Newslist For MMOValue

Patch 3.1.1a, which we previously covered last week, will be coming during tomorrow’s extended maintenance. This is according to a small update Crygil gave this evening.

While we don’t have the full patch notes yet, Patch 3.1.1a will just correct small issues that cannot be hot-fixed into the game. Notably, the tooltip to the Paladin’s Exorcism ability will be updated to reflect that it cannot be used on players.

Realms will be down from 3:00 a.m. PDT / 6:00 a.m. EDT until 11:00 a.m. PDT / 2:00 p.m. EDT. We’ll let you know when they’re up, and if there will be any additional extended maintenance.

MMOvalue World of Warcraft downtime, maintenance, patch-3.1.1a

The seasonal revamped extravaganza that is Noblegarden is due to start tomorrow and the Blues have revealed a little more about the new week-long festival. Yesterday night Zarhym posted on the official forums, revealing some new details as well as linking to a revamped festival page on the official site.

The new Noblegarden (which starts tomorrow) has its origins in a druidic festival, but the modern peoples of Azeroth seem more interested in egg-hunting and scoffing chocolates. Focusing on the starter towns like Brill and Goldshire, it’s one of those great festivals which is aimed at newer players as well as die-hard level 80s.

Zarhym promises egg hunts and new daily quests as well the chance to find cool items within brightly coloured chocolate eggs. There’s also a stack of new achievements (you know you want that Violet Proto-Drake) and if you get sick of eating chocolate you can also use them as currency to buy awesome Noblegarden swag.

Mustapha World of Warcraft Druid, eggs, noblegarden-achievements

Our sister site Joystiq pointed out last night to their readers that the BlizzCon 2008 beta codes were now being accepted, and we thought it prudent to pass the news along to you.

You can enter the code over at http://www.blizzcon.com/beta and enjoy the satisfaction that you’ll get knowing in a few months (or less?) you’ll be playing the beta of StarCraft II.

The code took me a few others on staff a couple tries to enter. ‘B’ looks like ’8′, and ‘S’ looks like ’8′. You’ll probably need to try a few different permutations of the code until you get it right. When you enter the right code, you’ll get an email ‘confirmation’ that really just tells you that you’ve entered the key successfully. You don’t have to do anything further. The email is a little oddly worded though, and doesn’t look like your typical Blizzard email. So we’ve posted a copy of it after the break for folks.

BlizzCon 2009 is coming up on August 21st and 22nd of this year. We’ll be there in force again. Should be a blast!
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Kanghi World of Warcraft beta-keys, blizzcon, blizzcon-2009, starcraft-2

Once upon a time, when the World of Warcraft was all shiny and new, things were simple: the Horde hated the Alliance and they, in turn, despised the Horde. It was a simpler time, but this wasn’t just some game mechanic to facilitate PvP and hours of ganking, oh no, it was integral to the lore of Azeroth.

Now, it’s also worth remembering that there’s no black and white in Azeroth either. The Horde aren’t evil for just being the Horde, neither are the Alliance all pure as newly fallen snow. Each faction has done its fair share of pure and evil acts depending on the actions of individual heroes and the motivations of their leaders.

But now we’re post patch 3.1, it’s time to rexamine the state of relations between the two factions. Times have changed quite drastically since we first entered Azeroth and the addition of The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King have only made things much more complicated. The Wrath Gate cinematic gave us some glimpse of how the two factions are getting on in the continually evolving lore of Azeroth. While the recent trailer for the Secrets of Ulduar offered an even more promising glimpse at the deterioration of that tenuous peace.
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gmaxwell World of Warcraft alliance-versus-horde, thrall, wow-patch-3.1

I’ve been looking at the Noblegarden items for awhile now, since they first showed up on the PTR. For some reason, it never hit me until I saw it on live realms how cool one item in particular actually is. For five chocolates you can buy your own Noblegarden Egg, which allows you to lay a Brightly Colored Egg. Yes, that’s five eggs for one egg of your own, which is a pretty horrible exchange rate.

What’s so cool about it? They’re the exact same eggs you’ve been picking up that whole time, except that you can set them out. You can loot them right away for an added chance of whatever loot may be in them, but I’m not sure why you’d do that, except for possibly completing Dressed for the Occasion/Sunday’s Finest. What makes it better is that other people can loot them.

What makes that so great? If you can get an organized crew (and their alts) together, you can set up your own Noblegarden Hunt for your guild or your friends and family. Laying an egg has a 1 hour cooldown, so each of you will only be able to set out one egg each, but with a sizable group that might not be too terrible. A brief hunt, but you can make it exciting! Feralas, perhaps? Icecrown? The interior of a cleared Ulduar? Just take it far, far away from busy cities or hubs. You don’t want to lay an egg out in the Stormwind Trade District. Joe McMullet will loot that thing in a flash, and that’s no good.

I don’t know for sure how long the eggs stick around, but it seems a fairly long time. I managed to set one up in Darnassus and it was there for at least 45 minutes before a nude level 1 Druidess named Sxxybabby ground it to dust beneath her haphazardly-thrusting hips of feral fury. Hence my suggestion that you take your hunt away from major cities. Very far away.

I’ll be honest here, though. The one hour cooldown on these is pretty lame and sort of limits the size of what you can coordinate. I’d love for Blizzard to hotfix the eggs to have no cooldown, or a much shorter cooldown. Being able to throw our own egg hunts (in an easier way than rotating alts to get 10 eggs down) would add a lot of extra flavor this this event, rather than it just being an egg (and achievement) grind for a day then forgotten forever. Drop the cooldown, and expand upon the concept for future holidays. This could be good stuff.

Castillans World of Warcraft noblegarden-egg-hunt, sxxybabby, ulduar

Blizzard has announced the final results of the qualifier rounds on the US Arena Tournament realms, and there they are — you can see that Death Knights are probably the most dominant class in the lineup. Their teamup with a Paladin and a ranged DPS (specifically a Warlock, though there is a Hunter in there) is pretty devastating so far. Shaman have made a nice comeback as well, serving both as utility and healing on a few teams. And of course the old Arena standby of PMR finishes out the top ten.

Blizzard will invite the winners from the qualifying round into regional finals — they will invite the top eight teams, but apparently, according to a few commenters in the forum thread, both “well then” and “GET TANKED” are somehow the same players on the same accounts (but different characters, even though they’re same classes), and the same is supposedly true for The Phuox Den and Almost Eighty on Live. So we’re not sure who they’re inviting — either these two teams will get to play twice in the tournament rounds, or Blizzard will pull in some more teams to fill in the spots.

Or maybe Blizzard will have to come up with something else: we’re not entirely sure about which players are on those teams, but certainly Blizzard can check that very easily. At any rate, congrats to all of the winners so far, and we’ll keep an eye out for the next round of Arena battles.

gmaxwell World of Warcraft Arena-Tournament, top-eight, warlock

Respecs have been flying around lately like Prayer of Mending during a Sapphiron fight (healing priests, you know what I’m talking about). Several commenters have expressed annoyance at having to remember where exactly they placed those 71 points, and at having to click each of them back into place again. Heck, I would be annoyed myself, with three level 80s and various alts to manage.
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Castres World of Warcraft addons, spec, specs, talent-builds

There is some much welcomed news on the five player dungeon front tonight. Zarhym has confirmed that there will be a new five player dungeon in an upcoming patch. That dungeon, according to Zarhym, will be comparable to Magister’s Terrace.

No other information is provided on it, other than the promise for a preview when it’s ready.

Magister’s Terrace was released in Patch 2.4 and contained higher-than-normal item level equipment and weapons for players. Many people felt that Magsiter’s Terrace was also the hardest 5-man dungeon introduced into the game at the time.

While there is no indication that this dungeon will be released with patch 3.2, I don’t think it’s a wild assumption to make. Blizzard has previously indicated a future patch will also contain a new battleground.

Kocherberg World of Warcraft 5-man-instance, patch-3.2, patch-3.3, zarhym

As an unannounced change in this morning’s patch 3.1.1, Exorcism can no longer be used against players. The stated rationale for this change not being announced ahead of time was that they were “trying to get the tooltip changed at the same time to reduce confusion,” which doesn’t quite seem to hold water for me – wouldn’t it be less confusing to tell the players, and not leave them to find out for themselves the next time they tried to PvP? Anyway, that’s a relatively minor issue.

Recall that in patch 3.1, Exorcism was changed to be usable on all targets, and to automatically crit against demons and undead (before, it could only be used against demons and undead). Evidently Blizzard feels that it’s just too much burst damage for Ret pallies in PvP, especially given that it means they can start up their combos from range. Edit: Just to clarify, the functionality of Exorcism in PvE is unchanged.

Ghostcrawler also promises that they’re working on making Pally DPS “more interesting and also less bursty” instead of just using all your skills on cooldown, and that once they figure out how to do that, you’ll be able to Exorcise other players again. He gives Conflagrate, Brain Freeze, Rip, Overpower, and Arcane Blast as examples of the kind of more interesting mechanics they might be going for. He invites feedback on ways to make Pally DPS more reactive, so go make your thoughts known in the thread if you have any ideas.

Catelet World of Warcraft paladin, patches, PvP

How you uh, how you comin’ on that Argent Tournament you’re working on? Huh? Got a big, uh, big stack of Valiant’s Seals there? Gotta, gotta nice little title you’re working on there? Your big achievement you’ve been working on for one week? Huh? Gotta, gotta compelling lance?

Well, if you have been working on the Argent Tournament dailies since Tuesday’s release of patch 3.1 then you’re set to become some of the first Champions today, earning your home city’s achievement.

After you finish off the five dailies today, you’ll need to go through a couple more quests. The first is The Valiant’s Challenge, where you have to go and challenge a rider via Squire Danny. After that you’ll want to go and complete A Champion Rises to get an Argent Squire or Argent Gruntling pet (pictured above) and 10 Champion’s Seals.

Once you’re done with that, the next step is to begin the dailies, which will allow you to begin stacking up on more Champion’s Seals for things like Tabards, Pets, and Mounts. Of course the other thing you can do is repeat the The Valliant’s Charge line of dailies to earn the right to represent other factions in the Tournament.
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Castiglione World of Warcraft achievements, argent-tournament, exalted

Zarhym has reaffirmed a comment that Blizzard’s made in the past telling players they should expect season six to start as early as tomorrow, and that “this [statement] is still the plan.”

Given the lack of solid statements made by Blizzard in saying anything is or will definitively happen with the game, this is about as much confirmation as we can hope for in hearing that season six begins tomorrow.

About a month ago there was some news released about season six, in that all ratings will start at 0 and work their way up, instead of beginning at 1500.

Today’s news, combined with the fact that there will be a talent reset in a client side patch very soon, probably means there’ll be a small patch tomorrow morning. While we’re not going to wave flags and say there will be one, no one here at MMOvalue will be surprised if there is. And hopefully now, you shouldn’t be either.

Of course, stay tuned throughout the evening and tomorrow morning. We’ll bring you the latest.

gmaxwell World of Warcraft patch, wow-season-6-start-date, zarhym

The opening announcement in-game tells us that there will be maintenance tomorrow from 3:00 a.m. PDT / 6:00 a.m. EDT until 11:00 a.m. PDT / 2:00 p.m. EDT. Hopefully this downtime won’t be a repeat of the patch 3.1 downtime we saw last week where the servers were offline for most of the day and evening.

There is a lot of recent announcements about events happening in the game in the near future. There will be a talent reset accompanying a client-side patch soon, a long list of in-game fixes, and the likely start of season six.

If there is a patch tomorrow, we’ll keep you updated on the site with the latest.

Castres World of Warcraft patch-3.1, talents, wow-maintenance

The folks over at GuildOx, a guild progress and achievement ranking site, were kind enough to email us some interesting new statistics about Ulduar’s achievements. As it stands a large portion of the raids are, of course, not getting encounter specific achievements the first time they go into the zone. However there are some that are getting them nonetheless.

People may wonder if guilds are getting the achievements this quickly because Ulduar is too easy. My opinion on the matter is that Ulduar itself sans hard modes won’t be abnormally challenging, however when you put in the hard modes and various twists to the encounter in order to earn the achievements, Ulduar is going to become quite challenging.

The achievements that have made the list so far, like A Quick Shave where you have to kill Razorscale with her only flying into the air once, just requires a lot of DPS. That’s not too hard for most geared out groups to muster.

Take a look after the break for GuildOx’s list of the top five Ulduar 10 and 25 man achievements, and head over there to take a look at things overall.

Top 25-Man Achievements

Heroic: Shutout – 1.89% achievement rate
Heroic: A Quick Shave – 1.27% achievement rate
Heroic: Nerf Gravity Bombs – 0.88% achievement rate
Heroic: I choose You, Stormcaller Brundir – 0.48% achievement rate
Heroic: Nerf Engineering – 0.27% achievement rate

Top 10-Man Achievements

Shutout – 2.81% achievement rate
A Quick Shave – 1.31% achievement rate
Nerf Gravity Bombs – 0.63% achievement rate
Nerf Engineering – 0.51% achievement rate
Orbital Bombardment – 0.39% achievement rate

Catelet World of Warcraft 10-man-raiding, achievements, wow-patch-3.1

A few weeks ago, when it looked like Oufitter was dead and Blizzard’s Equipment Manager was on the way, I did a rundown of some alternatives to Outfitter. Now patch 3.1 is here, dual spec is upon us, and the situation is reversed: Outfitter is still in action, and Equipment Manager is not (yet).

As a gear switcher makes dual spec even easier, I thought it would be helpful to do a quick rundown of support for dual specs in the various gear switchers that are out there.

• Outfitter fully supports dual specs, letting you select gear sets to automatically swap into when you activate your primary or secondary talents (see screenshot).
• For ItemRack, you can set up a custom event to switch gear when you switch specs.
• ClosetGnome can do it with the SwapSpecs plugin.
• WardrobeAL doesn’t seem to have particular support for dual spec.

For users who don’t already have a favorite gear switcher, I recommend Outfitter for dual-spec purposes; it’s quite easy to use, and has dual-spec capabilities built in. Are there any other good options out there I’m missing?

Castille Uncategorized closetgnome, dual-spec, gear-manager, outfitter

You may have heard that a number of guilds have cleared Ulduar to Yogg-Saron already, which to me is perfectly fine. I like to think that a lot of good, properly-coordinated guilds will kill Yoggy this week, and the Blues agree with me. Of course, this week’s Yoggy kills were on the easiest possible difficulty, so world first or not, it doesn’t mean a whole lot in terms of fame and fortune.

This is the beauty of Ulduar — if you want prestige (and the best gear), you have to earn it by flexing your raiding muscle and beating encounters on their respective hard modes. If you don’t have the chops or the time for the highest difficulty content, then you can still beat the instance and see every encounter.

But, of course, you want those 239-level items.

So you should probably read after the jump and find out how to activate each boss’ hard mode, yeah?
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Castres World of Warcraft auriaya, hard-mode, hodir