Tag: cataclysm

Polymorph or Polydeath?

Posted on by Gazimoff

Spoiler Alert: Discussion of Mage talents in Cataclysm, focusing on one new talent in particular.

I feel like I’m almost betraying my class by raising this discussion. We’ve been handed a gift almost, a rare glimmering tool that would be oh-so-nice to have. But I don’t like it and really hope that it doesn’t make it out of beta in it’s current form. From what I’ve managed to read on it so far, this new talent could have far-reaching ramifications.

Since Vanilla, us mages have been complaining about  Polymorph. One of the most versatile forms of crowd-control, it suffers from a single flaw – any damage done to the target breaks the spell. There are tools like Glyph of Polymorph that can make maintaining crowd-control a little easier, but in the main it takes a mix of practice and luck to get it right.

Classic situations like a sheep wandering into a Consecrate used to be a big deal back in the original game and even for part of Burning Crusade. Nowadays though, heroic dungeons and raiding are largely an AoE affair. Simply round up the trash, heal the tank and drop Blizzard on the pack of mobs underneath. I don’t think I’ve needed to use Polymorph at all during this expansion, save a few trips into battlegrounds and some dicey solo questing situations while levelling.

Blizzard’s already announced that crowd control will play a bigger part in dungeons and raids in Cataclysm, and I’m looking forward to dusting off my old macros as a result. But they’ve also added a new talent, Improved Polymorph, to help make things a little easier:

When a target you've polymorphed is damaged, that damage is delayed for 3.0 secs.

This talent is right at the top of the Arcane tree – you can have it maxed out at level 11. On the face of it, it looks fantastic – we’ll get a bit of a safety net from all the crazy AoE damage flying around. But what happens if we take it out of the dungeon environment and use it elsewhere?

For solo and questing PvE it still sounds great. I’ll be able to pull a mob using Polymorph, blitz it with a ton of damage over the following 3 secs then finish it off if it doesn’t die from all the damage I’ve dealt it. By having it from such an early level it should also be something I can get into the habit of using, right?

Wrong. Crowd-control is exactly that – controlling a crowd of mobs to make them more manageable. There are snares like Frost Nova and slows like… well Slow, that can help out with single target mob management. But using Polymorph as a three second stun? That just feels like you’re encouraging Mages to learn bad habits.

There’s also the huge PvP issue as well. If I go into a battleground, use Improved Polymoph on a player then burst them down in an Arcane spec, I can probably get close to killing them outright for very little effort. If other people gang up on the target as well, they’re toast. It’s not clear if they get dealt all the damage at once or if it’s only delayed by 3 sec, but either way that’s going to get messy. Considering this is going to be available at early stages, imagine what it’ll do to the twink setup? I know Blizzard don’t balance around early-level battlegrounds, but this does feel excessive.

There’s also the overall battleground and arena fight style to consider. I’m fairly certain that Blizzard wanted to remove the reliance on burst damage in PvP situation. This talent seems to encourage it though – can you make the weasel pop before the polymorph breaks? I know that plate-plate-plate teams have been emerging to counter the rogue-mage-priest team, but still.

That’s not to say all is lost. I’d suggest an easy change to this talent to make it much more balanced and not nearly as obscene:

When a target you’ve polymorphed is damaged, that damage is delayed for 3.0 secs, up to a maximum of x% of the target’s health.

I prefer this as it allows the total amount of damage to be fine tuned, but still handles accidental damage from multiple sources. We’d still get our new toy, but it wouldn’t be completely overpowering.

Why suggest it? I like the concept of the talent and it’s cheapness, so I want it to make it into live. But I’m also aware of how other classes will react to the talent, and want to address that with a suggestion. The last thing I want is for this shiny new toy to be taken away before all mages get a chance to play with it.

Cataclysm: New Mage Experience

Posted on by Gazimoff

Spoiler Alert: In-depth description of changes to the Mage class, levelling experience and spell ranks and usage. I’ll also be touching on the Cataclysm talent trees. Note that as I’m not in beta the content here is largely based on recounts and information gathered from elsewhere.

The floodgates have opened and the Beta has begun. But while there’s a general level of information about the upcoming expansion, it seems as if detailed looks at the individual classes are rare. There are a couple of notable exceptions – Restokin has a large amount of Druid information, while Gravity has Death Knights pretty much covered. Generally though, it feels as if there are some notable gaps in class coverage.

The experience that players will have in Cataclysm can largely be separated into three camps: those who roll a new mage after the expansion, those who are levelling up an existing mage from 80 to 85, and those who will be playing at endgame. At the moment the endgame experience seems to be largely capped and it doesn’t look like the new spells are fully implemented.

That said, the new levelling experience is largely there and is worth discussing in detail. If you’re thinking of rolling a new mage in the expansion or have a lowbie mage that you’re thinking of dusting off and getting back in with, this may give you a few ideas.

If you’re not sure about trying out either a Worgen or Goblin, you might want to go for a Troll or Gnome mage instead. The starting experience for levels 1 through to 5 is completely new for these races, so if you’re bored of killing the same old boars or wolves this might be an option for you.

The immediate difference when levelling is the lack of spell ranks. Not only does this mean fewer trips to the class trainer, but it also means that every time you visit them it’s to get something new and cool. When you level you get an alert to tell you which new spells and abilities are available, just to nudge you in the right direction. The spellbook has also been enhanced to show you which spells you’ve learned, which are available to learn at your current level and which aren’t available to you just yet.

A small factoid – the complete Mage spell list has dropped from nearly 300 to roughly 70.

The second thing you’re likely to notice is the change to conjure food/water, especially if you’ve played a mage before. The spell mechanics have been tweaked at lower levels, resulting in far less downtime for your average mage. The movement from fight-drink-fight-drink to something more fluid is welcome, but has some knock-on effects. Instead of getting Conjure Water at level 4 we’ll be picking up Conjure Refreshment at 38, with Mana Pies and Strudel replacing the single food/water we currently create at lower levels.

Defensive spells have also had a slight change. Frost Ward and Fire Ward are both gone, replaced by Mage Ward which drops in at around the same kind of level. Mana Shield has been pushed back from level 20 to 56, but the new version only requires 1 mana per point of damage absorbed (down from 1.5).

For a mage getting about should be that little bit easier. Basic teleports still come in at level 20, with Darnassus/ Thunder Bluff and Stonard/Theramore arriving at 22. Portals are a similar story at present, becoming available at levels 40 and 42. Information is still a little hazy on this, with some reports suggesting that all old-world teleports are now at 22 and portals at 42. I’ve also heard that both portals and teleports are going to be trainable by mage trainers, so you won’t need to visit a capital city in order to learn it’s teleport/portal spell.

Other than these changes, your basic Mage arsenal is fairly unchanged. There’s still talk of Arcane Missiles becoming a random proc from all spells, but I haven’t seen anything to see this change in affect.

Talent trees for mages are still in a state of flux. While the Arcane tree has had a slight makeover, the Frost and Fire ones seem largely untouched. I’m expecting to see further iterations on the trees as time goes on, mainly to reduce clutter and redundant talents. That said, talents like Arcane Tactics and Improved Polymorph could make Arcane once again the tree of choice for endgame, particularly if crowd control becomes more  relevant in the expansion.

Overall, mages seem to be benefiting from the streamlined levelling experience that all classes will go through. It’s still unknown how a mage will stack up at endgame, but this is likely to be the case until raiding guilds are trying out the new raids for the first time. This might not happen until the end of beta or possibly a few months after launch.

Cataclysm Gallery Time

Posted on by Gazimoff

Cataclysm Spoiler Alert!Spoiler Alert: I’ve included some of the best screenshots from Cataclysm. I’ve weeded out all the ones that would have revealed significant lore developments, so these should be fairly safe. As always though, reader discretion is advised. Note: I’m not in Beta, so can’t tell you much about these myself!

A friend of mine has been playing in the Cataclysm Alpha. So imagine my surprise when today the NDA was lifted as Blizzard officially announced that the expansion was moving into Closed Beta. The friend of mine (who doesn’t have his own blog) has asked me if I’d be happy to share the screenshots he took with you. Just in case you’re not sure if you’d want to see them, I’ve hidden them behind the cut. Better safe than sorry, eh?

Continue reading “Cataclysm Gallery Time”

Under the Hood

Posted on by Gazimoff

Spoiler alert: In-depth discussion of the planned changes to Cataclysm, primarily focusing on mechanics and core engine changes, leveling experience and endgame experience. All information here is public knowledge unless specified.

Over the weekend an avalanche of news came out about how development on Cataclysm is progressing. In an interesting change the majority of information was shared through a series of interviews rather than through blue posts on the official Blizzard forums (although there are some follow-ups). The removal of Path of the Titans and Guild talent trees are the two big items, along with the changes to Inscription and Archaeology.

What’s interesting is the overhaul the core game engine is receiving in order to make the overall experience better. One of the Ghostcrawler interviews mentions that the game was only expected to last for two or three years. Now they’re not just looking at the capability they need for Cataclysm but also for future expansions and development. In another interview he mentions that the revised game engine will have a number of hooks that can be adjusted, allowing for individual spells and abilities to be fine-tuned much more precisely.

What does this mean? Hopefully it’ll get classes to the stage where individual talent trees will be on an even level, so for example Fire, Frost and Arcane mages should be very close together. You’ll probably still get an “optimal” spec, but the differences between the three should be much smaller. It should also mean there’s less reliance on random-number-generation – something that the Fire tree suffers from immensely.

The problem with building a game engine is that it takes a lot of time and careful planning to pull it all together – especially something as complex as Warcraft. It’s also a problem that doesn’t scale well as you throw additional resources at it – as you scale up a programming team you can easily lose focus on the goal unless you have very tight project management. Having to put a large amount of your coding and design effort into bringing an old, creaking engine up to date is also going to pull them away from generating new content for the expansion.

The end result though is that most of the hard work won’t be visible to the player, at least not initially. It’s like changing stuff under the hood of a car, replacing the engine and upgrading the shock absorbers. It’s still the same car and works in the same way, it just remains unseen unless you flip the lid open and take a look inside.

It should however creep into the game through subtle ways, one of which being the revamped glyph system. In essence, being able to provide additional hooks into the spellcasting (or perform ability) process means that you have greater control over how they can be adjusted. Part of the change to glyphs includes providing a “middle tier” between powerful spell changes and basic cosmetic or remove reagent requirement ones. This middle tier is going to rely on the additional hooks to perform the subtle tweaks to abilities, so that the situational stuff can truly be situational and not incredibly overpowered or ridiculously weak.

There’s also scope for more interesting racial abilities, item bonuses and so on. You might find that items have properties that would work like a glyph, providing unique interactions with the spell casting pipeline in ways we haven’t seen before. It also means that we could get to the stage where an item does different things depending on the class or spec of the character using it.

Of course this additional complexity is going to be a nightmare for one team of people – the theorycrafters. As spells become tweakable in more ways, so the models used to predict their behaviour become more complex. if you think the guys with their spreadsheets and simulators have it bad now, imagine how bad things could get for them in the expansion?

In essence though it feels that in order to get at all the expansion’s content, you’re going to need to roll alts. Both Cory Stockton and Tom Chilton have commented on the amount of new quests that are being sunk into the game in order to sort out the level kinks. Improved crafting profession itemisation should also help, particularly around Inscription. If you’ve ever leveled a mage you’ll understand the frustrations around getting offhand items, rings and trinkets at the lower levels.

What does all this mean for me as a player? Larisa says that all she wants from Cataclysm is good raiding and a good guild, and I can appreciate that. But a hangover from my single-player days is that I want stuff to do in the game – zones to explore, quests to complete and characters to progress. I currently don’t feel that I’ll get that on my main character, and will have to roll an alt if I’m going to truly explore all the changes that have been brought in. Whether it’s a Worgen Mage or a Gnome Priest, I feel it’s going to be restarting that gets me the most out of this impending expansion.

Choose Your Weapons

Posted on by Gazimoff

A while back I mentioned that I had four different weapon sets on my mage and was having trouble choosing which one was the best. Theorycrafting wasn’t really helping me much, with no clear winner emerging. In the end I decided that the best way to test them was to go out, do some target dummy tests and run a few heroics with them. It means that I can test them against my own playstyle as well as getting a feel for each of them.

Unsurprisingly, both Nibelung and Sister Svalna’s Aether Staff came out at around the same for single targets, with Nibelung really coming into it’s own for those AoE sessions in heroics. Abracadaver was only slightly behind, which surprised me as I was expecting a much bigger boost from the haste. I only have 450 haste normally so I’m nowhere near the softcap, although I do get the tier 10 2-piece set bonus most of the time.

The Frost Needle and Scourgelord’s Baton came in last place, and so will be banked. I can’t risk disenchanting them though – if a substantial one-hander or off-hander drop then I’ll need the other one to sit alongside it.

As I was doing all this testing I gradually became frustrated – it didn’t really make sense to me why I could end up with four sets of weapons, all from the same instance and all similar in quality to each other. It wasn’t as if I could say that there was a clear upgrade path, or if there was a clear best-in-slot that I could work towards. Instead, the approach was to offer similar weapons that do similar things, but work in slightly different ways.

  • A sword and off-hand combo
  • A staff with an “on use” ability
  • Another staff with a low procrate ability
  • A third staff with just high base stats and nothing unusual

Frustratingly for me, I couldn’t even decide what I like more as a player. Do I like to be able to just compare raw numbers – if the numbers are bigger on the new item, it’s an upgrade? Do I like to go for things that are a little unusual? I know I don’t like on-use items as I always forget to use them (trinkets being a perfect example), but that’s more preference and playstyle than throwing away good quality gear.

Anyhow, just as I was beginning to settle on which items to keep and which to put into cold storage, along comes this blog post from Tachyon. If you’re not aware of his work, Tachyon is a mage blogger who is heavily into theorycrafting. His best achievements are developing simulators that calculate DPS for a given gear selection and spell rotation. The information he generates is fantastic in terms of working out stat priority and so on.

His latest post on DPS volatility is a real eye-opener – it shows why ten tests or samples are unreliable for calculating DPS, and that you need something like a thousand in order to build up even a rough picture of DPS. Now I don’t know about you, but I’m unlikely to run the same instance with the same gear a thousand times just to test if it’s a marginal improvement.

But more fundamentally though, I’d probably never be able to tell which was the better or worse weapon for me because they’re all so close to each other. That and Lady RNG adds her own influence, distorting whatever results I get. I might end up feeling that the mathematically worst choice gives me the best result just because it’s “lucky”.

It also makes me wonder if any of this will get better in Cataclysm? I mean, I love choice, but I’d rather not have to be a mathemagician just to be able to pick and choose between the huge range of loot on offer to me. It might be that with the Spirit mage changes there will be a clearer choice for us – if it’s got intellect and stamina but no spirit then it’s a mage weapon. I like to have plenty of upgrade chances and I do appreciate the idea of moving away from identikit gear choices as well, but I’d really like it to be easier for me to work out if something is an upgrade or not.

I’m also reminded of the times when I first started raiding. Everything seemed so much clearer – it was an upgrade or it wasn’t. There didn’t seem to be as much choice – Molten Core only really had the Staff of Dominance or the Azuresong Mageblade to choose from. There also seemed to be much more competition for loot, with about nine other players also keen to get their hands on the same gear. I’m not saying that an abundance of choice is a bad thing, but it just seems to take that epic edge off things.

I guess I’m looking forward to Cataclysm all the more as a result – the raid dungeon changes mean that loot will be the same for both 10 and 25-man. This in turn makes itemisation easier, which should make upgrade paths clearer. I’m aware that the expansion isn’t a panacea or cure-all, but I can live in hope.

Getting Ready for Cataclysm

Posted on by Gazimoff

At the moment there’s this imaginary calendar inside my head. It’s telling me that sometime before the end of the year, Cataclysm will be released. It’s the kind of thought that brings a smile to my face, like remembering that I’m going to have steak for dinner tonight. It’s not quite up there with the feeling I’d get if I had… say two tickets to see Ramnstein, but it’s in that rough ball park.

I have this kind of ritual that I go through when preparing for an expansion and Cataclysm is no exception. It’s also something that came up with Blog Azeroth’s shared topic this week. Going through three phases of preparation for a computer game expansion is probably a bit extreme, bud didn’t you hear that Warcraft is Serious Business?

The first one always starts with me trawling round the computer game stores twice a week, asking if they’re taking preorders. This goes on until they’re either sick of the sight of me or they’re finally taking them. And not just any order – I want to lay my hands on the Collector’s Edition. I’m not happy until I have the piece of paper in my hand telling me that it’s preordered. I also make sure I have preorders with about three or four different stores, just so that I can improve my chances of getting a copy.

As soon as a release date is announced, I book time off from work. The expansion is serious business, and I want to make sure I can enjoy it without interruptions! It also means that I can be one of the first to have the expansion installed, patched and running. At least that’s the theory.

The second phase starts around six months before the expansion when I realise that my bank is full to the seams with crafting materials that I’m never going to need or use. I’ll make some kind of noise about having a bank clearout, but it never happens until everyone else has done it and the prices have fallen through the floor. Anyone for a Frozen Orb, stack of twenty for five gold?  How about frostweave, fifty silver a stack? Maybe a few eternals?

I’ll also start looking at my characters, thinking about which one I want to get to level cap first (my mage) and get all the new recipes (also my mage). I’ll be taking a look at which characters would give me a good range of abilities on each server that I play (or which ones will help my mage the most) and make sure they’re prepped and ready. If there’s any gear that I can pick up for the alts, I’ll have a look at creating it. This’ll usually happen just after I’ve had my bank clearout, so I’ll end up buying it back and making a huge loss.

I’ll also make plans to clear out my PC and make sure it’s running smoothly as my third phase. I’ll promise to uninstall some games, delete some crap and maybe do a system reinstall in order to make sure everything’s sweet. I’m even thinking about picking up a copy of Windows 7 this time just to get off the concrete boot that is Vista. Of course none of this happens until the day of release when I’m holding the shiny disc in my hand and it’s telling me I don’t have enough space. Cue swearing, shuffling things around, more swearing and finally getting the thing installed. It’s then that I find out that it runs like a slug because of all the new effects and I end up playing it in 16-bit Sega Mega Drive mode until I fork out for a computer upgrade.

The upgrades also sting me. They’re never on sale, even though I’ve been browsing and passed up on a ton of special offers. I also have to choose the “ship it to me by rocket car or faster” delivery option. It usually costs me almost as much as the upgrade, but I tick it because I’m an impatient sod who has to see these crazy new effects immediately. This is also accompanied by comments from the Significant Other who’s still making do with the same machine she had five years ago and is wondering when it’s going to be her turn to upgrade.

So yes, I *am* getting ready for Cataclysm, just like I was getting ready for the previous expansions. But I’m also realistic – I’m lazy and easily distracted and will probably be cursing again sometime near the end of the year.

(Photograph of Palermo Airport’s luggage carousel by Bjs)

The Spark of Excitement

Posted on by Gazimoff

Hype is a wonderful thing. It serves to promote new products and bring them to our attention. It’s also there to help build up excitement; to get us thinking about what fun we’ll be able to have when we’re finally able to get our hands on whatever it is that’s being promoted.

The problem I have with hype is that by making tomorrow look so incredibly exciting, it makes today feel positively mundane. It’s like I’m being reminded constantly about the boring drudgery of my boring life. It’s the kind of thing that makes me want to take a holiday. Fly south for the winter, do something interesting, that kind of thing. Wait for the snow to blow over and come back home when everything is shiny again.

I think Larisa mentions the same thing – we’re all beginning to feel a bit down at the moment. It’s like we’re being sent picture postcards from Cataclysm saying “Wish You Were Here”, yet we can’t fly out there for another 6 months or so when the ash cloud finally moves.

But hang on a minute – our lives aren’t dull and boring. We do exciting things on a daily basis, they’ve just become a little jaded and tarnished over time. If there’s anything that’s making us feel run down, it’s the routine and repetition we end up in. The boredom of repetition though is self-inflicted – we can choose to break that repetition if we desire.

So I’m making a commitment to myself. I reckon that I only play about a quarter of all the game has to offer. I normally do endgame raiding, heroic dungeons and some light RP. I always play spellcasters, moving them in the same direction and clicking the same hotkeys. Considering how much of the game there is available, that’s pretty feeble.

It’s time to mix it up a little. Time to make my own excitement.

I’m going to try and get my rogue up from level 50 to level 80. I’m going to learn the mechanics of the class, find the parts that entertain me and make me smile, and make him my own.

I’m going to get to grips with PvP in earnest. I’m going to get a full set of PvP-ready gear on my mage, kit him out properly, learn the ropes and get an arena team going. I’m going to try and find Gnomageddon’s desire to set things on fire.

I’m going to work on some roleplay themes that have been bubbling away for a while, and stop being a passive consumer of roleplay. I’m going to try and present more of a story to those I play with in order to generate in-game excitement and interest for them today.

There’s also another side to this. It means that I’m not going to be moaning at how boring things are at present and how there’s nothing for me to do, because it simply isn’t true. There are stacks of easy achievements that I don’t have, there are tons of quests that I’ve never done. I’ve not even begun to exhaust the range of content there is in the game.

This spark of excitement is something that’s inside all of us. We had it when we first started playing the game, and it’s still with us now. We’ve just grown used to it, forgotten that it’s there gathering dust in some corner of our being. It just needs to be pulled out and cleaned up a little.

Blizzcon? I’m Virtually There

Posted on by Gazimoff

The date for this year’s Blizzcon has been known for a while, but we’ve all been wondering when we’ll be able to lay our hands on some tickets. The great news is that tickets go on sale on June 2nd and 5th at $150 each. There’s more information about what you get for your bucks on the official Blizzcon site.

I’ll be watching it myself through the DirectTV feed. This year it’ll be multi-channel, so I can skip the PVP yawnathon and focus on the panels instead. Yay for choice!

As always though, the big question is what the in-game pet will be? In previous years the ‘con attendees and livestream subscribers have been given a small present, with last year’s being Grunty. Already the interwebs are rife with speculation on what this year’s will be.

Fortunately I can exclusively reveal that those of us attending Blizzcon (either in-person or virtually) will receive a Mini-Deathwing! As is traditional in these situations, there’s the obligatory screenshot below.

Blizzcon 2010 Mini-Deathwing Pet

I think you’ll agree this is definitely a pet worth getting, and easily beats any panel or new announcement that might come out during the weekend.

The Composer and the Engineer

Posted on by Gazimoff

Hail to the Chief chorus music

Cataclysm

Note: Minor mention about revised levelling system. Nothing that isn’t common knowledge already.

Over the last few months I’ve been using the Refer-a-Friend system to level up some new alts. It’s been a bit of a struggle – even with the perks and bonuses I’d forgotten how much of a grind the experience can be. More to the point though, it’s made me pay much more attention to the process behind gaining new skills and abilities, and how those abilities are then put to use.

Looking at it one way, learning how to play a class could be a bit like learning music. For a mage, you would start off with your basic nuking spell like Fireball, learning the rhythm of the class. You’d then build upon that with other spells, such as Scorch and Hot Streak, in order to create a rotation. The way that your fingers beat out a patern on your hotkeys is a similar pattern to a pianist – there’s a melody there that becomes increasingly complex as you gain levels. I think that it’s also true for Affliction Warlocks, learning how to weave their spells together in a well rehearsed pattern.

Looking at it a different way, you could treat it as an engineering problem, with each ability seen as part of an engine. To start off with you have a pretty basic engine that grunts along, but as you collect more engine parts you can start building some really fancy stuff. Of course if you put the parts together in the wrong way you get something that misfires horribly. Arrange the parts well and you have an engine that purrs, delivering meaty performance and incredible efficiency.

The trouble starts creeping in when you look at how you introduce new abilities to a player. Currently you hop along to your trainer, who teaches you both new skills and existing ranks of old skills at the appropriate level. And that’s it. There’s no real advice about when the new skill you’ve just learned is worth using, or if it’s helpful to your playstyle at all. Some of the best in-game resources for helping with this are other players, while Psynister’s Guides are a great “missing manual” for players levelling a new class.

But should we need these guides at all, or is this something that the game itself should do? Should the game be teaching this stuff to players instead, either through interactions with class trainers or by an extended tooltip method? Should we have to rely on the goodwill of other players in order to help us?

I think that Blizzard understand some of this problem by removing spell ranks in Cataclysm. It removes “trainer blindness” – that bit where you’re spam-learning a ton of skills. Most of the time they’ll be new ranks of spells you already know, with the occasional new one sneaking in. The idea is that by focusing your attention purely on skills that are new you’ll be much faster at incorporating them into your routine. I’m not sure if it’s sufficient to provide all the help a player needs, but I think it’s a welcome step in the right direction.

More fundamentally than this, I think that it’s a ripe time to have a look at how classes treat their skills. Do you want to treat players as composers, starting them off with the simple things and giving them a rhythm to build upon? Or do you want to treat them as engineers, handing them a Lego bucket of abilities with which to build an engine that roars? After all, the two different approaches require a different mindset and a different approach to how they are taught.

Personally I think that both are valid approaches, as players in general are a varied bunch. Some will prefer one style over another while a few will be able to handle both. By being upfront and helping to start that process, I think that players are much more likely to find a class that grips them to the end.

Maybe, just maybe, they’ll make an engine that sings.

Cataclysm: My Rules of Engagement

Posted on by Gazimoff

As the new expansion approaches, there’s going to be a huge amount of information released. Blogs and websites will go crazy, posting update after update on every single detail. The web will be awash with screenshots covering every single detail.

Some readers don’t really want to be presented with news on Cataclysm, and I can appreciate that. In order to be as fair as possible, I’ve listed what I will and won’t write about as far as this expansion is concerned. This will hopefully mean that those readers hoping for a spoiler-free experience should know what to expect.

I should point out that at this point I do not have access to the beta, and I’ve not tried sandboxing the alpha client. Until further notice, what I write about will be inferred from other sources of information. UPDATE: I’m now in the Beta, so I should be able to describe content first-hand.

What I will write about:

  • I’ll cover class mechanics in detail, particularly for mages. This includes what spells are available and how the talent trees affect those spells.
  • I’ll also touch loosely on professions, where the profession has a direct impact on the class. I’ll try to keep this as generic as possible.

What I won’t write about:

  • I’m not going to write about specific quests, even if those quests are significantly important. I want the stories they unveil to be fresh to people
  • I won’t be covering particular areas of zones where there’s been a radical change in Cataclysm. Again, I want players to be able to experience that “wow” factor for themselves.

What I’ll commit to doing:

  • Any post that might contain Cataclysm spoilers I’ll tag with [Spoiler] in the post title. If it’s a particular type of spoiler, I’ll add that too.
  • Anything that I link to that might contain spoilers, I’ll also label as such.

What I ask of you:

  • Please don’t post comments that include quest or lore spoilers, as I’ll probably delete them. If you must, please include a link and a tag instead.
  • Please feel free to chime in with your own thoughts and opinions. If you’re not talking about class specifics though, please try to be as generic as possible.

I hope all this makes sense, and is as fair to as many people as possible. With a bit of luck, this will mean those who want will get to experience the expansion as a fresh and new experience. If you have any questions, please feel free to add them in the comments!