Finished leveling my shaman the other day, the total leveling time you can see above. I’m kind of surprised at how quick it was. I knew the new talents, along with specializations at level 10 was going to expedite the journey of leveling a new character, but I didn’t expect it to be quite so much. Granted, I did have full heirlooms, aside from the heirloom ring from the fishing contest. I guess it helps to have nearly every quest memorized as well, but not so much these days, considering you can just look at your map and instantly know where to go.

On top of that, I decided to level Inscription for my Shaman, half the reason being that, currently, Inscription is a goddamn money printing profession on pretty much any server. One of the very first glyphs you can learn before even reaching skill level 100 in the profession can sell for 100g. Of course, this is most likely prone to entropy, and will decrease quite a bit a month or two after Cataclysm is released.

In the Beta side of things, we have a new build that was pushed today, which is 13241. Changes to the Mage class are as follows:



Arcane

* Arcane Blast now increases damage by 10% (down from 20%) and mana cost by 150% (down from 175%) with each cast of Arcane Blast. Now also reduces the casting time by 0.1 sec with each cast. Base cast time reduced from 2.5 sec to 2.35 sec.
* Arcane Missiles base damage has been increased by 5%, from 341 to 358.
* Focus Magic tooltip clarified to add the 30 min duration and 1 target limit.
* Arcane Barrage base damage has been increased by 5%, from [ 1004 - 1228 ] to [ 1054 - 1288 ].

Fire

* Combustion now combines all your damaging periodic Fire effects on the enemy target, but does not consume them.
* Fire Power damage has been added to the tooltip – [ 1134 to 1336 ].

Frost

* Shattered Barrier now freezes enemies within 10 yards for 2/4 sec, down from 3/6 sec.
* Fingers of Frost now has a 7/14/20% chance to proc from your Chill effects, down from 10/20/30%.
* Early Frost now reduces the cast time of Frostbolt by 0.3/0.6 sec, down from 0.35/0.7 sec.



Some minor nerfs to Frost here, presumably for PvP balance. 20% proc chance on FoF means less shatter Icelances, which a number of people have been complaining about. I’m not sure what to make of the Shattered Barrier change, it may lead me to reconsider Improved Cone of Cold. I previously didn’t like both of them, as the risk of running into heavy diminishing returns with both would be pretty high.

The Arcane bits also puzzle me as well. They look like buffs across the board for the spec, but since Arcane isn’t a spec I really care about it, I can’t fully comment on it. That’s about it for now.

(On a sidenote, you’d think people would learn not to ride ontop of the Elemental shaman’s nuts when in the middle flag section of EOTS. Thunderstorm, ho!)

The Walking Dead has finally premiered tonight on AMC… and it is damn good.

The Walking Dead is an adaptation of the comic by Robert Kirkman of the same name. It is probably the greatest zombie series to be put on paper, ever.

The TV series is an adaptation helmed by Frank Darabont, director of movies such as The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile and The Mist.

Having actually read the comics here, I’m probably a harsher critic on the TV series, as it has the job of living up to the comics. On the other hand, I’m a zombie lover, so I can’t resist the type of story being told here.

How does it stack up? Exceedingly well. Anyone who knows Darabont knows that he has a real love for this type of story and the first episode shows it. We follow Kentucky sheriff’s deputy Rick Grimes as he wakes up in the hospital from a gunshot wound that put him in a coma. Suffice to say, while he’s been snoozing, the world has gone to shit. It sounds very 28 Days Later in the way it starts out, but that’s really the only connection between the two.

I have to say, this series has by far the best zombie makeup and effects that I’ve ever seen. A huge budget went into making this series and it shows at every angle. I’m not going to go on and on about it, because I’m not very good at making long winded reviews. I’ll just say that if you’re a fan of horror and the zombie genre, or even if you just like a well crafted drama, you will find lots to love with The Walking Dead.

All in all, it was a bit underwhelming, partially due to the fact that there were no big reveals this year. About the only reveal they had was the final 5th class for Diablo 3 being the Demon Hunter. Since this was already heavily speculated to be the case, it came as no big surprise to most people.

The Class Q&A along with the open Q&A were probably the most interesting parts of the WoW panels. Seeing slack-jawed WoW players ask obscure questions while the designers simply stare agape for a few seconds before they realize they have to try and answer the question is always entertaining. I think the most interesting thing overheard at the Q&A is that, yes, we will be seeing the Emerald Dream at some point, and yes, that will of course include the Nightmare. I had given up on ever seeing that in game, since the Warcraft novel Stormrage supposedly reconciled that whole plot line.

I did not watch the dance or costume segments, but this particular video makes me wish I did.

All in all, not much happened this year. There was a question as to whether Blizzard would reveal or announce the new MMO they’ve been working on, but it did not happen. We’ll always have next year to look forward to, at least. By then we may even hear whispers of a new World of Warcraft expansion, along with (hopefully) the big reveal as to what Blizzard’s next MMO actually is.

I’ve wanted to do high rated arena for a long time now, but the opportunities were always non-existent.  With Cataclysm however, and the people I’ll be playing with, I may finally have that opportunity.

2. Hit the gold cap

This is a longshot, especially since the gold cap is now much, much higher. Still, it’s something to shoot for.

3. Casual raiding

I haven’t raided hardcore since vanilla when I was with Impervious. I don’t mean to get back into raiding hardcore, but I do hope to do some light casual raiding in Cata.

These three things are the ones I know for sure I want to try for. So what’s on your Cataclysm to do list?

Honestly, I don’t understand what the big deal over this is. I played a Druid a number of months in Wrath, during which I was Restoration for a good chunk of. While I enjoyed the treeform animation, I was never too attached to it, and more than a few times found myself wishing I could heal in caster form without nerfing myself. I was generally surprised to see what my caster form looked like half the time. The problem I have with this situation is that a large number of people are reporting that they’re shelving their Druid because they can no longer sit in treeform all day long.

Now, this is just opinion, but you do not play a class specifically because you like the way they look when they’re healing. That kind of logic is just plain silly. The reason you should play a class is because you like the job that class is designed to fill and the tools that are given to you in order to do that job. To simply shelve a character over such an insignificant change is, quite frankly, extremely vain and just plain wrong.

I play this game to have fun, and while I can certainly see some people having fun ONLY because they’re a tree, it’s just the wrong state of mind to be in. I know I would much rather have a Druid in my group because he enjoyed being a Druid, not because he could turn into a fricken tree.

Me, I started leveling my Shaman, Thundastruck, while I wait for Cataclysm release to draw closer, which is when I roll my Mage and that will become my new main.

Leveling in the old world, with specializations at level 10 and enchanted heirlooms, is quite honestly ridiculous. I’m having a hard time trying to decide between Enhancement or Elemental, but I’m thinking Elemental at least until 30 just because Thunderstorm is so much goddamn fun.

I’m honestly kind of surprised at the amount of people that had no idea what patch 4.0 was bringing. You sit in trade for just a few minutes and there are all sorts of comments, like “wtf you can’t gem spellpower anymore?” and such. Common sense tells me these people are probably the ones you don’t want to get stuck with in a group. People may accuse me of having an elitist attitude because of that, but honestly, if you spent just 2 minutes looking at a site like MMO-Champion over the past month, they’d know all they would need to know about what was coming.

On the beta side of things, there’s this:

Arcane

* Polymorph now has a 1.7 sec cast time, down from 2 sec.

Frost

* Ring of Frost now has a 2 min cooldown, down from 3 min.
* Shatter now also increases the damage done by Frostbolt against frozen targets by 10/20%.

Fire

* Combustion reworded to clarify its effect – Consumes all your damaging periodic Fire effects on an enemy target, instantly dealing 954.57 to 1131.92 Fire damage and creating a new periodic effect that lasts 10 sec and deals damage per time equal to the sum of the consumed effects. / 40 yd range, Instant, 2 min cooldown

The Shatter change I’m actually pretty surprised about, simply because there’s quite a large amount of QQ on the beta forums right now over Frost and it’s current state.

There’s one particular post on the beta forums that I found greatly amusing. Ring of Frost was a hot topic in this thread. The post in question is this one. This druid is qq’ing over the fact that the current freeze from Ring of Frost is classified as physical, not magical, and is thus undispellable. He claims in this post that *every* caster CC is dispellable, and so should this.

Now, please, correct me if I’m wrong here… but isn’t Cyclone undispellable as well? That’s a caster CC (even if wielded by ferals) and it’s undispellable. Unfortunately, no one pointed this out to the clearly misinformed Druid. Hey, at least Cyclone doesn’t require your target to actually WALK INTO the freakin’ tornado in order to get CC’d.

Like I said, I’m really hoping this is permanent. 10k honor is so unbelievably easy to accrue and the ability for anyone to get easy access to these gems lead to a pretty big crash in price, as I haven’t seen cut gems going for more than 170g in months. Those aren’t even the common gems. Delicate Cardinal Rubies usually average around 100g on Deathwing US, with the most uncommon cuts hitting around 160-170g.

So, yes, I am hoping this guy is gone for good and stays that way for Cataclysm. I probably won’t win any fans over with that, but I really believe it’s better for server economy.

The next two months are going to be ridiculously long.

Besides the obvious change of the cooldown coming down to 2 minutes, the freeze effect is now a *real* freeze, so Shatter and Frostburn do apply. It still breaks on damage, however, but it’s unclear whether ANY damage will break it, or whether it breaks when a certain amount of damage has been applied in the same way that Frost Nova breaks.

All in all, I think the new Ring of Frost is finally making it into a worthwhile ability. I was a little disappointed when they changed the spell to Ring of Frost, as I was really rather happy with Curtain of Frost. But, I’m starting to think Ring of Frost will be an ability that sees a lot of use, in both arena and rated BGs.

I’m also pretty happy with the current state of Frost in the beta. Control is better than ever, damage is decent, on a premade Icelance is critting for around 15k, Frostfire Bolt for around 18k and that is without the 15% damage glyph. Not only that, but I think the Mage class is nearly done for Cataclysm, I think they only need about another month of polishing and everything will be fantastic.

* Pyroblast’s old boring name has been replaced with the infinitely more awesome Pyroblast!

Frost

* Ring of Frost now has a 2 min cooldown, down from 3 mins.

Yes, you must yell “Pyroblast!” everytime you say the name now, in some sort of weird Lina Inverse-esque voice.

Nice to see that they brought the cooldown of Ring of Frost down to 2 minutes, although as per feedback on the beta forums, it was pretty expected that they would at least reduce the cooldown. I’m still not entirely sold on the ability in it’s current form. It seems like an ability that will mainly only be useful in Battlegrounds, which makes sense since Blizzard is introducing rated Battlegrounds in Cataclysm.

Outside of that, however, I don’t see it having regular use in arena if it remains the same, buuuut, we’ll just have to wait and see. It could potentially be a great way to force a trinket early on in a arena match, though it does share DR with polymorph.

I’m starting to think Blizzard is putting the finishing touches on the Mage class at this point. The numbers are getting tweaked, things are starting to feel right. Ice Lance was critting for 15k with the glyph on one of the level 85 premades, the previous premades before they got decked out in ilevel 333 gear. At this point however, I’m wondering if it’ll be feasible to glyph for FFB in PvP. FFB was already hitting harder than Ice Lance before base damage was increased across the board. It does apply the dot, true, but with Glyph of Polymorph it may not matter.