When I say the Beta is a wicked ride, you better believe it.  Here I am cruising with my level 80 drood past the Org bank on my sweet new pimpcycle.  During the last push, a whole load of peeps were able to get the new Mechano-hog for free in Dalaran.  Unfortunately, I missed that, but since I have made such an obscene amount of gold doing inscription, plopping down 5,ooo gold for one of these was no problem.

The hog is made by engineers, and looks pretty steep as far as the mats are concerned.  Expect to see a ton of these around before christmas, but also expect the price tag to be large.

If you have an engineering toon at 375 with mining, this will be a monster money-maker if you can be one of the first ones to go to market with it.  It’s the most fun anyone will ever have on a land mount by far.

Vanity mounts like this one and collectible pets even have achievements attached to them.  There are an unlimited number of non-combat pets and mount slots.  I bagged the penguin for a pet and the cycle.  It’s a whimsical and fun new twist to the character tabs.

The hog looks really cool and is very different from the animal mounts.  It actually seems to turn a bit better, so riding it around in the buildings in TB seems easier on the bike than a raptor (and certainly more so than a kodo).

The sound leaves a bit to be desired, more like a wicked lawnmower than a harley, but good enough.  It even has a dismount button named “leave Vehicle” that pops up when you get on the thing.  It took me a bit to figure out how to get off of it the first time!

But perhaps the coolest feature is that another toon can ride with you!  All you have to do is group up and you’re ready to go for a cruise.  This could come in really handy for those times where you are powerleveling an alt through instances.  Your main can just party with your alt (or anyone for that matter) and then speed off to the instance portal at epic land mount speed.  It will really cut down on running time for low level toons.  Imagine everyone asking you for a ride all the time (ack).

Lawbringer and I have been grinding away at some really serious things in the beta, but the hog stands out.  Inscription is going to be even better than you can imagine, and the new Naxx raids are amazing.  It’s good that we will at least get the inscription profession in the next patch.  Keep your eyes on your email box in the next few days for more on inscription, we’re almost ready to tell you all about it.

The hog is a great example of just one of dozens of really cool things that stand out in the xpac.  And DYS is going to keep you ahead of the rest of the WoW players out there.  The info is going to come fast and furious as the beta gets into the final stages, so stick around for all the tasty tidbits.  I guarantee you, if you will read the articles and get to work on the information, you really will Dominate your server - and the last word - will be yours . . .

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23 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

Inscription is the new profession coming to WotLK. This will not be something that is optional for player enhancement; everyone will be using it in one way or another.

The common reason players will be subjugated to inscription is the need for glyphs. Glyphs are the main feature of inscription and what they do is power the player in certain abilities depending on what glyphs they decide to get.

Glyphs are kind of like gems and enchanting combined. They offer small enchants to certain aspects of a certain class. Unlike gems however, they are placed in their own little fancy UI (user interface), not on equipment or into sockets.

As of now, players can have a total of 6 glyphs (3 major and 3 minor). Major glyphs provide vital enhancement to spells and abilities such as an extra 5 yrd range to ambush or 50% to avoid interruption while casting wrath. Minor glyphs provide small and unique enhancement to spells and abilities such as lowering spell costs or changing an animation.

How glyphs differ from enchanting and gemming is that the enhancements are not a boost to stats. Instead, glyphs provide enhancements to abilities and spells. This is what will make inscription so unique and demanding, every player will need it.

Even at lower level glyphs are available. The number of glyphs able to use are lowered according to levels, as well as the types of glyphs used. Here is a list of what players should expect at what level:

· Level 1-14: None

· Level 15-29: 1 Major, 1 Minor

· Level 30-44: 2 Major, 2 Minor

· Level 45-59: 2 Major, 2 Minor

· Level 60 and up: 3 Major, 3 Minor

As for what glyphs to get, each glyph is made for a specific ability for a specific class. Here is a list of some glyphs to expect (1 of each class):

Glyph of Lifebloom – Increase the duration of lifebloom by 1 sec

Glyph of Steady Shot – Damage of steady shot increased by 10% when target is effect by serpent sting

Glyph of Death Coil – Increase duration of death coil by .5 seconds

Glyph of Blade Flurry – Reduce energy cost of Blade Flurry by 100%

Glyph of Dispel Magic – When you dispel the target it heals them for 6% of total health

Glyph of Healing Wave – Your Healing Wave also heals you for 20% of the effect when you heal someone else

Glyph of Fireball – Increase initial damage dealt of fireball by 5% but removes the DoT effect

Glyph of Flash of Light – Your flash of light heals 50% less, but also heals for 200% of initial effect over 15 sec

Just these few examples show how powerful glyphs can be. In a way, they are somewhat more of an improved talent point, furthering the specialization of how you want you to be. Glyphs bring a more unique feel of how you play your character.

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22 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

Blizzard holidays are never dull in the slightest. Aside from some of the neat and interesting activities they provide, there is usually a temporary boss that can also drop interesting items.

Right now the Brewfest is going on, and if you haven’t participated in the festivities you are missing out. Even if you are a party pooper and do not participate in the activities, there is a certain NPC that will interest you.

Coren Direbrew is out there, trying to ruin the Brewfest, and it is up to you to stop him. Even if you don’t feel up to doing the chain quest, you don’t have to. This holiday boss resides within Blackrock Depths (BRD). Oh yes, time to drag up those fond pre-BC memories.

Even though Coren is pretty far in, it is actually really simple to get there. Once you enter BRD, turn directly to the right. There will be 3 level 70 NPCs guarding these little contraptions. Take them out then right click on the doodles and be on your way.

You will be transported to the bar area in just a few seconds, (quite appropriate considering the theme). Once you land, there will be an NPC with the blue exclamation mark (!) over his head. This is a daily quest, you can fight Coren 1x per person. That means you will be able to fight him 5x per group.

Coren is fairly simple, not as easy as a regular boss, but just under the heroic level. Once you get the daily quest, talk to Coren and the battle will start.

There are a couple of things to watch out for. First off, there are additional mobs. Depending on how well geared your group is, you can literally ignore these. Having a paladin tank helps. If not, take them out, they are just regular mobs.

Coren has two abilities; the first is a whirlwind which deals a nice chunk of damage and also disarms melee ranged targets. This whirlwind is very slow and easy to avoid, so all melee classes be sure to evade this.

The second ability is this drill that will come up from the ground. Although this is harder to avoid at first, be sure to move once it comes up. Along with damage, the drill will pop the target back.

Coren also will spawn a female dwarf (Ursula or llsa Direbrew). These chicks can be kind of annoying. They will stun a target for 6 seconds from “Brewmaiden’s Stun” and also have another ability called “Barrelled,” which will disorient and slow the target for 8 seconds. This is troublesome for healers and can even cause a wipe.

The females are elite mobs, so they take a while to kill. It is actually wise to ignore both of them completely, focus dps on Coren and make sure your healer isn’t taking damage from adds. Follow these simple steps, along with avoiding his whirlwind, and you’ll be saving the Brewfest festival with ease.

Of course what everyone wants to know is what goodies Coren will drop. The answer is trinkets, lots of trinkets. There is a trinket for every necessity and an ‘extra’ one that is really fit for everyone. There is also an epic dagger called “Direbrew’s Shanker,” which looks like a broken glass bottle when equipped.

The trinkets compliment each spec: healing done, spell damage, attack power, block value, and then two stamina trinkets that can be used once every ten minutes. The two stamina trinkets either summon a brewmaiden who will smite your foes, or a brewmaiden who will bolster your party’s vigor.

The dagger is nice since the stats offer AP, agility, and stamina. It is a slow speed, 2.0, which is actually pretty rare. They are not unique so two can be wielded for those mutilate rogues out there. I enchanted one of mine with 7 weapon damage just to see if the glow would be seen and it did.

The equipment is on par with Karazhan epics, which is really nice for how easily they are obtained. Aside from the items that are used in battle there are, of course, some Brewfest items related to the whole theme.

A rare trinket which is dropped, called “Direbrew’s Remote,” will allow the party to teleport to the Grim Guzzler (where Direbrew is). This isn’t all that special, but more of a convenience for the festival. I wonder if it will still work when this is all over.

The last thing is really great for you rare mount collectors. There is a low drop percentage for the party to obtain either a Brewfest Kodo or a Brewfest Ram, a great way to compliment your character while running around naked in the Brewfest festival. (Role-playing?)

Holidays are always interesting in the World of Warcraft; it really does spice up the game.

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19 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

For those of you who already know the technical issues surrounding port forwarding this will be old hat.  But we recently had a guy comment that his 1.5 Mb connection was taking days to download patches.  So for you folks who are having serious downloading issues we thought it would be good to cover some basics and give you links to resources that will help you get your download speeds up to par with your connection.

Unless you are on dial-up, you should be able to grab patches and even full downloads in under and hour or two if you have your network ports properly configured.  In other words, if you are on any sort of DSL or Cable connection, problems with your download speed in relation to WoW stuff is not a matter of your connection, but something on your machine.

Now, we’re not going to be able to tell you exactly how to do this for Mac machines since I don’t currently have one to test with, but I may have to grab one and do an update for those later.

The first thing you need to do is figure out what you’re trying to fix.  Most people will get the message “Your computer appears to be behind a firewall.”  If you are getting any other message, just check out the link below to find the specific message you are getting from the Blizz Technical Support FAQ page.

Blizzard FAQ

http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?articleId=21275&categoryId=2316&parentCategoryId=&pageNumber=1

If you are getting this next specific message, you can use the link below for slow download speeds.  Most of the time slow speeds will be due to two factors that you can fix pretty easily once you know what to do.

Slow Download Speeds

http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?articleId=21065

In both of the scenarios we will deal with below, the problem is normally that the Blizz servers are having trouble talking to your system because something is in the way.  The two problem areas are in firewalls and routers.  In order to give Blizzard clean access to your computer you will need to make a path for them by opening some specific ports so that communication between your machine and Blizz doesn’t have something clogging up the process.

A big portion of the time, you windows users will be able to just open up ports on the internal Windows Firewall and that should do the trick.  Now, if you get the message about “it appears you are behind a firewall” don’t make the mistake of thinking that turning the firewall OFF will fix this.  Actually, turning the firewall off will usually make it worse, since it puts your entire internal network into the internet equivalent of safe mode.  Instead of only restricting certain things the way the firewall was designed to do, it will just restrict everything.  So turning it off won’t do you any good.

It’s really simple to open ports for WoW and anything else, you can check out the article at Blizzard here:

http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?articleId=21072

The other place you can get all gummed up is in your router if you are using one.  Routers can be particularly tricky because they are all different, there are thousands of them and some have internal firewalls that will also need to be dealt with.  Even though Blizzard has a little bit about working with routers to get ports open, there is a much better place to get the instructions you need.

Portforward.com is a massive database of highly specific information and guides on opening ports in almost any situation.  They have virtually every router ever made in their list, and if you can follow the links like breadcrumbs they will lead you to a pictorial walk-through of opening ports on YOUR router for WoW (and hundreds of other applications).  Talk about highly specific!  They also will help you deal with firewalls and their list of firewalls includes a much longer list than the Blizz page if you can’t find yours there.

Firewalls

http://www.portforward.com/english/routers/firewalling/routerindex.htm

Routers

http://www.portforward.com/english/routers/port_forwarding/routerindex.htm

By using the tools above you should be able to get the proper ports and port ranges open to allow your downloads to flow much faster.  For those of you who may get Beta invites it’s going to take your downloads from several days to just a few hours.  If you lose your WoW file or something this will save you a ton of download time.  you can see from my download screen I was on pace to be able to download the entire up-to-date game client in about 4 hours (it would probably be less than that, but not bad).

We know this doesn’t have anything to do with playing the game, but you’ll understand why we wanted to cover this in a day or two.  And for everyone who has been living with those 9000 hour downloads this will certainly help you get your patches a ton faster.  The portforward site is a terrific resource - and YES this research site is completly up to date!

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14 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

You’re going to get to play with some of the WotLK changes sooner than you think.  For those of you who have been saving up those herbs, your time to profit is almost here.  The public test realm using patch 3.0.2 went live on the PTR Tuesday, which means that the next major patch is just around the corner.

If you don’t read the patch notes, understand that this patch contains so many huge changes that it’s almost an expansion.  Blizzard is going to implement a lot of the changes in WotLK in this patch.  You are going to get all of your training points back since every class has a list of dozens of significant redos.

As a result, there is just no way to comment on all of the class changes at one time.  Even if we broke it down by class it’s going to take a lot of testing and several articles, but you know we’ll get it up here as we play through the new changes.  But there are some things we wanted to cover today, since they apply to everyone.

First, Inscription is going live in this patch to level 375.  That means all your herbs are worth a ton of gold and glyphs are going to be available.  I will try to make sure I get an inscription leveling guide up as soon as I am confident about the progression to 375.  I’ve got a lot of herbs to gather!  You herbalists can expect your services to be in wild demand, so I sure hope you took our advice and powerleveled that profession.

The achievement system will also be implemented.  This interesting panel tracks a whole slew of things you do in the game and represents another kind of ‘ding’ as you accomplish all sorts of things.  There are 749 achievements available in the beta as of today, so if you ever get bored you still have plenty to work on.  A funny one is Friend or Fowl, which requires you to kill 15 turkeys in 3 minutes.

Speaking of achievements, be sure to attend the Pirate’s Day event in Booty Bay on the 19th.  This one time, one day event is sure to land in the world event section of the achievements list so go check it out.

Since I’ve been playing a priest recently (and now have the entire epic PvP honor gear set from all that work) perhaps the most significant changes in the next patch are for casters.  My favorite change has to do with spell cast timer pushbacks and channeling interrupts.

This is going to be a big help for casters vs. mele classes.  The patch notes state that when attempting to cast a spell, the first and second hits will only add .5 seconds to the cast time, and further hits will have no effect!  No more looking at my cast bar and seeing +2.7 sec because some hunter keeps using his instant cast shots on me.  This works nearly the same way for channeled spells in that the first two hits reduce the channeling time by 25%, and further hits have no effect.

Now certainly this doesn’t apply to things that completely interrupt casting like silence, silencing shot, earth shock, shield bash and all those things that just stop casting completely.  But even in PvE, it’s going to make solo survivability for casters a lot easier.  If you’ve ever pulled 4 mobs and not even been able to heal yourself or get a spell of any kind off, this will really be a welcome change.

Next, anything that grants +spell damage or +healing is being consolidated into a single stat called Spell Power.  All gear that grants +healing or +spell damage will now reflect the one stat +spell power.  As a result, your visible bonus healing for healing classes will appear lower, but healing spells will gain more from spell power than damage spells so the net result will be the same.

This is an interesting change that will make gear more usable for all casting classes regardless of whether they are helaers or not.  Healers will always get a bigger buff to their healing spells from spell power, so stacking all that +heal gear will be a thing of the past and respeccing to a damage build will not require a major gear change.

On a lighter note, you will also be able to visit Stormwind harbor, which is pretty impressive.  You can also go see the huge hole in the ground where the purple Dalaran bubble used to be.  Dalaran has already been moved to Northrend as the Kirin Tor make their move.  It turns out that the bubble was more of a complete sphere, so the big hole in the ground might be worth a look.

You will also be able to visit the new barber shops and change the look of your toon if you like.  It seems that they have introduced some new hairstyles for each race, and you can also change your hair color and a few other thing if you like.

And last, but certainly not least the 51 point talent trees will open up as well.  You are going to have new skills to train based on your talents if you so choose, and that means that you’ll have a gob of new tricks to play with.  You can find a link to the patch notes as well as a talent calculator below so you can read about each class and then fiddle with the new talents in the next few days so you have some idea of what you want to try out.

This is a big patch for WoW, and you’re going to love all the changes (although there iwll be some initial balance issues that will need to be played through and worked on).  So check out the patch notes for yourself, work with the talent trees and get those herbs harvested/bought and ready to sell!  Oh, and go hang out with the pirates too - this patch is really going to Dominate!

Patch Notes

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/test-realm-patchnotes.html

New Talent Trees

http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?talent

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23 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

Last night, Blizzard announced the release date for Wrath of the Lich King.  I hope you are ready, because it’s coming sooner than any of us expected here at DYS.  I know you’re itching to know the date, but you’re going to have to pardon me a little hype and buildup here.

While the Beta has been frustrating at times (you notice I didn’t have a picture up for the article about WotLK pets because the new pet classes in the Beta have been bugged for the last 5 days :(  )  it is also the most fun I’ve had with WoW.  Before tBC, everyone had pretty much capped out on the available adventuring, and once that happens the game sort of gets a bit dull because there is nowhere to go that’s new, and nothing really fun to do because you’ve done it all.

The Burning Crusade expansion fed a lot of new and neat things into the game.  You may be taking them all for granted now, but tBC was an awesome expansion to an already good game.  With tBC we got flying mounts, a really well planned continent, dozens of new factions, and cool new mini-games within the game like the daily bombing runs.  All of this added up to a much more interesting and fun experience, even for those people who had completely mastered the original content.

If you thought that tBC was a good expansion, just wait until you see WotLK.  We haven’t written a whole lot about it so far because so much of the new content is in a state of flux.  We just don’t like to post information that turns out to be bogus later on.  You guys expect a certain level of perfection with every single article we post, and (even if you don’t believe it all the time) we really want to deliver above and beyond your expectations.  We truly want everyone to be able to find something in everything we write about or recommend that will help you Dominate.  You may not always agree, but we simply can’t win them all.

Well, the WotLK is dominating.  The first thing that strikes me about the continent of Northrend is that the graphics seem to be better.  Not to sound girly, but it is pretty.  It has such an epic feel and look in every single zone.  It’s not ‘cartoony’ in any way.  Instead it looks like something from a Conan the Barbarian movie.  It’s really visually awesome.

Next, there are some nifty changes to the quest environment.  There is a good flow to everything, but yet still enough different things to do in so many places that it will take you quite a few run-throughs before you start getting bored with the quest chains.  It’s not just - go here, kill this and the odd escort thrown in.  You still have to kill a bazillion things, but you also get to blow up buildings, ride in tanks, borrow dragons - and that’s just in the first level or two.

There are a whole new slew of factions with great rewards, a new profession, glyphs, a whole zone dedicated to constant and total PvP action (think battleground just bigger and no queue), new pets, new talents, new instances, the achievement system, the whole thing is just incredible.

Then there are the class talent changes and additions.  Probably every warrior is going to at least try out Titans Grip, a skill that lets you use two handed weapons in each hand.  It is awesome to see those guys running around with a monster axe in both fists.  So there will be things that nearly everyone tries out in the new trees, and you can be sure that we will give you all the inside scoop on what really works and what is just fluff as we test through all the possibilities in the coming months.

So are you ready for it?  Well, you better get that way pretty quick, because the

WotLK goes live on November 13th!

Which means you need to pre-order pretty soon to ensure you get your copy on time.  If you want to be one of the first guys to hit 80, and have your inscription at 450 in the first few days, rest assured that our leveling guide will send you screaming through Northrend in record time - Dominating everyone else.  We’ll keep you ahead of the learning curve with all the information you need to continue your domination of PvE, PvP, professions, recipes, glyphs, inscription, faction rep, progression, raiding and much, much more in the coming days and weeks even before WotLK debuts on Nov 13th.  But all of that will do you no good at all if you don’t have it to play!

But before you run out and order a copy at the store or hit Amazon to do it online, just know that we are working feverishly to get a special offer for all of you from one of the top online game retailers.  So if you can wait a couple of days we’ll give you a way to pre-order the game that will give you your game key as soon as the WotLK goes live on midnight of the 13th.  You’ll also be able to download the new version without having to wait for your disks to arrive or even wait in line at the store, nothing could be easier.  It will also put you in a position to pop a couple of levels before most people even put their disks in the drive!

So you better get seriously busy whacking out the last few levels to 70 on those alts in the next few weeks, and be sure to check out our WotLK information as we leak it to you here.  We want to take your game to a whole new level in the expansion, and we’re going to help you beat everyone else to the punch.  Look for our special DYS pre-order deal in the next couple of days - and as always, Dominate!

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37 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

When I say major changes I mean that more has changed than has stayed the same.  So many changes, in fact, that it’s going to be hard to do more than just hit the highlights in the space we have here.  But since we’ve had so many requests for info from the Beta, we can feel pretty comfortable publishing these since they seem about 95% locked in and will probably stay the same on release day.  So let’s get to it.

First, a LOT of the effort hunters used to have to put into pets is simply gone.  Training new pets and getting them up to speed is merely a matter of taming, and that’s about it.  Here’s a list of the things that just went “poof.”

• Pet training points - these are gone, so you don’t have to worry about where to place those odd points that just don’t fit.

• Pet Loyalty - axed for WotLK.  There may eventually be some sort of system to entice hunters to keep pets, but for now, it’s the equivalent of taming a pet with “Best Friend” status.  When training points disappeared, so did the need for loyalty.

• Pet leveling - mostly gone.  Pets will still have to level to some degree, but it will be a lot more transparent than it is now.  A level 1 beast trained by a level 80 hunter will hop to level 70 instantly.  That way the pet isn’t completely useless while you try to work on levels.  So if you missed that ghost saber at level 22, it’s not such a big deal to go back and get one for the coolness factor.

• Nearly everything associated with training points - you will no longer have to make hard choices (since training points are no more) between things like armor or resistances.  All pets now get base levels of resistance to all 5 schools of magic as they level, although you can still choose to increase these if you like through another method.

• Learning new pet skills - completely gone.  Never again will you have to go train Bellygrub to get Gore 4.  Instead, all pets will know 3 basic abilities (and a number of talent skills, more on those later) and those skills are set in stone.

• Having to keep an open slot at the Stable Master - all we can say is yeehaaw to this one.  Since you don’t have to train a trash pet to learn some skill or other, you will be able to put real pets in all your slots (the beta even shows an additional slot you can buy, which means you can have 5 pets).

• Some of your Current Pet’s skills - sorry, but if your pet knows claw and bite, they are going to lose one for the reason mentioned above.  All pets will have a set number of things they can use, and they will not get more than one “Focus Dump” skill.

• Crummy Pets - there is simply not a single pet in the game that will get you laughed at.  Up until now, there was a set of “caster” pets that had such awful stats that training points just couldn’t make up for how bad they were.  In WotLK if you can tame it, it will make a good pet.  There are even some pets that have surprisingly useful special abilities.  I mean, who would have ever guessed that they could make a moth a decent DPS pet?

That’s a good basic look at what’s gone, now let’s look at what those have been replaced with.  Personally, I like the new system a LOT more.  Pets will now be much more like your own character, and have a special talent point screen where you can select and customize that pet to be exactly what you want it to be.  This new system also has some wicked skills that don’t even exist now.  A level 70 pet in WotLK will be much better than a level 70 pet now.

• Three Pet “Types” - All pets are now divided into three distinct “types.” Cunning, Ferocity, and Tenacity.  These types loosely correspond to Cunning pets normally having some sort of debuff or short duration Crowd Control, Ferocity pets have DPS skills that can buff themselves or even an entire party (or raid, we’re not sure with all the raid buff tweaks yet) and Tenacity pets generally have talents that will help it to tank well.  There is a LOT of mixing and matching in the special skills, so remember that these are merely generalizations.  Each type also gets a specific modifier % to Damage Armor and Health.

• 31 Pet “Families” - All pets are further divided into 31 family groupings that determine the 1 “Special” skill that they will use.  Some of the special skills are simply incredible.  Rhinos get a skill called Stampede that knocks all enemies within 10 yards back 15 yards!  Warp Stalkers no longer warp toward their enemy, but they will instead warp the enemy away from them up to 30 yards.

• Pet Talent Trees - there are so many awesome tricks in the talent trees you’re just going to have to browse through them for yourself.  But basically, not only can you have a decent tanking pet, but that tank pet will can also be given talents that will help it do good damage as well.  The talent trees as a replacement for training points is an incredibly awesome change.

• ALL pets can now get a Speed increase skill - no longer will you be stuck with a pig to get charge.  All Tenacity pets can learn charge, and the other two pet types can all learn dash or dive.

It all boils down to a few really neat points.  Training pets is easier than ever, and you have a lot more control over what your pet can do.  There are more pet choices than ever, and more skills to choose from.  It is certainly going to lead to a lot more variety in the pets running around.  You will be able to customize your pet skills in a way that suits your needs, and do so with a lot less effort than ever.

All these changes will certainly make pets for MM and SV hunters more useful, but it may be even harder to leave BM behind when you see the simply wicked awesome firepower of a BM hunter with a core hound or devilsaur exotic ferocity pet.  The 51st talent point in the BM tree gives the hunter the ability to train pets from the 6 exotic pet families and 4 extra pet skill points to put into pet DPS skills, or other tanking skills for the rhino family.

Here are some convenient links to where you can dig a little deeper into the WotLK pet info for yourself.  But I warn you: don’t look at them if it’s going to make you ruin your keyboard drooling, you still have a rather long wait!

Pet Talent Trees:

• Petopia

Pet Talent Calculators:

• Cunning

• Ferocity

• Tenacity

Pet Types and Families

• Wowhead

Extensive FaQ for nearly all Wotlk Pet changes

• Petopia

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Everyone is stoked about the new talent trees in the upcoming expansion. There are an extreme amount of new abilities that come into context, creating a whole new field of strategies. WotLK will certainly shift the way we play not only in PvP, but PvE as well.

If you haven’t checked out the new talent points then get your butt over to Blizzard’s website and be amazed.

Rogue beta talents

Of all the characters out there, I am glad to say rogues look insanely sick. I think they are finally getting the true buff they deserve in certain aspects. Now don’t get me wrong, rogues already have a great advantage in the PvP world. But it is pretty basic; stunlock and hemo.

Rogues in PvP only have 1 of 2 choices. That is, go 20/41 assassination/hemo or go combat fists and pray you have a good priest (2v2 only). But what about the good old days when rogues use to deal that large burst of DPS via ambush? We still have a high DPS rate right now, but it is more of a consistent damage rather than a good burst. This being due to the resilience gear making such talents like ambush and backstab basically useless.

As we look at the different talent trees for the rogue, what is blizzard trying to tell us? Look at the subtlety tree, here is where it really excited me the most; Waylay and Slaughter from the Shadows. Nothing but pure ambush/backstab buffs.

With those two buffs, ambush rogues finally have their place back in the WoW society of what they should be; assassins striking from out of the shadows with a vicious dagger. What really pulls it all together is the shadow dance. This is the main feature that blizzard sticks out saying, ‘Hey, ambush rogues are back in the game.”

If you realize what shadow dance does, then there is no other substitution then using ambush between stealths. Using garrote over and over will be a vigorous waste, while cheap shot would be pointless with diminishing returns. This talent point was made directly for multiple ambush uses; anything else is not even an option.

Even though ambush rogues are very rare right now, I still play the spec (as well as every other spec). Using a 2k AP unbuffed rogue will crit SS ambushes at around 4-5.5k points of damage. If you add resilience into the picture you can lose up to about 1k of damage depending on the resilience rating.

I hit S3 warriors around 3k of SS ambush damage; it’s really only a chip in their side with their massive 13k hps+ and daunting plate armor. Now let’s bring blade dance into the picture. I can open up with a 3k ambush through SS, then I trigger blade dance. This gives me 3 extra opportunity attacks to use ambush at will, with 2.5k points of damage per strike. Do the math, even with resilience gear the warrior will be down over 10k of damage within a short period of time. And the best part; there will be no stun locking, which in turn procs second wind.

This is still assuming that I can get all 3 strikes from the blade dance off. Who knows what factors will be brought in, such as rend or a lock’s magic spell causing a dot on the rogue, disabling stealth. Then again, this should happen so fast that a warrior shouldn’t be able to do anything but /beg.  As soon as he turns around the blade dance should be set in motion, confusing him and hopefully creating outright terror. I would definitely panic if I got hit like that.

Now another scenario; let’s assume a decently geared mage but with NO resilience is attacked by this set up. Rouges with 2k AP can SS ambush crit mages for 5k damage easy (resilience drops this down to 3.5-4k). Using blade dance, a mage will be dead in seconds if they do not think fast by using frost nova, blinking out, or ice block (POM polymorph FTW). What other choice do they have? Any character is automatically thrown into the defensive while the rogue can have their way with them and be in total domination of the battle. That is, after all, the whole idea of a rogue; getting the opportunity attack.

The real questions are: How will this all play out at level 80? How much AP will rogues have that level? Is resilience going to destroy their DD (direct damage) like it has now?

All I can say is, I am very excited to find out.

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54 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

We really do a lot of research when writing articles here at DYS.  Sometimes the information we would like to add to an article just doesn’t exist, which means that the facts have to come from in-game analysis.  As you can probably figure, that can take a lot of time.

I recently had the idea based on a comment on the article about how soon will you be replacing gear after WotLK on a peice about farming honor gear.  It turns out there really isn’t a succinct guide for that anywhere so I have been forced to grind it out myself to put it into a readable and reasonably usable formulation for our readers.  And it’s going to take me a month of working at it a few hours a day.  You see, I just won’t put anything up here unless I’m certain that it is as factual and accurate as I can possibly make it before you read it.

In this vein, there used to be a really neat tool at Alakazam where you could look at all the different builds for all the classes and see what was the most popular.  When they changed their site format it just dissapeared, completely killing a terrific article I had already written.  Since that time, I have been searching for something that gives the same info, but to no avail.  However, I found something that comes pretty close.

So today I just wanted to introduce you to a neat little blog site you’ve probably never heard of.  I found it while browsing through the Wow wiki via a relatively obscure link on a build page, and it has maybe 90% of the info I used to use.  It may come in handy from time to time for you if you like big lists of facts like I do.

The site is Armory Musings and can be found at this address: http://okoloth.blogspot.com/ This guy has written a spider script that mines information from the WoW armory, and it can really show you some nifty stats on just about everything you could ever want to know about what players really use in the game.

On the first page, you will see a series of updates (with a LOT of scrolling) that show the balance of characters on every single realm by class.  While interesting, it’s not all that useful most of the time.  The real data is in the specific class links at the top of the page.

You can click on any of the class names here to take you to a class-specific page with a whole lot of useful data on your class of choice.  Let’s look at some of the information on the druid page.

You will see that he will break down the entire class by spec, and even give you the average stats that each spec has.  It should give you an idea how you rank according to the overall averages for your class at level 70.

Next, he shows you some averages for some other specific information from the character pane including mele, defense and spell stats so you can see how your toon stacks up against all the other 70’s on all realms.  He even has stats for the most popular professions and even profession combinations for all the classes listed.

But the part I really thought was cool was the next, and largest section.  The big list will show you the top 5 gear choices for all level 70’s broken down by builds.  He has even included the wowhead tooltip so you can hover each one and get the game tooltip, or you can click the link to go to wowhead and figure out where to go and get all this great loot.

Wondering what your Balance druid should be wearing on your wrist? Here is what the data says:

14% [Bracers of the White Stag]

followed by:

10% [Shattrath Wraps]
9% [Windhawk Bracers]
5% [Veteran's Wyrmhide Bracers]
5% [Mana Infused Wristguards]

So you can look at the choices thousands of other druids have made to determine what is easiest to get, and what may just be by far the best choice.  You can see that this might be extremely useful if this is an alt, or if you just haven’t played long enough to know what all the best gear choices may be.  So both noobs and pros should find this information really valuable.  (You’ll have to excuse me if I didn’t include all the HTML for the tooltips and links - that’s why I’m pointing you to the site!)

And if you’ve ever wondered exactly what gems you should be putting in all those sockets, there’s even a breakdown of the 5 most popular gem choices, which I found fascinating as well.

Again, he breaks this down according to base talent builds, which should take any guesswork out of selecting the right gems for your build choice.

Overall, I love the information at armory musings.  There are other things I would like to see added to the data.  And, of course, a blog format makes it pretty difficult to present these types of tables, so the presentation is a little sketchy at times.  But overall it will be a site I visit fairly often when I start working on end-game spec and gear for all those new toons I have hitting 70 with the refer a friend program.  I sure don’t want a pro inspecting my gear and giving me the loser chant.

You should be able to tweak your overall knowledge of any class in the game at armory musings based on great breakdowns of an absolute avalanche of data directly from the armory.  It’s a great resource to use and a tool that just might help you put the final touches on your toon of any class to go Dominate!

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22 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

In preparation for WotLK, you should certainly consider powerleveling herbalism.  For at least the first few months, herbs are going to be selling like hotcakes at the AH, and as of now we really can’t tell which particular flavors are going to be the biggest sellers.

We already recommended that you start buying up all of the herbs you can get your hands on at the AH and then sitting on them until the xpac, but those will be gone in very short order no matter how many of them you are able to collect now.

The only way to make sure that you can make the big bucks long after the initial push, and especially after prices stabilize is to add herbalism to one of your toons, or at least max out that skill just in case.

Now, I normally don’t go in for farming much, but there may be so much gold to be made with this one that it will actually make it worth your while for a few months.  I still keep one toon around with mining as a profession feed, and you may want to do the same with herbalism.

So overall this is going to be pretty short and sweet. What we’re going to try to do is give you the best areas for major Herb farming. This will be especially helpful if you’ve picked up herbalism as a higher level character and need to rush back through the lower levels in newbie zones.

As you go through this guide, remember that when doing circuits of an area, try to travel in a zigzag pattern. The more of an area you cover, the better your farming will be overall. Also, when you get to the higher level herbs, don’t skip the lower level stuff just because you don’t get skill ups for it. Part of the way nodes spawn is related to how many empty nodes there are in the area. The more nodes you pick, the more new nodes will spawn in the general area. You can actually speed things up by picking everything that pops up on your map. Besides, you can either sell the mats you don’t need at the ah or turn them into potions to use or sell if you are doing Alchemy.

1 – 50: Silverleaf and Peacebloom

• Alliance:
  • Dolanaar
  • Dun Murogh
  • Elwynn Forrest
  • Azuremyst Isle
• Horde:
  • Mulgore
  • Tirisfal Glades
  • Eversong Woods
  • Durotar

51 – 70: Mageroyal & Earthroot

• Alliance
  • Westfall Coast
  • Gol’Bolar Quarry, Dun Morogh
• Horde
  • Northwest Badlands

71 – 100: Briarthorn

• Alliance
  • Darkshore
  • Twilight Grove, Duskwood
  • Eastern shore of Loch Modan
  • Lakeshire, Redridge Mountains
• Horde
  • All of Northern Barrens
  • Southern Silverpine Forrest

101 – 115: Bruiseweed

• Alliance
  • Western Ashenvale
  • East of Loch Modan
  • Stonewatch Keep, Redridge Mountains
• Horde
  • Ramparts North to Splintertree post in Ashenvale
  • Stonetalon Mountains
  • Southern Barrens

116 – 125: Wild Steelbloom

• Alliance
  • Stonetalon Peak
• Horde
  • Southern Barrens
  • From Great Lift to Highperch in Thousand Needles
• Both
  • Outer edges of Arathi Highlands
  • Nek’mani Wellspring in Stranglethorn Vale
  • Zuuldaia Ruins, Stranglethorn Vale

By this time, both Alliance and Horde will be farming similar areas, so we’ll just lump them all together and you can look for herbs as you travel. Also, the higher levels have more scattered spawn points, so you’ll need to do complete circuits of each of these areas to find all the nodes.

126 – 160: Kingsblood

• Ashenvale
• Charred Vale, Stonetalon Mountains
• Wetlands
• Hillsbrad Foothills
• Misty Reed Swamp, Swamp of Sorrows

161 – 185: Fadeleaf

• Swamp of Sorrows

186 – 205: Khadgar’s Whisker

• Hinterlands
• Eastern Arathi Highlands
• Swamp of Sorrows

206 – 230: Firebloom

• Searing Gorge
• Blasted Lands
• Tanaris

231 – 250: Sungrass

• Felwood
• Feralas
• Forlorn Ridge, Azshara

251 – 270: Gromsblood

• Felwood
• Mannoroc Coven, Desolace
• Blasted Lands

271 – 290: Dreamfoil

• Un’Goro Crater
• Azshara

290 – 300: Plaguebloom

• Western Plaguelands
• Eastern Plaguelands

300 – 330: Felwood

331 – 350+: Zangarmarsh

350 – 375: Shadowmoon, or continue Zangarmarsh

As a level 70, you could easily do this in just a few hours. Also, if you are power leveling, be sure to watch where the herbs overlap, you could very easily go from 225 – 350 in Felwood alone, and maybe pick up a few Felcloth while you’re at it. Zangarmarsh is also just packed with herbs, so once you get there, there’s no real reason to leave, unless you just get bored of looking at giant mushrooms.

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22 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post