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Icecrown Preview

October 6th, 2009 by Kyth

Blizzard just posted this:

Icecrown Citadel: The Frozen Throne

All across the lands of Northrend, many battles have been fought against the vile Scourge. Countless lives have been lost since the Alliance and Horde first reached the frozen wastes, but the champions of Azeroth continue to march forward. Now Icecrown Citadel, the cornerstone of the Scourge’s power and the home base of the Lich King, is their final target. Tirion Fordring and the Argent Crusade have forged an alliance with Darion Mograine and the Knights of the Ebon Blade to form the Ashen Verdict. The strongest combatants of this coalition, along with the champions of the Alliance and Horde, will lead the charge against the citadel.

This dungeon reveals the culminating story events and battles of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion pack. Join the legendary heroes Highlord Tirion Fordring, High Overlord Saurfang, Muradin Bronzebeard, Highlord Darion Mograine, and King Varian Wrynn in an epic battle against the Scourge and their master. Icecrown Citadel features 10- and 25-player versions of the raid dungeon, and each version has 12 encounters. Each encounter can be fought in either normal or Heroic mode, and players can use a new user interface feature to toggle easily between difficulties. The rewards in the raid dungeon start at item level 251 in the normal mode with 10-player encounters, increase to item level 264 in the Heroic mode mode with 10 players and the normal mode with 25-player encounters, and then finally reach item level 277 in the Heroic mode with 25 players.

Grand Entrance of the Citadel

After breaching the fortress, players will face a legion of undead guards directed to repel any invaders. Commanding the defenders is Lord Marrowgar, a monstrosity fused together from the bones of the undead. Supreme Overseer of the Cult of the Damned, Sister Deathwhisper is the next opponent. She bolsters the faith of her followers by promising them the opportunity to give eternal service in undeath.

As they continue their ascent, the Alliance and Horde heroes ultimately end up outside of the citadel where their hatred for one another erupts into a battle for dominance over the Rampart of Skulls. Players will join in battle alongside High Overlord Saurfang on the Orgrim’s Hammer gunship or Muradin Bronzebeard on The Skybreaker in a unique encounter. Each faction will protect its gunship and try to destroy the other one in a back-and-forth battle to see who is truly worthy of facing the Lich King.

The Lich King’s most powerful death knight then stands as the final obstacle for the heroes to enter the upper reaches of the citadel.
The Wings of Icecrown Citadel

After the heroes of the Alliance or Horde defeat the other faction on the gunships and wipe out the creatures near the entrance, players will venture into an area with three separate wings. Here they will face a multitude of terrors that must be vanquished in order to confront the Lich King.

In the Frostwing Halls players will battle alongside the Ashen Verdict and push into the lair of the deadly frost wyrm Sindragosa, who continues to strengthen her brood with the help of Ymirheim’s vrykul. Along the way, the heroes will stumble upon Valithria Dreamwalker, a captured green dragon whom the Scourge is using as a test subject for their own ends….

The Plagueworks contains the most twisted experiments ever produced by the Scourge. In this wing players will face two new forms of abomination in Festergut and Rotface, who currently protect their devious creator, Professor Putricide.

The Crimson Hall contains the leaders of the San’layn, undead blood elves who oversee the Scourge’s operations throughout Azeroth. The blood-princes Valanar, Keleseth, and Taldaram were raised into undeath by the Lich King to avenge themselves while protecting their blood-queen, Lana’thel.
The Frozen Throne

After clearing all three wings, players will ascend to the Frozen Throne, where the Lich King and his runeblade, Frostmourne, await to deliver them to their deaths….

3.3 Weekly raid quests

October 1st, 2009 by Kyth

Looks like there will be weekly raid quests in 3.3, according to the information on mmo-champion.

From sigrie on mmo-champion:

  • Sartharion Must Die! (#24579)
  • Anub’Rekhan Must Die! (#24580)
  • Noth the Plaguebringer Must Die! (#24581)
  • Instructor Razuvious Must Die! (#24582)
  • Patchwerk Must Die! (#24583)
  • Malygos Must Die! (#24584)
  • Flame Leviathan Must Die! (#24585)
  • Razorscale Must Die! (#24586)
  • Ignis the Furnace Master Must Die! (#24587)
  • XT-002 Deconstructor Must Die! (#24588)
  • Lord Jaraxxus Must Die! (#24589)
  • Lord Marrowgar Must Die! (#24590)

Luckily none of them are too deep in the dungeon.

3.3 PTR notes

October 1st, 2009 by Kyth

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/test-realm-patchnotes.html

World of Warcraft PTR Patch 3.3.0

The latest test realm patch notes can always be found at http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/test-realm-patchnotes.html

The latest patch notes can always be found at http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/

General

  • Icecrown Citadel
    • The Forge of Souls, the first wing of the 5-player dungeon, is currently available for testing.
    • Additional Icecrown Citadel dungeon and raid content will be made available in future test builds.
  • Dazed: Creatures attacking a player from behind can no longer cause players level 1-5 to be dazed, and have a reduced chance to cause players level 6-10 to be dazed.
  • Copied Test Realm characters will no longer be copied with their achievement history in order to better facilitate the character copy process.

Classes: General

  • Default Equipment: Starting weapons are now more uniform. Rogues now start with a pair of daggers equipped. All other classes except shamans start with a 2-handed weapon equipped and the required skill already known. Shamans start with a 1-handed weapon and a shield, as they benefit more from the shield than they would from a 2-handed weapon.
  • Glancing Blows: The mage, warlock, and priest classes no longer have an increased chance for their melee attacks to be glancing blows; and the damage penalty due to their glancing blows is the same as for other classes.
  • Health and Mana Regeneration: These regeneration rates have been increased by up to 200% for low level characters. As a player’s level increases, the regeneration rates gradually reduce, returning to normal rates at level 15.
  • Spell Mana Costs: These costs have been reduced for almost all lower level spell ranks. In general, if a spell decreased in cost with a higher level rank in patch 3.2.0, that spell now has the decreased cost at all ranks. In addition, spells learned before level 20 with reduced cast times and/or durations have even further reduced mana costs, proportionate to their reduction in cast time or damage.

Races: General

  • Racial Attribute Bonuses: These bonuses have been recalibrated to even out the amount of starting health on the various races. All races start with a standardized level of stamina, except for orcs, dwarves, and tauren who now start with 1 extra point of stamina. For each class, bonuses and penalties to all attributes have been adjusted so that each race has an equal attribute total.

Death Knights

  • Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle: There is now a 1-handed version of this rune in addition to the current 2-handed rune.
  • Talents
    • Unholy
      • Night of the Dead: Now reduces the damage your pet takes from area-of-effect damage by 45/90%, but no longer applies to area-of-effect damage caused by other players.

Druids

  • Pets
    • Avoidance (passive): Now reduces the damage your pets take from area-of-effect damage by 90%, but no longer applies to area-of-effect damage caused by other players.

Hunters

  • Misdirection: Redesigned. Instead of having finite charges, it now begins a 4-second timer when the hunter using Misdirection performs a threat-generating attack, during which all threat generated by the hunter goes to the friendly target. In addition, multiple hunters can now misdirect threat to the same friendly target simultaneously.
  • Talents
    • Beast Mastery
      • Intimidation: If the hunter’s pet is in melee range of its target, the stun from Intimidation will now be applied immediately instead of on the pet’s next swing or attack.
  • Pets
    • Avoidance: Now reduces the damage your pet takes from area-of-effect damage by 30/60/90%, but no longer applies to area-of-effect damage caused by other players.

Mages

  • Talents
    • Arcane
      • Arcane Empowerment: This talent now also grants 1/2/3% increased damage done by the mage’s party or raid for 10 seconds after the mage gets a critical strike with Arcane Explosion, Arcane Missiles, Arcane Barrage, or Arcane Blast. This effect is exclusive with Ferocious Inspiration and Sanctified Retribution.
  • Pets
    • Avoidance (passive): Now reduces the damage your pets take from area-of-effect damage by 90%, but no longer applies to area-of-effect damage caused by other players.

Priests

  • Pet
    • Avoidance (passive): Now reduces the damage your pet takes from area-of-effect damage by 90%, but no longer applies to area-of-effect damage caused by other players.

Rogues

  • Dual Wield: Rogues now know this ability upon logging into the game at level 1.
  • Stealth: This ability no longer has multiple ranks. While active, the single rank of this ability (available at level 1) allows rogues to move at 70% movement speed.
  • Vanish: For the first second after this ability is used, neither Vanish nor Stealth can be broken by taking damage or being the victim of a hostile spell or ability.

Shamans

  • Fire Nova Totem: This totem has been replaced with a new spell, Fire Nova, which is available at the same ranks as the old Fire Nova Totem. Existing characters will automatically learn this new spell in place of the totem. With a Fire Totem active, shamans will be able to use Fire Nova (fire magic) to emit the same area-of-effect damage as the old Fire Nova Totem from the active Fire Totem, not consuming the totem in the process. Fire Nova will activate a 1.5-second global cooldown when used and has a 10-second spell cooldown. The caster must be within 30 yards of the totem to use this ability, but does not need to be within line of sight of the totem.
  • Talents
    • Elemental Combat
      • Improved Fire Nova Totem: Renamed Improved Fire Nova. This talent now provides an additional 10/20% damage to the spell and reduces the cooldown by 2/4 seconds.

Warlocks

  • Pets
    • Avoidance (passive): Now reduces the damage your pets take from area-of-effect damage by 90%, but no longer applies to area-of-effect damage caused by other players.
    • Summon Imp: This ability is now available from the trainer for level 1 warlocks and no longer requires a quest to learn.

Warriors

  • Victory Rush: This ability is now trainable at level 6.
  • Talents
    • Protection
      • Damage Shield: This ability will no longer trigger any chance-on-hit effects from the warrior or the opponent it damages.

User Interface

  • Quest Tracking Feature
    • This system is currently under development and is not fully functional.
  • Looking For Group System
    • This feature is undergoing several improvements and is not available for testing at this time.
  • For additional notes on Lua and XML changes please visit the UI & Macros forum.

Graphics

  • A new feature has been added to the D3D graphics engine to improve texture management (particularly for Windows XP users). This is currently enabled by default on the public test realms. For more information please visit our Test Realm forum.

Professions

  • Enchanting
    • Black Magic: This enchantment now sometimes increases haste rating for the caster rather than inflicting the caster’s target with a damage-over-time effect. It is also now triggered by landing any harmful spell rather than inflicting damage with a spell.

Items

  • Glyphs
    • Death Knights
      • Glyph of Icy Touch: Instead of granting additional runic power, this glyph now causes Frost Fever to deal 20% additional damage.
    • Shamans
      • Glyph of Fire Nova Totem: Renamed Glyph of Fire Nova. This glyph now reduces the cooldown of Fire Nova by 3 seconds.

Bug Fixes

  • Druids
    • Rejuvenation: Rank 15 of this spell was providing a 15-second duration. It has been correctly reduced to 12 seconds.
  • Mages
    • Flame Strike: Some ranks of this spell had an incorrect cast time of 3 seconds. All ranks now share a 2-second cast time.

Abyssal Shatter getting hotfixed in

September 30th, 2009 by Kyth

Originally intended to go live with 3.2.2, this didn’t — but Blizzard never posted about why or why not and didn’t respond.

I guess this is their response! Bibi on mmo-champion reports that you can train it on the EU servers. Presumably it will be going live in the US soon also.

There is no cooldown on it, and it’s a very generous “shatter” (although disappointing that it can’t produce shards — those are still needed in high quantities, and you can’t get them in any way from raiding.) It looks like it can turn an Abyss Crystal into at least 7-17 dust (possibly more/less) or 2-6 essences.

Ghostcrawler “stepping back” a bit

September 26th, 2009 by Kyth

In a post today Ghostcrawler said:

I always said that when my posting was doing more harm than good that maybe it was time to stop. I think I’ll at least chill it out a little. I will continue to read the forums though. If you want to make sure the WoW developer see your feedback, this is still a good place to post.

While I’m not sure I agree with him, I think it’s a good experiment at least: his presence managed to turn the WoW forums into a place of at least slightly better discussion than was there before.

And without a doubt it will result in more time for him: I know from experience with these blog posts (the one right below this being a prime example), that while it’s easy to put together initial thoughts, it can be time consuming and tiresome to try to pick exact words carefully so that you reduce the chance that people can re-interpret what you said to support their own agenda. I’m certain he has more productive things to do with his time than to go back and forth with people arguing semantics (I know I do!)

I will be interested to see what happens to the forums with less “blue” posting: will people continue their habits of posting there, or will the better posters desert those forums again, and they’ll be even more of a wasteland of meaningless drivel.

I do wonder if the Great Ghostcrawler Experiment would have gone better if, rather than replying to threads (and thereby giving the impression of “blessing” some threads and “ignoring” other threads), that he may have been better off with a more blog-style format, where he’d periodically start his own threads that would address issues or questions he had seen over the past few days or week.

The Fallacy of “Doable”

September 25th, 2009 by Kyth

This is mostly about Bloodlust, but it also spills over into a bit of Anub ranting, which I’ve kept confined to guildchat and irc (irc.gamesurge.net #stratfu) up until now.

I tried to post about this on the WoW boards but got greeted with “ur bad if u think u need lust 2 complete an encounter HAHA u suck.” No one there with the capacity to understand the difference between “doable” and “easier” and why it matters on the cutting edge of content (which varies by guild — it could be world-first Anub, it could be just getting past faction champions on normal.) So instead I post it here.

  • GC: 10’s are doable without Bloodlust/Heroism
  • “Doable” helps repeat kills more than first kills
  • What does this have to do with bosses?
  • The fallacy of “doable” has nothing to do with skill or world rank
  • Bring the player not the class
  • Armchair designer time

Text of the article is after the cut:

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Apologies for the slowness on ToC strats

September 24th, 2009 by Kyth

My focus has been full-time on creating the new version of StratFu, which will allow, among other things, you guys to contribute your strategies.

Have a better way to do things? Think our way sucks ass? Want to kite the mob to Vael’s room instead?

It will also have things like a far better commenting system and a host of other features.

There will be an alpha version in “not too long” and I’ll be looking for people interested in helping to test and contribute some content so we can shake the bugs out of the system.

I’ve been trying to work on this for the past year, but I never had the time if I was also maintaining strats and movies both. We’ll get strats up here soon, but movies are unlikely until Icecrown.

9/23 Hotfixes

September 23rd, 2009 by Kyth

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=19820412001&sid=1&pageNo=1#4:

  • The Val’kyr Twins will now heal for more in Heroic difficulties and ignore any heal dampening effects.
  • Koralon now pauses after casting Blazing Embers before casting Burning Breath.
  • Reclaimed Thunderstrike and Reinforced Thunderstrike will now properly grant attack power to Druids in Cat Form, Bear Form, and Dire Bear Form as listed in the item tooltip.

And I have to repost this, courtesy of Mearis, of Ye Olde Goone Squade on The Venture Co, EU. This is the strat that was the reason the Twins heal got changed to 50%:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-3zshJ0YOA&feature=sub

Critical PW:Shield bug on live

September 23rd, 2009 by Kyth

Update: Fixed on our server as of 3pm PST. I’d suggest double-checking on your server if you’re worried before raid. Just have a priest shield you with the glyph and cast a single spell at a training dummy. If recount/logs show you have the damage credited to you, you’re fine.

I just confirmed (11:45 PST) the reports in this thread on MMO-Champion that the Power Word: Shield glyph is bugged on live.

Steps to reproduce the bug:

  1. Have a priest get the Power Word: Shield glyph
  2. Cast it on someone
  3. Your next attack will be credited to the priest, including all side effects of it

Not all attacks can be affected, but given that critical attacks like taunt and even at least some physical attacks like maul are affected means it’s a very big deal until it’s fixed. If you don’t have the glyph, the bug doesn’t happen.

Even the side effects happen to the priest: so, for example, if you nabbed a drain soul, you will get soulshards.

If you cast it on someone mid-cast you won’t steal the currently-casted spell but may catch the next one (we couldn’t reliably grab the next spell, just sometimes.)

Arcane and Fire in 3.2.2

September 22nd, 2009 by Kyth

You are unlikely to see a huge DPS boost when going to arcane. It’s similar DPS to fire (within 5%) on tank and spank fights now. Fire is stronger on any fight with 2+ targets for a portion of the time, and is probably stronger on mobility fights as well.

For fire/frostfire, it’s definitely worth getting Combustion now. Just drop a point in Student of the mind or World in Flames.

If you do go arcane, however, it’s a simple rotation now:

Spam AB until you get a missile barrage proc. Make sure you have a full 4 stacks of AB. Then cast a Missile Barrage Arcane Missiles.

So if you get the MB proc on the first AB, you still keep casting AB until you get to 4. If you don’t have one at 4, you keep casting until you do. It seems likely this is sustainable, although only actual raiding will tell.

Spec for Arcane Barrage but don’t use it unless you’re moving.

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