Do you like getting sneak peeks at new weapons in Fallen Earth? We hope so, because we’ve got one for you today in the form of the Slug Thrower, a new gun coming to the game tomorrow.
No, it’s not what you think. Sadly.
However, it is replacing the previous starting weapon for new players. Before, you were given a slow-firing crossbow. Now? You get the Slug Thrower, a faster rifle-type firearm that uses the zip gun ammo, shared by pistols as well. As the type of players who enjoy getting fancy weapons early on in our character’s life, this is a change we can fully support. Now, if only they’d make a gun that actually shot gastropod molluscs.
gmaxwell MMOPRG News
It looks like we’re getting another version update to Final Fantasy XI in March. The update’s existence was broken by the official site today, promising more information when VanaFest rolls around in only five days. All we know at the moment is that it will feature expanded missions and improvements across the board, which is more or less standard fare for the game’s large updates.
Of course, that means the update certainly isn’t the big news that’s promised at the upcoming fan festival. But there’s a rumor flying around that we might want to enjoy this update a lot. Square-Enix, it’s hinted, won’t have the game slowly bleed out as Final Fantasy XIV comes into its own — they’re going to outright shut the game down. An employee posted and then retracted a statement implying that the venerable game would shut its doors to make way for Final Fantasy XIV.
Confirmed? Not by a long shot. Square has stated they’ve got more in store for the game, and more than a few players are hoping that a new expansion is the big secret to be revealed at the fan festival. Still, we’ll find out soon enough what the future holds for Final Fantasy XI… and perhaps we’d best treasure our time with it now, just in case.
Mustapha Final Fantasy XI
Lineage I players who think they’ve done everything there is to do in the game, hold that thought, because Episode U goes live tomorrow and you won’t be bored for a very long time.
The patch notes encompass a very long list of new content as well as updates to old content. There are new zones, bosses, and quests, as well as some new mini-games such as pet racing. The content isn’t limited to gameplay, however. Take a look at the new mail system, the many new furniture items, and the new alliance system as well.
The patch has been in testing, and there are still some bugs to be worked out. The patch announcement states “We are still committed to fixing more bugs, but we do not wish to delay the patch any longer,” and notes that none of the current bugs are game-breaking.
Take a look at the full patch notes here, and enjoy Episode U!
Catalans Aion
Each day WoW.com will take you through all the blue posts and other Blizzard news from around the internet. From Ghostcrawler’s latest posts to the latest news on StarCraft II and Diablo III, we’ll keep you informed.
Welcome to a new daily column at WoW.com! In this column we’ll rounding up all the blue posts and other Blizzard news and quotes from around the internet. We’ll be publishing this every night, and as long as Blizzard is posting, you’ll hear it here at the end of the day, in a nice and handy post.
While the column will be 90% WoW, 10% of it or so will also be about other Blizzard games. We realize a whole lot of you (nearly all of you?) are at least passively interested in StarCraft II and other Blizzard games, and we hope we can keep you appraised as necessary about all that news as well.
Ghostcrawler
Ghostcrawler — ImmolateThe intent of the Immolate buff was to buff Destro.
This is one of those situations where you can’t just say that Immolate is used by Demo so it buffs Demo too. It does. But it buffs Destro a lot more because Destro gets so much more benefit from Fire spells.
If you think this is not the case, please provide us some evidence using math, simulations, target dummy parses or whatever.
source
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Castille World of Warcraft
Each week WoW.com brings you a fresh look at reader submitted UIs. Have a screenshot of your UI you want to submit? Send your screenshots, along with info on what mods you’re using, to readerui@wow.com.
This week on Reader UI of the Week, I want to showcase a UI that does something that I, stylistically, don’t enjoy, but done in such a manner that makes me change my tune. Daedhir’s UI is a compact and neat interface that strives to make use of the game’s user interface art in order to give the UI a little classic with the total revamp. Suffice to say, I like it. Let’s take a look inside.
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Koeningsmark World of Warcraft
The patch 3.3.3 PTR has a bunch of cool pre-Cataclysm content added to it that was datamined by MMO-Champion. Massive spoiler alert, so don’t click on that link or follow us after the break if you want to avoid spoilers!
We covered some of the achievements and abilities being added before, but the latest update has a bunch of new information in it. Specifically, there are a whole whack of quests being added that relate to the Alliance retaking of Gnomeregan and the Horde retaking of Echo Isles! Also, both Alliance and Horde will be able to do a Twilight’s Hammer cult quest line. Click through for an exhaustive list. Also to note: they traced out where the new flight paths for these events will take you. Here’s the Alliance map, and here’s the Horde map.
It looks like the Alliance are going to get to:
Drop complex radiation detection equipment from a flying mount Learn to use Mechano-Tanks Retake the surface of Gnomeregan The Horde will get to:
Launch eavesdropping frog spies from a flying mount Enlist the help of some sort of super-tiger Retake Echo Isles I assume (and am hoping!) that this means we’ll continue to have access to the Gnomeregan instance once these quests are done.
Castillans World of Warcraft
Welcome to Lichborne, your weekly death knight discussion center. This week, your host is playing it cool in more ways than one, what with the test server shakeups to frost DPS.
Before we start into this week’s column, I do want to assure any prospective frost DPSers that I fully plan to write a frost DPS 101 guide. In fact, up until a few days ago, I had every intention of writing that as today’s column. Then I sat down at the computer on Friday, and we had a nice shiny new PTR with a whole mess of frost DPS buffs. It’s probably going to take a bit for us to sort through those buffs, see how they affect speccing and gearing, and whether or not they’ll make it live, so for now, we’re going to focus on some other topics.
This week, the subject is the loot in the final section of Icecrown Citadel, the Frostwing Halls. There’s only a few bosses here, but you’ll find some great off-spec pieces, a few best in slots items, and some interesting weapon choices. I’ll offer my usual disclaimer here and recommend that you go back and review the opening paragraphs of our Lower Spire loot guide, since it lists some basic stat rundowns and philosophies that you should keep in mind as you read these guides. You may also want to review the stat weights discussed in blood DPS 101 and unholy DPS 101 as you pick out your DPS gear from these pages.
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gmaxwell World of Warcraft
Spoilers. The word strikes fear into the hearts of many a fan, whether it involves books, television, or video games. Some people are fanatical about not learning information before it’s officially released. Others love nothing more than to run around and spoil things for the general public who would rather have the experience of being surprised.
My first real experience with spoilers was way back when I was playing a little game called Final Fantasy VII. I had played (and still own!) all of the prior Final Fantasy games, so this was something I’d been dying to play since the moment it came out. I was making pretty good progress through the first disc and working my way to the end of it when it happened. A coworker and I, who had hit it off quite well talking about video games, were discussing what we were currently playing one day in the break room. I mentioned I had finally gotten FFVII and was slowly making my way through the first disc, when he turned to me and blurted, “Man I hated the part where Aeris dies!”
He survived the subsequent pummeling.
Since then I’ve taken a far more casual approach to spoilers — yes, there are things I’d rather remain a secret, but there’s a part of me that loves learning about things ahead of time. It’s probably the same part that enjoyed trying to find where my parents hid the Christmas presents every November*. Still, I do respect people that wish to remain unspoiled, and make it a point to always post a spoiler warning on information I think people might not want to see. I do it because I remember that moment of sheer devastation when I realized the character I really liked was going to bite the dust, and nothing that I did in the game would prevent it.
With the release of the Icecrown Citadel patch, and now that 3.3.3 is on the PTR, what do you think about spoilers? Do you shy away from spoiler tags, or are you the type that gleefully ruins the surprise for other people?
*They were always in the closet in their bedroom. Mom and Dad were so predictable.
Castro World of Warcraft
So one of the new changes coming in Patch 3.3.3 is that one will be able queue up using the dungeon finder in order to fight world event bosses such as the Crown Chemical Trio or the Headless Horseman. However, the actual extent of the changes is a bit more involved, as Zarhym clarified in a recent forums post. Here’s the rundown:
First, you absolutely must use the dungeon finder to queue for the world boss. If you just go into a random dungeon or go into the dungeon directly the boss will not be there. Secondly, the boss will no longer have a chance to drop the incredibly rare vanity items such as the Big Love Rocket or the Horseman’s Reins. Instead, those will drop out of a special holiday themed loot trove that each person will receive the first time they kill the holiday boss on a given day, much in the same way one receives 2 frost emblems for the first random heroic they get. Finally, Since there’s no summoning the boss, you can’t bring in alts to get multiple summon chances, but you can re-queue to kill it as many times as you want. However, you’ll only get the extra holiday loot bag once. Note that you’ll still get the more “common” drops such as trinkets and rings and the like every single time. In the short run, this would appear to greatly lower a person’s chance at getting the rare mount, as they get exactly one shot at it per day. On the plus side, though, they will never have to roll against anyone else for it, and there’s no chance of being “cheated” out of their chance at it by someone who joins a pickup run despite having already spent their summon for the day. It could be that the loot caches will even have a higher chance to drop the rare item, though we probably won’t know for sure until we’ve had a chance to experience the full holiday and see how the loot drops go. Either way, this is a heads up: The way you hunt down holiday event bosses is going to change pretty drastically come Patch 3.3.3. Be ready.
gmaxwell World of Warcraft
Blizzard has added some major and minor improvements for the user interface in their minor content patch of 3.3.3. Some of these include the addition of a random battleground finder, a holiday boss random dungeon group, as well as others. It is still early in the patch process, so some of these things may undergo more changes as it works its way along. There are still a few rough edges on the interface for the moment.
We don’t have everything that’s been changed thus far in the gallery, but we thought we’d give you as much as we could muster on short notice. Plus, we included the new Frozen Orb vendor in the gallery for you to drool at things you can do with all of those spare orbs from your daily rampaging of Northrend instances.
Keep an eye on WoW.com for more updates on what patch 3.3.3 is bringing to you.
gmaxwell World of Warcraft
The Lunar Festival runs this year from Sunday, Feburary 14th at 9:00 am server time through Sunday, March 7th at 9:00 am server time. That’s right, folks; you’ve got three weeks to get everything done. The basics of the holiday involve talking to a number of Elders to honor them, receiving Coins of Ancestry in return, and then using the Coins to purchase fun holiday items. The To Honor One’s Elders meta-achievement is also a requirement for What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been. In general, this is not a difficult holiday, but it is time-consuming; you’ll need to hunt down a lot of NPCs. Because of the mileage you’ll rack up doing this, it’d be a good time to do World Explorer if you haven’t already done that, or pick up flight paths that a character doesn’t yet have.
We’ve updated and expanded our 2010 guide to include exact coordinates for every Elder in the game, and I’ve also arranged them in what I hope to be the most straightforward way to reach them all. Let’s get started.
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MMOvalue World of Warcraft
Frozen Orbs have been sort of a weird little problem since Patch 3.3 came out. Since they automatically drop off every heroic end boss, the dungeon finder has pretty much guaranteed that there’s thousands of them created every single day. However, the Emblems of Triumph that come out of those same dungeons pretty much make most of the profession gear made with Frozen Orbs obsolete.
As a result, many of us have at least a couple stacks rotting in our banks or backpacks, and I know I personally have started outright passing on them, having nothing better to do with them. Now I sort of wish I hadn’t, if only because they’re finally useful as currency in Patch 3.3.3.
On the PTR, a gnome called Frozo the Renowned will trade other tradeskill items to you in exchange for the orb. The list of his wares is as follows:
Various Eternals will cost you 1 Frozen Orb each. Runed Orbs cost 4 Frozen Orbs each. Crusader Orbs cost 6 Frozen Orbs each. Frozo is also currently selling Frost Lotus for 3 gold 20 silver apiece, although I’d wager that’s a bug that will be fixed soon to show a Frozen Orb cost of some sort. In short, the next time you’re heroic dungeon running, you might actually want to look forward to that Frozen Orb drop again. It may just be useful come patch time.
Kiuperli World of Warcraft
While we haven’t heard much new Cataclysm news lately, the Patch 3.3.3 PTR files have provided some pretty tantalizing hints as to what may be to come, including some new models associated with the Twilight’s Hammer cult.
First off, we have a series of portals. These portals are topped by a crystal that looks very similar to the wind stones of Silithus, and in fact, each portal and crystal seems specifically marked to summon a specific element. There’s also a bloodstained sacrificial altar and a couple of banners, all of these have a very specific dragon-like motif.
The Twilight’s Hammer has already been confirmed to be working with Deathwing in Cataclysm, and since they’re an elemental doomsday cult dedicated to bringing about the return of the Old Gods, busting Deathwing out of prison is right up their alley. We should probably expect to see these models in game relatively soon, and probably as part of a plot by the Twilight’s Hammer to summon Deathwing back into the world — a plot which will, of course, eventually succeed.
Stayed tuned for more coverage of Patch 3.3.3 and the Cataclysm opening event as it develops!
Castille World of Warcraft
One of the most frequent questions I’m asked as someone that’s entirely too interested in Warcraft story and lore, is where to go to get story information. How, exactly, do you find all of these story elements when they are literally scattered across several different games, comics, manga and novels? How do you know what should be taken as official lore, and what to throw away as mere speculation? Where, exactly, does someone just starting out with World of Warcraft find story information when they’ve got no idea where that story actually starts?
It’s a difficult question to answer, and you’ll see why later in the article. The Warcraft storyline is made up of several different parts, spanning several different games, and the time line is continually changing and developing as these games are released. Here’s a brief list of places you can go to get started:
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gmaxwell World of Warcraft
Want to get Gold Capped? This column will show you how, and is written by Basil “Euripides” Berntsen, also of outdps.com, the hunting party podcast, and the call to auction podcast.
Blacksmithing is a crafting profession that has made me a lot of money. Today, we’ll talk about how you can use blacksmithing as something more than a couple of extra gem slots for your main, and actually make gold! Many people with crafting skills invariably have tried linking their profession in trade and saying “tips appreciated.” Has that worked for you? Me either. If you want to make money with any crafting skill, the true profits are from acquiring the mats yourself, crafting, and selling your wares over the long term. As I mentioned in my previous post, the default UI won’t cut it for our purposes, so let’s get cracking and set you up with a proper crafting UI.
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gmaxwell World of Warcraft