvanas' army. Far from being outcasts in their culture, forsaken hunters could be seen as their people's most elite fighting force.

Night elf mages (and orcish ones too)

Night elf mages are probably the most like proper outcasts among all the new combinations, since they openly practice something their race has sworn to abandon. As Metzen mentioned at BlizzCon, they're also a good opportunity to play a really ancient character, if that's what you'd like to do, since young night elves probably wouldn't have had much opportunity to study arcane magic lately. So if you're going to be a night elf mage, keep in mind that your character has probably been very solitary for a very long time, unless he or she would have studied either in secret, or in exile.

Orcish mages are an odd option because there's really no lore for or against them -- how orcs could come to be mages isn't really clear, but nor is there any reason why they wouldn't. Until some sort of story appears around them, it's hard to know how to roleplay one, except possibly as a former warlock, who has turned away from his or her demonological ways.

Gnomish priests

And last but not least, thinking of gnomes as priests brings to mind some exciting possibilities. I am thoroughly intrigued by the ideas Michael and Daniel had about a possible "Church of Innovation and Discovery" -- that a gnome could cast divine healing magic out of his or her faith in the constant exploration of new ideas seems perfect for their race.

Gnome priests wouldn't exactly be "rebels" as such -- gnomes don't have anything against religion as such, but up till now, the structured beliefs of other religions haven't really made sense to gnomes. Gnomes do have a lot of faith, however, especially faith in possibilities -- if you ask a gnome whether a problem can be solved or not, undoubtedly they would say yes, as long as they have enough time to figure out some sort of answer.

Still, gnomish priests clearly represent something new for their people, and an ambitious roleplayer could play one of those gnomes who thinks he knows what religion is all about but doesn't, constantly praying for the next boss to drop good loot or whatever, winking at his Light-worshipping friends as if they share a secret together.

Keybindings and how to change them

Xella has a great post over at WoW LJ about keybindings, and it got me thinking. I play with what I thought was the "standard" way -- with the left hand sitting on the home fingers of Shift, A, W, D, and the spacebar, and then jumping up to the 1-6 (or further down the number line if necessary, though truth be told, I usually mouse-click those when I have the time to do so) to hit various abilities. But xella does it very differently -- she maps her fingers to the top abilities keys, using only her ring finger for movement. I would probably never have come up with that on my own (my habits come directly from FPS games, where the 1-6 keys are mostly for weapon switching, something you don't do quite as often as casting abilities), but it does make a lot of sense, even if xella says her ring finger, with all of those movement motions, is getting somewhat worn out.

And then she hits on something else I've been dealing with lately, too: changing what you've got. Setting up your keybinds is one thing, but actually changing them can be tougher.

For instance, my Hunter has always had Hunter's Mark attached to the 5 key -- that was the easiest and quickest place for me to put it when I was setting things up, and so I've trained myself, whenever I am about to start shooting a target, to smash the 5 key and move on. But I have Arcane Shot sitting on the 6, and Explosive Shot (when I'm in that spec) sitting on the 4. That can cause problems, as you might have guessed: reach up to mark a target before the fight, accidentally hit the Arcane Shot, and then I get labeled as a noob for pulling early (probably a deserved title for many reasons, but still). So I decided to switch the mark away from there, and put it somewhere else more out of the way.

But instinctively, as I've been hitting 5 for Hunter's Mark for so long, I would reach up and hit 5 again whenever I entered combat -- I had a lot of trouble retraining my reflexes to hit something else. I only really tried to change for about an hour, but at that point I had to run off to a raid, and rather than making mistakes during a raid setting, I just went ahead and moved the keys back.

I presume that if I gave it more time, I would eventually learn the difference (we humans are nothing if not adaptable), but I was definitely surprised to see just how ingrained my reflexes were with the key presses. xella says she wants to change as well, and most people recommend what I would do (and what I'll probably have to do if I really want to change) -- just take the time to practice and re-learn the keys. It's interesting that we can change keybindings in seconds, but especially if we've built up experience over time, it's much harder to change the way we move.

Making your Mage raid-worthy, part 1

A little while after Wrath hit, Arcane Brilliance posted a column on how to gear your Mage up for Naxx. Several things have changed since then:
You don't really gear for Naxx anymore. Naxx is now a place you go in order to gear up for other places.
Trial of the Champion.
Knowing these things, I thought an updated gearing column might be in order. So if you're raising a fledgling Mage, and level 80 is about to hit you like a truckload of Death Knights, and you're looking for the quickest way to turn green and blue into purple, look no farther. Well maybe a little farther. The column's not over yet.

Never before in the history of WoW have level 80 players had so many options for gearing up at 80. Like PvP? You can epic yourself up pretty quickly almost exclusively killing other players. Have a fetish for heroic dungeons? Normal 5-mans? Daily quests? Profession gear? Grinding for faction rewards? All of those things are perfectly viable ways top get shiny epics. Read on, and we'll focus on two of the various and sundry methods you can employ to get raid-worthy without ever stepping foot into a raid. Then come back next week for the rest.

Normal 5-mans

Trial of the Champion is, to put it bluntly, the single fastest way to get epics in the current version of this game. The non-heroic version of this instance is a relatively simple 5-man boss-fest that takes a good group about 20 minutes to complete, and is entirely farmable. Each of the three bosses drops epic loot. Picture a level 80 version of the Ring of Blood/Amphitheater of Anguish questlines, only one in which each boss drops epic loot, and you can do it over and over again. It's infinitely puggable, even a character with relatively crappy gear can contribute, and there are always plenty of other people looking to farm it.

And to completely contradict that last sentence, I'd like to point out that ToC isn't a face-roll, at least not for a character that's going in without good gear. Read up on the encounters before you go in, and know how to play your class. Though it is the fastest way to get epics right away, I don't want to encourage anybody to be the guy that comes in the second after dinging 80, still wearing greens he picked up in Dragonblight, doing 1k DPS, expecting to get free epics on the coattails of four other people. I've been in groups with that guy, and he's a pain. Do your homework, and gear up the best you can through other means before you hop into ToC's loot factory. Either that, or group up with guildies who are fine with you being undergeared.

Having said that, you don't have to be uber to make it in here. Just make sure you're doing more DPS than the tank. Get a couple nice blue pieces, run a couple of lower level instances, make sure you have a good grasp of things like threat management and spell rotations, and you should be able to pull your weight.

These are the normal mode Mage drops:

Belt of the Churning Blaze
The Confessor's Binding
Bindings of the Wicked
Handwraps of Surrendered Hope
Leggings of the Haggard Apprentice
Mantle of Inconsolable Fear
Signet of Purity
Brilliant Hailstone Amulet
Abyssal Rune

Holy crap, right? These are item level 200 epics, on par with the gear from 10-man Naxxramas. Go. Go now.

Heroics

Once upon a time, and not very long ago at all, heroics provided a shot at some nice blue-quality gear, the occasional epic from the final boss, and tokens that could fill a few slots with Naxx-level non-set pieces. You had to run a lot of heroics to get what you wanted, and you had to get a lot of lucky drops.

Things have changed.

Instead of each boss dropping lowly Emblems of Heroism, they now drop Emblems of freaking Conquest. That's the same thing that drops from, oh, Yogg-Saron. You want an idea of what you can buy with those? How about this, which you can then turn into this:

Conqueror's Kirin Tor Tunic

Or maybe some of this, which then becomes this:

Conqueror's Kirin Tor Hood

Yep. That's tier 8.5 stuff, right there. From running 5-man heroics. Do a few heroics of your choice, repeat every night for few weeks, and viola! You're uber! Well, partially uber, anyway.

Here's the highlights from the rest of the Emblem of Conquest gear:

Neck
Legs
Waist
Hands

And then, once you run out of things to buy with your Emblems of Conquest, you can always trade them in for the old emblems and fill the following slots:

Off-hand frill
Trinket
Back
Feet
Wrist
Finger

Also, there are the old tier pieces, but you'd have to trade so many of your Emblems of Conquest in to get them, you'd be far better off skipping them and getting their equivalents the old fashioned way, by actually raiding.

Oh, and by doing the daily heroic, you can get Emblems of Triumph (only 2 per day, but still), which also drop in the current final raid in the game: Trial of the Crusader/Trial of the Grand Crusader, and use them to get the following:

Band of the Invoker
Brimstone Igniter
And a selection of item level 245 cloth armor, including but not limited to this beauty: Khadgar's Robe of Conquest.

That's right, tier 9. You can pick up tier 9 gear without ever setting foot in a raid. It'll take a long, long time, and you may or may not get done in time for the next expansion to come out...but you can do it. Just thought I'd throw that out there.

While you're in those heroics, you may as well pick up the nice gear the final bosses drop, including the following sweetness:

Utgarde Keep: Annhylde's Ring
Nexus: Gloves of Glistening Runes
Azjol-Nerub: Rod of the Fallen Monarch, Sash of the Servant
Old Kingdom: Wand of Ahn'kahet, Skirt of the Old Kingdom
Drak'Tharon Keep: Overlook Handguards
Violet Hold: Azure Cloth Bindings
Utgarde Pinnacle: Girdle of Bane
Halls of Lightning: Woven Bracae Leggings
Occulus (yes, I hate this place too, but this staff is nice): Staff of Draconic Combat, and also Cuffs of Winged Levitation

And then there's heroic Trial of the Champion, which can be a bit of a gear check. I've seen a lot of groups that can burn their way through most other heroics struggle here. But the rewards are more than worthwhile. Every boss drops epics, and they're item level 219 epics, putting them on par with 10-man Ulduar drops. If that's not worth a few wipes along the way, I don't know what is.

The drops? Glad you asked!

Boots of the Crackling Flame
Embrace of Madness
Gaze of the Unknown
Kurisu's Indecision
Sinner's Confession
Spectral Kris

Yeah. I wrote about ToC loot when the patch first hit, so you've already heard me wax poetic about that dagger. But...yeesh. Beat the Black Knight. Beat him with a stick. When he bursts open and candy falls out, hope one piece of candy is shaped like that frigging dagger. Scrabble for it on the ground with the other casters, then use it to stab the Warlock who's trying to grab it from you. I fully advocate Warlock-stabbing. It's appropriate in every situation. Disclaimer: No real-life stabbing. Put the knife down, crazy guy who also happens to read these columns. Go play Grand Theft Auto or something and blame your inevitable killing spree on that, and not my column, please.

So, let's review.

If your preferred method of gearing up is running 5-mans, here are the slots you can fill with epics without ever getting a larger group together:

All of them.

That's right. Without going crazy, you can now get an epic in every slot before Naxx, before Ulduar, before any 10 or 25-man content, guildless, penniless, socially repellent, and unattractive. Just give your Mage a steady diet of Trial of the Champion and heroics, and you'll eventually be able to pull off a rough impression of a well-geared raider. Fool your friends!

Next week, we'll go over the best of the rest of the ways to get epic gear before going raiding. Yes, there are more. If you hate instances, you can still get epics. You gotta love the new end-game. Epic gear is no longer an exclusive club, accessible only to progressive guilds. Everyone can get it. It's just a matter of choosing how you want to go about it. And to the three or four of you out there who will say this is a bad thing, that this proliferation of purples somehow cheapens the game, that by allowing even casual WoW players into the epic treehouse, Blizzard's ruining everything: you, my friends, are tools. I'm not even kidding. I'm so incredibly tired of that kind of elitism, it's not even funny. In a progression-based game where progression is ultimately measured by gear, more ways to progress--available to more and more types of players--is always a good thing. Soapbox-tangent over.

Does Cataclysm Kill WoW’s Lore?

Alongside the elation and cheers of millions of WoW players, a selection of players weren't happy with the proposed changes in WoW's upcoming expanion, Cataclysm. The main issue these players have is the addition of several class/race combinations.

In Cataclysm, players will be able to play characters of the following class/race in addition to the existing choices:

Horde

Orc Mage, Undead Hunter, Tauren Paladin, Tauren Priest, Troll Druid, Blood Elf Warrior

Alliance

Human Hunter, Dwarf Mage, Dwarf Shaman, Night Elf Mage, Gnome Priest

Fans have accused Blizzard of butchering Lore, making these changes purely to make people re-roll characters once they get bored wit their current ones, or maybe enticing them to use the upcoming paid race change feature. However, as Wryxian explains below, the new combos DO actually fit in with Lore.

But again I feel what is really grating for some people is that there are so many new combinations at once. Because as we've stated already, these new combinations are based on storyline progression and not the other way around. We've had these evolutions in our playable race options planned for quite some time, so I think it is just that they're coming all at once that is making people raise an eye in suspicion -- because it is so clearly linked to opening up new possibilities for game play in our upcoming expansion.

And sure, it's quite obvious we are definitely wanting to open up some new combinations, and we don't see this as a bad thing. But the changes in terms of game play are indeed well rooted in lore and will be further explained through quests and other in-game text and events to highlight this even more.

Let's see how night elf society treats and adapts to having a few of their arcane wielding kind playable instead of quietly hidden away in Dire Maul, before we jump to conclusions on how wrong or right we feel it is from our perspective. The humans also do not like warlocks, but yet we didn't decide to not include the human warlocks just because some people might feel they don't fit with the human lore. Like Night Elf mages, human warlocks do exist and opening them up to being playable was, in my opinion at least, a cool idea and I feel pretty much the same about the new combinations coming in Cataclysm including the Night Elf mages.

Though personally I have my gleaming crocolisk eyes on those dwarven shaman... and I don't mean just for a tasty elemental flavoured snack...

Cataclysm: PvP Contested Eastern Plaguelands?

I finally met Wryxian (our cute croc) at Blizzcon, it was fun talking about his signatures which I probably mistook as conspiracy theories, but hey I swear he knows about some stuff in Area 51. With the Cataclysm forums now open, he’s answered a lot of fans. One of these makes you go Hmm. So we are going to nail Arthas in Icecrown Citadel, and later the Cataclysm happens. Are the Undead going to die automatically without his will to control them? Are the Undead Scourge going to become chaotic and attack anyone on sight with no one controlling them? Will the Undead Scourge become Forsaken? Or even worse ... will Ner’zhul return to lay claim over his former minions? (Read spoiler after the break about Ner’zhul)

Those are pretty good questions. However, there is yet another important question to tackle. Since Eastern Plaguelands is no longer Scourge territory, will it become a PvP zone with the Horde and the Alliance attempting to claim the land for themselves? Or will we see some kind of progression of the story there?

Wryxian: It’s really intriguing wondering what exactly will happen to places like the Plaguelands. Will they be kept much as they are, even despite the nailing we all expect Arthas will receive, or will they be liberated and thus potentially becoming hotly contested by all the various races that may be interested in re-claiming the area for their own?