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Episode 108: Don’t get your hopes up
We taped our podcast a little early this week, on Wednesday night, and rather than having you wait all the way until Monday for it (not to mention that Pirates’ Day will gone by then), we figured we’d post it up for you today). Matt “Matticus” Low was kind enough to join us (he writes the Spiritual Guidance and Raid Rx columns), and while Turpster was on a business trip, he did end up making it to provide us with his usual sparkling insight. We talked about that wacky 2v2 team rating and what it means for Blizzard’s Arena system, the Abyssal Maw and what else we’ve heard about Cataclysm‘s dungeons and raids, and whether being in a guild really can calm you down (Matt, our only guildleader on the show, says no). has been criticized in the past for some of their design ideas (the work they do, just in terms of an art and gameplay sense, does tend to borrow a lot from what’s come before it), but Afrasiabi does the right thing in the end: he lets the work talk for itself. Blizzard may have borrowed the MMO form from a lot of different places, but no one can argue that what they’ve done with it hasn’t turned out to be extremely impressive. Next week, hopefully I will have been able to sit in front of
Wherein we learn new slang
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com’s (almost) daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today. Today we’re going to hit a bunch of quick, short questions, which means today’s edition of The Queue might be a wee bit short compared to some of Allison’s epics. Picture above completely unrelated to anything written below. It just looks pretty freaking sweet, doesn’t it? ikandiman asked… “I have been trying to get the last Brewfest achievement for my Warlock, but every time I get smashed and jump off the elevator in Shattrath (with my Skyguard’s Drape to slow fall) I never get the bloody Drunken Stupor achievement. Had no problem with my mage and paladin. What gives?” I could be mistaken, but I’m pretty sure the source of the problem is the Skyguard’s Drape. You can’t use any Slow Fall effects when trying to get that achievement, you need to simply fall. You can use immunities such as Ice Block and Divine Shield, but you can’t use things like Levitate, Slow Fall, or items like the Skyguard’s Drape. To get that achievement done, I just took all of my characters to the Scryer elevator in
Ghostcrawler discuss the Lich King
The latest edition of Blizzard Insider, Blizzard’s very sporadic email newsletter (and no relation to our old name, WoW Insider) has been released. Issue 32 features a note that the Starcraft II: WIngs of Liberty site has been revamped, blurbs about the mobile Authenticator and the Armory app, and some calls to buy their merchandise. More interesting for WoW fans, though, is an interview with Scott Mercer (Daelo), WoW‘s lead encounter designer, and Greg Street (Ghostcrawler), a crab who needs no introduction. They discussed the arc of Arthas and the Lich King from Warcraft II through World of Warcraft (congratulations again to Blood Legion on their 10-man world-first). Please note that here there be spoilers for some details about the Arthas fight, so stay away if you want it all to be a surprise. The interview is fairly short, and a nice read if you have a few minutes. Here are my summary notes, though: In Warcraft III, a big part of Arthas’s role (design-wise) was to be the bridge between the human and undead campaigns. However, they didn’t always know how big a deal he was going to be in the ongoing story of the Warcraft universe. If you were around for the beginning of Wrath, you likely remember the developers talking about how
New Tauren skins found
Handclaw of the Scrolls of Lore Forums has uncovered something very intriguing in the Patch 3.3 PTR data files: New Tauren skins. Specifically, it looks like tribal war paint covering the face, arms, and chest, taking the form of bleeding wings on the chest. There’s red, white, and blue color versions for both males and females. There’s quite a few Tauren fans on the WoW.com staff, and we’ve been having quite a few conversations about the new Tauren lore and their place in Cataclysm, so you can bet this new discovery has us all atwitter. What could it mean though? There’s a few possibilities. For starters, there’s the introduction of the Sunwalkers, the Tauren Paladins and Priests, coming with Cataclysm. We’ve been getting progressive story bits about many of the new class and race combos as the patches progress, so it seems very possible that we could see Aponi and Tahu begin their training, with these new skins being tribal warpaint, a sign of their devotion to the sun. Could the wings be the Sunwalker version of Avenging Wrath? The other possibility (which is strongly suggested by the black fur of the Taurens in the data mined picture) is that these could be Grimtotems. Rumors strongly state that Garrosh is killing
Can’t get enough pony
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com’s (almost) daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today. I’m taking a break from piecing together the video from WoW.com’s recent run of the Forge of Souls to whip up a brand new edition of The Queue for you guys to read this afternoon. I went to Twitter for most of today’s questions, so don’t be surprised if they’re pretty short! AngerFork asked… “Theory time: Since Deadmines and Shadowfang Keep are coming back as Heroics, do you think any other dungeons will come back as Heroics? If so, which?” I don’t think there will be many more, if any at all, when Cataclysm launches. I figure they’re turning these into Heroics for one of two reasons. One, they’re updating them to reflect current events in the world. Or two, they’re just scaling them up to level 85 so newer players understand the background of current events. Someone who first leveled up in Wrath of the Lich King, or even Burning Crusade, might not know what happened in Shadowfang Keep and how it relates to the Worgen. In the context of what’s going down in Cataclysm, I could see Wailing Caverns
Queue: Irrelevant
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com’s (almost) daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today. Embedded video has absolutely not relevance to anything in this edition of The Queue. Why did I use it? Because I like the music. Do I really need more of a reason than that? Nope! Now let’s jump into the questions. Some of them came from right here on WoW.com, and others came from Twitter. Lavoz asked… “With Cataclysm, the blood elves will finally have access to the warrior class. Is there any information as to what order they will belong to? Will they be a part of the Blood Knights, or will we refer to them as Spellbreakers?” We haven’t heard anything about whether or not blood elven warriors will have any special sort of story behind them. As far as we know, they’ll just be generic muscular thugs wielding large clubs. Or majestic, skilled bladedancers… however you want to look at your warrior. That’s your thing, not mine. There’s nothing official about them so far, and I’m sure we’ll talk about it here on the site if that ever changes. metal_slime asked… “What is considered the
We got segments
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!
Naptime
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com’s (almost) daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today. I’m going to kick off today’s edition of The Queue with a question for you, the reader. It’s a gravely important question, so read carefully! What should I order from the local Chinese joint for dinner tonight? Should I go with my usual, shameful choice of orange chicken? Or should I go a spicier route and go for the Kung Pao? Heck, maybe I should bring a little variety to the table with a Pu Pu Platter? Help me, WoW.com! Sindrow asked… “Remember how faction switching caused all AT progress to be wiped? Is it safe to say that race change will not have similar effects, since everything is occurring within the same faction? Can you guys think of *any* negative result of a race change?” It’s way too early for us here at WoW.com to say anything about that, we won’t know until Blizzard launches the service. Personally, I don’t think it would be a problem. If I understand right, the problem is that the various quests are tied to your faction, and the faction change system didn’t set up quest equivalents across factions
Cataclysm zone overhauls
Okay, how did we miss this? We’ve been wondering about the level of change in each old-world zone for Cataclysm for months now, and the answer has actually been under our noses since BlizzCon. During the Art Panel, the above planning map was shown, along with some information to either side of it. We can’t make out everything in it, but there’s a lot of information if you know what you’re looking at. The zone colors, from what we can infer, indicate the level of overhaul each zone is receiving. Red is a heavy overhaul, yellow is moderate, green is light, and blue means a brand-new zone. The yellow stars indicate a dungeon, and the red stars indicate a raid. The white tabs each have a letter on them, indicating what in the zone was being changed at that particular point — L for level, Q for quests, etc. Astute readers will see some things jump out at them immediately, like Thousand Needles having two stars on it. The full list of visible zone changes after the break, along with other pertinent info. Disclaimer: While this image was captured during the BlizzCon 2009 Art Panel, the capture displays a photo taken by Blizzard staff, which is undated. We don’t know if it was a day before BlizzCon 2009 or six months before.
Cataclysm: The exhaustive list of old-world changes
World of Warcraft: Cataclysm is coming. Sometime. We’re at that point now where BlizzCon has been over for a few months and Blizzard is being pretty stingy with new information in the meantime. It’s a definite dry spell, but the same thing happened with Wrath — and then the Friends and Family Alpha began, and all bets were off. And while the F&F Alpha for Cataclysm hasn’t started yet (believe me, we’d know), that doesn’t mean you can’t stay informed. There’ve been bits and pieces of new info released, in PC Gamer magazine, on Twitter, and elsewhere on the internet. And we like to keep track of that! What’s come out is mostly new information on what’s going to happen to Azeroth. And we just recently decoded this planning map of Cataclysm zones, which is where some information comes from. So what this article is meant to be is a compendium of all known changes to old-world zones that’ll occur in Cataclysm, sorted by continent and zone. We’ll update whenever new information is released. Hit the jump to get caught up! Disclaimer: Some information may be outdated or incorrect by this stage in Cataclysm‘s development! KALIMDOR Ashenvale Overhaul level: Moderate. Levels
Blood and glory
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com’s (almost) daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today. I was going to kick off today’s edition of The Queue by embedding Black Eyed Peas’ I Gotta Feeling (slightly NSFW) since I mentioned it was a guilty pleasure of mine on yesterday’s Moviewatch. Unfortunately, the official Black Eyed Peas Youtube channel disabled embedding and I’m not going to be a jerk and hijack it from somebody else’s channel. So you get a Dragon Age screenshot instead. Hooray! Blood! No, we’re not getting paid to plug this game constantly. We’re just nerds. Nerd gamers. This is what we do. Ilmyrn asked… “Any word on whether we’ll ever see a non-Arena frost wyrm mount?” Well, there’s a frost wyrm model in patch 3.3, but I assume that’s to go with the latest arena season. So I’m going to say… no. The Gladiators get Frost Wyrms, the PvE players get Invincible. Cyanea asked… “Where does that picture come from?” The picture used on yesterday’s edition of The Queue is a time warp image from Zach Yonzon. On the left is his wife, and on the right
A trip to the stylist, part one
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