Via Blizzplanet, we have news of yet another Warcraft graphic novel coming to us from Tokyopop in December 2009. This time, the story will focus on Thassarian, a Human Death Knight NPC in World of Warcraft.
If you’ve played a Death Knight or an Alliance character in Northrend, chances are you know of Thassarian. He first shows up in game as a thrall of the Lich King, but even as he assists in the slaughter of the Scarlet Crusade, he shows a noble spirit that even the Lich King’s control can’t completely suppress.
He shows up again in the Borean Tundra, where his quest line uncovers both some insight behind his new existence and his past and involves epic battles against the Scourge to prevent them from completing a plan to completely dismantle the Alliance offensive. Not only is said quest line one of the few Alliance quests in the Tundra that is actually not boring, but it also provides some of the best early quest rewards for a new level 70. Finally, he shows up again in Icecrown, assisting the Alliance in sabotaging the Scourge.
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Castillans World of Warcraft comic-book, graphic-novel, icecrown, manga, scourge, tokyopop
Don’t miss out on your chance to cook up the zaniest, most Blizzard-worthy idea of a theme park — the deadline for submissions to Blizzard’s Theme Park Contest is on March 30. Blizzard called on fanboys everywhere to submit their ideas for a theme park based on their properties, Diablo, StarCraft, and Warcraft, and anything from theme park maps to ride schematics to landscape pictures of the park are welcome. Selected entries will be shown during BlizzCon 2009.
The best entry incorporating all three properties will receive a Wacom Cintiq 12WX, along with the Echoes of War soundtrack and a pair of StarCraft II Beta keys. Three other winners with the best Diablo, StarCraft, or Warcraft themes will win Echoes of War and two StarCraft II Beta keys each. With just under five days to go, designer hopefuls should submit their designs soon! You never know, Blizzard just might make that theme park happen…
MMOvalue World of Warcraft Blizzard-Theme-Park, blizzcon, news, Wacom, WoW-Theme-Park
Blizzard Europe poster Ancilorn posted the lowdown on Arena Season 6 (Bornakk posted the same on the US forums), which is slated to begin at around the same time that Patch 3.1 is released. There will be some key changes to this season, the biggest of which will be that all teams will start at 0 rating instead of the traditional 1500. This way, players will generally have an upward progression throughout the season before plateauing at their estimated skill level.
Another change is that Blizzard has reevaluated the item requirements, feeling that many of them were too difficult to obtain. The lowest rating requirement for an item is currently set at 1250, which may seem low but considering players will be progressing from 0, that’s a 1250 point spread. In Season 5, the lowest rating requirement is 1615, which is a mere 115 points from the starting point of 1500. It remains to be seen how much of the continually changing Arena system will award points and how easy or hard it will be to move upwards from 0. More details on the ratings after the jump.
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MMOvalue World of Warcraft Arena-Season-6, Blizzard
Upper Deck has officially released the latest expansion in the WoW Trading Card Game — the Blood of Gladiators is the game’s eighth expansion set (can you believe this game has been around for three years already?), and features new PvP action, including a new Duel Faction Ally card and a new Arena setting in the Gurubashi Arena. There are three new characters in the game as well, coming straight from the pages of the World of Warcraft comic, with art by none other than Jim Lee. And of course it’s got the loot cards we talked about earlier, including the Foam Swords rack and the Sandbox Tiger. Can’t wait to see those in the game.
Booster packs from the set run about $4 in most places, though demand for the game can actually drive the prices up at retail if store owners feel they’re running out too fast. Seems like, at this point, the WoW TCG has its fans, and the online game does as well, and sometimes the two are not the same people. Anyone been waiting for this release, or, eight times in, is yet another expansion set actually business as usual in the collectible card game?
MMOvalue World of Warcraft loot-cards, wow-tcg
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This may seem obvious considering how many changes are coming with patch 3.1, but we’ve been asked the question enough that I’m glad to finally see a confirmation on it: Yes, characters of every class will have their talent points refunded when patch 3.1 hits, Ghostcrawler says.
Reading further into his comments, however, it looks like the amount of changes happening to the talent trees may not be the reason for the free respecs, but rather the result of it. The free respec actually seems to be something that was necessary when implementing Dual Specs, and they went ahead and did some extra fixing and cleaning because of that.
That sort of makes sense, in the past it seems like they’ve mostly tried to target a few classes at a time rather than making heavy changes to all of them all at once. Patch 3.1 has hefty changes for every single class, and I don’t remember very many content patches that had such widespread class changes. One way or another we would all need to respec after dual specs went in, so they saw an opportunity to make some additional changes and they took it. I’m okay with that.
Castro World of Warcraft 3.1-Patches, Analysis / Opinion
BlizzCon 2009 tickets will likely go on sale soon, and before then, Zarhym is here to reassure you: Blizzard is doing what they can to make sure things will not go the way they did last year. Unfortunately, he doesn’t go into detail on exactly what that means. We’d have to think that they wouldn’t just open up the floodgates on a site that wasn’t ready again, but while most thought that the lottery that ended last year’s ticket sales worked pretty well, it looks like that may not be the plan just yet. Whatever they plan to do, we hope it works out in a fair way and with a minimum of fuss for those who do try to go. Anything without the Failoc or the FailSCV is a plus in our book.
Zarhym also says that they will be giving us advance notice before the tickets actually start selling, so people will have time to make travel arrangements if necessary (and/or ask the wife or parents for the money to go if need be). And he says that a pay-per-view type of event, as they did last year, or even a live stream of some of the events online, is not beyond the realm of possibility.
Of course, even if you don’t make it for whatever reason, you can be sure that WoW Insider will be there and covering everything that happens, from the awesome costumes to the possibly blogger-threatening danger. Stay tuned for more info soon.
MMOvalue World of Warcraft Blizzard, blizzcon, Virtual selves
This one has been in the game files for a while — the screenshot above has been with MMO Champion since November of last year — but the latest PTR Build reveals that the Arena Season 5 reward mount is a Frost Wyrm. Just as the otherworldly Armored Nether Drakes were representative of Outlands, the Deadly Gladiator’s Frost Wyrm is the perfect symbol of Northrend. As with past seasons, the mount is expected to be a 310% speed flyer awarded to the upper 0.5% of Arena participants in each of the three brackets.
With Arena Season 5 expected to close soon, perhaps as early as the release of Ulduar, players now have a small window in which to earn that Gladiator title and what might arguably be the coolest-looking mount in the game. In mount-related news, the Coralshell Turtle was renamed to Sea Turtle, whose tooltip reveals it as the first aquatic mount in the game: “This mount can’t move very quickly on land, but she’s a great swimmer.” Better practice that fishing…
MMOvalue MMOValue news Arena, Mounts, patches
The Egotistical Priest has a good series of posts up attempting to somehow quantify whether Wrath has been an overall success or not. Of course, it’s definitely a financial success, but has the game’s second expansion delivered what both players and Blizzard expected it to? Vonya sets out to find out in what has turned into a three part post: you can find parts one and two on the site now, and part three is set to come out tomorrow.
So far, the answer is yes: while the area of Tradeskills is noted as less than a success (it seems to me, too, that tradeskills had more variety and options in Burning Crusade than their current state in Wrath, though that might be because we’re only partway through the expansion cycle), everything else is noted as a win for Blizzard: they’ve really beefed up questing, balance has been intriguing since Wrath (and even if one class has rubbed you wrong, consider how many players came running back with the expansion patch to re-try their class), and of course, Achievements have (predictably) brought the game to new levels of addiction and given players of all kinds new things to do.
Vonya still plans to tackle instancing and raiding as the other two criteria for Wrath’s success (and there are probably a few other ways you could test it — lore? setting?), but by the reasoning so far, Wrath is a win no matter how you slice it. Blizzard has outdone themselves with the second expansion — the only question is where they’ll go from here.
admin World of Warcraft Blizzard, Expansions, raiding, Wrath of the Lich King
It’s time to get Murkimus the Gladiator! The Arena Tournament has officially moved on to the second phase of the tournament, where all matches played will count towards the season rankings. The bloodshed began last February, kicking off a two-week testing phase where players could create fully geared Level 80 characters, test out comps and strategies, and generally get warmed up for the real deal.
Players interested in participating simply have to pony up $20 or £15 for a shot at winning prizes totalling $200,000. All ranked matches now count towards the qualifiers, and the players belonging to the Top 1000 teams will receive the title of ‘Vanquisher’ on all their characters Level 71 and above on the live realms. Players who don’t crack the upper echelons of Arena rankings can still get the lovable armored murloc pet by playing 200 matches. The matches must be played on the same character and with the same team charter.
Blizzard has also opened up Arena Tournament forums for US realms and EU realms, which players can use to recruit for teams, discuss strategies or ask for advice, and generally keep up-to-date on the latest goings-on in the Tournament Realms. Of course, if you want a good shot at winning, it might help to take some pointers from Korea’s H O N, who played RMP to a completely different level, taking home $30,000 at the recently concluded ESL Arena Tournament.
admin World of Warcraft Murkimus-the-Gladiator, PvP, Tournament-Realm, Vanquisher
We’ve been hearing an awful lot about Ulduar and patch 3.1 lately. As such, this announcement is really not a surprise. Vaneras and Bornakk posted on the forums today to warn us all that Season 5 is drawing near an end. The current season should close at the same time 3.1 drops, or very shortly afterward. (I’d guess “very shortly afterward” means “the following Tuesday.”) Your Arena points will reset with the season transition, though your Honor points will remain banked.
The announcement doesn’t set a specific date. He just says “soon.” Since we traditionally get at least two weeks’ warning before an official season ends, that does mean that the patch probably won’t drop for at least three. And since Noblegarden has been expanded on the PTR, then I expect the patch to hit and season to wrap up in the beginning of April.
We haven’t heard details about season-end rewards yet. That’s important because we don’t demonstrably know whether those rewards are going to be based on personal rating, team rating, or even the Match-Making Rating. The details of season-end rewards tend to fluctuate a little, but the best Arena teams can probably expect a title. The very, very best can expect the Arena mount. However, we don’t know if it’ll be a Nether Drake or maybe even a Proto-Drake. We’ll let you know as we find out more.
admin World of Warcraft arena-season-5
The new Arena maps suck. The gimmick-laden maps of the Ring of Valor and Dalaran Sewers are great fun in a Takeshi’s Castle sort of way but are a bad idea in serious Arena play. You would’ve thought Blizzard learned their lesson with the cyclone effect in the Nagrand Arenas. The new Arena maps introduce unnecessary RNG that some high ranked Arena players don’t appreciate. In fact, both of the new maps are banned from the recent ESL Arena Tournament in Germany.
Blizzard applied some hotfixes over the past few days that should help make the maps less of a circus. The gates have been removed from the Ring of Valor, allowing players to engage as soon as the problematic elevators hit the arena floor. The moving pillars were adjusted to start the match in the elevated position, whereas they used to rise a few seconds after the match started. Most importantly, the damage from the flame wall was changed to break certain effects such as Fears and Roots after a certain amount of damage has been dealt. The last change is nice, but it’s still problematic. The only thing that should damage another player in an Arena is another player.
They also have some changes planned for Patch 3.1, such as bug fixes for falling through the world (gotta hate that), and making it easier to plan around the events in the new Arenas. As gimmicky as they are — and they’re gimmicks, make no mistake about it — Blizzard intends players to plan their strategies around the events such as the waterfall in the Dalaran Arena. So they’ve made these events easier to identify and prepare for. Blizzard poster Mumper says that most of the changes are taken from feedback on the forums, which is great. They seem hell bent on making these maps work, so even though I think the moving parts and fire (stupid, stupid fire) are terrible ideas for an Arena map, their constant tuning helps make things easier to swallow.
Catalans Uncategorized Arenas
So maybe you don’t have the kind of name recall as Leeroy Jenkins, and maybe you don’t have the street cred of GotFrag TV’s Kintt or the British accent of ESL’s Joe and Zalmah — but if you think you can commentate with the best of them, Blizzard’s got the right contest for you. Blizzard is looking for the best people to do play-by-plays on Arena matches (dubbed Shoutcasting), so if you think you’ve got the chops, head over to the contest page and see what it’s all about.
If you think you’re the Dick Vitale of eSports (that’s an interesting thought), go ahead and download the stock Arena tournament video on the contest page and dub over the best color commentary you can muster. The best entry will win a Dell Ultrasharp 3007WFP-HC Monitor as well as the code for a cool BlizzCon 2008 Polar Bear mount. Runners up will receive BlizzCon shirts and the mount. Contest ends on April 17, so get a-shoutin’, just be sure to read the rules first.
admin World of Warcraft Arena, blizzcon, Contests
Introduction
This guide is an guide on how to complete “The Snows of Northrend” Achievement,
it lists all quests and explains how to do them, I have also tried to use the same color coding and formatting as Jame uses his leveling guide because people it’s easier to do it the way people are familiar with.
Note: This guide is not 100% finished, I will go over it and re-formate it and fix bugs later, when Reeal Life gives me a break, meanwhile i hope you like it and bare with my half-done formating, and please let me know what you think of it:)
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Castres World of Warcraft Guide, WOW Achievements Guides
