World of Warcraft : daily

Lake Wintergrasp Daily Quests

Zyuu — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:01:17 GMT

This is the first "PvP only" zone of the game, it's only fair its daily quests are PvP oriented. Well 3 out of 4 is and they are nice and fast too. They are all available in the Fortress if your faction controls it or in your village close to the fortress if you're on offense:

For 620 Honor and 20.63g you need to kill 20 Alliance Players. This is easily obtainable since you need to re-earn your Private, Corporal, First Lieutenant ranks at the beginning of each battle in order to control and buy siege engines.
For another 620 Honor and 20.63g you have to kill 3 enemy Siege Engines. The big tanks.
There are some fire elementals that are used to fuel the siege engines for 10 of their essences you get 412 Honor and 20.63g
Of course there is a daily quest for winning the battle either by taking the fortress or defending it. The reward is another 620 Honor and 20.63g

For more daily quests in Wrath of the Lich King, go here.

Daily Blue WotLK Posts & The Harvest Festival

Zyuu — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 23:21:16 GMT

Like every day since the Wrath of the Lich King beta began, there's a large amount of blue posts which has surfaced today -- we got the summary, courtesy of World of Raids.

Also, since the summer is drawing to a close, the Harvest Festival has arrived!

Quote from: Wryxian (Source)

Summer draws to a close and the leaves of the trees begin to turn from vibrant green to rusty red, reminiscent of the blood of fallen heroes. The Harvest Festival has arrived and adventurers from all over Azeroth are gathering in Stormwind and Orgrimmar to remember those who have passed on into the Light over the fading year. Processions wind their way to Uther the Lightbringer's tomb and to Grom Hellscream's memorial as both the Horde and Alliance take a moment to pause, reflect, and remember the great ones.

To learn more about this festival, please check out our Harvest Festival page.

EU Premades

No dice.

Quote from: Vaneras (Source)

As we're moving ahead with the beta we feel specific testing on high-end PvP balance is required. Hence one (US) realm does have level 80 pre-mades available.

Between internal test realms, (upcoming) PTRs and beta realms for all regions our testing hardware is already fully utilized, and as the main testing needs are still on the vast amount of other content, other realms are kept as is.

While we appreciate everybody's eagerness to test high-end characters and PvP gear we hope you understand the need for having testing resources spread on all parts of the expansion.

WotLK Beta - Blue Posts

Casters and mana regeneration / Spirit on Naxx gear
All casters are going to need to take mana regeneration seriously again. For too long we let casters just stack +damage stats and fill themselves back up with shadow priests. You also have to consider downranking is also gone now so you can't rely on that to save you mana. Spirit is a seriously good stat now. I realize Dreamstate isn't directly a Spirit buff, but neither does it let you opt out of stat-based mana regen. (src)

As I posted in another thread, some amount of Spirit is something that all casters are going to need a lot more of. You can't stack shadow priests like you used to, and you can't downrank. Mana management is a part of all caster classes, not just trying to maximize the pewpew. We got away from that a little in BC.

We also don't always design gear to be perfectly optimal for everyone. Part of the game is examining a piece of gear, deciding if you need it or not, and how it will really benefit you. If your set pieces are perfectly optimized, it makes it less interesting to look at any other drops until you're at the next tier. (Now I'm not saying we're going to give you Str and Parry either. That said, I will bring up whether we could afford to trade a little spirit for crit on your gear. (src)

Death Knight
Yellow vs White damage
We did consider purposely lowering DK white damage so that the specials could be bigger. But it actually does some wacky things to scaling when melee classes do a much larger proportion of yellow damage than white damage -- 40% white damage is about what we shoot for, though that isn't always realized.

On-next swing attacks are very controversial. They make more sense for classes that need rage dump, but don't specifically help the DK. When we tried them for the DK, there were some people who liked the mechanic, but a lot who didn't.

You can make a compelling argument that the vision of the DK as someone swinging a big two-hander like Frostmourne doesn't jive well with runes as a power cost, since the latter tend to push you towards using more abilities more often (which necessarily pushes the damage down to compensate).

Changing that now though would be a huge setback, and I'm actually pretty happy with the DK rotations at the moment. We just need to get the damage somewhere that feels satisfying while still balanced with other classes. (src)

Druid
Balance Druids needs
What do we want balance to be able to do? What's your role?
You're a caster. Surprise, I know. But we think we didn't always give you the tools to be a good caster before. You need:

Competitive dps. Mages and warlocks just tend to get a lot of attention, maybe because there are more of them, or more races of them, or they are more archetypal classes (in the familiarity sense).
Good AE utility. Encounters and dungeons tend to get designed with the assumption that the ranged dps can do AE. Hurricane is phenomenal now. I healed a run today and did really competitive dps with Hurricane on the ranged pulls. And I wasn't even Balance! I love Starfall. It's a rare spell because it feels new -- it isn't single target and it isn't classical Hurricane-style AE either.
CC. If a group has a choice between a druid and a mage and only the mage can CC, the decision gets a lot easier. With Entangling Roots used inside, problem solved.
Group utility. I think deep balance provides that now. Even Insect Swarm and Faerie Fire have a better role now. Without the vicious cycle of Curse of Shadows buffing warlocks which lead to inviting more warlocks somewhat solved, I think it will be easier for Balance druids to get into raids regardless. We've just opened space for more classes now.
The ability to keep causing damage. I think the oomkin thing was largely addressed in BC, but it's still something we need to keep an eye on, or at least try and banish the stigma that other players still think it has.

So that's it for role. Beyond that, what I think Balance needed was a means not to go insane by mashing the same buttons all the time. My favorite talent for attempting to solve this is Eclipse. Eclipse almost by itself "saved" Balance for me. Several times I tried going Balance in Classic and BC and just couldn't do it. But Eclipse is fun just because sometimes you want to Wrath and sometimes you want to Starfire. Improved Insect Swarm starts to get at this kind of mixed up of rotations too, and even the haste benefit from Moonkin a little as well.

Those are my thoughts. I don't think Balance is done yet by any stretch, but I don't hesitate to go Balance in a dungeon or raid now, which actually says quite a lot. I think the designers have done a good job with the tree so far. (src)

Balance / Feral concerns (src)

There are no tank niches, at least the way they have been defined here. When you ask why would anyone take a druid tank over a warrior tank, the answer is because that player is a better player, not because they have the magic ability that makes an encounter much easier. If you're concern is that the preponderance of warrior mitigation and abilities makes warriors a much more effective tank than druids, then that is a legitimate problem.
We haven't finished tuning numbers yet. If cat dps is low, we'll fix it before Lich King goes live. We haven't focused on that yet because we are still working on talent trees and bugs. But you're starting to see some of it. One thing I forgot to mention is that the raid buff overhaul was a net dps loss to melee classes. We expected that would happen, but we have not yet adjusted their dps accordingly. That might not be all cats need, but I wanted to mention it before I forgot.
I know balance druids feel neglected. My time is limited, and it's totally valid feedback that I don't give all specs or classes equal attention. My choices seem to be post a little or not post at all. I'm not a CM and any time I spend here (while very valuable for me) is time I'm not fixing classes. We'll try to give balance some more love.
I think bears in particular could use a couple more situational abilities. We did lower the cooldown on Berserk and we might even do it again. I assume this doesn't count or you wouldn't be asking for more flashy abilities, but when I did Feral Charge as cat in Utgarde last night, the fight virtually stopped while everyone said "Wait? What did you just do? That looked so cool!"
Feral is going to feel a little bigger than other trees because we are specifically trying to offer you more talents than you can get. The design is that you can choose 2-3 talents to emphasize your bear role over your cart role... if you choose. If you want to try and be relatively good at both, then split the difference between those talents.

Rebirth & Innervate
At the moment we have no plans to give those abilities to other classes. The raid buff stacking change was done because it was disheartening to see players spend so much effort trying to min / max the buffs different classes brought, and understandably so, rather than trying the encounters.

We understand that the risk of having more redundant buffs across classes is homogenization and too much homogenization hurts class diversity. So long as we avoid any fights in which Innervate or brez offer a huge bonus, we don't see a reason to hand them out to everybody. That goes true for similar abilities that other classes have. (src)

Avoiding the daze effect
I believe bears with the right talents can avoid daze now. We discussed an implementation for that. It may not be in the data you have at the moment. (src)

Warlock
Metamorphosis Feedback
This is kind of a specific request, but please give us any feedback you have on Metamorphosis, the 51 Demo talent. Assume that we aren't going to swap this talent out with something else, but other than that, nothing needs to be set in stone.

Please don't use this thread for a lot of other questions or concerns about the class. (src)

Daily Quests of Northrend

Zyuu — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 13:52:59 GMT

This article lists all the Northrend daily quests currently ingame. Currently it is update to date with the latest Wrath of the Lich King beta build and when new builds introduce more daily quests, we will post an updated version of this article.

Borean Tundra

There's only one daily quest so far in Borean Tundra, in Coldarra. It is the exact same quest as the regular Drake Hunt. Take Raelorasz's Spear in Transitus Shield and catch a drake hatchling. That's it. 7.10g for 1 minute.

Howling Fjord

Alliance exclusive daily quests in this zone. One to repeat the very nice aerial combat quest and kill gargoyles rewarding7.10g and +250 Explorers' League. The second is bombing the blockade cannons and the nearby pirates at Westguard Keep. Very entertaining quest even to come back to at level 80. 4.70g and +250 Valiance Expedition

Dragonblight

So far the only daily quest of the zone is defending the Wyrmrest Temple. This quest gives you control of a red dragon with Immolate, Fire Breath, Renew and Blazing Speed spells to kill 3 big, 5 small blue dragons attacking the Temple and to destabilize the Azure Dragonshrine to stop whatever evil they are doing there. As an added bonus if you complete the quest in 2 minutes you get an achievement.

15.56g and +250 Wyrmrest Accord

Grizzly Hills

There are 8 daily quests in this zone, all located in one of 3 PVP areas. The Blackriver Logging Camp is just killing 10 NPC attackers or players, the Blue Sky Logging camp has a similar quest and you can also collect Shredder parts, return broken Shredders and heal wounded NPC defenders. The most intriguing area is Venture Bay where an Alliance, Horde and Venture Co ship are docked and you can drive away Venture Co NPCs, kill enemy players, kill the enemy faction's ship captain. The interesting bit is that these last 3 dailies reward Venture Coins (in addition to gold) which can be turned in for nice rewards.

4x 15.56g and +250 Warsong Offensive/Alliance Vanguard
1x 15.56g and +250 Horde Expedition
3x 15.56g and 10x Venture Coins

Since these daily quests are for level 74, they reward a little less gold then expected, but since there are 8 of them and they can be completed really fast, none can complain. Over 120g and quite some reputation in a half an hour.

List of Grizzly Hills daily quests

Zul'drak

I wasn't the biggest fan of the Argent Stand questline, so the daily quest that replaces the main quests - helping out 4 captains of the commander - didn't win me over either. But if you complete the quest within 30 minutes there's extra reward, which makes it a little nicer. Currently that is an extra +350 reputation and 38.27g! So the little tasks at the 4 captains vary every other day just like in Sholazar Basin (read below), mostly they rehash the previous quests:

Alchemist Finklestein needs your help to create a truth serum for his prisoner. To cook it you get a 40 second counter to find a random material on the shelves of the lab, however there are 2 storage rooms so if you can't find it in one, there's no way you can go through the other in time. Start again the whole cauldron. Pretty annoying. Oh and there's 6 random items to find. 4.76g and +75 Argent Crusade
Captain Rupert gives you orders to incinerate fallen soldiers or restore the courage of scared ones or close the Nerubian tunnels. 4.76g and +75 Argent Crusade
Captain Brandon wants you to collect water poppies, standard, 4.76g and +75 Argent Crusade
Captain Grondel needs wood for fire or to kill crocodiles or to gather medallions from troll corpses. 4.76g and +75 Argent Crusade

When finishing there's 18.89g and +250 Argent Crusade. Even on the first try it took no more than 25 minutes, on the second and third day it can be as low as 15 minutes. So it's 37.93g and +600 Argent Crusade, with the time bonus it goes up to 76.20g and +950 Argent Crusade. These count as 5+1 daily quests by the way.

List of Zul'drak daily quests

Sholazar Basin

After the long (and fun) questline I chose The Oracles, so I can only comment their daily quests. Now the thing about these daily quests is that they are not actually daily quests, but as far as I can tell, bi-daily or tri-daily. What that means is there are 3 questgivers in Rainspeak Canopy and they give a random daily quest every day from a given set. These quests are fairly similar, the only difference is how you accomplish it.

Soo-nee's quests have you either control Haiphoon, the Great Tempest to consume elementals, or kill some wind and air elementals yourself or sing a few songs on top the 4 great pillar or at the 3 lakes of the zone. 20.63g and +500 The Oracles
Soo-met's Kartak's hold quest set you on destroying 50 Frenzyheart warriors by either using 3 crystals that summon storms and laser beams or control a huge cat Shoo-lun, Will of the Titan to kill them yourself. 29.80g and +700 The Oracles
Soo-say's set of quest is actually just one, there's no variation here. Grab a gurloc and use it to dig up shiny treasures. The quest is pretty annoying but the gurlocs are adoowable so it's okay. 19.34g and +500 The Oracles

There's a slight variation among The Oracles and Frenzyheart quests, but in terms of reputation gain and gold reward they are the same. All in all these 3 are the highest level and probably best daily quests, oh and they reward 69.77g and +1700 The Oracles/Frenzyheart Tribe for about 25 minutes.

List of Sholazar Basin daily quests

The Storm Peaks

Most dailies come after unlocking the Sons of Hodir in Dun Niffelem, but there is one earlier as well.

Landmines are fun and Blizzard knows this. Garm's attacking soldiers are to be undermined again and again. Since there's an overstock on mines, we can use them! 20g
Fjorn's Anvil (yes, an object, not an NPC) wants more metal for the Frost Giants so kill some Brittle Revenants (ice elemental) and its essence to cool some hot iron scraps. 22g and +250 The Sons of Hodir
Hodir's Horn (yes, again an object) asks you to put some more spirits to rest and Thunderfall. 29g and +250 The Sons of Hodir
Hodir's Helm needs polish so off you go to the nearest cave for some ooze "stuff". 29g and +250 The Sons of Hodir

The anvil and horn quests I found mandatory to do for 2 days to gain high enough reputation to continue the questline and unlock the helm. Interesting new design if this is not a bug.

Cooking

Now the cooking daily quests are pretty interesting. In fact the whole cooking system is pretty interesting. When learning Grand Master cooking you get a set of food you can cook using fish and meat from Northrend and there is no more from the vendor. Most of these foods give a Well Fed buff of 30 rating of one kind and 40 stamina or 35 spellpower and 40 stamina or 60 attack power and 40 stamina etc.

The daily quests reward you with 1x Dalaran Cooking Award, however you need 3 of these for a recipe that allows you to cook an upgraded version of the previous foods, giving 40 rating instead of 30, 46 spell power instead of 35, 80 attack power instead of 60 and so on. 40 stamina stays at 40. To actually cook 1 of these yummy foods you need 1x Northern Spice too, which can be bought in stacks of 10 for 1x Dalaran Cooking Award. That gives 10 buff food 1 day for anyone who does the daily cooking quest, no more. Of course now the token and the spice aren't BoP so they can be traded kinda undermining this whole restriction.

Anyway there are 6 quests, you can do one of them every day, they mostly need 2-4 meat from an easily accessible mob in Northrend and different items from the city, like half-empty glasses of wine, cheese from the cheese vendor's shop or fungus from the sewers (ewww!). 9.63g and +150 Kiron Tor and 1x Dalaran Cooking Award.

List of recipes purchasable with Dalaran Cooking Awards
List of Cooking daily quests

Jewelcrafting

They are similar to the Cooking daily quests, they also reward 1 token to purchase recipes. 1 for uncut gems used for Jewelcrafter only unique gems, 2 for low-level gem designs, 5 for high-level gem designs, 8 for metagem designs. The actual quests require 1 drop from a random creature, like a Vrykul or a Revenants or a Shoveltusk plus 2 cut green gems. In turn they reward 7.40g and 1x Dalaran Jewelcrafter's Trophy

List of designs purchasable with Dalaran Jewelcrafter's Trophies
List of Jewelcrafting daily quests

Daily WoW News - DK Changes, Exotic pets and more

Zyuu — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 21:04:27 GMT

Death Knight - About the new Frost Strike (src)
The new Frost Strike still hits for Frost damage (no armor). The normalization will just allow you to use any speed weapon without worrying about what that means. We are trying Frost Strike as runic power right now. It works really well with talents like Merciless Combat, Deathchill and Killing Machine. You can still throw Death Coil at ranged enemies, but Frost Strike will always hit harder (and crit bigger since it's not a spell). Since Frost's 51 is not a damage spell, you don't feel like you are wasting runic power on the Frost Strike. We haven't yet added any secondary effect to Frost Strike (chill, freeze, disease, shatter) mostly because we have tried lots of those already and don't want to saddle the shiny new Frost Strike with any excess baggage at this point.

Death Knight - Dual Wield and 2H (src)
Death Knights will be able to dual-wield. The design is that DW and 2H are about equal. Because DW tends to dominate for specs that have it as an option, you probably won't see it propped up much more than it is now. Ideally we would like to see 2H and DW DKs. I suspect 2H will be slightly more popular since that fits most people's notions of a proper DK.

Death Knight - The new Death Strike (src)
Death Strike is 1U, 1F. It isn't a hard hitter (i.e. Oblit is always a better choice when you want big numbers), but you are healed by a percentage of the damage per disease. With two diseases, you can be healed for 100% or more of the strike's damage. It has no mechanic tied to killing an enemy or hitting them when wounded any longer.

Death Knight - Heart Strike has trainable ranks (src)
It has trainable ranks at higher level, much like Frost Strike and Scourge Strike.

Death Knight - Frost fever runeforge to be replaced (src)
Since Frost Fever became a disease that you can keep up relatively easy (and at range even), the Frost Fever runeforge isn't very useful so we plan on replacing it with the something like Frozen Rune Weapon. Windfury Totem, however, is a passive haste buff so it will stack with any enchantment. The DK runeforge enchants will not stack with enchants like Executioner, though they will stack with temporary buffs like sharpening stones.

Death Knight - The new talent trees contain a few bugs (src)
There are a few bugs in those tech trees. Off the top of my head,

Killing Machine and Deathchill benefit Frost Strike. Killing Machine only procs from white attacks.
There are no stacking diseases. Icy Touch causes Frost Fever and Plague Strike causes Blood Plague. You can talent to get a few more spells that cause those diseases, and Unholy can add two more diseases (Ebon Plague and Unholy Blight). This makes Unholy Blight quite useful because it's the only way to get 4 diseases up for Blood Strike or Obliterate.
Sudden Doom does benefit from Heart Strike. Heart Strike hits very hard and has a nice debuff with PvP and PvE uses (think Icy Veins, Windfury, Frenzy, Flurry and a host of boss abilities). It's less confusing than the previous debuff and isn't dependent on a next strike.
Chilblains lasts twice as long.
Abom Strength benefits the raid.
Imp Rune Tap lowers cooldown as well as +health.
Crypt Fever doesn't affect attributes, but it boosts the damage of other diseases on the target.
Corpse Explosion costs 1 Unholy (remember Raise Dead is free).
Blood-Caked Blade doesn't cause a disease. It adds melee damage to existing ones.
Morbidity lowers cooldown on DnD and cost of Death Coil.

I'm sure there are others. We'll get them fixed up.

Hunter - Trap talents to be enhanced (src)
We're still going to do a consolidation on the trap talents in the Survival tree, and we'll also add some synergy with Bear Trap in there too.

Hunter - Silencing Shot to get changed (src)
Some changes to Silencing Shot will be made before... the end...

Hunter- Devilsaur and more exotic pets (src)
In the current build, you can tame Devilsaur without the 51 talent, it's a bug. Next build there will be a few more Exotic pets, also there is currently a single chimera that is tamable and he might even be a rare spawn (Numaroc).

Hunter - Auto rezzing the pet (src)
We might try something where the talent still auto-rezzes the pet, but takes a few seconds longer so that hopefully whatever gibbed Fluffy in the first place isn't going to just do it again. It's a tricky balance because if the delay is too long, hunters will just use their own rez and the talent is a lot less attractive. An alternative is a shaman-like self-rez, though it would have to be on the pet bar, not the hunter's. Even then it is yet one more button you have to find room for, so I think the current implementation still might be cooler with some polish.

Hunter - Auto leveling mechanic not applied to pets retrieved from the stables (src)
I suspect that it won't be. We can do some investigation and see how hard it would be to get that fixed. Unless you have a personal attachment to that pet or it's one of the few that is no longer available, you could just go out and get a new one though.

Hunter - Devilsaur pet size (src)
It think it's pretty evident that having pets that are too large might make the game less fun to play in some situations. We're just going to have to see how the beta goes, but ideally it would be cool if devilsaurs could remain at their current size. We'll try.

Warrior - AE Tanking and Thunder Clap changes (src)
AE tanking is hard for warriors. This tends to mean that pugs in particular would rather have a paladin tank just for the consistency. I agree this feels broken. We think we can make it easier for warriors to AE tank, especially in 5-player instances, without displacing the paladin as the best AE tank. At the moment we are considering increasing Thunder Clap to 5 targets. We'll see how that feels.

Unobtainable Achievements (src)
Well its worth points to be a Key master and I can't reacquire those keys that I did away with. As a rogue I tossed the shadowforge key to make room once they made the lock pickable.
We're making all of the old keys obtainable if you deleted them. Same goes for pets and tabards. For keys, talk to a Locksmith. For Pets, talk to a stable master. For tabards, go to the tabard vendor. It's important to note that this ONLY works for pets/tabards/keys that cannot be obtained again by the player. This means that if a pet was a rare drop and you deleted it, you'll need to farm for it again.

WotLK Arena (src)
You will be able to continue rated arena matches at level 70, but there will be no new gear rewards in this bracket. Only skirmishes will be available from levels 71-79 but then at level 80 the rated matches will be available again.

Daily Posts from Blizzard (22/05)

Zyuu — Sat, 24 May 2008 03:26:24 GMT

5 person dungeons in Wrath of the Lich King

We are currently planning to keep the 5 person dungeons in Wrath of the Lich King fairly short in length, but with a boost to their overall epicness - the preview we have of The Nexus is a great example of this.

The more vast and sprawling dungeons will be found in the raid dungeons which more players will be able to experience with the changes to the setup.

World of Warcraft : daily

Lake Wintergrasp Daily Quests

Daily Blue WotLK Posts & The Harvest Festival

Daily Quests of Northrend

Daily WoW News - DK Changes, Exotic pets and more

Daily Posts from Blizzard (22/05)

Graphic Engine Overhaul, Daily Blue Posts, Comics

Graphics Engine Overhaul

Changes to the official WoW Forums

World Wide Invitational Fan Art Contest Announced

Comic & WoW Honorable Mentions Comic Contest

Eredar Twins loot, Tournament Realms stats, Daily Blue

Eredar Twins encounter: Reverse kill order grants 1 extra epic item + 4 sunmotes

Tournament Realms statistics

Daily Blue

Oceanic Free Character Moves & New Realm

10 man raid dungeons in Wrath of the Lich King

What about sexy/cool looking armor sets in WotLK?

Collector's Edition of Wrath of the Lich King

Practice on an NPC with your character?

Gates open, Daily Blue, Char Migration, Fan Artwork

Daily Blue

Changes to zone-wide buffs

Issue with Hunters Mark overwriting?

Unable to acquire the spell that summon the Paladin Epic Mount via quest

Class changes now and in Wrath of the Lich King

Arena Tournament Ineligibility

Free Character Migration in Europe

Akama Fanart Wallpaper and more

The Daily Quest Interviews Teza -- World of Raids

Daily Dose of WoW: Tuesday

Blue Posts

November Comic Contest - Winner