Coldarra, the Mystic Realm

Coldarra, also friendly called Rollercoaster (goes up and down and everybody is sick of it). I’m so curious about it.

This is just “yet another rant” post, so if you don’t care, feel free to skip.

When I opted for Beta, I was thinking about testing content. As opposite, I’m just testing world servers going down every 5-10 minutes and spike lags of 12-15 seconds each.

There are certain things I question myself. Why does US have 3 servers while we, averagely with more than half their whole people, we get 1? And why is the only european server in FRICKIN’ CANADA?!?

And that’s not all. There are several other little things, like the blizzard account-related pets. US people was forced to merge the WoW account and Blizz account to join the beta. In europe we dont even have the ability to do that, let alone for something. And this includes the fact that most bonus stuff linked to the merge of WoW and Blizz account won’t be avaliable to europeans.

I personally feel like they’re handing europeans a cookie, which also makes me quite willing to withdraw everything. I mean, if you don’t need us testing that’s fine, take it back, but if you want us to (and I’ve reported even some critical bugs), at least give us a FRICKIN’ DECENT SERVER.

Same goes for pre-made characters. US gets batches of pre-made characters to test instances and stuff, fully 70-80 geared bastards, while we, to test a DK in northrend, have to level them up in Outland.

I seriously don’t know what’s the matter with Blizzard…

Open Transfers: Hooray!!

Here’s for you a(n almost) fresh news:

As the state of the game has matured substantially since the inception of Paid Character Transfers, we will now be allowing PvE-to-PvP transfers on a full-time basis to provide players with more mobility and freedom to easily play with their friends.

But that’s pretty much the only change in the transfers policies:

Keep in mind that all of the other standard cooldowns and restrictions will continue to apply; we’re just opening the option to transfer characters on Normal realms to Player-vs.-Player realms.

If you’re asking yourself what all that stuff means and you don’t want to read, I’ll keep it short: now you can transfer your characters from Normal servers to PvP servers anytime.

The side effect, is that for example if your friends rolled on a PvE server, should you transfer there you will always have the possibility to transfer back to a PvP. Which is far from being useless.

I was asking to myself when they would have changed it. I’ve got my answer.

WoW 3.01

In the last hours, a patch has been delivered to our houses, namely WoW-2.4.3-to-3.0.1-TBC-EU-Update.

While we perfectly know that this is just the beginning, just like TBC, it makes a certain sense to believe in the “predicted” launch date, which is November 11.

Given an upcoming month of betas and fixes, another month for the final production, it could make quite some sense.

Guess we’ll see soon.

The Long Way to Northrend

Portal to Stormwind, ship to Northrend. NO, REALLY.

Stormwind Port
Stormwind Port

One of the newest additions which left me amused, is the brand new Stormwind’s Port, with the Lighthouse and all the rest. Enjoy the sight.

Ship to Northrend
Ship to Northrend

Amazing ship if you ask me. It makes me wonder how a ship half made out of FRICKIN’ STONE (and by half i mean the front half) could avoid sinking, but hey, it’s fantasy land, who cares!

Aside you bunch of nerds anyway.

Stormwind's Lighthouse
Stormwind’s Lighthouse

Stormwind’s Lighthouse. It’s… err… a lighthouse. Made of FRICKIN’ STONE.

Valance
Valiance

First sight you have when you take a step off the ship. By the way, you can use mounts on ships too now. AWSOME!

Valance Pt. 2
Valiance Pt. 2

A sight of the “middle field” between Valiance Port and Valiance Keep.

This is it for now, this is the last post for today. Or for the moment should I say. Anyway, I know that the latest image titles aren’t quite funny, but hey, those were just panoramics. What image titles you ask? Oh, wait, you didn’t hover through all the images in the last four posts, did you?

OH, BOY!

Death Knights

You want to know more about Death Knights, don’t you? I know you do. Don’t lie, I know all you damn nerds will roll a DK as soon as WotLK appears, so don’t even try to lie. Just for you I will spoil the best I can, to remove that shiny happy smile from your sorry faces.

Just kidding, btw. No, maybe not.

Arthas, the Lich King
Arthas, the Lich King

As I’ve already said in the 2nd post on this blog, you start right in front of the Lich King (or better, right at his back). Here’s a picture of him. By the way, every time you talk with him he will tell you bad things. Like, your soul is mine, you will have no own will, your mama is fat, and so on.

Corpse Dust
Corpse Dust

I bet my ass goggles this is one of the first things you will notice. The vendor itself is a normal reagent vendor, aside its name and that little powder that Death Knights use to summon a minion. Either with that or slaying some humanoid around you (including players) to summon a ghoul. Fun part is, if your friend dies, you cast the spell on him, he will become a ghoul. Or better, he will have control over the ghoul. NO, REALLY!

First Sword
First Sword

This is the first sword in the game for Death Knights (note, the “glow” is caused by one of the first Runeforgings you get along with the sword). It’s cool but not just like the second one. The second one has runic inscription along the blade. NO, REALLY. Problem is with runeforging you see like nothing of it, but still… Also, be noted, the “second weapon” can optionally be an axe, instead of the runic sword.

Rune System
Rune System

I must admit that the first time I heard of the Rune System, I simply misunderstood everything. By “consumed” I thought it meant that runes were a sort of strange “stones” you would “socket” somewhere, but had limited durability, or somewhere among those lines. Nothing so far from the truth. Consider those little “balls” some cooldowns for spells. A spell uses one, if there is one in cooldown uses the other, if there are all on cooldown you’re toast. That’s all there is to it.

Although I didn’t understood what do glyphs have to do with Death Knight, but I just made the first 3 levels with him, so there is still time to learn that, and HEY THIS IS JUST AN OVERVIEW, FOR GOD’S SAKE! Cut me some slack, man!

Archerus Deathchargers
Archerus Deathchargers

Gotten through a quest. Free. Epic. NO, REALLY. You get epic mount with Death Knight at about level 56. Which is terribly funny. And awsome. I used it to “run” through all the pack of mobs from Hellfire to Shattrath at level 58, and until deep Terokkar Forest nothing was able to stop me. And when they stunned and dismounted me, I killed the damn 62 wolf, and after him came another to help, namingly 63-Ima-kill-you wolf. And kill him too! NO, REALLY!

It was awsome… tiresome but awsome. Luckily I had a couple good  talents here and there that made me live another day 😀

Lights Hope Chapel Fight
Light’s Hope Chapel Fight

I thought it was cool. And I can’t talk you about it anyway, or I will spoil too much. Bear with me and enjoy the screen.

Death Knights
Death Knights

This is a graphical comparison of DK’s starting and “ending” gear. By ending I mean after completing the main quest line which brings you to… wait, you actually thought I would tell you what happens? HA! In your face!

Major Changes & Oddities

This post will be about some major changes I found during gameplay plus some “oddities”, something strange or terribly funny, or even the slightest inside joke I found out. Let’s start with something stupid, just to screw your mind.

Grand Theft Palomino
Grand Theft Palomino

Found during the first DK Quests. “I lol’d irl” (Anonymous)

Blizzard against Simpsons
Blizzard against Simpsons 

If you don’t remember Mayor Quimby, you should be ashamed of yourself. NO, REALLY! Also, apparently Blizzard just couldn’t resist another citation from BattleTech, and told us to stole New Avalon‘s Registry, but just after slaying each one of them, or closely anyway.

Off to serious things slightly less stupid things.

MOAR PETS!!
MOAR PETS!!

I had to check with my own eyes, so I rerolled hunter just for you guys. And yes, pet slots have increased from 2 to 4, rising the number of usable pets to 5. What? 4 you say? You need to tame beasts for skills? No, that’s what you HAD to do. Skills will be learned on a level base, lower level pets after taming (or being left in the stables) will automagically level to 5 levels below yours, and so you can have 5 pets at a time zOMG I CAN DIE HAPPY NOW!!

Mount Speed Increasers
Mount Speed Increasers

Shortly after I logged with my copied 70, I read the message you see below last image: “You receive item: [Skybreaker Whip].“. Useless to say, I had a unique reaction after this message, which left me a huge WTF?!? question mark parked over my hair. I tried to reequip it but it didn’t work. After hovering I noticed that the description was insanely longer than the normal I used to know. Read for yourself. NO MOAR TRINKETS!! The problem is that if you use more than a couple mounts, this will be a major pain in the ass wallet, because you would need several different speed enchants… basically just another money sink.

How the hell do you apply that you ask? I’ll show you right away, and the next is a feature that I like and welcome a DAMN LOT.

Mounts & Companions
Mounts & Companions 

This is a merged screen from the Character tabs, and it’s a screen of the “Pets” tab. What? You don’t understand? Press “C”, Character frame will popup, with tabs like “Character”, “Skills”, “Reputation” and so on. After the “Character” tab it’s been inserted a new “Pets” tab. From there you can select (you heard me right!) the pets or the mounts you want to summon. This has a few consequences:

  1. All mounts and pets have been “mutated” in “Use to Learn” objects, similar to what happened with [Riding Crop], [Skybreaker Whip] and the like.
  2. You won’t ever again use slots in bank or inventory bags to store all the damn companions and mounts you have acquired through your levels.
  3. Because of points 1 and 2, you are now forced to buy or acquire all the damn companions and mounts you wanted to take but you didn’t/couldn’t because of “where the hell do I put them?”
  4. I should have stopped at 3.

ISN’T IT TERRIBLY COOL? As you can see above I have/had quite a few mounts and minions, I destroyed even some because I didn’t know where else to put them to allow more space for new items, equips and the like. With those mounts/companions alone, you just theorically freed up a 16 slots bag in the bank. Don’t you feel happier?

WotLK Additions

It’s been a little while since I’ve posted the videos, and I since then spent my time on setting up the next few posts you will see in a moment. These are all the graphic reports from the time I started the betatesting until now. In the future they will be more synchronized, but as of now I couldnt do much more than what I’m doing right now!

This post will mainly talk about a few new additions to WoW and a couple minor changes (major changes will have soon a post of their own) . So, let’s begin.

I thought it was wise to start with one of the main introductions which let everybody go “zOMGFOHREAL”?

Barbershops

You can find these barbershops in all cities, in the picture you see me with a new style. When you “shave” for the first time, you also get an achievement (more on this later) . I found out the costs are quite high too. I found some cuts for 12-20g, maybe in some cases even more. Although that is not a great deal with all the dailies out there, it will probably be a no-no for new starters.

Next on our liste we have:

Achievements

For all who don’t know anything about achievements (where have you been living in the last 3 years?), said “achievements” are objectives to reach for fun. Each achievement gives points. Points will probably surely be used to brag with your archenemies friends to let them now how much they suck pro you are time you spent collecting them. And I’m not kidding, the net is now full of X360 cards displaying total achievement points. Sick parenthesis of humanity, but let’s move on.

I personally like achievements. Most of the times they require you to do the most stupid stuff you’d ever think of, and the fun part is you seriously start to like it. Or, at least, that’s what happened to me.

Loading/Splash Screens Revamped

Nothing major, but I thought that was cool. Characters are now more “toonish”, and I like the feel of it. I haven’t tested all loading screens, just a couple instances, but none of them were refreshed. As of now the only ones I found out are the zone screens. Who knows…

Skeletal Taxi, kthxbai

This particoular Taxi is the one I found while moving from the DK starting zone (after completing the whole chain) to the Dark Portal (in Hellfire. again. sob.)

I don’t know if there are any changes in other paths, although I don’t think they changed. Also I haven’t played in Northrend since the time I lastly logged out, so no news about Northrend flightpath yets. Just yet though 😉

A Huge Calendar
A Huge Calendar

I almost forgot to post the new Group Calendar, or whatever it’s name is. It has been fixed in the last patch (a couple days ago give or take). It has the ability to create new events for raids, display weekly resets, and even shows holidays and special events. I don’t know if it works for weekly battlegrounds bonus too, but I think it would eventually.

IMHO it’s damn HUGE and messy, but I see it’s in development right now, so I believe this is just a scratch.

… I’m not writing this, but until last patch, if you opened the calendar a shitload of error messages would appear flooding your screen. Also it was hilarious to see the use of constants: WEEKDAY_MONDAY, WEEKDAY_TUESDAY, … WEEKDAY_SUNDAY and so on. Ah, localizations… such gorgeous things… Still have the screen with that, should you be interested…

A Handful of Videos

Between the other things, I’ve been making videos here and there during the beta testing, mainly due to some dark pact with Neusy, but however… this is a special dedication to Neusy aka “Zeh Dragonlovah”:

Not too shabby for a beginning, isn’t it? What I really didn’t know and I found terribly hilarious and interesting, is that in the game you can actually ride that dragon in some point of the story. But more about it on next posts.

First thing everybody does when in the beta, is try out the Death Knight. Who wouldn’t? I personally would, and did it. This is the exact point where you spawn with your shiny new character. What you see in front of “you” is the Lich King nonetheless. I quite didn’t believe it in the first place, but I respected my duty and gave proper testimoniance. By the way, the “action” you see Arthas doing (Lich King) is the following: plant the sword, fit one glove, fit the other glove, getting back the Frostmourne (sword’s name).

Last video is about last DK quest. I won’t spoil it, and there’s why I cut the video, let’s just say it’s a big fight at Light’s Chapel.

This is all for the moment: since yesterday I’ve been more busy creating this website than playing, but I surely plan to play MOAR.

Like… now.

“We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.”