wowgoldhis-World Of Warcraft

With all this five year anniversary stuff going on, and the new push by Blizzard for subscribers via the TV commercials and special offers, I’ve been thinking about what it would take for me to leave WoW. What would my point be where I quit the game, unsubscribe, and not return to playing it? I think likely it would be a slow death. I’d log in less and less, until I found that I wouldn’t log in for months at a time. At that point I’d probably be sensible and cancel my account — although it took an inordinate amount of time for me to cancel my EQII account where I did more or less the same thing. I’d like to think this is how it’d go at least, I wouldn’t want to quit in a huff over some silly bug or class change. Of course, this is WoW, and I find myself uniquely invested in it. I’ve got characters with hundreds of days worth of /played on them, and I don’t know yet if I could ever stop myself from being able to have immediate access to them. They are a hobby, and investment, just like a detailed model airplane or schooner. Then there’s also what I do here, which gives me a little unique reason not to ever unsubscribe. But alas, it might happen one day. And that’s the topic of today’s breakfast nook

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The good folks at the Orange County Register got invited to Blizzard’s official WoW anniversary party that took place last Thursday on their Irvine campus, and their report is now posted. It sounds like quite the event — lots of free food and beer, head honchos regaling employees with their tales of the early days, and Rob Pardo suggesting that just like geek culture helped define this game, this game might help define geek culture going forward. The picture gallery included with the piece is a good browse, too — you can see all of the Blizzard heavyweights hanging out together, and the great spread set up on the campus. The Register’s also been asking Blizzard about their memories of the game — they’ve got more memories from Samwise, launch day stories from Shane Dabiri, and some thoughts from Pardo and Frank Pearce (who, strangely enough, at first didn’t believe that Blizzard belonged in a hardcore niche market like MMO gaming — he didn’t want to make “a game that never ended,” he says). All good stuff. Congrats once again to Blizzard on five years, good to see they celebrated in style.

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This is probably a good question to revisit since we’re heading into a patch where lots and lots of us will be running pickup raids and groups. Souldreamer on WoW Ladies LJ asks: “just when do you give up on a raid?” It’s a good question, and unfortunately, the answer probably depends on the raid itself. If, going in, you’re not sure just how much DPS the raid can do, and your healer says he’s actually specced prot, and you were planning on going to bed anyway, one wipe is probably enough to call it. On the other hand, if you’ve dropped a few bosses and have an issue with the tank losing aggro for a second on a boss, you’ll probably go back for another few wipes just to see. Do any of you have an actual policy? I tend to not get involved in PuGs at all if I think there’s a chance they won’t make it — there are too many fish in the sea, and too many other things for me to work on rather than beating my head up against a boss. But maybe it would be good to set up a rule that most of us can agree on, something like, “three wipes and you’re out.” That might save a lot of time and frustration in the new Dungeon system. Of course, the good news is that, on the opposite side of things, Blizzard has

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The latest patch 3.3 build on the PTR has yielded tier 10 purchasing information. When players were purchasing tier 9, they had to to use badges to pick up the item level 232 iterations. But to get the next rank up, they needed badges and a token. When purchasing tier 8, all you needed was a class specific token which dropped from different bosses. That will not be the case here. Tier 10 purchasing has been streamlined further, and I think this is the best solution as it contains elements of both tier 8 and tier 9 models. Now when you want to buy tier 10, you have to use Emblems of Frost to purchase the item level 251 variants. This is the lowest version of tier 10 you can get. In order to get the next level which is item level 264, you’ll need to get a class specific token which presumably drops from Icecrown Citadel on 25. It could drop from Icecrown Citadel 10 after taking down Arthas or doing some heroic versions of bosses. We have no idea yet. In other words, if I want to get item 264 versions my shoulders, I have to first spend 60 Emblems of Frost to get the Crimson Acolyte Shoulderpads. Then I have to raid and patiently wait for a Conqueror’s Mark of Sanctification to drop (Paladin, Priest, Warlock). Once I get the mark, I visit the tier vendor in Dalaran

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Reader comments — ahh, yes, the juicy goodness following a meaty post. [1.Local] ducks past the swinging doors to see what readers have been chatting about in the back room over the past week. Last week was a milestone event for fans of Christian Belt, as he appeared for the first time ever on the WoW Insider Show. As of last weekend, however, fans who hadn’t been able to catch the show live were still impatiently awaiting their chance to hear Archmage Pants in action. Frank: Can’t wait to hear Mr. Belt preach the warlock hate with his own sultry voice. Well, I assume it’s sultry — even if it’s not, he could be channeling Fran Drescher, and I still would listen with rapt attention. What other secret desires lurked among our readers’ comments this week? Read on for more true confessions. Brief launcher update The patch is here? THE PATCH?!? Oh, heck — it’s just a lil’ old launcher update. Leave it to overeager fan Frankintroll, relentlessly scouring WoW.com and reading between every line for any last scrap of information on why he was having trouble logging in, to piece together a whole new interpretation of this headline and photo. Frankintroll: Darn, I thought we were getting a new gnomish device. Gnomish

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More and more guilds are becoming just like Zen, above — they’re downing Anub in Trial of the Crusader, and then wondering just what’s next? The answer, of course, is Icecrown, but even our best estimates have that release a month away still. Not that anyone’s blaming Blizzard yet — quite a few guilds are still working on hard modes, and more people are worried just what’ll happen after Icecrown (though I wouldn’t be surprised if Blizzard still has a few cards up their sleeve for that one). But still, at this point, guilds are reaching their limits, and we’re starting to see the calm before the storm of raiding in patch 3.3. That doesn’t mean Guildwatch isn’t busy — we’ve got the usual downed, drama, and recruiting notices from around the realms. And if your guild is still active, be sure to tell us about it: send a tip to guildwatch@wow.com, and you’ll see it here in the future. Read on for more. DRAMA Laularo on Stormreaver was in Who Pulled Aggro with his friend, when his friend was suddenly kicked from a guild raid. Why? Because apparently he was 200 points short of the raid’s gearscore minimum. Laularo raised a fuss, and the guildleader returned to the raid and said no, they didn’t

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The Colosseum takes us inside the world of the Gladiator (Brutal, Vengeful, Merciless, Furious, and otherwise), to interview some of the top Arena fighters in the battlegroups. Our goal is to bring a better understanding of the strategy, makeup, and work that goes into dueling it out for fame, fortune, and Frostwyrms. We’re especially focused on the people who play these games, to further shed light on the world of the PvP player. Crinox is a hunter on the Burning Legion server. His 2v2 team is rated 2199, while his 3v3 team is rated 2212. Crinox took the time to hook up with us, and answer some basic questions about what it’s like in the Season 7 arena. Before we get into the interview all the way, though, I wanted to take a moment and mention that we’re always interested in interviewing new, highly ranked Arena players. Just drop a line to gray AT wow.com. I’ll follow-up with an in game mail to verify that the character is actually the interviewee, and we’ll get things under way. Without further ado, let’s jump behind the cut and talk to Crinox. WoW.com: Who are your teammates right now? What’s the general plan behind your composition? What challenges does your team have? How do you prefer to run your comp? Crinox: In 2v2, my

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New around here? WoW Rookie points WoW’s newest players to the basics of a good start in the World of Warcraft. Send us a note to suggest a WoW Rookie topic, and be sure to visit WoW.com’s WoW Rookie Guide for links to all our tips, tricks and how-to’s. Want to add high-powered functionality and high-octane style to your interface and controls? Add-ons, dear readers. You need add-ons. Also known as mods, add-ons can be such powerful upgrades to your gaming experience that some players consider them mandatory beyond a certain level of play. You can get add-ons that show you how much threat you’ve built as a tank, add-ons that show how much DPS you’re doing relative to other members of the raid, and add-ons that show you who needs Dispel Magic now. There are add-ons that let you reconfigure and move your hotbars anyplace on your screen, add-ons that show you how much gold you have on each of your other characters, and add-ons that point the way to the area where your quest objective awaits … Sweet stuff, indeed. Are add-ons against the rules? Add-ons are not only allowed by Blizzard – they’re encouraged. A visit to Blizzard’s add-on forum will confirm just how closely Blizzard works with add-on creators and users. Still,

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Welcome to another edition of Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column that won’t give up, will never back down, won’t retreat and won’t surrender. Arcane Brilliance has the heart of a champion, the eye of the tiger, the soul of a lion, the reflexes of a mongoose, and the gall bladder of an emu. Now, if you’ll excuse Arcane Brilliance, it needs to go indulge in an 80’s movie training montage to get ready for this column. And yes, in case you were wondering, Stan Bush and Vince Dicola will feature prominently. After a rather extended hiatus from the leveling grind, we here at Arcane Brilliance (and when I say “we,” I pretty much mean “me,” and when I say “pretty much,” I mean “absolutely.” I fact, I’m not sure why I even said “we” in the first place. Just forget I said anything. Let’s move on, shall we?) are finally ready to continue with our series of overly wordy leveling guides this week. Here’s what we’ve covered thus far (and, yes, I’m aware that I continue to use the first-person plural when referring to myself. I’m a very confused individual.): Part 1: Getting started Part 2: Levels 1-10 Part 3: Levels 11-20 We begin today’s installment at

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As you probably noticed if you watched along with us, yesterday’s developer chat (with Blizzard’s J. Allen Brack and Tom Chilton taking questions from Twitter and answering them on the forums) was a little light to say the least. Rather than answer questions about game balance seriously, the devs chose to make fun of hunters taming druids and do a lot of hinting and winking. Fortunately, we have Ghostcrawler — he’s responded to concerns about two of the questions yesterday over on the forums. The first is in response to some feedback about what the devs yesterday called “binary” hard modes — they said that instead of providing multiple levels of difficulty (as in Sarth and his drakes), they’d prefer to have a hard mode either on or off (you’ll be able to toggle between the two in Icecrown). This relates to what we just said recently, with different types of guilds looking for different types of content to play. GC replies that the “in-betweens” in terms of difficulty will come with later bosses in normal mode — if you want to play a challenge without stepping into the hard modes, Blizzard will do their best to make sure that the last bosses on normal give you that challenge. Which makes sense —

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