Myrddin – Seite 99 – Wolf-Hund.Org

2006, Dezember 19

Not much to say these days.

Well these days are somewhat uninteresting newswise. Everyone is trying to PvP his gear up and there are as many as 300+ simultaneous Battlegrounds open. Of course the server stability and lag issues become once more a reason for many to complain. While the protest is understandeable some spamming on the forums make them not fun to read at the moment.

THe Community Managers seem to get quite arrogant these days and I despise some ways of closing threads. It is one thing to close posts with bad language and offense versus blizzard. But other well argumented posts are just being ingored because they have the word blizzard or blue in them. Of course that is one way not to have to anwer uncomfortable questions by customers, but I doubt if it is the right one.

Also I do not think that snowballs are worth an extra news, or the clarification about double honor reduction.

"After internal testing by our QA department, we have found that the honor gained from honorable kills and bonus honor are receiving 30% reductions correctly as intended. The investigations lead us to believe there is no issue with calculations at this point in time, nor that players are getting a double reduction in their honor calculations. Players may have felt differently due to the fact that honor as seen during the day of accumulation is estimated honor and the actual honor amount is displayed the next day. Estimated honor doesn’t account for diminishing returns, which may have also added to the confusion." – Netharea

Not having internet for the past 6 weeks now and thus not being able to play makes me wonder if I really miss the game. I am currently farming legendaries in Titan Quest, offline … but well its still a lot of fun.

A lot of people I know stopped playing these days and I wonder what will become of Burning Crusade. The Nerf of glancing blows really took the wind out of my sails, because I had dedicated most of my online time on raising my little human Rogue, which is now quite pointless. The New Arena System will mean everybody will sooner or later have the epic Arena Rewards just like now. Buy a spot in a good team, attend 30% of the matches for full recognition and full points and voila there is Your gear.

Where does it leave us PvP wise, if there are now upgraded level 70 rewards for BG's that we can farm, when most players have their Arena Gear after 4 months (minimum is reported to be around 6 weeks) with a system that punishes you if you fight more than 10 matches a weak in your arena team. What after that? World PvP? or just being bored?

Same with instances, Some Tier IV parts are reported to drop in new 25 man instances and thus you need to be raiding again, not just grouping in teams of 10's as I hoped it was.

I was really hoping some of my old friends might return to RC and we would be able to make some kind of relaxed group pvp wise, doing some instances now and then – but currently it does not look like it. What are Your plans for TBC?

2006, Dezember 13

Burning Crusade Beta: Rogue Tier V Set

With introduction of the Tier V Set vendor in Burning Crusade Beta, there are now plenty of Screenshots of Tier V Armor available. Too bad its true, Rogues will look like Skeletor of He-Man in Tier V. Also I am not really impressed by the stats, but judge yourself.

Tier V Rogue Set

Tier V Druid Sets (the feral one looks really nice for my Druid)

Pictures of the other sets can be found at the World of Raids Forum.

2006, Dezember 13

Burning Crusade Beta: Patch 2.03 Rogue Changes

World of Raids has the new patchnotes for Burning Crusade Beta Patch 2.03 online. You can read all patch notes here. For us Rogues only some minor changes were applied.

Rogues:

Rogue talent Weapon Expertise changed to 2/2 increasing weapon skill of daggers/swords/fist weapons by 10.
Suprise attacks dmg increased from 8% to 10%.
Renataki Charm of Trickery changed (scales with lvl now, 40 energy at lvl 70)
Venomous Totem changed to: Use: Increases the damage dealt by instant Poison by 65 and the periodic damage dealt by Deadly Poison for 22 for 20 sec.
Rogue T4 set bonuses changed, are now:
(2) Set: increases the duration of your Slice and Dice ability by 1 sec per combo point.
(4) Set: Your finishing moves have a 15% chance to grant you a combo point.

Weapon Expertise is still quite useless, since the nerf of +weaponskill. It no longer reduces the damage reduction by glancing blows and just increases the critchance versus higher level mobs by 0.1% per +weaponskill. I do not think it is worth 2 Talent points

I have not heard if they also adjusted the mace skill in the mace specialization, but I would not wonder if Blizzard forgut us poor mace rogues again 😉 But then +weaponskill is so useless nowadays that it will not matter anyhow.

I like the increase of Surprise Attacks damagebonus. But I still think here that with Slice and Dice as THE finisher in PvE for a combat Rogue making finishing moves nondodgeable is a slap in the face of every combat Rogue and I would like to have it back on Sinister Strikes.

2006, Dezember 13

Honor Gain Reduction by 30% announced

Players brought up the question, if honor rewards would be going up in prices because they seem to be ridiculously easy to obtain in comparison to what it used to mean to gain Rank 14.

2 Days ago Drysc replied to this matter:

"More than likely the prices will be adjusted for the current honor rewards sometime after the expansion releases to reflect their 'value' more appropriately when compared to expansion items.

That would mean the prices would be going down though, not up." – Drysc

This is the reason most players are somewhat startled to hear that the total Honor Gain has been reduced to 30%. Nethaera has posted some information on this matter.

"Now that the Before the Storm content patch has been live for the past week, we’ve had a better opportunity to track the rate at which players are accumulating honor, and subsequently how easy it's been to obtain honor rewards. In gauging these elements, we've determined that the effort required to obtain honor rewards is more trivial than we had intended. As a result, during today's maintenance we’ve applied a hotfix that reduced the amount of honor gained by approximately 30%. This change allows the honor rewards to be obtained at rate that better reflects the item’s in-game value.

The reason that we decided to reduce the rate of honor gain rather than simply raise the honor cost of each item, is to ensure that everyone’s time and effort participating in PvP since the patch is not diminished. As this change will only affect future honor accumulation." – Nethaera

If You ask me its not that bad of a change, since the Rank 14 are still much easier to obtain than before the introduction of the new honor system. Good Luck with your farming.

2006, Dezember 5

Arena Points and Rating

With the coming Arena System the question arises, how fast You will be eligible to receive the awesome arena rewards. At WoWSzene.de this chart has been published:
[table id=1 /]
This basically means, the higher Your teams rating, the faster You will be able to get the rewards. As seen on the Arena Reward Page a mace rogue will need roughly 5625 points for weapons and 8250 points for armor. This means it will take roughly 8 weeks for the Top Arena Team to get all their items.

Just take note that the top Arena Rewards do not necessarily need to be the top PvE rewards. Arena items are all about standing power while for a Rogue PvE items will all be around maximizing damage output.

2006, Dezember 3

The coming Rogue Changes in 2.0

As listed in the official patch notes and on the World of Raids Forum these are the documented and undocumented changes that will come to the Rogue Class.

Rogues will no longer aggro targeted mobs that have not been attacked when their "Stealth" cooldown expires.
"Anesthetic Poison" is now properly available at level 68 at the rogue trainers.
Stunning an NPC will no longer cause the message "You must be behind your target" when rogues properly try to use abilities behind a target.
The talent, "Dagger Specialization", will now use the appropriate crit chance.
Unofficial: Improved Backstab moved to tier 2 Assassination.
Unofficial: Improved Slice and Dice moved to tier 2 Combat.
Unofficial: Surprise Attacks changed to "Your finishing moves can no longer be dodged, and the damage dealt by your Backstab, Gouge, Shiv, and Sinister Strike abilities is increased by 8%".
Unofficial: Improved Sap and Elusiveness have swapped tiers.
Unofficial: Improved Sap now 2 ranks, 50%/100%.
Unofficial: Preparation changed to "When activated, this ability instantly refreshes the cooldown on your Evasion, Sprint, Vanish, Cold Blood, Adrenaline Rush, and Premeditation abilities." Goodbye double Cloak of Shadows/Blind in arenas.
Unofficial: Cloak of Shadows is now 1 minute cooldown instead of 2.
Unofficial: Evasion ranged attack avoidance reduced from 50% to 25%.
Unofficial: Blind changed to 3 minute cooldown from 5 minutes(is this new? never noticed it before).
Unofficial: Wound Poison (all ranks) has been changed. Now has a 30% chance to instantly deal damage(increases with poison rank), and reduce healing effects used on target by 10% for 15 seconds. Stacks up to 5 times.

The latest changes with the reduction of the effect of +weaponskill gave us Mace Rogues already a 20% reduction of DPS in raids. On a short explanation +5 weaponskill reduced the damage reduction from glancing blows and increased the crit chance by 0,04%. Now the crit chance will be 0,1% and no effect on glancing blows. So we will drop 20% in raid damage and get a meager 0,06% increased crit chance.

Especially races like Humans with +weaponskill to swords / maces are affected since it was their only real good racial. Also talents which give +weaponskill are now worthless since they were balanced with their old effects. For us mace rogues that means we get 5% chance to stun mobs (which are immune in instances anyhow) and also 5 Skill = 0,5% crit chance versus monsters that are higher level than us for 5 talent points.

As a quick reminder: Here is the damage reduction table at the WoWWiki.

Now the next change comes. Our decent 41 Point combat talent "Surprise Attacks" has been significantly changed:

Old: "Your Backstab, Gouge, Shiv, and Sinister Strike can no longer be dodged, and the damage dealt by your Backstab, Gouge, Shiv, and Sinister Strike abilities is increased by 8%".

New: "Your finishing moves can no longer be dodged, and the damage dealt by your Backstab, Gouge, Shiv, and Sinister Strike abilities is increased by 8%".

If You read this You have to wonder if Blizzard ever played a combat Rogue. Combat Rogues do not really have burst damage and rely on constant damage which means that combat rogues finisher is mostly Slice and Dice and that one cannot be dodged at all. So where is the sugar for us in Surprise Attacks?

As I understand it the 41 point talents make You sacrifice talents from other trees in order to be able to get the crown-talent of Your tree, which should fully fit in there. But surprise attacks is totally off.

Its not like we do not already have the most useless tree of all, but with removal of +weaponskill and an obviously totally misdesigned 41 point talent what does it mean for our future?

2006, November 30

All Burning Crusade Arena Rewards

Here is a list and screenshot of all Arena Rewards that can be found in Burning Crusade. Take note that rated Arena matches will only be available at Level 70. All other matches will be skirmish mode only and You will not even receive honor points. If You won 10 matches in Your Arena Team You have achieved all You could and more rated matches can only make You lose and thus reduce the Arena Points you can receive.

Take a look at this thread on the official WoW Forums for more details on the Arena System.

But here are the screenshots You came for:

Arena Reward Weapons

Armor Reward Armor

2006, November 29

Patch 1.13 coming on December 5th

As confirmed by blue the new Patch 1.13 "Before the Storm" will come online at December 5th. If You are still trying to gain Rank it will be too late now. Next reset Your gained Rank will no longer grant You access to the PvP Items due to the changes to the honor system. In my eyes Alterac rewards will be much harder to get now with the new requirements, but we will see. I suppose for us Europeans it will mean that we get the patch 1 day after.

The coming patch will include the new talents, the new honor system and many more features of the Burning Crusade Expansion.

"The next World of Warcraft content update, “Before the Storm,” will include the new PvP Honor System, as well as other new features that will prepare us for The Burning Crusade expansion. We are currently planning to release this content update next Tuesday, December 5. Please note that the patch date is still subject to change, and we will keep you informed of any changes to the plan as they happen.

If the patch goes live as planned, this will be the last week that new PvP ranks under the old Honor System can be earned, as the patch will immediately introduce the new Honor System. We will run one final honor calculation on December 5 and update everyone’s ranking accordingly on that date so that players who achieve a new rank for that week have the opportunity to display that title on their character. Please note, however, that no new PvP rewards will be unlocked for purchase with this final “old Honor System” calculation, regardless of any increase in rank.

For those who have been seeking high-rank PvP armor and weapons, note that the new Honor System will still include these item rewards, and it will actually be easier to earn these items under the new Honor System than under the old Honor System. Those who wish to see how their PvP abilities measure up against other players will still be able to do so under the new Arena System." – Drysc

2006, November 29

Statistics online – Auctions, Created Items, Creatures, etc

The Blizzard has brought extended statistics online. Via the World of Warcraft webpage you can easily access statistics on auctions sold, created items, dangerous creatures, gathered items, looted items and quests completed.

Who would have thought that Copper Ore is the most gathered item? Or Vaelastraz the Corrupt the second most dangerous creature in the game? (Well Vaelastraz has caused us more problems than he used to due to overaggro with imab weapons – hehe)

2006, November 28

World of Raids publishes more Tier V – Sets

World of Raids has published more Tier 5 Sets on their forum. Click here to jump to the thread. They are including all sets on all Races and Genders as soon as they come available. Really awesome work World of Raids.

You can argue about taste, but I think the current Tier III is much nicer. Compare Dradnaught Armor to Warrior one which is just plain ugly. And then there is still the Skeletor-look of the Rogue set. Just the Warlock Tier V Set looks really really great, especially on orc.