NDA, Cata Profession Preview, Ruby Sanctum, Expertise/Hit, T10 4-piece

All things Cataclysm

MMO-Champion announced early today that Blizzard formally asked them to remove all leaked Cataclysm information from the website. This includes any information posted on the sites forums as well as information posted to the main news feed.

Personally I think it's a good thing Blizzard is enforcing the NDA to some extent and even though MMO-Champion is a huge site that gets a ton of traffic, I have a feeling Blizzard pays attention to as much as possible across the internet for all "unofficial" cataclysm information.

I admittedly ate up the information that was posted on the site, but I also have no issue waiting for the beta to start and the NDA to be lifted before seeing more than what Blizzard intends for the public to see.

This brings me nicely to my next topic: Relatively long blue post about cataclysm professions was released on the European forums and I'm pretty happy with most of the changes.

Engineering:

• Engineering is still being designed, but expect new unpredictable gadgets to use on yourself or enemies. Toys, explosives, and even a new vanity pet or two. Oh, and powerful mechanical bows and crossbows in addition to guns.
• In general, we want Engineering to remain a tradeskill mainly focused on creating fun or useful gadgets for the engineer, but we are exploring options for items that can be sold to other players for profit. 
  

 I'm really happy they are keeping Engineering relatively the same. Just give me a new (or keep the current) rocket boots and cloak parachute and I'll consider any other new/interesting additions as added perks!

Alchemy:

• New elixirs will be about 75% as strong as flasks. So you can get more total stat points with two elixirs, but flasks will still be the best at giving you a single offensive or defensive stat.
• New unique material used by nearly all high-level recipes will be created by alchemists on a one-day cooldown.
• New Mysterious Potion created with common materials restores health and mana in a massively random range, as well as sometimes granting the benefit of another potion. The health and mana range is from 1-20,000 and is able to crit. The minimum amount restored, however, is scaled upwards by the Alchemy skill, making it a great choice for alchemists to keep for themselves.
• All potions and elixirs now use the same basic vial type. Flasks still use a fancy vial.
• New Alchemist Stone.
  

I'll be honest I'm kind of on the fence with Alchemy right now. Everything in this preview looks promising with the exception of possibly the elixir change in the first bullet. As long as elixirs persist through death (which I highly doubt) the change is fine, but either way the rest of the alchemy preview looks promising. I really like the idea of the Mystery potion and it's added benefit to Alchemists; however, I have to admit I've been thinking of switching over to Jewelcrafting for some time now because of the added stats. And the flexibility that comes with that.

I suppose I will wait until Cataclysm releases or at least further into the alpha/beta before I make my decision, but it's something to keep watching.

Sunwell 2.0   The Gods of Zul'Aman 2.0   Obsidian Sanctum 3.0   Ruby "filler-content" Sanctum

Yes there is significant story and reason for it to be added, yes it will add some diversity to off-set/trinket slots for characters, yes it will keep people busy before cataclysm starts, but at least be a bit more creative than just adding a new boss with re-used models and popping in three fake...err excuse me.."mini-bosses".

It's never felt "epic" or mustered a sense of accomplishment, at least for me, fighting boss minions that have more health than regular trash and unique names, but cause no real threat to the success of a raid (see: Obsidian Sanctum drakes [if not doing hard-mode] & Freya tree adds [if not doing hard-mode]).

Time sink city if we have to kill a whole bunch of trash waves...yay!

Sorry for the ranting - I'm done. /hug

VoA comes through big and T10 4-piece really is THAT good

I was sitting at around 71ish frost emblems when this week started and had full intentions of picking up the T10 iLvl 251 legs from the vendor once I hit 95 emblems, but the first thing Berserk does as a guild once raid time starts on Tuesdays is head over to Wintersgrasp and knock out Toravon for some easy badges and hopefully something usef...BAM iLvl 264 feral pants drop! So now I'm sitting pretty at 105+ emblems after ICC 25 last night and I now have my 4-piece tanking set.

It's kind of funny with the current system how a couple weeks ago I was starved for emblems and had to be careful about every purchase I made and now I'm practically swimming in them so to speak.

Regardless it seems as though my expertise and hit rating woes are solved. I went ahead and picked up this beauty for 7k gold on the AH to make up for the hit I was losing by swaping from T9 pants to T10, and I'm pretty happy with my overall stats now.

And oh yeah - the T10 4-piece is A-M-A-Z-I-N-G. This is something anyone who is a bear tank has probably known for at least a couple months, but the low cool down on Enrage makes this fantastic in conjunction with Barkskin.

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Hopefully some solid attempts on Arthas tonight after we get Sindragosa down in 25 man! Hopefully they let me solo tank Sindragosa and MT Arthas at least for Phase One.

Cheers.

Besides my drood..

...what you thought the only class I enjoyed playing in this game is a druid?

Hah..I'm just like every other "altaholic" out there. I have on my old server Drak'thul:

Ampie - 80 - Blood Elf Hunter
Ampzilla - 80 - Undead Mage
Adaam - 80 - Blood Elf Paladin
Ampeh - 71 - Undead Rogue
Ampnet - 65 - Undead Priest

I know super creative names, sue me. Anyways the tragic thing is I don't play any of them anymore since I transferred my druid to Mal'Ganis.

I did however plan ahead and assumed I would get the itch to play one of these characters again at some point, so instead of just leaving all of my heirloom gear there I packed them up with my druid and brought them with me.

This immediately gave me the drive to start a whole new set of alts.....yah....uhh, not kidding.

I thoroughly enjoy the rogue class, probably because they are basically the Cadillac of kitty druids. So this is my first alt I'm leveling on Mal'Ganis. I'm already level 51 and I have to say I think I'm enjoying it even more than I enjoyed leveling my first rogue - and hopefully this time I'll make it all the way to 80 so I can mess around with some PvP.

One of the fun things for me at least when leveling a new character is to mess around with talents and build what I think is the "best" leveling spec for myself. Yesterday after work I hopped on and quickly tried out a Mutilate spec now that I'm able to get that far down the tree and the only comment I have is Mutilate kind of stinks for leveling. The stun locking is essentially the same as combat with maybe an extra second on kidney shot if you get lucky with a mutilate crit, but other than that it's harder to manage slice and dice and I came crawling back to my combat spec as soon as I got back to Orgrimmar.

The leveling experience is so completely different now with the LFD tool. At first I refused to quest and was relying on the dungeon finder (after level 14) to get anywhere, but since the queues are sometimes rather long as a pure DPS, I've been out in Azeroth enjoying it before everything changes forever, I'm glad too because I don't know if I'll ever get around to Loremaster on my druid before Cataclysm.

I'll have more posts about my rogue in the future, especially once I get to Outlands where the real leveling begins..

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Tonight marks the beginning of my second week of raiding 25 man ICC with Berserk, hopefully we can clear everything up to Sindragosa tonight. Man do I want a Lich King kill!

How about an update, and an explanation

I haven't posted in awhile and frankly I don't have a really good reason.

Blogging about a game that you love to play is hard to do when the way you are playing the game is far from the way you actually enjoying playing it. This has definitively been the case for me since I've started this blog. Not that this blog has anything to do with it, but it's just a good point of reference (date wise) from when I transferred off the old dead server I use to play on to the current incredibly overpopulated and active server I play on now.

Anyways to my point: I left a dead super casual server hoping to find a raiding guild that fit my schedule and my attitude towards raiding. I joined my RL buddies casual 10 man only ICC raiding guild as soon as or closely after transferring over. Mistake. I can't spend a large amount of time playing a video game and not excel at it, it just doesn't work for me. Too much time wasted and not enough accomplishment. I went from a no raiding status to a 'fake' raiding status and to me, that warrants a "I might as well quit" attitude. My way out was to find a 25 man raiding guild that needed a feral tank with sub-par DPS gear that had reasonable raid times (Nothing past 11 est on weeknights).

I happened upon Berserk, and they fit the bill perfectly. They are a great group of people (so far) and being in a 25 man raiding atmosphere really feels good.

So my hopes are this change of raiding status will help me stay more connected to the part of the game that I like best and also to facilitate with keeping this blog from becoming a deserted few pages out on the internetz.

So that was more the explanation..with that out of the way...

I have not fallen off the face of the Earth meaning I have been closely watching MMO-Champion and I'm mixed as far as what's in store for Ferals/Druids come Cataclysm. I'll save my thoughts/comments for a bit longer, because I think it's really too early to formulate much of an opinion yet. Definitely excited though!

I'll have more to say about raiding in 25 mans, the different stats juggling I've done recently, as well as more thoughts about being a hybrid and much much more!