Super Freak

This video is probably fake. The reaction captured on it, however, most likely exists in many of the mouth-breathers that make up the WoW Player Base.

Patch 3.2 PTR

The latest PTR changes for Death Knights. Huzzah!

* Due to significant talent changes, all death knight talents will be reset for players.
* Blood Strike: The bonus damage this ability receives from diseases on the target has been increased to 50% per disease.
* Chains of Ice: Now reduces movement by 95% instead of 100%. The main effect of this change will be that targets of Chains of Ice will not have to re-issue a movement command to continue moving.
* Frost Presence: 10% bonus health reduced to 6% bonus stamina.
* Frost Strike: This ability can now be dodged, parried, or blocked. Weapon damage bonus reduced to 55%, down from 60%.
* Icebound Fortitude: Cooldown increased to 2 minutes.


Talents:

• Blood

+ Dancing Rune Weapon: This ability now has a fixed duration of 12 seconds (which can still be modified by its glyph) and a fixed cost of 60 runic power.
+ Veteran of the Third War: Stamina bonus reduced to 1/2/3%.

• Frost

+ Blood of the North: Reduced to a 3-point talent. Increases Blood Strike and Frost Strike damage by 5/10/15%. There is now a 33/66/100% chance whenever you hit with Blood Strike or Pestilence that the Blood Rune will become a Death Rune when it activates.
+ Lichborne: Duration reduced to 10 seconds, and cooldown reduced to 2 minutes.
+ Threat of Thassarian: New 3-point talent. When dual-wielding, your Death Strikes, Obliterates, Plague Strikes, Blood Strikes and Frost Strikes have a 30/60/100% chance to also deal damage with your off-hand weapon. Off-hand strikes are roughly one half the effect of the original strike.
+ Toughness: This talent now grants 2/4/6/8/10% armor instead of 3/6/9/12/15%, placing it in line with similar abilities of other classes.

• Unholy

+ Desecration: This talent has been reduced to 2 points for 25/50% snare and no longer increases damage done by the death knight. It has also been moved one tier earlier in the tree and its spell effect has been made more transparent.
+ Desolation: New talent. This talent is in the position formerly occupied by Desecration. It causes Blood Strikes to increase all damage the death knight deals by 1/2/3/4/5% for 12 seconds.
+ Scourge Strike: Weapon damage bonus reduced to 40%, down from 45%. Damage increased by 10% per disease on the target, down from 11%.
+ Summon Gargoyle: The gargoyle now flies lower to the ground, making it susceptible to melee attacks. This ability now has a fixed duration of 30 seconds and a fixed cost of 60 runic power.
+ Unholy Blight: This talent has been redesigned. It no longer deals damage to nearby targets. Instead, when you deal damage with Death Coil, the target will take periodic damage for 10 seconds equal to 30% of the damage done by Death Coil. This damage accumulates in the same way as Ignite and Deep Wounds.

If it wasn't almost 3am, I'd probably have more to comment on this. But really, at this point is it any kind of big deal? It isn't live yet, so nothing is gospel.

Star Wars is Looking Good

E3 had some info on the potential WoW-Banger. This guy had some more.



Seriously, WoW will be fine. But this might be something to look at, assuming it isn't all flash and no meat. But I suspect that just might be the case.

Instances Are Fun

A growing number of players are complaining (I'll pause for a moment so you can get over the shock of that statement) that they can't get an Instance started up. Since most of these people are 80 and working through Heroics, I don't feel sorry for them. I'm an elitist that way.

Anyhow, Blue Poster Vaneras posted this over on the EU forums -

We are aware of your feedback concerning the limit on the number of instances. This limit was set up some time ago in order to preserve the gameplay experience of players who are already inside instances. Allowing too many instances to be opened at once would eventually have a negative impact on performance, which was definitely noticed and reported right here in the EU forums. This limit is still in place today for the same reasons. However, we are working on a more permanent solution for instance performance. This can take a lot of time to plan, implement and test -- so it is not something we can resolve quickly, other than using the limit currently in place. But we do wish to assure you that we are very much aware of your feedback and we continue to monitor the situation. We will inform you about the longer term solution as soon as we have more details to share.

I've never understood Blizzard's approach to situations like this. They touted Wintergrasp as the "Ultimate Epic PVP Experience", allowing for huge armies to battle each other. They then take steps to nerf the piss out of it because too many people were using it, thereby bogging down the servers. Now too many people are starting instances, bogging down the servers. Did someone not stop to do the math? Or were they too busy rolling around in their giant mountains of subscription money to realise that they might have to slap some more system tech onto their network to handle the growing load on it?

All I'm saying is that if Blizzard doesn't poke someone down their corporate food chain with a sharp stick to get them to pay attention, the only load they'll have left is the one growing in the player base's collective pants as they cancel subscriptions in pouting protest.

The Rokk - MIA?

In case anyone's been curious (or looking at the page for that matter), I have been off getting myself married & honeymooned. A few days in Las Vegas with Mrs Rokk, a few more enjoying the beach in California, and a final day back in Vegas before heading home. I didn't even take my authenticator with me. Probably a good idea to avoid playing video games on the honeymoon when only one of the two people play at all.

Blizzard? Meet Your Competition.

Every time a new MMO with any kind of name value comes down the tubes, people predict it will be the big WoW Killer (Warhammer I'm looking at you here) . Generally I don't even look at these other games, because I just don't care. Fluff and such won't draw me to a game. If it was all about the fluff, I probably wouldn't be playing World of Warcraft.

There's a new game on the horizon - Star Wars, the Old Republic. I'm not saying it's a WoW Killer, but if they put as much effort into the game as they do their trailer, it could very well be a WoW... uh... Injurer.

The Crab Has Spoken

Ghostcrawler had this to say in regards to DK armor nerfage -

As I explained, we compared DK armor, health and avoidance to other tanks, and found that the DKs ended up in better shape than other tanks even if you totally ignored cooldowns. When you consider cooldowns, things are even more skewed.

I just didn't want potentially disgruntled players to perpetuate a myth that DK armor got nerfed because their cooldowns were too good. DK armor got nerfed because their armor was too good. Many players (some DKs even) argue that the cooldowns are still too good.

The short version of how we got there was that some glyphs and set bonuses ended up being better or worse than we imagined, block ended up mitigating a lot less damage than we envisioned (before the Ulduar bosses actually existed), and because effective health ended up being way more important to progression than any other aspect of tanking.

I'm sure there's a metric ton of DK's out there who are outright pissed at this. To them I say, suck it up Princess. Mind you, Rokk is wearing the Hell out of quest greens and those aren't getting him killed yet. He might get the stink-eye from the androgynous Blood Elves, but that's like having Richard Simmons and his legwarmers get all up in your grill about the shirt you're wearing. That's when you take your Volkswagon-sized Mace and pound his head into some location south of his belt line.

Consequently, Ghostcrawler did have a thing or two to say about Paladin gear -

---

Q u o t e:
I feel that this crusade against Paladin Healers is unjust and if you could take another step back, take your dev team, and run Ulduar on some premades (given everyone knows how to play correctly, but honestly I sometimes wonder with some of the patches you guys roll out) then you will see that each class has a specific role. While not all roles are quite as pigeon-holed as a Holy Paladin, I do believe that this is as about even as you will let us become.

---

Oh, come on. All of these "If you'd just play my class, you'd understand" comments are a bit silly. We designed your class. We know how it works.

The issue that started all this was paladins saying "We don't want MP5 on our gear." The designers designed you assuming you'd have MP5 on your gear -- I know; I was there. If you are effective without having MP5 then it probably means you are going to be too powerful at some point because you are able to replace a less-powerful stat with a more powerful one without missing the loss of the less-powerful one.

Imagine you could prune every less-useful stat off your gear. Imagine you could trade in armor, Stamina and everything else for just spell power and crit. Do you think you'd blow away the other healers? I do. That's more extreme than giving up MP5 for more crit, but carries similar risks from a game-balance perspective.

Healers should care about Spirit (druids and priests) and MP5 (paladins and shamans). It's fine to care about Int and crit too, but if you're ignoring Spirit and MP5 and aren't missing them, then something isn't working right.

Sometimes this guy knows a thing or two about a thing or two.

Patch News

Since I've been quite an ass lately, I think I might as well toss a couple into the post. Get it?

Patch 3.1.3 drops today. Highlights for those DK's who are not 80 and raiding? Brace yourselves!

Death Knights

• Frost Presence: Armor bonus is now 60% down from 80%.

Items

• Death Knight PvP Gauntlets: The chance to refresh a Frost Rune when casting Chains of Ice has been removed. When equipped, these gloves now generate 5 additional runic power whenever Chains of Ice is used.

I felt the Earth move there.

Who Cares?

Over the weekend, there was a "big deal" being made about some paladin blogger who was not who she said she was. Ferarro was discovered not to be the girl she claimed to be, but a blogging identity who had been shared by several people over the course of the past few years. This, of course, was an atrocity. The person lied about who she was, and over the course of a few days some story came about which outlined the possible reasons for the deception.

What I don't get is: Why is this a big deal?

I don't play a paladin. Maybe they're made of softer, fluffier stuff. I have no idea. What I do know is that Ferarro's site gave (from what I could see) a wealth of information to paladins. Does the fact that the person posting that information is not the same one in the profile pic make that information invalid?

"OMG she's not the chick in the pic? You mean the the person I rubbed one out on... is a LIE? Does that mean Prot Pallies are the suck too? My World has been turned upside down!"

If that is you, may you pull the lever to the Ejection Seat while flying a helicopter. Seriously. The gene pool does not need this kind of contaminant.

WoW.com had just done an interview with Ferarro, and from that this whole thing came to light. I can see them making a bit of a stink about it, for no other reason than to clean the egg from their face. But for the rest of the "Blogging Community" to get into some kind of uproar is Just Plain Dumb, as the kids say.

At the end of the day, I don't think this is about lying and trust. I think people just don't like to have their illusions called out. For the Hunter community, BigRedKitty was a cult icon. But once his new blog came out, and people came to realise that he wasn't really a dwarf, well the illusion faded. As entertaining as his new site is, I doubt it gets the hits the BRK site did.

Well, that and it isn't a World of Warcraft site.

People should just enjoy the fact that someone, regardless of who they really are, is collecting information that will make the play experience a little better for the player base in general. More important than that, is the player base doesn't have to do the legwork.

It's cause they're lazy, y'know.