Warning: The above pic is not of a real Cataclysm Beta bug.

After playing the Cataclysm Beta for about a week now one of my favorite things is searching for (and inevitably finding) very strange and bizarre bugs.  Azeroth is full of them as Blizzard is busy destroying and rebuilding the entire world.  I’ve found a few great ones but I’m not the only one as beta testers all over the Internet are taking full advantage of the lifted NDA to post screenies of some of the bugs they have found as well.  Here are a few of them; some funny, some frustrating and all of them…uh…buggy.

Mount Speeds at 0%

This was actually accurate for a while.  Players would mount up and then move at walking speed.  Thankfully it has been fixed but the tool-tip is still showing no run speed increase.  Turtle mounts for everyone!

Unable to Train Spells

Copied characters are unable to train the new spells that have been added at lower levels such as Divine Light and Seal of Truth for a Paladin or Trap Launcher for a Hunter.  While that alone is frustrating enough the fix for now is to drop a profession.  Not too big of a deal for most but for my buddy who has Shadowmourne gemmed with Jewel Crafting gems, it is extremely annoying.  Especially since one thing we want to do as beta testers is try out the new recipes for our professions.  Hopefully this will get fixed soon.

DK Sigil Scaling out of control

Thanks to Ardhavara from Goon Squad for discovering the funky scaling of the Sigil of Awareness.  Before equipping it on the Obliterate tooltip boasts a “plus 2902″ to damage while after equipping it the damage bonus leaps to “plus 4855″.  Almost 2000 more damage from a piece that promises to up the base damage of Obliterate by only 336.  This is some thorough beta testing here by Ardhavara and as you can see tool-tips are very often buggy.  Even in the live game now you will find several tool-tip irregularities.

Visual Bugs

Here are just a sampling of the visual bugs that are all over the Cataclysm beta right now.  Lumped together for your viewing pleasure.

Funky half invisible Kara mount

Agghhh!  Sudden redness!

Magical lava

Woah!

The beta is full of ‘em.  If you have any cool or interesting screen shots of Cataclysm bugs post a link in the comments before they get fixed and we never get to see them.

Curse.com, a portal that offers many tools for MMO players, has purchased MMO-Champion.com from Major League Gaming.  MMO-Champion.com is one of the most popular World of Warcraft news sites boasting more than 7 million unique visitors and over 80 million page views a month.  The site is popular for it’s simple design and Blue Tracker as well as providing many sneak previews of upcoming changes to WoW.  MMO-Champion’s founder and administrator, Fabien Bonte, will be joining Curse as a full-time employee and maintains that “99% of the decisions on the site” will still be made by him.  While Curse has been a leading provider of MMO tools and resources since being founded by Hubert Thieblot in 2005, some gamers will also be wary of the deal since Curse, along with WoWInterface, led to the downfall of WoWMatrix.  Here is the press release as found on MMO-Champion.com:

San Francisco, CA – July 19, 2010 – Curse, Inc. announced today the purchase of the #1 World of Warcraft news site, MMO-Champion.com. The site was bought from Major League Gaming for an undisclosed amount.

MMO-Champion is a natural fit for Curse which already possesses the largest repository of add-ons available for MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) games such as World of Warcraft, Warhammer Online and Runes of Magic as well as extremely popular forums for Runescape, Aion and Final Fantasy XIV. The World of Warcraft news site attracts 7 million unique visitors and more than 80 million page views per month (Google Analytics WW, June 2010). The combination makes Curse the #1 MMO destination online.

“The acquisition of MMO-Champion markedly sets Curse apart from the competition,” said Hubert Thieblot, CEO and Founder. “Not only does the addition solidify Curse as the largest MMO destination on the web, but it plays a central role in delivering a complete Curse MMO solution. Curse is now the ultimate resource for MMO news, forums, databases, and add-ons.”

Gamers and advertisers alike will benefit greatly from MMO-Champion’s purchase by Curse. In the next few months, visitors can expect an updated page design and improved user experience. To insure the site’s strong content offering will not be compromised, Fabien Bonte, the site’s founder and administrator, will be joining the Curse staff as a full-time employee. Advertisers can take advantage of Curse’s extended reach into the core MMO market, making MMO gamers easier to connect with than ever. For more information about Curse and MMO-Champion, please visit www.curse.com.

While the acquisition of sites is nothing new, patrons of the site may fear that things will change a bit too much for their liking.  One of the major draws of the site currently is the ease of finding information as it is basically a blog featuring the days news in full layout on the front page.  A redesign as well as the addition of premium content may hurt the sites fan base but some features may be getting an upgrade as well, so time will tell if the move is positive or not from a gamers perspective.

Lightwell – Maybe the dumbest spell I can think of.  The idea is not horrible but in today’s raiding environment does anyone have time to stop their rotation for a moment to click on something for a heal?  I know when I’m dpsing or tanking the last thing I want to think about is healing.  That’s what the healer is for.  I’ve got a great idea.  How about we put a little Shadowwell on the ground and the healers can click on it to dps things?  Dumb right?  Right.  Also, why in crap does damage break the heal?  The only time I could see something like this really being useful is during a high damage AoE from a boss except with that wrinkle, it’s completely useless in those scenarios.  According to Blizzard’s placement of the talent in the Holy tree, they must have assumed it was as powerful as Power Infusion or Shadow Form.  Whoops.  I don’t know a single Holy Priest who takes this talent and that is all the evidence I need.

Blizzard doesn’t appear to be dumping this spell and are even requiring that Holy Priest take it to get the Chakra talent.  If they’re not dumping it, maybe Lightwell could be a spell you cast on a player who then heals everyone around them for certain amount over 6 seconds which would add to a Holy Priests existing AoE healing abilities.

Dampen/Amplify Magic – I know, we use Amplify Magic on the Saurfang fight.  I’m aware of that.  However; one fight does not make a spell useful or necessary.  I also don’t know a single Mage who is excited when I remind them to please “give amp magic to the raid please”.  They all have the same reaction, “Ugh”.  Dampen Magic is especially useless unless you are in pvp and there are no healers which usually means you will be failing no matter what you do.  I do think the idea is solid but in practicality it comes up so rarely that these spells are often completely forgotten about by many Mages.

We already know that Blizzard is planning to dump these spells and that doesn’t bother me in the slightest, but if we were to keep them maybe make them into more of a defensive cool-down rather than a 10 minute buff.  I could definitely see the use in a combo spell that lessens magic damage taken and ups healing and lasts for say 6 seconds.

Raptor Strike/Mongoose Bite/Counterattack – Hunters are not a melee class.  Yet we get three, that’s right, three different melee attacks.  Absolutely the wrong way to teach a new Hunter that they should be shooting things from afar.  Wing Clip is useful since Hunters need to get away from close up enemies but other than that I think it’s time to face facts.  Hunters do need to be able to do some damage to people within melee range but to have three types of attacks is bit odd.

I love the idea of giving Hunters pistols to use in melee range.  While you could use the same ranged abilities there would be a damage penalty that would encourage Hunters to get back out to range while not forcing us to keep melee abilities on our action bar.  If you’ve ever played a Hunter you probably know how many abilities are already there and this would allow Blizzard to drop some lame abilities.

Mind Soothe/Soothe Animal – Druids don’t get Soothe animal until level 22.  By that point you should just be going Cat Form and Prowling.  Priests can Mind Soothe which I guess could be useful while questing but if you can’t kill a mob reliably you got bigger problems than Mind Soothe can fix.  These seem like spells that sneaked in there because Blizzard need to give players something new around level 20 and ran out of ideas.  Dumb spell with almost no uses at all.

I do like the idea of these spells upping the targets vulnerability to other spells though.  I’ve heard of Priests using Mind Soothe on the Instructor Razuvious fight but I admit I have never confirmed that it really works.  Imagine though that a Priest could use Mind Soothe to refresh a Shackle or a Mind Control or a Druid could use Soothe Animal to refresh a Hibernate or increase the length of a Cyclone.  I could see some use in that.

Now you get to tell us what you think.  Leave a comment with any spells you hate or think should change or tell me how wrong my analysis is.  Now’s the best time to talk about these kind of things since the future of World of Warcraft is still being…well crafted and many spells will be dumped and overhauled.

In a huge victory for the thousands of posters to the Blizzard official forums over the last few days Mike Morhaime posted a response to the recent uproar about Blizzard requiring Real ID names on the forums:

“I’d like to take some time to speak with all of you regarding our desire to make the Blizzard forums a better place for players to discuss our games. We’ve been constantly monitoring the feedback you’ve given us, as well as internally discussing your concerns about the use of real names on our forums. As a result of those discussions, we’ve decided at this time that real names will not be required for posting on official Blizzard forums.”

And there was much rejoicing.

Blizzard ignited a huge debate in their forums with an announcement on the official forums.  Around the time of Cataclysm’s launch all posts made on the forums will use Real ID names which are also of course the real names of the posters.  At the time of this writing there are multiple threads on the US and EU forums, some with over 1400 pages and counting.  Some of you may know as listeners of The Instance, Scott and Randy are not known for their fondness of the official Blizzard forums but what does this mean for future of the forums?

I see several good and bad points that may come from this.  Just like most things in life the outcome will not be black and white and will fall somewhere in between but one thing is for sure; Blizzard is moving forward with this change.  Let’s discuss both sides of the arguments for and against.

The Good:

• Trolls will be forced to do their trolling in the light of day – while many people on the forums are posting with their main characters names displayed, many posts (and especially the negative ones) can be found with a level one alt listed as the author.  People love to say the nastiest things imaginable when they can hide behind the internet’s veil of anonymity and this may clean up the Blizz forums quite a bit.
• Spammers and gold sellers will have a tougher time harassing people via the forums – It’s not the most used vehicle for gold sellers and spammers but it is out there and this change will probably curb that significantly.

That’s really all the good I can find.  Please let me know if I missed anything.  Now, some of the bad.

• People will become much more exposed to other players that they may not want to be exposed to – Let’s be honest about this.  In a world of Facebook and Twitter most people are relatively exposed already, but some people (like myself) have segmented their online persona  and have different circles of friends in the many social networks available.  Now if someone were to google my real name they may find out that I am a heavy WoW forum poster (I’m not actually) and while someone like myself certainly doesn’t mind that, there are people who will.
• The children – I hope that parents aren’t allowing their kids to run around on the net unsupervised but I’m sure that some are.  These kids will become a bit more susceptible to creepy people.  If you are a parent, just don’t let your kids use the internet in dangerous ways.
• Mistaken identity – There are a lot of people with common names in the world.  Even with a way to differentiate these people, unobservant folk will mistake people for others quite a bit.  Some sticky situations will arise from this surely.

There are much more repercussions to discuss but I’d love to know what you think.  Does the good outweigh the bad or vice-versa?  Does it affect you?  Do you give a crap?

Bornakk!

A couple of my personal favorites:

• Q: Are Mimir and Mimiron supposed to be the same entity, or are they relatives?
  A: Same entity, though only his close friends are allowed to call him Mimir.

• Q: What happened to Algalon after Ulduar? It didn’t seem like he was just going to go back to business-as-usual.
  A: As shown in the World of Warcraft Special #1 comic, Algalon is currently monitoring the activities of the mortal races of Azeroth. His outlook on life and the titans’ plans has been called into question, so he seeks to understand what makes Azeroth so different from the countless worlds he has observed before.

You can find the complete thread here

Are micro-transactions like the Pandaren Monk pet the future of Warcraft?

A recent news story on pcgamer.com features some quotes from WoW lead designer Tom Chilton who even goes as far as saying that, “at some point, it may not make sense for us to have a subscription fee.”  These are some strong words from someone in the know and they lend credibility to the WoW free-to-play prophets.

I’ve personally had several discussions with a somewhat deranged individual who claimed that WoW would become free-to-play eventually.  Generally I would scoff at him and call him crazy but I may have to eat my words, although it does seem that Chilton and the rest of the Blizzard team realize that this is not an option for the near future.  With Cataclysm around the corner, the Warcraft well is far from dry and so far the nature of the free-to-play model has been a way to stay competitive.  World of Warcraft is still beyond competitive.

The implementation of the micro-transaction free-to-play model is a scary proposition to me personally.  One thing that makes WoW so wonderful is the fact that everyone starts at the same ground level and what you do from there is what sets you apart from the rest of the players.  If there were a division on what content was available based upon the amount of money a player was willing to spend then I believe many players would step away from the game.  However, if the micro-transactions were limited to aesthetic items and novelties then I do believe that WoW could stay profitable if the day comes when it is not the undisputed subscriber king of the MMO landscape.

It’s always going to be tricky to change the way a game is distributed so drastically but if Blizzard has proved anything over the lifetime of World of Warcraft it is that they are thoughtful and deliberate about making these sorts of decisions and I expect that will not change anytime soon.

What do you guys think?  Post some comments and share your opinions.

Baltharus the Warborn

The first thing that caught my eye about the Sanctum is the inclusion of three sub-bosses Savianna Ragefire, Baltharus the Warborn and General Zarithrian.  At first I assumed there would be an activated hard mode a la Obsidian Sanctum but that is not the case.  I admit I’m somewhat disappointed since I am a fan of the activated hard mode.  Each of these bosses will drop a frost emblem and have some interesting mechanics that I won’t spoil here.

Halion, the main boss of the Ruby Sanctum

The main battle of the Ruby Sanctum is with Halion.  According to much of the information available, Halion is not the most complicated fight a raid team will find in Northrend but does require some teamwork and strategy.  Again, I won’t spoil the mechanics here because if you’re at all like me you enjoy entering new fights with a bit of ignorance.  Did the player base want an extremely hard experience in the final stage of WotLK raiding?  I can’t say since everyone differs in preference but I will say that for a one-off raid instance it looks like Blizzard has a firm idea of how they prefer to tune these encounters, and that is generally less difficult than the full-fledged, 10+ boss instances.

Lastly, let’s talk gear.  It’s important since these are the purples you will wear until Cataclysm when you start to get those “epic greens”.  You will not be replacing everything you have gotten out of Icecrown Citadel but you can patch some holes in your gear.  There is a little something for everyone and the iLevels are equivalent to those that you find on Lich King gear.

Overall the Ruby Sanctum does what it sets out to do.  It begins the story arc towards Cataclysm as well as give players a little something to hold them over while they wait.  Let’s face it, we’ve been in ICC for the past 6 months and some people are starting to get a bit weary of the fights and this will give those players something to do in the meantime.

Post a comment with your views of the upcoming Ruby Sanctum and you will be entered to win a DVD from the German Medieval Martial Arts series entitled “German Medieval Marital Arts:  The Poleaxe“.  What could be better than that?  A winner will be selected at random.

Some quick links to Ruby Sanctum info:

• WoW.com’s Guide to Halion
• MMO-Champion.com Ruby Sanctum Info compilation
• wowwiki.com Ruby Sanctum