WoW p5.3 this week, highlights include

Patch 5.3 notes are out, for the Prod drop on May 21st. Ref: MMO-Champion – Patch 5.3 Live This Week for a full summary. I expect downtime to be bigish, with the downloader churning away. This means the cycle is less than three months between patches, and if the next patch comes quickly we might see a staggeringly fast end to the Pandaria story-lines. Blizzard’s website also has a nice prep summary.

I’m pondering the amount of ilevel 500+ gear which is being made available in one time rewards, and perhaps it is time to consider the offset as a priority.

A few highlights for me are:

• the return of the Item Upgrades, via that vendor. Yes, we can again decide if an existing upgrade is better than buying off-loot (” items upgraded with Valor will now cost 250 Valor Points to upgrade per 4 Item Levels, for a total of 500 Valor for 8 Item Levels per item “). Cool. Mr Robot and others will have their systems ready too if what I read is true.
• the ilevel 600 cloaks from the Wrathion quest chain. ilevel 600 is huge, and worth it for everyone. I want it, and want three of them.
• the Heroic Scenarios is a boon I’m looking forward to, not because I want to see that older content again, but because of the chance for the ilevel 516 gear. Including a quest that has a reward of a 516 built in. Wowhead has a comment which lists the rewards by armour type. Why on earth are these using the Pandarian models for blue and green loot? Lazy. A re-colour at least might have been nice – all emeralds and ruby.
• the Heroic scenarios need item level 480 to enter, and use a pre-made team of three. Still hopefully should be not too hard at ilevel 510.
• the new scenarios for the lead up lore/story to the Siege of Orgrimmar. Assuming that is the big deal in patch 5.4, this should get all the players happy with killing Orcs and agreeing that the War Chief is a bad guy, not a good-bad guy.
• a quest has been added that reveals the final Sha and some ilevel 502 boots. Nice upgrade for the slow and unlucky guys like me. Shamefully I’m planning on getting better than this, so I might just take the Tanking option instead of the Dps option.
• I know I should try the brawlers guild soon.
• the Darkspear Rebellion Quartermaster will sell re-colour of popular old Tier gear, upgrades to ilevel 489 which is nice for the alts and new main toons. I don’t mind at all they the stuff is available in a different way. They’ve chosen some nice sets, and as a DK I had access to my set anyway.
• we can now transmog from the Bank and Void Storage directly. Good. Nice change.
• the Heirloom Shields are in. Great news for alts. I’ve been saving the odd Justice Point for this.
• Lastly – I’d love a Hearthstone Beta. I’ve ripped on it recently as a distraction, but I am curious. HINT. Too strong? Nah. HINT HINT.

Overall I’m looking forward to the 5.3 patch. It is not a huge patch for content, rather is a prep patch. It is a great patch for gearing your toons. The folk who don’t get much are those who are already geared up beyond 522 or higher. Sorry guys, only the cloak for you.

I did not finish collecting the Wrathion tokens from boss kills in patch 5.2, but will get there soon. I also don’t run the downloader often, so I’m going to kick that off before bed tonight.

Happy Killing, TyphoonAndrew

Popular content observation

I read recently that WoW will be concentrating on scenarios rather than 5 mans. It started a pleasing debate over on the wow forums.It is worth a read through.

Quick thought – I think that the only reason people do scenarios and even 5 mans more than a few times is because they reward Valor points. The time/valor point is good, the experience is repetitive in the extreme. I know this is how I play, because as soon as I cap my Valor points each week I stop doing 5 mans and Scenarios.

Not true? So test this by removing the Valor reward from Scenarios and 5 mans for a patch and see how many people do them every day. Just because people are doing the content does not mean it is good, it means it is a means to an end.

(this was interesting from that thread – Sharmarli):

At this point I’m not really doing Scenarios or Heroics.  I have never done heroics this expansion (total of 9 I think when I got drug into guild runs) While I did a large number of scenarios initially to help gear up this Char the only reason I’ve been running since about the end of  November has been for quick valor points.

With the release of 5.2, however, I haven’t even been doing scenarios for the most part.  If I need extra VP I just go and kill the Isle rares for the 15VP books (made 135 VP last night in about 30-40 min of actual play time:  killed 6, went and made dinner, came back and killed 3 more).

Building new content should be an inbuilt part of the expected dev cycle. I know there is less money in the pot then before, but 8.5 million players is still a heck of a lot of players by any stretch of the imagination.

The devs have done great things by giving players more choice on how to earn these points, but we still need them. The old statement that Valor grinding is not “mandatory” is as silly today as it was before, we just have a wider range of ways to perform than grind.

TyphoonAndrew

Old news is good news

Some thoughts on what is now old news…

Valor points are not being reset (huzzah) to Justice points, and patch is set for 5.2 If you’re able to spend and then earn the valor for an upgrade it is still worth it, just don’t upgrade an item you’ll replace early (trinket, ring, etc) once you get into the new Reps. I shot a stack of Justice points on a basically useless heirloom item for a Shaman, because I have little else to purchase with them. Justice are pretty dull at the moment once you’re past a gear level. That is ok in the most part, but it would be nice to do something good with them.

In 5.2 we get new reps to grind out, new gear to loath the drop rate for, and new dailies to make the drop rate seem a secondary concern. Less yay, but something to get into.

New raids look good, in a way that is a new visual presentation (cybernetic aztec dinosaurs with lasers…..roar) and also a new set of mechanical challenges. Good news. Lore/RP wise it will be an interesting patch if only because we get closer to finding out why Garrosh goes bananas and why Jania does not follow suit and smash a few cities. I know she’s taken the road less traveled, but Garrosh is going to need to do some more shitty things before the rest of the horde will use him as an end-boss. He’s been an unmitigated arse so far and the horde racial leadership are happy with that. Well the ones who are alive are anyway.

Oh, and Wrathion! He continues to give the heroes gifts and boons, as we continue to follow his agenda. I feel that either he’s a major player i the end of this expansion, or the major NPC in the next expansion. It would be great to see a character transverse the expansions so that during Mists he helps and rewards, and then in the next expansion we see what and why he did particular things. I can’t help but think his goal is to restore the Black Dragon flight, and that might be brilliant or could be a total disaster for the players. It would be especially good if Wrathion is actually a creature of leadership, but not a “corrupted bad guy”. Sure his view might be different, and lets see him as a leader for the future stepping into the empty shoes of the other flights now that they have left.

The season 13 pvp gear for Death Knights looks nice, particularly the shoulders. The help is less so, but overall ok. The Shaman set is great, and stinks of a HP Lovecraft touch. Creepy Shamans.

Happy Killing, TyphoonAndrew.

Lore for the Fall of Theramore

Here is a great summary of the lost lore to do with the Fall of Theramore scenario, from the Wowinsider folks. Its a great summary that I’m going to read in detail a few more times. Kudos. I’m about 6 chapters into the book so far, and enjoying the lead up to what I know is about to happen to Theramore.

Al’akir defeat completes normal mode content

Sunday night the guild went back into the windy Throne, and decided to continue the fight against Al’akir. The team not only defeated Al’akir, but also did it on first shot for the evening. A one-shot is a darn good way to start a raid night, and the guys must have been really on their game.

This means that Insidious (my guild on Nagrand-US) have now defeated all the current normal mode raid content; scraping through before the patch 4.2 is released in the near future. I’m very pleased that the team were able to do it, and that the regular folks now have those sexy mounts. Congrats folks, well earned. We’re now jumping to hard modes for the early bosses.

The guild will now do what we did at the end of Lich King, and have two runs going – a progression raid where the guild proves that these kills were not just luck and determination, and a second set of raids which are to gear-up the folks coming through. This makes the “can I bring my alt” question a lot more prevalent, but the officers and raid lead have a really solid understanding of balance and when to switch folks, so we have the opportunity to get the kills and complete the achievement for some of the players who might have missed it. When in doubt, the mains have priority, and the main runs are always the most important. That said, some of the raiders have toons that are equally as competitive as their mains, so we have flexibility – which is a great way to start patch 4.2 Firelands content.

Personally I’ve seen some of the really tough fights, but missed some of the easier ones; like I have the Nef kill, but never completed the Omnitron system, and wiped on Al’akir but never seen the fight before it. My plan is to get these together before 4.1 hits, so I too can nab the mount and say I was one of the cool kids who did it when it was hard.

Happy gaming, may the great raids roll.

Stolen content WarcraftEmpireOnline?

Will the folks at WarcraftEmpireOnline also re-post my blogpost saying that they are ripping my content without credit?

• If they do, then they’re hardly worth the bandwidth to read as they’re posting anything.
• If they don’t then they’re applying some editorial control, which makes their use without credit (theft) even worse.

Acknowledge the use by Name and URL, or friggin stop guys. Its one thing to re-post, its another to call somebody anonymous.

I Hate Blog Scrapers (non-wow & nsfw)

Seems I’m getting a large amount of my content re-published in scraped form on some aggregation sites. I hate that. A lot.

If it was a commentary, useful feedback, or even abuse I’d be ok – but just re-posting for the purpose of link ads is off the scale wrong. Fu*kers don’t even credit my name in the feed, its just listed as “Random Feed”.

You’re on notice you leechy creepy bastards: every now and then I’m going to say something acidic, virulent, and mean. And there is no way in hell I’m going to link to you in comments and such; the height of rudeness. Trackbacks? Ha!

If you’re reading this, and its not on https://typhoonandrew.wordpress.com then its stolen. So how about some total mis-information for those wonderful scape-site:

• Hunter patch 3.1 will further reduce their dps; akin to the to-the-ground Paladin nurf
• Druid Tree form will have movement reduced by 15%, because you’re trees.
• Warlock Tier 8 gear set will feature a pink horns (much like donkey ears) with green sparkles on the top.
• Paladin seals will now need to be re-applied after Judgement.
• Mages will have be given new summon power akin to warlocks, so that warlocks can be removed from the game. And the new Pink T8 set that was for Warlocks becomes Mage t8. With a blue sparkles. Bet that stopped the mages laughing.

Arrg, enough. Scrape that you bastards.

Content clouds; somewhat cool?

Its what all the cool bloggers are doing, or in fact what is be coming more prominent; to expose the meta data about a piece of information to the viewer. Wordle.net offers a tag-cloud of your rss content. Is this actually valuable to a reader?