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On the tentative eve of 3.2, I am sitting here with my plush murloc, gnashing my teeth about the changes to the game. I don’t get it, it seems as if the Blizz-elites over in Irvine got together in one of their boardrooms (more than likely with a view of the badass “Orc on Wolf” statue from WETA Workshop) and drew up a plan. A plan so revolutionary to game design, only Blizzard would be capable of pulling it off. They came in with a 8 x 5 white board, an eight pack of dry-erase markers, a 12-pack of Frescas, and a vision. After a period of six minutes (four of which consisted of a thumb-war tournament… the dry-erase board was used to make the brackets) the members convened and they left the room, shaking their head and mumbling “there’s no way people will fall for this.”

It was a simple dream, born from a simple idea: Make 3.2 so bad that no matter what came out in 3.3, it would seem like a gigantic fucking leap forward in gaming. Truly revolutionary in scope, the designers toasted each other and poured their sweet draught of Fresca over their silver tongues as their minds did likewise with the nascent plan that was being executed throughout the halls of Blizzard’s B Team.

It was the perfect crime… throw in a large amount of half-assed designed armor and instances, sprinkle in a touch of NON-EXISTENT storyline, and cover it all over with inane Class Q&A’s in the forums that make it look like their actually attempting to accomplish some semblance of interest in the gameplay while answering completely nothing. All the while nerfing almost every class so as to make the instances harder so that we’re hung up on some bug for two months until we can finally stop wiping on what would have been a loot piñata in 3.1 and finally taking our rag-tag asses into Arthas’ crib where we will be forced to mount a steed and… joust.

I know they haven’t come out and said that we’re going to have to joust, but the signs are pointing to the inevitability of having to actually give a fuck about that bullshit. I would rather watch a fucking Sam Raimi movie than joust one more time in this game.

I have to say, their gall is rather epic. Their formula for destroying our expectations will, more than likely, give a computer science major a topic for his undergraduate thesis appropriately entitled “Blizzard’s Design Triumph and the Fuckwits that Bought into it.” The paper will discuss the logic dreamt up in that Fresca-induced sugar high many moons before and how they successfully lowered their audience’s expectations while maintaining an outward appearance of giving a shit. It will then go into detail about how the Fuckwits (a.k.a – people who are defending Blizzard in this patch) and how, even amongst growing evidence pointing to Blizzard not giving a fuck, they fought on. “It’s uniforms!” They shouted in cool indignation to those few skeptics. “It’s going to be awesome! You just wait and see!” Yes, we will see, but I’m not holding my breath.

Throughout the last couple of weeks I have had this image in my head of what the Blizzard employees are doing when they see us trying to come up with an excuse for their laziness, and I imagine them laughing so hard that their sides are cramping and tears are rolling down their cheeks. “Can you believe these chumps bought this? We made a couple circles to fight in, copy and pasted some armor sets, and people are actually excited about it!”

I haven’t really discussed these changes at length, stay with me a touch longer while I delve into my reasoning behind my explitive-laced tirade against everything that Blizzard is currently doing with the Warcraft franchise…

Dumb Armor Sets

The announcement was first made that they were going to go with faction-specific armor sets and I may have SQUEE!’d like a school girl… I’m not saying I did, but it is a definite possibility. This is the fictionalized account of my conversation with Blizzard personified upon hearing the news and subsequent learnings that the classes in each faction would look exactly the same:

• Me: “What a great idea Blizzard! Finally some real customization, now me and a troll priest are going to look nothing alike! What a great idea, man… you guys are so-“
• Blizzard [wearing some sort of beer helmet packed with Fresca instead of the suggested drink]: “Not so fast hombre!”
• Me: “What do you mean? This is great! Finally, I will be able to show myself as an Alliance Priest!”
• Blizzard: “Well… you will definitely be Alliance…”
• Me: “Whatever do you mean? Surely I will be wearing priest tier 9. No one else will be except other priests, yes?”
• Blizzard: “Erm, well, no. We’re going to dress you up in exactly the same shit as mages and warlocks too.”
• Me: “But I have nothing to do with mages and warlocks. My skills are vastly different and just because we all wear cloth? I think that seems rather lame and possibly even racist.”
• Blizzard: “Just listen to some people in our forums or something. They came up with the idea that it’s a uniform… we’re running with that. Anyway Kenny, great talk, but we’re going to go bask in a tub of dollar bills… of which 250 is yours.”
• Me: “But… but…”

But it was too late. They were already gone. (These last two sentences should be set to Natalie Imbruglia’s 1997 smash hit: Torn)

I hope that one of them dove into the deep end and choked on a nickel.

It’s not even so much that the designs are ugly… it’s that they didn’t make them any different from each other. My logic is that I would rather have armor similar to a troll priest than to have armor in common with a human warlock. In the world I live in, this kind of shit doesn’t happen and priests can be priests without being designated to a role of being a “caster.”

NOTE: Not that it matters I guess, but you know Figureprints can’t be happy right now. Who’s going to buy a 3d printed object of their character looking just like another class? I would imagine they’re getting ready for a drought.

Some Stupid-Shit Hogger Dungeon

Original, Blizz. Let’s take an idea that was kind of fun in Fable 2 and spruce it up for World of Warcraft. We’ll have the same kind of scoring system where the better that you do the more stuff you get and also we’ll use bosses that we have already had before… just maybe with a new move or two. Oh shit! I just discovered their secret… I wouldn’t be surprised to see this article down in a matter of hours and my name completely wiped off of every single database on the planet. Metzen’s cronies will probably be coming after me as soon as I hit the word “Publish.” But for those few of you that do manage to see my diatribe before it is removed from the powers-that-be take heed in these words.

Before I start, let me say that the new way that they’re doing the lock-outs is a great idea. OK, now that that is out of the way… Blizzard has somehow managed to create a world where creatures that have been killed thousands if not millions of times have arisen from their graves and are here to fight us again. I’ve looked and haven’t found a lore reason for this. It just seems to have happened. And they all somehow got to the Coliseum. Sound fishy? Sounds like they didn’t give two flips about making this dungeon anything more than filler content until 3.3 comes out. Get ready for mindless grinding in THE SAME ROOM. You thought Ulduar was getting boring? You are NOT prepared.

Oh, and because this will be dropping higher level badges and all the other instances (including five mans) will be dropping what Ulduar 25 dropped, Blizzard has effectively destroyed any reason to go into Ulduar. Get in as much of it as you can, especially if the patch doesn’t go live today. This will be your last chance before you never see that content again.

It’s Not All Bad…

It’s hard to find a silver lining in this maelstrom of shit (a veritable “fecalstrom” if you will) but as any good blogger, I must attempt to find some sort of redeeming quality about the patch and I will attempt to do that… somehow.

The patch will be good for alts. I really can’t think of anything else. If you’re currently playing another class you can more than likely get an alt geared in time for the battle against Arthas (were you will joust) and that’s good, I guess.

I’m kind of losing steam now. This has been a particularly long rant, but I do have some questions for those readers who have made it this far: Are you looking forward to the Coliseum? Will you ever go back to Ulduar once you can get the same badges in Naxx or even 5-mans? Have you even completed Ulduar?

Let me know in the comments section.

-Kenny D

This week’s NC-17 edition of Rawrcast features Haf and Stomp mucking it up through this week’s top news stories as they share their opinions on some of the more lighthearted stories, and give a parental perspective on more of the serious topics.

Grab Episode 29 on iTunes, RSS feed, direct download, or you can stream it from our main page.

Links to topics discussed this week:

• Rusted and Ironbound Proto-drake Still Available, Indefinitely
  
• Sam Raimi Set to Direct WoW Movie
• Addiction Therapists to Treat WoW Patients In-Game
• Alabama Man Meets and Abuses 14-year old Girl Met through WoW
• Elitest Jerks Hunter Spreadsheet Now Available through a Web Interface

Mark your calendars and make plans to

join us LIVE for
RAWRCON: Blizzcon Saturday
August 22nd, at 4PM, CST!

Let me start by saying this installment tackles an entire game design, and because of that, it will be lengthy. I will try and be concise, but for the idea to make sense, it has to be taken as a whole and not in bits and pieces or the entire mechanic becomes epic phail.

Over on the forums, someone decided to create their own design Q&A in hopes of some blue love. The questions are well thought out and worthy of a read from anyone interested in random aspects of the game. As would be expected, a question arises about spellpower plate, and we are lucky enough to be given a response from the crab.

“We would like to get rid of spellpower plate, but we don’t have a great system yet to make loot work without it. We want Holy paladins to wear plate and we don’t want them to be great at say damage or tanking without having to swap gear.”

I originally had a 4 paragraph response questioning what the hell he was talking about, but hanging out on MMO-Champion this morning, I found another response which I think better hits on the issue.

“We actually like the Feral solution and would love to implement something like that for Holy plate. We just haven’t figured out a way to make it work yet. The Feral tree is designed to have some crossover between dps and tanking and some degree of being able to use the same gear for both cat and bear. If you could use “rogue leather” to also heal and do ranged dps, then it might be a problem. That’s one of the risks in making paladins heal using dps plate. There are solutions of course, but we haven’t liked any of them sufficiently well to pull the trigger.”

Now the task becomes making DPS gear good for paladins, but not making all DPS plate desirable for healing.

This is a basic game design, and it impacts all healers.

Hit rating is the first and primary difference between healing gear and DPS gear, but there are also others. Boomkins like crit and it’s not quite as valuable to resto druids. MP5 has always been a way of deciphering whether mail is resto or elemental gear, even if Ulduar says differently. The major problem with my suggestions is without an addon like rating buster to help a holy decipher gear, things might be a little confusing, but it is my belief that if you have only one addon, it should always be rating buster.

First, let’s remove Divine Intellect from the holy tree. It’s not a cross tree talent, meaning neither rets nor prots are interested in it, and it is a seemingly lackluster talent for the avenue we are going to take. Holies will be taking Divine Strength, more on that later, if they want to boost their mana pool. Now with no intellect boost, you might as well remove Holy Guidance from the tree as well, but don’t worry, we are going to give you something way sexier than Megan Fox on a motorcycle (seen Transformers yet anyone?) for your sacrifice.

If you read the design Q&A thread I linked, you will find a suggestion for a talent called strength of mind. I like this talent, but I have called it something else, and because I’m as stubborn as a weimaraner without obedience training, I am going to call it what I have called it for a months, Brains from Brawn.

Brains from Brawn will increase your intellect by 25/50/75% of your strength. I compared the T7.5 shoulders to come up with the talent. 75% of the 75 strength on the retribution shoulders is 56.25 and the actual spellpower on the holy shoulders is 57. This number can be tuned up or down based on the itemization budget. Because I don’t really know the mathematical formula that Blizzard uses to budget gear, I am left guessing the actual numbers I should be using.

I would also add a talent (currently held by Holy Guidance) called Light Infused Armor that increases a holy paladin’s healing by 3/6/10% of their shield, cloak, and PLATE armor. Though Blizzard has removed +healing gear, there are still talents that prop up either healing or damage, so the mechanic is still in the game. Restricting the bonus to only healing will not impact the dps of a holy paladin because almost all of a paladin’s offensive spells are multiplied by both attack power and spellpower (see mathematical explanations for consecration, seal of righteousness, or hammer of wrath). A paladin with 20k armor would have about 2000 spellpower. When you add the raw caster gear a paladin will be wearing (rings, necks, shield, weapon, trinkets) this number is likely to be a little high. Tuning it down to 2/4/6% would give 1200 and seems more appropriate. The bonus would only apply if the gear is plate. A paladin trying to exploit the programming and wear some caster mail would not receive the bonus from that particular piece.

Degenrus, one of the best holy paladins I know is sitting on 20984 armor in all plate caster gear. 6% 20984 is 1259 spellpower. Add the spellpower bonus from his neck, weapon and shield, and rings and you will get 1900 spellpower. His spellpower, under the current design is 1931 for a net loss of 30 spellpower. It’s never nice to wake up on patch day and loose any spellpower, but the incoming changes in 3.2 to beacon of light and sacred shield would more than make up for a loss of 30 spellpower. Spellpower scaling may be the unforeseen problem. When you compare the T7.5 and 8.5 shoulders, you only gain 38 armor or a pathetic boost of about 2.28 spellpower while the current spellpower boost is 12.

The final solution is a little less refined when working in the current loot tables, but I will try and patch up the obvious holes.
Mental expertise will increase your MP5 by 50/100% of your expertise rating. Both the priest talent meditation and druid talent intensity imply an ability to focus in on the ability to regen your mana while performing your healing duties. The talents are, in a sense, an expert skill in the art of regenerating mana.

You will find only a few pieces without defense (meaning not tank gear though it did pick up some tanking pieces) and with expertise even useable by a paladin. The other plate with expertise is tier gear for warriors and deathknights so they are automatically off limits. I only really have the T8.5 hands to provide a comparison, and even then it’s not the best example, but it’s the best I could find.

The DPS gloves have 38 expertise rating while the healing version only has 19 MP5. The major flaw here though is there are no other pieces of tier gear for a ret paladin with expertise. Expertise is seen more as a tanking stat, and therefore, not much DPS gear has it. It appears when Blizzard decided to give ret paladin’s expertise, they did so by loading it all on one piece of gear and moving on to bigger and better things. If the expertise were spread out over more pieces of gear and not loaded up on one piece, then expertise rating could very well function as the MP5 stat for the suggested talent. Spreading expertise out among more pieces of gear would also help the dps reach the 214 expertise rating needed to nullify dodges. If you hop over to a warrior thread on elitist jerks, you will find that once a dps warrior is hit capped, the cheapest way to boost dps is with expertise rating. The paladin I mentioned earlier has 170 MP5 unbuffed. Since the 3.2 will increase the MP5 on all items by 25%, he will have about 212 MP5. 212 looks eerily close the needed expertise rating of 214. Looks like a little more expertise on dps plate would help more than just holy paladins.

ARRRRG!
Now, I am sure most DPS plate wearers are screaming at the screen right now and wondering why in the hell I would make you roll against another player for your gear? Well you won’t… ok, you will, but it’s better for you I swear. Instead of adjusting the loot tables down and removing the caster plate, the caster plate will be converted to DPS plate. This means that all bosses that drop DPS and caster plate will now have 2 pieces of DPS plate in the table.

You will be adding one more player to roll, but you will also be adding an extra piece to roll on. Instead of the current design where all the spellpower plate gets sharded to given to the ret or prot paladin for their rarely used offset, all of the plate wearers will have an extra chance to roll on a desired piece. Three classes wear plate, and though tied for the most with clothies, it has 3 different types of gear. Cloth has 2 and even those run together better than healing/tanking/dps gear. Plate crossover is abysmal where cloth crossover is, at least, manageable.

Keep the current loot tables intact
and use them as a model for the future ones.
Wrath is responsible for the rise of the retadin, an infestation of Death Knights, and warriors who can’t get passed just how bad ass they look with titan’s grip (no disrespect to you arms warriors out there). There is little evidence to suggest the demand for DPS plate is going diminish anytime soon; so load up the loot tables and share the love with holy paladins. Everyone will be better off for it.

-Rhab

The Rawrcast Show
Broadcasting LIVE
from our stream to yours
Saturday at 4 PM, CST

It is official! We will moving from Ustream to LiveStream this weekend. As always, we broadcast each Saturday at 4PM, CST. But, this week we are going pro! Visit our website, click on [LIVE], and you will be smack-dab on our new stream!

We are expecting a jumping crowd with a lively Free for All, so don’t miss out on all of the fun!

I work at a law firm where I find myself about two days a week going back and fixing the mistakes of the people that work above me. It’s okay, though. No real problem. It is rather cathartic to continuously see the people who would kiss their own ass if given the ability to do so make bone-headed moves. Soon after their completely idiotic blunder (tell us how you really feel, Ken) Boss-Man comes up to me and asks me to fix it.

Heyo! Yes please! I love fixing other people’s mistakes for three simple reasons: usually the mistakes are so mindless and so idiotic that a monkey with a lobotomy could figure it out; it looks great when you can show your employer that you are, indeed, smarter than those fuck-wits a rung above you; and whilst performing said mind-numbingly easy assignments, I can sit back, relax, and listen to one of my many previously unheard WoW podcasts. (Rawrcast, anyone?)

I think that podcasting in World of Warcraft is what has really given me the greatest moments of passion for this game, whether it is hearing Scott Johnson and Randy Deluxe on The Instance Podcast or Shawn Coons and Patrick Beja on How I Wow, the podcasts really do provide the listener with a great amount of insight to not only the game, but to the living and breathing community surrounding it. After hearing Alachia’s How I Wow episode (number 15 if you’re interested) I became really intrigued on this idea of the ‘metaverse’ and all that crazy stuff she’s into. So, I went over to her website and downloaded all of her podcasts. Whilst listening to the thirtieth iteration of her podcast, I heard something that made me think…

In this episode, Alachia interviews two couples that discuss their forays into Azeroth and how these adventures strengthened and eventually helped them find love through the game. When discussing their reasons for choosing classes, the woman from the first interview spoke of originally rolling a priest because of her “maternal nature.” I have heard things similar to this in other places as well (Randy in his How I Wow alluded to this as well – without the use of the word maternal) and it got me thinking: are healers of this mindset that because we like to heal in the game that we are somehow caring, good people? Are we the last bastion of humanity in an ever-digitized world? Do we have a greater affinity for small, furry animals and a natural inclination towards cashmere? Do we, as healers, look back after a night of raiding and think of “that one that didn’t make it” because our penance was on cooldown and shed a single tear of sorrow onto the pages of our livejournals and xangas?

Hell-to-the-fuck no.

If I was doing this because I was some sort of saint and I just wished everyone to survive fights and bask in the warmth that is my greater heal, I’d probably shoot myself. The fact is I chose healing because I am a leader and because tanking is boring. Perhaps it is my fault as a power-obsessed ego-maniac, but I don’t feel like there is any stardom to be found in the ranks of the faceless lemmings that is dps classes. For this reason, I decided early on that I would be a priest, and I would be a good priest, and I would be SO good that I would be able to, at times, be “choosy”* with whom I grouped with. (although I have backed down on this recently… I’m leveling a faceless lemming on Staghelm named Quaazar, and im really liking it)

Healing is ultimately the biggest power trip you can have sitting in front of your computer. Think about it like this: if someone is jawing at you and you’ve had just about enough of his chuckle-fuck-nuttery you have the best power in the world. You can simply not heal him and watch him die… over and over again. It’s the ultimate power in the game because at the end of the day, your message will stick in their heads… and your message is that they are contemptuous little ass-grabs that have a five hundred gold repair bill. If that kind of power trip doesn’t set you off, go to a spinal surgeon and get a laminectomy to remove that posterial arch of complete pussitude. And since actions speak louder than words and money speaks louder than actions it is safe to assume that people will want to stay on your good side.

The best way I can describe it by using a metaphor from the world’s greatest philosopher: Vince Shlomi. In this analogy we will equate World of Warcraft with canned tuna. What’s healing then?

Healing is the Slap-Chop ™.

In the ever-present and timeless words of Mr. Shlomi: “Quit having boring tuna, quit having a boring life.” This is the mantra I live by every day.

Man that seemed like a lot of work for a Slap Chop joke… oh well.

Now its about time to wrap this up… some closing thoughts though: Why did you choose your spec? Was it for some reason other than mine? Let me know! I’ll try not to tell you off too hard for choosing the wrong one.

-Kenny D

*Choosy loosely translates to being a scoffing elitist prick who will roll his eyes so hard that you will feel it at your computer. If someone types out SIGH that is another good sign that the person you are running with is most likely a self-delusional asshat and a self-proclaimed “choosy” player, bent on making sure you understand that you are a mere object that he (or she) is using to claw their way to the top of the e-peen shit pile that is World of Warcraft. So while you’re reading this article, there’s a good chance that I’m being a badass in-game, and telling a random passerby that my left nut leveled up 200 points of fishing skill in an hour. Booyah muthatrucka.

As Blizzcon approaches, everyone knows Blizzard will put together their finest spin doctors, and I’m talking the kind that can make Karl Rove raise an eyebrow. Blizzard’s expert panelists will take on groups far less forgiving than any White House press corps. How many of us are still reminding Blizzard of the now infamous, “to the ground, baby?” We will find them side stepping issues, tactfully finding a way to say, “L2P Noob,” and serving us the special Kool-Aid only a group of WoW gamers are willing to gulp down.

Does anyone remember the Alliance Commendation Signet? The Horde Commendation Signet? When I first started playing WoW, I just hopped on a recommended server whose AQ gates had not yet been open, and therefore I was able to participate in the Ahn’Qiraj War Effort. Though at the time I had no idea what I was doing, after a quick hop to wowhead, I was able to figure out what the hell was going on. This was the second coolest moment in my early WoW play after walking through the gates of Ironforge into the warm welcoming city after spending a couple hours in the harsh winter that is Dun Morogh.

Are you new to World of Warcraft or are just starting a new alt?

With all that said, you have to make the choice of which sever rule set is right for you. I will say this if you are very new to the game, stay away from the PVP severs if this is your first leveling experience. They can be very difficult if you don’t like the idea that you have to watch around every corner for someone waiting to gank you.

Which class should I pick?

Horde or Alliance?

What name should I use?
Now with all the hard stuff out of the way what seems like the easiest thing to do becomes the hardest… How to pick a name. I have spent many an evening trying to make the perfect name and failing so here are my tips to building a name that works.

• Use lore names. Some of the best names you will ever find come from movies and world history.
• Use the in game name generator. I know some of the names are really lame but every once in a while you will find a winner.
• And, the last one I have comes from the game guide from Blizzard and Brady games look around your room and you can find a cool name for your new addition.

Well guys I know these tips would have helped me when I first join the crazy World of Warcraft so I hope they help you.

This week’s show was filled with comparisons and experiences to other games. We were joined by Emeny, from The Combobulator Podcast, for a special LIVE edition of “The Big Picture” where we learn about new and exciting elements of other MMOs, and chat about things we would like to see adapted and updated in World of Warcraft.

All of this, and much, much more is available for your listening pleasure via iTunes, RSS feed, direct download, or you can stream it from our main page.

Links to topics discussed:

• Gladius – PVP UI Add-on
• Will Goblin and Worgen be the next new races?
• Official WoW Armory for iPhone
• New Rawr Crew Member, Vars’ article on the potential future of WoW
• Alliance Tier 9 Gear Sets / Horde Tier 9 Gear Sets
• Gurl IRL article – AnOOB’arak Indeed
• Emeny’s article – WoW vs. LoTRO

Mark your calendars and make plans to

join us LIVE for
RAWRCON: Blizzcon Saturday
August 22nd, at 4PM, CST!

10% OFF your purchase with code: RAWR

So Goblins and Worgen are the new playable races (maybe)…

The second of the new features which I believe you will see in WoW are 2 new professions now a lot of people think that wood working or something to do with wood will be a new profession. Sounds like they have a problem to me, but here is my take on it a Rune Tattoo profession. Matched with a gathering profession, Rune Tatooing would add new looks to your character and also give a buff to the stats of your character. Wait a minute their you say! “We already have enchanting in the game to buff our gear stats.” Well this is true but this new profession would buff the character directly and not the gear.

Hope you enjoyed my thoughts…