Developers Gone Wild!

This is just a tidbit, but check out this tooltip:

Glyph of the Monkey

At some point in the future, this dynamic link will get dynamically fixed. So for historical accuracy, at the time this was posted it said "Your Polymorph: Sheep spell polymorphs the target into a bear cub instead."

It gives me the idea that there's a bunch of developers sitting around a table somewhere calling out ideas that some peon is taking notes and they all get confused sometime.

To be honest, I have fought monkeys and I have fought bear cubs in world. I'm not sure that these are docile enough for polymorph.

Regardless, between my mage's Polymorph sheep, turtle, pig and cat, (penguin needs a glyph. Whatever) Need something to rotate around that bestiary a bit more frequently

Say hi to Naralie!

Hi, everybody!

Over in Betaland, there has been some shaking up going on.

A new build was released last week and it apparently became clear that something was wrong, because the presence of any goblin character in the realm caused the entire server to  crash.

As a result, all goblin characters have been "disabled."  There are some calling this The Great Goblin Wipe of Last Thursday, but since I can read and understand English, I know that "disabled" is not the same as "deleted." I'm taking a wait-and-see approach to this before I write Winklestien's obituary.

In the meantime, I decided to go visit the Eastern Kingdom a bit with Naralie the undead rogue here. I can say that Tirisfal Glades is not particularly special. There is a combination of some old quests with a few new ones, but it is sort of ambling. Silverpine Forest on the other hand... has gotten a complete and utter remake. The Banshee Queen Sylvanas is on the warpath against Gilneas and she is making face time with her loyal subjects.

Paradigm Shift

One thing never changes: Subtlety rogue dps is still lolz

I know I'm not the only one looking very hard at the new 31 point talent trees. Apart from Ghostcrawler, I don't think there is anyone very very happy with them. But I think that perhaps we need to look a little harder at the developer's intentions-- particularly at something that may not have been said (yet.)

I think the developers may be setting out to destroy min/maxing. This has not been a stated goal to the best of my knowledge, but most of the statements being made and then the structure of trees themselves seems to show this.

Things that Make You Go Hmmm...

• OMG! The Hunter AoE Volley is Out! Gone! Deceased! It has shifted off this mortal coil! It is no more! Ghostcrawler dropped a clarification note about this saying that a channeled spell causing a bunch of arrows to fall from the sky was not very hunterly, and that multi-shot would be the go to AoE effect for hunters now.  A collective whimpering arose from hunters forums the world over, saying that being able to hit three or perhaps four targets wasn't really AoE. And a collective grunt from the warrior community, who have only been able to AoE to the tune of four for a long time now, indicated that the hunters need to "suck it up."
• CC Spells are having their casting time extended to 2 seconds across the board. GC said something about them being uninterruptable with the levels of haste that exist in today's game. This reeks of "arena balance issues" to me, to which I say meh.
• Ghostcrawler said that the shaman talent Totemic Focus is not long for this world.  Huzzah! That was a crappy talent that everybody skipped over anyway. I hope they replace it with something more useful than Telluric Currents now.
• I met some NPC Worgen in game today and um, they snuffle a lot. There is this default sound that is something like "gnrrrrrhrokfmmrrrraaaarrrrll" coming out of those things most of the time.  They also do a dog yelp if you injure them.  I haven't observed any PC worgen making the same noises.

My Chef's Hat is Better than Your Chef's Hat

This is not beta, it's from the live servers:

I just wanted to show off what happens when you put an Arcanum of Burning Mysteries onto your cooking hat. I'm still not sure though if, when you crit on a Fish Feast, it burns the food or makes it an "Exquisite Fish Feast" (although "Exquisite Fish Feast" sounds like cat food really so maybe just burning it is better).

Gimme some Mana Back!

I shall make no doubt about this: Merinna is a restoration shaman. I levelled this char from the very beginning as resto (long before I realized how difficult that could be). Whenever new patch notes come out, or the big changes are announced, I always skip past everything else to read the shaman-- the resto shaman-- section first.

Once it became an option, I dual-specced elemental, which has been fun too. But at the bottom of it all, Merinna's mission in life is to spread life, to a tank or whoever else may need it inside a raid group.

So, bearing in mind that I barely know what I'm talking about outside of healing and chucking lightning at things from time to time, when it comes time to really examining class dynamics, I probably will not stray too far from where I feel at home :D

I think it is a little hard to talk about this stuff without it sounding a lot like QQ. I think most players want everything about their class to stay exactly the same as it was, with a few buffs of course to make what they are already doing more mighty. Especially this time around as the Cataclysm is coming, the developers have definitely come up with new ideas about all this. So it's up to us to adapt as best we can.

So let's talk about ways to get mana return!

It's the Little Things... (part 1)

• It appears that every quest in the game may have reset. I suspect that my full quest history does not copy to the test servers. Or, there will be a new Loremaster type achievement.
• My favorite shaman trainer in the game is Farseer Umbura who always sat in the Valley of Heroes of Stormwind, down by the water sort of enjoying the nice day.  She has moved to the tavern in the Dwarven District where she spends her time with a couple of Wildhammers now.  /sigh.  I'm not sure I appreciate these damn dwarves sort of taking over as the face of Alliance Shamanism.
• Things that are gone:  The Hydraxian Warlords. That big nasty bronze dragon outside the Caverns of Time. Steamwheedle Port. Arch Druid Fangel Staghelm (and good riddance to that last one).
• I was poring through Mer's gear and was thinking, "What the hell? Why has all my stuff got all this damn spirit on it? Bleah! Yuck! Spirit!" And then I remembered that Spirit is the new Mp5 and my gear in beta has transitioned to all the new stats. Spirit still seems like a priesty thing however, so it leaves a sorta bad taste in my mouth still.
• We have spirit, yes we do! We've got spirit! How 'bout you?
• Also, in my healing gear, I have approx 27.6% bonus hit. Even though 16% is the hit cap, and um... healing gear doesn't have any hit rating at all. So that's got to be a bug. But in the meantime, I feel like Bullseye. Ha! Can't miss!
• Merinna dropped by the newly flooded Thousand Needles and dove down deep to see what they have done with this (I was hoping to find a bunch of waterlogged centaurs honestly) But I got down there and finally needed to put on my water breathing spell. But all the glyphs are currently turned off, so I didn't have any reagent and drowned.