Monthly Archives: January 2010

Our podcast is now ready for your downloading pleasure, and I have to say — it was a good one. Nothing flashy, no once-in-a-lifetime guests (though both Turpster and Matticus were on with me, and those guys are definitely one-of-a-kind), but it was just a good solid podcast, with some great discussion about the latest PTR build and Lord Marrowgar, the Battle.net changeover, and our very first predictions about when we might see patch 3.3 on the live servers. Turpster’s even got some money riding on his guess already. That’s all for our audience with Prophet Velen! Next week, we’ll be speaking with Cairne Bloodhoof, High Chieftain of the tauren! If you have questions for Cairne, whether you need advice or have questions about totems or nursing homes or anything in between, send them via email to  with the subject line “AAFL”. 5:58pm CDT: Q: Who are the two developers answering these questions? A: Game Director Tom Chilton and Director of Production J. Allen Brack. 5:58pm CDT: Chat over!

Full disclosure here: The main thing that makes me want to play a particular race is their choice in hairstyles. Especially the females. Sometimes when I go to Stormwind and enter the barber shop I say, out loud, “All right, designers, let’s send our models to the L’Oreal Paris hair salon! Make it work!” Okay, that last part isn’t entirely accurate. Or is it? Anyway, yeah. Hairstyles are important to me, which is why I’m simultaneously happy and a bit miffed about the new styles in Wrath, a lot of which were just copy-paste jobs from other races. Night elf females still have a grand total of two good haircuts and human males can, joy of joys, be Goku now. While I can understand the trepidation from prot warriors at this statement (no one is terribly excited about a buff to Devastate, not even me) it’s an unfortunate but valid point he makes here. You really don’t have the time to make drastic mechanical changes this far into the Of course, if they just take out ammo altogether and roll the extra DPS back into the base weapon damage, I wouldn’t complain too much either. My engineer will be sort of sad that one more source of cash flow is gone, but then again, raw materials sometimes sell for more

Meanwhile, enhancement doesn’t really have it as bad. It shares gear with hunters primarily, and most of the stats (Agility, Int, Attack Power, Hit) share fairly well between the two. Enhancement shamans of course require expertise (a stat hunters make absolutely no use of) so they usually have to make that up on Tier pieces or rings, necks and trinkets which can be annoying, but thankfully expertise was added to Unleashed Rage a while back to help compensate. (This of course leads us back to the original spark of this discussion, the change to Elemental Mastery adding a desirable stat to a spec’s talent… we’re seeing as shamans progress that gear shortages are constantly made up for by talent changes.) The real issues in enhancement shaman itemization are haste (more is good as haste scales with Maelstrom Weapon) and Armor Penetration. Back in Burning Crusade, when double windfury ruled the day and physical damage was the overwhelming majority of enhancement DPS, Armor Pen was a decent stat for us. (I will admit I don’t remember any shamans really going bonkers stacking it.) But with the advent of Windfury/Flametongue and Maelstrom Weapon, a much greater portion of enhancement shaman DPS comes from instant spell casts as well

For a while I wasn’t sure if I’d continue playing World of Warcraft into the next expansion. I was by no means planning on giving up my gaming habit, but I really felt like I was ready for something new: either another MMO or one of the latest generation consoles. Many pros and cons were weighed, and I have decided to stick with WoW for at least one more expansion. It was a difficult decision for me but in the end it was the rocks that won me over. Yes, the rocks. You see, I am part of a small, but growing number of WoW players who collect rocks. For those of you who overlook this highly sophisticated hobby, I encourage you to give it some research. Blizzard has gone through great efforts to supply an expansive assortment of wonderful, prized rocks over the years and expansions. These items are really what separate World of Warcraft from other MMOs, by adding another dimension of enjoyment to the game. a. Rock b. Pet Rock c. A Very Pretty Rock d. Shiny Polished Stone e. Lucky Rock f. Happy Fun Rock g. A Pretty Rock h. Rock Chip Above you can see my treasured collection. Admittedly, not all of my rocks are 100% pure, but I am quite the sucker for derivative pieces. You’ll see exhibit d is actually a stone, but it holds a great deal

Again, that’s using a DPS axe from TotGC. Tanking gear in ICC is some of the absolute best gear I’ve ever seen, even the non set pieces (I agonize over which of them I’ll stop using for my 4 piece T10 set bonus, believe me, the idea of not wearing my Broken Ram makes me unhappy) and it only gets better as we will eventually get heroic modes down. (Please note I mean relative here: I am aware that Onslaught was a set designed for level 70 and this is level 80 gear. But the itemization here is proportionately better, I believe, and that’s saying something, as both BT and later Sunwell gear was well itemized.) At first I was kind of surprised to see how high the strength values can get, but that just seems to be part of a move to get tanks to pick up some threat stats and it’s working fine for me (I haven’t even missed the block value from my old TotC Set legs) as threat’s gone up as steadily as everything else. At present, I don’t even bother to wear a threat set to heroics anymore, I just use my current stam/avoidance set and that first shield block hits just as hard thanks to the set bonus on T10, and the shockwaves hit even harder. I find myself wondering where tanking design will go in Cat: clearly there

I touched on Blizzard’s presence at IgroMir 2009, sort of the Russian E3, a bit previously, specifically about J. Allen Brack’s panel regarding guild progression and leveling in Cataclysm. Of course, I had to Google-translate the panel from Russian (nyet, I do not know Russian, comrades), and not everything Blizzard-related from the whole convention was in the recaps I read. Thankfully, Blizzard themselves have released their own recaps of the Cataclysm panel. In his talk, Brack discussed rated battlegrounds, Tol Barad (briefly), and guild progression. It turns out that I was pretty thorough in the guild leveling post, but here’s the stuff I didn’t cover: Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com’s daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today. The Queue is a bit short today, and rather than giving you reasons why, I’m going to leave it up to you guys to create wild and zany reasons for it. Was Alex writing The Queue while on fire and ran out of burnable flesh? Was Alex hard at work, but was suddenly interrupted by the president recruiting him for a top secret mission to Mars? Was he watching cartoons while writing, and the cartoons came to