Moonkin form and mana regeneration
The mechanics of Moonkin Form are also being altered. Currently, a Moonkin can start bonking its target in order to regenerate mana equal to 30% of your attack power, which is boosted slightly by Moonkin form as well.

In Wrath, this AP boost is being dropped, and you will no longer be bonking things over the head with a feral weapon in order to regenerate some mana. Instead, your regeneration will be passive, and determined by your critical strike chance. When you crit, you have a chance to gain 2% of your total mana. Because Moonkin already stack some spell crit, this will be a nice bonus effect. Plus, you won’t have to change your playstyle to make use of it.

Actually, you should theoretically regen more mana this way than with the current system, considering that most druids have a healthy mana pool. Of course, it will also depend on how high your critical strike rating is, and how often the effect procs.

Threat reduction
Currently, Boomkin generate quite a bit of threat, with their aura, high damage output and large crits. In order to reduce their threat, you need to invest 15 points into the Restoration talent tree in order to get Subtlety, 4/8/12/16/20% reduction to threat generated by all types of spells, although with the expansion this will only affect Restoration spells.

The patch notes indicate that Nature’s Reach will, in addition to what it does now, reduce threat generated by Balance spells by 15/30%. Considering this is a 10% boost, is located on tier three, consumes only two talent points, and helps you to reach further into your main tree, this is definitely a pretty useful buff for PvE.

Casting time
Nature’s Grace is a talent that activates upon a critical strike, and currently wipes 0.5 seconds off of the cast time of the druid’s next spell. Wrath, which has a 1.5 second casting time, cannot take advantage of this because it is limited by the global cooldown of 1.5 seconds, which slows crit chaining.

According to the patch notes, this talent will soon reduce the global cooldown of your Wrath spell by 50% when activated, allowing you to cast the spell 33% quicker after a critical hit. Because it is such a quick spell, this will be useful for PvP and PvE.

Nerfs
The only current nerf to the Balance tree seems to be a reduction in the efficacy of Lunar Guidance. Instead of buffing your healing and spell damage by 25% of your total intellect when fully talented, you will receive a maximum of 12% instead.

Entangling Roots and Improved Faerie Fire
As promised, Entangling Roots will be usable indoors, which will mean that usage will no longer be limited to the handful of outdoor dungeons, and can be used in the flag room in Warsong Gulch. Accordingly, Nature’s Grasp and Improved Nature’s Grasp, which buff roots, will now also activate when indoors.

Talenting Improved Faerie Fire currently increases the chances that the target will be hit by melee and ranged attacks, which is great for raiding. Come the expansion, this will also work for spells

 RoleCraft: Just My Imagination

A long time ago, when I was a kid playing with other kids my age, we had this thing we’d do whenever we got together. It usually started with someone saying something like, “Hey, let’s pretend we’re…”, and suddenly, we transformed ourselves and our view of the world into something fantastical and wondrous. We became cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, samurai and ninja, a Star Trek Away team, Jedi Knights, and once, we were mystical super heroes who used classical music as our weapons. Those are of course just a few examples of play sessions I took part in, and I’m betting those of you my age, older, and possibly younger, can maybe relate with me on a deep and personal level.

Imagination is one of the greatest elements the mind is capable of. While the amount of knowledge that the brain can hold may be finite, it is imagination that completely removes any limit to what the human mind can ponder and believe. Merriam-Webster Online calls it a “creative ability”, and it is an ability that everyone possesses, albeit some seem to have a much greater grasp on how to use it.

Roleplayers are such people, I believe. I think (the use of) imagination is the key factor that separates roleplayers from non-roleplayers, and also helps to tell the difference between roleplayers and hard core roleplayers. RP in our beloved MMORPG’s begins not in the game, but in the mind, the imagination, of the player playing the game. The game simply helps (or should) with the ability to physically see what our imagination can project.

As for those of us who seem to have no trouble expressing our imagination through our gaming, much of what I’ll say here may be old hat, common knowledge. If so, perhaps you’ll still find something new in the following suggestions for those less skilled in the use of imagination for building and making better use of your imagination in RP.

I like this line in the Imagination entry on Wikipedia: “A basic training for imagination is the listening to storytelling (narrative), in which the exactness of the chosen words is the fundamental factor to ‘evoke worlds’.” I couldn’t agree more. There are a ton of resources from which a person could pull imaginative ideas from, but none I think more important than the reading or hearing of stories. I was a voracious reader as a child, on up until a few years ago. I am still constantly reading nowadays, starting and finishing about three books a month, but that is nothing compared to my youth, when I would easily go through the same amount during a normal week. I read everything I could get my hands on, no matter the subject or genre. I’m a bit more picky in my adult life about what I read, but the fact remains that I read much and often. I wish to pass this along to my fellow roleplayers, young and old, as a primary tip: Be specific when reading to strengthen your imagination.

Roleplayers are readers. Simply put, all this means is you should match what you read to the game you are looking for RP help in. For instance, if you are looking to broaden your RP imaginative tools for WoW, you’re in luck, for there is an entire library of books to choose from, available at the official Blizzard Entertainment Online Store. Fiction books, the trading card game, the tabletop roleplaying game, and official strategy guides, all are top potential items to use in cramming your imagination full of the lore, facts, and general information about WoW, which will only help you in creating and playing some high quality RP in your game sessions.

This same method can also be used no matter what genre your favorite MMO happens to be. If you play sci fi MMORPG’s, like Star Wars Galaxies (for which there is also a huge mass of books written to peruse) or Anarchy Online, then stick with sci fi books. Many classic authors, like Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury, are themselves the inspiration for many of today’s top game makers, so why not get it straight from the source? Of course, that’s not to forget about some of today’s top sci fi authors, for which Orson Scott Card comes first to my mind.

In traditional fantasy gaming, of course one of the first names to come to mind should be J.R.R. Tolkien. If you don’t know what world famous books he wrote, then you are in need of more help than I can provide. I dare say roleplayers would consider it an atrocity to meet someone calling themselves a roleplayer who has never read The Hobbit or any of The Lord of the Rings books.

To pay homage to a couple more very notable authors here, I ask you to not forget Madeleine L’Engle, who wrote the brilliant book A Wrinkle in Time, and Robert Jordan, author of the fantastic Wheel of Time series. Both authors passed away this year, but thankfully gave us some excellent and profound worlds and characters to mentally experience. I highly suggest you go read any and every book from these two you can find.

Now, to be sure, there are hundreds of other authors I could mention here, more than a few for every MMORPG setting and style that exists today. If you have such a question or need help with this, by all means, feel free to email me, I’m happy to help. Though my focus in this article is about reading, don’t of course forget about other imagination building media, like music (Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd), movies (The Matrix, Lord of the Rings), TV (Battlestar Galactica, Doctor Who), and even other games, from traditional RPG’s (Dungeons & Dragons, World of Warcraft the Roleplaying Game), to CRPG’s games of yesteryear and today (the Ultima series, Baldur’s Gate, Knights of the Old Republic, and Oblivion).

Imagination is certainly a key element in our RP, but more than that, it is a vital instrument in our daily lives, as long as it isn’t taken to the extreme. So, when you think you may have ‘hit a wall’ in RP’ing in your favorite MMORPG, take some time out to feed your imagination, expand your mind with a good book, and just pay attention and enjoy a good story through the vision of your minds’ eye. I don’t believe you’ll regret it. Role on!

WoW: Wrath of the Lich King Hands On
Eurogamer has posted a article about their visit to Blizzard and a chance at Wrath of the Lich King. It’s all summed up like this:
If Burning Crusade was a wild explosion of ideas, then Lich King is shaping up to be a smoothly orchestrated crescendo of them. It brings to mind the elegance, coherence and sense of direction of the Blood Elf starting areas – perhaps the jewel in Burning Crusade’s crown – only achieved across an entire continent.
“Northrend’s been kind of a coming home,” lead designer Jeff Kaplan told us. Despite the fact that Blizzard has been working on WOW non-stop for some eight years now, he maintains that his team is currently “in love with it”. As surprising as that it is, we don’t doubt it for a second. In every aspect of Wrath of the Lich King, it shows.
The article is a lengthy one and worth reading. It’s also accompanied by several screenshots. Enjoy!

The size of World of Warcraft is not at all a problem; many forms of transport can be used to get around to any place. Transport forms like a character’s two feet, a pair of wings, etc. But my opinion the best way to save some money and time especially while navigating in the World of Warcraft, is to know which the best means of transport is.

While using the main roads the best way is always travel by foot. Since they have signs at intersections, that would lead the player in the right direction. Traveling on the foot is quite ok until the 15th to 20th level as almost any of the locations in the World of Warcraft can be reached quite easily by this means with out the aid of a World of Warcraft map. Even though the towns are really, you would never find trouble with direction, since any of the guards will be able to guide you through any part of the town, they also place flags on the mini map inbuilt in the game to help them follow the right direction.

And soon after you complete level 20 you will sure need a world of warcraft map, without which navigation to complete tasks would be quite difficult. Today there is nothing to worry about since the is provided with many sophisticated expansion maps.

The expansion maps available in this game, is exactly like the Google Maps. Here you can zoom in and out, scroll and view different areas and select resources ands labels. It has more than 20,000 data points with 94 resources and their exact file location including herbs and ores. In these maps you also have the option of display treasure, flight paths, city names and zone names. This development in the maps is quite advanced from the original WoW maps. Here you can also link popular locations with any of your friend by just clicking and copying the location. Isn’t that amazing?

These expansion maps can be downloaded from Map WOW. They are also assuring that they will bring in a lot of added features to the maps in the future. They take into consideration the customers comments and suggestions to better their maps.

And after you have reached the 40th you are in a position to buy a land mount, which will help you cover distances much faster pace, with a native mount for each race. And for success in this point of the game a map is really essential. And soon as you reach level 60 you could buy a flying mount, which will help travel even faster and then you could never say what would happen without a World of Warcraft Map.

On the look out for help in the or are you new to this game? WoW Easy Gold is the answer; you can find all the help and advice possible here.