174 – The Instance: It's A Mod Mod Mod Mod World

Big News Of The Week
Class Balance Concerns Are Back With A Vengence

Remember those heady days of controversy in WoW, way back in 2005 when warlocks could single-handedly take out entire parties of other players in PvP, and feral druids and paladins were laughed out of town? Well, a sense of nostalgia for class imbalance controversy has overtaken the entire World of Warcraft recently, and this last week saw an eruption in unusually high volume to the shouting. What’s all the shouting about?

Here’s the pre-nerf/buff chart of DPS ranges we discussed in this segment:

Blizzard Returns With Dev Twitter Chat Part 2: The Reckoning
J. Allen Brack and Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street face the World of Warcraft again this evening on Twitter. Since we’re recording a few hours before their public chat – it’s happening today, Friday, January 15, at 5:00 p.m. PST – we could only speculate. Here is a link to the archived chat.

Mandatory Authentication Feels Kinda Funny
Nick Kolan over at IGN ran an article last week that began with this quote: Rumors spread on Friday of Blizzard Entertainment’s plans to make their authenticators mandatory, in an apparent attempt to stem the plague of compromised accounts that have Blizzard’s customer service backlogged for days. As of yet there has been no confirmation of the legitimacy of these rumors, but if true, it may prove to be a larger hurdle than most people think.” The rumor was indeed widespread, and talk of mandatory multi-factor security for WoW was all the rage over this past weekend.

Town Cryer
Lau D. writes: Just wondering your take on this. I am in a great guild and I love it. I do not use add-ons because I don’t want to deal with the risk of using them or the unpleasantness that can result from trying to get an issue resolved with the game because an Add on messed something up. I don’t think there is anything wrong with playing the game as it was made, but it has come up in my guild that some members feel that certain mods and ventrillo should be a requirement for raiding. While I love vent and I understand why people would want mods, I don’t feel this should be the case. It seems wrong to me to require ppl to use add ons. It should be a personal choice, they are suppliments to the game, not part of it. How do you guys feel about this? I know you use a ton so I thought it would be interesting to know.

Poseurs In The Armory!
Blizzard updated the WoW Armory this week with some features that you may want to look into. Specifically, there is now an interactive 3D model viewer built into the WoW Armory. You can see any character in the gear he or she was wearing at logout, complete with correct face, hairstyle and colorings, and get this – you can pose your own character however you like for others to see. The new features include the ability to cycle through animations for your character and see her doing what she does in game, and thoughtfully includes embed code so you can take your character elsewhere on the web!