The Vanish Fix is in.

So it appears that vanish has had its mega problems resolved by a simple method – you can still be hit in the 3 seconds after popping vanish but you won’t be taken out of stealth. So if all your enemies are furiously spamming AoE attacks in your general direction, your health will go down but you still have a shot at an opener. It seems so simple you have to ask why they didn’t think of it before. Maybe they did but they couldn’t make it work, who knows. But if this is true I will go out and sacrifice a chicken to the old gods as a thankyou.

I can’t pretend to have dug this up as it was Christian over at WoW.com who alerted me to it, so go check out his article. Check out the link he has to the elitest jerks thread and have a read through it as there’s some interesting stuff.

I’m also changing my blog list a little to reflect what I am presently reading and bloggers who have retired. I try to keep this updated as often as possible with blogs that I actively read.

ps; I got a nice comment on yesterdays post this morning from a reader saying that trawling through my old posts had helped their rogue play, (Thanks nice comment person!). However, this has brought to my attention the fact that I haven’t updated my tag cloud thingy or put posts in a category for about 5 months, which must make trawling through old posts pretty darn difficult. So I will do my best to update all those in the next few days I promise, I really do, hand on heart, maybe.

 

Raiding Prestige.

I was in Dalaran standing around waiting for a guildie to give me some enchanting mats when I suddenly got invited to a group by a stranger. Almost as quickly the invite disappeared and then I got a whisper of apology. It was another rogue. I whispered back;

“Those damn invite and inspect buttons are just too close for comfort, eh?”
“Indeed,” was his reply.

Truth be told, I myself had inspected him only a few moments before, checking out his impressive ilvl 264 weapons which I would do naughty things to an elephant in order to be able to get my hands on. The rest of his gear was all top level PvE stuff as well, nicely gemmed and enchanted. A wonderous thing to look apon. Some of his gear had the little heroic label on it and some of it was obviously from 25 man ICC. The best gear I ever saw on a rogue was back in BC when I saw a rogue decked out with all the top gear and the legendary twinblades. Man that dude looked cool.

Blizzard has announced that they will be giving the same gear and achievements to 10 and 25 man raids in the next expansion. There has been a lot of wailing and crying and happy people about this announcement in the time since, though things have quietened down somewhat in the last few days. I myself am happy with the change but I do think that it will be the death of 25 man raids for the simple fact that there will be no way to demonstrate to somebody inspecting you in Dalaran that you have run it. In short, running 25 mans with all the extra hassle and difficulty will garner you no prestige. You will have no special gear or achievements. There will be no way for you to show off with it. And this prestige goes a long way to getting players to put up with all the hassle of 25 man runs. Oh sure, maybe you’ll be able to find 10 or 15 players who still want to run 25 mans. But you won’t be able to flesh out the rest of the raid with the players who were doing it for epeen glory.

The question then is, where will the prestige be found? Arena gear will no longer have ratings either. Will the prestige be found in mounts? The common player needs the pull of potential prestige, even if they don’t have a realistic chance to get it. I hope Blizzard keeps this in mind for the next expansion, because otherwise we may see a decline in WoW.

 

Requests for Cataclysm

Dear Blizzard,

Hopefully soon you are going to release Cataclysm. This will be good as it will give us something to do. I am sure that you are going to put off the release with various arenas/battlegrounds/crappy PvE content to keep us occupied because it isn’t ready yet. Seeing that it isn’t ready yet, may I request a few things for the expansion? If you don’t want to put these in I understand perfectly due to the fact that you are all very busy and are a bunch of fucktards. Now that we’ve got off on the right foot, let me make my humble requests;

1. Arenas – these make our lives and yours rather difficult due to balancing issues. I know that if you nuke them altogether then people will say that you failed before and 0.000001% of the player base will be upset, so this obviously isn’t feasible. Could we make some arena-only realms where the laws of physics and magic function somewhat differently there? That could then leave the other realms to be arena free and not have to suffer through all the balancing decisions made as a result of this tedious medium.

2. Outland – Is there any point to this place anymore? It was a rhetorical question. I know that you wish the levelling process to continue through Outland but you have to know that apart from Nagrand, we all fucking hate that place. I’m not saying get rid of it, leave it out there hanging in space like a pair of undies on the washing line that you forgot before going on holiday for three months to India and when you come back you haven’t the heart to touch them again. Just give us a few alternative zones on Azeroth to get from 60-68. I know, make old raid content as a levelling option. AQ40! Yeeeeeaaaaaaahhhh!!!

3. Gnomeragon – Is that how you spell it? Whatever, please make this a city just so that I never have to run this as an instance again. While we’re on the subject I feel that Maraudon and Dire Maul should be turned into something else, such as theme parks or nudist colonies. To be fair, I shouldn’t comment on Dire Maul as I’ve barely done any of it, only due to the fact that I could never find a group to bare going with me at the appropriate level. It’s in my dungeon finder now though, so perhaps I can get back to you on this one.

4. The Weather effects – I like them a lot, please make more of them. How about some high and low tides in different parts of the world? And four seasons, would that be possible? Spring in the desert with flowers everywhere, that would be so lovely …

5. Vanish – Could you … ? Like … fix it?

6. Professions – Do something, anything, please, I like crafting but it is WoW’s weak point. Surely you could make these more interesting and not merely leveling time sinks.

If I think of any more I’ll throw them up. Thank you Blizzard for your oh so valuable time.