grath

 

Cranberry

Lore-wise this makes no sense, Arthas has no interest in Shattrath.

 

Ketari

That might well be what Blizzard intend...

 

• Falk

Hahaha, on PTR, those ghouls would NEVER deaggro. This means you could kite a bunch of ~30 of them all the way to the Shattered Sun camp, and anyone who so much as buffed/healed you or touched any one of the ghouls by mistake would get 'infected' and stuck in combat till every single one of those suckers died (i.e. forever). Good times.

I'd have thought Blizzard would have gone by a percentage increase in power level between tiers (say, 10%) rather than arbitrarily assigning X iLvl difference each expansion. That'd make more sense, anyway.

Considering Sunwell epics go into 160's already, I'd say it's safe to assume a jump of at least 20 iLvl between T7-T9 each.

Edit: T1-T3 was 66 / 76 / 86-92, though the power level differences were much bigger than suggested by the iLvl's due to itemization. That'd be close to a 20% power increase per tier from T1-T3. Hmm.

 

Starfire

Don't forget that T1 and T2 also had various resistances consuming itemisation points on them. So the jump to T3 was a bit "larger". (And this also made D2 look really appealing).

Anyone know how bonuses work in regards to itemisation points?

 

Tanoh

We also have to remember the way itemisation works. The higher the X is for all stats, the more expensive X+1 will be.

Adding another point of a any stat from 5 to 6 is a lot cheaper than going from 55 to 56.

Which will in effect make the ilevels less and less relatively powerful, as you get slightly less increase of stats the higher you go. However this can, and probably will, be totally undone by proper or changes to the itemisation. Like for example, giving melee classes strength and AP as different stats is a very big difference than having it all in AP. Assuming all that uses it gets 2 AP per strength, then the split way is vastly prefered. The difference is going to be more and more apparent the higher you go, which is one of the reasons why classes that rely mainly on one stat, for example affliction warlocks and shadow priests, scales so porly compared to classes that use several stats.

 

Shuror

The difference is quite insignificant, in fact. It only matters if an item has both AP and Strength, and there are very few such items. Items - World of Warcraft

No TBC items, except one single green, have such an itemization. I doubt Blizzard will ever make any more such items, as it is exploiting the item budget, and they seem to have realized that.

Similarly, I don't think there will be an item with +weapon damage and passive attack power/strength, as they also have almost the same effect, albeit +weapon damage depends on weapon speed.

+Weapon damage is a novelty effect which could be abolished with nobody missing it, though it hardly causes a lot of problems in loot distribution, with the extreme rarity of items with that effect.

 

Len

Now, as for AP and Str that's true. But if you look for AP/CritR/Agi -items, you can paint a totally different picture: Items - World of Warcraft.

I consider this mostly as a deliberate try to get around the limits imposed by old itemization (ilvl) rules.

(Of course, you might consider Dodge-component of Agi, which becomes more important in PVP, and BoK, which scales Str/Agi but not AP/ratings, but I'm thinking with PVE-mindset now, where damage output trumps all and BoK is standard)

 

bv728

Consider also the standard introduction of Haste and Armour Pen; those add an additional stat to spread yourself out on, resulting in itemization gains.

 

Addled

ArP is only available for melee specs, and haste varies in effectiveness between classes and even between individual specs of individual classes. It keeps on perpetuating the different scaling of specs syndrome.

 

Cube

The fact that T1's and, to a lesser extent, T2's overall itemization appeared to have been decided by the Blizzard designers throwing darts at a rotating board didn't help either. T3 was the first set that Blizzard itemized for "pure" spec use, rather than the semi-hybrid healing gear for hybrids with T1 and T2.

Bonuses consume some part of the itemization budget, but I'm not sure how much. It's probably the reason that the tier gear is about 5 iLvl's higher than the rest of the gear available in the same tier instance-even if some of the non-set pieces have better overall stats.

 

Karoo

I think it had more to do with the fact that t2.5 was the first token system so they just tried to please all possible specs of certain classes with that one set of gear in t1 and t2.

I also attribute the itemization of EQ to their early itemization decisions. Anyone who played EQ remembers that for the longest time almost every item in that game, including raid drops, were itemized with trash stats on purpose (Lots of resists and + stats to every stat, including charisma which was largely useless for anyone but enchanters). EQ was the game that every serious vanilla WoW raider and some of their designers played before WoW was released.

I still believe that is why T1 had random resists and all the early dungeon gear was basically just glorified "of the eagle" for casters or whatever variant thereof for melee.

 

rhea

I think blizzard's original idea was to increase resists with character/gear progress. It didn't work out really because of PVP and the minimal amounts they could fit in a piece of gear. Now it's just character level versus enemy level which dictates your resists (talking about resists as a progressive stat on your character).

I also don't see a reason to talk about ilevels because assuming WOTLK will have 200ish items is nonsense because they could change any other factors which would give us lower or way higher ilevels because it's the way we count it, not the way Blizzard does it. Useless posts, hi.

They should do something about resists thought, low amounts are very inconvenient and requiring high amounts just makes it "this or that", nothing between.

 

Switchblade

I would just like to add this idea about Vashj, Illidan gave her and Kael remnants of the vials of eternity. She could have been collecting all that water to make another well.

http://ctprofiles.net/1031812

 

Emeraude

I don't even know where this rumor originated from, there's is absolutely no evidence of this whatsoever. She was taking the water because she ruled over the section of outland that all the water came from to weaken their enemies. That's all there was to it.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=CX81UJZ8
For the lurking Phoenix Wright faithful.
What is the most important thing to you? Won't you grant me the pleasure of taking it away.

 

• Falk

I think you're misunderstanding the diminishing return formulae on item budget. It's completely seperate from how much item budget is available to an item of a given iLvl.

What you're thinking of (Stat costs calculated to the power of 1.7095) depicts how pumping a single stat onto an item of a given ilvl is not as good as distributing that budget across multiple stats.

Compare:
[Dervish Tunic] - iLvl30 (11 agi)
[Wanderer's Armor] - iLvl60 (26 agi)
[Dreghood Chestpiece] - iLvl90 (41 agi)
[Umbrafen Tunic] - iLvl105 (49 agi)
[Dragonhawk Tunic] - iLvl120 (56 agi)

The total stat points on a given item is linear vs its ilvl, although it doesn't intersect at 0 for theoretical iLvl 0.

Basically, an item 10% higher in iLvl is going to be ~10% more powerful with the same itemization, regardless if we're talking about 2-digit or 5-digit iLvls. Period.

 

Liebestod

Supposedly there's an official source - the RPG or something - that says that Vashj was trying to create a new Well of Eternity in Outland. Which would make sense, but one would have to wonder why this was never mentioned.

In any case, I concur that Azshara using some Vials of Eternity from Illidan to create a new Well would be a great way to set up the plot for a Maelstrom expansion, but Blizzard is quite difficult to predict in this regard..

 

Copernicus

The alpha for WotLK is officially over. Characters on the alpha will be locked at the start of the beta, but will transfer over.

Alpha Over, Beta [Soon]

 

Pyros

Had expected alpha to end as they patched 2.4.3 live, especially since they removed alpha downloads like last week. Hopefully beta starts soon, eager to see hunter/pally changes, and new DK since it'll probably be reworked quite a lot. Considering it seems they've been working on setting up beta for some time(no alpha patch in like almost 2months), there's hope for the end of the week, or next week during daily maintenance.

Guess I can start praying for a beta key.

 

• Argium

As was leaked earlier, ACHIEVMENTS have been officially unveilved.

 

Copernicus

Nice, they sneaked in the barbershop - http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/wrath...ievements2.jpg

 

Sinndir

Achievements will be such a good way for those who really want to spend a lot of time on a single character.

I personally cannot play alts, I just get bored. The achievement system is something I am very much looking forward too. Not to mention titles could possibly be one of the best parts of the system, "Grand Explorer", "Pioneer", "Slayer"... so many good things can come from this.

Got a laugh out of this at work.

 

flyingtoastr

Something I found quite interesting:

Finally getting some recognition for old school achievements other than RP walking in Ironforge in my Judgement.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

PSGarak

I'm curious just how far they can go with retroactive titles. Ones they can obviously do are old-school PvP ranks, and raid-boss quests like Ony and Nef's heads, c'thun's thingy, the phylactery, Ossirian, the T5 and T6 attunement quests, Kael's orb, and so forth. I wonder if they could do retroactive achievements just for normal kills. I assume they could have kept the combat logs and could parse them over if they really wanted to, and have those achievements ready to be loaded on exp-day, but I don't know if they'd think it's worth the effort.

Also, exalted with all reputations begs the question of what they mean by "all." Specifically, I'm thinking of Centaur clans and pirate hats.

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Garak.png

 

Mikari

Some interesting info from Alpha.