As some toons reached about 70, I created Cloth and Mail armor with crafting. There are several problems to be solved:
It turns out that the Wow crafting panel has a search feature, and if you choose “unlearned” then you can search for recipes that you don’t know.
Let’s compare the “Cosmetic Look” features of Guild Wars 2 and World of Warcraft, as well as the banking, battle and party loot features and see what that can tell us about game philosophy.
Starting with Wow, let’s look at Transmogrification.
Ok, I admit it. I need a guide to level up. I used to use Xellerated guides – which cost actual money. But after all these years, they are gone or changed their name. And there are lots of guides in the Curse catalog. I did a little looking and chose this one: Wow Pro Guide. This one looks like it has lots of other features – profession leveling, achievements, etc. – that I’ll look into, but I got going right away with the leveling guide and with TomTom which it requires, it works very nicely.
It’s been a while since I’ve played anything but the “Starter” which I check out every few months. But I’ve decided to Re-Up my subscription and get back into it. After all, with no upgrade I can go as far as Warlords now. My highest toon is 87, so there’s a long way to climb to hit the top of Warlords.
Things have changed, mostly for the better.
The prepatch is out and we can expect Legion to go live in August. At this point I’m playing starter with my other account on hold. Some day I may go back to it and continue with the dozen or so characters I have at level 85 and above.
While the actual Legion patch is not up, there are many class changes. Those are all covered elsewhere, so I’ll just summarize some of my first impressions here. One of the notable things about Legion is the addition of Hunter as a class for Gnome. When you start a Gnome hunter, you get a mechanical rabbit. Who can pass that up?
Here is my Gnome Hunter outside the inn in Kharanos. Notice all the motorcycles.
World of Warcraft is notorious for this. Making items “no longer available” in the game.
Why should an item become “no longer available”?
The item must be kept in the client forever. Yes FOREVER, since some players will have the items and they must be displayed or otherwise operate correctly when they are used.
If an item is truly “removed” from the game, it must be replaced by something of equal value and there must be an overwhelming reason to remove it. I’m having a very hard time thinking of a reason that would call for an item to be permanently removed from the game.
Removing an item is not the same as changing it. If a weapon or armor piece or set is too powerful, or too weak, then one can easily change the stats on it to make it more in line with the play styles of the game. This is done all the time.
Here are some of the Excuses that game designers have used to remove items from the game, and the reasons that none of them hold up.
In January 2007, Blizzard released World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade. This expansion included flying mounts in Outland. You had to reach level 60 to purchase flight training and a mount. You could only fly in Outland, the new continent. In the Cataclysm expansion flight was possible in all areas, except the starting areas.
Now, after all this time, other MMOs are adding flying. Guild Wars 2, in Heart of Thorns, has added flight, well Gliding actually, where you can glide in the whole world, but only for a limited distance.
In a few days on May 17, 2016, Tera is adding flying mounts. Again these mounts have limited range. Why are these games dumbing down flight?
On 13 November, 2008, Blizzard released Wow Wrath of the Lich King including Northrend and the city of Dalaran. Below Dalaran there are two trees.
On 25 January 25, 2011, Tera was released in South Korea. On the Island of Dawn, the starting area for all characters is this tree at Tower Base.
The BlizzConn 2015 Legion Game System Panel gave a lot more detail about the content of the Legion Expansion and the other game system changes that are occurring with the expansion.
See below for a link to the video as well as a summary of the information:
So, Blizzcon 2015 is underway and I tripped across the Youtube videos yesterday. See below. They had lots of coverage of the coming Wow Expansion Legions.
Pretty exciting. And they have even leaked the release date of “before” 21 Sept 2016.
There are some other things that you may not have caught up on if, like me, you have been away from Wow for some time. Here’s a catch-up guide in case you’ve been away:
Windy Weather 