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Tuesday, 17 October, 2006 - World of Warcraft Vault -- WoW News
Sticky: Extensive The Burning Crusade Beta Hands-On[ 52 Comments ] Print News | Mail News WoW Vault has another yummy treat for our readership today. Our very own Mithan has spent the last five days slaving over the most extensive hands-on preview of The Burning Crusade. Practically every aspect is touched upon in this massive six page hands-on preview from the closed beta that launched last week. This puppy also has a crap load of visual aids and eye candy for the senses. This is a must check out for everyone...
A handful of us are playing World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade well into the morning hours. We aren't doing it because we're hopelessly addicted to Blizzard's MMO, but rather because we want to start showing people who haven't got a chance to check out the Burning Crusade some of what to expect from the expansion.
Over the next few days, addicts posing as employees of Gamevideos will be busting out videos of a variety of stuff from the Outlands. For starters, here are videos of three bosses from Hellfire Ramparts, one of the first instances players will encounter post-level 60 in the Outlands.
The Insider recently sat down with the World of Warcraft design team and learned more about Silvermoon City, one of the two new capitals that will be introduced in World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade. Read on to see the ideas that led to the rise of the blood elf capital, and its rebirth from the ashes of the Third War...
Part of being in a stalwart band of adventurers is assembling that stalwart band in the first place. In the upcoming expansion, a new tool for finding a hearty group of cohorts will be available: our new Looking For Group interface! Here's an overview of this new interface, including details on a few of the new ways to locate companions to share your adventures with!
There has been some guard scaling in various locations. IF guards are 65 in the beta at current. I haven't paid attention to the levels of the city leaders myself but I'll remember to go have a look. ;) I believe we intend for AV scaling and the brackets will be 60-69 and 70.
The wait is over--brave, threadbare adventurers, your time is at hand! Pre-sale has ended, and World of Warcraft clothing and swag is now officially in stock at JINX.com. Check back often, as the secret J!NX underground lair is always cooking up hot new World of Warcraft gear.
Some players have been experiencing issues trying to use the Paid Character Transfer service. When the PCT process is initiated by a player, their bank is notified and the payment amount is placed in 'reserve'. This temporarily places the money outside of their bank account, looking like a payment has been made but in fact no transfer is completed until final validation is given.
On this occasion, a technical issue generated an error message which prevented players from completing the PCT process and validating the payment. On pinpointing the problem we turned off the PCT process and cancelled the payment requests.
Almost all payment requests have now been cancelled and the reservations are in the process of being released by the banks. We continue to work on this process and will provide further updates as soon as possible. Meanwhile the PCT service will remain closed until further notice.
WoW Vault's Weekly Report[ Comment ] Print News | Mail News | Category: World of Warcraft News - Site News Another week in news for World of Warcraft and this week proves to be the most massive in a long ass time. There are a ton of The Burning Crusade news for everyone to chew on. So, be sure to check out what went on down with last week's top news stories.
You'll amass arena points over time and eventually be able to buy the rewards, but it could be substantially slower than if you were at the top each week. Personally I know I'm not going to be in one of the top-rated teams, but I'm just looking forward to some small group PvP combat, and eventually getting some cool rewards.
Although it has nothing to do with your question; wins/losses don't really mean anything as far as base statistical value. You could be 5/5 and still come out ahead if you were playing against teams with higher ratings for all of those matches. You would get more points for winning, and lose less for losing.
Progression of Power[ 6 Comments ] Print News | Mail News | Category: World of Warcraft News - The Burning Crusade Thought this was sort of interesting. A player recently expressed the notion, "do not make greens and blues look like normal little weapons. We're past level 60 now. It'll suck to go from Destroyer of Worlds and Thunder furies to something that looks like a lowbie item." In which Drysc from Blizzard replied:
If the grandeur of the items just kept increasing on an even scale of progression we would all eventually be wielding planetary fragments that spin and shoot fireworks out of them. Now granted that sounds cool, but really it would get out of hand very quickly (no pun intended). What has to happen then is a careful progression of power, and a careful progression of looking powerful that makes sense. You�ll get to the new Zin�Rokh�s and Sulfuras� quickly enough anyway.
Survival of the Fittest - Reduced to 3 ranks, same 1/2/3% improvements.
Balance
(NEW) Focused Starlight - �Increases the critical strike chance of your Wrath and Starfire spells by 2/4%.�
Improved Thorns - Renamed "Brambles", now increases damage from Entangling Roots as well.
Omen of Clarity - Swapped with Insect Swarm, prerequisite from Natural Weapons removed.
Improved Wrath - Renamed "Starlight Wrath", reduces cast time of Wrath and Starfire by .1/.2/.3/.4/.5 sec.
Improved Starfire - Reduced to 3 ranks, no longer reduces cast time of Starfire, just has the 5/10/15% stun chance.
Natural Shapeshifter - Moved to Restoration tree, where Improved Enrage was.
Restoration
Improved Healing Touch - Renamed "Naturalist", in addition to the cast time reduction of Healing Touch it also increases all physical damage by 2/4/6/8/10%. Essentially, we folded Natural Weapons into it.
Natural Weapons - Removed.
Improved Enrage - Removed.
Reflection - Renamed "Intensity", mana regen in combat as it did in addition to causing Enrage ability to instantly generate 4/7/10 rage.
Natural Perfection - Changed to "Your critical strike chance with all spells is increased by 1/2/3% and melee and ranged critical strikes against you cause 4/7/10% less damage."
Sprawl's Scrawl: Another Look at Closed Beta[ 9 Comments ] Print News | Mail News | Category: World of Warcraft News - Burning Crusade Beta Sprawl's Scrawl is back as we continue our adventures from level 5 to 10 for both races. Follow both the Draenei and the Blood Elf as they continue their adventures after leaving the starter town on their way to the big city. This weekend's issue is full of screenshots and three exclusive videos from closed beta showing Exodar, the Draenei capital city, Silvermoon City, the Blood Elf capital city, and some of the very first footage from the 2v2 PvP arena.
Sooo� the great adventure into the Outlands begins. Right off the bat, there is a couple of things I should note. It took me two freaking days. Yes, that's TWO FREAKING DAYS to download 2.13GB worth of Burning Crusade installation files via the Blizzard downloader. Watching that freaking bar go from 99 to 100 percent was like having your teeth pulled in slow motion.
Once the download was finally done, all the files checked for CRC errors and I proceeded with the installation (which finished successfully), I got a notification from my ISP letting me know that they are having issues with their back end and that the net connection *may* be a bit slow.
Oh yes, it was slow, my friends. It stayed in the 3000ms range throughout my time in the Outlands (and no, the test server wasn't lagging, it was my net), which gave some slutty Night Elf priestess ample time to corpse camp me till about two minutes ago when I logged off and decided to write this report. Log off my character named�
THUNDER?!
Yep, apparently, and much to my dismay, upon logging into the BloodMyst PVP server and reaching the character screen, I was greeted with a message that said "Twolions" is in violation of the game's naming policy.
Blood Elf 101 The color pallets used and the architectural compositions of Eversong Woods are truly a delight to behold. The Blood Elf race is a very beautiful one compared to some of the other races in WoW, but don't let their good looks deceive you. They are intelligent, sly and cunning and altogether rather snobby -- traits which are conveyed very well through the graphical designs of the zones and characters. These guys and girls certainly believe they are one notch above the other riffraff of Azeroth.
The Draenei Experience I took a good look at the Draenei racial abilities, and was intrigued by the possible effectiveness of the Heroic presence ability. If you play as a caster, you and all players in your party gain an extra 1% chance to hit with spells. As a melee class or hunter, you and your party gain an extra 1% chance to hit with attacks. It'll remain to be seen whether this completely renders the other racial options useless, but a party of Draenei hunters grouped together in a raid force would have an extra 5% to hit between them, which for hunters is incredibly significant, considering that they need around 9% total to-hit bonuses in order to reach their threshold, where their attacks stop missing.
In those in-between times when they're trying to find new places to stash all of the money overflowing from their Scrooge McDuck sized money vault, they've been developing an expansion pack called Burning Crusade. That burning sensation comes with two new races, the Blood Elves and Dranei, a bunch of new zones including a bunch of them on the other side of the Dark Portal made famous by the early real-time strategy games that started the franchise. Closed beta for the expansion has begun and we were compelled to once again don the mantle of addiction and wander into Azeroth to first check out the new beginning areas for the two new races. We'll be wandering into the high-level content beyond the Dark Portal in the future to give some impressions there as well.
[Updated 10/17]
