Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Guilds, Odds and ends, Instances, Humor, Raiding, Guildwatch, Bosses, Forums

Continue reading Guildwatch: "10 guilds kicked me in a row"

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Blizzard, News items, Mounts

The Zul'Aman bear mount has been a popular treat -- popular enough that folks offer paid runs to get the bear mount. We already knew the chance to get the bear was going away when Wrath comes out. However, in the bad news category, Zarhym revealed over the weekend that bear mounts will no longer be obtainable when the content patch comes out.

While I know a lot of folks already have their bear mounts, in my opinion, this change kind of sucks. I have a small raiding Guild who I've been working with to get our bear mounts (with a few bumps along the way). Since we knew the earliest we'd lose our opportunity would be November, all of our planning has been focused on getting the bears this month and next. And now, that's changed without enough warning to alter our plans. Heck, I can't even plan since all I know about when the patch is coming out is "soon."

To be clear about it, the problem isn't that the chance to obtain the bear is going away. That's fair -- the timed event would be stupid easy after level 70. The problem is that Blizzard set one expectation (when Wrath comes out), and has now vastly reduced the opportunity without warning. That's a problem for me.

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Filed under: Druid, Priest, Raiding, Talents, Buffs, Wrath of the Lich King

Yes, this may be the third post I've made in a few days that mentions the Shadow Priest talent Misery. You got a problem with that? Previously on "Eliah talks about Misery:" Misery gets nerfed in the beta from +1/2/3/4/5% spell damage, where it is now, down to +1/2/3% spell hit. Eliah complains that this makes it either required or useless. OK, now that you're all caught up, let's move forward.

In the comments on my last post, several people made the helpful observation that Misery isn't the only debuff that gives +spell hit against the mob. Balance Druids' Improved Faerie Fire is now going to give the same effect of +1/2/3% spell hit (the +melee/ranged hit is getting removed). And of course, in the new raid buff/debuff system, these effects will not stack. So you only need one Shadow priest or one Balance druid to give that +3% spell hit.

Continue reading Misery and company

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Filed under: Humor, Wrath of the Lich King, Forums, Account Security, Forum Post of the Day

Have you ever wondered what one of those fake emails from "Blizzard" look like? The nastier ones are copies of real Blizzard emails, with the links subtly changed. Other scam emails are a bit more transparent, however.

While we've identified some red flags for you before, let's add a few more, shall we?

If the email refers to the patch you "must" download as "a mod one" then it might not be real.

If they have moved said patch to an external website, then you might want to worry.

If the reason for the move is because, "recently, Hackers have been trying to crack our folders and steal every future project" then it is time for you to roll on the ground laughing. Just hope that Hackers don't team up with the Boogeyman, or Terrorists!

If you are referred to as one of their "lovely members who do not understand" you should get a medal, really. Their repetitiveness is dizzying. Luckily, they will "explain it shortly" for you. I think someone needs a thesaurus (or a brain).

Continue reading Forum post of the day: Hilarious scam email

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Filed under: Blizzard, Humor, Forums

When it comes to the WoW forums, few things make me happier than seeing blue text truly and utterly own the trolls and other unsavory types that hang out there. Especially when it's a case of someone thinking they can lie to the GMs and Customer Service reps and get away with it. We've seen it before, but it is no less entertaining each time.

In this particular case, a level 70 Warrior (posting on his level 42 Mage alt) claims that he forgot to loot the Vial of Eternity from his guild's recent Kael'thas kill. He filed a GM ticket, and they refused to grant it to him, stating he should just go kill Kael again for it. Embers, the alt, goes to the forums to ask for this vial instead. EU Game Master and Customer Service Rep Xaldavan joins the show pretty quickly, asking for some necessary information to help him (her?) investigate the situation, even offering to give him the quest item if his claims are accurate.

As you can guess, they weren't accurate at all. In fact, the Warrior left the raid an entire hour before Kael'thas was actually killed. In the middle of a trash pull, too! You would think people would know by now that trying to scam a GM is silly. As Xaldavan said, they can see everything. Some of these people are very, very lucky that Blizzard's GMs tend to be merciful about these sorts of things.

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Filed under: Items, Mounts, Wrath of the Lich King

The Riding Crop. If you're level 70 (and not a druid) you probably have one, and if not, why not? Jeez, just buy it from your friendly neighborhood leatherworker already; they have few enough ways to make money without you cheaping out. However, everyone's favorite mount-speed-increasing item is going to be changing a little bit in LK. Blizzard realized that it's "no fun" to be swapping your trinket around all the time, even with addons, and that it's relatively common to be stuck in combat with the Crop equipped when you really want to have your Bladefist's Breadth or whatever. So they wanted to get the Crop out of your trinket slots.

There was a brief period of time, reflected in some spells mined from the data files, when the Crop was going to be an item that would be right-clicked to enchant your mount with extra speed. This led to many people complaining that they would now have to buy one Crop per mount. Anyway, now that mounts are going to be learned instead of kept in the inventory, this doesn't work anymore, apparently. So Blizz is still undecided on what precisely to do with it. It does seem certain that it won't stick around in its current trinket form, and virtually certain that it won't disappear entirely, but everything else is up in the air. What do you think they should do?

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Filed under: Patches, Analysis / Opinion, Podcasting, PvP, Expansions, Humor, Death Knight, Wrath of the Lich King, Arena, WoW Insider Show

Just as it does every Saturday, our weekly podcast went live over the weekend, and the recording of the show is now up on the WoW Radio website for listening. Michael Gray joined us for the first time on the show, and Turpster was aboard for the ride as usual. We chatted about a lot of the most popular stories from the last week in Warcraft, including:

Answering lots of emails -- during the show, some kind folks started up a We Love Turpster group on Facebook (and WoW Insider is on there as well), and we also tried yet again to eradicate the legendary missing show, episode 23. Downranking also got a revisit, with a look at how healers use it specifically.
We talked about the pre-Wrath content patch 3.0.2, and what surprises we saw in there that we thought would be in the expansion release.
Michael spoke with us about Bambi showing up in Northrend, and why people were so fascinated by this critter's story.
He also talked with us about his series of interviews with high-end Arena players, and the trends he's seeing among the high level Arena play.
And finally we talked a little bit about the tech of the game, including the new phasing technology, and how/if we'll see graphical updates come to the game in the future.

It was a pretty packed show -- if you listened to the live feed, you know we had a little streaming problem in the beginning, but don't worry, because the recording is complete, so anything you missed then you can hear now. Additionally, if you hear anything that inspire you to write to us, please do: the email is theshow@wowinsider.com. Additionally, you can also look us up in iTunes -- if you haven't written a review of the show there yet, please do, as we're always hungry for feedback.

Enjoy the show, and we'll see you next week.

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Filed under: Druid, Guilds, Raiding, Classes, (Druid) Shifting Perspectives

Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting druids and those who group with them. This week John Patricelli, the Big Bear Butt Blogger, takes a trip down memory lane, and looks once more at the crazy hijinks Druids get up to.

In the months before Burning Crusade was released, when players knew that the raiding rules were about to change and a new game-changing patch was imminent that would cause everyone to re-examine their specs and gear choices, many guilds eased up on the raiding focus a bit.

As the focus on raiding changed for some guilds, and players suddenly had a bunch of extra time on their hands, folks that had been raiding relaxed and looked for new ways to have fun.

Being WoW players, the desire to try new and wacky things just for the heck of it flourished.

Dire Maul tribute runs, Baron Rivendare speed mount run competitions, naked gnome raids on Hogger, and many other antics were seen.

Of all the classes out there, though, In my opinion, players that roll Druid style just seem to look for more fun and crazy ways to goof around and try to take on stuff together.

Sure, I'm biased. But while there are plenty of hybrid classes in the game, it just seems that it's always the Druids that I hear about going off and trying crazy things together.

For example, look at the evidence of Druid fun and games, from before the Burning Crusade as seen in this video from back in November of 2006.

More recently, of course, we had the infamous Murder of Crows that swept Dark Iron, terrorizing the Horde server wide. As far as I know, the Penny Arcade Alliance of guilds remain unchallenged after that one.

Doesn't that look like a lot of fun?

Well, here we are at the same point in the life of the game, where a new game-changing patch is imminent, a huge expansion of goodness is coming soon, and some raiders are relaxing a bit in anticipation... and looking for different ways to have fun.

Continue on after the break for more neat all Druid hijinks!

Continue reading Shifting Perspectives: Having fun with all Druid runs!

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Filed under: Priest, Analysis / Opinion, Wrath of the Lich King

Shadow Priests have been eagerly anticipating some love in the Wrath Beta for a long time now, and we've finally received some feedback beyond a pat on the head and a "hold on a bit." Koraa has just posted some great news in a thread started by the ShadowPriest.com community.

While it won't fix all things, it's definitely a start, and a good one: Mind Flay's coefficient will be raised by roughly 30% "to start," and it will gain the ability to crit. Yes, that's right. The coefficient will be de-gutted, and it will benefit from crit. After months of nothing, this is like a ray of sunshine from the heavens. Koraa also mentions that they'll be looking at the rest of the Shadow tree, but states that most people agree the tree itself is fine, the issue is the Shadow spells themselves, which I will more or less agree with. While some new spells would be nice, the class is plenty functional with what they have assuming the numbers will be tuned properly, and our gear matches up with that.

Hopefully we'll be seeing the new and improved Mind Flay in the next beta build, but it may take a little longer than that since it will be a complete rebuild of the spell. As soon as it's in, I'll be back here raving about it, I promise.

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Filed under: Features, Interviews, 15 Minutes of Fame

15 Minutes of Fame is our look at World of Warcraft players of all shapes and sizes - from the renowned to the relatively anonymous, the remarkable to the player next door. Tip us off to players you'd like to hear more about.

If you've ever wanted to quit your job, travel the world and play WoW whenever and wherever you please - take it from Caesar of US Dark Iron-H, it's as good as you'd ever dreamed it could be. In March 2007, Caesar sold his house, put the rest of his belongings in storage and hit the road. Since then, he's managed to keep his WoW account alive and has played on and off from his laptop and internet cafes all over the Pacific and Asia. So far, he's logged in from two dozen different countries on almost every sort of network issue you could imagine.

We caught up with Caesar in Kuala Lumpur to see if his travels are turning out to be as cool in practice as the idea was on the drawing board. (TLDR version: They are.)

Continue reading 15 Minutes of Fame: Around the world playing World of Warcraft

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Filed under: Hunter, (Hunter) Big Red Kitty

Daniel Howell contributes BigRedKitty, a column with strategies, tips and tricks for and about the Hunter class, sprinkled with a healthy dose of completely improper, sometimes libelous, personal commentary.

It's Starship Troopers time in Wrath of the Lich King beta, and that means another exoskeleton pet for the 51-point Beastmaster hunters: Silithids!

Yes, Silithids are Exotic pets and Marksman and Survivalists need not apply. Silithids are classified as Cunning pets, so you get a really nice selection of spells you're not going to have seen elsewhere. They're not PvE or PvP-specific, but can be build to focus more on one of these aspects than the other.

Honestly, any pet that looks more like Scourge than a Beast isn't going to find a place in our stable. But if you thought Ravagers just weren't freaky enough, then you're in for a treat.

You are invited to download the YouTube version (44MB) of this movie here, and the full-sized version (169MB) here.

As always, a great big Thank You to the WoW Insider editors for allowing us to publish this movie both here and on our little blog at the same time!

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Wrath of the Lich King

Ghostcrawler posted fairly heavily on the Warrior forums the other day, and while Warriors are not especially my territory, something the crabman said reminded me of something I've really liked about Wrath so far. Referencing Gladiator, "Watch how Maximus uses his shield -- he isn't cowering behind it -- he's bashing people in the face with it. Shields should be a viable form of combat, not the option to avoid combat." This was said in the context of Protection possibly being viable in the arenas in the nebulous future (not anytime soon), but it reminded me of general playstyles anyway.

To some extent, Warriors have fought like this for quite awhile. Shield Bash, Shield Slam, things like that. It wasn't just Shield Block. However, none of that stuff hit very hard. Sure, Protection Warriors shouldn't be able to rock the DPS with their shield, but Shield Slam was more like Shield Bump. The higher block values and thus higher Shield Slam damage is exciting, and the addition of Sword and Board puts even more emphasis on the shield.

Continue reading Allow me to introduce my shield to your face

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Filed under: Machinima, WoW Moviewatch

Nathan Allen Pinard is known mainly as the composer for projects by Oxhorn, but you may not know that he agreed to let entrants for the WeGame machinima contest use some of his work for their submissions. However, Firebolt Productions, the award winning creators of Acolyte 1.5 and Ugly Goblin's Christmas, went above and beyond that by getting a custom soundtrack by Nathan. The composer was so proud of his score that he sent in the link if you want to listen to it by itself!

The Way of Life is another top contender for the contest. The story revolves around a man, Thord, sent to Northrend at a young age at the same time as Arthas Menethil. Instead of emerging a hero, he is resigned to a life of misery at a post in Menethil Harbour. However, one day he'll meet a young man, Caldor, that will change his outlook on life.

Clearly in this contest to win, Firebolt pulled out all the stops with sound design by Caruu and a voiceover by Drewbie! He also used CrazyTalk, by Reallusion, for lip-synching. As a longtime fan of the program, it's about time that the World of Warcraft machinimators embraced it!

[Thanks, Nathan!]

If you have any suggestions for WoW Moviewatch, you can mail them to us at machinima AT wowinsider DOT com.

Previously on Moviewatch ...

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Filed under: WoW Insider Business, Contests

It's been one week since we opened our most recent Caption This! contest to entries. We've allowed them to age to perfection over the weekend, and they're now ripe enough for you to pick the winner! Members of the WoW Insider staff have chosen their favorite captions from the bunch, and I've added in some of the highest-rated captions with the comment system. All in all, we ended up with a baker's dozen of quotes. Now you get to decide who goes home with a 60-day game card, a choice of one of seven World of Warcraft action figures as detailed in the original post, or nothing but a deep sense of inadequacy. Just pick the best caption for the above picture. Voting closes tomorrow, Wednesday, September 3, at 11:59 PM EST, and winners will be informed shortly afterward by e-mail.

Remember, entrants must be U.S. or non-Quebec Canadians at least 13 years old. If you'd like to peruse the contest's official rules, they can be found here. Happy voting!

View Poll

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Filed under: Priest, Analysis / Opinion, Death Knight, Wrath of the Lich King

We'll get started with Gareth's question...

How is the Storm Peaks coming along? Seems like it has a lot of history and culture behind it.

This zone has been closed off more than it's been open. There are a few hefty bugs that they're trying to iron out that forces them to seal it off now and then, since the bugs bring the entire world server down. That and there was an XP exploit that the beta testers found and needed to be dealt with mighty quickly, so it was sealed off for that as well.

As far as the history and culture, I loved what I saw. A lot of Titan lore, a lot of Dwarven history. The introduction to the zone is pretty awful, though. Your first quest hub in the culture-rich zone is a Goblin town (K3) full of whimsy that has little to do with the zone's overall story. I guess you need to keep the mood light sometimes, though. Still, despite the silly Goblins, it was one of my favorite zones while I could get in there. Blizzard has thrown around the term "epic scale" quite a bit, and I think Storm Peaks really displays that. The place is absolutely massive, in the good way. Watch the video above if you want an example of the quests you'll be seeing. Be warned, it's kind of a spoiler in that doing this quest for the first time really leaves you in awe. Watching it beforehand might take that away a little.

dotorion asked...

Does Northrend have a 'level requirement' like Outlands?

Continue reading Ask a Beta Tester: The Drakkensryd, Dispersion, and other stuff

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Filed under: Screenshots, Around Azeroth, Galleries

Most Trees of Life seem at home in rural environments. Ashenvale, Mulgore, even Zul'Aman -- anywhere with grass, trees, and lots of people begging for Innervate. But Shadowchaser of Guardians of the Flame on Proudmoore seems to have evolved to fit into modern urban life. Just chillin' with a beer in the basement of Wildhammer Stronghold, wedged awkwardly into a chair, and waving as his drinking buddies show up. I suspect that anyone Shadowchaser Lifeblooms tonight is going to have a hangover the next morning.

Do you have any unusual World of Warcraft images that are just collecting dust in your screenshots folder? We'd love to see it on Around Azeroth! Sharing your screenshot is as simple as e-mailing aroundazeroth@wowinsider.com with a copy of your shot and a brief explanation of the scene. You could be featured here next!

Remember to include your player name, server and/or guild if you want it mentioned. We strongly prefer full screen shots without the UI showing -- use alt-Z to remove it. Please, no more sunsets.

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Filed under: Engineering

Just the other day, a fun little potential toy for Engineers cropped up. Wormholes! Wormholes? Yes, wormholes. What do they do? Think about Mages for a moment. They have both Teleport and Portal spells. Teleport spells take only them to a capital city of their choosing. Portals create a way for your entire party or raid to go to that capital city.

Engineers have Transporters, which work similar to a Mage's Teleport. They take you specifically to whichever Goblin or Gnome town your Engineering specialization likes best. Wormholes will be the answer to the Mage's Portal. You will be able to take your entire party to that town, not just you. The only one we've seen so far is a Wormhole to Gadgetzan, which may actually prove to be quite useful. While Shattrath has an NPC that will teleport you straight to the Caverns of Time, I haven't seen one of those in Dalaran so far in the Wrath Beta.

Currently it seems the intent is to have Engineers quest for these Wormhole generators, but they aren't available on either the live or beta realms quite yet. That could easily change before we see them ourselves. We may also see these in Patch 3.02 rather than Wrath of the Lich King as well, seeing as Northrend has Goblin towns of its own.

[ via MMO-Champion ]

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Filed under: Horde, Fan stuff, Virtual selves, Odds and ends, Fan art

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Blizzard

GamesIndustry.biz recently had an opportunity to chat with Frank Pearce, co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment, about World of Warcraft and their other properties. At the Games Convention in Leipzig, Pearce was asked if he found WoW's performance since launch interesting to watch. He doesn't quite say no, but he doesn't say yes, either. "I don't know if I'd describe it as 'interesting' as much as exhausting," he says. He goes on to detail just how much the company has grown, up to 3000 employees worldwide, with 130 people on the WoW development team trying to sate our 'voracious appetite for content.' World of Warcraft is almost directly responsible for that growth.

Pearce talks a bit about Blizzard's other franchises and projects, specifically Starcraft II and Battle.net, suggesting a brave new world where World of Warcraft players could crack out a quick 15-20 minute multiplayer round in Starcraft II while waiting for their WoW raid. That sounds like an awesome time to me, but perhaps that's a little too much Blizzard in one evening for most folks. Then again, maybe not!

Continue reading Frank Pearce labels WoW's success as "exhausting"

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Filed under: Patches, Analysis / Opinion, Breakfast topics, Burning Crusade, Classes, Buffs, Wrath of the Lich King, Inscription

So we're expecting the new pre-Wrath content patch any week now, and with it a whole flood of new mechanics and abilities, such as raid buff stacking. It should be interesting to see how all this new stuff fits in to the current Burning Crusade end game, and how people adapt to it as they prepare to plunge into Wrath. Of course, many will probably get a head start on Inscription, while others may already have a new haircut picked out.

Myself, I'm looking forward to playing around with the new changes to my Hunter. Disengage and the new Freezing Trap mechanics are looking delicious enough to me that I may just see if I can get back into Arenas for a few weeks to check them out. I'm also pretty interested to see how the Aspect of the Viper changes feel on some big boss battles. It'll be nice to have to essentially have no mana regeneration worries ever again, assuming the current version stays as is.

What about you? Given everything we'll likely see in patch 3.0.2, what are you looking forward to doing while you wait for Wrath?

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Blizzard, News items, Expansions, Wrath of the Lich King

Good Tuesday morning, everyone! Most of us will be getting away just a quick set of rolling restarts at 5AM PDT today, but there is a handful of servers that will be going down for extended maintenance from 3AM PDT to 11AM PDT. Those servers include Azjol-Nerub, Bloodscalp, Bonechewer, Boulderfist, Bronzebeard, Crushridge, Daggerspine, Darkspear, Draenor, Dragonblight, Dragonmaw, Dunemaul, Eldre'Thalas, Feathermoon, Firetree, Frostmane, Gurubashi, Nathrezim, Perenolde, Scarlet Crusade, Shadow Council, Shadowsong, Silvermoon, Skywall, Smolderthorn, Spirestone, Stonemaul, Stormscale, Suramar, Terenas, Uldum, Windrunner.

As always, for those who play on the affected servers, or those who are unable to play WoW at the moment, let me suggest some articles from the past week. There was certainly a lot of news to discuss, with build 8885 going up on the Wrath Beta servers and a good smattering of con news as well. Let's check it out:

Hot News and Features

Continue reading The Tuesday Morning Post: Treadmills, Bambi, and keyloggers in space

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Filed under: (Guild Leadership) Officers' Quarters

Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership.

There's only so much a blogger can take before he has to set the record straight! Two of my August columns -- and, oddly enough, even some columns I wrote back in January -- all managed to stir up a bit of controversy last month. Some of my readers made very good points, some were flat out wrong, and some grossly misunderstood my intent. I'd like to address them one by one.

First up is Auz from the excellent blog ChickGM.com. She respectfully disagreed -- albeit vehemently! -- about my columns from early in the year about what to look for in a potential officer and what types of people to avoid promoting. Here's what she had to say about my criteria in a nutshell:

Don't create strict rules or boxes for your leadership. Some of the best leadership is done outside of conventional thinking and wisdom. To quote myself; "If you do what everyone else is doing, you'll end up where everyone else is."

Continue reading Officers' Quarters: Allow me to rebut

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Filed under: Fan stuff, Blizzard, Expansions, Contests, BlizzCon, Wrath of the Lich King

And here's another BlizzCon ticket contest (see, we told you there'd be more). Pixelated Executioner got his hands on an extra ticket (though he's taking the goodie bag, but beggars can't be choosers, we suppose), and he's offering it up in a story contest -- to enter, you've just got to punch out an original Wrath of the Lich King-related story, at least 700 words, and send it over to him on his blog.

It's only for US residents, and you've got to find your own ride and hotel at BlizzCon -- you'll have to meet him at the gate to get in, and he apparently wants a picture (and to supposedly publish the story, so anyone who doesn't want to be in the spotlight can probably pass now). But after you say hi to him, the rest of the conference is yours -- if you're interested in hitting every chance to grab a BlizzCon ticket you get, better start writing.

The entry is due by September 14th, and PE's email is on his blog. Good luck to everyone who enters, we can't wait to read the winning story.

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Filed under: Odds and ends, Blizzard, Expansions, Mounts, Wrath of the Lich King, Battlegrounds, Achievements

Gametrailers hit up Tom Chilton for an interview at Leipzig and here's the video. His main point is that Wrath is bigger and better than before -- more, better, cooler content. Intercut with lots of cool video from the beta (though some of it was seen as far back as BlizzCon last year), he lays down what's up with the next expansion.

He says that Wrath is meant for high-end players, but that there's lots for lowbies as well: recruit-a-friend was actually designed as part of the Wrath feature set, and Blizzard thought it was better to release it earlier. Inscription is also seen as a "whole-game" feature, since you can pick it up right at level one, and Achievements will work for everyone as well.

He also talks about how the new gameplay features Blizzard is building in let them do all kinds of things with quests and instances -- he specifically mentions one encounter in the Oculus where you'll get to choose a ride with different abilities, so it'll be a different experience than your normal class play. There's some great footage of air combat in there as well, and even a little tidbit about the official threatmeter. Nice interview, and it sounds like Blizzard is rolling right along with their progress in the beta.

[via WorldofWar]

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Fan stuff, Odds and ends, Blizzard, Achievements

We asked for more titles, and darned if Blizzard didn't give them to us. Just in case you missed it over the weekend, there are tons of new titles in the latest beta build that all revolve around Achievements and Feats of Strength, from titles for the first people to level to 80 (and 450 in professions) to titles for obscure reputations and even holidays and fishing. Blizzard really delivered on the title front -- no matter what you do in game, odds are there is a title for you to aim for.

And here's the best part: this is a direct result of reader requests. Zach linked to this the other day, but he forgot to point out that when Tigole posted that the Ambassador title (for earning Exalted with all five core city factions for Alliance or Horde) was coming to the game, it was in direct response to a player asking for it.

Kudos to Blizzard not only for fulfilling their promise to have lots and lots of titles for players to choose from, but for doing it in a way that came straight from players themselves. These seem so simple to implement, we're glad Blizzard is being generous with them.

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