Category Archives: World of Warcraft

World of Warcraft

Legendaries and How to Fix Them

Leave a comment

Legion is very, very good. The questing is the best it’s ever been, dungeons are actually relevant for the first time since Cataclysm, and the new class campaigns are a welcome improvement on the much-hated Garrison system in Warlords of Draenor.

However, there is one aspect to Legion that has received a lot of criticism: the Legendary system. Unlike in past expansions, where Legendaries were only achievable after a long, complicated grind, in Legion, players randomly receive Legendaries by completing basic content.

Needless to say, this system has many downsides. Because of the greater diversity of Legendaries, there are a few (namely, the ones that increase damage dealt) that are much, much better than the others. As a result, if a player receives a ‘bad’ Legendary, they’ll be upset because of all the potential damage they’re missing out on.

For example, take this Legendary: Prydaz, Xavaric’s Magnum Opus is a necklace that gives the wearer 2,010 Stamina, 1,247 Critical Strike, 1,247 Haste and 1,247 Mastery. It also has a Prismatic Socket and the ability: Every 30 sec, gain an absorb shield for 25% of your maximum health for 30 sec.

As you can probably tell, Prydaz, Xavaric’s Magnum Opus is a very strong Legendary. Its stats are very good for a necklace, and its effect basically increases your maximum health by 25% (which is very good). However, it doesn’t increase your damage, so it’s deemed a ‘bad’ Legendary.

This is a big problem, but the solution is relatively simple: make all the Legendaries in the game pure utility. This way, there will no longer be any ‘Best-in-Slot’ Legendaries, as they’ll all be basically the same value-wise.

Of course, this solution brings up another problem: what happens to all the DPS Legendaries currently in the game? Fortunately, the solution to this problem is once again very simple: change them from Damage to Utility.

A good example of this is the Retribution Paladin Legendary Cape Whisper of the Nathrezim. Currently, the Legendary has this effect: Templar’s Verdict and Divine Storm increase the damage of your next Templar’s Verdict or Divine Storm within 4 sec by 15%. Most of a Ret Paladin’s damage comes from these two abilities, which means that this Legendary is easily the class’s Best-In-Slot.

However, what if Whisper of the Nathrezim’s effect was changed to: Templar’s Verdict and Divine Storm cause your next Templar’s Verdict or Divine Storm within 4 sec to heal you for 30% of the damage done? The cape no longer increases your damage, but it provides your character with a powerful source of self-sustain.

After a change like this, Whisper of the Nathrezim would still be a very good Legendary, but if you were to get Prydaz, Xavaric’s Magnum Opus instead, you wouldn’t be too upset.

Now, while many Legendaries could be changed this easily, there are some that would require a bit more work. For example, there’s the Windwalker Monk boots Katsuo’s Eclipse, which have the effect: Reduce the cost of Fists of Fury by 2 Chi. This is a difficult Legendary to work with, as its method of increasing damage isn’t as straight-forward. However, there are some pretty cool things that could be done with it.

For example, what if Katsuo’s Eclipse now said: Enemies struck by Fists of Fury have a 15% chance to be stunned for 2 seconds. This is a very powerful effect (especially in Mythic + dungeons) but it doesn’t increase your damage in any way.

Overall, I think that making changes like these is the best way to improve the Legendary situation. It won’t be easy, but it’d be really cool to see what crazy utility Legendaries Blizzard would come up with.

 

Here are a few more of my thoughts for changing Legendaries. Please tell me what you think about these changes in the comments below!

 

Name Class Old Effect New Effect
Toravon’s Whiteout Bindings Death Knight While Pillar of Frost is active, you deal 15% increased Frost damage. While Pillar of Frost is active, 50% of the Frost damage you deal is converted to an absorption shield that lasts for 10 seconds.
The Instructor’s Fourth Lesson Death Knight Scourge Strike has a chance to burst an additional 1-5 Festering Wounds. Festering Wounds heal you for 100% of their damage when burst by Scourge Strike.
War Belt of the Sentinel Army Hunter Each enemy you hit with Multi-Shot increases the damage of your next Aimed Shot by 10%, stacking up to 20 times. Aimed Shot now interrupts enemies recently damaged by Multi-Shot.
Shard of the Exodar Mage Your Time Warp does not cause Temporal Displacement on yourself and is not affected by Temporal Displacement or similar effects on yourself. During Time Warp, Blink has infinite charges.
Hidden Master’s Forbidden Touch Monk Touch of Death can be used a second time within 3 sec before its cooldown is triggered. If an enemy dies from Touch of Death you receive an absorption shield equal to 50% of the damage dealt.
Liadrin’s Fury Unleashed Paladin While Avenging Wrath is active, you gain 1 Holy Power every 2.5 seconds. During Avenging Wrath, your melee attacks and spells have a 15% chance to interrupt the targeted enemy.
Anund’s Seared Shackles Priest Each time Shadow Word: Pain and Vampiric Touch deal damage, your next Void Bolt gains 2% increased damage, stacking up to 50 times. Each time Shadow Word: Pain and Vampiric Touch deal damage, the cooldown on Psychic Scream is reduced by 1 second.
Insignia of Ravenholdt Rogue Your attacks that generate combo points deal 15% additional damage as Shadow to all targets within 15 yards in front of you. Your attacks that consume combo points heal you for 10% of the damage done per combo point, stacking up to 5 times.
Emalon’s Charged Core Shaman If Crash Lightning hits 3 or more targets, you deal 10% increased damage for 10 sec. If Crash Lightning hits 3 or more targets, they’re stunned for 3 seconds.
Archavon’s Heavy Hand Warrior Mortal Strike refunds 15 Rage. When Mortal Strike’s effect expires, you are healed for 150% of the healing prevented.
Cinidaria, the Symbiote All Leather Classes Your attacks cause an additional 30% damage as Physical to enemies above 90% health. Damage you take from enemies above 90% health is reduced by 50%.

 

Hearthstone, World of Warcraft

How Hearthstone has changed WoW

Leave a comment

For most of its lifespan, Hearthstone has stood in WoW’s Shadow. Its characters, settings and spells were all taken from the popular MMO while WoW ignored the card game’s existence (with the exception of a couple Easter Eggs). Over time, however, Hearthstone has grown massively popular (reaching over 50 million players, according to Blizzard) and by the time Legion rolled around, WoW had definitely taken notice.

Here are the ways Hearthstone has influenced WoW, starting with the Easter Eggs from Pandaria and WoD, and ending with the massive impact it has had on Legion.

Mists of Pandaria

In Mists of Pandaria, if you visit the Shrine of Seven Stars or the Shrine of Two Moons in the Vale of Eternal Blossoms, you’ll find some NPC’s playing Hearthstone while other NPC’s spectate. In addition, there is a second Hearthstone table set up someone nearby that players can sit next to in order to ‘play’ the game against each other.

Warlords of Draenor

In WoD, you can find an NPC named Benjamin Brode wandering around your garrison. As you probably know, Ben Brode is the lead designer for Hearthstone, so if you talk to his NPC you can buy a couple Hearthstone-related toys.

In addition, there is a mission in your Garrison called ‘Hearthstone Tournament’ that you can send your followers to complete. The enemies on this mission are named after popular Hearthstone decks (such as the ‘Zoo Lock’), and if you successfully complete the mission, you’ll get a couple Hearthstone-themed toys.

Legion

Now, the Easter Eggs in Mists and Warlords were fun, but they didn’t really have a huge impact on the game. In Legion, Hearthstone takes a much bigger role, heavily impacting one of the expansion’s core elements: the Emissary Quest system.

In Legion, players receive an Emissary Quest every day, which requires them to complete World Quests for a specific faction. Once you complete an Emissary Quest, you’ll get substantial rewards from the appropriate faction, such as gold, gear and Artifact Power.

This system is virtually identical to the Quest system from Hearthstone, and since Blizzard is known for sharing good ideas between their games, there’s a good chance that’s exactly where it came from. Similarly, the Brawl mode that’s coming to WoW was inspired by Hearthstone (according to WoW Game Director Ion Hazzikostas during the Blizzcon WoW panel).

On the Easter Eggs side, the Return to Karazhan Dungeon was filled with references to the recent ‘One Night in Karazhan’ expansion for Hearthstone. These include references on item tooltips and effects, but the biggest and most noticeable Easter Eggs have to do with some mobs right after the Opera Event.

Called Back-Up Singers, these mobs are affiliated with the ‘Medivas’ faction (a nod to the Hearthstone expansion), and they cast two spells:

1: Firelands Portal, a 7-mana spell that deals 555,555 damage and summons a random creature from the Firelands Raid.

2: Purify, a 2-mana spell that dispels all negative magical effects on a friendly target and lets the caster draw a card (whatever that means).

Needless to say, these two spells are obvious references to the Hearthstone Cards Firelands Portal and Purify, and it’s really cool that these show up in the Karazhan dungeon.

Last but certainly not least, Legion marked the first time that a character original to Hearthstone was introduced into the World of Warcraft. This character is the famous Sir Finley Mrrgglton, explorer extraordinaire.

Found along the eastern shoreline of Stormheim (just north of Greywatch), Sir Finley has set up camp nearby the ruins of Dreyrgrot. Talk to him, and he’ll tell you that he was on his way to observe the local murlocs of Morheim when he stumbled across the ancient burial grounds of Dreyrgrot.

Being of member of the Explorer’s League, the gentleman murloc felt obliged to check the ruins out—however, before he could conduct a proper survey, a small fleet of pirates landed and broke into the main tomb, unleashing an ancient evil that lurked within.

Corrupted by the darkness lurking within Dreyrgrot, the pirates began wildly looting and pillaging the nearby area. As Sir Finley is

Sir Finley’s Location

just a simple Murloc, there’s nothing he can do to stop this crisis, so he needs your help!

 

The quest series that follows has you grapple from ship-to-ship, battling a host of Blood-Crazed Pirates before entering the tomb to destroy their new leader, a powerful Vrykul Vampyr! It’s not a huge questline, but it’s a lot of fun, so any Hearthstone fans should definitely check it out!

Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, Overwatch, Starcraft, World of Warcraft

BlizzCon 2016 Highlights

Leave a comment

BlizzCon—the largest source of news and reveals for Blizzard Games—opened its doors yesterday, and in the opening ceremony alone, a whole host of new content was announced for every one of their games. This information was only expanded upon in later interviews, and by the end of the day, Blizzard fans were left with a lot to look forward to in the months to come.

Hearthstone

As many suspected would happen, a new Hearthstone expansion was announced at BlizzCon. Entitled Mean Streets of Gadgetzan, this expansion focuses around the titular Goblin city and the crime that fills its bustling streets.

This expansion will be a full 100+ card content update, and it also features a lot of exciting new concepts. For example, Mean Streets of Gadgetzan has a new multi-class card system, where certain cards can be played by three different classes and have a unique effect on each. This expansion also features a brand new Legendary minion that lets you create a custom spell through a series of Discover effects.

So far, only a few cards have been revealed, but the full set will be shown over the next couple weeks before it releases in early December.

Heroes of the Storm

After last year’s surprise release of Cho’gall, everyone was wondering how the Heroes team could possibly top their success. Fortunately for us, however, they did just that by announcing two new heroes, Varian Wrynn and Ragnaros.

The High King of the Alliance, Varian Wrynn is a powerful warrior who can perform three main roles—tank, sustained damage or burst damage—depending on which ultimate he chooses. This makes him the first Warrior/Assassin in the game, and he’ll likely take the Nexus by storm (pun intended) when he arrives in a couple weeks.

Even more exciting than Varian Wrynn, however, is the announcement of Ragnaros the Firelord. A massive Elemental Lord from the Warcraft universe, Ragnaros is a Melee Assassin who uses his massive hammer (called Sulfuras) to strike down the mortal insects who dare to oppose him.

Ragnaros has two ways to kill enemies. In his Hero Form (which is what he starts the game in), he can move around like a normal Hero, killing minions and heroes if they get too close. If he is attacked near one of his forts (or near the destroyed foundation of an enemy fort), however, Ragnaros can use his trait—Molten Core—to take over the fort and turn into a giant-sized version of himself.

In Molten Core form, Ragnaros gets a whole new set of abilities, which allow him to easily defeat an entire enemy team. In addition, while he is in this form the structure beneath him cannot be damaged, so Molten Core can buy time for your team to respawn and make an amazing comeback.

Overall, Ragnaros sounds like an amazing Hero, so when he arrives in the Nexus in early December, I will definitely be trying him out.

Overwatch

The Overwatch announcements during the Opening Ceremony started out simply enough, but then Sombra hacked into the proceedings, and everything turned upside down. (Wow, who saw that coming…)

Fortunately, Sombra looks like an incredibly fun hero, as she has a kit that focuses entirely around disabling your enemies’ capabilities before your team attacks. Using her hacking skills, Sombra can hack turrets (turning them off), health packs (preventing them from being used by enemies), and even hack enemy heroes to stop from using their abilities.

Sombra is the game’s first stealth hero, however her damage output is surprisingly low, so she won’t be able to sneak up behind squishy enemies and take them out in a couple shots. Instead, Sombra can lurk near hacked health packs, killing any low-health enemies who fall back for healing.

In addition to Sombra, a new map was announced. Called Oasis, it is a beautiful city in the Arabian desert that represents the pinnacle of modern science. Like Ilios, Nepal and Lijiang Tower, Oasis will be a control-style map, featuring 3 points that teams will vie over. (This map also contains the game’s first jump-pad, which is sure to generate a lot of highlights.)

The weekly brawl system is also being completely revamped. Instead of a weekly brawl, there will be a new Arcade section, where you can choose to play a variety of games with special rulesets. This change will bring several new game modes (including 1v1 and a 3v3 elimination modes), and a small new map to play them on.

Finally, Quick Play is going to receive a one-hero limit similar to what Competitive Mode received a couple months ago. For players who still want to stack heroes, a new, hero-stacking game mode is being added to the Arcade.

StarCraft

StarCraft didn’t receive as many announcements this year, however there were still two points that are worth noting. First, Alexei Stukov—the infested Terran Admiral—is coming to the StarCraft co-op mode as a new commander. Secondly, Blizzard announced that they are going to release the StarCraft AI program to the public to aid in furthering studies into Artificial Intelligence.

World of Warcraft

World of Warcraft didn’t get any major announcements during the opening ceremony—however, in a panel a couple hours later, some very big changes were revealed.

First, it was announced that World of Warcraft would start getting mini-patches, which would add more content to the game without necessarily moving forward the main storyline. The first of these mini-patches will be 7.1.5, which will add Mists of Pandaria Timewalking Dungeons, new holidays, some class balance changes and the return of the Brawler’s Guild.

Next, Patch 7.2—The Tomb of Sargeras—was announced, and with its arrival a whole bunch of exciting new content will come to the World of Warcraft. First, the Broken Shore area will become a new questing hub, as the forces of all the united Class Halls marshal their forces and march on the Tomb of Sargeras.

In addition, 7.2 will feature the return of the Legion invasions from the pre-launch event—this time, however, the Burning Legion will be invading the Broken Isles, and you’ll need to stop them before your new allies are destroyed. To help deal with these new invasions, 7.2 will add flying to the game, along with Epic Class Flying Mounts that will be awarded at the end of the new questing experience.

Of course, no major patch would be complete without a raid of some kind, and in this case 7.2 will add the titular Tomb of Sargeras raid into the game. In this raid, players will use the Pillars of Creation to seal the Legion’s path into the world of Azeroth, while battling powerful foes such as Naga, Undead and even Kil’jaeden himself!

For those ardent PvP players, Patch 7.2 will add new PvP ‘Brawls’. Similar to the Brawls from Hearthstone and Overwatch, this new game mode will be the classic PvP you know and love, but with a couple changes to make things interesting.

Finally, at the very end of the presentation, World of Warcraft Game Director Ion Hazzikostas made an exciting announcement: Patch 7.2 would not be the end of Legion—in 7.3, players will go to Argus.

Diablo

I don’t normally cover Diablo news—however, the announcement made at BlizzCon was too exciting to not talk about. To honor the 20th anniversary of Diablo, the original Diablo game is going to be added into Diablo 3 as a whole new set of zones.

These new zones will play like they did back in the old days, with pixelated graphics, limited movement and old music. You will get to use your current characters, however, so you won’t have to learn a new playstyle.

In addition, it was announced that Diablo will get a new Necromancer class. Based on the old Diablo 2 Necromancer that fans of the game loved, this character will harness all the fan-favorite abilities as he fights to defend the world of Sanctuary.

 

So, what do you all think of these exciting announcements? Leave a comment below with your thoughts!