I was able to get some decent play time in this weekend and ended up at level 64-1/2. Only 3-1/2 more levels and I’m into the new content… Unfortunately this is going to be the week from hell at work, so I’m not convinced it will be the week I hit 68. We’ll just have to see…
In the process of gaining two more levels I shed some old gear as well, but I’ll have to update you all on that next time…
The speed at which quest text is written to the screen has been dramatically increased as of the last patch (8770). This is a welcome little tweak to the game since I always used to have “instant quest text” turned on. The new speed is slow enough that you notice the effect, but slow enough that you’re not waiting around impatiently for the quest text to appear.
In an earlier post I mentioned I was a little worried about just how far into Outland the starting gear for the Death Knight would last before being replaced. I’m happy to report that after questing through Hellfire Penensula and moving on to Zangarmarsh (now at level 62) I’ve only replaced one piece of gear. There were plenty of other “close calls” that might have resulted in ever-so-slightly better stats, but I’d prefer to keep the “Death Knight Look” going just a little bit longer. As I head out into Zangarmarsh I’ll keep you all updated as usual on any gear changes that head my way, but for now here’s the one change:
Keleseth’s Signet Ring was replaced by Amaan’s Signet for a gain of one hit rating.
I haven’t had any decent play time at all this week, so I jumped up early this morning to get started on some weekend fun, and was greeted by a 490MB patch. There are no official patch notes updates yet, but a thread has started on the Beta Forums to track all of the changes. The most exciting thing appears to be that the dedicated PvP zone Wintergrasp is now open, and includes some playable siege weapons. Since I’m concentrating mostly on the Death Knight class (and am still stuck at level 62 after nearly a week with no play time) it will be a little while until I hit these new zones, but we’ll get there!
One of the most interesting aspects of the new Death Knight class is the ability to raise dead humanoids to fight by your side. An even cooler feature is that if you raise the corpse of a friendly player that has died, that player can control the Ghoul as if it were their own character. I tried this out with my son today (also in the beta) but it turned out comically and horribly wrong as the first ability button he hit was his last…
As usual you can watch a higher quality version if you click through to YouTube and hit the appropriate link below the video.
Today Blizzard detailed a new recruit-a-friend program on their website that I swear belongs on the April 1st page. The exclusive Zhevra mount is certainly believable, but when they started talking about summoning your friends and earning triple experience I had to do a double-take. In the end, there are so many restrictions on how you earn everything that I’m sure it’s legit, but it’s certainly taking some elements of the game in an odd new direction.
I’ve been busy leveling up Pwnshop (about 61 1/2 now) but I wanted to drop by and test out uploading a movie. This is just a quick one of Pwnshop on the DK mount. I recorded my son’s adventure doing the final DK quest last night, so if this is as easy as it should be, I’ll be posting that soon.
If you want to watch this in higher quality mode, you can click through to YouTube and hit “watch in high quality”.
Logging on to Wrath of the Lich King today involved downloading another 24MB or so patch. Among the changes I noticed as I was playing the Death Knight was that Runic Power now decays out of combat like it used to, so apparently the temporary lack of decay was an accident (or an experiment).
In terms of general changes, I spotted an update to the patch notes showing a large number of Mage changes and a few tweaks to the Shaman. The most interesting addition for the Shaman was a new talent called Tidal Force that increase Healing Wave, Lesser Healing Wave, and Chain Heal critical effect chance by 60%. The trick is that each critical heal reduces the effect 20% and lasts for 20 seconds. I’ll have to log into my Resto Shaman to check out the mechanics of this a little more and report back. Yes; I’m the only person I know that leveled up a Shaman all the way “full resto”. It wasn’t pretty. I’ll add some information on this talent in a future post for sure.
One last exciting thing. Folks are noticing a new pop-up in the scrolling combat text that says “100% Threat!”. Apparently, add-on developers now have full threat information built into the API, which means we should all see some pretty exciting and accurate threat mods when WotLK comes out. Scanning the forums showed some folks already experimenting with this new capability.
I missed it yesterday, but Blizzard announced the sale of Blizzcon 2008 tickets starting August 11th. I’ll be there with the whole crew for the third time, covering all the news from the show floor.
Well, officially the new patch notes are out, but the only thing they indicate for changes is:
New Calendar feature: Players will be able to access the new Calendar feature by clicking on the new icon located in the top right corner of their mini map. The calendar will track in game events, allow raid scheduling, and more. New Vanity Pet and Mount changes: Players will now be able to access their non-combat pets and mounts by clicking on the pets tab in the Character Info panel. These pets and mounts will be now learnable much like spells or abilities. Once a vanity pet or mount is learned, the icon will disappear from within a player’s inventory and reappear in the appropriate tab under the pet tab under Character Info. Say goodbye to your vanity pets and mounts taking up bag and bank slots!
But just a little bit of play time shows there are other differences. For one thing, I verified the change to runic power decay that I mentioned in my post yesterday. After going into combat and maxing out the runic power to 100/100, I sat around and waited to see what would happen. As suspected, it just sat there at full. If this is an intentional change, it’s certainly welcome!
The other major changes focus on Ebon Hold, the Death Knight starting area. The area has been revised significantly, including a new flight path in and out of the city. The flight path uses the new skeletal gryphon mount (shown below), which is also new Death Knight only mount at level 70 (The Winged Steed of the Ebon Blade).
The new skeletal gryphon mount leaves Ebon Hold
Also related to my previous post about Death Knight starting gear, I wanted to create a new Death Knight to get a screenshot of the first set of gear you start with.
A brand new Tauren with the Lich King
And another screenshot of pwnshop after completing the first set of quests to leave Ebon Hold and start my adventures in Outland.
Pwnshop posing in quest gear
The last bit of info I caught today was that Blizzard has immortalized some of the early Death Knight players by adding their names and stories to a book in Ebon Hold. The book is only visible when playing as a brand new Death Knight, and supposedly its contents change as you advance in your initial quest line, so it’s something I’ll have to explore in a future post.
Unfortunately for me, the server was going down for a restart right when I finished up with these screenshots, so it looks like two nights in a row of logging in for about 10 minutes to experiment before being logged out again for the night. With any luck I’ll get another good test session in soon, and get this little Death Knight into the 60s.
Until next time…
