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Archive for Warcraft

Warcraft Movie Trailer

Nov07

Well the first “real” Warcraft Movie trailer is here:

Interesting. I really wonder what non players are going to make of this. Visually it looks good. The CGI and real world stuff appears fairly seamless. Odd too see the characters, which look pretty much like their in-game cartoon origins against those realistic backgrounds.

The world and mythos of WOW is so vast, complex, and “inclusive” of so many other fantasy ideas that it must have been a serious challenge to narrow down into a coherent story. Clearly they are focusing on the Warcraft I Orcs vs Humans aspect. I see nary a glance of any of the other even more fantastic elements: spellcasters, undead, elves, dragons, etc. Probably not a bad idea from a budget and mainstreaming POV.

Hmmm. It will be interesting to see how good a job they do — and if people not familiar with the lore can engage in it.

WOW Endgame series: Vanilla, Burning Crusade, Lich King, Cataclysm, and Pandaria.
or read about Mists of Pandaria leveling.
Latest hot post: Reaper of Souls Analysis!
If you liked this post, follow me at:

My novels: The Darkening Dream and Untimed
or the video game post depot
or win Crash & Jak giveaways!

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Related posts:

  1. Movie Review: Thor
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  3. Book and Movie Review: Let Me In
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  5. Book and Movie Review: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
By: agavin
Comments (2)
Posted in: Games, Movies
Tagged as: Blizzard, Warcraft, Warcraft Movie, WOW

Warlords of Draenor Cinematic

Aug14

Blizard released the Warlords (WOW expansion 5!) cinematic today:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLzhlsEFcVQ]

Actually pretty cool. Oddly, and as usual, even after having played since launch, I don’t totally understand the details of the “lore” and even who all the players are. Guldan, Thrall, Hellscream sure. But who is that Burning Legion dude with the Illidan wings? It’s funny how much effort you’d have to make in order to actually understand the lore. I know all the factions and just roll with it. Now the gameplay, that I understand. Although I hesitate to actually play again, as it’s such a time suck. But usually my resolve breaks.

WOW Endgame series: Vanilla, Burning Crusade, Lich King, Cataclysm, and Pandaria.
or read about Mists of Pandaria leveling.
Latest hot post: Reaper of Souls Analysis!
If you liked this post, follow me at:

My novels: The Darkening Dream and Untimed
or the video game post depot
or win Crash & Jak giveaways!

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Related posts:

  1. Diablo 3 Opening Cinematic
  2. Expansion of the WOW Factor
  3. WOW Endgames – Mists of Pandaria
  4. Hearthstone Beta Review
  5. Diablo 3 – Commercial
By: agavin
Comments (2)
Posted in: Games
Tagged as: Blizzard, Blizzard Entertainment, Races and factions of Warcraft, Warcraft, Warlords, Warlords of Draenor, World of Warcraft

Hearthstone Beta Review

Jan06

I’m no stranger to Trading Card strategy games, having played Magic: The Gathering way back in 1993 (and fairly heavily through 1995 or 96). In recent years, lacking an enthusiastic series of human opponents, I  periodically tried my hand at their latest computer incarnations. Most recently, this was IOS Magic 2013. This game was okay, but the designers felt too beholden to the specifics of the card game and not confident enough to invest in changes that would streamline the digital experience. Also, I’ve long felt that nearly all MTG expansion packs have strayed from their classic D&D flavored roots into that sort of bizarre out-there-and-too-cool-for-school style of western fantasy (all that dimensional and  plane waker stuff).

To prove my old school cred, I dug up 20 year old box of magic cards, including beta dual manas, and a 1996 calendar!

To prove my old school cred, I dug up 20 year old box of magic cards, including beta dual manas, and a 1996 calendar!

Which brings us to Blizzard’s entry into this underdeveloped genre: Hearthstone. Basically, the Irvine powerhouse has taken the MTG formula, reskinned it with Warcraft characters, and streamlined it for online play. And while this may sound merely evolutionary — and it is — in typical Blizzard fashion, when they do something, they do it well.

Hearthstone is great fun and the gameplay itself extremely well balanced (considering its beta state) and fast and furious for a card game.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdXl3QtutQI]

For those of you not familiar with this sort of game, it represents a “duel” between two fantasy characters. Each player constructs (or uses an off the shelf) deck of cards out of the pool of cards they own. Hearthstone’s decks are 30 cards, no more than two of any one type. You draw from this (shuffled) deck representing spells, abilities, and creatures to play them against your opponent as best you can. Generally cards require certain resources (mana) be spent to play, limiting the combinations you can cast in a given turn.

The biggest Hearthstone gameplay innovation (and I haven’t played enough Trading Card Duel games to know if it’s even a real innovation) is assigning decks a distinct class. In MTG, your deck design balances the flavor of mana versus the cost needs of various cards.  I.e. it’s possible to “dual class” (or even triple class), but the odds of ending up with mismatched land and spell/creature cards becomes greater. In Hearthstone, you select one of the original nine Warcraft classes (Warrior, Rogue, Warlock, Mage, Druid, Shaman, Paladin, Priest, and Hunter — Deathknight and Monk being left for a future patch). Your deck must be constructed from cards specific to that class or the Neutral cards. This is quite clever as by giving each class unique mechanics found only in their specific cards, particular gameplay styles are created. Each class also has a unique 2 mana hero ability which can be used once per turn without consuming a card. This serves to both differential them and prevent the “nothing to do because I don’t have a usable card” problem. In Hearthstone, mana capacity notches up one turn at a time (unless affected by special cards). I.e. first turn you have one mana available, next turn two, and so on. This helps measure out the phase and progression of the game, being like a less frustrating version of playing your MTG lands.

A typical game board

A typical game board

The original World of Warcraft classes transition to this new medium impressively. For flavor, the art is very similar, cards are almost invariably named after WOW spells and creatures, and many are even accompanied by sound effects or voice snippets lifted right out of the MMO (Aaaaaughibbrgubugbugrguburgle!) . To a longtime WOW player like myself (9 years!), this is all pretty effective. I’ve played most WOW classes (all but Hunter and Shaman) and I’ve done enough PVP and raided exhaustively. For me,all the class abilities have a certain iconic quality. Add the fact that Blizzard based the mechanics of the individual classes around similar WOW abilities to color me impressed. For example, mage specific cards include: Arcane Explosion, Arcane Missles, Fireball, Polymorph, Cone of Cold, Flamestrike, Frost Nova, Frostbolt, Ice Lance, Mirror Image, Blizzard, Pyroblast, Mana Wyrm, Water Elemental, and Ice Block — all of which are fairly faithful to their WOW roots. And they world as a cohesive play feel and strategy that makes the transition into the card duel.

Being fully computerized, and not relying on mechanics that work with physical cards, Hearthstone is able to support more complex AOE and card modification. Spells can strike all or groups of cards for certain, random, or variable damage — and work in combination with modifiers like shield, stealth (can’t be attacked), taunt (must attack first), or enrage (extra abilities for damaged minions). Some of these mechanics, while possible on paper, would be tedious and slow to manage (annoying counters anyone?). The game doesn’t exactly push the hardware limits of a modern PC/Mac, but it features the typical slick Blizzard interface. Actions are fast, with satisfying sounds and effects. Plus they queue up nicely in a way that allows for rapid play out of multiple moves. This is in sharp contrast to a game like Magic 2013 which drags out each move with awkward and slow animations. Hearthstone lets you just go bang bang bang in a far more satisfying manner.

$1.50 to $2.00 for just 5 virtual cards!

$1.50 to $2.00 for just 5 virtual cards!

I suspect Blizzard is also (as usual) going to make a lot of money with Hearthstone. Not only is it fun, and technically free to play, but seamlessly integrated with Battlenet and your attached credit card. Basically, to add anything but the basic cards to your pool of available cards, you have to either be very good, very patient, or spend some money on packs of cards. These cost $1.50-$2 for a pack of 5! And there is no guarantee you’ll get cards you want. Although you can disenchant extra or undesired cards for dust and use them to craft any specific card. Getting substantial dust pretty much only comes from buying packs, so this mostly allows the player who spends $50+ a way to fill in for bad luck (thank God!). Certainly for $50-100 one could get the cards for any ONE deck one wanted (the cost is mostly in getting lucky or enough dust for the 1-3 legendaries many serious decks want).

Warlock class specific cards. You face Jaraxxus, Eredar lord of the Burning Legion!

Warlock class specific cards. You face Jaraxxus, Eredar lord of the Burning Legion!

There are a variety of modes and tricks to keep you coming back. Classes level up (giving you extra cards and bonuses). There are daily quests (you can have up to 3) that earn extra gold (which can be spent on cards or the Arena) and there is practice, normal, and ranked play modes. Possibly most interesting is the creative Arena mode. You have to pay (with dollars or gold) to enter, then you semi-randomly build a new deck, and play until you lose three times. The more wins in this time, the bigger the reward in gold, dust, and cards. The Arena seems currently, even for a sucky player, to be a slightly better value gold/dollars to cards, as it costs $1.50 and you seem to earn at least one pack. However, it does take an hour or two (you don’t have to play all at once). I’ve only done it twice, as I find playing with it’s fairly random decks a little frustrating compared to my carefully crafted normal mode ones.

Finally, you can always play with your Battle net friends, which will be cool once we get out of closed beta and more of mine try out the game. All in all, now that my main in WOW is ilevel 558 and I’d basically have to run Heroic raids for upgrades (almost), and given the fact that Hearthstone can be played in 5-10 minute chunks, I’m having a blast with it. If I feel motivated, I might even write up my experiences with the three late game strategies I’ve been working: Warlock, Mage Ice Control, and Pally Utility Control (sadly, as I’m a Lock in WOW, my Mage deck is doing much better).

WOW Endgame series: Vanilla, Burning Crusade, Lich King, Cataclysm, and Pandaria.
or read about Mists of Pandaria leveling.
Latest hot post: Reaper of Souls Analysis!
If you liked this post, follow me at:

My novels: The Darkening Dream and Untimed
or the video game post depot
or win Crash & Jak giveaways!

12

Related posts:

  1. Diablo 3 – Beta Preview
  2. WOW Endgames – Cataclysm
  3. WOW Endgames – Burning Crusade
  4. Expansion of the WOW Factor
  5. The Last of Us – My Review
By: agavin
Comments (5)
Posted in: Games
Tagged as: beta, Blizzard, Blizzard Entertainment, card game, Hearthstone, Magic: The Gathering, Video Games, Warcraft, World of Warcraft

WOW Endgames – Mists of Pandaria

Jan11
Mists of Pandaria Box

The xpac box

Having discussed all the previous wow endgames, we come at last to Mists of Pandaria.

Leveling

I wrote a previous detailed post on leveling 85-90. I won’t repeat myself and go into the talent changes again. Overall, while I like the new rotations and abilities for Warlock Destruction (the only spec I’m really playing), and feel they are the best yet, I do miss a bit of the crafting that went into old school talent selection. I have little incentive nowadays to investigate changing my spec or talents.

But I must admit I adore Kil’Jaeden’s Cunning, which allows casting while moving. This is a game changer for warlocks. Even with a cast and movement speed penalty, it means not having to cancel that big cast in order to get out of the fire!

Of Justice and Valor

MOP, great as it is, is a highly evolutionary expansion. The Justice and Valor system was born from  BC badge system, iterated on during LK, and finally codified under Cata. It passes nearly unaltered to MOP. We have four major point systems, two each for PVE and PVP. Since I don’t PVP at all anymore, I’ll only talk about Justice (the lessor) and Valor (the greater) points.

But first, I need to discuss item level. As discussed in my Cata post, with reforging and the like, WOW gearing is more and more about ilevel. Better is generally better and there is an elaborate spread based on gear source and difficulty level.

  • 458: Justice rewards, superior blue quality
  • 463: Heroic dungeon gear, superior blue quality
  • 476: Mogu’shan Vaults LFR and crafted PvE gear bought from reputations, epic purple quality
  • 483: Heart of Fear and Terrace of Endless Springs LFR
  • 489: Vaults normal mode gear and valor point gear bought from reputations
  • 496: Galleon and Sha loot table, Heart and Terrace normal mode gear, crafted gear from raid-drop patterns, and valor rewards for the patch 5.1 reputation vendor
  • 502: Vaults heroic mode gear
  • 509: Heart and Terrace heroic mode gear

Justice points are more useless than ever. You earn them exclusively by killing dungeon bosses, notably heroic dungeon bosses. They earn fairly slowly. They buy ilevel 458 blues. But wait, heroic dungeons drop ilevel 463 blues. By the time you have enough points to buy something, you probably have a replacement that is slightly better from drops. Justice points are therefore useful only to fill in the occasional piece that you are unlucky on. I bought two items fairly quickly after hitting level 90 and wore them for a few days, perhaps a week, before replacing them. Theoretically you can also spend Justice points on heirloom items for your alts. I’ve sworn off this deadly addiction and so wouldn’t know.

Valor points are very different. You can earn them doing just about anything: Heroics dungeons, Challenge dungeons, Scenarios, daily quests, LFR,  regular and heroic raids. Valor points cap at 1000 points a week. There is a strong incentive to reach your cap, but it takes awhile, probably at least 10-15 hours a week of play. If you don’t cap, you aren’t gearing as fast as you could. They buy you ilevel 489 epics, which is the same level dropped by the first half of the first tier of normal raids. After patch 5.1 Valor buys ilevel 496 and upgrades. For active raiders with a guild, these are supplementary, filling in on missing drops and allowing faster gearing. For players (like me) who only use LFR (more on that later), Valor gear is always better than raid gear, and represents the best and most important items. The only better gear open to us is world boss gear, and that’s very limited in selection.

Because of the cap, and its importance, grinding Valor feels like a bit of a chore, or at least certainly an obligation. This is a difficult balance for the designers to achieve. Set the cap too high, and there would be no limit to how much time you could sink into it, set it too low, and you feel that post cap, you are “wasting your time.” For me personally, it’s just about right.

In Vanilla and BC you spent a lot of time playing for no reward, and these point systems address that issue to a significant degree. This time around, the Valor system seems better than ever, rewarding all sorts of play. The Justice points seem like a fail and basically irrelevant.

Shrine of Two Moons

Shrine of Two Moons: profession hub and standing in for a new city

Going Professional

The professions got their usual cleanups and tweaks. Many remain boring. Herbalism is the same as it ever was. Alchemy is even simpler than ever, as you now learn new recipes not from the trainer, but from making previous ones. This shouldn’t be confused with the more elitist Burning Crusade discovery system. By the time I hit level 90 and max skill level I’d learned everything. The better/cheaper “alchemist only” potion is nice. The Alchemist trinket is decent, but after patch 5.1 badly needs an upgrade to epic. I level enchanting on an alt and that seems to have lost the interesting daily mechanic from LK and been tied back to reputations. That’s annoying on an alt as I don’t want to level those reps there. These recipes should be BOA.

Archeology got a hell of a lot easier. During Cata I gave up on it because it was intensely boring and slow. Now I leveled it in 2-3 hours. But there isn’t anything good to make. No epics, no cool pets or mounts, just some mediocre blue weapons.

Fishing is easy to level now as it’s tied to the Angler’s reputation. It’s got a few cool things, although not as cool as the old BC Mr. Pinchy days.

Cooking is the real standout. Wow. This got a lot of love. It’s tied in with the whole farming game (see below), the awesome Tillers rep (see below) and even in of itself is chock full of goodies. There are now six different sub schools to level, and it takes considerable time and effort, but the whole combined cooking/farming/Tillers thing is great fun. I’m even training up my apprentice. They need to do all the professions up with this kind of complexity.

Angler's Warf

Angler’s Warf

Mote in your Eye

A new system this time around is the “harmony” system. Monsters randomly and occasionally drop these little “motes of harmony” which combine into “spirits of harmony.” These currency items can be used to buy just about any top trade skill item, or even some of the other trade skill currencies like for cooking and archeology.

This sort of combines and improves two general systems/trends from previous xpacs. One is the “limited top profession item.” For alchemy this was the Lotus. For enchanting the epic enchanting mat. Motes normalize and make less frustrating the collection of these resources.

They are also an evolution of the older crafting essences that came in various flavors. Motes are a marked improvement. Spirits of Harmony are generally quite useful, and you accumulate them at a slow but reasonable pace. I’ve never been a heavy crafter and the old piles of 10-12 types of currencies for each xpac still clog up my bank alt.

Scenario Fail

A new addition to MOP is the scenario. This is a mini dungeon, for three players, not requiring a tank or healer. There are about 10 of them and you enter through LFG with virtually no queue (because of no tank/healer crunch). They reward some Valor and are designed to include hefty doses of lore.

Being even easier than dungeons (which were pretty easy), I found them ridiculously boring. They yield Valor, and are approximately the same Valor/time invested as dungeons, yet duller. In dungeons I enjoy boss fights and hate trash. Most of the scenarios feel like short outdoor dungeons with a 100% trash ratio. I hate trash. The rewards themselves are just some random and useless blues. Perhaps they might have been upgrades for about a day after hitting 90, but that’s about it. I haven’t even run all the scenarios. There is one in the Temple of the White Tiger, highly reminiscent of Lich King’s Trial of the Crusader, that is alright, as it’s just a series of bosses.

Shado Pan Monastery

Shado Pan Monastery

Shades of the Lich King

The dungeons in MOP have all been carefully tuned. They’re all pretty short and fun and none of them stand out as annoying or particularly more difficult than the others. Difficulty tuning is back where it was at launch in Lich King. There is no need to run a level 90 normal level dungeon. Maybe if you’re an ignoramus at gearing, you might have to pop into one or two. Basically you drop into heroic and steamroll. They take 20-30 minutes. CC is completely gone again. It’s like every dungeon is Heroic Utgarde Keep or Azjol-Nerub. My least favorite these days are Shado-Pan Monastery and Siege of Niuzao Temple, but only because they take slightly longer than the others. They aren’t harder and they are cool enough. This time around there is nothing like Halls of Lightening or Occulus to throw anyone a loop. It’s worth noting that in my entire (extensive) MOP playing experience I never ONCE had a dungeon group fall apart. Every single one has completed. Wipes of any sort are rare, and I doubt I’ve ever wiped more than 2-3 times. This is unprecedented, as in Vanilla, BC, and Cata groups that self destructed were more the rule than the exception. Even in LK it happened, particularly in Occulus or some of the Icecrown instances.

Gear is solid at 463 and things are well itemized. However, it only took me a week before I had every piece of dungeon gear I needed, after that, they’re just an easy way to earn valor (80 points a day).

Blizzard added a cool new Challenge mode in which you can run instances for speed with normalized gear. I’ve never tried it. The mode requires that you run with friends, and I don’t have a big enough group of in game friends or a guild.

stormstout brewery

Stormstout Brewery

The big Grind

While reputations have always been part of the WOW endgame, with MOP Blizzard put a lot of extra effort into them. In the BC-LK era reputations usually awarded a couple of small things each. Generally a free epic, maybe a cosmetic item like a pet, crafting recipes, and often enchants for certain slots like head and shoulder. While small, these enchants were considered mandatory by most raiders. So Blizzard removed them, but at the same time tied the Justice and Valor gear into the system. Rep gear isn’t free anymore, pretty much all Justice and Valor gear is divided randomly among four (five with patch 5.1) reputations. Initially, honored was needed for Justice gear and Revered for Valor. Blizzard argued that this wasn’t mandatory, and it probably wasn’t, strictly speaking, for serious raiders, as they have access to equal or better gear in raid. However, in practice, for those of us without guilds the Valor gear is the best available. Even serious raiders tend to optimize for getting the most stuff as quickly as possible. This meant bringing at least the four major reps to revered. Two of them, the August Celestials and the Shado-Pan are mysteriously tied to the Golden Lotus, and so you can’t even start their grinds until reaching revered with Lotus.

In LK and Cata you could combine tabards with dungeon grinding to speed leveling of the reputations. In MOP, the new tabards no longer give rep, although you can still finish out reps from the old xpacs in the new dungeons. This means doing the dailies for each rep. And dailies there are in spades. On the plus side, these give valor points and the special new currency that increases loot drops (more on that later). On the minus side, there are a LOT of dailies.

I’ve reached exalted in every MOP rep, including the fifth important one introduced with patch 5.1. At the beginning, and particularly about two weeks after 90, this meant A LOT of dailies. I’ll discuss all the reps below because Blizzard deliberately built a different style grind into each of them in order to experiment, but at the peak, it is very easy to have 2-3 HOURS of dailies in your queue PER DAY. On one level, this is a lot of end game content, as you could do it slower, on the other, for a few weeks it felt like a Herculean chore.

Golden Lotus

Because this rep gates two others, it’s very important. And the GL has a lot of good Valor items itself. Here Blizzard went with a “more is more” theory of dailies. There are three hubs, each with four quests that are completed sequentially per day and a final boss quest. This means 13 dailies (plus some connector quests). Not all of these are available at the start, as the hubs open up as you advance. The individual quests are well enough designed for the most part, but for a new 90 can actually be pretty hard. At the beginning, competition for mobs was fierce and frustrating. This chain alone could take 45 minutes a day and often felt very tedious.

There were also a couple different cool ways of earning bonus rep. Periodically you find keys which can be used to open secret chests (available only on select end dailies) that give you extra rep bonuses. GL mobs also (extremely) rarely drop a crystal that once you have 10, allows capturing an (extremely) rare mount. By exalted I had 2/10.

The Golden Lotus has lots of secret chambers

The Golden Lotus has lots of secret chambers

Klaxxi

The second major rep open at the start is pretty cool. There are about 9 quests available per day in about four areas within a zone. You can select various Klaxxi (bug dude) champions to help you too. The quests are pretty cool, but some of the areas were better than others and the set could run a little long. There were a bunch of cool intermediate non-daily progressions on the quest-line. Much better than GL, but 5-6 quests would have been better than 9.

There is a collection mechanic here too. Killing mobs in the zone earn you crystals that you can turn in for rep. This is a great idea, but the drop rate on them was so low as to make little difference.

Return of the Klaxxi Paragons

Return of the Klaxxi Paragons

Shado-Pan

SP also has champions to help you and rotates roughly 6 quests between three locations. In between, you have non-daily champions to fight. This would have been an excellent rep except that one of the locations, “stra-vess” (sic) was very annoying and represented the only place in the entire daily grind across all reps where I died on a frequent basis. The mob density was just out of control.

August Celestials

This rep chain opens late and runs slow. Every day there are about 4 quests available in one of four spots in wildly different zones. You find the location at your home base and fly there. The quests are pretty quick and easy, but the grind goes on for longer than the other reps. One of the four zones (the Niuzao Temple) is far more annoying than the other three. One of the quests in the White Tiger temple complex (the one where you cross the bridges avoiding the wind) was incredibly frustrating and best skipped.

Dominance Offensive / Operation Shieldwall

This new rep, added with patch 5.1, gates the 496 ilevel rep gear and is very important. It’s also a very well designed daily grind. Blizzard learned from the earlier four in short order. There is an alternating mixture of non-daily quest groups of 3-4 quests and a group of 5 dailies that rotates between 4 hubs. There is even a cool daily mini-boss. The dailies are pretty quick and enjoyable (except the cave one was annoying because the caves are so dark it’s hard to see the tunnels) and the mix in of non-dailies felt great. It doesn’t have the tedious chore-like quality that GL, Klaxxi, and Shado-Pan often did.

Loremasters

This is a fun rep that is outside of normal progression. Bringing it to exalted wins you a cool flying magic disc mount and a few aides to the archeology profession. But it’s also the easiest rep, taking only an hour or two flying around Pandaria to level.

Order of the Cloud Serpent

You level this rep for one reason (besides the Valor points): to earn the right to fly on cloud dragons. It’s a fast and easy rep that thats takes 2-3 weeks and combines some profession tie-in quests and a rotating pool of fairly simple fight and gather dailies. Every once in a while it is possible to engage in cloud dragon racing. This was really cool. The problem is, there seems to be no way to know if they are available (which is about once a week) without flying over to the far away zone and checking. So once I hit exalted, I didn’t bother, because I didn’t want to haul out there for nothing.

Everyone wants to ride one of these!

Everyone wants to ride one of these!

Anglers

This rep is tied to fishing. It provides 3 quick and easy fishing quests every day. They’re pretty easy, but not very exciting, and the quest hub has no flight point (serious annoyance). Once I maxed out fishing it was irritating to head down there and grind it out, even though it didn’t take long. I gave up for awhile at revered, then eventually finished it out.

There is also a separate reputation with master angler Nat Pagle. This earns you two different items and requires that you fish around the world for about 45 minutes every day for several months to fish up some EXTREMELY rare fish. This is the only grind in MOP I didn’t bother with, because it’s for the very extreme and the rewards aren’t compelling. It should at least have had a cool pet.

Tillers

The Tillers faction, which dove tails in with cooking and the new farming mechanic, is hands down the best designed grind in the game. This all has several components. The profession itself has been split into 6 different grinds (the ways of cooking). They are all very similar, but for number collecting obsessives, it’s very addictive to level each. Then the master Tiller reputation is a nicely balanced 5-6 daily per day mix that rotates between 3-4 hubs. Some of these quests are very easy and some are related to farming. Some of the quests aren’t really attached to the hubs but are randomly selected floaters around the zone. Many are very creative (if a little annoying) like the weed war, pest control, and chase the chicken quests. One of the daily quests earns you a cooking token. These are actually quite valuable as they speed your leveling of the cooking profession and production of useful feasts.

Progressing through the main reputation opens up periodic cool quests that “level” the farm by adding more plots. You can also buy quests at one of the vendors at different reps to add convenience features to the farm like sprinklers, pesticide, and the master plow. The rep and token vendors have all sorts of fun and useful items. If you get enough tokens you can buy an apprentice that has a new daily him/herself that you can level. This opens up other stuff. As you level, your farm gains small cosmetic “improvements” relating to the quests (mostly farm animals).

Then, as if that wasn’t enough, there are eight or so quest givers who all have their OWN reputations. You level these up by completing their quests (randomly in the daily sets) and/or making particular foods for them and/or finding these oddball farming drops and/or finding the same drops in dirt piles around Pandaria. Reaching max reputation with a particular Tiller opens up  a small person specific quest chain.

All in all it feels very fresh and varied, far more so than any of the other rep grinds, and being intertwined as it is with farming and cooking encourages you to engage in those other skills just to see what might be coming. Bravo!

Big Bags of Loot

MOP reintroduces world bosses, two of them to start. One of these, the Sha of Anger, is a replacement for the LK/Cata PVP loot boss. Sha is easy to kill with 30+ people (it can even be done with 25). He drops a random mix of PVP and the PVE ilevel 496 hands and pants. The first time you kill him, he gives a token for an ilevel 476 boot. He can be looted once a week and his respawn timer is 10 minutes. For LFR people like myself, this makes him very valuable as the set pieces are half a tier better in score than the 483 stuff from LFR. With the short timer, the only difficulty with this boss is finding a group. If one needs him, you usually have to do that on Tuesday, often early Tuesday. After that, too many people have killed him and you’re unlikely to find a raid.

The other world boss is Galleon. He drops a mix of various 496 loot and is fairly easy to kill. The problem with him is that his respawn timer is several days. I’ve killed him twice, and both times it happened after a server reset. At this point, when he’s up, both Alliance and Horde are usually gathered to try to kill him and it becomes a strange battle in which one can wipe the other side, but that results in flagging and a near infinite back and forth between the factions. We were able to kill him once when a Horde group outside the raid generously took it upon themselves to keep wiping the Alliance side.

He must die every week - until you have your gloves and pants

He must die every week – until you have your gloves and pants

Way of the Raid

MOP has more raiding options than ever, and as this is an area that keeps evolving, it’s worth mentioning. There are now five types: LFR (25), Normal (10), Normal (25), Heroic (10), and Heroic (25). LFR has it’s own per boss lockout, but the other four share the same lockout. I.e. if you kill the boss on Heroic (10) you can’t loot it again on Normal (25) in the same week. The lockout is all per boss, and only affects loot (but that’s what matters, doesn’t it?). The two normal modes share gear, so do the two heroic modes. I only run LFR these days, but presumably 25s are pretty rare, as they are harder to form and offer little advantage at this point. This is kinda a shame, but I can understand Blizzard not wanting to add even MORE loot levels.

LFR has a new loot system which is quite controversial. In the traditional model, still used in normal/heroic raids, the boss drops his loot, and the party divides it up. In the new LFR system, each player has his own individual random role, which appears to be about 1 in 10, to see if he gets loot or gold. If he gets loot than he is handed a random item from the loot table that fits the spec he is currently using. There is no consideration made as to what items you have. You can get an item that you already have even if something else in the loot table would be more useful. There is no trading. On the plus side, there is no drama. Each player’s loot situation is totally separate. On the minus side, you get a lot of “gold” and it’s annoying. Other players also get items they can’t use (already have), but you could, which feels frustrating. Overall, it’s probably better as drama in LFR is a bad thing.

To complicate this, doing daily quests earns a kind of currency that you can spend once a week to earn 3 coins in a different currency (up to 10 max in your inventory) that can be spent to buy extra rolls at a bosses loot table. In practice, you use these on the three bosses each week that have stuff you need the most. This is kinda nice as it increases your chance of getting the things you want. It is possible to partially abuse this system by killing a boss a second (or third, or fourth) time and using the coin, even if you are not eligible anymore for the regular drop. I don’t do this, too tedious.

Terrace of Endless Springs

Terrace of Endless Springs: the last raid of the 1st tier

Raid Finder Rules

I didn’t play Cata during the final months with its Raid  Finder, so for me, LFR was new to MOP. This is the ultimate conclusion (for now) of Blizzard’s trend toward “let everyone see the content.” The raids are broken into 3 boss chunks with minimal trash (still sometimes too much, as in Heart of Anger). There is a gear level requirement, but the tuning is very easy, aimed at allowing the bosses to be killed with no active coordination and 0-2 wipes. The first week a particular dungeon opens, when most of the people are completely unfamiliar with the mechanics, there are wipes. After that, it’s a total steamroll. Mechanics that wipe raids have been “tuned down” so they don’t. There isn’t really much skill, although I personally, as a Warlock, amuse myself by focusing on maxing my DPS.

For me, LFR is a facsimile of real raiding. It’s missing the challenge and camaraderie, but it does feels kinda like raiding and yields pretty good loot. It also can be done on your own schedule in 30-45 minute chunks, which is huge. Raiding with a guild is scheduled, like 6-10pm Tues-Thurs, and involves drama and stress. LFR is queue up, steamroll, maybe collect loot.

Everyone is a Legend

What makes up a legendary has really changed in MOP, and probably for the better. I don’t know if they plan to still have the old kind of legendary weapons, but there is a new quest chain that anyone who raids can get which is more equivalent to the old Mount Hyjal or Ice Crown rep chains that allows you to slowly, but fairly straightforwardly, earn into legendary gems that can be placed into the sockets of special weapons dropping from Terrace of the Endless Spring. These are a pretty big boost, +500 in a primary stat, and the chain continues allowing you to keep upgrading slowly across the course of the xpac. This is a real nice touch and very compelling, although it’s a different thing than the traditional legendaries.

The Black Prince

This guy is actually a Black dragon!

No need to PVP

As a PVE player, there seems to be no need to PVP in any way shape or form. With the Sha of Anger having taken over for the PVP bosses and no new world PVP zone, that’s gone. This is fine by me.

Return to the Old Raids

One of the new things I’ve been doing a lot of is actually old stuff. The drastic scale up of every stat has made it possible for level 90 toons, particularly us OP Warlocks, to solo nearly everything in the first three expansions. Vanilla raids are trivial (for Locks) and Blizzard has made some effort to change a few of the mechanics that were impossible to solo (Viscidius, Razorgore, who is still a pain). Plus, you can now go into old raids without a raid group and they added cool minipets to the Vanilla raids. I’ve been running MC, BWL,  Naxx, and AQ40 every week and have all but two of the pets. I’ve also nearly completed my Felheart, Nemesis, and T2.5 sets (I had a lot of them from the Vanilla days, but the RNG is fickle). This is all good fun.

And last week, I even earned Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker! Too bad it can’t be used to xmorph. My Lock does dress old school, usually in Felheart or Nemesis. Even some of the really difficult titles can be soloed. I soloed Sarth 3 drakes 10 man and 3 manned the 25 man (I had the titles from before but I wanted the mounts). I soloed Ulduar 10 to get Starcaller and even facerolled some BC heroics to finish out two reps I hadn’t quite knocked out originally.

Cthun

I finally killed Cthun (by myself)

Farmville Wow

The Tillers have brought limited Farmville to WOW. Once you level up your farm you can grow up to 16 crops a day. It’s possible to make feasts pretty much for free this way, or easily earn extra cooking tokens. There are some optional plants that will earn you crafting materials or even teleports. It’s a pretty simple mini-game, and takes about 5 minutes a day, but it’s fairly fun.

Tillers Farming

Better than Farmville

Pet Battles

I have yet to invest anytime in the pet battles, which is surprising given that I’m a pet collector. I’ve heard they are really fun and Pokemon like. They certainly have vastly expanded the mini-pet inventory.

Back to the Fun

MOP has brought a notable effort to really add a lot of fun and vanity items and quests. This stuff has been in short supply since Vanilla but there is a lot of it now. So many one of a kind vanity items that they fill up the bank. There are neat weird quests and achievements based on lore and whatnot too. We could still use more actual USEFUL items that have weird powers, like in Vanilla, but this is a good start.

Warlock in Felheart

Scaberus is in his old school finery

Patch 5.1

The only patch so far is 5.1 and it’s a very evolutionary patch, including no new raid or instance. It did beef up the southernmost zone and add a faction, more dailies, and a rep vendor. The faction is one of the better ones. To help raiders spend their valor points a new upgrade system has been added that allows Justice points to upgrade blue items and Valor points to upgrade epics. This is a pretty useful point sink. It seems Blizzard intends that the epics from the patch 5.2 raid will not be upgradable until patch 5.3, which seems a decent idea to slow inflation. The item upgrade in general, while useful, continues the long trend toward anonymous gear based on ilevel.

Another very useful addition is that MOP reps have gained a hastily implemented feature for doubling the speed at which you earn revered to exalted, and passing on the advantage to alts when a main has hit revered. This must be very welcome for alts, but I wish they’d given me a feat of strength for leveling all my reps to exalted BEFORE the patch shipped.

Domination Keep

Home of the Horde on Pandaria

Conclusion

In conclusion, MOP really draws together all of the elements present in Cata but rebalances them into a much much more effective (and therefore fun whole). There is a LOT to spend your time on at level 90 and pretty much all of it is either very fun, for vanity purposes (pets, mounts, xmorph etc), or contributes directly to your character via Valor. All elements of the game are more accessible than ever. I have a level 25 guild that I share with another real life friend, but it’s essentially a ghost guild and no one else is ever online. Yet I’m able through LFR and Valor to advance my character steadily.

Frankly, it keeps me playing and while without real raiding some of the extreme highs of the game are gone, it’s rarely frustrating and generally very fun. Pretty impressive after 8 years!

WOW Endgame series: Vanilla, Burning Crusade, Lich King, Cataclysm, and Pandaria.
or read about Mists of Pandaria leveling.
Latest hot post: Reaper of Souls Analysis!
If you liked this post, follow me at:

My novels: The Darkening Dream and Untimed
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Mists of Pandaria

Related posts:

  1. WOW Endgames – Cataclysm
  2. Mists of Pandaria Leveling
  3. WOW Endgames – Burning Crusade
  4. WOW Endgames – Lich King
  5. WOW Endgames – Vanilla
By: agavin
Comments (49)
Posted in: Games
Tagged as: Blizzard Entertainment, Mists of Pandaria, Races and factions of Warcraft, Warcraft, World of Warcraft

WOW Endgames – Cataclysm

Nov28
Cataclysm Collector's Edition contents

The Cataclysm Collector’s Edition contents

For the record, like many others, I stopped playing during the last six months of Lich King (who needed to run ICC more than 20-30 times?) and came back for Cataclysm. I discovered what is now my least favorite era of WOW.

Getting There

I didn’t even like leveling in Cataclysm. The zones were boring. I hated Vashj’ir for it’s annoying 3D travel and vast size. The others were just uninspired. Only Uldum was decent.

The Big Distraction

I suspect that the designers blew their wad on the giant world revamp. Every zone in Azeroth got an update, some quite dramatic, and all of the quests were redone. But I never saw any of this — except flying overhead. With four toons from 60-80, I wasn’t about to go level a new one. I didn’t even try out the new starting zones (Goblin and Worgen, although I heard they were good). If Worgen had been Horde (like they should), I might have tried them.

Cataclysm Barrens divide

The old world got a facelift, or hatchet job…

Talent’s Last Stand

The talent trees got another huge overhaul, but this time instead of adding 5 new talent points, Blizzard took away  30! Level 85 characters had 41 talents, which wasn’t so bad except it reduced the emotional reward given at each level. Still, I understand how the prospect of 76 points could be overwhelming from a design and user standpoint. More substantially, Blizzard introduced a more formal choice of specialization. Instead of merely investing points in various trees, you had to pick your preferred tree. Along with this came certain mutually exclusive abilities and resources.

On the plus side, this allowed the designers the freedom to work on the specs in more isolation without having to place signature spec abilities deep into the trees. By Pandaria, it allowed even greater differentiation of specs. On the minus, this change continued a trend toward homogenization. There was a feeling under the old system, even if illusionary, that you could create an interesting hybrid between two specs. No more.

Cataclysm Warlock Talents

The new, post diet, Warlock talent trees

Reforging to Sameness

A number of gearing innovations were introduced with Cataclysm. In the BC and LK eras, the number of affixes (different stats and attributes possible on gear) had expanded considerably. The game has a lot of gear specs: plate tanks, plate dps, plate healing, mail spell dps, mail melee, mail ranged, mail healing, leather healing, leather spell dps, leather melee, leather tanking, cloth healing and cloth dps. In the old days, the designers ignored some, like bear tanks, but with making every spec viable came the need to provide them gear.

With Cataclysm, the designers tried to reduce this gear proliferation and consolidate stats. For example, the new “mastery” stat, basically good for every spec, but does something different for each. It might improve healing for a Holy Priest and damage for a Shadow Priest.

To make more gear useful to more players Blizzard introduced the reforging vendor. This allowed players to exchange one secondary stat on an item for another secondary stat. For example, if you had an item with crit and mastery, but want more haste, you could take half the mastery off and turn it into haste. This was reversible and modifiable.

This allowed almost any gear that fit your basic spec to be adjusted to fit your overall itemization. The downside was that it made gear increasingly by the numbers. Individual items used to matter more. You sought out the Azuresong Mageblade or the Core Hound Tooth. After  Cataclysm, if the item had a higher ilevel (item level) and fit your spec at all, it was likely better. This meant that you stopped caring so much about the individualitem and its stats and more about its ilevel.

Reforging Vendor

The reforging vendor allows you to play with the stats on your gear

The End of the Silhouette

Vanilla, BC, and LK WOW never allowed the modification of gear appearance. Other games had dyes and methods of cosmetic alteration, but in WOW, the gear actually looked good, and because each class had unique tier gear, it was usually possible at a glance to tell how good (or at least dedicated) a player was. In fact, when I first started playing I was really impressed by the way your character slowly improved visually. At first, you dressed in rags, and slowly but surely you got cooler looking (with a few setbacks). I, like most players, chose function over form, and sometimes had a patchwork appearance.

Cataclysmchanged all that by introducing Transmogrification. The transmorg vendor, would for a fee, make any piece of gear look like any other of the same type that you owned (i.e. you couldn’t make a bow look like a sword). Suddenly, your best gear was disconnected from your best-looking gear. The cool part of this was that old gear, which often looked very cool or nostalgic, was useful again as a template for appearance. It also allowed characters to construct unified thematic sets without compromising function. Negatively, the specific new gear you got became even less memorable. It was just ilevel and stats.

transmogfircation window

You can now make any gear look like pretty much any other gear

Normal Mode is Back

Cataclysm about faced the dungeon difficulty trend from LK. Normal mode level 85 dungeons had some challenge, and Heroics had a new key: gear level. You couldn’t enter them (via the Dungeon Finder) without having a certain gear level. This meant you actually had to run the normal ones. Which was good.

They weren’t really that hard and they had some decent gear. Plus, each faction had a tabard you could wear to gather reputation. Two of these dungeons were favorite Vanilladungeons that got a refresh and new level 85 modes: Shadow Fang Keep and Dead Mines.

Uldum's Lost City of the Tol'vir

Uldum featured this cool outside dungeon (shades of ZF and ZG) called The Lost City of the Tol’vir

The Return of CC

Heroic difficulty was another matter. While Cataclysm Heroic’s weren’t as brutal as BC Heroics, they were actually kinda difficult. They often required a bit of crowd control (CC) and knowledge of boss strategies. Again, not anywhere near that from the BC and Vanilla era, but a lot harder than in LK.

In guild runs, this was no probably and actually quite fun. But the problem was that most people didn’t run dungeons in guild groups, they used the Dungeon Finder. Heroics with the Dungeon Finder became torture. They were just a bit too hard for most random groups. They required you know the fight. Many good players reacted to this by dropping group as soon as anything went wrong. This happened prior to the Dungeon Finder, but social factors kept it more in check. Now, one wipe and your best player or two fled, leaving you to replace them by random chance.

At the time, I thought my problem was that after facerolling dungeons in LK, it was hard to go back to a challenge, but I think it had as much to do with the interaction of the Dungeon Finder. Pugs with no invested social connection are not well geared to face and learn to overcome challenges.

Justice/Valor Points

The badge system reached more or less final form: which wasn’t badges at all, but points. Instead of a constantly expanding collection of currencies, Blizzard converted the badges into two types of points (presumably the badge->point thing was for better granularity) and instituted several policies. With the release of new tiers, any remaining currency in the better currency (Valor) was converted into the lesser (Justice). Old Valor Gear was then made available for Justice Points. New gear went into the Valor Vendor. You earned Justice via dungeons (easy) and Valor by dailies and raiding (harder). Both currencies gained a weekly cap to discourage hardcore players from grinding out too much at once.

Blizzard experimented with different methods of Valor awards for non-raiders: first Heroic completed of the day, then up to 7 Heroics per week. The later was designed to remove the “need” to run one Heroic every day, but somehow turned out to discourage running as many of them.

This latest evolution worked well. Valor gear was very good, and could be purchased approximately one item every two weeks (if you maxed out your weekly cap). There was too little Justice Gear. For single spec classes (like my Warlock) the currency was useless after about two weeks — until a new tier landed a bunch of formerly top gear in the Justice Vendor. For non-raiders, Valor points were too hard to cap.

The elite can slay Deathwing, which is pretty cool

Guild Loyalty

Another successful new system was the expansion of the guild system. With Cataclysm, guilds as an entity gained reputation, levels, achievements, perks and more. Doing “work” (quests, dungeons, profession work, etc) started earning you reputation with your guild and the guild itself experience. The guild could then level up, earning members various guild perks. Certain achievements could open up guild rewards. The perks and rewards were actually pretty sweet although not usually related to performance per-se. Things like: faster running while dead, shorter hearth teleport timer, 10% more reputation, and a mass resurrection spell.

Overall, the system felt rewarding. You definitely wanted to be in a guild, and one that was pretty high level at that. The speed of leveling was reasonable and worked even for my tiny and fairly inactive guild.

Guild reward window

The guild reward window: lots of cool stuff

Reputation Redux

Cataclysm‘s end game reputation grinds kept me occupied for a few weeks. There were some decent epic items and a few cool mounts. Most reputations had some dailies to help them along, or there were always dungeon runs. But they didn’t last forever, after about a month, I pretty much maxed them all out.

PVP + Dailies, oh my

Blizzard tried world PVP for a fourth time with Tol Barad. It was a lot like Wintergrasp, including the same kind of loot piñata boss. I felt obligated to run the boss once a week, but couldn’t have cared less about the PVP.

It also had a PVE rep and hub with a whole bunch of dailies. This was a pretty extensive 2-3 week grind-a-thon but awarded a couple of worthwhile things at exalted. Then it was done.

Tol Barad

The Tol Barad outside world PVP zone. Pretty much just good for its loot filled tasty creme boss.

Archeology Fail

Instead of adding yet another crafting profession, like BC and LK, Cataclysm added a fourth optional profession all players could train: archeology. This turned out to be a rather boring, albeit, time consuming distraction. Making you travel is a time-proven form of cheap WOW gameplay (lots of holidays feature “tour the world” activities). Theoretically, Archeology could earn you cool items, but at launch it did so in a maddeningly tedious fashion.

Archaeology gets you all too familiar with this little gizmo.

Raiding as Usual

My guild fell apart at the end of LK and my new one consisted of mostly casual players, so I didn’t raid much at all during Cataclysm. I suffered from near burnout and never mustered the energy to try pugging anything or finding a raiding guild.

About a month after the expansion shipped I ran out of any way to progress my character without raiding. So I stopped playing.

Trolls again?

A few months in, Blizzard added two new 5 man dungeons with better gear. But I’d seen them both before: the troll raids Zul’Gurub and Zul’Aman, just repurposed as 5 man dungeons. I tried a couple of times to run them, but they suffered from the same problem (as the Heroics) of pug wipes.

I stopped playing one more time.

Zul'Gurub

The return of the trolls: Zul’Gurub!

Molten Front

Blizzard tried again with the Molten Front, a new raid (I didn’t try it) and a daily quest hub and reputation. I ground out rep for a week or two and grew bored.

I stopped again, and didn’t return until Pandaria.

Molten front

Burn your eyes out on the bland looking Molten Front

Gone for Good?

Without a raiding guild, the majority of endgame progression was unavailable. Sure, I could have continued mindlessly running the same dungeons to gather valor points, but what was the point of getting new better gear if I wasn’t facing any new encounters? I just didn’t feel motivated. This time around, I didn’t bother with alts, the boring 80-85 zones put me off.

Late in the expansion, Blizzard introduced the Raid Finder, an attempt to do for raids what the Dungeon Finder did for dungeons. I never tried it out, but it’s possible, probable even that had this been around at Cataclysm launch, I would have played longer and had more to do.

But as it was, Cataclysm suffered from a diffuse focus spread throughout the world, frustrating Heroic pugs, over homogenization, and a general lack of newness. Had I played too long? Or was it the content itself?

I assumed it was me… until Mists of Pandaria…

 

WOW Endgame series: Vanilla, Burning Crusade, Lich King, Cataclysm, and Pandaria.
or read about Mists of Pandaria leveling.
Latest hot post: Reaper of Souls Analysis!
If you liked this post, follow me at:

My novels: The Darkening Dream and Untimed
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Deathwing

Deathwing lunches on a tasty tower

Related posts:

  1. WOW Endgames – Burning Crusade
  2. WOW Endgames – Lich King
  3. WOW Endgames – Vanilla
  4. Mists of Pandaria Leveling
  5. Expansion of the WOW Factor
By: agavin
Comments (19)
Posted in: Games
Tagged as: Blizzard Entertainment, Cataclysm, Video Games, Warcraft, World of Warcraft, World of Warcraft: Cataclysm
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