Overheard at BlizzCon 2008: A real, live Blue   Scene: Just outside the BlizzCon badge pickup area, the Thursday before BlizzCon, 10 minutes before 4pm badge pickup. Crowd: (Mills around, is huge, waits patiently, talks occasionally about everything from the Protoss to the weather. Throws out a random “WoW Insider rocks!” yell as we pass by — thanks for that!) BlizzCon Employee: (Steps out of Convention Center to address the crowd) Hi everyone! We’re going to open up the doors here in just a minute, but we will not be giving out badges until 4pm. So when we open the doors, in about five minutes from now, come on in and line up, but we won’t give out badges until four. Crowd: (Various murmurs of excitement, until, from in the back:) Why aren’t you wearing a blue shirt? (Laughter from all sides.) Employee: Ha, that’s funny. No, I’m wearing a black shirt today, not a blue shirt. Ok, so in five minutes we’ll let you in, and then we’ll give out badges at 4pm. (Turns and heads back inside.) Crowd: (Follows immediately, calmly

OK so we have the following new AP enchants: Enchant Weapon – Greater Potency – 50 AP Enchant Weapon – Superior Potency – 65 AP Enchant Weapon – Greater Savagery – 85 AP (only for 2H, although the spell itself isn’t labelled as such, only the description) Enchant Weapon – Massacre – 110 AP Questions/Suggestsions: I’m guessing that potency enchants are AP instead of strength now so more people can make use of them? Enchant Weapon – Greater Savagery should be renamed to Enchant 2H Weapon – Greater Savagery. Also: the bonus AP given doesn’t seem in line with the 1H weapon enchants. Massacre is a 1H enchant that trumps Greater Savagery and Superior Potency (obviously more expensive), but is it a placeholder that is actually supposed to be a proc based enchant? Or is it intended that all AP enchants are replaced with Massacre?

Not that the change is relevant in the least. Nobody is ever gonna ‘need’ to reglyph during a 5 man. so what you will see is raids sending people out and then summoning them back into the instance again. So the real cost in it all is a soul stone Yes, but I wasn’t referring to 5 mans. I was referring to the people who are very serious about min/maxing in raid and PvP situations. The fact they’d need to leave and come back is somewhat a deterrent because it takes time and if you need to wait for 12 of your 15 people to come back every fight, that slows you down greatly. If you have raided before, have you been in a situation where your guild didn’t have a repair bot and 20 of your 25 (or 30 of you 40 depending how long ago you raided) HAD to repair before they moved on? As I said, I’d LOVE for that to be the case where scribes could reglyph. I suppose it depend on how much blizzard accounts for glyphs in future encounters. After all, enchanters can re-enchant gear, and everyone can re-gem their things without a JC. I’m just pointing out a

I’ve been playing with the motorcycle mount but i’ve really gotta say it’s the most overpowered mount in the game. I didn’t even want one at first just because I prefer riding one my bird god mount, but after seeing the motorcycle in action, it’s hard to want anything else. It has nothing to do with “coolness”, this quite literally is the best mount in the game. First of all, you cannot be dazed/dismounted off of this thing. Thats a major plus by it’s self. You can’t even be force dismounted via polymorph. Secondly, you take NO FALL DAMAGE in this thing. The motorcycle has it’s own hitpoints which eat fall damage then regenerate at a very fast rate. If you fall from a high enough distance to kill the motorcycle (i fell from 200 yards), you still jump out of it unharmed when it dies and you simply make a new one. Thirdly, it’s really hard to target people driving this thing. In pvp, you end up targeting and attacking the bike, not the players. That is extremely frustrating. I don’t even know if things like

I don’t care if its not usable in arena, I don’t want to have to arena for a PvP set so I can play what I really like, world pvp/bg pvp. Sorry, but I’ve gotten to 1850 on my shaman already and after maintaining that for a few months it just gets tiring. Arena is a failure. The devs might disagree, and thats fine, but don’t punish we bg enthusiasts and world pvp freaks because you like arena best. Make a BG epic set, ilvl200, but not usable in arena. The lack of a full epic set for honor only has more to do with ensuring that pvp itemization isn’t significantly easier to achieve than pve itemization than it is a “bg vs arena” issue.

WoW Insider Show Episode 57: The return of the Turp Our latest podcast is now available for your listening pleasure over on WoW Radio (and in iTunes), and we’ve got a few familiar faces returning to the fold — Amanda Dean and Turpster are on this week, and we haven’t talked with them in a while. Turpster is back from his trip to the US, and Amanda is back with a whole new character and a new PvE outlook. We hit on: ·         Brewfest, how it’s going, and whether it’s safe for minors (or miners, as Turpster may have heard) to celebrate a holiday that revolves around drinking and riding rams fast right afterwards. ·         The upcoming Honor reset that we didn’t really have a problem with but that didn’t happen after all. ·         The Bejeweled addon and some other possibilities for official third-party addons ·         And as usual we answered your emails, including where to get started with WoW Lore and whether Mages or Shamans cry more (I think Shamans probably cry more, but Mages do more

Juking Another important skill for healers is faking a heal. This is perhaps more important to Paladins than any other healing class because getting interrupted while casting locks the Paladin out from doing anything at all. For this reason alone I still employ the obsolete /stopcasting macro which cancels my current heal instead of putting it in the queue. This is more efficient than breaking heals with movement, which costs precious split seconds. It is imperative to get an AddOn that helps you track spell cooldowns, such as the essential Afflicted. This is probably one of my favorite AddOns in PvP, giving me an idea of my window to cast spells. It also helps to understand what classes can interrupt and lock you out of a school. For example, if a Shaman is waiting for my heals I don’t worry too much because Earth Shock is a mere 2 second school lockout (GCD is already at 1.5) whereas Pummel, Kick, and Counterspell all have longer lockouts at 4, 5, and what feels-like-forever 8 seconds respectively. There’s also the Shadow Priest’s Silence and Felhunter’s

Knights of the Ebon Blade • I find some of the rewards the Knights of the Ebon Blade offer to be puzzling. Death Knights can’t use fist weapons, and yet here’s Unholy Persuader, a reasonable offhand fist weapon. • Similarly, they can’t use shields, and so here’s Toxin-Tempered Boots, tanking options with Block Value. As a warrior I like boots with Block Value, but… what’s the deal? Are the DK’s just handing out the crap they can’t use from their former lives as faction rewards? • Well, at least the DPS boots have a chance to give you some hit if you socket them properly, I guess. The Death-Inured Sabatons continue the trend of disappointing me with their itemization. • Reaper of Dark Souls is a solid DPS option which could also work as a tanking item if you’re looking for hefty Devastates. I’d suggest picking up a fast and slow tanking weapon in order to adjust your threat to the situation. • Finally, for arms warriors there’s the Runeblade of Demonstratable Power. It’s not perfectly itemized

Holy priests in 8962 Holy priests were no more exempt than Shadow priests from the changes in 8962. Most were good, and many were previewed by Koraa, but let’s look at them anyway, shall we? ·         Divine Hymn now does a HoT (10 closest targets within 15 yards, 348 every sec for 6 sec) as well as its previous effect of putting enemies to sleep and reducing incoming damage. OK, I’m now officially convinced by this spell. It’s on a six-minute CD, which is pretty good, and that is a good chunk of healing to ten targets for less than the cost of a max-rank Greater Heal. Even if it didn’t put enemies to sleep or decrease damage taken, I would still use it as a cheaper, wider-effect Prayer of Healing. [Edit: just noticed I'd misread the skill; it makes enemies take less damage. That's a bit depressing.] ·         Holy Fire is now a 2 second cast. Whatever, although this probably means it won’t scale as well with spell power; it used to be our most efficient nuke (assuming you let the DoT tick out). ·         Holy Nova is now

Typhoon bug dominates the Wrath beta Remember a few content patches ago, the PTR had a fun little bug where Warlocks had the spell effect of Seed of Corruption castable rather than the spell itself? So Warlocks had an infinite range, no cooldown, no global cooldown, mana free, instant Seed of Corruption? Remember the chaos that caused? Well, guess what? It happened again! No, no, it wasn’t Seed of Corruption this time. It happened with the new Druid spell Typhoon. Specifically Typhoon Rank 5. It’s already been hotfixed, so don’t bother trying it now- you missed out. If you want to see exactly what people were doing with this spell, just check out the video above. I had a chance to experience a little of this firsthand, and it was impressive, to say the least. A Moonkin rolling up to an enemy faction’s town and laying waste is just hilarious to see, though not so much after the tenth time. Remember, this thing didn’t even trigger the Global Cooldown. Druids were running around with macros that cast this spell ten or twenty times simultaneously. Nothing