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Raiding with Leashes V Pet Preview
Raiding with Leashes V: Cuteaclysm
is the latest pet collection achievement coming in Patch 7.3. In this achievement, players will collect pets from bosses in Bastion of Twilight, Blackwing Descent, Throne of the Four Winds, Firelands, and Dragon Soul.
Check out
TheStatman's comment
for the basics on farming these pets, and click on the pet links in this post to learn more about their type and movesets.
News Roundup: Cataclysm World In Game Longer Than Original Azeroth, Blizzard Holiday Activity and Campus Decorations
Today's news roundup features a look at Blizzard's holiday decorations for the iconic Orc Statue on campus, a blue post on Blizzard holiday activity, and a gallery of pre-Cataclysm screenshots inspired by
a Reddit post
pointing out that the post-Cataclysm world has now been in game longer than the original pre-Cataclysm world. We feel
really
old.
Cataclysm Timewalking Guide (January 27 - February 1st)
Cataclysm Timewalking Dungeon Event
runs from January 27 through February 1st with
Timewarped Badge
items to purchase. Players can also farm dungeons for the
Reins of the Infinite Timereaver
mount which is a random personal loot drop from any Timewalking boss.
For full details on Timewalking holidays, our
Timewalking Guide
covers everything about the three events; in this full post are the highlights for Cataclysm including
Gurboggle's Gleaming Bauble
for 0
Timewarped Badge
and
Tosselwrench's Mega-Accurate Simulation Viewfinder
for 0
Timewarped Badge
.
Cataclysm Timewalking Guide (November 18 - 23)
Cataclysm Timewalking Dungeon Event
runs from November 18th - 23rd with new
Timewarped Badge
items to purchase. There is also the new
Reins of the Infinite Timereaver
mount which is a random drop from any Timewalking boss.
There are six Timewalking instances you can run:
End Time
: 0
Timewarped Badge
Grim Batol
: 5
Timewarped Badge
Lost City of the Tol'vir
: 5
Timewarped Badge
The Stonecore
: 5
Timewarped Badge
The Vortex Pinnacle
: 0
Timewarped Badge
Throne of the Tides
: 5
Timewarped Badge
For full details on Timewalking holidays, our
Timewalking Guide
covers everything about the three events; this article has the highlights for Cataclysm including
Gurboggle's Gleaming Bauble
for 0
Timewarped Badge
,
Earl Black Tea
and
Tosselwrench's Mega-Accurate Simulation Viewfinder
for 0
Timewarped Badge
sold by
Kiatke
.
Live
Cataclysm Post Mortem -- Quest Design with Dave Kosak
To kick-off our World of Warcraft: Cataclysm post mortem series, we sat down with World of Warcraft Lead Quest Designer Dave “Fargo” Kosak to discuss his thoughts on questing in Cataclysm.
Q: What were your main goals going into Cataclysm?
Certainly from a quest design standpoint our primary goal with Cataclysm was to remake the old world, specifically the 1-60 questing experience. World of Warcraft was released in 2004, and we've learned so much in the years since about what constitutes good MMO gameplay. We wanted to make sure that the game was relevant to new players coming in, and walking up and down the length of the Barrens on foot over and over just didn’t do it for us anymore.
Remaking the entire old world -- 46 zones! -- was ambitious. Actually, it was ludicrous. It was like re-releasing a whole game in the course of an expansion cycle. Then we added a couple new races and their starting zones on top of that. I’m not sure how we convinced ourselves we could make it happen, but somehow we pulled it together.
Q: Are you happy with how the old world re-vamp turned out?
I am. Leveling up a new character to 60 nowadays is a gr
Live
Patch 4.3.2 Will be Cataclysm's Last According to Dave Kosak
Dave Kosak, Blizzard's lead quest designer, gave a
solid interview with Videogamer.com
late last week. He highlighted 4.3's successes, failures, and also confirmed that there will be no extra content in the wings for Cataclysm--meaning anyone betting on a Ruby Sanctum styled encounter should stop while they're ahead.
In the interview, Kosak also touched on World of Warcraft's recent subscriber losses as well as Blizzard's overall feelings towards Cataclysm as an expansion. Although many have been disappointed with Cataclysm, he was quick to note the sheer level of content it brought to the world and how much of an epic undertaking that truly was for the World of Warcraft development team. Overhauling all those low level quests took massive amounts of time--and were desperately needed, whether players realize it or not.
While Cataclysm may not have been the highlight of WoW's timeline, it was a necessary one to prolong the life of Azeroth.
Hit the break for a transcript of the full interview and let us know your thoughts on both the interview and the expansion. Was Cataclysm a good expansion? Should there have been anot
Live
Traveling Around Azeroth: A Transportation Guide
Getting around Azeroth quickly is important--especially with holidays requiring lots of travel like the Lunar Festival and Love is in the Air coming up. Basic flight paths can take you anywhere, but they're slow and easily up to 15 minutes across a continent. And which boat goes where from Stormwind anyway? There are numerous items, teleports, and portals that can shave minutes off your travel experience--whether you're looking to get to an Outland instance to farm transmog gear or have archaeology digsites scattered across the world. There's even breadcrumb quests that you can hold onto which will provide useful ports!
With this guide, you'll learn about all the travel options on each continent. You'll never have to spam trade looking for a mage to port you to a major city again!
Travel Basics
Flight paths are what most players will use to travel between nearby zones, and Cataclysm added many new flight paths to the game. You can view them for a particular region by looking at our zone maps and turning on the flight path option. Continent maps also show boat/zeppelin paths as well.
We've got a page covering
Riding
: skill levels, mount types, speeds, and training costs.
A warlock's
Live
Wowhead's Patch 4.3 Guide
4.3 just went live, so we've released an extensive guide to help get you started! From innovative dungeons and raids to vanity features like Transmogrification, there's something for everyone's playstyle. After the daily quest grind and reused content in Firelands, 4.3 is a welcome contrast--it's shaping up to truly be unique and epic as the final showdown with Deathwing draws near.
Below, you'll find consolidated versions of all of our 4.3 feature coverage, as well as patch notes, Dungeon Journals, and loot tables. Big thanks to Perculia for covering many of the 4.3 features, Krelumian for his awesome video, and Neutronimity for helping with the coding.
Our Patch 4.3 Overview Video
Patch Notes & Class Changes Overview
4.3 is hitting live today, so it's time to review the patch notes and see what changes are happening. We've got the patch notes collapsed below, as well as Ghostcrawler's explanations for all the class changes and an overview of general additions.
Notable changes not explained by GC:
New Legendary item for Rogues:
Fangs of the Father
.
Three new dungeons and a new 10/25 player
Live
News Round Up: Tyrande Whisperwind, Tier 11 Acquisition, and More
It was an unusually slow Friday today, but it looks like Blizzard has posted the latest story to their lore section--this one is on Tyrande, one of the more overlooked leaders in World of Warcraft's lore scene.
In some exciting Wowhead news, we have a sweepstakes coming up next week that will give our users a chance at some fabulous gaming gear. We'll talk more about that once it's live, but I figured I'd give everyone a little heads up!
On Epics for Casual Raiders
We've offered players who don't raid a reasonable way to gear up, and achieve high levels of power. The JP/VP system makes a lot of sense to us, and gives everyone a pretty good personal progression track in addition to loot drops, and we feel pretty good about the system as it stands. That doesn't necessarily mean that we think that full sets are a necessary part of that picture, though.
We still want to preserve some of the most prestigious PvE loot for players who face down raid content (even if it's a tier behind), and we feel that completing a tier set means that a raid needs to fit in there somewhere. That design makes sense to us, and we want to preserv
Live
News Round Up: Ethereals Are Back in Blizzard Teaser
So Blizzard just posted a really weird picture to their Facebook of ethereal NPCs. A blue posted it with no explanation as presumably a teaser. At this point, it's probably a hint for either 4.3 or the next expansion; in particular, maybe it even hints towards a redone Outlands or further character customization. Whatever it does mean, though, it's pretty crazy.
Curiouser and curiouser...
4.2.2 Patch Notes PTR (August 11th)
World of Warcraft PTR Patch 4.2.2
Notes for all World of Warcraft patches can be found
here
.
Dungeons & Raids
Firelands
The visibility of Ragnaros’ Dreadflame ability has been increased.
The size of Ragnaros’ hit box during the final phase of the Heroic encounter has been increased.
User Interface
Raid Frames should
Live
4.2.0A Patch Notes
Blizzard has been pretty quiet lately, but they have just posted some new patch notes for the latest live mini-patch 4.2.0A. This patch contained no new content, items, or any of that fun stuff but instead includes a number of system bugfixes. Many of the issues which were causing client crashes have been fixed, so some players should still appreciate this boring little patch!
World of Warcraft: Cataclysm patch 4.2.0A is now available on all realms! Below you'll find the official patch notes.
Notes for all World of Warcraft patches can be found
here
.
Bug Fixes
Using an instant cast spell right after a target dies should no longer re-target the dead target’s body.
Using an ability immediately after switching targets should no longer affect the previous target.
Resolved a movement error when jumping onto an object while experiencing a low frame rate.
Mac: Fixed a bug preventing shift and mouse wheel commands from registering properly.
Resolved issues that were causing client crashes near Beth’tilac in the Firelands.
Live
Hotfixes (July 19 - August 15)
August 4
General
Balloon pets can no longer be sold to vendors.
Flight points in Outlands should correctly display for characters created after the release of patch 4.2.
Classes
Melee auto-attacks should properly trigger trinkets.
Druid
is correctly triggered when Rake gets a critical hit, and is putting an extra combo point on the target.
should no longer strike targets with which the druid is not in combat.
Hunter
Burning Adrenaline
is properly removing the focus cost of
.
Rogue
Mutilate
should now properly trigger trinkets.
Warrior
should no longer incorrectly apply double damage when certain buffs are present on the warrior.
Dungeons & Raids
Blackrock Spire
The
Scarshield Quartermaster
is properly flagged as a quest NPC and not a rare spawn.
Firelands
Burning Orb attack range has been increased for the
Majordomo Staghelm
encount
Live
Ask the Devs #11: Healing
Ask the Devs #11 was posted and this time it's all about healing. As someone who has played a healer since vanilla, I probably have too many opinions here so I'll let you guys do most of the reading--overall, there are some good questions, especially the one about Holy priest viability in top PvE content, but the answers aren't necessarily the best. And while Mana Tide is brought up, they don't talk much about how currently many guilds bring a Resto shaman in over another class solely for that buff.
I spend a lot of my time in raids keeping Water Shield up, which I rely on to maintain enough mana. There have been times I've neglected to heal someone because I had to refresh Water Shield. Why are shaman healers less effective compared to other healing classes? – Epistemology (NA), Ерз (EU-RU)
We’d like to be more consistent about what does and doesn’t trigger Water Shield. Having the shield trigger when taking direct damage, and consume an orb, is consistent with how all shaman shields work. On some encounters though, constant pulsing damage probably burns through those charges too quickly and doesn’t need
Live
Wowhead's Patch 4.2 Guide
4.2 is coming soon--very soon in fact. And we aren't oblivious to this fact, either.
In fact, as the news dries up, we're inclined to make a singular compendium of all the vast changes this patch brings in the form of
yet another Wowhead guide
. Patch 4.2 is a huge patch and it's more than just a new daily hub, legendary, and raid instance. There are also new rares, loads of new gear, and many new achievements. Overall, it's massive and it's the first true patch of the expansion--4.1 simply didn't cut it!
This guide is the product of hard work by the volunteers ArgentSun, Neutronmity, Perculia, and even Gnub (a moderator who pretends to do content time to time, or at least when a legendary he wants strikes). Special thanks to them for putting forth such a great effort and also nagging me to do my dailies daily as well as make some videos for 4.2. We hope you enjoyed this guide and find it a great resource in the weeks to come. We also hope you enjoyed our 4.2 coverage these past few months; it was Wowhead News debut and we've been going out of our way to bring great content quickly to everyone. You can always browse the
4.2 tag
on
Live
New Dev Watercooler Blog: Content for the Casual 85
This new dev watercooler blog covers casual content for 85s. As we've covered in recent posts, there's a ton of content to do even if you don't raid with Firelands coming out: dailies, epic questlines, new achievements and zones. Blizzard has created great quest hubs and events that tie into the current plotlines before--Isle of Quel'Danas, the war efforts for Ahn'Qiraj, the Argent Tournament dailies to name a few--and now we get to read a dev's perspective on Firelands.
As this is my first dev watercooler, I thought some introductions would be in order. I'm the lead quest designer for World of Warcraft, but many of you may already be familiar with my writing and webcomics under the pen-name "Fargo" from years past. To all my new and old friends: Hello! I hope to have the opportunity for more chats like this in between cramming our game full of epic experiences capable of melting your frontal lobes with pure liquefied awesome. (It says that on my business card.)
I'm 85. Now What?
World of Warcraft has a pretty big footprint: we try to create a world that appeals to casual and hardcore players alike. There's a whole body of players -- be t
Live
New Ghostcrawler Blog: Cataclysm Talent Tree Post-Mortem
Ghostcrawler's back after a hiatus from posting his developer blogs and this time he wants to talk talent trees. A lot of us aren't a big fan of the new trees, especially because it feels foreign to take an entire tree without looking up; frequently a good spec boils down to a cookie cutter spec with 1-2 points in a different ability or two.
Then again, cookie cutters
were
always popular--even in vanilla. Cataclysm just
streamlined
them. All in all, this is an excellent post-mortem into why Blizzard changed talents and how they feel about it currently, even if the system has its detractors. It's also a good examination into mastery and early leveling as well as endgame goals.
You may have noticed we changed class talent trees for Cataclysm. We changed not just the trees themselves, as you might expect for an expansion, but the entire structure of the trees and the way you choose talents. Now that the Cataclysm model has been in play for several months, the team has been discussing what we like and don’t like about it, and I thought that might be of interest to some of you. As always with this series, this is design rumination,
Live
Patch 4.1 Hotfixes (May 15 - 19)
A few big hotfixes were just announced for live today.
Classes
Death Knight
Necrotic Strike
's AP coefficient has been reduced from 0.75 to 0.7.
Obliterate
has been reduced from 160% to 150% base weapon damage.
Shaman
Healing Surge
has been reduced in power by 20%.
Warlock
now deals 25% less damage.
First Batch of BlizzCon Tickets
Also, as a quick reminder, BlizzCon tickets go on sale in less than 24 hours. Remember to get up prepared on Saturday!
Just in case May 21 isn't circled on your calendar, here's a quick reminder that BlizzCon 2011 tickets will be going on sale Saturday at 10 a.m. PT -- keep your eye on
the ticket sales page
tomorrow for the chance to get yours. If you are unable to purchase tickets tomorrow, a second batch will go on sale Wednesday, May 25 at 7 p.m. PT. In addition, tic
Live
Latest Cataclysm Hotfixes (5/11)
May 5-11
General
There were several situations on transports or moving objects where players were receiving Movement Enforcement Error messaging, which should now be corrected.
Players using Mobile Guild Chat should no longer sometimes receive error messages incorrectly stating they are not in a guild.
Mail sent from the Auction House should no longer sometimes display incorrect information about the transaction. This also applies to those using the Mobile Auction House.
Parties will no longer disband immediately after all members log out. There is now a 5-minute grace period before the group is disbanded.
Classes
Characters who are resurrected by a player on a moving platform should now be transferred to the caster’s world position, rather than the location they were in when the spell was first cast.
Select classes are no longer able to aggro and pull a single enemy NPC from a linked group through various measures of sneakiness.
Druid
Stampeding Roar
(Cat) should always properly
Live
World of Warcraft's Subscribers Decline and Blizzard Promises Quicker Expansions
Today's
Activision Blizzard earnings call
touched on quite a lot of World of Warcraft and its future as well as a little bit of Diablo III news.
During the call, Blizzard Entertainment's CEO mentioned that subscriber levels had fallen down to 11.4 million this March from its former peak of 12 million. Initially, this seems staggering, but it's important to remember that subscriber levels do not decline linearly and tend to fluxuate. Furthermore, it actually makes quite a bit of sense given two factors: RIFT's launch in March and the absense of a major content patch at that point of time. The new and shiny feeling of Catalysm was disappearing by March and we've only just gotten a new patch a few weeks ago. Unfortunately, 4.1 was fairly light on content for a patch--luckily Firelands will be this summer and it looks much beefier, so it's likely a lot more people will resubscribe to check it out at that point.
In response to the declining subscriber levels, Blizzard has
made some promises for WoW development speeds
Live
Patch 4.2 Firelands Preview
Patch 4.1 has only been live for a day, but 4.2 is being given some love right now from Blizzard. It looks like they're sticking to their promise of more frequent patches and content releases. They've just posted two preview videos of the upcoming content, including the new Firelands raid and
Molten Front
.
4.2 Raid Preview
4.2 Daily Quest Preview
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