All this talk about the impossibility of a good world pvp system because of faction balance - bleh.

Assume 10 towers, here' the resulting benefit to holding x of them to either side.
1 - 3% increased HP
2 through 9 - buffs worth 5 points of item budget each (5 str, 10 ap, 15 healing, etc)
10 - 3% increased exp, honor, gold gain rate

By giving multiple objectives, and only putting the big rewards at the start and end of the objective capturing process, you've given the weak side a reason to defend, and the strong side a reason to attack. With 10 objectives, especially if they're spread out, it would be very unlikely any population imbalance would preclude the weaker side from taking/holding at least one.

I don't understand this system.

I understand that such system would in theory result in weaker side looking for exploit (tower with the weakest defense), then taking it over. It will trigger fast reaction of the stronger side, which will result in losing the objective, forcing weaker side to look for exploit somewhere else. In theory, that would result in dynamic and continous PvP over the towers.

Point is, it won't. Why would weaker side care at all about fighting? What's the benefit of having 3% more HP for common player logging for to the game for 2 hours? What's the benefit for raider assuming it won't work in raid instance (which is granted)? What's the benefit for arena player?

As a result, rarely anyone will bother taking over the towers, because buff, even if useful, won't be lasting for weaker side for long.

If anything, those buffs should not affect faction, but players involved in taking the tower. Reason is simple - I take tower, I reap benefits, they stay on me through death for let's say, 3 hours (not in arena nor raid though, of course). I'm happy. Why would I care for my faction? they don't care for me.

I'd be interested to know if Blizzard have looked at these sorts of calculations when deciding how successful raiding is. Whether (say) they look at their figures and see that there are 5,000 Gruul's Lair instances created in the EU each week, and then compare that to 5,000 Molten Core instances each week. (Note: numbers are illustrative only)

If done naively, using that kind of metric for instance popularity could well show that the two instances are "equally popular", until you stop to think how many more actual people are involved in the latter case.

If grulls lair gets rolled over as frequently as molten core was, that would imply that it is massively more popular than molten core ever was, not less, because guilds dont really farm it the way they did MC - We havent touched it in months ourselves, because there is better uses of our time than praying for another trophy, and we are neither massively advanced (on kael) nor very quick to drop farm content.

This is silly tough, since we dont have the numbers, and to be honest, I suspect that blizzards analsys of all this is wastly better informed than anything we could come up with will ever be simply because they have data we dont possess, and cannot get, even employing armory travlers.

Consider: We can scan the armory, and thus find out how many characters on an average server have no raid loot what-so-ever.
But this doesnt tell us what percentage of wow-players raid because we do not know how many of those characters are alts of players that do raid. I suspect "a lot" but this is a naive assumption based on the fact that most raiders I know have at least one alt, and usually more than that, but blizzard will have the actual numbers, and will logically be assigning resources according to player participation rather than character participation (because players pay them, characters dont!)-

Why are you discussing about world pvp? Blizzard has clearly stated that they want to improve the "e-sport factor" of WoW, which means arena and (maybe) battleground pvp. Instanced pvp is on the one hand fraction independent and on the other handy the most fair one. Open pvp is fun at last, i don't deny, but we should treat it as Blizzard does, as a funny, nice-to-have instanced pvp alternative.

One of the highlights of the new expansion pack is big outdoor zone designed speciffically with PvP in mind (siege machines, destroyable buidings and such). That's the reason speculations has started how such thing can be kept alive longer then just for few weeks like it was with Halaa.

You are right that it got nothing to do with 2.4 of course. So I'll end this off topic here.

BlizzCast - The Blizzard Entertainment Podcast

The BlizzCast with only a few news about 2.4.

I think that is quite a leap in logic to believe that you can extrapolate that to mean more than 30% of players have seen TK. Wowjutsu is very much flawed. It only looks at ranked guilds and there are a ton of smaller guilds who have never even set foot in Kara, that don't make the rankings. Also it doesn't take into account people changing guilds. I've seen a lot of people leave hardcore raiding guilds burned out and opt to play with friends in a casual guild instead. Or they simply don't make it past a trial period but won loot while on trial. They go to a different guild and presto the whole guild gets a TK icon next to their name because one player has tier 5 shoulders.

The actual percentage of players that have been inside TK for more than novelty of saying they've been inside is a lot less than 30%.

There is basically nothing in there we didn't already know from that Sweedish game magazine interview about three weeks ago. Utterly pathetic.

Rehashes the magazine interview. Did not pick up on any notable new information on the raid instance.

Tiny bit of new info specific to the 5-man:
ilvl 115 blues from first 3 bosses, 4th = ilvl 110 epic
Heroic: 1st 3 = ilvl 110 epics, 4 = ilvl 128 or whatever Prince Maelchaazar is from Karazhan.

So loot that is partially equivalent to Karazhan isn't terrible for a 5-man.

Hopefully the ilvl~120 gear in the heroic 5-man turns out to be weapons. It's the glaring omission in badge gear.

Hopefully this indicates that WotLK won't have the same system of loot that heroics have now (i.e. hardly worth the effort). But he does say that this is explicitly to keep the loot relevant at a late stage in the expansion's lifecycle, so no guarantees.

Better loot is something that was expected.

After all, if it stayed in line with other lev. 70 instances (normal mode - lev. 115 blues only, heroic mode - lev. 115 blues and lev. 110 epic from final boss) it would be quickly abandoned unless some sort of new reagent was introduced inside. Blizzard wants people to visit it more then few times, hence better loot.

I would also expect longer loot lists per boss then normal. It's only logical action to ensure that people will be coming there for a while instead of running it once or twice for novelty and abandoning it right after.

A 5 man with no lockout, so it'll be farmed solid

The 5-man difficulty will also dictate its frequent use (for badges, and later interest in dailies). Not to mention possible faction rewards with SSO (rep in the 5-man, for sure).

A big loot list can help, but also annoy other players (bad luck only gets worse). I'd prefer it not to have a huge loot table, as there is still plenty of incentive to run any heroic for badges, daily gold, and in this case, rep.

No 5-man is going to give you a challenge if you're in Tier 6 gear.

That was one really poor excuse of an official podcast. Not really any new information at all (the slightly better items from 5 man was to be expected, new content always buffs it a bit to drag people to doing the content).

They should learn something from the dev irc chats LOTRO developers do, where you actually get tidbits of information months before the stuff is officially announced.

Also very dissapointing they dont try various difficulties in Heroics. Isnt boding well for Wotlk.
Some sort of progression in 5 mans would be great.


Not sure I agree, but even if we said that was the case, they could still make it harder than current heroics. Just because it still wouldnt be more difficult content for t6 geared players, it could be more difficult content for those people who dont raid.

This still myths me somewhat, so we're going to get T7 now, however without unique graphics (im shocked at this, no really...), in sets which have set boni per class.

So atleast the loot there will be worthwhile, or well as much as T5-T6 was.. I guess this makes up for my useless T6 4piece bonus, I pity those with good ones.


Some of AQ40 was really good, the problem was the vast amounts of useless hybrid gear before hybrids were actually good, you had several key areas of poorly itemized slots taken care of here, so this does seem abit ominous considering how they have tinkered with itemization at the moment.


Im really dissapointed however as this podcast really gave next to no useful information except how they have changed loot slightly in the new 5man.


Seriously, this is a change they have already implemented in 2.3.2, why is he going on about this in an interview about 2.4.



Have Blizzard devolutionized? they said they wanted to improve communication, to try to avoid big mega patches that take ages, and this is exactly the oposite as of late, even 2.3.2 was on the PTR for around 2 months I believe? What purpose do they have on being so damned tight-lipped about everything from either 2.4 or WoTLK. I've moved from intense curiosity into mild annoyance by their silly ideas.

Well at least Emeraude has her lore correct.

I will be disappointed if Kil'Jaeden is made a boss simular to Illidan. Kil'Jaeden is supposed to be a massive godlike character. Sargeras>Kil'Jaeden>Archimonde>Lich King (Ner'Zuhl)>Arthas>Illidan

Kil'Jaeden should also be incorporated with Velen somehow. Being as they're arch enemies. The whole corruption of the orcs, destruction of worlds and the end of races was due to Kil'Jaeden's hate for Velen and tracking him across the universe.

Well, they have said that he's only partially attuned to the world at this stage, or something like that. How that plays out remains to be seen. I doubt he'll rise up out of a pool of lava and lecture his lackey for summoning him too soon, but it has to be something along those lines.

What I was most surprised about is there still ZERO screenshots of the new Sunwell Plateau area. All the "new" screenshots on the official Blizzard podcast page are taken straight out of Silvermoon City/surrounding already accessible area.

Does the website team not have access to the developer server? Are the art assets not done yet for 2.4? Is the Sunwell going to look SO amazing that they are holding off on releasing screenshots until players get to see it first hand?