Election time is stressful for me; I’ve already put in for a vacation for Thanksgiving week. (I’d hoped that The Burning Crusade might be released then, so I could fully geek out and decompress, but I suspect it won’t be released that week after all.)
Every election cycle, I turn into Public Enemy #1 with at least a portion of the readers. This week, I had a supporter of one of the incumbent school board members come into the office and express his extreme displeasure at length and in no uncertain terms, and I have a feeling that next week, supporters of the teachers union candidates might offer a similar point of view.
It’s been worse, of course: In 2004, the supporters of two different city council candidates demanded that I be fired.
Everyone tells me that, if everyone’s mad at me for my political coverage, I’m probably doing a good job, and they might be right. But it sure doesn’t feel that way. And yes, it’s the job I signed up for; there’s no draft for reporters, far from it.
Thank goodness elections only take place on even years.
Just saying that I’m going will likely jinx this again, but Monday, I’m going to see a taping of William Shatner’s new game show, “Show Me the Money.”
That’s right: William Shatner. Game show. “Show Me the Money.”
You know you’re jealous.
- Something came up: The chamber of commerce is having a candidates’ forum Monday.
Kris sent me an ad for this product:
The Jarvis Model BS-1 — brain sucker removal system for removing all the material in brain cavity.
•Avoids contaminating heads and saves cheek meat.
•Permits de-boning of heads on tables, without cross contamination.
•Eliminates placing corks in heads – avoiding any brain seepage.
•Lightweight handpiece for optimum operator comfort and handling.
•All stainless steel construction for maximum hygiene.
I think someone’s hinting at what she’d like for Christmas this year …
I’ve been answering questions about the alpha on various message boards, so I’ll repost the information here as well, as it comes to me.
I also took a few screenshots of my very demonic-looking draenei paladin and a few of the Hellfire Peninsula. I’ll try to post those in the next day or two.
Anyway, more alpha info:
- I didn’t even make it to 61 in the alpha (the election is seriously kicking my butt) and I made over 100 gold just fooling around a little in Outland. EVERYONE will be rolling in dough and able to afford to learn the basic level of flying mount riding skill unless they’re a complete ninny.
- On the changes to hunter itemization: You’ll feel weaker as your gear suddenly isn’t a matching set of stats the way you might have wanted them to be, as some pieces of gear will get more RAP than AP or more AGI than +hit or more +hit than +crit. I guess, on average, people’s gear is about the same, but to keep there being variety, not all pieces got the exact same balance of stats.
Oh, and there are craftable guns with significantly higher DPS than my dwarf destroyer, which suggests that all pre-60 raid guns will be great stuff, pre-60, but replaced pretty quickly after that.
Your pre-expansion purple gear will still have more stats generally than level 62 and 63 greens, but pure numerical superiority will start to vanish pretty quickly.
The best-geared pre-expansion character will just get to 62 or 63 a little faster and then still replace their gear with quest items and so on.
If anything, The Burning Crusade looks to be more casual-friendly than the regular game, with a wealth of single group dungeons that can be played at ascending difficulty levels and smaller raids as a standard.
- All the master trainers appear to be in the Horde and Alliance towns in the first two Outland zones, but you’ll need to skill up to 305 (where the new recipes start) with old world recipes. I got to 305 Engineering with good old thorium bullets.
- There are three sizes of arena teams you can form (it’s like smaller versions of guilds). The ladder brackets are only available to those teams. Otherwise, you can play something like an exhibition match.
But world PvP is fully integrated into Outland, so I don’t think it’ll be hard to find a team of any size.
- Higher level bullet recipes are more complex, taking more components and more steps to make them. There was a recipe for an engineering bag (like herb and alchemy bags now), but I don’t know if it made it all the way through alpha.
On the other hand, there are better store-bought bullets available too, including ones usable at 60.
- It’s hard to beat blood elf lands for a magical civilization. If and when Dalaran ever opens up, it’s going to have a pretty high bar to leap over.
- The first few outdoor quests in Hellfire Peninsula were cake in my Zul’Gurub gear, although this being alpha, some of the quest text wasn’t as clear as it could have been always. In Honor Hold (and presumably Thrallmar) you’ll be given some orange elite quests at 60 to do the first dungeon — whose name completely escapes me this morning for some reason — with rewards people were favorably comparing to Molten Core gear. (Which I think was an overstatement, but a lot of people said it, so I could be wrong in my view of said “omg” cloak.)
- With 47 blood elves in the entire world in alpha, within 30 seconds of making my blood elf warlock, I ran into a naked dance party.
- There are PVP-controlled towns in Outland. If those flip sides, you’ll be affected. But no zone, as I recall, has ONLY those towns. If you use Honor Hold/Thrallmar as your base (which most people will for a long time), you can totally avoid PVP, if that’s your preference.
- I did not see a non-combat pet vendor in either the Exodar or Silvermoon, but both were going under major revisions last time I played the alpha. (The floors had been removed from the Exodar as they rearranged things — many dead characters as a result.) Silvermoon has a TON of cats running around, though, so I suspect the Horde may have their own crazy cat lady, hopefully with a new skin or two. Didn’t see anything comparable at the Exodar, but maybe.
So, the alpha is over for the first expansion to the megagame, World of Warcraft, The Burning Crusade and yep, just like last time, I was an alpha tester.
Unfortunately, the election season kept me from trying it out very much, beyond fooling around in the newbie areas for blood elves and draenei and running around the first few areas of Outland on my dwarf hunter.
I will say that it looks like Blizzard has spent a lot of time on the 60+ game, as they were still in the middle of middle-to-early polish on the newbie zones when I got invited into the Friends & Family alpha earlier this fall.
And some of the testing was actually being done in the live game: The much-heralded world PvP (the stuff in Silithus and Eastern Plaguelands) is essentially what you’ll find in the Hellfire Penninsula and elsewhere, but on a larger scale. The Azeroth versions of those PvP objectives were essentially just a proof of concept for the expansion. Unlike in the pre-expansion versions, though, completing the objectives gives characters tokens like they’re used to in battlegrounds which can be used for fabulous prizes familiar to battleground veterans (they range from food and water to potions to items to new tabards).
If you’re planning on avoiding the blood elf and draenei lands when the expansion comes out (I’m guessing in November from what vendors are saying, but I have no 1337 alpha info on this), don’t. Although the Hellfire Peninsula is HUGE and there are more than 40 quests for level 60 characters that I counted, you’ll see pretty much everyone over level 59 in the Horde and Alliance towns in the Hellfire Peninsula at first, and until they start leveling up and spreading out, it’s going to be a logjam. The draenei and blood elf lands, both of which are very neat, can’t possibly be any worse.
(Oh, and if you’re like me, and bought the Collector’s Edition of the regular game, you’ll be glad to know your draenei and blood elf characters can get the CE pets, or at least they could in the alpha. My blood elf warlock ran around with Mini Diablo dogging his heels, which was fitting.)
(There’s also a level 6 or so quest in the draenei starting area that lets anyone ride an elekk, their elephantine mounts, on a timed quest. It’s worth popping over there just to ride what are sure to be the coveted cross-faction mounts on the Alliance side.)
You could certainly run around and pick up the books to raise your skill caps on Cooking, First Aid and Fishing, though. Remember to have your character’s gloves enchanted with +mining, +skinning or +herbalism if you intend to pick up any of the new tradeskill components. Even after you find the trainers to raise those caps, everything I saw required at least 305 in the relevant gathering skill to collect.
As I said previously, I didn’t have time to do any of the dungeons during alpha, unfortunately, but I will say that what I saw of Outland was eyepoppingly gorgeous, lore-tastic for all the Warcraft fans and clearly shows that Blizzard has learned from the past two years of World of Warcraft.
Outland is a bizarre and astonishing place, a mix of nightmare vistas and amazing dreamscapes. If you’ve been tempted to upgrade to a new graphics card, do it. It’s worth being able to slide that clipping bar all the way out just to see the absolutely alien new world.
Expect the transition to the higher levels to be rough in one way, though: You may think your character is the cock of the walk on Azeroth, with his swell raid gear and level 60+ spells and so on, but the bad guys just roaming around in Hellfire Peninsula (to say nothing of the zones beyond) run up to level 75 and their version of the Welcome Wagon isn’t pleasant or sweet.
So clear out your quest logs, max out your pre-expansion skills and get ready to be rocked. From what I saw in my admittedly non-comprehensive tour of Outland, the Burning Crusade is going to be a hoot.
