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WoW 5.05 Patch Notes

September 12, 2012 by

Patch 5.05 has landed and it’s got a nice little swag of bug fixes, including as promised the CPU usage / overheating bug and some class balance changes as well for Druids, Hunters, Paladins and Warlocks.

Here’s the patch notes in all their glory for you:

 

WORLD OF WARCRAFT PATCH 5.0.5

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

CLASSES

  • Many tooltips have been corrected to account for recent class balance adjustments.
  • Druid
    • The 25% speed increase granted by Cat Form should no longer stack with the speed increase of Dash.
  • Hunter
    • All hunter aspects have been removed from the global cooldown, and they again share a 1 second category cooldown
  • Paladin
    • Holy Shock’s base damage has been reduced, and its spellpower coefficient has been increased.
  • Warlock
    • Havoc’s cooldown has been reduced from 45 to 25 seconds.
    • The missile effect of Chaos Wave should no longer display erratically when cast on a moving target.

BUG FIXES

  • Well of Eternity
    • The spell graphic for Arcane Bomb during the Queen Azshara encounter has been reduced to a reasonable size.
  • Ulduar
    • The Silence and Pacify effects from Conservator’s Grip are now removed from players once they step within the appropriate area radius of a Healthy Spore mushroom.
  • Dragon Soul
    • Player pets should no longer experience pathing issues when attacking Deathwing’s Arm Tentacles.
    • Congealing Bloods now move at slower base speed.
  • Master Looters can again assign loot to players in other groups within a raid.
  • The Refer-A-Friend Summon should again function as expected.
  • Worgen players on pre-Cataclysm accounts should be able to accept and complete all Gilneas quests.
  • Players should again be able to teleport out of the Firelands Hatchery in Hyjal if they have completed Aessina’s Miracle.
  • Players should be able to use the new Fishing spell where appropriate.
  • Crossing coalesced zone boundaries should not duplicate profession recipes.
  • Players should no longer inappropriately receive the “Requires master riding skill” or “Requires artisan riding skill” errors when attempting to mount certain mounts.
  • Items in the Auction House UI should no longer display in reverse order when sorted.
  • The PvP node capture bar should be back in expected locations such as Wintergrasp, Tol Barad and Venture Bay.
  • Players should no longer be placed into battlegrounds that they have downvoted while queueing for a Random battleground.
  • Flying over Wintergrasp when no battle is active should no longer cause a forced dismount.
  • Accepting a quest that flags you for PvP combat should no longer prevent you from accepting further quests.
  • As he deserves, Crithto should now be attackable by both Alliance and Horde players.
  • Resolved a Mac issue related to CPU usage.
  • [Taiwan and China only] Fixed an issue that was preventing the white Murloc pet Terky from appearing in the Pet Journal.

 

Filed Under: General News, Patch Notes, WoW Tagged With:

Through The Mist: More On 5.04

September 12, 2012 by

Through the Mist is a regular column from Luke Le Page covering everything World of Warcraft. If you’d like something covered in a future column, drop us a line!

Firstly I wanted to apologise for the delay between columns, it has been a pretty busy time for me.

By now, we have all had time to adapt to the changes made by Blizzard in 5.04, and just in time with Mists just around the corner. There have been a lot of polarised opinions about the new talent system within the community, but it seems to be settling (for the majority of classes) now that people have had time to familiarise themselves with builds.

The first thing I did with 5.04 was log all of my characters in and assign their new talents. Having played the beta quite a lot, I was fairly familiar with where I wanted to go with each character so it didn’t take me long, I would like to mention that a lot of players on my realm where struggling to grasp these new talent trees at first.

Still, I had something of a learning curve actually putting the new talents to the test using Blizzard’s Looking For Raid function, I won’t get into the merits or lack thereof regarding this feature but it definitely served my purposes well when it came to trying out their new builds outside of a guild raid. It took a little while for me to really get into the rotations, having only really played a handful of dungeons on beta – most of my time had been spent levelling various classes and exploring. Once I found a rotation I was comfortable with, I barely noticed the differences. Sure there are a few new abilities such as Dispatch to work into rotations, but it seemed to be a fairly seamless merge into the new system.

I noticed, as did most classes, a fairly strong increase in DPS. This of course is because most of the new abilities and talents are attuned to Level 90 stats. With our current stat budgets we’re at the top end of performance for this expansion and will likely see lower relative dps at 90 than we are currently seeing.

I have also enjoyed the changes to Holy Paladin and I am tossing up on who to level first and progress into raiding for MoP.

So how did your experience of 5.04 go? Are you enjoying the changes or do you hate them? Did it have any  effect on which characters you want to level?

Filed Under: General News, Opinion, WoW Tagged With:

Blizzard Start TV Spots for Mists of Pandaria

September 10, 2012 by

Blizzard in the US have started promoting the upcoming expansion on TV, with two different advertisements taken from the first cinematic released a bit over a week ago.

Here are the two ads:

For the avid and active WoW player there’s not much in there to get excited about, but we’re obviously not the audience. I also think it might have been good to show a second or two of actual gameplay.

What do you think?

Filed Under: General News, News, WoW Tagged With: ,

WoW 5.04 and Overheating Issues: Fix On The Way

September 9, 2012 by

Update: Blizzard have mentioned a fix is on the way in Beta, 5.0.5 (16048):

So good news there!

—————

There’s been a bit of discussion on the Battle.net forums and elsewhere on some issues with the WoW 5.04 client causing a computer to run very hot i.e at 100% or more of CPU usage. I can vouch for this myself in that I’ve seen my Mac laptop running at 128% of CPU usage (don’t ask me how that works) when playing the game proper.

Here’s my CPU usage sitting at the login screen (click on image for full-size):

There’s a number of threads discussing the issue – this one being a prime example. Initially it was thought it was affecting Macs only but there’s increasing reports of PC users copping the same. Additionally, some Mac users, including me, are seeing the stuttering / graphic line effect occur sometimes when opening in-game windows such as the talent window etc.

There’s no word from Blizzard on the issue yet that we’re aware of, but we’ll update this post once there is something substantive.

Over to you: are you experiencing any big heating issues since the 5.04 update?

Filed Under: General News, Support, WoW Tagged With: ,

Where Is The Darkmoon Rabbit Located? Right Here

September 1, 2012 by

Are you ready to take on one of the cutest and most ferocious bosses in WoW? Then here’s where you’ll find it (right where the pink X is):

Filed Under: Maps, WoW Tagged With:

Oceanic Soap Box: Gander At The Pandas?

August 30, 2012 by

It’s an embarrassment of riches at the moment with MMOs. Guild Wars is only a few days old, SWTOR is close to going Free to Play, and World of Warcraft just had Patch 5.04 drop, the last one before the Mists of Pandaria expansion hits in late September.

So let’s focus on Pandas for a few minutes. For ex-players of WoW, is the latest expansion enough to draw you back? For people who’ve never played: is the game too old to consider? For current players like me: what are you liking or hating from your first 24 hours with 5.04?

Let the debate begin!

Filed Under: General News, Op-Ed, WoW Tagged With: ,

WoW 5.04 Final Patch Notes

August 29, 2012 by

Well it’s happened. The last significant patch before Mists of Pandaria hits, has been released to the live servers – once maintenance is done of course.

Like any pre-expansion patch there’s plenty of changes, and we have the full patch notes for you below. Also, don’t forget our own preview of some of the 5.04 details as experienced from Beta here.

It’s also a time that Blizzard does some serious housekeeping with your WoW install, so before you can start playing the patch you’ll need to have completed the optimisation process (pictured). I love this as it clears valuable hard drive space – I’m funny like that.

So get optimising, and while you’re waiting, have a browse through the full patch notes (we’ll update further once the Battke.net site is up in full):

 

World of Warcraft Patch 5.0.4

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

General

Account-wide Achievements, pets, and mounts

In Patch 5.0.4 and beyond, the majority of your character’s Achievements, pets, and mounts will be shared with your other characters.

Please read: Bringing Achievements to the Account Level, by Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street
World Event: Attack on Theramore Isle

Warchief Garrosh, obsessed with assuring the Horde’s supremacy over Kalimdor, launches an all-out attack against Jaina’s island home of Theramore. Though valiant Alliance defenders rush to repel the sudden onslaught, they’ll soon find themselves unprepared for the terrible scope of Garrosh’s true plans…

This Scenario will become available in the weeks leading up to the launch of Mists of Pandaria on September 25.

AOE Looting

Area of effect looting comes to World of Warcraft with this patch. After killing a group of enemies in close proximity, when you loot one of their corpses, the loot window will include items from all of the nearby corpses for which you have loot rights.

BattleTag support in World of Warcraft

Players who have enabled their BattleTag will now be able to:
– See BattleTag friends in your friends list.
– Add and remove BattleTag friends.
– Send BattleTag invites to other players via right-click.

Cross-Realm Zones

In some zones, players are now able to form a group with other players from a select pool of realms.

When a player is in a zone that is set as a “cross-realm zone”, in addition to seeing other players from their native realm, they’ll also seamlessly see (and be able to play with) players from other realms.

Players will always be able to group and quest as they normally would with players from their native realm.

This functionality will be enabled for a limited number of realms at first, and will be granted to additional realms as we near the release of Mists of Pandaria.

Classes: General

All classes have been updated with a new talent system, improved abilities, and spells (accessible throughout levels 1-85). Your character’s talents have been reset.

Many old talents have been converted to specialization abilities.

Druids now have access to a fourth class specialization: Guardian.

New spells are now learned automatically. Class trainers are only needed to change talents, glyphs, class specialization, or to utilize the dual specialization feature.

All characters now take 40% less damage from other players.

Currency Conversion

Valor points have been converted to Justice points, and Conquest points have been converted to Honor points.

Neither of the resultant currencies (Justice and Honor) have an enforced hard-cap at this time.

Players are no longer able to earn Valor or Conquest points (bosses drop Justice, and arenas are closed).

Items formerly purchasable for Valor/Conquest are available for Justice/Honor.

Items

Spell Penetration has been replaced by PvP Power on existing items.

Head enchants removed

Enchants that modify the gear in your head slot have been removed from the game. This includes older head enchants of every type.

Relics, ranged, and thrown items

The slot in which ranged, relics, and thrown items were previously equipped has been removed. All weapons should now be equipped in the weapon slot.

Ranged weapons, including wands, have been adjusted to be more powerful.

Ranged weapons no longer have a minimum range.

Professions

The glyph system has been updated. Many class glyphs have been added, altered, or moved to different glyph types.

Prime glyphs have been removed.

Chef’s Award and Dalaran Cooking Award have been removed. Existing awards have been converted to Epicurean’s Award.

Quests

The cap for daily quests has been removed.

There is no longer a displayed count of daily quests completed.

User Interface

There is a new user interface for your mounts and pets.

Character creation screens have been updated.

Buffs have been consolidated in the UI.

New roll results frame added. This new feature can be accessed by clicking the word “[Loot]” in chat, or by typing “/loot”.

The PvE queue frames have been unified. You can now queue for dungeons, raids, and other queue-able content in one handy place.

Vendors now offer item filtering.

Spellbooks have been updated to reflect changes to core abilities, and now include a brief overview of specializations.

The Dungeon Journal has been expanded with information on all pre-Cataclysm encounters.

A new help system has been added to many frames. You can toggle this on and off by clicking the “i” button in the upper left corner of the frame.

Mac

Mac OS X 10.5 is no longer supported.

Added full support for Retina displays.

Added support for game resolutions that match Mac screen aspect ratios.

Switching between Windowed and Fullscreen display modes should be faster.

A “Help” menu has been added, so that players can quickly navigate to support pages.

A menu item that allows players to copy system information to the Clipboard has been added.

A menu item that reveals various game files and folders in Finder has been added.

Over to you: is there anything in the patch that’s surprised you / got you excited / made you want to punch your monitor?

Filed Under: General News, WoW Tagged With:

/gchat: Swings, Roundabouts and Blenders

August 28, 2012 by

/gchat is an ongoing column on guilds and the fun, conflicts, laughs and rage-quits they contain. If you have a topic you’d like covered, drop our guild guru Jemima Moore a line!

Raid Team Selection. Yep, I said it. It’s a dirty word. It’s an ugly word. Ok, it’s three words but I’m bringing them out of the closet and shining a light on the shabby, shameful, heart-wrenching world of raid team selection – no holds barred.

The oldest and arguably most maligned way to assemble a raid team is the Playground Panel.

It comes in many forms from “everyone be on at 7 and we’ll see who’s on” to “I’ll be picking teams based on class balance and gear” and is often characterised by a green wall of furtive questions around  7:15pm AEST: “Are we raiding tonight?” “What time is it starting?” “Have invites gone out yet?” It may seem harmless enough, but rest assured it’s all a euphemism for “I’m too lazy to care about anyone ‘cept me and mah boyz.”

It’s a bad system. Designed and perpetuated by a select few who want the maximum number of warm bodies to fill raid slots for the minimum effort. It promotes elitism, anxiety, dissent and disappointment as even the most seasoned raider can’t help feeling at least a momentary lump in the throat wondering whether they’ll get to go – and only the biggest narcissist will leave someone behind without at least a momentary twang of guilt. The best case scenario is you didn’t set aside an entire evening for nothing and the majority of the team made it through the selection process with enough confidence intact to actually perform.

Thankfully, this arcane system of selection has evolved and most guilds have moved on to more structured modes of selection. If yours hasn’t, I suggest you shop around.

The Rotating Roster with a Team Split Twist is the most common of these. Guilds divide their raiders into fixed, over-sized teams and schedule the extras on a rotating stand-by schedule.

It’s a much fairer method and provides a lot more flexibility in terms of attendance. Plus there’s an argument that sticking with the same people in the same roles makes progression easier and more efficient. There are some hidden drawbacks though.

Tanks and healers are typically not rotated as much as dps. If they are, it falls on a few members of the team to maintain two sets of gear and the skills to fill those roles on odd nights.

The counter-argument to easier and more efficient progression is reduced development of skills across the broader team which often makes the next fight harder. Plus, you’re back to wiping a few times on a boss you usually one-shot when that key taunter/runner/add collector isn’t around.

It sucks to have your standard rotation night come up just after you spent an entire evening wiping on a boss and know the team will kill him next raid without you. The only things that sucks worse is having it happen twice.

Unapologetic 1980’s reference foisted on this great post by the sentimental Editor

Then there’s the ‘guild killer’ that’s more insidious than cancer: the A-team / B-team split. One team due to subtle (or not so subtle) differences in make-up, happens to progress faster than the other. Maybe that team has an extra taunt, a speed boost or a min/maxing dps of a certain class that makes a hard boss just a little easier. The acquisition of gear and new skills they’re developing skyrocket them ahead of the other teams and A-grade egos develop in line with an A-team tag. As the gap in progression widens, so does the ability for players to interchange teams and, over time, the individual groups become insular and cliquey. A vicious circle ensues until one day someone wonders out loud why they’re tolerating the whiney/egotistical pack of QQers/l33t jerks on the other team at all. There’s usually casualties.

All too frequently, guilds with this make up can’t ride the ebbs and flows of raiding through multiple expansions and inevitably one team breaks away to form their own guild ready to start the cycle over again.

In order to overcome these problems, some guilds are now guaranteeing raid spots for players willing to commit to 100% attendance (or close to it) and are mixing raiders up from lock-out to lock-out. I call it “Will it Blend?” and Aftermath tried it this season. It’s not a perfect system by any stretch but it does engender whole-guild camaraderie, significantly reduces the drama surrounding kills and loot drops and that in turn develops both loyalty and pride in oneself and the guild. It also requires a team of skilled and committed raiders who show up every week ready to do anything but that’s kind of a chicken and egg thing. The downside is that without guilded raiders on stand-by, real life getting in the way becomes a huge issue. Assembling and balancing teams each week is no small issue and maintaining a wide and varied friends list to PUG from takes a lot of time.

As an aside, Murphy’s law holds true every time – a PuG will always win the /roll on set gear. And finally, when there’s no side door to nudge a lacklustre player to, it occasionally forces you to have conversations that are more honest than you’d like.

I can’t help but think there has to be a middle ground. On the one hand, it’s a game and requiring 100% attendance for a hobby is pretty hard core. On the other hand, less than 100% attendance when multiplied by the number of people in your raid team, means that somewhere between 7 and 24 people that set aside their evening are adversely affected to at least some degree every single raid.

In a good MMO, raids are hard enough that the individuals in the team need to work pretty hard on their class, their gear and their research to be there in the first place. Yet developers don’t allow any flexibility in raid size or balance for sickness, working late, someone’s 21st birthday, wife aggro or the Grand Final. Guilds and players are expected to somehow overcome real life and field a team of an exact size and class balance each and every week.  Working within these limited parameters, it’s hoped that Raid Leaders can minimise disappointment, inconvenience and drama while providing a fulfilling and satisfying group experience for a set of highly competitive and motivated individuals.

Anyone else think these mechanics are somewhat at odds?

What BioWare, as a developer, has done to help is make a point of supporting server communities.  On the Empire side of Dalborra end-game raiding guilds have embraced that. The GMs of Prophets of Agony, Tenacity, First Legion, Reach (now part of Violation) and Aftermath formed a network of guilds that “borrow” raiders from each other for the night or the week. We try and make sure all our raiders get a run through somewhere and we try our best to help each other out with any bodies we can muster when another team is short. There’s still a healthy dose of competition between the guilds, but there’s just as many woots and gratz in /1 Denova on Wednesday night.

Again, it’s not a perfect system but it is better than the sand-box shenanigans we suffered in primary school.

I’d love to hear your stories of the best and worse raid team selection techniques you’ve come across.

Filed Under: General News, Guild Wars 2, Guilds, SWTOR, The Secret World, WoW Tagged With: ,

WoW Remote Auction House And Guild Chat Now Free

August 27, 2012 by

Blizzard Software have come to the party with their Mobile Armory app, now offering the remote guild chat and auction house for free.

It’s available for Android and iOS, with the following features:

Full Character Profiles

3D Viewer
Activity Feed
Achievements
Character Stats

Remote Auction House

Browse Auctions
Create Auctions
Bid on Items
Claim Your Gold

Remote Guild Chat

Guild & Officers Channels
Saved Whisper Conversations
Guildmate Presence
Chat Push Notifications

Other Features

Guild Profiles
Realm Status
Talent Calculator
Item Browser

So if you want to constantly check how your Hogger Shanks are doing on the auction house, you’re now set.

Thanks to ever-faithful reader Gail for the heads-up!

Filed Under: General News, News, WoW Tagged With:

Through The Mist: Patch 5.04 In-Depth

August 22, 2012 by

Through the Mist is a regular column from Luke Le Page covering everything World of Warcraft. If you’d like something covered in a future column, drop us a line!

With patch 5.04 just around the corner, I thought it would be good time to take a look at some of the changes that are taking place before the launch of Mists of Pandaria. The patch notes can be seen below and as you can see there are some major changes coming.

Perhaps the most exciting part is the pre expansion world event involving Theramore. This looks to be an exceptional event. Personally I have elected not to go on the PTR to test it so that I can fully enjoy it when it goes live.

The change that will have the greatest impact on gameplay is obviously the changes to talents and I encourage everyone who intends to play to check it out beforehand so you can get an idea on what talents you want to take.

I have also included the update, which can be found below the patch notes, that details how currency is going to be dealt with.

Apart from the major gameplay changes such as talents, there are a number of excellent Interface changes. The queuing system has undergone a much needed overhaul and all queue types can now be accessed from a single menu.

The removal of ranged and relic slots has been a fairly contentious issue throughout the beta and for hunters it means that their ranged weapon will now fill the “weapon” slot and no other weapons are usable. As a Rogue I am obviously a fan of any change that stops Hunters rolling on Agility-based weapons!

Theramore of old – we will miss you!

It is also important to note that with this patch, all of the races in World of Warcraft will be available to players no matter what level of access they have. The Pandaren however will remain locked until the official launch of Mists of Pandaria and then become available to all players. The Monk class will only be available to people with access to the expansion. I have yet to find any details on whether this will be the same for Death Knights (with Wrath of the Lich King access) or not.

My personal favourite in regards to the changes is account-wide achievements. I played extensively in classic and the Burning Crusade on my Paladin, it was not until very late in the Burning Crusade that I elected to change mains for guild purposes and so I do not have any classic raiding reputations at exalted. With this change all of the work I did on my Paladin can be transported across to my Rogue and I will be rewarded with a huge increase in Achievement points to display on my main. While this by no means affects gameplay in any way it is a nice gesture from Blizzard and enables people who have changed mains for whatever reasons, or simply altoholics to have all of their work displayed in one place. (An interruption from the Editor here: WOOT!!)

We also see an increase in the number of character slots. You can find the details in this interview with Tom Chilton. The character slot response is at about 1:20 mark of the video.

The patch notes:

Patch 5.04

Welcome to the World of Warcraft Patch 5.0.4 Public Test Realm. We thank you for testing Patch 5.0.4 with us, and ask that you participate in our PTR Feedback forum and our PTR Bug Report forum.

Your feedback is greatly appreciated.

Please note that PTR testing is restricted to World of Warcraft game accounts that do not have access to the Mists of Pandaria beta test. You can find more information on this here.

General

  • Account-wide Achievements, pets, and mounts
    • In Patch 5.0.4 and beyond, the majority of your character’s Achievements, pets, and mounts will be shared with your other characters. Please read: Bringing Achievements to the Account Level, by Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street

 

  • World Event: Attack on Theramore Isle
    • Warchief Garrosh, obsessed with assuring the Horde’s supremacy over Kalimdor, launches an all-out attack against Jaina’s island home of Theramore. Though valiant Alliance defenders rush to repel the sudden onslaught, they’ll soon find themselves unprepared for the terrible scope of Garrosh’s true plans…
    • In the Public Test Realm, we will be testing this event at specified intervals. Keep an eye on our PTR Feedback forum for more details as they become available.

 

  • AOE Looting
    • Area of effect looting comes to World of Warcraft with this patch. After killing a group of enemies in close proximity, when you loot one of their corpses, the loot window will include items from all of the nearby corpses for which you have loot rights.

 

  • BattleTagsupport in World of Warcraft
    • Players who have enabled their BattleTagwill now be able to:
      • See BattleTag friends in your friends list.
      • Add and remove BattleTag friends.
      • Send BattleTag invites to other players via right-click.

Classes

  • All classes have been updated with a new talent system, improved abilities, and spells (accessible throughout levels 1-85). Your character’s talents have been reset.
    • Many old talents have been converted to specialization abilities.
    • Druids now have access to a fourth class specialization: Guardian.
    • New spells are now learned automatically. Class trainers are only needed to change talents, glyphs, class specialization, or to utilize the dual specialization feature.
    • All characters now take 30% less damage from other players.

Currency Conversion

  • Coming soon.

Items

  • Spell Penetration has been replaced by PvP Power on existing items.
  • Head enchants removed
    • Enchants that modify the gear in your head slot have been removed from the game. This includes older head enchants of every type.

 

  • Relics, ranged, and thrown items
    • The slot in which ranged, relics, and thrown items were previously equipped has been removed. All weapons should now be equipped in the weapon slot.
    • Ranged weapons, including wands, have been adjusted to be more powerful.
    • Ranged weapons no longer have a minimum range.

Professions

  • The glyph system has been updated. Many class glyphs have been added, altered, or moved to different glyph types.
  • Prime glyphs have been removed.

User Interface

  • There is a new user interface for your mounts and pets.
  • Character creation screens have been updated.
  • Buffs have been consolidated in the UI.
  • New roll results frame added. This new feature can be accessed by clicking the word “[Loot]” in chat, or by typing “/loot”.
  • The PvE queue frames have been unified. You can now queue for dungeons, raids, and other queue-able content in one handy place.
  • Vendors now offer item filtering.
  • Spellbooks have been updated to reflect changes to core abilities, and now include a brief overview of specializations.
  • The Dungeon Journal has been expanded with information on all pre-Cataclysm encounters.
  • A new help system has been added to many frames. You can toggle this on and off by clicking the “i” button in the upper left corner of the frame.

 

Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

The currency conversion coming with Mists of Pandaria is going to happen in three stages, and this is how we plan for it to progress:

With Patch 5.0.4 on August 28

  • Valor points will be converted to Justice points, and Conquest points will be converted to Honor points.
    • Neither of the resultant currencies (Justice and Honor) will have an enforced hard-cap at this time.

 

  • The current Arena season will end.
  • Players will no longer be able to earn Valor or Conquest points (bosses will drop Justice, Arenas will be closed).
  • Items formerly purchasable for Valor/Conquest will be available for Justice/Honor.

With Mists of Pandaria on September 25

  • Valor can be earned again.
    • Characters can earn up to 1000 Valor per week, and carry a maximum of 3000 Valor.
    • Daily quests, random Scenarios, random Heroic dungeons, and all levels of raiding will reward Valor.
    • Valor will be used to purchase ilvl 489 gear in Mists of Pandaria.
      • The Klaxxi, Golden Lotus, Shado-Pan, and August Celestials factions will sell this gear.
      • Revered reputation with each faction will be required.
  • Conquest will become earnable.
    • There is a cap of 4000 Conquest points.
    • Arenas and Rated Battlegrounds reward Conquest.
    • It will be used to purchase ilvl 483 gear from Pandaren battlemasters on the Great Wall.

With Mists of Pandaria, Patch 5.1

  • We currently plan to upgrade the Valor system as Ghostcrawler described in Mists of Pandaria Looting Explained in the 5.1 patch, allowing you to upgrade your gear using Valor points. We’ll have additional information once Mists of Pandaria launches and we get closer to the 5.1 patch release.

Do you have questions or comments about currencies in World of Warcraft? Please let us know in this discussion thread.

 

Filed Under: General News, Patch Notes, WoW Tagged With:

Through The Mist: World of Warcraft Pet Battles

August 20, 2012 by

Through the Mist is a regular column from Luke Le Page covering everything World of Warcraft. If you’d like something covered in a future column, drop us a line!

This week I logged in to take a look at the new pet battle system coming with Mists of Pandaria. Prior to logging in I was not particularly looking forward to this feature and it was something I looked at as a time waster while waiting for queues to pop and raids to form. However, I was pleasantly surprised with the feature. As I mentioned a few weeks ago in my overview of the major changes Pet battles does not offer us anything ground breaking in terms of new MMO technology or gameplay, it is simply a mini-game that is extremely fun.

To enable the feature we need to learn about pet battles from Varzok in Orgrimmar. He can be found near the flight master.

Once we have learnt the ability we now have to find some critters to fight. We can do this via our mini map – attackable critters appear as a paw on our mini maps and are spread generously throughout the world:

To attack on these critters we simply click on them. We begin the battle with just 1 pet slot and can unlock more as we progress through levels. At level 5 we receive our 3rd slot and can then queue to fight other players, though we can challenge players to a pet duel at any level in person.

As our pets progress in level, they unlock new skills and eventually we can capture the critters that we are fighting. Each pet has 4 stats: Health, Power, Speed, and Quality.  Health, Power and Speed increase as your pets level up.  Quality designates the overall strength of your pet’s stats and will vary on every pet that you catch.

We also have the option to rename each of our pets individually – this is helpful as we can capture multiple types of one pet as we battle across Azeroth. It also allowed me to officially rename my Panda from the original collector’s edition to the name by which I have been referring to it for years.

As mentioned above there is nothing mind blowing about this new feature, it is in fact very much like the classic Pokémon games from the Nintendo Gameboy. It is highly addictive and a lot of fun to play and after having played it on the Beta I have spent close to 5,000 gold on pets on the live realm, ready to be levelled as  soon as the feature is released.

Filed Under: General News, Opinion, WoW Tagged With: ,

Mists of Pandaria Cinematic Trailer Released

August 16, 2012 by

It’s been a while coming, but Blizzard have release the cinematic trailer for next month’s Mists of Pandaria expansion.

Enjoy!

Over to you: what are your thoughts? Is the cinematic more or less than you expected?

Filed Under: General News, WoW Tagged With: , ,
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