Can we get some gear balance this time?

From IGN's WotLK "preview":

So how soon will you be replacing all your gear from Burning Crusade? We'll have to wait and see.

Heck of a preview there. Thanks guys.

Still, this does raise the part of BC that bugged me the most. After my first major WoW hiatus, I came back determined not to buy BC until I'd finished a few things on my old TODO list, like up my rep with the Thorium Brotherhood, grab my Pattern: Lava Belt and Pattern: Molten Helm, and make PHAT LOOT!

Luckily I came back just before BC's release, and I managed to cash in, but just barely. Aside from a little naive buying, prices for Old World craftables dove like there'd been a housing bubble after BC arrived. And after buying BC, I could tell why. The quest loot was so phat, there was no reason to keep my hard earned craftables and purples around any more.

Burning Crusade forced players to upgrade. I should argue that in more detail, but for now I won't. The bottom line is that BC provided unique shortcuts to power that did not, imo, greatly improve gameplay. Instead, it created another system of virtual ghettos back in WoW's Old World. Endgames shifted. Years of development time for instances, etc, rendered worthless. Those new to WoW or who hadn't seen the OW end game had no real incentive to go back.

There were options. Create mobs that have a new attack type or one for which there was little resistance gear in the OW, kinda like fire resist was used in the original. Keep the progression of items natural, and ensure items (other than just epics) continue to have some important value in the future. Here, I'm thinking about something like the Illdari-Bane items -- perhaps there's a mob in the WotLK that can only be damaged by items that specifically harm demons by 150 or more points. Bam, you're dropping Wrath folk back into BC storylines. And, honestly, there's no reason not to put some check in the game that can tell when level 75s are dropping in to grab the Lexicon Demonica from Grandmaster Vorpil and up the difficulty a bit.

I realize the achievement system is supposed to help fix the obsolescence issue, but so were heroic dungeons. I'm not optimistic that WotLK will be much different, in practice, than BC (though honestly it's no big loss to me this time. Aside from the blood elf zones, I didn't find much in BC that I couldn't do without).

In a strange twist, complete obsolescence isn't a boon to the publisher, like it is when Microsoft kills Word 97. Here, there are rendered instances, ready for just a little tweaking before they're efficiently eating up monthly fees from addicted ur, happy players. I hope Blizzard gets it right this time.

Repeat after me: You have a problem.

I've still got a 60 day card sitting on the bookshelf. I've promised myself I'm not going to play until Wrath, and even then not until mid-December. But then The Molten Core was released.

Yep. You guessed it.



It was lots of fun, though after some time away I'm pretty sure it needs a bat.

I'm not alone

From MacMerc:

About the only game that became so addictive for me that it started to negatively affect the other aspects of my life has been World of Warcraft. I came to the realization that I was spending too much time leveling up in my artificial, digital life and not nearly enough time achieving and contributing with my real life and I finally gave it up. I still miss it. Even though the quests were repetitive and meaningless, the learning of new and imaginative abilities, the interactions with other players, and the friendships I developed made the game very enjoyable.

Well said. This is why I have a 60 day game time card sitting at home, begging to be used. And to think I spent about $100 extra on my laptop to get a video card that would play WoW easily. *sigh* The trials of an addict.

Will Return Nov. 13th

It's called "Part-time" for a reason, I suppose. Man, you get a lot more free time when you're not playing, though seeing at least five laptops on WoW at the local coffee shop this evening didn't help the addiction much.

Inside Mac Games News: Wrath Of The Lich King Coming November 13th:

Blizzard Entertainment announced today that World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, the second expansion for its award-winning subscription-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game), will arrive in stores on November 13 in North America, Europe, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, and Russia, and November 14 in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand.

Roots indoors?

Well, this sorta changes everything, doesn't it?

There were some details of class changes (sorry its incomplete, as I mentioned I missed the start of the presentation) but from what I recall:
...
Druids:
Entangling roots will work indoors!
"Flourish" was mentioned but I didn't catch what that did ...

(emph mine)

Rawr: Dr00d gear optimization utility

While googling around to find a list of WoW enchants in XML, I stumbled over Rawr, an application that is designed to help optimize your gear. Here's the description from the site.

Rawr is a program for comparing and exploring gear for Bears, Cats, Moonkin, Warlocks, Mages, Retadins, ProtWarriors, and Healadins, in the MMORPG, World of Warcraft. It is currently in public beta testing, and is being developed by by Astrylian, of US-Eonar. Rawr has been designed from the start to be fun to use, and helpful in finding better combinations of gear, and what gear to find.

It's a Windows app, written in C# for .NET, and at least marginally works in OS X using the Mono project (and, therefore, I assume, Linux). I've played around with it a bit, but have yet to be particularly impressed with its "Moonkin model". The upgrades seem to be all about upping damage without any real consideration for anything else. They should call the model "Clothkin," because that's what you end up with for upgrades. Oh well.

Still, it remains in development, is open source, and I suppose I could get in there and write a Panzerkin model... Might be worth your checking it out, so I thought I'd pass it along!

Hello, hardware

WoW on my iBook doesn't look quite this good (see screenshots). I've retired my Windows tower in the interest of space and in the interest of stealing one stick of its RAM for the Mac Mini, but this kind of detail is making me think about firing it back up. I miss it. My Vostro (with a slightly upgraded video chip) is choppy at times for no good reason, which also stink0rz. Argh, I miss good hardware. It makes WoW a different game.