Project Lore

Almost 48 hours since the release of Patch 3.1 and there are still many, many issues to be ironed out.  Players across the greater Internet are reporting numerous snags that are consistent with all of Blizzard's content patches.  Dead or laggy servers, extended extended maintenance, busted spells, broken talents, castrated add-ons, un-updated add-ons interfering with general WoW play, disconnected instance servers, the works.  As Ivnication stated in the Secrets of Ulduar post, even if Blizzard had a perfect patch, it'd be unlikely that we would have been able to raid efficiently on Wednesday, let alone Tuesday, due to the massive amount of changes.

As it stands now, I have let the issue go by the wayside.  Better to shrug it off than pull my hair out while screaming about my paying customer status.  During the intermittent server problems I spent most of my time leveling my priest's professions and, preparing her for her incoming second spec.  Since I wasn't doing anything of consequence, I allowed my eyes and mind to roam and came across a collection of unexpected things.  First and foremost, Magtheridon was playable by late Tuesday evening.  Being an original server, I expected it to be utterly destroyed by its high population, so I was taken aback by its playability.

I did my best to keep up on the patch notes and all the upcoming stuff in Wrath's first content patch, but a lot of small tweaks managed to slip by me.  It takes enough time to digest the class changes, let alone all of the other stuff listed in the patch notes.  It wasn't until I was a few hours into the patch that I began noticing just how many things I missed.

• There are a ton of new icons for various spells and talents including Devouring Plague, Cleanse Spirit, Riptide and many others.  Even the Essence of Wintergrasp icon has been overhauled with new art.

• Along with the addition of maps for the dungeons, Blizzard overhauled the minimap.  Our personal guide is far more detailed and allow us to zoom out further than before.  A fantastic surprise addition for me.

• You no longer need to be near a Lexicon of Power to apply a Glyph.  Does that change make the Lexicons completely useless, or do Inscriptors need them for something specific?  I haven't rolled one yet so I am not certain.  Speaking of Glyphs, how did the old Supply and Demand scale work on your servers?  Prices on Magtheridon are up over 200%.

• New music courtesy of Ulduar and the Argent Tournament!

• "Flint and Tinder is no longer necessary for creating a campfire. You're just that resourceful!" (emphasis added).  That bit from the patch notes just made me laugh, even though I see the bold as a possible slight against the hardcore RPers.  Apparently we are all Survivorman.  Now I can make my first campfire.

Since most of these dents have been pounded out, it's about time to get working on my new spec, gem and enchants for my pair of toons.  Ahh, decisions.  What changes have caught you unawares, if any?  How bad our your servers acting up?  Anyone have a chance to head into Ulduar yet?  Bosses have already been downed, some before the first round of hotfixes.  As Tom Chilton expected, each and every one of Yogg-Saron's maws have been thoroughly beaten.  Nearly all the hardmodes remain undefeated by the best of the best raiding guilds, which means Algalon is still alive and well.  Grats on being the first to clear 10-man Ulduar Ensidia.

Click to read more ...

Dungeon maps? Yes, please!

While my game was patching this afternoon, I took a look through WoW's official Patch Notes on 3.1. We've already been talking a lot about some of the larger ticket items including Ulduar and related achievements, dual spec, armor upgrades, profession changes and the unfortunate delay of Equipment Manager. Now, there's a WHOLE lot more that we'll undoubtedly be combing over in the coming days and weeks, but until then let's take a look at some of the other random details from the Secrets of Ulduar page and the patch notes that jumped out at me. My aim for this first round up is to detail what will affect all of us, as opposed to the specific. The convenience factor:

• All Ground Mounts may now swim without dismounting the rider. Flying Mounts still may NOT, and will dismount the rider upon entering water.
• Players will now be able to queue for battlegrounds from any location. Leaving a battleground will return you to the location from which you entered.
• Applying a glyph no longer requires a Lexicon of Power. The same rules for switching between dual talent specializations now apply to switching glyphs and cannot be performed while in combat, Battlegrounds (except when Preparation is up), or Arenas (no exceptions).

Class changes:

• Death Knights have a TON of changes that will take some time to readjust. Some spells got buffed, some got nerfed. With time, we'll see what the overall affect is. If I had to guess, it may be an overall nerf.
• Druids, hunters, paladins, priests, shamans and warlocks also are seeing substantial class changes.
• Mages and warriors will see some changes but not as many.
• Rogues, my specialty, may possibly be getting an overall buff. A couple of skills got debuffed, but not by a ton. /hopeful! What I'm looking forward to most -- Killing Spree: Now also increases all damage done by the rogue while active by 20%.

Professions: cooking:

• A new recipe has been added to cooking trainers for making Black Jelly, using several Borean Man 'O War as ingredients. While it looks disgusting, it restores more health and mana than the highest level food.
• Flint and Tinder is no longer necessary for creating a campfire. You're just that resourceful!
• Ingredients such as Spices, Apples, and the like have been removed from most cooking recipes.
• Several Northrend recipes were given greater skill up ranges to make it easier to reach 450 cooking skill.
• You no longer need to learn cooking from books. The trainers have finally done their reading and are able to teach you the same thing.

And for the all-important First Aid:

• You no longer need to complete the “Triage” quest to attain Artisan First Aid. Instead you can learn the Artisan skill from the trainers in the capital cities.
• You no longer need to learn First Aid from books. The trainers have finally done their reading and are able to teach you the same thing.

And Fishing:

• A new (and very rare) special mount can now be caught from Northrend fishing pools (hmmm, what could it be?).
• The time needed to catch fish has been reduced.
• You can now fish anywhere, regardless of skill. Every catch has the potential for fishing skill gains, but you are likely to catch worthless junk in areas that are too difficult for your skill.
• You no longer need to learn fishing from books. The trainers have finally done their reading and are able to teach you the same thing.

The only bummer for me on professions, and this is of my own doing, comes from Leatherworking:

• Added a recipe for combining Borean Leather Scraps into Borean Leather. You can still use Borean Scraps from your inventory to combine them. (I JUST combined a TON of these without the recipe, and hence got no levels for it. Sadness!)

Dungeons:

• New dungeon maps have been added for all Wrath of the Lich King dungeons. (YAAAAAAAY!!)

User Interface:

• New Advanced features for quest tracking are now available. Players will need to activate this option within the Interface panel.
• Several new options for increased graphics such as Video Mode Ultra, higher Shadow Quality detail and new high-resolution player textures for Northrend armor sets.
• Players can now return items purchased with an alternate currency back to the original vendor within 2 hours of the purchase time for the original cost of the item. Stackable items (such as Frozen Orbs and gems) and charged items that can be purchased with an alternate currency are not eligible.
• Confirmation boxes have been added to purchases over 150 gold.
• The calendar now supports a guild-wide sign-up sheet, allowing the event organizer to invite his or her entire guild.
• Class roles (i.e. damage, tanking, healing) have been added to the Looking For Group feature. Class roles will be displayed when sorting through the Looking For More section.
• Quest and Achievement tracking are now combined in a new Objectives Tracking window. Advanced features can be activated from the Objectives Options panel.
• On-Use items will display in the Objectives Tracking when tracking a quest that uses them. No more searching through your bags for that on-use quest item!
• Health and Fuel/Ammo bars have been added to the vehicle interface whenever operating a vehicle.
• The mini-map has been optimized for better performance. Displays for vehicles, class colors, and off-map pings have been added as well.

Items:

• Loot from clams now stacks correctly! (Thank the Azeroth heavens)
• Changed the icon for Succulent Clam Meat so it doesn't look quite as disgusting. Now 100% more succulent!
• A whole ton of glyph changes.
• Three new mounts are available from Horde mount vendors, equalizing the number of purchasable normal and epic mounts: the Black Wolf, the White Kodo, and the Black Skeletal Horse (in Orgrimmar, Bloodhoof Village, and Brill respectively).
• Hearthstone: Cooldown has been reduced to 30 minutes down from 60 minutes. (!!)Bug Fixes - there's a bunch for all the classes, some items and some race-related. Good stuff to make your game play a more enjoyable experience.

For the full notes, check WoW's patch notes page, and keep checking back with Project Lore as we wrap our heads around all these changes!

Click to read more ...

Initially, I was going to discuss the purported patch notes for Wrath of the Lich King's first content patch.  As it turns out, the "leaked" Patch 3.1 notes that began floating around this weekend are fakes according to most sources.  How fake?  That remains to be seen, but it is likely that the creator - Aurelius of Forlorn Legacy on Windrunner-US according to WoWInsider - got some changes close to correct. Thankfully there was another interesting topic to crop up late last week, BlizzCast Edition Seven.  The latest podcast of all things Blizzard focused on one universe for the first time since the developer began the series, Rock N' Roll Racing World of Warcraft.  The episode was designed as a wrap-up to Wrath's release with J. Allen Brack, Jeff Kaplan and lore master Chris Metzen, all stopping by to give their thoughts. The first part of the cast featured JAB and Kaplan discussing Northrend's creative process, things learned from the previous expansion, the hard choices and how they turned out.

• Northrend was one of the first lands to be prototyped for the MMORPG, during the development of The Frozen Throne.
• Northrend & Outland were both in the running for the first expansion.
• A group of five people, lead by Metzen took care of the awesome quests.
• Implement multiple starting zones for expansions.
• Throw the antagonist in everyone's face at all times, in as diverse a fashion as possible.
• Moving to 10- and 25-man raiding was validated as a solid decision in the first month.

Perhaps one of the most interesting things to be revealed in this section of the BlizzCast was the amount of Hero classes that were in the works.  Blizzard narrowed down the choices to 29 separate classes before beating that number down to just three.  None of which were the long-rumored Arch Druid.

• Rune Master - Melee archetype like a rogue or monk (Pandaren ftw!).
• Necromancer - Ranged caster with "a lot of corpse explode."  Many ideas incorporated into the Death Knight.
• Death Knight - Umm, well, I hope you know what this class does by now...

The second half of the Q&A has Cygil questioning Blizzard's Senior Vice President of Creative Development, Chris Metzen.  Being the creative mind that he is, Metzen's answers are incredibly long and descriptive.  Cygil leads the discussion in all sorts of directions and storylines, covering Illidan's demise, the distracted Dragonflights, Medivh and even the newly introduced Order of the Ebon Blade.  For the lore lovers out there, the second half of the podcast is incredibly interesting with future plot points being danced around by Metzen. If you haven't checked it out already, Episode 7 can be read, downloaded or streamed at the official BlizzCast site.  The total runtime is just under 40 minutes.

Click to read more ...

Fing classic.

Patch v3.0.8 had many of us at ProjectLore a bit excited. Heck, you could get away with calling us downright ecstatic at all the changes the first Wrath of the Lich King patch would bring. We all all had our owns reasons for the anticipation, new achievements, cheaper enchants, one-shot mining, knowing that Dorkins will never stop complaining, it was all there. Blizzard finally dropped the patch on us this Tuesday, but not all was well in the lands of Azeroth. Actually, the whole ordeal has been quite a clusterfrak.

The first major bug to rear its ugly, beady-eyed head was a Death Knight related bug. The non-gameplay issue basically nullified one of the “features” being added by v3.0.8. For many, the ability to make Death Knights on any realm, so long as you had a level 55 character somewhere, was unavailable. Not a big deal, and it didn't affect a majority of the players directly. However, the hotfix forced a series of rolling restarts, the first of many to come.

The next two issues were huge, game changing problems that brought major features of WoW to its knees. A bit more troublesome than some lag and server restarts for sure. Lake Wintergrasp, a highly touted feature for Wrath's release, had a moth in it so bad that it crashed servers or at least Northrend (depending on  reports). I was indirectly informed that Wintergrasp's issue had something to do with zone population. According to the informer, the zone was not stress tested heavily enough on the PTR.  This allowed the bug to sneak into the live code and wreak havoc.

The next major $#*() is far more upsetting than Lake Wintergrasp being disabled. Blizzard silently modified the way Arena matching and rating was calculated in the patch with disastrous results. The modifications allowed teams to shoot up to 2000+ ranking in no time flat. This was caused by the fact that a losing team did not see a reduction in Arena points. Following the Wintergrasp debacle, Blizzard pulled the plug on Arenas as they attempted to correct the bug.

What's worse (to some) is that the developers decided that everything gained during this time frame was “illegitimate.” Do to their stance, the company reset team and personal ratings to pre-weekly maintenance levels, removed all awarded gems, points and enchantments. I for one agree with them on this entirely, but it still sucks when people waste their time.  Kalgan also has a post up that goes into more detail on the rollback.

Hopefully we can have an uneventful weekend after this morning's emergency maintenance “to resolve current In-Game issues,” but at this point who knows. I guess I may have been lucky as none of these bugs really bothered me. I have avoided Wrath PvP so far, as I am still working on my gear.  On my server the Alliance was stuck with the Wintergrasp buff. So that was cool. In fact, my buddy who plays the game for the Arena actually ran some rare instances!

Oh geez, I almost forgot this non-patch related dozy. Despite my best efforts to warn them about the pitfalls of ads on their official forums, Blizzard got a little greedy and did it anyways. As the screenshot shows, an unapproved group of ads slipped through their filtering process. Someone over at Microsoft (who owns the ad provider) is getting canned. At least the banner managed to stay on topic!

Tell me Bastosa, was this the mess you were “so anxious” about?

Click to read more ...

Blizzard Poster Wryxian added a wall of blue text to the official forums yesterday, dealing entirely with the upcoming patch. Being the first major patch since Wrath of the Lich King went live means we expect many changes, but the list is slowly leaning towards ridiculousness. As of yesterday, the up-to-date Player Test Realm notes for Patch v3.0.8 stands at a full six posts from our boney friend. Needless to say, it is a lot to digest and cover.

Not everything is new to the list, so if you have been keeping yourself abreast of the situation, then you will only have to add small morsels to your extensive knowledge. Every aspect of World of Warcraft will see some small changes with v3.0.8. Some of the most drastic changes target the newly added Wrath content, namely the Death Knight class. Most of that information is old hat, but tweaks to Wrath's PvP contributions aren't. Despite the laundry list of changes to Lake Wintergrasp and Strand of the Ancients, nothing comes off as earth shattering, except the change in marks. For some actual game changes we have to move to the professions.

Here are some of the highlights to the profession changes:

• All flasks no longer require an alchemy lab to create. (Alchemy)
• Reduced the cooldown on Northrend Alchemy Research from 7 days to 3 days. (Alchemy)
• Succulent Orca Stew and Shoveltusk Soup have been removed from the requirements for any cooking achievements as they will not be added to the game. (Cooking)
• Many high level enchantment recipes have had the amount of Infinite Dust and Greater Cosmic Essence requirements significantly reduced, but with Dream Shards being added to them. (Enchanting)
• Added a new recipe to convert a frozen orb and some green quality gems into several superior quality gems. (Jewelcrafting)
• Mining veins and deposits no longer require multiple hits to receive all the ore. Players will receive around the same amount of ore, stone, and gems they would have received from multiple hits. (Mining)

Personally, my two main toons are not too effected by any of the changes. My priest is in it for the money, thus she is a strict gatherer – Skinning and Herbalism. The rogue will love the change to mining, even though it is four years late, for its speediness.  The flip side is that he will miss the ability to Sap, ninja and go for a HK that he enjoyed so. Heck, even their class changes aren't worth mentioning.  Can't complain about cheaper enchants though!

Blizzard managed to squeak in some UI changes that no one specifically asked for, but are happy to see. The company has pledged to implement much needed anti-scamming measures into WoW and the first of such will come with this patch. MMO-Champion.com gave us the first details and screenshots the other day, and it is a valiant effort by Blizzard, but I am not sure how much scamming it will curb. In practice a GM chat request window will pop-up when a GM wishes to chat with you. Upon clicking it a self-contained GM chat window will show up on the screen.

This is all fine and dandy, but the biggest problem is the dissemination of the information. I doubt most players will realize the request feature has been added, so they won't expect it, leaving some of them open to the same type of scamming we see today. At least Blizzard is finally trying something though, even if it is just to cover their ass.  Naturally, the one thing Wryxian didn't update us on is when the patch is coming out...

Click to read more ...

Mages, Death Knights and Hunters definitely need to be aware of Ghostcrawler's most recent posts. The face of the forums has tore it up over the last two days, announcing changes to all three classes that are sure to upset some, but will having others jump for joy.

Some of the changes he listed are now part of the just posted v3.0.8 PTR notes, which include a new mount-based Achievement, complete with an exclusive mount as the reward. Although this probably isn't exactly what the people QQing in the comments of this post had in mind, it is a start. An expensive start considering if you bought ground epic mounts for half of the required 100 mounts, you'd be dropping something like 5000g. And I don't think there are even that many available.  So let's just call it a crapton of gold.

I will just start this off with the bad news. Dorkins, prepared to be nerfed to the ground. Ghostcrawler's notes specifically mention that Hunters, PvE Beastmastery Hunters to be more specific, are doing too much god damn damage for Blizzard's liking. While the designers hoped other classes would catch up to them, they haven't, thus comes a series of nerfs. The developers figured the best way to hurt PvE damage, while skirting the PvP balance issue, would be to heavily modify Steady Shot and Volley. Ouch!

From the blue:

• Steady Shot – now only gains 10% of attack power as damage (down from 20%).
• Volley – reduced the damage by about 30% for all ranks. Note that AE damage from many classes is very high right now and we are looking at all of them. Volley in particular had reached the point where some hunters were using it to the exclusion of most other attacks.

Death Knights are getting the opposite treatment of Hunters. The changes to the newest and most populous class - for the moment – revolve around modify tanking a good deal, while reducing their defense capabilities for PvP. Those PvEers out there, specifically the ones who rolled a DK for tanking, should be excited. From my understanding of the changes, and the class, the PvP modifications aren't nearly the nerf that Hunters received on the PvE end.  Blood Aura doing double the healing...think I may go Blood when I return to my DK.

As for our faithful Blinkers out there, some of you will be happy to hear that you have a buff coming your way. I quantified that previous sentence with 'some' because the buffs only apply to those mages that are Arcane spec. To be honest, I do not know, and possibly have never known, a mage that was Arcane spec. Nonetheless, Blizzard will has decided that that particular spec needs a hand, going so far as to completley redesigning the Arcane Blast ability.

• Arcane Blast – overhauled. Will now increase the damage of your next Arcane spell by 15/30/45%. However using Arcane Blast itself does not consume the charge, but instead increases the mana of your next Arcane Blast, up to a maximum of 3 stacks (and a 45% buff). You can alternate Blast and Barrage to keep buffing Barrage, or you can build Blast up higher for a heavy mana cost.

To sum it up, we have Hunters' PvE being super-nerfed with a buff in survivability for PvP. Death Knight's Blood spec is more attractive for tanking, with tanking mechanics relying less on cooldowns and a small nerf to their defense in PvP. Arcane Mages get a nice bump in damage, however, Blizzard is keeping a close eye on them to see if they become too powerful in PvP, or the class in general taking the lead in PvE damage output.

As for me, my two main characters have barely been touched. Fan of Knives is now better, but my rogue lacks the ability, so blah. Circle of Healing now has a 6 second cooldown, instead of just the global cooldown. That sucks, but I hated spamming it so much anyways.

Click to read more ...