Official WoW Expansion Talent Information 226
smartidiotaz writes "Blizzard has finally released more information about the talent trees after leaks broke out over the internet. " As typical, every class thinks every other class got a better deal, but the Pallies get to mean it ;)
What a summary... (Score:3, Funny)
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Why is that some slashdot readers, when something in the summary is outside their knowledgge, they can't just look it up on Google.
Tip for you - if you're using firefox, just select the word/acronym/phrase, context click & choose "search web for..." It's not that hard and you're then not bothering a group of peole who want to discuss the article, rather than answer questions from noobs.
Um... Hunters? Druids? (Score:2)
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Why Are People Still Playing WoW? (Score:4, Interesting)
I played through the 1-60 level grind on my free month, battlegrounds seemed a joke with the wait times, and WoW raiding doesn't seem very interesting(at least IMO compared to EQ raiding a few years ago).
I know a lot of MMORPG players and not one of them are still playing WoW - which is strange because the sampling of the people I know has pretty well tracked player populations for every previous MMORPG over the past six to seven years I've been playing them.
Where are all these WoW players and what are they doing while they are logged in all these months since the game went live?
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Re:Why Are People Still Playing WoW? (Score:5, Informative)
The wait times on Alterac Valley average about 2 minutes, across all hours of the day.
For Warsong or Arathi Basin, you might have to wait up to 8 minutes in queue in the off-hours, but during peak hours the queues for AB and WSG are less than two minutes.
Also, it looks like the upcoming changes to the honor system will eliminate DKs... so, more world PvP.
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<grumpyoldman>Also, to all you fo
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There are these things called Battlegrounds. Currently, there are three of them: Arathi Basin, Warsong Gulch, and Alterac Valley. Each battleground has different objectives that need to be accomplished in order to win.
Now, before the 1.12 patch, the way Battlegrounds worked was as follows. If you entered a battleground, you were only working with people from your own faction from that server, and you were only facing people from the opposite faction from that server. If you were on the Argen
Because you never played the game. (Score:5, Insightful)
As such you would be clueless as to why people continue to play the game. See, they are playing a game. You were in a race, with what no one knows, but obviously you did not come to play. First and foremost, you cannot win at a MMORPG, so where is the rush?
Apparently the MMORPG crowd you hang with is a minority. Then again people with your mindset normally are. Do you jump from game to game? If you only spent a month in WOW I can't see how you spend more in any other.
Yeah this borders on bashing but if I had a PENNY for everyone who claims WOW is dieing or that everyone they know doesn't play it I would be so rich it would be silly.
Re:Because you never played the game. (Score:5, Insightful)
No, WoW isn't dying, but the grandparent had a point. You seriously run out of things to do in the game at a certain point. Maybe he races through things and reached it early.
I played for about a year, took my time, levelled up a warrior and a priest (one horde, one alliance). And you know what? It got real tedious, real grindy, and real pointless. I sat and thought 'Why am I logging in? To grind to get a better item/new skill. So I can get better items/new skills more effectively. Huh. Waitaminnit.'
WoW is not at all unique with regard to this problem, but it's not immune to it either.
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I really enjoyed the game but I didn't see any point in continui
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i.e. you weren't into wow. That's fine, but wow is raiding and pvp. If you don't like those then you don't like wow. I'm a bit so so with raiding, but I love pvp especially world pvp.
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Actually, no. If you had said "the end game in wow is raiding and pvp" you would be correct.
There are plenty of people that enjoy small party questing and 5 instances but don't care for 40 man raids. The best times I had in the game were 5 man groups in Dire Maul.
I also did raid extensively. My raid tracker logged somewhere in the neighborhood of 75 raids run. The prospect of having to do the runs over and over for the 40 man runs just didn't seem fun. My old guild has gone on to do
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"There was no way I could ever hit top of the ladder in PVP so there was very little point in doing it. I wouldn't be able to get the nice gear."
I'll never hit the top of the ladder either, but the point for me isn't to
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Fair enough. I'm somewhere in the middle. I don't obsess on gear or xp but I like to feel progression of some sort. I think the issue I had with PVP was partially my class. As a lvl 60 Druid specc'd restoration (this was also before the talent revamp that
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I think most good games like that go in stages - there's the point where you are wowed by the newness of it, the part where you're racing to get all the best stuff and become really powerful, and then the part where it's mostly a place to hang out with all the friends you met
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"Let's go camp the bears," they'd say, because it was safe XP. But who wants safe? What kind of paladin doesn't want to fight to save the group, casting lay hands on the besieged wizard just in time to port the rest of the party out, while taking his death blow just as the blue l
Re:Why Are People Still Playing WoW? (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe they're not still playing it so much as they just started playing it? I picked the game up in July as I had no interest in playing it before then (I'm not a large MMO fan). But a friend who recently bought a new computer that could run WoW bought it so I did.
I'm sure there are still players that have been playing since the very beginning but I doubt they're the majority. I'm sure most of the people playing are either those who didn't buy the game until just recently or those who put it down for several months or longer and have decided to pick it back up again.
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I like running around the world, and I have almost all the gryph points in the Eastern Kingdoms (I am level 43 on that character). It's an adventure getting there, and with so many ways you can get to level
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After playing the original for 4 months (5 chars, 2 60s), I came to the same conclusions as many of the others who dropped it(not to mention being helped along that decision by incompetant and/or apathetic GMs in charge of the RP server two of my chars were on).
Friend who play/have played suggested I might like it better when the expansion comes out. I somewhat doubt it. New races don't change the fact that the slog to 70 still leads to the same raiding garbage and Gear-v
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He's mostly playing flash anime games, I'm mostly doing the Sims until the Wii comes out with Spore and Animal Crossing and hopefully a Diablo spinoff.
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-chreekat
Re:Why Are People Still Playing WoW? (Score:5, Insightful)
And since I reached 60 I'm still playing the same character, slowly acquiring gold to purchase my epic mount, trying to get some end game gear but not being obsessed with it, going in some raids with my guild, fine-tuning my addon collection, and so on and so forth.
So, I'd say that WoW is kinda like a Mac: an integral experience. If you focus on a single aspect of the game it gets boring pretty fast. If you try to do all it allows you to do, then there's almost no limit to what you get from it. I am very far from getting bored, that's for sure.
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And that leads me to another problem. MMO players seem to have a skewed sense of what casual gaming is. Compared to the ones who play all night I suppose 4 ho
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You must've missed the thousands of quests and literally tens of thousands of lines of text, dialog, etc. that describe the world, giving life to over a dozen books and 3 other games spanning 10 years. Easy to miss.
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Try playing the game more than a day before you make a judgement. Most of the story is in instances, not the levelling up quests.
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WoW has possibly the easiest levelling of any MMORPG there is. The only challenge to levelling in WoW is avoiding all the bored level 60 gankers. Roll on a PVE server, and there is absolutely no challenge at all.
The XP curve in Wow is very linear, as opposed to other games, where the XP to level is on an exponential curve.
You should play anarchy online if you think WoW levelling is 'epic'. AO has 250 levels basically, on a very steep exponential curve. Basically you
Re:Why Are People Still Playing WoW? (Score:5, Insightful)
Many of us are still there. Not necessarily with our original characters, but still
Myself, I played from beta onwards. Not continously, I've taken multi-month breaks. Early on I spent most of my time exploring the 1-60 content, most of which is soloable or doable in five-man groups. Then I spent much time exploring the pvp aspects. Most recently, I've taken to the end-game (i.e. "raid") content, which is more challanging, but only by virtue of there being little room for error (and learning techniques for getting 40 people to deal w/ some rather intricate encounter mechanics).
Why do I continue with a game that is considered rather pedestrian by the hard-core mmorpg crowd? Mostly, I suppose, because I don't like mmorpgs, and wow doesn't "feel" like one (in the traditional sense). It's fast paced, you kill quickly and you likewise can die quickly. But more than that, buried behind the accessibility of the game that has made it so popular is a rich and sophisticated set of mechanics. These mechanics were originally designed to create as much diversity as possible between the different classes (although I fear those responsible for this design are long gone, as the trend has definitely been towards homogenization). Each class has a significantly different feel to it and requires a different playstyle in order to excel, while simultaneously retaining class-specific complexities. These traits don't usually become fully apparent until one has reached the higher levels with a given class.
While these sophistications certainly exist in WoW, the other edge of the sword is that, quite obviously, mass accessibility was a primary design concern; meaning that while you can become very good at the intricacies of a particular class and playstyle, it's not exactly required in order to experience all the content. The fallout from this is that the majority of the (very large) playerbase isn't terribly good at playing the game (and there exists little incentive for them to improve). Similarly, with a small group of proficient players who have mastered these intricacies, one can easily move through late/end-game content that most players would consider very difficult (without high-end "raiding" gear itemization).
Re:Why Are People Still Playing WoW? (Score:5, Insightful)
Where are all these WoW players and what are they doing while they are logged in all these months since the game went live?
I play WoW in a decent sized guild. A solid 50% of them are not gamers. My brother is the perfect example. He plays two games on the computer - WoW, and a poker tutorial game.
Which may suggest the answer to your question: You know a lot of hard-core gamers, to whom WoW may not be attractive. It is EQ easy-mode, after all. But, to a great many people like my brother who grew up with video games but were never hard-core about it, WoW is a pleasant distraction for an hour or three a week.
I was once a hard-core gamer, but I got distracted by other shiny things along the way. Now I play WoW a bit, and it's fun. Hard-core me probably wouldn't have liked it much - there is too much chance, not enough reward for mad skillz. Casual me finds it to be just about right.
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Because it is the only MMO I can play :( (Score:2)
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Really? I installed EQ2 because I got myself a buff new box and wanted to push it, and I'm able to turn everything up all the way in EQ2 but I gotta say I was very underwhelmed. The textures were for the most part terrible, the terrain engine was ugly and generally speaking I failed to get what so many of my friends that are harcore EQ fans mean when they say "it looks so realistic!"
Va
Re:Why Are People Still Playing WoW? (Score:4, Informative)
Horde Paladin? (Score:2)
Re:Horde Paladin? (Score:5, Interesting)
So blood elf paladins' holy power does not come with any EULA saying they have to have a +5 stick of morality up their ass.
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Re:Horde Paladin? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Horde Paladin? (Score:4, Interesting)
Take the Orcs, for example: they allowed themselves to be near completely corrupted by demonic powers. They are now free from this corruption, sure, but in the end they lose in comparison to the Alliance, for the member races of the Alliance did not become corrupt, they fought against the Burning Legion's corruption so fiercely that they managed to avoid the corruption.
Now, look at the Undead (Forsaken): they, like the Orcs, managed to become free from the corruption. But a lot of the evil influence from the Burning Legion remains, just look at the biological experiments they do.
The new Blood Elves are addicted to magic, and their culture revolves around the idea that totaliarianism is A Good ThingTM. For instance, see how did they manage to get Paladins: they captured and enslaved a holy entity that would have given holy powers to them had they simply asked! But no, Blood Elves don't ask, Blood Elves take!
And the Trolls were cannibals that only gave up on cannibalism because the Orcs told them that they wouldn't be allowed to join the Horde if they kept doing that.
From the entire Horde, the only race that is clearly and plainly good are the Tauren. They're with the Horde due to their sense of duty, because the Orcs for having saved them, but that's it.
Now, let's look at the Alliance:
The villest thing the Night Elves did was to go around in a killing spree against Furbolgs, thinking all of them were corrupted and thus killing the minority that wasn't. They also built a new giant tree when their gods told them "no" (the shock! the horror!).
The Gnomes messed up badly and ended poisoning their own capital after being invaded by trolls. Now they have to live with the Dwarves.
The Dwarves dig big holes, what the Night Elves think violates "Mother Azeroth" (or something like that).
The Draenei had bad luck and ended in a forced landing in Azeroth while fighting the Burning Legion.
And the Humans, ah, the Humans! The most horrendous thing they did was not to pay the masons that rebuilt their capital, these masons now being pretty revolted with the nobles...
So, all things considered, I don't think both are equal in the moral level. The Horde is clearly, at least, a "bad neighbour". Were not for the existence of the much more evil Burning Legion, in comparison to which the Horde is made of saints, and the moral difference between the Alliance and the Horde would be really undisputable.
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The Scarlet Crusade is human, and they're evil.
Most of the pirates (nice folks there) are humans.
Oh yeah, the Barov family are great examples of human kind.
Stratholm is a human city, right?
Let's see, what else have I missed...
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I also don't understand the knock against the orcs. They were dominated by a far superior enemy and used as pawns in the outlands. Finally thanks to Thrall they broke free and the PCs that you make in WoW are part of those "good" orcs. Yeah so the Dar
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The "forsaken" are the victims of the scourg
Tankadin Viable Now? (Score:2)
Now it seems they've reneged on that promise and made some changes to boost tanking. Any paladins out there see improvements that would make it worth coming back? I'm looking for a role as a 5-10-man main tank and a raid off tank, with healing as a backup when off tanking isn't necessary.
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I'll give you that it takes a bit to kill a paladin, but having an elemental shaman at 49 I'm finding equal-level paladins absolutely no trouble whatsoever. "purge-purge-ZZZAP... purge-purge-ZZZAP. Oh OK you bubble there and blow the rest of your mana futilely healing yourself, I'll be right back after melting your 42 mage friend's
Leaks (Score:5, Funny)
Well, that explains it. I *thought* the Internet was running a bit slow today...
Re:Leaks (Score:5, Funny)
(ducks)
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But what if you're a Catholic? Is there a rhythm method for leaking internet tubes?
News (Score:2)
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This is different. This is the addition of new, higher tier (up to 41 point required) talents to coincide with the release of the expansion and the increasing of the level cap to 70.
Talent Icons (Score:1)
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Technically, not "stolen", since Blizz owns both.
But yes, lots of the iconography is WC3 recycled. Unsurpisingly, since WoW is the sequel (in storyline, if not spirit) to WC3.
Look close enough, and you'll find WC2 and even original Warcraft: Orcs and Humans graphics (or at least icons inspired by those from that game).
Reuse at its finest. (Whether I am being ironic or sincere is left as an exercise for the reader.)
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Uh, it is (W)orld (O) (W)arcraft, since it's part of the same game series, I don't think it is considered stealing.
-G
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I know for a fact WoW has been using WC3 icons since early beta.
I'm sure it's been the same since day 1.
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WOW server can't take the load...how strange (Score:1)
Summons (Score:1)
Marvel's gonna be *pissed* (Score:5, Funny)
"Avenger's Shield
Hurls a Holy Shield at the enemy, dealing 270 to 330 Holy damage, dazing them then jumping to nearby enemies. Affects three targets."
Why not just change the class name to Captain America while you're at it?
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need to have the joke hurled at them and two of their friends in
order to get it.
Wait. nevermind.
Nice Paladin Improvements (Score:2, Insightful)
While that was said in jest, I would actually say that Paladin's didn't get a raw deal this time. Not only can we be viable tanks, but also a lot of the improvments focus on Paldins being in the thick of things, going melee on mobs, instead of standing in the back and healing. That's a definite improvement in my book.
Maintenance Day (Score:2)
Re:Talent? (Score:5, Funny)
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You'd probably belong to the "Stereotypical View of MMO Players" or "Stereotypical View of Nerds" classes. Their special ability is "+5 to Old Jokes That Should Have Been Retired in the 80s". Chance to crit(ically fail) is pretty high.
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Re:WoW, who gives a bards ass? (Score:4, Informative)
Feel free to flame me if I'm wrong about that.
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You keep saying that word.... I do not think it means what you think it means.
From The free dictionary [thefreedictionary.com]:
How was the parent using it incorrectly?
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whinge [reference.com]
intr.v. Chiefly British whinged, whinging, whinges
To complain or protest, especially in an annoying or persistent manner.
[Dialectal alteration of Middle English whinsen, from Old English hwinsian.]
whinger n.
whingingly adv.
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Whinge [reference.com]
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Which is exactly why DPS Warriors were not improved much. They have no business outdamaging rogues with equivalent gear.
Rogues wear leather. Rogues cannot tank. Rogues have no taunting abilities. The only thing they bring to a raid is enormous damage and the luxury of not having to worry about a mana pool. The only other primary ability they have unique to them is Stealth, which is curren
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Tactical Mastery made into a tier0 talent??? That is a buff to DPS warriors in itself. Especially at lower levels.
I don't think
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The "capture the flag" warsong gulch pvp game at high skill levels is won on crowd control, especially in the 3 lower brackets where chasers dont easily have the ability t
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Hi Tigole. I didn't know you read Slashdot.
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Also, I have a warlock alt that I absolutely hate. I guess just
Deathwish (Score:2)