The Blazing Speed change is interesting. It’ll grant us a lightning-quick 150% speed increase instead of 50%, but it’ll only last a second and a half. Plus, it’ll be triggerable instead of a proc, but only after taking a spell or melee hit that does 2% of our max health or more, it’s off the global cooldown, and it can be activated even during a spellcast. It’ll be a powerful escape maneuver to use when Blink isn’t available or just when we need to move a long way in a short amount of time. I’m not sure 1.5 seconds is quite long enough, but we also don’t know how often the ability will be available (is there an internal cooldown? How long after the damage is taken can we still activate the ability?).

The middle tiers

Tier 3 is relatively untouched, though Ring of Frost seems to have traded its 3-second “coalesce” time for a 1.5-second cast time. Tier 4, though, has some changes. Greater Invisibility is much improved, retaining all its original stealthy goodness, but adding in a 90% damage reduction while active and for 3 seconds after being broken. That’s a very powerful damage mitigation and avoidance ability right there, guys. Cauterize will no longer require a heal to prevent it from eventually killing you, as its life-saving effect will bring you to 50% health and then only burn you for 40% over the next 6 seconds. And Cold Snap is also being given a healing component; when activated, it restores 20% of your max health in addition to finishing the cooldown on Ice Block, Frost Nova, and Cone of Cold. … Because frost mages were just too easy to kill, I think we can all agree.

We should probably discuss tier 5 a little bit, too. Living Bomb looks pretty much the same as it did before, but the other two bomb spells have evolved a bit. Frost Bomb still does essentially the same thing it did in previous iterations of this talent calculator, placing a ticking frost bomb on your target that explodes after 6 seconds, doing damage to nearby targets and slowing them, but now the countdown on that bomb and the cooldown of the spell are both reduced by haste. Arcane Bomb has seen a full overhaul.

The Skull Banner ability (30% critical hit chance for 15 seconds) seems powerful enough that I have to believe it’s a minute cooldown. Demoralizing Banner (10% less damage by all enemies with 30 yards of the banner for 15 seconds) and Mocking Banner (all enemies attack the warrior for 6 seconds; banner lasts for 30 seconds) are just revamped versions of Demoralizing Shout and Challenging Shout, and as such, I expect the ability can’t be longer than a minute or they’ll be fairly useless.

I suspect future design on this ability will actually break it up into an entirely new category of ability for warriors called banners, much in the same way that paladins have hands and blessings and seals. Warriors will use shouts for active abilities that generate rage and buff directly, and banners for passive buffs or static areas of effect. That way, abilities like Skull Banner can be uncoupled from Mocking Banner.

I really like how the level 1 abilities have been redesigned so that warriors just get Heroic Strike to start. No more clunky Strike ability you never use again. I also like that Enrage is now passive and class-wide and that it’s been redesigned to increase rage generation. (We’ll talk about how fury’s mastery has been redesigned in the spec section.)

That said, there was still some prime WoW news in the pipeline over the last week. We had the Activision Blizzard investor conference call, where we learned that WoW lost only 100,000 subscribers since last count, mostly on the strength of the WoW annual pass. Lead Systems Designer Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street held a discussion on class roles. We also got a new Blizzard representative on the story forums, Nyorloth, who’s already starting things off we a bang with a shipping thread. Heck, we even heard that a Warcraft Monopoly game is in the works. There’s a downtime filler for you.

Downtime this is week is from 5 a.m. to 11 a.m. PST, so in lieu of Warcraft Monopoly, we have plenty of stuff for you to read, both in the paragraph above and in our usual roundup below.

Check out the Wowhead comments for each of the achievements; that’ll probably be your best bet. But as you mentioned, there aresome that can’t be soloed. However, many can, and I’ve had some success just messing around on my warlock with them.

I think you’ll have the easiest time if you just get another person or two and bang them all out. Try posting on the realm forums, too. I bet you’ll run into a few people there if you don’t have luck in trade chat. (I know you mentioned it’s obnoxious, but sometimes it’s the best bet.)

Bilbomoody asked:

Is it the World’s End Tavern in Shattrath where you have a quest to start a bar brawl? I think that bar’s my favorite, what with the nostalgia of BC and all.

As Jaq pointed out in the comments, the bar fight at the World’s End Tavern is part of a quest chain that starts out in Nagrand, it’s named “He Called Himself Altruis…”.

You also start a fight in leveling a toon out in Thousand Needles with some Goblins. My ‘lock had fun with that one (he’s an instigator of Pure Evil™).

Joakim asked:

Do you think it will be possible for Blizzard to actually alphabetize (spelling?) the Glory of the Hero achievements?

Blizzard really needs to update its achievements UI to include things like searching, sorting, and filtering. I did a 25-man heroic Ulduar run the other week, and the hardest part of the run was finding all the achievements and tracking them to make sure we got ‘em.

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DPS classes have it easy. Their only goal is to deal more damage than the other guys. Their existence revolves around a single, immutable metric: DPS. There’s no ambiguity when comparing two damage classes, as their DPS speaks for itself. As a DPS player’s gear and skill improve, it directly increases their damage done, allowing them to evaluate their performance clearly and instantly.

Evaluating a healer is much more difficult. As their group’s damage and skill improve, their healing numbers will actually go down. Healers are relied on the most when a raid is attempting a new encounter and gradually become marginalized as the fight moves toward farm status. As a healer, your best HPS performance might be the very first time you down an encounter. If you’re killing heroic Ultraxion in four minutes, your raid simply isn’t taking enough damage for you to parse highly. In order to properly evaluate a holy paladin’s play, you have to dig deeper.

Begin with the basics

When you first start evaluating your healing parses on World of Logs, there are several easy items to examine first. You want to maintain 100% Judgements of the Pure and Beacon of Light uptime, you want to be using your cooldowns like Divine Plea and Divine Favor on every encounter, and you want to ensure that you’re spamming Holy Shock on cooldown. The basics of playing a holy paladin properly are easily divinable from World of Logs, and you should start there first. If you’re still finding that you’re being outpaced by other holy paladins, then you need to get down to the details.

Pick a difficult fight

If you’re examining your healing parses from an easy encounter, like the Raid Finder version of Morchok, you’re not going to uncover any useful information. Healers can only heal when there’s damage being done to the tanks or the raid. If you want to figure out exactly how well you’re performing, you need to push your holy paladin to the limit. The later Dragon Soul encounters like the Madness of Deathwing are a good start, while parses from the heroic fights will be especially relevant.

If you only play your holy paladin in dungeons and the Raid Finder, then there’s really not much for you to evaluate. You’re never going to push the class to its limits, and so you can’t properly evaluate your performance. You can breeze through most dungeons by doling out a Holy Radiance every now and then, or by casting a few Holy Lights, or by unloading a few Divine Lights. Performance evaluation is only really effective when you’re trying to squeeze all the healing you can out of the class.

So, Act I of our Cataclysm for Dummies guide went over the basics of Cataclysm — how it came to be, just who that Deathwing guy is, anyway, and why he’s so annoyed with the world in general. We also found out why we’re going to all those new level 80 to 85 zones and, more importantly, why we’re wandering around in three different raids in three completely different locations around the world. If you made it through the basics, congratulations! You’re caught up through patch 4.0.

But we’re in patch 4.3, aren’t we? And you’ve probably still got questions. Questions like: What’s up with the troll dungeons — didn’t we kill those guys already? And why did we have to go fight Ragnaros again? Why is Thrall friendly as all get-out with the Dragon Aspects? Why do we have to do all this silly time travel? The good news is, by the time you’re done reading this guide, you’ll totally understand what Cataclysm is all about.

Please note: There are spoilers here for the novel Thrall: Twilight of the Aspects. If you’re still planning on reading it, you may want to do so before you hit this recap.
Thrall and his amazing dragon friends

The Dragon Aspects needed to unite to defeat Deathwing, but there was a small problem — Malygos, leader of the Blue Dragonflight, was dead. We killed him back in Wrath because he’d gone crazy, and the blue flight still didn’t have a leader. On top of that, Nozdormu, Aspect of the Bronze Dragonflight, was still missing somewhere in time. In order to address these problems one at a time, Ysera and Alexstraza met up with the members of the Blue Dragonflight to try and pick a new leader. But the blues weren’t happy about this, seeing as how it was Alexstrasza who had ordered Malygos’ death in the first place.

They met at Wyrmrest Temple, but the meeting was interrupted by an attack from the Twilight Dragonflight, and the Temple was nearly destroyed as a result. Not only that, but all of the eggs from the Red Dragonflight that were kept under the Temple were destroyed, too — and Alexstraza’s consort, Korialstrasz. Alexstrasza was so grief-stricken that she took off on her own, and Ysera was left to figure out how to handle this matter of the Hour of Twilight she’d seen in a vision. In order to move on, she needed the Aspects, and in order to do that, she needed to find Nozdormu — and in order to do that, her visions told her to go find Thrall.

Meanwhile, Thrall was doing an amazing job of being terrible at being a shaman, much to the dismay of the Earthen Ring. When Ysera showed up and asked him for his help, he was almost unwilling to help her, but a few harsh words from Aggra, who he had been happily falling in love with, sent him on his way. After a complicated bout of time traveling, Thrall found Nozdormu and brought him back to the present, helped the Blue Dragonflight pick a new leader, and helped Alexstrasza come to terms with her overwhelming grief.

But he helped in another way, too — one the Aspects hadn’t expected. Thrall was a powerful shaman; he just didn’t quite have a handle on things yet. And when he finally did get a handle on them, he united with the Aspects to fight off a horrific Twilight creation made by a mysterious man known as the Twilight Father. Thrall took the place of Deathwing as the warder of the earth, briefly. After that was finished, Nozdormu ‘fessed up to where he had been — when he was given power over time, he was shown the moment of his death. One timeway had him rise as the leader of the Infinite Dragonflight, and he wanted to find out why.

In finding this out, he discovered that the issues plaguing the various dragonflights were all part of a conspiracy by the Old Gods. But at that point, there was little to be done, and Thrall returned to the Maelstrom, a better shaman for his journeys.

All classes have their secrets — their little tricks of the trade that are passed from player to player in the hidden hangouts of the class. I can imagine the warlocks in their lush boudoirs explaining to eager-faced new ‘locks about the real benefits to the succubus. Or mages in their mirrored enclaves admiring dresses and explaining to stricken young mages the real benefits to sheep.

Hunters are no different. When we gather in the wild, high places of Azeroth, we pass our own tricks around the campfire, the secrets that let us survive to see another boss.

Many of these tips are not specific to hunters, and every class could benefit from what we have learned the hard way. These are deeper truths and mechanical tips we’ve learned through the specific roles hunters often fill or through the hardships of our class design. In the interest of inter-class cooperation, we now share five of these secrets with you.

1. Kiting
Pro Tip: Just run away.

Since the vanilla days of General Drakkisath, hunters have been the go-to class for kiting situations, and we have perfected this delicate art. To be sure, we have some tools to enhance our ability. We have a slow trap and a slow shot that works on most non-boss mobs. We have a speed boost that dazes us if we take a single point of damage and thus is usually impractical.

But here’s a secret to hunter kiting: Most of the time, all we do is run away from the bad buy. Really. We’re flattered that you always ask us to do it, but really, in most cases anyone could manage it. We don’t really understand why you don’t feel like you can do it yourself. Just keep some DoTs up on the target or fire off an instant or two while you’re running (jump-shot is also just as simple as it sounds), and run away from the bad guy.

“Eldacar’s posting style and contributions to the community first crossed my radar during Cataclysm beta,” Zarhym explains. “He had created some very useful guides on the beta forums detailing good feedback and bug reporting etiquette. I stickied his information and had brief contact with him via email and in the beta around that time.

“In the fall of 2011, once the community team solidified plans for expanding the MVP program, his name popped back up in part because of some PvP-related posts he was working on,” he continues. “I really make an effort to try and hang onto the names of constructive, eloquent posters — whether or not they’re critical of some of Blizzard’s decisions. The MVP program is really meant to be a reflection of the diversity within our community. Its members are just a collection of folks from the community who are embraced by their peers for their knowledge and personality, to the extent that we want to give them official recognition. I think Eldacar’s a damn fine example of this.”

A “damn fine example”? Frankly, we’re with Zarhym — Eldacar’s thoughtful approach and obvious passion for his subject matter made trumpeting his recent call to arms for player feedback a no-brainer. So who is this guy? And how’d he get so damn fine, anyway?

Main character Eldacar
Guild Martha Stewart
Realm Boulderfist (US)

WoW Insider: Are you an old hand in Azeroth, Eldacar, or is your forum MVP status riding on a wave of a more recent involvement with the game?

Eldacar: I have been playing WoW continuously since a few months after launch, although I did take a five-month break during The Burning Crusade while I was deployed to Iraq. [My guild] is a small, PVP-focused guild that has been around on my server since vanilla. I actually became friends with the guild and its members by fighting against them back at level 60 (I was Alliance at the time) and developing a relationship of mutual respect with them.

It is hard to say what led to me being invited to the MVP program; only Blizzard can really answer that. [Editor's note: Psst, Eldacar -- according to our intro here, Blizzard's done exactly that.] However, I have always tried to be a constructive and helpful forum poster. I maintained two sticky threads during the Cataclysm beta test in the general discussion forum; one was a list of all the content that was currently available for players to test, and the other was unofficial patch notes, which I did my best to update with each of the 30+ patches. Both of those took a lot of work to maintain throughout the course of the beta.

In the last year, I have spend a lot of time writing PvP-related guides and other informational posts such a guide to how resilience scales, a breakdown of all the currently announced PvP content coming in Mists, and an FAQ for the season 10-to-11 transition. Most of my recent work can be found on my website, which is a WoW PvP blog I made primarily as a repository for all of this stuff I was already writing.

I love putting out a call for submissions because I get bombarded with some of the coolest stuff in response! It seems that dolls and plush toys are in abundance this season, including the sweet duo pictured above, created by Layla Rei. Layla’s no stranger to creating dolls; her deviantART gallery has dozens upon dozens of delightful, whimsical creations.

It’s the tiny little details that makes them so utterly charming. The button eyes remind me of Coraline, and come on — how could you not love that goblin and those goggles? But here’s the kicker behind all of this: Leyla doesn’t play WoW. Instead, she created these dolls and others for her sister who does play. For someone who doesn’t play the game, Leyla’s got a wonderful grasp of the whimsical feel of Warcraft … and she was more than happy to sit down and chat with us about her delightful creations.

World of WarCrafts: Hi, Layla! Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got started with crafting.

Layla Rei: Well, my name is Julianne Taylor, but my gaming/online persona is Layla Rei. I was brought up with games and art/crafts, so of course I would grow up making gaming-inspired crafts. I come from two very artistic and supportive parents. Really, my whole family has an artistic flair about them. I tend to love to try new types of crafts, which makes me a jack of all trades … but a master of none. I use to go through cycles where one month I might be into drawing/painting … then sewing … then maybe chain mail, but lately I’ve stuck to making dolls.

I use to make costume wings for adults for cosplay, and I’ve made costumes for cons I’ve gone to and even for a lot of the people that attended my pirate wedding! I’ve done a little bit of art in college but most of what I do is self-taught. I’ve always have been making something — some of my early memories are of my dad teaching me how to do watercolor trees and thinking back I was a little young to be trying to make skillful trees like he wanted!

You’ve said that you don’t play WoW — so how did you get the idea for the dolls?

As a gamer, you make this character and you play it through it levels and you get attached to it. You think of a story that goes with it. You might draw it or commission someone to draw it for you. It becomes a hero, maybe. I started out with making my Layla Rei doll — though in the MMO that I play, she wears more clothes!

My mom is one of my biggest fans and loves little Layla and suggested I make my sister her character for a gift. Since then, every gift to my sister has been a WoW doll because she loves them. I have a list of her characters, and when it’s time for a present, I pick off that list. I’m one of those people that rather make presents then buy them for people, because that just makes it unique and what better gift than to make my sister’s character come to life.

Sites like LFRaid.com and Twitterland Raiding are two communities that have sprung up quickly in this new cross-realm raiding world. Twitterland Raiding is a website created for the Twitter WoW community to form up groups for raiding across server lines. With a centralized place to express interest in raiding as well as no server structure or logistics to worry about besides Real ID names (which gets immensely easier with the introduction of BattleTags), raiding can happen in greater volume and more quickly.

LFRaid.com is another site that has set up a system to advertise for raiding with a group in a cross-server community. The biggest difference between sites like these and guild recruiting sites is that they exist outside of the guild parameter. You do not have to spend money on a transfer as a new recruit to raid with a different group of people, and you skip that potentially expensive trial period that might not work out. LFRaid.com also has a great Teams Recruiting section that players can browse through to find a group that’s looking for a guy or girl just like you.

Choosing to create a community in a very different way, @vitaemachina on Twitter administers the Sleepy Hams public Mumble server. Originally created to streamline cross-realm raiding groups that wanted a place to use voice communication, Sleepy Hams has sort of taken on a life of its own.

Many people threw up their hands in protest over the Dungeon Finder’s unintended consequence of damaging server communities (or, in layman’s terms, asking in trade chat for two hours for a tank, because we thought that this was fun for over 10 years). Instead, we got a robust system of dungeon queuing that has been revised, tweaked, and added on to since halfway through Wrath of the Lich King. The Dungeon Finder and, by proxy, the Raid Finder may have potentially been among the most important innovations for the MMO genre to this day, if only because of how much content it made accessible to previously unknowing players. What these projects show is that no matter how much community you think Blizzard is removing, by adding features that greatly enhance accessibility, players will always find a way at creating communities with the people they want to play the game with.