Blizzard has revealed the details for this year’s Blizzcon where fans of all Blizzard products gather:

Blizzard Entertainment® gaming convention returns to Anaheim Convention Center 10-11 October

MARLOW, UK - 12th May, 2008 - Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. today announced plans for its third BlizzCon™ gaming convention, to be held at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, California on 10 and 11 October. BlizzCon is a celebration of the global player communities surrounding Blizzard Entertainment®’s Warcraft®, StarCraft®, and Diablo® franchises. In response to the demand to accommodate more attendees, this year’s event has expanded from two convention halls to three.

“Whenever we’ve been able to meet and interact with Blizzard gamers from around the world, it’s been a great experience for us,” stated Mike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment. “We’re looking forward to seeing even more of our players at this year’s BlizzCon and delivering another entertaining and informative event for them.”

BlizzCon will offer a wide variety of activities to help all attendees get the most out of the two-day event. In addition to serving as a gathering place for the different Blizzard Entertainment gaming communities, attendees will be able to enjoy:

• Hands-on play time with upcoming Blizzard Entertainment releases
• Discussion panels with Blizzard Entertainment developers
• Competitive and casual tournaments for players to showcase their talents
• Areas and activities devoted to licensed products such as the World of Warcraft® Trading Card Game
• Costume, machinima, and character sound-alike contests with great prizes
• Commemorative merchandise based on the Blizzard Entertainment franchises
• A silent auction
• More exciting activities to be announced

Tickets for BlizzCon will go on sale in the next few weeks at a price of $100 USD per person. As the event draws closer, further details will be announced on the official BlizzCon website.

Since those of us here are actually in Beta, experiencing northrend and all of its great quests, we have a great advantage to those on live who only get to experience Wrath through all of the fan sites.

So, I was wondering, who here being given this great ‘head start’ is planning on racing to 80 when Wrath hits to get one of the titles?

What strategies/addons will you be using to help get there?

Note: Some people disagree with the concept of racing to level 80, powerlevelling, titles are unfair, blah blah. This isn’t the thread for that. If you think the idea of racing to 80 to get one of these titles is “stupid”, then express that in your own thread, please.

I didnt get into beta for testing purposes. I got in because I paid $100 for a blizzcon ticket. No where in my blizzcon card did it say I had to be here for testing purposes. I am here to enjoy myself. So before posting anymore of your “suggestions”, “theories” and “insight’s into Blizzard’s purposes”, consider this: I dont care if you think I need better gear, less gear, need to test X or whatever. I frankly dont care at all what you think I need to do in the game I PAID for access to. (Yes, I paid $100 for this “Beta Key for Future Blizzard Title” and the “World of Warcraft Murloc Costume”. Feel free to start in with the fanboy mantra that beta is free, its your priveledge to test, blah blah blah.) I am here to preview the expansion, not test it. If in the course of my previewing, I provide info that helps Blizzard, thats great. Its not my goal. For the record, I have submitted feedback on nearly every quest ive done in beta. But that is besides the point.

I asked a simple question. Where were the s2 vendors, if anyone knew. Instead I get joe blow’s telling me how to beta test, what gear I should or shouldnt use, and a bunch of other crap I never asked for. I didnt ask for substitute suggestions, I didnt ask for opinions on my gear. I asked for specific information that has yet to be provided other than speculation and tangent discussion.

Since everyone is handing out advise, here is mine to you: please go give your advice to someone in another thread that might actually need or want it. You are wasting my time, your time and anyone elses time that was dumb enough to read this far down the thread, by acting sanctimonious and telling me how I should beta test instead of answering my question. I bet your manager at McDonald’s loves it when you tell people they dont need a Big Mac, they need a Salad after they ask for a burger. Just think of the time you wasted on me that you could have been giving to someone that actually wanted your opinion.

I’ve heard a few guildies throw this idea around and thought it would be an interesting way to show bosses killed in raiding.

Everyone can buy a tabard of achievement (needs a cooler name) which contains unlimited empty gem slots. When you down the final boss in a dungeon or a raid instance there could be a lootable gem that everyone in the raid can pick up which goes in your tabard and is viewable by others, this gem would show achievements of killing bosses and would also give a small bonus such as +4 agi/hit/spell damage or whatever depending on the class, or even a resist to the certain type of damage that boss does.

I’m not sure if this would be to hard to implement, but it seemed like an interesting idea and I figured I’d share it.

I’ve heard a few guildies throw this idea around and thought it would be an interesting way to show bosses killed in raiding.

Everyone can buy a tabard of achievement (needs a cooler name) which contains unlimited empty gem slots. When you down the final boss in a dungeon or a raid instance there could be a lootable gem that everyone in the raid can pick up which goes in your tabard and is viewable by others, th

Let’s be honest, I don’t think anyone is exactly thrilled that you can’t get to Dalaran until lvl 74 unless you feel like depending on a Mage or a Warlock to get you there. The actual lockout doesn’t make much sense either.

This is a beta. We’re supposed to test things, right? While I understand Dalaran isn’t exactly finished, I don’t think it qualifies this limitation, and that’s my own opinion. From what I understand a glitch occured in the last patch where there are parts of Dalaran you can fall through the word of.

Likewise, Dalaran is home to, I beliebe, the vast majority of Trainers who teach Grand Master versions of professions, and those need testing just as much as anything else.

Dalaran is one of the key elements of the expansion. It needs thorough testing, and everything placed within it needs testing, and limiting this doesn’t do that.

While I can see why the cap may be wanted on live, to keep the lower level characters out, the fact remains you won’t keep them out. Their mage and warlock friends will send them there fairly quickly, and the people who don’t have those friends will be forced to degrade themselves and beg over public channels, earning the ire of many of their peers, or wait for a long time to get there and upgrade their professions. This is a beta, and the chances we are playing with our friends aren’t so great, let alone ones who can send us to Dalaran.

Also, I’d like to speak on a side note, from what I understand, the mage spell that teleports you to Dalaran is a lvl 71 spell. I’d like to know how I’m supposed to get to Dalaran to learn my level 71 teleport spell, when the city is off limits to me until I’m lvl 74?

This is a request, a plea to the developers. Please, remove the level lockout, at least until live, because you’re really not shutting out anyone except your lower level beta testers, and prohibiting them from testing the content.

As promised, it looks like Retribution has been nerfed, through a hotfix. The substance of the nerf is as follows: Divine Storm now does physical damage, not Holy. This means, among other things, it’s mitigated by armor, which should obviously cut its damage significantly against certain classes.

Many people have noticed a similarity between this sequence of events and something that happened back when 2.0 was released, right before Burning Crusade. Divine Storm is the 51-point Retribution talent. The 41-point Ret talent, Crusader Strike, was pretty overpowered at level 60, so Blizz nerfed it, only to have to buff it back up later in the expansion.

The Divine Storm nerf is, similarly, in the context of level 70 balance. At level 80, where much of the Wrath balance testing has been done, Divine Storm may well have fit right in. Is an un-nerf coming when Wrath is released? Paladins can only hope.

Update: I am also told that they may have reduced the health/mana returned from Judgment of Light and Judgment of Wisdom by 50%, and reduced the damage of Judgment of Command by 25%. There still isn’t a blue post that I can find about any of this, so it’s hard to confirm — can anyone confirm/deny the Judgment changes?

A new beta build went live yesterday evening, and while it wasn’t a massive patch, I don’t think very many of them will be anymore. We’re pretty close to the launch of Wrath of the Lich King, so I think a lot of the class changes will just be fine tuning from here on out. The glyphs coming in these beta patches look like they may be a little more exciting, though. With professions, especially something like Inscription, they can add new recipes whenever they’d like. You can’t quite do that with new spells. I expect we’ll be seeing new glyphs right up until the day Wrath launches and plenty afterwards, too.

Shadow Priests got a few good changes, a few bad changes in this patch. Let’s take a look at the Glyphs first, then the class changes:

·         Glyph of Shadow Word: Pain - Increases the damage done by your Mind Flay spell by 10% when your target is afflicted with Shadow Word: Pain. Changed from: Reduces the mana cost of Shadow Word: Pain by 20%.

·         Glyph of Mind Soothe has been removed. Replaced with Glyph of Shadow: While in Shadowform, your spell critical strikes increase your spell power by 10% of your Spirit for 10 seconds.

Woohoo! It looks like our glyphs are on the right track finally! The new Shadow Word: Pain glyph is so much better than its previous incarnation, my mind is nearly blown. Glyph of Shadow looks downright fun. I was looking at Warrior glyphs the other night and wondered why their glyphs were so fun while most classes get straight bonuses or even punishment in their glyphs. Things like Glyph of Shadow is what I like to see from glyphs. Things that are fun and exciting. Something beyond ‘more damage’ or ‘longer stun.’ I min-max like crazy, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like my min-maxing to sparkle, you know? Eh! On to the class changes:

·         Devouring Plague’s base damage has been lowered.

This change struck me as being a little strange, because Devouring Plague didn’t exactly have a high base damage to begin with. It did less damage per tick than Vampiric Touch, and Vampiric Touch isn’t exactly known for being a powerhouse in the damage department. Just nerfing DP would be… special. I hopped on the beta realms to test out a theory of mine, and it proved fruitful!

Ghostcrawler mentioned they would be increasing the Vampiric Touch coefficient to help bring Shadow Priest DPS up to speed, but it looks like they did some tinkering with Devouring Plague, too. With equal gear, talents, spell damage, et cetera, Devouring Plague was doing roughly 110 damage per tick more than on live realms, after this ‘nerf’ to the base damage. Unless there’s a factor I hadn’t taken into consideration (which is entirely possible, I’ll admit) it looks like Devouring Plague actually received a buff to its scaling. That was also without Shadowform, by the way, so it will scale even better than my numbers here reflect.

·         Vampiric Embrace now heals the priest by 15% and other party members by 3%.

·         Improved Vampiric Embrace now increases the healing received from Vampiric Embrace by 33/66%.

This is a nerf, yes, but it was a necessary one, as much as I hate it. Let’s bash it into our heads right now. Things that scale with a percentage of your damage are, at their base, broken. Vampiric Touch was the biggest example of this but it isn’t the only one. Come the next expansion, 25% personal healing and 5% party healing will be higher than the devs like. Hell, we may run into that before Wrath even ends. It will probably play a factor in Icecrown. Shadow Priests will become invincible or some nonsense, and it will break again. Then they’ll shift it over to a straight proc on damage or periodic effect while Mind Flaying that will heal a small percent of your maximum health and your DPS will have nothing to do with it, because that’s the only way it will work properly.

This isn’t a dig at Blizzard or the devs. Vampiric Embrace is an amazingly fun idea. I love it. It’s just… flawed. If things such as expansions (or even gear) were not concepts in WoW, the spell would work. As it stands, we’re going to get a new iteration of it every expansion until it becomes Vampiric Touch 2.0, but for health. Which is honestly a little funny since Vampiric Touch used to be Vampiric Embrace, but for mana.

The changed the way mounts work with the newest build and its quite an easy fix to be able to mount again.

Goto your home city or Shadowmoon Valley(for flying) and simply repurchase the mount. If you have an older mount/gladiator mount you can’t use those atm unfortunately

Right click on the new mount to “learn it”.

Then, hit Shift-P and at the top click the Mount tab, and you should see your new mount in there. You can drag that out and put in a bar! Hope this helps!

So I copied my character in alpha. Got it to 75 in a couple days running all the content in the first two zones. Explored a bit of the other outdoor zones but waited waited waited for a new patch to finish the content in them before testing them. Finally got it but it came in the form of a beta that I can’t even participate in? So the alpha testers are taking it in the rear for being in the alpha?

How long is the locked out crap going to last?

Can I recopy the same character and start over at level 70?

That way when I get to 75 by the end of the weekend again I can at least keep going to the new level cap and new content that I couldn’t get to during alpha.