VE nerf, DPS buff for shadow priests in beta In the wake of sweeping alterations to shadow priests going live tonight, the inimitable Ghostcrawler has posted about a few more changes that will be making their way into the Wrath of the Lich King beta. ·         Vampiric Embrace is getting nerfed to bits. Fully talented, it currently heals group (not raid) members for 25%. It’s being changed to 5% to the group and 25% to the caster, again fully talented. A bit confused about this given GC’s statement that “we don’t want it to be terrible for priests in small groups” – 5% is pretty terrible. ·         Vampiric Touch’s coefficient is getting doubled, from 20% to 40%. Cool, though I don’t expect this makes up a huge part of your damage at 80. ·         Big DPS change: “Your Shadow Word: Pain, Devouring Plague and Vampiric Touch do an additional percentage damage equal to your critical strike chance.” This is crittable DoTs, basically, with the randomness taken out. Instead of critting (say) 25% of the time for double damage, you just hit for 125% damage all the time. And of course our other damage spells (Mind Flay, Mind Blast, SW:D) can already

Breakfast Topic: The revival of the non-standard group   The other night I told my guildies about a Hunter who used his Gorilladin to tank a Heroic instance. So they were determined to try it themselves in Heroic Mechanar. The group was three hunters and me as feral cat. Monkeyboy tank lasted two shots. Downgrading to Normal Mech we had a little more success when we added a healing Paladin. Not quite the Heroic run we were hoping for, but still good fun and I didn’t have to go bear. With all the new specs and players experimenting with new builds, have you found any non-traditional roles or group compositions since Patch 3.0.2?

Blizzcon 08: In-game item   I loved blizzcon last year but was really dissapointed that I couldn’t claim my reward on more than one character.   WoW has a play style that lends itself to creating new characters (and sometimes deleting old character to make way for new ones) all the time and for me and others having a server (or account) full of regularly played Level capped characters is normal.   Please keep this in mind when creating this years blizzcon rewards. i’m sure I speak for everyone when I express great interest in displaying proudly that I attended blizzcon on all of my characters and not just “The one I have the most interest in at that time”.   Thanks a ton and I look forward to attending as many forums on WoW and Diablo 3 (and maybe a little more infor on that movie coming) in the up coming blizzcon as possible!!  

Installing on Linux   It’s a problem with the HTML controls.   I got it to install by using ies4linux, shudder.   Run BC once using ies4’s wineprefix to create the proper registry entries, then run the wrath installer using ies4’s prefix, then move wrath to your regular wineprefix and create shortcuts as necessary.   $ WINEPREFIX=~/.ies4linux/ie6 wow $ WINEPREFIX=~/.ies4linux/ie6 /path/to/Wrath/Installer $ mv ~/.ies4linux/ie6/drive_c/Program\ Files/Wrath ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Wrath   $ cat ~/bin/wrath   #!/bin/bash cd /home/<me>/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Wrath\ of\ the\ Lich\ King\ Beta/ wine explorer /desktop=wow,1440×900 Launcher.exe “$@”&  

BlizzCon 2008: Everybody out   Our folks on the floor of BlizzCon have said a fire alarm has gone off, and they’re asking everyone to leave the convention. We can’t get inside to verify, obviously, but people are streaming out of the front of the hall. Currently, things in the press room here are unchanged, and we haven’t heard anything officially yet. More as we learn it. Update: We were heading into the hall, and saw an alarm go off. The guards at the doors started turning people away, and when we asked what was up, we were told it was a fire alarm and that we should exit the building. There’s still no action in the press room (and they haven’t interrupted the class panel on the floor), so it’s likely a false alarm. Update2: Whoops, the class panel is being held upstairs, not on the convention floor. We just sent our man Adam Holisky down to see what the ruckus is all about and get the inside story. It’s good having bloggers to boss around, and nice to know they’ll even walk into possible injury to do what we say. Update3: A security guard told Holisky that somebody tripped something they weren’t supposed to, and they are now letting people back onto the floor. Crisis..

Submit a question for the devs to answer at BlizzCon! Just popping in with a quick note here; even if you’re not going to BlizzCon, you can still enter a contest to have a question answered live by the developers. I braved the red tape for you all to figure out the following: ·         You have to be at least 13 years old. ·         You can’t be a resident of North Dakota, Connecticut, Vermont, or Maryland in the U.S., Quebec in Canada, or Queensland, Victoria, or the Australian Capital Territory in Australia. Otherwise, if you’re a player in the U.S., Canada, most nations of the E.U., South Korea, Singapore, or Australia, you should be eligible. No word on Russian, Mexican, or Latin American players so you guys may, like me, be ineligible. ·         You have until 4:00 pm PST October 11th (this Saturday) to enter the contest. Twenty contestants will be selected to have their questions answered, and if you’re one of the winners, not only will your question be answered, but you’ll also get a prize package containing various Blizzard swag items plus a new ATI graphics card. The actual submission form is right here if you’re interested (with the laundry list of rules