188 – The Instance: Betty White Was A Horrible Arena Teammate

That’s Right: It Could Kill Everything
This week, Blizzard unveiled the latest in their in-depth examination of content forthcoming in Cataclysm: The Halls of Origination. It is a level-85 five-player dungeon in Uldum, featuring an unparalleled journey through the timeless titan construction and seven unique boss fights. Hidden deep within its halls lies an ancient treasure that, if placed in the wrong hands, could endanger all life on Azeroth!

Finding Out Who Your Real Friends Are
Blizzard officially announced their long-planned Battle.net Real ID system this week, raising many more questions than were answered on their new service website. As previously stated, the new chat system will allow for cross-game chat in Blizzard games on Battle.net, the ability to see your friends on any character that they’ve created, broadcast announcements, and better see what your friends are doing in-game.

Mandatory Glyphs And Talents Are A Drag
Our good friend the Blizzard Lead Developer Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street invaded a thread in the forums on talent frustrations with a quote that buttoned up a really long jacket. Ghostcrawler said: “We’re stuck in this trap sometimes where players want glyphs and talents to be meaningful but optional. That’s a pretty narrow design space. If we make a talent that affects Shield Wall, then it feels mandatory. If we make no talent that affects Shield Wall, then it feels like the talents aren’t affecting things you actually care about and can become this potentially marginalized aspect of the game. The argument seems to be that if you didn’t have to get Improved Disciplines, that you could get some other potentially juicy talent. True. The same would be true if you didn’t have to get Shockwave or if paladins didn’t have to get Ardent Defender. You need Improved Disciplines, but they need Vindication.

My point is that classes are balanced as part of their entire package. You aren’t balanced at the core level with talents and glyphs thrown on as gravy on top of that. Now we are making an attempt with Cataclysm to give players more options in how they talent. But still if you imagine a talent tree in which every single talent is optional, it’s also hard to imagine how every single talent is interesting or powerful enough.”

Town Cryer
Garrond writes: I’ve been given an invite to the Cataclysm alpha by someone I know who works at Blizzard. You might think this is great for any wow fan, but normally I’m the kind of person who stears well clear of spoilers for any game that I think I’ll play. I try and avoid any intimate details of new content – things like screenshots/videos or leaks about lore. Should I let my normal reluctance to ‘spoil’ new content stop me from jumping in the alpha? Or do you think that as I’ll actually be playing the game, rather than seeing videos or hearing about it, I wont actually be spoiling anything – i’ll be experienceing it first hand months before anyone else?

Joshua H. writes: I haven’t played WoW for a good six months so far, and I know that I’m missing it. But I’m no good at the level 80 content and find myself with nothing to do when I have gone back for a week or so at a time. So my question to you is this: do I go back to WoW before Cataclysm, or after? Is there content that will keep my leveling enjoying self happy, or should I just wait until I can start new characters in a new world?

We’re Running Out Of Time
This week on The Instance, we’re taking Drop Of The Week in a unique direction for a while – The Cataclysmic drop for the next few episodes is going to answer the question that we’ve gotten the most for the last few months – “what do I do before the Cataclysm?” Specifically, we’re going to use this series of segments to highlight something that you could do that you may never get to do again. And we’re kicking it off this week with some dungeons.