World of Warcraft Gold Guide

I tried to make a “stealth nerf” pun in the headline, but it just wasn’t coming to me. Anyway, Blizzard has decided that items that grant stealth detection were feeling too mandatory in arenas, “forc[ing] players to use lower level equipment even when more powerful items were available to them.” Therefore, they’ve nerfed the lot of them. Ultra-Spectropic Detection Goggles can no longer be used in arenas. Epic engineering goggles will no longer grant stealth detection. Stealth detection on many other items (Catseye Ultra Goggles, Blood Guard’s Dragonhide Gauntlets, Marshal’s Dragonhide Gauntlets, Knight-Lieutenant’s Dragonhide Gloves, General’s Dragonhide Gloves, Bloodvine Lens, Knight-Lieutenant’s Dragonhide Grips, Blood Guard’s Dragonhide Grips, The Night Watchman) has been reduced. This hotfix is already live; tooltips are not updated, yet, but will be in the next patch (patch 3.1.2). What’s your reaction to this? Obviously it’s bad when people feel compelled to wear low-level items because they’re overpowered (witness the Badge of Tenacity for Druid tanks), but is this going to lead to

Filed under: World of Warcraft | No Comments »

We here at WoW Insider are on a Daily Quest to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere. Matticus’s UI blog, No Stock UI, takes a look at six different tooltip addons you may be interested in. We’ve talked about the Insane in the Membrane achievement ourselves, but The Unconventional Priest has a guide of her own that may help you out on your quest to become completely and utterly insane. Make sure you check out parts I, II, and III. Haven’t gotten your hands on your epic flying mount yet? That’s alright. Here are some tips on how to make that 5000g with the Art of Soloing. Many players are getting deeper and deeper into Ulduar with every passing day. Are you hybrids ready for General Vezax?

Filed under: World of Warcraft | No Comments »

Blizzard has announced a partnership with ESL TV to bring streaming footage of eSport competitions of Blizzard’s games, including Warcraft 3, WoW, and Starcraft. The service has been dubbed the Blizzard eSports Channel, likely due to its preponderance of Blizzard, eSports, and channels (but no man can be truly certain). The service is accessible for World of Warcraft subscribers through the Account Management page of WoW’s main site. This is pretty cool news for the type of people who like to watch really, really good players have it out, replete with commentary. I visited the site today and found that there was not only a ton of archived games to watch, but there was a bunch of live games going on too. You can filter the videos and live channels by the game or game type, too, in case you hate watching Starcraft players practice their uber micro but just love Sentinels on Scourge action. I imagine the chances are pretty good that we’ll see Starcraft 2 added to the list of games available for viewing once it’s launched, too, as well as future titles that make their way to Battle.net. Given Blizzard’s years-long push now for better representation in

Filed under: World of Warcraft | No Comments »

We here at WoW Insider are on a Daily Quest to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere. The YOGSCast has done it again. Another flawless Ulduar strategy. You can either watch it embedded above, or over on their YouTube page. You might want to watch it in HD, it’s worth it. Big Bear Butt talks about his guild and how they approach casual raiding. You could learn a thing or two from him, perhaps! We’re a day late on linking this one, but Frost is the New Black was right there Sunday morning to honor the Mothers of Azeroth. Slice and Dice answers some of their most frequently asked Rogue questions!

Filed under: World of Warcraft | No Comments »

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. Flamers and trolls aside, WoW Insider readers are generally a contentious lot. Their viewpoints are as divergent as the player demographics the site attracts – all types of players, from the casual to the hardcore. With this many angles to consider, WoW Insider becomes a melting pot of ideas and opinions, from the sublime to the ridiculous. (And let’s face it – some of the so-called ridiculous ideas are the most entertaining to read.) Yet this week, readers seemed to be more often of one mind than not – whether that agreement was ultimately to agree over the topic at hand or to agree to disagree. [1.Local] highlights several reader conversations that made the radar this week. Are PuG raiders disposable? Readers agree: while guild-only raids are a good thing, dumping PuG players for latecoming guildies is not. “As someone who often PUGs due to my unstable schedule, I have to say that there are guilds who treat me like an extension of their guild,” wrote

Filed under: World of Warcraft | No Comments »

Toussaint is exactly right — this took me back. Way back to the original login screen and music, when level 60 was the max and everyone was running UBRS and the Plaguelands instances, and “heroic” was just something us players were. Even the Burning Crusade login screen, right, brings back some memories, of wandering around Hellfire Peninsula and raiding in Netherstorm. The roar of the frost wyrm we have now is nice and all, but sometimes we long for earlier days. Which brought me to the question: what about a theme-switching system? There’s no real reason the login screen has to be set to the current expansion — while it’s nice to have a new look to that interface every time we reinstall the program, there’s nothing the new one really does that the old one couldn’t. You’d think they’d be easy to change around, and if Blizzard just gave us a drop-down switcher in the options, we could choose whichever one we wanted. Let’s not forget, however, that their code is weird — you wouldn’t think that they’d hard-wire the new Battle.net login code to the newest login screen, but maybe they did something

Filed under: World of Warcraft | No Comments »

With all this talk about the Curse client and WoWMatrix, it’s easy to forget that another major player is entering the scene soon (™): MMOUI Minion, from the people at WoWInterface. According to the FAQ for the forthcoming client, the target date for open beta testing is May 17, 10 days from today. Here are some salient points about Minion: Will work on Windows, Mac and Linux. Has an option to auto-update, set to “off” by default. There will be a premium version, but the only difference will be that premium users don’t see ads. In contrast to the Curse client, the non-premium version of Minion is not crippled, and will have an update-all button and wow goldfull download speed. If an author enables donation requests, they will show up in the updater. Most interesting to me is the module system that the client will support. There’s going to be an API in Minion so that anyone who wants to can write plug-in modules; for instance, Curse could write a module that would let Minion users update addons from Curse in Minion. They could show their own ads, and make their own decisions about whether to enable/disable “premium” features for the

Filed under: World of Warcraft | No Comments »

Alan over on WoW LJ has a great question: just what is PuGgable? Lots of people are talking about Naxx and Vault of Archavon and Obsidian Sanctum as PuGable, or able to be taken down by a pickup group, but just where does the line get drawn? Is 25-man Naxx able to be killed by a PuG? Sarth with three drakes? Ulduar? Most of the 10-man instances are generally easy enough to be dropped by a pickup group, in my experience, though probably not for the achievements. A well-geared PuG can roll right through Naxx or VoA without any problems at all. But when you start getting into the achievements (Sarth with drakes) or the higher content (Eye of Eternity is tough unless everyone in there is experienced), then things get a little shady. Which is why lots of PuG leaders will be checking gear and achievements — they’d rather take along someone who’s already done the content than worry about pulling newbies through. Services and reputations can help that a little bit too — a good friends list can come in very handy for PuGging even hard content. And I’d say Ulduar is not PuGgable, yet, for a number of reasons. First of all, it’s brand new, which means

Filed under: World of Warcraft | No Comments »

When patch 3.1 went live, Destruction warlocks (and 0/40/31s) had a lovely time smacking everything in sight with massive Conflagrates. This was promptly nerfed, for PvP purposes; the devs felt it was overpowered for ‘locks to be able to do that much, that fast. However, it was acknowledged that Destro would need some PvE buffing to make up for it. It looks like we’ll see that buff in patch 3.1.2, when the deep-Destro talent Fire and Brimstone is currently planned to be changed to: Now increases the damage done by your Incinerate and Chaos Bolt by 15% on targets afflicted by Immolate, and increases the critical strike chance of your Conflagrate by 25% (at rank 5). The first part is entirely reworked, and the second part used to only apply if your target’s Immolate had 5 or fewer seconds remaining. There was also a brief and terrifying time where they were considering changing Glyph of Conflagrate to give an entirely different effect, but fortunately, the current plan is to leave it as-is. Will this F&B revision be enough to make Destruction competitive with Affliction again? We’ll see; I know I’ll be trying it out.

Filed under: World of Warcraft | No Comments »

We’ve heard about suggestions of vanilla servers before (and Blizzard has flatly stated that they have no plans for them), but here’s a new twist: Nomnom on Korgath says that Blizzard should finally, once and for all, abandon the old world. He says that leveling from 1-60 is a pain, even with the changes and recruit-a-friend (and on that, I agree — my Paladin is level 50 and staying there, because leveling is boring), and that Blizzard should just start all new characters at level 55, especially if you’ve already got a 70+ character. They already did it with Death Knights, and those have worked their way into the endgame just fine. That idea’s definitely been batted around before, and anyone leveling an alt can definitely see the benefits. But think of what you’re giving up with a new rule like that: Deadmines, Wailing Caverns, Scarlet Monastery. All of the epic quests and reputations, all of the great old-world vistas and settings. Plus, new players to the game will find the old world even emptier than it already is — everyone who has a high level character will already be leveling through Outland or Northrend. Do we really want to

Filed under: World of Warcraft | No Comments »