RootBreaker

Maybe I'm being crazy here, but isn't the ring unnecessary? Each set gives 86+86+115 frost resist which gets you to 287. A frost resist totem or aura bumps you up another 130 to 417, which is 2 points over the level 80 cap.

 

Douglas

I do not. I think that there is a deliberate attempt to make gearing up (most) tanks considerably easier than gearing up (many) non-tanks.

But it is worth contacting Blizzard about it in any event. I'll use the in-game feedback mechanism to do so later today, after sending my smith and tailors to their respective trainers to confirm that this disparity is indeed active on beta at the moment.

 

Rasputin

This seems odd in the face of the fact that the only real frost resist fight(Sapphiron) requires raid-wide frost resist. Unless KT-25 has a far more stringent FrR requirement than I thought? Even if so, you have to get past Sapph to get to him, meaning everyone would have FrR already.

 

Jebraltar

KT-10 does not require frost resist at all - it could be useful on a tank, but the meaningful damage there is on the Guardians of Icecrown tank, not the KT tank himself. Sapphiron does not require it, although it is useful for everyone there. Lowered mats cost for plate Frost Resist gear is probably a mistake - a tank wouldn't want to wear it, because Sapphiron hits really hard and getting uncrittable is not easy for non-Druids, and there's no particular reason to make frost resist easier for non-tanking Warriors/Paladins/Death Knights.

That said, I'm hoping that the mistake is that the other sets currently require Frozen Orbs - there's a lot of good badge loot, and spending badges just so that we can get Sapphiron kills with two healers in the first few weeks before people have enough Naxx gear for the frost resistance to be completely useless would be irritating. (I'm assuming that even with heroic farming, nobody's going to win four Frozen Orbs from last bosses, so purchased orbs would be necessary for full sets on everyone.)

 

thorpac

If you're that hard up for the orbs, and if the orbs aren't BoP, just take an alt through for badges and buy the orbs that way. I'm sure I'm not the only one with my own personal army of 70s ready to go.

Not everything i say is stupid.

 

footloop

That doesn't make any sense though. If you've got progression bosses to go kill, then do them instead and you'll get HoD from their trash anyways. If you're talking about not being able to put in attempts on the resist boss themselves, then yeah you're gonna have to take the night to farm unless you feel like waiting a couple weeks until you get the mats you need normally. Alternatively you could buy some of them off of the AH.

If you think that the rate at which you get the resist mats is slow to the point that you'll be stuck staring at that boss for longer than you would at another progression boss, then either the bosses before it are undertuned or the mats need a slightly higher drop rate.

I really like the model of having resist mats drop from raiding, be it from bosses or from trash. Personally I prefer trash, since it means you can progress somewhat even if you don't manage to get the boss down. Putting the burden of getting all of the mats/badges/whatever on the individual is unnecessary, and having the mats you need slowly build up as you raid makes more sense to me than having to go out and farm on your own for a couple hours.

 

Douglas

Confirmed: the smithing recipes for plate do not require the orbs, and the tailoring recipes for cloth do, on beta right now.

I tried to report this via the in-game issue reporting tool. It's gone. It has been removed from this build. This happened back in TBC beta when we were really, really close to being mostly done. (Didn't happen in the original beta, but then, "/bug" and "/suggest" continued to work even in the released version 1.0.)

So, I instead followed Sydane's original suggestion, and posted a report on one of the forums. We'll see what comes of it.

 

Cuer

Yes, we are now up to the versions of the patch with the "Release Assertions Enabled", as listed in the client in the login screen. This is generally done late in the PTR test cycle, so that in theory they can push the same version live that is currently on the PTR, when they are ready. They remove all reporting tools and other features that are only active on the PTR, in those patches.

It remains to be seen what will happen to the beta patches after 3.0.2 goes live, they may put those functions back in, or not, depending on how they view the beta servers at that point.

 

BeerBelly

It feels kind of scary that Blizzard is getting ready to push the patch live, since a lot of the classes still continue to post bugged spells or talents. It seems to me that Wotlk might be the first Blizzard game which goes live prematurely.

 

• Ungeir

I'd argue that TBC went live prematurely as well. The raid instances were untuned and/or unfinished. Quests linking instances and providing lore were missing due to time constraints. Class balance wasn't finalized. Heroic instances were rushed and missing proper itemization and tuning. Quest hubs were missing (Ogri'la, Terokkar come to mind).

 

sadistic

I think you are being a little harsh when considering the nature of MMO's in general. Granted Wow is/has been way above any MMO I've touched or heard about, but you still gotta cut them some slack. Class Balance can by the complexities of its nature not be finalized in this category. In MMO's, class balance will always be a continual process.

The quest hubs you are referring to were added later as the daily-quest-theme got more focus from Blizzard. You can not say there were too few quests available at TBC launch. I personally had around 2 whole zones worth of quests left when I hit 70 with my first char. And there was a reason the gold-mantra when people started hitting 70 en masse was "complete all your quests"

 

Prinsesa

Technically, you can't make an MMO go live prematurely, as long as your servers and other technical resources are up to snuff.

The fact that we undergo a weekly patching/maintenance process means the game is constantly evolving outside of the Beta/PTR phase anyway.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

Dancing Wu Li Master

I think you can see the results of TBC going live early / unfinished in Wrath. I think Blizzard feel BC was too ambitious in some areas, and so have intentionally made Wrath "smaller".

There will be fewer dungeons and raids on release at 80 than there were at 70, because they didn't have time to test them all. SSC / TK could have been delayed by a few weeks at the very least, allowing for more testing. There were too many heroics; having (say) 15 Heroics of which only 7 are run frequently isn't necessarily better than having 10, all of which are run. Reusing Naxx saved time in resource creation.

 

Opioid

Hardly. Diablo is legendary in the pantheon of "bad design ideas that should not have gone live."

 

BeerBelly

I'm not really talking about class balance, more about the bugs still present on the PTR/beta. I understand that MMOs are never really finished when it comes to class balance, content, etc. But I do think that they should not go live with a patch that still carries quite a few known bugs. The date, which was tossed around for the 3.0 patch is next week and I'm not really sure they can polish the patch to a degree that all classes work as intended.

 

burghy

Consider 3.0 as a "live beta". It will be buggy/unbalanced and most likely fun :p
Most of the stuff won't work as intended but will help a lot with fixing bugs for wotlk.

 

sadistic

Very true, WotLK looks small in comparison, relatively speaking.
And I support that 100%

Add the fact that 3.0 going live about a month before WotLK means they will get some nice zerg-testing in for WotLK release patch.

 

RangerSix

Hmm, patch 2.0 was loaded with bugged spells and talents too from what I can recall.

 

Havok

As 2.1 seemed to smooth out BC, my belief is that 3.1 (come Jan. 2009) will likely do the same for Wrath.

 

Roywyn

Has anyone been able to determine what the new Darkmoon Cards are shaping up to be?

The recipes for Scribes to make them are in (Darkmoon Card of the North - Spell - World of Warcraft), so maybe the sets are in somewhere as well?
It's Darkmoon Week right now on the servers, so now's the time if someone has a set collected.

The Blue Bar and you - the complete Fire Mage 2.4 mana compendium: http://elitistjerks.com/658230-post3191.html

DPS spec and class comparison in Naxxramas gear: http://code.google.com/p/simulationc...i/SampleOutput

And [Timbal's Focusing Crystal] doesn't proc on AM.
Neither does [The Egg of Mortal Essence] since 3.1.

 

Stopokingme

A search on WoWHead gives this.

New deck names I've found are Chaos, Nobles, Prisms and Undeath. Nothing else so far.

 

xiaoxin21

I believe a major effect of 3.0 is that people will have working addons come Wotlk, which will largely make the focus on the day of getting Wotlk to be leveling, rather than getting your addons to work.

It will make the game more fun as you do not want your customers to go home with the expansion and spend 1 day trying to figure out addons rather than level.

Why are there Brown and Black Polar Bears?

 

Lezwyn

Anything other than decent balance and playability is hardly necessary for the leveling phase of WotLK though. Honestly, even bugs tend to be fun early on as it's all about discovering all the new things and find out what works etc. , for me at least, so I suspect that's all fairly minor. If three months in you're still not able to raid well as, say, warlock because shadowbolt is buggy I can imagine people getting frustated with the lack of polish, but early on, lots of things might as well work as flavor. :P

 

ildon

Nevermind, redundant post.

 

• Falk

Stuff like Mangle infinite range pulling and Shadowstep teleporting were discovered/documented -months- after TBC went live. These things happen.