First, go read Alex's post, because he makes some good points about recruiting for 25 man raids in Wrath of the Lich King. We now know that in the expansion, all raids will come with a 10 man and 25 man setting, effectively a 'normal' and 'heroic' mode for raiding. While I personally believe this to be awesome, I can understand the idea that this will adversely affect (not effect, I'm reminded) recruitment for 25 mans if people can see the exact same content by just running a 10 man. Sure, the gear won't be as good, but if the starter 10 man gear allows you to run the next stage 10 man, and so on until you finally reach a 10 man version of Arthas, guilds that run 25 man raid content might have a harder time recruiting people to run what is essentially the 'same' content with 24 other folks instead of 9 other folks.
The reason I don't think it will be a real issue (I do think it's worth considering, though, and I do believe it will have some effect on 25 man recruitment) is threefold. Unrelated to those reasons (which are coming up after the jump) I have to admit that this may vary by server: on Norgannon, if anything I'm seeing more new 25 man guilds recruiting and starting up the crawl through Gruul's and Magtheridon, so I may just be working from a glass half full through rose colored glasses state of ludicrous (and heavily over-metaphoric) optimism here.
It's a good week for posts at DwarfPriest.com, it seems. In this look at the manual for World of Warcraft, we get to see that the maps included in the original, 2004 release (which hasn't been updated since... four years later, and we're still using the same increasingly inaccurate manual) are at times surprisingly accurate to what we see in the game today. Interesting inclusions and omissions abound: the fact that Maraudon isn't on these maps but Dire Maul is just fascinates me from the perspective that Maraudon was a full patch ahead of the Maul.
I remember riding around Silithus way before the AQ release trying to get inside and see what was back there, and have been to both Hyjal and along the Greymane wall with my lovely wife who always wants to see the zones that are the hardest to access: I like the idea of Gilneas coming into the game so much that I've mused about releasing the whole zone as an instance before. For these reasons I found this look back at the game manual's maps and what has and hasn't made it into live yet to be grist for the mill of my naturally speculative brain. Will we finally see Uldum when Ulduar hits in WoTLK? Maybe Hyjal will finally go live? Will those islands off the coast of Gilneas make a reappearance on the world map? I've been wondering for years now what's up in Kul Tiras.
Anything on these maps you're surprised to see? Anything excluded that you'd expect? The very detailed map of Quel'Thalas, years before it went live, was one of my big 'woah' moments looking over these maps, which shows how easy it is for me to forget just how much lore the RTS series packed in.
I'm one of those odd players who likes to play multiples of the same class. I've got a tauren, human, night elf and draenei warriors at 70 and to be honest, my human currently way out-gears them all. Not only does he sport T4/T5 level gear for tanking, his DPS gear is also at that level even though I rarely DPS with him. Now, this isn't a problem, exactly. It's not that I dislike having good gear for the content.
It's that I hate playing my human.
When I first started playing World of Warcraft, I started a paladin, and then switched quickly to this warrior. I've been playing him on and off ever since, he's got close to 170 days played on him. I've come up with a personality for him (I wouldn't actually say I roleplay him so much as I emphasize my curmudegonly side when I play him... I like to roleplay, mind, but I don't really put enough effort into it) but while he's got a lot of sentimental attachment for me, his major flaw is that he's a human, and Blizzard gave humans the dumbest emotes and /silly jokes in the game.
Well, okay, a couple of towers is funny. But the rest really just doesn't work for me anymore after having played the other options. In fact, what I really want to do is play my 70 draenei warrior instead. The problem there is, while he's on the same server, he's nowhere near as well geared for the content my guild is doing, and it's hardly fair to ask them to gear up another warrior for me.
Yes, I realize this is a really minor problem. But since WotLK is promising us more cutomization in the form of dances and haircuts, my pipe dream is that they'd allow me to either pay to transfer my soulbound equipment between my level 70 toons or allow me to pay a similar fee to a server transfer to change my race. I know there are PvE and PvP balance issues to be considered here, and I got myself into this situation by playing all these characters to 70, so I don't ever expect to see it happen. But man, I'd really like it if it did.
What about you? What one ridiculous, you know it's never going to happen but you can't stop wishing it would dream do you hold dear for the game?
Tipster Medros emails in pointing out that Blizzard has finally put the Wrath of the Lich King Bestiary online. In his email, he mentions that the TBC bestiary started showing us the long leggedy beasties of the first expansion roughly nine months before it launched, arguing for a summer release for WoTLK.
What with all the recent talk of what else might be in the expansion, I am starting to think it may launch sooner than that. It depends, in my opinion, on when Sunwell Plateau launches and if we can expect them to have learned from the original launch of Naxxramas so close to Burning Crusade. In my opinion, I'd hope there would be enough time between the Sunwell launch and the expansion for more guilds to get to see the place in full, especially with the way we're told content will unlock there as people complete quests. So I wouldn't be surprised to see it in late spring/early summer, nor would i be surprised if it didn't launch before Christmas of this year.
Meanwhile, take a look at the two new monsters being unveiled for us today and get your speculation on.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors spent some time looking back at 2007 not so long ago, and finds itself looking forward to 2008 and beyond this week. Matthew Rossi wants you to imagine a big swirly tube and either the Stargate or Dr. Who music playing, whichever you prefer. I'm more of a Dr. Who man myself, but as the omnipresent third person narrative device I don't think my opinion is much consulted. It's a hard life being a narrative device. No one ever asks you out for coffee.
As the somewhat emo italic text stated, this week we're going to look forward at where the Warrior class is going, a discussion I quite frankly think will be more interesting in the comments you leave than in my own ramblings. My goal here is mainly to serve as a firestarter, hoping to initiate a few sparks of brilliance from you. As a result, I'm going to just throw my musings and opinions at the wall here and see what sticks with you guys, what you accept and what you reject. After all, in the end it's the players who will ultimately determine what warriors will become, as they're the ones who'll chose what they do with their characters.
My first thought is, looking over the past few years, the trend is that warrior successes in PvP tend to be followed by large nerfs. So PvP warriors are almost certainly going to be nerfed in a rather large way if they remain dominant in PvP. I expect mace spec to see the lion's share of this nerfing, perhaps changed into an entirely unrecognizable form removing stuns entirely, but mortal strike is also up for a few changes. It will probably be safe for the next few months, as they just gave a similar effect to hunters and to change MS now would mean having to change that, too, but it will most likely come in whatever patch lays the preparations for Wrath of the Lich King. If not these, then some change to a fundamental warrior DPS/PvP mechanic, similar to the way weapon speed and rage generation were normalized.
Warriors with better gear still, despite nerfs like rage normalization, perform at a much higher rate than before they achieved it. My tauren warrior does much, much better in PvP now, even against opponents who substantially outgear him. In my biased experience, right around the time I start winning in PvP is when the nerfs start coming.
You can find all kinds of things on the forums. For instance, you can find a forum thread about Illidan. Back and forth the debate goes: does killing Illidan free him from his demonic taint or, well, just kill him? Will he come back or not? Is Maiev kind of a jerk? Bornakk weighs in on page two and continues to post throughout, which to be honest is what I like to see in a blue poster.
The debate on whether Illidan was a hero to his people, a misguided power-hungry ambitious sort, or even out and out evil is interesting on its own, but what really interests me is to see this level of back and forth, even if Bornakk doesn't really say a lot in his replies. It may just be the lore geek in me talking, but I'd really like to take Chris Metzen out for a beer and talk turkey about Illidan, Arthas and the storyline in WCIII. How is it going to manifest in WotLK, did it work out in TBC the way they wanted? Might we see Illidan again or is he definitively dead on the floor of Karabor? Does Maiev have any purpose to her life now? This kind of stuff fascinates me, and clearly it does some other folks as well given the back and forth of this thread.
What about you? Could you care less about lore? Do you want to see Illidan again? Was he a basically good but flawed hero or an out and out villain or both?
One of my guild's officers has taken up the dubious practice of "farming for Wrath of the Lich King." He has epic mounts for all his 70s, all the recipes he could ever want, and enough spare cash to pay alt support for an army of gnomes, but he's convinced there'll be some big, 20K or so gold sink in the new expansion.
The gold sinks for WoW have always been epic mounts: the epic ground mount in vanilla WoW, and the epic flyer in BC. I'm not sure what it could be for WotLK. I can't see that many people would spend a ton of money on PvP structures, which leaves a couple of options. There could be extremely expensive forms of character customization, such as tattoos, wings, or other adornments. There could be guild housing (finally.) My guildmates suggested that it will be submarines shaped like "sharks with frickin' lazer beams" and underpants "with rockets on the front", further confirming that my guild's sense of humor is stuck in 1997.
What do you think the gold sink will be when WotLK finally emerges from its cocoon?
Once upon a time, cavemen roamed the earth, great volcanic eruptions disrupted the cavemen's gaming time, and I wrote an article called "Know Your Lore: Good Dragons." Now it's time to cover the "bad dragons" - the Blue, Black, Chromatic and Infinite Dragonflights. And yes, I know you're all going to complain about the blue dragonflight being "bad", but unless you really want to run every dungeon at level 80 without a mage, you're gonna have to fight them.
Blue Dragonflight
Leader: Malygos.
Characteristics: The blue dragons may be the most intelligent of all the dragonflights. They're the masters of magic, the weavers of the arcane, and the guardians of icy areas. Of course they're going to be villains at some point! "Arcane magic corrupts" is one of the primary lessons of WoW, along with "elves are jerks" and "never get involved in a land war in Kalimdor."
Is that him in the WoW comic book, or is he going to be in Northrend?
The answer, according to Stormgaard of Se7en Samurai, may be 'both'. And to be honest, I agree with him. Not because of the strength of his evidence, good as it is, but because his argument makes sense. One of the things we've seen with World of Warcraft tie-in media like the manga series and novels is that they all flow back into the MMO, help develop and direct the lore forward. As much as players like to chant 'lorelol' it is clearly important to the folks at Blizzard, and Stormgaard's argument that the comics and movie may well be setting up a new age of hostility between the horde and the alliance centered around a new lore figure who is connected to, if not the 'star' of the Missing Diplomat quest makes a lot of sense to me.
Plus, having the comic star a human who washed up without his memory on the coasts of Durotar... well, if you look at the map you'll see why that could well lead to the exact scenario Stormgaard posits. It makes sense to me. What do you guys think?
The official Wrath page is slowly accreting information, which is good, because it started out pretty dang empty. The latest addition to it is an "interview" about the Death Knight class with the developers, along with a page on lore. I put "interview" in quotes because it doesn't feel like a real interview; it reads like an excuse for the devs to give the same information we already have. Which is fine and all, I just think "interview" is the wrong term for it. Here's a summary in my own words:
Why did you pick Death Knight for the new class? They have a connection to Arthas and Northrend, and we needed more tanks. The playable DKs will be allied with the Horde or Alliance, fighting against Arthas.
What will adding another tanking class do to the group/raid game? We want all tank classes to be equally good in general, so you can use any of them for a 5-man, but we want them to have distinct raiding roles. (They also took this opportunity to reiterate for the nth time that "hero class" doesn't mean it's more powerful than other classes, just more different.)
How is the DK different from other tanks? No shield, powerful melee abilities, magic attacks. The devs are making sure they have the core tanking abilities of keeping aggro and mitigating damage, while still making the DK feel like its own thing.
Will we see some classic DK spells and abilities? Yes, we're taking a lot from previous Warcraft material. One thing that will set them apart as a new class, but still tie them into WC3 DKs, is the rune system.
The lore page is less decipherable to me, since I don't actually know a lot of the background information of the Warcraft universe. It gives a relatively short overview of the evolution and status of Death Knights. Is it new information that "modern death knights consist mainly of paladins who lost their faith and pledged their souls to the Lich King in exchange for the promise of immortality?" If DKs come from paladins, why can we make them in non-Paladin races? So Blood Elves don't get even more popular, I guess.
The folks at World of Raids linked to this fascinating and disturbing interview with the folks at Blizzard about the upcoming expansion. Disturbing in a good way, to my mind, in that they talk about making the journey from 70 to 80 one of tough moral choices and twisted encounters with the Lich King himself, and fascinating because it talks about what the design team for the expansion learned from The Burning Crusade.
Blizzard vice president of creative development Chris Metzen seems to be apologizing for it. "It had a lot of high-concept ideas, high-concept environments," he says, calling to mind the psychedelic mushrooms of Zangarmarsh, the tragic majesty of Tempest Keep, "but other than some really nice moments, there was nothing really personal about it."
There's a lot more substance in the interview, although some of it is stuff we've seen before - Lake Wintergrasp PvP, flying mounts not working right away, Death Knights - but the insight into what they've learned and how they're approaching the mood and feel of the new expansion is, I think, worth a read in of itself. The way they intend to weave Arthas' journey into each player's experience, if it works, will be one of the most interesting things any MMO has ever done.
Last week, Blizzard released a new machinima movie called Lament of the Highbourne, featuring Sylvana's performance of the old Quel'dorei song and a retelling of what went down between her and Arthas Menethil, now known as the Lich King. WoW Insider, being the extreme lore geeks that we are, has put together a video analysis of the movie that Blizzard released, featuring an almost frame-by-frame commentary about Sylvanas' story. You can see the finished product above-- prepare to be lore-geeked out.
Two things that didn't make it into the commentary above in time: reader Lift sent us a bit of insight about Arthas riding an Undead mount-- does that mean, he asks, that Death Knights will get their own Warlock/Paladin-esque mount? And one more thing we noticed-- the spectre behind Arthas as he resurrects Sylvanas may well be the Lich King himself. By all means: discuss.
Now clearly both show a forested, lush area, and there is only one forest that we know of is Northrend so far: Grizzly Hills, supposedly a redwood type of forest home to the Northern Furbolgs. This forest, however, looks a little greener than that-- it may be the Sholazar Basin, which we haven't seen screenshots of yet. Obviously the creature above is some new kind of Dryad, so that means we may see traces of Cenarius in Northrend, and when you mention Cenarius, you have to mention the Emerald Dream. So we may find out more about that line of lore in Northrend as well. Very interesting.
We've already heard, as you may know by now, that Malygos, the blue dragon aspect, will return in Wrath of the Lich King, and, as the Guardian of Magic, is supposed to be a little unhappy at all the Mages running around. Malygos' big thing is that he wants to keep magic from the mortal races-- he doesn't trust them to use it without destroying the world. The only thing that's kept him from doing something crazy is the fact that he hasn't had a dragonflight for a while-- Deathwing wiped them out, more or less.
But in Wrath, Malygos is back, and so is his mind, and so is his dragonflight. The Blue Dragonflight is returning (thanks to Alexstrazsa's help), and as Metzen told us at BlizzCon, Malygos is waking up, looking around, and seeing all these little mortal players wielding magic like it was a game (a massively multiplayer game, more appropriately). And so he's not likely going to be happy with Mages when we arrive in Northrend.
To which Takeru says: maybe Malygos is right. Maybe we shouldn't be using magic for our own purposes-- look what it did to the elves. Non-mage players are even saying we should give up the Mages to Malygos anyway-- what did they ever do for us, right? (err, besides make water and food and port us around and polymorph our enemies...)
At any rate, it probably won't matter-- Malygos will probably bring the war to us, and if he doesn't, then the Kirin Tor (also in Northrend) will probably bring the fight to him by recruiting us to do it. Either way, we'll likely find the Aspect of the Blue Dragonflight on the wrong end of our pointy sticks.
When Byrthor asks whether folks attuned for the old Naxx will be attuned for it when it returns in Wrath, Drysc answers with what will sound like music to most raiders' ears: there is no attunement planned for the new Naxx. Blizzard learned their lesson in Burning Crusade about wacky attunements, and so while they're likely not gone from the game completely, there will probably be fewer barriers to raiding, especially early on in progression.
There is something else about this thread that irks me a bit, however. In the past day, the CMs have been hit with tonsofquestions about Wrath of the Lich King, and in almost all cases, the answer has been the same: maybe. Why don't they know what's going on? Because all indications are, guys, that Wrath hasn't even been designed yet. Blizzard hasn't determined if Atiesh will show up, or if flying mounts will work, or if we'll each get our own Arthas windup doll, because the expansion is still way into the planning stages. It's fine to be ready for 2.2, or excited about 2.3, or interested in what we might see in the Sunwell. But if you're excited to find out what's in the next expansion, have a seat and take a deep breath, because it's going to be a long, long time before the CMs can even know anything worth not telling us. Ya dig?
That said, I can't fault players for being excited about upcoming content, no matter how far off it is. But it does make me wonder about Blizzard's focus. They could just as easily had us playing Zul'Aman or even the Sunwell at BlizzCon-- both of those will show up long before Northrend will. With Wrath so far away, why did they push it so hard at BlizzCon? Why didn't they just announce it, and leave the rest of the hype to something we'll actually see before the Beijing Olympics?
It's a good week for posts at 
I'm one of those odd players who likes to play multiples of the same class. I've got a tauren, human, night elf and draenei warriors at 70 and to be honest, my human currently way out-gears them all. Not only does he sport T4/T5 level gear for tanking, his DPS gear is also at that level even though I rarely DPS with him. Now, this isn't a problem, exactly. It's not that I dislike having good gear for the content.
Tipster Medros emails in pointing out that Blizzard has finally put the 
You can find all kinds of things on the forums. For instance, you can find a forum thread about 
One of my guild's officers has taken up the dubious practice of "farming for Wrath of the Lich King." He has epic mounts for all his 70s, all the recipes he could ever want, and enough spare cash to pay alt support for an army of gnomes, but he's convinced there'll be some big, 20K or so gold sink in the new expansion.
We've already heard, as you may know by now, that 
When Byrthor asks whether 
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