Fortune Favors

Just booted up my WoW client to find this little nugget of uncertainty stareing back at me.  This patch is supposed to have some good and bad about it, depending what you play and how you play it.  Let’s hope for the best.

(I want my darned Healadin Goggles, dagnabit!)

WoW Insider has posted the latest batch of patch notes.  These aren’t live yet (they’re only on the test realms at the moment), but you can expect them down the pipe soon enough.

As someone whose alts are mostly under level 58, I’m particualrly happy with the addition of a bunch more graveyards on the original two continents.  The increase in run speed when dead is nice too.

Yes, I just admitted that my alts die a lot.  Why do you think my main is named “Splat?”

Speaking of which, I’ve been toying with this brand new feature.

That’s right, for $15 (US) you can change everything about your character – including the name, if you want!  … OK, I’m not changing Splat’s name any time soon, but if I happen to have a bit of extra Christmas cash I might splurge for a new character model.  We’ll see.

Well that was a wasted effort.

It started with the news that Orgrimmar was under attack by elete level 71 abominations and undead dragons.  This was confirmed with multiple pictures and even some video.  Things were strange in Stormwind Harbor as well, preceding an attack there.

At least on some servers.  Not Trollbane, which despite having a large turnout ready for action saw not a single agent of the Scourge.  Perhaps our extreme lag scared the Lich King away?  Who knows.  In the end I had several friends annoyed at me for telling them something was going to happen when as of 1:00 AM all was quiet on the Western Front SW Harbor.

Sorry about that.

(Via WoW Insider)

Looks like Blizzard updated the emote list.  There’s some new ones in there (/cower) seems to be a favorite for a lot of people), but there’s also some old ones I just didn’t know about before.

I’m going to have to try these out.

(Image courtesy of WowWiki, since patch 3.0.2 broke my model viewer app.)

OK, the Ziggurats floating over capitol cities?  Those are cool.  The zones that fall “under attack” from level 70 mobs out in the middle of nowhere so the low level players don’t get a major smackdown handed to them?  Those are cool as well and (after an apparent fix revolving around the drop rate of the runestones) seem to be getting even better.

But giving players the ability to not only BECOME zombies but also infect everyone else?  Not as cool.

In fact, it stinks.

I recall that a while back there was an instance boss that could give players a contagious debuff that would cause them to lose life and then explode.  Players with this disease weren’t supposed to make it out of the instance alive, but players are resourceful.  They managed to find their way to the AH, Bank, Goldshire, or anywhere else that large numbers of players congregated.

Then they went boom and infected everyone.  Do a search and you’ll find a story or two about it – probably on Wired News.  I don’t have the time at the moment.

This was, of course, seen as a problem.  Blizzard fixed it so it couldn’t happen again, and there was much rejoicing.  (Yay.)

The zombie plague takes that glitch, shoves a bunch of steroids into it, clones it, then sets it lose on the world.  It’s darned annoying if I can’t go to Bank, AH, the FP of any city, or even TRY to play my lowbie alts because a few 70s with nothing better to do decided to turn Lakeshire into a retirement home for rotting corpses that want to retire you.

“Aw, QQ some more,” say the prepubescents that are taking time away from questioning each other’s sexuality on X-Box Live to kill my Daily quest givers.

Look, on a PvP server, I wouldn’t have a problem with it.  But we’re on Trollbane – a PvE server.  I don’t chose to play PvP usually because that’s not as fun for me.  I’m not saying PvP is bad per se, just that it isn’t my cup of tea.  If I’m doing a timed quest I don’t want to have to worry about someone coming through and delaying me.  If a level 70 challenges my level 22 to a duel and I don’t feel like getting one-shotted, I can ignore them.

But I can’t ignore the zombies, because even if they’re not flagged they end up infecting the NPCs around them.

The concept is kind of neat.  The implementation of it, however, is very, very flawed.

Apparently this has been out for a while now, but Blizzard has released the new, revised talent trees.  From what I’ve seen it’s not just stuff added onto the end, either – they’ve done a bit of rearranging, too.

For those of us with high level characters the changes won’t be nearly as important as the additions – I myself will be respeccing the day I install WotLK to take the few points I have in Prot and throw them into Holy with the rest of them.

This might, however, have a significant effect on twinks.  I can’t be sure because the only talent tree I really looked at was my own, but that’s my guess, at least.

This is most likely Blizzard continuing to tweek the classes in an attempt to make them more balanced.  Usually when they do this half the players cheer while the other half gnash their teeth.

This time, who knows?  At least Splat can earn me enough cash to respec all of my toons if it comes to that, though I do feel bad for all the new players who might not be able to afford it.