WotLK Beta - Borean Tundra and The Nexus

Today, I managed to unlock two new achievements



This means I've now officially "completed" Borean Tundra, one of the two starting zones in Wrath of the Lich King, the other being Howling Fjord. Or near enough anyway. Apparently you don't need to complete every single quest in the zone, because I still completed four more quests there after I already got the achievement unlocked. Furthermore I've also managed to clear the only non level-80 dungeon, The Nexus. At the end of the zone, I was level 73 and 30% into the next level, with minimal rest XP.

I have to say, without spoiling too much of the zone, that I thouroughly enjoyed my adventures here. There are a lot more storylines in this zone, compared to for example Hellfire Peninsula, the starting zone of The Burning Crusade. There's also a little more variety in the quest types, although obviously the vast majority of quests still has you collecting X number of enemies of a certain type, collecting Y number of drops from mobs or picking them up from the floor, or a delivery quest that sends you to the next quest hub. The zone also introduces you to a few new major races, each one having their own interesting storyline. You also have to help an old enemy race, including one very enjoyable quest, which will probably become an instant favourite of most players.

All in all a very enjoyable zone, it rates much higher than Hellfire Peninsula in my opinion, and most of the quests seem bug-free at the moment. The one thing that The Burning Crusade did better was, when you first enter the new zone, you immediately see Alliance and Horde forces, battling it out with huge demons, which made for a very impressive opening of the expansion. This is somewhat lacking. Although you are immediately dropped in the middle of a siege, it misses the same epic feeling.

The Nexus itself is a very atmospheric dungeon, although it remains a conventional dungeon crawl. It has four bosses and the two last bosses have an interesting mechanic to them that I hadn't seen before. Especially the last one has a nasty trick up her sleeve that might not get noticed in the heat of the battle. At least 3 out of 5 people in my party didn't notice it, and we only just managed to kill the boss.

All in all, it took us about one hour to clear the dungeon, but my group kind of overgeared the instance. It's a level 71-73 instance, and I was the lowest level player there at 73. The tank and another warlock were level 75 and all of us had tier 6 or season 3 gear, so it went quite smoothly.

Well, this zone sure wet my appetite for the remainder of the expansion. Hopefully the rest of the game is as enjoyable as Borean Tundra.

WotLK Beta - New titles!

I quickly logged onto the Wrath of the Lich King beta after our guild raid last night, and spotted an alliance character who had a new title I hadn't seen before: Elder! I asked around but nobody seemed to know where it came from and since the character in question was alliance, I couldn't even ask him.

Well, today I found the answer. Apparently the Elder title is a reward from visiting every single Elder during the Lunar Festival world event, which is one of the achievements of the new Achievement system Blizzard is going to add in the expansion. And there are more of those. For example completing all quests related to Midsummer gives you the Flame Keeper title for Horde, Flame Warden for Alliance.

Hurray, more fluff! The completionist in me really likes these little rewards for achievements and they're exactly how they're supposed to be. Give the character some bragging rights for doing something out of the ordinary, but don't make it something you have to do to stay competitive.

Is Age of Conan slowly dying?

It's been a very quiet year so far in MMO-land as far as I'm concerned. Very few new and upcoming games really managed to grab my attention, with the notable exception of Warhammer Online and Age of Conan.

Warhammer Online is still in development, but Age of Conan was released in May. The initial hype the game managed to generate at launch was amazing. The game attracted loads of players, entire guilds in World of Warcraft migrated to the new game, while other guilds had a hard time getting enough members online to keep their raids going. Within a couple of weeks, the game's developer, Funcom, reported sales of over one million units, making it one of the fastest selling MMORPGs ever. It was obvious that loads of people were getting tired of WoW and were looking for something new. I gave it a try as well, playing the game when I wasn't raiding in World of Warcraft.

However, the bubble burst quite early after. Reports of bad performance on reasonably recent PCs, frequent crashes, numerous bugs, missing end-game content and features that were promised on release that either weren't in-game yet or totally unplayable were a bad blow to the game. There even was a bug were female melee characters attacked about 30% slower than their male counterparts! That must be the weirdest bug ever in any online game and Funcom reported it would take several weeks to fix it.

Personally, this was the bug that sealed the deal for me. I didn't care much about missing end-game content and bugged boss fights, because I wasn't levelling up all that fast anyway. But the fact that my character was only playing at 70% of her abilities, was too much. Apart from that, I still experienced frequent crashes to desktop and sluggish performance, even on a recent system, so I cancelled my subscription.

Apparently, I was not alone. People left the game in droves. From the players who gave it a try that I know, which would be about 20 players, none of them are still playing at the moment. Even the most avid fans of AoC are now back in World of Warcraft, either playing their old character again or levelling up an alt. Obviously the game was released too soon, with too many bugs still left to be ironed out and content to be added. My guess is that Funcom's cash supply ran out and investors started demanding some returns on their money. The result: an unfinished game with very few people renewing their subscription after the initial first free month was up.

It's a shame to be honest, AoC has a lot of potential and I really wanted this game to succeed. One of the very first MMORPGs I played was Anarchy Online, Funcom's previous MMORPG. AO itself is notorious for having the worst MMORPG launch in history. But when I started playing the game, most bugs were already gone and it was a very enjoyable title at the time. It's my hope that Funcom will manage to do the same again, add all the missing content and get rid of all the bugs and make the game the class A title it deserves to be.

It'll probably be too late to attract the big numbers again though. But if we can learn anything from the AoC story, it's the fact that there's a real demand for a new MMORPG and lots of money to be made if someone manages to release a good game with lots of content and a minimal amount of bugs. I hope the guys over at Mythic are listening.

WotLK Beta - The in-game calendar

Another feature added with the latest build on the beta servers, is a calendar for organizing your in-game events. A useful addition, considering the fact that third party addons like this have been around since pretty much the beginning of the game.

You access the calender by clicking the huge button on the top right of your screen, near the mini-map. This gives you a month-by-month overview, which already has all the Blizzard-organized events in it, such as the weekly Stranglethorn Vale Fishing Extravaganza and Brewfest for example. Right-clicking on a particular day allows you to create an event. You can give it a name, a description and pick from 5 different categories: Raid, Dungeon, PvP, Meeting or Other. Choosing either Raid or Dungeon then allows you to pick the instance you wish to go to. You can set a time and invite other players.

When these players then hover over the calendar button, they'll see they have been invited to an event and haven't responded yet. When they then open the calendar, they can either accept, decline or remove the raid from their calendar. At the bottom of the screen you can see an overview of the players that are connected to this event and their status.


Looks remarkably similar to Guild Event Manager, doesn't it? It seems like Blizzard is keeping the tradition of "borrowing" the ideas of third party addons and implementing them in their main game. Which is perfectly fine by me, the more people get access to good functionality, the better.

Anyway, this seems like a very useful tool, especially for the more casual guilds who don't have a dedicated website with their own planner or for non-guild groups who do events on an irregular basis. As for the raiding guilds, they'll probably want to stick to their website, because it's a lot easier being able to sign up for something without being in the game.

WotLK Beta - The barber shop

Last night, Blizzard patched the Wrath of the Lich King beta servers with a new version of the build. Among the changes are the fact that you can now learn your mounts and social pets as spells, so they don't take anymore bagspace. Another eye-catching feature that was added, was the barber shop.

I gave it a brief try, and apparently it's only possible to pick a different hair style, hair colour and facial feature. What's more, it looks like the styles etc. you can choose from, are the same old ones who have been in the game since release.

That's a bit underwhelming to be honest. Hopefully they'll add more and new styles before release, because if it stays like this, a lot of people will be disappointed.

Edit: Apparently they are going to introduce more styles later on, but they aren't finished yet. I'm looking forward to seeing those!

WotLK beta - Warlock demonology tree

Over the weekend, I spent some time on my level 70 warlock in the Wrath of the Lich King beta, exploring one of the two "starting" zones in Northrend, Borean Tundra, and doing some quests there. For the occasion I respecced from my cookiecutter raiding spec, destruction/demonic sacrifice, to a build that has most talents in the demonology tree. I've always liked the pet aspect of warlocks, and I've always leveled mainly as demonology, both pre-TBC, going from level 1 to 60, and in the first expansion from 60 to 70.

And I must say, I like the changes to the tree. First key change for me is Fel Synergy, finally something that can keep your pet alive without having to micro-manage it with Health Funnel. It should also help greatly when grouping/raiding, in situations when there's a lot of damage on the whole raid. It's not always easy to keep your pet alive in those cases and you lose a lot of damage doing so. In a lot of bossfights, demonology warlocks put their pet on the side, out of harms way, which makes you lose some of your abilities and hopefully thanks to this talent, you won't need to anymore.

Second highlight is Mana Feed, again a very nice talent that will keep your pet supplied with mana, preventing it to be OOM half of the fight.

A third talent that caught my eye is Demonic Pact, which is basically a spellcaster's version of the hunter Survival talent Expose Weakness, although it depends on the damage your pet is doing, rather than its owner. It's also a five point talent right now, compared to only three points needed for Expose Weakness, so we'll have to see if Blizzard changes it for release. But still, an excellent idea which increases the utility of a demonology warlock in raids and this should be a core talent in any raiding demonology build.

The icing on the cake is of course the 51-point talent Metamorphosis, the already-famous warlock "demon form". I'm not entirely sold on the usefulness of the talent yet, but it just looks too cool not to pick it up.

The only thing that got changed for the worse is Demonic Sacrifice, compared to the version that is now on live. As you can see it got changed from a 30 minute buff, depending on the type of pet you sacrifice, to a 20 second spell haste ability. It is very doubtful that this will be used a lot, and a Blizzard respresentative has already stated on the official forums that they are going to revert the changes, but will probably make the effect a little bit less powerful. Apparently, they want warlocks to use their pet wherever it's possible, as it wasn't their intension that warlocks sacrificed their sidekick for a buff as the best option everywhere. The idea behind Demonic Sacrifice, according to Blizzard, is to give warlocks something when it's not possible to use their pet. More information on a thread on the official beta forums. Fair enough I guess.

All in all I'm really fond of the changes to the tree, it looks like there's hope for a viable demonology spec that's also useful in raids.

WotLK beta - Death knight starting area

After I managed to install the Wrath of the Lich King beta client, one of the first things I did was of course check out the starting area of the expansion's new hero class, the death knight. They have an instanced zone just for them, as the setting is in the past, somewhere during the original Scourge invasion. You, a former Alliance or Horde hero, was taken and "converted" by the Scourge and are now a fearsome death knight, in the service of the Lich King, ready to wreak havoc on the helpless, and sometimes not so helpless, population of Azeroth.

You start at level 55, without any talent points, on a floating necropolis, somewhat like Naxxramas, that's hovering above the town of New Avalon, in the area that is now the Eastern Plaguelands. The idea is that you progress through this starting area by doing the quests the, sometimes familiar, NPCs give you. As a reward you get money, talent points and sometimes a piece of rare, blue, equipment. You also get a quest chain which rewards you with a summoned epic riding mount, the deathcharger, which works exactly like the warlock's summoned mount, the dreadsteed.

I personally completed the starting area quests in a couple of hours. At the end of the ride, you're level 57, in full blue equipment, got all your talent points appropriate for that level and with an epic ground mount. Not too shabby at all. The quests themselves are mostly the trusted old kill this many mobs of type A and collect that many items of type B. There are a couple of somewhat unique quests though that bring some variety to the old concept, although I wouldn't exactly call them revolutionary. A couple of them even got a bit tedious after a while, because of the sheer number of objectives you have to complete. But all in all an enjoyable experience, mostly because of the story and how it unfolds. A special note should go to the big finale of the whole chain, which is really well-done and I would guess of particular interest to lore fanatics.

I guess the whole area is probably best compaired to the Tortage destiny quest line of Age of Conan, and apparently I'm not the only one who got that idea. Although you don't have a private instance, you share it with the other players that have also just started a death knight.

I would say that it's definitely worth it to at least play through the death knight starting zone, even if you're not interested in leveling one up all the way to level 80, because of the well-crafted starting zone and, if you're interested in the Warcraft universe, the interesting story line.