150 – The Instance: The Emblems Of Our Affection

They’re Not Changing The Game At All
Just kidding! Blizzard has announced sweeping changes, particularly to the endgame play in World Of Warcraft this week. The Big News Of The Week, however, is an unprecedented access to difficult endgame dungeons via gear, coming in patch 3.2. There are tons of changes coming in 3.2, according to the preliminary patch notes. Here are a few that caught our attention:
 * All of the instances that are currently dropping Emblems of Heroism or Valor will drop Emblems of Conquest instead after 3.2.
 * The new dungeon, Crusaders’ Coliseum, will drop the new Emblem Of Triumph in both its’ 10 and 25 player versions.
 * Here’s the surprise: The heroic dungeon daily quest will now reward 2 Emblems of Triumph and the normal daily dungeon quest will reward 1 Emblem of Triumph.
 * The local Postal Service has grown tired of walking so far each day to collect mail and have decided to install a large number of new mailboxes to Stormwind, Undercity, Darnassus and Orgrimmar.
 * Tauren now have the option of changing skin tone by visiting the barber shop.
 * Chef’s Hat is now superior quality and allows the chef to cook faster.
 * In Alchemy, all stackable potions now stack to 20. Praise the maker!!

Don’t Forget The Midsummer Fire Festival!
Not that it will be easy to miss – the yearly two-week long event starts on Sunday, that’s June 21st, and this year it’s an expanded event with a full plate of achievements and torch-juggling fun. Or frustration, depending on your point of view.

Are We Really Going To Get To Turn Off XP?
We spotted it in the 3.2 Patch Notes for the Public Test Realms, a change coming to the game that would allow you to pay 10 gold and disable xp gains for your character in all parts of the game. It’s a sharp turn for several types of players, as Blizzard CM Nethaera pointed out in a post on the official forums yesterday.

Town Cryer
Christopher L writes: I disagree with some of the statements you made about recount in your 149th episode of The Instance podcast. The enrage timers in Ulduar are strict, and if someone isn’t doing enough damage, they’re holding the group back and no one is going to gear up if bosses can’t be downed. Recount is a tool that can be used by the raid leader to identify players that are not yet ready for tier 8 content, and need to go back to tier 7 content to further gear up.

Sam S. writes: I am a long time listener of your show. I always here all these great things that wow has to offer at end game. Whenever I play, I can never get my character to the level cap 80. I hesitantly decided to test and try a powerleveling service. Well, to say the least, i got mega boned. The service is now 2 weeks late, (which is a total time of 3 weeks that i cant play) and blizzard has temporarily banned my account for a total of 96 hours because of this powerleveling company. I am most definantly regretting this decision. I just want to play again. Please urge others that it is not worth the power leveled character.

Interviews Everywhere
Yesterday, the Blizzard Community Development team published two big interviews in a Q&A style – one with Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street on the mage class, and the other with WoW Lead Content Designer Cory Stockton, where they discussed the future of World of Warcraft Battlegrounds, including the upcoming epic siege-style Battleground, Isle of Conquest. This follows the first class Q&A with Ghostcrawler that we saw a couple of weeks ago. Of course, we’ve got links to them for you in our show notes, but the point here is that Blizzard is turning up the volume in bridging the gap between the developers and the rest of us. There are way too many points and details for us to have talked about these on the show, and we expect more of them to come along soon, so check them out!