Project Lore

Since World of Warcraft was released, the hearthstone has been one of the most important items. It allowed characters from level 1 to teleport back to an inn to rest or to a capital city to trade. Since then, the game has changed significantly. Shattrath and Dalaran are wonderful hubs, but they lack auction houses and make it difficult to do business. Thus, the faction capital cities, especially Orgrimmar and Ironforge, stayed populated. However, its not easy to get from the faction capitals back to Dalaran. Most players who aren't mages or shaman rely on their hearthstone to get back to Dalaran. The hour long cooldown on the hearthstone has limited how players use their hearthstones as they might want to save them if they want to return to Dalaran after visiting a capital city. One of the solutions behind this was called "ghetto-hearthing". Since the number of players inside a given instance is limited, if a player is in a group in an instance and gets removed, they are teleported to the hearthstone's homepoint and the cooldown on their hearthstone is reset to one hour. Thus, if you make a group with someone and enter and instance, you will trigger the "ghetto-hearth" upon leaving the group. Players in Orgrimmar could use Ragefire Chasm to ghetto-hearth, and players in Stormwind could use Stockades. If you were out and about adventuring in the world, you could likely find a nearby instance to ghetto-hearth in. Well, patch 3.1 is changing this mechanic. Among other large changes, the "ghetto-hearth" will now take players to the nearest graveyard without resetting their hearthstone, and more importantly, hearthstones will have a 30 minute cooldown. The implications of this are interesting. One of the major convienances of shaman and of mages was easy travel, and this lessens it significantly as now everyone can get around more easily. Scribes and their Scrolls of Recall are also relatively less useful. These scrolls were a major incentive for me to make an scribe. It is unclear if cooldowns on other items like Band of the Kirin Tor or such spells will be changed or left alone. I hope to see them reduced as well to keep their relative usefulness intact.

Click to read more ...