Recently in Wrath of the Lich King Category

Now that we are almost all traveling through Northrend, and we are well into our new year, I thought it night be a good time to look back on the war that was TBC. There were many fronts I that war, from the Naaru versus the Legion, to Scryers versus Aldor, even spreading to Alliance versus Horde. So who 'won' the war? Did the Naaru succeed in defeating the Burning Legion? Sure they had some victories, but as I flew through Hellfire the other day, I still saw plenty of demons, however Shattrath City also still stands, so the
Legion was not victorious in anything more notable than staying alive either.

The Scryers and Aldor began Burning Crusade as bitter hated enemies. Venturing into an opposition area was grounds to get booted from the city at best, get quickly killed at worst. While the forces came to work together over time, eventually joining forces under the banner of the Shattered Sun Offensive, venturing to Scyers Tier as an Aldor still gets the adventurer an unpleasant result. I am not sure what I would put this battle as, since it is neither won nor lost.

Now for the old standards, Alliance v. Horde. The two factions had more battle fronts in TBC than ever before. Hellfire, Zangarmarsh, Terrokar, Nagrand. More than half the zones of Outlands had a Horde v. Alliance fight, and while my realm most often had Alliance controlling the majority of those zones, Other realms cannot say the same. Again, we cannot declare a winner or loser in this particular battle.

So Aldor, Scryers, Naaru, Legion, SSO, Horde and Alliance. None of these groups 'won' the second expansion's content. I guess we need to look elsewhere for a winner. Firstly I think the players won the expansion. We got a lot of awesome content, some great new skills, and two years of amazing game play. We learned to fly, met the Draenei and Blood Elves, and found the end of the epic Sunwell storyline. Second, of course Blizzard won in TBC. From the first 24 hours of TBC, Blizz had a winner, setting records and learning from many design mistakes. What do you think? Who do you think won in the Burning Crusade era of WoW?

Below you will find a gallery of a few of the more spectacular sights I saw in the month or so between the launch of Wrath and when my paladin Medros dinged 80. Enjoy.

Those of you who are Alchemists and who have been for awhile now will recall the Burning Crusade days when a lot of what you did, in fact one of the most profitable parts, was transmutation. There were a few recipes on the trainers, some on faction quartermasters, and the majority were learned via discovery. There were a lot of Elixirs and Potions that were discovered as well, but by and large it was Transmutes that made the cash.

In beta the form of learning new transmutes and recipes seemed like it was going to change a bit with the appearance of research.  Sadly, I was wrong. Not only does all but one transmute require discovery, but the one you can train has pretty harsh mats, is on a 4 day cooldown, only has a chance of discovery, and is the only transmute you can discover from. I am not sure what you can learn from research, but as it requires over or nearly 40 herbs of different kinds, it too will be hard to perform.

While discovering items was hit or miss in Burning Crusade, in Wrath it feels somewhat more assured, but a lot more expensive. When you add in the fact that the discovery transmute, which requires mined resources, makes some that can be mined and smelted with no cooldown. All of this together means that transmuting in Wrath is incredibly frustrating and aggravating in the long run. We can only hope that Bliizzard will realize how hard they have made the transmutation aspect of the Alchemy profession.

Hi there! I am Medros! You might remember me from such events as the National Blog Post Month and National Podcast Post Month. I am very sorry for not posting for several days now, but after the monumental effort it took to do those two events, I needed a bit of breaking time. I am back, though, and wanted to give you some posts. I hope to give you 4-6 posts a week for the foreseeable future, content depending. Therefore I present to you the Top 5 Things I Learned from the Tundra and the Fjord:

1. The Forsaken Plaguebringers around Halgrind are very bad to fight at range. Unless you have a 1-2 shot spell to kill them, use melee. Their shoot plague attack hurts.
2. Remember all those poop quests that disgusted you in Burning Crusade? I have some bad news for you..
3. Breaking News! All Murlocs are not evil. More Breaking News! All Gorlocs are not evil either. Damn you Blizzard! First Murky, now this?!?
4. When a quest tells you to go fight giants, and it says to take friends, you should listen.
   
5. Photo ops with the Lich King more often than not kill the subject. The photographer is usually not far behind.
   

I know, not the best, but those are my top 5 observations from the first two zones of Northrend. I will note Medros is now 74, still not done in Howling Fjord, and only done a single run through Nexus. While I am sure the 300k XP I got on the first day helped, I am not at all sure how I have gotten so much from the first two zones. With Telaan almost halfway through 71 and having barely touched Borean Tundra, I am sure he will likewise get excellent leveling from the first two zones, especially as he has Cooking and Jewelcrafting dailies in Dalaran to do.

First up, this is not a rumor or even stated as possible by Blizzard. I do want to suggest this, though. The Collector's Edition of the game and expansions have not been cheap, ranging from $80 to $150 dependent on where and when you ordered it and the willingness of the vendor to gouge their customers. While you do get a fair bit, without a doubt, there is more Blizzard could do to reward players for their continuing loyalty, and their patronage in the face of the often high prices of the boxes. Some of the things Blizz could offer for loyal CE buyers are clips from Blizzcon, exclusive wallpaper, or ongoing flavor items in game. I will be talking more about this on today's AzPodMo, so do watch out for that episode!

I dinged 72 tonight in Borean Tundra, over a dozen quests still left to go, and wondered to myself. Is there a benefit to doing both of the starter zones, Borean Tundra and Howling Fjord? On beta I did both, and found I was barely halfway through Grizzly Hills before I got the quest in Dalaran to fly out to Sholazar. That was also before I had a 20% jump start in xp from my previously mentioned daily plan. I am almost certain I could get by pretty effectively without having to do the Howling Fjord, and instead moving on to Dragonblight right away. The lore of that zone makes it even more tempting, I assure you.

The flipside to all of that, of course, is gold. Cold, hard cash. If I do all the quests available as I go along, Borean, Howling, Blight, Grizzly, Sholazar, Zul'Drak, Storm Peaks, Icecrown, well I should hit 80 by Sholazar or Zul'Drak, I would think. In Beta I skipped a big chunk of Grizzly Hills to move on to Sholazar, and hit 77 about halfway there. I am pretty sure I would have left Sholazar late 78, or somewhere in 79 if I had stayed in Grizzly. This means it wouldn't have taken much in Zul'Drak, or maybe an instance or two, to hit 80 in that zone, leaving me roughly 2-2.5 zones of pure quest gold plus dailies.

This will be even better on Telaan, who will be leveled third, cause he is doing 2 dailies every day, and is nearing on 71.5. I suspect he will be into 72 before I pick him up to level again. How all of this might hit Ameland or Arita I am not sure, while I am pretty sure Connroe will be hit hard since he has about 22 levels to go and a long road to go. I think I will take him in chunks. In the end, this leveling thing can be tricky. In BC it took me 3 70s before I perfected it for Telaan, and I just do not know how close I can get this time to perfection. I had time between my toons to evaluate, collect, prepare. I do not see any Unidentified Plant Part type items that are tradeable in Wrath, so that might be hard. Time will tell, I suppose. What do you all think?

When Wrath came out, as I have chronicled before, I did a lot of different things. I rolled Connroe, my Death Knight, and worked him through the starting experience, then power leveled his Inscription to 360 or so. I worked on Medros, then Arita, and then Telaan, with a bit of time on Ameland to work on his skinning. In fact the only played toon I have done nothing on in the 9 days since Wrath is my lowbie hunter, whose enchanting I would like to get up so that I can DE all the greens I am making to progress my various skills.

The problem is that while I am 71 on 3 our of 4 prior 70s, I know people with less free time than I have who have gone from 65 to 75 in the same time. I have spent so much time repeating the same quests, the same areas, the same actions that I have slowed my own progress. Therefore I have decided to focus on Medros, much like I did in the early days of Burning Crusade, as my first and primary toon to level, and will level him up to 74. I will then decide if I want to level him to 77 or 80, or swap to Arita for some leveling. After both are up where I want, I will work on Telaan, as two Ret Paladins back to back would be really hard to do. I will still do the proper dailies on all three, but when it comes to questing Medros will be number one. What lessons have the first 10 days or so of Wrath taught you?

The news we have all been waiting for since the high that came from the launch of Wrath finally began to subside has finally arrived. Wrath of the Lich King, the second expansion to World of Warcraft, the most popular MMO in history, broke all previous sales records for a PC game, previously set by it's predecessor Burning Crusade, as they sold 2.8 million copies of the game in the first 24 hours of sales. I was recently talking to one of the few MMO players I know who did not get hooked on the WoW crack, and the one point about the superiority of WoW over EQ2 that he could not argue was the sheer subscriber count.

His beloved EQ2 could never even hope to rival the numbers that WoW had done, even since day 1, and between the number of players who returned from AoC and WAR, and the second expansion breaking records set by only the expansion before, the combined effect pretty much seals the fact that World of Warcraft is the biggest MMO in history.

I am even willing to admit I was wrong in my prediction that the problems with Wrath that Blizzard themselves admitted would not be fixed by the release date would hurt the subscriber and sales numbers for Wrath and the game overall. Blizzard announced a few weeks before Wrath that the subscriber count was at 11 million, up from the previous 10.7 million milestone, and the announcement I mentioned before about the droves of players who said they were leaving for AoC and WAR coming back, nearly 70% in one case. What do you think the future of WoW holds? 12 Million players worldwide? Do you think we will see 15 million? Let me know your predictions for the future of WoW in the comments!