Posts Tagged ‘News’

Tuesday Morning Post: Happy 2009 edition

Jan 6, 2009 WoW Insider

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Realm Status, Odds and ends, News items Welcome to the first Tuesday Morning Post of 2009. I trust you’ve all recovered from your wild New Year’s Eve debauchery and ready to face the new year bright eyed and bushy tailed, right? Anyway, you know what woul

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Welcome to the first Tuesday Morning Post of 2009. I trust you've all recovered from your wild New Year's Eve debauchery and ready to face the new year bright eyed and bushy tailed, right?

Anyway, you know what would be an awesome way to kick off the new year? With a new patch. This would be the perfect time for 3.0.8 to go live, and with Ghostcrawler talking about changes that will make 3.0.8 but won't make the PTR and yet another 3 AM to 11 AM (Pacific time) downtime this morning, the time is right.

Still, I'm not making any predictions, since I've been terrible at predicting 3.0.8 as it is. It could just be that Blizzard is trying to let the servers recover from the holiday season and we still have a week or two to go for the patch. Either way, we have at least 8 hours of downtime coming up, so now's a good time to get caught up on all the latest WoW news. As usual, I have some of the past week's best content for you after the break.

Continue reading Tuesday Morning Post: Happy 2009 edition

WoW InsiderTuesday Morning Post: Happy 2009 edition originally appeared on WoW Insider on Tue, 06 Jan 2009 05:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Extended maintenance, some hints of patch 3.0.8

Jan 5, 2009 WoW Insider

Filed under: Realm Status, News items, Rumors Maintenance will run “extended” tomorrow for all U.S. realms until 11:00 a.m. PST / 2:00 p.m. EST. The last few weeks we’ve seen the down time grow as Blizzard’s worked out issues, so I wouldn’t count on the servers being up at

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Maintenance will run "extended" tomorrow for all U.S. realms until 11:00 a.m. PST / 2:00 p.m. EST. The last few weeks we've seen the down time grow as Blizzard's worked out issues, so I wouldn't count on the servers being up at 11:00 a.m. PST. However I'll happily eat my words. However unlike Alex, I will not eat my hat.

We also have heard a couple sources whispering in our ear that patch 3.0.8 will be dropping either tomorrow or next week. We'll have to wait and see on that one. Don't take what we're saying here as any more than a creditable rumor.

However these rumors do have some added credence in that they coincide with comments from Ghostcrawler today such as "These [changes] will be in the next patch (3.0.8) even thought they were not on the PTR," and "We'll be able to share patch notes soon."

No matter if 3.0.8 drops tomorrow or not, there will be downtime. Fable II anyone?

WoW InsiderExtended maintenance, some hints of patch 3.0.8 originally appeared on WoW Insider on Mon, 05 Jan 2009 21:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Queue: Pandapocalypse

Jan 5, 2009 WoW Insider

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Expansions, Lore, The Queue Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider’s daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. On Friday I responded to a question regarding Pandaren, and it turns out I’m about hal

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Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft.

On Friday I responded to a question regarding Pandaren, and it turns out I'm about half wrong. Partially right, but also partially wrong, which is certainly a problem. My answer was based off of something I talked about with a random Blizzard employee, but in hindsight that's a pretty poor move on my part, they wouldn't necessarily know the little inner workings of one or two departments within the company. What I said was refuted with quotes from J. Allen Brack and Chris Metzen, which I'm willing to put more weight in as far as game lore goes. The Chinese did, indeed, have a problem with the Pandaren being in-game.

I was right in that there are no laws against virtual pandas getting shivved or whatever, but there definitely was an issue with the Pandaren race, culturally. It's much more likely it just ran into a lot of friction when it came down to dealing with censors and the cultural shift, and it became not worth it to risk losing players over. I'm sure the fact that the Pandarens' original design was much more Japanese (see above) than Chinese didn't help, but that was shifted in the right direction eventually and may not have had an actual impact at all. And with that said...

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WoW InsiderThe Queue: Pandapocalypse originally appeared on WoW Insider on Mon, 05 Jan 2009 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Compare gear easily with Pawn

Jan 5, 2009 WoW Insider

Filed under: Items, AddOns Gear is one of the main ways characters in WoW get more powerful, and pretty much the only way once we reach the level cap. However, it can sometimes be difficult to decipher whether one item is better than another - as a rogue, will 10 hit rating help you more or [...]

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Gear is one of the main ways characters in WoW get more powerful, and pretty much the only way once we reach the level cap. However, it can sometimes be difficult to decipher whether one item is better than another - as a rogue, will 10 hit rating help you more or less than 10 Agi, assuming you're not capped? (Less, according to most sources.)

Questions like these are why stat weighting scales were developed; they aim to answer questions like that by expressing how much each stat is worth in terms of "points," which quantify how much each stat helps your DPS/healing/tanking. For instance, Shadow Panther has calculated that if 1 Agi is worth 1 point, 1 hit rating is worth 0.85 points, 1 Str, 0.55 points, and so on. Many different rating scales for various classes and specs can be found around the internet.

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WoW InsiderCompare gear easily with Pawn originally appeared on WoW Insider on Mon, 05 Jan 2009 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The future of healing in the Arena

Jan 5, 2009 WoW Insider

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, News items, PvP, Forums, Battlegrounds, Arena If you’ve been in the Arena during Season 5, you probably have noticed a particular change to the way gladiators fight. It can be summarized in a single word: “Damage.” In the bygone days of Season 4, drai

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If you've been in the Arena during Season 5, you probably have noticed a particular change to the way gladiators fight. It can be summarized in a single word: "Damage." In the bygone days of Season 4, drain teams and Mortal Strike debuffs were all but an entry requirement to high ranked play. Without a strategy to reduce or nullify your enemy's healing, you were unlikely to produce sufficient burst DPS to actually kill anyone. A few double-DPS teams managed to thrive, but for the most part, a gladiator's number one priority was shutting down the healer.

That dynamic is all but dead in Season 5. Players output such a high level of damage compared to other players' health that healing is almost a non-factor in most matches. My friends, Ghostcrawler is aware of this dynamic, and is looking into it. (It turns out, Ghostcrawler mostly plays a healer in the Arena.) As stated by the crab himself, the Arena should not simply be about burst damage. (Nor, however, should it be solely about healing or solely about crowd control.)

Of course, Ghostcrawler does admit he has difficulty saying what the long terms plans are going to be. The design team hasn't had enough whiteboard time to say anything with complete honesty. But he also hopes that as more Resilience gear enters the PvP system, the damage might scale down to be more reasonable. (To quote, "It's mostly just math.") Still, there's hope that future teams will include more than just seeing which team can burst down the other first.

WoW InsiderThe future of healing in the Arena originally appeared on WoW Insider on Mon, 05 Jan 2009 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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