When is 4.2?

That's the question on my mind today. My personal guess is we'll see it before July. I can't wait to see what firelands has in store for us. It also makes me wonder with a raid tier of only 7 bosses...how far away is the next raid? How long does bliz really think this will last us? I know they've said that they want to release quicker smaller patches but I'll believe it when I see it.

Ps. I fail At updating this blog. I'll try and do better :(

4.1 Call to Arms

In patch 4.1 we'll be introducing Dungeon Finder: Call to Arms, a new system intended to lower queue times. Call to Arms will automatically detect which class role is currently the least represented in the queue, and offer them additional rewards for entering the Dungeon Finder queue and completing a random level-85 Heroic dungeon. - Blizzard

First let me say wow, I wasn't expecting this to come in 4.1!  It's the patch that keeps on growing.  Seriously, when are they going to release this thing?  I thought for sure that it would be out a few weeks ago.  I thought that blizzard's new design philosophy was to have smaller little patches, but they keep adding things to this one to make it bigger!  Anyway on to this controversial topic...

I can't believe people are complaining about this.  This is a great idea by Blizzard in my opinion to help with DPS queue times.  So lets think about who's complaining about it....

Tanks: Definitely not, they will have call to arms probably 90% of the time.
Healers: Maybe...Probably not a whole lot because every now and then they might be able to get some of these rewards.  Even if they don't our 5-10 minute queue time should be down to almost nothing.
DPS: This seems to be where all the QQ'ing takes place.  But why?

This is designed to HELP DPS!  If blizzard gave these rewards to everyone, then that would defeat the point of the rewards as all roles would queue more often.  Do people not want shorter queue times?  Blizzard can't push an easy button and make it happen.  This is entirely a player problem, and short of them hiring tanks to go do 5 mans or turning the game upside down, they can't solve this problem. 

Also, any rewards the call to arms people get can be acquired elsewhere, they aren't getting anything unique!  As a healer main with some dps alt's I love this change even though I will probably never see the rewards myself.  It might even encourage me to try to tank on one of my alts, which is what the system is designed to do!  I hope the player-base doesn't QQ enough where blizzard does a 180 on this change because it will really help the game I believe.

The New Warbear

It looks like the model for the new amani war bear has been datamined, it looks green instead of red. As one of the few people who actually have one of the originals from tbc I have to say that I'm glad blizzard made it very noticably different. Same model but you can easily tell who got it when.

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Valor points

Right now, you receive 70 VP for the first random Cataclysm Heroic dungeon you complete each day. In 4.1, you'll receive 70 VP for the first seven random Cataclysm Heroic dungeons you complete each week. Similarly, you'll receive 140 VP for the first seven random Rise of the Zandalari Heroic dungeons (the new Zul'Aman and Zul'Gurub instances) you complete in the week, too. Collectively, you'll be able to earn up to 980 VP exclusively from Heroic dungeons, which in turn will count towards your weekly 1250 VP cap. - Blizzard

So it looks like valor points will be much easier to come by come 4.1.  I have mixed feelings about this.  On the one side it's definitely good for the casual player.  You can get your 5 mans in any time you want for valor points.  Heck, you can don't even have to raid at all and you will get near the weekly cap!  What this does do, is totally eliminates any advantage that 25 mans have.  One of the carrots on the stick used to be extra valor points.  When you can get 140 a pop from doing a 5 man though, that incentive becomes much less valuable.  I think we are seeing the slow demise of 25 man raids in World of Warcraft.  By next expansion they won't even exist.

I'm back!

I decided it might be a good time to resurrect the blog!  Why you ask?  Well it's something I enjoy doing a lot, I just wasn't making time for it before.  Cataclysm sucked up quite a bit of my time and that's died down a bit now so
A. I have more time to blog and
B. There isn't quite the flurry of news which is difficult for me to keep up with. 

I am going to make a few tweaks to the format though.  While the main focus of the blog will always be world of warcraft, I'll also throw in some other MMOs which have caught my interest.  Currently I've been playing Rift a bit, so you might hear me talk about that until that gets old.  The second change I'm going to make is that I know I probably can't keep this blog updated daily.  My aim for this blog will be to update it about 3 times per week.

It's been about 4 months since the last post and much has happened since then.  Cataclysm had a pretty successful launch and I am loving the expansion.  I have also found an excellent raid group from my guild in "The League".  We started raiding a bit late but we are tearing through content like there's no tomorrow, so expect to hear my impressions of some of the raid bosses as we progress.

All in all, glad to be back though!

The Death of a Video Card

Hey all,

It's been a while since i last posted an update, and this is due to 2 circumstances:

1. There's not a whole lot of WoW news now, and I'm not playing the game a ton until cataclysm starts.
2. My poor video card on my computer blew up :(.

I should be back in the swing of things now since I just installed a brand new video card. 

Previously I had mentioned my disappointment with blizzard and their decision to drop the insane feat of strength with the upcoming cataclysm.  Once again though, Blizzard swoops in and rights their previous wrong.  In this link they say that the Insane in the Membrane feat of strength will still be obtainable come 4.0.3a!  Hooray!  Thank you Blizzard!  This will make many players very happy.  A large part of why Blizzard is such a successful company is that they truly listen to their players.  Thanks Bliz!

The end of the world is coming!

Today we see the beginnings of what will be the upcoming cataclysm of Azeroth.  Phase 1 for the event is online and available for everyone to do.  There are a handful of quests to be done which start the story and yield some easy gold for those who need some. It will be interesting to see how long Blizzard takes with this since it is an event with quite a few different stages.  Will we see the world change soon?  I'm guessing right before Thanksgiving might not be a bad time (6th year anniversary?).

Here's one of the doomsayers: