Various Recent Blue Posts, June 2010

I’ve picked up on some interesting posts by Blizzard today that I thought I would share, starting with this exchange with Ghostcrawler regarding alts, BoA (heirloom) gear, and the achievement system.

The heirloom/BoA gear is in a good place now, if you ask me. With the chest and shoulders, your lowbie characters will sport neat-looking gear that provides decent stats and a massive 20% boost to xp gains. Couple that with a BoA weapon and most classes will shred through mobs as they blast away levels at a break-neck pace (only eclipsed by dual boxing Recruit-A-Friend accounts). If you manage to win the Kalu’ak Fishing Derby, you can obtain the BoA ring that bumps the xp rate by another 5%. Most characters can cover a large amount of gear slots with heirloom gear, so I don’t believe there’s much room for additional heirlooms. One I wouldn’t mind seeing would be a shield, say with stamina and hit rating…not sure what other stat could be added, since the item could be used by offensive casters (ele shaman), healers (resto shaman and holy paladins), and tanks (warriors and paladins), but decent shields can be tough to come by while leveling. I don’t view it as being a necessity, though. Heirloom gear is in a great place now, and has made leveling alts tons of fun. Uber gear alone makes leveling faster, let along uber gear that has +xp bonuses on it!

Now on to the achievement system…and I cannot WAIT for achievements to be account-wide/bound. I have recently ascended to an achievement level of OVER NINE THOUSAND, while my highest other alts flail around in the 3-4k range. With the achievement system being account wide, it will help folks like yours truly, who has ample raid experience on his main, get into pugs with my alts even if their gear/spec/whatever isn’t up to standards (such as the VoA 10s requiring 5k+ gearscore…please die in a fire). Not only that, but if it were to consolidate some achievements that are scattered about on various characters. I have at least 3-4 achievements towards the Battlemaster title that are on characters that are not my main, who has the majority of said achievements. Also, would it accumulate your battleground victories from all characters, or just take the highest number you’ve acquired on a single character? I would think (and hope for) the latter. Maybe we’ll luck up and the achievement system will become account-wide when battle.net is fully fleshed out (since I expect future Blizzard games to include such an achievement system).

Now, we also have some more Wintergrasp balance changes coming down the pipe. I’m surprised this particular change wasn’t implemented already. I expect there to be a lot of tears shed when this one goes live, particularly from realms where the horde/alliance population ratio is heavily skewed in favor of one faction (such as US Mal’ganis, where horde outnumber alliance by a ratio of around 4-5:1…maybe even worse now). I agree with the OP in this post; Tenacity sucks. I’d much rather balance the game by going by the lowest common denominator instead of relying on a buff of uberness that lets folks 1 shot enemies while requiring 10 of them to gather up to take down one person. I could see it being fun for a time or two, but not game after game after game, aka Windrunner horde and their constant 10+ stacks of tenacity.

Last, but not least, we have this wonderful bit about cross-battlegroup BGs. I can only hope that this is the answer for the annoying queue times for horde players that have cropped up ever since faction transfer was introduced. Perhaps this in conjunction with the new races in Cataclysm (from my observations, there are more people interested in going worgen than there are those wanting to play goblin), the queue times will finally even out to where they are a very short wait. As it is now, Alliance players have almost instant queue times, whereas Horde players find themselves waiting 10-15 minutes on average for a random BG queue to pop. I do wonder, though, if cross-battlegroup BGs work out well if it will extend over to arena. If so, there wouldn’t be any more of the “you’re either BG9 or you suck” jalopy going on, and queue times for arena would just about be non-existant (they just about are, least on Stormstrike at crappy low rating, heh).

As for me, things are going well. New guild is now 5/12 on ICC 25 hard modes, and we’re looking to make that 7/12 this Sunday. 10 man group should be going in tomorrow evening, so hopefully I’ll knock off a few more achievements towards a sick looking frostwyrm mount. 🙂