206 – The Instance: Shadow Word: Deathspam Is A Cooked Food

Big News of the Week
With all the finesse of a bull in a china shop, version 4.0.1 of World Of Warcraft crept into live use yesterday, bringing about changes to many of the underlying systems of the game, weighing in at more than 20 gigabytes, and giving us the beginning of the end of the World!… of Warcraft. Or at least, the beginning of a new beginning.

December 7th! It’s official!
Blizzard announced last week that the the expansion will be yours to purchase on the first Tuesday of December, ending speculation. At least, ending that sort of speculation.

You’re A PVP God!
Right out of the gate last night, players were stunned to find how different some specs seemed to be. Today, none other than Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street posted a message entitled “Class Balance As Of Oct. 13th, 2010”, in which he stated the following: “Please excuse the brevity. 1) We think Fury, Arms, Feral cat and Retribution dps is too low and we will be buffing them.

2) We think mage dps is too high, especially Fire, and will be nerfing it.

3) We think Shadow priest dps is too high, but that’s largely a result of Shadow Word: Death spam, which is tough on healers. We’ll be fixing that.

4) We think Destro warlock dps is too high, but that’s largely a result of Searing Pain spam, which is tough on tanks. We’ll be fixing that.

5) As we suspected, PvP dps is just too high given that the health pools of Cataclysm haven’t kicked in yet. While competitive PvP is over for the moment, we still want the environment to feel better so we will be buffing resilience. This change might be reverted at level 85.

There will probably be more changes after another night of raiding and BGs. Many of the bug fixes we have made today will affect dps as well. Stay tuned. “

We Broke World Of Warcraft. Sorry About That.
A week ago today, Blizzard dropped a dirty bomb on WoW communities like ours with the announcement that in Cataclysm, the game just couldn’t handle very large guilds, and installing a 600-guild-member cap on guilds.

Town Cryer
Allz callz.

You Have Alts, We Have Answers
With version 4.0.1 of WoW upon us, many players are experiencing something they’ve not dealt with in a long time. Perhaps since they loaded Wrath Of The Lich King. How to assign talent points to your spec. Or specs. For those players with a half-dozen alts, it’s daunting, to say the least.