Korea Players to get MF and XP Bonuses at PC Bangs, Monks Stunlock Inferno Diablo, Meet Svetlana Quindt, Community Thoughts on the Paragon System
Battle of Theramore: One Week at Level 85 and Patch 5.0.4 Class Guides / WoWDB Addon
Mists of Pandaria Digital Deluxe Mount and Pet Released
If you bought the Digital Deluxe version of Mists of Pandaria you should receive your mount, pet, and achievements when logging in after Patch 5.0.4.
Gamescom Interviews
There are few more interviews from Gamescom that have some interesting bits of information. If you want to read the entire interview, check out Millenium and Judgehype.
The Sha of Anger respawns every two hours and will drop PvP and PvE gear, similar to Tol Barad bosses. You should be able to do this boss once a week.
Salyis's Warband will only respawn once every four to five days and drop items you can't find anywhere else such as mounts and pets.
Proving Grounds (solo instances to try out new specs, train yourself and earn achievements) are not forgotten, just something that has to be done right. There is no specific announcement date yet, but it is something they might come back to after Mists of Pandaria is released.
Playing with lower level friends is something that would still be nice to do, and part of the tech needed was added with challenge modes. This is not a high priority for the moment, so there is no specific announcement to be made about it.
The goal for Mists of Pandaria is to deliver the next major content patch right as players are finishing up the first one. They should be spaced out more evenly with a shorter time between patches, maybe even a little more content than in previous expansion patches.
There are no current plans for a system of veteran's rewards for older players.
Mists of Pandaria won't be bringing back any old bosses.
There won't be any server merges, as cross-realm zone technology will be applied to the problem.
The legendary questline will start in Patch 5.0 with Wrathion who traveled to Pandaria. After completing the questlines, you will be rewarded with a powerful gem that will let you upgrade specific items dropped from raid bosses. The questline will not finish here and will continue with Patch 5.1, after the Horde and Alliance really settle in Pandaria. The questline available after the release of Mists of Pandaria will end with a cliffhanger.
PvP/Arena spectator mode is a functionality that developers would like to add but no real plan for now.
Pet Battles could be available on mobile platforms one day. Blizzard thought about it but developers are currently focusing on the extension for PC and Mac. We will have to wait to know more.
Patch 5.0.4 Class Guides
There were a lot of class changes in Patch 5.0.4 and Icy Vein's class guides are a good place to start catching up. The Priest guides are still being finished up and should be done soon, but there are previews for each spec to hold you over until then.
These guides give a more in depth overview of the changes and new status of each class than the some of the guides in our Patch 5.0.4 preview, so they are worth a look if you already read some guides yesterday!
Originally Posted by MMO-Champion
Death Knight
Blood
Frost
Unholy
Paladin
Holy
Protection
Retribution
Priest
Discipline
Holy
Shadow
Rogue
Assassination
Combat
Subtlety
Warlock
Affliction
Demonology
Destruction
Known Issue: Master Looter in Raids
Originally Posted by Blizzard
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
With the release of patch 5.0.4 Players who utilize the Master Looter option in Raid groups may encounter a known issue under certain conditions in which loot cannot be assigned to players outside of the Master Looter’s own group.
We are currently working to resolve this issue in an upcoming fix.
To work around this issue, Master Looters will need to move players they wish to award loot to into their own group. Please note that normal loot trading between players in Raid groups will still apply once the loot has been awarded by the Master Looter.
Account-wide Mounts, Pets, and Achievements
Originally Posted by Blizzard
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
It’s finally here, and you’ll be able to enjoy just about every mount and pet you own on any character, and any license, under a single Battle.net account. You can also work on a wide variety of Achievements from multiple characters. Please be aware of the rules and guidelines we’ve just posted for how you can coalesce your account-wide pets and mounts smoothly and safely.
*To see all of your achievements, pets, and mounts, you’ll want to log into every character at least once.
Blue Posts
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Alterac Valley NPCs
This is going to be a rather confusing explanation so bear with me.
The BG NPCs have to be nerfed both on beta and on live to make sure they aren't too deadly in the 85-89 bracket. This nerf also applies, perhaps unintuitively, to the level 90 bracket on beta. However, once you are legitimately in the level 90 bracket on live, the NPCs should be more challenging.
To complicate this explanation, we found that the 85-89 bracket for IOC was not nerfed correctly, but we have just fixed that. The IOC NPCs should be as weak as the AV ones now.
But again, when you hit level 90 on live (not beta), they should be more challenging. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Making all Pets and Mounts Account Wide
You have to log into the character that has that mount first
Indeed, and it’s highly recommended you log into all of your characters on every realm just to be sure every pet and mount is accounted for. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Unable to Ride Some Flying Mounts
Do you have the appropriate level riding capability (flight) for it? Also: Be sure to log onto the character that found it and learned it first. You have to log onto all your alts for their items to be shared.
It's also worth noting that the violet proto-drake no longer grants the flying skill associated to ride it.
Oh, and this too: You can't ride a flying mount at level 37 unless it is classified as both a ground/flying mount. The TLPD is not. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Account-wide Pets with Patch 5.0.4
You can have more than 4 of a particular pet type in your journal.
This is correct. The migration was allowed to exceed the limit. It is a limit on the player collecting pets, going forward.
Is the only way to get rid of the excess (I have so many rocket bots) releasing them?
Yes. Please note that there are many pets that will have significant value once they can be caged (after Mists of Pandaria). (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Game Design and Character Progression
This is a cop-out. I can't tell you how disappointed I was when I read this from a company that has claimed it believes giving players options to enjoy the game the way they want suddenly saying that options are a bad thing and shouldn't "count".
I think you're taking that out of context. For the players saying "I want something to do after I finish my raid for the week," providing them very optional content (the examples I used were maxing out professions or achievements) isn't something that fits the bill for them. Telling them they can always find something to do if they try hard enough would be fairly considered a cop-out. They want some kind of directed gameplay with a sense of character progression.
Options as a general philosophy are a great thing. We love options and we have tried to provide lots of options for max level players to progress their characters, such as scenarios, challenge modes, Raid Finder and daily quest hubs, in addition to options you've always had, such as dungeons, PvP and professions, and some new types of content that aren't tied to character progression, most obviously pet battles.
We never want players to feel locked in to a character so we are making things account wide! *locks vp gear behind rep grinds that are not account wide*
That's a tricky balance to strike. At the end of the day, the reason most players make alts is to have additional characters to play. I could just as easily say "I feel locked to my priest because she has so much better gear than my rogue. I should be able to give any gear I pick up to my rogue and I should be able to share valor and conquest points among all my characters." Or you can take it to a silly extreme "I already leveled up one character to 90, so I shouldn't have to do it for a second character." That really isn't that different from saying you don't want to do the level 90 quest content a second time.
As I've said before, we don't think leveling an alt (and by "leveling" in this context I am technically including all of the progression you need to do to max out a character including level 90 content) needs to take as long as leveling your first character, but it should take some amount of time. Maybe we're erring on the side of being too conservative, but it's always easier to make game rules more forgiving than it is to tighten them up. (Players like gaining power and freedom by they hate to lose it.)
For example, a compromise might be that you could buy an item at Exalted level that you could mail to an alt to give them a headstart. Maybe we re-introduce the tabards, but at Exalted level, but have them only work on quests, not dungeons, and make them bind-to-account to help a second character. Maybe it's okay to have factions be shared across accounts the way mounts and achievements are, but currency should only stay on the character who earned them. Or maybe it's the currency that should be BOA and not the factions. (Those are just brainstorming ideas -- not announcements.) (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Hunter (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Aspects and the GCD
As I said above, we're still not convinced the Aspect design is working as intended (which is to provide a decision for the hunter) and long term, we will likely continue to iterate on it.
In the short term, our plan is to revert the recent change and return Aspects to off the GCD. Yes, you might just macro them again, but that seems to be the lesser of two evils compared to having them on the GCD.
I can't provide any information on when this will happen. Hopefully we can fix it before you start leveling from 85 to 90. No promises. I'm just sharing our intent. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Guild Wars 2 Hits 400,000 Concurrent Users and First Level 80
Guild Wars 2 was released on the 28th, but before release time even rolled around the game hit the 400,000 concurrent users mark from just the people with early access! More than one million copies were pre-ordered, giving the game a successful start.
We also recently saw the first Level 80 character, Surfeuze! GW2Guru has an interview with him talking about how he accomplished this speedy leveling.
If you want more frequent updates, check out GW2Guru or find some other players to play with in our Guild Wars 2 forum. If you are looking for maps or anything else that can be found in a database, check out GW2DB!
World of Warcraft Exclusive Look (2001)
SamuraiSmurfette provided us with scans of one of the earlier looks at World of Warcraft from a 2001 edition of Computer Gaming World. Enjoy a look back almost 11 years ago at what WoW was planned to be during the earlier stages of development. If you are interested in the rest of that issue, or any others, you can find them over at Computer Gaming World Museum.