147 – The Instance: Death To The Iron Council

Look At That, Look At That!
Our long national nightmare is over – Blizzard has announced… and demonstrated… all sorts of improvements coming to World Of Warcraft, including new looks for characters coming to the game.

-Did we mention the new looks for characters? Blizzard announced this week that they aren’t just adding new playable content, but they’re in development on changes to the look of the existing game. To illustrate this, we now have six new projected looks for night elf druids and six new looks for tauren druids, when they take bear form. In his post on the official forums, Zarhym also indicated that there will be new skins for druids in cat form, but there is no official word on how many options cat droods will get.

-One final note: The next patch we’re aware of for World of Warcraft is a small interim patch numbered 3.1.3. According to Blizzard, that patch does not have any new major content, and is entirely class changes, profession changes, bug fixes, encounter tweaks and so forth. They aren’t even going to put 3.1.3 on the public test realms. At least, that’s what they’ve said so far.

A Better Pet May Be Coming
Last night, in a particularly late post on the official forums, Ghostcrawler – also known as World Of Warcraft lead systems designer Greg Street – said that he agrees with the call for improvements to combat pets in PvP. Here’s the entire quote: “We think it’s probably time to let pets scale, to some extent, with resilience and spell penetration. The way pets scale from the master’s stats was implemented (on our side) in a slightly clunky way which made it difficult to add additional stats. In BC, it took some effort to kill a pet so it wasn’t a burning problem for us. In LK, we have bumped up pet health a few times, but we are thinking now that the balance will never work right without some crit mitigation. Pets will never scale right with gear as long as the master improves in ways that don’t benefit the pet. We have a new way to let pets scale, and assuming it works, we should be able to give the pets scale with all relevant stats from the master, from hit to haste to crit. Some things will need to scale at 100%, since it’s silly to have your pet inherit part of your +hit. No promises until you actually see it live, but that’s what we are thinking at the moment.” Ghostcrawler clarified one point in all of this in a follow-up message in that thread. When asked whether or not that improving pets’ survivability would require hunters and warlocks stacking stats that they don’t personally use, such as expertise, he replied, “We don’t want you to have to stack stats on your character just to benefit your pet. For example, we currently let warlock demons earn melee hit based on the caster’s spell hit.”

While We’re Pointing You At The Official Forums
We may as well point out a thread that caught our eyes this week, on a subject we don’t get to explore enough on The Instance: Rogues. The thread is entitled Newbie Rogue Pointers, it’s in the European forums, and it’s pretty good. It covers everything – Leveling Builds and Gear, Stats (including, importantly, a full explanation of Hit Rating), Instances & Early Raiding, has an early level 80 Gear guide, and tons of frequently asked questions.

Town Crier
Tom writes: Hi, i just started playing WoW again after a year and i hate how leveling takes so long, so im wondering do you know of any good power leveling services or should i just steer clear of them all together? I know people are using the recruit a friend and are paying for another account to level faster but id rather not give blizzard more money than i already do. Any help would be great and i love the podcast. Oh and while on the subject what are your opinions on power leveling, gear and gold buying services. And do you think its right for blizzard to basiclay say you can level faster by giving us more money?

Failoc-alypse
If you tried to buy Blizzcon tickets for the last couple of Blizzcons, you probably know the Fail-loc. He’s a murloc that lets you know you didn’t get tickets. It’s depressing, but to cheer you up, yesterday Blizzard released a new almost-side scrolling, pseudo-shooter game called Failoc-alypse.