Category Archives: aion account

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered, like why paladins are so awesome.

Blizzard recently promised to release a flurry of Mists of Pandaria information in March, but apparently it’s opened the gates early. The Mists of Pandaria talent calculator and ability list received a massive update this week, giving us new info on the talents and spells that holy paladins can look forward to in Mists. In addition, the Blizzard community managers have been answering questions about the new data at a rapid-fire rate.

Holy paladins have a lot to look forward to in Mists. It’s clear that the developers have been looking at our weaknesses as healers, as several of our long-standing issues have been addressed. While we’ve always had a wide variety of utility abilities, until recently, holy paladins really only had single-target heals at their disposal. With the introduction of the revamped Holy Radiance in late Cataclysm and now the new talent options we’ll in Mists, our base healing toolbox is looking more and more complete.

The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You’re playing the game, you’re fighting the bosses, you know the how — but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft.

If you’ve read Act I and Act II of Cataclysm for Dummies, you should have a pretty basic understanding of what happened during Cataclysm, why Deathwing was a threat that needed to be addressed, and what we’ve been doing in all of those zones, 5-man dungeons, and raids. There was a purpose to every raid that came out with Cataclysm, but that purpose isn’t blatantly clear unless you’re paying really close attention as you’re leveling through the zones. People who love following the lore do that automatically, which is why these guides aren’t for them.

However, you might want to know what all of this means or have some questions about the stuff that wasn’t really resolved in Cataclysm. Or you may want to know what’s in store in Mists of Pandaria and why you should be interested in what’s coming next. This epilogue is going to go over a few simple end-of-Cataclysm points that should be of interest to those wanting to know what’s next or still have some questions about Cataclysm’s story.

Cataclysm: The age of integration

Death knights, to put it lightly, didn’t have a huge part in Cataclysm itself. For the most part, we may be able to assume that most death knights stayed in Northrend to help with containment and cleanup of the last of the Scourge, but of course, we don’t see any of that. We have been told that the Ebon Blade, along with the Argent Crusade, is keeping an eye on Sylvanas, but unfortunately, they don’t take much direct action as a group.

Luckily, we’re not left bereft of any death knight development. Two of the more prominent death knights, Thassarian and Koltira, are now generals in their respective factions’ armies and have come to clash at Andorhal. This, at least, implies a certain few things about the status of death knights in Horde and Alliance society.

It is certainly true that death knights were noted as barely trusted in the Wrath era, but in Cataclysm, we see two death knights as generals at the heads of rather important armies at Andorhal in Western Plaguelands, and there’s no sign of dissension or distrust in their ranks. While there’s always the chance of small pockets of people who still hate the death knights for their ties to the Scourge, the death knights’ actions in Northrend seem to have essentially earned us some amount of respect and trust among our faction.

Lich Queen Rising: Death knights vs. Sylvanas

Of course, possibly the biggest story hook for death knights comes at the end of the Andorhal quest line. Thassarian and Koltira, acting in remembrance of their brotherhood as members of the Knights of the Ebon Blade, have been trading truces and peace agreements to allow each other to rest up, fight fresh, and fight fair.

Sylvanas, as one might expect, is having none of that, and captures Koltira in some kind of controlling spell, prompting Thassarian to vow to rescue him. This, of course, brings up quite a few questions. Will Thassarian be joined by others of the Ebon Blade? Will there a split between the Horde and Alliance death knights, in which the question of whether death knights are ultimately more loyal to the Ebon Blade or their own factions is called into question?

Two types of guilds in WoW are having the most difficulty right now: 25-man raiding guilds and new guilds of every sort. For officers, competing against established, max-level guilds can be incredibly daunting. Success in this game is never a sure thing. However, you can take steps to help your guild to survive and grow.

1. Establish your credentials.

You are the face of this new enterprise. Asking players to give up all their shiny perks is a big deal these days — bigger, honestly, than I ever thought it would be. Luring people away from that into your brand new organization all hinges on their confidence in you and the other officers. They can’t just assume you have a plan and the background to pull it off. They have to know.

You wouldn’t buy a car designed by a guy who never learned how to drive. Likewise, players aren’t going to join your guild if it’s clear to them that you don’t have the appropriate level of experience.

That level is different depending on what sort of guild you’re creating. If it’s a raiding guild or a PvP guild, you should know how to do those things at a competent or above-average level. Confidence in you will inspire confidence in the guild, but the reverse is also true. If players see you as a weak or uninformed player, they may bail on the guild at the first sign of trouble.

Social guilds don’t require the same set of skills. Your best credentials are your experience with MMOs. That way, players know that you have experience dealing with different personalities in an online world, where it’s often very different than real life.

Leadership in any setting can inspire confidence in you as a guild leader or officer. This experience can come from sources you might not immediately think of, such as teaching a class or raising children. My first leadership experiences came from serving as a senior patrol leader in the Boy Scouts.

2. Don’t focus only on recruitment.

It doesn’t do any good to add new players if you can’t keep the ones you have. A revolving door roster doesn’t get you anywhere. Recruiting is important in the early going, of course, but so is retention.

Don’t spend all of your time recruiting. Make sure that there are enough guild events and activities that the players you already have are satisfied.

The first time someone gquits because there isn’t enough going on, everyone else is going to start thinking about it, too.

3. Don’t lower your standards for guild experience or achievements.

In the beginning, it can be incredibly frustrating to see the slow pace of your guild’s leveling. You’ll be tempted to bring in anyone with a pulse just to increase the rate. This is a mistake.

Recruiting carelessly by inviting anyone who’s interested can backfire on you badly. When you bring one person into the guild who causes problems or annoys people, you could lose 10 as a result.

Of course, you can’t always know ahead of time when a recruit is going to stir up trouble. That brings me to the next point.

4. Settle drama quickly and decisively.

New guilds, particularly in this era of perks, are incredibly fragile. Any negative situation that arises in the early stages of a guild can destroy it.

You may question when it’s appropriate for you to get involved. Down the road, after the guild has grown larger and more confident, you will have the luxury of letting people settle their own differences when possible. At this point, however, you can’t afford that.

Don’t be afraid to ask someone to leave the guild or even gkick them if you feel like it’s best for the organization as a whole. Yes, that will mean slower leveling, but you’ll risk a lot more than that if you keep them around.

5. Empower your entire guild to help you recruit.

By this, I don’t mean give every guild rank the power to invite. Rather, encourage members to talk to players on the server and elsewhere about joining. In WoW today, you need all hands on deck.

Too often, the average guild member sees recruiting as a job for the officers. They feel like it’s not their place to do so, that they’re stepping on the officers’ toes. Make sure they know that it’s not just OK to help with recruiting — it is, in fact, essential.

I would actually argue that it can be more effective for nonofficers to talk to players about the guild. Players will think, “Hey, this player is just a regular guild member, but she’s willing to spend time talking to me about it. She must really like this guild.”

6. Use the Raid Finder to your advantage.

If your goal is to become a raiding guild, you may not have the critical mass you need to raid as a guild right away. The Raid Finder is perfect for your situation.

However, don’t let your guild members settle for a typical Raid Finder experience. Get a Vent server to allow ease of communication among your members. Don’t share it with the rest of the raid if you don’t want to. The point of it in this case isn’t to coordinate the raid but to let your members get to know each other better.

This way, you can turn what is often viewed as an anti-social experience into just the opposite. Voice communication helps people to grow closer and feel more like a community. Sure, you’re depending on other players to progress through the instance. As long as your guildmates are all there with you, however, the experience will feel more like a guild activity.

If there’s someone in the raid that you’re targeting as a recruit, privately invite them into your Vent server. You’ll get a great sense of whether they’ll fit into your guild.

Anyone familiar with board games could tell you that there are about 100,000 different versions of Monopoly out there. There’s an officially licensed The Wizard of Oz Monopoly. There’s a Powerpuff Girls Monopoly. And a Looney Tunes Monopoly. Even the lousy IP-cash-in movie effort Cars 2 has its own version of Monopoly. So it would only stand to reason that World of Warcraft would get its own version of Monopoly eventually, right?

Right.

According to BlizzPlanet, an officially licensed World of Warcraft Monopoly will be unveiled at next week’s Toy Fair 2012 in New York City. There really aren’t any details as of yet, just that the board game will be showcased. Presumably, though, there will be a lot of customization involved, right down to the playing tokens.

Perhaps even more exciting than Monopoly (a game I am incapable of losing, FYI) is the companion Blizzard tie-in, Risk: StarCraft. Supposedly, the playing pieces for that game will include StarCraft II units. That’s all sorts of awesome.

Update: BlizzPlanet has removed its references to these games in its Toy fair 2012 posting, so it’s possible USAopoly was not prepared to announce these products yet.
——————————————————————————–

With the Mists of Pandaria press event still a month down the road, Lead Systems Designer Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street has posted a new Dev Watercooler to keep us busy. This time, he philosophizes on the role of class roles. He cautions up front that this is not meant to be any sort of announcement or even hint at what’s to come in Mists of Pandaria.

But at the same time, the struggle of what to do with class roles is one that’s always relevant and ongoing within the game, and that includes Mists of Pandaria. Ghostcrawler gets right into the meat of it with this blog, asking questions and discussing various methods of balance. Do we strive for perfect balance among all DPS specs? Is it fine to leave certain specs with specialties? Should we return to the days of the solid divide between PvP and PvE specs, as it was in the vanilla era? Should each class just have one DPS talent tree? Read on for all of Ghostcrawler’s comments.